by Mike Allen
“Please, your Majesty” Pansy says to the woman, “show us the way out. Take us to the door.”
At her words, the woman jumps like a rabbit and lurches into motion, walking fast. Her sandals crunch in the broken glass. She cuts into the alley that leads to the front side of the shops.
Pansy runs after her, and I grab her arm as she passes. “The Fixers are out there. We have to hide.”
Pansy shakes free. “We have to follow her. The King knows the way out.”
I want to scream at her stupidity, but with the men so near, I don’t dare. I scuttle after her down the alley, my back against the block wall. I stick close to the building, crouch in the shadow.
The woman is on the other side of the open street, standing in front of the cracked glass of a restaurant window. She stares at her broken reflection. Pansy crosses towards her, and just then the line of Fixer men appear, marching together with tools in their hands, wearing their blood-stained overalls like uniforms. There are only six, but they bulge in the deserted street, filling it side to side.
The man in the lead, red-haired and broad, raises his fist, the blood-smeared blade held high. Beside him, two boys with first-haired lips lean into a sprint and streak towards Pansy.
My hand closes around the handle of the knife in my belt. Pansy and I have been together forty-five days, and we look out for each other. She is the only thing I have left in the world. But in my mind, I remember before. I see my own hand holding a knife, see the blade slice into flesh, part the seam of life and turn a living body into a nothing bag of skin.
Everyone said the Wanderers would kill us first. My head ran pictures of them slinking in from the forests with their dirty feet and animal noses, whispering their secret songs and carrying wet bags of gleanings, water dripping from the blades of their crook-armed diggers. On Day 3, I saw the crowd holding a girl down in my street. Her name was Bel. Grown men and women were spitting on her and kicking her and making her cry. My heart skittered, and I ran and joined them. The furnaceman’s wife threw a stone. A boy next to me gave me a knife. Bel called me by name and begged me not to kill her. Snot ran from her dirty nose, and she jumbled up frightened stories, trying to remind me how we used to play frogstones together in the street when we were small.
My hand shakes. The Fixers are coming, and still I can’t draw the knife.
I could step out into the road and tell the men I come from a Fixer family—that’s one thing that Pansy already knows—but we are too late in the days for that to matter anymore.
Pansy tries to run, arms pumping, her skirt flying around her legs, looking too late for somewhere to hide. A mustache boy lunges, and brings her smash down in the dirt. I feel her hit in my own chest, bite to stop from crying out. The other five stomp forward, dust and stink and hungry blades.
In my eye’s corner, I see the horns move. The woman turns her head from her reflection to Pansy, and the antlers swivel. She kicks through the restaurant window and heaves up a table as she leaps back into the street. With both hands overhead she smashes it down, breaks off the leg. She grips the end, double-fisted. She holds the sharp tip high, and walks into the crowd of men.
She swings into their stomachs, jabs into their ribs, cracks the table leg against their skulls. The men fall, toppling into the dirt.
Pansy runs to my side, unhurt. She holds onto me and I hold onto her. We watch the men destroyed, one after the other, until they lay scattered in the street.
The King drops the sword, and then she speaks.
“Where am I?” she says. This time I know she is seeing us.
I shove Pansy in the back. She made the King, so it’s only right that she explain.
“You’re the King,” Pansy says. “You’re going to take us to the right-side world.”
“I was on my way somewhere,” she says vaguely. She digs into her pockets, comes up with little belongings—a slip of paper, a coil of wire, a coin. Each one she holds up in confusion, lets drop from her hand. They fall on the dirt next to her sandaled toes.
A man on the ground groans, and his body shifts. His arm flails, and I stomp it.
“Can you take us?” Pansy asks.
“Yes.”
* * *
The King leads us out of the city. We follow her along the Wanderer’s wall into the country, where blackthorn tumbles over its fallen stones. Blood drips from the King’s missing fingers. It bothers me that she is still bleeding. I tear the sleeve off my shirt and take the King’s hand, wrapping the cloth over the stumps, tying it off across the palm.
As we travel, Pansy tells the King her story, the one she has already told me, about the man who lived next door.
“I used to call him Uncle,” Pansy says. “He and his wife looked after me when my parents were out gleaning. When I heard about the killings in school, I ran to him and asked him to protect me. He dragged me down the stairwell, and pulled my hair and slapped me. He held a chisel to my face and told me I was a dirty Wanderer sow. He made me take off my clothes.”
I go up behind and put my arm around her, but she shrugs it off. “When he was done,” she says. “He sat over me with the knife, and I could see him wondering what to do. But then more men came up behind him, and beat him in the head. He fell on top of me. His blood—” she says, wiping her eyes with both hands.
The King walks ahead, her antlers against the blue sky.
“The Fixers,” Pansy says. “I don’t know why they started it.”
“This time,” I say. “But we all have something to answer for.” The blackthorn reaches out from the side of the road, tears my legs.
Pansy looks at me sharp. “You told me your parents never hurt any Wanderers.”
“They didn’t,” I say. “The fightermen herded the Wanderers into the hall. They handed out stones and knives to all of the Fixers and told them to kill the Wandering wood lice. My parents refused. The fightermen said if they wouldn’t kill the Wanderers they were traitors and had to die. My parents still refused. So the other Fixers killed them.”
The King turns her head, the golden antler eyes gleaming out at me from under the black wing brow.
I am telling the truth. I watched my father stand in front of my mother and take the first cuts. I saw him fall down, screaming, at her feet. I saw her cover her face and bend over him as the Fixers fell on her with their tools and fists.
* * *
When the sky dips dark, we lay down in the forest to sleep. The blackthorn is on the air, sweet with a scratch like hay, up my nose in the starlit air.
The King is stretched out, her neck propped on a stone to give her antlers clearance from the ground. Pansy sleeps, curled in front of the King.
I pull the knife from my belt and creep up beside them. The way the King looks at me with her antler eyes. She knows what I did, and I can’t bear it. I raise the knife, hold it over the woman’s head, ready to plunge into her eye.
Then, I see the bandage, the piece of my own shirt wrapped around the King’s hand. She is already a bag of skin. She has crossed the line from living to dead, but here she is wrapped around Pansy, keeping her safe, taking her out of our upside down sunken world.
I put the knife away.
* * *
We follow the King all the way back to the potato man’s house. The house has been set on fire, but the flame is out, smoldering. From the distance, we see dogs circling, running through the potato fields, but when the King passes in through the yard, they are gone.
The dark house smells of smoke, and the body of the potato man is gone. The dogs bark in the distance, and out the window I see their brush tails disappear over the hill.
Pansy hangs close by the King, who steps carefully over the place where the potato man lay. She picks up the loft ladder and leans it against the wall above the door. The empty nail hangs above the sill, where we lifted the crown.
Pansy holds the ladder, and the King climbs. At the top, she unwraps her bandaged hand. The blood runs new from her m
issing fingers. She dips the first finger of her other hand into the blood, and, starting at the nail, draws a square on the smoke-smudged wall above the door. She dips into the blood again and again until the line on the wall is clear and dark.
I stand by the small window, where in comes the blackthorn air, faint over the smoke and molded potato.
The King dips her head forward and taps the wall with her antlers, one-two. The wall splits along the blood-drawn line. Click, and a new door springs open. Inside the door she has drawn, instead of outside the potato man’s house and a view of fields and forest, is a hollow space. Inside the space, steps lead up, a long staircase. Leaving the door open, the King backs down the ladder and stands in front of a wooden bench pushed against the wall.
Pansy watches, and wipes her hand across her eye, still trying to get the blood out. I wonder if she will still see it in the rightside world.
Pansy kneels down and kisses the King’s undamaged hand.
“We’re going up,” Pansy says, looking at me.
I think about Pansy, how we found each other among the fertilizer, how we have traveled and survived for forty-five days, hiding and crying into each other’s hair. I think about the knife in my hand, and the moment when the seams of life split and Bel’s self fell out.
“You go first,” I say. The King is patient, watching. The drip of blood from her fingers is drying up.
Pansy puts her foot on the ladder, and begins to climb. When she reaches the top, she lets go of the ladder and reaches one hand through the new door the King has drawn. She holds it there, watching, waiting. To see if she really can go. Then she brings her hand back, closes her eyes. Waits. Finally, she crawls up and over the ladder, and through the door. I see her legs, her calves and ankles below-skirt, and I watch each bit disappear up the stairs.
The King-drawn door bangs closed behind her. Its bloody edge-lines swallow back into the plaster wall.
I’ve always known I wasn’t going. I am fixed here, stitched in place by what I have done. But that doesn’t make no way out easier to bear.
The King drops down on the bench and slumps back, the tips of the antlers clacking against the stone wall.
My knees go, and I fall on the sooty stone floor in front of the King. I grab her hand, hold it to my chest, hanging on. Potato root is in my nose. “Oh, King,” I say. “Don’t leave me alone.” I want the King to say something. That she understands. That she forgives me. That I had reasons.
She looks sympathetic, but she is dying. A last drop of blood falls from the stub of her middle finger. And then the King is just a bald-headed woman several days dead.
My throat closes up, my lids bang down on my eyes, shutting my mind, trying to stop me. The King is gone. Pansy is gone. The world where I have lived the first fourteen years of my life is over. If there is any world left for me to go, it is the one inside of me.
I let go of the woman’s cold hand. I stand and face the empty room. It feels like the knife is back in my fist, only this time I am slicing into myself.
“I wanted to hurt Bel,” I say. These words are the point of the knife, digging against resisting skin.
“It was a relief,” I say. “It felt good.” I work the truth harder, split the tough seams I have sewn. Something gushes out, warm and sour. “Once I hit her, I couldn’t stop. It was the only way to be safe, the only way for the world to make sense again. I made Bel a bug, a germ. I struck and slashed with that knife, and my fear fell away.”
I hold out my hand, staring at it. “Then she was dead, and her blood was wet on my skin. And I was even more afraid than I had been before.”
Some last bit slumps out of me onto the floor of the potato man’s house, and I am left standing in an empty bag of skin.
New things fill up my eyes. I had been looking slant through a bunched-up seam, and now the threads are cut and the fabric ripped away. Now I can see so much more. I can’t see where Pansy has gone, but I can see all of the potato man’s life. I see the lines of him before they cut his throat. I see the bald-headed woman under the antlers. How she was just a woman on her way to the shop with a man who loved her and how she was cut down. I see the puddle of my frightened self on the dirty stone floor, wet and lumpen. The lines stretch and go in every direction.
Down my front, the potato air blows through the tattered edges of the self I have left. I am empty, open.
I go to the woman. Her face is blank and bloodless. I unfasten the antlered cap and take up the crown.
A LITTLE OF THE NIGHT
(Ein Bisschen Nacht)
Tanith Lee
Preface
Now he was an old man, but you could not entirely think of him in that way. He was lean and tall and hard as steel still, or he looked it. His face was lined, but his eyes had stayed jet black, and he had kept a full head of hair, even if the dark of it had changed to white silver. His teeth were good too—he could crack the shells of walnuts with them, they had seen that only this evening. And in his strong and well-made hands the sabre, when he lifted it, seemed quite as graceful and as dangerous as twenty, thirty years before.
Women had loved his voice, continued to do so. It was a beautiful voice even now, dark in tone, musical. He had persuaded troops into battle with those tones, given them the courage. He was a brave man, and intelligent as not so many were that were also brave. His name was Corlan Von Antal, and each of the sixteen men here tonight had served under his command. They called him, amongst themselves, Ursus (the Bear), and said it was for his famous cloak of black bearskin. But really it was for his valour and his power, his honour. And for the secret, forest-deep, whatever it was, that they had heard tell of, and that they sensed too about him. Besides, his hound was half wolf, and its pelt, like his, was silver. It would pad courteously from chair to chair when first they were seated, its massive ruffed head level with each man’s heart; a colossal beast, but calm as a trained dove. It took a bear to govern a wolf.
The fire shone crystal red and amber, the tasty meal was over and the crimson wine was in the glass goblets, and all around the finely furnished old tower, in which he lived, went up through the eaves of the night, showing its yellow windows to the stars. Would he tell them the story, this year? He was sixty-five if he was a day. Surely he could trust them now, now, these officers of his. Surely now he must tell them, as they had always hoped he would when they visited him. But they had thought that last time, and the times before. He had been fifty, fifty-five, then sixty. He might live to be ninety, of course. And they—well they might even die, for they were still active soldiers, and though it was hard to recall sometimes, only these three miles from the town of Ruzngrad, the war was going on eighty miles in the other direction.
The young officer Nacek thought this particularly, as he sat watching Von Antal in the firelight. No man, Nacek reflected, old or young, ever knew how long God would give him. Every day ended in a night. The lights in the windows of the highest towers would go out. No one should keep silent forever.
But Ursus did not tell them anything tonight. Just as he never had. As, perhaps, he never would.
One: Night
Forest-deep …
The forests—
Corlan ran through them, his coat and shirt sticking to his back in a freeze of sweat, his thick sheaf of hair flattened into black water by icy rain. He was thirty-four. He was afraid.
He had killed a man. For a soldier currently employed in the chess manouevres of warfare, that would have been a superfluous statement, were it not that the man Corlan had killed belonged to his own regiment, an officer of equal rank. Gerner was a plague-pig, greedy, bloated, cras and vicious. His men suffered from him, which Corlan and his brother Knight-Captains had watched, and said, done, nothing, for Gerner was not the sort to listen. But days ago Gerner had gone into a small village in the forests’ outskirt, taken every bit from it that was edible or portable, lined up the men and any male children and had them shot, then made his supper among the females. Some o
f his battalion had joined him with enthusiasm. Some always would. Others hung back. These village people had had little enough, and were not even counted among the enemy. A day after the “Feast”, as Gerner had called it, three of his men deserted. Winter was beginning and the weather was strident; they were easily caught. Gerner had the trio hung up by their ankles from a tree and left in the sleeting rain till their brains should burst. He had also previously made a little supper on them, too.
They were young, not yet sixteen, and—as Gerner remarked—had the “beardless faces of girls”.
One evening after that Corlan met Gerner unexpectedly, both of them alone and walking across a half-reaped, spoiled field, under the grey roar of the sky. And Gerner had smiled at Corlan. “You have some difficulty with me, brother Knight?” “Only one,” said Corlan. “You still live.” “Oh,” and Gerner laughed, “so I do, so I do.” In that moment Corlan, into whom the discipline of the military had been calcified nearly from birth, felt a cool high hand lift him upwards from his own body, until he stood some seven metres tall. From here, not dazed only a little surprised, he looked down on the ugly face of Captain Gerner. And then, almost gently, Corlan stepped forward and slammed his right fist into Gerner’s jaw. Corlan felt nothing much, though he heard the crack of a tooth—or a bone. But when Gerner toppled over; Corlan stamped hard, once, on his guts. After which, as the creature writhed there, bulge-eyed, retching, and wheezing for air like a damaged street-organ, Corlan drew his army sword and decapitated him.
Only when he had wiped off the blade and re-sheathed it, with a certain military precision, did Corlan Von Antal drop back into his own skin. And at once, from a mad retributary angel he became a mad terrified boy. And the boy turned and sprinted from the field, straight through into the deepest avenues of the trees, nearly mindless, with everything lost and thrown away—Gerner, obviously, but also Corlan’s prospects, career, family, friends, ideals—life—heart—lying in the rotted stalks like pieces of a broken plate.
