“I’m not scared of you,” Saben says, but it’s obvious to Soldier that she is, that she’s terrified—the way her voice trembles, the sweat standing out on her upper lip, her slightly dilated pupils, the faint electric reek of adrenaline.
“I think I want to see you on your knees,” Soldier whispers. She can feel the other woman’s body growing tense, fight or flight, resist or submit, and she nips at the top of Saben’s right ear, not quite hard enough to draw blood, but hard enough to hurt, catching the soft curve of helix and antihelix between her strong incisors.
“Screw you,” Saben says, her voice rattling like empty tin cans strung on baling wire.
Slowly, tentatively, Soldier releases her ear, and when it’s free, Saben covers that side of her face with her right hand and turns her head towards Odd Willie.
“Is that what it’s going to take?” Soldier asks her. “Do I have to actually fuck you to get your attention, to make you understand who’s on top?”
“Willie, call the Bailiff,” Saben says. “Tell him I had to do it. Tell him to get her off me.”
Willie just shakes his head and flicks the butt of his cigarette at the curb, then takes his silver Zippo and a fresh pack of Winstons out of his coat. He peels away the cellophane wrapper and drops it on the ground. The wind whisks it away at once, and the crumpled plastic snags in a patch of dry brown weeds closer to the gate.
“C’mon, Saben. You know he’s not going to do that. You ought to know he can’t do that. He might be a lunatic, but he knows the rules. He knows your ass is mine if that’s the way I want it. Ain’t that right, Odd Willie?”
“Yeah, sure,” he replies, and lights another Winston. “I know how it is. But, Soldier, I mean, fuck it, why don’t we deal with the good Father Whoever-he-might-be in the trunk there before every cop in this end of Kent County shows up. You can still mess with Saben later, right?”
Soldier ignores him, only half hearing the words anyway, her own heartbeat too loud in her ears now, the taste of Saben’s fear too sharp, entirely too immediate.
“Get down on your knees, Saben. Don’t you fucking make me tell you again.”
“No,” Saben says, still watching Odd Willie like maybe there’s some hope he’s going to change his mind and come to her rescue after all. “I won’t do it.”
“Fine,” Soldier says, “if that’s how it’s got to be, that’s how it’s got to be,” and she slaps the left side of Saben’s face so hard that she staggers and almost falls. Blood spurts from her nose and busted lower lip, falling in vivid crimson droplets across the blacktop. Odd Willie makes a disgusted, impatient sort of noise and retreats a couple of steps towards the Dodge. Saben slumps against her car, stunned, gasping through her bloody lips and nostrils, and Soldier seizes her by the back of her neck and forces her to her knees. She isn’t surprised that it requires so little effort. She’s learned that one good blow takes the fight out of almost everyone.
“How’s that?” Soldier asks, bending over Saben. “Are you comfortable down there?”
“You know, just for the record,” Odd Willie says, “it seems to me you got your priorities turned around.”
“Duly noted,” Soldier replies breathlessly and smiles at Odd Willie. Drawing blood felt even better than she expected it would, and the sight of Saben on her knees, Saben helpless and hurting and humiliated after all the weeks of bullshit, has her a little giddy. Part of her, the sliver of humanity that knows enough to keep its hands clean, reminds Soldier that there are limits to what she can get away with.
Don’t worry, she thinks. I’m not gonna kill her. Not today.
“Maybe I should put it in writing,” Odd Willie Lothrop says.
“Yeah,” Soldier agrees, “maybe you should. There’s a pen in the glove compartment. Probably some paper, too.”
“But you’re not gonna hold this against me?” he asks. “I mean, I know this sort of shit can come back to haunt a guy, taking issues with the powers that be and all.”
“Oh, hell no,” Soldier says, still smiling, and then she kicks Saben hard in the ribs. There’s another gout of blood on the pavement, and Saben White’s mouth is opening and closing, opening and closing like a fish caught out of water, fighting to draw breath back into her bruised, deflated chest. “I’m not vindictive,” Soldier continues. “You ought to know that by now, Willie. I’d never think of keeping anyone from speaking his mind. I mean, that’s the freaking First Amendment. That shit’s sacred as George Washington and the goddamn golden rule.”
“Never hurts to ask. I figure a guy’s gotta watch his own ass,” and then he slips quickly back inside the Dodge, shuts his door, and rolls up the window again. Soldier nods once in his direction and turns back to Saben White.
“Still thinking we should get the Bailiff’s opinion on this situation?” she asks, taking her cell phone from her jacket and laying it on the blood-spattered ground in front of Saben. “It’s easy. All you gotta do is press redial. Of course, I’ll break your fucking hand, but nothing’s free.”
Saben, still gasping, starts to reach for the phone, then pulls her hand back.
“That’s a smart girl,” Soldier says, squatting down next to Saben White. “Who’d have ever thought it. Now, we’re going stop fucking around and come to a mutual understanding, and then we’re going to clean up this mess you’ve made, capisce?”
Saben only nods her head once, then gags and almost vomits. Soldier retrieves her cell phone and returns it to her jacket pocket.
“I…” Saben gasps. “It’s…it’s not…”
“You need to concentrate on breathing, babe, not talking. We’re way past talking now.”
Soldier leans forward and closes her jaws firmly around the back of Saben’s neck, just below the hairline, just behind the point where her spinal cord enters the foramen magnum. She bites down hard, breaking skin and bruising muscle, sinking her insufficient teeth in as far as they’ll go and tasting the warm, coppery sea trapped there inside that body. A low and threatful growl begins deep in Soldier’s throat and rises very slowly; Saben White goes rigid, then, gradually, she begins to relax, accepting Soldier’s rank, accepting her own position. They both know this drill, have both known it since they were children wrestling with other changelings and the ghoul pups in the tunnels beneath College Hill. It’s almost instinct to them both. After only two or three minutes, Soldier releases her, and Saben crawls away, sobbing, still trying to get her breath, trailing blood and spit and snot.
“I’ll give you a couple of minutes to pull yourself together,” Soldier calls after her. “I wouldn’t waste it crying.” But the anger is deserting her now, and there’s little left in its place but weariness and dread of all the trouble that’s yet to come. Her phone call to the Bailiff. Keeping her mouth shut and taking it, whatever it may be, whatever he has to say. Whatever she has coming for letting all this happen on her watch.
She wipes her mouth, and her lips and chin leave a red smudge across the back of her wrist. Her throat’s a little sore from the noises it was making only a moment before, the guttural canine sounds that it was never intended for. She thinks of the bottle of whiskey hidden beneath the seat and watches Saben White, who’s sitting near the front fender of the Impala now, sobbing, her face hidden in her hands. Her tattoo, the Seal of Solomon, seems very bright beneath the afternoon sun, all those shades of ink shining from her skin like a beacon, like a warning. Soldier imagines cracking open the bottle of Dickel, imagines it filling her mouth, warming her belly, driving back the thought of the Bailiff’s voice, and then she even manages to pretend she has that luxury.
The second time that Soldier met the Bailiff, he was wearing the same threadbare seersucker suit as before, the same white tennis shoes, but he offered her sugar cookies and grape soda instead of the foul-tasting, turpentine-scented tea. She’d been sent upstairs again by Madam Terpsichore, and one of the silver-eyed women who kept the house led her through the kitchen and a parlor and down the long hallway to th
e library where he was waiting at his writing desk. There was an oil lamp with a tall glass chimney sitting near the book he was reading, and it cast the only light in the room besides the waxing three-quarter moon slipping in through the parted draperies. He smiled when he saw her, smiled wide and thanked the silver-eyed woman, whose name was Adelaide.
“You’re back so soon?” he asked Soldier, as though the whole thing had been her idea. “Why, it’s hardly been a month, has it?”
In fact, it had hardly been a full week, but Soldier figured it would probably be best if she didn’t correct him. A plate of cookies and a bottle of soda had been placed on the floor near his chair, and the Bailiff pointed at them and asked if she was hungry.
“Yes sir, I am,” she said and sat down near the plate. She was missing her dinner, being sent up into the yellow house to talk with the fat man who claimed that he wasn’t the god of men and churches or the Cuckoo, but whom she suspected could be either one and, perhaps, even both. She drank half the grape soda, taking care not to spill any on her blue calico dress, and ate one of the cookies before he said anything else to her.
“Have you been thinking about the things we talked about?” he asked. She told him that she hadn’t and finished a second cookie.
“Oh,” he said, sounding neither surprised nor angry. “Well, I don’t suppose that much matters, does it? I suppose it matters much more what we talk about tonight. Before we begin, do you have any questions, little Soldier?”
And there were things that she wanted to ask him, such as why none of the other children had been sent up to the library, why only her, and whether or not he had a name besides “the Bailiff,” which didn’t seem like much of a name at all. But before she could think which question to ask him first, which might be most important, in case she got to ask only one, he was already talking again, so she started on her third cookie instead.
“That cup of tea you finished off,” he said. “I trust it likely didn’t agree with you. It’s damned heady stuff, I’ll grant you that. Sometimes, it knows the road into a person’s dreams. Sometimes, it can leak straight into the soul,” and then he tapped himself twice between the eyes with a pudgy index finger. “Unless, of course, you happen to be accustomed to it.”
Soldier put down the unfinished cookie and stared up at him; his green eyes seemed even brighter than the last time. She wondered if they were real eyes, or if the Bailiff had somehow lost his own and these were only polished gems.
“I had a dream,” she said. “Is that what you’re asking, if I had a bad dream after I drank the tea? Were you the one who carried me to bed?”
The Bailiff hesitated a moment, as though confused at having been asked two questions at once. He rubbed at his beard and frowned.
“I had a dream,” she said again, recalling the way her head had ached when she woke after her first visit with the Bailiff, waking confused, disoriented, and hurting, and sick to her stomach. She’d been excused from her lessons for the whole day, and Madam Melpomene had even made someone else take her chores. So she’d lain there in her bunk all night long, staring at the underside of the bunk above, afraid to sleep again, thinking about the Bailiff and trying to remember all the missing pieces of the strange, long dream. She knew it had come from the teacup, from whatever she’d swallowed. She didn’t need him to tell her that.
“I might have warned you, I suppose,” he said, those too-green eyes twinkling in the lamplight.
“Are these real cookies?” she asked him and poked at the one she’d left half-eaten. “Will they give me nightmares, too?”
“Do I look like the sort who would give a little girl tainted sweets?”
“Yes,” she replied, and he laughed out loud, his laugh like a thunderclap, and leaned back in his chair. The old wood creaked alarmingly, and she thought for a second that it might burst apart in a hail of varnished splinters.
“The dream, then,” he said, when he’d stopped laughing and had wiped his eyes with his handkerchief and put it back into his breast pocket. “Tell me as much of it as you can, little Soldier. Everything you recollect. Take care to omit nothing, no matter how nonsensical or insignificant it might seem to be.”
“Nonsensical?” she asked, puzzled by the word because she’d never heard it before.
“Silly,” he replied. “Ridiculous. Inane. Absurd.”
“I see,” she said, though she’d never heard inane before, either.
“Anyway, take care to leave none of it out. The devil is very often in the details, you know.”
“Unless he’s in this room,” she said, deciding against finishing the sugar cookies and grape soda. The Bailiff laughed again, and his chair creaked and popped beneath him.
“Whatever in the hells have you gone and plucked from the wild, wild sea, my dear old Terpsichore,” he chuckled, even though Madam Terpsichore wasn’t in the room with them. And then to Soldier he said, “Child, you are a rare scrap, indeed. We shall have such delightful conversations, you and I.”
“Do you want to hear about my dream or not?” she demanded, and the plate with the remaining cookies squeaked softly against the floor when she pushed it away from her.
“Oh, most assuredly,” he said. “More even than I desire my next breath.”
I could keep it for myself, she thought. I could make it a secret and keep it forever, and no one would ever know. I’d forget he made me have that dream. I could try—
“Whenever you’re ready, dear,” he prompted.
“It doesn’t make much sense,” she warned, but he said that didn’t matter. “I don’t remember all of it,” she added, and he said that didn’t matter, either. Of course, he’d told her both these things already, and she could tell he was losing patience. She didn’t know what would happen if she made the Bailiff angry, the bald man, the one who might be the god of men and of churches, who might be the Cuckoo, who might only be a demon. She didn’t know, and she didn’t want to find out, so she took a deep breath, wished that she weren’t afraid of drinking the rest of the grape soda, and cleared her throat.
“At first I was in a desert,” she said, though that wasn’t actually the beginning of it. The true beginning frightened her too much to put into words, so much so that it was better to risk making the bald man angry with her. “I was in a desert, and I wasn’t a child. I was grown-up, and there was another woman walking with me. She was also a child of the Cuckoo.”
“Did she tell you that?”
“Yes, I think so,” Soldier replied. She told the Bailiff that the woman was the most beautiful person that she’d ever seen, dreaming or awake or anywhere in between, Above or Below. She was very, very tall, with long gray-white hair pulled back in dreadlocks to reveal her face and her golden-brown eyes. Her skin had, over the long ages that she’d wandered the sand, been burned black as pitch by the relentless desert sun and might as easily have been ebony or jet as flesh and blood. They’d walked together through the whispering sand, trudging over gigantic dunes that seemed to run on in every direction as far as Soldier could see.
As they walked, the woman told her a story about three witches and a changeling child named Esmeribetheda, an old story that Soldier had known already, though she’d never heard it told quite the way that the black woman told it.
“She was not a traitor,” the woman said to Soldier. “That part’s a lie. Esmeribetheda had good reasons for the things she did. The djinniyeh in their great domed city had set themselves against the ghul, who were interlopers, who’d come to the deserts from some world far away. Esmeribetheda was to be made a djinniyeh herself, when the ghul were all dead or driven back to that other place.”
“How curious,” the Bailiff said and lit a briarwood pipe with a kitchen match. He exhaled, and the air in the library smelled of brimstone and cherry tobacco. “And you’ve told none of this to the hounds?”
“No,” Soldier replied, because she hadn’t.
“Good. It’s best we keep it that way for now. Continue, plea
se.”
“Are you sure?” she asked, hoping he’d decided that he’d heard enough and would send her away.
“Of course,” he said around the stem of the pipe clutched between his yellow teeth. “You’re doing very well. Don’t stop now.”
So she told him about the ruined walls and empty windows of a city half-buried by the sand. They passed it and then descended a particularly steep dune to stand together on the parched bed of an ancient, vanished lake or sea hidden deep within the endless desert, a vast plain of cracked mudflats and glittering salt and gypsum crystals. All around them lay the crumbling, petrified bones of the monstrous beasts that had lived there long ago, the beasts that had haunted deep places almost from the dawn of time until that last day when the sun had finally consumed the waters, and the things had perished in the mud and blistering heat.
The crooked, scorched trunk of a tree rose from the lake bed. There were symbols Soldier didn’t recognize carved into the wood in long vertical columns.
“The ghul murdered her,” the woman said, running her fingers across one of the symbols. “That part’s true. Her bones turned to dust, and her ghost still murmurs in the night. In time, the djinniyeh became distracted by other things—they’re too easily discouraged—and didn’t try again. But the hounds moved on, searching for someplace where they’d have no enemies to fear.”
And then, Soldier told the Bailiff, the black-skinned woman had gone, and she’d been left alone and standing at the crest of a very high dune, the tallest one yet, the King of Dunes, she thought. She stood there, wrapped in silk and muslin robes that the dark woman had given her, looking down at a place where the desert finally ended, a place where the sea met the land, where the two were forever fighting a war and the sea was forever winning. The yellow-brown-white sand became a green sea capped with silvery waves, and she was starting down the far side of the King of Dunes when she heard something in the sky and looked up.
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