Here be dragons © Sarah A. Hoyt 2015
Cover illustration © Gerd Altmann
Cover design by Marian Derby
Published by Goldport Press
Goldport Press
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Denver, Colorado 80206
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations for the purpose of review. For information address Goldport Press – [email protected].
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to any persons, (living or dead), places or events is a coincidence.
Table of Contents
Author’s Bio
Here Be Dragons
Sarah A. Hoyt
Introduction by Cedar Sanderson
SOME TIME AGO, in the lost mists of time, a young woman who thought she would like to write fell in with a group of other writers. She knew she had it good, because she had learned that not all writing groups are created equal. So, her skin already calloused from legendary SFF semi-anonymous group Critters, where no-one knows your name and everyone has an opinion (not always based in her reality) she shyly hung around the fringes and mostly listened.
This group was not like the others, she quickly learned. It boasted professional published authors that really wanted to help. One of those was Sarah Hoyt. The young writer was myself. I can look back at that time and think that I was a different person, back then. Like a phoenix, I’ve been through fire and reborn anew. But Sarah has been a constant, along with Dave Freer, in mentoring my writing until the current day.
Sarah calls me, and the others who share her mentoring, her fledglings. It was due to Sarah that I finally became a published author and proved my feathers were fully grown-in and could keep me aloft. She was the person who suggested that Independency was not only possible, but feasible to the businesswoman I had become.
I think this collection of stories reflects that facet of Sarah very well. She is enamored of life, liberty, and the freedom that our American Founders espoused. They were borne, as the main characters in Around the Bend are, by hope. She started the concept called Human Wave, stories that don’t condemn our human race as hapless and vile, but hopeful.
Sarah’s stories often explore the human condition by peering through odd filters at it. What if vampires were real, and threatening an ancient France? What would the fabled Musketeers be, and why would humans join together against a terrible evil that seemed hopeless to resist in First Blood? Ah, hope!
Not to say that all the stories have happy endings. Although I suppose I shouldn’t spoil that one, even if… Nope. You have to read them yourself and discover which one I’m referring to. This collection shows some of the breadth of Sarah Hoyt’s mind, and it can be a dizzying glimpse of range, from kittens cute and fluffy to the multitude of Chinese Hells and gods therein.
Even then, when all seems lost, she never loses the reader to despair. Hope or horror, humor is the leavening she sprinkles in to keep her characters going through the worst she can throw at them. As an author, Sarah and I both focus on our characters. Whatever else the story tells, the characters must live, breathe, and ultimately sacrifice in order to grow. Both of us have a special fondness for families. We know what a mother’s sacrifice is, and you can see her love of her own children in her tales of family life and love. It’s not a rosy glow, she sees the reality that not everything will have a happy ending. She’s very good at showing love, rather than telling us that her characters love one another.
Because it is love, she reminds us in tales like Shepherds and Wolves, that ultimately makes us human. In an era when packs of roving bullies harass people on the internet, allowing their prejudices and assumptions to blind them to the reality in front of them, we need this reminder. Humans, one race, each one a unique individual who loves, and is loved. By someone, somewhere. Even if we don’t love that person, we cannot forget that they are human like we are.
Unless they aren’t human. Sarah often writes about vampires, the undead who have become a common theme in our culture. Her take on them is by no means flat, however. You will find more than one note in the immortal, deadly beings she brings to life (you should excuse my deplorable humor…) in tales like Blood Ransom. Sick of vampires? Don’t worry. You haven’t met Sarah’s conflicted, all-too-human characters yet.
One thing I have always enjoyed about her characters is their realism. From the middle-aged woman called out on one last mission, to the over-talented youngster who still struggles with school, you feel like you might know them. Sarah doesn’t fall into the trap of the perfect hero or heroine who can do no wrong. Just like you and me, her characters screw up. They have more snark than they ought to, and they are stubborn, just like Sarah can be.
In the years I’ve known Sarah, I’ve come to learn that a good writer can mimic those around them onto the paper. It’s a writer’s gift, after all, to bring words into life, worlds from our minds drawn onto a flat plane that yet invoke imagination beyond the bounds of what the reader knows to be true. A great writer can spin whole universes into being from the neuron web of the brain and then hang shimmering globes of tales into that cobweb universe. People talk, fight, love, and die in those tales, and the reader weeps for the reality that isn’t there at all.
Reading is, in the end, the ultimate goal of the writer. We do not write to lock the story in a desk drawer to gather dust. We write that the tales might be read. Sharing the worlds with readers breathes new life into them. Writers learn from their readers. Sarah’s readers interact with her at her blog, According to Hoyt, and let her know what they want to see. It doesn’t always happen, but I know as a writer that it helps, to hear others ask for more when they have just devoured your worlds and found them good. That feedback loop helps the writer give more.
I’ve learned so much from Sarah. One of the things I learned by observation. Writers often despair. We get to a certain point in a story and throw our hands up. This is horrible! We tell ourselves. No-one could possibly enjoy this. Fortunately, we’re wrong. Sure, we’ll never please every reader. Some won’t get what we were trying to say. But if we use the skills we’ve learned to spin the tales as they come to us, then we can make magic. Even if it isn’t the sort of magic that will leave you with a dress made of silk and butterfly wings, it is a magic worth having.
Magic comes with a price, they say, and certainly we write of prices. This, then, is the price writers pay, the sadness and joy of creation. Sarah advised me that to write a story that would grip the reader, you must metaphorically open a vein and bleed on the page. I’ve done that, and discovered that this is true. However, if you go too far, you write horror. Spilling one’s heart’s blood results in a story that is so emotionally painful it makes your readers flinch. I tried again, and found that a few drops of my essence… like the story of Heart’s Fire, where the young heroine is reading a paperback novel, the key to her downfall. Wry humor here. Sarah and I share a love of reading, and furthermore, reading stuff that everyone tells us is trashy and why aren’t you reading works with great and lofty messages?
Because sometimes it’s not about the message that blinks and flashes like a giant neon light tearing the quiet night apart. Sometimes it’s about the little stories, the lives of people who work and love and live quietly, never thinking they could make a difference until they have no choice. Because that is a message in itself. Stories give us hope, which enables us to continue. Stories show us how heroism really works,
and romance, and all the big things that make us human and keeps us going onward into the future which might hold magic in the form of technology. Or maybe not, it could be things we haven’t even dreamed of yet, writers nor readers.
We won’t know until we are in the future. Here in the present, we can look clear-eyed at the world around us, the history behind us, and we can tell stories. Mothers and grannies have always told stories. Sometimes they were stories to teach, or to give hope, or to simply make a child laugh. We could attain no higher praise than that simple laughter.
Enjoy Sarah’s stories, the worlds that she has woven with her words. Live with the people she heard in her mind, and then remember to say thank you, for the simple pleasure. Authors are people too, and it means a lot. One of the best ways to say thanks? Leave an honest review for the book you just read. I’m saying thank you, for the stories, and the way she has poked, prodded, critiqued, and teased me into becoming a writer too. I’m a better person for knowing her and learning from her.
Ready to travel the universes? Go read! – Cedar Sanderson, Ohio, 2015
It Came Upon A Midnight Clear
THE POUNDING ON THE DOOR, the words, “Open up in the name of the law.”
Juan Johnson who had been lying in the dark, in his little bed at the back of the house, half asleep, retained only a sense of explosions, a smell of something burning, papa up front saying he didn’t know anything of these Usaians and besides, he was a honest carpenter and what could they—
And mama! Mama, who had never left dad alone in any difficulty, Mama who rarely left the house without him and never at night, had gotten Juan and Angelita out of their beds, in the dark, wrapping the baby and putting her in a sling, and dressing Juan, fast, so fast that she’d put a sock of each different color on his feet.
This still bothered him, as they ran down the alley in the night, and then up another alley, all staying away from the police.
Juan could hear other pounding and “Open up—”
And fragments of other sentences, too, “Forbidden,” and “Dangerous elements” and “Seditious ideology.”
Juan knew what “dangerous elements” were. He was only ten, but Mama and Papa had taught him at home and he’d been allowed to read a lot of dad’s old books, the sort of thing they no longer taught in the school. Dangerous elements were things like Uranium and other things that gave off radiation that could kill you. Why the police would be looking for it, he didn’t know.
He did not however have any idea what Seditious ideology meant.
He repeated the words to himself as mama stopped in a dark alley, by a flyer. It wasn’t their flyer, but then Mama rarely drove their flyer, and she certainly never burned its genlock clean off, reaching in before it could do more than emit a bzzzt and burning something else, murmuring to herself as though to remember a list, “Alarm off,” Then went in, leaving Juan alone at the entrance for a moment. She came back and threw something to the floor. Juan didn’t know what it was – pieces of something electronic. “Tracker,” Mama said.
She pulled Juan in with one hand, and closed the door, then sat him in a seat, and – strangely – put the sling with Angelita around him. The baby was only three months old, but Juan was a slim boy and the sling – and the baby – very big and very heavy. He thought of protesting, but Mama looked as though she would start to cry, so he said nothing. He let Mama put the harness over both of them, and saw her consult a paper in Papa’s handwriting as she set the coordinates.
Moments later they were in the air, and Juan might have dozed, but he woke with the flare of explosions, and the shaking as Mama sent the flyer careening side to side.
“Mama!” he said.
“Say it, Juan, say it, my little Juanito.”
“I pledge allegian—”
Mama made a sound. It wasn’t quite laugh and not quite a cry. “Not that one. The other one. The human events one.”
Juan blinked. He’d learned all these from as soon as he could speak. The only time dad was really strict was in making sure he remembered everything, every single word. And the meaning. All the meaning. “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God—”
An explosion came very close, making them shake and showing Mama’s face, very pale and marked with trails as if she’d cried a lot. He hadn’t heard her cry. How could she cry so silently.
“Nature’s God?” Mama prompted.
“Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness—”
Mama sobbed then, but didn’t say anything but “Go on,” so Juan did, as explosions rocked the small flyer, and Mama, finally, just took them really low, and did something, and pulled Juan out after her, but never took the baby sling of him, and she pushed him against a wall and put her hand over his mouth, while the flyer lifted off again and flew a programmed course.
“It was only a second,” Mama said. “Only a second. Maybe they won’t notice.”
But then she was pulling Juan, and running down an alley, and then another.
Juan heard heavy boots after them, and was surprised when Mama pulled out a burner and shot a man down. Juan didn’t have a very clear idea of what happened then, save the man fell, and mama pulled Juan after her again.
Up, up and up, they were climbing narrow stairs in the dark. Mama was talking to herself in Spanish, something she only did when she was really worried. Juan didn’t know Spanish, but he knew a few of the words. He knew “must do something” because mama used to say it at Papa when she was really mad or worried.
“Mama,” Juan said. “My legs hurt. And Angelita is heavy.”
“Yes,” Mama said, which seemed not to be an answer at all. From somewhere to their right came an explosion and then someone screamed, and screamed and screamed, the voice getting weaker as it went. Mama, who normally went to help all the neighbors, didn’t even slow down.
“Juan, you know what we’ve taught you? Papa and I?”
They’d taught him so many things. To read and to write, and to brush his teeth, and– “To mind and be a good boy?”
Again, Mama made that sound that wasn’t quite laughter or a sob, and her hand came down and touched his hair briefly. “That too, my love, but not that. About the USA. About how it existed and was blessed by God as long as it kept to the precepts of liberty and equality before the law. And how it fell and gave its power to supposedly enlightened rulers and then—”
“It was reduced in size,” Juan said, puffing a little as it was hard to keep up with Mama as she ran down one alley, then another. “And punished.”
“Not reduced in size,” she said. “What remains calls itself United States, but it’s not.”
“But you said, if it returned to faithfulness and the…” He struggled for the words Papa had said so many times, “the inspired vision of the founders it would be forgiven and be great again.”
Sob-laugh and mama said, “It’s not the same place. It can’t return. We’ll have to remember and make it true again. Those of us who keep the faith.”
“Daddy said,” and now he was having true trouble catching his breath. “Daddy said that as long as the belief in the principles of the declaration of independence and the constitution-” deep breath. “As long as those remained in one human heart, the USA wouldn’t be dead.”
“And so it won’t.” Mama stopped abruptly. Juan could hear the noise of people running after them, voices saying “They went this way. The Flyer was a ruse.”
There were flyers above too, with low-pointing floodlights. As one
passed overhead, Mama pressed Juan against the wall. She spoke quickly, in a low voice, “That’s why they made us illegal. That’s why they’re trying to exterminate us. As long as liberty remains in one human heart, the bio-lords won’t have full sway. And they want full sway. They want to dictate our every thought. Listen, Juan, my son. Do you know where the Peace Tower is? From here?”
Juan thought. He wasn’t sure where he was, but he knew the neighborhood, and they hadn’t gone very far. Their flight had been too short. The Peace Tower, built to commemorate peace in the Americas, even if Papa said it wasn’t peace at all, just surrender, was big and lit up and right in the center of the city.
He shook his head a little, because if the peace tower were anywhere nearby, he would see its light. They lit it up in white and green every night.
“If you take that alley to the left, and keep going, mind, Juan, as fast as you can, you will come to the plaza where it is. Don’t go to the plaza. I don’t know if your description is out, but it might be. Instead, the alley that leads to the peace tower plaza, just before you leave it, it has a branch that turns left. Take that. It runs behind a lot of restaurants. Keep on that until you come to the back of a restaurant called Silver Palate – remember that. The name is on big red dumpsters in the back. Turn right there. Follow that alley till it ends, and climb over the wall to the right. It will be difficult, but mind, Juanito, keep Angelita from falling as you climb.
“You’ll be in the backyard of an apartment house. It’s what used to be a large house, long ago, but it’s now apartments. Go in through the back door, run up the stairs to the left, all the way to the top. There’s a door there, marked 4 B. Knock on it. Say Paul sent you. Say treason. They’ll know what to do. The man in the house, his name is James Remy. Do what he tells you. Can you remember?”
Here Be Dragons: A collection of short stories Page 1
