by Cat Rambo
“Is she pretty?” Britomart asks. Her face is still turned away.
Laurana considers. “Yes,” she says.
“As pretty as I was?”
The anguish in the whisper forces Laurana put down her pen. She takes Britomart’s hands in hers. They are untouched by the disease, the nails sleek and shiny and well groomed. Hands like the necks of swans, or white doves arcing over the gleam of water.
“Never that pretty,” she says.
____________________
The next morning Laurana goes through the room, touching each charm to stillness until the lace curtains no longer flutter. Until there is no sound in the room except her own breathing and the warbling calls of the deathbirds clustering among the blossoms of the bougainvillea tree outside.
She hears a fluttering from her room, a pigeon that has joined the dozen others on the windowsill, but she ignores it, as she ignored the earlier arrivals. She sits beside the bed, listening, listening. But the figure on the bed does not take another breath, no matter how long she listens.
All through that day, the golems labor boiling sugar. Jeanette brings her lemonade and the new girl, Madeleine, has made biscuits. She drinks the sweet liquid and looks at the dusty wallpaper. The thought of changing it stuns her with the energy it would require. She will sit here, she thinks, until she dies, and dust will collect on her and the wallpaper alike.
Still, when dinnertime comes she goes downstairs and under Tante Isabelle’s watchful eye, she pushes some food around on her plate.
Daniel cannot help but be a little thankful that Britomart is dead, she thinks. He was the one who emptied her chamber pot and endured her abuse when she set him to fetching and carrying. The thought makes her speak sharply to him as he serves the chowder the new girl has made. He looks bewildered by her tone and slinks away. She regrets the moment as soon as it is passed but has no reason for calling him back.
Upstairs the ranks of the pigeons have swollen by two or three more. She lies on her bed, fully clothed, and stares at the ceiling.
The next morning she takes two golems from their labors to carry Britomart’s body for her. They dig the grave on a high slope of the mountain, overlooking the bay. It is a fine view, she thinks. One Britomart would have liked.
When they have finished, she stands with her palms turned upwards to the sky, calling clouds to come seething on the wind. They collect, darkening like burning sugar. When they are at the perfect, furious boil, she brings lightning down from them to smash the stone that stands over the grave. She does it over and over again, carving Britomart’s name in deep and angry, blackened letters.
At home she goes to lie in bed again.
One by one, the golems grind to a stop at their labors, and the sap boils over in thick black smoke. They stand wherever their energy gave out, but all manage in their last moments to bring their limbs in towards their torsos, standing like stalks of stillness.
It may be the smoke that draws Christina. She arrives, knocks on the door, and comes inside, brushing past the servants. Without knowing the house, she manages to come upstairs and to Laurana’s bedroom.
Laurana does not move, does not look over at the door.
Christina comes to the bed and lies down beside the sorceress. She looks around at the bedroom, at the string of shells hanging on the wall, but says nothing. She strokes Laurana’s ivory hair with a soft hand until the tears begin.
Outside the golems grind to life again as the rain starts. They collect the burned vats and trundle them away. They cask the most recent rum and set the casks on wooden racks to ferment. They put the plantation into order, and finish the last of their labors. Then as the light of day fades, muffled by the steady rain, they arrange themselves again, closing themselves away, readying for tomorrow.
“Sugar” was another of my pirate anthology inspired stories, although its seed was an image of the golems lined up before their mistress. Ironically, Sean Wallace picked up “Sugar” for his Fantasy sampler before I had a chance to send it to any of the pirate anthologies and it appeared there in 2007.
A Key Decides Its Destiny
Because Solon DesCant was the greatest enchanter of his time, which spanned centuries, Lily had chosen him for a teacher despite the peril. He had produced wonders for the Duke of Tabat, performed miracles for the Emperor, and even vanished mysteriously for a decade, returning to claim he had undertaken certain unpalatable tasks for the demons of S’Keral.
Every fifty years Solon took an apprentice, whose work was to straighten the shelves of his workroom, to fetch and carry, cook and clean, tend his chickens, and run those errands beneath the magician’s dignity. In return he taught the apprentice the ins and outs of enchanting and the secrets he had spent his life discovering. And sometime in the forty-ninth year, Solon would kill the apprentice before they could carry his secrets out into the world. Two had escaped this fate by fleeing before that year arrived. But the final year was the year of true knowledge and many had let their thirst for secrets keep them there until it was too late and they found death in one of the ingenious poisons of which Solon was master.
Today’s creation was a minor magic. He made the key out of cats’ whiskers braided together and hardened with the chill from a heart that had never known love. He couldn’t resist embellishment so he carved roses from mouse bone and attached the beads on strands of lignum vitae. Handling it required care—whisker tips protruded along its length like tiny thorns and a drop of blood swelled on his finger where one pricked him. The manticores stuffed and mounted on the walls of his workroom watched him with glassy eyes as he held it up.
“Is that it?” Lily asked from the doorway. He nodded, setting the key down on the table so they both could study it. She tucked her hands behind her back as she looked at it like a child examining a fragile heirloom, afraid of breaking it.
“What will it unlock?”
He shrugged. “Enchanted keys choose what they will unlock. But I’ve made this for a witch, who hopes to persuade it to the destiny she prefers.” He wrapped the key in a length of velvet before handing it to the apprentice. “Lily, you’ll take this to her. There will be no payment; I’ll ask her for a favor in due time.”
She chewed her lip at the thought, looking down at the bundle.
“You’ll have to learn to deal with witches at some point,” he said. He reached for an alembic and pulled it in front of him, readying his next experiment. “It might as well be now.”
“Is there anything I need to know beforehand?” she asked.
“Don’t look in her eyes and be polite above all else. Witches take offense very easily.”
Lily went down the winding stone stairs. The thought of delivering to the witch made her dizzy with nerves—witches are uncanny sorts and dangerous to cross. Girding herself with charms and amulets to fortify her courage, she slung a cloak around her shoulders, dark as night, soft as a smile, and went down the road towards the Thornwoods. She hunted up and down the paths, stepping right and left, walking deosil rather than risk the bad luck of widdershins, and trying to ignore the boggarts that hunted through the branches, watching her with sly eyes like cracks of light in a darkened room.
The key rested heavily in her pocket. A key that could open any door if it were persuaded. It burned in her mind like Magnesia Alba, which ignites hot and white when exposed to the air.
The witch lived in a cavern. Two great beasts crouched on either side of its entrance, mawed like panthers, tailed like scorpions. The apprentice did not look at them directly but she could feel their eyes like flames against her back as she walked down into the darkness.
The air was cold on her face and the plink of falling moisture echoed in the distance. Once something small and leathery-winged flapped past but she pressed on.
Up ahead an archway held the warmth of torchlight and through it was the witch’s chamber, unexpectedly cheerful. Rugs woven in scarlet and purple covered the rocky floor, swallowing Lily’s footsteps.
The witch sat at a table, laying down cards made of stiff paper and painted in elaborate detail, colored with powdered lapis lazuli and gold leaf.
The witch did not look up until the last card had been laid down. Then finally she raised her gaze.
“You’re new,” she said. “Got you running errands, does he?”
“I’ve brought the key you wanted made.”
“Have you now? Let me see it.”
A touch of reluctance slowing her movements, Lily put the velvet bundle in the witch’s hands. She unwrapped it like a long-awaited present, her eyes gleaming with avarice.
“I’ll lift a curse with this,” she gloated, fondling the haft and ignoring its tiny thorns. She frowned as it twisted in her grasp. “What’s this? This key has already decided its purpose—one that is no good to me.”
“I brought it straight from Solon’s hands,” Lily said, bewildered.
Drawing back her arm, the witch flung the key in Lily’s direction. It glanced across her cheek, drawing blood as it hit and fell without a sound to the carpet. “Take it back and tell Solon I demand a new one within the next century.”
Shaking with fear, Lily picked up the key and put it back in her pocket. She moved to retrieve the scrap of velvet but the witch motioned her away. “Be off and be glad I don’t set the blood in your veins to boiling! It’s you I blame for the key’s decision.”
The trip back through the corridors seemed longer than it had going down but at last she saw the light of the entrance and made her way out. A beast snapped at her, rending her cloak, but she hurried on.
Back at the tower she hesitated at the foot of the stairs. Solon’s temper was slow to rise but fierce as a dragon’s blaze when awakened. She wavered on the bottom step, slipping a hand into her pocket. The thorns stung her and she thought, Why bring pain upon myself now? He won’t know until he asks the witch for a favor, and that may be centuries away. She turned and went to the workroom to grind sulfur crystals into the fine powder that summoning spells demand. Distracted by the demands of constructing a matrix for water elementals, Solon never asked about her errand.
Days passed and the key remained in her pocket. At night she puzzled over what its purpose might be—if she and Solon were the only people who had touched it before the witch then it must be shaped to the desires of one or the other of them. If it is Solon’s, it could be anything, she thought, but after all he took precautions and great care in shaping it. He must, after all, know the best way to prevent such things.
Perhaps it’s my desire that gave it purpose, she thought. The witch did say she blamed me. Perhaps it is the key to Solon’s heart. She fell into daydreams of romance where Solon declared his passion and vowed to lay the world at her feet, where he slew hippogriffs and kings for her and built a castle of rose-colored crystal on the slopes of Berzul, the dwarf-infested mountain that is the tallest in the world.
Yes, he’ll love me, she thought. He will be unable to kill the woman he loves. She began to watch him for signs of passion: sighs or glances, or uncharacteristic lapses into poetry. Sometimes she thought she glimpsed warmth in his eyes as he demonstrated how to dissect a basilisk and preserve its delicate, fan-shaped heart or as he leaned over her to show the steady back and forth of the pestle necessary to produce a diamond powder as fine as flour, glittering particles floating in the air around the mortar, falling onto the sheet of parchment Solon had placed on the table to catch them.
But there was nothing certain as the years passed and finally Lily thought, He’s waiting until I am no longer his apprentice, but his equal, before he approaches me. How just of him! For he knows that otherwise I’d be distracted from my learning.
And learn she did.
In the twentieth year of her apprenticeship, she learned to tie time in a loop to keep herself from aging; in the twenty-fifth year, how to weave moonlight and sunlight together in a rope that neither creatures of the day nor creatures of the night could escape. In the thirtieth year, Solon showed her how to make a saddle that could sit any steed, from dragon to crocodile, and more. At night the knowledge dancing in her head kept her from sleeping and she took to midnight walks around the tower roof, walking in circles until the cloud of facts settled, sifting into layer upon layer in her mind.
In the fortieth year she became aware that Solon watched her covertly, gazing when he thought she would not notice. It confirmed her hopes and she took to wearing fripperies and furbelows, making sure her shirt fit snugly, and putting belladonna in her eyes to make them shine.
As the forty-ninth year approached, Solon taught her more and more and praised her for her quickness. “No apprentice has ever taken to things so swiftly,” he told her and she glowed with happiness.
The beginning of the year came and went. Lily took simple precautions such as checking her food and drink with a unicorn’s horn because she did not want Solon to think her stupid or that she knew his secret love. The moment that he announced it would be all the sweeter if he thought she did not know. She imagined it over and over again, wondering how he would choose to tell her, picturing his handsome face creased with worry that she might not reciprocate. She was pleased to see that he took over more of the work that she had previously performed, such as preparing his morning meal and doing his laundry. Getting used for the rearrangement of the household when I become his wife, she thought.
On a day that dawned clear and bright Solon asked her into his workroom. Now, she thought, he’ll tell me now. He stood framed by the sunlight coming in the window, gazing at her. She gathered her skirts and took a chair.
“I regret to tell you,” Solon said, still looking at her, “that you will be dead by tomorrow. The laundry soap has had a poison in it for the last two weeks—I calculated it to match your body weight and allow it to cumulate into a dose sufficient to end your apprenticeship at midnight. Give or take a half hour.”
She looked at him, horrified. Her fingers played over the key in her pocket. “But you love me,” she protested.
He looked surprised. “Dear child, where would you have gotten that idea? I am sworn to celibacy for the sake of my art.”
The thorns on the key pricked and stung her but they were not the source of the blood warm tears rolling down her face. She felt the key stir beneath her touch and finally realized its purpose.
And when she plunged it into his heart, piercing it as love could not, he was as surprised as she had been, dying with a startled look fixed on his lean and timeless face.
She went downstairs and put her things in order, tidying the shelves and sweeping the floor one last time. She dusted the tall glass jars of powders and set the flock of chickens loose, shooing them away. Then she went to sit on the tower roof, listening to the owl’s call, and waited for midnight to arrive.
“A Key Decides Its Destiny” was written in response to the challenge posed by Say’s “What’s the Combination?” themed issue in the winter of 2005. It is set a few hundred years ago on the Old Continent, in Tabat’s world. It started with the image of the magician making his key and thinking about what a key is for. Superimposed over the creation of the key and its fate is a love story of sorts, albeit one that only exists in the apprentice’s mind.
The Towering Monarch of His
Mighty Race, Whose Like
The World Will Never See Again
It was a peanut butter jar, not even a brand name but generic, the two and a half pound size, as big as a lantern. Oily dust roiled inside.
The woman dressed in gray picked the jar up and held it between her large flat hands. There was something reflexive about the gesture, as though her mind were very far away.
The boy said “Those are Jumbo’s ashes.”
Her eyes returned to regard him dispassionately. It was an old look, a look that had been weighing the universe for many years now and found it lacking.
“Jumbo,” she said in a leaden voice.
He pushed on, fighting his way against her indifference, wanting to
see her thrill and liven, if only he found the right fact.
“There was a fire in 1975, here in Barnum Hall, and Jumbo, who was the Tufts university mascot by then, burned up. They saved the ashes in that jar.”
She turned it over, watching the flakes stir.
“Of course, he was stuffed then,” he added. “The bones are in the Smithsonian. His keeper, Matthew Scott, donated them.”
For the first time her gaze sharpened, though not to the degree he wanted. “Is Scott still alive?”
“No,” he said. “He died in 1914. In an almshouse. How could he still be alive?”
She turned the jar with slow deliberation, letting the contents tumble once, twice, three times. “Stranger things have happened.”
There wasn’t anything Jumbo was afraid of but the big cats, even years and years later, when he was much too big for them to terrorize him. The wind would shift and bring him the tigers’ musty reek and his eyes would roll while Matthew laughed and thumped him on the side, calling him a big baby.
But that wasn’t true. He hadn’t been afraid of any number of things that were worse than lions. Even the swaying of the netting holding him hadn’t frightened him as it hoisted him aboard the ship among the gulls’ harsh screams, in a dazzle of blinding light that left his eyes red and weeping and unable to see until much later in the hold’s darkness, smelling like hay and saltwater.
The thing he remembered best from those first captive days was the hunger. They had lowered him into a pit too deep for him to free himself. He searched the ground over and over again, ravenous. He had been used to constant grazing, being able to snatch a trunkful of grass or leaves as he wanted. But here they did not feed him, and his bulk, even at less than a year old, demanded fuel.
