The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-I

by Jonathan Strahan

  "I already have," said the hedgehog.

  "You have? Have I got some magic power or other now?" asked Marish. He sat up. The screaming was over: he heard nothing but the fire, and the crunching and squelching and slithering and grinding of the chariot.

  "Certainly not," said the hedgehog. "I haven't done anything you didn't see or didn't hear. But perhaps you weren't listening." And it waddled off into the green blades of the grass.

  Marish stood and looked after it. He picked at his teeth with a thumbnail, and thought, but he had no idea what the hedgehog meant. But he had no doubts, either, so he started towards the village.

  * * *

  Halfway there, he noticed the dead baby in his pack wriggling, so he took it out and held it in his arms.

  As he came into the burning village, he found himself just behind the great fire-spouting lizard-skinned headless thing. It turned and took a breath to burn him alive, and he tossed the baby down its throat. There was a choking sound, and the huge thing shuddered and twitched, and Marish walked on by it.

  The great chariot saw him and it swung towards him, a vast mountain of writhing, humming, stinking flesh, a hundred arms reaching. Fists grabbed his shirt, his hair, his trousers, and they lifted him into the air.

  He looked at the hand closed around his collar. It was a woman's hand, fine and fair, and it was wearing the copper ring he'd bought at Halde.

  "Temur!" he said in shock.

  The arm twitched and slackened; it went white. It reached out, the fingers spread wide; it caressed his cheek gently. And then it dropped from the chariot and lay on the ground beneath.

  He knew the hands pulling him aloft. "Lezur the baker!" he whispered, and a pair of doughy hands dropped from the chariot. "Silbon and Felbon!" he cried. "Ter the blind! Sela the blue-eyed!" Marish's lips trembled to say the names, and the hands slackened and fell to the ground, and away on other parts of the chariot the other parts fell off too; he saw a blue eye roll down from above him and fall to the ground.

  "Perdan! Mardid! Pilg and his old mother! Fazt—oh Fazt, you'll tell no more jokes! Chibar and his wife, the pretty foreign one!" His face was wet; with every name, a bubble popped open in Marish's chest, and his throat was thick with some strange feeling. "Pizdar the priest! Fat Deri, far from your smithy! Thin Deri!" When all the hands and arms of Ilmak Dale had fallen off, he was left standing free. He looked at the strange hands coming towards him. "You were a potter," he said to hands with clay under the nails, and they fell off the chariot. "And you were a butcher," he said to bloody ones, and they fell too. "A fat farmer, a beautiful young girl, a grandmother, a harlot, a brawler," he said, and enough hands and feet and heads and organs had slid off the chariot now that it sagged in the middle and pieces of it strove with each other blindly. "Men and women of Eckdale," Marish said, "men and women of Halde, of Gravenge, of the fields and the swamps and the rocky plains."

  The chariot fell to pieces; some lay silent and still, others which Marish had not named had lost their purchase and thrashed on the ground.

  The skin of the great chamber atop the chariot peeled away and the White Witch leapt into the sky. She was three times as tall as any woman; her skin was bone white; one eye was blood red and the other emerald green; her mouth was full of black fangs, and her hair of snakes and lizards. Her hands were full of lightning, and she sailed onto Marish with her fangs wide open.

  And around her neck, on a leather thong, she wore a little doll of rags, the size of a child's hand.

  "Maghd of Ilmak Dale," Marish said, and she was also a young woman with muddy hair and an uncertain smile, and that's how she landed before Marish.

  "Well done, Marish," said Maghd, and pulled at a muddy lock of her hair, and laughed, and looked at the ground. "Well done! Oh, I'm glad. I'm glad you've come."

  "Why did you do it, Maghd?" Marish said. "Oh, why?"

  She looked up and her lips twitched and her jaw set. "Can you ask me that? You, Marish?"

  She reached across, slowly, and took his hand. She pulled him, and he took a step towards her. She put the back of his hand against her cheek.

  "You'd gone out hunting," she said. "And that Temur of yours"—she said the name as if it tasted of vinegar—"she seen me back of Lezur's, and for one time I didn't look down. I looked at her eyes, and she named me a foul witch. And then they were all crowding round—"She shrugged. "And I don't like that. Fussing and crowding and one against the other." She let go his hand and stooped to pick up a clot of earth, and she crumbled it in her hands. "So I knit them all together. All one thing. They did like it. And they were so fine and great and happy, I forgave them. Even Temur."

  The limbs lay unmoving on the ground; the guts were piled in soft unbreathing hills, like drifts of snow. Maghd's hands were coated with black crumbs of dirt.

  "I reckon they're done of playing now," Maghd said, and sighed.

  "How?" Marish said. "How'd you do it? Maghd, what are you?"

  "Don't fool so! I'm Maghd, same as ever. I found the souls, that's all. Dug them up from Pizdar's garden, sold them to the Spirit of Unwinding Things." She brushed the dirt from her hands.

  "And. . . the children, then? Maghd, the babes?"

  She took his hand again, but she didn't look at him. She laid her cheek against her shoulder and watched the ground. "Babes shouldn't grow," she said. "No call to be big and hateful." She swallowed. "I made them perfect. That's all."

  Marish's chest tightened. "And what now?"

  She looked at him, and a slow grin crept across her face. "Well now," she said. "That's on you, ain't it, Marish? I got plenty of tricks yet, if you want to keep fighting." She stepped close to him, and rested her cheek on his chest. Her hair smelled like home: rushes and fire smoke, cold mornings and sheep's milk. "Or we can gather close. No one to shame us now." She wrapped her arms around his waist. "It's all new, Marish, but it ain't all bad."

  A shadow drifted over them, and Marish looked up to see the djinn on his carpet, peering down. Marish cleared his throat. "Well. . . I suppose we're all we have left, aren't we?"

  "That's so," Maghd breathed softly.

  He took her hands in his, and drew back to look at her. "Will you be mine, Maghd?" he said.

  "Oh yes," said Maghd, and smiled the biggest smile of her life.

  "Very good," Marish said, and looked up. "You can take her now."

  The djinn opened the little bottle that was in his hand and Maghd the White Witch flew into it, and he put the cap on. He bowed to Marish, and then he flew away.

  Behind Marish the fire beast exploded with a dull boom.

  * * *

  Marish walked out of the village a little ways and sat, and after sitting a while he slept. And then he woke and sat, and then he slept some more. Perhaps he ate as well; he wasn't sure what. Mostly he looked at his hands; they were rough and callused, with dirt under the nails. He watched the wind painting waves in the short grass, around the rocks and bodies lying there.

  * * *

  One morning he woke, and the ruined village was full of jackal-headed men in armor made of discs who were mounted on great red cats with pointed ears, and jackal-headed men in black robes who were measuring for monuments, and jackal-headed men dressed only in loincloths who were digging in the ground.

  Marish went to the ones in loincloths and said, "I want to help bury them," and they gave him a shovel.

  HALFWAY HOUSE

  Frances Hardinge

  Frances Hardinge is a writer who wears a black hat. Notoriously unphotographable, she is rumored to be made entirely out of velvet. Sources close to Frances who prefer not to be named suggest that she has an Evil Twin who wears white and is hatless. This cannot be confirmed. Her first story, "Shining Man", appeared in 2001, and was followed by her first novel Fly by Night in 2005. The story that follows originally appeared in the sadly lamented magazine Alchemy.

  "Would you mind holding her for just a moment? I won't be long." The baby did not cry as it was handed ove
r. It was beyond the age of prune-faced screaming at any strange hands. Its eyes were marbles of drugged and pompous incredulity, its mouth pursed to blow tiny bubbles. Its head wobbled, and its limbs floated vaguely like an astronaut's.

  Instinctively supporting its head, the boy took the child and watched the mother walk off down the carriage, the fabric about the slit in her skirt twitching with her stride.

  We're in a station, he thought. How does she know I won't run off with her baby? He let little fingers fiddle with his blazer lapel as he watched four pigeons mob a crisp packet on the platform. After two minutes the carriage juddered, and the little scuffle slid away to the left, yielding to verges of purple loosestrife and the combed gold of fields. Twenty minutes later, the mother had not returned.

  So Kaiser took the baby home.

  * * *

  "Look what I got."

  Eve looked up from sweeping the wood-shavings, her long, thick pigtails swinging with the motion.

  "Where'd you get it?" she asked, in her quiet man-voice.

  "Someone give it to me." Kaiser sat the baby down on the cold cobbles. The nappy padded it into duck proportions, and propped it upright. Unfocussed, it watched a butterfly, and dribbled at it.

  "It needs better eyes. And paint." Having delivered her professional advice Eve sat and went on whittling, curls of white wood falling unregarded into her lap.

  "No. She needs a name."

  "Sharmadyne's got lots at the moment. He found a book on Latin names for mushrooms."

  "I don't want to call her mushroom." The baby took drunken fistfuls of shavings and found it could crush them. "What's a word for something nice?"

  "Forever," said Sharmadyne, from the balustrade above.

  "Biscuit," said Eve.

  "No. Wrong." Kaiser frowned his forehead into a crisscross, like a teacher's mark, echoing his word, wrong. "What's a word for something quiet?"

  "Death," said Wolf from his easy chair, removing his hat from his face.

  "Cloud," said Sharmadyne.

  "Biscuit," said Eve.

  "Library."

  "Small rock."

  "Mushrooms can be very, very quiet," said Sharmadyne, hopefully.

  Wrong, said Kaiser's frown.

  "What else do you get on trains?"

  "Arguments and plastic foam cups."

  "Horses."

  "That's not trains, Eve, that was something else and they don't have them anymore."

  The baby hardly heard the boom of voices. Her hand wouldn't hold the shavings properly, and the white flakes of crack and crackle went off to play with the wind and wouldn't wait for her.

  They called her Ticket and left it at that.

  * * *

  Years went by. They installed automatic doors on the trains and little screens that scrolled luminous station names. Many of the smaller stations closed down, and signs appeared everywhere telling bombs to be alert.

  The negotiations went badly in London, and Paul left his briefcase on the Circle Line. The jacket with the redundancy papers in the pocket he left on the train from Paddington to Ardenbeck. Seated now in a heat-stiffened shirt on a second train to his home in darkest Wiltshire, he had made a neat pile on the table before him of his tie, his fountain pens, and the key to his company car. While he carefully kicked off his shoes and considered getting off at the next station to walk in the fields, a wasp was noisily going about the clumsy business of dying against the window.

  A little boy was lying on the floor. A mild concern that the child had been overcome by heat or succumbed to some illness pulled Paul out of his own thoughts. As he watched, an elderly woman hobbled down the aisle hugging plastic-packed sandwiches to her chest, carefully stepped over the prone form, and continued. Paul leaned forward for a better look.

  The boy wore a school uniform of sky blue and smoke grey, the tie looped and knotted into a rough cravat-bow. He lay with his head under one of the tables, tongue-tip pushed out at the corner of his mouth in concentration. With a penknife he was levering at the underside of the table, working loose the cement-grey wedges of abandoned chewing gum. The family seated about the table moved their feet to let him wriggle this way and that, without a break in their conversation.

  The boy squirmed out, crawling to Paul's table without a glance upwards. He lifted Paul's shoes, looked them in and out, peered at the soles, then knotted the laces and slung them about his neck. Rising to his knees he cast a quick glance about, like a hare reared to watchfulness. The little pile of Paul's life apparently caught his attention. The boy glanced up at him with eyes grub-grey as pencil rubbings, seemed to make some assessment, then swept the heap into his palm and filled his pocket. As an apparent afterthought he reached across and plucked the dead wasp from beside the window.

  The next stop was not listed on the neon scroll. No one looked up to note the place-sign on the platform. The doors opened for the boy to step out. After a moment's hesitation, Paul found his feet and followed, the door sliding to just behind him.

  The windows of the little station house were dusted dull as ice, and dandelions had insinuated their way through its lower bricks. No one stood on the platform before him, and the track behind him was empty.

  To his left, a meadow was visible through the frame of a stile. Between the bars he saw the bobbing of a fair, little head, receding as if its owner were running. Paul moved to the stile, the paving stones warming him through his socks.

  A ragged route had been trampled through a plain of sunflowers. Paul stumbled along it through the choke of pollen, blinded with black and gold, his mind too taken with prickle and stab of stalks in his shins and the weight of sun on his skull to notice the thousands of heads turning slowly as he passed, following his progress with hot black eyes as if facing for the sun.

  The hedgerows seemed larger, the way he remembered them as a boy, and he was only a little surprised to find himself crawling through a hole in the underbelly of one, burring his clothes and running a thorn up under his thumbnail. Halfway through, the briar playfully set its teeth in his shirt and refused to release him. He strained, and twisted, and ceased, and panted, and heard.

  Music there was, a breathless breath of it. It was tuneless and unseemly, like a wind chime jumble. It was ritualized and right, like birdsong. Paul reached back and loosed his clothes from the brambles.

  He had forgotten the late summer stills, with their hanging menace and their eternities of blinding sky. A thousand leaves wavered and watched his clumsy progress, flashing blue-white as the sun caught their sleek. The corn stubble was striped with tree shadow like the belly of a tiger, and the wind was hot as breath. A hedge rose high as two men and beyond it windows blazed white, windows in colored capsules slung like carry cots on a great frame. With the appearance of the big wheel, the music began to phrase itself freakishly. My bonny lies over the ocean, it sang. Paul saw the pointed pinnacles of pavilions, see, pink, white, yellow, or striped like a raspberry ripple. We'll meet again, sang the music. Paul found a slim stile half-buried in the foliage. Trill, tinkle, clang, sang the music. Clang, sang the music. Clang, cling, clang.

  Tarpaulin flapped on the skeleton of the big wheel, and the canvas of the pavilion tents was sun bleached, greenish pools gathered in its folds. Some still stood erect under decades of bird trophies, while others sagged like failed cakes. A rough roof of corrugated iron rusted over the ghost train, where three peeling spectres gaped from the painted wall. Four white geese huddled and gossiped nervously. In the centre of the old fairground two women worked. One wore a leather apron and swung a hammer onto a great grey anvil, a hammer that sang clang, clang, cling, clang. The other sat cross-legged a few yards away, hands busy and head bowed low.

  The standing woman was manly in proportion and motion. She had the thick neck and firm jaw of a Rossetti female. The simple, girlish cut of her patchily dyed blue dress, combined with her heavy, black pigtails, gave her the appearance of a youthful giantess. The other woman was light and slight as str
aw. The hair of her lowered head was a rich toffee-gold and tied back in a vaguely archaic manner. Her skin was golden-pale and dimly dappled, like corn as it loses its green.

  "Do you like her?" The boy sat on the stile just behind Paul, rolling a gobstopper from one cheek to another. "She's mine."

  "She's your sister?" Paul assumed he had misheard.

  "No, she's mine. I found her."

  Kaiser took the sweet out of his mouth and held it to the sun. It glowed like an emerald.

  "Are you selling or buying or dying?" he asked.

  Paul rose and walked forward towards the two women. The taller laid down her hammer to watch him, eyes wide, brown and frightless. The other worked, apparently oblivious. Her pale lashes darkened towards the tips, and her fingers seemed unnaturally slender and rapid. They fashioned corn dolls, ribbon-throated, who raised their fingerless hands to their invisible mouths as if blowing a kiss or smothering a scream. She wore a red ribbon about her own throat, stark as a gash of poppies in a cornfield.

  Kaiser felt a certain proprietorial pride as the stranger seated himself beside Ticket and watched her work in rapt silence.

  Paul put out a hand to touch one of the corn dolls, but halted at the last moment. The dolls were too much like the girl herself. Touching them casually seemed a violation. It would have been akin to handling their creator like an object for sale.

  Looking at her he felt an ache of the mind, like the feather-touch of a forgotten word. The word was almost palpable, it already belonged to him, it would make sense of every sentence in his life, but it was held from him by something insubstantial as a bubble-skin. He almost felt that if he touched her hand he would tear through this barrier into a rich new world, but there was a fear that if the bubble burst she would vanish with it.

  Uncertainly, Paul reached across to the pile of corn at her side, and began sorting the stalks into groups of the same length for her. She picked up the four longest and started to fashion them without giving him a glance, but when she finished the doll she placed it next to Paul rather than with the pile at her feet. This doll had a twisting straw skirt, woven to look as if it had been flung out by wind or whirling motion, the hem describing slow dips and rises. As if the meshing were coming undone, the little figure started to twist on itself, the skirt's undulation shifting. As Paul watched, however, the doll twisted the other way, its crude hands seeming to drag at its ribbon collar. The pale girl's face remained calm as milk while her doll thrashed slowly to and fro, threads of torn straw jutting from its knobbed joints.