“But—”
“Butts are for rifles and cigarillos, little sister. Love something. Doesn’t have to be another person. Could just be your own sweet self. But for goodness sakes, don’t let him take off with your joy between his teeth, else you might as well have died with all the rest of us in that crawlspace beneath the stairs.” The fox snaps her fangs together, snickety-snak. Rosa shudders at the noise, and the memory. “That’s all I came here to say, anyways. Some of the others are better at speeching, but I got elected to it. Hope they’re happy with the results.”
And the mystery of the vixens suddenly clicks together like the oiled machinery of a revolver inside Rosa’s head.
It all happened like the worst kind of fairy tale. Rosa can almost imagine some prairie hen of a mother telling it to her circle of wide-eyed daughters, a cautionary sermon on impropriety and the dangers that lie waiting around every corner for headstrong young girls:
Rosa’s sixteen and oh! my darlings, such beauty you’ve never seen. Curls thick as blacksnakes, eyes brown as a summer flood, and a dab hand at the fiddle that could charm a Mennonite into doing the Jarabe Tapatío. She’s the delight of her father’s eye and the worry of her mother’s heart, high-spirited, fractious, and stubborn as three mules standing end to end to end.
A rich man lives in this town. He wears a bright blue uniform with bright brass buttons, and his hair is bright, too, like a penny at the bottom of a spring. There’s money jingling in his pockets, a whistle like rubies on his lips, and a glint in his eye when he looks at Rosa that says he’ll have her on his knee before the next Fourth of July. And does Rosa mind, my dears? Does she turn up her nose at all his flattering and charming and carrying on, like she’s done with all the other farm boys who came a-courting? Good heavens, no! For this captain is an easterner, and that spells different, and different spells interesting. She follows him around like a cat expecting fish, and if his eyes are sly (so sly!) and his expression foxy-sharp (so sharp!) she pays no attention and gives it no thought. Love’s wicked sneaky that way, my darlings. Like blinders on the eyes, or having no eyes at all.
So here he is and here she is and never have you seen a better-matched pair, tight as ticks in a coyote’s armpit. They’re the talk of the town and the toast of the throng, admired by every second son and firstborn daughter in the county. The months march on, and, as often happens, talk of a wedding springs up. Rosa’s chomping at the bit to see where she’ll live—to see where they’ll live, he and she and their lives ivy-twined together but her Captain, sly and slick as a greased lizard, never takes her there. It’s away down the white road, he says, far too dusty a length to travel for a mere visit.
“How many rooms are there in your villa?” she asks. For our Rosa’s a curious girl, as curious as a cat with its paw under the door.
“As many as there are teeth in a fox’s jawbone,” says he. “You could dance on your pretty toes from one end to the other and back again, fiddling all the while, and never come across the same set of doors twice.”
“When can I see it?” she asks. For our Rosa’s an impatient girl, as impatient as first love and last rites.
“Why, when we’re married, of course,” says he. “You know as well as I do what people would say if you visited before then, don’t you?”
Rosa smiles too, but she’s not smiling inside, no no no. Propriety be damned, her heart says. I want what I want and I want it now.
All through the long weekdays of sewing and study she’s imagining her lover’s touch, until she’s near full to bursting with impatience. All through Sunday mass and Monday oration and Tuesday baking and Wednesday washing she’s thinking of his eyes, and lips, and hands, until she can barely focus on another blessed thing. The moon comes up one Thursday night big and round as a horsecrippler cactus, and Rosa’s had enough of prim and enough of proper. Out of bed she goes, dancing past creaky boards and sleeping siblings and the room where her parents lay a-snoring. Into the stables and out again like thread looping a needle, and now she’s pounding away down the white road and no one can stop her.
The wind blows fine white sand all over them and now they really are a ghost army, gritty and swift as dust devils as the sign gets fresher and the foothills loom. The vixens smell victory and begin to lope. Rosa senses it too and kicks Santiago into an out-and-out run, reins in one hand, the polished grip of her brother’s revolver warm in the other. She imagines the other girls riding beside her, bloody and vengeful. She whispers their names, lets them spring from her mouth like hunting animals.
Samantha.
Lettie.
The pretty Navajo girl with the long, long hair.
The one with the freckles nearest the door.
Essie from Buck’s Ridge, who died a free woman.
Ada, who died with her hands over her eyes.
There’s a crack, like the purple evening sky is hatching from some unfeasibly huge crow’s egg, and a little gout of sand spins upward to her right. She barely has time to register what’s going on—a gunshot a rifle someone’s shooting at us he is shooting at us—before the next bullet whines past her ear, so close the wind of it tugs at her hair. Rosa blesses the dusk, the shadows, and Lady Luck. She stands in her stirrups and screams a challenge across the plain, her voice a snarl of barbwire and rust.
“Is that the best you can do?” she howls. “Do you think I’m afraid of you, you miserable stinking lump of horse shit?” The tears are finally falling now, hot and angry. “We found you! Get out here and fight me face-to-face, coward! Either shoot straight or show your goddamned face!”
The silence unreels and stretches lariat-taut, Santiago’s hoofbeats drumming a tattoo across its surface. For long seconds no response comes. Rosa hunches closer to the horse’s neck, pressing her cheek against warm skin and lathered hair. She wants him to do it. She dares him to call her bluff, to finish what he started, to take her maidenhead with a bullet. Anger like ether fills her up and chases out what little fear is left, leaving her as hollow and light as gnawed rabbit bone. Let the lead fly. Let her skin rip like a rattlesnake’s shedding. There’s nothing inside to tear apart but air and a paper heart.
“Go on,” she whispers. “Do it. Do it and be damned.”
It comes like a knock at the door after a long illness. Gray Sister shrieks, tumbles into a clump of sage, and fades to smoke and twilight, still clinging desperately to her old shape.
Rosa feels the vixen go, a deep-down-in-her-bones tug that hurts worse than an entire pouch of bullets. She tries to scream, but it comes out a wordless gurgling whimper and the wind snatches it away as greedily as it did Gray Sister. Shots are peppering the earth like hail now, as fast as her unseen enemy can pull the trigger. Pirate falls by the wayside, biting at her fading flank. Sepia somersaults like a great unseen hand has grabbed hold of her scruff, already mist before she can hit the ground. Phantom and Frizzle and Patch die in rapid succession and buzzards with straight-razor beaks tussle at Rosa’s guts, each casualty another pull and twist. He’s severing parts of her she didn’t even know she possessed. Invisible connections are snapping, ragged as exposed nerve.
Captain Todd is sending her a gunpowder telegraph. I know how much this hurts, it says. There are worse things than dying, and I’m going to teach you all about them before I finally take your life.
Somehow she manages to stay a-saddle, clutching blindly at Santiago’s mane as they charge across the last of the desert and up the first foothill. The world recedes into a raw red haze of pain and noise. When she comes back to, there are only eight of the original twenty-four vixens left, a snarling half-ring beneath the pile of cliffside boulders where Captain Todd has gone to ground.
He’s scrawnier than she remembers, all gangly, boyish limbs and pale skin shrunken over bone. The pretty blue uniform he always took such pride in hangs off his shoulders in scarecrow tatters, toes peeking through ripped scraps of boot. Even his face is strange now, covered from chin to cheek in a forest of gingery
hair. The Todd she knew kept his mustache trimmed and his boots glossed to a high sheen. This stinking, hairy creature clicking his empty revolvers at her foxes can’t be the same man, and yet she knows it has to be. There hangs the evidence from his belt, shriveled and grisly. There sits the memory in her mind’s eye, vivid as a vision of Hell.
“Rosa. The one that got away. I declare, this is a spot to bump into a soul, isn’t it?” He doffs his hat to her, polite to the bitter end. “I believe the last time we crossed paths I promised to kill you.”
Her voice is tight when she manages to reply, more controlled than she thought possible under the circumstances. “You’ve gotten pretty good at lying. Looks like that’s not gonna stop any time soon.” The hammer punctuates her words with a sharp click. “I loved you once, you know. Maybe I still do. Doesn’t mean I don’t think you’re a monster that needs to be put out of his misery, though. I’m sure those other girls loved you too, right up until you slit their throats.”
“Sanctimonious, aren’t we? Haven’t you ever heard that the memory of a thing is better to keep than the thing itself?”
“No, but I’m more than willing to find out if it’s true.”
He barks a laugh. “You and what’s left of your pack of ghost bitches, I presume? Whatever you paid your scrub witch was too much. All it takes is silver bullets and a little bit of aim to break that sort of sorce—”
The bullet catches him in the kneecap. His chuckle turns to a shriek, the sound tearing at Rosa like a swallowed fishhook. Down the slope he goes, cracking against boulders and slabs of stone, his momentum carrying him right into the jaws of the waiting vixens. They waste no time falling on him with their sharp, sharp teeth.
If I was brave and strong and honest, I’d have done that myself, she thinks as she turns her horse away. The noises from behind are horrific. But I’m not. God help me, I’m not.
When they’re finished, all that’s left of him is a scrap of blue cotton and a fox’s whisker.
Rosa doesn’t go home. The only thing that makes that village full of cowards “home” now is her family, and she cannot bring herself to face them after everything that’s happened. Not yet.
It’s not a bad way of living. Odd jobs and jackrabbits keep her clothed and fed, and the remaining vixens—for better or worse, no more come up after that night—provide company and much-needed cheer. Some mornings the sky is so blue she could drown in it, the wind smelling of sage and clean earth. These are the good days, the forgetting days, when she races Santiago against cloud shadows and clutches Gray Sister’s advice between her teeth like a stolen hen. Just as frequent are the bad turns, the nights when she dreams of the dead and wakes with the sound of Captain Todd’s final muffled screams still echoing in her ears.
She misses her brothers, blunt and teasing. She misses Gray Sister, curled like a tombstone at the edge of her bedroll. She misses having an unscarred heart. The way back to her old life is still somewhere out there, Rosa knows it must be, but no matter how many times she casts for the scent, she can never seem to find it.
Brooke Bolander is a chaos-sowing trickster girl of indeterminate employment, half-tornado, half-writer. Originally from the deepest, darkest regions of the southern US, she attended the University of Leicester from 2004 to 2007 studying History and Archaeology and is a graduate of the 2011 Clarion Writers’ Workshop at UCSD. She enjoys loud music, peaty scotch, drawings that move, and anything pumpkin-flavored you might happen to have on hand. Her short fiction has previously appeared in Reflection’s Edge.
The Mermaid and the Mortal Thing
Chris Willrich
It is rare to glimpse a mermaid, rarer still a whole pod building sandcastles.
The travelers on the road from Palmary to Amberhorn paused upon a sea-cliff, staring down at the peculiar sight. Lovely figures, the shades of emerald and coral and turquoise, splashed about a sandy hollow licked by the rising tide. They sang and gestured, and sand sculpted itself in deference to their voices, a tower for a trill, rising steps for a staccato scale, a battlement for a crescendo. Like songs in a medley, the sandcastles blended together in a riot of styles, turrets to minarets to onion domes, and what the pair of wayfarers could see filled an arc of fifty yards. More was hidden by the cliffs.
“Let’s go closer,” said the poet Gaunt, her eyes widening.
“Why not?” mused the thief Bone, his eyes narrowing. “I have lived too long.”
Still, before approaching the beach, he made sure his daggers were handy, and he stopped his ears with wax.
Between Palmary and Amberhorn ran a golden coast—not gold in the hard lucrative sense (Imago Bone had long since checked), but the soft spill of light upon dry grassland, tawny sandstone cliffs, and beaches of beer-colored sand. All this gold was pillowed by blue: a sky that looked rich enough to dive into, a sea that appeared crystalline enough to skate upon.
Despite all this metaphorical loot, the glorious landscape lay deserted. A lonely stone road, cracked remnant of Amberhorn’s imperial past, straggled its way amid boulders and hills and fissures. True desert, a limb of the mighty Sandboil, glowed yellow-white to the east. Offering little provender for humankind, this was a land for skirting … or for those who fed upon the skirters.
As if to underscore the thought, the next turn of the downward path brought Bone a glimpse—just beyond the mermaids and up the coast—of a pirate ship.
He put his hand upon Gaunt’s shoulder, and drew her back toward the shelter of a sandstone wall. He pointed out the vessel.
Taking a swig from his water skin (already he missed the cool of Palmary’s shadows), he watched her as she watched the craft. He would have preferred the sight of Persimmon Gaunt any day. Of pale, sturdy, Swanisle stock, she was sun-browned by months in southern lands and further marked by the rose-and-spiderweb tattoo upon her cheek, hidden and revealed and hidden by the wind-dance of auburn hair. A poet who wrote of graves and grue, she’d been popular among the elite of Palmary of the Towers—popular enough to live in cobwebbed, dusty independence. She’d been happy, but had traded all that for stony campsites and foot-blisters and hardtack.
For him. That was a wonder to rival Plasmstones and Mobius Rings, and even the bejeweled steam-powered war-coffin of Skizlok the Vampire. (He, Bone, would know).
“Do you know,” Gaunt said, “what that ship represents?”
“I do,” Bone said, drawing himself to his full height, for some words require gravity. A lean scarecrow of a man with a tangle of dark hair lately turning sandy from the sun, he knew others assumed him a rakish twenty, a slumming dandy perhaps, who’d seen too little of life to grant it full seriousness. A second glance, however, might reveal scars from fire and blade, one for each side of his face, and then his ninety-year-old eyes—lit with the gaze of one who’d seen too much of life to grant it full seriousness.
“That,” he said, leaning close to Gaunt, “is the flag of the Four Skulls Society.”
“Oh,” she said, putting her lips to one plugged ear. “I was referring to the ship. It is a trireme, Bone, a beautiful example.”
They peeked again around the cliff’s side.
They were both right. The ship flew a triangular black banner like a flicking tongue of smoke, displaying faces lacking tongues themselves, being eyeless, white, and grinning. The skulls portrayed were of a human, a goblin, a delven, and an arkendrake (with its usual jewels and precious metals gleaming amid the white). The Four Skulls Society was egalitarian as regarded both crews and victims.
And likewise with ships. The craft below the flag was indeed an old trireme—a vanishing breed, a hundred-and-twenty feet from bow-to-stern, with big, painted, bloodshot eyes on the upswept prow, and an abundance of oars jabbing from the hull like the legs of some seagoing centipede. Such ships had once commanded the winding coasts of the Spiral Sea, and the pitch-dark waters of the Midnight Sea, and brightened the waves below splendid Amberhorn, which linked them both. Those had been the last days of the gods-
who-walked, oft-forgotten in this era of cogs and dhows and knarrs. This ship was like an ancient grandfather, dreaming by daylight of long-ago journeys. Bone wondered how old it might be, how long it could last.
Bone whistled. “I’m almost tempted to steal it,” he mused, “though I’m no sailor. But, of more immediate concern, what’s happening to the true sailors?”
For indeed there were rough men and mutable goblins and translucent delven on deck, all staring at the lovely, singing architects a stone’s throw to the south. Indeed, it appeared they were doing nothing else. Bone tapped the plugs in his ears, offered Gaunt the remaining lump of wax.
She shook her head. “Legends agree, a mermaid’s voice afflicts only males.”
“Perhaps. But just who is leading us on here, Gaunt?”
Gaunt laughed, waved a hand. “I am not like the pirates, Imago Bone. I am my own person. I am a poet, and was once a bard. How can I resist experiencing their song?”
“My point,” Bone muttered, but he stowed the wax where he could fetch it at need. He sighed. “We’ll approach to within a dagger-cast of the construction,” he said, as if he expected obedience, “and then withdraw. You’ve survived one confrontation with magic —”
“Which freed you from a curse.”
“Which freed me from a curse, for which I thank you, and will trust to your good judgment.”
Lightspeed Magazine Issue 21 Page 13
