Grandma stops what she’s doing, turns around and looks at her. When the spoon clatters against the bowl of grits, she sets it down atable. “He put that fool notion on your head?”
“Naw,” she says, “but I know he can do it. Even if he did fall down, I seen him fly on teevee.”
“See all kindsa things on teevee,” Grandma says, and brings Duncan his breakfast. When she comes back, she makes pancakes for everyone, forgetting Jaima said eggs, but she doesn’t complain. There’s a wrong current in the house, and even Jaima knows that, knows it ain’t just about Duncan. She rubs her chest while they eat, feeling for the wishbone.
“You think I could make a wish on my wishbone, Mister Typhoon?” she asks.
The Typhoon coughs on a bite of pancake and then laughs, and so does Grandpa, and even Grandma smiles. Mama scowls, not at Jaima but the rest of them. “It’s no laughing matter,” she says. “Nothing funny about it, not a thing.”
No one says anything. The Typhoon starts to, but doesn’t even get a whole sound out.
“So could I?” Jaima asks, because whether it’s funny or not doesn’t answer her question any.
“No, honey,” Grandpa says.
Mama puts her hand on Grandpa’s, instead of outright telling him he’s wrong. “But everyone does,” she says, not looking straight at any of them, hiding her eyes. “Everyone makes a wish when she breaks, Jaima.”
Everyone finishes their pancakes in the silence of forks scraping against plates, eyes on the table and knees too close together. “They used to call them Mary thoughts,” Jaima says, but nobody answers.
“Don’t expect me to think it’s coincidence, do you?” Grandpa asks the Typhoon. Jaima can hear them on the front step of the barn, which is where Grandpa keeps his pouch and his flask. “You showin’ up here of all places, to lick your wounds.”
“I got hit,” the Typhoon says. They’re talkin’ hushed. “I got hit hard and I fell.”
“Yeah,” Grandpa says, and Jaima sits against the side of the barn where sometimes she plays shouting games because the sound doesn’t carry as well to the house from here, so she won’t bother anybody. “You’re a damn fool, but not too much to know who loves you.”
“Moira?” the Typhoon asks.
“All right, ‘Moira’, and Kate too, damn it. And Kate’s mama, and her before that. All the women of the family. You ain’t here for Jaima, is what I come to tell you.”
“Johnny!” the Typhoon says. “You know that’s not why I’m here.”
“And I’m remindin’ you. Even when she’s older. This family’s quit of you, Peter. We’ll mend you when you’re sick, we’ll feed you an’ you’re hungry, but no more. You understand? You keep to your cot.”
“You don’t have to worry about me and Kate,” the Typhoon says.
“Damn right I don’t!” The air around the corner smells like the tobacco that grows all over the east fields, a smell Jaima’s lived with all her life. It smells better curin’ than it does burnin,’ but she reckons that’s true of most the world. “Kate may love you, but it don’t make her love me any less. You got to understand that about Mary too, kid. Christ, you never did grow up, did you? Not really. You get hurt, you still come lookin’ for somebody to mother you. It don’t matter to you whether she’s Moira or Mary or the next one. You play dress-up and go off on adventures.”
“I’m given to understand that Moira’s husband passed on?”
Grandpa laughs. “Passed on down the street for a woman he isn’t tired of yet! I love Mary, but she’s a hard soul, you understand. Tom’s a chickenshit, but he ain’t all the way out of the picture yet, she just keeps driving him off in the hopes he’ll fight her on it. You don’t mess where you oughtn’t, you understand?”
The Typhoon shakes his head, Jaima can see his shadow moving, and the shadow of smoke rising around them. “There was another like you, you know. Like all you all, someone who used to have wings, someone who saw things a little differently.”
“Yeah?” This is a new tone in Grandpa’s voice.
“Gabriel. You seen him on the newsreels?”
“Used to did, when Mary was a girl.”
“That was him. Passed on now. Years ago, I guess.”
“He didn’t have any kids, did he? Brothers, sisters?”
“No. No, it was just him.”
Grandpa sighs. “That’s a damn shame.”
“Johnny, come on. Are you ever going to let me know what’s going on?”
“Ain’t nothing going on anymore. That’s the thing of it. We fought a war a long time ago. Not me, not my father, but a father long before him. The war ended centuries ago, and there wasn’t nothing much left for them that survived it, so they came here, settled down. Old soldiers retirin’ to raise families.”
“Georgia?”
Grandpa snorts. “Earth, Peter. Christ’s sake. This family ain’t even been in Macon County two hundred years, you know that. It don’t none of it matter now. The war’s long ended, one way or the other, and what did we get for it? We’re the last of us, now. Jaima and Duncan, there won’t be no more. I had a sister died of pox, and you know about Kate’s brother.”
“You don’t know you have to be the last.”
Jaima peers around the corner, and the Typhoon’s sitting with his elbows on his knees, leaning over smoking a hand-rolled cigarette with Grandpa, who keeps taking sips from the flask, licking his lips.
“There ain’t nobody left. You won’t be surprised to know we don’t breed with humans. Just don’t work.”
“Well,” the Typhoon says. “Maybe I’m not a hundred percent human, though. When you think about it.”
Grandpa doesn’t say anything to that, until he’s finished his cigarette and there’s just a tiny nub left that he crushes between his old fingertips. “Don’t put your nose on anything you shouldn’t be sniffin’ around. I can still lick you, Peter. Now or then, it don’t matter. Put that on your mind and don’t dawdle about getting back to your fancy work up in the sky. If you think that just cause we help you means we need you, you’re humaner than you think.”
Jaima plays Princess Jaima of the Winged Folk, running down the fallow hill with her arms spread, running as fast as she can so she can feel the air in her hair and her sweat, and it’s almost like flying. It almost is. She runs along the stones of the old wall, jumping as high and as far as she can with each stride so she can feel that hanging moment in the air when she isn’t falling yet and isn’t jumping anymore. She keeps touching her chest, where her wishbone is. She skins both her knees and one of her elbows, and gets a bump on her head, but there’s no one around so she doesn’t cry. She might later if Grandma notices she tore her shirt at the collar.
“There’s no need to take a stand,” someone says, voice rising from a quiet she hadn’t heard. She’s been climbing up in the trees, among those three trees near the base of the hills that are so old that she can climb from the branch of one to the branch of the next, as long as Mama and Papa aren’t looking and distracting her by yelling that she’ll break her fool neck.
“There’s no need to take a stand, I’m the one who started it,” the Typhoon says. He has Mama in his arms, in the sumac grove where Grandma goes sometimes to get sumac for lemonade. Mama has her back to him, so that the Typhoon’s arms are around her waist, and she has her own arms folded against her chest like she’s pretending she isn’t letting him. “Jaima’s right about that much. Without me, there’d be no Shadow. Without the Shadow, no war. I came to help, but maybe I set it all off. Maybe I should have trusted them to handle the Hook on their own.”
“Maybe you should have killed him,” Mama says. “Maybe you just should have killed him before it was ever a problem, or after you came here and saw all he done.”
“You know the Typhoon doesn’t kill,” he murmurs, and she snorts. “We could make a fresh start,” he says. “We’re different now, older.”
“I am,” she says.
“I am too. Look at me, look how I’
m dressed! Look how plain.”
“In my husband’s clothes.” They almost fit him, but not well.
“We could have a family. We could start a family.”
She shakes her head, but leans back against his chest. “Jaima was the last. I—can’t have more children. It was a hard birth. Harder than most.”
“You don’t seem to hold it against her.”
Mama peers up at him. He’s so tall he towers over her, and Mama’s not a slight woman. “Love her more for it. But we’d never be able to start a family, Peter. The one I’ve got’s more than enough.”
“Well,” the Typhoon says. “Jaima—when she’s older—there’s no saying I can’t, I mean I could conceive—”
She turns around, wriggling in his arms, to fully face him. “You’re sayin’ we could be together and have a family of you putting children on my daughter. When she’s old enough.”
His face screws up and he sighs. “It sounds so crazy when you put it like that, but how can you stand to be the last? How can anyone, Moira?”
“I guess you could tell me that.”
They neither of them say anything more, and he leans to kiss her when there’s the grind of gravel from the road, the spin of wheels and an old horn leaned on. They both freeze, and Jaima turns to look up the hill. She can see what they can’t from the ground, the old blue pickup rounding the bend.
“Tom,” Mama says, amused and surprised. “He finally fixed that fucking truck like I been naggin’ him to do.” She pushes her way out of the Typhoon’s arms.
“Moira—” he says. “No, wait—Mary. It’s Mary. Mary—”
“No,” she says. “That’s enough. A little flattering attention is fun and all at my age, but I’ve had all I need, ‘Mister Typhoon.’ Just touch my cheek, and get on your way. That busted wing of yours looks like it’s healed up all right. You always did heal fast.”
“Not so fast as some.” He leans to kiss her and she presses her cheek against his mouth and stalks up the hill without looking back at him.
Jaima and the Typhoon both watch her go, and Jaima jumps down to the ground. The Typhoon doesn’t seem surprised to see her. They walk a little ways up the hill towards the old well, in time to see Mama and Papa embracing. Their arms are tight around each other and their mouths together, nothing like the way the Typhoon held Mama.
She looks up at the superhero. “Are you gonna teach me to fly like you do, without wings?” she asks.
He looks back at her, and finally puts his hand out. “I’ll tell you a secret. Every time I fly, I think I’ve forgotten how. I don’t think I can teach it anymore, but I can show you what it’s like. Would you like that?”
She takes his hand and nods. “But you gotta bring me back, Mister Typhoon.”
The Typhoon cradles her against his chest, a hand on the back of her head like you’d hold a baby, and the ground falls away. It’s fast but it feels floaty, the wind rushes less than it does running down the hill. Like swimming without the wet. The sky surrounds them and the dots of Mama and Papa and the house and the barn become smaller until you’d hardly remember where they were.
“Wow,” Jaima says, and the Typhoon laughs.
“You’re not scared,” he says.
She shakes her head. “Grandpa could still lick you.”
He laughs hard at that, and she feels sad for him because he doesn’t believe it. “What would you like to see?” A V-formation of birds passes underfoot, and clouds take on wispier shapes here. It’s strange seeing a cloud from the side.
“Show me where the winged people came,” she says. “When we first came to Earth like Grandpa said.”
“I—I don’t know where that is,” he says. “Somewhere in Europe, I guess. Maybe the Middle East. Jerusalem would make sense, or Babylon. That’s Iraq now.”
“Well,” she says. “Show me where the superheroes are fighting.”
He shakes his head violently. “No. No, it’s dangerous there. Rules aren’t the same there.”
They soar in silence, in a high blue where you can see both the sun and stars.
“I guess you can just bring me home, then, Mister Typhoon,” Jaima says.
He lands softly, his feet touching the ground like she imagines you would if you were parachuting, and places her down gently. “I think I need to go now,” he says, looking up the hill, at Mama and Papa laughing in the back of the pickup.
Jaima looks up at him and stands on tip-toes and he leans down to her. She presses her palm against his chest. “You need to be more careful with this,” she says very seriously to him. “You don’t get a wish if it breaks. You’re not like us.”
He grins at that and kisses the crown of her head. “Be careful yourself,” he says. “Be careful growing up.”
“It’s not as scary as you think,” she says, but he might not hear her as he disappears into the sky.
She walks back up the hill, thinking if Mama and Papa are happy enough, maybe they can all get in the pickup and go into town and get ice cream, in the nice little glass dishes that curve like petals. Rum raisin. Or chocolate orange. By the time she gets to the top of the hill, she’s changed her mind about which flavor four times, and has just taken it for granted that ice cream will be in her near future. She touches her chest and tells herself to save the wish until she really needs it, because you only get one.
THE RED BRIDE
SAMANTHA HENDERSON
You are to imagine, Twigling, the Red Bride to be a human, such as yourself, although she is in truth a creature of the Var.
I’m guessing you’ve heard the kitchen staff speak of the Red Bride, because you’ve a quick ear and the wit to pick up a few words of Varian, and you’re not so arrogant as most of your race, to think the back-chatter of servants and slaves as no account. You’re small for your species, and quiet, and I’m wise to that trick of yours of tucking up under the table and staying so still everyone forgets you’re there. Still, they should be cannier than to imagine a human Twigling like you wouldn’t overhear.
You must be patient. The Red Bride isn’t a story I’ve pondered back and forth in my head and made like a Terran bedtime tale, all chopped up nicely for your eager birdlike gape. I must think it through in the telling and you must open up your mind and believe that a dog-which-is-not-a-dog may be hatched from an egg with all the knowledge it needs to hunt. The story of the Red Bride is a slave’s tale in slave speech, which I do not generally hold in my head around humans lest my face betray me, so I must shift words around from one meaning to another like stones on a reckoning-board, each stone taking meaning from a square where another stone was a moment before.
Also, I think the story of the Red Bride is Varian entirely, nothing human at all, and doesn’t come from the shared tales the scholars say that all the Seeded Races share in common.
If your mother overheard me mention the Seeded Races, and that the scholars begin to say that human and the Var are alike, she would have me whipped. You know that yourself, Twigling. But past this night, I do not think that your mother’s whip will be used for anything after tonight save lashing a bundle of fiber-thorn.
The Red Bride is a Var and so squat, stunted, and ape-like to you, but you are to see her as we do and therefore beautiful, straight and strong, with piercing eyes and poised like a warrior. However you think of those princesses of yours, that you watch in your holo-stories and then beg me to weave into your bedtime tales—however you think of the most beautiful of them, or the most adventurous, the one you want to be—that is what she looks like.
You must understand, Twigling, that your princesses are all very ugly to me.
The Red Bride is born again and again, as our holy people are, over the span of many years. In the story in your head you might say that she is one of a long line of women that are born each from another. I notice that in the stories humans tell their young a woman who lives forever is a monstrous thing—a demon that kills the newborn, or that runs about on chicken-feet, and not to b
e honored as we would honor her.
The story doesn’t start with the Bride, but with the Vallhan, a leader that is born, unknowing, when the Var have greatest need of him. He is not born a dreamer, or a gatherer, or an arbiter, as are our males, but all these things together. In your story, you must think of a village boy who has found an ancient sword. The Vallhan’s mind is like a prism, gathering and scattering light, and information, and knowledge, and pain.
It’s quiet—yes, it’s very quiet. You don’t hear the clatter from the kitchen, the servants getting ready for tomorrow’s anniversary feast and celebrations. They’re not preparing the Great Room, or polishing the silver. I wonder if your parent’s guests, come to the ambassador’s house for this holiday, snug in their bedrooms with a Var outside each door to supply their every need—I wonder if they notice anything strange about it.
There comes a time when the Vallhan has seen enough, and bears all he can bear, but he cannot act without his bride, the Red Bride, beside him.
So far this tale is easy to tell but now it gets difficult, for I don’t have time to shift from what the words mean in slave talk to Semla-Varian (we have as many languages as bloodlines, you know, although as far as the humans are concerned we all speak the same debased patois), to bedtime-speak. My mind’s rusty—I’ve been living among the Terrans too long. You are to imagine that the Red Bride must be sought, hunted down by a dog, a hound. This hound hatches from an egg laid by a monstrous bird, like the ones whose bones are stone in the Vandian Mountains, that the scholars say are like those dug out of Terran soil. The egg is made from the belly-stones of the Var that go to the mountain-lakes to die; the bird eats them, and crushes them inside it, and makes it all as one: egg and shell and hound.
You remember the lake, and the belly-stones, don’t you, Twigling? I know you followed us that day we took old Impiti to the mountain on his dying-day. I didn’t say anything, because I know you were fond of Impiti and brought him water when he was thirsty and he feared to move from his place in the children’s wing. And also I know that you lied to your mother and said you had sent him on an errand when he was really sleeping. I didn’t say anything, because I thought that it might be a good thing for a human child to see how a Var died.
The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2011 Edition Page 29
