by Garth Nix
“You’d better study harder so you have a chance to get away from this place,” said Jane as they sat on the porch eating birthday cake and watching the world go by. None of it had gone by yet, unless you counted the Prowells’ cat.
“I like it here,” said Alice May. “Why would I want to leave?”
“Because there’s nothing here!” protested Jane. “Nothing! No life, no color, no…events! Nothing ever happens. Everyone just gets married and has children, and it starts all over again. There’s no romance in anything or anyone!”
“Not everyone gets married,” replied Alice May after a short pause to swallow a too-large bite of cake.
“Gwennifer Korben, you mean,” said Jane. “She’s a schoolmistress. Everyone knows they’re always spinsters. You don’t want to be a schoolmistress.”
“Maybe I do,” answered Alice May. She spun her cake fork into a silver blur and snatched it handle first out of the air.
“Do you really?” asked Jane, momentarily shocked. “A schoolmistress!”
Alice May frowned and threw the cake fork into the wall. It stuck, quivering, next to the tiny holes in the wood that showed several years of practice in the gentle art of cake-fork throwing.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I do feel…I do feel that I want to be something. I just don’t know what it is.”
“Study,” said Jane firmly. “Work hard. Go to college. Education is the only way for a woman to have her own life.”
Alice May nodded, to avoid further discussion. It was her birthday, and she felt hot and bothered rather than happy. The cake was delicious, and they’d had a very pleasant lunch with her family and some friends from school. But her birthday somehow felt unfinished and incomplete. There was something that she had to do, but she didn’t know what it was. Something more immediate than deciding her future life.
It didn’t take more than two hours in the rocking chair on the porch to work out what it was she needed to do, and wait for the right moment to do it.
The steamer trunk. It had been a long time since she’d even looked at it. Over the years she’d tried it many times, alone and in company. There had been times when she’d gone up to the attic every day to test if by some chance it had come undone. There’d been times when she’d forgotten about it for months. But no matter what, she always found herself making an attempt to open it on her birthday.
Even when she forgot about opening it, the trunk’s brooding presence stayed with her. It was a reminder that she was not exactly like the other Hopkins girls. Sometimes that was pleasant, but more often not, particularly as she had got older.
Alice May sighed and decided to give it yet another try. It was evening by then, and somewhat cooler. She picked up her lantern, trimmed the wick down a little, and went inside.
“Trunk?” asked her foster father, Jake, as she went through the kitchen. He was preserving lemons, the careful practice of his drugstore carried over to the culinary arts. No one else in Denilburg preserved lemons, or would know what to do with them once they were preserved.
“Trunk?” asked Stella, who was sewing in the drawing room.
“Trunk?” asked Jane on the stairs, as Alice May passed her. “Trunk?”
“Of course the trunk!” snapped Alice May. She pulled down the attic ladder angrily and climbed up.
It was a very clean attic, in a very clean house. There was only the trunk in it, up against the small window that was letting in the last of the hot summer sun. A red glow shone on the brass lock and the lustrous leather straps.
Alice May was still angry. She set the lantern down, grabbed a strap, and pulled. When it came loose, she fell over backward and hit her head on the floor. The sound it made echoed through the house. There was a noticeable pause, then three voices carried up in chorus.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes!” shouted Alice May, angrier still. She wrenched at the other strap and it came loose too, though this time she was ready for it. At the same time, the brass lock went click. It wasn’t the sort of click that was so soft, you could think you might have imagined it. This was a slow, drawnout click, as if mighty metal gears were slowly turning over.
The lid of the trunk eased up half an inch.
Alice May whispered, “It’s open.”
She reached forward and lifted the lid a little farther. It moved easily, the hinges free, as if they’d just been oiled.
“It’s open!” screeched Alice May. “The trunk is open!”
The sound of a mad scramble below assured her that everyone had heard her this time. Before they could get there, Alice May pushed the lid completely back. Her brow furrowed as she looked at what lay within. All her life she had been waiting to open this trunk, both dreading and hoping that she would find some clue to the mystery of her birth and arrival in Denilburg. Papers, letters, perhaps a family Bible.
Nothing of that kind was obvious. Instead, clipped into the back wall of the trunk there was a lever-action rifle, an old one, with a deeply polished stock of dark wood and an octagonal barrel of dark-blue steel chased with silver flowers.
Underneath it were two holstered revolvers. Big weapons, their barrels were also engraved in silver with the flower motif, which was repeated on the holsters, though not in silver but black thread, somber on the leather. A belt with bullet loops was folded up and pinned between the holsters. More dark leather, more flowers in black thread.
On the left side of the trunk there was a teak box with the word AMMUNITION burned into the lid in slim pokerwork.
On the right side there was a jewelry case of deep purple velvet plush.
Underneath the ammunition box and the jewelry case, along the bottom of the trunk, there was a white dress laid out flat. Alice May stared at the strange combination of cow-girl outfit and bridal gown, cut from the finest, whitest shot silk, with the arms and waistcoat—it had a waistcoat—sewn with lines of tiny pearls. It looked a little big for Alice May, particularly in the region of the bust. It was also indecently short, for either wedding dress or cowgirl outfit. It probably wouldn’t go much below her knees.
“A Winchester ’73,” said Jake behind her, pointing at the rifle. He didn’t make any attempt to reach forward and touch them. “And two Colt .45s. Peacemakers, I think. Like the one my grandfather had above the mantelpiece in the old house.”
“Weird,” said Jane, pushing her father, so he moved to allow her and Stella up.
“What’s in the jewelry box?” asked Stella. She spoke in a hushed tone, as if she were in a temple. Alice May looked around and saw that Jake, Stella, and Jane were all clustered around the top of the ladder, as if they didn’t want to come any closer.
Alice May reached into the trunk and picked up the jewelry case. As she touched the velvet, she felt a strange, electric thrill pass through her. It wasn’t unpleasant, and she felt it again as she opened the case: a frisson of excitement that raced through her whole body, from top to toe.
The case held a metal star. A sheriff’s badge, or something in the shape of one, anyway, though there was nothing engraved upon it. The star was shinier than any lawman’s badge Alice May had ever seen, a bright silver that picked up the last glow of red sunlight and intensified and purified it, till it seemed that she held an acetylene light in her hand, a blinding light that forced her to look away and flip it over.
The light faded, leaving black spots dancing in front of her eyes. Alice May saw there was a pin on the back of the star, but again there was nothing engraved where she had hoped to see a name.
Alice May put the star back in the case and closed it, letting out the breath she didn’t know she’d held. A loud exhalation from behind told her that the rest of her family had been holding their breaths as well.
Next she slid the rifle from the straps that held it in place. It felt strangely right in her hands, and without conscious thought she worked the action, checked the chamber was empty, and dry fired it. A second later she realized that she didn’t know
what she’d done and, at the same time, that she could do it again, and more. She could load and fire the weapon, and strip and clean it too. It was all in her head, even though she’d only ever fired one firearm in her life before, and that was just her uncle Bill’s single-shot squirrel gun.
She put the rifle back and took down the twin revolvers. They were heavy, but again she instinctively knew their weight and heft, loaded or unloaded. She put the revolvers, still holstered, across her lap. The flower pattern on the barrels seemed to move and flow as she stared at them, and the hering bone cut on the grips swung from one angle to another. The grips were some sort of bone, Alice May realized, stained dark. Or perhaps they were ebony and had never been stained.
She drew one of the revolvers, and once again her hands moved without conscious thought. She swung the cylinder out, spun it, checked it was empty, slapped it back again, cocked and released the hammer under control, and had it back in the holster almost before her foster family could blink.
Alice May put the revolvers back. She didn’t even look at the box with the pokerwork AMMUNITION on it. She closed the trunk firmly. The lock clicked again, and she rapidly did up the straps. Then she turned to her family.
“Best if we don’t mention this around…” she started to say. Then she saw the way they were looking at her. A look that was part confusion, part awe, and part fear.
“That star…” said Jake.
“So bright,” said Stella.
“Your hands…a blur…” said Jane.
“I don’t want it!” burst out Alice May. “I’m not…it’s not me! I’m Alice May Susan Hopkins!”
She pushed past Jane and almost fell down the ladder in her haste to get away. The others followed more slowly. Alice May had already run to her room, and they all could hear her sobbing.
Jake went back to the kitchen and his preserved lemons. Stella went back to her sewing. Jane went to Alice May’s door, but turned aside at the last second and went downstairs to write a letter to a friend about how nothing ever, ever happened in Denilburg.
When Alice May came down to breakfast the next morning, after a night of no sleep, the others were bright and cheerful. When she tentatively tried to talk about what had happened, it became clear that the others had either no memory of what they had seen or were actively denying it.
Alice May did not forget. She saw the silver star shining in her dreams, and often woke with the feel of the rifle’s stock against her cheek, or the harsh weight of the holstered revolvers on her thighs.
With the dreams came a deep sense of dread. Alice May knew that the weapons and the star were some sort of birthright, and with them came the knowledge that someday they were to be used. She feared that day, and could not imagine who…or what…she was supposed to shoot. Sometimes the notion that she might have to kill a fellow human being scared her more than anything. At other times she was more terrified by a strange notion that whatever she would ultimately face would not be human.
A year passed, and summer came again, hotter and drier than ever before. The spring planting died in the fields, and with the small seedlings went the hopes of both the farmers of Denilburg and the townsfolk who depended on the farmers’ making money.
At the same time, a large number of apparently solid banks went under. It came as a surprise, particularly since they’d weathered the credit famine of ’30 and the bursting of the tantalum bubble two years previously. The bank crash was accompanied by a crisis of confidence in the currency, as the country shifted from gold and silver to aluminum and coppernickel coins that had no intrinsic value.
One of the banks that failed was the Third National Faith, the bank that held most of the meager savings of Denilburg residents. Alice May found out about it when she came home from school, to discover Stella weeping and Jake white-faced in the kitchen, mechanically chopping what might have once been a pumpkin.
For a while it looked like they’d lose the drugstore, but Janice’s husband had kept a highly illegal cache of double eagles, the ones with the Dowager Empress’s head on them. Selling them to a “licensed coin collector” brought in just enough to pay the Hopkinses’ debts and keep the store a going concern.
Jane had to leave college, though. Her scholarship was adversely affected by inflation, and Jake and Stella couldn’t afford to give her anything. Everyone expected her to come home, but she didn’t. Instead she wrote to say that she had a job, a good job with a great future.
It took a few more months and a few letters before it turned out that Jane’s job was with a political organization called the Servants of the State. She sent a tonatype of herself in the black uniform with the firebrand badges and armband. Jake and Stella didn’t put it up on the mantelpiece with the shots from her sisters’ lives.
The arrival of Jane’s tonatype coincided with Alice May—and everyone else—spending a lot more time thinking about the Servants. They’d seemed a harmless enough group for many years. Just another right-wing, bigoted, reactionary, pseudomilitary political organization with a few seats in Congress and a couple of very minor advisory positions at the Palace.
But by the time Jane joined the party, things had changed. The Servants had found a new leader somewhere, a man they called the Master. He looked ordinary enough in the newspapers, a short man with a peculiar beard, a long forelock, and staring eyes. He had some resemblance to the kinetocomedian Harry Hopalong, who favored the same sort of overtrimmed goatee—but the Master wasn’t funny.
The Master clearly had some charisma that could not be captured by the tonatype process or reproduced in print. He toured the country constantly, and wherever he appeared, he swayed local politicians, the important businesspeople, and most of the ordinary population. Mayors left their political parties and joined the Servants. Oil and tantalum barons gave large donations. Professors wrote essays supporting the economic theories of the Master. Crowds thronged to cheer and worship at the Master’s progress.
Everywhere the Servants grew in popularity, there were murders and arson. Opponents of the Servants died. Minorities of every kind were persecuted, particularly the First People and followers of the major heresies. Even orthodox temples whose haruspices did not agree that fortune favored the Servants were burned to the ground.
Neither harassment, beatings, murder, arson, or rape were properly investigated when they were done by, or in the name of, the Servants. Or if they were, matters never successfully came to trial, in either State or Imperial courts. Local police left the Servants to their own devices.
The Emperor, now a very old man roosting in the palace at Washington, did nothing. People wistfully spoke of his glory days leading hilltop charges and shooting bears. But that was long ago and he was senile, or close to it, and the Crown Prince was almost terminally lazy, a genial buffoon who could not be stirred into any sort of action.
Off in Denilburg, Alice May was largely insulated from what was going on elsewhere. But even in that small, sleepy town, she saw the rise of the Servants. The two shops belonging to what the Servants called Others—pretty much anyone who wasn’t white and a regular worshiper—had red fire-brands painted across their windows and lost most of their customers. In other towns their owners would have been beaten or tarred and feathered, but it hadn’t yet come to that in Denilburg.
People Alice May had known all her life talked about the International Other Conspiracy and how it was to blame for the bank failures, the crop failures, and all other failures—particularly their own failures in the everyday business of life.
The fact that something really serious was happening came home to Alice May the day that her uncle Bill Carey walked past dressed not in his stationmaster’s green and blue, but the Servants’ black and red. Alice May went out into the street to ask him what on earth he thought he was doing. But when she stopped in front of him, she saw a strange vacancy in his eyes. This was not the Bill Carey she had known all her life. Instinctively she knew that something had happened to him, that the adop
ted uncle she knew and loved had been changed, his natural humanity driven deep inside him and overlaid by something horrible and poisonous.
“Praise the Master,” snapped Bill as Alice May looked at him. His hand crawled up to his shoulder and then snapped across his chest in the Servants’ knife-chop salute.
He didn’t say anything else. His strange eyes stared into the distance until Alice May stepped aside. He strode off as she rushed inside to be sick.
Later she learned that he had been to Jarawak City, the state capital, the day before. He had seen the Master speak, out of curiosity, as had a number of other people from Denilburg. All of them had come back as committed Servants.
Alice May tried to talk to Jake and Stella about Bill, but they wouldn’t listen. They were afraid to discuss the Servants, and they would not accept that anything had been done to Bill. As far as they were concerned, he’d simply decided to ride with the tide.
“When times are tough, people’ll believe anything that puts the blame somewhere,” said Jake. “Bill Carey’s a good man, but his paycheck hasn’t kept up with inflation. I guess he’s only just been holding on for some time, and that Master gave him hope, somehow.”
“Hope laced with hatred,” snapped Alice May. She still felt sick to the very bottom of her stomach at seeing Bill in his Servants’ uniform. It was even worse than the tonatype of Jane. More real, more immediate. It was wrong, wrong, wrong.
A knock at the door stopped the conversation. Jake and Stella exchanged frightened looks. Alice May frowned, angry that her foster parents could be made afraid by such a simple thing as a knock at the door. They would never have flinched before. She went to open it like a whirlwind, rushing down the hall so fast, she knocked the portrait of Stella’s grandsire onto the floor. Glass shattered and the frame broke in two.
