Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded Part 13

"She took the lumps she'd found, hid them in her skirt, and polished them until they glowed. Then she waited until the great chief held a potlatch, a feast for all his tribe and their allies. She waited with the other women by the cooking fires, until she knew it was time for the hosts and their guests to outdo each other by offering rich gifts.

"She walked into the lodge, straight and proud, walked to the bench where her master sat, and everyone fell silent and stared as she pa.s.sed by. She looked neither to the left nor the right. She walked straight to the chief and stood before him.

"He had feasted well, so he was in a good mood.

"'What do you want, Little Maid?' he said. 'A blanket, or a bowl, or a necklace?'

"'None of these,' she replied. 'I want my freedom.'

"'And what do you have that would buy the freedom of a pretty slave?' he said, admiring her courage.

"For answer, she reached out her hand and dropped three pieces of copper on the hem of his robe. In the firelight they shone like fragments of the setting sun.

"'A fair gift, but not enough to purchase a slave,' he said. 'You price yourself too cheaply.'

"'This is nothing,' she said. 'In the woods is a great boulder of copper that I will show you and make no claim to, if I may be free. More copper than anyone has ever had before.'

"'Tomorrow,' he said. 'Tomorrow you will show me. If you speak the truth, you shall go free. But if you are lying, little slave, you will die.'

"The next day she led the chief to the boulder, and gained her freedom, and found her own man and lodge in the lands of the Kwakiutl. And so my story ends happily."

"What happened to the chief?" asked Megan.

Coyote grinned. "Given so much copper, he was overcome with greed and kept it all himself, refusing to give rich gifts to his friends and rivals and allies. And so he diminished in honor and stature, growing old before his time, and died clutching his boulder of copper, wizened like a spider.

"But we are not concerned with him. We speak of the girl, who bargained with copper for her freedom."

She stared at him. "The Fae want copper?"

"Ah," he replied. "Not anything so simple. I'm going to have to tell you another story."

Coyote slid to the ground, crossing his legs and resting his hands on his knees. "There was a time when all the animals walked the earth on two feet and spoke together, and Man was just another animal. Then everything changed. Something made it change.

"Sometimes it was one thing and sometimes it was another. Sometimes it was the Bears and sometimes it was Thunderbird. But this is what I remember best. I remember a shadow blotting out the sun. I remember something like a great warship sailing the sky. Immense and streamlined, like a dolphin, and the red-gold color of copper. And how it sang..."

He closed his eyes. "Such a strange song, so alien, maybe even not music at all, it shouldn't have been so beautiful. But it was sad, and lovely, and all the animals stopped, staring up at the sky. Some wept, some covered their ears and turned away, and some laughed. That's when everyone started to change, to become the way they are now. The Beaver and the Wolf and the Frog and the Man.

"I was one of those who laughed. And then..."

He opened his eyes. "It fell.

"There are many stories about Copper Woman. How she was made by the One Who Made The World and made mankind from the stuff that came from her body. How she married the Wealthy Chief who lives under the sea. How she controls the volcanoes.

"But this is what I remember: Copper Woman came from the sky and fell, hard and enormous, into the soft earth beneath the shallow sea. She sank deep, and the islands grew above her. She made things change. So long ago, I can hardly remember. Sleeping, she changed the world. I wonder, what might she do if she was awake?

"Pieces of her still work their way up through the dirt. Copper, but different from the native copper of the place-crafted, twisted, Wild Copper. Every piece plays a part. Every fragment tells a story. This is what the Sidhe Queen craves. Wild Copper.

"Since I came back I've whispered stories about Copper Woman, Wild Copper, every night, every noon to t.i.tania as she sleeps. I've made her dream of it, and crave it. She thinks it will give her the power to break free of these inlet woods, this tiny finger of land your people have driven them to. She thinks the Wild Copper is tiny parts of a great magic.

"The Fae don't know anything about machines. Sitting cheek by jowl with humans a thousand years, they think they do. But they were never at Trinity, never at Hiroshima, like I was. They don't know a d.a.m.n thing.

"But you're still human. You don't get distracted by the pattern of the bark or a moonbeam. You're still dirt: you understand machines. I'll help you find it. You can buy your freedom from t.i.tania."

Freedom. From Oberon. From the fairies' teasing. From the fear that soon she would not want to be free at all.

"What will happen, when t.i.tania has her machine?"

His face flickered, becoming birdlike, bearlike, again vulpine.

"This is what I think will happen. Copper Woman will hatch out of the deep mud. She will awaken and break free."

"Out of the Sound?"

"Out of the Sound."

"Under the hills?"

He thumbed an itch away from his forehead and sighed.

"Under the hills. She'll tear them away from the wet bosom of the world like a scab."

"But-everything will be destroyed!"

He shrugged. "I am Coyote. I ate my sisters to keep them in my belly and give me advice. I slept with my daughters because I felt like it. I changed a girl to stone because she wouldn't marry me. What wouldn't I do? I would destroy the world as a joke. I have, many times. At least, I think so. My memory's not what it was.

"The question is: what would you do?"

She looked at the ground before answering, and when she looked up again, he was gone, as she knew he would be.

5.

Coyote showed her where to look: at the rim of the water, where the fairies wouldn't go. At the base of a sea-twisted pine she shoved pebbles aside until her fingers were sore, until she reached soggy sand. She was about to give it up as one of Coyote's jokes until she felt a force pushing back at her hands. Fuzzy, like a mild electrical shock, it was almost-pleasant-unpleasant, like an itch begging to be scratched. She dug a few inches deeper and found, sand-crusted, a delicate reddish coil that looked like the broken links of an old necklace she'd found in the bottom of her mom's jewelry case...

She sat there looking at it until the sun began to set, and she knew t.i.tania was awakening.

6.

"I want my freedom. I want to go home."

She knelt with her knees deep in the moss at the edge of t.i.tania's bower.

The Fae Queen flashed her a look, not unkindly.

"So do I child," she said. "But neither of us is going to get what we want this day."

In answer, Megan held out the copper coil. She heard the hiss of t.i.tania's indrawn breath.

"You know what it is, don't you? I'll find you all the pieces I can," she said. "I'll bring you every one of them. But then I want to go home."

Cautiously, almost flinching, the Queen spread her long pale fingers towards her and Megan fought the urge to scramble backwards, because suddenly the fingers looked like tentacles, the beautiful hand like an abbreviated octopus. But she made herself hold still as t.i.tania gathered the fragment between her fingertips. Her face twitched as if it stung her, but she did not let go.

"Yes," she said. "Bring me the pieces and I'll let you go. I'll break the geis."

She drew in her breath as if to say more, and her expression was sad, but she looked again at the object in her hand and something else smoothed the sadness away.

There was a stir in the undergrowth, a scattering of fairies, and Megan looked up, expecting to see Coyote. But it was Oberon, in his silvery blackness.

He was in a foul mood: she could smell it, burnt fern and feathers in the dusk breeze. Automatically she drew inwards, bracing herself against him and against the pleasure she was beginning to feel when he changed her.

Oberon looked at her with hooded eyes. But t.i.tania put out her hand, her attention still on the copper spiral. "No."

Oberon's face became sharp and gla.s.sy. "What did you say?"

"Leave the girl alone. Your games tire me."

He shot Megan a look that p.r.i.c.kled across her skin, and she felt like a ball of clay in the grubby hand of a toddler. But then something stole through her, penetrating as t.i.tania's octopus fingers, but cool, green, comforting. Her center, which was beginning to quiver and melt, stilled and became solid. t.i.tania's green power met Oberon's force, and this time, like paper embracing rock in a child's game, prevailed.

She had not once looked at him. "Go," she said. "Until you can come here in peace, go."

The Fae King stood, a cold black flame of rage. For a second Megan feared he would rise and consume the bower, herself, t.i.tania, the Sound, perhaps the world. But as a flame flickers he vanished, leaving the smell of soot behind.

t.i.tania stayed, staring at her hand.

7.

"Why does she want it, Coyote? Why does a Fae want a machine?"

She was digging in the soft earth beneath a bank of ferns. Coyote had told her to look there yesterday. She didn't see him but spoke out loud, on the chance that he was spying.

He didn't respond at first. But presently his voice came from behind her.

"Do you think t.i.tania likes having you for a handmaid? Dirt-girl? Mucus-woman?"

She didn't answer, still digging in the soft decomposed mulch.

"Do you think she enjoys Oberon's games?"

Megan took a moment to answer. "I don't think she cares."

"She has learned not to care."

He appeared at the periphery of her vision and sat, well clear of the ferns.

"Once they were Lord and Lady of the Wood. Once all was in harmony between them.

"But things change. Love intensifies and fades and grows again. One seeks power. One plays politics. One is jealous and seeks revenge for wrongs real and imagined. One wants a changeling boy for himself. One falls in love with a mortal, and out again. Cromwell's Bane would have had no power against what they once were."

Two feet down, and something tingled in her fingers. The force that surrounded the Wild Copper.

"How do you know?" She dug faster. "How do you know what happened in Albion?"

He had gone, and his voice came from behind again, distantly.

"Of course I don't know. I'm making it up, like I made up the world."

Her roughened fingertips touched smooth metal.

"Silly Coyote," she said, smiling. "Raven made the world."

"Ah. You are learning."

He was gone, leaving behind a coil of laughter.

8.

"It's the last piece," Megan told t.i.tania.

"How do you know?"

"I'm dirt. I know." Nothing else had worked itself free. The rest lay buried underneath the peninsula.

She held it out on her palm, and it gleamed like burnished gold.

t.i.tania reached for it but Megan drew it back, fisting her hand by her shoulder, and for the first time her eyes met the Fairy Queen's.