Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded Part 14

Leaf green and leaf brown and stormy, like the tops of trees tossing in high wind. She smelled ozone and lightening, and felt the pull to run wild in that wind. If Oberon's power was that of spider-webs and the dark places between the trees, t.i.tania's was of storms slashing though the forest.

Megan didn't look away, but she squinted until her eyes couldn't hold any more storm.

"Your promise, Majesty," she said. "You promised my freedom with this last piece."

"I did," said t.i.tania, in a gentle voice that was a soft breeze counterpoint to her wind-tossed eyes. "I will. Give it to me."

"Break the geis." Megan kept her hand clenched. She heard a Coyote-size rustle in the dry leaves.

t.i.tania's eyes narrowed and Megan learned a new thing: the wind has the power to tear you apart. She felt dog's-warmth behind her and pulled the fibers of her being back around her, like a cloak.

The Fairy Queen's beautiful eyes widened and the tempest became a gentle breeze, winding around her, caressing and seductive.

"Stay with me, girl," said t.i.tania. "Come with me across the sea, when I break Cromwell's Bane. I will be Queen of Albion then, and you will stay at my side.

"No, Majesty," said Megan, her heart breaking. "Our bargain. Break the geis."

"Don't you understand?" said the Fae, with a contemptuous sympathy. "Don't you know that your people, your family, died years ago? Have you no concept of how long you have been here?"

Megan couldn't answer. Her mouth was dry, and a small brittle hope she'd hardly been aware of crumpled away.

"A hundred years, two hundred. You have lived with the Fae. In a season with us, your mother grows grey and brittle, and fades away. In a year, your brother ages and dies. For all you know, the world of men is gone. Stay with us. Live in beauty."

Megan cried, although no tears came. She shook her head.

t.i.tania's eyes narrowed, but there were no storms left for Megan. "Very well then," she said. "I would have crowned you with English daisies, and shown you secrets no mortal has dreamed of, but you are a silly girl after all, in love with your human flesh and mortality. Give me your hand."

Megan stretched out her left hand, a grubby paw, and the Queen's fine ivory fingers closed around it briefly and there was a p.r.i.c.kle like nettles and that was all.

She was free.

t.i.tania held out her hands: on her palm were six twisted fragments of copper. Her beauty was terrible and cold and immense.

Megan unfisted her hand and dropped the last piece into the Queen's hands.

For a second they lay on her white skin like dull garnets. Then they began to move.

She watched, and the Queen in her beauty watched, as the Wild Copper twisted and turned and crawled together, piece to piece, crawled together and joined together, one by one.

Megan stepped back, stepped back again. t.i.tania was immobile, a smile playing on her lips, and something glowed in the cup of her hands.

Megan forced herself to turn away and stumbled through the trees. A rustle told her Coyote followed; he emerged from behind a cedar and waited for her.

9.

Despite herself and needing comfort, she drew close to Coyote's side. He was warm, and smelled rank and foxy. She knew he was afraid, too.

"What is going to happen?" she whispered.

He whispered back. "I don't know. There is much I don't remember." He rubbed at his forehead with the heel of his hand. "Sometimes I think I dreamed it all. Copper Woman with her b.a.l.l.s of dirt and snot and sweat, the Bears standing upright with their bows and arrows, marrying chieftain's daughters.

"Did you know people cooked their food by the heat of the sun, until I gave them fire? Did you know they went hungry until I made the Beaver sisters give the Salmon back?"

"No. I didn't know that."

"I taught them how to live as men, and I bargained with River and Wind and Bear and Eagle to ease their lives, to give them time to weave and make pots and store food and create a people out of an animal.

"But sometimes it wasn't me, but Raven."

His features flickered and looked, momentarily, birdlike.

Back in the grove, out of sight in her bower, t.i.tania screamed.

"Run." Coyote's breath was hot on her ear. "Run as if Tsonoqua was coming after you."

She didn't think, but turned and ran, and sprawled as the earth shook beneath the trees.

Oh for four legs and a tail, she thought, and something inside her, the same something that knew to ask Oberon for her brother's life, that knew about the laws of geis, something reached deep inside her and made her blood and bones remember what it was like to be a deer.

She sprang to all four feet and saw Coyote waiting for her, and ran until the woods closed in and became brambles.

Snake, said something. She saw the ferns grow over her head and she slithered through the undergrowth, rocks round and cool and bark sc.r.a.ping against her belly, and her way was barred by thick spiny stalks of blackberries and something said...

...mouse...

...skitter scatter between the thorns like she was born to them and c.l.i.tter clatter of tiny claws on the beach pebbles that were starting to shake and could crush a little mouse, break her skull like a dryad, and something said...

...girl.

Megan crouched at the rim of the water. In the middle of the Sound the water was shaking like jelly, and wavelets crashed on the sh.o.r.e frantically, out of their natural rhythm. Coyote was beside her, with his man-body and his dog-face. Behind them the slope of cedars and close-knit ferns was shaking apart.

She turned to the water. She could swim, but not fast enough, and Oberon had never changed her into a water-creature. She didn't have that pattern knit inside her. Coyote watched her, eyes wide, and understood.

"Leave me," she said.

"Never," said Coyote.

Something tore free deep underneath. From the woods came a high-pitched keening.

She stepped into the water and the cold of it struck to the bone. Pebbles and sh.e.l.ls sc.r.a.ped against her bare feet and she made herself push on. She was up to her waist, up to her neck, and now she had to kick off by herself. The cold water made her limbs leaden and ripples were turning into waves, knocking into her and filling her mouth with salt.

Just behind her and to the side was a flash of silver as a salmon leapt out of the Sound: grey and pink with Coyote's lazy eyes. It darted around her and underneath, brushing against her flank, her toes, but he couldn't help her, and the waters were getting rougher.

The rumble of the land stirring sounded like a freight train, like an earthquake. She managed to float on her side and looked over her shoulder.

The peninsula was lifting as something huge ripped from underneath it. Birds flew, and other animals, squirrels and snakes and deer, darted from the undergrowth by the sh.o.r.e and plunged into the water.

A hundred feet up the sh.o.r.e the earth gaped. As it lifted and lengthened, Megan saw what was inside, what had been buried under the peninsula for millennia, what made it, and what would destroy it now: the flank of an enormous, copper-colored vessel, the same color as the coils and k.n.o.bs of Wild Copper she had given t.i.tania, some kind of trigger that rebirthed the ship when allowed to rea.s.semble.

The submerged land beneath her was shaking and clots of dirt from the land were flying by her head. She couldn't swim away fast enough. The little snakes that arrowed past her on the surface of the water had a chance: she didn't. She would die along with the Fae. The silver salmon darted about her like a reflection itself.

She looked down at him, willing him to swim for the other side, and saw two bulbous, brown eyes beneath her, behind them, a smooth black-and-white body. She was paralyzed with the cold and hardly moved as the long feelers tickled her feet.

It surfaced beside her and it wasn't until it nudged her that she understood. She grasped one of the flippers and wrapped her legs around what she could of the slippery body.

It took all her strength to cling to the water-demon as it drove towards the far sh.o.r.e, the harbor town, with powerful strokes of its tail. She willed her muscles to lock into place, shutting her eyes against the stinging salt spray. She could not block out the sound of the land behind her and all its creatures being torn asunder.

Rocks beneath her bare leg: the Kooshinga had brought them to the opposite sh.o.r.e. Numb, she released her grip on its flippers and stumbled onto land. Something silver flipped beside her and Coyote stood on the sh.o.r.e.

The Kooshinga rolled into the deep choppy water and vanished.

The sky was darkening, the sun turning sunset-copper although it was still over the horizon. She spared a glance for the town splayed across the sh.o.r.e. Stores and restaurants and little cottages were crumbling away, their paint long gone. There was no sign of any people. A rusty car squatted on a ragged shelf of asphalt that jutted where a pier had fallen apart, driver and pa.s.senger doors spread open as if the occupants had fled a hundred years ago.

Across the Sound the peninsula was ripping itself apart. As they watched, the land split open.

The craft that rose from its deep womb was larger than any ship or building Megan had ever seen. Clumps of dirt, not clumps really but clots of land with boulders and trees, dropped from its terraces.

It was a dull red-gold that blanched the b.l.o.o.d.y sun, it had wings and sails and delicate towers laced along its sides, it moved through the air with the controlled strength and grace of a seal in water, and as it moved it sang. It sang a song to make you cry and laugh and cover your ears.

Copper Woman.

Megan felt Coyote's hand warm on her shoulder. She closed her eyes and let the song inside, free within her.

The song coiled and lapped at her very core, coiling like copper wire through her flesh. It pulled and tugged and caressed. It found the places soft and bruised from Oberon's tinkering, and healed them. It found the defenses she had built against him, and broke them apart. It found the years she had spent with the Fae and braided them together. It found the wet sound of a dryad's skull breaking and pondered that.

She opened her eyes. The ship was gone.

She stood on the pebbles of the Sound. She had the legs of a deer, the tail of a snake, and the ears of the mouse. And then, with a thought, she didn't.

Megan laughed.

The waters of the Sound poured into the great wound Copper Woman made. Soon, except for an occasional tree that bobbed to the surface, no sign remained of that tongue of land.

"What do we do now?" said Megan, when she had stopped laughing.

"Now we make the world," said Coyote.

The Bold Explorer in the Place Beyond.

David Erik Nelson.

DAVID ERIK NELSON is a freelance writer living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His stories have appeared in Shimmer, Asimov's Science Fiction, and The Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. You can find him online at www.davideriknelson.com. "The Bold Explorer in the Place Beyond" is "one of several interlocking stories set in an America where the Union won the Civil War by [using] a large body of Chinese clockwork soldiers. After the war many discharged clockies, feared and reviled for their efficiency on the battlefield, went west to live peacefully apart from a citizenry that neither appreciated their contribution to the war effort nor their company. The most noted of my clockie stories (and also the sequel to the following story) is the novelette 'Tucker Teaches the Clockies to Copulate' (Spring 2008 Paradox). That novelette, and thus the whole of the 'Clockie' universe, grew out of a riff on a Zuni Trickster story, 'Teaching the Mudheads How to Copulate.' While the story you are about to read is framed by the Clockie universe, its heart-the misadventure of the Bold Explorer-is a bedtime story I told to my son when he was about a year old. In other words, 'The Bold Explorer in the Place Beyond' is a kid's story wrapped in a dirty joke."

"SO, THAT LIL squid, the bold explorer, had just knocked his whole d.a.m.n operation into a c.o.c.ked hat, is what he'd done." That voice came chopping out of the crisp spring dark and scared the tar out of me. I'd been creeping down to peep into the windows of Two-Ton Sadie's Dancehall-catch me a look at them dancing girls she's got-when that crippled ole Johnny Reb, d.i.c.kie Tucker, came bellowing out of the dark alley alongside the General Mercantile Emporium, bottle in hand. He stomped up to Rev. Habit's First Church of the Latter-Day Saints, and I went hopping into Sheriff Plume's high hedge like a jackrabbit.

The fat, spring moon gleamed on d.i.c.kie's single good eye and made plain the hard fist of scars clenching the right side of his head as he hectored the big double doors of Rev. Habit's church. He looked like the Devil's own fist hammering down the Lord's door.

"That lil squid had kitted himself together a clever ole clockwork diving engine-an undiving engine. Looked like a lil crab st.i.tched outta sc.r.a.ps of copper, rubber, and greased leather." d.i.c.kie made obscure gestures in the air, like he was telling a Chinaman how to put together a pump head, but I already had a notion of what his bold explorer looked like: like them Union automatic clockwork soldiers that keep their camp up on Windmill Mesa, now that they's retired from Sherman's dreaded First Mechanical Battalion. Word was that d.i.c.kie'd lost his face to a clockie platoon at the Battle of Atlanta. No one knew if that was true-you couldn't hardly talk to d.i.c.kie Tucker, no more than you could talk to a rabid dog, but the way he lashed into the clockies when he'd see them in the street...it seemed credible.

"Started okay: The bold explorer, he'd crept up out of the water, peering from behind a curved shard of a Chinese blowed-gla.s.s fishing float, not knowin' what to expect of the Place Beyond. He'd clicked and clacked up out of the surge and scuttled into the sedges, not just blinded by the clean, pure light of that slitted sliver of moon, but by his sense of wonder and terror. He'd skidded right through the scintillant edge of everything, and was still live and sane." d.i.c.kie wavered in the street and held his bottle up to see its level in the moonlight. I couldn't see how much he had, or had had, or would have. Probably G.o.d couldn't, neither. Behind him, the dancehall thumped and jangled. With its swaybacked roof and lit-up windows, it looked like a November jack-o'-lantern gone soft, waiting to fall in on itself.

"Before he'd even gotten over congratulating hisself on bein' so d.a.m.n brave and clever," he told the bottle, "the bold explorer had already b.u.mbled his way through the thickets of sharp bentgra.s.s, tumbled down the backs of the dunes, and stumbled into the forest." d.i.c.kie took another slug.

"The forest was thick," he said, taking the church steps like he was charging a trench through a mucky field, "and the leafy branches of the old beeches and buckeyes cut the glare off the moonlight. His lil optically perfect eyes could focus again, and he saw a sick world of wonders. It was crowded with what he took for corals and anemones, but these reefs was fishless and vacant, the piebald corals bleached of their living color, the anemones listless. No wonder, he thought, that the few that got pulled up through the Silver Edge came back broken and dead, and the survivors mad; the Place Beyond was a dead world." d.i.c.kie knelt shakily, set down his bottle on the top step, and peered through the door crack like he was peeping on Jesus in the bath. Then he started to whisper into the doork.n.o.b.

"The bold explorer's lil legs whirred and clicked as he scuttled through the dry leaves," d.i.c.kie crawled the fingers of his left hand over the wooden door, like a giant spider tickling a lady's bottom over her silk knickers, "whirred and ticked as he scrambled over logs, whirred and tocked as he skittered over k.n.o.bby old roots. Even if it was a dead world, there was still much to see, and he aimed to look his fill while he had the chance. He was slipping into a dip under a big ole uprooted paper birch when his suit whirred and sproinged, and one of his front legs gave out limp." d.i.c.kie made his index finger flop lamely. "He stopped in his tracks, and gave the leg a test jiggle. It did nuthin'. He gently tested the other seven; two more sproinged. He backtracked up out of the dip, but was hardly clear of the tree's lee when the suit crack!ed" he clapped his hands, "sproinged, whirred, whistled, and keeled over." d.i.c.kie's left hand dropped dead on the church's wide top step. "He rolled a half turn, and looked up through a break in the canopy at the drowsy, half-lidded moon." d.i.c.kie himself rocked back on his heels, almost tumbling down the steps, then spun and planted his skinny hams on the narrow threshold. He leaned back into the door's embrace, closed his eye, and basked in the spring moonlight.

"Soon enough," d.i.c.kie grunted, "bold explorer discovered that the forest wasn't so empty like he thought. But till then, he had hisself a time to lay out orderly how he'd got where he was. If there's such as sin, then the bold explorer, his sin was pride. All his days, as a young squidlet at the bottom of the G.o.dd.a.m.n sea, he'd been too fancy to socialize proper with all them other lil squiddies. When they'd spurt up to ask him to play at races and crack-the-whip, or to twirl it up at the annual squid cotillion, he was always too busy studyin' up and schemin' on his glorious future. He's too busy to even be proper and polite and express his regrets, and so it wasn't too soon before every other lil squid stopped tryin' to pal up to him. Not that the d.a.m.n thick b.a.s.t.a.r.d even might notice." d.i.c.kie opened his eye and there was fire in it. He shot to his feet, and shouted in the moon's face.

"'Cause ole Mr. Fancy Pants had him a notion that there was somethin' worth knowing up beyond the undulant, silver top edge of the waters, some-thin' more than plain, ole Death. The squids, they all knew there was somethin' out Beyond, but didn't reckon it was somethin' worth knowin'. Why? 'Cause on account now and again some poor d.a.m.n b.a.s.t.a.r.d would get caught in a net, or lay into a baited hook, and get whisked up clean out of their world. Mostly, that was the end of the story. Occasionally, his corpse might get coughed back out, limp and torn. And very, very, very..." his steam had run down. d.i.c.kie seemed like a locomotive that might start rolling back down hill, devil may care and no survivors when it jumps track. He took the steps back down in a loose-limbed trot, then looked at his hands quizzically.

"Very, very rare," he mumbled absently, looking about him on the ground, "that unlucky squid would come back live. But what he could say of what he'd seen..." d.i.c.kie finally caught a glimpse of his bottle, left neglected on the church steps, and his single eye sparkled, "There weren't much to it. It was crazy babble," d.i.c.kie leaned over the steps, laying out across them, s.n.a.t.c.hed up his hooch, and took a long, reflective gulp before standing. "He'd tell 'em, of a thin place up above and beyond the world, a searing place of blinding light, of roars and shudders, of helpless flopping and hopeless incomprehensibility. All them other squids pitied these madmen that had seen the Place Beyond. And, jus' like us, sayin' they pitied these luckless travelers is to say they ignored them."

d.i.c.kie rubbed his face then knuckled his good eye. "But the bold explorer," he sighed, "he lacked the good G.o.dd.a.m.n sense to ignore crippled lunatics."

d.i.c.kie rocked on his heels, starring into the moon, and then muttered, "He was a brave, dumb sonofab.i.t.c.h. I'd pity the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds too. Pity 'em all."

d.i.c.kie strutted up the street, like an actor across the boards. He took a deep breath and blew out his contemplative mood. "And then," he kicked a horse apple, aiming for Sheriff's door. It pounded into the bushes where I crouched, off to my left. "As the bold explorer laid there, thinkin' on his progress, cats oiled in on the darkness, like eels 'cross ice. Feral old toms, refugees from a torched plantation. One still wore his leather collar, which was cracked and dry, but had its silver bell. Though tarnished black, that bell tinkled high and pretty in the moon-bright night." He kicked another t.u.r.d. "Not that the bold explorer could hear." And it went extremely wide, skittering up the street. "They was cats and didn't know much, but they remembered the sorts of fancy food what came out of cans and jars, once upon a time, afore them clockie sonsab.i.t.c.hes brought their fire down through Atlanta and clear to the sea." He kicked another t.u.r.d, hard. It disintegrated to a mist of manure on impact with his boot toe, but he still squinted into the distance to see where it had landed.

"Them cats flowed out of the dark and knotted around the bold explorer who, bless his stupid heart, was glad to see 'em. He watched the cats glide through the air, slick as fish, and blushed a warm h.e.l.lo and gracious salutation, such as you might to diplomats and amba.s.sadors. 'Course," he kicked, and a horse apple shot into the bush directly above me, raining down leaves and filth, "they didn't give a good G.o.d d.a.m.n for greetings. Them toms couldn't even imagine the full-color skin semaph.o.r.e that's squid talk. All they saw was pretty fish in a Mason jar." Two more horse apples came in quick succession, cutting right into the trail of the last, and dusting me with stink to match my regret.

"But the bold explorer, he just kept grinnin' like a blue-ribbon a.s.shole, and flashin' his howdy-do? and swirlin' his embarra.s.sed relief, and jiggin' an excruciatingly boring explanation of his predicament. He was explicating his situation when the first swat knocked him and his little bubble of sea into the brush." d.i.c.kie cracked his hard palm smartly across his thigh, "And they was off to the races. The trio of toms swirled off into the forest, drivin' that squid in his clockwork divin' bell before 'em like injuns runnin' buffalo off a cliff. They went ricochetin' off trees, tumblin' down banks, and sprintin' up hills. Soon as they started they'd lost the sense of the goal of the task, and was just runnin' after the savage joy of it. Once that dome cracked the party'd be done, and maybe they'd mourn the loss of the game, but a full belly goes a long way to soothe a sad heart. Least when you's livin' rough." d.i.c.kie made to drink, but lost his grip. The bottle tumbled to the dirt. He shook his head, watching his tonic glug away into the rutted lane. Sadie's thumped and rocked, like a distant train pa.s.sing on a track that don't go nowhere near your town. The girls all whooped together, high and pretty, and the sound of it in the spring night made my heart crinkle till I was near to crying.

"But the cats," d.i.c.kie said, "they didn't get their supper. They was all legs and cartwheels, time a-their life, when somethin' big and angry, somethin' that wanted what they had, pounded up the brush and loosed a single screechin' roar. Stopped them three toms dead in their tracks, and sent 'em yowlin' to the four points of the compa.s.s, leaving the bold explorer to rock and froth and shudder to rest among the roots and bracken."

d.i.c.kie squatted shakily and dabbled his fingers in the puddle of booze that was mingling with everything else in the street-hog slop and horse p.i.s.s and cowflops and G.o.d even don't imagine what. "The cat's yowls and ruckus drifted off into the night, with the tinkle of that age-black silver bell followin' after." He brought his fingers to his mouth and my guts clenched up tight and greasy. He scowled, then nodded.

"Soon, out from the brush, crept the 'possum, gopher, and two squirrels who'd made that racket." d.i.c.kie got shakily to all fours. "They circled up 'round the bold explorer. His little undiving engine was worse for wear: Three of the legs was gone altogether, with toothy gears and useless snarls of spring-steel protruding from their empty sockets. The other five were twisted beyond all hope of repair, bent back and around the dome of his lil anti-bathysphere like the green sepals pulled up around a dandelion's fluff." He carefully lowered his face to the puddle. "The gla.s.s was still whole-maybe for the luck of being shielded by them bust-up legs-but there was a trickle of water running out from between the tarred plates on his undercarriage." d.i.c.kie was bringing his lips to the dirt-flecked surface of that grotesquely filthy whiskey puddle when the better angels of his nature reared their heads. My guts. .h.i.tched into my throat and stuck there, even when d.i.c.kie flopped onto his backside instead of slurping up that mess. He sighed like an abandoned dog.

I was scared of getting skinned by my pa', and scared of d.i.c.kie Tucker, and sick sad that I was missing on seeing those dancing girls that Pa' calls "prairie nymphs," like the words are a mouthful of spoilt milk. Maybe they're cheap trash, but to see them twirling in the light of a hundred candles, their curls shining, to see them lounge against the bar like cats, to see their legs and arms and necks, to see their coyness that ain't coy when they set hand to a man's arm or chest-it's warm and dizzy and worth any kind of scared. It settled my gut, thinking about them.

"The bold explorer himself was bruised all to h.e.l.l," d.i.c.kie said, "with one eye swelled shut like a county fair pugilist, but he's just as optimistic as ever. He smiled tentative, then blushed and wigwagged his color-talk, 'splaining how he'd got there-which they knew plain enough, from seein'-and askin' their help in diagnosing the ailments of his suit-which was beyond their capacities." d.i.c.kie stood and turned back toward the church doors, serendipitously catching sight of his dropped bottle. A bare inch of liquor lay in the curve of the bottle's belly, and d.i.c.kie perked up seeing it. "All's to say that it was probably just fine that they couldn't understand a d.a.m.n thing he said." d.i.c.kie scooped up the bottle and drained her.

Though it seems unlikely, d.i.c.kie was even less steady on his feet than before, pacing careful, his eyes glued to the dirt. He brought each step to bear with ferocious concentration, as though he expected the ground to squirt out from under foot.

"The squirrels, 'possum, and whistlepig held a lil powwow, and agreed that they didn't know what in the h.e.l.l they'd stumbled into, or where it belonged. They figured it was some manner-ah tadpole 'r salamander, and needed water, which it was quickly runnin' shy on in its leaky fishbowl." d.i.c.kie stood at the base of the steps, staring down the doors.