Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 22

"Mais oui, mon cher Jules followed us all the way to the New World after le pauvre pet.i.t Cendrillon did what she did-" A shrug of wings the color of maple syrup over a barred, b.u.t.ter-white breast. "He has made all eleven of my brothers men again, though not one of the ungrateful wretches stayed with me-" She heaved a great theatrical sigh. "And now he's going to die before he can save me too. If he'd had the sense not to love me in the first place-"

Oui, for you did so discourage my love, my darling. All those promises and all those stolen kisses- -only to spurn me in the end.

Once there was a tin soldier with only one leg, but a steadfast heart, who loved a tinsel ballerina.

Stella squeaked and burrowed deeper when the hawk began to speak. The bird hopped onto the chair that the jacket was draped on and unleashed a spatter of white excrement, oblivious to the convulsive coughing of the old leatherman hunched on the floor. "I beg your pardon," the bird said, but did not seem concerned.

Hannah started forward, edging past the angry-eyed bird to help him as he rolled from the pallet. He was crawling for the second chair, she realized-more a determined wriggle, for he could not force himself up off his belly-the chair that held the hooded leather cloak. "Oh, merci a Dieu," the hawk said. "JZ nest pas tout a fait mort."

"Sit," Hannah told the old man firmly. She gestured her father over, and-Stella still swinging like a burr among her skirts-went to fetch the cloak. Dell helped the old leatherman sit and gave him back his needle. Hannah laid the cloak across his lap and rethreaded for him.

And then she straightened and yelped, "Mercy!" and went to pull the burning coffee beans from the stove.

She started another batch while the old man sewed, pausing every st.i.tch to cough as if he were breathing smoke. Hannah's father brought him a clean bandanna for a handkerchief, which he took as gratefully as he did the mug of coffee Hannah brought him. The hawk fluttered from place to place, and Stella stayed on the opposite side of Hannah's skirts.

"What's wrong with the brat?" the bird asked idly, squatting like a vulture on the table.

"She hasn't spoken since her father died," Hannah answered, her hackles rising. "Would you mind terribly not fouling that?"

It took the old leatherman hours to sew a single seam through the half-inch-thick hide to join the top of the hood together. Another racking cough doubled him over his own outstretched legs, blood darkening the red bandanna he held to his mouth. He dropped it and gestured to the jittering hawk.

She stood before him, rocking from foot to foot, wings spread and beak open in birdy antic.i.p.ation. The old leatherman looked at her and smiled, and waved Dell and Hannah over as well, the cloak spread wide between his hands. Hannah came up beside her father, her hands on Stella's shoulders to hold the squirming child before her skirts.

The old man coughed. His fingers wriggled. Closer. Closer.

With a sense of deathbed ceremony, hawk and woman and man and child obeyed.

The old leatherman pushed himself to his knees, pain creasing his forehead under beads of sweat. He spun the cloak so that its edge flared wide, a snapping noise like the clatter of vast leathery wings following the flick of his wrists. Stella cringed against Hannah so hard that she tripped on Hannah's skirts and tumbled to her knees. The hawk edged forward, pinions wide against the floor as the old leatherman whirled the garment high and cast it-over Stella's startled shoulders.

The little girl screamed out loud, and then pulled the hood over her head and dropped down on the floor under thick leather. For a moment there was no sound but the old leatherman's breathing and the bubble of the percolator.

And then Stella peeked from under the edge of the cloak and screamed again as the hawk, shrieking animal noises, flew at her face. "Mama, mama, help me!"

"Vieille chienne," the leatherman whispered, slumping back on his heels, his face white as dough. "I wish I'd known thirty years back that Cendrillon was worth twelve of you."

He died before Hannah managed to chase the draggle-tailed hawk out of her kitchen with the broom.

Once there was a brave little tailor. Or a seamstress. Or a cobbler.

Once there was a curse.

Once there was a girl.

Snow Dragons This is not a real dragon.

But the men who come in the long trains creaking through deep drifts don't seem to know that. They come with their armor and their axes, their spears and their shields. Some-the ones who think they're clever-come with firearms, ignoring the old wisdom that only forged metal will slay a dragon.

Their trains toil along switchbacked tracks up through the piney mountainsides, through the shanty mining towns, through the depths of winter. With monotonous regularity, the tracks are swamped by man-deep drifts, and with monotonous regularity the men disembark, forming black ant-chains when viewed from the high fastness of a mountaintop.

The chains are antlike also in their busyness. The princess tells me she watches from her eyrie and imagines the individual particles that comprise them wielding shovels and brooms, struggling to clear the tracks so their black belching beasts can wend higher through her white and green mountainsides. She doesn't say it just like that, of course; the princess is not given to what she calls high talk. That is my purview. She could focus in and see-for a dragon is longsighted-but she prefers to keep them distant and anonymous.

At least until they come to kill her.

She tells me she could fall upon them from a great height, like the eagle in the Tennyson poem. She could push snow down on them, thundering avalanches, or she could tear up the fragile tracks that guide the trains' toilsome journeys. But that is not the way the legend unfolds, and there's always the chance that if she lets the story happen, it will work out the way it's supposed to-with a happily ever after.

I think, deep down, she hopes so.

The princess could go about in white robes, in cloaks lined in ermine-"Weasel-fur," she says mockingly, whenever I pull them from the trunks-in boots of softest leather st.i.tched with milk-white pearls. She possesses all these things, gorgeous raiments and jewels left in tribute for the dragon.

She has no use for them. She wears the down and sheepskin coats of the men she's murdered, their worn trousers held up by suspenders, their too-big gloves cinched about her reed-fine wrists with big elastic bands. She clambers down the mountainside, her ice-colored hair all braided up under the dead men's flannel caps, and watches the long trains pa.s.s like some other kind of dragon-fire and steel and coal and steam and black soot staining white snow, and the white snow covering it over again. If the men in the trains see her, they imagine she's nothing more than one of them, a coal miner playing hooky on the dragon's dangerous mountainside.

She waves and they wave back, and when they have gone she breaks the branches of winterlocked plums and cherries. She carries them inside and sets vast armfuls in water. The vases fill the great bay windows near our fire.

In the fullness of time, in a week or two, they blossom, great white showers of petals sometimes tinged with pink. They never take root. They only linger a few days and die.

I wonder if these are the last plum blossoms in the world. But I never quite get around to asking her.

I remember when first I saw her. She was just a glimpse through the frozen body of the dragon, fractured into a thousand repeating bits of image the same way the beads and glitter inside a kaleidoscope get patterned by the mirrors. The dragon reared up, transparent wings buffeting me with frozen gusts at each pendulum stroke, and it turned its head from side to side, swinging each ice-prism eye by me in turn and dazzling me with beams of shattered light.

No one ever returned from the dragon's mountaintop alive. I covered my eyes with my hands and waited to die.

But in the moment before I cowered away, I could see the blood under the ice. If you knew how to look you could see it too, the pale flush at the center of each scale.

Something like those petals.

I tell her she's freezing the world. Inside the dragon, she shrugs and rolls over, showing her long, jewel-armored white belly.

The dragon isn't real, but her jewels are. And so is her stolen princess.

I'm different from all the others. I didn't come on the train. I didn't come to kill her.

I came so she would eat me.

But even unreal dragons never do what you wish they would do, what you need them to do. If they did, they wouldn't be dragons. So of course she let me live, took me in, amputated my frostbitten toes when they went gangrenous.

I had trudged a long way through the snow in cheap boots to find her. When I did, she wasn't what I had been expecting at all. Women who'll amputate your rotten toes-gagging, puking into a bucket, doing it anyway-don't just grow on trees.

I guess I was expecting a dragon.

I don't know how long I've been here. I don't know how wide her winter has grown. If it's grown at all.

Sparrows haunt the rafters of her great cold hall, taking shelter from her winter. They could be the only sparrows left in the world. I don't know. They perch on the dragon's spines and its long, curved talons when she is not wearing it like armor.

She puts out seeds for them in crystal bowls, and water near enough our roaring coal fire that she only has to break the ice in the morning. She climbs up on a tall ladder and winds pine boughs through the rafters so the sparrows have a warm place to sleep. I tell her she could put on the dragon for that, and she just looks at me and shakes her head.

I guess I wouldn't understand.

"D'you love me?" the princess asks, her spines rattling like icicles along her nape as they flare and fall.

And I lie and say, "No," because she terrifies me. When she has the dragon skin on, too. But otherwise, also.

She's full of winter, and the winter is crawling over the world.

"Womenfolk are the real heroes," the princess says shyly. "If you'd ever picked up an honest storybook you'd see, but all you read is that fancy poetry. I've got all these books, twenty different Beauty and the Beasts at least, all those others, you never look."

I close my eyes and listen to the chime of her voice, ringing down crystal pa.s.sages as if from a long way away.

"It's the girls," she says. "Always the girls who have to grab onto something that wants to be loved and isn't strong enough to let it happen. It's the girls who come with their hammers and chisels to cut the ice, with their pretty lips to kiss the beast. It's girls who tame unicorns, when unicorns have horns to kill anything that touches them. Girls step up. They save the world. They kiss the Beast."

She cranes her head back and looks up at the sky, showing the diamond-bright throat of the dragon. "When men come for the beast, men just want to stick their sharp knives into him."

I don't argue. She's always right. She's a dragon.

"They don't come for me," the princess says. "They come to fight the dragon."

I hold my hands out to the blossoms that fill her icy windows as if to the fire, as if they could warm me. All I feel is the chill of the winter beyond the diamond-shaped panes. I draw my borrowed ermine cloak, a little too small, around my shoulders. I can't look at her and talk at the same time, so I stare at the snow-bent pines beyond the window. I can still see her reflection between the frost that rims each flake of gla.s.s. The panes aren't set even in their frames, so they turn her into sc.r.a.ps and shatterlings of patterned images.

"So send the dragon away," I say.

The princess smiles-a gentle sorrowful smile, one that grieves my ignorance but does not mock it. She draws her wings close about her, furling them like a cloak of frost feathers.

"Oh, sweetheart," she says, and for a moment I almost think she's going to lay her talons on my shoulder. "But then they wouldn't come at all."

Sparrows rustle in the rafters. There's so much winter outside the window. One of the plum branches sheds a petal, and as it falls I make a wish on it.

I wish for the strength to kiss the beast.

The Something-Dreaming Game It's autoerotic asphyxiation, but n.o.body's admitting that.

The children get jump ropes or neckties or shoelaces, or they just do it to each other, thumbs under chins buried in baby-fat. With childish honesty, they call it the pa.s.s-out game, the fainting game, the tingle game. The something-dreaming game, too.

When it's mentioned in the papers, journalists coyly obscure the truth. With Victorian prudishness, they report that the children strangle each other to get "high." Because society thinks that children that young- nine, ten-aren't supposed to experience erotic sensation. The reality that kids don't always do what they're supposed to-am I the only one who remembers my own confused preadolescent s.e.xuality?-gets disregarded with fantastic regularity.

But the truth is that they do it for the tingle through their veins, the arousal, the lightheadedness, and the warmth that floods their immature bodies. Like everything else we do-as individuals, as a species-it's all about s.e.x. And death. Yin and yang. Maybe if we admitted what was going on, we'd have a chance of stopping it before more die.

It's the things we don't talk about that become the monsters under the bed.

The game is autoerotic asphyxiation. You would hope the smart ones wouldn't do it alone, wouldn't do it at all.

But my Tara was as smart as they come.

Tara must have learned the game at the hospital, when she had her implant finalized. It was the cutting edge of therapy, a promising experimental treatment. An FDA trial; she was lucky to be selected.

The implant is a supercomputer the size of the last joint of my thumb, wired into my daughter's brain. Tara has RSD, reflex sympathetic dystrophy syndrome, a disease resulting in intense, uncontrollable neuralgia. Which is to say, her nerves hurt. Transcendently. All the time.

The implant interrupts the electrical signals that cause the brain to register the sensations. The computing power is quantum, supplied by a Bose-Einstein condensate, and no, I don't know what that means or how it works, any more than I know how a silicon chip works, or a vacuum tube.

What matters is, it worked.

Two weeks after Tara returned to school, I got a phone call from Silkie Mendez's mother. I was still at work; Tara was in after-school enrichment, and her dad was supposed to pick her up. I'd get her after dinner.

It's the real mark of domesticity. You become somebody's mother, somebody's father. A parent, not a person at all.

But at work, I still answered my phone, "Doctor Sanderson."

"Jillian. It's Valentina. We have to talk."

You get to know the tone, so-carefully-not-panicking. A mother scared stiff, and fighting with every ounce of rationality to over-ride the brain chemicals and deal with a threat to her child with smarts rather than claws and teeth. "What's wrong?"

Her breath hissed over the pickup on her phone. Cell phone, I thought, and there was noise in the background. Human bustle, an intercom, stark echoes off polished tile. I've been in private practice since my psychiatric residency, but you never forget what a hospital sounds like. "Val, is Silkie okay?"

"She will be," Val said. The sob caught in her throat and she choked it back. "The doctor says she-Jillian, uh, she'll be fine-"

One thing I'm good at is getting people to talk to me. "Val, just say it. You don't have to soft peddle, okay?"

I heard her gulp. She sniffled and took a breath, the phone crackling as she pressed it against her hair. "Silkie says Tara taught her how to hang herself."

First, there's the pressure.

A special kind of pressure, high under Tara's chin, that makes her feel heavy and light all at once. She kneels by the chair and leans across the edge, because if she faints, the chair will roll away and she won't choke.

She's always careful.

After the pressure she gets dizzy, and her vision gets kind of ... narrow, dark around the edges. It's hard to breathe, and it feels like there's something stuck in her throat. p.r.i.c.kles run up and down her back, down her arms where the pain used to be, and a warm fluid kind of feeling sloshes around inside her. She slides down, as things get dark, and then she starts to dream.

But not like night time dreams. These are special.

When Tara dreams the special way, she hears voices. Well, no, not voices. Not voices exactly. But things. Or sees things. Feels them. It's all jumbled together.