Firebirds Soaring (24 page)
Authors: Sharyn November
“Ah, my husband!” whispers Ma, stroking his transparent cheeks.
All the workings move under the jellified skin. “Bury me with all the rites,” he says. “And use real coin, not token.”
“As if she would use token!” I say.
He kisses me, wetly upon all the wet. “I know, little scowler. Go on up, now.”
When he follows us out of the hole, it’s as if he’s rising through a still water-surface. It paints him back onto himself, gives him back his hair and his clothes and his colour. For a few flying moments he’s alive and bright, returned to us.
But as his heart passes the rim, he stumbles. His face closes. He slumps to one side, and now he is gone, a dead man taken as he climbed from his cellar, a dead man fallen to his cottage floor.
We weep and wail over him a long time.
Then, “Take his head, daughter.” Ma climbs back down into the hole. “I will lift his dear body from here.”
The day after the burial, he walks into sight around the red hill in company with several other dead.
“Pa!” I start towards him.
He smiles bleakly, spits the obolus into his hand, and gives it to me as soon as I reach him. I was going to hug him, but it seems he doesn’t want me to.
“That brother of mine, Gilles,” he says. “He can’t hold his liquor.”
“Gilles was just upset that you were gone so young.” I fall into step beside him.
He shakes his bald head. “Discourage your mother from him; he has ideas on her. And he’s more handsome than I was. But he’s feckless; he’ll do neither of you any good.”
“All right.” I look miserably at the coins in my hand. I can’t tell which is Pa’s now.
“In a moment it won’t matter.” He puts his spongy hand on my shoulder. “But for now, I’m counting on you, Sharon. You look after her for me.”
I nod and blink.
“Now, fetch us our cups, daughter. These people are thirsty and weary of life.”
I bring the little black cups on the tray. “Here, you must drink this,” I say to the dead. “So that the fire won’t hurt you.”
My father, of course, doesn’t need to be told. He drinks all the Lethe water in a single swallow, puts down the cup, and smacks his wet chest as he used to after a swig of apple brandy. Up comes a burp of flowery air, and the spark dies out of his eyes.
I guide all the waiting dead onto the punt. I flick the heavy mooring rope off the bollard, and we slide out into the current, over the pure, clear tears-water braided with fine flames. The red sky is cavernous; the cable dips into the flow behind us and lifts out ahead, dripping flame and water. I take up the pole and push it into the riverbed, pushing us along, me and my boatload of shades, me and what’s left of my pa. My solid arms work, my lungs grab the hot air, my juicy heart pumps and pumps. I never realised, all the years my father did this, what solitary work it is.
MARGO LANAGAN
is the author of three story collections,
White Time
,
Black Juice
, and
Red Spikes,
and the novel
Tender Morsels. Black Juice
won two World Fantasy Awards, was a Michael L. Printz Honor Book, and was short-listed for, among other awards, the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize.
Red Spikes
was the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Book of the Year for Older Readers in 2007.
is the author of three story collections,
White Time
,
Black Juice
, and
Red Spikes,
and the novel
Tender Morsels. Black Juice
won two World Fantasy Awards, was a Michael L. Printz Honor Book, and was short-listed for, among other awards, the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize.
Red Spikes
was the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Book of the Year for Older Readers in 2007.
Margo lives in Sydney, Australia, with her partner and their two teenage sons. She has a rather dusty history degree and has worked various jobs, including freelance book editing and technical writing.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Every year my partner Steven and I design and edit an anthology of writing and pictures by primary school children of the Murray-Darling Basin, the river system that occupies much of southeastern Australia. One year there was a piece written by Harrison Fridd, aged eight, of Waikerie in South Australia. It began, “The ferry on the river is where my dad works. Most of the day he takes people back and forth across the river.” My brain went to the most famous ferryman of them all, Charon, who poles the souls of the dead across the rivers of Hell, and when Harrison went on to mention that he sometimes saw his dad on the ferry in the mornings on the way to school, I had the story of the child who nips down into Hell to take her ferryman dad his lunch. I liked the combination of the gruesome job and the cosy family errand. I had no idea the gruesomeness was going to take over so thoroughly. Honest!
THE GHOSTS
OF
STRANGERS
OF
STRANGERS
NINA KIRIKI HOFFMAN
E
lexa had been up the mountain to see her mother’s dragon once. Her father took her and her older brother Kindal when they were very small, just after their mother drowned in a storm-swollen river. The dragon had raised her children already, with Elexa’s mother’s help; after Mother died, the dragon waited only long enough to meet Elexa and Kindal before flying away forever.
lexa had been up the mountain to see her mother’s dragon once. Her father took her and her older brother Kindal when they were very small, just after their mother drowned in a storm-swollen river. The dragon had raised her children already, with Elexa’s mother’s help; after Mother died, the dragon waited only long enough to meet Elexa and Kindal before flying away forever.
Her mother’s dragon terrified Elexa. The dragon was huge to a three-year-old child, a great dark thing with a mouth full of flame and spears, and dark pearl eyes. She did not speak to them; she reared up before her shadowy cave, spread her wings, belled a mourning wail. Heat came off her stronger than the warmth of a winter stove. Elexa hid behind her father, who spoke formal words in the human approximation of dragonspeech, words full of hisses and gravel. The dragon did not look directly at them. She faced them, though, long enough to weep five ruby tears, before turning and retreating into her cave. Father knelt and collected the stones. He gave three to Kindal and two to Elexa. “It is her mourning gift,” he whispered. “Hold these when you feel your sorrow.”
For the next year, Elexa slept curled on her straw pallet with the rubies in her hands. They were the first stones that spoke to her.
The first human ghost Elexa caught was the ghost of old Peder, the village headman, the night he died. She was six. The whole village gathered together to worry about old Peder, who had been their leader for forty years. Everyone but Peder and his wife said prayers at the temple of the mountain god for Peder’s health to return, for two days and nights, until Peder sent his wife to ask them to stop. Peder had spoken with his stomach, and it told him that this time he would not recover; he should leave this life and move on to another.
After that, everyone vigiled together around old Peder in the gatherhouse. He lay on a pallet near the storytelling firepit, the fire low, with his wife and daughters beside him, and everyone else waited with them, drowsing, quiet, respectful. The rattle came after the middle of the night, his last unquiet breaths. Elexa saw the ghost ease out of him, a white-gray cloud shaped vaguely like a person. She sent out her mental net before she thought, wrapped him up, and pulled him to her.
“What? What?” he said. “What are you doing to me, Daughter? ”
She glanced around to see if anybody else heard his questions. Everyone had their heads bowed, praying for Peder’s next journey.
She rose and walked out of the gatherhouse, into the chilly night, his ghost trailing her like a fish on a line in a river of air. She sat on the worn stone steps of the mountain god’s temple and pulled the headman’s ghost beside her, loosening her net so he could take human form. He settled onto the stair, a gray-white shape, like the snow sculptures they built in midwinter, rough outlines of people and dragons, gods and animals. His eyes were dark pits; only a tingling flavor told Elexa who he was.
“What has happened?” Peder asked. “I no longer feel ill. There’s no hurt in me. Yet I can’t walk where I want. Why did I follow you? How am I flying?”
“You’re a ghost,” Elexa said.
He held out his arms, stared at his blurry hands, turned his head to look at her. “I feel stranger than I can understand,” he said. He pushed against her ghost net. “This is what we do to the ghosts of animals? I hear a call. I know there’s a farther place I can go without walking. It is like a door with light beyond it. But your net holds me, Elexa. You stop me.”
She gripped one hand with the other, thought of Peder the old man, presiding over village meetings when the men talked about hunting problems or the women discussed plans for the spring planting. He settled disputes about goats and sheep, chickens and apples, hunting rights when any argued over who could hunt dragon prey in this meadow or that. He assigned unpleasant tasks so no one had to do them all the time. He read the weather and the sky and told people when to plant. Peder was the one who led the children into the forest when they were five, six, seven, taught them which plants could be picked for food, which ones they should never touch. He showed them how to tell one tree from another by the shape and smell of the leaves, the form of the flowers, the texture of the bark, the way the branches grew. He tutored everyone in dragonspeech during long nights around the storytelling firepit.
Everything he did, he did for the village.
“I’ll let you go,” she said, and reached out to unweave the threads of her net.
“Wait.”
She halted.
“Take me to my dragon,” he said.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She stopped at the cottage and got her robe and fur-lined boots. Peder had died in early spring, and the night air was full of wet cold. She didn’t yet have the thicker, slightly scale-patterned skin of those who had dragon bonded, so she wasn’t as impervious to flame and cold as she would be after she turned thirteen. She got her walking stick, too, and then she headed for the path up to the terraces.
She was frightened. The grown mother dragons were as big as five or six humans. They cast racing, winged shadows when they flew over the village. She had looked up often as they flew overhead, memorized the patterns of colors on the undersides of their wings and bellies, learned to recognize which dragons had bonded to which boys and girls, which fledglings belonged to which mothers. Dragons often landed on the village center ground to pick up the day’s catch from their bonded humans, saving the humans a trip up the mountain. Elexa watched them from the shelter of the smithy or the door to the gatherhouse. She had never gone close to them on her own.
She wasn’t alone now, was she? Peder was with her. Peder, and all the stories the others whispered on fall and winter nights when they huddled together in the gatherhouse, spinning thread or shelling nuts or grinding flour, about how their village was special and strange, different from other human villages and cities.
In other places, stories said, female dragons ate humans.
Male dragons, who only visited the terraces during mating season unless they were village-born, were wild and untrustworthy; they never bonded and were always a threat, unless they were the nestlings of local dragons; then they might know the rules, or they might have forgotten them on purpose. During mating season, the humans spent daylight hours in their houses, sheltered the domestic animals in caves or low-roofed structures so they couldn’t be seen from the air, and crept out at night, while dragons slept. Some of the wilder males dove at human houses, but older, past-egg-laying-age bonded females guarded the village. They drove the wilder males away.
Fortunately, mating season came at the tail end of winter, when there was little work in the fields, and it lasted only three weeks at most.
The stories lasted forever.
The darkest stories spoke of ravening dragons who dropped from the sky and carried off humans in their claws. Dragons who flamed, burned fields and houses, cooked people as they ran. Dragons who—
Elexa faltered on the path halfway to First Terrace.
“Don’t worry,” said old Peder’s ghost. “The males have already left. It’s sleep time.”
She stumbled on, upward. At the edge of First Terrace, she looked around. Cave mouths gaped against the cliff wall across the terrace. Bones of game animals stood in piles near each cave, and smoke drifted from the caves. She smelled sulfur, burlap, cinnamon, rotten meat, and hot metal. Sleepy chirps came from a nearby cave, and the murmur of a dragon mother, the rustle of wings spread and settled.
“That way.” Peder gestured toward the left.
Elexa walked on the outer edge of the terrace, as far from the caves as she could.
“Here,” said Peder. He indicated a cave.
Elexa rubbed at her throat until she could swallow, then approached the cave. “Greetings, O great one,” she said, the first phrase she had learned in the tongue of dragons. It scratched and rattled in her mouth.
Deep in the cave, a stirring, the scrape of talons on rock. A wave of heat flowed from the cave. Then a narrow head on a long snaky neck emerged, the snout wreathed in waving whiskers; streams of smoke flowed from the nostrils; the eyes great, glowing yellow-green jewels.
“Who disturbs my sleep?” asked the dragon in a deep, menacing voice. She spoke human more clearly than any dragon Elexa had overheard in the village center ground.
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