Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories (22 page)

That winter everybody was busy, and the busybodies were busier than ever. Rumor rose like steam from a town that seemed to be coming to the boil. The cane had been cut, and the refineries were lit up all night. In the wind that came off the sea, the town smelled of caramel. The wind blew across the bay named Broken Crown, over the port and refineries, and right into town, where it mingled with the smells of the Saturday market and the gardens, its caramel giving body to the fruit and floral scents.

Gethsemane was a city of gardens. Its topsoil was made of eons of decayed vegetation mixed into many feet of ash, making a fertile, friable soil that parted lovingly for the hoe. The locals had always talked about their soil as if it were some kind of demigod — the way people in high-latitude ports talk about the weather. The locals discussed soil, but the engineers who arrived on the
John Bartholomew
were interested only in ash—where it lay, and to what depth. To the townspeople, "ash" was potash for porcelain, or wood ash for gunpowder—utilitarian stuff—and though they worshipped their soil, they never thought about what it was made of, or the ground beneath it. Gethsemane's earthly powers, the mayor and sheriff, the owners and managers of refineries, the plantation owners with summer houses on the lower slopes of the town, all were welcoming to the engineers because they wanted to grow Gethsemane — as the town's soil grew melons. Yet, at their parties, the talk wasn't about money but progress, the fecundity of the future. They all agreed that Gethsemane was paradise on earth. Its early settlers had discovered a salubrious climate and a most welcoming native people keen to share their bounty of bush pigs and fat native birds and fruiting trees and hot springs — the earth's own ovens. The settlers dug hot-water wells for their baths and laundries. The very earth, even barren, had utility in the form of heat. Puffed up with civic pride, the city welcomed the engineers and geologists who came to learn how to tap that earth for power, how to sink bores and find steam forceful enough to drive turbines and generate electricity, so that the refineries could run day and night, and the city could sparkle, a clean, bright, South Pacific jewel.

There was another hot property of the town's wishful gossip. The thermal project's chief engineer, McCahon, proved to be a bold and ferociously forward-looking man — a real novelty in the islands, whose planter families were old and established powers. McCahon was someone on whom the island's future prosperity might depend. Someone
new.
He was invited everywhere, scrutinized and admired, and after scarcely a fortnight it was rumored that he'd developed a fancy for the mayor's daughter, Sylvia. Then, to pour fuel on the fire of rumor, that young woman was seen, in man's attire, and a hat pulled low, ducking in at the gate to the witch's crib.

The witch, a pretty girl aged somewhere between sixteen and twenty, had set herself up nearly a year before, selling balms and love charms, and—it was rumored — abortifacients, and sleeping drafts, and potions that produced dreams vividly reminiscent of those the moneyed people of Gethsemane would share whenever they visited Southland, the nation of which the Shackle Islands were a protectorate. No one knew the witch's name, and she had a servant—a white-eyed mute — said to be a dead woman.

In the fine residences along the inner harbor, practical-minded people tried to point out errors in the logic of these rumors. Why would the mayor's daughter be looking for a love charm if she'd already caught McCahon's eye? And—in more hushed tones—how could she be looking for an abortifacient when she'd only known McCahon for a couple of weeks? And—on the subject of the little witch—how could her servant be a zombie and also have been seen coming down the mountain path leaning on the arm of the old able seaman?

A local doctor talking to a certain group of lacy matrons over iced tea said that he thought the girl's potions were probably only opium and datura and psilocybin mushrooms. She was either a skilled herbalist or a daring experimenter. The doctor said all this to dispel the nonsense of gossip. But having sown the seeds of his own temptation, he visited the witch's crib himself several nights later. He told himself that he only wanted to procure for analysis some of her home-brewed remedies, but he came away impressed in spite of himself by the girl's terrible, cold gravity, and by the figure who stood unmoving in a corner the whole time he was there — tall, skeletal, and as inanimate as a broken grandfather clock.

You ask how we know what the doctor thought. Well — he survived. He had an operation to perform in the other big settlement in the archipelago.

The circular harbors of Calvary and Gethsemane were the "shackles" of the Shackle Islands. The towns were linked by a 150-mile "chain" of low islands, planted in sugarcane, and by a road that ran through cane fields and salt marshes.

One hundred and fifty miles. In Calvary, there was time enough for an evacuation.

The doctor lived to tell his tale. And so did Alice Lewes. Alice had sailed to Southland, sent away by her father when he discovered that she'd been out at night with her wild friend, Sylvia. It was Alice and Sylvia—Sylvia in man's attire—who were seen slipping through the gate to the witch's crib. Alice had promised to keep her friend's secret and did so even though her father threatened to send her away to school. She kept her mouth shut and was packed off. She was in transit when she heard what had happened, and she understood that there was no one left who cared what she and Sylvia had done.

It was Alice who first approached the witch. She did it to tease her friend. They were in the market and spotted the haughty girl, with a basket on her arm, taking her time over each display, to the discomfort of the stallholders — a girl who went about untouched in the crowd, shadowed by her starved, still-faced servant. "Perhaps the little witch can make you a love potion, Syl," Alice said to her friend, and darted away from Sylvia's desperate batting hand. Alice didn't know that although Sylvia liked to talk about Mr. McCahon, she hadn't liked to hope.

Alice followed the witch from the market. She waited till there were fewer people about, and she could approach the witch while keeping the girl between herself and that frightening, black, white-eyed creature. "Excuse me," Alice said. "I have a friend who requires a love potion. Can you do that?"

And the witch told Alice where she lived and when they could come.

The courtyard of the witch's crib had a wicket gate, and its walls were lined with empty poultry cages made of silvered gum-tree wood. Their grid was so tight that there was very little light. If the gate hadn't creaked and given the two people in the house some warning, Alice and Sylvia might have heard the witch say to the dead woman, "Will this do? A tisane strong enough to be offensive to the palate but not to turn the stomach. That's what you said." And they might have heard the dead woman answer, "I said, 'One that tastes bad but won't make the young lady sick.'" And then heard the witch, fondly chiding,
"Mary!"

The gate creaked. Alice clutched Sylvia's arm. Sylvia, now resolute, shook off her friend and hurried to the door. It opened onto a long room that seemed to squeeze itself down to nothing at its end, where the ceiling dropped and there was a step down into a scullery. The only window was there, at the very back, its glass coated with black mold. For a moment all that the friends could see was the witch's white apron and her pale face. Then they glimpsed the figure standing in the room's darkest corner, thin, and sinewy, and as motionless as a monument.

The witch sprang forward and pushed Alice and her friend right back out into the courtyard. She said, "I don't want your hopes contaminating this potion before it is finished." She slammed the door in their faces. They waited in the close, hot space, Alice with her skirts gathered in her gloved hands. They heard the witch whispering — spells, they supposed. A moment later she let them in again.

The kettle had been swiveled back over the coals and was steaming. There was a bowl on the hearth, beside it a small bottle, a funnel, and a rag stopper.

Alice kept her friend between herself and the white-eyed figure in the corner. She gripped the back of Sylvia's jacket.

"How does the potion work?" Sylvia asked the witch. "What must I do?"

"You must drink one-third of the potion the night before you see this man. On the morning of the day that you see him, you must comb all but a few drops of it into your hair. The remainder you must dab
here."
The witch stepped close and insinuated her hand into Sylvia's shirt to touch her cleavage. "Over your heart," the witch said. "Then you cannot cover yourself—you must let the sun shine on your hair and breasts."

Alice giggled.

"But what if he — Mr. McCahon — can't keep his appointment with my father or comes late, when the sun is down? He's up the mountain every day, where they're drilling."

"I know where he is," said the witch. "If he fails to appear before sundown, come again and I'll repeat the charm. I won't charge you for that. We can't control all circumstances."

"But will it work?"

"It will if your heart is pure."

Sylvia's face fell. Even Alice could see the obvious hitch.

"Oh," said the witch, "you mistake me. I don't mean
maidenly.
Your hopes can be wholly carnal — but you must not be simply playing."

Sylvia nodded, solemn.

Alice, made bold by the witch's forthright and doctorly manner, ventured to ask, "Is it true what they say, that your servant is"—she dropped her voice — "a zombie?"

"My slave," the witch said, her tone gloating. "While your potion cools shall I tell you her story?"

Sylvia and Alice looked around as if they had been invited to sit. But there was nothing to sit on, not even a stool. There was the low hearth and, in a corner, a single pallet bed covered in grubby blankets.

The witch went to the fire and stood with her back to it, its light striking only one blue eye. "My craft came to me," she said. "And this is how." She pointed at her slave. "This woman and my nurse were rivals for the love of a certain man. This woman procured a curse that, she was told, would strike my nurse ugly. The curse was cast, and the following Sunday, the curser was infuriated to see my nurse holding my hand as we came into church—and looking as lovely as ever." The witch raised a finger, and an assortment of brass and silver bangles slipped, chiming from her wrist to elbow. "But, a week later, my nurse discovered a tiny blue mark on her cheekbone. She washed her face, but soap wouldn't move it. She tried pinching color into that spot and felt, between her fingers, a little hard ball, like a dry pea. Week by week that pea grew, into a cherry, into a plum, into a bluish horn of flesh. She took it to a doctor, and the doctor told her it had grown into the bones of her face. And he told her that there wasn't any hope for her. My family kept her on, and she still saw to my needs, but kept her face covered. After a time the horn stopped growing and began to sink and spread, and my nurse complained of always having a terrible smell in her nose. Then she lost the sight in her left eye. After that she stayed in bed. The horn blossomed. Once, when she was sleeping, I crept into her room and uncovered it and saw a cavity, like a crater, black at its edges and hot and bloody at its center. At the end the poor woman couldn't even speak or swallow. But before she lost her voice, she taught me a powerful curse, a curse her family had kept but the knowledge of which she had always shunned, because she was a good woman. It was a curse to take a soul. Not a life; a soul.

"The night my nurse died, I used that curse on her rival. This woman" — the witch pointed at her silent slave — "this woman came to my nurse's funeral. She followed the coffin to the churchyard and stood at the graveside, smirking. But when the mourners had moved away and the sexton was filling in the grave, this woman was still there, standing, swaying. Her head was back, and she was staring up into the sun. She wouldn't stir. They had to lead her away indoors, and by that time, her eyeballs had blistered.

"I did that," the witch said. "I made her mindless and soulless and now she follows me.

"You were watching me in the market before you screwed up enough courage to make your appointment. You must have seen how she always follows after me with her hand held out. It isn't that I'm guiding her, but that I'm
all she can see.
And what she sees is my shadow. And my shadow appears to her as a black door. She wants to go through that door. For she knows she can only escape her servitude in death. And she knows that if I die first, the door vanishes, and she is left in a desert of whiteness, the whiteness that is all she can see."

The witch finished her story and turned to the hearth to pick up the bowl and blow on it. As she came closer to the fire, her shadow moved and thickened and fell across the face of her silent slave, who raised her arm and reached — like someone putting out a hand to door handle.

The visitors gasped and clutched each other.

The girl turned back to them and smiled at their fear. She took a funnel and decanted the potion from the bowl into the bottle, then stuffed the bottle with the rag stopper. She held it out—a reddish liquid behind grubby glass. Her hand was stained with plant juices. "For your Mr. McCahon."

Sylvia closed the bottle into her fist and slipped her fist into her pants pocket, making a little boyish bulge.

"Remember," said the witch, "you must have a heart unsullied by hesitation. I may have followed my nurse around Ragged Hat —"

Ah,
Alice thought,
so she comes from Calvary!

"— learning about herbs, but I wasn't a witch till I cast that curse. It worked because I asked justly. Magic makes judgments. Remember that."

Gethsemane's harbor was roughly circular, seven miles across, and half a mile wide at its entrance. The flat land and gentle slopes of the town were all opposite the harbor mouth. The rest of the harbor was a crown of forested cliffs. If the harbor was a clock face with its entrance at twelve, and the town at six, then at four there was Mount Magdalene, taller than all the surrounding ramparts, two thousand feet high, and the reason why everyone but layabouts and prisoners in the thick-walled city jail got to see the sunrise. The sunrise was always late, for Gethsemane lay in the shadow of the mountain till eight in the morning in winter.