Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories (24 page)

Mary listened. She made sure there was no one else near them. "I can't be seen in church," she confided. "I'm dead, you see."

"Mam?"

"You must have heard the talk about us?"

"I don't hear anything unless it's said in front of me or my young friend deigns to tell me."

"And he doesn't?"

"He's his own man." Mary heard the old man rummaging in his clothes, and she waited with a kind of cool disenchantment. He took her hand again and placed something in it. "That's a plug of chaw."

Mary put the chewing tobacco into her mouth. Her mouth grew wet and her head hummed. They stood side by side, chewing companionably.

"You're missing the service," Mary said.

"God is here, too."

Mary thought,
God isn't anywhere.

When diphtheria had come to Mary's village, the houses closed against one another. Mary's door was shut even to the friend who had helped her with her children when her cataracts began to rob her of her sight.

The disease was well known to all cane cutters, and Mary had had it as a child. Many people in the village had. There were a number of deaths. But in Mary's house, her Maeu husband and half-Maeu children all died. They went one by one, the baby first, and quietly, then Mary's husband, who struggled fearfully and ended draped over a windowsill trying to draw breath, as if his only trouble were the stuffy room. Mary carried her six-year-old and then her ten-year-old to the church, where they lay together along two pews pressed seat to seat. They lay gasping like beached fish, then died only an hour apart, and for a long time after that, Mary sat beside them, passing her hand back and forth across their lips, hopelessly feeling for breath. Finally she lay down between them. Her world had been turned upside down, and someone had shaken it till the last things had fallen out.

Mary's friends found her and led her back to her house. They helped her bury her family. After that they'd come with food, and to sit with her, or to water and hoe her vegetable patch. Some weeks went by, and it came to Mary that there was still something she
didn't
want, a positive something. She didn't want her friends to feel that they'd failed her. So, one night, she packed a little bit of food and put on her stoutest shoes. When the village was asleep, she set out from her home. She walked for days, through cane fields and salt marshes. She went along the road north. When people passed, she turned her head away from them so that they wouldn't see that she was blind. She stepped into the dry litter at the roadside whenever a cart, or coach, or rider went by. The road went along in lazy curves, and was easy for her to follow. And Mary wasn't going anywhere, only away, far enough away so that she could sit down and die where her death wouldn't trouble her friends.

On the fourth evening of her walk, Mary was at a place where the road ran east to west and the sun shone right along it. There was no shade, and the wind had dropped, and the cane had stopped its usual percussive rustling, and the air over the road began to thicken into a syrup full of flies. Mary stopped at the roadside and stood still, her body and hands and feet burning, and her head in the faintly cool halo of her hat. As she stood there, she heard horses coming toward her. She shuffled closer to the wall of cane. She knew she must look distressed. She couldn't help it—the heat had peeled her of her skin of deathly indifference and was trying to prove that she was alive under it. Mary didn't want to draw any notice, or sympathy, so she dissembled. She took off her hat, closed her cataract-covered eyes, raised her face to the sun, and fanned her face with her hat. She stood as relaxed and flat-footed as any old cane cutter woman. Between her eyelids the world was pure white, as it always was when her eyes were aimed at the sky. And then a shadow fell across her face, a shadow from where there should be nothing that could cast a shadow. Mary knew that whatever it was, it was too high.

It was the girl. She had been hot and had stood up on her saddle to try to catch any breeze coming over the top of cane field. Her horse was ambling along, two other horses tethered to it.

The girl stopped to ask whether the cane cutter woman wanted a ride. "I don't have a saddle," she said. Then: "Are you blind? Did I frighten you?" Then: "You can't see them, but I have two more horses. They're my father's. I've stolen them. I'm going to sell them in Gethsemane and use the proceeds to establish a new life for myself."

And, at that, Mary decided to go along with the girl to see what she did, how she managed. Mary postponed her death; after all, it wasn't as if death were going anywhere.

Mary and the old man were still standing in the shade of the church portico, turning their tobacco over with their tongues, when the girl arrived. She was in a rush, and in tears.

"Honey!" The old man was concerned.

Mary didn't say anything. She was shocked. The witch never wept. Mary heard the girl say, "Please" — choking — "will you see Mary home for me? I'd be very grateful."

"Of course," the old man said. Mary heard the girl's running steps recede from them.

They waited for the service to end, and the man's "young friend" to appear, before setting out for the alley off Market Square. The man questioned the boy. "Did you see anything? Did someone speak unkindly to the girl?"

"No," the boy said. "She ran out during the service. Everyone else was attending to the guy in the pulpit."

They went along quietly, puzzling it out. And then Mary asked, in a whisper, "What was the text of the sermon?"

"It's Founders' Day, so it was the Agony in the Garden. You know,
What? Could ye not watch with me one hour?"

Mary woke up in the middle of the night because all the cages in the courtyard were rattling, as though filled with a bunch of agitated, voiceless poultry ghosts.

The girl cried out, then came fully awake and said into the diminishing rustle of dry timber or of the air, "What was that?"

Two days after Founders' Day, the mismatched couples went up Mount Magdalene together. The boy was carrying the girl's basket, and the man was guiding the woman. The man and woman were in conversation; the boy and girl were silent.

The boy kicked a stone ahead of him, then looked unhappily after it when he finally knocked it off the path and down the slope.

The girl asked him how he got his black eye.

He fingered the cut on his eyebrow. "I got into a fight, and the sheriff decided to take exception to me and not to the other fellow. He was in a bad mood because he was having trouble with his horses — they came out of the fort all shivering and crazy."

"So it was the sheriff who gave you that?"

"Yes. And that's why I'm up here, taking the air with you." He sneered. "I'm supposed to stay out of town, and trouble. The sheriff has been drinking with my captain, who has said something indiscreet, and now the sheriff has decided he doesn't like the cut of my jib. And we have to give up our evenings ashore."

"Then it's true?" she said. "What?" He looked at her narrowly.

She pointed at the old man. "If you're confined, so is he, because he's paid to keep an eye on you.

The boy scowled, and his jaw clenched, and he strode out and overtook the others. He got so far ahead on the path that looped up the mountain that, after a few minutes, he was nearly out of sight. They could still see him, his figure dark against the afternoon sky, his shoulders hunched and his fists thrust into the pockets of his jacket.

There came a massive thump under their feet, and the sky before the boy filled with streaks of orange. The fiery bouquet spread, turned into a fountain of fire, and dropped burning matter onto the slope below the path. There was a roar, so deep it was almost inaudible. Its tone rose and blended with a bass hiss, and then the fountain was quenched and swallowed in a cloud of steam.

The boy threw his arms over his head and tottered back along the path. Under their feet the earth seemed to sizzle, grit jiggling, like seeds popping in a hot pan. The ground was quivering.

The girl saw, far below, an articulated mass of metal slithering down the slope — a derrick, disjointed, drill shaft following, still attached to the derrick by a steel cable. She thought she could see a body on the slope.

She had once been out on the sea when a whale came up under her boat. The long sleek back had slipped out of the waves, water pouring aside from its bulk. It came up in a rolling curve, and its bifurcated blowhole opened and it took a breath, and the sound of air sucked into those vast lungs was what the girl could hear now as steam billowed from the flank of the mountain.

Mary put her mouth close to the girl's ear and yelled, "I think I can hear people crying out."

The girl listened, then she could hear it, too. She ran along the path, elbowed the boy aside, and made her way to where he had been standing. Her hair was instantly damp, and her face felt sweaty, then scalded. The steam was much farther off than she'd imagined. There was a long, creeping slick of gray mud moving down the mountain from the point where it emerged. There were smoking lumps of rock scattered below the geyser. The girl saw more bodies on the slope, and one man was staggering her way, his face and hands red and covered in blooming yellow blisters. He fell over before he reached her, tried to rise, then rolled faceup and lay still. The girl crept forward till she could see that his tongue was fat and white and that he had blood in his mouth.

She heard a faint call: "Girlie!" She cast about—but it was the old able seaman, who had joined her, who spotted McCahon.

The engineer was lying a short distance from the steaming mud river. They scrambled down to him, and without any consultation, each grabbed an arm and dragged him away from the hot ooze and around the slight shelter of a hump in the cone. The boy joined them. They gathered around McCahon, all cringing as the ruptured fumarole spat out a few more rocks, and the sound of the geyser became deeper and softer — not quieter, only somehow more steamy.

McCahon's leg was smashed, his shinbone in his blood-soaked pants leg in several pieces, like beads on a string. His palms and one side of his face were deeply grazed. But he still was conscious, even after their rough handling. "What about the others?" he said.

The old man shook his head. Then he sprang up and went back to

Mary, who was gingerly trying to make her way down to them. He took her hands and led her like a beau handing his belle out onto the dance floor. He showed her where to sit and placed her hands on McCahon. She gently felt the engineer's leg.

"We'll need a stretcher," the old man said, then added, to the engineer, "I hope that, for you, this is just like an oil strike." He meant that it was a dangerous business and was asking whether this was normal.

McCahon didn't seem to hear him. He reached past Mary and took hold of the girl's hanging plait. He pulled her closer, only to gaze into her eyes.

Mary said to the girl, "You have some devil's claw in your bag. He could chew on that."

The girl fumbled her small satchel around in front of her. It was hard for her to see what she was doing with her head on one side and hair pulled tight. She found her knife and slipped it into her apron pocket. She broke eye contact with McCahon to seek out the root. She pulled off a piece and folded it into his mouth. He let go of her hair.

The old man said, "You two youngsters should run for help. Town is a distance off—but there are men in the crater and the airship. You should try both directions, to be sure."

"Yes," said Mary.

"I'll go down," the boy said. "It's farther." He jumped up and started away from them. The old man shouted his name—which was James. The boy hesitated, then gave a hasty wave and headed off.

McCahon took hold of the girl's upper arms, the blood from his grazes seeping sticky through her sleeves. She caught his gaze again. He had hazel eyes. "I can't go," she said to Mary and the old man.

"I'm afraid it has to be you, dear," the old man said. "It's at most only a ten-minute uphill scramble. And once you're there, you can leave the problem to the men. They'll know what to do."

"Girlie," said McCahon.

"I
can't
go," the girl said. "I mustn't." She began to cry.

"You must—and be quick!" Mary said.

"It's wrong!" the girl wailed. "It's wrong to leave him."

"We're not leaving him. It's you who has to run for help. Mary can't see, and I'm not as spry as I once was." The old man was being patient, but under it, he was exasperated.

The girl didn't hear this. She continued to moan that she couldn't go.

Mary suddenly punched her in the chest, shoved her so hard that she fell over and her arms were torn from McCahon's grip. She lay for a moment, stunned, then staggered up and ran off.

They watched her sprint down the path till she found a good place to climb and began to clamber up toward the summit.

It took more than ten minutes, though she went as straight and as fast as she could. She didn't even pause to look up. And as she got farther from it, the sound of the geyser grew less. But by then she could hear other sounds. And
feel
them. She felt like she was climbing a long, green baize-covered door, and some terrible thing was on the other side of it, knocking, pounding, straining the latch and the hinges.