Mathew Babaoye's Blog: Pure Impure, page 5

Favorite Passages in Literature

The Curse of Chalion, by Lois McMaster Bujold

This book is set in a fantasy world with multiple kingdoms and factions, although the story takes place almost exclusively in the land-locked realm of Chalion. Political intrigue, deadly assasinations, mayhem, magic and romance are all to be found in this excellent tale which begins, charmingly enough, with a good man down on his luck after a string of disasters, and just looking for one more chance…

…

(pg. 3)

Cazaril heard the mounted horsemen on the road before he saw them. He glanced over his shoulder. The well-worn track behind him curled up around a rolling rise, what passed for a hill on these high windy plains, before dipping again into the late-winter muck of Baocia’s bony soil. At his feet a little rill, too small and intermittent to rate a culvert or a bridge, trickled greenly across the track from the sheep-cropped pastures above. The thump of hooves, jangle of harness, clink of bells, creak of gear and careless echo of voices came on at too quick a rhythm to be some careful farmer with a team, or parsimonious pack-men driving their mules.

The cavalcade trotted around the side of the rise riding two by two, in full panoply of their order, some dozen men. Not bandits—Cazaril let out his breath, and swallowed his unsettled stomach back down. Not that he had anything to offer bandits but sport. He trudged a little way off the track and turned to watch them pass.

The horsemen’s chain shirts were silvered, glinting in the watery morning sunlight, for show, not for use. Their tabards of blue, dyes almost matching one with another, were worked with white in the sigil of the Lady of Spring. Their gray cloaks were thrown back like banners in the breeze of their passing, pinned at their shoulders with silver badges that had all the tarnish polished off today. Soldier-brothers of ceremony, not of war; they would have no desire to get Cazaril’s stubborn bloodstains on those clothes.

To Cazaril’s surprise, their captain held up a hand as they came near. The column crashed raggedly to a halt, the squelch and suck of the hooves trailing off in a way that would have had Cazaril’s father’s old horse-master bellowing grievous and entertaining insults at such a band of boys as this. Well, no matter.

“You there, old fellow,” the leader called across the saddlebow of his banner-carrier at Cazaril.

Cazaril, alone on the road, barely kept his head from swiveling around to see who was being so addressed. They took him for some local farm lout, trundling to market or on some errand, and he supposed he looked the part: worn boots mud-weighted, a thick jumble of mismatched charity clothes keeping the chill southeast wind from freezing his bones. He was grateful to all the gods of the year’s turning for every grubby stitch of that fabric, eh. Two weeks of beard itching his chin. Fellow indeed. The captain might with justice have chosen more scornful appellations. But… old?

The captain pointed down the road to where another track crossed it. “Is that the road to Valenda?”

It had been… Cazaril had to stop and count it in his head, and the sum dismayed him. Seventeen years since he had ridden last down this road, going off not to ceremony but to real war in the provincar of Baocia’s train. Although bitter to be riding a gelding and not a finer warhorse, he’d been just as glossy-haired and young and arrogant and vain of his dress as the fine young animals up there staring down at him.Today, I should be happy for a donkey, though I had to bend my knees to keep from trailing my toes in the mud. Cazaril smiled back up at the soldier-brothers, fully aware of what hollowed-out purses lay gaping and disemboweled behind most of those rich facades.

They stared down their noses at him as though they could smell him from there. He was not a person they wished to impress, no lord or lady who might hand down largesse to them as they might to him; still, he would do for them to practice their aristocratic airs upon. They mistook his returning stare for admiration, perhaps, or maybe just for half-wittedness.

He bit back the temptation to steer them wrong, up into some sheep byre or wherever that deceptively broad-looking crossroad petered out. No trick to pull on the Daughter’s own guardsmen on the eve of the Daughter’s Day. And besides, the men who joined the holy military orders were not especially noted for their senses of humor, and he might pass them again, being bound for the same town himself. Cazaril cleared his throat, which hadn’t spoken to a man since yesterday. “No, Captain. The road to Valenda has a roya’s milestone.” Or it had, once. “A mile or three farther on. You can’t mistake it.” He pulled a hand out of the warmth of the folds of his coat, and waved onward. His fingers didn’t really straighten right, and he found himself waving a claw. The chill air bit his swollen joints, and he tucked his hand hastily back into its burrow of cloth.

The captain nodded at his banner-carrier, a thick-shouldered… fellow, who cradled his banner pole in the crook of his elbow and fumbled out his purse. He fished in it, looking no doubt for a coin of sufficiently small denomination. He had a couple brought up to the light, between his fingers, when his horse jinked. A coin—a gold royal, not a copper vaida—spurted out of his grip and spun down into the mud. He stared after it, aghast, but then controlled his features. He would not dismount in front of his fellows to grub in the muck and retrieve it. Not like the peasant he expected Cazaril to be: for consolation, he raised his chin and smiled sourly, waiting for Cazaril to dive frantically and amusingly after this unexpected windfall.

Instead, Cazaril bowed and intoned, “May the blessings of the Lady of Spring fall upon your head, young sir, in the same spirit as your bounty to a roadside vagabond, and as little begrudged.”

If the young soldier-brother had had more wits about him, he might well have unraveled this mockery, and Cazaril the seeming-peasant drawn a well-earned horsewhip across his face. Little enough chance of that, judging by the brother’s bull-like stare, though the captain’s lips twisted in exasperation. But the captain just shook his head and gestured his column onward.

If the banner-bearer was too proud to scramble in the mud, Cazaril was much too tired to. He waited till the baggage train, a gaggle of servants and mules bringing up the rear, had passed before crouching painfully down and retrieving the little spark from the cold water seeping into a horse’s print. The adhesions in his back pulled cruelly. Gods. I do move like an old man. He caught his breath and heaved to his feet, feeling a century old, feeling like road dung stuck to the boot heel of the Father of Winter as he made his way out of the world.

He polished the mud off the coin—little enough even if gold—and pulled out his own purse. Now there was an empty bladder. He dropped the thin disk of metal into the leather mouth and stared down at its lonely glint. He sighed and tucked the pouch away. Now he had a hope for bandits to steal again. Now he had a reason to fear. He reflected on his new burden, so great for its weight, as he stumped up the road in the wake of the soldier-brothers. Almost not worth it. Almost. Gold. Temptation to the weak, weariness to the wise… what was it to a dull-eyed bull of a soldier, embarrassed by his accidental largesse?

Cazaril gazed around the barren landscape. Not much in the way of trees or coverts, except in that distant watercourse over there, the bare branches and brambles lining it charcoal-gray in the hazy light. The only shelter anywhere in sight was an abandoned windmill on the height to his left, its roof fallen in and its vanes broken down and rotting. Still… just in case…

Cazaril swung off the road and began trudging up the hill. Hillock, compared to the mountain passes he’d traversed a week ago. The climb still stole his wind; almost, he turned back. The gusts up here were stronger, flowing over the ground, riffling the silver-gold tufts of winter’s dry grasses. He nipped out of the raw air into the mill’s shadowed darkness and mounted a dubious and shaking staircase winding partway up the inner wall. He peered out the shutterless window.

On the road below, a man belabored a brown horse back along the track. No soldier-brother: one of the servants, with his reins in one hand and a stout cudgel in the other. Sent back by his master to secretly shake the accidental coin back out of the hide of the roadside vagabond? He rode up around the curve, then, in a few minutes, back again. He paused at the muddy rill, turned back and forth in his saddle to peer around the empty slopes, shook his head in disgust, and spurred on to join his fellows again.

Cazaril realized he was laughing. It felt odd, unfamiliar, a shudder through his shoulders that wasn’t cold or shock or gut-wringing fear. And the strange hollow absence of… what? Corrosive envy? Ardent desire? He didn’t want to follow the soldier-brothers, didn’t even want to lead them anymore. Didn’t want to be them. He’d watched their parade as idly as a man watching a dumb-show in the marketplace. Gods. I must be tired. Hungry, too. It was still a quarter-day’s walk to Valenda, where he might find a moneylender who could change his royal for more useful copper vaidas. Tonight, by the blessing of the Lady, he might sleep in an inn and not a cow byre. He could buy a hot meal. He could buy a shave, a bath …

He turned, his eyes adjusted now to the half shadows in the mill. Then he saw the body splayed out on the rubble-strewn floor. He froze in panic, but then breathed again when he saw the body didn’t. No live man could lie unmoving in that strange back-bent position. Cazaril felt no fear of dead men. Whatever had made them dead, now…

…

Progress Report

Currently more than halfway through editing the 2nd Edition of Nightglory for release in January 2016, just started the final editing pass of the urban supernatural story for release in Febuary 2016, and just started the first editing pass of the military science fiction story for release in May 2016. This is one of the first times in the last year where I am not writing new story content daily, but my manuscripts need the extra attention right now. Tangible benefits for readers :)

Favorite Passages in Literature…

House of Suns, by Alastair Reynolds

This book is set millions of years in the future, in a universe where humanity has branched out in endless evolutionary permutations across the stars. The Gentian  line is a branch of humanity formed from one thousand male and female clones of Abigail Gentian, thereafter called shatterlings, only reassembling during reunions held periodically between unimaginably vast swaths of cosmic time, until one day a myserious attack nearly wipes them all out in one fell instance

However, as in most cases, the Gentian line’s story must begin at the beginning, showing how so many began as one strange young soul…

…

(pg. 5)

I was a girl then, a single individual called Abigail Gentian.

During the thirty years of my childhood, I only saw a fraction of that vast, rambling, ever-changing mansion. Even as I grew older, and gained the authority to wander where it suited me, I doubt that I ever explored more than a hundredth of it. I was intimidated by the long, forbidding corridors of mirror and glass, the corkscrewing staircases rising from dark cellars and vaults where even the adults never went, the rooms and parlours that – although the adults and housekeepers never said as much in my presence – were alleged to be haunted, or in some way not convivial to anything other than transitory occupation. The elevators and dumb waiters alarmed me when they moved without apparent instruction, obeying some inscrutable whim of the house’s governing persona. It was a mansion of ghosts and monsters, with ghouls in the shadows and demons scuttling behind the wainscotting.

I had one true friend, although I cannot now remember his name. He arrived occasionally, but only ever for short visits. I would be allowed to watch the approach and docking of his private shuttle, viewing it from the airtight vantage of a glass-windowed belvedere perched above the mansion’s highest tower. I was always pleased when Madame Kleinfelter allowed me up to the belvedere, and not just because such an occurrence signalled the arrival of my only true companion. From there I could see the entirety of the house, and much of the world on which it was built. The house curved away in all directions until it met the sharp bend of the planetoid’s jagged horizon, a thin margin of rock marking the limit of my home.

It was a strange building, although for a long time I had nothing to compare it with. There was no organised plan to it, no hint of symmetry or harmony – or if there ever had been, that underlying order had been lost beneath countless additions and alterations – work that was still ongoing. Though the planetoid had no atmosphere, and therefore no weather, the house was designed as if it belonged on a world where it rained and snowed. Every distinct part of it, every wing and tower, was surmounted by a steep-sided, blue-tiled roof. There were thousands of roofs, meeting each other at odd, unsettling angles. Chimneys and turrets, belvederes and clock towers punctuated the haphazard, dinosaur-backed roofline. Some parts of the house were only one or two storeys high; others had twenty or more levels, with the tallest parts rising like mountains from the foothills of surrounding structures. Windowed bridges spanned the gaps between towers, a silent, distant figure occasionally stealing behind their illuminated portholes. It was less a house than a city in which you could walk from one side to the other without ever stepping outside.

Later in life I would learn the reason for my home being the way it was, the reason why the building work never ceased, but as a child I simply accepted it unquestioningly. I knew the house was different from the ones I saw in books and story-cubes, but then nothing in those books or cubes resembled any significant aspect of my life. Even before I could read, I knew that we were rich, and it had been impressed on me that there were only a handful of other families whose wealth could be compared to our own.

‘You’re a very special young lady, Abigail Gentian,’ was what my mother told me on one of the many occasions when her ageless face addressed me from one of the house’s panes. ‘You’re going to do great things with your life.’

She had no idea.

It did not take me long to realise that the little boy must also be the child of a rich family. He came on his own ship, not one of the company-owned liners that occasionally conveyed lesser mortals to and from our planetoid. I would watch it arrive from deep space, slowing down on a spike of cobalt flame before stopping above the outer wings of the house, pirouetting into a landing configuration, flinging out skeletal landing legs and lowering with elegant precision onto the designated touchdown pad. Our family’s symbol was a black cinquefoil; his was a pair of intermeshing cogs, the emblem painted on the ship’s sleek, flanged hull.

As soon as the shuttle was down I would rush from the belvedere, almost tumbling down the tightly wound spiral stairs threading the tower. Whichever clone nanny was looking after me that day would take me to one of the elevators and we would travel up, down and sideways until we reached the docking wing. We usually got there just as the little boy was coming out, taking hesitant steps down the long, carpeted ramp from his ship, with two robots gliding alongside him.

The robots scared me. They were hulking things of dull, weatherworn silver, with heads, torsos and arms, but only a single huge wheel in place of legs. Their faces consisted of a single vertical line, like an arrow slit in a castle wall, at the leading edge of a fierce wedge-shaped skull. They had no eyes, no mouth. Their arms were segmented and ended in three-clawed hands, good for nothing except crunching flesh and bone. In my imagination, the robots were keeping the little boy prisoner when he was not visiting me, doing horrible things to him – so horrible that he could never quite speak of them even when we were alone. It was only when I was older that I grasped that they were his bodyguards, that deep within the dim architecture of their minds was something perilously close to love.

The robots only came to the bottom of the carpet, never rolling off it onto the wooden reception floor. The boy would hesitate, then step off, shiny black shoes clicking on the varnished blocks. His clothes were black except for white cuffs and a wide lacework collar. He wore a little backpack, and his black hair was glued back from his brow with strong-smelling lacquer. His face was pale and slightly pudgy, with round, dark eyes of indeterminate colour.

‘Your eyes are funny,’ he always told me. ‘One blue and one green. Why didn’t they fix that when you were born?’

The robots would spin around at the waist and reverse back into the shuttle, where they would wait until it was time for the boy to leave.

‘It’s hard to walk here,’ the boy always said, his footsteps unsteady. ‘Everything’s too hard.’

‘It feels normal to me,’ I said.

It was a long time before I realised that the boy came from a place in the Golden Hour where the local gravity had been fixed at half-standard, which meant he found it difficult to move around when visiting the planetoid.

‘Father says it’s dangerous,’ the boy said as we made our way to the playroom, two nannies trailing behind.

‘What’s dangerous?’

‘The thing inside your world. Or has no one told you about that yet?’

‘There’s nothing inside the world but rock. I know – I looked it up in the story-cube, after you told me there were snakes living in the caves under the house.’

‘The story-cube was lying to you. They do that when they think you need to be protected from the truth.’

‘They don’t lie.’

‘Then ask your parents about the black hole. It’s under your house right now.’

He must have known that my father was dead, and that I could only ask my mother something when her face appeared on one of the panes.

‘What’s a black hole?’

The boy thought about this for a moment. ‘It’s a kind of monster. Like a giant black spider, hanging in an invisible web. Anything that comes too close, it grabs them and stings them and then eats them alive. And there’s a very big one under your house.’

Thinking I was being clever, I said, ‘So what happened to the snakes? Did it eat them?’

‘I lied about the snakes,’ the boy said insouciantly. ‘But this is real – ask the story-cube about black holes if you don’t believe me. Your family had it put under the house to make everything heavier – if it wasn’t there, we’d be floating now.’

‘How can a spider make things heavier?’

‘I said it’s like a spider, not that it really is one.’ He gave me a pitying look. ‘It’s a sucking, hungry mouth that you can’t ever fill. That’s why it pulls everything in towards it, making us feel heavier. But it’s also why it’s dangerous.’

‘Because your father said so?’

‘It’s not just Father. The story-cube will tell you everything, if you ask it the right questions. You can’t just come at it headlong – you have to go in sideways, like a cat stalking a mouse. Then you can fool it into telling you things it isn’t meant to. A black hole swallowed up a whole planetoid once – bigger than this one. It swallowed up the planetoid and everyone living on it. They all went down the plug, like water after a bath. Glug, glug, glug.’

‘That won’t happen here.’

‘If you say so.’

‘I don’t believe you anyway. If you weren’t telling the truth about the snakes, why should I listen to you now?’

Quite suddenly, the malice vanished from his face. I felt as if my friend had only just arrived – the teasing, spiteful boy who had accompanied me until now had just been an impostor.

‘Have you got any new toys, Abigail?’

‘I’ve always got new toys.’

‘I mean, anything special.’

‘There is something,’ I said. ‘I was looking forward to showing it to you. It’s a kind of doll’s house.’

‘Doll’s houses are for girls.’

I shrugged. ‘Then I won’t show it to you.’ Echoing the words he had spoken to me earlier, I announced, ‘I said it’s a kind of doll’s house, not that it really is one. It’s called Palatial; it’s like a castle you control, with its own empire. It’s a pity; I think you would have liked it. But there are other games we can play. We can play in the mood maze, or the flying room.’

I could be manipulative as well, and I had already gained some dark insights into the boy’s mind – I knew that he would feign indifference for at least part of the afternoon, while his curiosity to see the doll’s house was burning a hole right through him. And he was right to be curious, for the doll’s house was the toy I was most eager to show off.

With the nannies in tow, I brought the little boy to the playroom. In the dark-shuttered, gloomily lit room I rolled out boxes and trunks and unpacked some of the things we had played with on his last visit. The boy shrugged off his backpack, undid the top flap and pulled out some of his own favourite toys. There were things I remembered from his last visit: a scaly-winged dragon that flew around the room, spitting pink fire before landing on his arm and coiling its tail several times around it; a soldier who would hide himself somewhere in the room when we closed our eyes – it had taken us hours to find him the last time. There were marbles, little glass balls cored with whirls of colour, which rolled on the floor and organised themselves into shapes and figures according to shouted commands, or formed shapes which we then had to guess at before they were complete. There was a puzzle board and a lovely machine ballerina who would dance on anything, even the tip of a finger.

We played with these things, and eventually the nannies brought us lemonade and biscuits on a floating trolley. Somewhere in the house a long-case clock chimed.

‘I want to see the doll’s house now,’ the boy said.

‘I thought you didn’t want to see it.’

‘I do. Really.’

So I showed him Palatial, taking him into the room-within-a-room where it was kept, and although I revealed only a fraction of its capabilities, he was fascinated by it, and I knew even then that he was jealous, and that Palatial would be the first thing he would want to see on his next visit.

It was the first time I had felt him in my power. I decided that I liked the feeling very much.

…

Progress Report

The new fantasy story is still coming along nicely; I’m really getting into it now that the introduction is settled and the action is truly underway. Also: working on a first editing pass of the military science fiction story and a 2nd Edition of Nightglory. Excerpts from my urban supernatural release in February 2016 will be coming soon too.

Currently Reading…

The Book of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe.

The premise: set in a brutal medieval world called Urth, a young man named Severian has been raised from birth in the Guild of the Torturers, who dispense justice for the Autarch. Severian is curious, and different, which one day brings about misfortune as he is exiled from the Guild for committing an unpardonable sin: showing mercy to a victim.

So far this book has lived up to its pedigree of being one of the all-time SFF classics. Wolfe is an astounding talent.

Progress Report

Still writing the new fantasy story and really enjoying the process, getting into the characters, their interplay and magical world again. Also finished a final edit of the Übermensch 2nd edition recently and sent it to the studio for formatting, so now I am moving onto a first edit of the military science fiction story. Finally: holiday promotions and sales are coming soon – stay tuned.

Favorite Passages In Literature…

The Knight, by Gene Wolfe.

This book is one of my favorite fantasy stories of all time. A boy from Earth is vacationing with his older brother at the family’s woodland cabin before one day going off to explore alone among the trees. Out of sight, and growing lost as the day darkens, he gradually leaving behind the land he knew, unknowingly entering the medieval fantasy world of Mythgarthr where Aelf, dragons and more lurk in the worlds below while heroes and angels carry the banner of honor and courage in the worlds above.

Our young hero, Able, has just left the knight and squire he was travelling with after he hears a cry for help from the forest surrounding the nearby robber town ruled by Saxneat. When Able goes out to investigate alone, however, he finds nothing human…

…

(pg. 38)

“Help…” It was not so much a cry as a moan like that of the wind, and like a a moaning wind it seemed to fill the forest. I pushed through the brush that crowded the forest’s edge, trotted among close-set saplings, then sprinted among mature trees that grew larger and larger and more and more widely spaced as I advanced. “Please help me. Please…”

I paused to catch my breath, cupped my hands around my mouth, and called, “I’m coming!” as loudly as I could. Even as I did it, I wondered how she had known there was anyone to hear her while I was still walking down the rows of sprouting grain. Possibly she had not. Possibly she had been calling like that, at intervals, for hours.

I trotted again, then ran. Up a steep ridge crowned with dreary hemlocks, and along the ridgeline until it dipped and swerved in oaks. Always it seemed to me that the woman who called could not be more than a hundred strides away.

The woman I felt perfectly certain had to be Seaxneat’s wife Disira. Soon I reached a little river that must surely have been the Griffin. I forded it by the simple expedient of wading in where I was. I had to hold my bow, my quiver, and the little bag I tied to my belt over my head before I was done; but I got through and scrambled up the long sloping bank of rounded stones on the other side.

There, mighty beeches robed with moss lifted proud heads into that fair world called Skai; and there the woman who called to me sounded nearer still, no more (I thought) than a few strides off. In a dark dell full of mushrooms and last year’s leaves, I felt certain I would find her. She was only on the other side of the beaver-meadow, beyond all question; and after that, up on the rocky outcrop I glimpsed beyond it.

Except that when I got there I could hear her calling still, calling in the distance. I shouted then, gasping for breath between the repetitions of her name: “Disira? … Disira? … Disira?”

“Here! Here at the blasted tree!”

The seconds passed like sighs, then I saw it down the shallow valley on the farther side of the outcrop—the shattered trunk, the broken limbs, and the raddled leaves that clung to them not quite concealing something green as spring.

“It fell,” she told me when I reached her. “I wanted to see if I could move it just a little, and it fell on my foot. I cannot get my foot out.”

I put my bow under the fallen trunk and pried; I never felt it move, but she was able to work her foot free. By the time she got it out, I had noticed something so strange that I was certain I could not really be seeing it, and so hard to describe that I may never make it clear. The afternoon sun shone brightly just then, and the leaves of the fallen tree (which I think must have been hit by lightning), and those of the trees all around it, cast a dappled shade. Mostly we were in the shade, but there were a few splashes of brilliant sunshine here and there. I should have seen her most clearly when one fell on her.

But it was the other way: I could see her very clearly in the shade, but when the sun shone on her face, her legs, her shoulders, or her arms, it almost seemed that she was not there at all. At school Mr. Potash showed us a hologram. He pulled the blinds and explained that the darker it was in the room the more real the hologram would look. So when we had all looked at it, I moved one of the blinds to let in light, and he was right. It got dim, but it was stronger again as soon as I let the blind fall back.

“I don’t think I should walk on this.” She was rubbing her foot. “It does not feel right. There is a cave a few steps that way. Do you think you could carry me there?”

I did not, but I was not going to say so until I tried. I picked her up. I have held little kids who weighed more than she did, but she felt warm and real in my arms, and she kissed me.

“In there we will be out of the rain,” she told me. She kept her eyes down as if she were shy, but I knew she was not really shy.

I started off, hoping I was going toward the cave she knew about, and I said that it was not going to rain.

“Yes, it is. Haven’t you noticed how cool the air has gotten? Listen to the beds. To your left a trifle, and look behind the big stump.”

It was a nice little cave, just high enough for me to stand up in, and there was a sort of bed made of deerskins and furs, with a green velvet blanket on top.

“Put me on that,” she said, “please.”

When I did, she kissed me again; and when she let me go, I sat down on the smooth, sandy floor of the cave to get my breath. She laughed at me, but she did not say anything.

For quite a while, I did not say anything either. I was thinking a lot, but I had no control of the things I thought, and I was so excited about her that I thought something was going to happen any minute that I would be ashamed of for the rest of my life. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life (she still is) and I had to shut my eyes, which made her laugh again.

Her laugh was like nothing on earth. It was as if there were golden bells hanging among the flowers through a forest of the loveliest trees that could ever be, and a wind sighing there was ringing all the bells. When I could open my eyes again, I whispered, “Who are you? Really?”

“She you called.” She smiled, not trying to hide her eyes anymore. Maybe a leopard would have eyes like those, but I kind of doubt it.

“I called Seaxneat’s wife Disira. You aren’t her.”

“I am Disiri the Mossmaiden, and I have kissed you.”

I could still feel her kiss, and her hair smelled of new-turned earth and sweet smoke.

“Men I have kissed cannot leave until I send them away.” I wanted to stand up then, but I knew I could never leave her. I said, “I’m not a man, Disiri, just a kid.”

“You are! You are! Let me have one drop of blood, and I will show you.”

―――

By morning the rain had stopped. She and I swam side by side in the river, and lay together like two snakes on a big shady rock, only an inch above the water. I knew I was all different, but I did not know how different. I think it was the way a caterpillar feels after it has turned into a butterfly and is still drying its wings. “Tell me,” I said, “if another man came, would he see you like I see you now?”

“No other man will come. Did not your brother teach you about me?”

I did not know whether she meant you or Bold Berthold, Ben, but I shook my head.

“He knows me.”

“Have you kissed him?”

She laughed and shook her head.

“Bold Berthold told me the Aelf looked like ashes.”

“We are the Moss Aelf, Able, and we are of the wood and not the ash.” She was still smiling. “You call us Dryads, Skogsfru, Treebrides, and other names. You may make a name for us yourself. What would you like to call us?”

“Angels,” I whispered; but she pressed a finger to my lips. I blinked and looked away when she did that, and it seemed to me, when I glimpsed her from the corner of my eye, that she looked different from the girl I had been swimming with and all the girls I had just made love with.

“Shall I show you?”

I nodded—and felt muscles in my neck slithering like pythons. “Good lord!” I said, and heard a new voice, wild and deep. It was terribly strange; I knew I had changed, but I did not know how much, and for a long time after I thought I was going to change back. You need to remember that.

“You won’t hate me, Able?”

“I could never hate you,” I told her. It was the truth.

“We are loathsome in the eyes of those who do not worship us.”

I chuckled at that; the deep reverberations in my chest surprised me too. “My eyes are mine,” I said, “and they do what I tell them. I’ll close them before I kiss you, if we need more privacy.”

She sat up, dangling her legs in the clear, cold water. “Not in this light.” Her kick dashed water through a sunbeam and showered us with silver drops.

“You love the sunlight,” I said. I sensed it.

She nodded. “Because it is yours, your realm. The sun gave me you, and I love you. My kind love the night, and so I love them both.”

I shook my head. “I don’t understand. How can you?”

“Loving me, couldn’t you love some human woman?”

“No,” I said. “I never could.” I meant it.

She laughed, and this time it was a laugh that made fun of me. “Show me,” she said.

She kicked again. The slender little foot that rose from the shimmering water was as green as new leaves. Her face was sharper, green too, three-cornered, bold and sly. Berry lips pressed mine, and when we parted I found myself looking straight into eyes of yellow fire. Her hair floated above her head.

I embraced her, lifting and holding her, and kissed her again.

…

Progress Report

Busy times this holiday season. Besides attending multiple Thanksgiving engagements, updating various pages on the blog, and the varied, necessary promotional duties necessary for the recent book launch of Nightglory, I finished up the latest editing pass of the urban supernatural story and sent it out to beta readers today. Can’t wait to hear what you all think of it :)

Favorite Passages in Literature…

The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffeneger.

This book is one of my all time favorite love AND sci-fi stories. Set on earth, where a young man has been a part of a unique phenomena his whole thing… he jumps through time, sometimes on purpose but mostly randomly, and rarely knows where and when he will be going.

In this scene he knows where he is randomly jumping: to the palatial compound of his wife’s rich family, when she is only a girl. It is the first time in life they will ever meet.

…

(pg. 81)

FIRST DATE, TWO

Friday, September 23, 1977 (Henry is 36, Clare is 6) Henry: I’m in the Meadow, waiting. I wait slightly outside the clearing, naked, because the clothes Clare keeps for me in a box under a stone are not there; the box isn’t there either, so I am thankful that the afternoon is fine, early September, perhaps, in some unidentified year. I hunker down in the tall grass. I consider.

The fact that there is no box full of clothes means that I have arrived in a time before Clare and I have met. Perhaps Clare isn’t even born yet. This has happened before, and it’s a pain; I miss Clare and I spend the time hiding naked in the Meadow, not daring to show myself in the neighborhood of Clare’s family.

I think longingly of the apple trees at the western edge of the Meadow. At this time of year there ought to be apples, small and sour and munched by deer, but edible. I hear the screen door slam and I peer above the grass. A child is running, pell mell, and as it comes down the path through the waving grass my heart twists and Clare bursts into the clearing.

She is very young. She is oblivious; she is alone. She is still wearing her school uniform, a hunter green jumper with a white blouse and knee socks with penny loafers, and she is carrying a Marshall Field’s shopping bag and a beach towel.

Clare spreads the towel on the ground and dumps out the contents of the bag: every imaginable kind of writing implement. Old ballpoint pens, little stubby pencils from the library, crayons, smelly Magic Markers, a fountain pen. She also has a bunch of her dad’s office stationery. She arranges the implements and gives the stack of paper a smart shake, and then proceeds to try each pen and pencil in turn, making careful lines and swirls, humming to herself. After listening carefully for a while I identify her humming as the theme song of “The Dick Van Dyke Show.”

I hesitate. Clare is content, absorbed. She must be about six; if it’s September she has probably just entered first grade. She’s obviously not waiting for me, I’m a stranger, and I’m sure that the first thing you learn in first grade is not to have any truck with strangers who show up naked in your favorite secret spot and know your name and tell you not to tell your mom and dad. I wonder if today is the day we are supposed to meet for the first time or if it’s some other day.

Maybe I should be very silent and either Clare will go away and I can go munch up those apples and steal some laundry or I will revert to my regularly scheduled programming, I snap from my reverie to find Clare staring straight at me. I realize, too late, that I have been humming along with her.

“Who’s there?” Clare hisses. She looks like a really pissed off goose, all neck and legs. I am thinking fast,

“Greetings, Earthling,” I intone, kindly.

“Mark! You nimrod!” Clare is casting around for something to throw, and decides on her shoes, which have heavy, sharp heels. She whips them off and does throw them. I don’t think she can see me very well, but she lucks out and one of them catches me in the mouth. My lip starts to bleed.

“Please don’t do that.” I don’t have anything to staunch the blood, so I press my hand to my mouth and my voice comes out muffled. My jaw hurts.

“Who is it?” Now Clare is frightened, and so am I.

“Henry. It’s Henry, Clare. I won’t hurt you, and I wish you wouldn’t throw anything else at me.”

“Give me back my shoes. I don’t know you. Why are you hiding?” Clare is glowering at me.

I toss her shoes back into the clearing. She picks them up and stands holding them like pistols. “I’m hiding because I lost my clothes and I’m embarrassed. I came a long way and I’m hungry and I don’t know anybody and now I’m bleeding.”

“Where did you come from? Why do you know my name?”

The whole truth and nothing but the truth. “I came from the future. I am a time traveler. In the future we are friends.”

“People only time travel in movies.”

“That’s what we want you to believe.”

“Why?”

“If everybody time traveled it would get too crowded. Like when you went to see your Grandma Abshire last Christmas and you had to go through O’Hare Airport and it was very, very crowded? We time travelers don’t want to mess things up for ourselves, so we keep it quiet.”

Clare chews on this for a minute. “Come out.”

“Loan me your beach towel.” She picks it up and all the pens and pencils and papers go flying. She throws it at me, overhand, and I grab it and turn my back as I stand and wrap it around my waist. It is bright pink and orange with a loud geometric pattern. Exactly the sort of thing you’d want to be wearing when you meet your future wife for the first time. I turn around and walk into the clearing; I sit on the rock with as much dignity as possible. Clare stands as far away from me as she can get and remain in the clearing. She is still clutching her shoes.

“You’re bleeding.”

“Well, yeah. You threw a shoe at me.”

“Oh.”

Silence. I am trying to look harmless, and nice. Nice looms large in Clare’s childhood, because so many people aren’t.

“You’re making fun of me.”

“I would never make fun of you. Why do you think I’m making fun of you?”

Clare is nothing if not stubborn. “Nobody time travels. You’re lying.”

“Santa time travels.”

“What?”

“Sure. How do you think he gets all those presents delivered in one night? He just keeps turning back the clock a few hours until he gets down every one of those chimneys.”

“Santa is magic. You’re not Santa.”

“Meaning I’m not magic? Geez, Louise, you’re a tough customer.”

“I’m not Louise,”

“I know. You’re Clare. Clare Anne Abshire, born May 24, 1971. Your parents are Philip and Lucille Abshire, and you live with them and your grandma and your brother, Mark, and your sister, Alicia, in that big house up there.”

“Just because you know things doesn’t mean you’re from the future.”

“If you hang around a while you can watch me disappear” I feel I can count on this because Clare once told me it was the thing she found most impressive about our first meeting.

Silence. Clare shifts her weight from foot to foot and waves away a mosquito.

“Do you know Santa?”

“Personally? Um, no.” I have stopped bleeding, but I must look awful. “Hey, Clare, do you happen to have a Band-Aid? Or some food? Time traveling makes me pretty hungry.”

She thinks about this. She digs into her jumper pocket and produces a Hershey bar with one bite out of it. She throws it at me.

“Thank you. I love these.” I eat it neatly but very quickly. My blood sugar is low. I put the wrapper in her shopping bag. Clare is delighted.

“You eat like a dog.”

“I do not!” I am deeply offended. “I have opposable thumbs, thank you very much.”

“What are posable thumbs?”

“Do this.” I make the “okay” sign. Clare makes the “okay” sign. “Opposable thumbs means you can do that. It means you can open jars and tie your shoes and other things animals can’t do.”

Clare is not happy with this. “Sister Carmelita says animals don’t have souls.”

“Of course animals have souls. Where did she get that idea?”

“She said the Pope says.”

“The Pope’s an old meanie. Animals have much nicer souls than we do. They never tell lies or blow anybody up.”

“They eat each other.”

“Well, they have to eat each other; they can’t go to Dairy Queen and get a large vanilla cone with sprinkles, can they?” This is Clare’s favorite thing to eat in the whole wide world (as a child. As an adult Clare’s favorite food is sushi, particularly sushi from Katsu on Peterson Avenue).

“They could eat grass.”

“So could we, but we don’t. We eat hamburgers.”

Clare sits down at the edge of the clearing. “Etta says I shouldn’t talk to strangers.”

“That’s good advice.”

Silence.

“When are you going to disappear?”

“When I’m good and ready to. Are you bored with me?” Clare rolls her eyes.

“What are you working on?”

“Penmanship.”

“May I see?”

Clare gets up carefully and collects a few pieces of stationery while fixing me with her baleful stare. I lean forward slowly and extend my hand as though she is a Rottweiler, and she quickly shoves the papers at me and retreats. I look at them intently, as though she has just handed me a bunch of Bruce Rogers’ original drawings for Centaur or the Book of Kells or something. She has printed, over and over, large and larger, “Clare Anne Abshire.” All the ascenders and descenders have swirling curlicues and all the counters have smiley faces in them. It’s quite beautiful.

“This is lovely.”

Clare is pleased, as always when she receives homage for her work. “I could make one for you.”

“I would like that. But I’m not allowed to take anything with me when I time travel, so maybe you could keep it for me and I could just enjoy it while I’m here.”

“Why can’t you take anything?”

“Well, think about it. If we time travelers started to move things around in time, pretty soon the world would be a big mess. Let’s say I brought some money with me into the past. I could look up all the winning lottery numbers and football teams and make a ton of money. That doesn’t seem very fair, does it? Or if I was really dishonest, I could steal things and bring them to the future where nobody could find me.”

“You could be a pirate!” Clare seems so pleased with the idea of me as a pirate that she forgets that I am Stranger Danger. “You could bury the money and make a treasure map and dig it up in the future.” This is in fact more or less how Clare and I fund our rock-and-roll lifestyle. As an adult Clare finds this mildly immoral, although it does give us an edge in the stock market.

“That’s a great idea. But what I really need isn’t money, it’s clothing.” Clare looks at me doubtfully.

“Does your dad have any clothes he doesn’t need? Even a pair of pants would be great. I mean, I like this towel, don’t get me wrong, it’s just that where I come from, I usually like to wear pants.” Philip Abshire is a tad shorter than me and about thirty pounds heavier. His pants are comical but comfortable on me.

“I don’t know….”

That’s okay, you don’t need to get them right now. But if you bring some next time I come, it would be very nice.”

“Next time?”

I find an unused piece of stationery and a pencil. I print in block letters: Thursday, September 29,1977 After supper. I hand Clare the paper, and she receives it cautiously. My vision is blurring. I can hear Etta calling Clare. “It’s a secret, Clare, okay?”

“Why?”

“Can’t tell. I have to go, now. It was nice to meet you. Don’t take any wooden nickels.” I hold out my hand and Clare takes it, bravely. As we shake hands, I disappear.

Wednesday, February 9, 2000 (Clare is 28, Henry is 36) Clare: It’s early, about six in the morning and I’m sleeping the thin dreamy sleep of six in the morning when Henry slams me awake and I realize he’s been elsewhen. He materializes practically on top of me and I yell, and we scare the shit out of each other and then he starts laughing and rolls over and I roll over and look at him and realize that his mouth is bleeding profusely. I jump up to get a washcloth and Henry is still smiling when I get back and start daubing at his lip.

“How’d that happen?”

“You threw a shoe at me.”

…

Progress Report

Still writing the new hard science fiction story, but have gotten a couple of great short story ideas in both of my existing book universes and fleshed them out during that process. Also: nearly finished with my current editing pass of the ubernatural supernatural story to be released February 2016. Very excited to share more details about it with you all in the coming months :)