Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 56

The three of them had been following for a long time, it seemed, when Doctor S. and the woman gave one another a conspiratorial glance and stepped through an archway, past a rusted gate. Gina drew up short, stepping out of the traffic flow into the shelter of a doorway. A moment later, Katie heard gla.s.s breaking and something kicked or thrown.

Katie ducked in behind Gina, rubbing her elbow nervously. This wasn't the best neighborhood at all. "That's a dead end, I bet," Gina said, when Melissa came up beside them. "Either they're going inside, or that's where they're going."

"Here?"

Gina winked. "Want to sneak up and peek through the gate?" Katie and Melissa exchanged a glance, and Melissa angled her head and said, "What the heck." Side by side, the three stepped back out onto the sidewalk, picking their way over chewing gum spots and oily, indeterminate stains. Katie somehow found herself in the lead, as Gina and Melissa fell in single file behind her. She had to glance over her shoulder to make sure they were still with her.

She stopped two feet shy of the broken gate and tried to still her hammering heart. No luck, and so she clenched her hands at her sides and edged forward.

She could see through plainly if she kept her back to the wall and turned her head sideways. She saw Doctor S. and the cop sketch the diagram, saw them pull a black rooster from the box and do something to its head and feet. She flinched, expecting some b.l.o.o.d.y and melodramatic beheading, but instead Doctor S. went to the center of the star and began chaining himself up, which made her feel distinctly funny inside. And then he blindfolded himself with a hood, and the woman did some more sketching with the chalk and walked around the circle pouring something in between its lines from a flask.

A moment later, the rooster began to struggle, while Doctor S. stood perfectly still. The woman crouched down and unhooded it, and a moment later it flapped onto her shoulder and settled itself.

"This," Melissa whispered, a warm pressure against Katie's side, "is freaking weird."

"Gosh," Gina said, very loudly, "would you listen to that?"

Katie turned to shush her, and heard it herself. She took a deep breath, chest expanding against her s.h.i.+rt, as if she could inhale the music too. It seemed to swell in her lungs and belly, to buoy her. She felt Melissa cringe, and then fingers caught at her shoulder. "f.u.c.k," Melissa said. "What is that?"

"Beautiful." Katie stepped forward, moving out of Melissa's grasp. Into the courtyard, toward the woman and the chicken and the blindfolded English professor. Katie lifted her arms and twirled, her feet light as if she walked on flowers. She strode through a pile of garbage that the magicians had piled up when they cleared the center of the courtyard and her airy foot came down on gla.s.s.

A cracked bottle broke further under her foot, shattering and crunching. The soft sole of Katie's tennis sneaker clung to broken gla.s.s; she picked it up again and stepped forward, to another crunch.

The noise was almost lost under the music. Rising chorales, crystalline voices.

"It sounds like a rat being shaken to death in a bag of hammers," Melissa groaned, and then sucked in a squeak. "Oh, f.u.c.k, Katie, your foot ... "

There was something slick between her sole and the bottom of the shoe. She must have stepped in a mud puddle. She looked down. Or a puddle of blood.

Well, her foot was already wet. And the singers were over there somewhere. She took one more step, Melissa's fingers brus.h.i.+ng her wrist as her friend missed her grab. Behind her, Melissa made funny sobbing noises, as if she'd been running and couldn't get a breath.

Somehow, Gina had gotten ahead of her, and was walking too, kicking rubbish out of the way with her sandaled feet, crunching through more gla.s.s, leaving red footsteps. The courtyard was filthy, the buildings moldylooking, scrofulous: brick black with soot and flaking mortar.

Something moved against the wall. A gleam of brightness, like sun through torn cloth. And then-so beautiful, so bright, oh-a spill of jadevioletandazure, a trailing cloak of feathers, a sort of peac.o.c.k or bird of paradise emerging like an image reflected in a suddenly lit mirror. Its crested head was thrown back, its long neck swollen with song. Its wings mantled and rays of light cracked from between its feathers.

Gina was still ahead of her, between her and the bird. Katie reached out to push her, but then suddenly she was gone, fallen down, and Katie stepped over her. It was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen. It was the most beautiful thing she'd ever heard.

And oh, it was blind, the poor thing was blind. Somebody had gouged out its eyes, she saw now. The old wounds were scarred gray, sightless.

And still it sang.

She reached out her hand to touch it, and couldn't understand why Melissa was screaming.

Matthew saw both young women hurry across the gla.s.s and stones, faster than he could reach them-not that he could have stopped them. Even though he was airborne, and already on his way.

He saw his body react, too-it hurled itself at the edge of the pentagram, hurled and kept hurling, but the wards they'd so carefully constructed held him, and he bounced from them and slid down what looked like plain still air. So strange, watching himself from the outside. Marion and the red-haired girl both crumpled, Marion with her hands over her ears, bellycrawling determinedly toward the running children; Melissa Martinchek down in a fetal position, screaming.

And he saw the c.o.c.katrice.

The movement caught his eye first, a ripple of red like brick and gray like concrete, its hide patterned in staggered courses that blended precisely with the blackened wall behind it. It was bigger than a c.o.c.k, but not by much, and his rooster's heart churned with rage at its red upright comb and the plumed waterfall of its tail. His wings beat in midair; he exploded after it like a partridge from cover.

It chameleoned from stone to brilliance, colors chasing over its plumage like rainbows over oil. The two girls clutched for it, their feet pierced with unnoticed shards, their hands reaching.

Matthew saw them fall, their bodies curled in around their poisoned hands. He saw the way they convulsed, the white froth dripping from the corners of their mouths.

He shrieked war, wrath, red rage, and oblivion. The spurs were heavy on his shanks; his wings were mighty upon the air. He struck, reaching hard, and clutched at the enemy's neck.

An eruption of rainbow-and-black plumage, a twist and strike and movement like quicksilver on slanted gla.s.s. Matthew's gaff slashed the c.o.c.katrice's feathers; the c.o.c.katrice whipped its head back and forward and struck like a snake. Pearl-yellow droplets flicked from fangs incongruous in a darting beak; the rooster-tail fanned and flared, revealing the gray coils of an adder.

Matthew beat wings to one side; his feathertips hissed where the venom smoked holes through them. He backwinged, slashed for the c.o.c.katrice's eye, saw too late that that wound had long ago been dealt it. A black c.o.c.kerel was immune to a c.o.c.katrice's deadly glare, and to the poison of its touch. If he could hit it, he could hurt it.

Except it wasn't a c.o.c.katrice, not exactly. Because c.o.c.katrices didn't sing like loreleis, and they didn't colors.h.i.+ft for camouflage. Maybe it was hatched by a chameleon rather than a serpent, Matthew thought, beating for alt.i.tude, and then reminded himself that now was not the time for theory.

Some kind of hybrid, then.

Just his luck.

And now the thing was airborne, and climbing in pursuit. He dropped-the c.o.c.kerel was not more than pa.s.sably aerodynamic-and struck for its back, its wing, its lung. The breast was armored, under the meat, with the anchoring keel bones. His spurs would turn on those. But they might punch through the ribs, from above.

He missed when the monster side-slipped, and the blind c.o.c.katrice turned and sank its fangs into his wing. Pain, heat and fire, weld-hot needles sunk into his elbow to the bone. He cackled like a machine gun and fell after the monster; wing-fouled, they tumbled to stone.

It lost its grip at the shock of impact, and Matthew screamed fury and pain. The hurt wing trailed, blood splas.h.i.+ng, smoke rising from the envenomed wound. He made it beat anyway, dragged himself up, his spurs sc.r.a.ping and sparking on stone. The c.o.c.katrice hissed as he rose; his flight was not silent.

They struck hard, breast to breast, grappling legs and slas.h.i.+ng spurs. He had his gaffs; the c.o.c.katrice had weight and fangs and a coiling tail like a rubber whip. Wings struck, buffeted, thundered. The c.o.c.katrice had stopped singing, and Matthew could hear the weeping now. Someone human was crying.

The c.o.c.katrice's talons twined his. Left side, right side. Its wings thumped his head, its beak jabbed. Something tore; blood smeared its beak, his face. He couldn't see on his right side. He ripped his left leg free of its grip and punched, slashed, hammered. The gaff broke skin with a pop; the c.o.c.katrice's blood soaked him, tepid, no hotter than the air. A rooster's egg hatched by a serpent.

The c.o.c.katrice wailed and thrashed; he ducked its strike at his remaining eye. More blood, pumping, slicking his belly, gumming his feathers to his skin. The blood was venom too. The whole thing was poison; its blood, its breath; its gaze; its song.

The monster fell on top of him. He could turn his head and get his eye out from under it, but when he did, all he saw was Marion, each arm laced under one of Melissa's armpits, holding the redheaded girl on her knees with a grim restraint while Melissa tried to tear herself free, to run to the poisoned bodies of her friends. The bodies were poison too, corrupted by the c.o.c.katrice's touch. The very stones soaked by its heart's blood could kill.

It was all venom, all deadly, and there was no way in the world to protect anyone. Not his sacrifice, not the unwitting sacrifice of the black c.o.c.kerel, made any G.o.dd.a.m.ned difference in the end.

Matthew, wing-broken, one-eyed, his gaff sunk heel-deep in the belly of his enemy, lay on his back under its corpse-weight and sobbed.

The building was emptied, the block closed, the deaths and the evacuations blamed on a chemical spill. Other Prometheans would handle the detox. Matthew, returned to his habitual body, took the s.h.i.+vering black c.o.c.kerel to a veterinarian with Promethean sympathies, who-at Matthew's insistence and Jane's expense-amputated his wing and cleaned and sewed shut his eye. Spared euthanasia, he was sent to a farm upstate to finish his days as a lopsided, piratical greeter of morning. He'd live long, with a little luck, and father many pullets.

Matthew supposed there were worse deaths for a chicken. Marion did the paperwork. Matthew took her out to dinner. She didn't make another pa.s.s, and they parted good friends. He had a feeling he'd be seeing her again.

There were memorial services for his students, and that was hard. They were freshmen, and he hadn't known them well; it seemed ... presumptuous to speak, as if his responsibility for their deaths gave him some claim over their lives. He sat in the back, dressed in his best black suit, and signed the guest book, and didn't speak.

Katherine Berquist was to be buried in Appleton, Wisconsin; Matthew could not attend. But Regina Gomez was buried in a Catholic cemetery in Flus.h.i.+ng, her coffin overwhelmed with white waxy flowers, her family swathed in black crepe and summer-weight worsted, her friends in black cotton or navy. Melissa Martinchek was there in an empire-waisted dress and a little cardigan. She gave Matthew a timid smile across the open grave.

The scent of the lilies was repellent; Matthew vomited twice on the way home.

Melissa came to see him in the morning, outside of his regular office hours, when he was sitting at his desk with his head in his heads. He dragged himself up at the knock, paused, and sat heavily back down.

Thirty seconds later, the locked door clicked open. It swung on the hinges, and Melissa stepped inside, holding up her student ID like a talisman. "The lock slips," she said. "Gina showed me how. I heard, I heard your chair."

Gina's name came out a stammer too.

"Come in," Matthew said, and gestured her to a dusty orange armchair. She locked the door behind her before she fell into it. "Coffee?"

There was a pot made, but he hadn't actually gotten up and fetched any. He waved at it vaguely, and Melissa shook her head.

He wanted to shout at her-What were you thinking? What were you doing there?-and made himself look down at his hands instead. He picked up a letter opener and ran his thumb along the dull edge. "I am," he said, when he had control of his voice again, "so terribly sorry."

She took two sharp breaths, shallow and he could hear the edge of the giggle under them. Hysteria, not humor. "It wasn't your fault," she said. "I mean, I don't know what happened." She held up her hand, and his words died in his open mouth. "I don't ... I don't want to know. But it wasn't your fault."

He stood up. He got himself a cup of coffee and poured one for her, added cream and sugar without asking. She needed it. Her eyes were pinkred around the irises, the lower lids swollen until he could see the mucous membrane behind the lashes. She took it, zombie-placid.

"I was safe inside the circle," he said. "I was supposed to be the bait. Gina and Katie were unlucky. They were close enough to being what it wanted that it took them, instead. As well. Whatever."

"What did ... it want?"

"Things feed on death." He withdrew on the excuse of adding more sugar to his coffee. "Some like a certain flavor. It might even... . "

He couldn't say it. It might even have been trying to lure Matthew out. That would explain why it had left its safe haven at the north end of the island, and gone where Prometheus would notice it. Matthew cringed. If his organization had some wardens in the bad neighborhoods, it might have been taken care of years ago. If Matthew himself had gone into its court unglamoured that first time, it might just have eaten him and left the girls alone.

A long time, staring at the skim of fat on the surface of her coffee. She gulped, then blew through scorched lips, but did not lift her eyes. "Doctor S.-"

"Matthew," he said. He took a breath, and made the worst professional decision of his life. "Go home, Ms. Martinchek. Concentrate on your other cla.s.ses; as long as you show up for the mid-term and the final in mine, I will keep your current grade for the semester."

Cowardice. Unethical. He didn't want to see her there.

He put his hand on her shoulder. She leaned her cheek against it, and he let her for a moment. Her skin was moist and hot. Her breath was, too.

Before he got away, he felt her whisper, "Why not me?"

"Because you put out," he said, and then wished he'd just cut his tongue out when she jerked, slopping coffee across her knuckles. He retreated behind the desk and his own cup, and settled his elbows on the blotter. Her survivor guilt was his fault, too. "It only wanted virgins," he said, more gently. "Send your boyfriend a thank-you card."

She swallowed, swallowed again. She looked him in the eyes, so she wouldn't have to look past him, at the memory of her friends. Thank G.o.d, she didn't ask. But she drank the rest of her too-hot coffee, nerved herself, licked her lips, and said, "But Gina-Gina was ... "

"People," he replied, as kindly as he could manage with blood on his hands, "are not always what they want you to think. Or always what you think they ought to be."

When she thanked him and left, he retrieved the flask from his coat pocket and dumped half of it into his half-empty coffee mug. Later, a TA told him it was his best lecture ever. He couldn't refute her; he didn't remember.

Melissa Martinchek showed up for his next Monday lecture. She sat in the third row, in the middle of two empty desks. No one sat beside her.

Both Matthew and she survived it, somehow.

The Iles of Dogges THE LIGHT WOULD LAST LONG ENOUGH.

Sir Edmund Tylney, in pain and reeking from rotting teeth, stood before the sideboard and crumbled sugar into his sack, causing a sandy yellowish grit to settle at the bottom of the cup. He swirled the drink to sweeten it, then bore it back to his reading table where an unruly stack of quarto pages waited, slit along the folds with a pen-knife.

He set the cup on the table in the sunlight and drew up his stool, its short legs rasping over the rush mats as he squared it and sat. He reached left-handed for the wine, right-handed for the playscript, drawing both to him over the pegged tabletop. And then he riffled the sheets of Speilman's cheapest laid with his nail.

Bending into the light, wincing as the sweetened wine ached across his teeth with every sip, he read.

He turned over the last leaf, part-covered in secretary's script, as he drank the last gritty swallow in his cup, the square of sun spilling over the table-edge to spot the floor. Tylney drew out his own pen knife, cut a new point on a quill, and-on a fresh quarter-sheet-began to write the necessary doc.u.ment. The Jonson fellow was inexperienced, it was true. But Tom Nashe should have known better.

Tylney gulped another cup of sack before he set his seal to the denial, drinking fast, before his teeth began to hurt. He knew himself, without vanity, to be a clever man-intelligent, well-read. He had to be, to do his job as Master of Revels and censor for the queen, for the playmakers, too, were clever, and they cloaked their satires under layers of witty language and misdirection. The better the playmaker, the better the play, and the more careful Tylney had to be.

The Ile of Dogges was a good play. Lively, witty. Very clever, as one would expect from Tom Nashe and the newcomer Jonson. And Tylney's long-practiced and discerning eye saw the satire on every page, making mock of-among a host of other, lesser targets-Elizabeth, her Privy Council, and the Lord Chamberlain.

It could never be performed.

RIGHTEOUS-IN-THE-CAUSE SAMSON:.

Why is't named Ile of Dogges?

WITWORTH:.

Because here are men like wild dogges. Haue they numbers, they will sauage a lyon: but if the lyon come vpon one by himselfe, he will grouel and showe his belye. And if the lyon but ask it, he will sauage his friends.

RIGHTEOUS-IN-THE-CAUSE SAMSON:.

But is that not right? For surely a dogge should honour a lyon.

WITWORTH:.

But on this island, even the lyon is a dogge.

It could never be performed, but it was. A few days later, despite the denial, Jonson and the Earl of Pembroke's Men staged The Ile of Dogges at the Swan. Within the day, Jonson and the princ.i.p.al actors were in chains at the Marshalsea, under gentle questioning by the Queen's own torturer, Topcliffe himself. The other playwright, Thomas Nashe, fled the city to elude arrest. And The Theatre, The Curtain, The Swan-all of London's great playhouses languished, performances forbidden.

The Ile of Dogges languished, likewise, in a pile on the corner of Tylney's desk, weighted by his pen-knife (between sharpenings). It lay face down, cup-ringed pages adorned with the scratch of more than one pen. The dull black oakgall ink had not yet begun to fade, nor the summer's heat to wane, when Tylney, predictably, was graced by a visit from Master Jonson.

Flea bites and shackle gall still reddened the playwright's thick wrists, counterpoint to the whitework of older scars across ma.s.sive hands. Unfas.h.i.+onably short hair curled above his plain, pitted face. He topped six feet, Ben Jonson. He had been a soldier in the Low Countries.

He ducked to come through the doorway, but stood straight within, stepping to one side after he closed the door so that the wall was at his back. "You burned Tom's papers."

"He fled London. We must be sure of the play, all its copies."

"All of them?" For all his rough bravado, Jonson's youth showed in how easily he revealed surprise. "'Tis but a play."

"Master Jonson," Tylney said, steepling his hands before him, "it mocks the Queen. More than that, it might encourage others to mock the Queen. 'Tis sedition."

Recovering himself, Jonson snorted. He paced, short quick steps, and turned, and paced back again. "And the spies Parrot and Poley as were jailed in with me? Thought you I'd aught to tell them?"

"No spies of mine," Tylney said. "Perhaps Topcliffe's. Mayhap he thought you had somewhat of interest to him to impart. No Popist sympathies, Master Jonson? No Scottish loyalties?"

Jonson stopped at the furthest swing of his line and stared at the coffered paneling. That wandering puddle of sun warmed his boots this time. He reached out, laid four blunt fingertips and a thumb on the wall-his hand bridged between them-and dropped his head so his arm hid the most of his face. His other hand, Tylney noticed, brushed the surface of the sideboard and left something behind, half-concealed beside the inkpot. "No point in pleading for the return of the ma.n.u.script, I take it?"

"Destroyed," Tylney said, without letting his eyes drop to the pages on his desk. And, as if that were all the restraint he could ask of himself, the question burst out of him: "Why do it, Master Jonson? Why write it?"