Eyes Like Sky And Coal And Moonlight Read online

  For a frozen time—a dozen breaths?—she let me hold her, she clung to me.

  Then a hand fell on my shoulder, and my mother pulled me away, begged their pardon, and took me off to shake me hard and tell me never to meddle in matters of magic or witchcraft.

  It was half in me to demand what about my father. Wasn’t he as steeped in magic as Alkyone, whether or not he hid it? But something in the way my mother looked made me hold my tongue on that subject.

  “Is Alkyone the Lord of Ash’s now?” I asked, and my mother shook me again, so hard my neck popped on its spine, which startled me, because she’d never been one to strike us in anger.

  “Magicker business!”

  No one spoke about Alkyone after she’d gone. No one said anything, even though I tried to ask. My mother hissed me into silence, and my father—when he was there—would not speak of it.

  A half year later I was outside emptying slop buckets when I saw lights in the sky. Stars and comets, dancing lights, far to the south. I ran inside to fetch the others, but by the time my family came out into the yard, the lights were gone, and they only made fun of me.

  Months later, though, I was vindicated when travelers spoke of the night the lights had flashed in the sky to mark the last battle with the Lord of Ash. They said Alkyone helped defeat him, but that it was a joint effort, really—the J’Karr and the Tan Muark, and a handful of magickers joined together. That their dead friend Arianis had come back as a gwoshi to help them defeat the Lord of Ash, that there had been a fierce fight nonetheless, and Kul had offered no aid—he’d been off in the North on his own expedition, searching for ways to defeat Isar.

  They said down in the Salt Flats there was a statue of the Lord of Ash, what he had been, turned into black stone—obsidian. My eldest once traveled down to see it, and said it was large and wicked, and that she dreamed of it for three nights running. The Muark still make the trip there once a year, to piss on its feet and curse it.

  Phaedrin had turned out to be working with the Lord of Ash. He died on those sands as well and no statue marked his grave.

  Time wore on, and my mother entrusted me with more and more of the inn’s running. My father was taken away by Lord Isar’s people under suspicion of being an unlicensed elementalist. Every week my mother went to ask news of him and every week there was none. They never said officially whether or not it was true. He was gone, either way, and he didn’t come back. People disappeared in those days, just as they do now. That’s always been Tuluk’s way, no matter who sat in power.

  I had my first boyfriend. Liselle stole him and broke him so when he came back to me, he wanted me as little as I wanted him. I listened to travelers’ stories and the news that the bards passed along in their songs, the few bards that still existed under Lord Isar’s hand. Poet’s Circle, where they had once all lived, was boarded up and guarded.

  I wore the earrings Alkyone had given me each year at Isar’s Festival. One year I had a daughter with my broken boyfriend, and then two years later another with a man who wasn’t broken, and who loved my first as his own.

  Thoughts of Alkyone, somehow, pulled me through. I listened for news every night in the inn’s common room. I heard she had died. I heard she had never died or that she had come back. I heard that she was sometimes an elemental and sometimes human, and sometimes something in between. Rumors said Kul was in exile. He’d tried to kill Isar after retrieving some artifact, and had been driven to live with the Tan Muark. Some people said he’d married a Muark woman who’d fallen in battle a few days later. We did not see the tribe much after that, and you couldn’t get blue silk ribbons for years. They were the only ones with the secret of the dye.

  No one knew what would happen.

  Then a few Muark appeared, began passing the word to watch out, that on the night of Isar’s Festival, rebellion would break out. That something was happening, that the last of the rebel magickers were planning something. That we should hide that night, and be ready the next day to take the city.

  No one knew what to expect. No one dreamed how bad it would be. But we hid like they told us, for all the good it did most of us.

  That night, elementals walked through the city, beings from planes outside our own. The city shook with their passage all night long. My family and I hid in the cellar with four crates of Reynolte wine and a keg of spiced brandy. The Tan Muark had brought up a great wheel of cheese on their unexpected visit two days earlier, and we ate half of it that night because there wasn’t anything else to do.

  I wondered where Alkyone was. Surely she was part of this? Had the Lord of Ash returned, was she out there helping defeat him once again? Who had brought the elementals to destroy the city? Were her friends with her still, was exiled Kul there to defend his home? Did she remember giving me her honey cakes, back when I was as young as the child huddled against me?

  And what color were her eyes now?

  It was a long night. None of us slept. We sat listening to the cries and feeling the earth shake whenever some monstrous thing passed in the street outside, nibbling at our cheese as though it would quiet the nervous snakes in our stomachs.

  In the morning, the city was gone.

  Our inn still stood, but other buildings near us had been burned and flattened.

  Survivors recounted stories of a great fire-winged hawk from the plane of Suk-Krath, and a stone tortoise from Ruk, and a girl made of water from Vivadu. Liselle was dead. They wouldn’t let me see the body, but I heard the whispers. The water elemental had drowned her with a kiss.

  No one knew what happened, but they knew Lord Isar was defeated. Kul and his soldiers marched through the streets with Lord Isar in chains before them, hunched over, looking small. The prisoners in his dungeons were freed, but my father wasn’t among them.

  Kul came to the Inn that night. I knew it was him. Hadn’t I seen him during the march? Hadn’t he waved to the crowds, perhaps even seen me there? For a moment when he entered, lean and rugged, flanked by two soldiers, I dreamed that he had noticed me, had come to claim me for his bride.

  But his gaze was perfunctory. He went to the back room. On his head was a high crown made of wrought metal, green with verdigris. Others came—high ranked merchants, the Kuraci, the young general, Garas, who had helped defeat Isar’s troops.

  Alkyone came in after most of them, two Tan Muark men with her. When she entered the back room, voices were raised. I maneuvered myself near the door, tried to overhear what was happening.

  Kul was ordering every magicker out of Tuluk.

  “How can I trust any of you, after this?” he demanded. “We are so weak that even now Allanak is readying itself to come and gnaw the spoils your folk have prepared for it!”

  “We gave you your victory, gave you what you needed. We didn’t know what the elementals would do!”

  I picked up a tray and went in to retrieve glasses, counting on a servant’s invisibility. Kul stood near the fireplace, his arms crossed, and gave Alkyone no smile. “You have a day to leave the city.”

  “She’ll go with us, since you don’t seem to acknowledge your debt to the Tan Muark either,” one of the men said. Everyone else in the room scowled at him. Merchants dislike the Tan Muark, who have tricked every house in the Known World in their time—often more than once.

  Kul stared the Muark down. “My city is destroyed. Press me no further.” Alkyone stirred as though to speak, but Kul turned to cut her off with a gesture. “And tell your comrades in magic that they will get no favors from me either. I mean to put them entirely out of the city or see them dead. There is blood on all your hands, and you cannot wash them clean enough for me. And make no threats—this crown enables me to defeat any of you.”

  “I have made no threats. Indeed, wasn’t I there to help you secure that crown, Kul?” she said. “I am tired and heartsick. Many of those I loved vanished in this as well. You give me a deadline, but I already have one. I gave my life to fuel the ceremony that opened the gate. I have bu
t a day in this form before I am returned to the wind. Do not reproach me. I have given my life to this struggle and it has taken all that I am.”

  And with that, she walked away.

  At the door, she stopped, seeing me. “I recognize those earrings. Is all well with you?” She waved her two Muark companions on ahead.

  “The inn is still standing—we lost the stable and some livestock,” I said. “And my little sister’s barrakhan pen, which is why we have no eggs.”

  The words were inconsequential. I drank in the sight of her in. Her eyes were no longer coal. They were the color of moonlight on the sands. They were sad, but they were so beautiful that they gave me hope.

  For years afterwards, I could take my breath away just thinking of her eyes. It took me through some hard times—the occupation by the Allanaki, the night when my two youngest were killed by the Borsail lord they’d sent up to oversee things. We didn’t know it then, that we’d be decades under their heel because of what the elementalists had done. But I never hated her, never thought that, even when they were taking my children.

  She had not stood back, she had gambled. None of us knew what had been won or lost at that point.

  As she paused in the doorway, one of the men said, “Come on, Alkyone.” But she shook her head.

  “I believe I’ll walk in the desert by myself for a little while,” she said. The other held out his hand, and she sidestepped it with a wry twist to her shoulders that had them both laughing as though to keep from crying.

  “This is goodbye, then,” the Muark said.

  “I’ve walked by myself most of my life,” she said. “That’s how I intend to end it.” She smiled at me.

  I’ll always remember her eyes. All through my life, through the betrayals and petty rivalries, the moments that were large and small and everything in between, the thought of her eyes has gotten me through the hard times. She walked by herself, and gave me the strength to do it too, by remembering her eyes. Not as they were at first—that storybook blue, the color of the ancient days when it rained—and certainly not when they burned with that black, fierce light.

  But rather as they were that final night, when she walked out in the company of the gentle evening wind, a fearless woman who had given all she could in the fight and would never be seen again. Her remarkable eyes, silver as the moonlight, and twice as kind, and a thousand times as brave and alone.

  This story, written in the spring of 2008, is set in the world of the online game I worked with for almost two decades. A war-torn desert planet where magic shapes people’s lives, Zalanthas has provided the backdrop for a series of stories about the female soldiers and sorcerers involved in the endless struggle. “Her Eyes” is told by one of the peripheral figures, a woman who sees the war only when it touches her own daily life. She finds a figure there, Alkyone, which informs her own, equally harsh, existence. The game is still in existence, and its website can be found at http://www.armageddon.org. If you walk those sands, I hope you find them as entertaining as I did. Armageddonites will note a few in-jokes in the story, such as Amos' name, as well as a wealth of details taken from Zalanthas.

  On the craft-centered side of things, the story was written after a workshop with John Crowley about time in fiction writing, and I tried in the piece to work out some of the things I’d learned. It functions in a space of being told, in which it is anchored by the storyteller’s references to the moment of the telling. The storyteller is herself a character in the story, first as a child and later as adult, and her development serves as the subplot that is both shaped and which acts out the overall plot: how Alkyone is shaped by her decision to assist in the war. Its cost—the destruction of the city of Tuluk by elementals—is mirrored in Alkyone’s own destruction.

  The story appeared first in this collection.

  The Accordion

  If I play my accordion too loudly while you’re painting, you complain. You stamp about in your room under mine. You fetch the broom from the closet and use it to thump vehemently on the ceiling. I feel the vibrations through my feet.

  “I’m trying to work down here!” you shout furiously out of your window.

  I put the accordion down on the sofa. The air slowly squeezes out, making it wheeze like a beast perishing for love. I go to the window, but you have already pulled in your head, and are engaging your canvas once again. There is only the lit trapezoid of your window.

  I lower myself in the window washer’s abandoned apparatus, ropes squeaking, bump bump bumping against the bricks. I come to your window and peer in. There are pockmarks in the plaster of your ceiling. Your coveralls are streaked with drips of black and white and red.

  You’re painting still, a picture of hearts and flowers and maidens with mournful eyes. Are you thinking of me too? My breath makes a foggy patch on the glass. But when you turn around and see me, I am suddenly shy. I pull the window washer’s cap down over my eyes and pretend to be squee-geeing.

  You go back to your painting. Sadly, I hoist myself back up.

  I hire jugglers to ambush you in the hallway, street mimes to gesture out my devotion to you, mariachi bands to stroll beneath your window in the little garden ten stories below.

  But you ignore the jugglers, pay the treacherous mimes to go away, absent-mindedly empty the turpentine you’ve used to clean your brushes out the window. Several members of the band who were smoking cigarettes are badly burned.

  I play my accordion again, and this time I hear no thumps. Can you be listening?

  I look out my window and see yours dark and empty. You have gone away for the weekend.

  The witch doctor down the hall offers to cast a love spell on you, if I give him twenty dollars and three live chickens.

  I buy the chickens and bring them home, but in the car they look so reproachfully at me that I cannot bear to give them to him. Instead I install them in my room and feed them popcorn. They sit on the radiator, clucking peacefully. I play lullabies to them on my accordion.

  I hear a door slam and then the thumping begins again. You are back!

  Spring wears into summer, and now you don’t even thump any more, because the drone of your air conditioner drowns out my accordion. I leave my window open. The chickens seem to enjoy the heat.

  One day I despair. How will I ever reach you? I pace my room, at each turn banging my head against the unpainted walls, raising puffs of white dust which coat my eyebrows. The neighbors on each side complain, and rightly so. I stop banging but still pace, thinking feverishly. The accordion lies abandoned on the sofa. The chickens watch me with sad eyes.

  I buy a bassoon, a cowhorn, a dulcimer, an euphonium, a flugelhorn, a glockenspiel, a harmonica, a jaw harp, a kettledrum, a lute, a marimba, a nail fiddle, an oboe d’amore, a pan pipe, a recorder, a samisen, a tambura, a ukelele, a violin, a wood block, a xylophone, a yang kin, and a zither. No use! I can’t produce a single recognizable note. I can’t step anywhere in my room without tripping over one of the instruments.

  I go out for a walk. I leave the door unlocked behind me, hoping that someone will come in and steal the bassoon, the cowhorn, the dulcimer, the euphonium, the flugelhorn, the glockenspiel, the harmonica, the jaw harp, the kettledrum, the lute, the marimba, the nail fiddle, the oboe d’amore, the pan pipe, the recorder, the samisen, the tambura, the ukelele, the violin, the wood block, the xylophone, the yang kin, the zither, or perhaps even the chickens. Anything but my accordion.

  When I return, there you are! Sitting on the sofa, next to the accordion. I can only gape in astonishment. You blush.

  “I came to thank you for the eggs.”

  “Eggs?” I say. Perhaps artist’s jargon for songs. I don’t think so.

  “Yes, the fresh eggs you’ve been sending down via the window washer’s lift. I find them outside my window every morning. Aren’t they from you?”

  The chickens have a smug look. “Oh yes,” I say. “From me.”

  “And the notes?” What could they have written?<
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  But I nod. “Of course.”

  That night I play my accordion again. You and the chickens listen, sitting together framed by the perfect rectangle of the window, eating popcorn. When I finish, you applaud. Then you take the zither, and we play together.

  I wrote “The Accordion” in the summer of 1990 before attending the graduate seminars at Johns Hopkins. It was the first piece I workshopped there, and I was nervous because it was short. Because of that, I included it in a batch of three short-short pieces, which puzzled everyone, because they were looking for connections between the stories when there were none. The others involved Death doing crossword puzzles on a train and life on Planet Crabby. After that I calmed down and produced one story at a time.

  This is one of my favorite stories to read aloud, because of the moment where one launches into the second instance of the instrument list, where you can feel the audience thinking, "Oh, cripes, she's going to go through all that again."

  In trying to figure out the elements of the story, I remember I was living in Charles Village and daily passed a house where there was not just one accordion player, but two on different floors. I don’t know where the chickens came from, but I was reading a lot of Donald Barthelme at the time. This story originally appeared in the Walden Review and later was reprinted online at Café Irreal.

  I'll Gnaw Your Bones,

  the Manticore Said

  Even Duga the Prestidigitator, who never pays much attention to anything outside his own hands, raised an eyebrow when I announced I’d be hooking the Manticore up to my wagon.

  “Isn’t that dangerous?” my husband Rik said. He steepled his fingers, regarding me.

  “The more we have pulling, the faster we get there,” I pointed out. “And Bupus has been getting fat and lazy as a tabby cat. No one pays to see a fat Manticore.”