"Our Lady of American Sorrows" is one of the short novels in American Sorrows, which is copyright © 2004, Jay Lake, all rights reserved. Introduction copyright ©, James W. Van Pelt. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by any means electronic or mechanical, without prior permission of the publisher, with the exception of brief passages quoted in reviews.
American Sorrows ISBN: 1-931305-02-1
Cover photograph: Life Sentence, Copyright © 2004, Aynjel Kaye
American Sorrows is also published in a print edition (ISBN 0-9755903-0-8) by Wheatland Press.
Scorpius Digital Publishing
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Seattle, WA 98109
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There are more people to thank in this year of my life than I could ever put names to on this page, so this one's for Bronwyn. The rest of you know I love you, too.
A ficionados of fantasy genre literature have been discussing lately what the trends are. Have we entered the world of the “new weird?” Has “slipstream” replaced the older traditions? Has the word itself, “genre,” lost its meaning?
Whatever the case is, you can be sure that when a writer sits down with pen and paper (or word processor), that literary discussions of today’s movements drop away. They become moot. What matters most after a few minutes in that special reverie which is the writer’s own, is the story. And among storytellers, there’s a select group who not only have a story to tell, but also have a compelling voice to grab you by the ears and make you pay attention. “Something vital is going on here,” it will say. “Something that will move you and entertain you and leave you thinking.”
That’s a Jay Lake kind of storyteller.
In this collection you will find four assuredly told stories by Jay Lake, who both has the confidence in his own tales to plunge in without hesitation, and faith in the readers to follow him. These stories take us immediately into real worlds not quite like our own, but so unerringly told that you’ll be asking yourself if maybe, just maybe, they aren’t fantastic at all.
In “Our Lady of American Sorrows,” a parallel history to ours plunges us deep into political intrigue, high adventure and Mayan mysticism. While I was reading, though, I found myself wondering if the events of that world weren’t real. Did I miss a day in my history class? Did the Pope really have access to nuclear weaponry? What were the effects of the second great war on South American politics? I don’t know, and in that area of ignorance, Jay has woven his story.
The setting of “The River Knows Its Own” is a Portland I recognize, complete with achingly funny caricatures of grunge environmentalists and the fringe folks who practice environmentalism like it’s a black magic, except in Jay’s world, the magic works. The story never ceases to be a dead-on portrait of one segment of our society, and all the while it isn’t about our world at all, at least not the part of it you will be familiar with.
Clearly the Texas of “Into the Gardens of Sweet Night” isn’t ours, but everything within it is, warped and twisted and familiar, even the talking pug and the very purposeful wolves. In this, my favorite story in the collection, Jay takes us on a ride that is reminiscent of pulp fiction at its best. A rollicking adventure filled with surprises. Readers had best hold onto their wits while reading this one.
“Daddy’s Caliban” is the only piece here that doesn’t seem firmly grounded in a place you’ll recognize, at least not recognize like you would Portland, Texas, or New Albion, or America’s west coast, but it’s a place you’ll recognize emotionally. This is a child’s world told from a young person’s sensibility. It’s a world of brothers playing together, investigating river currents and the mystery of adults.
But where I think Jay excels best as a storyteller is that he has a love of things. Sandra McPhearson, a poet I admire, once said that a poem can be judged by its “thing count.” If you consider a poem as an envelope, how many things does it have in it? Can you open the envelope and shake a pile of things out? If you can’t, then the poem might be lacking. Stories can be considered that way too. Jay’s stories are filled with things to see, touch, taste, smell and hear. There are elusive green parrots and Panthera tigris sumatrae and dirigibles and ragged dragons, and a host of other solid, concrete persons, places and, well, things.
Jay is a thoughtful and articulate person. I’ve heard him expound on writing theory with the best of them. He knows his way around the academic version of the writers’ world, where sometimes it seems that writers don’t consider themselves to be successful unless they are writing a work that only the smartest five-hundred people in the world can appreciate. Jay’s stories aren’t like that. They’re informed by his profound thinking about language and narrative, but they are always stories first.
If this book is your introduction to the work of Jay Lake, and it leaves you wanting more, rest assured that there is a lot of it out there. Jay has been writing up a storm. Reading a Jay Lake story is like settling in around the campfire. The wood crackles cheerfully; the smoke curls pleasantly into the forest around you; the stars glitter with that special hard edge that mountain air provides, and just when you are comfortable, Jay joins you at the edge of light. “I have a story to tell,” he says.
And he does.
James Van Pelt
July, 2004
W riting is a sufficiently challenging journey in its own right to daunt all but the most foolish. And then there is publishing. Courage does not even begin to describe the requirements for that peculiar endeavor. Willful blindness, perhaps, and a deep and abiding love for the word made story.
Here is a new publishing experiment for me, then: an e-book with my name upon, with thanks to the support of Bridget McKenna and Marti McKenna of Scorpius Digital. I've been all about the electronic press in my career to date, yet curiously never managed to land in this outlet before.
That this book exists at all is through the good offices and strong encouragement of Deborah Layne, publisher and editor of Wheatland Press. Deborah has played a large role in my career since before I even had one. She has been friend, confidante, cheerleader, marketing guru par excellence, and above all the one who has kept me honest.
American Sorrows was Deborah's idea. I'd been grumbling about the difficulties of marketing a novella I quite liked, and she pointed out that there had been increasing interest of late in longer works by various authors in the field. So we noodled tables of contents for a collection of novelettes and novellas to be built around my Hugo-nominated novelette "Into the Gardens of Sweet Night."
A little while later, through the intestinal magic of publishing, the excellent Jim van Pelt produced a kind introduction, Aynjel Kaye supplied a stunning cover photo, and suddenly we had a book. I say "we" -- I presided majestically over some unruly words, while Deborah wrestled with page layout demons and Bridget and Marti took on file formats two falls out of three. The end is a first for me: a simultaneous print and digital release of my fiction.
Be that what it may, here is American Sorrows, a collection of work that might loosely triangulate on the history of a continent, a nation, a people, or even the life of just one author. Or perhaps, as I believe, they are just stories.
Enjoy.
T his story literally came to me in a dream, or at least the first scene did. I was on a flat-topped roof in a dusty Central American town with my best friend—we were both in high school—watching a convoy of red Chevy Suburbans roll by, filled with priests. It was utterly clear to me, in that way that dream knowledge can be, that these big, burly men with their hard, narrow eyes and their dog collars were French Legionnaires Étrangères, come to do mischief in my town.
I woke with that image dense in my head and wondered what they were about. The rest flowed from the keyboard, surprising me as most of my stories do.
There’s a discussion that all writers get in to from time to time, a variation on “what exactly did you mean by thus-and-such.” If I could answer that question, I’d be teaching contemporary lit somewhere. All I do is write them. Interpretation is an exercise for the reader.
But I look at a story like “Our Lady of American Sorrows” and I see echoes of many things. My childhood in Asia and Africa, transmuted to the boy Peter in this other version of Central America. Edd O’Donnell’s Chevy Surburban, years ago back in Austin, Texas, though it was white rather than red. The Orthodox monasteries of Bulgaria I visited in my late teens. My long fascination with the very concept of an anti-pope, and eventually learning some of the history of the Avignon Papacy which infuses the backstory of this piece.
All this probably means something. What, I don’t know. But New Albion was an interesting place to visit, though I wouldn’t want to live there. If I could, I’d walk Water Avenue out to the monastery, just to see that cliff wall over the river. I’d explore the sacbe, hoping to meet who Peter and Rodger met there.
I SAT WITH MY FRIEND RODGER—two months older and taller than me, but otherwise close as any twin brother—on the flat stone roof of my family’s house, second from the end of the row on the steepest block of Rondo Street. We were both sixteen, and this was our last summer of freedom before our final year at Latin School, before we had to work for our livings. The day was so hot it felt as if the sun itself reached down to press on my head.
We shared our perch with a handful of iguanas and a pair of dusty-winged crows. We could see half the town, from the landing field along the river to east, back to the Civil Palace downtown. A series of open-topped trucks belched black smoke as they strained up the cobbles of Charles Avenue, coming from Ostia, New Albion’s little port at the river’s mouth. Four in three hours!
Each was filled with straight-backed men in black cassocks, their dog collars visible like white slashes against their throats even from our distance. They all were heading for the monastery west of town—Our Lady of American Sorrows, a great fortress of a holy house inhabited only by solemn Cistercians.
Until now. I sincerely doubted these were more Cistercian brothers come to call. “Four trucks,” I said. “Perhaps a dozen priests in each.”
Rodger snickered. “Are there enough souls in danger here in New Albion to need fifty new priests?”
“No one needs fifty new priests,” I said darkly.
Papa was a theist, which was legal in New Albion, sort of. Even though Mama had raised me well I found his skepticism daring. Last Sunday at Mass at St. Cipriano’s, Father Lavigne told us that Pope Louis-Charles III had sworn a renewed mission in the Americas when he had elevated the Archbishop of Teixeira. But fifty priests? If the Holy Office were coming to test the faith of our parishes, Papa would be in trouble.
I tried to imagine another reason for the priests to be here, hoping to conjure some little word-magic to offset my newfound fear. “Perhaps they are headed for the interior, to the native countries.”
Rodger’s snort was answer enough for that. “Just you watch,” he said. “Something big is brewing.”
No more trucks appeared, and the next aeroplane wasn’t due until Friday, so after a while we got our fly rods and crickets to go fishing for bats off the seaside cliffs at sundown. The catch was always difficult, but they crisped so well on the fire, and tasted delicious with sea salt, lime and ground peppers.
New Albion sprawls across dusty hills that are almost never hidden from the sun. Despite what they say about us in Avignon and Londres, it does rain here, at least at certain hours of the day during certain times of the year. Our little country is known mostly for our heat and our cloudless summers, and beaches which stretch at the feet of pale cliffs two hours’ walk to the east.
We were also known, I suppose, for our coffee. That plant grows in abundance, both wild and cultivated, in the high hills far to the west of town, where there is shade and rain drifts down from the distant mountains. Somehow God arranged it so we had neither ocean nor coffee ourselves here in New Albion proper, but were rather simply caught in the middle ground between the salt spray and the morning’s benediction.
Papa had been working on a new kind of coffee mill ever since I could remember. He had a job as well, at the Ministry of Commercial Affairs in a high-windowed office down by the sluggish river that he sometimes took me to see. He sat under an old wicker-bladed fan that squealed in a slow tempo, stamping seals on forms after holding them in files for long periods of time. Since his mother was Brasilian, it was good that Papa had a civil service job—anyone with Brasilian connections had been under suspicion since the Second Great War.
Another reason to fear the new priests.
Papa went down to his office three or four days a week, stamped papers for a while, then counted the circling flies until the sweat beneath his collar drove him home again. The rest of the time he labored in the little workshop across the alley behind our block of whitewashed houses. Undershirt grimy with oil, Gauloise dangling from his lips, Papa sent sparks showering from his welder or patiently rewound electric motors. Somehow the heat did not bother Papa so much when he worked on his own projects.
There were two very old coffee mills built into the slope of the hillside just south of Papa’s workshop, where the alley rises higher. Each was as big as a small house, with a door into the lower level. They still had mule troughs alongside their loading platforms, and hand pumps to bring the water up to the separator tanks. Both were overhung by enormous banyan trees.
The mills always looked to me like kilns, great squat shapes with their tanks and pipes and chutes and gears. One even had the original wood-fired boiler still attached, which once had driven the pulping press, though it had long been reduced to a still for mash fermented from durians and coconuts gathered along our quiet beaches. The electric wires tied off to the banyan trees sparked in thunderstorms, but still the mills always worked when the grinding-men came to start them up in coffee season.
Papa sometimes stood before them at dusk, once he had lost the light in his workshop. He smoked, staring at the limestone walls and the teakwood separator tanks as if they, not the stunning heat or New Albion’s aching bureaucracy, were his true enemy. “Listen to me, Peter João Fallworth,” he had said more than once, stabbing the cigarette like a tiny orange comet in the dusk. “You are almost a man. Understand this: it is the coffee that keeps us poor. The factors from the commodities bourses in São Paulo and Londres own us through those damned beans as much as any plantation overseer of the last century.” Flick, the Gauloise blazed away to the center of the alley, far from the dry brush. Only its sharp scent remained, the smoke lingering like our pale dust always does.
“Slaves,” he would say. “We are as slaves.”
I never could understand why Papa’s coffee mill was better than the old mills, or how it was supposed to free us. Though Mama hated it, he liked to talk about political economy and natural rights over our corn and turkey stews, but New Albion was already free. There hadn’t been slaves here for almost a hundred years, and they’d almost all gone to Brasil when they were manumitted. Father Lavigne preached liberation on Sundays, and my teachers at the Latin School said the same during the week.
Me, I was my own person only on Saturdays, except during the summers when I was free as any ex-slave. Even that was almost over, as next year would be my last at the Latin School.
On Wednesday Rodger and I were down in the free market, spending our few hard-earned Albion pounds on fried pies and shopping for rumors of the new priests. I wanted to know if they were Jesuits, who often worked for the Holy Office. We heard a rumbling in the sky above us that drowned out even the bleating of the goats in their pens.
We both looked up.
“That’s a jet,” Rodger said in an awed voice. Every month or so through the post he got an aviation magazine from Nouveau Orleans. It wasn’t really a proper magazine, more of a fly-specked thing folded down from a large sheet that was printed in French he could barely read, but it continually fueled his passion for flight. Aeroplanes were one of the few areas of life where I would admit to his superior wisdom without argument. “Look…” He used his half-eaten pie to point, jabbing me in the ribs with his free hand. “See, no propellers.”
The aeroplane was too big to be up in the air like that. Despite myself, I felt a tiny shiver of fear. “Where are the engines? How does it stay up?”
“The wings keep it up, dummy.” His tone would have withered bananas. “That’s where the engines are, too. See how fat the wings are close to the body? That’s why it’s a jet.”
We both stared. The usual aeroplane from Teixeira was short and fat, with a huge propeller engine in each wing. Rodger called it a gooneybird, and said it was a veteran of the Second Great War. This jet aeroplane was long and silver, like a flying cigarillo wrapped in foil. The tail was red, with the Papal key in gold, and a French tricolor on the top of the rudder. It roared like a jaguar, where the usual aeroplane whined like an enormous wasp.
“Do you suppose it flew straight here from Avignon?” I asked.
He snickered. “The Comète doesn’t have that kind of range. It probably flew to Bermuda, then down to Spanish Florida. San Agustin or that big Armée de l’Aire base at Santa Lucia, I’d guess. From there it would be an easy hop across the Caribbean.”
“But why?” There was no aeroplane due today. It must have something to do with the priests.
The jet made another pass over the city. That was the usual signal for the pilots from Teixeira to have the Civil Guard clear the landing field down by the river of stray cattle or football games or whatever other uses the shantytown people had got up to for the wide open space.
Business in the market had come to a halt as people stood and stared, chattering or keeping an awed silence depending on their character. It was clear very few of them had Rodger’s information.
“Come on,” I said, “let’s get down to the landing field.”
We trotted toward the market gates and Water Avenue beyond even as a distant bell began to ring. The deep tone could only be the Grand Bell at Our Lady of American Sorrows west of town. As Rodger and I made our way down the street St. Cipriano’s bells picked up the ringing, followed by Santa Clara and the tinny ones at All Angels’, and the bells further east that I didn’t recognize by ear.
“Can you tell me why the bells are ringing?” shouted a red-faced fat woman from her doorstep, an enameled pan of beans trembling in her hands.
We both shrugged. “Perhaps the Pope has come!” called Rodger. Despite myself, I laughed as we began to run.
Then the carillon at the Civil Palace picked up the peal, and the sirens of the Civil Guard wailed as their jitneys poured into the street, and then it wasn’t so much fun any more. Rodger and I scuttled into a little café and pretended to look at stale pastries in the fly-specked case until the jitneys had roared past. The proprietor said nothing, just kept reading his newspaper with one eye on us in case of theft.
Though the minions of New Albion’s government rarely stirred themselves to action, everyone knew to practice prudence when they did. That Papa was one of ‘them’ had never occurred to me before today, but I stared at the crumbling currant scones, suddenly ashamed of who I was.
Rodger and I picked our way along the riverbank toward the landing field, stones in hand to drive off the shantytown kids if they hassled us. They were far more dangerous than the occasional alligator come too far up the river. Today though, the arrival of the jet and the Civil Guard scrambling in the streets was more interesting than a couple of boys strayed down from the hills.
The shanties didn’t quite come to the water. Rather, they stopped at the muddy bluff overlooking the river, just about the high water mark during rainy season. Right now in summer there were dosses and firepits all over the stony beach, where people slept out under the stars to catch the breeze and a few dozen extra mosquito bites. Their houses were built from big steel shipping containers, or coffee crates patched together, or just plain old scrap wood and deadfall. There were even a few made from decrepit busses retired from the overland express routes. No two were alike, except for the little plumes of smoke from their cooking fires and the pervasive odor of rancid corn oil. Mangy dogs growled from doorways while wild-eyed cats ran feral among brown-skinned toddlers playing in the dirt.
Whenever I complained that we were poor, in our whitewashed house high up on Rondo Street, Mama would send me down to the center of New Albion on some errand near the river, making sure I walked by this place. When I got home again, I would sink to my knees beside my bed and thank God for what wealth we had.
There was a spit of land ahead of us, mud and sand caught up behind a tall rock everyone called the Bishop’s Head. If you were polite, or too young to understand, you said it was because it looked like a man wearing a churchman’s miter. There was a tangle of trees on the spit, which meant we either had to climb the bluff to our right and actually walk through the shantytown, or we had to pick our way along the stones in the water on the other side of the Bishop’s Head. In rainy season, that would be near-suicidal, but in summer, there was little risk of anything beyond damp feet.
Rodger said nothing, and neither did I. We both cut left, following the water’s edge. The stones rolled beneath our shoes, cheap canvas sneakers from the factories of Spanish Florida, but we kept our balance. I was slightly in front of Rodger when I got to the Bishop’s Head itself.
I had one hand on the stone, balancing against the warm, gritty surface as I watched my feet carefully. There were a couple of pools deep enough to soak me to the thighs there, and always the possibility of turning an ankle. I almost stepped on a black cloth floating in the water, overbalancing to avoid it, when I realized it was man.
“Ahh!” I shouted, then shut up.
Rodger almost ran into me. “What is—” he started to snap, then stopped as he saw it too.
It wasn’t just a man, it was a priest. Face down in the river. With a ragged, bloody hole in the back of his head.
My stomach heaved, and I vomited, trying to lean away from the dead man.
“They will kill us,” Rodger said quietly when I was done. “Just for knowing of this.”
“It has to be the new priests,” I said. I was shivering, and my nose stung. I cupped my hand and reached down for some water to wash my mouth out, then stopped. I did not want to drink of this priest’s death. I finished my thought. “The water’s always deep up by Our Lady of American Sorrows, but no one from New Albion would expect this river to carry a body away in summertime.”
“Priests.” Rodger made the word a curse. “Killing is a sin. I am quite sure it says so in my Bible.”
Reaching down, I touched the dead man’s shoulder. He bobbed in his little pool.
“Don’t,” Rodger said.
“I have to.” I realized we were whispering now. I stepped in with the corpse and pushed down harder, then caught his other shoulder and turned him.
I recognized the man. It was a brother from Our Lady of American Sorrows who had occasionally assisted with Mass at St. Cipriano’s. It made me sad that I did not know his name. He still wore his hand-carved pectoral cross over his cassock, and a look of sad surprise on his gray-fleshed face. I tried to close his eyes, which were clouded and dull, but the open lids were wrinkled tight from the water.
Instead I took his hand. A priest probably needed no help from me to get into Heaven, but I was pretty sure no one had given him last rites. I couldn’t do that either, but I could pray for him.
After a few moments, we headed back the way we had come. “Why?” Rodger asked after a time, but I had no answer.
At home, Mama glared at my muddy pants and wrinkled sneakers. “Where have you been?” she demanded. “Swimming in that filthy river?”
“Please, Mama, not now.” I wanted to tell her what I had seen, hand the problem of the dead priest to someone older and wiser, but Mama would just be afraid and run to Father Lavigne. Papa would know what to do, but he was downtown in his high-windowed office, or perhaps out at the landing field with whoever the Pope had sent to trouble us.
I felt a burst of guilty relief that whatever troubles had come to town were not about my father. The Holy Office would not have shot a priest to dump him in the river. But they were still troubles, terrible troubles, even if the Holy Office were not involved.
I could certainly run to Father Lavigne myself, but I was worried. For him, for me, for New Albion. These truckloads of priests were poison for us all.
“Mrs. Dalhousie says that new aeroplane brought a cardinal all the way from Avignon,” Mama said. “He must be here to consecrate the mission of those new priests.” She leaned close. “I worry about them.”
It was as if she had read my mind. I thought when I got older that sort of thing would stop. “Me too, Mama.”
“Mrs. Dalhousie says they’re Jesuits.” She looked around, as if one were hiding behind the door of our kitchen. “Big men.”
Watching with Rodger, I had only seen them in the backs of the trucks. It was hard to tell how big they really were.
Big enough to kill our local priests, I realized.
“I don’t know, Mama,” I said. “Can I go change my clothes?”
She ruffled my hair and smiled, beauty passing across her face like a momentary shadow. “Yes, Peter, you may change. Go wash up, too.” Mama raised her voice. “And Rodger, you may come in from the alley and have a cup of tea.”
“I’m a mess, Mrs. Fallworth,” he said from the alley.
“So is my floor, thanks to Peter. I’ll set out a pan for you to wash your shoes.”
I went to our little bathroom and scrubbed until I couldn’t feel the rough dampness of the dead priest’s cassock on my hands anymore.
That afternoon, Rodger and I got our rods, some salt and ground peppers, a wicker cricket case and two old bananas for bug bait. “We’re fishing for bats,” I told Mama.
“I don’t want you out late,” she said. “Not with all these goings on.”
“We’ll be safe at the coast. No one ever goes there.” Which was more or less true, except for tourists and the people who worked in Ostia. “We might even sleep out.”
She kissed me, which she hadn’t done so much these last few years. “Come back safe,” Mama said, then we stepped out into the alley.
“We’re not going to the coast,” said Rodger.
“No way.” I shivered, the image of the dead man in the river very clear in my head. “I want to get a better look at these new priests.”
“Good,” he said. “You’re smarter than you seem.”
We stashed our gear in the pressing room of one of the old coffee mills and headed up the alley to be out of sight if Mama stepped out the back door. Once we made it to Formby Way, the next cross street, we headed west.
Our Lady of American Sorrows is on Bullback Hill. The road out there is a westward extension of Water Avenue into the countryside that finally leaves the riverbank and switchbacks up to the monastery. The back wall hangs forty meters or more up above the river at a wide bend, which was where the dead priest must have been shot and thrown off before floating down to the Bishop’s Head. But there was an old sacbe, a Mayan road, that ran westward parallel to the river just behind a line of bluffs, coming quite close to the monastery without being visible from it.
I figured the new priests wouldn’t know about the sacbe yet, since no one used it but goatherds. The Cistercian brothers weren’t likely saying much right now.
As we walked past the Catalpa Street Oil Depot, a government jitney drove by. Brakes screeched as it slammed to a halt just in front of us. Rodger and I looked at each other, but there wasn’t much point in running.
Yet.
Then Papa got out.
My heart sank. He had a revolver on his belt. I had never seen him carry a weapon in my entire life, not so much as a machete. He looked very angry, but judging from the way his eyes darted around, not at me.
“Are you crazy, Peter,” Papa hissed. “This is no time to be on the streets!”
“I…” I wanted to tell him about the dead priest, ask him what to do, but I couldn’t see who was driving the jitney. Papa had gotten out of the left side, the passenger side. I wasn’t afraid of him, but I was afraid of what his job might make him do.
Papa cleared his throat. “You boys go home,” he almost shouted. His voice had a weird, false heartiness. He was lying at the top of his lungs. His eyes kept darting to the left, his head almost shivering.
“Yes, sir,” Rodger suddenly shouted back, and grabbed my elbow. “Right away.”
Papa jerked his chin left, set one hand on his pistol, and bellowed, “Get out of here, then!”
We got. Rodger almost dragged me away from my own father, into the nearest alley. Papa jumped back in his jitney, which took off with a squeal of tires. Immediately afterward we heard a diesel straining up the hill.
Rodger and I peeked out.
It was another open-topped truck, like the ones we had seen carrying the priests yesterday. There was a machine gun mounted on a pintle just behind the cab. Half a dozen Civil Guardsmen sat in back with rifles pointing over the side.
“It’s a coup,” Rodger said.
“Against what? New Albion barely has a government.”
The last alcaldé had died of cholera when I was twelve. In the four years since, New Albion had simply kept functioning under a ministerial junta. I’d learned in school that our little country was technically an English protectorate, but there had been no financial or political support from Londres for several generations. In practice, when high justice was required or something irresolvable happened in government, the abbot from Our Lady of American Sorrows was consulted, or a message sent to the archbishop in Teixeira.
As Papa liked to say, the death of the alcaldé simply streamlined that process.
“Maybe there will be a new alcaldé,” Rodger said.
“Like we need one.”
We heard a popping noise from downhill, toward the middle of the city. Sirens wailed.
“Guns?” I asked, just as the unmistakable stutter of a machine gun began.
Rodger and I hid among the pipes of the oil depot until dusk, long after the gunfire and the screams had died away, though the open-topped trucks continued to rumble through the streets of town.
Evening found us picking our way along the goat paths among the hills. We caught occasional glimpses of Our Lady of American Sorrows, the monastery’s walls floodlit as if for a festival. Someone was taking no chances. But whom? With what?
The paths were winding dirt tracks among the stubbly scrub of the hillsides. Once, so I had been told, there had been great forests along this coast, but centuries of logging and farming had driven them back and dried out the soil. At least it was not so dusty here.
Walking single file, Rodger and I had little to say to one another. I kept thinking of Papa’s gun, and the truck that had followed him. Had those men been under his orders? Had any of the shots been fired by him?
Some concern of the world had come to New Albion, something larger than coffee or tourism or our notion of civil affairs.
“Peter.” Right in front of me, Rodger stopped. His voice was a whisper.
I stopped too, snapped out of my thoughts and looked around. Two or three hundred meters ahead, in a copse of bushes where the sacbe first assembled itself from scattered gravel, a gleaming spark rose and fell. For a moment, I thought a star had come to earth, a sign to accompany the Papal jet that had landed that afternoon.
“Sentry,” Rodger breathed.
Then I realized that what I had seen was a match, someone lighting a cigarette. Like Papa in front of the old mills at home.
By unspoken agreement we both worked our way up the bank to our right until we could look over the crest. Just like playing Great War when we were younger, shooting each other with sticks and throwing cowpie grenadoes.
The monastery still gleamed, its floodlights making the high, smooth walls seem marble instead of limestone. Though we were several kilometers from it, the clatter of the diesel generator echoed across the distance. The river beyond the monastery, visible where it appeared from behind Bullback Hill, gleamed in the rising moon.
No sign of sentries. No one pacing the walls of Our Lady of American Sorrows. No trucks or guards on the road that wound up the hill to the gates.
“Why is someone up here?” I finally asked. “They can’t know about the sacbe.”
“I don’t know.” Rodger sounded puzzled.
“They were shooting people in town today.”
“Not them.”
I could hear the rustle as he nodded toward the monastery. Rodger was thinking of Papa, but had the decency not to mention my father.
“Someone killed that priest,” I muttered. I could see the gaping tunnel of crusted blood at the back of his head, so big in memory that I could have reached inside it, though in life it must have been no wider than a pencil.
“Someone,” Rodger said. “But I’m still going on. I’ll bet that’s only a goatherd over there.”
“No—” I started to say. This wasn’t a game, not anymore.
He stared me down in the darkness, then I saw the glimmer of his teeth as he smiled. “You’re such a girl, Peter.”
After that, I had to follow him.
We picked our away along the path, still moving toward the glimmer of the distant cigarette. We had to cross a hundred meters of exposed meadow, clearly visible from the monastery walls. Silhouetting ourselves in the rising moonlight to the smoker in the bushes ahead at the same time. The bet Rodger made staked our lives, but I wanted to believe what he believed, that something in New Albion was still normal.
Never in my life had I been afraid of my own home.
The smoking man was no less of a puzzle when we got close to him. For a moment I thought I was seeing one of the old statues, left behind by the Mayans before they had retreated to their jungle kingdoms far inland. He was short and wide, with an enormous nose and a high forehead. He wore nothing but a loincloth and a feathered headband. In the moonlight he looked as shiny and pale as the stones around him. Then his eyes gleamed as he took a drag on…what?
A small pipe, I decided.
Though he made no effort to block the path, we stopped in front of him. The land had risen again, hiding both us and the sacbe from view of the monastery, so we stood without fear of observation.
“In la ’kech,” he said, in what had to be Mayan, waving the pipe at us. It was oblong, with the bowl carved out of the body rather than attached to it, and seemed to be made of jade. Whatever he was smoking was nothing like Papa’s Gauloises. It was sweeter, more cloying, not at all unpleasant.
“Hey,” I said. Beside me Rodger stirred, shifting his weight, but he had nothing to add.
There were stories, told by kids camping around midnight fires, of Mayan sorcerers who flew down from the mountains and spoke to goats and dogs before stealing babies. Everyone knew somebody whose cousin had lost a child to the native wizards. As I’d gotten older, I’d realized we told these stories out of guilt and fear.
The Mayan took another drag on his pipe. “You walk an old road.” There was nothing wrong with his English.
“You’re a long way from the mountains,” I said, cautiously. Some few Mayans left their homes and crossed the coffee plantations to venture to New Albion from time to time, also to Teixeira and other cities of the Caribbean. Most were wanderers, poor or unhomed in search of work or shelter, but not all of them. Some were said to be princes, or priests, or great traders. Like all campfire stories, ours had held seeds of truth. For all the tales of terror, there were also rumors of young men given jade swords in exchange for a chance sharing of fruit.
“This is our land.” He puffed on the pipe. “We cover it like the rain. You merely have use of it for a time.”
“Peter,” said Rodger, tugging at my arm again. He wanted to go on, to scout the monastery. Whatever he’d hoped for from this man wasn’t to be found. But I was certain the Mayan had been waiting for us. I jerked my elbow free of Rodger’s grasp and waited. Rodger huffed, but he stayed with me.
“Tun,” said the Mayan. “That is Peter in my language. You are the stone.” He laughed, and leaned down to tap his jade pipe against the first slabs of the sacbe. As he did a wind swirled up around us, circling as a dust devil will, though they do not blow at night.
“Peter.” I remembered what I had been taught in Latin School. “The rock upon which Holy Mother Church was built.”
“Your rock is foundering.” He tamped some fresh crumbling herbs into his pipe, that the wind somehow failed to snatch away from his fingers even as it built stronger and stronger. “Your king is troubled.”
“The alcaldé? He died some years ago.”
Another puff of the pipe. The wind was like a wall around us now, green sparks flickering within its dusty flanks. I should have been afraid, but I was not.
“Your great king across the water plays at games,” said the Mayan. “His games should not come to our land. In time rain always defeats stone, but sometimes only another stone is required.” He handed me a feather which had not been there a moment before and smiled as the swirling wall of dust collapsed.
Rodger and I both coughed so hard that we staggered, blundering into each other as we wiped the grit from our eyes. When I could clear away the tears, the Mayan was gone like a ghost out of legend. I still had the feather in my hand, though.
“Look,” said Rodger.
At our feet was the jade pipe, fallen inverted, a spray of crumbling herbs spread around it like a fan. A tiny jade idol, no larger than a saint’s medal, lay next to the pipe. We both stared, each afraid to touch.
In the moonlight the idol was the very image of the Mayan. Had he ever been here? Or was there something in his pipe smoke?
“We can’t leave those things lying around,” I said.
Rodger knelt and gently touched the idol. It didn’t spark or sizzle or snap at his fingers, so after a moment, he picked it up. “Pipe’s yours.”
I tried to scoop up the little fan of herbs, succeeded mostly in mixing them with dirt, but I refilled the tiny bowl. Then I plucked a few fresh leaves from a creosote bush growing nearby and sealed the herbs into the bowl before slipping the pipe into my pants pocket.
The feather I held on to.
“Death, then magic,” said Rodger. “I will never forget this day.”
“We’ll see more death than magic before it’s all over with,” I replied.
Half an hour later we huddled in a bougainvillea, brushing against the hairy leaves. The sweet-smelling plants had grown up around a dead stand of scrub pines filling a gap in the ridgeline that sheltered the sacbe, almost due south of Our Lady of American Sorrows. We could get no closer to the monastery without walking up to the front gates.
By this time of the evening the air was cooling. I shivered, still clutching my feather, and stared across last few hundred meters at our goal. It remained brightly lit. This close, the details of structure were clearly visible. While the riverside, invisible to us, was sheer to Bullback Hill’s cliff over the water, the side facing south had buttresses footed in the slope of the hill. These supported the wall, which was about ten meters high and quite smooth. The top of the wall was clear except for corner towers, where the Cistercians kept eremite’s cells for contemplation. We were not high enough up to see over the walls to the buildings in the courtyard, but I knew from visits in better times that there were three floors of wooden galleries on the inside of the walls, with a stone chapel in the middle of the yard and various outbuildings.
Our Lady of American Sorrows resembled a fortress because it had been built as one, back when the British Americas Company had contested with the French, Spanish and Portuguese for control of the New World. The forests here had held mahogany and teak, there was more rain, and everyone had believed that the Mayans were wealthy with hidden gold.
In the end the Pope had settled affairs to his own satisfaction, the Mayans had withdrawn, and the fortress became a monastery where Cistercians prayed for forgiveness from the abused land and its absent people. But those monks had always kept their walls in good repair.
Nothing stirred there now, though the clatter of the diesel generator was quite loud from our little observation post.
“‘Our king is troubled,’” I said under my breath. “What did he mean?”
“I—” Rodger started to scream, quickly cut off.
Feather still in my hand, I turned to look. Rodger’s eyes rolled white and wild as a black-gloved hand covered his mouth. His assailant, all in black, held a knife at Rodger’s throat. Another man in black with a machine pistol swung it back and forth, bobbing nervously, looking everywhere but at me.
“À qui parliez-vous? “ whispered the man with the knife.
Though I knew very little French, Rodger had more, from his aviation magazine. He rolled his eyes at me, as if trying to make me speak by main force of will. I shook my head slowly. The man with the machine pistol nearly jabbed me in the stomach, but still didn’t seem to see me.
How was this possible? I was right in front of them.
“Dites-moi maintenant, petit porc, avant que je vous colle.” The gloved hand slipped away from Rodger’s mouth as his captor looked around, eyes darting nervously in the gleaming dark, settling everywhere but on me.
They were asking Rodger where I was. They had to be.
“Please, sir,” my friend gasped.
Good, I thought, don’t let them know you have some French. I was afraid to even breathe.
“I was just out looking for my dog,” Rodger said.
“Un chien? This far from the city?” The man with the machine pistol spoke heavily accented English. He jerked the weapon toward Our Lady of American Sorrows. “Nous le prendrons dedans.“ Both men laughed, then the pistol carrier added, “Il faut que nous ne laissons pas autre corps à trouver..”
Even I knew what ‘autre corps’ meant. Another body. So they wouldn’t kill Rodger, not here and now. But they must have killed the priest in the river. And now someone knew about it besides us, or they wouldn’t care about there being another body. Which maybe explained the shooting in the city this afternoon.
I shivered, torn between dread and disbelief, by some miracle standing unnoticed before these two dangerous men.
The knife vanished, and large, hard hands hustled Rodger over the edge, down the slope toward the monastery. The feather trembled in my grasp as I realized the two Frenchmen—Jesuits? soldiers?—had never seen me at all.
I was the stone.
After waiting a few minutes, I followed them down the slope. I picked my way carefully. Invisible or not, they could still catch me crashing through the bushes.
I almost caught up to Rodger and his captors just below the monastery. They had stopped at the bottom of a scree slope extending down from the roadbed, and seemed to be arguing. Rodger squatted between the two Frenchmen, who were pointing at each other and speaking in voices that I couldn’t quite hear, even if I had understood them.
Rodger looked up to stare right at me. His face wrinkled into a sort of regretful smile, and he mouthed some word I could not catch. Then the Frenchman grabbed him, one to each armpit, and dragged my best friend up the slope to the roadbed and on to the monastery gates. Though I could still see no guards the postern opened as they approached. The three of them stepped through, Rodger making one last glance over his shoulder.
I picked my way up the slope much more carefully, wary of dislodging rocks. I was desperate to rescue Rodger but could not imagine how to get through the gate. Whatever invisibility the Mayan had given me did not allow me to fly, or withstand bullets. Or perhaps it would—but I had no way to test my powers except by trying.
The Mayan’s words came back to me again. Was I the rock? Or was I the one who was foundering? Clutching the feather, I fingered the pipe in my pocket. There were still some herbs in the bowl, but they wouldn’t help me cross the walls of Our Lady of American Sorrows.
If I went back to New Albion, I could ask Papa for help. But somehow his revolver was more frightening to me than a monastery full of armed Frenchmen.
The Pope’s man, whoever had come on that jet. Cardinal, Bishop, Chancery Secretary. Some high official of the Church was present in New Albion. I didn’t think he’d be out here at the monastery, either. I would take my feather and go find him on his aeroplane and warn him. Not even the Pope’s emissary would be guarded the way Rodger was right now.
Someone had smuggled these false priests into Our Lady of American Sorrows. Surely the Pope could have sent soldiers to New Albion openly if he wanted to.
But even though the Frenchmen had snuck in, the Pope’s man had flown in for all to see, without stealth or guile. Someone of his rank would be a true priest, a man I could trust, with authority to set things right. Heading back to the city to speak to him was the best way I could help Rodger right now. No one else had the power to rescue my best friend.
I wasn’t happy with leaving Rodger, but I could think of no better plan. And I had to trust someone.
Then the gates squealed open and a truck rumbled out. Up close, I could see it was a Bedford truck, one of the Port of Ostia vehicles used to bring cargo into New Albion from the ships that called.
Surely this was a sign that I had made the right decision.
The truck rolled by slowly, the driver grinding the gears downward, so I grabbed at the stake sides and scrambled over the tailgate into the open bed. There was no one back there, but I shared the cargo space with several long, narrow boxes under a canvas tarp. I glanced at the cab. Two priests—or rather, two men in priest’s collars—sat up front. I’d have bet they had machine pistols with them. Neither looked back, or even glanced in the mirrors.
I lifted the corner of the tarp and looked. The boxes were crates, soft, splintered pine stenciled with letters and numbers. In the last gleam from the increasingly distant monastery walls, I could read ‘Missile Anti-Aérien.’
More French I didn’t need a dictionary to understand. This was what the false priests were here for: an assassination that would rock Avignon and bring disgrace upon New Albion. Now I had something concrete to say to the Papal representative, news about the trail his Comète would blaze when next it vaulted into New Albion’s sky. I would trade that threat for Rodger’s life.
The driver killed his lights and rumbled off the road just before we reached the edge of town. My ride was heading for the stony beaches of the river. I vaulted off the back, feather still gripped tight in my hand, and scuttled to the other side of the road to take cover in a line of tangled wild rose. The smell was clear and simple, slowing the beating of my heart, as I watched the truck lurch to the edge of the riverbed proper.
It stopped there, the driver shutting off the engine. I watched for a little while, but nothing more happened. Not even so much as a cigarette being lit. Who were they meeting? People from the shanty town? Traitors among the Civil Guard?
Could it be Papa?
It wasn’t possible. Not my father. He worried about coffee prices and economic imperialism, not coups against the Church. Or by the Church, against the very government for which he worked.
Shivering now in the midnight air, I imagined an interrogation. Men in red robes from the Holy Office, gun-toting French priests and fat Civil Guardsmen with egg on their tunics would surround me.
“Would you call your father a loyal man, Peter?”
“Did he fulfill his duties to the city government?”
“What complaints did he voice about the affairs of New Albion? Londres? Avignon?”
“What about you, Peter? Have you been sneaking around in the—”
My head snapped up so hard my neck cracked. I was falling asleep on my feet, right here in the bushes. I couldn’t stay still any longer. All I needed was to drop the feather. Or worse, lose it. Mother Mary and the saints only knew how long the Mayan’s spell would last. Rodger’s life depended on me. If he still lived.
With a heavy sigh, I crossed myself, then trotted toward town. A man who came to New Albion in such a magnificent craft as that Comète would most likely sleep aboard, just like the Nord-Américain tourists bunking in their cruise ships at Ostia. Our little hotels, the Hotel de la Réforme and the Ritz-Albion, were nothing compared to the luxury the Pope’s man would be accustomed to. Even the Archbishop of Teixeira stayed at Our Lady of American Sorrows when he visited.
At this time of night our city’s visitor must have been asleep. So I headed toward his jet aeroplane to see what I could do.
The landing field was no more than a long strip of dirt east of town alongside the road to Ostia. It had been bulldozed by the Brasilian army engineers during the Second Great War, back when I was a small child. The Brasilians had flown fat little gooneybird aeroplanes, as well as snarling fighters that I could still recall the sound of. Supposedly there was even an Ottoman squadron based here for a while, but no one I knew could remember ever seeing Turks or Arabs in the city.
Later the FEFA—Force Expeditionaire Français-Anglais—had liberated New Albion from the Imperialists. For a while a different set of fat little aeroplanes had flown in and out. The fighters had already moved on, following the front south and east toward the Brasilian heartland.
When the war was over, everyone had gone home, leaving New Albion with five captured Brasilian bulldozers not worth the trouble of hauling across the Atlantic as war booty. Now, fourteen years later, three of them still ran. They were used to maintain the road to Ostia and keep the landing field clear. The other two were parked for parts. Rodger and I had played on them for days on end when we were younger. Last winter, after the Boxing Day floods, I had even had the chance to drive one while working on the emergency road crew.
Now I approached the landing field, still clutching my feather. The two abandoned bulldozers bulked dark next to the equipment shed where the working bulldozers were stored. The equipment shed was an old coffee warehouse that had been dismantled and moved inland from Ostia during the Brasilian occupation. There was no light other than the naked bulb flickering over the office door—as Rodger had explained to me, no one ever flew to New Albion by night, so there had never been a need for landing lights.
Even while invisible I didn’t know whether I would cast a noticeable shadow, so I was glad enough for the darkness. My sheltering shadows wouldn’t last much longer, though. The three o’clock bells had rung in the Civil Palace as I passed through town along Water Avenue. Dawn would be coming in another hour or so.
The Comète was easy to find. The big silver jet gleamed in the waning moonlight. The door was open, a round-cornered black rectangle just behind the pilots’ cabin. A coffee picker’s three-legged ladder leaned against the hull just beneath the opening. There was a slight red glow from the cockpit windows, but otherwise the aeroplane was dark.
Too bad for me that a Civil Guardsman snored in a jitney parked under the wing. No, make that two, I thought. The second man was awake and smoking, leaning on a machine gun.
I was invisible, right?
Right.
Clutching my feather in sweaty fingers, I walked slowly, softly, across the dirt. I didn’t want to kick a pebble or send up any little dust clouds in time with my footfalls. The man with the machine gun might see that, then see me. I kept a nervous eye on the wobbling glow as he took his cigarette from his lips, exhaled a cloud that gleamed silver in the moonlight, then resumed his smoking. I paused and waited to see if the coal would turn toward me, aiming like the barrel of a gun.
At least it could not be Papa. He was a bureaucrat, not a Civil Guardsman. He would be home with Mama, not shivering on a landing field this late at night. Though I wondered where he kept his gun.
Then I reached the ladder. I tested it with my hand. The wood shifted against the metal skin of the Comète. The coal of the Guardsman’s cigarette shifted toward me, and I heard the muffled creak of the machine gun swiveling on its mount.
Nothing here, I thought. A stone. I am but a stone.
After a few moments, the cigarette began to bob about. The man in the jitney had lost interest. Very slowly I leaned on the ladder, bringing my weight to bear. It creaked, not loudly.
There was no reaction.
I eased my foot up onto the lowest rung. The ladder groaned, a noise like a door hinge! I jumped away from ladder, holding my breath against the effort.
The coal of the cigarette pointed right at the aeroplane again, and the Guardsman was muttering. How would I get into the aeroplane without him seeing me?
One man with a machine gun could not stand between me and my only hope of rescuing Rodger.
I made my way back across the field. I had to get the Civil Guard jitney away from the Comète long enough for me to board unnoticed. Once inside, it would be a different game, but I had to get in. Rodger’s life was at stake, and the Frenchmen had taken missiles to the river.
What else could they shoot at but the Comète?
The office door of the equipment shed was unlocked, as it often was. Who would steal a bulldozer or a fuel tank? All the small tools were inside lockers of their own.
Inside was deep shadow. I could make out the bulk of the three bulldozers, a pickup truck, two fuel tanks on trailers, a forklift and lots of other heavy equipment—welders and drill presses and things for which I had no name. I went to the bulldozers. One was parked against the back wall.
Perfect.
Climbing into the seat, I reflected that this would not be so difficult. Electric starters had been installed after the war, in place of the old hand cranks. Mostly it was a matter of knowing what to do. Only seven months ago I had driven one of these, though Gomes the road boss hadn’t ever let me use the blade.
I set the clutches for each track, pulling each long handle back and flipping the locking pawls. Then the transmission—left track in reverse, right track also in reverse. Pulled out the choke. Feather still gripped between my fingers, I put my fingers on the cool bakelite knob of the starter switch.
This was it.
I could still go home right now, but once I started the bulldozer, things would be different. They might never be the same for me.
Then I thought of Rodger sweating out his fear in some monk’s cell. Or worse, under torture. The flame-tailed streak of a missile shooting toward the Comète. Papa’s gun.
I wanted my home back. I wanted everything to be normal again.
I flipped the starter switch.
The electric motor groaned and chattered as it kicked the bulldozer’s huge pistons toward life. There was a rattling cough, then the engine caught with a screeching roar. I tugged the accelerator handle, locked its pawl, and let the clutches loose before jumping out of the operator’s seat.
The bulldozer clanked into life, back up to hit the wall of the equipment shed that faced the road. It seemed to pause for a moment as the building’s beams groaned. Glancing up into a shower of dust, I ran for the office. The engine raced until the wall gave way with an explosive bang. I was out the office door at almost the same time as the runaway bulldozer backed its way across a narrow verge of struggling grass and into the road.
The smoking Guardsman was paying attention. I heard him shout, then the jitney started up. The gears ground and the coal of his cigarette jerked twice before the headlights came on and the vehicle shot out from under the Comète’s wing to race across the landing field toward me.
I ran in a wide curve, staying out of the beam of the headlights. It turned out not to matter much—the equipment shed was collapsing with a great screeching of boards and rippling of the corrugated roof. No one would have noticed me anyway.
Panting from exertion, sweating even in the chilly air, I made it to the ladder at the Comète’s door. No time to think now. I scrambled up, pushing through the door.
The feather in my hand caught on something and slipped free. I turned, stifling a scream, to see it flutter in the moonlight before it turned into a brilliant green bird that glowed like a little sun of its own. The bird rose above the landing field and flew toward town, and the mountains far to the west, a plumed Mayan missile.
Someone laid a hand on my arm. I turned to see an old man in a white cotton sleeping gown. He was very small, much shorter than I. His eyes were rheumed with sleep, bags of skin beneath them making him resemble a hound. He had a little black hat he’d apparently just pulled on over his short silver hair, and wore a jeweled gold pectoral cross.
A churchman then, and a wealthy one. Important.
“Can I help you my son?” He had an accent, something from Europe that I did not quite recognize.
“Father,” I gasped, surprised to find my breath suddenly so short. “Pardon me. Lives are in danger. My friend Rodger’s, and your own.”
He glanced out the door at the ruckus around the bulldozer. “Step back here with me, son. We should speak.”
I let him lead me along the red and gold carpet through a narrow door even as outside a machine gun stuttered once more.
The next cabin back within the Comète was a little sitting room of sorts. There were two seats on each side of the door we came through, facing back, and two more on each side of the next door, facing forward. They were oddly padded chairs, not quite like anything I’d ever seen, and both facing sets had a little table-topped cabinet between them. The tabletops were plastic, each with a small frame attached with several holes. This floor was also carpeted in more of the red and gold.
Somehow it was much shoddier and cheaper than I had imagined the inside of an aeroplane to be. Especially an aeroplane as grand as a Papal jet.
The churchman waved me to a seat. He bent down to open a cabinet. He removed two glass tumblers and a wine bottle, then set them in the holes of the little frame before taking the seat across from me.
“You have worked hard to come see me,” he said, pouring out the wine.
I watched, fascinated. I was not permitted wine at home. “Yes…sir.”
“What is your name, my son?”
“Peter.” I was suddenly uncomfortable saying Papa’s name, so I made up a last name. “Peter Fitzpatrick, of St. Cipriano’s parish here in New Albion.”
“Well, Peter Fitzpatrick, you may call me Father Kramer.” Father Kramer, who was certainly a bishop or even a cardinal, handed me a glass. “Drink. You must relax. Please excuse the poor service, we have no way to secure proper snifters aboard this infernal craft.”
I took a tiny sip, as I had seen Papa do when he drank. The wine left a mellow, golden taste in my mouth.
“Thank you, Father Kramer.”
“You are welcome, my son.” He sipped at his glass. “So tell me of this danger.”
“I— there are new priests here in town. False priests, Father.” I would not repeat Mama’s rumor that they were Jesuits. “They have taken the monastery. Our Lady of American Sorrows?”
Father Kramer nodded. “I am aware of the establishment. As for the new priests…” He shrugged and smiled. “The Cistercian Father Superior doubtless knows what he is about.”
“The newcomers killed a priest there. And there are missiles, for your aeroplane.”
“Ah.” He set his glass down in the holder and leaned forward. “Dead priests. Missiles. Peter, Peter, my young friend. You have been reading too many of those dreadful Boy’s Own adventures.”
“I saw the body,” I protested. After all I had been through to see him, how could he think I was lying? Father Kramer’s doubt brought the sting of shame to my eyes. “The dead man was down at the river this afternoon. And the missiles, tonight, also at the river. These false priests have my friend Rodger imprisoned in Our Lady of American Sorrows.”
“Ah.” Father Kramer tapped his glass for a moment before raising his voice. “Lugano, venite qui. Li ho bisogno di fare qualcosa. “
Though I understood none of that, it sounded like the Latin of Mass, I thought as the door at the back of the little cabin opened. An enormous man in an undershirt and brown wool pants stepped out. He looked sleepy, except for his eyes which were bright like gems, and the pistol he carried. It would have been a huge gun for anyone but him, but it seemed lost in his large fist.
I felt as if I had reached for an egg and grabbed a snake.
“Che cosa, signore?“ Lugano said. His voice rumbled like our river in flood.
“Blocchi questo giù sotto.” Father Kramer smiled at me, his lips pressed thin and pale. “Rimarrà là fino a che non dica liberarlo.”
Lugano stepped toward me, that gun staring me down like the eye of a dog. There was nothing I could do.
What did this mean?
“Venite,” Lugano rumbled at me. “You come-a.” The pistol cracked against the side of my head.
“Non ci è necessità di danneggiarlo, “ snapped Father Kramer.
Then Lugano tried to smile, which was almost more frightening. He dragged me back through the next door, through an unlit cabin with more seats set closer together, then past a few tiny doors until we must have been near the back of the aeroplane. There were several trapdoors set into the carpeting. Letting go my arm, Lugano opened the one closest to the back. He then poked me with the pistol. “Sotto. You down-a.”
Down-a I went. He slammed the hatch shut, leaving me in the dark in a small metal-walled space that was empty of anything but me. Blood trickled down my right temple where Lugano had struck me with the pistol. I was more tired than I’d ever been in my life. All I could think of was the jet taking off from the landing field with me still in this little room. In my imagination, missiles rose from the riverbed on tails of flame to seek my life.
I shuddered with fear, fighting tears of pain, until somehow I fell asleep.
A clatter woke me up from a confused dream of the sacbe and the Mayan sorcerer and a flame-tailed missile that resembled a brilliant green bird. I blinked into a square of light above, partially blocked by a shadow that could only be Lugano.
Mama will be so ashamed of me. The thought seemed important and irrelevant all at once.
“Affamato?“ he rumbled.
I decided the language must be Italian. No one spoke Latin but priests, and Lugano was no priest.
The big man tried again. “Ah, you ah eat, yes? Mangia.”
“Mangia,” I croaked. I was starving. More, I was thirsty. “Water, too. Please.”
“Si.” Though he was mostly shadow to my blinking eyes, I could see the gleam of his teeth. “Catch-ah.”
A sack fell, hitting me on the head before bouncing to the floor.
“Desiderate le sigarette? “
Cigarette? I didn’t smoke, but matches might help me better see where I was. “Yes, please,”
He tossed a cigarette pack and book of matches down at me, then leaned over with something. A glass bottle, I realized. I stood to take it from him, and discovered my little prison was no taller than I.
Once standing, I could see Lugano more clearly. He got to his feet and winked at me, then gently shoved the toe of his shoe into my forehead before slamming the hatch again.
It would have caught me on the head if he hadn’t pushed me back down. I never imagined I’d be grateful to a man who held a gun to me.
Guns.
Papa.
Would he know where I was now? How would he find out? Father Kramer wouldn’t think to tell Papa as I had given a false name. Rodger was in more trouble than I, and would be no help. No one else knew where I was except Lugano.
I had no doubts where Lugano’s loyalty lay.
To take my mind from my troubles, I worked the cap from the glass bottle. I could not read the label in the dark. I would not waste matches on that. It hissed as it opened. I sipped to find mineral water. The sack contained two sausages and a small fruit with a nubbly rind, which turned out to be a lime when I tore the skin open. I ate everything but drank only half the mineral water.
Then I moved my hands around on the floor of my little compartment until I found the cigarettes and the matches. The pack rustled in my hand. It had been opened. I sniffed. The sharp, brownish-bitter smell of tobacco, but lighter and sweeter than Papa’s Gauloises. I felt the rough heads of the matches. The matchbook seemed new.
I had already realized that no one was going to rescue me from here. I did not want to depend on Father Kramer’s kindness. His Christian charity had been notably lacking when he’d had Lugano put me down here.
And why had he? Father Kramer knew about the missiles. He knew, and he didn’t want me to know. Why would he plan to shoot down his own aeroplane?
Unless another aeroplane was coming. Surely not the Friday flight from Teixeira. That was due…I had to think. Tomorrow. The gooneybird would come tomorrow, with a few coffee factors or traveling priests or maybe even a confused tourist aboard. Who would care about them?
But another Papal aeroplane, maybe even another Comète. There would be death, and scandal. Armies would come to New Albion again, as they had during the Second Great War. We would be made part of Nouveau Orleans or British Miskitia. Papa would be sacked and Rodger and I would be made to fight. I couldn’t—
I stopped myself. I could not know those things. I could know that Father Kramer knew of the missiles. I could know that he did not seem concerned for his own safety. Whatever plot was afoot was, in part, his doing.
And here I was, knowing where the missiles were, or at least where they had come from and where they had been last night. Papa or the Civil Guard could find the missiles, if only I told them. The ministerial junta at the Civil Palace could negotiate with Father Kramer, have him take his crime away to some other city. If only I told them.
Time to light the first match and look for a way out.
It struck easily and flared to life. The whiff of sulfur made my nose tingle even as I squinted against the brilliant glare. I was in a metal box, which I had already known from the feel of the things. The walls were seamed as if it had been welded from the other side. Any seam could be a secret door, but who would put a secret door in an aeroplane?
The match burned down to my fingers as I looked around. My prison was a little less than two meters high, just about as wide, and meter deep. I was going nowhere.
Shaking the last of the match out, I blew on my fingers to cool them where the flame had come too close. Soon enough nature would call. Especially if Lugano kept feeding me. That would be unpleasant in such a small place. After that, what else? Sit in the dark waiting for the missile?
I wished I’d kept the feather. Being invisible would not help me much in the dark, but while I was invisible, I had been special. Different. I had a sort of power.
Then I remembered the jade pipe in my pocket.
It still had the Mayan’s herbs packed beneath the creosote leaves. I half stood so I could reach in my pants pocket and tug it out. The pipe was small and cool, its rounded edges comfortable in my hand. It was if the Mayan had carved the jade just for me.
I sat down again cross-legged like a tailor and tried to thread the needle of my thoughts.
What had happened on the sacbe? We met someone, for I had held the feather and still possessed the pipe. But the sorcerer had vanished like smoke, while Rodger and I were in more trouble than we’d ever imagined in our entire lives.
Our Lady of American Sorrows indeed. I was only learning what sorrows we Americans could have.
I didn’t smoke. I especially didn’t smoke herbs from some native’s mountain temple. The thought was enough to make my skin itch. But where had he gone? What if the smoke was a kind of…a kind of, well, road.
Like the sacbe. An ancient, hidden road of the mind, instead of a goat track through the hills.
Carefully holding the pipe I tugged the creosote leaves free. I didn’t want to spill the herbs. They were contaminated enough from the dust of the road. Whatever power they held might already be lost.
I set the pipe down on my thigh and struck a match. In the stinking flare, I noticed that the matchbook cover had a green rooster on it, with the name of some tavern. I took the green bird to be a good sign and picked the pipe up again. I had never smoked, but almost every adult in New Albion did. I had seen hundreds of pipes being lit.
Hold the match close. Take a gentle drag, pull the pipe away, exhale. Had the herbs caught? One more time with the match. Smoke came with that breath, almost choking me, but it was that sweet, cloying smoke that had wreathed the Mayan sorcerer’s head back on the sacbe. It tasted…well, not good. Right, maybe.
Cautiously, I puffed again. My throat tickled, kept trying to cough, even as my nose started to run, but I inhaled the smoke. I didn’t know what I was expecting—stone dragons, or an army of little men with jade swords. What I got was a lungful of smoke that almost made me cough all over again.
I bent over wheezing, trying not to joggle the pipe too much. I heard a flutter. As I turned to look I thought I saw a trace of green in the darkness of my little cell. Had the Mayan’s bird flown by?
Another puff. Then another.
I smoked the pipe down to nothing. It did little but irritate my lungs. I looked at the little jade oblong, visible in the faint green light that filled my cell. It was nothing but a toy.
Why had I placed my faith in a nameless sorcerer? I’d never been invisible, just foolish. No one had met us on the sacbe except in a fevered dream.
Then I tried to close my eyes and rest.
There was another place on the other side of my eyes. I was still in my little metal cell aboard the Comète, but the walls around me were no more than a green fog. It was little different from my idea about the sacbe of the spirit. Everywhere I looked the world stretched before me like an open road.
The pipe had been no toy. I should be frightened, but that was not within me at that moment.
Above me and a little bit forward, I could see a soft green glow that I knew was the heart of Lugano. A hard glint hovered nearby. His pistol. Forward of that, in the next cabin that I could see three more hearts: Father Kramer and two men that seemed familiar.
The false priests from the truck with the missiles.
Somehow, they were together, Father Kramer and these men who sought to shoot down his aeroplane. Who was betraying whom?
They were all crazed, I decided, mad for power or God or the beauty of their weapons. Turning away from them, I looked further along the spirit road with my new eyes.
Southwest, away from the river and into New Albion, it was as if I watched fireflies in the spring. A whole city full of soft hearts and hard weapons, from the shanties by the river all the way up to the big houses on the tops of the hills well above our family’s home. With that thought, I could see Mama in our house on Rondo Street. Then I spotted Father Lavigne, and Rodger’s parents and his little sister, and down in his office by the river, Papa with his pistol at his side.
North of the river were tiny glows, the field mice and foxes of the scrubland, mixed with the larger, slower hearts of the goats and cattle that ranged there.
I looked west toward Our Lady of American Sorrows. The monastery was like a box of fireflies glowering with weapons. Rodger’s heart still beat, a soft green lost in its depths.
And where were the missiles? If I could see the things I knew, surely I could see them. I looked back toward the river, scanning from the monastery toward town. It took me a little while but I found them, four lances of fire pulsing in the heart of shantytown.
Those two false priests in their truck down at the river had been waiting for the men who slept out on the beach. The men whose dosses and fires Rodger and I had passed by when we’d gone to search for this very aeroplane.
Seeing the missiles had drawn my eye back to the aeroplane again. Right before me, blooming with a fiery glare of hate, was something I did not understand. There were six hard-edged glints that somehow also shared the soft glow of the living hearts around me. Even as I watched their glow seemed to pulse higher, as if responding to my view.
They were inside the aeroplane with me, in a forward hold. With a sudden certainty I knew these were what had brought the Mayan sorcerer down from his jungle kingdom. These were the rocks on which my great king—the Pope—would founder.
I realized that they could be only one thing. Without considering what I did, I moved toward them, passing through the wall of my cell as if it were a fog. I stood among six long cylinders of some finely polished metal, carefully racked in the Comète’s hold. There was a warning stenciled on the side of each.
Danger: matériaux nucléaire. Ne manipulez pas.
Though I had very little French, it was as if a voice spoke within my head. Danger. Nuclear material. Do not handle.
These were atom bombs.
Some things are too dangerous even to put in textbooks. So ours, which came from Londres or Boston or Nieu Amsterdam, always years out of date, merely talked about the Pope leading the free world to a victorious peace in the Second Great War. But the headmaster at the Latin School, Dr. Souza, thought some things were too dangerous not to be taught.
This was not old history. Though I barely remembered it, the teachers at the Latin School had lived through the war. We were taught in fourth form, not out of textbooks, but simply from their mouths and old books of clippings and letters, wire recordings off the radio.
The Second Great War had ended abruptly after the French Armée de l’Aire had struck Sevastapol and Beirut with atom bombs. The shocked Imperialists in St. Petersburg and Constantinople sued for peace. With the collapse of the European Front, their Brasilian and Japanese allies were quickly forced to follow. The newly-elected Pope Louis-Charles III had gone on wireless and sworn on the blood of Christ never to use the terrible weapons again so long as peace reigned.
As Mr. Fentress had said in fourth form civics, if you thought about the exact meaning of the Pope’s words, that pledge of peace was no pledge at all.
Now Father Kramer, surely acting on orders from the Pope, had brought those weapons to the Americas where they had never been before. Had brought them to New Albion, where they had never been wanted. Had brought his own stew of plots and counterplots to threaten us all.
No wonder the little man with the jade and feathers had come down from his jungle home. We were all lucky he had not arrived at the head of an army with demons on the wing. As a Catholic, I did not believe in demons. As an American, I believed in the natives and their powers.
“Sometimes only another stone is required,” he had said.
I walked to the skin of the Comète and stepped through. Rodger and I had failed on our own, and I had lost him to the false priests. Father Kramer had betrayed me to a cell. I had only one place left to go for help.
Papa.
Moving through the green-lit town among the glowing hearts and shimmering guns, I imagined that if the people around me saw me at all I was no more than a bird to them. Perhaps it had been the sorcerer himself who had reclaimed his feather at the aeroplane’s door last night. I found myself hoping he had watched over me since our meeting.
I flew along Water Avenue and lifted myself over the shantytown. The fiery lances of the missiles drew my eye again, scattered in four different places among the hovels of the poor. On foot, I was not sure I could find them again, unless some of the sorcerer’s power were still with me.
It was enough to know that they were there.
Up the hill, I saw that Mama was making her way through the streets toward St. Cipriano’s. She did not ordinarily go to Mass on Thursday morning, but with me missing and Papa working amid the crisis, she must have needed prayer. Or perhaps confession. If I’d still had hands in my bird form I would have crossed myself for her.
Then I was at Papa’s office close to the Civil Palace. The Ministry of Commercial Affairs was one of the tallest buildings in town, four stories with cornices and limestone gargoyles over the high, narrow windows. Circling around it, I could see the hearts and weapons within. I saw that there were cellars, which I had never known, and more hearts beat deep beneath the ground. These were darkened or inflamed, hearts in pain, surrounded by more weapons.
Many more weapons.
Papa worked atop a prison.
I wondered at this. New Albion had one small jail, in the Civil Palace proper, where miscreants or drunks were kept. Serious criminals—murderers, rapists, incorrigible thieves—were sent to Teixeira to stand before the Archbishop’s court. So we’d been told in Latin School.
But people disappeared sometimes. I knew this. Rodger’s cousin’s father had vanished while out hunting. Everyone said a jaguar had gotten him, but no body had been found. A man who lived further down Rondo Street had never come home from his job at the Coffee Exchange one day the summer I was fourteen. They said he’d been mugged and thrown in the river.
Oh, Papa. You lecture me on freedom, but you work atop a secret prison.
Still, who else did I have?
Even if he had turned into another man with a gun. I had come to fear what guns did to the men who held them just as much as I feared what they did to the men they were pointed at. There was no gun bigger than the atom bombs the Pope had sent to New Albion.
That thought decided me.
I circled the building twice more before I dove for Papa’s window. The glass rippled against me as I passed through it, then I was in his office. He glanced up from his desk, looked at me without seeing me, rubbed his eyes and went back to studying some papers spread before him.
I found a perch on the back of a chair by the window. How would I speak to him? Would he believe it was me? I wasn’t sure I was ready to give up the spirit road yet, even if I knew how. I did not think I could ever find my way back to this place, and I intended to go for Rodger once I had set Papa on the problem of the atom bombs.
The door opened and another man walked in. I recognized him as someone I’d seen in the halls here, but we’d never been introduced.
“Fizeram-no,” said the newcomer. He was speaking Portuguese! The language of our Brasilian oppressors in the Second Great War. “Os papéis em Teixeira e em Nouveau Orleans estão carregando a história, que significa que Londres e Avignon sabem tudo sobre ela.”
Even stranger, I understood him, though I had no Portuguese. They have done it, he had said. Everyone knew, even in Londres and Avignon.
Done what?
“Tolos,” said Papa. Fools.
I had no idea my father spoke Portuguese. That chilled my heart.
“Idiots,” he went on. “Poderiam ter mantido esse segredo por anos. Uma explosão no Matto Grosso nunca observado. Mas preferem cantar como galos de um alto do celeiro.”
No one would have noticed an explosion in the Matto Grosso for years, if they hadn’t crowed about it like roosters in the barn
.Papa and the other had to be speaking of a Brasilian atom bomb. So the Pope hadn’t been the first to bring those weapons to the Americas. No wonder the Mayan had come to New Albion. He needed to stop their spread.
“Now the bombs are here,” I said aloud.
“Now the bombs are here,” Papa said, echoing my words without seeming to hear me.
“What?” asked the other man.
Papa stared at him. “I didn’t speak.”
“You said something about bombs here.”
“Atom bombs in New Albion,” I said.
“Atom bombs in New Albion,” Papa said. He clapped his hands over his mouth for a moment.
The other man frowned. “Are you well, Hubert?”
“I…I…” Papa never stammered, but he did so now. “I may have taken ill.” He wiped his brow with a kerchief. “The pressure of the past few days.”
“Tenha um cuidado. Estes não são dias seguros.” Have a care. These are dangerous days. He walked out, leaving Papa to stare at the wall.
I watched, wondering. Papa had never spoken Portuguese to me. He must have known something of the language, his mother was Brasilian, but Papa was born and raised here in New Albion. I never knew my grandmother. She’d died during the war.
During the Brasilian occupation, I realized, though Papa never spoke of it. What had happened to her?
Perhaps Papa was a spy.
Why would he be discussing explosions, in Portuguese, here and now? Because if he discussed them in English, too many people who might overhear would understand.
Neither Papa nor the other man had been surprised when Papa had repeated what I’d said about atom bombs. Surprised that he’d said it, yes. But not surprised at what he’d said.
Papa was a spy. Or a traitor. I glowered at him. The pistol had changed my father into someone I did not want to know. He had betrayed me as thoroughly as Father Kramer. My own father.
No one was what I thought them to be.
“Peter?” Papa whispered after a few minutes.
Without answering, I left the office. There was nothing I could do here. The world would have to save itself from an atom war, and my father with it. Rodger needed my help before the power of the spirit road left me.
My personal sacbe took me high into the sky and west, toward Our Lady of American Sorrows.
Approaching from the spirit road, the monastery continued to resemble a box of fireflies. I could see the lines of the buildings of the courtyard sketched against the outer walls. The beams of the structures were limned bright in my vision. Rodger was in a monk’s cell in one of the towers. There was no one close to him, though the base of the tower was guarded. Trucks in the courtyard held more fire-lance missiles along with other weapons that glowed. Grenadoes, perhaps, or mines.
I did not want to know.
Instead I flew into the tower that held Rodger until I found myself outside his cell. I landed in the hall.
He lay on a cot, half sleeping. His heart flickered as if he were weakened or dying. There were no bars between us, just a wooden door someone had bolted from the outside. I had to go to him. I reached for the bolt to draw back, and in that single material act found myself off of the spirit road.
I was inside Our Lady of American Sorrows in the flesh.
For a moment I was angry at myself for letting the spell loose. How had that happened?
Because I was thinking of myself as being in the building, not on the spirit road, when I had reached for the bolt. It made me want to swear, that I had so easily given up the power lent to me by the Mayan.
Then I was amazed that I was there at all. This was a miracle of both God and sorcery, that I could come here to help Rodger in his extreme need.
And finally I was glad not to still be confined inside Father Kramer’s Comète.
Enough. I was here with all my clothes and wits alike. I checked my pockets. The jade pipe was gone, as were the cigarettes, which of course I had not been holding when I’d smoked the pipe. I still had the matchbook with the green rooster on the cover.
I tugged open the bolt and stepped in to see Rodger.
He was pale, hot and sweaty. Both of his eyes were blackened. His cheek had been split, by a beating I supposed, and badly taped back together.
No wonder he was unguarded. Rodger would no more walk out of here on his own than he would fly without an aeroplane.
That was my department, apparently.
“Rodger,” I whispered. “It’s me. Peter.”
“Ah…” he said. “I never…” He shuddered.
I felt cold, too, a freezing tang of fear like a dagger in my chest. I’d never seen a dead man before we’d found the priest in the river yesterday, and I’d certainly never watched someone die. But Rodger looked close. Too close.
“Don’t worry. I’ll get you to the Misericorde St. Cosmas in town. They’ll fix you right up.”
“Peter.” Rodger’s voice was a strained whisper. “The Pope, Louis-Charles…he’s…”
“I know,” I said, thinking of the atom bombs back at the landing field.
“They will kill him, I think.” Rodger gasped. “So many questions.”
Kill who? The Pope? Father Kramer? “Why the missiles,” I wondered aloud.
“Cover their tracks.” Rodger’s breath heaved as his chest shuddered.
“Enough,” I said. “Ups-a-boy.” I gathered him up off the cot, his arm across my shoulder. Rodger couldn’t quite stand, and his right foot seemed to be broken, but he held his weight on the left.
This was my fault. Everything that had happened to Rodger. I should have followed him into Our Lady of American Sorrows the night before. I shouldn’t have left him here alone.
As we stepped out of his cell, I shot the bolt again. We shuffled to the stairs, he and I, and started down them. There was no one on the landing. When we made the next level down, the door at the base banged loudly and voices speaking French floated up the stairs.
“…trois bataillons des parachutistes dans Teixeira,” someone said. I could almost understand that.
They clattered up the stairs, a deeper voice complaining, “Brésiliens damnés par Dieu. Teixeira est une ville ouverte. Aucunes forces là, par traité!“
The first voice laughed. “Aucuns militaires dans New Albion par traité, l’un ou l’autre.”
The rest of them laughed at that too, five or six voices at least. They couldn’t be more than a flight below us. I shoved at the nearest door, which popped open to the walkway atop the monastery wall. Rodger groaned as I dragged him out then pushed the door shut. We leaned against the wall, trying not to be seen from the courtyard below.
A few seconds later the squad inside the tower must have reached Rodger’s cell. I heard someone bellow incoherent rage, then, “Jésus Le Christ! Cette ville est-elle pleine des garçons d’oiseau? Ils toute la mouche foutue partie!“
Some fragment of the Mayan’s spirit road stayed with me, because I could swear I understood that. Bird boys, he called us.
Boys. Not boy. Which meant Father Kramer had told them of my escape. Of course, he’d had the false priests aboard the Comète this morning.
I smiled at Rodger. “We’re going to fly out of here.” I had no idea what to do next.
“Don’t let them kill the Pope,” he muttered, and sagged into my shoulder.
Craning my neck to look down into the courtyard, I saw two more of the Bedford trucks, loaded with weapons crates. A few real Cistercians scurried about down there, while a number of the false priests worked on weapons or exercised in a circle.
Though taking a truck would have been nice there was no way to get to it without being seen by the eyes of dozens.
I heard more shouting from inside the tower, then the door slammed open in front of me. Two of the Frenchmen raced out, rifles ready, right past Rodger and me. They looked over the wall at the river, then down at the courtyard.
We were trapped. Horrified, I prayed for some shred of the invisibility I had enjoyed the night before.
The two in front of us turned to face the courtyard, shouting, “Avez-vous vu ce garçon? Le petit bâtard glissé librement!“
A man cleaning a rifle pointed right at Rodger and me. He began to grin.
The two false priests turned. We weren’t four meters apart. The one who had been shouting turned red, opening his mouth for some new round of insults even as the other raised his machine pistol at us.
We had seconds to live. Still holding Rodger’s shoulder, I swept us both over the edge of the wall and into the air, forty meters or more above the river. I prayed for deep water and good lungful of air.
The last thing I heard was the surprised laughter of the Frenchmen.
When I’d flown out from town along the spirit road, that mystical sacbe the sorcerer’s pipe had opened for me, I had been like a hawk or even an angel. I had soared above the earth with no care for the consequences of gravity.
It must have gone to my head, because for one tiny moment as we jumped, I somehow expected to soar again. Instead, Rodger and I tumbled out away from the wall and the cliff below, falling over the river as the dead priest must have a day or two before us.
We couldn’t have been falling for more than a few seconds but I could have written books during my time up there in the air. There was a peaceful aspect to that moment of inevitability. Rodger and I were free of false priests and atomic bombs and my traitorous Papa, flying like birds. There were no more choices. We were committed, fleeing for our lives from bullets and bad intentions alike.
I had a brief hope that Rodger might have been free from pain too as he floated like a doll, loose in the air, when the flat hand of the river slapped us both into a deep, cold darkness.
My ears rang as hard as they ever had when I fell off a bicycle. All the air left my lungs in a rush. Even as my mouth opened to gasp, I stopped myself. I was deep down in the pool at the river’s bend below Bullback Hill, the water almost black except for the pale curtains of bubbles. I wanted to swim, to find the surface, knowing I had seconds to live.
But where to go?
Even underwater I could hear. There were dull thuds, small sounds like raindrops in mud. More bubbles flashed around me, darting in lines.
Bullets. From above.
At least I’d found up. Which way was downstream?
I struck out for what I hoped was the base of the cliff, trying to get so close to the wall they couldn’t see me from above. I needed to breathe with a dire desperation that made my body shake. Instead I swam. Still the water thudded with more lines of bubbles, but somehow none of the bullets found me.
Then I hit a rock head on and bounced upward only to bump something else which danced at my touch.
Rodger.
My face broke the surface just where his neck met his shoulder. Rodger floated on his back above me, dancing in time to the bullets striking his chest.
I finally cried then, not caring whether they could hear my sobs at the top of the wall, as I cowered beneath my friend and the bullets rained down on us from above.
After a while the lead stopped falling and the water carried us away.
“We’re free, buddy,” I whispered to Rodger a few hours later. I’d dragged him to shore about a kilometer upstream from New Albion, getting us both settled in a brake of juniper and low bushes.
Rodger had nothing to say, of course, but I had no one else to talk to.
Everything had failed. I could not stop whatever plot Father Kramer was up to with the atom bombs. Papa was a traitor and a Brasilian spy. If I’d understood what the Frenchmen were saying, and what Papa’s friend had said earlier, the world was about to go to war again. Atom bombs in the Matto Grosso and Brasilian paratroopers in Teixeira.
The whole world was crazy and I couldn’t even save my best friend. No wonder the natives hated us. The Mayans and all the rest had always known us Europeans were worthless. Rather than fighting, they simply had the patience to wait us out.
I didn’t have that much patience. And I knew where some of the missiles were. Right in the heart of the shantytown.
“Rodger,” I said, whispering to the ants already crawling in his ear. “I’m going to town. I’m sorry, but I have to shoot down that jet. I know you’ll understand.”
He didn’t answer but I figured he understood.
My one advantage was that no one knew it was me who had been in and out of Father Kramer’s aeroplane, then escaped from Our Lady of American Sorrows in a hail of bullets. The Frenchmen must have thought me dead, and Father Kramer only knew me as Peter. There were fifty boys named Peter in New Albion. Surely the plotters had larger concerns than their search for me.
So I walked down the road that became Water Avenue as if I had everyday business. I walked with the ox carts and the motorcycles and the taxis and everyone else just as if it were a normal Thursday in New Albion.
No one stopped me. No one looked at me.
Soon enough I would reach the shantytown. Any of those kids tried to hassle me, I would show them what real anger was.
It was enough to make me wish I had a gun, just like Papa.
Feral cats slunk along muddy rivulets between the ragged huts. Even in hot summer, these people managed damp and sticky filth. Small children with silvered hair sucked on their hands, staring at me, while larger kids of several races whispered and followed me and sent runners onward. There were almost no adults around, which surprised me. Everyone knew the people in the shantytown were lazy. If they were willing to do honest work they could live like honest people.
I supposed that some of them must work as maids or janitors or whatever, but why did they have to live here?
The shantytown wasn’t really that large. It occupied a long, shallow triangle with the point out by the Bishop’s Head, the flat side bounded by eight or so blocks of Water Avenue. But within that small space it was complicated. Tiny alleys wound into one another, too kinked and narrow to even ride a bicycle along. Buildings seemed to spring up every way I turned, while the whispering kids followed me, giggling.
I didn’t know where the missiles were, exactly, but I knew they were here. I knew they were spread out. I couldn’t be far from one or more of them.
Stopping, I tried to think. The power of the spirit road was gone from me. I could no longer see the lances of fire. But I had seen the crates they had come in. The missiles had to be over two meters long. Not something you could just tuck under a dresser. Some of these shanties weren’t even that big.
“Hey.”
It was one of the whispering kids. He had on a ragged cotton shirt and an old pair of underwear. He was barefoot, with dark skin, waxy-colored hair and green eyes, and could have been any age up to fourteen perhaps. A small fourteen. None of his kind bothered to go to school, so no one kept track. The whispering kid had his hands open, spread wide and facing me.
“Leave me alone,” I warned. I tried to growl like Lugano, but mostly I squeaked.
“Oh, we are.” He snickered, sounding for a moment just like Rodger.
I hated him for that.
“You looking for those Frenchies?” the kid asked.
Ah. The false priests had not made friends here. I woke from my stumbling rage, a little. “Yeah.”
The kid shrugged. “They spread money around.”
I’ll bet they did. “Don’t got no money,” I said.
The kid shrugged again. “Some folks took it. Some turned away.” He looked defensive for a moment, as if ready to fight at his own words. “We’re New Albion, too.”
“And the Pope is our—” Friend, I started to say, but I of all people knew that wasn’t true. No friend of New Albion would have sent us such terrible trouble.
“Pope’s a long way from here,” said the kid. “Frenchies, they ain’t so nice to us. Money ain’t everything.”
I was starting to understand how he thought. It seemed weird to say, even to myself, but I wasn’t so different from this kid. “They leave something here?” I asked cautiously.
The kid nodded. “What you going to do?”
“Stop their crap.”
“How?”
A good question. Smart kid. I hadn’t thought about that. Hadn’t thought beyond finding one or more of the missiles. I couldn’t even see the airfield from here. Whatever the plot—and I still didn’t understand it, exactly, but surely Father Kramer didn’t plan to die—someone shooting at the Comète from here had to wait until it took off.
Up on the rooftop of, say, my house, you could see the landing field just fine.
I took the plunge. Everyone I’d depended on in life had betrayed me, so I would trust this kid, my casual enemy, instead. “Rondo Street,” I told the kid.
“We know who you are. Meet you at the mills in the alley in an hour.”
Because he was who he was, I asked the question I had to ask. “What do you want for it?”
The kid stared at me for a little while then laughed. “We are not beggars. Whatever you can do. Maybe just don’t forget about us later.”
These kids were going to steal missiles from the false priests for love of the city?
“I’ll make it right,” I said, flushing with shame.
I ran all the way home. Still no one looked at me. There were Civil Guard jitneys cruising the streets, but there was no shooting today. People clustered around newspapers or wireless sets, talking about war. No one but me seemed to know what was in the hold of the jet aeroplane down at the landing field.
As I ran I saw flashes of green in the corner of my eye, as if the sorcerer’s spirit road were following me. Or perhaps just a bright tropical bird on the wing.
I burst into the house to find Mama cooking stew.
“Peter Ignacio Fallworth,” she shrieked, “where have you been!”
I cannoned into her, hugging. “Mama.” My voice was almost a sob. “Don’t…don’t…” I stepped back.
She looked at me. “My God, you’ve been, what, beaten? Did the Civil Guard do this to you?”
Looking down at myself, I realized that my clothes were muddy, bloody and torn. Mostly Rodger’s blood, but still… “Mama. Listen. This is life and death. Make as much stew as you can. People are coming. We need to feed them, treat them like guests. I am going to give them my books, my lesson books and the others. My whole library. Please, please, if we have money in the house, we need to give them that, too.”
“Have you lost your—” she began, but I interrupted her.
“Please,” I said. “You must listen to me, Mama. I cannot explain now, but Papa is in trouble. New Albion is in trouble. The world is in trouble. I might be able to stop some of it. If I do nothing, it will all happen anyway.” I took her shoulders. “Rodger is dead, Mama. I almost died. There are plots all over the city.”
She screamed then, bringing her towel to her face. She quickly calmed herself and dropped her hands to her sides. “I would believe that you are mad,” Mama said, “but I’ve heard that they found Brother Lazare in the river yesterday. And your father…I do not know how you knew of his troubles, but your father has been arrested.”
Traitor. Did he deserve it? Had he been a jailor, or a prisoner all along? Or did this mean Papa was innocent? “Listen to what is happening in town, Mama. If you want New Albion back, do as I ask.”
I ran into my room, leaving her to think. That is always best with Mama. She does not like to be pushed.
There I changed my clothes then grabbed all my books, even my treasured science fictions, and hauled them out to the dining table. I stacked them there and went back to my closet. I owned four pairs of shoes. I could give two away.
Papa’s lectures on colonialism were finally making sense to me. We had made a colony of part of our town. If I was going to free the world from the Pope’s atom bombs and Father Kramer’s madness, I might as well start by freeing the poor of New Albion.
Rodger. I stopped, my breath shuddering. He would have been laughing alongside me right now. Clothes, then, and my Easter money, and my second-best ruler and protractor.
Back in the kitchen Mama had three stew pots going. “You are a man now, Peter, and I will trust you,” she said without turning around. “See that my trust is not misplaced.”
About an hour later a rubber-tired cart pulled by two mules trundled up the alley with a bulky tarp in back. The same silver-haired kid was driving. Three more kids from the shantytown rode with him on the board.
“Heavy,” he said with a grin. “The mules, they are slow.”
“Can we get the cargo up on the roof?” I asked.
The kid shrugged.
When the cart stopped, he carefully set the brake, then tugged the tarp free. There was a heap of trash in the bed. I opened my mouth to protest just as the trash cascaded off. Half a dozen more kids stood and stretched. They were all smaller than me, but as I looked at their faces, I realized they were my age or older.
Mayans? No, they were pale. Europeans, just as my family was. Just not enough food, like a dog raised half starving.
I was glad I could smell Mama’s stew even from here.
The kids tugged ladders from their wagon, swarmed the wall of our house, and quickly brought the missiles out one by one.
This was the first time I had seen the weapons up close. Each had legs folded beneath it and sat in a sort of sleeve. They looked simple to operate. I hoped they were.
“Up, up, up,” shouted the silver-haired kid. Within minutes all four missiles were out of sight.
“Tie your mules by the mills,” I said. “We have a meal for you inside.”
The silver-haired kid looked at me funny. “We don’t eat up here.”
“You do now.”
They unset the brakes, moved the cart up the loading dock of one of the old mills, and set the mules by the horse trough. One of the kids filled the trough with water from the hand pump while I led the others inside.
Mama had every bowl in the house set out, the stew pots bubbling on her stove. “Welcome,” she said with a fixed smile.
I was embarrassed, for everyone. What had I been thinking?
“Ma’am,” said the silver-haired kid. He looked at me.
I nodded. I knew my smile was as tight as Mama’s.
He took a bowl and dished out a few spoonfuls of stew.
“Fill it,” said Mama. “There’s plenty.” Her smile was more natural now, perhaps at our guest’s shyness.
“Thank you, ma’am.” He paused. “Uh, I’m Reg.”
“And I’m Mrs. Fallworth,” said Mama. “Your friends are welcome to eat, too.”
The kids from the shantytown fell to the stew like they had been starving. Which they had, I supposed. While they ate, I showed them my books, my clothes, everything I wanted to give them. “These are from Rodger,” I said.
Reg looked at me over his emptying bowl. Around him the other kids, none of whom had said their names, slurped and spooned away at their stew. They stared at the two of us.
“Don’t know no Rodger,” Reg said.
“And you never will.” The thought made me terribly sad.
“Can’t take your stuff.”
“Why not?”
“People will say we stole it.”
I looked at the pile while spoons clinked. “But I’m giving it to you.”
“Still say we stole it.”
I was frustrated. I didn’t know what to do. “I have to help you,” I said. “You helped me.”
“Don’t forget us,” said Reg.
“Peter,” Mama said, her tone sharp.
Then Reg set down his bowl. “Roof time,” he said.
They all set down their bowls, empty or not, and scrambled out of the house. I looked at Mama, who was picking up her rosary and shawl. She nodded at me, such small blessing as she could give.
I followed the little crowd out the door in time to see Reg fly backward off the roof and land hard in the alley. He sat back up and groaned.
Crud, I thought even as I scrambled up the ladder.
Lugano was up there with the missiles. This time he didn’t have a pistol in his fist, but somehow he seemed bigger than ever. He also had a swollen nose and stitches on his lip.
“Pietro.” His voice was thicker, too, as if he’d bitten his tongue.
“Lugano.” I couldn’t think what to say. “Welcome to my home.”
“Grazie.”
He didn’t seem moved to attack me. There was no way I could fight him anyway. He did seem willing to listen. I had to try. “What Father Kramer is doing…he’s wrong, Lugano, very wrong.”
“È il mio padre. Devo seguirlo.”
I almost understood that. “You don’t have to do what he says, Lugano. Would God want what is being done here?”
“Il Papa lo ha indotto ad essere. Il Papa has made it be.”
“This is beyond even the Pope, Lugano,” I said softly. “Why would Father Kramer shoot down his own aeroplane? Who was going to be on it?”
Lugano stared at his feet, wearing the same pointy alligator shoes with which he had pushed me back into my little hole on the aeroplane. “Lugano.”
Had he not known about the missiles?
He looked up at me again, his eyes smoldering. “Padre Kramer, he beat me, lo ha battuto, when you fled.” Lugano touched the stitches on his lip. “He said I done it. Regolili liberi. Set you to free.”
I tried to imagine Father Kramer setting on Lugano with a stick or the butt of a pistol. Lugano was three times the priest’s size.
“I’m sorr—”
“He told me find you,” Lugano interrupted. “But before, when we first have you, he told me non ci è necessità di danneggiarlo. To not-a hurt you.” The huge man smiled. “So I find you. Still I no hurt you.”
I glanced at the missiles. “Now what?”
“They think I am beast, big Lugano,” Lugano said. “They talk before me. Il Papa, there is a…a…conspirazione…a plot. Not strong enough before the Turk, they say. Not stand up to the Russian. A man more powerful is-a needed. We make-a changes. Il Papa order Padre Kramer here with the big bombs to scare Brasil and the Turk. Padre Kramer say this is the time for change. He take the big bombs away from Il Papa, make himself the new Papa.” Lugano stared down again. “It is wrong.”
“That’s what I said.” The coup wasn’t against New Albion, I realized. It was against Avignon, against the Pope himself, using the nuclear weapons as a lever of some sort. There were plots and more plots afoot. No wonder the Brasilians had moved against Teixeira—they must have gotten word about the atom bombs being here. Despite the cold fear in my heart, I kept my voice soft. “You don’t have to do this. Any of it. This is wrong, wrong enough to kill the world.”
“I will not. But you no hurt Padre Kramer. This Lugano cannot do.”
I walked over to the missiles, glanced back to see Reg and the other kids at the edge of the roof. They watched Lugano nervously.
The Comète was visible, right where I expected to see it. One shot, maybe two. The false priests—Father Kramer’s men—had more missiles at Our Lady of American Sorrows. They still had their plot, shooting down the departing aeroplane to cover Father Kramer’s tracks. Everything would be blamed on us here in New Albion, or perhaps the Brasilians.
A perfect excuse for a war, I realized, and confusion for that coup against the Pope. Father Kramer would be hidden here at Our Lady of American Sorrows, with his terrible weapons ready to be used.
But I had missiles too. Father Kramer and the atom bombs were still on board. I only had to get around Lugano and I could destroy—
Then I realized what I was thinking. Just as the pistol at Papa’s belt had done to him, these missiles were making me into someone I didn’t wish to be. The Mayan had wanted me to solve this problem, but surely he had not wanted a battle.
The bells struck the hour across town, at St. Cipriano’s and the other churches and down at the Civil Palace. It was three in the afternoon.
Bells.
“Reg,” I said. “Lugano and I are going to the middle of town. There will be a disturbance. When the Civil Guard is busy with that, take as many people as you can find and mob the landing field. Stand close to the jet, don’t let it leave. Don’t fight them. You will just be shot. Can you do that?”
The silver-haired kid nodded at me, suspicious. “Yes. Can you?”
“I think so, but I’ll need your cart. I must take a missile.”
Lugano walked over to the weapons, leaned down and picked one up. The strain made the tendons of his neck stand out, but he managed it. “I carry one. Enough?”
“Enough,” I said. “No cart, then. We need to go to St. Cipriano’s now and see Father Lavigne.”
Once we climbed down from the roof, Reg wrapped Lugano’s missile in the tarp from the rubbish cart. It looked almost as if the big Italian were carrying a coffin. The shantytown boys took their cart and left while Lugano and I trotted to St. Cipriano’s. Mama was nowhere to be seen.
“You want what?” Father Lavigne demanded, glancing nervously at Lugano.
“Ring the fire bell,” I said. “Get people in the streets. The other churches will pick up the peal if you begin it.”
“But there is no fire.”
“There will be,” I said darkly. “There is a plot against the Pope himself, and it has come to New Albion. We can stop it now, peacefully, before the next Great War breaks out. But you need to ring the fire bell to begin things.”
Father Lavigne shook his head. “Peter—”
Then Mama stepped through the church doors and took the priest’s hand. “Peter is touched by God this day, Father. Please. You have known us for many years. Hear me. Please. My husband is in prison, the city is in danger. My son, maybe he can save us.”
“The Archbishop will have my head,” said Father Lavigne, but now he was nodding.
“As soon as you can,” I said.
“Grazie,” Lugano added.
As we ran toward Water Avenue, I asked the big man, “Do you know how to shoot that thing?”
“Si.”
“Is it big enough to destroy a building or something?”
“No.” He considered that as we jogged along, tongue sticking out of one corner of his mouth. “Make a big hole in a wall, maybe.”
Perfect. I knew exactly what I would do. “I will show you the target, then.”
We came out onto Water Avenue near the Ministry of Commercial Affairs. I tried to imagine the layout as I had seen it from the spirit road, the people in the cellars. The prison where Papa was. They had been below the entire width of the building. Where would ‘a big hole in a wall’ do them, and Papa, the most good? After a moment’s thought I pointed out a series of tiny windows set at street level, admitting light for what I had always thought were storage rooms. They stretched to each side of the main entrance.
“Can you hit one of the windows mid-way between the entrance and the corner on the right side?” I hoped to God no one was in the cell we would be aiming at, especially not Papa, but I had to hit it somewhere. Then the prisoners could escape, carrying my father and their stories with them.
“Si.” Lugano grinned, set the missile down, and pulled the tarp off.
People immediately drew back from us, muttering, but then the fire bell began to ring at St. Cipriano’s. Two Civil Guardsmen came out on the portico of the Ministry building and stared at us.
The legs snapped into place on the launcher’s frame. Lugano grunted as he lifted the back end off the ground, essentially leveling the missile. He opened a little panel in the sleeve and toggled two buttons. “Un momento.”
“One moment is all you’re going to get,” I said, watching the Civil Guardsmen draw their pistols and start toward us. The bells at Santa Clara and All Angels’ picked up the fire signal almost at the same time, though the carillon at the Civil Palace was still silent. I stepped around the missile and put myself between it and the approaching Guardsmen.
“Hey,” said one of them. “Aren’t you Hubert Fallworth’s kid?”
The other looked thoughtful.
“Down now,” said Lugano in an ordinary voice.
I dropped to the cobbles, slamming my knees and elbows painfully onto the ground as the world roared and flame washed across my back. A moment later the earth tossed me upward in perfect silence.
Something was wrong with my ears.
A shadow flashed over me, a big man practically in flight.
I sat up to see Lugano fighting both of the Guardsmen. The missile’s launch frame lay toppled next to me. I put one hand on it to support myself as I rose, but it burned me.
I held on despite the pain in my palm. I could barely stand as it was.
“Hey,” I shouted, but I could hear nothing.
People were running around with their mouths moving as if they screamed. Smoke billowed from the Ministry of Commercial Affairs, much more than I would have expected from one big hole in a wall. Everything was quiet as midnight.
Something was definitely wrong with my ears.
“Hey!” I shouted again.
Lugano finished knocking heads together, came and picked me up to sit on his right shoulder. I could feel him shouting, feel the muscles move in his neck as he yelled. People stopped running, turned to face him and me.
“There is a coup,” I said as loudly as I could, though I could hear nothing. These people wouldn’t understand about the Pope, but they would understand about New Albion, since the shootings this week. “Some of you go into the basement of the Ministry right now. Some of you go the landing field and search the aeroplane right now. Everyone must know what is being done to us.”
I could see the crowd twist and turn, like an animal searching for its tail. They were worried. They were afraid. I could only imagine the noise of their panic, though I could hear none of it.
Then they went. First a trickle, a few men picking their way into the smoke and dust of the shattered façade of the Ministry building as others began to stumble outward from the wreckage. Some more men began to head east, toward the landing field. More followed. The trickle became a flood, and then it seemed like half the city was on the move.
By the time the Civil Guard arrived in force to beat Lugano and me into submission, the real fight was over. I was happy to be arrested by New Albion’s Guard because it kept me away from the false priests with their machine pistols.
I was more happy that I had not become another man with a gun.
A green bird came to me that night in my cell beneath the Civil Palace. There being no more prison for the politicals, they’d put me in with the drunks. I didn’t know where Lugano was, but I hoped he was going to be all right.
Three men snored on bunks around me, though I still could not hear. A fourth sat and muttered at the wall, which made my deafness a blessing, though I prayed that my affliction was temporary. None of them noticed when the bird flew through the barred window, circled the cell twice, and came to rest beside me.
I smiled at it, having little to say. Everything was out of my hands now.
The bird looked at me, cocking its head as if to see if the view differed between one eye and the other. It glowed slightly. I thought I could see the ripple of its heart. Then the bird shook itself, leaving me with a tiny jade idol in my hands as it vanished in a cloud of sparkling green dust.
Save for the idol, it might have been a dream. I did not look to see if it more resembled Rodger or the sorcerer. Instead I kept it pressed between my hands, expecting no magic and finding none.
My memories were enough. I thought about Rodger and prayed to St. Cipriano for my friend’s soul.
Later, Papa came for me. His white shirt was spattered with dust and blood and stained with smoke but he was smiling.
Nothing was said as the Civil Guard brought me from my cell, but I found I could dimly hear the clink of keys. On the long walk home, Papa began to talk about coffee mills and pressing the beans and what he hoped his redesigned mill would do for the economy of New Albion. His voice was tinny and high, but I was glad to hear it. Trucks rumbled past us through the streets, filled with straight-backed men heading for Ostia, but I did not need to look to see who they were.
Rodger would rest little more easily.
As we walked through town in dawn’s first light, I even heard a distant roar. The Comète rose from the landing field, banked above the town, and flew away. No tongues of fire followed it, no missiles deadly and true. I knew with a certainty that the beating green hearts of nuclear fire had left with Father Kramer. If there was going to be another Great War, it wasn’t going to start here in New Albion.
Papa nodded at the aeroplane. “Your large friend,” he said, interrupting his own lecture on milling and grinding, “he has stayed behind, throwing himself on the mercy of the abbot of Our Lady of American Sorrows.”
I smiled, knowing Lugano would safe.
At home there was nothing to do but put the jade idol away and listen to Papa rant about coffee and colonialism. He did not mention Brasil and I did not ask about his speaking Portuguese. I rather imagined I’d find myself before the ministerial junta before too long and did not want to know any more. Rodger would have his funeral soon, while I had unfinished business of a friendlier sort in shantytown. There were American sorrows enough for me to face.
It was enough for today that my father wore no gun, and that I wanted none for me, and that a green bird flew free and happy in the dusty summer skies of New Albion.
Photo by Michael Hiebert
Jay Lake lives in Portland, Oregon within sight of an 11,700 foot volcano. His fiction has appeared and/or is upcoming in Asimov's, Postscripts, Realms of Fantasy, and Æon among many other markets, as well as the critically acclaimed collection Greetings From Lake Wu. In addition to 44 Clowns , which he co-edited with Mike Brotherton, he is editor or co-editor of the Polyphony anthology series, All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, TEL: Stories and Exquisite Corpuscle.
Visit Jay Lake's website at http://www.jlake.com
Four Unforgettable Short Novels by the Hugo Award Nominee
Includes the Hugo Award finalist Novelette
"Into the Gardens of Sweet Night"
I t's the kind of place where two boys might uncover the pope's nuclear machinations in Latin America following the Second Great War; where embattled environmentalists might call down dragons from the sky; where a pair of almost-brothers might learn the truth about their people and themselves. It's the kind of place where a dog and his young man might embark on a journey fraught with peril to return to the fabled Gardens of Sweet Night.
It's the kind of place from which you may never want to return.
ISBN: 1-931305-02-1
On a Mission From God
G od has set you upon this Earth to fulfill a mission. When the last trump blows and blood flows in the streets, you will ride out with your brothers to spread war, famine, pestilence and death. You are a figure of Biblical terror. You have haunted imaginations for two millennia. You are the harbinger of doom. You are... A clown!?
Something's gone terribly wrong with the End Times. The four horsemen have been mistakenly incarnated as clowns. Figures of terror in the minds of four-year olds, harbingers of doom if you happen to be a cream pie. What's so damned scary about clowns anyway? Actually, everything.
Includes stories from master of magic realism Bruce Taylor, surrealist genius Ray Vukcevich, and nine more authors.
Read the book. Count the clowns. But don't sleep, because they'll eat you.
ISBN: 1-931305-03-X
Scorpius Digital Publishing Titles
44 Clowns: 11 stories of the 4 Clowns of the Apocalypse, Edited by Jay Lake and Mike Brotherton — Something has gone terribly wrong with the End Times.
After the Vikings, by G. David Nordley — Interwoven Stories of a Future Mars
The Algis Budrys Omnibus, Volume One — Some Will Not Die and selected short fiction
American Sorrows, by Jay Lake — Four short novels by the Hugo and Campbell Awards finalist.
Ariel, by Steven R. Boyett — A magical adventure through a world where fantasy and reality have collided, by the author of
Dark Corners, by Barry B. Longyear — A master of science fiction takes you to the darkest places in the human soul
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Fine Cuts, by Dennis Etchison — View the bright lights of Hollywood through the dark lens of Dennis Etchison’s imagination
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Hemogoblins, Stories to Chill the Blood, by Alan M. Clark and Friends — Stories to astound, startle, and amuse, illustrated with paintings by award-winning illustrator Alan M. Clark
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Meridian Days, by Eric Brown — A novel of wounded lives and deadly intrigues on the planet called Meridian. By the British Fantasy Award-winning author of A Writer’s Life
Mobius Highway, by Howard V. Hendrix — Science fiction stories from the brilliant and daring author of Empty Cities of the Full Moon
Naming of Parts, by Tim Lebbon — Winner of the British Fantasy Award
Nearly People, by Conrad Williams — The British Fantasy Award and International Horror Guild Award-nominated novella
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The Schemes of Dragons, Book Two of War of the Dragons, by Dave Smeds — Another cornucopia of swords, magic, and brave men and women caught between awesome forces, by the Nebula Award finalist and author of The Sorcery Within
Something Rich and Strange, by Carrie Richerson — Extraordinary Tales of Fantasy from the Campbell Award finalist
The Sorcery Within, Book One of War of the Dragons, by Dave Smeds — A novel of magic, new worlds, and high adventure by the Nebula Award finalist and author of The Schemes of Dragons
Street, by Jack Cady — A novel about horror and heroes, by the Nebula Award winner and author of Street and Ghostland
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Talking to Shadows, by Phoebe Reeves — A story about murder, art, and transformation, from the Stoker Award nominee
A Temple of Forgotten Spirits, by William F. Wu — Jack Hong’s adventures in the world of spirits and the world of men, following the kei-lin, by the author of Hong on the Range
Triad, by Sheila Finch — A Novel of Alien Contact by the Nebula Award winner
Vermifuge, and Other Toxic Cocktails, by Lorelei Shannon — Stories to make you shudder, weep, and laugh out loud, by one of today’s best new talents, and the author of Rags and Old Iron
The Well, by Jack Cady — A classic of modern horror by the Nebula Award-winning author of Street and Ghostland
Wildest Dreams, by Norman Partridge — A novel of death, deliverance, and the Devil in California by the Stoker Award winner
The Wizard's Nemesis, Book Three of War of the Dragons, by Dave Smeds — The conclusion of the high fantasy adventuer series by the Nebula Award finalist and author of The Sorcery Within and The Schemes of Dragons
A Writer’s Life, by Eric Brown, winner of the BSFA Award — A tale of literary obsession and haunting discoveries by the author of Meridian Days
A Quarterly Anthology of Science Fiction and Fantasy - Æon Speculative Fiction.
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