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SHE-CREATURES

Margo Lanagan

We were bringing the kegs over. Everything had gone exactly to plan. The moon was new, a little white smile in the sky. Dassel had kept his mouth shut and I thought he was to be trusted. Bertoldo's back had not given him the gyp and so he had been able as much as Dass and I to walk about the beach and hoist the kegs that lay all over—"like babies," said Dass in glee, "like little black happy babies"—all over the sand.

The lads up the coast had timed the tide exactly right casting them out of the cave and the cove. Oh, we were a strange band, working by night and out of sight of one another—but not out of mind. I had been as good as there, dressed dark in my place in the line under the headland, passing the kegs along. I had felt their weight, all but heard the slosh of them in my palms.

Put it out of your head, Fion had said in the night, her face above mine.

I'm not moving! says I in protest.

No, but I can hear your brain, wheeling and crackling in your stillness. You're stiff as a poker, and not in a good way. And then she started fiddling and fumbling at me.

Gawrd, woman, I've got to keep my wits about me this night.

I reckon . . . she says, with a hold on me like a warm, dry mouth, like a spell. It ran up my spine, the feel of it, quieting my worrying brain, I reckon you're already awake; you may as well. Don't you think so?

Anyway, that was hours ago and now we were into the men's-only business, well and truly, the wagon loaded and the road to Leightman's barn curving away among all the breasts and bums of this land, and the Elder Cooper with his bag of gold in the hay with which to give us each our divvy, and the Younger at watch over Constable Mastiff in the Arms, keeping him rotten with the best of the last haul's Spanish, keeping him immovable in his cups.

"I am glad we made it this far," says Dass, "before them clouds set in."

"You'll not chat," says Bertoldo low. "'Tis a windless night and, as we have learned to our detriment, sounds carry weird in this place."

Dassel came up to my elbow and spoke quiet. "What detriment is that?"

"Jon Plaice in the gaol and forty barricks confiscated."

"Oh, I did not know he were gaoled for this! I thought it were for dumping his refuse on the common."

"It is because you are a new bloke," I said. "People will tell you all manner of nonsense. No—" and I eyed the cartwheel, which had a tiny squeak that I'd thought I greased over. "It was because he broached one of them. He was not used to such quality. He sat by the roadside singing and, before you know, old Widow Pussmouth has stridden off in the middle of the night and fingered him to the constable. 'Twas not Mastiff then; 'twas a man you'd not want to meet even in your first-born innocence. Just his look at you made you guilty of something, even if you could not recall it."

"Keep it down, Cottar," said Bertoldo then, and I could hardly snap back at him, seeing I had just been preaching for silence, so we went on awkward among ourselves, listening nervously to the crunch of the wheels on the road and the fall of the donkey-hooves and of our feet and the rub of our trousers and rasp of our breaths, of which Bertoldo's was the most stertorous and interfered-with by phlegm. Dassel's I couldn't hear, his lungs were so young and uncrushed as yet by life; my own was somewhere between his and Bertoldo's, cold in my chest and then hot in my throat and nostrils, and you could hear the heartbeats in them.

It distresses you so, maybe you should not be involved, Fion had said when Frost had proposed this last one. There's nothing gives the game away so fast as some sweaty man going all guilty about his days.

It is just too clean an opportunity, I told her, and I went through the plan again.

I cannot see the hole in it, she said when I had finished. So what is making you so twitchy?

I don't know. Maybe you are right. Maybe I am getting too old for shenanigans like this.

Did I say that? And she cuffed me, just soft, back of my head, passing to get the kettle off the fire. Bertoldo must be twice your age.

He doesn't have a wife and children on him—

Ooh, I wonder why. Such a jolly feller. And high fun in the bedroom, too, I'm guessing.

And neither does that Dass, I point out. Maybe it is that.

Yes indeed, your burden of responsibilities. Poor helpless Fion and those rickety babs hardly able to lift their own weight. Which given her character and the fact that all our sons and the daughter too looked to be building like bullocks—

Is it that I have the most to lose of them, I mean, I said, should we be nabbed?

By whom exactly? I cannot see that person, anywhere near your plan.

Now the moon was coming and going a bit. Whenever it was gone, I could see things only by memory and the sounds they made.

"Like your head is wrapped in cloth," came Dass's murmur.

"Rain would be good," said Bertoldo quiet behind, "to shush over your remarkings. You could blether all you liked."

"Sorry," said Dass, when he might have bristled and riposted, so I thought more of him for holding himself back. "It's so quiet, I forgot. It feels like we are the only people in the world."

"Well, we are not," said Bertoldo. "The night is sprinkled with ears. If only lightly in these parts, still ears they are. It only takes the one with a waking brain behind it." He sounded almost as if he relished the thought of that ear hearing, that person running for authority.

Dass's feet came to a decisive stop.

"Uff!" Bertoldo had run in the back of him. "What the bloody—"

"Sh!" hissed Dass. "There is someone up ahead."

I held back the donkey and we stood searching.

"I cannot say," I whispered. "Anything I'm seeing may be as much a flash in my eye as a movement of light up there."

"It's there; I saw it," he says. "Some big lamp moving, and then quelled and covered, suddenly."

The donkey made a disbelieving noise with its lips.

"You and I will go up there." Bertoldo made himself sound tired, and Dass stupid. "Cottar, stay and mind the cart, and we shall go and see if it is safe to proceed. Come, lad."

"We must go very careful and quiet."

"Oh, really? I had not thought o' that until you said it."

Then I was alone in the dark—well, there was the donkey, but he were never much company. "Stormcloud," my daughter had wanted to call him, after his coat, but I was more inclined to think of him as Boss-Eyes or, when times were hard, Ribs, or Nipper in the days after he had just bitten someone. He was not a nasty animal, but he had not the nobility for a proper name or decorative.

Anyway, there he was, his shoulder stolid at my elbow as I tried to fix Dass and Bertoldo's few sounds to shapes moving away up the road. Again, the blooms of night-blood across my eyeballs were more distinct against the dark than anything. I knew we were near Martin's copse; I could smell a wisp of fox from the earth there. I looked up in hopes of some stars, but there were only a couple of places torn in the rolling cloud, closing up like water over little drowning white faces. I had to wonder if I even existed, now that their sounds were gone, Dass and Bertoldo's, now that I could see nothing, and nothing see me. I had to wonder if I were not drowned myself, and dissolved back into the darkness of un-creation, just as before I was born.

"Are we done for, Fion?" I whispered just to hear myself. "Has Mastiff got wise to us, and is waiting up there, with men and muskets?"

It was a long time wondering. Other stars whimpered above me and were sunk again. I began to think this was some dreadful scheme of the others, to have me caught like Plaice all alone with this load, that they had gone ahead to advise the law that I was here and ready for the picking, the goods on my cart with my donkey undeniable. Someone was going to leap from the trees any moment, and I would be collared and carted off to the roundhouse at Duggley, never to see Fion again for year on year, or hear her dirty laugh, or feel her scurrying hands on me. Nor see my boys nor girl again, who were just getting interesting, and would have good natter with you, bringing you odd pieces of the world that they had noticed, and asking you to explain them.

I hardly know how to tell what next went on. Even having seen it myself I cannot credit its happening, let alone expect that you will believe me.

First, just as in the Holy Book—although God knows there was nothing else holy about it—first, there was light. It grew unnatural, very weak at first, grey and cold and seemingly sourceless among the trees up ahead. Dass and Bertoldo moved against it, and then they stilled like shapes cut out of black paper, all frozen elbows and knees, and then they skittered off to one side and crouched, just cut-out heads poking out of a cut-out tree.

And then—it was as if someone put a tap to a hole in the top of my head, and ran some kind of cold syrup through me—four figures stepped from four different directions into that part of the road. And I suppose it came from their throats, but the music—the four different notes of it, holding on and on without taking any new breaths, and making, if a harmony, so foreign a notion of harmony to my ears that my teeth clenched and creaked on one another to hear it and my mouth watered—the music seemed as sourceless as the light.

But it was the sight as much as the sound. How can I communicate, I wonder, the sight of those? They were as innocent as babies, and as hairless. They were white-skinned, for goodness' sake! They were nearly naked, which was alarming; they were bare chested, bare breasted I thought; from here I could not see proper whether they were women or men. Each wore a cloth around its middle and a hat upon its head. The pale cloths were strange enough—one apricot, one yellowish, one faded blue, one pink—and draped and tucked-up like a Hindoo-man's, or a baby's napkin between the legs. But the hats, each matching its owner's cloth, oh! How could it be, such simple things, no more than tubes going up from the heads—but tall, tall, and cut in two points at the top—could strike such fear into a heart?

They did not quite meet, the four. They came to the middle-ish and stood, facing each other and holding each his or her loathsomely offset note. It was a terrible song—not even a song, a terrible cold caterwaul. It was the voice you might hear if you flew up close to the sky, the voice that echoed in the ears of larks and sent them downward trilling and wittering with fright and excitement.

Out of the dark road beyond them stalked their queen, and this one there was no mistaking the sex. And you might think it a wonderful thing to be in secret watching and some splendid woman appear, fine and full-rounded, stripped to the waist and the nipples on her gleaming unsucked, ungnawed by any child ever, but I tell you this did not man me up. Rather the reverse: I shrank, and the knacks on me fought to be first back into my body, so that I had to cup myself with my hands as I stood there, to warm and protect them, to ease the sick feeling that struck up from them on the sight of that dreadful woman.

And just as I was too far back and yet I seen those nipples no mistaking, I was well out of hearing, yet Dassel made this little sound in his throat and I heard it. Everything heard it, every owl and leaf and foxlet and bit of grit stuck to my boot. Every one of those infernals heard it; though I did not see them move they were in woken stances now, and their music was suddenly half as loud as had been. Stormcloud beside me were stiff as a wooden donkey, all his relaxment and laziness gone.

It were like some nightmare. They all turned and had faces, and their arms and their renewed music reached and wavered out like some monstrous sea-nemminy torn itself up from its deep-sunk rock and come lumbering out across the hills, and now must catch some land-fish to swallow. I couldn't see neither of the boys a moment, and then, I see him; it is like the air is water and Dass is being tide-pulled along, like he is already a dead body hauled by his middle and his limbs and head dragging behind.

All of them was women—how could I have thought them other? I never found that shape more terrifying, the tits like eyes, the hips all blowsed out by that garment, by that cloth. Where was their hair? They must have tucked it up inside them dreadful dumb-caps.

They gathered poor Dass in—oh!—into that nemminy of flesh and bending voices. I were nearly sick at the moment they first touched him; I saw clear as you see in a tree cut nearly through and poised to fall the approaching of the moment I would go unhinged. The feeling, I thought—with a horror you would not credit were you new-manned and all a-lust for normal women—the feeling of all them breasts, pressing and eyeing you, them stomachs, that ring of weird faces—the hats, oh the hats! leaning and touching and crossing above you!

"God help me," I said almost soundless, for now that they had Dass it were safe to speak; he had taken their attention off the rest of us. And I stood there clutching mouth and conkers both, fighting off the music that pushed me like that axe-bit tree about to squeak and topple.

I don't know what they did with his shirt and trews—ate them? Magicked them off o' him somehow; I did not see them throw them out. All I saw, they laid him out among them at their waists and he were bare and vulnerable to them, two each side and the queen at his feet and his arms and head out my end in this dreadful, stupid, moving-underwater way—you dazzle a fowl and it will move just so, slow, enchanted, knowing in some dimmed corner of its mind it ought to struggle. Though they would have been plenty strong to carry him, I did not see in their muscles and movement that they took the weight of him; he lay there on the air and their hands moved above and below him busy, describing upon the space around him and against the skin of his body all the signs that needed making to keep a man afloat. So many, so entangled and entangling! How was he ever to escape?

Then they came to their decision, and lifted him, and as I watched and moaned they rose to their bare toes. The weight went out of their feet and their toes left the earth and slowly, slowly . . .

But it were like they were the waist of a skirt, and we the hem, or burrs caught to the hem, the donkey, Bertoldo and me. And as the creatures rose, the folds of the skirt, vast, invisible, drew inward and upward after them, and Stormcloud stumbled from his woodenness and I, I who had not drunk a drop in two days, I scuffed and staggered with the dragging, airy cloth, that was made of their horrid music, that was made of their weird intentions and their nakedness, the gathers of it conjured of their gathering.

Bertoldo wept and shouted; Bertoldo was mad; he clutched his head as something inside it exploded. You know him; you saw him before. Have he ever been the same? All the punch went out of him, all the snarl, and that was where it happened, before my eyes as the rising women, turning slightly but rebalancing back, drug him into the witch-lit road. There he fell, and he raved and slavered and tried to walk where he lay, tried to hold his head together, pitiful, as the donkey and I came up, with the cart, which might have held nothing of kegs nor any more lawful load it seemed of such little consequence to the beast that pulled it. That cart were witch-worked too, I shouldn't be surprised, to be so light.

You think you would have fled? You think stayed hidden? Well, I will tell you the worst spell: it was not their dragging music, nor the tidal folds of their cloth; it were the connection that could not be broke without you breaking yourself like Bertoldo done; it were the thing I first told you of, the light; it were the bond tight as wire, strong as chain, between the flying women with their burden, and mine eye.

This I seen, this I realised, my head dragged back by their heightening magic. White they were above me, and the singing hung in the road there, quite removed from their bodies and independent, a shell of noise at the limits of the light, a horrible reverberation. There hung their grey feet, there swirled their cloths weightless around them, and their thighs went up to shadows, and their elbows busied all around like an animate crown.

They were eating him! No, they were kissing. They were some of them like leeches upon his skin and one was sucking and mouthing above the point of his chin. His face was in shadow, but his mouth was darker, wide; his hair—that I'd almost been jealous of it, were so raven-black, unfrosted yet by age and responsibilities—creeping around his head in the air like a pail of snakes caught for Saint-day.

The circle of them span, the pointed feet below, the pointed hats above crisscrossing, nodding. The queen, I saw, was in between his legs, and she had got a fine point up on him and were working all about on him, swooning and swaying and rubbing her self and arms up all his thighs and stomach, pointing her breasts to heaven and then burying them either side of his rod, there in the flesh you never think about you are usually fixed upon the man itself, the two valleys there left and right of it, unsunned and tender, unprotected by hair.

A long moan was stuck in my throat, sucking out all my breath. Higher they went very slowly and I strained after them; I would lift, myself, and point my own feet and be dragged up after them, any instant now. Dass were up there among them all, flesh upon flesh, slowly swimming, slowly scrambling. The queen had her hand in the darkness under his buttocks; in the midst of the turning, bright lit, was the great veined spike of the man, almost rumbling under the hum and rub and the irritation of the music, trembling on the point of discharging.

I reached back over my head for the neck of my shirt, and even as my face drank in every drop of jealousy, and light, and terror—I have never done anything more difficult in my life—I pulled the cloth forward, to cover my eyes, to swathe my head. 'Twere my choice, weren't it?, to break my own mind or to have it broke for me by the sight of those monsters.

And I ran, as far as the light showed the road at my feet and then I freed my head and without looking back I plunged out of the music into the darkness and I did not stop, scrambling from leaf-wink to star-snippet, beating my feet against the dull ground in the songless quiet so safe, so glorious, until I fell into Leightman's, more or less into old man Cooper's lap.

"Hie, boy, are we lost?" He was up and ready to flee any implications.

I sat in Leightman's hay. Cooper gummed and tutted and wanted clarity above me while I got back my breath, great homely whooshes of it into me, out of me, smelling of hay, smelling of the pomander that Mistress Cooper must put among all their clothes; I have smelt it on the younger man in the alehouse, orange-y, clove-y.

"Where is they? What's up wi' ye?"

I put up my hand to stop his hissing, to settle him. "They're coming," I said. "All is good. They are just up the road." And I stood and straightened myself, everything most ordinary around me. "I will have them to you in a little."

"What d'you mean thundering in like you've Mastiff on your tail? Men have fallen over dead from lesser shocks."

I left him twitching and cursing and went, myself all peaceful and relieved, out again into the spacious night. A breeze had come up, and a freshening stroll it was, a leisurely amble with nothing but the strokings of grasses around me, the snuffling of forest, the limp and pat of the wind.

Dassel were motionless in the road, dropped there insensible. I cast about for his clothes, but could not find them.

"Bertoldo? Bertoldo?" I called softly here and there, and finally I found him far back along the roadside trying to disguise himself as a log, but the log whimpered, and shivers went through it like horseflesh shaking off flies.

I had a right time, as I told Fion, getting the two of those into the cart. 'Twas not that they were so much heavier than I, more that the witchment had taken from them the ability to move helpfully. I forgot, almost, about the kegs, I was so occupied with getting these injured men to home and safety.

The women, the witches, the bitches were gone that had done this to them, that had turned Bertoldo soft and made Dass the odd unmarriageable character he is. I cannot tell you with what joy I uttered those words to myself, They are gone; they are gone, all the way out to the road there, and all the way back to Leightman's. I cannot tell you even today the relief it is, the gone-ness of them, the surprise it was to look back and see the will in myself, pulling forward my shirt-cloth, breaking the spell that was on my eyes. The clink of Cooper's gold had nothing on it, nor the dispersal of that gold on boots for us all, and on Fion-finery and on a pony, a little bay gelding, bless him, that did not take a piece out of anyone came near, like that donkey done ever after.

So who were they, husband? Fion says. You said you seen their faces. She cannot believe me, she who can recognise a certain look passing between two women across the far side of the May Fair, beyond the hankerchee-dancing and everything.

I tell you, I say. Constituted though they were like people, yet there was nothing recognisable about them.

Except their bosoms. I've told her of my unmanment time and again, but—Sounds like you were too enwitched by five sets o' bare nipples to look properly anywhere above.

It were not like that, I tell her feebly. It were not.

The one man who kept his wits on him. She turns to me all fierce and fiery. Who might have named them to Mastiff and got them weeded out fr'amongst us.

They were no one I knew, I point out again, gentle as I can. There is nothing so disheartening as uttering truth, and your goodwife standing there, fists on hips, outraged and unbelieving.

So I don't tell about this to Fion anymore. She were the only one I did tell, and well after the glamour of the spoils had worn off. She'd been at me and at me since the night of it. What happened there? You are not the same, and as for those other two. Until I spilled it all out, more fool me, and this is my reward, only rage and accusation. She does not understand at all.

 

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Framed