Issue #98 • June 28, 2012

“Lady Marmalade,” by E. Catherine Tobler

“Death and the Thunderbird, Pt. II,” by Michael J. DeLuca

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LADY MARMALADE

by E. Catherine Tobler

        “My old San Francisco, Beth?”

        The lime rind is slick between her brown fingers and she looks up to Jackson’s face which peers through the caboose’s side window. Weathered, lined, still the color of a baby’s belly in the gloom of pre-dawn.

        Beth is not her name, though she responds well enough to it by now. Perhaps one of the countless jars that line the wall of the caboose-turned-bakery contains her real name, but if so, it is pushed well to the back, gathering dust, cobwebs, forgetfulness. She has not forgotten; she cannot.

        She flicks the rind into the bowl before her, wipes fragrant fingers over her apron, and stands from her stool. She has time to go. Fingers trace over soda-lime glass, milk glass; amber, cobalt, green. Ball blue, violet, clear, and black. Jewel tone marmalades press against the curves: lime, lemon, orange, quince, pomegranate. Colorless fogs, rivers, rains, and bogs. Sparrow hearts. A first blush, a last breath, countless in betweens. Her fingers close around a square jar. She gathers one more, this one empty, before leaving the caboose. Eamonn the dwarf perches on the counter, hovers over the rind bowl, and does not look at the bell jar which sits on a shelf at his eye level. Inside a Ferris wheel stands beside a tree caught in perpetual autumn.

        “Just a little jaunt,” Jackson says and slips his arm through hers before she takes the lid off the first jar and they vanish as though never there.

        Jackson is a jar himself, containing in every aspect the time he wishes to visit. Beth dips her hand into him and the streets permeate her skin. Stone cobbles run like gooseflesh and bridges arc where her fingers once did, stretching into piers, looping backward into avenues soaked with smoke, shade, spice. Through Jackson she can smell the salty ocean, the iron rails, the stink of love and bloom of despair. She walks, her feet inside his shoes, her fingers around the knob of the red-flecked door he opens. His slim sketchbook is hidden in a woman’s wrapper pocket. Beth feels the trespass of his fingers into the pocket, the tug of a thread as the sketchbook slips out of time’s place.

        Jackson whispers, “Four years later, this place is gone.”

        Time does not matter to Beth, but it is a thing which anchors Jackson and others like him. These rooms haunt him; he hates and loves them by turn. What becomes of them in four years? Part of her wants to know. Part of her presses hands against that pane of glass and peers. Still, she can’t reach it, not even through Jackson; for he won’t be there to remember it by sight or smell. She wishes time did matter, would wish it with all her heart if she still possessed such a thing. She slides the empty jar into his hand and hears the whisper of the book curling inside glass.

        “And, back.”

        Eamonn is still not looking at the bell jar when they return in a blink, steaming in the summer air, the opalescent light. It is not heat that sluices from them, but chill, for it was winter Jackson wanted, claiming his book from a lady he refuses to name. Beth doesn’t ask; she never does.

        Jackson takes his leave with his jar. Beth slides her jar against another—Exposition Universelle, where Jackson admired the gauge railway— then settles into the well-worn groove her bottom has made upon her stool. She returns to the lime rind, cutting, cutting. Eamonn perches—not looking—until at last he turns away and moves for the dough bowl. He peels back the damp tea towel. The scent of yeast fills the caboose.

        The carnival opens as the sun touches the tips of the long field grass, to allow the crowds to capitalize on the warm yeast rolls, the glazed buns, the sour breads. Eamonn’s large hands cradle each one as they come free from their pans, then set them to cool along the caboose windowsills. His slippered feet leave small impressions in the flour which scatters the counter. The tails of his black and green striped coat sweep up after him.

        Beth hears the soft murmurs from several paces away; older ladies dressed in their Sunday best though it may be Wednesday or later. Older ladies clutching straw pocketbooks (adorned with flowers made of gleaming plastic jewels) with gloved hands, every step tentative though not because of age. They fear the very thing that draws them forward.

        “It smells like my childhood.”

        “Mine, too. Do you think they have— Ah! Elephant ears!”

        A thin arm points toward the banners which snap in the warm breeze above the caboose, while the scent of fresh fried dough reaches the woman’s nose. She closes her eyes a moment and stands in place, near a swoon.

        Eamonn extracts the fried dough while Beth readies the marmalade. Lemon and a touch of twenty-two, Beth knows, and has the confection ready as the women come to the window. She lets Eamonn deal with them; they love to fuss over his fancy coat and marvel at how small he is. He either doesn’t hear them or doesn’t mind, for he is never put-out when they laugh.

        The lemon elephant ear seems to melt against the woman’s tongue; Beth can almost feel it upon her own. It tastes like the woman’s childhood, but the marmalade brings with it another memory, the memory of a younger body that once balanced on a high wire. Maybe an umbrella, Miss Sophie, a dark-haired boy says. His eyes rake up her stockinged leg and she loses her balance, plummeting.

        “Oh.” It arrives as a soft exhale. “Do you— Do you sell this lemon marmalade?”

        Of course they do and Beth reaches into the long line of bright jars, retrieving the proper one for Miss Sophie. A square of fabric that looks to have been cut from a circus tent just that morning covers the lid. Beth ties it with a yellow ribbon that makes Miss Sophie recall the feel of that young man’s tie between her fingers.

        Beth feels nothing as they walk away and she turns back to the jars which line the west wall. The shelves which Rabi made her are worn with time and fingerprints, allowing only one gap for the thin window on that side. Every jar is different and Beth knows where each came from the way she knows the lines on her palm. Her fingers dance over them now, glass shoulders and corked tops; embossed lettering, the thick curve of a sealed lip. Sunlight sneaks through the windows to fragment itself in the bottom of the jars. This shattered sunlight scatters across the shelves which bracket the back door, over the counter and sweltering stoves, across Beth’s brown cheeks in a stained glass mosaic. Small black monkey feet scamper across the topmost shelf as Ichabod steals inside, leaping down to Eamonn’s shoulder where he chatters at the customers.

        “Pomegranate pear?”

        The voice at the window draws her attention. The young man there is tall, for his eyes meet Beth’s over the sill. His eyes are the color of the bottle just above the window, its label a scrawl that only Beth knows: Co. Kerry, morning mist, November.

        Pomegranate pear was a flavor she didn’t want to make, but she still did, turning the golden pears into a smooth chocolate-brown butter, dribbling in the crimson seeds. Beth had allowed herself one spoonful before jarring it, admitting to herself it was one of her best. She reaches for the jar now, fingers knowing where it rests, but her fingers close around nothingness.

        Amid the cluster of jars upon the counter, there is a vacant space, a jar-shaped space, a space pomegranate pear should occupy but doesn’t. She looks past the marmalades, beyond the canisters and knotgrass, the jarred yeast and dormouse footprints. The deep opal bowl which houses dreams is still near to overflowing and she drapes a soft towel across it before she moves to the bell jar, fingers printing the lid before she works up and up, past jarred breaths and bottled cities; past boxed fields and ribbon-bound supernumerary rainbows. No pomegranate pear and when she comes back to the window; no young man.

* * *

        It is easier to move a single person than it is the entire train and its company. Beth can and does move the train when necessary, even enjoys the challenge, but takes a different kind of pleasure when it’s just one person; when it’s just herself.

        She opens the jar to find herself on a Himalayan plain, in a time before humanity has discovered this place. The air here is cold, pinks her cheeks. She picks her way toward the pomegranate trees which line the foothills and opens a wide-mouth jar. Two pomegranates will fit inside, little else. She twists the lid into place then sinks into the dark soil at the base of the trees. If she keeps still, the sunlight sinks through her and she hears only the wind.

        She doesn’t keep still. She hears the faint beat of a heart and pushes up from the soil. It cannot be her own, she refuses the very idea, but then she sees the shadowed figure on the hill before her. The heartbeat lurches.

        She runs. Clutching jars against her sides, she runs toward the figure that shouldn’t be here. Shouldn’t be here and she screams. He’s not supposed to be in this place—she broke all the jars he ever had claim to, removing those places and years from her reach. (But you didn’t, oh you didn’t, whispers a distant voice.) Still, he leaps into motion, long legs and flailing arms and that shock of curling black hair. She knows the color of his eyes even if she cannot see them now.

        He evades her advance. The pomegranates jostle in their jar, making a solid thumping rhythm against her ribs. The empty jar in her other hand slips and she tightens her hold. Don’t drop it, she tells herself. Don’t. Don’t be stuck here with this shadow-creature. Her feet come down hard with every stride.

        “Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.”

        The word comes with every fall of her right foot. And then: “Don’t go.”

        But he goes; vanishes through another stand of pomegranate trees as a breath of wind, pulling her after, turning her heel over head until she does not know which way is up. If the ground is blue, then so be it. She feels as though something precious has been taken from her yet again, even though it was lifetimes ago. Once, she could have counted the time on her fingers, but not now. Even so, she remembers the feeling; it remains a broken place that never healed straight. Staggering, she turns from the trees and runs.

        She reaches for the train, pulling caboose walls tall around her, patching in every jar she knows by touch in the dark. She pictures the rusting Ferris wheel under the gleam of the glass and the sugar bowl with its chipped edge and paired dormice curled inside; she draws the taste of sour dough into her mouth, swallows it down, and lets it consume her. Himalayan air slides down her arms, summer sunlight taking its place. Eamonn and Ichabod come into slow focus and she allows the jars to slip from her fingers. Eamonn startles, then moves to the broom.

* * *

        She doesn’t think she will ever grow tired of the sounds of the carnival. When night comes and the jars fall to darkness in their nooks, Beth closes her eyes and listens.

        Even from a distance she names the lions by the sound of their voices. If the train stays in one place long enough, she comes to know the voices of the children who frequent the rides in the same way. The tightropes creak under Pasha’s feet while the cotton candy machine buzzes like an angry bee and the filaments in the electric lights hum high and bright. A soft moan runs below it all, something old and fluid like a river and Beth’s toes curl inside her shoes, as though she were dipped in up to her ankles. The heart of the circus, dark and wet and cold and pounding.

        “Miss?”

        The boy standing outside the caboose is lit by the clear glass bulbs, his hair like spun gold curling into his open collar. It’s warm enough that’s he’s barefoot and clutching two dollars in his shaking hands. Beth leans across the counter and holds to the feeling of that ancient sound at the base of all she knows. Eamonn leans, too, against Beth’s shoulder as he looks out at the boy.

        “My ma said—” He swallows hard, thin throat working as if he has an apple lodged there. His eyes skip to the dwarf, then back to Beth. “She said you have jams, or jellies, or summat?” He offers the money up, the bills trembling.

        Beth reaches for a crate. “Did you want to spend the whole two dollars?”

        She already knows he does; his mother is a bright star in his head, fully formed in a white dress splattered with blue flowers. Twelve buttons run between her breasts, from waist to throat where her own spun gold hair tangles in a knot. At present she is screaming and laughing to be let off the Ferris wheel. This woman tasted the marmalade before—three years ago?—and with it the memory of a boy she kissed when she was but twelve. A small peck, standing barefoot at the end of a lake-wet dock; the gangly boy fled and she never saw him again. Lakes and docks always make her wonder where he is. He’s in New York, Beth could tell her; he tasted the marmalade five years ago and remembered that kiss as well. He never married.

        “She said you would know, see.”

        “I know,” Beth says.

        Beth fills the small crate with six jars: two orange, two lemon, one lime, and one cherry jam. The cherry jam doesn’t sell well, but the crew likes it—Manny says the lions like it especially well. Still, she knows this woman (Lila, the wind says) and knows these cherries will remind her of her husband. Though it is a small jar, Lila will savor it over the course of a month, remembering the warmth of his fingers and the way he held her hand when their golden haired boy was born in a field of wheat. After, there was the sweet taste of cherry cola.

        The boy runs back to his mother and Beth leaves the caboose, knowing Eamonn can sell the marmalade well enough without her for a bit. She seeks the main tent, where a cacophony of sound spills. Shards of light escape the tent flaps and vents; screams and laughter come in bursts like thunder. Inside the tent warmth, Beth keeps to the outer edge of planked bleachers, unseen as she steps past a young boy and girl who have found more to enjoy in each other’s lips than they have in Rabi’s center-ring show.

        Vanquisher and vanisher, sink me down into this dirt and let me rest. Beth wants to speak the words to Rabi, but doesn’t and won’t ever. She knows too well how his talent weighs on his mind, how it’s not such an easy task to make someone or something disappear. She has been asked to open a jar she would rather not; she has crossed that line, and will again. They are almost in the same business, she and he.

        Beth disappears through the shadows, fingers trailing along the bleacher supports. Paper cups dot the landscape here, dropped from careless hands; she finds a wallet amid the soft dirt but leaves it there—perhaps its owner wishes to be someone else. Under the tent, everyone should be given that chance.

        The Kerry-eyed boy is not within the tent. Beth knows this from the moment she enters, yet still she looks for him, an automatic response like a leg jerking when tapped. She finds instead Eamonn, at the end of the curving bleachers. He claims her hand and drags her from the tent, into the wash of yellow-white light outside. It’s the parked caboose he pulls her toward and to the second empty space within it.

        The bell jar is gone, a perfect faded circle in its place where the sun has worn around it all these immeasurable years. In its center sits a silver coin with an owl upon it.

* * *

        In the beginning, darkness lay upon the face of the deep. When this darkness roused itself, it was the great lifting wings of a raven who was Mother Night. From her crawled doom, fate, sleep, and dreams. From her fingertips spilled the aether, the madness, and the ancient river’s boatman. All things would come to an end, she decreed, even night herself as dawn crept over her wing’s edge to spread warmth where there had been but cold.

        To see that all things would be kept in their place, that all things would end, Mother Night divided fate, bestowing her daughters with tasks they might never finish. Every night, a breath would be stilled even if another came into being. Every night, a love would be confessed as another fell to ash.

        Into her eldest daughter’s hands, Mother Night placed the scissors to cut the thread, forgetting that fingers might also tie knots in severed lines. What was torn asunder might yet be joined again.

        Beth remembers her name, even if no one uses it. She wishes that it were a lost thing moved elsewhere by Rabi’s clever fingers; that years from now she might come across it in a corner (huddled and dusty and reaching for her) and say “oh yes, that.” “I don’t remember” would be a comfortable lie, the way carpeted with sugared rose petals.

        In her name lingers the blade her mother gifted, a thing meant to cut so people might be at final rest. But this cutting takes its toll and, when confronted with the one thread she realizes she cannot cut, makes Beth search for other ways a thing might be ended. Gather it up, wrap it tight, seal it with a lid. Every jar becomes a knot in a thread, a way to stem the tide.

        In the middle stands the discovery: that what is sealed away tends to leach into the ground no matter how hard one tries to control it. Water is meant to run; earth is meant to shift. Threads, if not cut, often fray on their own. Better then to control these things, parcel them out so that a thing doesn’t end but somehow goes ever on. If a thing must end for one person, surely it can continue for another.

        Yet here rises the absurdity: Beth wishes the thread she cannot cut would fray, but it is stronger than any one thing she knows. Stronger than he knows too, and though his own sharp name cuts the strand once and twice and he walks away, meaning to go forever, there is yet that thread, spooling out through dark labyrinths. Wherever he walks, there is a trail in his wake, a trail she can trace no matter how she tries not to. She wishes to end it, slip it in a jar and hide it away, give it to another person so that she might at last be ended and rest, but she cannot.

        She is bound as surely as everyone else is, to her own spooling thread. She cannot cut it. She has tried to tie it in knots so that she might run elsewhere, but she comes always again to the main line.

        The thread makes a whisper as it goes, a soft hiss that reminds her of an egg in a pan. She breaks the jars, letting time evaporate—ending all Mother Night said should be ended—and even that becomes not enough. Not enough, for there he is, stealing through pomegranates, and there, in her own caboose, leaving a token for the bell jar.

        In the end—

        No, this is the part she cannot yet see.

* * *

        The young redheaded woman comes to Beth on a warm afternoon, finding her behind the caboose washing the bowls that have overflowed the small inside sink. The bowls make a kind of music as they clink together, water streaming from them as Beth lifts them from the washtub to the rinse water.

        “The little man said you were back here.”

        Beth is about to ask which little man but then realizes she means Eamonn. She straightens to peer through the back window, watching the dwarf and monkey dole out jars of marmalade to customers.

        “Here I am,” Beth says. She gently drops the bowl into the rinse water and dries her hands upon her apron. If the woman wanted marmalade, she would be up front, not back here.

        “I heard that you might— Might help me.” She sweeps her jacket back to reveal the small bundle nestled against her chest. “I want to keep her, but can’t.”

        The last two words are only a whisper. Tears spill over the girl’s cheeks then, brightening her brown eyes. Beth clucks her tongue.

        “Sometimes we can’t have the things we most want,” she says, looking at the pair of them long and hard. The baby makes a faint gurgle, seeming to nestle closer into its mother. Sometimes, Beth thought, even though we can’t claim a thing we are still haunted by it. “Wait here.”

        Beth gestures to the upended crate in the shadow of the caboose and when the girl sits, she steps into the train car. She takes down one jar of orange marmalade, then returns to the girl. The girl who frowns at her.

        “I didn’t come for your mar—”

        “You will hush,” Beth tells her and crouches before the pair of them. She sets the marmalade between her own knees, in the hard dirt, and looks up at the girl. “Stay quiet.”

        Beth slides a hand into the sling, finding warm darkness inside. Her fingers seek out the curve of the baby’s skull, smoothing over that downy hair before settling just above the nape. More warmth floods through Beth’s palm. An unnamed daughter, born seven days ago.

        She ties a small knot in the thread of life, before she divides the thread as neatly as she ever has. She splices this life from that, knowing that no matter what she does, there will always be this point for the mother to look back on. Beth cannot remove the memory of it entirely, so she changes it, infusing the marmalade which sits nearby. Even when given willingly, the loss of a child is no easy thing to bear, but when this young mother looks back onto the knot of the severed thread, she will remember only joy. She will remember the blue of the autumn sky that arced overhead when her child was conceived; she will recall the way the air cooled that night and how sharp the stars looked when they finally came out. With every bite, the young mother will be calmed.

        Even so, she will still have to face the bottom of the jar, when the sweetness is gone and only clear glass remains. Will she break the jar or keep it and the memories it tries to hold? Will she seek the circus out in an attempt to find more? Beth can see all ends coming to fruition—she sees the young mother on an endless search for the train, the train which she never finds again; she sees her making the small jar the center of her universe, as if it might replace the child she gave away. This is the true price to be paid.

        “What do I owe you?”

        The young mother gets to her feet, the crate rocking gently. Beth rises beside her and presses the marmalade into her hands.

        “Thirteen pears,” she says.

        The woman nods and walks away, sunlight gleaming on her auburn hair as she emerges from the caboose’s shadow.

        What of the child? Beth looks only far enough to see this woman walking to the edge of town and the steepled church there. A young widowed man will notice the infant on his way into town, will raise her as his own. Beth could look farther, but she doesn’t, leaving them all there for the time being. Sometimes, she doesn’t want to see where the threads lead.

        In the morning, Beth finds a bag of thirteen pears on the caboose’s back porch. They are bruised and fragrant, and perfect for turning into butter (no pomegranate seeds this time, for they perished when their jar shattered, shot through with glass). This work keeps her busy the morning through, distracting her from the idea of the young man returning, even though the pear butter is meant for him. She refuses to acknowledge the way his name spills from her spoon every time she whisks it around the edge of her pot. It is not about her troubles, no, but those of every person outside these caboose walls. She can think on their miseries, if not her own.

        She saved one pear for eating and slices another bit of it free, savoring the warm grit of it between her teeth and against her tongue. Ichabod, who perches where the bell jar once did, bends his head down and opens his mouth. Beth feeds him a slice and softly hums until the sunlight brightens the caboose and customers begin lining up at the window. She searches their eager faces yet finds no one she knows.

        The disappointment is still sharp, even after all these years. She glances to the jars and reaches for County Kerry’s morning mist. The jar always feels cold in her hand and weighs more than it should for mist. At this point, she doesn’t even have to open this lid, for she knows the mist too well. She simply vanishes into it and is gone, her bare feet sinking into long wet grass, the scent of heather replacing that of cooking pears. She closes her eyes and turns west, walking.

        She finds him where he always is, in the churchyard where they first met. He crouches at the base of a crumbling statue, scribbling in a book. She is surprised to see him—she always is, for this is how Memory wrote it. She was only searching for clovers when her path crossed his; she had never looked further down her own thread, for knowing too much about one’s future was a dreadful thing—didn’t everyone agree?

        In this moment, he is young—so young! His brow is not yet creased with lines of worry, for he has not met her. She hesitates. If he doesn’t meet her, how much better off might they both be? She brushes that thought aside as she does every time.

        “Fáilte.”

        He startles when she speaks, his laughter broken and loud in the gloom of morning. He tilts his book and she can see the image there, a church bell tower emerging from the morning’s fog. She glances past the statuary to see the church herself.

        “I didn’t think anyone came out here,” he says. He stands, setting his book on the statue’s base, watching her with reserve. She is intruding into his private space, the space he has shared with no other.

        “You came out here,” she says. She picks her way past him, leaving footprints in the mud. She crouches beside a statue to Saint Peter and rolls her jar on the ground. It makes a faint tinkling noise, as if something other than mist is caught inside.

        Later, he will think he dreamed her and Beth almost wishes she had kept it to that, but she can’t. She knows she will follow him. Nothing sparks her interest the way he does; nothing will haunt her the way he will.

        She sits with him all afternoon, silent while he draws. He doesn’t ask anything of her, shares the orange he has brought, and when she rises to leave, makes to follow. She doesn’t stop him, knowing that as she begins to pull caboose walls back around her, he will pause on the muddy track, studying the line of footprints that are once there and then gone, as though the strange girl became the mist itself.

        Mist falls from her shoulders as she comes back to the train. Deliberately, she lets the jar slip from her frozen fingers; it hits the floor with a solid thud and does not shatter. Beth watches it roll away from her and then back, resting against her muddy toes. It is the second jar she cannot break.

* * *

        The first jar is the bell jar.

        Her younger sister offers it to her in the depth of a night so dark Beth thinks that Mother Night has returned for good. The jar is strangely warm, like a living thing though it is made of glass. Beth cannot immediately see what it contains and for that she is grateful; when she can—when dawn’s first sun breaks through the glass and illuminates the wheel and tree inside—her breath sticks in her throat. She knows that this eternal autumn will be her undoing (salvation, that distant voice whispers), but not precisely how.

        She keeps the jar with her, throughout all the years she can count. It sits at her side, upon a shelf, or buried in a chest; it is never more than a dozen steps away. In one house, she can see it from anywhere she may be, like a bright pinprick of light that has its own heartbeat.

        She has tried to break the bell jar three times.

        The first time is an accident. While sweeping autumn leaves from her front room, the broom handle collides with the curved glass, sending it from the table to the floor. Beth’s heart seems to pause as she watches the jar drop; she expects it to shatter into a thousand pieces and mourns its loss even before it is gone. Though the glass makes a familiar sound against the floor, it stays intact. The wheel inside doesn’t even come loose from its moorings. A small blizzard of orange and flame leaves rise within the dome and from that moment, though unbroken, the tree continues to shed its bounty.

        She expects the leaves to build up and eventually fill the jar, though they do not. She watches the bell jar, once for an entire afternoon, and she can see what happens. She can see the leaves slowly rot and if that is a skeleton barely visible beneath the tree’s roots, she does not want to know. Let the leaves cover it. Better yet, let the thing break and become trash.

        The second time, she throws the bell jar to the ground in an effort to make it just that. She is living alone in a lonesome, stony place; the floors are stone yet worn smooth from the continued passage of her bare feet. Back and forth and back once more and she can no longer stand the tree with its damnable leaves. She hurls the jar into the stone and it simply rolls; rolls until it hits the wall. It remains whole.

        Years pass. She does not count how many, but when the third attempt rolls around, she is running for her life. When people suspect what she can do—that she knows too much about their lives, that she can seemingly control some part of them—they allow fear to guide their actions. Driven from her home by women too enraged at the idea of what Beth knows of their husbands, Beth flees toward the low murmuring sound that has approached all day. Across this field and that, putting more distance between herself and those women, Beth finds herself at the edge of a railroad track.

        She draws up before she stubs a toe against the ties, against the tracks, and only stands there, breathing, praying, listening. Don’t, don’t, don’t. The longer she stands, the more she realizes she can no longer hear the women. Perhaps they have gone.

        And then the train, blazing out of the night with its headlamp, rushing past her so fast that her skirts fly up. The rush of wind through her tight brown curls is like laughter or fingers or some combination of both. Beth finds herself laughing and as the train passes her, she flings the bell jar at the caboose. The glass lands on the back porch and is carried off, deep into the night. Beth falls to her knees and presses her hands to the hot rail.

        The little man finds her in the morning. She wakes, aware of a hand on her cheek and then her shoulder, and she opens her eyes to find a curious sight: the man can be no more than two feet tall, his face beautiful with gold dust and kohl, his lips turned into a bright red flower with green leaves that spread across his cheeks. On his shoulder perches a small monkey wearing an even smaller top-hat, and their eyes are the very same color, a color that Beth longs to drown in.

        “You will need to collect your things,” he tells her.

        She can’t go back there, can’t risk those women, and the little man seems to know this without her saying a word. He takes her by the hand and tugs her up from the ground, walking with her along the railroad tracks. By noon, they reach the train.

        The bell jar sits on the back porch of the caboose, looking none the worse for its adventure. The wheel is still upright and leaves continue to fall from the tree. Beth bursts into tears at the sight of it, watching the little man as he and an assortment of people from the train head off, toward town. Later, they return with her trunks.

        The first time she watches them raise the great wheel, Beth feels like she will be sick. It is a long process for the workers, to dig the holes for the supports, to set the foundation and precisely place each panel that will hold a car. This, Eamonn tells her, is why they don’t always raise the wheel. Only certain cities get the wheel and it’s because they’ve paid extra for the time and risk.

        Beth notes each little, worn red car that slots into place when the panels finally ring the axel like petals. She knows there will be twelve cars and that on windy days they will squeak, for so does the wheel within her jar. Eamonn sits beside her on the caboose’s back step and they watch the process in silence, until Beth can watch no more. Still, she has nothing else to occupy her. Within this traveling circus she has no talent that might be put to use, not until Eamonn presses an orange into her palm and gives her the idea.

        Her hands close around the orange, fingers seeking the rough skin as the wheel takes its first test spin. The wheel makes a horrific noise, all that metal and wood being forced to move, until it finds its rhythm and rolls easily within its frame.

        “Sweet,” Eamonn murmurs and leans into Beth’s side.

        She glances down at him and then to the orange. He may be talking about the wheel, but she’s focused on the purpose he has placed within her hands. Sweet was not without bits of sour to counter it; Mother Night said everything has its beginning and so too its end.

        Her first efforts are terrible, more tart than sweet, though the monkey Ichabod eats it without complaint. She sits on the back stoop to contemplate where she has gone wrong—with only the marmalade, for any truly complete list would run far into the future. She hears the wheel groan as it lifts another bunch of people into the night sky; she hears the fall of each leaf within the dome of the bell jar.

        The idea of the jar draws her to her trunks, which have stayed locked all this time. She opens one, to look upon the jars that line its interior. They gleam as the light from the carnival hits them. All these things she has preserved: time and cities and small words that people have otherwise forgotten. Salvation. Hope. Mercy.

        She is adding the laughter of a three-year-old child to a batch of orange marmalade when Jackson enters the caboose unannounced. Beth pauses mid-pour to stare at him, thinking he will tell her to get out, that he will smash every jar she’s strewn about the caboose. But he instead shambles forward and nudges the jar up, preventing her from adding too much. Beth caps the jar while Jackson dips a long wooden spoon into the pot upon the stove. He tastes and then is smiling and laughing much as that three-year old had a hundred years before.

        Beth closes her eyes and sees the thread of Jackson’s life stretching far into the distance. When she looks closer, she can see the knots and deviations, the other threads he is tied to. Looking even closer, she can tell that she and he have skipped forward and back, with and without the train, and she sees the thing he cherishes most, the hand holding the cross which rests within his beloved locomotive, and she knows then—believes that if she can infuse such a memory into her marmalades, that though all things must end, she can make the in between bearable.

* * *

        Beth does not know how long she has been with the circus train, nor does she care. Her days are spent helping people as she can. Rather than severing lines, she fuses them together for a little longer. But every fuse has its consequences, she knows. Everyone cannot go on forever and sometimes she must open jars she would rather not.

        She kneels now before a jar wreathed in cobwebs, its label peeling and yellowed. The name that was once writ upon it is long gone, but it whispers in the back of Beth’s mind. Her own name. The cork has been sealed with a thick coat of wax and she digs her nails into it, until she can pull the cork free. The air that filters out is stale but she breathes in it, accepting all she has denied herself.

        The great wheel is not far from the caboose; though it is night, crowds still revel amid the tents and booths. Children squeal and the scent of popcorn saturates the land. Beth’s course is steady, a jar cradled within her hands. Her bare feet make no sound until fallen leaves begin to crunch underfoot.

        There, near the base of the wheel, stands a tree. A few leaves yet cling to its thick branches and though they fly off under the cooling night air, they never seem to run out. At the base of the tree stands the young man, looking the way he did those many years ago when she startled him in a church graveyard. He’s dressed in the colors of the circus, though, for he works here, operating the great wheel. She knows he does not remember her, for she took that from him. (And yet, whispers that voice, he does, for look, he is here and you are here.)

        A sob escapes Beth when she realizes what she has done—what she hasn’t done—and she feels the weight of every second spent in this place pressing down upon her. She feels so heavy, she wonders how she will ever reach his side, but when she does, she’s laughing, because he’s looking at her as though he wants to say—

        “No one comes here,” he says, though the people around him contest those very words. The wheel slows behind him, and the people holler for him to fix it—make it go! His brow wrinkles.

        Beth’s laugh deepens and she offers the jar of pear butter she carries.

        “You came here,” she says, and when his hands close around the jar and he opens it, dipping two fingers in to taste the sweetness, the salvation, the wheel above them glides once more into smooth motion.

Copyright © 2012  E. Catherine Tobler

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

E. Catherine Tobler was born on the other side of the International Dateline, which either gives her an extra day in her life or an extraordinary affinity when it comes to interdimensional gateways. Her fiction can be found in Clarkesworld Magazine, The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, Fantasy Magazine, and several times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She is the senior editor of Shimmer Magazine and calls Colorado home. For more, visit www.ecatherine.com.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

DEATH AND THE THUNDERBIRD, PT. II

by Michael J. DeLuca

(Concluded from Pt. I, in BCS #97)

* * *

VII.

        Shoving the steward boy ahead into the brightness and roaring wind of the platform, Five Legs slammed the aft door to the passenger car, cutting off the sounds of rioting, the growl of flame and the skin-crawlingly appetizing scent of cooked flesh. The handle began to turn; he threw his weight against it. The snarled breath of a bay centaur fogged the window. Thin lips, creased by a ghastly scar, brushed the glass—he noted with relief it was reinforced with wire. The other pursuers turned back. They’d be looking for a ram.

        The platform was narrow, with barely enough room to turn. Five Legs’s pulse beat high in his throat, matching the rhythm of the wheels, drumming thunderbird, thunderbird, thunderbird, thunderbird. The things he’d done to make it here—killed without thinking, without asking indulgence of the soul within the body, without giving thanks or caring for the blood or the meat—they hadn’t felt wrong. He didn’t regret them. If he thought it would make any difference, he would turn around, open the door, and go on slaughtering centaurs until someone awarded him a death of his own.

        She had sent the thunderbird to spy on him. To ensure he didn’t stray so far from the humanity she’d never believed he possessed as to place himself beyond redemption. Had he? If he ever saw the elder again, would she destroy him?

        He didn’t fear centaurs. Not anymore. But humans....

        A hand groped inside Five Legs’s coat, and he jerked around to find the steward boy pointing the conductor’s revolver at his chest, one eye screwed closed, arms shaking with the effort.

        “It’s empty!” shouted Five Legs over the wind, with a twinge of regret.

        The boy pulled the trigger, kept pulling it until the cylinder had spun twice around and he could no longer hold the gun level. He let it fall, clattering. It struck the iron coupling that bound the cars, two fists clenched together, then disappeared in a flicker of blue sparks under the train. The boy scrambled across the gap and flattened himself against the rough wood of the slave car.

        They stared at each other, smoke and wind rushing past, the door behind Five Legs thudding with blows.

        He didn’t know what to say to this boy, the inverse of himself. But he was almost there, almost to the slaves. He’d done what Bienor wanted of him. Now there was a chance to thwart him, thwart Nessus, give them the train but not its cargo.

        “We—we have to separate the cars.”

        “What makes you think I’d help you?” the boy shouted back.

        “There are people in those cars. Your people! Thousands of them. Look.” The Echidna curved along a hillcrest, climbing gently. Cattle cars filled the track as far back as they could see, coarse wood jaundiced in the sun, still more emerging from the gully as they watched. In the shadowed gaps between slats, Five Legs could imagine movement—bodies, faces. On the platform, there had been a waving hand.... “Where they’re going, they won’t get to dress in white linen and serve cocktails. They’ll be worked to death. If they’re lucky, they’ll be eaten.”

        “They’re not my people—they belong to the centaurs. Like I do. They’re yours.” The boy began pounding on the slave car door.

        “No... don’t you understand? I want to free them. You saw what I did back there—”

        “What—kill centaurs?” the boy shouted. “That’s what centaurs do. I’m supposed to think that makes you different?”

        The pressure on the door handle suddenly released; Five Legs ducked in time to avoid the bay centaur’s rear hooves as they smashed through the window. He caught hold of one shank before it was withdrawn and forced it downward through broken glass and torn wire, sawing. The bay screamed as glass cut past bone; tendons gave way with a sinewy pop and flesh tore free. He found himself laughing, holding a severed hoof.

        The boy’s smooth flesh, undarkened by a life of mountain sun, blanched whiter.

        Five Legs let the ghastly thing fall after the gun. “Just tell me how to separate the cars.”

        The boy’s eyes flicked to a row of flywheels and levers blazoned with sorcerous symbols. He went on pounding on the cattle car door, shouting for help.

        Frantically, Five Legs studied the levers. One of them must work the coupling. He wrenched one at random. Brakes squealed; the car lurched violently. He threw the lever hastily back the other way.

        When he looked around, the steward boy was gone.

        The slave car door slid open, unleashing a stench of sweat and stale breath, eloquently human; Five Legs’s belly clenched with shame. He couldn’t see them in the shadows, but they were there in his mind, faces pressed between the wires of their cages towards the light: human faces, wrinkled by laughter and sun, stoic, afraid or despairing. He didn’t want to see. He couldn’t save them. The wouldn’t know him. Not with the spiral brand naked on his hide, his hair cropped so close, his tailored clothes stained with hot blood not his own.

        From within came the crackle of a prod, a moan. A hulking shape lurched out of the darkness, all upper body, horns and grasping hands, the breath from its snout an open furnace. A minotaur. Behind it in the shadows, the slave-driver brandished a smile.

        The screaming, maimed bay was dragged from the passenger car window. Others took his place, wielding a service cart like a ram. The minotaur charged over the gap, swinging its horns low at Five Legs’s belly; Five Legs gripped them and was lifted off his fore-hooves by the power of its charge. A blow from the cart bent the door out of its frame. Another blow and the door flew into the gap between the cars. Centaurs spilled out onto the platform, screaming for blood.

        Then, overhead, the thunderbird. Its vast wings beat ponderously, an eternity between each downstroke, climbing, the wind of its passage driving back smoke such that the sun fell full and blinding on its plumes. It wheeled, tucking in its wings to dive. Talons like threshing blades. The hooked beak, parted.

        Five Legs understood. He had failed; his time had come.

        He let go the minotaur’s horns, stepped into the open, and inclined his chin, exposing his throat to the sky.

        A shot, its source indiscernible. An instant’s haze of vaporized blood before the sun, a screech torn from the spirit world’s throat. Then a great weight struck him, accompanied by shadow and a sharp, lung-crushing pressure over his shoulders and chest. The mass of his body was lifted from his hooves, and—for a moment—he was flying.

* * *

        Bienor lowered the rifle. He tried to reload; dropped a shell through the catwalk, then another. He finally got the third to stick. He thought he’d hit it, though he didn’t know how, shaking like that. Now it was gone: no burst of feathers, no body. He’d gotten lucky. With his string already cut, the Fates had handed him a parting gift—a reprieve. The rooftop was empty, cleared by talons and a beak, not his own wild bullets. Corpses hung from the windows and lay scattered along the tracks for miles among indifferent dust and thorn.

        The Echidna’s wheels keened as it crested the ridge, going too fast, and the curve hardened westward. Bienor was thrown against the railing. His grasp on the Pyretus rifle slipped, and he hugged it clumsily to his chest as he clutched his way forward, heading for the brake. Deimos was making a sound halfway between screaming and laughter, and Bienor glanced back to see him mash the broken bottle into his latest foe’s fingers grasping the rail; the grizzled centaur’s grip came loose, one of his fingers flying free, and the acceleration of the curve sent him sliding, screaming, past the sheared-off edge of the catwalk into empty space. Blood bathed Deimos’s fore-hooves to the fetlock. His nose bent crazily in a different direction from his face, blood streamed from one nostril, and a shank of twisted metal protruded from his side. He panted, cheeks flush with absent, vicious joy. Catching Bienor’s gaze, he shouted over the wind, “Where you going?”

        “Rooftop’s clear—coming up on the end of the line—have to slow her down or she’ll derail!”

        “Let her derail. Kill us all—save yourself some time.”

        Bienor edged along the steepening downward slant to the engine. Red rock surged up on either side, throwing the train into shadow. They were entering the canyons.

        He vented the boiler and eased on the brake. The tracks swerved back in the other direction, hugging the canyon wall, supported by timbers that shuddered and creaked beneath the Echidna’s weight, meant for one carload of ore at a time, not an overloaded slave train. No time left for fighting. The remainder of the ride, everyone onboard—soldiers, thieves and slaves—would be more than occupied hanging on for dear life.

        Bienor groped for the whistle-pull, leaned into it until the shrill note drowned the roar of the engine and all he could hear was the staggered pounding of his hearts. Nessus might as well know they were coming.

* * *

        Five Legs picked himself up, wincing at bits of gravel embedded in his lacerations. Buzzards dove in the distance. Of the thunderbird, there was no sign—no mythic shape fading into sun, no monstrous body broken in the dirt. Had he imagined it?

        In the flesh of his shoulders, underneath his torn, tailored coat, he found the marks of talons.

        The Echidna took the curve too fast, wheels screeching, descending into the canyon car after car, an ouroboros’s endless tail still writhing long after the head has been severed. From one of the slave cars, a thin arm—Thin Crow’s—waved with incongruous grace.

        Five Legs fought down sick laughter. The last car roared past, wheels clicking on the ties, and he was alone.

        Not alone.

        A bent pine clung to the dry slope, roots bare to the wind like skinless knuckles burrowing for something solid to keep from being blown away. Leaning heavily against the trunk, her strength or her sorcery drained, perched the elder. The mask showed no age, no fatigue, no humanity.

        He was somehow unsurprised to see her here, at this lonely tree in the waste on the canyon’s rim. He was tired, and she’d warned him. Perhaps she waited at every such tree.

        “It went as you said, elder. I became a centaur. I lusted for their deaths, achieved many. But when I needed to prove my humanity, to demonstrate compassion, I couldn’t. I couldn’t even look our people in the eye. The only one I could have saved—a boy—I let him die.”

        She released her death-grasp on the tree and reached for him, faltering, brittle as the fragile old woman she ought to have been. “Come here to me.”

        He remembered too vividly the hate in her eyes as she’d raked those claws across him. Her touch had driven him from the ruin of his tribe with no thought but those she’d planted in his head: guilt and revenge.

        “Are you a centaur?” she said, impatient, her voice unsteady as the wind. “Where, then, is your endurance? Eurytus is unstoppable. Our enemies live. Come. Lend me your strength.”

        He found himself supporting her, astonished at her lightness. Past the edge of the mask, tight hair, bone-white, curled behind a sagging ear. Blood matted the feathers of her cloak and trickled from her upper arm pressed tight against her side. A wound—not some sign of decay, of age, but a wound of battle, like his own. A sign of fallibility. She, the survivor; she who had evaded Eurytus’s attack when all her tribe had not, older than this gnarled tree, older than these stones, was mortal. “Elder,” said Five Legs, “Elder, let me see your face.”

        The mask disdained him, laughing, looking down its long hooked nose as though at a cowed bit of prey.

        He closed his hands around her waist, the cloak’s feathers coarse and broken, shifting against flesh loosened by years. He lifted her, placed her astride him. Then she was clutching him, sharp nails pushing through rips in his tailored coat, softening as they reached the tender marks of talons.

        “I watched you,” came the elder’s voice soft at his ear. “I never believed you’d do as you said. I thought you’d run back to them—I thought you a traitor. I meant to hunt you—” She patted him, twice, at the nape of the neck. “—rip out your throat. It would not have brought them back. They’re not the first tribe I’ve lost. I watched you fight. Now I begin to see....”

        Apology, forgiveness? No. She forgave him only insofar as she needed him to go on, needed his strength to fool herself she still could find the will to fight.

        How could he argue? He needed to be fooled.

        The mask’s sharp edges dug into his back. He flinched, glancing behind. Its glare was unceasing—but behind it, the elder had fallen asleep.

        Now—what? The Echidna was gone, out of hearing and sight, though its passage still shivered the rails. Past the curve, the canyons dropped steeply away, stone writhing in the shapes of rivers long dead, colored in the ochre shades of Thin Crow’s body paint. From what he could recall of Bienor’s map, with its crusted brown ink, Epimethea must be close. What could they achieve there?

        More than by wallowing here.

        He took a few careful steps along the track. She clung painfully tight, even in sleep. He could barely feel her weight; only the slightest drag of the feathered cloak against the wind. But the mask burned its rage into him, hot and searing as a branding iron.

        He broke into a gallop.

VIII.

        Bienor leaned back on the brake, slowing the train to an easy canter. The Echidna passed through a neck in the canyon, between yawning iron gates wrenched off their hinges, and entered a stretch where the absent river must once have pooled. Where human slaves by thousands had toiled, died, rebelled.

        Deep gouges marred the red stone on both sides of the track, the tunnel-work of slaves long dead, interconnected by zigzagging scaffolds ascending level after level towards the light. Skeletons of blackened timber thrust out of scorched sand—slave barracks, torched to deprive striking miners of a place to conspire. Blood had spilled here, casks of it, barrels—enough to make this dead river flow again, if only for a moment. The sheltering canyon had preserved it so well it might have happened yesterday.

        It was dark inside the canyon’s belly, cold. No movement anywhere, no glint of steel nor clack of hoof. But they were here. Nessus, and enough centaurs to accomplish whatever was coming. Bienor swept his gaze over gauges and dials, trying to guess.

        Nessus’s eyes; irisless, obsidian-black. Dried flowers, sticking to the spittle on his lips and spilling down his beard. His head filled with what psychotic sorceries those tools of human prophecy could wreak. Even if Nessus had become the thunderbird, learned the secrets of the human gods, of the future, of fate, he remained himself. A liar. Nowhere did apotheosis rule out killing off his co-conspirators. Unless he needed them—and what good was a drunken sharpshooter who couldn’t shoot and knew more than was healthy?

        Explosives, drilled into the walls in the right locations, could bury the Echidna, crush or suffocate its crew and cargo. That would make a fine insult to Eurytus—a colossal, brutal, petty annoyance of the kind at which Nessus had always excelled. But a threat to his power?

        Round the next curve, a heap of broken stone came into view in the distance, piled as tall as the Echidna’s eye, blocking the track. Bienor pulled hard on both brakes, raising sparks. Still, he knew he couldn’t stop in time. He shoved his head out through the eye, looking back. The rush of air yanked off his hat and sent it spinning past Deimos, who was laid out on the tinder’s catwalk taking potshots as passengers leapt from the windows.

        “You’ll get your crash,” Bienor shouted at him over the wind. “Get ready to jump—pray you’re luckier at it than your lover!”      

        He felt a chill as the words left his lips. Couldn’t keep from rubbing his own pain in the vicious runt’s face. Maybe Deimos deserved to suffer for his lover’s death, as Bienor had. That didn’t stop it sawing open his own wounds.

        Straining at the brake, he let himself think what Gryneus would say about all this. Helping Nessus make a bid against Eurytus was killing the wolf to raise the coyote in his place. Expecting to get paid at the end of it was madness, pure and simple.

        Kill ‘em both, Gryneus would say with a laugh, and pass the wine. No illusions. They had chosen to desert, to live as outlaws, because anything else amounted to a martyr’s death.

        But Gryneus had never been old.

        Like Phaeton had said: might as well die trying to accomplish something. Gryneus would have seen that in the end. But he’d never have just sat back and let death come. He’d have done whatever he could to hold Nessus to his word—and failing that, to make him pay for breaking it.

        “Deimos!” roared Bienor, coming to a decision. “Quit wasting bullets—they’ll be dead anyway in a minute—and get up here, help me stoke.” If the stupid colt was too wrapped in his grief to listen, so be it. Call it fate.

        But Deimos appeared in the doorway, shaking the ache of recoil from his palms. “What in Hades for? It’s the end of the line.”

        “Starting to think you’re right—that we’ll be getting paid in lead.”

        Deimos’s long look said he knew it and didn’t care.

        “End of the line,” Bienor agreed, “for us and them. We need a way to load the dice.”

        They packed the flagging boiler as full of coal as they could manage. Then the heap of rock loomed up, and Bienor threw down the ramp. It bounced and scraped against the canyon floor, kicked up a flying wake of sand and was ripped away. “Jump,” he told Deimos, who needed no prompting.

        Rearing, Bienor kicked at emergency pressure release until   the flywheel bent back against the threads. He closed the vents, released the pressure brake but left the manual engaged. Then he followed Deimos out.

        Moments after his hooves caught hard ground, the leering, distorted iron face of Eurytus plowed open-mawed into the rockpile. As the impact scattered the pieces, he recognized the broken fragments of a monumental sculpture. A chiseled hindquarter big as a centaur rolled away among old ash and blackened timber. A massive fist, clenched round a slender throat, spun and tumbled between the wheels, then was shattered. With a shriek and a shudder, the Echidna jumped its track. The cars that made its endless tail writhed like a rattler, kicking up waves of sand. The train accordioned to a halt. The overloaded boiler held, for the moment.

        Along its flanks, a scattering of centaurs—those who’d leapt free before impact—picked themselves up out of the dirt. “All right, grandsire?” said Deimos a few lengths behind. “Didn’t twist a stifle?” When Bienor didn’t dignify this bitterness, Deimos turned for the nearest of the Echidna’s crew, reloading a repeater. Bienor gave chase, caught him by the shoulder. “Don’t. Just—stand still. Wait.”

        The echoes of the crash, bouncing from the canyon walls, swelled in volume instead of diminishing. Then they turned to laughter—a voice amplified by sorcery, as at the Circus or upon the field of war. Nessus.

        “Did you see it, Bienor—the monster of his folly, devouring his desecrated corpse?”

        A rifle barrel glinted on the heights. Figures appeared on the canyon walls, emerging from dark tunnel mouths, peering over ledges.

        “There, by your left hoof,” said the voice.

        Bienor prodded a round lump of stone. It rolled: a face. The statue’s head. It, too, had been Eurytus: powerful, virile, in the full of youth. He ground that leer into the sand. “Was this your vision, Nessus? You claimed to have foreseen his defeat—was that a joke?”

        Laughter—not from Nessus this time, but hundreds of voices, boisterous and prideful, distorted by the canyon’s curves. How many had he brought? Their appreciation of his humor felt just slightly forced.

        “You know the tenor of my wit,” Nessus acknowledged, “but don’t think me so petty. I intend to bring about Eurytus’s fall. The statue had been desecrated long before we arrived—a Rape of the Sabines, I believe, featuring Eurytus as ravisher, and Ceres, Nature incarnate, as his victim. Worthy of him, don’t you agree? The rebels pulled it down, motivated by a compulsion to symbolism more simplistic than his own. And he repaid their gesture with a massacre, guaranteeing Epimethea’s abandonment for no better reason than to remedy a slight. For a symbol to command any power, it must be backed not just by strength but reverence.”

        At some unseen signal, gunfire erupted from the canyon walls, strangely quiet after the gale of his voice. The Echidna’s surviving passengers and crew went down in waves. Some tried to run, seeking cover. They died regardless. The rest simply waited. Deimos stood stock-still, wild-eyed, the ridiculous silvered repeater dangling from his open hand, one finger through the trigger-well. Bienor saw the realization in his eyes. They would have lived like nomad kings, reclining on sumptuous carpets in tents deep in the desert, far from everything, sipping bourbon, feasting on roast meat and fucking.

        A bullet cracked open Deimos’s skull, and a spear of blood skewered him into the sand.

        When the roar died away, Bienor found himself whole.

        “Now,” said the voice of doom, “at your pleasure, invite Eurytus’s prisoners to exit their cars.”

* * *

        Five Legs galloped down the canyon with the elder on his back, the mask’s hate goading him to further speed as she who wore it drifted in and out of sleep. Sweat streamed from him, soaking through his clothes. But when he made to tear them from his back, regain at least what modicum of humanity nakedness could bring, the elder woke. “Not yet.”

        She pointed, cackling, as they passed each body lying crumpled by the tracks. One more centaur dead. “Once,” she hissed through the mask into his ear, “I thought humans the only beings capable of killing our own kind.”

        Five Legs had to struggle to muster breath. “I... thought the same of... centaurs.”

        He was pounding past the torn-down iron gate, the painted wooden frieze, bent and trampled, that had once read “Epimethea”, when the elder dug her claws into the close-shorn remnants of his mane, sending sharp pain through his temples.

        Heat rushed to his cheeks. No centaur would suffer such humiliation—he could snap her bones like kindling—but he forced the anger down. He checked his stride. She had restrained herself from tearing out his throat. He could suffer at her hands. “Elder, why do we stop?”

        “Mustn’t let them see us.” She dragged at his head, jerking his chin upward. On a high curve of the canyon wall ahead, where the stone faded sharply in color from burnt gold to bone, there was movement: centaurs, heavily armed, descending single-file along a narrow trail—a full hundred or more. “Not until we’re among them.”

        She’d known they would be there. “Elder, how—”

        “They’ll emerge on this track before long. You must be close enough to make it seem you were among them. You must appear like them—a soldier, restless, trained to shallow self-importance, inflamed with the spirit of rebellion, blind to the nature of the world.” Her hands ran over the fabric of his coat, smoothing it, straightening, brushing away dirt, folding together the edges of tears. “It won’t be hard.”

        He wasn’t forgiven, wouldn’t be until he gave his life in trade for all those she had lost. Not even then. She gripped his equine ribs between her bony knees and slapped his haunch too close to the spiral brand. “Quietly now, if you can, with those hammers of feet.”

IX.

        Bienor took a ring of keys, heavy as butcher’s cleavers, from a centaur jailor’s corpse. But his hands shook, he couldn’t make them work the locks. So at each car, expecting every moment the bullet from above, he reared and kicked at the planks until they splintered.

        He was tired after ten cars, hurting by twenty. After that he stopped counting. As he rolled open the doors, the press of humans within shrank from the light—from him. How could so many fit inside so small a space? Bodies lay underfoot, crushed beneath each other in the crash. He moved on, letting the survivors emerge in their own time, not caring to engage what he encountered in their faces. The eyes frightened him—the glaring ones less than those that canted away. In Eurytus’s service, he’d killed humans, eaten them, sucked marrow from their bones. What use would guilt or apology serve them in the moments before their slaughter?

        The daring or stupid ventured forth, then more and more, squinting, climbing soft-footed down into the dust and gravel. Humans streamed across the canyon floor. Swarms gathered like carrion-flies around the corpses of their jailors. Maybe they’d never seen a centaur dead. Perhaps it reassured them. “Get back,” Bienor said as he passed among them, first mumbling, then louder. “Leave the poor bastards be. Keep away from the front of the train. You’ll be killed if you don’t.” When it blows.

        Stupid old horse, making a time bomb of a boiler. Who would it harm? Not the centaurs on the walls. When would it go? Outwardly, the foundered Echidna showed no change. Its armor was thick; it had been built to take abuse. But the pressure was there in his own stomach, building.

        He reached the last car, broke it open, then limped as far from the flanks of the train as the canyon would allow. Turning, looking to the walls for Nessus, he realized a stream of the humans had followed him.

        He didn’t know how to read those hollow faces, dark and milky-eyed, trembling with hunger. They were thousands, and he was alone. What else could they be thinking?

        He unslung the Pyretus rifle.

        A bullet exploded into the wall by his head. Flecks of sharp stone stung his neck. The humans shrank back. “Put that away,” Nessus’s booming voice reproached, “or I’ll be forced to take it from you. These humans were Eurytus’s slaves. They are our guests.”

        Bienor did as he was told. Not that it mattered. With his nerves in this state, he couldn’t have shot a hole in the sky. “If you didn’t bring them here to kill them, why? Surely not to free them?”

        He couldn’t fathom why he wasn’t dead.

        “There is no freedom anymore,” came Nessus’s voice, a gale without source, “only death and what must be. The poison flower showed me that.”

        Hoofbeats, from the neck of the canyon. Centaurs filled the gap three ranks deep, weapons drawn, blocking the only escape. No outlaws or deserters these. Hoplites, career soldiers, not a tremor in any hand.

        In the century’s last rank, one face stood out from the rest, handsome, young, haunted as any human’s. Seeing him there, in the canyon’s shadow, whole, made Bienor fear he was already dreaming at the Stygian shore. A glance at his tremoring fists assured him he was wrong.

* * *

        It seemed years, not hours, since Five Legs had seen Bienor last. He was shrunken, gray, his bare scalp pale, age-spotted, his bulk hanging loose from his bones. He was no longer in control. And yet the look he gave Five Legs betrayed an impossible hope. The humans behind him—a sea of them, hemmed in by stone and iron—made Five Legs wonder what there was to hope for. Thin Crow. Where was Thin Crow? He wanted to go to them, to fight his way through, show them at least one centaur was with them. But the elder’s nails burrowed into his spine and Bienor’s eyes into his head, rooting him in place.

        The hoplites were turning, staring. Bienor had given him away. “A spy—look—he wears the spiral!”

        Yes, it was still there on his hide. It still stung, faint now among the chorus of his wounds, where the elder had ripped away the paint. She clung now in the small of his back, huddled so behind the mask that it almost swallowed her. Not even Bienor seemed to see her, despite the hate that radiated from her like a furnace’s heat. Any moment she would hurl herself upon them—frail as she was, she’d rip a few of them to shreds before they killed her. Yet she resisted. The vengeance she wanted was fuller than that. And somehow she expected him to achieve it.

        The broken spiral on his hide had fooled them, the old outlaw and sorceress both, into believing he could save them. That, and desperation. Five Legs opened his weaponless hands.

        “A spy?” came the booming voice of Nessus. “Bring him here.”

        Hoplites surrounded him. A conflicted memory resurged: sweat, equine musk, rough play. The hands at the Labyrinth Ranch had taught him to wrestle. Had he hated them then, as he came to hate them? Or had he still been innocent enough to mistake their animosity for anything but earnest? Innocence, among centaurs, was as much a myth as the gods of Olympus.

        They shackled his wrists and hobbled him with chains too short for his stride, designed for humans in a simpler time. They stripped him of his tailored clothes, ripping buttons away, tearing cloth. They collared him with leather. Somewhere in the midst of it, the elder’s claws pulled free, the weight of her lifted, and a feathered shape, stooped low, slipped between the legs of the distracted soldiers. She was back among her people.

        Humans watched as he was led away, looking between him and his captors—attempting, no doubt, to distinguish between them.

* * *

        “He’s one of mine,” shouted Bienor, finding his voice too late. “My plant aboard the train. No spy.”

        “One of yours?” Nessus demanded. “Where are the rest?”

        Five Legs was alive. For how long? Bienor’s throat was as ragged and pocked as this desert landscape, tight with sand and dread. “Dead.”

        “Why should that make this one any less a spy? Where did you find him? Did it occur to you to ask how he came by that spiral?”

        He tried to recall it: standing drunk by the tracks in Prometheus Gulch, head swollen full of his own lies—Artemis, the Old World, and Gryneus, always Gryneus—watching this strange, beautiful colt stumble down out of the hills and stoop to listen at the rails.

        There’d been no such thing as thunderbirds. Five Legs had found one. Bienor had given him the worst of tasks, sent him to be slaughtered just to buy them all a little time. Yet of the three Bienor had bulled into his service, only Five Legs had survived. Did that make him a spy for Eurytus?

        He scanned the tortured strip of sky above the canyon for the thunderbird.

        Two hoplites stepped uneasily to flank him.

        “Why don’t you climb up here to me? I owe you your reward. And you’ve wanted from the start to see my plans from on high.”

* * *

        The hoplite led Five Legs like a leashed mule up the narrow trail along the canyonside. Naked, in chains—this was what he should have suffered when Eurytus took the River Crow. If he’d given up stalking deer, gone home empty-handed when the other hunters had—if he hadn’t still been struggling to prove himself after seven years—he might have met Nessus and Eurytus on the slopes of the sacred mountain. He knew the contours of that valley like the smooth skin between Thin Crow’s shoulder-blades. With surprise on his side, and the darkness....

        One against hundreds, his arrows against their guns. But he and his tribe would have suffered together.

        All along the cliffs, centaurs stretched prone among dry, thorny growth, the theta of Nessus gleaming in scarred skin on bicep, hock, or shoulder, the barrels of carbines reaching out into thin air. Some of them stirred as he passed, craning around to look on the spiral with contempt or dread. Were they as the elder saw them; petty, self-important, blindly following Nessus because Eurytus was the only alternative? Were they in it for the money, like Deimos? Or like Phaeton, desperate for change regardless of consequence?

        Crescents of frost lined the switchbacks like sweat dried on creased skin. Where the trail was steepest, the hobbles made him stumble, cold ground cutting into his stifles. Blasted holes and intricate natural formations divided the canyon vistas into stark contrasts. Below, the human crowd shrank into anonymity.

        Nessus stood high on a promontory ahead, his profile statuesque and dark against the sky, laying out their fate. He spoke in Greek. The humans, save an unlucky few, wouldn’t even understand.

        “Hear me, human slaves. I, Nessus, have delivered you from bondage to Eurytus—but not from responsibility. Your homelands are lost. Could you return, you’d find them changed, no longer your own. That’s the nature of conquest—a truth your brethren of the valleys and plains have been forced to accept or die denying. One choice remains: learn the ways of the New World, the ways of your conquerors.

        “You’ve lived too long in isolation, oblivious to the suffering of your race. Over the past days, you have only sampled that suffering. Had you reached New Ilium, Eurytus would have stripped you of that ignorance. There, like all the rest, you would have learned to seek oblivion in pain, to find pleasure in the only place you could: the pain of others.

        “I release you from that fate, but I can’t do the same for your brethren. The onus lies with you, who cowered in the wilderness while Eurytus ground them low. By failing to arise, you have doomed them and shamed yourselves. It’s too late to defend your way of life, your homes, your people—that train has rolled on—but you can still fight to avenge them.

        “I, Nessus, vow to make this possible. Here, where others of your race once found courage enough to rebel, I will train you, teach you to fight and to die. I will shelter and feed you. I will heal your sick. You won’t escape: I’ll kill you if you try. When the time comes, I will lead you in battle. I ask only this in return: that when Eurytus is overthrown and New Ilium in flames, you name me king.”

        Wild cheers rose from the centaurs. Hooves pounded stone. Dust spilled in plumes from the canyonsides.

        The crowd of humans rippled, their moans and murmurs like a wind.

X.

        Atop a ledge so high it emerged from the canyon’s shadow into light, Five Legs’s captor choked him to a halt. Nessus stood among his bodyguards, squinting in the last sun fading towards the peaks, a liquor bottle glinting golden in his hand.

        “The spy.” The quiet of his voice was eerie after the roar of his sorcery. His steel-shaving beard, once coal-black, was thinning, ill-concealing heavy lines marking cheekbones and jowls. His chestnut body had been a solid ton of muscle, bone and steel, unstoppable, a locomotive unto itself. Now the outlines of ribs showed through flesh, and a sagging stomach pulled at the flaccid muscles of his chest. Surrounded by the bronzed young bodies of his guards, he seemed an old stud ready for pasture. He was huge—he had always been huge—but in his age, Five Legs saw a chance.

        Bienor appeared around the last switchback, stooped and huffing with the exertion of the climb. The sharpshooters lining the trail straightened from their sights, touching hat brims as he passed. What was Bienor to them?

        “Don’t trust his reputation, my revolutionaries,” Nessus said. “He defied Eurytus, true. But his courage, his resolve, I fear died with his lover. Or else he drowned it in the bottom of a bottle. Now he fights for no cause save his own. Keep him back. If he lays hand on that precious rifle, kill him.”

        Reaching the ledge at last, Bienor leaned heavily against an outcrop, chest heaving. He wiped his lips with the back of a clenched fist and glanced over the edge at something Five Legs couldn’t see.

        Five Legs was shoved forward, his shackles clattering on the sandstone. A bodyguard reared, struck with iron-shod hooves. He went down, tangled in the chains. Dust mingled with blood in his mouth.

        “That brand... let him rise. Bienor, who is this you’ve brought me?” As Five Legs clumsily regained his hooves, Nessus stepped close, his huge bulk though diminished still dwarfing Five Legs as a sire beside his foal. With probing fingers, he reopened a clotted cut on Five Legs’s thigh, smeared crimson across the spiral. He pantomimed applying a burning poker to mimic the blur in the lines—a slow, unsteady thrust with a hitch in the middle. The recognition in his eyes was awful to behold.

        That other name, Five Legs told himself; his name they had used at the Labyrinth Ranch, in whispers, grunts, or screams—it couldn’t make him that person again. It wouldn’t change why he was here. Still, at the sound of it on Nessus’s lips, it was all he could do to keep from retching.

        “Patroclos.” Nessus’s fingertips smeared blood up Five Legs’s spine. “I remember that day—the day he made you his. You brought it on yourself. You resisted—you didn’t want to be owned. What else could you expect? It only stoked his desire to possess you.”

        He thought of rearing up, lunging, ripping Nessus’s throat out with his teeth. How would that curling steel beard taste, the flesh beneath it? He could guess: like human flesh, old and tough, basted in bourbon and smoked. But he couldn’t—the hobbles bound him to the earth.

        “What does it mean that you return now, not to him but to me? Where have you been? All these years we thought you dead, taken by wolves. Was it outlaws instead?”

        Bienor gave a hoarse cough that might have been trying for laughter. “If I’d raised him, he’d be dead. You look surprised—did your visions not predict this?”

        Nessus snorted. “That’s what brought you this far, isn’t it, Bienor? Visions. You always were a sucker for a whiff of the sublime. But I never claimed to know the future. I dare say by now the flower has granted me more visions than it ever showed that human priest—or else he might have seen the bullet coming. But the way of seeing it imparts isn’t sorcery—not in the sense we use the word. I see the past, the present. The flower grants... insight. New perspective.”

        “You told me it had shown you how to kill Eurytus.”

        “And so it did—by showing me how he and the humans were different. Look at them—they’re frightened now, numbed by revelation, but they’ll resurge.” The crowd huddled quiet below, the elder and Thin Crow somewhere among them, as far from the centaurs and the train as they could get. “Centaurs have always considered them weak, but they’re as resilient as we—think what we’ve done to them. They’ve always been more capable of change. This has never occurred to Eurytus. That I, his only rival, might be capable of change has never crossed his mind.”

        Five Legs had learned of the flower from the hunters of the River Crow. They talked like it was human, a member of their tribe. The flower could speak and play jokes, take offense when slighted. At first, he’d thought they must be speaking of the elder. She wouldn’t let him taste it—no more than she would let him see her face. But he’d heard the stories, seen the dance. Alone in the wild, cold and hungry, when a bird on a branch didn’t fly at your approach but sat staring—that was the flower. When you knew you’d pierced a deer’s heart yet it ran on for miles, spilling a river of blood, then disappeared—you hadn’t shot a deer at all. They called it Brother. They called it Death. They said you recovered from its poison, but the flower never truly left you.

        Nessus had eaten of that flower, and it had told him to make of its people an army of slaves.

        “It was humans,” Five Legs blurted, blood flying from his lips like spittle. “Not wolves, not mustangs. For seven years, I’ve lived with humans. I learned their tongue. I ate their food. I loved them. I would have spent my life with them. Then centaurs came and destroyed them.”

        There was a silence, wind hissing indiscriminately over smooth contours shaped by time and jagged edges cut by hands.

        “With... humans,” said Nessus at last. “You ran away from him... to live with savages.” His mouth opened slowly into a grin, cruel teeth blunted by erosion. “Amycus was the last centaur to fall in love with humankind. You knew him, didn’t you, Patroclos? Did you aspire to his fate? From Legate of the West to gelded cowboy in a single stride? There, Bienor, you see? Patroclos can be no spy—he hates his sire too much for that.”

        Amycus, the old soldier at the Labyrinth Ranch. All those years ago, the colt Patroclos had never understood his grief. He understood it now.

        Bienor was looking at him, wrinkles sagging with his jaw. “His... sire? Eurytus.”

        His voice was bitter as wormwood. “Is it so hard to believe? He must have sired a thousand sons. I killed one myself aboard the Echidna—a black who wore the theta.”

        At that Nessus burst into laughter. “I like the centaur you’ve become, Patroclos—whether he or humans made you thus. I find myself further in Bienor’s debt for bringing us together. Which reminds me, there’s the matter of a reward. You’ve given me the makings of my army. For that I owe you both more than I can repay.”

        He waved a hand, warding away imagined objection. “You weren’t in this for gold, I know. None of us are. The death of Eurytus has been our rallying cry. Patroclos—let our common enemy unite us. Join us. Join our revolution. Say the word and I’ll strike off those chains. Bienor—I can’t return Gryneus to you, but I can give you justice. Throw that legendary rifle in with ours, and I’ll give you Eurytus.”

        Bienor’s eyes darted to the bottle in Nessus’s hand, the cliff, then Five Legs. If he was looking for escape, he didn’t find it. Nessus’s assembled captains shifted, hooves pawing at the stone and dust. Five Legs, growing up on the Labyrinth Ranch, then among humans, had never heard of the outlaws Bienor and Gryneus. But Bienor’s presence seemed to mean something to these “revolutionaries”. They wanted him to acknowledge their belief in him—to justify it.

        Nessus, Five Legs realized, needed Bienor’s blessing to cement their support. Or failing that, a passable excuse to kill him.

        Nessus’s nostrils flared with impatience. “I don’t need the flower’s influence to see your hesitation. You know my plans. You can’t deny the justice of our goal. Do you doubt my revolutionaries’ will? Or is it cowardice that stays you?”

        Five Legs decided, when the moment came, he would go for the wrist that held the liquor. The vein.

        “I doubt,” Bienor said at last, “their leader.”

        “Who would you suggest?” returned Nessus, indicating his captains with a sweep of the bottle. “Who knows better than I the mind of Eurytus? The other who might have made that claim is dead. Who else has tasted of the poison flower, learned its secrets? Who has the capacity to rule the New World in his place—you? I warned you of this, my revolutionaries. The outlaws Bienor and Gryneus deserved our respect. They were fearless, endlessly inventive, with a penchant for spectacle in any kidnapping or theft. The tall tales their victims told—the hours of pleasure I enjoyed at Eurytus’s irritation—they inspired all of us who chafed to throw off his yoke. But Gryneus is dead, and the Bienor who ranged with him is gone, replaced by the drunkard and weakling who cowers here before us.”

        “It wasn’t me,” Bienor said quietly, looking at his hands. “It never was. Gryneus—it was always him.”

        “It pains me,” said Nessus sharply, “but you force my hand. If you won’t join us, you’re against us.” He gestured, and the centaurs around him lifted rifles, laying the stocks against their cheeks.

        Bienor swallowed, hard, and nodded at the bottle. “You promised a reward. Give me a drink before I die.”

        Nessus smiled. He raised the bottle, golden liquor flashing. “The last of my stores. After this, I won’t taste it again until we’ve stormed the gates of the Labyrinth Ranch. I hoped we could share it in celebration. Still, despite the recalcitrant mule you’ve become, incapable of vision, you deserve for your past deeds our homage and respect.” He thumbed the stopper free, kicked it down over the cliffs, and drank. Then he offered the bottle to Bienor.

        As Bienor reached to take it, his right hand quaking like a branch in winter wind, his left fell to his side, brushing the pocket of his coat.

        It was clumsy attempt, visible to everyone.

        Nessus twisted away from the blow. The bottle slipped from his hand to strike the stone. It didn’t break but rolled towards the cliff, wobbling, spilling its contents and their overpowering aroma into the cold air. A rifle discharged, the bullet whooshing between them, the report echoing. “Hold your fire,” Nessus snarled. Five Legs flung himself forward, but the guards were on top of him in half a stride.

        Bienor swung again, and Nessus caught the wrist that held the knife. He half-reared but Nessus leaned in, using his huge bulk to force Bienor down.

        When Nessus stepped away, the knife’s handle—elkhorn, scrimshawed in the likeness of a sheaf of rods—protruded from Bienor’s ribs at the top of a crescent-shaped gash long as his forearm.

        Blood seeped from a small cut between Nessus’s fingers; he made a fist to staunch it.

        Bienor fell headfirst towards the bottle, stopping it an arm’s length from the edge. He lay on his flank at the brink of the cliff and tipped it to his mouth, his larynx contracting as he swallowed. Slick cords of intestine bulged from the wound, mingling ichor with spilled whiskey on the ground. He let out a sigh that, though ragged and gurgling, still sounded to Five Legs like relief.

        “You were wrong about him,” Five Legs said. “The cowardly thing would have been to obey.”

        “Pity,” said Nessus. Stooping, he plucked the knife from Bienor’s chest.

        Bienor grunted; he pressed a palm ineffectually against the gap where the knife had been; bile and blood bubbled up between his fingers. Eyes closed, he kept on drinking, his breaths shallow. The carved stock of the Pyretus rifle rose over his shoulder on its battered sling.

        He could have led us, Five Legs realized. He hadn’t asked for command, never wanted it—but they would have followed him. And Nessus knew it. That’s why he wanted Bienor dead.

        But it wasn’t Nessus who needed convincing.

        “He could have led us,” said Five Legs aloud, his eyes on the captains, former soldiers of Eurytus now so desperate for change. None of these were branded with theta or spiral; they wore their own marks. Could they be swayed?

        “He was old,” Five Legs said. “His hands shook. He’d never eaten of the poison flower. But centaurs would have followed him. And in time, humans might have come to trust him. With Nessus, there is never going to be that chance.” Humans would never follow him in battle. They might die for him, the way they’d died for years—but they would never fight.

        This was where he rose to Bienor’s expectation, and the elder’s. Where he’d earn her forgiveness, if she had any to give.

        “Unchain me,” he said to the centaurs who held him. “Let me test him. If I can stand against Nessus, I’ll have a chance against Eurytus too. And the humans would follow me willingly, not by coercion. They know me. They trust me—some of them.”

        “Raised by humans,” Nessus said, cruel mirth in his tone. “Does their love support you, Patroclos? Does it make you invincible, as your sire’s love would have crushed you?” His hoof struck the bedrock with a clap. When he spoke again, his voice was deafening. “Hear me, human recruits. Here is a centaur, Patroclos, who claims to serve the human cause in challenging my right to lead. Will any of you speak on his behalf?”

        Among the voiceless crowd below, faces made featureless by distance, he recognized the elder’s mask: tilted upward as though seeking the sun, its exaggerated eyes and beak standing out clearly from the rest.

        Nessus laughed. “Listen well, centaur and human. I am your champion, I who have tasted of your poison, seen your visions and your fate. Take a lesson from what follows: though we rebel against Eurytus, dissent among our own ranks will be met with death. Watch his corpse doesn’t crush you as it falls.”

        He turned to Five Legs, the fasces knife balanced on his finger at the hilt, like a scales. “Do you challenge me, Patroclos, in the Old World style, might against might? I’ll allow you that privilege, if you choose it—but be warned. I won’t restrain myself as I did when we play-wrestled on the ranch in simpler times. Remember who you face. I’m not human. My sorcery extends beyond mere inner sight.” By way of demonstration, he traced his symbol on the blade, then held it forth as it began to spark and smolder with his power.

        A wind blew up out of the canyon, raising goose-pimples along Five Legs’s spine. Or was that the poison flower, Death, taking form on the ledge beside him to warm its human toes in a centaur’s blood?

        He had climbed to this knife’s edge of his own volition; now he must dive.

* * *

        Bienor let the bottle drop from his lips. A few fingers of liquid remained in the depths, but he’d had enough to serve his purpose and to spare. His head buzzed gloriously with alcohol and loss of blood; a warm, tingling precursor to numbness crept up from his extremities; his lips were swollen with the last flavor he ever wanted to grace them. The end was coming. He thought he could see it already in the cloudy haze above the cliffs. It looked like snow.

        Gryneus had never hijacked a train nor dared take a swing at Nessus, but Bienor wasn’t even with him yet. When they met on the far shore at last, he wanted to be able to step high. Besides, he owed a debt here.

        Five Legs tore the loose shackles from the hands of the soldier who had freed him. The fasces knife, red-hot and smoking, seemed to leap between Nessus’s hands of its own volition. The bodyguards leaned in, fingertips tense on their guns, tails twitching. Nobody looked at Bienor. Why should they? He was dead.

        His hands were empty; he must have dropped the bottle already. No matter. He didn’t need it anymore. It made him smile to think how badly he’d wanted it, and for so long, now that it meant so little.

        The Pyretus rifle lay heavy across his shoulder-blades, inert, ignored. He couldn’t reach it without further ripping open his gut, but what did that matter? He raised his hand from the wound, reaching. He drew its smooth stock into his tingling hands, pulled it to him like a lover.

        He’d only have one shot. The guards would be on him by then, even if he could still work his fingers well enough to find a second cartridge.

        He came upright on three hooves, one rear leg dangling out over the cliff. He slid his finger through the trigger-well, pressed the stock to his shoulder, and swiveled at the waist, feeling organs that had once been inside him burst and splatter against his hide.

        But he’d been too slow—far too slow. Now Five Legs and Nessus were grappling, the fasces tangled in the shackles, the chain-links hissing and spitting before the heat of Nessus’s power. He didn’t have a shot.

        A gun went off, then another. Not his own: he could tell by the noise, the high-pitched barks, and by the sudden new pinches in his chest, his flank, the corresponding blackness swarming from the edges of his vision. Time running out. Had to make these last moments count for something. No shakes now, no doubts—he was steady as stone. With this one last bullet, he could shoot out the eye of a needle.

        He swiveled back, hunching, and looked down the barrel’s smooth finger, past the sight pin, past the prone sharpshooters lining the switchbacks and the empty nests of cliff birds abandoned to the cold. There below was the crowd, the burned stumps of slave barracks, the prone body of Deimos, the line of hoplites blocking escape. At the least, he could take out their captain, give the humans a last hope to break through—if they could find the backbone for it.

        The human crowd—something had gotten them riled. They were moving, the crowd’s surface rippling outward from center like intricately-patterned cloth. Unless it was the stars in his vision.

        No. In the center of the crowd, something had taken shape. He knew that nightmare figure. He’d feared it—but it couldn’t scare him anymore. It reared its golden head, parted that razor beak, spread immense scarred wings. It screamed. And in answer, a cry rose from the crowd—high-pitched, ululating and eerie, building in intensity—a war cry.

        It sent a shiver through him. Bienor hadn’t heard that sound since the campaign outside Acoma, when Gryenus still lived, when desertion was only a whisper shared across bedrolls in the dark. Humans had been vicious once. They’d been warriors, killers in the name of a cause; their war cry alone was enough to let Eurytus spin them into a threat centaurs could be proud to fight.

        The humans Bienor had met since that campaign—since deserting, since Gryneus’s death—had been prostitutes, runaways, slaves; the conquered, forced into the habit of submitting, none of them capable of putting up a fight. These humans needed a champion, as Five Legs had said, but they needed more than that. A leader wasn’t worth shit if his people had nothing to believe in. More than a leader, they needed a myth.

        The thunderbird’s pinions beat down, casting up a wind enough to knock the nearest humans to their knees as it took flight. But one of its wings was crippled, bent; black blood matted the feathers where Bienor’s shot had struck; it could barely hold itself aloft. This time its scream was anguished, piercing and long like a train whistle.

        The train—the Echidna. The boiler, pumped all full of fire and force with no escape. He’d forgotten his ace in the hole. He shook his head, smiling. Liquor—it numbed the pain, killed the jitters, the doubts; it made bad memories warm again and drove the worst away. But it made you slip. It made you clumsy, made you take risks you didn’t need to and say things you shouldn’t. And it made you want to feel that way all the time. What a thing it was, what a joke, dreamed up by centaurs in a world without gods. What a tragedy.

        Bienor took a bead, precise and perfect, unwavering, stone-steady, on a rivet above the iron ridge of the Echidna’s twisted brow, where just a hint of superheated steam displayed itself in winter white. His efforts at recruiting Deimos and Phaeton should have reminded him of the finest thing about drink: it allowed him to believe again. He felt the merciful fingertip of Artemis upon his spine, counterbalancing the pain—his own great myth; no matter that it was a lie, it worked—and what a fine thing for these humans that their own myth could be real. He couldn’t wait to tell Gryneus.

        Under the slightest pressure from his finger, the trigger slid back, smooth as butter, and the Pyretus rifle boomed like a tympanum.

* * *

        The flat of the fasces knife pressed into Five Legs’s collarbone, searing, twisted up in the chains that had bound him. The scent of sweat and Nessus’s acrid breath, mingled with that of his own flesh burning, sent him back to the Labyrinth Ranch. Patroclos remembered the taste of human flesh, though Five Legs had made himself forget.

        His stomach clenched with shame, his skin crawled with revulsion, tears of rage perilously blurred his vision. The chain was growing hot from contact with the fiery knife; he wouldn’t be able to hold onto it much longer. Nessus was too big, too fast. It took all his concentration to anticipate the next twist or feint; his perception had narrowed to include nothing else but the dark hairs on Nessus’s knuckles, the tense and release of sagging flesh around tendons in his neck and arms, the pale reflections of the desert sky in his pupils.

        When the booming rifle-shot came from beside him, it was no more than a clear peal near-forgotten behind mountains, and the answering scatter of lesser gunfire from the guards a fleeting memory of rain. Only when the shockwave struck, pushing Nessus back on his haunches and Five Legs to his knees, did he recover the presence of mind to look for its source.

        Bienor was gone from the cliff’s edge, leaving only the rifle, smoking, in a smear of alcohol and gore.

        Nessus launched himself again on the attack, now wielding both knife and chain, too fast for Five Legs to do any more than fall and roll, flailing wildly with his hooves in blind hope of warding off the blows.

        Then the rushing wall of smoke and steam boiled up out of the canyon’s depths. And astride it came the thunderbird, screaming, beak and talons outstretched, brown and golden feathers filled with fading light, its eye the eye of hurricanes, calm in the face of pain.

        Among Nessus’s deafening amplified screams and the thunderbird’s steam-whistle howl, among flying bullets, smoke, the frantic plunging motion of fasces knife and chain and beak and threshing claw, Five Legs heard Nessus speak a name, an accusation. “Eurytus.”

        They were so much the same, the lords of the centaurs. Eurytus would never have accepted that Nessus could change, and Nessus couldn’t believe defeat was possible at any other hand.

        The Echidna’s explosion ignited rockslides. Old tunnels in the canyon walls collapsed. Centaurs fell in curtains from the cliffsides among cascades of earth and stone. Humans, like tenacious desert pines, resisted and were crushed.

* * *

        When it was over, Five Legs struggled upright. A few centaurs who’d kept hooves beneath them and guns in hand aimed at him, but he ignored them.

        Nessus, governor of the Northwest Plateaus, legate of the armies of the New World, controlling shareholder of the New Ilium and Acheron Railroad, was dead: his throat torn out, those terrifying black eyes pecked away, his steel beard shredded, slick bones exposed through gouges in his flesh. Dried flowers, spilled from a pouch at his withers, were scattered everywhere.

        The thunderbird was gone, replaced by the body of a broken, frail old woman in an ugly mask and tattered cloak of feathers. Five Legs lifted her easily into his arms—she was lifeless, limp, her body soft in places where bullets had shattered bone. The fasces knife protruded from her heart. He left it there and pulled away the mask.

        The eyes were familiar—haunted, proud, but less accusing now in a human face he’d never dared imagine; so old, so intensely fraught with lines it reminded him of a map of the world. He knew it had been made before the conquest, because none of its features were named.

        He laid her down. Let her lie here, between the aeries and the sky.

        He didn’t venture to raise the mask to his own face, nor even to look at the back of it. From the front, it was the face he knew. Gingerly gripping its edge, hesitant even to touch the smoothness of its inner side where it had pressed against the elder’s skin, he held it close against his side, lifted the Pyretus rifle slicked with Bienor’s blood and dust, and began to pick his way down the into the changed canyon. To pull survivors from the rubble. To look for Thin Crow.

        As he went, centaurs followed.

Copyright © 2012  Michael J. DeLuca

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Michael J. DeLuca brews beer, bakes bread, hugs trees, and curates a precolombian thought broadcast out of the back of his head. He graduated from the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2005, belongs to the Homeless Moon writers’ cabal, volunteers at Small Beer Press, and operates Weightless Books, an indie ebook store. Look for more of his short fiction upcoming in Jabberwocky, Bibliotheca Fantastica, and Live Free or Never Die. Read his blog at www.michaeljdeluca.com/.

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COVER ART

“Knight’s Journey,” by Raphael Lacoste

Raphael Lacoste is a Senior Art Director on videogames and cinematics. He was the Art Director at Ubisoft on such titles as Prince of Persia and Assassin’s Creed. Raphael stepped away from the game industry to work as a Matte Painter and Senior Concept Artist on such feature films as: Terminator: Salvation, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Repo Men. Raphael now works as a Senior Art Director for Electronic Arts and now Ubisoft. His artwork “Chinese Steampunk Village” was the cover art for BCS in winter 2010. View his gallery at www.raphael-lacoste.com..

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1046

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Copyright © 2012 Firkin Press

This file is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 U.S. license. You may copy and share the file so long as you retain the attribution to the authors, but you may not sell it and you may not alter it or partition it or transcribe it.