Bone Swans: Stories Read online

  From Mythic Delirium Books

  Bone Swans: Stories

  Copyright © 2015 by C. S. E. Cooney

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Cover art by Kay Nielsen, illustration in East of the Sun,

  West of the Moon: Old Tales from the North, 1914.

  Cover design © 2015 by Mike Allen

  Published by Mythic Delirium Books

  mythicdelirium.com

  This book is a work of fiction. All characters, names, locations, and events portrayed in this book are fictional or used in an imaginary manner to entertain, and any resemblance to any real people, situations, or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Our gratitude goes out to the following who because of their generosity are from now on designated as supporters of Mythic Delirium Books: Saira Ali, Cora Anderson, Anonymous, Patricia M. Cryan, Steve Dempsey, Oz Drummond, Patrick Dugan, Matthew Farrer, C. R. Fowler, Mary J. Lewis, Paul T. Muse, Jr., Shyam Nunley, Finny Pendragon, Kenneth Schneyer, and Delia Sherman.

  “Introducing C. S. E. Cooney” © 2015 by Gene Wolfe.

  “Life on the Sun” first appeared in Black Gate, Feb. 10, 2013. Copyright © 2013 by C. S. E. Cooney.

  “The Bone Swans of Amandale” is original to this collection. Copyright © 2015 by C. S. E. Cooney.

  “Martyr’s Gem” first appeared in GigaNotoSaurus, May 1, 2013. Copyright © 2013 by C. S. E. Cooney.

  “How the Milkmaid Struck a Bargain with the Crooked One” first appeared in GigaNotoSaurus, Nov. 1, 2013. Copyright © 2013 by C. S. E. Cooney.

  “The Big Bah-Ha” first appeared in 2011 as a Drollerie Press trade paperback. Copyright © 2011 by C. S. E. Cooney.

  This collection is dedicated to

  John O’Neill and Tina Jens.

  Table of Contents

  INTRODUCING C. S. E. COONEY

  by Gene Wolfe

  LIFE ON THE SUN

  THE BONE SWANS OF AMANDALE

  MARTYR’S GEM

  HOW THE MILKMAID STRUCK

  A BARGAIN WITH THE CROOKED ONE

  THE BIG BAH-HA

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by C. S. E. Cooney

  Praise for Bone Swans

  Picture me sitting in a small used-book shop with a banana cream pie on my lap. The young man reading at the lectern has given us a short-short story that is certainly publishable and has now launched upon one that that is not. We have had the poetry that suggests a poor article in Reader’s Digest cut up into uneven lengths, and the heart-wrenching personal memoir of the sister of a soldier killed overseas. And others. You know.

  The readers are kept in order by Claire Cooney, a startling young blonde with a smile capable of lighting up a good sized theater. At last she reads herself, a poem that rhymes and scans and grabs you from the opening line. The hero is a disfigured corpse floating down a city sewer, and it is funny when it is not horrible. (And sometimes when it is.) She chants it, and her voice is clear and musical. I couldn’t be prouder of her if I were her father.

  I met Claire when my friend Rory Cooney brought her around to see me. His daughter wrote, he explained, and he felt she had talent. Would I be willing to coach her a bit? I read some short pieces she had written and promised to do it. She was eighteen at the time.

  Most writers begin by imitating some favorite writer, H. P. Lovecraft imitating Lord Dunsany for example. There’s nothing wrong with that, provided the beginner grows out of it and finds his or her own voice. If Claire began by imitating somebody, she had already grown a long way out of it at eighteen. She wrote pure Claire Cooney. (Try to define that when you’ve finished the stories in this book.)

  She is in love with literature AND the theater—yes, both at the same time. She had a double major in college and has had a double major in life. She has played Rosalind in a professional production of As You Like It, and I wish I could have seen it. If there was ever a girl created by God to swagger around on stage with a broadsword pushed through the knot in her sword belt, Claire is that girl. The one time I have seen her in a play, she was a South African whore; she was good in that role, too, and gave me the impression that she would be good in any role that did not require her to die coughing up blood.

  What did she learn from me? Nothing, really. There is a select type of student, rare but invaluable, who will certainly succeed if not run down by a truck. You help yourself instead of helping them, putting an arm around their shoulders and making them promise to say you taught them all they know. I have had two of those, and Claire is one. I tried. I explained to her that there is no money in poetry anymore.

  She continues to write poetry anytime she feels like it. It’s all good, and some of it is great.

  I explained that though writers learned to write by writing short stories, the money was in novels these days.

  Claire insists she has a secret novel she is grinding away at; meanwhile she shows tourists through an aquarium, answers casting calls, and pens poems. Not to mention short stories starring cunning were-rats. And on rare occasions, she writes e-mails to me.

  I explained the business of—well, never mind. You get the picture.

  Also—this one actually took—I introduced her to science fiction conventions. To the best of my memory, her first was Readercon. (Always start at the top.) Claire, Rosemary, and I lived in greater Chicago in those dim, far-off days. Readercon, as you may know, is always held in or around Boston.

  We drove.

  It used to be that Rosemary would spell me at the wheel. By the time we drove to Boston, she was unable to walk more than a step or two and completely incapable of driving. So Claire spelled me, letting me for the first time ever ride in my own back seat. She would, I’m sure, have worn a chauffeur’s cap, had I had wit enough to obtain one.

  Doubtless you know that once upon a time, the very best cars—my father remembered them—had run by steam. The chauffeur did not drive them; he stoked the fire under the boiler. Now I was the chauffeur in the original sense, stoking our fire by encouraging Claire, praising her skill at the wheel, and so forth. Giving her confidence, too, by keeping the road atlas open on my lap and explaining that soon we would leave this federal highway and enter the other interstate. Claire held our speed between fifty and fifty-five, so that our progress resembled that of a barge on a canal. I was tempted to climb out a window and ride on the roof, ducking for low bridges like the passengers in the song, but though that might have been fun, it would almost certainly have resulted in the loss of the road atlas. I remained inside.

  Claire did lots of other things, too. When I was locked in an elevator on the first floor of a large motel, and Rosemary marooned in her wheelchair on the second, Claire served as go-between, running up and down the stairs to check the condition of the elevator and report to Rosemary.

  When we got to Readercon, Claire discovered a coven of witches and joined at once. (“Keep Halloween in Your Heart All Year long!”) She fit right in, and before the con was over, the witches were boasting about their new member. Nobody had smartphones then, but Claire and I had brought our cell phones. Claire, I should explain, pushed Rosemary’s wheelchair from time to time and was able to accompany and assist her in the ladies’ room. On one occasion, Claire and I held a long conference by cell phone before I discovered that she was around the corner, about five short steps away.

  Perhaps you feel that I have told you too much about the author in this introduction and not enough about the stories in this book. All right, let’s take up a favo
rite of mine, “The Big Bah-Ha.” Perhaps you know that you and I live in the Milky Way galaxy, an immense whorl of stars. You may also know that for years astronomers have wondered whether our own star’s orbiting planets were unique. Did other stars have planets, too? A few said yes and many more no. But no one actually knew; it was all guesswork.

  Science fiction (and religion) sided with the minority, the scientific world in general with the majority. Without evidence, it was foolish to assume that anything existed. To assume that things as large as planets did was the height of folly.

  Now we have a little hard data, and it would appear so far that planets are the rule, not the exception.

  Let’s think about that. The number of stars in our galaxy is enormous, almost infinite. And yet our galaxy is only one of many. We continue to find new ones, and it may well be that their number is infinite or nearly.

  Enter Claire. If there are so many galaxies, and so many stars in each of those galaxies, almost every imaginable race must also exist. What about a race similar to our clowns? A race wearing oversized shoes and rubber noses. Why, there are stranger customs right here on Earth! We know, then, what their society would be like, but what about their religion? And what if their religion were true?

  God is infinite.

  For Mir and Kiri

  That was the day the sky went dark.

  No eclipse was scheduled on the priests’ calendars to spur the fervent into declaiming the last days. No dust storm had blown up from the Bellisaar Wasteland, spinning the air into needle and amber and suffering all unwary walkers the death of a thousand cuts. No warning.

  Just the dark.

  Outside the gates of Rok Moris, a white sun blazed. Rattlesnake basked. Sandwolf slunk to fit inside the meager shadow of a sarro cactus.

  Inside the gates, blackness. Frost glistened on brick, boardwalk, dirt path, temple column. Quiet canals formed ice at the banks. Olive branches silvered and verdy bushes withered, and each blood-pink bougainvillea shed its papery petals to show the thorns.

  In the hottest, driest month of the year, to the hottest driest city in the Empire of the Open Palm, a long and endless winter night had come.

  Fa Izif ban Azur and his Army of Childless Men marched upon Rok Moris.

  * * *

  “Kantu!”

  Kantu groaned and rolled. A moment for the past to catch her. Ah. There it was. Like Lady White Skull, who calls you to the canals with her song and begs a ride upon your back. And halfway across the water, her bony claws dig in, and she drowns you.

  “Kantu!” The voice was nearer now, almost familiar.

  Her nose was clogged. Something congealed and unpleasant. She started to touch the mess of her face, but it felt strangely spongy, with a deep throb that reached the back of her brain.

  “Is it winter?” she muttered.

  It was dark and cold, a darkness and a coldness that ate at you. Not a desert darkness. Not the clean, crisp, starry dark of Bellisaar’s nightfall. Wizardry.

  “The Fa,” Kantu remembered aloud. Gooseflesh sprang to her arms. She made herself say it again. “The Fa came. And we fought.”

  The Bird People had fought—but not against the Fa. Their battle was, and had been for years, against their occupiers, the Empire of the Open Palm.

  The Fa’s arrival in Rok Morris had been an inadvertent blessing; his dark spell upon the city, their call to arms. No more desperate acts of midnight sabotage. No more skirmishes or staged protests. The time had come for the Bird People to rise, rise up from the middens, up from the Pimples, up from the Catacombs beneath Paupers’ Grave. They rose up, armed with cudgels, torches, oil bombs. Three to a carpet they flew, bombarding the Grand Palace of Viceroy Eriphet with fire and rage, taking out the houses and offices and barracks of the Audiencia lordlings. They flew, and they fought the rulers of the city, their invaders and oppressors. At last, at long last. After so many weary guerilla years!

  And the Viceroy’s guards engaged them in the streets, bringing down the carpets with their nets, and the Gate Police came with their spears…

  “Kantu!”

  Kantu tried to answer, got as far as a croak. Her lips felt fat, crusted together, a pulsing purple ache.

  A quick breeze rushed overhead, along with her name in an urgent whisper. Kantu groaned louder, trying to be helpful.

  Rokka Luck! A matter of seconds, and the sound of a velveted landing. Footfalls. Then a soft blue light, and Mikiel was there, with a ghost of a grin on her long, bony face, helping Kantu to sit upright.

  “Stupid, stupid, stupid!” hissed Mikiel. “Manuway said you jumped carpet.”

  “Guy with a net,” Kantu murmured. “Taken us all down. You’d’ve done the same.”

  “I would have dropped a brick on his head,” Mikiel answered, “not myself.”

  “Heat of the moment.” Kantu paused. “What’s that light?”

  Mikiel touched the glowing blue button on her shoulder. It flickered off. At another tap, it blazed up again.

  “Kipped it off a Childless Man. Once the Fa marched in, his soldiers were everywhere. I just sort of swooped down and plucked it off one of them. Figured the Fa had plenty more in his chest of wonders. Why not ward the dark with borrowed wizardry?”

  Because, Kantu thought, the wizard is a god, and all gods are vicious.

  She rubbed her bruised eyelids and tongued wincingly at the crusted coppery bits in her mouth. The weirdness of the witch light transformed Mikiel from best friend back to the alien thing she once had been. Her red hair seemed black as Kantu’s own, but her skin, paler than quartz, turned almost transparent, and Kantu thought she could see to the bone.

  Mikiel did not hail from Rok Moris—nor any city, village, town, or tent of the Bellisaar Desert. She had been born in the north, farther north than the fountains and flowers and silver opulence of Koss Var the King’s Capital. North, even, of Leevland where the fjords ran deep as the mountains rose high. She came, she said, from the top of the world, from a land called Skakmaht, where demons made their homes in flying castles made of ice.

  Mikiel’s wanderings had taken her to every land imaginable. But it was in Rok Moris she decided to stay, eight years ago, when she found the Bird People and allied herself with their suffering. Kantu knew many of Mikiel’s secrets, but not this first and deepest: why Mikiel had remained. Only the Rokka Mama knew that.

  The Rokka Mama had adopted Mikiel into their raggle-taggle tribe, bunking her with Kantu in a subcell of the ’Combs.

  “Why?” Kantu had thundered. All the sullen rancor and blistering jealousies that characterized the age of seventeen roared in her words. “She’s a stranger. She’s too tall. She talks funny.”

  “Because, Kantu, you are of an age and very alike. Yes—very! Both of you are headstrong and preposterous. Both of you,” she sighed, “still believe in justice.”

  “Well. She looks dead. Drowned. She’s so white.”

  “Then she’ll complement you well, my dark one. Be kind. She’s come a long way.”

  So Kantu, grudgingly, had taught Mikiel to walk the mazepath of the Catacombs, how to weave a carpet with thread that could fly, and finally, how to take to the skies. In turn, Mikiel showed Kantu how to dance with a knife strapped to her thigh, how to use a slingshot and flirt in twelve languages. For eight years they lived and fought alongside each other. As unlike her in looks as Rok Moris from Koss Var, Kantu came to consider Mikiel her sister. Their hearts beat a twin tattoo on the Thundergod’s drum.

  And now, in all the chaos of the uprising, Mikiel had not forgotten her.

  She found me, Kantu realized. Even in this darkness, she found me.

  As if Mikiel caught the thought, she grinned again, and her eyes sparkled. They were a limpid, pearly blue in color, almost white. Despite the witch light, she became herself again.

  “You’re dreaming, Kantu,” she said. “Too many blows to the head.”

  “Just the one. Didn’t improve my nose, I’m afraid.”
/>   “That meat hook? The gods could not improve it.”

  “Got any salt, Mik? Want to grind it in a little?”

  Mikiel made to throw her arm around Kantu’s shoulders. Her movement cast a strange shadow onto the crumbling alley wall. The shadow was taller and boasted more angles than even lissome Mikiel could account for. Leaning back, Kantu glanced from the shadow to the thing casting it, and whistled through her teeth.

  “Huh.”

  “You like? Crizion helped. She wanted to come, but it never would’ve carried three. So she went to scavenge food instead. Supplies are low.”

  “Mikiel Maris Athery, you are such a goddaft show-off!”

  Her friend shrugged, the mass on her shoulders bobbling. “It’s just—we’re all so scattered down in the ’Combs. The Rokka Mama had no carpets to spare for finding your sorry carcass. I had to do something.”

  Her something had been to fashion a collapsible glider from the magic tatters and raveled rags of carpets too threadbare and patchy to carry riders. The contraption jutted up and out from Mikiel’s shoulders like the Great Raptor Rok mantling her prey.

  “It flies,” she assured Kantu. “Sort of. You just have to talk gently to it. Lots of encouragement, that’s the way.”

  Kantu wiped her nose with the back of her hand. Immediately regretted it. “It carries you, sure. Mik, a praying mantis weighs more than you. Question is, will it carry two?”

  “Come on, Kantu.” Mikiel neatly avoided answering by hauling Kantu to her feet. Every time she moved it was a kind of dance, even weighed down as she was. “We can’t stay in the streets. Too damned dangerous.”