Last Plane to Heaven

Spendthrift

All of Merauke whispered with the rumors. The Japs are coming. Springfield McKenna didn’t place much faith in rumors. She’d traded in them far too long to lend credence to someone else’s social munitions.

The Hotel Hindia-Belanda had stood above the port town’s waterfront for two centuries, insofar as she knew. Springfield could believe that story, based on the eccentric interior fittings. The parlor seemed to have been constructed of lumber salvaged from a dozen wrecks. Parts of the walls were paneled in teak that would have fetched a fortune at auction in Honolulu or San Francisco. Other sections were raw, faded ash; gone to splinters and mottled with mysterious stains that could just as easily have been rotten durians burst in the heat or the lifeblood of a hapless crew overrun by Sea Dayaks.

The piebald interior suited the Hotel Hindia-Belanda, a piebald place in a piebald city at the edge of the Dutch East Indies. Which was, insofar as Springfield was concerned, precisely the ass end of nowhere.

She liked it that way.

Or had, until the war came creeping down the sea lanes and stepping across the islands, scaring the Dutch and the Aussies who ran most of the guns and money in these parts. Though she wouldn’t have cared to be a huisvrouw in Merauke, the fat old traders and their lean factors were happy enough to do business with an American woman who could match them drink for drink and joke for joke until the dawn came back around the curve of the world to light up another day.

Except for the damned Japanese and their damned Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

That, she thought, and a certain American bastard who traded away almost every bit of my wealth, all for a nickel.

The coin lay now on the tabletop. The familiar Indian head had been cut to a grinning skull, still wearing his braids and feathers. The old bastard looked positively happy. Which was strange, because the hobo nickel bore a patina that Springfield could barely put words to, speckled with time and hate. She could swear she heard it vibrating in her bureau drawer at night, mixing with her costume jewelry gold and her real silver.

First Ferris Roubicek had come into her life. Then he was gone again, leaving her with a broken heart, a failed business, a Japanese invasion, and a coin.

She wasn’t sure the coin wasn’t the worst of the whole business.

The scrape of chair legs prodded Springfield McKenna out of her reverie. “You still here?” asked a rough Aussie voice. Which was good, because her Dutch was crap; mostly useful for talking to bartenders and sailors.

Springfield peered up to discover that to her surprise she was mildly drunk. Otherwise Captain Waldo Innerarity, Royal Australian Air Force, wouldn’t have looked so good to her.

No way.

Not even for a moment.

He wasn’t all that bad a view to take in, she had to admit. Tall for a pilot, with the shoulders of a shore patrolman and pale blue eyes like the Andaman Sea. Ruddy from sun and drinking, brown hair with enough of a kink to argue about where all his ancestors might have come from. All of that just made him more interesting to think about.

But looking good? Waldo? She’d have sooner kissed her brother.

“You’re out of uniform,” Springfield said. Which was true but pointless. Waldo wore canvas trousers and a short-sleeved linen barong Tagalog. The embroidery looked a little queer on him.

“Uniforms might be pretty unpopular around here soon.” Waldo threw himself down in the chair with reckless disregard for the stresses involved and signaled the bartender for a drink. The Hotel Hindia-Belanda knew how all its regulars took their booze.

Springfield was pretty sure that the Indonesians and New Guineans in Merauke hated their white masters with an indiscriminate abandon, but at least around the hotel they smiled and kept their opinions behind the kitchen doors. She was careful never to order any food that could easily be spat in on the way to the table.

Sometimes one just had to trust the cook.

“Not all of ’em,” Springfield finally said, realizing she hadn’t been holding up her end of the conversation. “Jap yellow could be all the rage for the next season’s fashion.”

Waldo nodded and reached for the coin on the table. She snatched it away before his big, oddly delicate fingers could close on it.

“What you got there, lass?” he asked. Inerarrity’s voice went oddly soft, as it did so often when he spoke to her. She knew what that meant, coming from a man like him.

“Nothing anyone here cares about.” That, at least, was true.

“Been taking payoffs?”

She had to laugh. “In American nickels? One at a time? You’re out of your mind, flyboy.”

He leaned forward as a sweating glass of gin garnished with a sliver of mango tapped on the table. Springfield avoided the waiter’s eye. Waldo bit his upper lip, then asked, “So if you ain’t being paid, why are you still here?”

She met his stare with a level gaze of her own. “Everybody’s got to be somewhere.” The verbal equivalent of a shrug.

“Not every somewhere is in fear of Jap bombings. Or patrols. The boys had a shootup two nights ago in the hills not forty miles east of here.”

“So I heard.” Rumors, rumors. The Japs are coming. “They’ve got a lot better things to do than knock over one-horse towns where the horse died.”

He smiled like moonlight on the Torres Strait. “You’ve got a lot better things to do than sit around waiting for one-horse towns to be knocked over.”

Springfield thought that one through for a moment. “Are you propositioning me, Leftenant Innerarity?”

His smile blossomed to a grin. “Hell no, Sheila. A man ain’t that daft. But I am trying to save your damned fool life. If you want a seat out of town, I’m flying over to Darwin in two days. Hitch a ride, see what comes next.”

The name slipped unbidden from her lips. “Ferris Roubicek.”

Waldo frowned. “Mr. Ferris is gone from these parts three months and more. Last seen on a Chinese steamer heading for Ceylon. And well understood not to be coming back.”

“I’m tapped out,” Springfield admitted. “Ferris took me good. I was running a pretty solid business in spice and batik, even with the war coming. Maybe especially because of the war. But he… promised…” Confidences whispered under starlight as the insects whined against the netting. She tried again, her head growing hot and tight under Innerarity’s infuriatingly sympathetic gaze. “I made a bad deal, Waldo. I’m living on the last of my credit now.” She turned the hobo nickel over in her hand, felt its patina through her skin even under the table and out of sight.

Somehow it all came down to the damned coin. Yet she hadn’t been able to get rid of it yet.

The words “until death do us part” sprang unbidden and unwelcome into her mind.

“All the more reason to leave, eh? Seat’s yours, no need to pay.”

“Not in coin,” she replied.

With those words, his face closed and his frown drew tight. Springfield knew she hadn’t been fair, but damn it, this was Waldo. Not someone who had any right to have an interest in her.

“Besides,” she added. “The Japs might never get here.”

He stood up, tossed back his gin in one huge gulp that must have burned all the way down. The mango slice tumbled into his mouth with the booze. “You just keep telling yourself that, Spring. Who knows? Might even be true.”

With that, the lieutenant left, taking his big shoulders and his manly ways with him.

After a while, Springfield signed her chitty and trudged up to her room. Doubtless the waiter would report what he’d heard to Inigo van Damme, the manager. Then the manager would ask, again, about her bringing her bill up to date.

She was fairly certain they wouldn’t take a lone skull-faced nickel in payment.

That night Springfield McKenna had the dream again. Japs in their mustard-yellow uniforms and peaked hats walked the muddy streets of Merauke. The city was under occupation, the Dutch and Australian defenders vanished as surely as if they’d never been here. There weren’t even blood spatters or bullet holes. Just Japanese soldiers everywhere. Stolid. Silent. Shuffling. Staring at her with empty eyes.

They all marched to the beat of some distant tin drum. A rattle that carried from the hills outside of town all the way down to the portside slums along the banks of the Maro River. Even the endless nightly concerto of insect and bird and jungle screech had quieted in the face of that beat.

She heard that noise. Metallic. Small. Sly. It carried everywhere. It informed her heart and doused her hearing and set her thoughts to smoldering.

With a sweaty, fetid start, Springfield realized she was awake. But the beat that had carried through her dream of invasion still echoed.

It was the nickel. In her bureau drawer. The coin was rattling. Marching like a tiny army of its own through her dreams and through her life.

She slid from her bed and tugged on a pair of airman’s coveralls. In the sticky heat of the New Guinea night, Springfield didn’t even bother with foundation garments or makeup. She just dressed swiftly and angrily, then took a discarded cigarette tin in hand and stood before the bureau.

Inside, the skull-faced nickel rattled on its own. Counting time. As if it were one of those deathwatch beetles.

“You bastard,” she hissed, though Springfield couldn’t have said whether she was talking to Roubicek or Innerarity or her father or who. She yanked the drawer open with a savage tug and captured the dancing nickel in an empty tin. It rattled a moment, then fell quiet.

“You bastard,” she repeated, and stalked out into the night.

It wasn’t far from the Hotel Hindia-Belanda to the waterfront. Though in truth, nothing was far from anything else in Merauke. She scuttled the few blocks, keeping to the deepest shadows where possible.

As she approached the dockside, a single shot echoed. Springfield froze. She wasn’t especially afraid of men with guns, but she had a lot of respect for what they could do in a careless moment. The only thing stupider than being shot in a war zone would be being shot by accident.

“Damn it all.” Springfield froze next to a stack of fish traps that reeked of rot and creaked slightly in the wind questing off the night’s water.

A voice called out nearby, indistinct but with the overtones of Dutch.

Someone answered cautiously from farther down the docks.

A short laugh, barked with the clipped nervousness of a man under pressure.

Then another shot.

Her nerve broke. She ran back toward the Hotel Hindia-Belanda, cigarette tin clutched so tightly in one hand that the metal was being crushed. When Springfield reached her room, she dumped the coin out on the scarred marble top of the bureau amid the grimy doilies and empty atomizers. The skull grinned up at her.

“I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy,” she told it with a glare.

Waldo’s offer of a seat on his flight was looking better and better. She absolutely hated that.

Rumors the next day were of Japanese spies on the waterfront, and graves being violated at the cathedral. Springfield was hard-pressed to see how those two could be connected. That didn’t stop people from speculating.

She used her copious free time to pack one small valise. It wouldn’t do for van Damme to think she was leaving with her bill unpaid, after all. And nothing a woman wanted or needed in Merauke was going to be too hard to replace in Darwin, or wherever she wound up.

Lieutenant Innerarity wouldn’t be footing her bills, Springfield promised herself.

She packed her last pair of silk stockings, a few necessaries, and one nice red dress. Just in case. With her dark hair and pale complexion, the color was striking, setting off her green eyes to great advantage. At least, that’s what her mother had always said. Springfield figured she’d need all the advantages she could get.

Her gulden were pointless outside of the Dutch East Indies. Let the hotel staff squabble over the small stack of coins. She still had two hundred American dollars, the last of her working capital remaining from Ferris Roubicek’s taking of her wealth and pride. That was what she couldn’t give to the manager. What she couldn’t afford to lose.

A few clothes, a little money, a nail file, and the nickel.

That was it.

Half a decade working here in the islands, a place where being a woman wasn’t an automatic disqualification from business, by virtue of her being an American. All she had to show for five years was a valise that could have carried half a dozen newspapers. A little money and a red dress.

Even the rest of the clothes she’d leave behind. She’d meet Waldo at dawn in her coveralls.

That dealt with, Springfield decided to go out. She couldn’t stand spending the day under the suspicious eyes of the waiters and the bartender. Everyone knew the white people were one panic away from leaving.

That night, she dreamt again of Japs in the streets. They shuffled as they walked, dragging their feet and staring downward as if afraid to say anything that might compromise their fealty to their emperor. They were everywhere in Merauke, filling the streets as if division after division had landed and overrun the place. Shoulder to shoulder, chest to back, the soldiers moved in eerie silence except for the beat of their one tin drum.

She refused to wake up for that damned coin.

Absolutely refused.

In the end, Springfield awoke for Waldo Innerarity. Or at least his knock.

“We’ve got to get moving, love.” His voice through the door was low almost to the point of being indistinct.

Her ride out. The dreams, the shots. It was over here in Merauke, her whole party done for. Ferris Roubicek had blown out the candles, but even the cake was nothing but crumbs now.

Springfield had slept in her flight overalls. She tugged on a pair of men’s low quarter boots, ran her hands through her hair twice, grabbed her valise, unlocked the door, and threw it open.

“I—” Waldo swallowed his words as he stared at her.

“Ain’t seen a woman before, flyboy?” She chucked him under the chin. “Let’s go before the manager busts me.”

“Too late, I am afraid.” Van Damme stepped up behind the lieutenant. “You cannot be leaving us without a settlement?”

“Not at all,” she began sweetly, but Waldo elbowed Inigo in the gut, effectively ending the discussion. Springfield shot him a wild look of thanks. She reached into her valise for the skull-faced nickel, intending to leave it for a tip, but all she could think of in that moment was the marching Japanese in their endless, mindless numbers.

“Get out while you can, van Damme,” she whispered, the best tip she knew to give him. But Innerarity was already tugging her arm away, away, away.

The RAAF flying boat looked like a real beast as it floated at the dock. Beyond, over the hills east of town, the sun pearled the eastern sky the color of the inside of a compact. “Short Sunderland,” Waldo said, as if that meant anything to her. “The boys are aboard already. Don’t say nothing you don’t have to, it’ll go easier on us all.”

Springfield felt a sudden and unexpected attack of cold feet. She stood on the dock, looking up at the looming side of the aircraft. Something whirred—bilge pump, starter motor, she had no idea.

She felt as if she were being invited to climb into her coffin.

“Waldo…” Springfield whispered.

“Come on, Sheila.” He tugged at her arm. “We’ve got to be away before the sun comes up.”

Before anyone sees me getting on the airplane, she thought. Then she remembered Inigo van Damme gasping on the floral carpet in the hotel’s upstairs corridor.

She was committed now.

“I’m ready,” Springfield whispered, mortified at the squeak in her voice.

Innerarity helped her aboard. As she stepped up the gangplank, she could swear she heard the skull-faced nickel rattling in her valise.

Takeoff was an agonizing bounce and drag over the waters offshore. The Short Sunderland was a roaring, stuttering monster that clearly had no affinity for the air. It coughed around her, reeking of electricity and fuel and exhaust and the sweat of nervous men. Cigarettes, too, though no one was smoking right then.

Perversely, Springfield wished she had a Lucky Strike. She didn’t smoke, never had, but she’d always envied the easy way people who did could handle their nerves. Light up, take a draw, strike a pose. It was much more elegant than wringing one’s hands and hoping for better.

The airplane lurched and banked. She looked out the porthole at the Arafura Sea gleaming in the dawn’s light. Sharks lurked in the waters along shore, visible in their silhouettes. The muddy beaches were littered with storm debris, the swamps thick with trees. Shadows still lay across the land in contrast to the ocean’s morning glow.

The Japanese were down there somewhere.

Springfield glanced around the upper cabin. The rest of the seats were empty. Which was strange. Surely other people had wanted to leave Merauke as badly as she. Though the RAAF wasn’t in the habit of giving rides to anyone who just happened along.

It occurred to her to wonder once more what Waldo wanted. But then, that was obvious enough. Not him, she told herself. Though in truth, not anyone.

Not since Ferris Roubicek. Nor since long before him.

She found the nickel in her hand then. It lay cold and heavy, like a bullet. Heavier than a coin should ever have been. Springfield could feel it vibrating against her palm. Not in time with the overwhelming drone of the engines. Rather, the coin set its own rhythm. The rhythm of a thousand shambling Japanese.

Then one of the engines coughed harder. It emitted a blatting noise. Springfield shot a look out the window to see a haze of smoke coming from her side. Left. Port. Whatever they called it on an airplane.

The engine coughed again, stuttering before it settled into the slower rhythm of the nickel.

The little metal door leading forward banged open and Waldo leaned into the passenger cabin. “What the bloody hell happened?” he demanded.

Springfield closed her fist on the coin, feeling guilty for no reason she could name. “Something’s wrong with your, um, port engine.”

“I fewking know that.” He stalked over to stare out her porthole. “Damn it, we can’t just turn back.”

The airplane bucked then. A series of thumps echoed from the outside.

“Japs,” shouted Waldo, and rushed back to the flight deck.

Japs? But they walked in slow silence, taking over the world by numbers and rhythm. Not through violence in the air.

Outside her porthole, a slim aircraft slid by. She could see the big red circle on the side, painted over the jungle camouflage. Why paint an airplane like a tree? Who would it hide from in the blue, blue sky?

Three more of its fellows followed.

Zeroes. Even she knew that word, knew what those planes looked like.

One waggled his wings in salute, as if they were just friends sharing a pleasant morning’s flying.

The flying boat banked hard to the right, tilting her view toward the clouds still colored salmon and rose. Springfield McKenna watched the heavens glare as around her Lieutenant Waldo Innerarity’s airplane began to die. In her hand, the nickel pulsed like a beating heart.

The shoreline came rushing upward, a green fist folded over the troubled rim of the ocean. Waldo, or whoever was up on the flight deck with him, brought the Short Sunderland in hard, skimming the wave tops. Springfield supposed they were aiming for a welcoming stretch of beach. All she saw was the end.

Smoke curled through the cabin, and both engines were ragged and stuttering. The flying boat wallowed like a puppet with half its strings cut. The Japanese were surely out there, following their prey to earth. Sharks on a dying swimmer.

Then the great fist of the land grabbed Springfield and punched her in the chest, took the air from her lungs and the fire from her belly and handed her only pain and pressure in return.

She was not so lucky as to pass out. Rather, she was thrown back and forth in her seat, somehow held in place by the flimsy safety harness, as the world outside the porthole dissolved into a mass of spray and sand and smoke.

“Out, out, out,” someone was shouting. Springfield didn’t know who. It might have been her. She still couldn’t breathe, couldn’t talk, but she could unclip her belt and tumble from the chair and slide across the carpeted wall and see nothing but sand out of the opposite porthole set into the floor.

A man was screaming as well, the kind of scream someone lets out when their arm is ripped off. She ignored that, ignored the smoke and flames and reek of fuel and the irregular chatter of gunfire outside, to claw her way toward the portholes where the world still peered through. New Guinea was briefly surprised by her latest invader before the jungle would come to claim them all.

A few panicked moments later, Springfield found herself hidden away among great, tall roots. She watched the RAAF flying boat burn while one of the Japanese Zeroes lazed overhead, laying down gunfire on the beach every second or third pass. In case any of the Aussie airmen inside had notions of surviving their crash.

She stared impassive, tears streaming down her face, unfeeling, grief-stricken, the coin clutched in her hand like a beating heart, waiting for the fire to die and all of Innerarity’s crewmates with it.

Springfield McKenna knew then that her life had been bought too cheaply.

Night brought wakefulness once more amid the reek of smoke and jungle rot. She didn’t even realize she’d fallen asleep. The snarl of the last loitering Zero had been in her ears, until it was replaced by the chatter and howl of New Guinea’s moonlit jungles.

The tree she’d wedged herself into still protected her. Sure, there were some bugs crawling down the leg of her coveralls, but they seemed to be using her as a throughway, not as a meal ticket.

At least someone is getting some good out of this.

The coin was quiescent in Springfield’s hand. She slid from the tree’s embrace and stepped aching onto the sand. Her body was bruised in places she didn’t even know she had. The skin on the side of her head felt sticky and tight in a way that suggested she really didn’t want to look into a mirror. The surf rolled in before her, foaming wave tops glowing slightly in the light of the three-quarter moon.

“Now I give you back to the ocean,” she whispered into her clenched fist, then cocked her arm to throw the skull-faced nickel far out to sea. She might have been a girl, but Springfield McKenna could throw. Two seasons playing left field for the Jax Maids down in the Crescent City had proven that. Before she’d had to leave the country.

“Ferris,” screamed Springfield, her eyes filling with tears for Waldo and the men she didn’t even know, “you bastard.”

A voice groaned out of the darkness. “Sheila…”

She aborted her throw, spinning in place to face the sound. “What?”

Someone was crawling toward her across the muddy beach. He creaked as he came, moving no faster than the shambling Japs of her dreams. “Spring…”

Dropping to her knees, Springfield peered at him. “Waldo?”

He made another three or four crawling steps, then collapsed to roll over on his side. “I…”

She looked close, trying to peer into those Andaman blue eyes. All she saw was rippled, bubbled skin. The smell of crisped pork filled her nostrils. His teeth gleamed unnaturally large, lips burned away and gums drawn back with the heat.

His breath… He had no breath at all. Lieutenant Waldo Innerarity had exhaled his last trying to reach her.

Springfield jumped to her feet and swallowed the urge to scream. This was another dream. All of it. The flight. The Zeroes. The crash. This. Waldo.

She backed away from him, slowly, her heels kicking at the slimy mud. Stumbling into a tree root, Springfield turned to catch herself on a branch.

Except it was no branch.

She had bumped into the leg of another burnt corpse. He hadn’t been there a minute earlier, when she hopped out of the tree.

The nickel twisted in her hand. It vibrated, tapping out its rhythms as if preparing to sing.

The sea brought the odors of watery death and seaweed. Infinitely preferable to fuel fires and roasted pork. Behind her, the jungle breathed. Springfield stared at the two dead men at her feet. Then she opened her hand to drop the nickel.

“N’a do ’at,” said another voice in her ear.

This time she did shriek. Springfield twisted to find another Aussie airman, crisped by fire, half his skull shattered from a Japanese bullet.

This was Waldo, she realized with horror. Not the corpse behind her. She spun again and he was gone. So was the other airman.

A dream, a dream, she told herself. Like the shambling Japs. Wake up now, damn it.

But there was no waking up. There were only burnt, bloody hands tugging at the sleeve of her coveralls, clumsily brushing through her hair which had come flyaway loose, stroking at her feet.

Springfield screamed again. She really put her lungs into it this time. She kicked, too, with what had once been deadly accuracy. But these men… creatures… whatever they were… they didn’t care.

She grabbed a piece of driftwood and swung it as hard as any Louisville Slugger. Teeth sprayed in the moonlight, a puff of ash flying with them. A broken skull shattered. Grasping hands were slapped back.

There were only two of them. Or maybe three, or four. Not like the Japanese soldiers in her dreams who filled the streets of Merauke and came on in their blind, implacable, unstoppable numbers.

Just a handful of men. One of whom she’d actually kind of liked in his strange way. “Damn you, Waldo,” she shouted at the twitching corpses. “Why the hell did you go and do this?”

She kicked and kicked again, then had to whack her own leg with the stick to force an independent, questing hand off her calf. Just like a man. Breath whooping, tears threatening, Springfield McKenna fought a nightmare on the moonlit beach at the mouth of the Torres Strait until eventually she was surrounded by only bones and pulped flesh and shattered teeth and wispy shreds of scalp.

She stood over the corpse she thought might actually be Waldo. Like all of them, it was in several pieces. At the least, they’d come apart easily under the blows from her stick. Springfield resolutely ignored the fact that various severed body parts were moving and twitching. She ignored the yawning gap where her heart used to be, where her nerve used to live.

“It’s yours now.” She raised her clenched fist to drop the skull-faced nickel with the rest of her dead.

The click of a rifle bolt sliding home just behind her arrested Springfield’s hand in mid-motion.

A small man, frowning, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a uniform pale gray by moonlight, stepped in front of her. A Jap officer.

“Some things are not meant to be thrown away.”

Springfield blurted the first thing that came into her head. “You speak excellent English.”

“For a Jap?” He nodded and smiled, a small, controlled expression that seemed more practiced than real. “Lieutenant Ginnosuke Sakamura. Stanford Law School, class of nineteen thirty-six.” The officer glanced at her fist. “Do not let go of that.”

What? she wanted to ask, but it would have been a foolish question. She settled for, “How do you know?”

“Some things can be seen clearly enough.” He shouted in Japanese over her shoulder, though she’d heard no noise behind her since the click of the rifle bolt sliding home.

Slowly, Springfield turned. Sakamura held his ground. She could feel his smile boring into her back like the first thrust of a knife.

An entire platoon of Japanese soldiers stood between her and the tree line. They were ranked in unbreathing silence, staring at not quite anything, moving no more than a line of stones might be expected to do.

Only one held his rifle trained on her. He was as unblinking, unmoving as the rest.

“I’m never going to wake up from this, am I?”

Sakamura chuckled lightly. “You already have woken up, Miss McKenna. That is the nature of your problem. You are no longer dreaming.”

How did he know her name?

Ferris, she realized. Somehow, this Jap lieutenant had learned about her from Ferris Roubicek.

“You know what I hold, then,” she said cautiously. Her heart shuddered. Waldo and the rest of the Aussies had died for… what? Ferris to play a revenge game against her? There was no justice in that.

Not that there was much justice anywhere else, either.

“You are a spendthrift, Miss McKenna.” Sakamura sounded sympathetic. Almost loving, even. “You have sold your life cheaply and gained nothing in the bargain.”

“Yet I am the one who has saved my nickel.” Thrift is a virtue, isn’t it?

Every time she’d tried to throw it away, things had gotten worse. Springfield seriously doubted that Lieutenant Sakamura would take the thing from her now. He knew too much already.

There was only one solution.

She slapped her hand over her mouth and swallowed the nickel, taking it down as hard and ugly as any emetic. Sakamura cried out, but he didn’t wrestle her to the ground or try to stick his fingers down her throat.

“Good day, gentlemen,” Springfield said, and began walking toward the water.

No shot rang out. No shouts called for her to halt or face the consequences.

She stepped into the surf. The water claimed first her feet, then her knees. Warm salt washed away the smoke and grime and blood and the last few stubborn beetles still clinging to her coveralls. The ocean slapped at her belly, at her bosoms, took her hands like an eager lover.

Springfield McKenna allowed herself to be claimed, because she had come to understand that there was no escape. There had been none since her affair with Roubicek. All that was left to her was to deny him the fruits of his evil investment. No nickel, no gain from claiming her body or soul or spirit. Whatever it was he’d sought.

When the sea came for her mouth, she cried out in gladness and spent her life freely.

At least it isn’t fire, she thought, choking on the water. The nickel thrummed in her gut. Already it sought a way back out into the world.

The sharks bumped her as they closed in.

Jefferson’s West

“Damn me for a Kentucky fool,” muttered Lieutenant William Clark.

He and Captain Meriwether Lewis had climbed the crumbling white tuff for over an hour, finding momentary shade in tree-lined gullies before beetling across stone beneath the sun’s heated regard. They explored without aid as Charbonneau and the men of the Corps of Discovery were down by the Missouri River playing at rounders and roasting a pallid sturgeon Sergeant Glass had caught.

Some things were best discussed between gentlemen first. Clark kept his knife close by. His old friend Captain Lewis had the expedition’s written orders straight from President Jefferson, but Clark had his own, secret orders as well, whispered in the blood-warm darkness of a Virginia summer night.

“Hot, William?”

“Hot, yes, but that is the state of this interminable country at this particular season.” Clark wiped his face on the back of his sleeve, the wool scratchy and rank.

“What makes you such a particular fool, then?”

His friend’s voice was gentle, but Clark felt the barb. He tried to explain himself. “Your great, pale towers here upon the high shore, Mr. Lewis. In your journal you named them ‘the remains or ruins of elegant buildings,’ but up close they are just rocks. I am a fool for having held faith in them.”

“Hmm.” Lewis grabbed hold of a struggling sage and stepped up to a narrow, flinty ledge. The distressed plant perfumed them both. “I had an angle of view from the river. These cliffs are deceptive, sir. In both their appearance and their altitude.”

“Hence my foolishness.” Clark pushed past Lewis, scrambled up a gravel wash to make the next rise. He glanced over his shoulder. Lewis’s face was lost in shadow beneath the wide-brimmed leather hat the commander had traded from the Mandan Indians the previous winter. For a moment the captain looked to be a fetch, a shade of himself, some dark ghost risen in the noontime sun.

Just as Jefferson had feared.

There were no powders or perukes when Lieutenant Clark called at Monticello in the summer of 1803. The president was there, though the papers said otherwise in Philadelphia and Washington City.

Jefferson and Clark took their ease on a small brick patio looking down the hill. A fat moon sailed the horizon, full-bellied and satisfied. Distant dogs barked as Negroes chanted around a pinprick fire visible through shadowed trees.

Clark wondered why he had been summoned to the plantation. Alone, no less, without Captain Lewis, who was deep in preparations back at the capital. This visit was passing strange and piqued his curiosity. He was equally fearful of being found out for coming here in secret.

“The War Department drags their heels at your promotion, Lieutenant,” Jefferson said slowly.

“It is their way, sir.”

“Meriwether is doing his best for you.”

“I’m sure, sir.”

Jefferson’s teacup clinked against its saucer. Mosquitoes and larger insects buzzed in the dark around them as the chanting down the hill reached some crescendo before dying off into laughter.

Clark wondered again exactly why he had been called to this place.

“I am a rational man, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, sir.”

“There is certainly a Deity, a Creator. No man could deny that, simply from witnessing the sheer complexity of the universe.” The president sighed. “His intentions with respect to our lives on this Earth, however, are entirely a matter of interpretation.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Ten days ago I had a dream. Do you dream, Lieutenant?”

“I suppose so, sir.” Clark’s dreams were rarely recalled and seemed mostly to involve grappling with angry phantoms. It was as if he dreamed the idea of a dream, rather than the jumble of thoughts and images others spoke of.

“Every man dreams. Some remember more than others.” The saucer clinked again. “And there are those rare dreams possessed of such a compelling verisimilitude—a reality, Lieutenant, as sure as any waking journey through the hallways of your own home.”

Clark’s neck began to prickle. Down the hill, the dogs and slaves had fallen silent. “Sir?”

Jefferson’s voice was sad. Tired. “An angel came to me, Lieutenant. In my rooms. He— No, it. It was black. Not ‘black’ as we speak of our Negro slaves being, but black as my boots. Black as a Federalist’s heart, sir. Its wings glittered like stars, or perhaps coals in a furnace, and it spoke to me in a voice of iron.”

The night remained silent. Even the moon seemed to have paused in her rise. Clark’s curiosity finally overcame his discretion. “What did the angel say, sir?”

“I do not know. It spoke the tongue of Heaven, perhaps. I did not know the words in my dream, and I do not know them now. But in one hand it held a bloody knife, in the other a broken arrow. And mark this, Lieutenant Clark… the dark angel had the face of Captain Lewis.”

The words slipped from Clark before he could consider them fully. “Do you fear betrayal?”

Jefferson laughed without any tone of amusement. “Betrayal? From Meriwether? Sooner would I be betrayed by my own fingers. I have already entrusted him with various affairs of state, and make no second thoughts about it.” A pale hand shot out of the shadows to grab Clark’s arm, nearly startling a scream from him. “But watch over my captain, Clark. Watch for the broken arrow and the bloody knife. Be my wits out there past the frontier.”

“Yes, sir.”

Then the slaves chanted again, and the dogs barked, and the moon moved once more across the fetid Virginia sky.

Clark stared up at the crumbling white towers set on the flat peak they had just climbed. They were real after all, these buildings, made of the same pale stone as the cliffs below. Brush and gravel obscured the bases of the towers, but there were large openings higher up, of no particular plan or symmetry that he could see.

He tried to imagine dark angels flying in and out of the high windows. Though it was hard to tell with their state of disrepair, there seemed to be a paucity of ground-level entrances.

Lewis sucked in his breath. Clark knew without looking that his captain would be idly chewing on his lower lip. “Burr came to me just before we left,” Lewis said.

Clark was shocked. Simply conversing with the vice president was close to an act of treason among good Democratic-Republicans. Jefferson had not taken kindly to Burr’s Federalist maneuverings during the contesting of the election results. That Lewis would talk to Burr at all was amazing. That he would admit such a conversation to Clark was inconceivable.

“Offered me ten thousand pounds on deposit in London, in exchange for certain reports.”

“Reports of what?” Clark asked. The bribe was a magnificent fortune, enough for a lifetime of a gentleman’s ease and most likely his heirs’ as well.

“He had a list. I said no, of course, but I still remember what he wanted to know of. It was fantastical. Old Testament, if you will. Giants, woolly mammoths, angels.”

Angels?

“Lost cities,” Lewis continued.

“’Tis definitely a city,” said Clark, nodding at the towers before them. “And ’tis definitely lost.” Then, because he could not help himself, “Did you tell the president?”

“He would not listen.” Lewis shrugged. “Burr’s ambitions are not a mystery to those who know him. Our vice president would be king of the West. I will not scout for him.”

The two of them pushed forward, down into the brush that grew around the towers—sprawling junipers and close-set berry vines, cluttered with sage and a dozen other bolting bushes and flowers. There was water up here then, at least at certain times of the year.

Was this what Jefferson had feared, Clark asked himself. Had Burr been the dark angel with Lewis’s face?

They came upon a wall hidden in the brush. It was worn with age and erosion, a dragon-backed thing marked mostly by gravel where once had risen an imposing barrier. Wordless, Lewis headed to the right, so Clark continued to follow. He wondered why neither the guide Charbonneau nor the voyageur’s Indian wife Sacagawea had made mention of this place.

The gate was before them soon enough. It was an arch formed of a pair of ivory tusks that swept up fourteen feet or more, though whatever barrier had once stood between them was long gone.

“This gate faces east.” Lewis pointed downward. “And look here…”

At their feet was a flat stone, much scorched by flame.

“‘So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden,’” quoted Lewis. “‘To work the ground from which he had been taken. After He drove the man out, He placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.’ From the third chapter of Genesis.”

“I know that,” whispered Clark, his hand more firmly on his knife. Hair stood up all over his body, prickling harder than it had even that night in Virginia. He could almost hear Jefferson’s slaves chanting. “Come away from this place, Captain. It is not for us.”

Lewis sounded bemused, or perhaps enchanted. “But the president set us to explore the West. If we walk through this gate, we will be heading west.”

Drawing his knife against what foe he was not sure, Clark grabbed Lewis by the elbow with his free hand. “I do not trow if this is Eden or not. I disbelieve that it could be, but that doesn’t matter.” He tried not to let his rising desperation seep into his voice as the blade shook. “Come back to the river. Forget this. Tell the men we saw tall rocks. The Republic isn’t ready for this, Meriwether. The human race is not ready.”

The captain tried to shake Clark off. Clark wouldn’t let go, so Lewis stepped into him, chest to chest, ready to shove, except that he stepped into the blade of Clark’s knife.

“Oh, Lord, no!” shouted Clark.

“Oh, Lord, yes,” said Lewis with a tinge of surprise and disappointment, as the arrows of the Teton Sioux began to rain around them.

In the summer of 1805 Captain Meriwether Lewis’s body was recovered at St. Louis by two Negro slaves scraping paint above the waterline of a river barge. They told the sheriff, and later the Territorial governor, that a little canoe had just sort of bobbed up and nudged them where they stood waist-deep in the water. Despite the automatic suspicion of Negro involvement in the death of a white man, their story was eventually believed. The slaves ran away up the Missouri shortly after the inquest, however, which reopened the question and considerably delayed official reports to Washington City.

When the canoe was brought to shore, the captain’s hands were folded over a black feather almost as long as he was tall, that glinted in the sunlight and was later seen to glow pale red under the night’s moon. He was otherwise unclothed, making it clear that he had died of grievous wounds. His body was accompanied in the tiny boat only by the corpse of his dog Seaman and a single gigantic tooth fit for the mouth of Leviathan—or at least a mastodon.

God didn’t send anyone else from the Corps of Discovery home that year. Lieutenant Clark eventually returned to the Republic a very changed man, accompanied by Lewis’s servant York, Sacagawea, and an army of Indians and Negroes. When they finally came they hunted justice with rifle and bayonet.

The Bible was wrong in a few other particulars as well. Eden had only one river, not four, and it was the Missouri, not the Euphrates. But God had made His point just like Clark and his army would someday, and later on Aaron Burr made his point as well in Spanish Tejas.

The West was never the same.

They Are Forgotten Until They Come Again

Once bound by iron ribbons on each bank, River has been unfettered for more years than the lives of the salmon who leap Her rubbled rapids. She runs wide and powerful through deeps and shallows, over the stubs that formerly bridged and trussed Her and the shattered walls that at an earlier time impounded Her waters. She is a pool of memories, a current of thought, a channel through which all of life itself must pass. In Her time, River has sundered mountains and cradled thundering floods as great as any raging fires of the earth. Now furtive men slink to Her verges and cast throat-cut sacrifices into Her waters that they might scavenge metals and other wonders from what remains in the margins of Her embrace.

She flows. In flowing, She is, was, and always will be.

Smallish Boy crouched underneath the rhododendron alongside his older brother Dog’s Breath and watched the water pass by beneath them. Their vantage point was a wooded bluff still dusted with snow. The four-hundred-foot drop in front of them granted both a visionary viewpoint and a modicum of security.

Down below, on secret paths through the woods, Rotten Trunk, Blue Ears, and half a dozen other warriors from their steading made slow and careful progress toward the water’s edge. The men carried Angry Eyes’s baby with them, that wouldn’t have lived long anyway, so was a good sacrifice.

“Doesn’t River want them whole?” he whispered. “What good is a crippled baby that can’t see nothing?”

“Shut up.” Dog’s Breath didn’t really mean that, Smallish Boy knew from the distracted tone of his voice. It was just the way his brother talked. “Besides,” he went on, “it’s the beating heart that counts.”

“Then why don’t we sacrifice a chicken?”

“Not the same. Stupid.”

Which, Smallish Boy had long since realized, meant that Dog’s Breath didn’t know the answer either.

Their job was to watch for Angry Eyes. Everybody was afraid of her temper, even the Old Men. If she wasn’t such a good healer, and made the best birchbark beer anyone in the steading could remember, she might have been the sacrifice, years ago.

She was a pain in the stick.

Smallish Boy wasn’t sure what that meant exactly, but he’d heard Blue Ears say it one night when the warriors were drunk after a difficult elk hunt. He knew it must be true, though. His mother had slapped him hard for repeating the words later. She generally just looked sad when he was stupid or wrong. She only got mad when he was right about stuff he wasn’t supposed to know yet.

“Look!” hissed Dog’s Breath.

Smallish Boy followed the line of his brother’s pointing finger.

A clump of logs was emerging around River’s upstream bend, visible now past the rocky knees of Wind Mountain. It seemed oddly sideways to the current, until he realized the whole business was spinning.

Smoke rose from the mass of wood.

“Fire?” he whispered.

Dog’s Breath sounded both horrified and impressed. “No one goes on River.”

No one did. Ever. River was jealous of Her flashing, beautiful skin, and all too often claimed the life of any person who marred it. Storm might churn the gleaming smoothness, but that was just the way of nature. Flood might scar and pock it with debris, but that was the land offering its own sacrifice to River, who drained the heart of the world into distant Ocean.

But people?

Never.

Even Smallish Boy knew that, and had not been slapped for saying so.

“By the seven and the twelve,” his brother swore. Now there was a beating waiting to happen, to speak of the mysteries so. “That’s Angry Eyes on a… a…”

“Log?” offered Smallish Boy.

“No, one of the old words. We talked about it in men’s circle.” Dog’s Breath scrunched up his face as if he was trying to squeeze out a difficult turd. “Raft. That’s the word. Like a fishing platform that floats on the water.”

“I guess she’s so mad she forgot to be afraid of River.”

“Nobody gets that mad.” His brother stood up out of cover. “Or at least nobody gets that angry. She has to be mad to do this, though.” He cupped his hands and began the coyote bark that you never heard during the day. It would echo down the distance to Rotten Trunk and Blue Ears and the rest who carried the baby.

They would know the boys had spotted something.

“Come on,” Dog’s Breath said once he’d seen the answering wave from below. “We got to get down there.”

“Aren’t we supposed to watch for anything more?” asked Smallish Boy, who found himself afraid to face Angry Eyes. “Or worse?”

“What could be worse than this?” His brother managed to sound both scornful and excited at the same time.

They scrambled down their faint backtrail, even in their haste careful as always not to leave too much evidence of their passage behind.

By the time the brothers reached a decent overlook within a stone’s throw of the forbidden shore—here a shallow, rocky beach littered with recent floodwrack—the log raft had drifted into view from this vantage as well. Smallish Boy could see the men spread out along the bank. Most of them crouched in cover, their bows and axes ready as if Angry Eyes was going to swarm ashore like some raiding party come over the mountains from the Helens tribes.

If any woman ever born could do that, it would be Angry Eyes. But even he knew that she was not a problem you solved with a fist.

She’d never married, though she was beautiful, because no man wanted that temper inside his cabin every day. Smallish Boy knew that her beauty still drew them to dance the night dance, one then another, until their wives and mothers and sisters hated her for her power over men. The other women whispered that her power was the power of Storm, moving across the steading and then was gone. Not the power of River, that was always here.

That had never made sense to him, though. Storm was the way Ocean sent her water back to River. To say their power was different was like saying the power of a man’s foot was different from the power of his hand. Not quite the same, surely, but they were fed by a single beating heart.

When he’d said that to his mother, he’d been slapped again, so he knew he was right.

Words meant things, he’d always thought. People should watch what they said.

Except now people were watching the approaching raft. It was a mat of fallen trees, limbs tangled and already gone brown and dead, so the wood must have been snagged a while farther up River. He wondered how Angry Eyes had gotten it moving, or if she even controlled it at all.

A fire burned in the middle. So far as he could tell, the flames were fed by the wood itself. Angry Eyes was destroying her raft even as she rode it. She danced at the edge, covered in clay and nothing else.

That would distract the men on the banks. Especially those who had snuck over to feel her storminess in the dark of night. He wasn’t sure exactly why the night dances worked the way they did—people mounting one another mostly looked like they were in pain, and it always seemed to be a mess afterwards—but he’d realized that all boys and girls eventually discovered that secret for themselves, in time.

He sometimes wondered if Angry Eyes would still be sharing her beauty when he grew old enough to ask. He couldn’t figure out if that was to be desired or feared.

Below them, Blue Ears stood out on the stony beach, a long, slim throwing spear at his side, its butt grounded against his right foot. That message was unmistakable. Gray Face stood with him, holding the baby in the crook of his left arm and the steading’s one good steel knife in his right hand. That message was also unmistakable.

Angry Eyes drifted closer, the logs heading for the bank now. “Is she steering the raft?” Smallish Boy asked.

“No, log-wit. River is doing it.”

“Why does River care?”

“Wants Her sacrifice.”

He could hear the quaver in his brother’s voice. Dog’s Breath was afraid.

Smallish Boy realized that he wasn’t afraid. He wondered why. Perhaps because he knew he was watching something that would likely be a teaching story for his grandchildren. It must have been like this to be alive during the days of the cities and the fire. A person could be a part of a thing to remember, that no one later would ever quite understand.

“You have gone too far this time,” bellowed Blue Ears. He was shouting over the water at Angry Eyes, but the boys could hear him just fine from their overlook.

She ignored him, still dancing. Her body swayed back and forth, her arms swinging wide then close, her small breasts and narrow hips shifting with the uncertain rhythms of her step. Angry Eyes’s face was turned up toward the sky, mouth open as if to catch the rain, her feet unseen but still sure among the matted branches of the logs.

“She dances Storm,” Smallish Boy blurted. “Look, those are the rhythms of wind and rain.”

“Shut up,” snapped Dog’s Breath, who was staring out at Angry Eyes.

Smallish Boy glanced over to see his brother panting. “You want to do the night dance with her,” he said, giggling.

That time he got a punch in the shoulder. He slithered a few more feet away from Dog’s Breath, still giggling, and turned to watch again.

River was making more noise now. Water crept up the stone beach to lap at the feet of Blue Ears and Gray Face. No one spoke after the echoes of Blue Ears’s shout had faded, but the baby began to squall, as if it could sense the approach of its mother.

Her dance grew stronger, stranger, faster. Wind whistled around Smallish Boy, and where moments before had been a blue sky only a little ragged with clouds, fat raindrops flew hard and fast from west to east, stones slung by Ocean to be borne by Storm to this place.

Still the men watched, more of them leaving their cover to stand ankle-deep in water on the stony beach. Angry Eyes’s dance had turned to something deeper and stranger. Her hands covered her breasts, reached below to her sweetpocket, opened up to implore the men to come to her.

Dog’s Breath slid down the embankment to join the others below as they waited calf-deep in the rising water.

“No!” Smallish Boy shouted, but he knew he could not catch his brother. He knew he could not bring his brother back even if he did scramble after him.

Besides, these fools could plainly see the river was rising fast. Unnaturally fast. Yet they stood, caught by the dance of Angry Eyes.

The log raft was almost to shore now. The fire blazed higher, untroubled by the driving rain. Her dance carried her to the forefront of the mass of wood, until she was looking down at the men hip-deep in River, and Dog’s Breath now up to his belly beside them.

Her mouth opened. Whatever words she said to them were lost in the sizzling crack of lightning just in front of Smallish Boy, as the world erupted in blue-white glare and deafening noise.

He had not been asleep, but insensible. Once Smallish Boy managed to open his eyes, he realized that not much time had passed, either. The squall was still visible retreating to the east now, fleeing farther from Ocean with its burden of rain. Smallish Boy blinked away the tears of pain from his newfound headache.

The beach was empty of both water and men. River had gone back to Her banks. Blue Ears, Dog’s Breath, and the rest were just gone. The raft had passed a bit farther down the current, bound for Ocean and whatever fate the world held for drifting logs.

Only Angry Eyes stood there, her baby in her arms. She had not kept the good steel knife.

The woman looked up at him. Even from this distance, he could see Storm in her eyes. She frightened him.

Still, Smallish Boy understood the demand. He scrambled down the embankment, following his brother’s careless trail, wondering what he could possibly say back at the steading. They had lost eight warriors and Dog’s Breath just now to the wrath of one woman and the might of River. He already knew the steading would likely starve this winter for lack of hunters. Even if they escaped that fate, they’d be victims to the next good-sized raiding party that happened along.

He wondered if he should go home at all. He wondered why he was not crying, or cutting his skin in grief. The Old Men were nubbled with scars from their losses down the years. Some might bleed to death from this day.

But still he walked toward Angry Eyes.

The brief rain had washed most of the clay from her. Now she was just a beautiful, terrible woman naked with a baby in her arms and River at her back.

Smallish Boy had never been so afraid in all his life.

“They have made a great sacrifice,” she told him. Her voice was hoarse. He was surprised at how ordinary it was.

“River can’t give us enough for losing them,” he muttered. It was what his mother would say, he was certain.

She showed him the baby. It blinked. The formerly milk-white eyes, now cleared of their caul, were a rich brown like its mother’s. Smallish Boy saw that its legs were straight and true as well, which they had not been before.

Her voice was steady, strong. Thrilling. “I believe this is a great gift indeed.”

Not so great as the lives of Dog’s Breath and Blue Ears and all the rest, he thought but did not say. This woman could drown him with a word.

But his brother. All of them… They weren’t nice, mostly, but the dead were men of his steading. As he would be too someday soon, if he survived this day.

Summoning what was left of his courage, Smallish Boy raised his small stone axe. “You cannot take their lives!” he shouted, and rushed toward Angry Eyes.

She simply held the baby in front of her, like a shield between them. His steps faltered at the last. He could not strike with those wise eyes staring at him in innocent fascination. Smallish Boy stumbled to a halt, then collapsed, sitting on the rocks of the beach. His axe fell beside him, and he began to weep.

He could do nothing worthwhile now.

Angry Eyes leaned close, the baby clutched to her chest now. “Come, we have much ahead of us,” she told him, and began walking east along the beach.

For a little while he sat as she strode farther away from him. Did he go with her? Or back to the steading, bearing the unlikely tale of this day? He could run, carry the word, and then… what?

As she walked, he saw her pert, rounded bottom, as that was all there was for him to see. Things in the middle of his body began to stir, and Smallish Boy realized that soon he would need a new name. The night dance had begun to make sense to him.

Drawn, he stood and trotted after her. When he caught up, he asked, “Where are we going?”

“The future,” she said without turning around or breaking step. “River has shown me a place with city things. We will care for Her daughter there, and raise the city things up again one by one.”

She walked. He followed. His feet were wet from splashing at the water’s edge, but River did not seem to mind him when he was in the company of Angry Eyes. He was still afraid, but now it was a different kind of fear.

What he could not figure out was whether his life was the sacrifice or the gift.

River flows. In flowing, She is, was, and always will be. Her memory is long, and She keeps secrets until they are needed again by those of Her grandchildren who can pass by softly enough not to stir Her ancient wrath.

Like wind and rain, they rise and fall around Her.

Like wind and rain, they are needful to Her.

Like wind and rain, they are forgotten until they come again.

The Woman Who Shattered the Moon

I am the most famous woman in the world.

That’s something to be proud of, something no one else can say. It does not matter that the European bastards have locked me up for the past forty-one years, seven months, and eleven days. It does not matter that they dynamited my stronghold and sealed off the steam vents that drove my turbines and powered my ambitions. It does not matter that Fleet Street and the American press and governments from the Kaiser’s Germany to Imperial Japan have all forbidden my name from being mentioned in writing.

Despite all that, they cannot unmake me, because every night, my greatest deed glimmers in the sky, a permanent reminder that I am the woman who shattered the moon.

Colonel Loewe comes to see me every Tuesday. He is proper, starched and creased in his lobster-red uniform with the white Sam Browne belt smelling faintly of oiled leather. His moustache is full and curved, something that must have come into fashion after I’d been imprisoned here in this hidden fortress, as it looks silly to me. In recent times, he has grown exactly nine white hairs hidden in the auburn of the moustache. The colonel’s face is sometimes as red as his jacket. I am never certain if this is exertion or anger.

We meet in a tiny room with a knife-scarred wooden table between us. The floor consists of boards ten centimeters in width. There are thirty-six of them in a row most of the time. Some weeks there are thirty-seven of them. My jailors think I do not notice these little changes. It is much the same as the patterns in the dust and cobwebs, for nothing is clean in this place except what I clean for myself. I save my old toothbrushes to scrub out the mortared joins in the stone walls of my cell.

The walls of our meeting rooms are covered in stucco, so I do not know if they are stone beneath. I see patterns in the plastering, but they are never the same, so I suspect my own imagination may be at fault.

Either that or they have many more nearly identical rooms here than seems practical simply for the purpose of manipulating a single prisoner.

This week, Colonel Loewe has brought me a chipped stoneware mug filled with a steaming brown liquid which appears to be coffee. After eleven years and fourteen weeks as my interrogator, he knows my ways, so with a small smile, the colonel sips from the mug to prove to me that it is not something dangerous or unpalatable.

I inhale the rich, dark scent. There is of course the possibility that he previously took an antidote, but even in my darkest moments I recognize that if my jailors wished to kill me, they have had ample opportunities over the decades. Whatever my final end will amount to, I strongly doubt it will be poisoning at the hands of the colonel.

“Madame Mbacha.” He always greets me politely. The coffee is a break in the routine.

I take the mug, the warmth of it loosening the painful tension that always afflicts my hands these years. The odor indicates a Kenyan bean. Another small politeness, to bring me an African variety.

“Good morning, Colonel.” I follow our ritual even as I wonder what the coffee signifies. The routine is that he asks about my work, my machines, precisely how I shattered the moon from my East African mountain fastness. In all my years here, I have never revealed my secrets, though I am sure forensic teams extracted much from my laboratories before their terminal vandalism rendered my works into dust.

Why should I offer confirmation of their abuse? Why should I give them the secrets of gravity which I and I alone discovered, after being laughed away from the great universities of Europe and America for the inescapable twinned flaws of being African and a woman?

What Colonel Loewe should say now is, “Let us review the facts of your case.” That has been his second line for the entire time he has been my interrogator. Instead he surprises me by departing from his script.

“I have news,” the colonel tells me.

I tamp down a rush of frustrated anger. In my years of incarceration I have become very good at containing my feelings. Long gone are the days when I could work out my troubles on some trembling servant or prisoner. Still, how dare he change our rules now?

“What news, Colonel?” My voice barely betrays my intensity of emotion. This cannot be good. Change is never good.

He clears his throat, seeming almost embarrassed for a moment. “Madame Mbacha, it is my happy duty to inform you that your parole has been granted by the plenary session of the League of Nations on humanitarian grounds. You will shortly be processed for release, and will be free to go where you will, within certain restrictions intended for your own safety.”

I stare at the colonel for a long moment, then begin to laugh. It is the only way I can stop the tears that threaten to well up.

Home. I can go home. The one thing I have never expected here in my imprisonment was to ever be allowed home again.

They bring me a newspaper with my supper. Such a thing has never before happened in my time in this prison. The change in routine intensifies my discomfort. At least the meal is consistent. I have been served the Tuesday menu. Sausage and cabbage, steamed so the meaty scent mingles with the rankness of the vegetable. Also hard brown bread. The relief cook is on duty, I can tell by the way the food is prepared. Even that is part of the routine, though his shift does vary.

I glare at the folded newsprint as if it were a rat snuck into my cell. The Times of London, a respectable and credible outlet. The lead story concerns ongoing negotiations over changes to fishing rights in the North Sea. Apparently the cessation of lunar tides continues to exert significant effects on marine life, as does the shortening rotational period of the Earth in the absence of lunar drag. Fish stocks have shifted catastrophically time and again in the decades since my master plan came to fruition.

At this I can only laugh. Long-dormant emotions are beginning to stir within me. To be in the world, to walk under an open sky as I have not done since the last day of my so-called trial. Why, once more I can do anything.

I give vent to a rising bubble of glee. Even with my eyes closed, I could measure this cell to the centimeter. My voice echoing off the walls gives me an aural map just as accurate as my visual observations and memories.

The process of my release takes several more weeks. The newspaper left nightly with my meal mentions nothing of me or my fate, though I do learn much about the state of the world. Many of those things are incredible, even to me who mastered electricity, magnetism, and gravity in the days of my youthful ascendancy. It took a combined Anglo-German army reinforced by numerous battalions of African askari to bring me down, in the end. Still, I had not anticipated the development of aeroplanes or thermionic valves or electronic switches. My world once consisted of iron and brass mechanical behemoths motivated by the pressure and heat of steam.

The colonel still comes on Tuesdays, but now I also have other callers. A milliner, to clothe me fit for today’s street, at least its European variety. An alienist to discuss with me how people might be expected to behave. A geographer to inform me of the current state of empires, colonies, and independent kingdoms in the West Africa of my birth and upbringing, and the East Africa of the years of my power.

“Kilima Njaro is preserved by the Treaty of Mombasa,” the small, serious man with the Austrian accent informs me.

“Preserved?” I ask.

“Set aside by multinational acclamation as a natural area to maintain its beauty and bounty.” His voice is prim, though he rattles off those words as if he does not quite believe them himself.

I smile at the geographer. Already I know this unnerves him. I am history’s supreme villain, after all. My deeds rewrote the night sky, triggered floods and famines that altered the fates of entire nations of people. Self-satisfied white men such as this fussy little lavender-scented Herr Doctor Professor have trouble compassing the idea that a woman born of Africa could have accomplished such mighty perfidy. Even the prosecution at my trial at one point advanced the notion that I must have been a stalking horse for some unknown evil genius of European or American origins.

So my smile, coupled with the power of my personality that has faded so little with age, disturbs this man. Much to my delight. I ask in his native German, “And this Treaty of Mombasa was signed shortly after my capture, I presume?”

He sticks to the English that my jailors speak. “Ah, in fact, yes.”

“So what they are preserving is the ruins of my stronghold. Lest some malcontent unearth the secrets of my strength and turn my lost machines against the Great Powers.” I lean forward, allowing my smile to broaden further. “Or perhaps worse, prevent European scientists from successfully publishing my research as their own?”

Now the little geographer is completely flustered. I know I have struck home. So it goes.

The last time I see Colonel Loewe, he speaks more frankly than anyone ever has since I was first subdued and captured on the slopes of my mountain, fleeing my besieged stronghold. It is a Tuesday, of course. Some things do not change. I, who am about to see more change than I have in decades, choose to interpret this as courtesy on his part.

“Madame Mbacha.” He once more offers me coffee.

“Colonel Loewe.” I nod, grant him that same broad smile I have used to upset some of my other visitors.

His voice grows stern. “I must inform you that as a matter of personal opinion, I am not in favor of your parole.”

Interesting. “Thank you for your honesty, Colonel. Why do you think thusly?”

“These people at the League of Nations do not know you as I know you.” His fingertips drum briefly on the table. “They barely know of you, except as a rumored evil slumping into your dotage.”

Dotage! I will show them dotage. I hold my tongue, of course.

The colonel continues. “I am well aware that even I barely know you. Always you have guarded your words as jealously as any citadel’s sally port.” After a moment he adds with further reluctant candor, “Though for many reasons I wish matters were otherwise, I cannot help but admire your strength of character.”

I am near to being enchanted by his words. Flattery is one unction that has been denied to me in the more than four decades since my capture. “Do go on,” I tell him in a throaty whisper which even at my age can distract all but the most determined men.

“You and I both know full well you are slumped into nothing, especially not dotage. Age has not dimmed your fires, only brought you to a preternatural discretion. I have noted this in my reports over the years. In my judgment, you are still by far the most dangerous woman on Earth.” Another drumbeat of the fingertips. “The most dangerous person of either gender, in truth.

“It is hoped,” he continues, “that four decades of incarceration have mellowed you, and that what prison has failed to accomplish, the inevitable withering of time will have managed. Your release is seen as a humanitarian gesture, proposed by some of the new regimes in the tropical lands that are slowly emerging from colonial patronage. You are a hero in the tropical villages of Africa, of Asia, and of South America, Madame Mbacha.” He clears his throat, sending his moustache wobbling. “But we also both know you are still the greatest villain who ever lived.”

I wait a long, polite moment to see if the colonel is finished speaking. Then I take pity on him, for he is flushed and perspiring, obviously uncomfortable with himself.

“They are not far from wrong,” I tell him. “My years here have made of me an old woman. I do not have the funds or the equipment to embark on grand ambitions. Nor, frankly, the years.” I take brief joy in imagining his precious London burning, choking in clouds of toxic chemical fog, assaulted by clanking monsters rising from the bed of the Thames. “Whatever is in my heart must remain there, hostage to age and penury, not to mention the watchers you and yours will surely be setting to dog my every step between the door of this prison and the grave I eventually find.”

“Fair enough.” His eyes flick down to his hands as if his fingers were an unexpected novelty. Then Colonel Loewe meets my gaze once more. “If you will, for the sake of all that has passed between us these dozen years, please indulge me with the answer to one final question.” He raises a hand to forestall my answer. “This is my own curiosity. Not for any report I shall write, nothing to be used against you.”

I wonder what could be so important to him now, though it would not be too difficult to guess.

“With all the unimaginable power you commanded, why did you lay waste to the moon? If you’d wanted to free the nations of the tropic world from colonial bondage, why not destroy London or Paris or Berlin, or sink the fleets of the world powers?” He sounds almost apologetic.

The question makes me laugh. A full-throated laugh, the delight I’d once taken in powering up a new machine, in uncovering a novel physical principle of material progress and destruction, in arranging a particularly baroque and painful fate for some interloping spy or traitorous servant. I’m certain it makes me sound mad to him, but what do I care now?

Finally I regain control of my voice. “Believe me, Colonel, once I’d perfected my gravitational gun, I considered those other targets and more. I could have altered the balance of the Great Powers in a single moment. But for every city destroyed, every ship sunk, every army brought to its knees, three more would have sprung up in their place. You Europeans are like the god Eshu, sly tricksters who make a lie of the world with the strength of your guns and gold. In a dozen years, you would have rebuilt and remade and convinced yourself my strike against you had never happened, or had been of little consequence. But who can deny the loss of the moon? So long as men and women live in the world and lift their eyes to the night sky, you will be reminded that at least for a while, there was a power greater and more fearful than even your own.”

“In other words,” he says quietly after a thoughtful silence, “you destroyed the moon because you could.”

“Well, yes.” I smile again. “And if my gravitational gun had not imploded, I might well have gone on to destroy London and Paris and Berlin. I chose my most lasting target first.” I lean against the table, almost pushing it into him. “I will be remembered.”

When I walk out of the prison, the daylight is blinding. I have not seen the sun in over forty years. I stumble against the physical pressure of its brilliance. Guards flank and support me, corporals in the same uniform that Colonel Loewe wears.

I’d never known where my prison was. They had brought me here by night after my trial in a secret courtroom in Brussels, the capital of that mad despot King Leopold. Now there was a city I should have destroyed. I was brought not just by night but also blindfolded, as I’d been moved from armored omnibus to sealed railway carriage to a cabin on a boat or ship.

England, almost certainly, for where else would one take ship to from Belgium, at least for a short voyage? And English had always been the language of my imprisonment. Still, I am surprised to find myself on the verge of a busy city street amid scents of petroleum and cooking oil and hurried, unwashed people. Gleaming horseless carriages careen past with a clattering of engines and a blaring of claxons. Men and women wearing unfamiliar fashions throng the pavements alongside the roadway. Airships and aeroplanes dot the sky.

My breath grows short and hard as a headache stabs through my eyes to interrupt my thoughts with vicious distraction. Dizziness threatens, and despite my best efforts, I feel perspiration shivering on my face and about my person.

“’Ere you are, missus,” says one of the guards. He presses a cheap cardboard suitcase into my right hand. “They’ve put your walking money inside. I’d be careful of snatchers.”

With that, I am alone and free for the first time in more than half my life. I take a deep breath, look up into the harsh, brilliant sky, and see a silvery band stretching from horizon to horizon. The Ring of the Moon, they call it. My signature upon this Earth.

Even amid the pain and panic of the moment, my smile returns a thousandfold. Then I set out to find my way home.

The borders around the Kilima Njaro Preserve are secured by soldiers from a number of European states. It seems that Africans cannot be trusted to protect our own. There is a wall, as well, topped in places with electrical wires and brass light pipes through which guards might spy on distant locations. Still, it is not hard to find men among the Kikuyu who know how to slip through the animal gates. They poach, and gather from the forests on the lower slopes of the mountains, and generally show the white men their asses.

These are not my people—I was born half a continent away—but they and I are of one mind when it comes to the British, Frenchmen, Germans, Belgians, Russians, and others. Joseph, my guide, has been engaged for a quantity of silver rupees I earned through various chicaneries and the sorts of petty crimes open to a woman of advancing years. Once I’d gained my needed funds, it had not been so challenging to slip away from Colonel Loewe’s watchers in Mombasa, where I was but one among many thousands of old African women.

I have not told my guide who I truly am, and I am certain it has not occurred to him to guess. If nothing else, he was not even born when I shattered the moon. Tales of Madame Mbacha and her gravitational gun are surely just as legendary and improbable to a young man as are his parents’ stories of the days of their own youth.

Still, whether he thinks me mad or simply lost in the world does not matter. Joseph smiles easily, his teeth gleaming in the dark. His ragged canvas shirt and duck trousers are sufficiently reddened with the ground-in dust of the savannah to keep him unobtrusive in these grasslands below my mountain. I myself am equipped with tropical-weight camouflage which Joseph finds an endless source of amusement.

“You are an old woman,” he declares, his Kikuyu accent inflecting his English in a way I had not known I’d missed during the years of my imprisonment. “Why do you want to look like a German bush ranger?”

“For the same reason German bush rangers dress like this. To not be seen.”

He shrugs eloquently. “You do not come to fight. There is nothing to see here except what is here.”

True, I carry no firearm. I never have. There were always others to do the shooting for me. Joseph has a rifle, an old bolt-action Mauser that I suspect is more dangerous to him than to any lions or soldiers he might shoot at. “Sometimes seeing what is here is enough,” I tell him.

He does not need to know.

We take our time, moving by night and sleeping by daylight against clay banks or hidden in low-lying hollows. The guardians of the Kilima Njaro Preserve fly overhead periodically in small aircraft that drone like wasps. Twice we hear the chuffing clank of European steam walkers and even catch the scorched metal scent of their boilers, though we never actually see the machines. Neither do they see us. Joseph and I are small and hard to find, as if we were beetles on a banyan tree.

My only complaint, which of course I do not voice, is the heat. I, who once worked with great gouts of steam and the fires of a foundry to build my ambitions. I, who was birthed amid the parched plains of western Kamerun. Slowly I come to admit that the years spent entombed in cold British stone have sapped my bones of their youthful fire.

After four days we gain the slopes of the mountain. I am on my home ground now, and have begun to see traces of my old roadways, the supply lines that brought game meat, grain, and other supplies from the surrounding countryside up to my stronghold. The heat seems more bearable up on the slopes, where the breezes can more easily reach us and trees spread shade from time to time.

“There is nothing here,” Joseph says uneasily one evening as we break our camp. A collapsed, fire-scarred stump of one of my watchtowers stands close by. “I do not think we should go on. Haven’t you seen enough?”

“I can find my way from here,” I say politely. Back in my day, I would have had him whipped for cowardice and sent to take a turn stoking the fires of my industry. Now I must rely upon this man to stay alive. I press another sack of silver rupees into his hand. “Give me a water gourd and wait in this place for two days. If I do not return, make your way home and forget you ever saw me.”

“There are ghosts here,” he says uneasily. Then: “I will wait.”

Perhaps he will, perhaps he will not. I tell myself this does not matter, that I am almost home.

I hike the last few kilometers alone. Even in the evening, the heat persists in bothering me, so to put my mind at ease I review the triumphs of my life. The moon, of course, first and foremost. But also how in my youth I bested the chief’s son in my home village and left him crying for his manhood, which I took away in a muti pouch. How I’d learned the physics and chemistry and mathematics of the Europeans while working as a cleaner in the universities at Heidelberg and Cambridge. How I’d carved out my own domain in the savannahs of Kenya and Tanganyika, laying the foundations for what would become my stronghold on Kilima Njaro.

Madame Goodwill Adeola Mbacha, scourge of the white race. When my resolve falters or my memories fade, all I need do is lift my eyes to the Ring of the Moon and I am reminded of all I have accomplished.

I come across the outer gates by starlight. They are shattered, their tumbled ruins covered with cloying flowers and acrid-scented shrubs. Vividly I recall the cannon fire that laid waste to my defenses. I walk past a row of nearly vanished graves, surely guards and servants of mine buried where they fell.

Ahead, where the walls of my stronghold should have risen, there is only a larger, night-shadowed heap of rubble. No flowers there. I wonder if my enemies salted the ruins to keep them barren. Slowly, still sweating profusely, I make a deliberate circuit of the destroyed fortification, taking 4,127 paces to do so.

It is all gone. My laboratories, the refineries. The little railroad that brought in wood and ore for my smelters has been ripped up completely and the bed trenched so it would erode.

Somehow, I’d thought there would be something more of home here. A doorway, a room, a place to start again.

My aching bones and shaking hands tell me that I am old. The heat tells me this is not a place to rekindle forge fires and drill anew for steam vents. The dusty, bitter air tells me I do not belong here.

For a while I sit on tumbled, fire-blackened stones and weep. I, who have not wept since earliest childhood, let the tears flow unchecked. Even the Ring of the Moon seems a mockery, my lost power glimmering in the sky day and night as the world rearranges itself around missing tides and deeper nocturnal darknesses.

In the morning I walk back down the mountain to where Joseph should still be waiting. I bid the graves farewell as I pass them. The slope is hard on my hips and knees. My mind should be awhirl with plans and possibilities, but I cannot summon the energy. It is too late in my life to start over.

I just want to go home. Is that giving up? The world lives with my mark. I’ve accomplished more than they can ever take away from me. Now I can return to Mombasa and allow Colonel Loewe’s agents to find me. Since I have broken my parole, they will remove me once more to my cool, stone-walled room in the depths of London.

Home is where you live, after all. I have lived most of my life there, and there I will live the rest of my life.

“Colonel,” I tell the uncaring thornwood trees and the bone-dry wind, “I am coming home.”

The Blade of His Plow

They tell stories about me. A lot of those are wrong. I was never called Ahasver. I wouldn’t know how to make a shoe if you paid me. No one cursed or blessed me. Really, I just am.

When you realize you are deathless, you gravitate to certain lines of work. Not a lot of call for immortal bricklayers. Doesn’t take much luck or skill to follow a plow, beyond knowing the business of your own fields. Standing behind the sharp end of the sword is what I do.

Used to be I kept count of how many men I’d killed. Then I just counted the battles I’d been in. After a while, I lost track of that and started counting the wars. Now, well, they count the wars for me. Finally, you people are finishing the job that Yeshua Ben Yosef started all those years ago on top of a dusty hill too far from his home or mine.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Blessings upon you, all that are in my power to give. I know God has an eye on me, lets me direct His gaze to your heart.

Well, maybe not that last.

Longinus had already walked the earth six times longer than the life of mortal man. He had fought in Syria, in Scythia, among the Parthians. He’d changed his name a dozen times. No matter how far he ranged, he eventually found his way back into the legions.

He’d settled on the rank of tesserarius, always being vague about his exact history while showing enough of his experience with weapons and maneuver and the business of wrangling men to be convincing to a signifer or centurion desperate enough for skilled bodies to ignore the irregularities. The older the empire grew, the easier this became. There were always men discharged for drunkenness or brutality who drifted back into the ranks.

And by the gods, Longinus knew one end of a spear from the other.

This time, though, he could see the end coming. Not his own end. Not anymore. He’d taken enough blows, caught enough arrows point first to know what would happen to him. It hurt like crazy, but the wounds always closed up. So far no one had tried to cut off his head. He wasn’t looking forward to finding out how that went.

This time it was not his body absorbing the blow. It was the Eternal City herself. Alaric’s armies were at the gates for the third time in two years. The Emperor Honorious was long since decamped. Everyone of consequence in the senate and the army had gone with him.

Only the broken legions, and those whose masters could not arrange their timely withdrawal, remained.

Longinus watched the smoke rise from the fires near the Salarian Gate. Rumor among the centurions and their troops was that slaves had let the attackers in. Not that it had done the poor bastards much good. The Visigoths seemed pleased to kill anyone unlucky enough to be in their path.

Now, atop a house partway up the Aventine Hill, he no longer wondered how long it would take them to reach him. A band of the Celtic warriors had ridden into the Vicus Frumentarius perhaps half a glass earlier and set to the serious business of smashing their way through the homes here.

He had four men with him—two of them drunkards, one barely old enough to shave, and another veteran like himself. Longinus had only bothered to learn the old soldier’s name—Rattus—as the others wouldn’t live long enough for him to need to remember them.

“We could just bugger off.” Rattus was slumped against the rooftop parapet sucking down the last of a broken amphora of wine from the house stores. The kid had been useful at least in handling the petty thievery on behalf of the older veterans. It wasn’t very good wine, though. The vinegar stink rose up like pickling time in the kitchens.

“Bugger off where?” asked Longinus distantly. He wondered how many of the Visigoths would make it to this house. They were visibly drunk, and not moving with their reputed efficiency.

“Skin out of our kit, flee with the rest of the meat.”

Longinus understood from Rattus’s tone that the old soldier wasn’t serious. “Die here, die there,” he said. “They kill everything.”

Rattus burped. “What’s so special about dying here? If we die there, might have a little longer to live first. Something could happen along the way. A man can be lucky.”

“Here is where we were sent to die.” Longinus remembered a hot, dusty hilltop in Judaea. He’d learned a lot about being sent to die at that place.

“Fair enough.” Another belch.

One of the drunkards poked his head up from the narrow ladderway. “You coming down?” he asked. “We got duck in brine.”

“Eat, drink, and be merry,” Longinus replied. He heard the raucous laughter of the Visigoths spilling back into the street, two houses down. Smoke was already rising—they’d finally set a real fire here, too. “For all too soon we shall die.”

There was no purpose defending this place. Their handful of legionaries had been set here to guard against looting, should the Visigoths be turned back or otherwise overlook the house. Now, well, it was a worthless fight. Nothing more.

Longinus regarded his gladius. As swords went, his was not a bad one. He’d claimed eleven lives thus far with the blade. Perhaps a few more today.

When they came, the Visigoths killed the drunkards out of hand. Rattus died swiftly as well, to his mild surprise. When they got bored with Longinus holding off three of them on the roof, they shot him with arrows until he could not stand. The kid they used like a girl until he begged them to permit him to die.

He watched it all through the filmy eyes of an apparent corpse. If speech had yet been granted to him, Longinus would have begged them to take his head as well.

I tell stories about them, too. Or would if I had anyone to listen to me. Another grumbling old man in a world with no patience or place for grumbling old men. Veterans have war stories that no one cares about but the men they fought beside.

Charles Martel is as dead as Abd al-Rahman. Nobody but me remembers them, or what happened in that rainy autumn deep in the forested country of the Franks. Anybody I might tell wouldn’t believe me anyway.

Sometimes I’ve thought to write it all down. My memory used to be real good. A man isn’t made to remember everything, not even last week’s breakfast. But he should remember taking a life, a night with a woman, helping birth a baby.

I’ve done all those things, a thousand times over. Most of the details are gone. Sometimes it’s like I’ve never lived at all.

Longinus had never felt much sympathy for the English. Once a Roman, always a Roman, he supposed. The English were edge-of-the-Empire rubes grown too proud of their mucky little island. But here in France, Charles VI, le roi, was a fool. The men who commanded his armies were little better.

One thing Longinus had never done, not as legionary, mercenary, or soldier, was turn his coat. Desert, yes—there was small point in remaining with a defeated army. He had never fought for his own flag, or whatever surge of patriotism drove the sons of farmers and butchers and priests to seek blood. But he did not leave in the moment of battle, and not to the harm of the army he fought for in that season.

What he never could forget was that the men at his side were just like him. The only difference was that none of them had ever been on a Roman execution detail one hot morning in Judaea. Other than that, they were all the same: soldiers in a uniform who would kill or die for the sake of their next hot meal and the pay to come. Whichever came first.

These names he knew, the pikemen in his line. Longinus was a caporal just lately. A dozen men to wrangle, and a sergeant to avoid.

The French had not paid sufficient attention to longbow. Longinus had. He’d served at Crécy. He knew what the English could do. Even a generation later, the idea that a peasant could slay a sworn knight still seemed too difficult for the French nobility to comprehend. Longinus understood. He’d taken a clothyard shaft in the breastbone and been left for dead. One of the worst injuries he could recall, in fact, a deeply blossoming field of pain that had almost overwhelmed even his strange, accurséd gift.

Finding new and interesting ways to die was an occupational hazard of going for a soldier, but that didn’t mean he had to search them out. The frightened squad around him deserved better than their commanders would give them. Longinus was recalled to that by the smell of urine—Petit Robert had wet himself again. Mist and birdsong might have raised the dawn sun from the fields, but it was the smell of piss and blood that really reminded a man that he was at war.

“When you see the knights fall as if struck down by God, we will fall back into the woods,” he said, wondering how many different languages he’d given orders in. After a while, they all faded with disuse, except the Koine and Aramaic of his youth. Those were languages of his dreams. “Sieur d’Albret has promised us a great victory and revenge for the defeats of our fathers.”

The squaddies muttered, elbowing one another, a few grinning.

“I have a different promise,” Longinus continued. “I promise to keep you alive, if I possibly can.”

“Our names will all live on in victory,” shouted Henri le Doyeux, surely the most ardent partisan of their little unit.

Longinus met the glance of the caporal of the next squad in their line—a hard-bitten Basque who reminded him of Rattus, except for an unpronounceable name. Idiot, their eyes said to one another.

“I think you’d rather your body lived on,” Longinus replied. “Carrying your name with it.”

A bit more elbowing and grinning met that remark, then they settled down to the serious business of breaking their fast and tending their pikes.

When the arrows came, they chittered through the air like blackbirds on the wing and fell through the skin like knives. Longinus never did get his men to the woods, but he found out once again how badly a longbow could hurt a man.

A woman once told me that only in dreams are we truly free. I think she had it backwards. Only in dreams are we truly ensnared. A waking mind knows better than to hope for certain things. Wishes can be avoided for the sake of sidestepping the pain of life. But the dreaming mind, like the heart itself, wants what it wants.

I’ve spent centuries cultivating the art of not wanting. Married a few times, along the way. Even once staying around long enough to see your children grow to doddering age, then burying them, will put a stop to that.

Cultivating the art of not getting killed took more of my time. Like I said, I don’t die, but otherwise-fatal injuries still hurt like blazes. Even so, I’ve walked off more battlefields than anyone in human history. Of this I am certain.

I’ve kept a few kids alive. I’ve sent a few fathers home. I’ve slain a lot more, of course, my own side’s and others. Loyalty is where you find it. Kind of like those dreams.

Even as bad as the English archers were, it was gunpowder that made things impossible. When you could be killed without even knowing you had been fighting, that changed everything.

He hated trenches. Worst invention in the history of warfare. Worse even than guns and bullets. With trenches came mustard gas and bombing runs and tanks and all the things that could befall a man pinned down by position.

Longinus wasn’t too happy about his Lee Enfield 0.303, either. With bayonet fixed, it was an incredibly inefficient spear. Mostly, though, it was a finger of death. One that didn’t even require the training and sweat of an honest bowman.

The newest lieutenant came down the line, yammering about orders and an attack. Longinus figured he’d last three days at most. Given that the man’s first act on arriving was to root out all the booze and cigarettes, then lead a prayer service to stiffen everyone’s souls, no one was going to ask too many questions about who fired the bullet that would soon kill him.

After almost two thousand years of warfare, he’d long since realized that every army ever constituted had precisely the same process for producing foolish twits recklessly in love with the power of their commissions. Most of those armies also had an informal process for weeding out the foolish twits on the ground.

It would be pleasant to at least consider that natural selection, except the quality of the officers never seemed to improve.

“Corporal Longo!” shouted the twit.

“Sir?” Longinus gave the man his best tired old sergeant’s stare. He knew the noncoms and the company commander had him pegged as a disgraced sergeant major serving under another name. You just couldn’t hide the kind of experience he carried in every step, every glance, every word. The new lieutenant saw corporal’s stripes and assumed malingering, as that’s what the lower classes by definition did with themselves in the absence of proper leadership. Or so Longinus had been told.

A red face sweated at him despite the chilly, fogged-in morning. “Do not eyeball me, Longo. You may be my father’s age, but you will respect my authority.”

“Sir.” Longinus didn’t bother to conceal his contempt.

The lieutenant leaned close. “I’ll be sorting out the order for our next assault. Would you like to be first out of the trench?”

“If you’ll be leading the way, sir, I’d be pleased to follow your example.”

The resulting staredown ended poorly for the officer, who finally stomped off muttering.

When the order to go over the top came down the next morning, Longinus shot the lieutenant himself, saluted the captain, then took his squad through a barbed-wire forest into a hail of Boche bullets.

Did you ever figure how much of it all was connected? Just what you can remember now, at the end of the Imperial age, should be enough. Andersonville, Isandlwana, Katyn Forest, My Lai.

A curse, Christ’s Harrowing of Hell.

I have been the blade of His plow down the centuries of history. Only now, the numbers catch up to me.

And so they have. A man came to me last night. He wore a suit and snakeskin boots and he ate an apple as he spoke. “Longinus,” he said in my own native Koine. He was the first person to call me by my right name since the fall of Rome. “Your days have numbered beyond counting.”

I was drinking coffee from a wretched paper cup on a sidewalk in a city of Africa. No one here should know me or speak my tongue, this I well knew. There was only one answer I could give. “I have waited for you a very long time.” Whichever one you are, I thought but did not say.

His eyes were violet, and spread wings were reflected in them as if an angel stood just behind me. “Are you done?”

“Ever have I been done. Good for evil’s sake, evil for the sake of good.” I added, “I am tired.”

He touched me, just once, saying, “You are free to go.”

Where his fingertip had brushed the back of my hand, blood welled up. Two hours later, the scratch had not healed. The lingering pain was a marvel I had not seen since Judaea.

To test his word, I cut off the least finger of my left hand with a hunting knife. It did not grow back.

Then, I knew I was free. The only question was what to do with my freedom? I could only go where I had ever been, the battlefield, but that was no longer so easy.

In these days, the recruiters can number the lines on a man’s thumb. They can number the flecks in his eye. They can number the patterns woven into the seed of his loins. I have never bothered to learn the crafty skills of forging paperwork and changing records. Always, I could walk away and take another name.

Now, though, even the least of African tyrants wants a résumé and a cell phone number for the mercenaries who might bear weapons in his name. Tramp freighters of no fixed flag won’t hire gunmen on their deck unless references are provided. There is no place left for me.

Sunrise greets me now with a sky of fire, as it has done down the long centuries. I have made my preparations. Just in case this last promise is another deceit, I will strike my last blow so well they will not find me after.

I used to wonder what it was like to die. Eventually I stopped, but on this last morning, another wretched paper cup of coffee in my hand, it occurs to me once more that my reward and my punishment are likely just the same.

A soldier’s death, and a silent, restful peace with no grave at all. If God wants me, He will have to take some trouble to find me.

So I am walking up that dusty hill for the last time—my still-wounded left hand throbbing in time with my heart. Going over the top of the trench. Claiming the fire for my own. No one will miss this truck until it is too late. The fertilizer and fuel oil in the back will serve. If I have been lied to, not even my God-given invulnerability can survive being vaporized.

I hope.

I am tired, I am old, and I am sick of being the plow blade. The dust like stars shall be my tomb. All those who went before me have borne my name to Heaven or Hell. It does not matter which.

Really, I just wish I still had my old spear. That would bring a proper end to all stories.

Grindstone

Blood always rusts the springs in my hand. Other people’s blood, to be specific.

It’s cold up here on the fly deck where I am cleaning my weapons. There is nothing around us but empty sky, stretching to the horizons and beyond. The good airship Entwhistle is two days and more from the nearest friendly port given our current heading and the nature of the winds in this airband. I can hear her engines straining slightly. They are running under just enough load to give them a workout without redlining. Which is good, because the rest of this vessel is about to fall through the sky, carrying us all with it.

At least we beat those rat bastards off.

This time.

Laying down the last of my blades, I begin cleaning my right hand with my left. It is fastidious, demanding work. My Maker would have been proud of my diligence. His apprentices would have been appalled. “Don’t make so much work for us, Jakesia,” they used to whine.

I stare past the rail a moment, tempted by memory and old pain until my eyes lose their focus against distant, empurpled clouds.

Shadow is returning. No matter how many rat bastards we fight, there will always be more.

Meat breeds. That’s what we Tocks always said, when we were just whispering intelligences, unsighted and benchbound in the earliest days of our creation. Meat breeds. And it always breeds faster than Tocks build.

My hand is sticky and stiff. Carefully I pick flecks of cruft out, that were some rat bastard’s heartsblood not so long ago, and try not to think too hard about the breeding of Meat. I try even harder not to think about the fact that I am now in command.

Palacio Sarita bat Mardia, Skymistress of the Lesser Port of Grand Reserve, watched the airship Entwhistle beat across the wind into the eastern slips. She stood on the observation deck of the Eastmost Tower, clad in the wool-padded leather of any common dockhand. The formal robes of office with their cerise banding and lacework fringes were too damned prissy for real work. Plus they picked up grease like nobody’s business.

If there was anything Lesser Grand Reserve had, it was grease. In copious amounts. At least up to now. Without grease, they would have been nothing but a bunch of starving people on a too-small island in the sky.

The scent of the pits was, as always, omnipresent. So far as Sarita knew, there was nowhere on Lesser Grand Reserve where one could escape from that odor. Tall as she was—well over six feet, unusual for a woman of this or any era—in her time of service, even she had crammed and folded herself into all but the smallest passages and bilges all through the island’s keel and decks and towers.

A Skymistress was expected to know her domain. While the endless kingdoms of the air were beyond any woman’s knowledge, her home was as familiar to her as a hutch to a rabbit.

Her tools lay beside her, racked and fastened as proper in their filigreed brass-and-balsawood case. Sarita brushed her fingers over them in their familiar order. Telescope, range finder, electrical divinatory, telelocutor, flare pistol, and shock prod. See, signal, and shoot.

Of course they were old, as all the best equipment was. Of course they were worn, as all the most properly used equipment was. Of course they were slightly slick with the ambient grease of Lesser Grand Reserve.

She wondered what would become of them. Likely there would never be another Skymistress of the Lesser Port of Grand Reserve.

Panjit, her chief acolyte, snapped his own telescope shut with a crisp movement that telegraphed bored mirth. As always, he struck a pose. No leathers for him. No, Panjit favored the full regalia, identical to her own neglected cerise robes except for the azure dye and shorter fringework. He was not shy about remarking on how well cerise would favor his magnificent dark complexion and patrician nose.

Not in this lifetime, she thought. Or at least, not in my lifetime.

But what was a Skymistress without a port?

“You watch, they’ll clip the number-three east boom on the way in.” He sounded remarkably satisfied for a man predicting a minor disaster. “That’ll bring a good levy.”

“The state of her gasbag and rigging says otherwise,” observed Sarita mildly. “No matter how great the fine, we cannot wring payment out of someone who’s already wallowing in penury.”

“You underestimate the value of salvage, Skymistress.” Panjit’s tone was so smooth and self-assured that she wanted to slap the words from his face.

Sarita didn’t bother anymore to ask herself why she was stuck with this dreadful little climber for a chief acolyte. Everyone of worth and potential had emigrated over the past two years. Once the state of the grease pits had become general knowledge, anyone with sense had been able to see which way the wind was blowing on Lesser Grand Reserve.

Due wrong, in two simple words. The wind was blowing due wrong.

The problem with basing your entire economy and raison d’être on a constrained resource was that eventually you ran out of the resource in question. Decisions which had seemed canny two centuries ago during the bright days of the port’s founding and initial construction were now foolhardy in the blindingly obvious light of hindsight.

For the past thirty years, they’d actually been burning the grease to make electrical energy. On ascending to the post of Skymistress, she’d put a stop to that, and nearly lost control of Lesser Grand Reserve’s governance in the ensuing spat. Now the few Master Mercers yet remaining in port quietly praised her foresight in doing so, and even more quietly grumbled that she hadn’t seen through the problem sooner.

Logic was not an essential element in politics, Sarita had long ago learned, to her displeasure.

“Panjit,” she said, her voice filled with the regal snap of authority. Not to mention the cold edge of the air on the Eastmost Tower. “Take yourself down to the east slips and present my compliments to Entwhistle’s captain. Dinner in my apartments, should they be so inclined.”

“We would be better showing them the back of our hand than our open palm,” grumbled the acolyte.

Sarita stroked her shock prod fondly, not trying very hard to keep her impulses from her face. “Are we so rich in visitors these days that we can afford to turn anyone away?”

“No, Skymistress.” Without making the proper obeisances, he turned on his heel and strode away.

Little bastard never had believed in the grease crisis, she knew. Panjit still thought it overblown, still believed that if you bullied and bribed the surveyors enough, they’d come back with better estimates of the depth and grade of what remained embedded within the caverns hidden at the heart of Lesser Grand Reserve.

Sarita watched the airship a while longer, pleased to see that Entwhistle beat past the number-three east boom without incident. She finally went below herself to review once more the remorseless reports that charted the death of her city in the sky.

Having arranged the good airship Entwhistle to be tied up to the waiting slip and boom-braced until her gasbag is no longer under load, I am now reduced to watching the local Meat whine and caper alongside our battered hull.

The Lesser Port of Grand Reserve is a friendly port, her slips and galleries open to us, but that does not make her welcoming. It simply means that in the war of Shadow, she does not shelter those who hunt us across the endless sea of skies.

Meat does not hate Tock here, except in the vague way that all Meat fears and despises Tock. It is something in their monkey flesh, buried deep beneath Meat’s quick, erratic mind, that leads them to such animosity.

I no longer care. My hand rusts, my captain is lost, and my ship is wounded. Any of those things would distress me. All of them together overwhelm.

“You,” says the most important Meat on the slipside. I know he is important Meat because he is dressed like a fool and doing no work.

I meet his eyes, my own glittering stare encompassing the liquid brown of the man’s gaze. He needs no response from me, he knows he has my attention.

“Where is Captain Armature?” the Meat continues.

“Falling,” I answer. I am laconic truth, and find the depths of my despair yawning below me like the bottomless sky.

This imperious Meat blinks a moment, thrown off whatever script he has prepared. “An air sailor’s death, to be sure. Then who commands here?”

Fool, I think. Tock do not die. We are stopped. Meanwhile, three of my deckhands drift close. Two bear blades loosely sheathed, the third carries a long iron lever bar. The Meat grows impatient.

“Jakesia,” I finally say. Swift grins chase one another across the faces of my crew.

Anger flashes in the Meat’s eyes. This one is important, unaccustomed to a lack of cooperation in others. “Summon him.”

“She is here.” I rise and bow, the bad servomechanism in my left hip whining briefly in counterpoint to my indifferent dignity.

Three of the port’s dockhands bring over a water line, hup-hupping in time as they coordinate with my own deckhands. Our credit is good enough here for a resupply without advance guarantees. I am certain we will not be treated this well again.

The important Meat turns and walks away. In showing me his unprotected back he is telling me how insignificant I am to him. This is fine with me. He is not a rat bastard intent on claiming my life, nor is he a minion of Shadow. Therefore he is insignificant to me as well.

Skymistress Palacio Sarita bat Mardia strode down a deserted hallway. Pale patches on the wall betrayed the long tenancy of portraits recently removed. Dust, flecks of paper, scraps of cloth and grit were scattered across the polished floor. She could remember when this had been a busy thoroughfare. Now it was as deserted as any dockside lane when the airships were away.

She took a deep breath and allowed the smells of this place to settle into her nose. Grease, of course. Everywhere the grease. If there was one benefit to the not-so-slow death of the Lesser Port of Grand Reserve, it was that she might someday soon escape the perpetual reek of grease.

Beyond grease, there was the faint, murky scent of mold. As if water had gotten into some nearby carpets. Sweat, too, of dockhands working hard to shift loads while there were still decks to shift them to. Someone’s old cook fire, rancid oil and burnt beans. But mostly the dusty, silent reek of emptiness.

Already well over half of Lesser Grand Reserve’s population had departed. Most of the early migrants were from the monied classes. People with the funds or education or skills to easily find passage aboard some airship or another with reasonable expectation of new employment at their next port. Or possibly the port after that one.

Those who remained were the poor, the stubborn, and the terminally optimistic. Along with a few operators like Panjit who saw, or thought they saw, ways to profit from the collapse of a once-proud port.

The last major port failure had occurred when the springs on Flymonkey Island had dried up unexpectedly. Within a handful of months the city there had been reduced to empty ruins. Not even pirates could harbor there in later days.

Sarita had been a girl then, well into her own apprenticeship at Port Lamassu. The collapse of Flymonkey Free Port had been a subject of speculation and rumor for months.

The Lesser Port of Grand Reserve was a much more important place than Flymonkey Free Port had ever been. But she both hoped and feared its fall would be less remarked upon.

Someone—or something—had been hunting airships out in the airbands, pulling the stricken vessels to their deaths among the clouds. The disruption to communication, trade, and migration was impossible to ignore.

Shadow was coming, the laborers whispered in their dormitories and refectories, but Sarita placed little faith in such rumors. The fears of small people everywhere could speak louder than any voice, and with less reason. Legends were just that: legendary.

If not Shadow, though, it was something. New and aggressive pirates. An invasion from distant airbands. Something.

And in the midst of it all, her city was dying.

The Skymistress passed quickly through a cleaner hallway and into the elegant dining room where affairs of state were often conducted, and even occasionally settled. The table awaited. Oil cups and troughs were set on one side for Tock, plates under domes on the other side for Meat.

It was set for three, she noted sourly. She would not escape Panjit this evening.

I sit in a gilded room with two Meat. We are surrounded by statues of heroes of yore, and a carpet thick enough to bury corpses in encloses our feet. History and art and money reek about me. Amid their glory, I ignore the Meat blood still crusted in the joints of my right hand. They dine in the fashion of their kind. Steaming food is clutched in their soft, clever fingers and shoveled into their pursed, damp maws. I try to imagine what it would be like to have teeth. Excrescences of bone within one’s jaws. Brittle, fragile, hard and sharp.

Much like Meat themselves.

The important Meat who met me at the dock ignores me. He pretends attention and respect to the woman he sits with. Even I, a simple Tock, can see she has no use for him. She does not bother to hide her corresponding lack of respect.

She I must focus on. She is the Skymistress. It was her order that permitted Entwhistle to dock at the Lesser Port of Grand Reserve. It is her forbearance that permits us to take on supplies even now in advance of our letters of credit and our limited funds.

The Skymistress has a name, but Meat always has names. They never seem to last long enough to earn them. Still, I attend to her. She is at least polite to me. The Skymistress meets my eye, when she is not looking at her glistening, crumbling food. She listens to my mumbled words. She seems interested.

Too interested, perhaps.

Finally she places her little stabbing fork down at the left side of her plate and her dull knife down at the right. “Captain Jakesia,” the Meat says in that clear, strong tone of voice Meat always uses to announce something unpleasant. “I must ask a difficult question. In the interests of my island.”

“Ask.” I am not long on courtesy, but then I am not long on much of anything these days.

“What became of Captain Armature? Who did such terrible damage to your ship?”

“Entwhistle is airworthy,” I say almost automatically. A sky court might find differently, especially if I were ever heard to express fears contrary to that basic sentiment.

“I do not seek to… challenge… you.” She leans forward, her hypertrophied chest glands straining against the curdled red of her robes. “We live in a time of adversity. Especially here on Lesser Grand Reserve.” That earns the Skymistress a hard look from her Meat companion, the important one that I have already come to dislike in a most collegial manner. I grudgingly admire the way she simply ignores his hostility.

“We were attacked,” I say. Truthful but unhelpful. That is usually best with important Meat.

“Stupid Tock.” The other Meat’s impatience practically spills across the table. “Her language facilitator is on the blink.”

I meet his eye and hold him with my gaze. I am Tock, I do not need to blink. In time, he does. “There is nothing wrong with my language facilitator, you ignorant dolt. I am merely parsimonious with my words.”

“Attacked by who, then?”

“Whom,” I correct him. “Attacked by whom.”

The Skymistress bursts into noise that after a moment I recall is Meat laughter. It has been a long time, and very little is amusing to me anymore. “Panjit,” she says with a bright smile, laying one hand upon his arm, “you will not best this one.”

I trace my fingertips in the remaining pool of my machine oil, a lovely 000 light vegetable base. “No, leave that to the rat bastards. They bested us all too well.”

She leans close again, pressing her glands against the table edge so that the other Meat’s eyes slide sideways despite his hostile focus to me. “Who are the rat bastards?”

Now there is a question. I take another long, hard look at her assistant Meat. He is a dangerous fool, but the Skymistress holds the lines of power here. Also, I have little left to lose. Armature is dead, Entwhistle is stricken.

“The rat bastards are servants of Shadow,” I say. “They sail in small ships, some of them just wings without gasbags. They live hard and close to the wind. They come from the east and antispinward. They attack ships far out in the airbands, or traveling within the clouds. I have never heard of one attacking an island or a port or a city.”

That is the longest string of words I have spoken since before Armature went over the rail with three rat bastard lances in his chestplate.

“They prey on trade,” the Skymistress says in a thoughtful voice.

“Your trade is gone anyway,” I observe. “Your slips are idle, and most lie long unused.”

Unexpectedly, the other Meat speaks. “Too many believe our grease mine has failed.”

I know a state secret when I hear one. “Your port is dying,” I tell them. “My airship is dying. Will you repair me?”

“Will you bring back our trade?” snarls the other Meat. The Skymistress stares him to silence before returning her attention to me.

“I thank you for the information.” Her voice is grave. “Our crews are diminished, but we can still provide repair parties and supplies.”

Grudging honesty forces answering words from me. “Payment may be slow.”

She spreads her hands. “Where would we cash your credit draft?”

That provokes a chuff of steam and a wheeze from me. Laughter, indeed.

Disgusted, the other Meat rises from the table and leaves with great ceremony. His exit is clearly intended to provoke us, or possibly make a point.

“Your life would be improved by killing him,” I tell her.

“Unfortunately, he is the best of those remaining to me.” She sighs and sags a bit in her chair. Becomes more human, more like me, in that moment. “Will they come in time, these rat bastards?”

I opt for the truth. “Come the Shadow, comes the rat bastards. In the darkness, they will shit in your halls and shatter your windows and howl from the tops of your towers.”

“Shadow is just a rumor.” Her voice is uncertain.

“Shadow is the end of all things. They are just its servants and heralds.”

She watches me a little while. Then: “You are very angry.”

I shrug. Human is as human does. “No one craves their ending. Meat ages and dies. Tock can fail without proper maintenance or too far from fuel and grease. But Shadow? Shadow is the failing of the entire world, the dying of the light.”

The Skymistress is aghast. “How do you know?”

“Because of the coming of the rat bastards. This has all happened before. It will all happen again.”

“How do you know that?”

I tell her my deepest secret, one that runs back to my Maker and my very making. “Because I remember the last time.”

Her voice drops to almost nothing. “How old are you?”

“Older than the light itself.”

With that I rise and begin my walk back to Entwhistle. It won’t matter soon. The Lesser Port of Grand Reserve is dying, as surely as the light is dying. As surely as I am going to fail.

If Tock could cry, I would weep.

Skymistress Sarita returned to the observation deck of the Eastmost Tower, trailed by two silent servitors. The best of her household were gone. A few more departed with every one of the increasingly infrequent sailings.

Soon, the Lesser Port of Grand Reserve would have too few people to maintain the docks and keep the island’s businesses running and supplies moving. The grease mines wouldn’t matter then. The people would continue to shelter a while—there were still springs, and granaries, and orchards—but without grease, and money, there was no trade. Without trade, there were no new supplies.

As she’d promised, repair crews were about Entwhistle. In truth, the dock masters were glad enough of the work. It was something to do. The airship was listing slightly in her slip even as men and women swarmed over the rigging and along the decks. Hoses snaked from the gasbag to pumps brought out on trolleys.

A cold wind picked at her hair and made her eyes water. It blew from antispinward. She thought hard on Jakesia’s words about the rat bastards and the coming of Shadow. The actual darkness might be a nursery tale to frighten children, but surely Lesser Grand Reserve was falling into its own Shadow.

Metaphor or not, the Shadow was real.

“What if I just boarded the ship and sailed away with them?” she asked the wind.

Meat and Tock usually did not mix in crews. The demands of everything from watchstanding to what was required of each sailor were too different. Tock did not sleep, and were hideously strong by the standards of ordinary men. They could sail with half the complement of a Meat ship.

But any ship would take passengers for the right fee, under the right circumstances. Any ship would take them on.

“Alfons,” Sarita said aloud.

Her servitor stepped forward. “Skymistress?”

“How many persons remain on this island?”

“A moment, please.” He retreated indoors, searching for records.

Her old steward would have simply known.

She watched Entwhistle and listened to the wind a while. Eventually Alfons came back. Bald, stooped, one eye drooping, he was at least sharp of mind. “One thousand and one hundred natural persons, Skymistress, and six hundred and forty made persons. That is the current estimate.”

“Of which we could put perhaps forty aboard Entwhistle,” she said. “It will take fifty more like her to carry everyone away.” And long before that the great steam engines and electrical generators and water pumps that maintained life on the island would fail for reduced maintenance and lack of tenders. Were fifty more airships ever going to call at the Lesser Port of Grand Reserve?

“They are unlikely to pay for the services we provide,” Alfons said lugubriously. “You may as well demand forty passages as compensation.”

Something in his voice caught her attention. “Would you go?”

“No, Skymistress.” He protested loyalty, but she knew he did not mean it.

Nobody did. What was there to be loyal to? The city was dying. And Shadow was coming.

Sarita wondered what had become of her loyalty. Evaporated under Panjit’s ambitious glare and the burgeoning decay of the port city in her charge. Nothing remained but old habit, it seemed.

She watched the horizons of air eastward and antispinward a while, looking for the swirling dots of a flight of rat bastards, or some other harbinger of Shadow. All Sarita saw were storm clouds trading lightning in the distance. All she heard was the lonely voice of the wind.

“We shall be ground as dust.” Her words slipped out aloud once more.

Alfons spoke, so close to her elbow that she startled slightly. “Every grain breaks upon the grindstone, Skymistress. That is the fate of grain.”

“We are more than wheat and chaff,” she replied, but did not believe herself.

I stare across my deck. My hand is clean, finally. It took a wire brush and a foolish degree of patience, but I am clean. Even rat bastards have mothers. How different is that from me cherishing memories of my Maker?

Those other memories, from the beginning, when the light first came back—those I do not cherish.

The deckhands assemble. Bosun Shimwater nods to me. All are accounted for.

“We are ready to sail soon,” I call out. “We have taken on no cargo. There may be passengers, though perhaps not once I have seen the Skymistress again.”

They all stare at me, eyes bright and marbled with expectancy, servomechanisms whining slightly as weights shift, eddies of steam emerging from odd vents. Tock is never so still as Meat can be, because Tock never sleeps. We move or we die.

I pause, considering my next announcement. “Captain Armature had plans, but he is lost to us. Entwhistle is a ship without home port or purpose. Too many of us were lost as well. Her boilers are sound, her gasbags tight, her engines strong, but her heart is broken.

“As is mine.”

Still they stare at me, glittering and feral. No one turns away. No one seeks to shout me down.

“I have a plan as well. Entwhistle will sail antispinward. I want to face the Shadow as it comes, and press my blades into the faces of the rat bastards. We will not drive them back. We will not stay the coming of darkness. But we will meet it with eyes open and arms raised.

“Will you come with me?”

There is no great shout, as a crowd of Meat might have done. Neither is there a rippling tide of those slipping away. Everyone just stands and stares. Bosun Shimwater. Leftscrew the junior pilot. The Leyden Twins, connected by spark and cable as they were. All twenty-three of my surviving crew. No one answers, no one steps back.

They just await orders.

In that moment, I love Tock all over again as I never have before in all the centuries since my Maker first unbound me from my birthing bench.

“Captain Jakesia.”

I turn to see the Skymistress on the gangplank. She has presented herself without the foolish, important Meat who follows her around. Only with a servant bent and palsied with the age that afflicts all Meat after a few years.

To my surprise, her name comes to me. “Sarita,” I say, forgetting the honorific.

I realize she has left behind her blood-colored robes. This Meat woman is clad in stout leather with wisps of wool peeking from her collar and cuffs.

“May I have your permission to come aboard?”

With a bow, I welcome her to Entwhistle. In setting foot on my deck, she comes under my rules. “Welcome.”

She glances up as the old man crowds behind her. The important Meat stands on the tower, glaring down at us. Though even I cannot see his eyes from this distance, I can read the set of his body in his blood-colored robes.

“Your rank is no more?” I ask politely.

“I am just Palacio Sarita bat Mardia.” She bows slightly in return to me. “I would work my passage wherever you are bound.”

“Toward Shadow,” I tell her, “and the dying of the light, amid the swords and spears of the rat bastards.”

“We all sail into Shadow,” she says. “And every woman’s light dies someday. I would face it in good company.”

The servant cackles. “Not with Panjit back there. Peacocked fool.”

“The winds of time are turning foul,” I warn her. “They will not turn fair again in our lives.”

“We are all grain,” she says. “The world is our grindstone.”

“Can you haul a line on command?” I ask.

Sarita, once Skymistress of the Lesser Port of Grand Reserve, smiles.

Very much despite myself, I smile back.

I check the springs of my hand one last time, then I give the orders to cast off.

The Temptation of Eustace Prudence McAllen

You know that place out west of Casper? Wild badlands like you’ve never seen, all rocks and salt and twisty dead-end ravines’d swallow up a man and his horse both like they was watermelon seeds. Hell’s Half Acre is its name these days, but folks used to call that the Devil’s Kitchen.

What do you think, biscuit-head? On account of him cooking up sin there. What else’d the devil his own self set to boiling over a fire?

Now this fellow name of Eustace Prudence McAllen rode for Hotchkiss Williamson what had the Broken Bow Ranch out that way. Williamson held a good spread, with two different springs and a box canyon full of cottonwoods running down through his grasslands. Drought didn’t bother him nearly so much as it troubled his neighbors, though he did have a problem with range fires there through the summers of 1864 and 1865.

McAllen, he might of been a Southern man, ain’t no telling now. But he’d showed up the autumn of 1863 and signed on. Working over the winters on the range here always has called for a special kind of cuss, so Williamson and his brother ranchers didn’t ask a lot of questions of a man what rode strong and didn’t backtalk and kept the cattle out of trouble. Anyone who came west in those war years was avoiding something, somewhere. So long as they didn’t bring their troubles in their saddlebags, that was generally good enough.

No, I can’t rightly say exactly what he looked like. You talk to people who rode for Williamson in them years, you get different tellings. Time plays tricks on memory, don’t you know. There was a lot of panics, from Indian attacks and the range fires and what all. Can’t even say if’n he was a colored fellow, some kind of quadroon, or just white, like a black Irishman. Taller than most, maybe. Carried an ivory-handled double-barreled LeMat revolver what had been engraved real tiny, some folks said it was the book of Jeremiah writ real small, always close to his hand.

Why anyone would carry that particular book of the Holy Bible so I can’t rightly say.

So here’s McAllen working the cattle for Williamson and minding his own business. Don’t drink too much, don’t fight hardly none at all, don’t cuss in front of Williamson’s wife and daughters, lends a hand even when he ain’t been asked. Everything’s fine until the second summer of range fires and somehow word gets around that McAllen has been setting ’em.

Firestarting is worse than rustling, in its way. You don’t just lose the cattle, you lose the land. And fighting a range fire is somewhere between suicide and hopeless. Best you can do is get livestock and people out of harm’s way and pray the wind don’t shift wrong.

Mostly you know what done it. Dry thunderstorm, often as not. But sometimes they got a pattern. Summer of 1864, and again 1865, it was like that. Visitations, almost.

And they was talking, people. Cooks and runners and the feedlot boys and the fancy women and whatnot. McAllen’s name was on a lot of lips. For a fellow ain’t made no enemies, he sure didn’t have a lot of friends. It was all-around peculiar.

So Williamson, he got the wind put up his own self and went and had a quiet talk with McAllen. I can’t reckon the old man had pegged his hand for a firebug. More like he wanted McAllen gone a bit, out of the way to let rumor run its course. So he sent the poor bastard out riding trail west of Fort Caspar, what the city was called back then afore it was really a city. Said McAllen was checking springs and shelter in case they needed to drive the herds through the Powder River country.

Which was so much horse puck and everybody knew it, but it did serve to calm the hard words down some.

McAllen, he got himself out toward the Devil’s Kitchen. That’s a wild, wild land, looks like God dropped some old mountains into a thresher the size of Kansas, then let Leviathan vomit all over what fell out the ass end. All gray and brown and furze, covered with sand and ash and alkali and salt, nothing a fellow with any sense would ride into.

But he saw smoke, you understand. And fire was on his mind more than anyone’s. Range fires could take his life in a hanging, if those hard words stuck around and took root in people’s thoughts. So McAllen probably figured on picking his way on in there and finding some camp of layabouts or Indians or deserters, or something he could lay them fires at the feet of.

Off he went, leading his horse down a slope of scree and into one of them little, twisted canyons, following the smoke and his own sense of what was right and what was not.

Now the Devil, he’s one crafty son of a bitch.

Yeah, I said that. You just mind your piehole or I’ll mind it for you, and you won’t like that one tiny bit.

Crafty on account of that’s how the Creator made him. Lucifer, he’s practically the first of God’s children. Old Adam, more or less an afterthought he was. A gardener, really, set to watch the fruit trees and keep the snakes off the lawn. No, all the pride and power and glory went into the Prince of Light. When he done fell from Heaven, he took a piece of the Old Man’s heart with him. The meek might could inherit the Earth, but it was the prideful for whom the beauty of the day was first forged.

After the Fall, though, the Devil he had to slink around in the dark patches and hide in the shadows and walk with the rotten side of a man’s soul in his hand. That’s why he hangs around even to this day in places like Hell’s Half Acre, what was the Devil’s Kitchen back then. Ain’t no place for him among the shaded cottonwoods or along a quiet bend in the river with a fishing pole.

Still, a fellow’s got to eat. That’s part of our earthly estate, don’t you know? And the Devil likes him some barbacoa as much as the next man.

Yeah, what they call barbecue now days.

A good loin of pork or brisket of beef, dry rubbed with salt and some spices, then cooked long and slow over a bed of coals afore you slather on a compounded ferment of vinegar and tomato sauce—that’s a ticket to Heaven through the gates of the mouth. Food as righteous as any toe-curling sin.

So here’s the Devil got him a roasting spit down in a dry ravine in the Devil’s Kitchen, and he’s got a dozen lesser dark angels to tend the fire and turn the spit, and a whole heifer off of Mr. Williamson’s land stuck up there roasting to feed his own hungers and keep his myrmidons at their labors. It was a good place for Lucifer, on account of no one ever goes there, and he could rest in peace until time called for more of his mischief to be spread upon this Earth or down in the dominions of Hell.

Yeah, like that, kid. And you wouldn’t be the first one ready to sell their granny down to darkness for a mouthful of that hot, sweet meat fresh off the fire. No, sir.

Devil was resting his spurred heels on a shattered knob of gray-white rock, a jug of white lightning in one clawed hand, a corncob pipe in the other, when Eustace Prudence McAllen led his old bay mare into the mouth of the ravine.

Them demons, they giggled and cackled and sizzled as demons is wont to do. Old Scratch looked up to see what the fuss was and saw a beanpole of a man with a week’s beard looking back at him. Dark fellow, for a white man, in a pale canvas duster and a busted-down slouch hat pulled low over his eyes.

“Boys,” the Devil announced in a voice like a flash flood down a canyon, “we got us a visitor.”

You got to understand the Devil speaks all languages and none. Adamic, what everyone talked before the Tower of Babel, that’s the tongue of Heaven. Any man born of woman will understand it, on account of it’s the language God made us all to know and be known by.

So while his vowels sizzled with lightning and bedded coals, and his consonants were the fall of hammers and the snap of bones, the cowboy McAllen heard this in English as plain as any what got spoke in the bunkhouse back at the Broken Bow Ranch, and in an accent as melodious as General Nathan Bedford Forrest himself.

Which is to say, McAllen, he wasn’t fooled one tiny bit. The Devil can make himself fine and fair as any Philadelphia dandy, or he can be small and slick and mean as a scorched badger, or anything in between. But this day Old Scratch was taking a rest, so his tattered wings spread black and lonely behind him while the horns on his head showed their chips and cracks and stains.

The only characteristic that marked him out from the chiefest among his lesser demons was the blue of his eyes, which were as deep and quiet as the lakes of Heaven. No creature born of Hell could ever have possessed such a gaze, and it was them orbs of light that marked the Devil still as being directly the work of God’s hand.

McAllen saw the wings and the flickering, scaled tail and the great clawed feet and corncob pipe and the jug of shine, but most of all he saw those blue eyes, and he knew his time had come, and probably already gone past.

He also knew from the barbacoa spit who’d been setting those range fires.

“How do, neighbor?” he asked pleasantly, careful not to let his hand stray to the gun butt at his right hip. McAllen knew perfectly well that the six or seven wiry, bright red bastards tending that cow a-roasting could take him down before his second shot got off, and he knew perfectly well his first round wouldn’t do no more than irritate Old Scratch.

“Smartly enough, I reckon.” The Devil sat up straight and set down his jug. “Strange place you picked to be riding fences, son of Adam.”

McAllen touched the brim of his slouch hat. He dropped the bay mare’s reins, on account of she’d been pulling hard. “It’s rightly son of Allen, your worship,” he said calm as a millpond. Behind him, the horse bolted with a scream of fear to melt a man’s heart.

Go, he thought, and carry the news of my death if not the tale of the manner of my passing. For it is given to some of us to know the manner and hour of our passing.

Well, yes, you’re right. Even a deaf-mute idiot Frenchman would have known this was the manner and hour of his passing. And Eustace Prudence McAllen was none of those things.

The Devil smiled, which was not a sight for the faint of heart. “Still no fences down in these lands, son of Allen.”

“Just a fire down below.” McAllen summoned the courage that had stood him up against Yankee bullets and Oglala Sioux arrows and Wyoming winter blizzards and Texas summer droughts—that courage was needful now for him to walk slowly toward the Devil, measuring his steps with every care a man could bring.

“My cooking could bring a circuit preacher to his knees,” the Devil said proudly. Pride was, after all, his overweening sin and greatest accomplishment.

McAllen touched the brim of his hat again. “But your worship, the sparks from your fire keep setting the grasslands east of here to flame.”

With a shrug, the Devil smiled again. “Fire is my servant and my only friend. What does it matter to me that the prairie burns?”

Here is where Eustace Prudence McAllen showed what a clever man he was. He smiled back at the Devil, though his guts liked to turn to water, and said, “Except folk are setting the blame on me for them range fires. You ain’t getting the credit you rightly deserve.”

At those words the Devil’s teasing of McAllen vanished in an eruption of wounded vanity. He stomped one great, clawed foot, what shook the ground so hard they felt the tent poles rattle over in Laramie. “By all that’s unholy, I shan’t be having you take the credit for my deeds, son of Allen!” His shout smoked the air blue and called dark clouds into swirling overhead. Flames snapped at the broken tips of his horns, and his wings spread wide with a creak like a barn in a tornado.

No, no, they ain’t had no real buildings in Laramie till after the war was done and the railroad come to town. Of course it ain’t a camp now.

Anyway, I got a story to tell, if you don’t keep aggravating me like that. Who taught you manners, anyhow?

“That’s why I come to you, your worship.” McAllen somehow kept his voice steady, though he nearly voided himself in his drawers from sheer, raw terror. “It ain’t right, and I reckon to set the record straight.”

“I’ll straighten the record,” roared the Devil. “I’ll show them who’s Prince of Flame and Darkness around these parts.”

At this point, McAllen realized he might of overshot his mark just a little bit. He hadn’t aimed to set Old Scratch on the folks of Fort Caspar and the Broken Bow Ranch. He hadn’t aimed for much at all, except to live a minute or two longer in the face of such wrath.

He had his second fit of brilliance. “Before you go wreaking havoc across the land, your worship, maybe you ought to partake of your dinner.”

Well, those words brought the smell of barbacoa back to the Devil’s nostrils, along with a strong whiff of the sulfur that has been his natural estate since he first fell from Grace. Like I said, there ain’t many that can resist the crackling lure of the slow-cooked meat.

“Be damned if I won’t,” the Devil replied, then began to laugh at his own joke.

McAllen, he laughed along with the Devil, because what else is a man to do in such a moment? The two of them stood there, cackling and howling like two lunatics, even the lesser demons capering and giggling through their needle-toothed mouths.

Old Scratch strode with a purpose to the roasting cow and tore off a long, lean, juicy strip of meat, all crisped dark on the outer edge and dripping fat within. The smell that came off the carcass like to set McAllen’s brain on fire, reaching right through his nose and his tongue and lighting up the sin of gluttony as nothing else in the world could have done.

“You want some?” the Devil asked, drippings running down his face from both sides of his mouth, his rotten fangs chewing the soft, sweet meat like it was manna fallen from God’s hand.

The scent nearly undid McAllen. He was tempted, knowing he’d taste of the finest meal ever to be eaten by himself or any other man. Knowing likewise if he took food from the Devil’s hand, he’d be a servant of darkness for the rest of his days here on Earth, and damned for eternity beyond.

He never was a churchgoing man, McAllen, but anyone who’s stood when the bullets fly or watched over the herds when the wolf packs are hunting down the moon knows better than to disbelieve. Life is too short and hard and strange not to blame God for what He done made of the world.

Yes, even now. And I know none of you knotheads ever dodged a bullet in your young years.

No, acorns out of a slingshot do not count.

McAllen looked at that most perfect barbacoa steaming in the Devil’s grip, and reckoned if he didn’t take it from Old Scratch’s hand, he’d be next up on the spit. But like I said, he reckoned if he did take it, he’d be bound then and forever more in service, like that Faust fellow out of the old days in the Germanies.

Death, or barbacoa?

That right there was the temptation of Eustace Prudence McAllen.

What would you have done? This here’s the point of the story, ain’t it?

What would you have done?

Really and truly, on your best swear, what would you have chose?

They heard the shot at the Broken Bow Ranch, clear as if someone had loosed a round off the porch of the bunkhouse.

Folks heard it in Fort Caspar, too.

Later on some claimed they heard it in Laramie, reckoned the noise for a boiler explosion or some such, but the railroad ain’t reached Laramie yet that year, so you can figure on them being liars or at the best misguided in wanting to be part of history their own selves.

But the howl that followed, everyone heard that clear on to Fort Benton in one direction and Omaha in the other. Like a storm off the plains grabbing up sod houses and snapping telegraph poles it was. Anger and pain and rage and loss that caused drunks to stop beating their wives for a day or two, and sent even the randiest cowpokes scurrying into the revival tents for a good dose of prayer and preaching.

You see, Eustace Prudence McAllen shot the barbacoa spit right off the posts and dumped the Devil’s dinner into the ashes and sand of the firepit below. He resisted temptation and bought himself a ticket straight to Heaven on account of nixing Lucifer’s vittles and vexing the ambitions of evil that day, in that place. Hell didn’t let out for dinner, see, on account of what he done.

The Earth split open so that the Devil and his minions could chase themselves straight down to Hell, taking that ruined carcass with them.

When Williamson and a posse of his hands came the next morning on the bay mare’s backtrail looking for McAllen, they found him lying flat on the ground deader than a churchyard dance party. His clothes were nearly burnt off his body, his hair turned white as the Teton glaciers.

One last piece of crispy barbacoa was stuck between his teeth, and Eustace Prudence McAllen had the expression of a man who’d died with his hands on the gates of Heaven.

They buried him where he fell, on account of none of the horses would sit still for the body to be slung across. Williamson kept the LeMat revolver, which the metal of them double barrels looked to have been frosted but never did thaw, and dropped that piece of barbacoa into a leather pouch to take home and study, for even then he knew it for what it was.

There weren’t no more range fires for a long time after that. Some folks took that to mean McAllen had been the torch man, but Williamson and his hands knew better. They kept their dead compadre’s name clear, and they kept the herds well away from the edges of the badlands.

Even now, if you ride out west of Casper toward Hell’s Half Acre—for the Devil don’t cook there no more, so it ain’t his kitchen now—if’n you ask around and folk like the set of your shoulders and the light in your eyes, there’s a barbacoa pit run by some of Williamson’s daughters and granddaughters. McAllen’s Barbecue, they call it. Place ain’t on no signpost or writ down in no tax rolls, but it’s there.

Head for the badlands and follow the scent. Just mind who’s eating on the porch when you get there, because even the Devil himself can be tempted back to this corner of Wyoming when the wind is right and the cuts of meat are just good enough.

That Which Rises Ever Upward