Elizabeth Bear: Bone and Jewel Creatures

“Watch it,” she said to Catherine and Lazybones, who peered down from the rafters. Lazybones’ round glittering head swiveled on the deceptively long neck, bent between strange arms. Light caught on the mirror-encrusted shoulderblades.

The palms of Bijou’s hands were still laced with the network of fine scars she’d inflicted upon herself with the mirrors. For all its soft deliberate dignity, Lazybones was not a creature anyone would care to stroke.

The child slept on while Ambrosias clattered close and cleared the plates away, while Bijou stomped to her nearest workbench. There, sealed in a shallow-lidded watchglass, lay the shredded petal, brown and curled at the edges. She sparked the lights over the bench and adjusted the reflectors to send brilliant light showering down.

Jeweler’s tweezers and her scalpels would do for the dissection, though she already suspected what she would find. But it was neither scientifically nor sorcerously responsible to assume the accuracy of one’s speculations.

Bijou would investigate.

Blinking in the eye-watering light, hands already aching, Bijou selected her tools. “Lupe,” she called. The wolf trotted over, toenails and bones clattering on stone. Left-handed, Bijou reached down and smoothed the copper-chased skull. “I need your eyes,” she said.

Lupe reared up, front pawbones on the edge of the bench, and cocked her head at the work surface. The light through her lenses coruscated for a moment before it focused, but then Bijou was looking at a much-enlarged projection of the rose fragment on the surface of her work bench. The projection was large enough to show every pore and vein in the petal, and make out a suggestion of the cellular structure.

Delicately, she peeled back layers of tissue, the motions of scalpel and tweezers so tiny she could only see them in magnification.

She found what she was looking for. Between the surfaces of the petal ran tiny threads as pale as moonlight. She scraped them free, returning a few to the watch-glass, and bent close to study the remainder in the projection.

The silky fibers were the protective, venomous spines of a puss moth caterpillar, and they threaded the structure of the petal as if they had grown there.

There was only one gardener in whose garden this poisoned blossom might have grown. Kaulas, the Necromancer.

Days passed, and though autumn drew down around the great city of Messaline, Bijou had no occasion to leave her home or her work. As for the child, Emeraude was surprisingly little trouble. It was fastidious, making the enclosed side garden its toilet until Bijou demonstrated the use of the squatting toilet in the rear garden outbuilding. When it saw Bijou bathing in the old tub, it wanted to play as well. Despite the frustrations of teaching it to keep its stump out of the water, it learned quickly, by mimicry, though Bijou at first despaired of making it stand up and go about on its legs. But once she—with Lucy’s assistance—taught it to recognize the benefit of wearing clothes against the sun and in the night’s chill, it mastered walking erect quickly.

Its bones were clean within a week.

Compost kept the corpse-beetles and blowfly larvae at work in the back garden warm and productive, and Bijou had clay ovens to set about for when the nights—inevitably, though only in the deepest part of winter—might dip towards freezing.

Bijou learned from the bones. As she had suspected, the deformity was not merely the result of an old injury. The bones were warped, and two fingers had had no bones at all. The child had been born with a useless limb, which explained why its mother might have chosen to expose it. How it had survived since was a story about which Bijou could only speculate.

What she could not comprehend was how it had run afoul of Kaulas the Necromancer, and what it might mean that she, Bijou, and Brazen the Enchanter had intervened.

The stitches came out the day after the bones were polished, Emeraude watching curiously while Bijou steadied its arm and Ambrosias snipped and pulled. Emeraude bit its lip once, but remained stoic, and Bijou thought if it could have gotten its head down to the end of its stump it would have licked the blood away.

The next morning, with moonstone and silver and wire, with some of its own bones and some bones that were better, Bijou began building the child an arm.

The cub climbs and explores, but it does not try to run. The old creature is gentle and like the mother, bringing food and tending hurts, and it makes a warm soft place for the cub to sleep in. It grumbles to itself and it creaks and lurches when it walks, but the cub is used to old creatures that are cranky. They’re sore and no longer strong, the cub knows, and so one pays no mind to their irritability.

And anyway, the garden wall is high for a three-legged cub to get over, at least until the cub is strong again.

But the cub can explore the garden, whose walls bound all sorts of wonders. There are the roses and the palms, the passionflowers now merely huddled vines as winter encroaches. The lemon and lime trees are heavy with fruit in the cold, and once it understands what is wanted, the cub helps the centipede-creature harvest them. It is pleased to help feed the old creature, or, as it is starting to think of it, the old-mother. The limes are stacked in baskets; the lemons salted and packed away in lemon juice to pickle.

Although the old creature makes that attention-noise—“Emeraude!”—to try to stop it, the cub nevertheless bites through the thin skin of one before it is pierced for pickling, and makes a face. This is food. This could be eaten.

But for once in its life, the cub is not hungry enough to eat things that taste bad just because they are food.

There are secrets and lairs and amazing corners within the old creature’s den as well. The cub discovers ladders by watching the centipede-creature scurry up and down them, into and out of the rafters. There are creatures that live in the rafters too: there is the vulture-creature with its dusty smelling wings, and there is the slow sparkling creature. The cub clambers up a ladder, balances across the rafters, and touches the slow creature once, but shallow bloody slices across its fingertips convince the cub of the unwisdom of that idea. The cub makes no sound—it knows better; sounds draw attention—but the red dropping from its hand brings the old creature grumbling from whatever it was that the old creature does at its benches, to wash the wound and tuck the cub into bed, on a short leash, for the rest of the day.

After that, the cub is careful not to touch the slow creature.

The slow creature cuts.

But that expedition across the rafters has shown the cub something it did not know existed: a mysterious wooden hatchway.

The cub is fascinated .

The next day, when the leash is off, it will climb the ladder again.

In all Messaline, there were only three individuals upon whom Brazen the Enchanter would dance attendance. One was the Bey, whose rule Brazen chose to honor because Brazen did not himself care to govern. One was the Ordinary entertainer and famed beauty Madam Incarnadine, his paramour.

And one was Bijou.

Brazen’s house was at the bustling heart of the city, halfway up the hill topped by the Bey’s palace and gardens. To reach Bijou’s loft—which lay on the West bank, surrounded by warehouses and inexpensive apartments—Brazen’s carriage scurried effortlessly over swarming streets and marketplaces, and danced across with the broad shallow river with great splashing and no benefit from any of Messaline’s four bridges. Spidery elegant legs seemed too frail to bear up the crystal-windowed body; narrow feet thinned to pointed needles. Those rested lightly on the cobbles, dancing between goat-carts, dog-carts, and donkey-carts; litters, rickshaws, bicycles, and flocks…schools… hordes of pedestrians; water carriers, pastry peddlers, workmen, marketing women, news-sellers, a few Ordinaries in palanquins. The street society of Messaline.