Ursula Vernon - The Tomato Thief

The answers to these questions were completely immaterial—food and tea would be forthcoming anyway. Grandma Harken let herself sink into the comfort of Anna’s hospitality.

She’d brought along a half-dozen nearly ripe tomatoes. Now that she’d finally eaten one, they weren’t so precious to her.

The tomatoes were duly admired and whisked away into the kitchen. Tea was drunk, then more tea, and then Grandma Harken held up her hands and said, “No more, Anna, I’m begging you. I’ll explode.”

Anna laughed. “All right. You came for an answer, then.”

Grandma nodded.

“A woman,” she said. “Turned into a mockingbird, from up past Gila way.”

Anna tilted her head. “Not one of mine.”

“Wouldn’t think so. But some kind of enchanter’s got her bound up with a silver cuff through her tongue, and I aim to break her loose if I can. She called it a ‘he’ but that’s all I know.”

She sat back, and glanced at the windows out of habit.

“Nothing out there can hear you,” said Anna. “Or if it could, it’s so big that you shouldn’t be tangling with it anyhow.” She flicked her fingers. “Sounds interesting, but what do you need with the Mother of Trains?”

Grandma told her about the tracks.

“I could go over every inch of the desert and miss it if somebody folded the world up the wrong way,” she said. “Trains don’t care about folds.”

“They run in three worlds,” said Anna distantly. “We will not talk about the fourth. If there is anything to be seen, the train-gods will see it.”

She gestured, and the grandchild appeared. Grandma Harken took the time to finally look at the child—a girl, delicate as a quail, probably older than she looked. “Go and get your uncle,” Anna said. “Tell him we will be at the station shortly, with a question.”

The girl nodded and padded away.

Anna watched her go. Someone would have to have known her as long as Grandma Harken to notice the sudden smoothing of a line between her eyes, as if she had found an answer that eluded her.

“The next priest?” asked Grandma.

“I wouldn’t wish it on her,” said Anna wearily. “She’s got desert in her, not steel.”

Grandma nodded. She was something of an authority on the subject.

“I’ll send her to you,” said Anna.

“Like hell you will!” Grandma scowled over her tea. “I don’t need a girl and I’m hard to live with. And I’ll probably die running after mockingbirds.”

“Then you’ll want somebody to point to where the body fell,” said Anna. She waved a hand. “Not now. Later. Soon, I think, but not yet. After you’ve dealt with this foolishness, perhaps.”

“I said—”

“You get your answer and she gets a teacher,” said Anna. “Fair trade.”

Grandma Harken glowered, but she knew that Anna had her in a hard place. And the girl like a quail needed … something.

“She broke her arm when she was small,” said Anna quietly. “She’s got cholla ribs for bones. We didn’t let the doctor see. I set it myself.”

Grandma sucked the air in between her teeth. That was immense power and vulnerability, all at once. That was a child that should never be taken out of the desert.

That was someone a little more like Grandma Harken than either of them were like fully human folk.

“Dammit, Anna …”

“Dammit, yourself.”

Anna’s grandson Jun was a slender man with apologetic eyes. He clasped his hands together and bowed over them to Grandma Harken. “How may I assist you, Grandmother?”

It felt awkward to be formal with a man you’d seen in diapers, but Grandma Harken had come to speak to a train-priest, not talk about how much he’d grown in the last forty years. She nodded to him. “Appreciate it, Jun. Looking to see if the train’s gone past anything strange.”

They stood in the station itself, not the main platform, but the small room before it where the train priest spoke to the engines.

There was no train there now, which was a relief. A train was like having a thunderstorm in the room with you, and having a priest around made it worse.

Jun smiled ruefully. “The trains go past many strange things, Grandmother.”

“One in particular, then,” said Grandma, and set out to describe the place where the world was folded and the train tracks ran through it.

Jun listened. He listened intently, with his eyes closed, and Grandma had to fight to keep from shivering.

Passing right through him to something else. It ain’t natural.

And then, because she had to be fair: Lot of good things ain’t natural. Most of ‘em just don’t rub your face in it.

She finished describing it and waited.

“Yesssss …” said Jun, and there was a hiss of brake lines in it. “Yessss, I ssee.”

He opened his eyes. Grandma’d seen it once before, so she didn’t take a step back, even if a good chunk of her skin wanted to.

It was nothing so dramatic as the color changing. It was only that there was something else in his eyes, something that wasn’t human or even close to it. When he blinked, his eyelids came down like the door to the firebox slamming shut.

“Along the line,” he said. “North and west and north again. There are five saguaros together. There is a hill of stones. There is a dwelling of the used-up people. There is a person there.” He nodded twice, with his eyes still closed. “There is nothing else for many miles.”

“This person,” said Grandma Harken, “he’s folding the world?”

Sweat was beginning to trickle down Jun’s face. She could feel the heat radiating off him. “There is a person. There is a bend in the track. There is a bend in the track.”

“Does that mean—”

“There is a bend in the track.”

Anna put a hand on Grandma’s arm and shook her head.

Grandma bowed to her friend’s experience. “Thank you,” she said.

The train-god, through Jun, said “Yesssss …” and it trailed away into the distance as the god went away again.

Jun stood for a moment, trembling like a horse that has run a hard race, then let out his breath in a long sigh. When he opened his eyes, they were only human dark.

“Can you tell me what it meant by there is a bend in the track?” asked Grandma.

Jun took out a cloth and wiped his head. “It’s hard to say,” he said. “Probably there’s really a bend, but repeating it like that …” He shook his head. “They fixate on odd things. That was the Mariposa . It’s not the clearest of the trains. Leviathan was better, but Leviathan has stopped speaking. The other trains say that it’s waiting for something.”

This was alarming, but also nothing to do with Grandma Harken. She made a mental note to order more coffee, though, in case the trains were planning to run mad.

They left the station. Jun came with them, not sweating now, shivering as if it were midnight in the desert instead of noon. Anna sent another grandchild to get him tea and put a blanket around his shoulders herself.

“Worth it?” she asked Grandma.

“I hope so,” said Grandma. “Thank you, Jun.”

The girl with bones made of cholla ribs said, “Who are the used-up people?”

“Hohokam,” said Grandma, which was a thing she hadn’t known she knew until she said it. “The ones who built all the canals. That’s what their name means, the used-up ones. Our enchanter’s squatting in some ruins, I guess.”

“Do you think he’s Hohokam, then?” asked Anna.

“Not unless he’s a thousand years old,” said Grandma. “Which I can’t rule out entirely. I’ll be going. Jun, thank you, and you too, Anna.” Her eyes slid over the cholla-bone girl and she nodded once and took her leave.