Diana Pho - Steampunk World

“And the waters of the swamp—”

“All shallow.”

“No one was bitten by poisonous serpents? Eaten by crocodiles?”

“No. We were protected.”

“Protected by whom?” asked Wilson.

A moment of silence. Under the white cloth it seemed long to him.

“Protected by him to whom you have promised yourself.”

“I didn’t—”

“You did. Or else you would be dead. Others, too.”

“But I—” Wilson remembered. If I give you your life back you will owe it to me. “I have dedicated my life to my lord, Jesus Christ.”

“Yes? When was this?”

“What? What does it matter when?”

“If it was before you met your new lord you must take it back.”

Take it back. Be forsworn. He couldn’t do that.

Could he?

“You will remain here overnight. Alone. Considering. In the morning I will come for you, for your final decision.”

“I can say no?”

“You can. So think well. Think what that will mean.

“When I am gone, remove the cloth. You will see you have been provided with water, food, a candle, a pot into which you may relieve yourself, and one more thing: an object to help you make your choice.”

The sound of footsteps leaving.

Wilson lifted the cloth and looked around at a small cave. The food, water, candle, and chamber pot were all present as described.

The only other thing there was a mirror.

Wilson removed his clothing. He looked at himself as long as the candle’s light lasted, using the reflective surface to examine sides he would normally be unable to see. He stared at the healed bullet wound hard and often.

The candle died. He couldn’t use the mirror anymore, so he used his mind.

All he had was his life. It was all that was wanted.

The sound of footsteps coming back.

Elena, bright rage twisting in her chest, felt her tail creak under her coat as she faced the man in the snow.

“That’s not enough.” The man jabbed his fat fingers at the three gemstones pinned to burgundy velvet that Elena clenched in her gloved hand.

Elena wished she could spit in this man’s face, watch cold spittle drip from his frozen whiskers. If only she could trade for the oil with someone else, as she had all autumn, but winter fell hard over Novgorod and today he was the only merchant left in the market—all the other stalls stood shuttered in the long purple shadow cast by St. Sophia’s gold domes.

“It’s more than enough.” Elena dangled the velvet between them; snowflakes pocked the fabric. Sell me the oil, you fat bastard. They had run out of oil more than a week ago, and Nina was fading away.

“I’ll need twice as many. Price’s gone up.” The man cradled the glass bottle, black oil sluicing inside.

“Do you have any idea what these jewels are worth?” Elena’s tail creaked again, stretching the cold skin around her tailbone; she ground her teeth as the corroded feathers spread apart. She willed her tail to stay down, to stay hidden, but anger coursed through her and she felt the spreading feathers lifting her coat’s frayed hem. “The Empress Catherine gave this sapphire to my great-great grandmother, and this emerald—”

“It don’t mean you get to tell me what to do no more.” The man stomped his feet as snow drifted around his boots. “Your kind aren’t even people. Commissar says so.”

Elena hated the way his mouth twisted in a smile around the words. Once upon a time you would have ducked out of the road for our family’s motorcar. Where were you the night of the fire? Stealing vodka from our cellars or holding a torch?

I can’t lose Nina too, the way I lost my parents.

Sell me the oil.

“Seven gemstones, or nothing,” he said.

Her tail twitched, this time lifting her knee-length coat like a boat-sail—she felt the wind bite her thighs. Wincing, she turned her head and out of the corner of her eye saw the rubies on her tail winking in the falling dusk.

The man’s mouth spread into a smile of missing teeth and triumph. “Cout-ments. I see.”

“They’re called accoutrement ,” Elena snapped.

“Wouldn’t the commissar like to know you’ve been hoarding the people’s property?”

They ripped off accoutrement , without ether—Elena had heard men like this one talk about it in the market, about how some nobles died from the pain. She would make them shoot her before she let them take her tail, or take Nina’s lungs.

“Wouldn’t the commissar like to know you’re bartering for jewels with a noblewoman instead of reporting me straight to him?” Elena’s tail was now fully lifted, the feathers spreading apart and bristling, visible under her coat, but she didn’t care. He already knew she had accoutrement .

He shrugged. “You have nothing anymore. The commissar don’t care what you say.”

Elena lunged forward and jammed her fingernails into his throat, wanting to hear him howl, because he wouldn’t sell her the oil she needed for Nina, because he was a face of the faceless millions who had risen up and destroyed her home, her family, everything .

He grappled with her hands and threw her off. She skidded over ice, the swollen skin around her tail grinding into the snow as her coat rode up.

She pulled herself up using the low branches of a pine tree, then skidded towards him, pulling up her coat-sleeve to reveal the thick brass opera glasses installed on her left wrist. She swooped her arm down on his head.

He screamed. The oil bottle rolled into the snow. She snatched it up and ducked away from his stomping boots. He was still screaming, and she hit him again, from behind. He tripped, rolled into the snow with a red line spidering up his forehead.

Elena jammed her black-buttoned boot into his side. He wasn’t dead, but he should be.

A shout, and shadowy figures marched around the church, coats buttoned tight and hammer-and-plough hats pulled low over eyebrows. Elena ducked behind the silver bell hulking on a frozen patch of dirt beneath the birches that lined the market. She pressed her back against the frozen metal, remembering when this bell had hung in the belfry of St. Sophia’s, before the city’s new commissars had taken it down to melt it for metal.

Elena peered around the bell: the soldiers clustered around the man she had hit. She slunk around the other side of the bell, then raced towards the kremlin gates—her tail aching in its socket with every step she took—towards the road that would lead her back to Nina’s raw cough and to the boxcar, the only home they had left.

In Elena’s girlhood of lemonwood dressers and ice skating parties, her favorite folktale was the story of the firebird, the wild creature that men hunted through the dark Siberian forests. In the best version of the story, which Mother didn’t like her to read, the firebird turned vicious when it was caught, lighting villages aflame and clawing out the necks of the men that captured it. She always knew when she came of age and received her accoutrement , as all aristocrats had since ornamenting oneself with the tails or wings of folktale creatures had become fashionable in the last century, she would receive the jeweled tail of a firebird.

Nina, on the other hand, had always loved the story of the rusalka, the drowned women who mope around after lost lovers in marshy rivers, and so the summer of Nina’s debut she had received fish scales on her arms along with the customary opera glasses. Of course, consumptive Nina, who grew tired even after an afternoon of playing the piano, already had another accoutrement : the pair of brass lungs she’d received when Mother and Father had sent her to a spa in Switzerland one summer.