Ellen Datlow - The Beastly Bride

“I hate to take it. ”

“I’m pretty fond of S to T , but I know the best entries almost by heart. Right now I’m reading C to D to my girls.”

Xan settled the book in his arms. “That bit about the creatures like flies of fire? They must have been flakes of oxidized copper or some other metal.”

“Then what’s the salamander?” Garland asked.

“I thought you’d be telling me!” Surely the salamander was nothing but pulsating coals seen by an overtired gaffer, his eyes swimming.

Xan begged a bag from Garland and slipped the encyclopedia inside. “Come by if you need it,” he said, scribbling directions on a scrap of paper, “or just stop in for a visit. Or to fish — I’ve got a trout stream.”

And so the volume was deposited on the marver beside the box of tools.

At home Xan unloaded his inheritance, stowing the gear in his studio. The room was as tidy as a bakery after hours. Tomorrow he might be pulling glass and twisting it like taffy, but today he sat in a rocker, flipping through the book, drinking strong coffee.

“Listen to this,” he said to the cat. “Magicians expected help from salamanders when their houses burned.”

She lay on the ledge before the glory hole, switching her tail.

“Be born a writer, I wouldn’t need to make one of those fire salamanders.” He read aloud: “ ‘ The fire of hell does not harm the scribes, since they are all fire, like the Torah — if flames cannot hurt one anointed with salamander blood, still less can they injure the scribes.’ Garland must have peculiar dreams after reading this book. What do you say, Fritsy?”

The yellow cat leaped down and rolled on the stone floor. Xan had tried to keep her away from the studio but eventually decided that she was indestructible. She must have eaten a peck of glass dust, and her fur occasionally glittered in the sunlight. Fritsy had learned to stay out of the batch, the powder for making glass, but loved to fool with beads or millefiori and had won her name by a fondness for playing with colored frit. More than once he had found her curled in the empty crucible.

His place was a mix of old and new. With the help of a stonemason, he had built the studio on two acres of slope deeded to him by Harold Queen — Queen was an even more common a name than Prince among mountain names — but had left the cabin that had belonged to Harold’s father much as it was. His friend the mason had bartered labor for glass at a time when collectors were beginning to ask for Xan’s work. He was lucky; he knew that. He had been brought along by notable craftsmen. If not for Harold and Russ taking a shine to him, he would be waiting tables in Sylva or pounding nails all summer long to support a glass habit.

He had been struck by glass fever at a fair during a demonstration of lampworking. A seldom-watched foster child of eleven, Xan stayed until dusk and returned the next morning to help the old man set up shop. By thirteen he held an apprenticeship with Harold that demanded three hours after school and all day on Saturdays and vacation days. So deep had been his unhappiness at home and school that he often said the glass saved his life. Harold introduced his young charge to buyers, provided him with tools that he still used, and treated him like family. After his mentor died, Xan dropped out of high school. He was sixteen, strong and determined. Russ and Eva took him in, insisting that he stay with them and finish out his apprenticeship. They never once suggested that he return to school, though Eva gave him books and taught him a smattering of Latin. When asked about college, Xan would declare that Eva was his Alma Mater. But Harold and Russ had made him a gaffer, and the magic and surprise in working the glass still brought him joy. He didn’t need talk of fire moths and magic myrtle fires and salamanders to make him see the craft as wondrous.

The queer thing was this: he owned a load of myrtle. Crape myrtle wasn’t the one proper to the Middle East, not the kind of myrtle that Zechariah saw in a vision of branches and red horses and an angel. But it was what sprang up when a Southerner thought of “myrtle.” If mixed with resinous pine and the windfall oak that he had split and stacked, perhaps that would do.

“What if I did that? What if I worked the glass for seven days and seven nights? Even if I didn’t end up with a living creature in the coals, it would be a feat.” Like many another wedded to a craft, he’d gotten into the habit of talking to himself. Some days his own was the only voice he heard. He got up to see that his blowpipes and punty rods and all the gear and tackle of his trade — the puffer, the tagliol, the blow hose, the threading wheel, the pastorale, and so on — were in order, ready for the first gather from the furnace. He shifted squares of beeswax so that they lay beside the jacks, and ran his hand across the shears and paddles. Satisfied, he went to the door. April humus mixed with the fragrance of an unknown flower, and a rampant scent like bruised garlic pleased him — he could have gone hunting for his own greens, but he had a liking for Garland and thought that he would like to know the man better.

Xan split wood until bedtime and afterward dreamed of nothing but a slow fall through a well of night, ending with strands of a glass dawn. In the morning he kindled the fire with splinters of fatwood and some split crape myrtle. After heaping on oak, he shut the cat in the cabin — separated from the realm of flame by a dogtrot — and went out for groceries. On return he poured cullet into the furnace and began planning the day’s work while Fritsy batted and chased a ricocheting pellet of glass. Animated by the blaze, glass cracked and bounced in the crucible. He left it alone and took a nap, curled on a daybed. When he woke, the fire sat just above two thousand degrees and the glass was a sunny orange in the bowl.

“For you, Russ.”

The first gather of the day was colored with blue and white frit. Xan rolled the glass on the dead man’s marver and afterward brought the blowpipe to the bench. He seated himself close to one of its arms, with his jacks and diamond shears on the table and wood blocks in a bucket of water. While shaping the vessel, he wished for an apprentice to help him with the large gathers. He set the pitcher in the heated garage to wait for a lip wrap and handle. When he was ready, the body would be heated once more, this time in the glory hole; using a punty rod, he would bring a dollop of glass from the furnace and attach the handle and thread the lip.

He kept quiet much of the time. If he spoke, it was to the cat. Intermittently he whistled a minor tune.

All day long he worked, moving from furnace to bench to garage, from garage to glory hole to bench, from bench to the annealers, where the pieces would slowly cool. When the cullet was finished off, he melted the batch and left it alone to “fine out,” bubbles slowly seeping up to the surface. He stripped off his damp T-shirt and dozed again. On waking he took a pipe from the water barrel and heated it.

Before nightfall the annealers held bowls, pitchers, and vases. Strands of ruby and gold trailed through glass the color of a wild persimmon after first frost. A series of tiny fluted bowls and vases were blue and green with a peacock’s metallic luster; he had tossed newspaper into the glory hole to rob it of oxygen and “reduce” the color.

“Today I worked fast, Miss Fritsy. Filled orders for a big sky blue pitcher and a group of smalls. Next I’ll be fussy and start with a shimmery vase with green stems and leaves. Bloodroot. Or uvularia.”

He yawned as he threw on more wood, and that night his brief sleeps had no trace of dream.

Days passed, sometimes snailing as slowly as lampwork — time stretching out like a glittering length of twisted cane. Other times it seemed to fly as swiftly as a teardrop of hot golden glass spiraling around the belly of a vase.