It had been hard to find any sort of job but with his belly full again he had thrown himself into it, getting two shifts of dock loader, sleeping and eating the rest of the time and not thinking much. He had saved his money and now after three weeks he had come and got this.
He sat up and ran his hands over the woman. She was better in the dark than to look at, all satin and black corset, garter belt and hose that made the creamy flesh somehow ripe to the point of near-rot. But he had been drawn to her in the big reception room downstairs. She had leaned on the upright piano and regarded him with sly, primeval eyes. He had refused the drink or entertainment normally due gentlemen callers, wanting to come upstairs and pay extra for the whole night. The first time should be really something special.
And it had indeed been fine. Like being seized by a great creature that had lived inside you all this time without your knowing, but now released, would never be put back.
He eased out from beneath the heavy quilt and lit an old brass oil lamp. The woman slept noisily, head back and mouth open, showing two missing teeth, through which whistled her moist sighs. An oddly urgent need made him pick up his scruffy knapsack and unlace its innermost compartment. He had carried all his valuables in it since his first days back in Cairo, out of a pervasive, floating insecurity. He usually worked with the sack on his back, afraid to even put it aside.
The papers were still there. Their reassuring official thickness he found pleasurable. Despite some blurring from John’s immersion in the river, Mr. Preston’s bold handwriting in his crew contract for the Natchez stood out, royal blue beneath the wavering liquid glow of the lamp.
People said the Natchez had not come back from its uptime voyage … not yet. Cairo dwelled so near the great timestorm arcs that its folks always spoke conditionally, ending their statements about events with so far and seems to be and in the sweet by and by and we’ll see.
John paged through the crew papers, treasuring their solidity. Yesterday he had been coming back through the stockyards, from a hauling job, and had run into Stan on a plank-board sidewalk. Or at least the young man looked for all the world like Stan, with sandy hair and certain distracted gaze. But he stared blankly at John and disavowed ever being on the Natchez or uprivering at all. When John had started to tell of what had happened the young man had said irritably, “Well then, you shouldn’t ought to have went!” and brushed by him.
John put back the papers and felt also deep in the pocket the wad of documents he had taken off his father. Probably time to look at them, he figured. As soon as the man had poured out his blood on the sand John had felt utter and profound release from the charge of over a decade, and had taken from the body only the papers and a leather belt.
There was little, mostly receipts and incidentals. But the dues book in the Pilots’ Association was different, cardboard-thick and consequential. The straight columns showed dues paid right on time, the secretary’s scribbled initials acknowledging them. John flipped forward to the front and found there in one single blistering instant not the name of his father at all, but that of himself.
The shock of it kept him rigid while the name itself, black ink set forth with a firm hand—a writing laborious and undeniable—loomed and oscillated in his gaze. Yet it was stone-solid, calling forth the sharp memories of that face in the desert, features lined and fearful but now completely and at last familiar.
The woman stirred and yawned, opened her large eyes. Slowly she smiled at the unmoving man who held scraps of paper and stared into nothing. With a thick-lipped smile as ancient as time she said languorously, “We got a right smart spell left, honey. Gobs of it. Honey? What you reaching up in the air for? Honey?”
Death and the Lady
Judith Tarr
The year after the Great Death, the harvest was the best that anyone could remember. The best, and the worst, because there were so few of us to get it in; and the men who had lived through the plague all gone, even to the fledgling boys, in the high ones’ endless wars. The few that were left were the old and the lame and the witless, and the women. We made a joke of it that year, how the Angel of Death took his share of our men, and Sire and Comte the rest.
We did what we could, we in Sency-la-Forêt. I had lost a baby that summer, and almost myself, and I was weak a little still; even so I would have been reaping barley with my sisters, if Mere Adele had not caught me coming out with the scythe in my hand. She had a tongue on her, did Mere Adele, and Saint Benedict’s black habit did nothing to curb it. She took the scythe and kilted up her habit and went to work down the long rows, and I went where she told me, to mind the children.
There were more maybe than some had, if travelers’ tales told the truth. Every house had lost its share to the black sickness, and in the manor by the little river the dark angel had taken everyone but the few who had the wits to run. So we were a lordless demesne as well as a manless one, a city of women, one of the nuns from the priory called us; she read books, and not all of them were scripture.
If I looked from where I sat under the May tree, I could see her in the field, binding sheaves where the reapers passed. There were children with her; my own Celine, just big enough to work, had her own sheaf to gather and bind. I had the littlest ones, the babies in their pen like odd sheep, and the weanlings for the moment in my lap and in a circle round me, while I told them a story. It was a very old story; I hardly needed to pay attention to it, but let my tongue run on and watched the reapers, and decided that I was going to claim my scythe back. Let Mere Adele look after the babies. I was bigger than she, and stronger, too.
I was growing quite angry inside myself, while I smiled at the children and made them laugh. Even Francha, who never made a sound, nor had since her family died around her, had a glint of laughter in her eye, though she looked down quickly. I reached to draw her into my lap. She was stiff, all bones and tremblings like a wild thing, but she did not run away as she would have once. After a while she laid her head on my breast.
That quieted my temper. I finished the story I was telling. As I opened my mouth to begin another, Francha went rigid in my arms. I tried to soothe her with hands and voice. She clawed her way about, not to escape, but to see what came behind me.
Sency is Seney-la-Forêt not for that it was woodland once, though that is true enough; nor for that wood surrounds it, closing in on the road to Sency-les-Champs and away beyond it into Normandy; but because of the trees that are its westward wall. People pass through Sency from north to south and back again. Sometimes, from north or south, they go eastward into Maine or Anjou. West they never go. East and south and north is wood, in part the Sire de Sency’s if the Death had left any to claim that title, in part common ground for hunting and woodcutting and pig-grazing. West is Wood. Cursed, the priest said before he took fright at the Death and fled to Avranches. Bewitched, said the old women by the fire in the evenings. Enchanted, the young men used to say before they went away. Sometimes a young man would swear that he would go hunting in the Wood, or a young woman would say that she meant to scry out a lover in the well by the broken chapel. If any of them ever did it, he never talked of it, nor she; nor did people ask. The Wood was best not spoken of.
I sat with Francha stiff as a stick in my arms, and stared where she was staring, into the green gloom that was the Wood. There was someone on the edge of it. It could almost have been a traveler from south or east, worked round westward by a turning of the road or by the lure of the trees. We were a formidable enough town by then, with the palisade that Messire Arnaud had built before he died, and no gate open but on the northward side.