I said, “I may succeed, or I may fail.”
“You’ll make it. I’ve seen you climb. After you rescued me, crossing that waterfall. You went up those rocks like a squirrel going up a tree.”
I did not have his confidence in my climbing abilities.
He said, “Swear to me by all you hold holy. Swear by your King, who waits over the sea as he has since we drove his subjects from this land. Swear by the things you creatures hold dear—swear by shadows and eagle feathers and by silence. Swear that you will come back for me.”
“You know what I am?” I said.
“I know nothing,” he said. “Only that I want to live.”
I thought. “I swear by these things,” I told him. “By shadows and by eagle feathers and by silence. I swear by green hills and standing stones. I will come back.”
“I would have killed you,” said the man in the hawthorn bush, and he said it with humor, as if it was the biggest joke that ever one man had told another. “I had planned to kill you, and take the gold back as my own.”
“I know.”
His hair framed his face like a wolf-gray halo. There was red blood on his cheek where he had scraped it in the fall. “You could come back with ropes,” he said. “My rope is still up there, by the cave mouth. But you’d need more than that.”
“Yes,” I said. “I will come back with ropes.” I looked up at the rock above us, examined it as best I could. Sometimes good eyes mean the difference between life and death, if you are a climber. I saw where I would need to be as I went, the shape of my journey up the face of the mountain. I thought I could see the ledge outside the cave, from which we had fallen as we fought. I would head for there. Yes.
I blew on my hands, to dry the sweat before I began to climb.“I will come back for you,” I said. “With ropes. I have sworn.”
“When?” he asked, and he closed his eyes.
“In a year,” I told him. “I will come here in a year.”
I began to climb. The man’s cries followed me as I stepped and crawled and squeezed and hauled myself up the side of that mountain, mingling with the cries of the great raptors; and they followed me back from the Misty Isle, with nothing to show for my pains and my time, and I will hear him screaming, at the edge of my mind, as I fall asleep or in the moments before I wake, until I die.
It did not rain, and the wind gusted and plucked at me, but did not throw me down. I climbed, and I climbed in safety.
When I reached the ledge, the cave entrance seemed like a darker shadow in the noonday sun. I turned from it, turned my back on the mountain, and from the shadows that were already gathering in the cracks and the crevices and deep inside my skull, and I began my slow journey away from the Misty Isle. There were a hundred roads and a thousand paths that would take me back to my home in the lowlands, where my wife would be waiting.
SEVEN SEXY COWBOY ROBOTS
SANDRA MCDONALD
Sandra McDonald is a graduate of Ithaca College, and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine. She spent eight years as an officer in the United States Navy, during which time she lived in Guam, Newfoundland, England, and the United States, and has worked as a Hollywood assistant, a software instructor, and an English composition teacher. Her short story “The Ghost Girls of Rumney Mill” was shortlisted for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award in 2003. Her first novel, The Outback Stars , was published in 2007, and was followed by two sequels: The Stars Down Under and The Stars Blue Yonder . Her most recent book is collection Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories . Originally from Revere, Massachusetts, she currently lives in Jacksonville, Florida.
I.
When I was a much younger woman, as part of the divorce settlement from my then-millionaire inventor husband, I asked for our house in Connecticut, a modest amount of alimony, and six sexy cowboy robots. Sentient sex toys, if you will.
The robots were my revenge for all the time and money Herbert had lavished on tawdry mistresses across the world. His company, New Human More Human, specialized in mechanical soldiers for the U.S. Department of Defense with a lucrative side business in sensual satisfaction. The factory delivered my boys in a big white truck. They jumped off the back ramp wearing shit-eating grins and oozing Wild West charisma. No other firm in the world could produce as fine a product. My husband was the Preston Tucker of his time: a brilliant innovator and visionary done in by vicious boardroom skullduggery.
If you believe that one strong man can succeed in the face of titanic conspiracy and unrelenting backstabbing, you probably believed global icing would be solved. Then the snow reached five feet high against your living room windows and your belief in science was shattered, as was mine.
In any case, Herbert fulfilled his divorce obligations. But he also incorporated his revenge. He had my guys created as sexy cowboy robots with steel blades permanently attached to their feet. By design they were most happy when twirling, spinning, and jumping on ice. The frozen lake behind the house sufficed during the winter but back when summer was still a threat, I had to build an indoor rink to avoid months of pouting. There’s nothing more sad than a depressed sexy cowboy.
Let me back up. One of the best dates Herbert and I ever went on, pre-nuptials, was a charity benefit at the Hartford Ice Arena. A group of skaters in tight jeans, flannel shirts and cowboy hats took the ice halfway through the show. They gyrated and spun around to an Elvis remix in a way that made the crowd—especially the female half—go wild. I myself heaped so much praise that Herbert turned red with jealousy. He was never very sanguine about competition. He was even worse at winter sports, and in fact met his mortal end ten years after our divorce by skiing off the side of a kiddie slope in Colorado.
Let me jump forward: this is not the story of a woman gifted with mechanical companionship who eventually realizes true love only comes in the shape of a flesh-and-blood man. Screw that. Since the day that white truck arrived, every one of my emotional, intellectual, and sexual needs has been satisfied by my cowboys (except for Buck) in their splendidly unique ways. Never again have I taken a human lover. I’m only writing this now because I’m a hundred years old and dying, hoping to find a companion for the one sexy cowboy robot who needs it the most.
First I’ll tell you what happened to the other five, so that you understand the great responsibilities and sexual joys of owning a mechanical cowboy.
II.
Naturally all my boys were great at mending fences, roping horses, and tending the vegetable garden, but from day one Doc distinguished himself as our go-to robot for any mechanical or electrical problems. Not just with his brothers—that time Yuri cracked his knee on a sideboard, or when Neill’s arm was stolen by government agents—but in the mansion and across the grounds, too. Over the years he fixed the garbage disposal, the furnace, the sonic Jacuzzi, the vacuum bots, and the cranky house computer. Whenever my aircar had problems he was the first to slide under the fantail, and once we built the indoor rink he singlehandedly redesigned the chillers to double their output at half the energy cost.
On the ice he specialized in triple lutzes and a signature move that included hooking his white cowboy hat on his jutting pelvis. In between rehearsals and shows, he built his own workshop in an old shed and would spend many happy hours tinkering. At night in my bed his hands were warm and his breath sweet like maple syrup. He insisted on calling me Katherine instead of Kay. From him I learned the importance of wearing protection from the knees down; steel blades are hell on shins and satin sheets.