I held my breath and waited for the first story she would tell him, the first words that would make it one big story sewn with little ones as a wedding gift to him.
She smiled and said, “A lot of brackish wine.”
He laughed so hard he had to drop his head, and for a moment she and I looked at each other.
I saw the bars of her cage bending around her, saw why she had wanted those stories; she’d needed something that was hers, to hoard against a life with some dull boy to whom she had given her word.
When he had recovered from his laughter he saw I was still there, and blinked. “You need your bride-price, of course, so sorry for forgetting,” he said, and a moment later there was a little ruby bracelet in my palm.
I was still looking at Sara. I had forgotten I would be paid.
The priest at the bastion wrote “safely delivered,” and wrote down all our names, and it was over.
She said, “Come visit as soon as you can.”
“We’ll be back again,” I said, which was the only lie I ever told her.
When I got back to the market the wagon was still packed and Mark was waiting in the driver’s seat.
“What did he look like?”
“Let’s go,” I said, took the reins.
We were five miles outside the city when I said, “What do you want to do after your indenture?”
“Trade!” he blurted, choked on a mouthful of dust.
I got his story; he had a woman in Suth he’d promised to come back for, and he’d heard about the botanist from Sara and wanted to find new spices. “From the East, maybe,” he said, “if they can be had by ship.”
I gave him the ruby bracelet. “Payment for the spice I used on the journey. Your indenture is over.”
The oxen would warm to him; he knew how to drive the wagon.
I moved through and questioned anyone who would answer. I wanted to know everything about the world. With the first sapphire, I bought a book to write in.
Some old man married a woman with six red-haired sisters. The youngest got black hair, and set about cursing them all, poorly, and he and I laughed into our beers until we cried.
Three brothers pulled aside a riverbed to keep their village from flooding, and they bought wine and sang songs in three parts, and I marked the words as fast as I could.
When the first book was full I bought another, for the botanist and the birders and all the stars I knew.
I listened to everyone, wrote down everything.
You have to write down everything. The world is wide, and you never know what stories someone is waiting to hear; maybe someday, someone will have bought a pair of boots from the shoemaker and his ugly wife, down a dusty street in Okalide.
THE ADAKIAN EAGLE
Bradley Denton
I
The eagle had been tortured to death.
That was what it looked like. It was staked out on the mountain on its back, wings and feet spread apart, head twisted to one side. Its beak was open wide, as if in a scream. Its open eye would have been staring up at me except that a long iron nail had been plunged into it, pinning the white head to the ground. More nails held the wings and feet in place. A few loose feathers swirled as the wind gusted.
The bird was huge, eleven or twelve feet from wingtip to wingtip. I’d seen bald eagles in the Aleutians before, but never up close. This was bigger than anything I would have guessed.
Given what had been done to it, I wondered if it might have been stretched to that size. The body had been split down the middle, and the guts had been pulled out on both sides below the wings. It wasn’t stinking yet, but flies were starting to gather.
I stood staring at the eagle for maybe thirty seconds. Then I got off the mountain as fast as I could and went down to tell the colonel. He had ordered me to report anything hinky, and this was the hinkiest thing I’d seen on Adak.
That was how I wound up meeting the fifty-year-old corporal they called “Pop.”
And meeting Pop was how I wound up seeing the future.
Trust me when I tell you that you don’t want to do that. Especially if the future you see isn’t even your own.
Because then there’s not a goddamn thing you can do to change it.
II
I found Pop in a recreation hut. I had seen him around, but had never had a reason to speak with him until the colonel ordered me to. When I found him, he was engrossed in playing Ping-Pong with a sweaty, bare-chested opponent who was about thirty years his junior. A kid about my age.
Pop had the kid’s number. He was wearing fatigues buttoned all the way up, but there wasn’t a drop of perspiration on his face. He was white-haired, brown-mustached, tall, and skinny as a stick, and he didn’t look athletic. In fact, he looked a little pale and sickly. But he swatted the ball with cool, dismissive flicks of his wrist, and it shot across the table like a bullet.
This was early on a Wednesday morning, and they had the hut to themselves except for three sad sacks playing poker against the back wall. Pop was facing the door, so when I came in he looked right at me. His eyes met mine for a second, and he must have known I was there for him. But he kept on playing.
I waited until his opponent missed a shot so badly that he cussed and threw down his paddle. Then I stepped closer and said, “Excuse me, Corporal?”
Pop’s eyes narrowed behind his eyeglasses. “You’ll have to be more specific,” he said. He had a voice that made him sound as if he’d been born with a scotch in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
“He means you, Pop,” the sweaty guy said, grabbing his shirt from a chair by the curving Quonset wall. “Ain’t nobody looking for me.”
Pop gave him the briefest of grins. I caught a glimpse of ill-fitting false teeth below the mustache. They made Pop look even older. And he had already looked pretty old.
“Cherish the moments when no one’s looking for you,” Pop said. “And don’t call me ‘Pop.’ ‘Boss’ will do fine.”
“Aw, I like ‘Pop,’” the sweaty guy said. “Makes you sound like a nice old man.”
“I’m neither,” Pop said.
“You’re half right.” The sweaty guy threw on a fatigue jacket and walked past me. “I’m gettin’ breakfast. See you at the salt mines.”
Pop put down his paddle. “Wait. I’ll come along.”
The sweaty guy looked at me, then back at Pop. “I think I’ll see you later,” he said, and went out into the gray Adak morning. Which, in July, wasn’t much different from the slightly darker gray, four-hour Adak night.
Pop turned away from me and took a step toward the three joes playing poker.
“Corporal,” I said.
He turned back and put his palms on the Ping-Pong table, looking across at me like a judge looking down from the bench. Which was something I’d seen before, so it didn’t bother me.
“You’re a private,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes, sir.”
He scowled, his eyebrows pinching together in a sharp V. “Then you should know better than to call another enlisted man ‘sir.’ You generally shouldn’t even call him by rank, unless it’s ‘Sarge.’ We’re all G.I.’s pissing into the same barrels here, son. When the wind doesn’t blow it back in our faces.”
“So what should I call you?” I asked.
He was still scowling. “Why should you call me anything?”
I had the feeling that he was jabbing at me with words, as if I were a thug in one of his books and he were the combative hero. But at that time I had only read a little bit of one of those books, the one about the bird statuette.
And I had only read that little bit because I was bored after evening chow one day, and one of the guys in my hut happened to have a hardback copy lying on his bunk. I wasn’t much for books back then. So I didn’t much care how good Pop was at jabbing with words.