Welcome to Bordertown Page 15

  * * *

  The sky shuddered from full daylight to stars and black and no moon at all with a hard lurch and a snap, like blinds zipping down.

  Come on, kid. You gotta go somewhere else.

  Nothing left for us kittens.

  The train car was gone, and I was sitting on a long bench with a red cushion, with Maria in my lap. We rattled along on some part-stagecoach, part–city bus beast, something out of an old movie, like we’d jumped frames. Jangling silver and bone bells hung from several posts of some kind of twisted black horn; nodding black flowers drooped from their crowns. Several long benches stretched behind me, with some folk asleep, some awake. A woman was knitting quietly in the starlight. I sat up front, Maria’s legs curled on the seat, her head in my arms. The driver wore a top hat covered in living moss with tiny clovers and thistles growing in it. The coach heaved and jerked as though horses were pulling it, and I could hear the clop-clop of hooves, but even in the dim light I could see that no animal pulled us along.

  I started shaking—I didn’t mean to, but my body rejected what it saw, what it felt, and I couldn’t think of anything to do or say, with this girl in my lap and this utterly wrong thing happening. There was no horse pulling the carriage-trolley, but I could hear the hoofbeats, and like a kid I seized on that, that one thing wrong out of everything, everything wrong.

  I cleared my throat. I felt unused to talking to adults. “Sir,” I said to the driver. “There’s no horse.”

  “This is Bordertown’s own Ye Olde Unicorn Trolley. Famous, like. I’m Master Wallscrew, at yours.”

  I laughed a little, nervous. “Where’s the unicorn?”

  The driver turned to grin at me from under his fuzzy green hat.

  “You’re it, kid. It only works with a virgin on board. Sure and it’s not me.”

  I blushed deeply, and at the same moment it hit me, hard as a broken bone: He said Bordertown.

  I shook, and felt cold, and felt hot, and my hands were clamped so tight in Maria’s coat, my fingers got fuzzy with lost circulation. I had been wrong. There was a moon out, low in the sky, almost spent, a slim rind left, hanging there like a smile. I laughed. Then I put my face in Maria’s neck and cried.

  “What is it, girl?” gruffed the trolley master. “I can’t abide girls crying, I’ll warn you. Shows a fragile disposition, and brings amorous types to wipe tears away, which would pretty much sort our whole conveyance issue. Sniffle up, before some silver-haired Byron gets your scent.”

  “It’s a mistake,” I said quietly.

  “What’s ‘it,’ now?”

  “A mistake. I’m … I’m nobody. I’m nobody. I’m not supposed to be here. It’s for her.”

  I had made it and didn’t even audition. Maria auditioned with her whole heart. She had the discipline. She went down into the dark, where I was never brave enough to go. I was supposed to mess around in the back and say nothing. I wasn’t supposed to suddenly have to function in Athens, with a lost kid in my skirts. This was Maria’s place, and she couldn’t even see it.

  “Wake up, Maria, wake up,” I sobbed. “Wake up. There’s unicorns, like you said, sort of, and magic, and …”

  She didn’t stir. But her breathing was better, deep and even, and she had locked her arms around my waist.

  “Well, Nobody,” the driver said softly, “where to?”

  I rubbed my nose, flowing with snot and tears. “What about these people? Don’t they need to get … places? Go where they want to go. We don’t care.”

  “Tourists.” He shrugged. “They wait for the … uh … fuel stop, and go where the trolley goes. It’s exciting—they never know what they might see. Besides, the old monster’s not too reliable as a method of mass transit. The kids come on sometimes, to haze each other—if it goes, well, they’re not as tough as they say. But mostly we just glide, child. It’s part magic and part machine and neither of the parts work quite right, so sometimes you’ll say, ‘Dinner at Café Cubana, hoss,’ and it’ll take you pert as a duck to Elfhaeme Gate and you’ll be dining on fines and forms. Sometimes it’s nice as you please, right up to the door at Cubana and no fuss. Not its fault, you understand. The magic wants to go Realmward and the machine wants to go Worldward, and in a mess like that you can’t ask for any straight lines.”

  “Then why ask where we’re going?”

  The driver looked down at me, his blue eyes dark in the starlight, like crystals.

  “It don’t run without desire, kid. Nothing does.”

  Well, what do you do when you don’t know what to do? What you’ve been doing. I wanted somewhere for Maria to get well, to get fed, to get happy again. Something like a benevolent golden Denny’s, something I could sing in front of, somewhere with coffee all night for $1.10 in a cup like a grail and just a little more room on the blank pages in the backs of my books. Just a little more room.

  I didn’t say it. I didn’t say anything. But the Unicorn Trolley veered off sharply into the shadows and light of the city, into the sound of it like a wall.

  And I looked over my shoulder, back toward the moon and the gnarled, thorny weeds of the road. Something banged there, hanging from an iron pole, banged in the wind and the night. On a scrap of tin that might have once been painted blue, I read: “Starfire Station.”

  And just then, just then, Maria opened her eyes, bright and deep as a fairy’s.

  * * *

  And that’s my story, Mr. Din. If you don’t mind I’ll take that beer now. I still need a little something to be brave. I guess that’s better than not being brave at all. It’s Titania’s world and I’ll never be Hermia, and not Helena either. Just Fig, but not in the background. Not anymore. I still stand with the fairies with glued-on leaves, but oh, you’d better believe I’ve got lines to sing. Hail, mortals, we attend. Well met, and what ho, and all that jazz, every word, down to the last verse.

  Now, I see a microphone up there, and my girl and I are hungry. May I?

  STAIRS IN HER HAIR

  BY AMAL EL-MOHTAR

  There is a girl with a stair in her hair

  made of thorn and thistle and bone.

  There is a girl with a stair in her hair

  and she climbs it to be alone.

  There is a girl with a coin in her fist

  made of breath and hunger and cold.

  There is a girl with a coin in her fist

  who buys whatever she’s sold.

  A girl with a voice and a girl with a name

  a girl with strong hands and eyes like the rain

  a girl who’s too young and too easy to bruise

  a girl with nothing to lose, oh

  a girl with nothing to lose.

  Here is a girl with a stone on her tongue

  plucked from a wave on the shore.

  Here is a girl with a stone on her tongue

  that keeps her from asking for more.

  Here is a girl with a key in her palm

  and here is a door with a lock.

  Here is a girl with a key in her palm

  wondering if she should knock.

  A girl with a voice and a girl with a name

  a girl with strong hands and eyes like the rain

  a girl who knows all of her lines and her cues

  a girl with nothing to lose, oh

  a girl with nothing to lose.

  I am a girl with a stair in my hair.

  I climb it to be alone.

  I am a girl with nothing to share

  but thorns and thistles and bone.

  I am a girl with a coin in my fist

  but I have learned to be bold.

  I am a girl who will never be missed

  if she’s borrowed or broken or sold.

  I am a girl with a voice and a name

  a girl with strong hands and eyes like the rain

  a girl who can fight and a girl who can choose

  a girl with so much to lose, oh

  a girl with so much to lose.

  INCU
NABULUM

  BY EMMA BULL

  There was blood on his shirt.

  Not a great deal, not so much that a death lay behind it—though there might be more of it elsewhere from the same source. He did not think it was his. It blotched the white linen like ink in the harsh conjured light of the lamp stabbing at his eyes. He could smell it, faintly: the rank odor of butchery after a hunt. His thoughts ran, spun, hurtled against each other and the walls of his mind like a herd of captive …

  Captive something. Penned. With small, hard hooves and delicate ears … Even as he grasped after the picture, it scattered. He held nothing but the vision of his thoughts in frantic disarray.

  “Name.” A grating voice without music from beyond the lamp.

  His shirt felt dry against his breast, at least.

  “Name!” the voice repeated, and the light shifted until he could peer through it to the pale, fair face of the one who held it. “Come, my merry flower, my own fleeing rat, you may withhold whatever else you like, but your name we will have before you pass us.”

  He ground the heels of his palms into his eyes. Sight was thought’s widest window; perhaps in wiping the glass he might freshen his mind.

  “Drunken rat,” another spoke from beyond his inquisitor. That new voice was bright with amusement and sweetly pitched. “And if that blood’s not yours, make sure you don’t do whatever you did back home on this side of the Gate. Because if you try it in Bordertown, we’ll see you don’t run away from the consequences.”

  “Perhaps he has no speech?” suggested the first voice.

  “Maybe he doesn’t want to use it out here in public.”

  Hard fingers fastened on his upper arms, pushed and dragged him sideways, though he clutched at the earth with his toes and twisted against those unfriendly hands.

  His toes? Why had he no boots? Or even slippers suited for the smooth floors of … of … But he had crossed floors, he was certain.

  Then he was under a roof, where the light was gentle and general. He gathered his scattered wits and senses and bid them work.

  It was a tiny room; the wooden table and unmated chairs nearly filled it, and the people fit themselves in as best they could. The walls were made of ruddy bricks in their lower parts and ridged and painted metal in their upper, like a tree with trunk below and leaves above. Lamps that burned some foul-smelling fuel hung from the low beams overhead, darkening the night to oily black through the single window.

  Those who gripped his arms so tightly, one to each side, were of the Blood. They were as tall as he, and as pale. The grim-mouthed woman on his left had hair the color of milk and a warm tint to her eyes like tarnish on a spoon. The hair of the man on his right was so white and brilliant it might have been bundled threads of glass, and his eyes were silver touched neither with gold nor blue. Both wore some glossy gray livery without crest or insignia, in a fabric soft with wear and washing.

  He had trespassed, perhaps, in some private or forbidden place. He tried to recall if he knew of any such within his common reach.

  But he couldn’t remember what his common reach was.

  Seated across the table from his guards (they must be guards) and himself was a woman with curling hair red as corn poppies and skin brown as an acorn shell. Her features, her very silhouette, were softly rounded, as if she were made of clouds and not hard bone. A human, he realized. He had seen them depicted, but had never been in the presence of one, alive and moving and exuding a warm animal scent like the fur of a cat.

  She, too, wore the gray. The little silver oak leaf on her breast might have been an ornament or a badge of rank. A ledger lay open before her, and the gold-nibbed pen she held had smudged her fingertips with ink.

  “Name,” she said without looking up. The guards eyed him with an air of expectation.

  His name. That was what they wanted.

  He felt the mindless terror of a dumb beast entrapped when he realized he had none.

  He jammed his heel against the wooden floor and twisted. The two who held him were braced, perhaps, for something else. A burning, bruising pressure against his arms, the pop of breaking linen threads, and he was free.

  He was half through the doorway of the hut when someone behind him said a word. He stuck there like a leaf caught in ice.

  “Thought that might come in useful. Get a decent grip on him this time, and we’ll try again.”

  His two guards pulled him back to his place before the table. Like ice, the spell in the door seemed to have stolen the warmth from his blood. It shamed him to shiver before these strangers, but he had no choice.

  The poppy-haired human gazed up at him. “Look. This is just a formality. You haven’t done anything wrong in B-town, as far as we know. Yet.” Something in her words seemed to amuse her. “We just need a name. Over on your side they got their ears in a clamp over having lost a bunch of kids during the Gap, so we have to keep records now. It won’t help, but we have to do it anyway. So try not to make trouble when you don’t have to.”

  He parted his lips to speak. A wave of new fear rose in him when at first he couldn’t. Was it true that he had no voice? He gave a ravenlike croak, and coughed, and found that fright and disuse had dammed his throat, but there were words behind the obstruction after all. “I don’t remember. I don’t remember my name.”

  The human lifted her eyes to the smoke-stained ceiling. “Oh, good grief. A drama llama. My shift is officially perfect.”

  “Drama llama?” echoed the fair man whose hands held fast to his right arm.

  “Heard it from the New-Come. They practically invented a whole new language out there, seems like.”

  “And in your scant hours of rest,” said the woman on his left, her words seasoned with laughter, “you disport yourself in Soho’s clamorous dens?”

  His captors’ grips were strong, but by their talk they might as well have forgotten him. He found no solace in it; it touched him, indeed, like an insult.

  “Just honoring my roots, hon. All right, then.” The mortal woman lowered her pen nearly to the paper’s surface and held his eyes with hers, brows lifted. “What name was it you’ve forgotten again?”

  Without an answer, they would not let him pass. And he must pass. Why, he also could not remember, but he was as certain as he was of body and breath that he could not return whence he came.

  “Perhaps he bears a curse,” offered the woman on his left.

  The man on his right made a rude noise in the back of his nose. “Or just a lot more beer than is good for him.” He leaned closer and made much of sniffing the air. “Or brandy? Don’t drink it if you can’t hold it, boy.”

  “All right, you two, don’t rile him up. I’d like to get home for breakfast.”

  The woman at his left with the tarnished eyes pinched his arm fiercely through his shirt and smiled when he flinched. “Do as your fellow winsome emigrants, and speak a false name. We neither know nor care for the truth, stripling.”

  Her companions did not correct her, but only waited.

  Desperation drove all names from his head, not merely the one he owned. He cast his eyes about the room, seeking any object that would offer a word to call himself by. The human woman’s pen hovered over the ledger, impatient to tie him to this place with ink and paper—

  “Page,” he declared, too loud, and he was grateful they would accept a lie, for no one would have believed it true. “I am called Page.”

  “I’ll just bet address and place of birth are a great big mystery, too.” Had the red-haired woman been of the Blood, he would have judged her both annoyed and entertained.

  The thought of being anyone’s entertainment revolted him. He closed his lips and lifted his chin, and was almost glad the vacancies of his mind left him nothing to tell her.

  She nodded and gave her attention to her ledger. “No … fixed … address,” she pronounced, the pen point skipping and scratching across the paper.

  For all he knew, he was a vagrant indeed, and all hi
s pride was false.

  “There. Was that so hard? Welcome to Bordertown. Enjoy your visit. Stay out of trouble.”

  As if her words were an incantation, the bruising fingers on his arms unclenched. He drew himself up tall and brushed his sleeves, pretending he might tidy away the creases and the lasting soreness. The man with the brilliant hair observed the motion and shot a mocking smile at him, straight as any arrow.

  You shall regret what you’ve done this day, he thought. But why? One fey boy with nothing but the clothes he stood in, and those fouled and torn—were he to say aloud “You shall regret,” the room would riot with laughter. Even the human would laugh at the elfling with his bloody shirt and false name.

  But he inclined his head as if acknowledging those of lesser rank, turned on his heel, and strode boldly from the hut.

  He faltered in the ill-lit street. What he’d thought was a hut while inside was only an anteroom for the larger building behind. Along one of its brick flanks stretched a gray stone terrace, breast-high, as if it had been built to stand above some seasonal flood. Doors yawned down its length, each one tall as two men and wide as two with arms outstretched. A flat wagon on iron wheels backed up to one door; two people unloaded its freight of cloth-wrapped bales and stacked them on the terrace, where another figure seemed to be inspecting them. He couldn’t tell if the workers were human or of the Blood.

  To his right stood the Border that marked the bounds of the Realm. It fluttered, luminous, alive with motion like a curtain in a breeze. It looked soft as fog, but where it met the humans’ buildings of brick and stone it seemed to slice through like a blade through a neck. Did the structures’ other halves exist beyond that wall? He couldn’t remember.