Eyes Like Sky And Coal And Moonlight (23 page)

Most sorcerers are not strong enough to animate so many golems. She has the largest plantation in this area. Others, though, have followed her lead, although on a smaller scale. It took decades for them to realize how steadily she was making money, despite the depredations of the Duchy merchants or the pirates they paid to disrupt the western shipping trade.

She had been to the Old Continent before all the trouble, two years learning science at a school, where she had met Britomart, who was an actual princess as well as a sorceress. She had been centuries old when she met Britomart but she had dared to hope that here was her soul mate, the person who would stay by her side over all the centuries to come.

But in the end, she wanted to return to her island, full of new techniques and machineries that she thought would improve the yield. Rotating fields and planting those lying fallow with clover, to be plowed into the soil to enrich it for planting. Plans for a windmill to be built to the southeast, facing into the wind channeled through the mountains, with sails made of wooden frames tied with canvas. Lenses placed together that allowed one to observe the phases of heaven and the moons that surrounded other planets, and the accompanying elegant Copernican theories to explain their movements.

She swore to Britomart that she would return by the next rainy season and she kept her promise.

But by then, the trap had been sprung and Britomart had begun to rot away, victim of a magic left by a man who had died two weeks previously.

“
You’re ready to be rid of me,” Britomart says.

“
Of course not.”

“
It’s true, you are!”

She goes about the room, conjuring breezes and positioning them to blow across the bed’s expanse.

“
You are,” Britomart whispers. “I would be.”

Two breezes collide at the center of the bed. Britomart wants it cold, ever colder. It slows the decay, perhaps. Laurana isn’t sure of that either.

Outside she sees that the golems are nearly done with the southeast field. One more to go after that. She glances over the building, tallying up the things to be done. Roof. Trimming back the bushes. Exercising the horse she had thought Britomart would ride.

Half a mile away is the beach shore. Her skiff is pulled up there, tied to a rock. Standing beside it, she can see the smudge of Sant Tigres on the horizon.

She is so tired that she aches to her bones. Somewhere deep inside her, she is aware, there is an endless well of sorrow, but she is simply too weary to pay it any mind. It is one of the peculiarities of mages that they can compartmentalize themselves, and put away emotions to never be touched again.

She does this now, rousing herself, and prepares to go on. She has a pact with the universe, which told her long ago when she became a sorceress:
nothing will be asked that cannot be endured
. So she soldiers on like her workers, marching through the days.

She is still tired a week later.

“
Go to her,” Britomart says. “I don’t care. You don’t have much time with her.”

“
I have even less with you,” Laurana says, but Britomart still turns away.

It is harvesting season’s end. Outside in the evening, some of the golems are in the boiling house, where three boilers sit over the furnace, cooking the sugar cane sap. The syrup passes from boiler to boiler until in the last it begins to crystallize into muscovado. Two golems pack it into clay sugar molds and set the molds in the distillery so the molasses will drain away.

In the distillery, more golems walk across the mortar and cobble floor in which copper cauldrons are set for molasses collection, undulating channels feeding them the liquid.

They mix cane juice into the brew before casking it. In a few months, it will be distilled into fiery, raw rum and sold to the taverns in the pirate city.

She goes and fetches her notebook and sits in the room with Britomart, her pen scratching away to record the day’s labors, the number of rows harvested, and making out a list of necessities for her next trip to Sant Tigres. She estimates two thousand pounds of sugar this year, three hundred casks of molasses, and another two hundred of rum. Recently she received word that the sorcerer Carnuba, whose plantation is three days south, renovated his sugar mill to process lime juice. Lime juice is an excellent scurvy preventative, and much in demand—she wonders how long it would take a newly planted grove to fruit. Her pen dances across the page, calculating raw material costs and the best forms of transportation.

“
Is she pretty?” Britomart asks. Her face is still turned away.

Laurana considers. “Yes,” she says.

“
As pretty as I was?”

The anguish in the whisper forces Laurana put down her pen. She takes Britomart’s hands in hers. They are untouched by the disease, the nails sleek and shiny and well groomed. Hands like the necks of swans, or white doves arcing over the gleam of water.

“
Never that pretty,” she says.

____________________

The next morning Laurana goes through the room, touching each charm to stillness until the lace curtains no longer flutter. Until there is no sound in the room except her own breathing and the warbling calls of the deathbirds clustering among the blossoms of the bougainvillea tree outside.

She hears a fluttering from her room, a pigeon that has joined the dozen others on the windowsill, but she ignores it, as she ignored the earlier arrivals. She sits beside the bed, listening, listening. But the figure on the bed does not take another breath, no matter how long she listens.

All through that day, the golems labor boiling sugar. Jeanette brings her lemonade and the new girl, Madeleine, has made biscuits. She drinks the sweet liquid and looks at the dusty wallpaper. The thought of changing it stuns her with the energy it would require. She will sit here, she thinks, until she dies, and dust will collect on her and the wallpaper alike.

Still, when dinnertime comes she goes downstairs and under Tante Isabelle’s watchful eye, she pushes some food around on her plate.

Daniel cannot help but be a little thankful that Britomart is dead, she thinks. He was the one who emptied her chamber pot and endured her abuse when she set him to fetching and carrying. The thought makes her speak sharply to him as he serves the chowder the new girl has made. He looks bewildered by her tone and slinks away. She regrets the moment as soon as it is passed but has no reason for calling him back.

Upstairs the ranks of the pigeons have swollen by two or three more. She lies on her bed, fully clothed, and stares at the ceiling.

The next morning she takes two golems from their labors to carry Britomart’s body for her. They dig the grave on a high slope of the mountain, overlooking the bay. It is a fine view, she thinks. One Britomart would have liked.

When they have finished, she stands with her palms turned upwards to the sky, calling clouds to come seething on the wind. They collect, darkening like burning sugar. When they are at the perfect, furious boil, she brings lightning down from them to smash the stone that stands over the grave. She does it over and over again, carving Britomart’s name in deep and angry, blackened letters.

At home she goes to lie in bed again.

One by one, the golems grind to a stop at their labors, and the sap boils over in thick black smoke. They stand wherever their energy gave out, but all manage in their last moments to bring their limbs in towards their torsos, standing like stalks of stillness.

It may be the smoke that draws Christina. She arrives, knocks on the door, and comes inside, brushing past the servants. Without knowing the house, she manages to come upstairs and to Laurana’s bedroom.

Laurana does not move, does not look over at the door.

Christina comes to the bed and lies down beside the sorceress. She looks around at the bedroom, at the string of shells hanging on the wall, but says nothing. She strokes Laurana’s ivory hair with a soft hand until the tears begin.

Outside the golems grind to life again as the rain starts. They collect the burned vats and trundle them away. They cask the most recent rum and set the casks on wooden racks to ferment. They put the plantation into order, and finish the last of their labors. Then as the light of day fades, muffled by the steady rain, they arrange themselves again, closing themselves away, readying for tomorrow.

“
Sugar” was another of my pirate anthology inspired stories, although its seed was an image of the golems lined up before their mistress. Ironically, Sean Wallace picked up “Sugar” for his
Fantasy
sampler before I had a chance to send it to any of the pirate anthologies and it appeared there in 2007.

A Key Decides Its Destiny

Because Solon DesCant was the greatest enchanter of his time, which spanned centuries, Lily had chosen him for a teacher despite the peril. He had produced wonders for the Duke of Tabat, performed miracles for the Emperor, and even vanished mysteriously for a decade, returning to claim he had undertaken certain unpalatable tasks for the demons of S’Keral.

Every fifty years Solon took an apprentice, whose work was to straighten the shelves of his workroom, to fetch and carry, cook and clean, tend his chickens, and run those errands beneath the magician’s dignity. In return he taught the apprentice the ins and outs of enchanting and the secrets he had spent his life discovering. And sometime in the forty-ninth year, Solon would kill the apprentice before they could carry his secrets out into the world. Two had escaped this fate by fleeing before that year arrived. But the final year was the year of true knowledge and many had let their thirst for secrets keep them there until it was too late and they found death in one of the ingenious poisons of which Solon was master.

Today’s creation was a minor magic. He made the key out of cats’ whiskers braided together and hardened with the chill from a heart that had never known love. He couldn’t resist embellishment so he carved roses from mouse bone and attached the beads on strands of lignum vitae. Handling it required care—whisker tips protruded along its length like tiny thorns and a drop of blood swelled on his finger where one pricked him. The manticores stuffed and mounted on the walls of his workroom watched him with glassy eyes as he held it up.

“
Is that it?” Lily asked from the doorway. He nodded, setting the key down on the table so they both could study it. She tucked her hands behind her back as she looked at it like a child examining a fragile heirloom, afraid of breaking it.

“
What will it unlock?”

He shrugged. “Enchanted keys choose what they will unlock. But I’ve made this for a witch, who hopes to persuade it to the destiny she prefers.” He wrapped the key in a length of velvet before handing it to the apprentice. “Lily, you’ll take this to her. There will be no payment; I’ll ask her for a favor in due time.”

She chewed her lip at the thought, looking down at the bundle.

“
You’ll have to learn to deal with witches at some point,” he said. He reached for an alembic and pulled it in front of him, readying his next experiment. “It might as well be now.”

“
Is there anything I need to know beforehand?” she asked.

“
Don’t look in her eyes and be polite above all else. Witches take offense very easily.”

Lily went down the winding stone stairs. The thought of delivering to the witch made her dizzy with nerves—witches are uncanny sorts and dangerous to cross. Girding herself with charms and amulets to fortify her courage, she slung a cloak around her shoulders, dark as night, soft as a smile, and went down the road towards the Thornwoods. She hunted up and down the paths, stepping right and left, walking deosil rather than risk the bad luck of widdershins, and trying to ignore the boggarts that hunted through the branches, watching her with sly eyes like cracks of light in a darkened room.

The key rested heavily in her pocket. A key that could open any door if it were persuaded. It burned in her mind like Magnesia Alba, which ignites hot and white when exposed to the air.

The witch lived in a cavern. Two great beasts crouched on either side of its entrance, mawed like panthers, tailed like scorpions. The apprentice did not look at them directly but she could feel their eyes like flames against her back as she walked down into the darkness.

The air was cold on her face and the plink of falling moisture echoed in the distance. Once something small and leathery-winged flapped past but she pressed on.