Philippine Speculative Fiction (19 page)

My challenge is to murder the acting sovereign of the
colonia.
The Gobernador-General is protected by guardia sibil, some of who have their own augmented limbs, to enable a more
effective defense. The key is to do something no one has done before, to truly rebel against the laws of
fisica,
to fly higher, move faster, so that I may be able to penetrate the wall of
men and women that surround the Gobernador
.
To do that, I need power.

The copper-springed heart was my idea, but I needed Maren to build the mechanism that would operate it, and I needed Cristan to distill me the medication I would need to survive the transplant.
We knew there was a possibility it would not work; we knew I could die for, just as with Hustino, we were merely mimicking the healing arts.

But my body proved once again its resilience. It accepted the change and became stronger for it. And if cerulean pulsing lines often appear under my skin, and if I hear the whirring sound of
turbines instead of the steady thrum of a heartbeat, and if I see phantoms of my dead lovers conversing, laughing, asking me to come with them, all of these combined is still a small price to pay
for what, in turn, I am able to do.

I see Cristan and Maren and Hustino take their imaginary seats among the selected guests invited to the Gobernador-General’s soiree. The audience is small, even accounting for the guardia
sibil, the stage they allotted me, large. In my starting position on the raised platform, the endless opportunity of space beckons to me, calling to me to fill its emptiness with the caress of my
arms, the harsh flicks of my feet. I delve deep within myself to stay still. Only when the melancholy music begins do I move.

I drag one leg, then the other, in time with the subtle base, tapping my foot lightly on the wood, letting the exhausted sadness of my movements flavor the ambient energy. At the unexpected
melodic crescendo, I execute a sharp
roto trasero
then proceed to a slow slide, as if the harsh interruption never happened.

I am lost,
I tell the audience as I interrupt the sway of my hips with a jump and twist in midair.
I am broken,
I say as I harshly stop the gentle flutter of my arms with a
drop on the floor. And I repeat this again, and again, with broken
salidas,
and disrupted
ochos
, and a sudden stop to a languorous pirouette.

When the music fades I begin to turn.

The 360 degree rotations of
girasoles encadenados
require balance and concentration, but it is my copper-springed heart and not my mind that holds me steady. I am reliving the last
years again, temporarily immune to friction and gravity and the failings of mechanical joints and mortal limbs, free to dwell on images of Hustino, laughing as he explained the alma parpadear, and
Cristan as he served his decadent flavorful masterpieces, and Maren, as she navigated the winds in her marvelous, powerful galleon. With each completed revolution, with each spin that defies the
laws of
fisica
with its almost infinite source of angular momentum, I feel the stress inside me building, growing, increasing to the point of sublime pain, until the images themselves
cease to be illusions, but take on weight and mass and volume (and texture and scent and sound) so that I am surrounded by the Cuadro Amorso, turning to the music of a thousand precious memories,
even as a miniscule part of my artificial heart loses its place, leaving a dynamo to course its power without a circuit, intensifying the pain a hundredfold and momentarily blinding me, until
finally, eventually, inevitably I stumble to a halt.

And my chest explodes.

My last image is of my heart, impossibly slow to my eyes, traveling a straight line toward the Gobernador-General, to its unavoidable end.

Leon Cedric C. Tan graduated from Ateneo de Manila University in 2013. Most recently, he was a fellow of the 13th IYAS National Writers’ Workshop.
His works have been published in
The Philippines Free Press, Philippines Graphic,
and
Ateneo Heights.

He currently hops back and forth between Manila and Clark.

The Woodsman
is dedicated to the ones who share his space.

BRAM SQUINTED, AND not just because of the sunlight—beads of sweat were also running down from his forehead, into his eyes, threatening to obscure his vision. After a
whole day of trekking through the woods, he had finally emerged from the dark leafy canopies, only to find himself in the frigid embrace of open mountain air. The cold made every breath feel like
swallowing broken glass. Bram took a moment to readjust the position of the young woman’s body he carried on his back, then gritted his teeth and soldiered on.

He was the village’s resident giant; shoulders like an ox’s, and legs built just as steadily from years of woodcutting. Where he had size, however, he lacked nimbleness. A few steps
up, as he tried to find a solid foothold on the steep incline, the earth crumbled under his oversized boot and he slipped, falling flat on his face and tasting dirt. The girl he was carrying fell
awkwardly beside him, limp as a doll.

Fool. The voices stirred in his head, mocking. Fool, fool, fool.

After shaking himself, Bram pushed himself off the ground, ignoring the dirt clinging to his sweaty face. He looked over at Marike—even with her dress caked with mud, and her long hair
tumbling out of its braids, she was still quite pretty. Bram picked her up in his arms and continued walking.

The sun was at its highest when the house came into view. There it was—a simple cottage, lonely atop the mountain, built of wood and mortar and roofed with dry thatch. It was to this house
that the least traversed mountain paths led.

They said that the witch looked different to every villager who dared lay their eyes upon her. Old Man Wob claimed that she looked just like his long-dead wife. The idiotic stable boy Harrow
swore that she had the scales of a snake covering half of her face. Other people said different things, and Bram wasn’t certain which form would present itself to him as he stumbled towards
the cottage and banged his fist upon the door. He had only knocked twice before it swung open.

“Come in,” a voice sung from inside, sweet as Bram’s favourite nectar.

Holding Marike’s body close to him, Bram stepped into the blackness within, ducking his head under the door frame. The moment he was inside, a gust blew from behind him, slamming the door
shut.

Fool, the voices taunted again, but he dared not turn back, dared not to let the whimper of fear escape his lips.

Bram waited breathlessly as his eyes slowly adjusted to the dim interior of the house. His eyes were aided by a fire that suddenly burst to life in a hearth at the far corner.

She stood before him, not three steps away, and Bram thought that she might be the loveliest woman he’d ever seen, with flawless skin, eyes like glinting steel and crow-black hair. He
dwarfed her in size. He felt utterly afraid, unnerved by her beauty.

“What can I do for you, giant?” the witch asked, her honeyed voice tugging at Bram’s heart in a way no melody could.

Tell her.

“I, umm, I need your help.” His voice, though a deep rumble, came out in the usual stammer.

“Of course.”

“This girl.” Bram held up the limp body of Marike. Firelight and shadows pranced about her still face.

“A dead girl,” the witch said, sparing Marike just a glance.

“Yes, she’s, umm, dead. But can you make her a-alive, again, p-please?”

The witch’s cold eyes twinkled. “Do you love this corpse?”

“Umm. Can you do it?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps, I can.” The witch grinned, and at the sight of that knowing smile Bram felt a stab of regret at having brought Marike to this woman. But he pushed it away. She
can’t hurt her if she’s already dead. She can’t, she can’t.

“Dear giant, what are you willing to do for this girl?”

“A-anything.”

The witch’s grin widened, and there were the voices again, louder than the blood pounding in his ears, telling him, fool, fool, fool!

BRAM ALREADY LOOKED like a full grown man when he was just eight years old, if full grown men had mismatched eyes and mouths dumbly hung open half the time. By the time he was
thirteen, all the men in the village–butchers, farmers, everyone–had to look up at him. His parents loved him well enough, but not even they could help him learn to read or write.
Stefan and the other children said it was because his body was so big, that’s why there was nothing left for his head.

They called him Bram the Big Fool. Sometimes just Bram the Fool, and when they were feeling particularly lazy about it, they just called him Dunghead.

Finding a living for Bram was a collective effort on the part of the villagers. Working in the stables was out of the question, and the smith never let him near his workshop either. Finally, the
elders put him to work cutting trees in the woods–handling the axe and collecting lumber was the only task he could put his sizable self to. No other job suited him half as well.

So thought Bram as he swung the witch’s axe and the pine fell with a noisy crash. A flock of birds in the nearby tree fluttered away, twittering in irritation. The witch’s
instructions were simple enough:

“Collect some wood,” she told him. “Take this axe of mine, and cut some wood.”

“Umm, how much wood?” he asked.

“When it is enough, I will say.”

And so he swung. There seemed to be something wrong with the axe the witch had lent him: though it had an elegantly carved handle and a lustrous steel blade, it was extraordinarily heavier than
it looked. He struggled at handling it, even with his muscular, well-practiced arms. The axe’s weight slowed down his progress, turned every other chop into a tedious affair. It didn’t
help that he hadn’t eaten yet, either.

But, he told himself, he wasn’t going to eat until the witch fixed Marike up, fixed her good.

ONE DAY, BRAM was walking through the village by a path fringing the woods, carrying a heavy load of timber on his shoulders for the elders’ hearths. Stefan suddenly
appeared before him, dirty and sweaty as usual, but wearing an innocent smile. He had his hands behind his back.

“Hello Bram!”

“He… umm… hello, Stefan,” he replied, stopping in his tracks.

“Do you like eggs, Bram?” Stefan asked.

He did. “Y-yes. My mama, she makes them for, umm, for breakfast. I like eggs.”

Stefan was pleased with the answer. “Good! Here you go!” And he tossed the egg he had been holding behind his back at Bram’s face. Before he knew it, ten other boys, all
friends of Stefan’s, had jumped out from their hiding places and begun hurling eggs at Bram, never missing with a target so large and unmoving. The yolk and eggshells splattered across his
face and his chest, making his clothes sticky.

Bram’s senses abandoned him and he cried out, dropping the load of wood he’d been carrying. One of the logs landed on his foot, instantly crushing his toe. He howled in agony,
clutching at his right foot and hopping around on his left, much to the amusement of the other boys. Bram finally fell to his side just as Stefan threw one last egg at Bram, landing sticky white
right between the giant’s unfocused eyes.

“Bram,” one of the boys gasped with false concern, “did you just drop all these eggs? They’re all broken! Stupid fool!”

And of course, the whole group began to cackle the usual song. “Fool! Fool! Fool!” they all cried, rushing away.

It was many minutes before a young girl came across Bram and cautiously approached him. He looked up at her approach, and flinched when she came within two steps of him. But the girl looked at
him a little differently, like she would a bear caught in a hunter’s trap.

“I’m sorry,” she said, sadly. “I’m so, so sorry, Bram.”

ANOTHER TREE, ONE that might’ve been standing for the last thousand years, fell under the witch’s axe and Bram’s mighty swing. With that, Bram strode up to
the trunk and began hacking away at it.

She has to fix Marike, fix her good.

His bones were aching with effort by the time he returned to the witch’s house. There she stood, out in the open, with Marike’s body at her feet. In front of them, Bram dumped enough
logs for a small cookfire, then gave the witch a hopeful look.

“Not enough,” she said, shaking her head at the pile. “A little more wood, giant. A little more wood, if you are to see her alive again.”

“HE’S TALKING TO his potatoes!” Stefan howled with laughter and his ragtag group of friends followed suit. In reality, Bram had only been counting his
potatoes out loud, poking at them with his fork. He did like potatoes as much as eggs, but he certainly hoped they wouldn’t be pelting him with potatoes anytime soon. Potatoes were a little
harder than eggs, and would probably hurt more.

Stefan started singing, and as expected, ten more grating voices joined him in chorus. “And Bram was a fool, and he liked to drool, oh, Bram the Fool, fool, foo––”

Then the voice of the girl again, angry: “That’s quite enough! No good, sack of sheep guts.”

Marike walked over to where Bram was seated and sat herself down beside him, matching his confused, cross-eyed gaze with her own–kindly, sparkling blue. Stefan and the other boys found
themselves silenced for the first time.

“Would you like an apple?” she asked him, offering the one on her own plate.

“Umm…” Bram looked away.

“Here you go.” And she put the apple on his plate.

She spent the rest of their supper talking to him, at least until Stefan and his loud friends went away. She cast some of them cautious glances, but mostly conversed with Bram about the merits
of gardening.

A few weeks later, Marike had asked to accompany Bram into the forest, as he made his rounds collecting wood for the village. She didn’t bother him at work, staying clear of his way as he
hacked trees down and cut them into manageable logs. Marike had a small leather bag slung about her shoulder, with which she collected berries and nuts as they trekked through the woods. When they
stepped out into a glade and saw evening starting to fall, they sat together on a mossy rock and Marike shared the blackberries she’d gathered.