The Skymistress has a name, but Meat always has names. They never seem to last long enough to earn them. Still, I attend to her. She is at least polite to me. The Skymistress meets my eye, when she is not looking at her glistening, crumbling food. She listens to my mumbled words. She seems interested.
Too interested, perhaps.
Finally she places her little stabbing fork down at the left side of her plate and her dull knife down at the right. “Captain Jakesia,” the Meat says in that clear, strong tone of voice Meat always uses to announce something unpleasant. “I must ask a difficult question. In the interests of my island.”
“Ask.” I am not long on courtesy, but then I am not long on much of anything these days.
“What became of Captain Armature? Who did such terrible damage to your ship?”
“Entwhistle is airworthy,” I say almost automatically. A sky court might find differently, especially if I were ever heard to express fears contrary to that basic sentiment.
“I do not seek to … challenge … you.” She leans forward, her hypertrophied chest glands straining against the curdled red of her robes. “We live in a time of adversity. Especially here on Lesser Grand Reserve.” That earns the Skymistress a hard look from her Meat companion, the important one that I have already come to dislike in a most collegial manner. I grudgingly admire the way she simply ignores his hostility.
“We were attacked,” I say. Truthful but unhelpful. That is usually best with important Meat.
“Stupid Tock.” The other Meat’s impatience practically spills across the table. “Her language facilitator is on the blink.”
I meet his eye and hold him with my gaze. I am Tock, I do not need to blink. In time, he does. “There is nothing wrong with my language facilitator, you ignorant dolt. I am merely parsimonious with my words.”
“Attacked by who, then?”
“Whom,” I correct him. “Attacked by whom.”
The Skymistress bursts into noise that after a moment I recall is Meat laughter. It has been a long time, and very little is amusing to me anymore. “Panjit,” she says with a bright smile, laying one hand upon his arm, “you will not best this one.”
I trace my fingertips in the remaining pool of my machine oil, a lovely 000 light vegetable base. “No, leave that to the rat bastards. They bested us all too well.”
She leans close again, pressing her glands against the table edge so that the other Meat’s eyes slide sideways despite his hostile focus to me. “Who are the rat bastards?”
Now there is a question. I take another long, hard look at her assistant Meat. He is a dangerous fool, but the Skymistress holds the lines of power here. Also, I have little left to lose. Armature is dead, Entwhistle is stricken.
“The rat bastards are servants of Shadow,” I say. “They sail in small ships, some of them just wings without gasbags. They live hard and close to the wind. They come from the east and antispinward. They attack ships far out in the airbands, or traveling within the clouds. I have never heard of one attacking an island or a port or a city.”
That is the longest string of words I have spoken since before Armature went over the rail with three rat bastard lances in his chestplate.
“They prey on trade,” the Skymistress says in a thoughtful voice.
“Your trade is gone anyway,” I observe. “Your slips are idle, and most lie long unused.”
Unexpectedly, the other Meat speaks. “Too many believe our grease mine has failed.”
I know a state secret when I hear one. “Your port is dying,” I tell them. “My airship is dying. Will you repair me?”
“Will you bring back our trade?” snarls the other Meat. The Skymistress stares him to silence before returning her attention to me.
“I thank you for the information.” Her voice is grave. “Our crews are diminished, but we can still provide repair parties and supplies.”
Grudging honesty forces answering words from me. “Payment may be slow.”
She spreads her hands. “Where would we cash your credit draft?”
That provokes a chuff of steam and a wheeze from me. Laughter, indeed.
Disgusted, the other Meat rises from the table and leaves with great ceremony. His exit is clearly intended to provoke us, or possibly make a point.
“Your life would be improved by killing him,” I tell her.
“Unfortunately, he is the best of those remaining to me.” She sighs and sags a bit in her chair. Becomes more human, more like me, in that moment. “Will they come in time, these rat bastards?”
I opt for the truth. “Come the Shadow, comes the rat bastards. In the darkness, they will shit in your halls and shatter your windows and howl from the tops of your towers.”
“Shadow is just a rumor.” Her voice is uncertain.
“Shadow is the end of all things. They are just its servants and heralds.”
She watches me a little while. Then: “You are very angry.”
I shrug. Human is as human does. “No one craves their ending. Meat ages and dies. Tock can fail without proper maintenance or too far from fuel and grease. But Shadow? Shadow is the failing of the entire world, the dying of the light.”
The Skymistress is aghast. “How do you know?”
“Because of the coming of the rat bastards. This has all happened before. It will all happen again.”
“How do you know that?”
I tell her my deepest secret, one that runs back to my Maker and my very making. “Because I remember the last time.”
Her voice drops to almost nothing. “How old are you?”
“Older than the light itself.”
With that I rise and begin my walk back to Entwhistle. It won’t matter soon. The Lesser Port of Grand Reserve is dying, as surely as the light is dying. As surely as I am going to fail.
If Tock could cry, I would weep.
Meat and Tock
Hand and clock
Rise and walk
Meat and Tock
Tock and Meat
See and greet
Have a treat
Tock and Meat
—Children’s rhyme
Skymistress Sarita returned to the observation deck of the Eastmost Tower, trailed by two silent servitors. The best of her household were gone. A few more departed with every one of the increasingly infrequent sailings.
Soon, the Lesser Port of Grand Reserve would have too few people to maintain the docks and keep the island’s businesses running and supplies moving. The grease mines wouldn’t matter then. The people would continue to shelter a while—there were still springs, and granaries, and orchards—but without grease, and money, there was no trade. Without trade, there were no new supplies.
As she’d promised, repair crews were about Entwhistle. In truth, the dock masters were glad enough of the work. It was something to do. The airship was listing slightly in her slip even as men and women swarmed over the rigging and along the decks. Hoses snaked from the gasbag to pumps brought out on trolleys.
A cold wind picked at her hair and made her eyes water. It blew from antispinward. She thought hard on Jakesia’s words about the rat bastards and the coming of Shadow. The actual darkness might be a nursery tale to frighten children, but surely Lesser Grand Reserve was falling into its own Shadow.
Metaphor or not, the Shadow was real.
“What if I just boarded the ship and sailed away with them?” she asked the wind.
Meat and Tock usually did not mix in crews. The demands of everything from watchstanding to what was required of each sailor were too different. Tock did not sleep, and were hideously strong by the standards of ordinary men. They could sail with half the complement of a Meat ship.
But any ship would take passengers for the right fee, under the right circumstances. Any ship would take them on.
“Alfons,” Sarita said aloud.
Her servitor stepped forward. “Skymistress?”
“How many persons remain on this island?”
r /> “A moment, please.” He retreated indoors, searching for records.
Her old steward would have simply known.
She watched Entwhistle and listened to the wind a while. Eventually Alfons came back. Bald, stooped, one eye drooping, he was at least sharp of mind. “One thousand and one hundred natural persons, Skymistress, and six hundred and forty made persons. That is the current estimate.”
“Of which we could put perhaps forty aboard Entwhistle,” she said. “It will take fifty more like her to carry everyone away.” And long before that the great steam engines and electrical generators and water pumps that maintained life on the island would fail for reduced maintenance and lack of tenders. Were fifty more airships ever going to call at the Lesser Port of Grand Reserve?
“They are unlikely to pay for the services we provide,” Alfons said lugubriously. “You may as well demand forty passages as compensation.”
Something in his voice caught her attention. “Would you go?”
“No, Skymistress.” He protested loyalty, but she knew he did not mean it.
Nobody did. What was there to be loyal to? The city was dying. And Shadow was coming.
Sarita wondered what had become of her loyalty. Evaporated under Panjit’s ambitious glare and the burgeoning decay of the port city in her charge. Nothing remained but old habit, it seemed.
She watched the horizons of air eastward and antispinward a while, looking for the swirling dots of a flight of rat bastards, or some other harbinger of Shadow. All Sarita saw were storm clouds trading lightning in the distance. All she heard was the lonely voice of the wind.
“We shall be ground as dust.” Her words slipped out aloud once more.
Alfons spoke, so close to her elbow that she startled slightly. “Every grain breaks upon the grindstone, Skymistress. That is the fate of grain.”
“We are more than wheat and chaff,” she replied, but did not believe herself.
There must be people in the world beyond simply Meat and Tock. They are rarely seen. Legends, to most of us. But the sky is infinite. There are always more islands floating in the airbands. How can there not be both angels and orangutans somewhere? It would be stranger if there weren’t.
—Binyan the Wanderer, Sermon at Port Ruin
I stare across my deck. My hand is clean, finally. It took a wire brush and a foolish degree of patience, but I am clean. Even rat bastards have mothers. How different is that from me cherishing memories of my Maker?
Those other memories, from the beginning, when the light first came back—those I do not cherish.
The deckhands assemble. Bosun Shimwater nods to me. All are accounted for.
“We are ready to sail soon,” I call out. “We have taken on no cargo. There may be passengers, though perhaps not once I have seen the Skymistress again.”
They all stare at me, eyes bright and marbled with expectancy, servomechanisms whining slightly as weights shift, eddies of steam emerging from odd vents. Tock is never so still as Meat can be, because Tock never sleeps. We move or we die.
I pause, considering my next announcement. “Captain Armature had plans, but he is lost to us. Entwhistle is a ship without home port or purpose. Too many of us were lost as well. Her boilers are sound, her gasbags tight, her engines strong, but her heart is broken.
“As is mine.”
Still they stare at me, glittering and feral. No one turns away. No one seeks to shout me down.
“I have a plan as well. Entwhistle will sail antispinward. I want to face the Shadow as it comes, and press my blades into the faces of the rat bastards. We will not drive them back. We will not stay the coming of darkness. But we will meet it with eyes open and arms raised.
“Will you come with me?”
There is no great shout, as a crowd of Meat might have done. Neither is there a rippling tide of those slipping away. Everyone just stands and stares. Bosun Shimwater. Leftscrew the junior pilot. The Leyden Twins, connected by spark and cable as they were. All twenty-three of my surviving crew. No one answers, no one steps back.
They just await orders.
In that moment, I love Tock all over again as I never have before in all the centuries since my Maker first unbound me from my birthing bench.
“Captain Jakesia.”
I turn to see the Skymistress on the gangplank. She has presented herself without the foolish, important Meat who follows her around. Only with a servant bent and palsied with the age that afflicts all Meat after a few years.
To my surprise, her name comes to me. “Sarita,” I say, forgetting the honorific.
I realize she has left behind her blood-colored robes. This Meat woman is clad in stout leather with wisps of wool peeking from her collar and cuffs.
“May I have your permission to come aboard?”
With a bow, I welcome her to Entwhistle. In setting foot on my deck, she comes under my rules. “Welcome.”
She glances up as the old man crowds behind her. The important Meat stands on the tower, glaring down at us. Though even I cannot see his eyes from this distance, I can read the set of his body in his blood-colored robes.
“Your rank is no more?” I ask politely.
“I am just Palacio Sarita bat Mardia.” She bows slightly in return to me. “I would work my passage wherever you are bound.”
“Toward Shadow,” I tell her, “and the dying of the light, amid the swords and spears of the rat bastards.”
“We all sail into Shadow,” she says. “And every woman’s light dies someday. I would face it in good company.”
The servant cackles. “Not with Panjit back there. Peacocked fool.”
“The winds of time are turning foul,” I warn her. “They will not turn fair again in our lives.”
“We are all grain,” she says. “The world is our grindstone.”
“Can you haul a line on command?” I ask.
Sarita, once Skymistress of the Lesser Port of Grand Reserve, smiles.
Very much despite myself, I smile back.
I check the springs of my hand one last time, then I give the orders to cast off.
The Temptation of Eustace Prudence McAllen
* * *
Editor Kerrie Lynn Hughes asked me one day for a story. Which she needed by the end of the week. About supernatural weirdness in the Old West. But it couldn’t be zombies or vampires. And would I mind setting it in Hell’s Half Acre, Wyoming? “Sure,” I said. There’s nothing like a focused market requirement. Then I went out for excellent barbecue at the Salt Lick outside of Austin. The rest is history, and a few burps.
* * *
You know that place out west of Casper? Wild badlands like you’ve never seen, all rocks and salt and twisty dead-end ravines’d swallow up a man and his horse both like they was watermelon seeds. Hell’s Half Acre is its name these days, but folks used to call that the Devil’s Kitchen.
What do you think, biscuit-head? On account of him cooking up sin there. What else’d the devil his own self set to boiling over a fire?
Now this fellow name of Eustace Prudence McAllen rode for Hotchkiss Williamson what had the Broken Bow Ranch out that way. Williamson held a good spread, with two different springs and a box canyon full of cottonwoods running down through his grasslands. Drought didn’t bother him nearly so much as it troubled his neighbors, though he did have a problem with range fires there through the summers of 1864 and 1865.
McAllen, he might of been a Southern man, ain’t no telling now. But he’d showed up the autumn of 1863 and signed on. Working over the winters on the range here always has called for a special kind of cuss, so Williamson and his brother ranchers didn’t ask a lot of questions of a man what rode strong and didn’t backtalk and kept the cattle out of trouble. Anyone who came west in those war years was avoiding something, somewhere. So long as they didn’t bring their troubles in their saddlebags, that was generally good enough.
No, I can’t rightly say exactly what he looked like. You talk to people who r
ode for Williamson in them years, you get different tellings. Time plays tricks on memory, don’t you know. There was a lot of panics, from Indian attacks and the range fires and what all. Can’t even say if’n he was a colored fellow, some kind of quadroon, or just white, like a black Irishman. Taller than most, maybe. Carried an ivory-handled double-barreled LeMat revolver what had been engraved real tiny, some folks said it was the book of Jeremiah writ real small, always close to his hand.
Why anyone would carry that particular book of the Holy Bible so I can’t rightly say.
So here’s McAllen working the cattle for Williamson and minding his own business. Don’t drink too much, don’t fight hardly none at all, don’t cuss in front of Williamson’s wife and daughters, lends a hand even when he ain’t been asked. Everything’s fine until the second summer of range fires and somehow word gets around that McAllen has been setting ’em.
Firestarting is worse than rustling, in its way. You don’t just lose the cattle, you lose the land. And fighting a range fire is somewhere between suicide and hopeless. Best you can do is get livestock and people out of harm’s way and pray the wind don’t shift wrong.
Mostly you know what done it. Dry thunderstorm, often as not. But sometimes they got a pattern. Summer of 1864, and again 1865, it was like that. Visitations, almost.
And they was talking, people. Cooks and runners and the feedlot boys and the fancy women and whatnot. McAllen’s name was on a lot of lips. For a fellow ain’t made no enemies, he sure didn’t have a lot of friends. It was all-around peculiar.
So Williamson, he got the wind put up his own self and went and had a quiet talk with McAllen. I can’t reckon the old man had pegged his hand for a firebug. More like he wanted McAllen gone a bit, out of the way to let rumor run its course. So he sent the poor bastard out riding trail west of Fort Caspar, what the city was called back then afore it was really a city. Said McAllen was checking springs and shelter in case they needed to drive the herds through the Powder River country.
Which was so much horse puck and everybody knew it, but it did serve to calm the hard words down some.