The kid’s uniform was crisp and dark blue and looked unworn. His yearglass hung on his belt, full of pale sand. Twelve’s uniform was frayed and faded to a bluish gray, patched up where it had been sliced into, or ripped, or burned. They reached the kitchen door and—
Whap!
They were outside, in a forest, somewhere very cold indeed.
“DOWN!” called Twelve.
The sharp thing went over their heads and crashed into a tree behind them.
The kid said, “I thought you said it wasn’t always like this.”
Twelve shrugged.
“Where are they coming from?”
“Time,” said Twelve. “They’re hiding behind the seconds, trying to get in.”
In the forest close to them something went whumpf, and a tall fir tree began to burn with a flickering copper-green flame.
“Where are they?”
“Above us, again. They’re normally above you or beneath you.” They came down like sparks from a sparkler, beautiful and white and possibly slightly dangerous.
The kid was getting the hang of it. This time the two of them fired together.
“Did they brief you?” asked Twelve. As they landed, the sparks looked less beautiful and much more dangerous.
“Not really. They just told me that it was only for a year.”
Twelve barely paused to reload. He was grizzled and scarred. The kid looked barely old enough to pick up a weapon. “Did they tell you that a year would be a lifetime?”
The kid shook his head. Twelve remembered when he was a kid like this, his uniform clean and unburned. Had he ever been so fresh-faced? So innocent?
He dealt with five of the spark-demons. The kid took care of the remaining three.
“So it’s a year of fighting,” said the kid.
“Second by second,” said Twelve.
Whap!
The waves crashed on the beach. It was hot here, a Southern Hemisphere January. It was still night, though. Above them fireworks hung in the sky, unmoving. Twelve checked his yearglass: there were only a couple of grains left. He was almost done.
He scanned the beach, the waves, the rocks.
“I don’t see it,” he said.
“I do,” said the kid.
It rose from the sea as he pointed, something huge beyond the mind’s holding, all bulk and malevolent vastness, all tentacles and claws, and it roared as it rose.
Twelve had the rocket launcher off his back and over his shoulder. He fired it, and watched as flame blossomed on the creature’s body.
“Biggest I’ve seen yet,” he said. “Maybe they save the best for last.”
“Hey,” said the kid, “I’m only at the beginning.”
It came for them then, crab-claws flailing and snapping, tentacles lashing, maw opening and vainly closing. They sprinted up the sandy ridge.
The kid was faster than Twelve: he was young, but sometimes that’s an advantage. Twelve’s hip ached, and he stumbled. His final grain of sand was falling through the yearglass when something—a tentacle, he figured—wrapped itself around his leg, and he fell.
He looked up.
The kid was standing on the ridge, feet planted like they teach you in boot camp, holding a rocket launcher of unfamiliar design—something after Twelve’s time, he assumed. He began mentally to say his good-byes as he was hauled down the beach, sand scraping his face, and then a dull bang and the tentacle was whipped from his leg as the creature was blown backwards, into the sea.
He was tumbling through the air as the final grain fell and Midnight took him.
Twelve opened his eyes in the place the old years go. Fourteen helped him down from the dais.
“How’d it go?” asked Nineteen Fourteen. She wore a floor-length white skirt and long, white gloves.
“They’re getting more dangerous every year,” said Twenty Twelve. “The seconds, and the things behind them. But I like the new kid. I think he’s going to do fine.”
February Tale
Gray February skies, misty white sands, black rocks, and the sea seemed black too, like a monochrome photograph, with only the girl in the yellow raincoat adding any color to the world.
Twenty years ago the old woman had walked the beach in all weathers, bowed over, staring at the sand, occasionally bending, laboriously, to lift a rock and look beneath it. When she had stopped coming down to the sands, a middle-aged woman, her daughter I assumed, came, and walked the beach with less enthusiasm than her mother. Now that woman had stopped coming, and in her place there was the girl.
She came towards me. I was the only other person on the beach in that mist. I don’t look much older than her.
“What are you looking for?” I called.
She made a face. “What makes you think I’m looking for anything?”
“You come down here every day. Before you it was the lady, before her the very old lady, with the umbrella.”
“That was my grandmother,” said the girl in the yellow raincoat.
“What did she lose?”
“A pendant.”
“It must be very valuable.”
“Not really. It has sentimental value.”
“Must be worth more than that, if your family has been looking for it for umpteen years.”
“Yes.” She hesitated. Then she said, “Grandma said it would take her home again. She said she only came here to look around. She was curious. And then she got worried about having the pendant on her, so she hid it under a rock, so she’d be able to find it again, when she got back. And then, when she got back, she wasn’t sure which rock it was, not anymore. That was fifty years ago.”
“Where was her home?”
“She never told us.”
The way the girl was talking made me ask the question that scared me. “Is she still alive? Your grandmother?”
“Yes. Sort of. But she doesn’t talk to us these days. She just stares out at the sea. It must be horrible to be so old.”
I shook my head. It isn’t. Then I put my hand into my coat pocket and held it out to her. “Was it anything like this? I found it on this beach a year ago. Under a rock.”
The pendant was untarnished by sand or by salt water.
The girl looked amazed, then she hugged me, and thanked me, and she took the pendant, and ran up the misty beach, in the direction of the little town.
I watched her go: a splash of gold in a black-and-white world, carrying her grandmother’s pendant in her hand. It was a twin to the one I wore around my own neck.
I wondered about her grandmother, my little sister, whether she would ever go home; whether she would forgive me for the joke I had played on her if she did. Perhaps she would elect to stay on the earth, and would send the girl home in her place. That might be fun.
Only when my great-niece was gone and I was alone did I swim upward, letting the pendant pull me home, up into the vastness above us, where we wander with the lonely sky-whales and the skies and seas are one.
March Tale
. . . only this we know, that she was not executed.
—CHARLES JOHNSON, A GENERAL HISTORY OF THE ROBBERIES
AND MURDERS OF THE MOST NOTORIOUS PIRATES
It was too warm in the great house, and so the two of them went out onto the porch. A spring storm was brewing far to the west. Already the flicker of lightning, and the unpredictable chilly gusts blew about them and cooled them. They sat decorously on the porch swing, the mother and the daughter, and they talked of when the woman’s husband would be home, for he had taken ship with a tobacco crop to faraway England.
Mary, who was thirteen, so pretty, so easily startled, said, “I do declare. I am glad that all the pirates have gone to the gallows, and Father will come back to us safely.”
Her mother’s smile was gentle, and it did not fade as she said, “I do not care to talk about pirates, Mary.”
SHE WAS DRESSED AS a boy when she was a girl, to cover up her father’s scandal. She did not wear a woman’s dres
s until she was on the ship with her father, and with her mother, his serving-girl mistress whom he would call wife in the New World, and they were on their way from Cork to the Carolinas.
She fell in love for the first time, on that journey, enveloped in unfamiliar cloth, clumsy in her strange skirts. She was eleven, and it was no sailor who took her heart but the ship itself: Anne would sit in the bows, watching the gray Atlantic roll beneath them, listening to the gulls scream, and feeling Ireland recede with each moment, taking with it all the old lies.
She left her love when they landed, with regret, and even as her father prospered in the new land she dreamed of the creak and slap of the sails.
Her father was a good man. He had been pleased when she had returned, and did not speak of her time away: the young man whom she had married, how he had taken her to Providence. She had returned to her family three years after, with a baby at her breast. Her husband had died, she said, and although tales and rumors abounded, even the sharpest of the gossiping tongues did not think to suggest that Annie Riley was the pirate-girl Anne Bonny, Red Rackham’s first mate.
“If you had fought like a man, you would not have died like a dog.” Those had been Anne Bonny’s last words to the man who put the baby in her belly, or so they said.
MRS. RILEY WATCHED THE lightning play, and heard the first rumble of distant thunder. Her hair was graying now, and her skin just as fair as that of any local woman of property.
“It sounds like cannon fire,” said Mary (Anne had named her for her own mother, and for her best friend in the years she was away from the great house).
“Why would you say such things?” asked her mother, primly. “In this house, we do not speak of cannon fire.”
The first of the March rain fell, then, and Mrs. Riley surprised her daughter by getting up from the porch swing and leaning into the rain, so it splashed her face like sea spray. It was quite out of character for a woman of such respectability.
As the rain splashed her face she thought herself there: the captain of her own ship, the cannonade around them, the stench of the gunpowder smoke blowing on the salt breeze. Her ship’s deck would be painted red, to mask the blood in battle. The wind would fill her billowing canvas with a snap as loud as cannon’s roar, as they prepared to board the merchant ship, and take whatever they wished, jewels or coin—and burning kisses with her first mate when the madness was done . . .
“Mother?” said Mary. “I do believe you must be thinking of a great secret. You have such a strange smile on your face.”
“Silly girl, acushla,” said her mother. And then she said, “I was thinking of your father.” She spoke the truth, and the March winds blew madness about them.
April Tale
You know you’ve been pushing the ducks too hard when they stop trusting you, and my father had been taking the ducks for everything he could since the previous summer.
He’d walk down to the pond. “Hey, ducks,” he’d say to the ducks.
By January they’d just swim away. One particularly irate drake—we called him Donald, but only behind his back, ducks are sensitive to that kind of thing—would hang around and berate my father. “We ain’t interested,” he’d say. “We don’t want to buy nothing you’re selling: not life insurance, not encyclopedias, not aluminum siding, not safety matches, and especially not damp-proofing.”
“‘Double or nothing’!” quacked a particularly indignant mallard. “Sure, you’ll toss us for it. With a double-sided quarter . . . !”
The ducks, who had got to examine the quarter in question when my father had dropped it into the pond, all honked in agreement, and drifted elegantly and grumpily to the other side of the pond.
My father took it personally. “Those ducks,” he said. “They were always there. Like a cow you could milk. They were suckers—the best kind. The kind you could go back to again and again. And I queered the pitch.”
“You need to make them trust you again,” I told him. “Or better still, you could just start being honest. Turn over a new leaf. You have a real job now.”
He worked at the village inn, opposite the duck pond.
My father did not turn over a new leaf. He barely even turned over the old leaf. He stole fresh bread from the inn kitchens, he took unfinished bottles of red wine, and he went down to the duck pond to win the ducks’ trust.
All of March he entertained them, he fed them, he told them jokes, he did whatever he could to soften them up. It was not until April, when the world was all puddles, and the trees were new and green and the world had shaken off winter, that he brought out a pack of cards.
“How about a friendly game?” asked my father. “Not for money?”
The ducks eyed each other nervously. “I don’t know . . . ,” some of them muttered, warily.
Then one elderly mallard I did not recognize extended a wing graciously. “After so much fresh bread, after so much good wine, we would be churlish to refuse your offer. Perhaps, gin rummy? Or happy families?”
“How about poker?” said my father, with his poker face on, and the ducks said yes.
My father was so happy. He didn’t even have to suggest that they start playing for money, just to make the game more interesting—the elderly mallard did that.
I’d learned a little over the years about dealing off the bottom: I’d watch my father sitting in our room at night, practicing, over and over, but that old mallard could have taught my father a thing or two. He dealt from the bottom. He dealt from the middle. He knew where every card in that deck was, and it just took a flick of the wing to put them exactly where he wanted them.
The ducks took my father for everything: his wallet, his watch, his shoes, his snuffbox, and the clothes he stood up in. If the ducks had accepted a boy as a bet, he would have lost me as well, and perhaps, in a lot of ways, he did.
He walked back to the inn in just his underwear and socks. Ducks don’t like socks, they said. It’s a duck thing.
“At least you kept your socks,” I told him.
That was the April that my father learned not to trust ducks.
May Tale
In May I received an anonymous Mother’s Day card. This puzzled me. I would have noticed if I had ever had children, surely?
In June I found a notice saying, “Normal Service Will Be Resumed as Soon as Possible,” taped to my bathroom mirror, along with several small tarnished copper coins of uncertain denomination and origin.
In July I received three postcards, at weekly intervals, all postmarked from the Emerald City of Oz, telling me the person who sent them was having a wonderful time, and asking me to remind Doreen about changing the locks on the back door and to make certain that she had canceled the milk. I do not know anyone named Doreen.
In August someone left a box of chocolates on my doorstep. It had a sticker attached saying it was evidence in an important legal case, and under no circumstances were the chocolates inside to be eaten before they had been dusted for fingerprints. The chocolates had melted in the August heat into a squidgy brown mass, and I threw the whole box away.
In September I received a package containing Action Comics #1, a first folio of Shakespeare’s plays, and a privately published copy of a novel by Jane Austen I was unfamiliar with, called Wit and Wilderness. I have little interest in comics, Shakespeare, or Jane Austen, and I left the books in the back bedroom. They were gone a week later, when I needed something to read in the bath, and went looking.
In October I found a notice saying, “Normal Service Will Be Resumed as Soon as Possible. Honest,” taped to the side of the goldfish tank. Two of the goldfish appeared to have been taken and replaced by identical substitutes.
In November I received a ransom note telling me exactly what to do if ever I wished to see my uncle Theobald alive again. I do not have an Uncle Theobald, but I wore a pink carnation in my buttonhole and ate nothing but salads for the entire month anyway.
In December I received a Christmas card postmarked THE NOR
TH POLE, letting me know that, this year, due to a clerical error, I was on neither the Naughty nor the Nice list. It was signed with a name that began with an S. It might have been Santa but it seemed more like Steve.
In January I woke to find someone had painted SECURE YOUR OWN MASK BEFORE HELPING OTHERS on the ceiling of my tiny kitchen, in vermilion paint. Some of the paint had dripped onto the floor.
In February a man came over to me at the bus stop and showed me the black statue of a falcon in his shopping bag. He asked for my help keeping it safe from the Fat Man, and then he saw someone behind me and he ran away.
In March I received three pieces of junk mail, the first telling me I might have already won a million dollars, the second telling me that I might already have been elected to the Académie Française, and the last telling me I might already have been installed as the titular head of the Holy Roman Empire.
In April I found a note on my bedside table apologizing for the problems in service, and assuring me that henceforward all faults in the universe had now been remedied forever. WE APOLOGIZE OF THE INCONVENIENTS, it concluded.
In May I received another Mother’s Day card. Not anonymous, this time. It was signed, but I could not read the signature. It started with an S but it almost definitely wasn’t Steve.
June Tale
My parents disagree. It’s what they do. They do more than disagree. They argue. About everything. I’m still not sure that I understand how they ever stopped arguing about things long enough to get married, let alone to have me and my sister.
My mum believes in the redistribution of wealth, and thinks that the big problem with Communism is it doesn’t go far enough. My dad has a framed photograph of the Queen on his side of the bed, and he votes as Conservative as he can. My mum wanted to name me Susan. My dad wanted to name me Henrietta, after his aunt. Neither of them would budge an inch. I am the only Susietta in my school or, probably, anywhere. My sister’s name is Alismima, for similar reasons.