Realms 2: The Second Year of Clarkesworld (Clarkesworld Anthology) Read online

  Time to dance like half-dead cats. Presto!

  Paul Jessup has been published in many magazines, including Post Script, Fantasy Magazine, Apex Digest, Farrago’s Wainscoat, Electric Velocipede, Psuedopod and the Journals of Experimental Fiction as well as many others. In 2009 a short story collection came out, Glass Coffin Girls, as part of their PS Showcase series, and Apex Publishing released his surrealistic space opera, Open Your Eyes.

  A DANCE ACROSS EMBERS

  Lisa Mantchev

  In the clearing where it was always-spring, Grandmother Bear took Milena’s hand in her paw and smiled. “I am to be married today.”

  “Again?” Milena laughed. Grandmother Bear was forever getting married to someone or other. “Will there be mummers and fire-dancers? Will we drink rosewine and dance until morning?”

  “Of course,” said Grandmother Bear. “That is how these things are done.”

  Milena pointed to a lovely thing of white mist, woven from spidersilk and woodland lace. “And will you wear your veil, Baba Metza?”

  “Yes, I will,” said Grandmother Bear with a laughter that was sunshine and tears that were the soft, sweet rain. The soon-to-be bride rose and took up a ceramic dish filled with wheat, coins and a raw egg. Then she tossed it over her head.

  The dish smashed on the forest floor in a hundred-thousand pieces and Milena skipped over them to retrieve the veil. It was not as tricky as fire-dancing, but it still brought very good luck indeed.

  It was a sunshine-on-snow morning. Brilliant white light poked fingers through the curtains, but Milena knew better than to put her bare toes on the floor. They’d freeze, sure as anything, and she’d be stuck there until spring. Her suspicions were confirmed when she poked her nose out from under the covers like a little brown wood-bunny and an icicle formed on the end of it.

  Somewhere in the basement, the furnace grumbled to life. It gobbled up coal in shovels-full, its chin hovering over the bin like an old person eating soup; even under the covers Milena could hear it chewing with its furnace-door mouth hanging open, belching smoke and sooty cinders. She could also hear Tatko listening to the morning news on the television.

  And Mama opened the door to her room. “Good morning, darling.”

  “Did you have a nice time at your party?”

  “Of course.” Mama, with her face turned to the curtains, didn’t sound as if she was telling the whole truth.

  “Can I come with you next time?” Milena pressed.

  “It’s not that sort of party.” Mama patted the hump of blankets that covered Milena’s knees. “Did you have pleasant dreams?”

  “I didn’t sleep last night; I went to a party too. A wedding.” Milena tasted her quilt when she answered. “Grandmother Bear got married.”

  “Again?” Mama turned, and her smile warmed the room as much as the radiator which clanked and hissed like a tea kettle. “Who did she marry this time?”

  “Father Time.” Milena rubbed at her sleepy eyes with her fists. “He’s old, with a long white beard and crinkles around his eyes. But she likes him ever so much. So they married, and I was the best girl.”

  “But, of course! And then what?”

  “There was sunshine and rain, all at once. And when the stars came out, she tucked me into the big bed in the middle of the forest,” Milena said. “I didn’t want to sleep there because the ghosts might take me in the night.”

  Mama froze as though icicles had grabbed her elbows. “The ghosts?”

  “The ones that take people from their beds in the middle of the night,” Milena told her. How silly of Mama to not know about the ghosts! “Ventsei told me—”

  “Yes, well, your friend Ventsei shouldn’t say such things.” Mama had the frown-line that cut her forehead in half. “Get dressed now. Breakfast is waiting.”

  Milena pulled and stretched her sweater like it was saltwater taffy until her head popped through the opening at the top. Then she skipped down the stairs. “Good morning, Tatko!”

  Her father greeted her at the table with a smile like warm chocolate. He kissed her with a loud smacking of his lips, and his moustache sprinkled her with drops of coffee. “Eat!” he commanded.

  “All right, all right.” Milena reached for her napkin and wiped off the offending coffee. Her plate held slices of spicy lukanka sausage around the edge, with a buttered pitki alongside a soft-boiled egg. While Milena ate, her parents talked, words tossed back and forth over her head like the red rubber ball on the playground.

  “Another one taken in the night,” Milena’s father said with his eyes on the paper. He had his mouth full of caviar and toast.

  “Shush,” Mama told him. “Not in front of the little one. The words are sparrows; once released, they cannot be caught.”

  “We should tell her, before she hears at school. It was the fire-walker—”

  “Ivan?” Mama said with a sharp intake of breath.

  “What about the nestinar?” Milena asked. Ventsei’s grandfather performed the ritual every year on Saint Constantine and Helena’s Day.

  “The glowing coals are a bridge between the village and the patron saints and venerable ancestors,” he once told her, then winked. “Some hail me as a prophet, but most just call me crazy.”

  No one in Ventsei’s family went to the parties, so Tatko didn’t like Milena to visit Ventsei’s house.

  “He . . . left last night,” Milena’s father told her with a rattle of his silverware.

  “Did he disappear like a magic trick?” Milena asked. “Magicians can make people disappear with a poof of green smoke and nothing’s left but a rabbit.” She swung her legs against the rungs of her chair. “Maybe it was the ghosts. They steal people from their beds. Do you know where they take them?”

  “You’ll be late,” her mother interrupted. “And put on your coat.”

  “Yes, Mama.” Milena slid out of her chair and ran for the front door.

  “It’s not so important that I am well,” her father was saying in the kitchen, “but that my neighbor is worse off than I.”

  Milena pulled on the heavy wool coat, the one with fur around the collar. She strained her ears to hear what Mama would say.

  Normally that phrase—but that my neighbor is worse off than I—made Mama laugh, but she wasn’t laughing now.

  “Indeed, they are worse off this morning for certain.”

  Something in her voice prickled Milena’s throat, and she decided she didn’t want to hear anymore. She reached for her hat, scarf, and mittens of pink yarn. She shoved her slipper-shod feet into her overshoes and lifted her voice to bellow down the hall, “Ciao!”

  “What is wrong with your own Bulgarian, eh?”

  Milena called back, “Divizhdane!”

  “Have a good day!”

  Milena saw Ventsei trudging up the first hill. He’d gone on without her.

  “I thought of a new riddle!” she called as she struggled through the snow to catch up. They played this game every day on the walk to school. “As small as walnuts, they sit in a low place but reach to the skies. What am I?”

  He didn’t answer, and he didn’t stop to wait for her either. Instead, he plodded through the snow with his chin tucked against his chest and his coat collar turned up against the chill of the morning. She skippity-skipped up next to him and nudged him with her book bag.

  “Dobro utro, Ventsei.”

  Ventsei shook his head. “No, it’s not a good morning.” His nose was red just as it was every morning, but she could tell from the way he swallowed hard that he’d been crying.

  “What happened?” she asked, then she remembered the rubber-ball words her parents had exchanged. “Is it about your grandfather?”

  “I don’t want to say.”

  That was a first. Milena blinked at him. “Are you all right?”

  “No.”

  They plodded in silence for a few minutes. Only their boots, scuffing through the snow, murmured tsh-tsh-tsh to each other. Ventsei’s breath came i
n short pants and the crystals hung in the air long enough to freeze in ugly misshapen imps. He shoved them away and seemed to make up his mind about something. “The ghosts came last night and took him.”

  “I thought he left,” Milena said.

  “No, they stole him right from his bed.”

  The imps snapped and snarled and then dove headfirst into the snow banks that lined the road. Milena stopped and stared at her friend, but he kept marching forward, and she had to run to catch up.

  Milena’s coat blew open, and the icy wind rattled her bones. “Did you see it happen?”

  Ventsei shared a bed with his grandfather because their house was old and small and there wasn’t enough space for everyone.

  He jerked his chin up and then down. “They were all in dark suits, and they had guns.”

  “Now you’re exaggerating,” Milena said. It was a big word, but she used it with confidence, having been told on occasions too numerous to count by her parents and her teachers that she exaggerated too. “Ghosts are white. And they carry chains.”

  “Not these ones.” Ventsei came to a standstill in the snow; with his pale face and blank expression, Milena thought he looked more like a ghost than the ones he’d described. “He never thought they’d come to the house because of the stolinina—”

  Milena gasped at the idea of the ghosts rummaging through the icons, rearranging the votives, or maybe even tapping on the drum. The little chapel in the back of Ventsei’s house held the icons of saints and the sacred drum, and all the villagers considered it holy. “Did they touch anything in it?”

  “No.”

  She put an arm around his shoulders and squeezed him as hard as she dared. “Why didn’t you stay home today?”

  Ventsei shook his head. “My mother thought it would be better if I got out of the house and away from the trouble there.”

  “And your father?”

  “He didn’t say anything.” Ventsei’s hands doubled over into fists. “But I think he went to look for my grandfather.”

  Milena didn’t know what to say to that. She scuffed the snow with the tip of her boot. “Did you have any breakfast this morning?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Come on. Silviya’s window is open. Let’s get banitchki.”

  Ventsei hung back. “I don’t have any money with me this morning.”

  “I have coins.” She tugged him across the snow and to the blue-shuttered window. Lelya Silviya’s house leaned just a little to the left, like a tired old woman resting on the way home from the market. Its wooden shingles slanted this way and that, the plaster walls crumbled a bit around the edges. But Silviya’s oven was hot, and her wizened hands rolled the finest pastry in town.

  Milena reached up on tiptoe to slide her coins over the timber-framed windowsill. The smell of melted butter and hot baking pans set her stomach rumbling. “Two please, extra hot.”

  “Every morning you say that, Milena,” Silviya grumbled, “and every morning I give you a bantitza that is hot as the sun blazing down on Rose Valley in June. I am not a doddering old woman to forget such a thing. These just came out of the oven. Be careful you don’t burn your mouth. You too, Ventsei.”

  “Yes, Silviya,” they chorused as they each juggled a hot pastry from one mittened hand to the other. Steam rose off them like smoke from Tatko’s cigars, but they smelled infinitely better. Milena took a bite before she ought and, of course, scorched the roof of her mouth.

  Ventsei saw the water rise in her eyes and admonished, “You do that every time.”

  Milena huffed around the molten cheese and danced from foot to foot. “I know.”

  “Then why not wait a moment longer?” he scolded without any real heat. “And the answer to your riddle? Small as walnuts, sitting in a low place but reaching for the skies?”

  “Yes?” she said with a happy grin, glad to stand in a sure place for the first time since leaving the house.

  “Your eyes,” he answered. “Now one for you. What is the sweetest and the bitterest thing in the world?”

  She thought on it as they ambled down the street, taking careful bites. “Sugar is sweet, but not bitter. Maybe lemonade?”

  “Close, but no. It’s the tongue that is the sweetest and bitterest thing in the world.”

  Milena didn’t know what to say after that; she wanted to comfort her friend, to say something about her visit to Grandmother Bear and the ghosts that roamed the forests. Instead, she picked the phyllo-dough crumbs from her mittens as they neared the schoolyard.

  At the gate, Ventsei grasped her by the elbow. “Don’t say anything to anyone else, all right?”

  Milena lowered her voice. “About the ghosts?”

  He nodded. “It’s not safe right now. Nothing is.”

  “Maybe . . . ” Milena hugged her book bag to her chest. “Maybe we should ask Baba Metza. She’ll know where they’ve taken your grandfather.”

  Ventsei stared very hard at something overhead. Then he looked down the street and up. And finally he nodded. “Come on; let’s go.”

  They turned the opposite direction and headed for the forest. The ringing of the teacher’s bell gave chase but could not catch them.

  All the rain that had fallen during Grandmother Bear’s wedding had frozen in glittering rainbow-orbs that rolled and crunched underfoot as they picked their way through the forest. The trees were no longer bedecked with flower-garlands but reached skeletal arms toward the dour, gray sky.

  “Baba Metza?” Melina called as they entered the clearing that was her bedroom. “Are you here?”

  “I am.” There was a rustle in the frost-speckled bushes, and then she ambled in on all fours. At first Melina thought the snow clung to the shaggy silk of her coat, but when Grandmother Bear got closer, Melina could see that white hairs threaded through the brown. Swirls of snow started at the corners of Baba Metza’s lovely dark eyes then whorled over her shoulders and down her back.

  Melina’s hand twitched toward Grandmother Bear’s fur, but such a thing wouldn’t be polite unless invited. She twisted her hand behind her back instead. “Are you quite all right, Baba Metza?”

  “Just a little tired.” Grandmother Bear settled back on her haunches and looked them over. “What brings you here in the daylight?”

  “Ventsei has a problem.”

  Grandmother Bear’s shaggy head swung towards the boy. “Is that so?”

  Ventsei didn’t answer; he was trying too hard to keep the tears from falling, so Melina answered for him. “His grandfather was taken by the ghosts.”

  Grandmother Bear didn’t look surprised. Just sad. “Yes, I hear the whispers on the wind.”

  Ventsei found his voice. “Where did they take him?”

  “The bees are sleeping, but even in their sleep they whisper to me.” Grandmother Bear’s ears twitched toward the wild beehive ensconced in the oak tree. The buzz of a thousand creatures snoring rose louder for a moment, then faded back. “Far away, little one. And your father has joined him.”

  “Oh, no.” Milena covered her mouth with both hands, but Ventsei only looked grim about the mouth.

  “I thought that might happen,” he said to Milena’s surprise. “Can you ask the bees, Baba Metza, what I should do?”

  Milena listened again, squeezing her eyes shut and concentrating very hard. She heard the ice crackling on leaves and the gray of the sky and even the promise of grass under the snow, but she could not make out the conversation between Grandmother Bear and the hive-mind.

  “Even the bees don’t know the answer to that,” Grandmother Bear finally said. “But they bid you pile the logs high and burn them down to glowing coals. Then dance across the embers. And when you go into the fire-trance, you will be able to hear the voices of your father and grandfather. And they will tell you what to do next, nestinar.”

  “Ventsei . . . the nestinar?” Milena said. “But . . . he’s too young to be the fire-dancer!”

  “I am not!” he blazed at
her. “I’m nearly nine and older than you!”

  “Only by two months,” she argued.

  “Ah,” Grandmother Bear held up her paw, “but his soul is far older than yours, Milena-my-love.”

  “How can his soul be older than mine?”

  “He has heard more, seen more, knows more.” Grandmother Bear stood up on her back legs and reached into the hive. Her massive paw extracted a chunk of honeycomb that she broke into two dripping-gold pieces. She handed one to each child, but her eyes were always on Ventsei. “He understands the changes coming better than you, with your head full of fairytales and loveliness.”

  “You make that sound like a bad thing.” Milena moved honey and wax around in her mouth. “I’d rather my head be full of nice things than ugly ones.”

  Ventsei shifted his honeycomb to one hand and licked his fingers. “I would too.”

  “As would we all.” Grandmother Bear shook her head; the swirls of white spread down her back to meet the snow on the ground. The flakes began to fall, thick and fast. Milena blinked them off of her lashes as fast as she could. The clearing was dusted with powdered sugar snow and icicles clung to Grandmother Bear’s fur.

  “Baba Metza?” Milena could hardly see her for the white.

  “Children, you must stack the wood high and let the fire burn bright . . . ” Grandmother Bear said as a bearded man—Father Time—appeared between the oldest of the oak trees. Grandmother Bear nodded to him. “One moment more, my love.”

  “We must leave,” he told her. “It’s not safe to linger here. I have heard gypsy bells in the woods, and I will not let them catch you.”

  Milena glared at him. “Where are you going?”

  “Deeper into the woods, further up the mountain.” All the rich brown of Grandmother Bear’s fur was gone now. Against the falling snow, it was nearly impossible to see her. “Closer in time to spring and closer to the stars in the heavens.”

  “Don’t go!” Milena started to run forward, but Ventsei caught her by the back of her coat. “I don’t want you to go.”