Eyes Like Sky And Coal And Moonlight (22 page)

We buried her beside Lake Sammamish, over in Marymoor Park, near the communal gardens and the off-leash area, taking the thin armful of twigs and spindly roots in the dead of night to lay it to rest it where I figured she would see people daily. Last time I was there, a thin, weedy tree had sprouted there among the blackberry tangles in the shadow of the white-railed fence.

Jonah was more shaken than I. I’ve held onto the Box Elder land to spite Morton-Thiokol, but we’re still going next month to Paris, to see if I can coax the shadow from his eyes. Morton-Thiokol Corporation may not have come through for us or for Deirdre, but the Thai sapphires did last week.

“
Eagle-haunted Lake Sammamish” is a self-indulgent story in that it draws on the relationship between my spouse and I, who do live beside an eagle-haunted lake. I also did buy land in Utah on Ebay, but unfortunately there were no dryads on it, nor has a large corporation tried to purchase it as of this date.

EHLS originally appeared in a lovely small magazine,
Shimmer
, in 2007.

Sugar

They line up before Laurana, forty baked-clay heads atop forty bodies built of metal cylinders. Every year she casts and fires new heads to replace those lost to weather, the wild, or simple erosion. She rarely replaces the metal bodies. They are scuffed and battered, over a century old.

Every morning, the island sun beating down on her pale scalp, she stands on the maison’s porch with the golems before her. Motionless. Expressionless.

She chants. The music and the words fly into the clay heads and keep them thinking. The golems are faster just after they have been charged. They move more lightly, with more precision. With more joy. Without the daily chant they could go perhaps three days at most, depending on the heaviness of their labors.

This month is cane-planting season. She delegates the squads of laborers and sets some to carrying buckets from the spring to water the new cane shoots while others dig furrows. The roof needs reshingling, but it can wait until planting season is past. As the golems shuffle off, she pauses to water the flowering bushes along the front of the house. Placing her fingertips together, she conjures a tiny rain cloud, wringing moisture from the air. Warm drops collect on the leaves, rolling down to darken pink and gray bark to red and black.

Inside the house is quiet. The three servants are in the kitchen, cooking breakfast and gossiping. She comes up to the doorway like a ghost, half fearing what she will hear. Nothing but small, inconsequential things. Jeanette says when she takes her freedom payment, she will ask for a barrel of rum, and go sell it in the street, three silver pieces a cup, over at Sant Tigris, the pirate city. She has a year to go in the sorceress’s service.

Daniel has been here a year and has four more to go. He is still getting used to the golems, still eyes them warily when he thinks no one can see him. He is thin and wiry, and his face is pockmarked and scarred by the Flame Plague. He was lucky to escape the Old Continent with his life. Lucky to live here now, and he knows it.

Tante Isabelle has been with her since the woman was thirteen. Now she’s eighty-five, frail as one of the butterflies that move through the bougainvillea. A black beak’s snap, and the butterfly will be gone. She sits peeling cubes of ginger, which she will boil with sugar and lime juice to make sweet syrup that can flavor tea or conjured ice.

“
If you sell rum, everyone will think you are selling what lies between your thighs as well!” she says, eying Jeanette.

Jeanette shrugs and tosses her head. “Maybe I’d make even more that way!” she says, ignoring Daniel’s blush.

Tante Isabelle looks up to see Laurana standing there. The old woman’s smile is sweet as sunshine, sweet as sugar. The sorceress stands in the doorway, and the three servants smile at her, as they always do, at their beautiful mistress. No thought ever crosses their minds of betraying or displeasing her. It never occurs to them to wonder why.

Christina is a pirate. She wears bright calicos stolen from Indian traders and works on a ship that travels in lazy shark-like loops around the Lesser and Greater Southern Isles, looking for strays from the treasure fleet and Duchy merchants. The merchants, based in the southernmost New Continent port of Tabat, prey on the more impoverished colonies, taking the majority of their crops in return for food and tools. The treasure fleet is part of a vast corrupt network, fed by springs of gold. This is what Christina tells Laurana, how she justifies her profession of blood and watery death.

When Christina comes to Sant Tigres, she goes to the inn and sends one of the pigeons the innkeeper keeps on the roof. It flies to Laurana’s window. She leaves her maison and sails to the port in a small skiff, standing all the way from one island to the other, sea winds whipping around her. She focuses her will and asks the air sylphs, who she normally does not converse with, to bear her to her lover’s scarlet and orange clad arms.

Tiny golden hoops, each set with a charm created by Laurana, jingle in Christina’s right ear. One is a tiny glass fish, protection against drowning, and the other is a silver lightning bolt to ward off storms.

Christina likes to order large meals when she comes ashore. Her crew hunts the unsettled islands and catches the wild cattle and hogs so abundant there to eke out their income. They sell the excess fat and hides to the smugglers that fill these islands. So she is not meat-starved now, but wants sugary treats, confections of butter and sweet, washed down with raw swallows of rum, here in harbor, where she can be safely drunk.

“
Pretty farmer,” she says now. She touches the sorceress’s hair, which was black as Christina’s once, but which has gone silver with age, despite her unlined skin and her clear, brilliant blue eyes.

“
Pretty pirate,” Laurana replies. She spends the evening buying drinks for Christina and her crew. The pirates count on her deep pockets, rich with gold from selling sugar. Sometimes they try to sell her things plundered on their travels, ritual components, scrolls, or trinkets laden with spells. The only present Christina ever brought her was a waxed and knotted cord strung with knobby, pearly shells. It hangs on her bedchamber wall where the full moon’s light can polish it each month.

Laurana brings Christina presents: fresh strawberries and fuzzy nectarines from her greenhouse. In Sant Tigres, she trades sugar for bushels of chocolate beans and packets of spices. Someday, when circumstances have changed, she would like Christina to spend a day or two at the plantation. Jeannette would outdo herself with the meals, flaky pastries and flowers of spun sugar.

It is time to send for a new cook, she thinks. It will take a few months to post the message and then for the new arrival to appear, and even more time for Jeannette to train her in the ways of the kitchen and how to tell the golems to fetch and carry.

Someone leans forward to ask her a question. It is a new member of Christina’s crew, curious about the rumors of her plantation.

“
Human slaves are doomed to failure,” she says. “Look what happened on Banbur—discontented servants burned the fields and overtook the town there, turning their masters and mistresses out into the underbrush or setting them to labor.

“
And,” she added, “Whites do badly in this climate. I can take care of myself and my household, but it is easier to not worry about my automatons growing ill or dying.”

Although they did die, after a fashion. They wore away, their features blurred with erosion. They cracked and crumbled—first the noses, then the lips and brows, their eyes becoming pitted shadows, their molded hair a mottling of cracks.

Time to redecorate soon, she thought. She did it every few decades. She would send a letter and eventually a company representative would show up, consult with her, and then vanish back to Tabat, soon replaced by rolls of new wallpaper and carpets, crates of china, and porcelain wash basins. She looks at Christina and pictures her against blue silk sheets, olive skin gleaming in candle glow.

Later they fall into bed together and she stays there for two hours before she rises, despite her lover’s muffled, sleepy protests, and takes her skiff back to her own island. Overhead the sky is a black bowl set with glittering layers of stars, grainy as sandstone and striated with light. Moonlight dapples the waves, so dark and impenetrable that they look like polished jet.

At home, she goes upstairs. A passage cuts across the house, running north to south to take advantage of the trade wind, and open squares at the top of each room partition let the wind through. Britomart’s is the northernmost room.

The air smells of dawn and sugar. Sugar, sweet and translucent as Britomart’s skin, the color of snowdrifts, laid on cool white linen. The other woman’s ivory hair, which matches Laurana’s, is spread out across the pillow.

Tonight her face is unmasked. Laurana does not flinch away from the pitted eyes, the face more eroded than any golem’s. Outside in the courtyard, the black and white deathbirds hop up and down in the branches, making the crimson flowers shake in the early morning light.

“
Pleasant trip?” Britomart says.

Laurana’s answer is noncommittal. Sometimes her old lover is kind, but she is prone to lashing out in sudden anger. Laurana does not blame her for that. Her death is proving neither painless nor particularly short, but it is coming, nonetheless. A month? A year? Longer? Laurana isn’t sure. How long have they been locked in this conversation? It has been less than six months so far, she knows, but it seems like forever.

She goes to her room. The bed is turned down and a hot brick has been slipped between the sheets to warm them. A bouquet of ginger sits on the table near the lamp, sending out its bold perfume.

She lies in bed and fails to sleep. Britomart’s face floats before her in the darkness. She is unsure if she is dreaming or really seeing it. She wonders if she remembers it as worse than it really is. But she doesn’t.

Two weeks later, the pigeon at her window.

Christina has a bandage around her upper arm, nothing much, she says, carelessness in a battle. She pushes Laurana away, though apologetically. Rather than sleep together, they stay awake and talk. It is their first conversation of any length. Two hours after their first meeting, in the Sant Tigres market, they had fallen into bed together, four months ago.

“
So she’s sick, your friend?” Christina says.

“
You were raised here in the islands,” Laurana answers. “You don’t know what it was like in the Old Country. In the space of three years, sorcerers destroyed two continents. Everyone decided to make their power play at once. They called dragons up out of the earth and set them killing. The Flame Plague moved from town to town. Entire villages went up like candles. Millions died, and the earth itself was charred and burned, magic stripped from it. Some fought with elementals, and others with summoned winds and fogs, but others with poisoned magic.”

She pours herself more wine. Christina’s skin is paler than usual, but the lantern light in the room gleams on it as though it were flower petals.

“
And you were here…” Christina prompts.

“
I was here in the islands, preparing to go. I heard that Britomart had blundered into someone else’s trap and was dying of it. I brought her down. The magic is clean here, and there are serendipities and artifacts. I hoped to heal her.”

“
But that hasn’t happened.”

The wine is mulled with cinnamon and clove and sugar that has not completely dissolved, a gritty sweet residue at the cup’s bottom.

“
No,” she says. “That hasn’t happened.”

Christina smuggles Laurana onto her ship while it’s at harbor. She and three other sailors are supposed to be watching it. Laurana sits with them drinking shots of rum until the yellow moon swings itself up over the prow, its face broad and grinning as a baby’s. It reminds her of Britomart and her tears well up. She savors the moment, for magic removes almost all capacity to weep.

She nudges Christina and points to the distant reef. Out on the rocks, mermaids cluster, fishy eyes shining in the moonlight, fleshy gills pulsing like tidepool creatures shuttered close by the light. She kisses Christina as they watch.

Eventually, the two climb into Christina’s bunk for frantic, slippery, drunken lovemaking, careful of the still healing arm.

She leaves in the small hours, past the stares of the mermaids. It is still planting season and the golems work and night.

When she first came to the island she tried yellow-flowered sea-island cotton. Then indigo and ginger. With the arrival from the Mage’s College of Tabat of schematics for three-roller mills and copper furnace pots, sugar cane has become the crop of choice. Her workers perform the labor that must be undertaken day and night when the cane is ready to harvested and transmuted into sugar and molasses. She makes rum too, and ships barrels of it along with the molasses casks and thick cones of molded muscovado sugar to Sant Tigres, which consumes or trades all she can supply.