Very Best of Charles de Lint, The (27 page)

I had always known, but I had chosen to forget. I had let the chance for survival seduce me.

“
Yekka buliasa nashti beshes pe done gratsende
,” was what Bebee Yula used to tell us when we were children. With one behind you cannot sit on two horses. It was an old saying, a warning to those Rom who thought they could be both Rom and
Gaje
, but instead were neither.

I had ridden two horses these past few years, but all my cleverness served me ill in the end, for they took Budo from me all the same; took him, stole his life and left me with his cold, pale corpse that would rise from its death tonight to be forever a part of their world and lost to mine.

For see, the
shilmullo
have no art.

The muses that inspire the living can’t find lodging in their dead flesh, can’t spark the fires of genius in their cold hearts. The
shilmullo
can mimic, but they can’t create. There are no Rembrandts counted in their ranks, no Picassos. No Yeats, no Steinbecks. No Mozarts, no Dylans. For artwork, for music, for plays and films and poetry and books, they need the living—Rom or
Gaje
.

I’m not the best musician in this new world that the
shilmullo
tore from the grave of the old, but I have something not one of them can ever possess, except vicariously: I have the talent to compose. I have written hundreds of manuscripts in honour of my patron, Brian Stansford—yes, that Stansford, the President of Stansford Chemicals—in every style of music. There are sonatas bearing his name and various music hall songs; jazz improvisations, three concertos, one symphony and numerous airs in the traditional style of the Rom; rap music, pop songs, heavy metal anthems.

I have accompanied him to dinners and galas and openings where my performances and music have always gained him the envy of his peers.

In return, like any pet, I was given safety—both for myself and my family. Every member of the Petalo clan has the Stansford tattoo on their left brow, an ornate capital “S,” decorated with flowered vines with a tiny wolf’s paw print enclosed in the lower curve of the letter. Sixteen Petalos could walk freely in the city and countryside with that mark on their brow.

Only Bebee Yula, my aunt, refused the tattoo.

“You do this for us,” she told me, “but I will not be an obligation on any member of my clan. What you do is wrong. We must forget the boundaries that lie between ourselves and the
Gaje
and be united against our common enemy. To look out only for yourself, your family, makes you no better than the
shilmullo
themselves.”

“There is no other way,” I had explained. “Either I do this, or we die.”

“There are worse things than death,” she told me. “What you mean to do is one of them. You will lose your soul, Kata. You will become as cold in your heart as those you serve.”

I tried to explain it better, but she would not argue further with me at that time. She had the final word. She was an old woman—in her eighties, Papa said—but she killed three
shilmullo
before she herself was slain. We all knew she was brave, but not one of us learned the lesson she’d given her life to tell us. Sixteen Petalos allowed the blood-red Stansford tattoo to be placed on their brows.

But now there are only fifteen of us, for protected though he was, three
shilmullo
stole Budo from me. Stansford himself spoke to me, explaining how it was an unfortunate accident. They were young, Budo’s murderers, they hadn’t seen the tattoo until it was too late. Perhaps I would now do as he had previously suggested and bring my family to live in one of his protected enclaves.

“We are Rom,” I had said.

He gave me a blank look. “I’m a busy man, Kathy,” he said, calling me by my
nav gajikano
—my non-Gypsy name. “Would you get to the point?”

It should have explained everything. To be Rom was to live in all places; without freedom of movement, we might as well be dead. I wanted to explain it to him, but the words wouldn’t come.

Stansford regarded me, his flesh white in the fluorescent light of his office, small sparks of red fire deep in his pupils. If I had thought he would have any sympathy, I was sorely mistaken.

“Let Taylor know when you’ve picked a new mate,” was all he said, “and we’ll have him—or her—tattooed.”

Then he bent down to his paperwork as though I was no longer present. I had been dismissed. I sat for a long moment, ignored, finally learning to hate him, before I left his office and went back downtown to the small apartment in a deserted tenement where Budo and I had been staying this week.

Budo lay stretched out on newspapers before the large window in the living room where Taylor and another of Stansford’s men had left him two days ago. I knelt beside the corpse and looked down at what had been my husband. His throat had been savaged, but otherwise he looked as peaceful as though he was sleeping. His eyes were closed. A lock of his dark hair fell across his brow. I pushed it aside, laid a hand on his cold flesh.

He was dead, but not dead. He had been killed at three A.M. Tonight at the same time, three days after his death, his eyes would open and if I was still here, he would not remember me. They never remember anything until that initial thirst is slaked.

His skin was almost translucent. Pale, far too pale. Where was the dark-skinned Budo I had married?

Gone. Dead. All that remained of him was this bitter memory of pale flesh.

“I was wrong,” I said.

I spoke neither to myself, nor to the corpse. My voice was for the ghost of my aunt, Bebee Yula, gone to the land of shadows. Budo would never take that journey—not if I let him wake.

I lifted my gaze to look out through the window at the street below. Night lay dark on its pavement.
Shilmullo
don’t need streetlights and what humans remain in the city know better than to walk out-of-doors once the sun has gone down. The emptiness I saw below echoed endlessly inside me.

I rose to my feet and crossed the room to where our two canvas backpacks lay against the wall. My fiddlecase lay between them. I opened it and took out the fiddle. When I ran my thumb across the strings, the notes seemed to be swallowed by the room. They had no ring, no echo.

Budo’s death had stolen their music.

For a long moment I held the fiddle against my chest, then I took the instrument by its neck and smashed it against the wall. The strings popped free as the body shattered, the end of one of them licking out to sting my cheek. It drew blood. I took the fiddle neck back to where Budo’s corpse lay and knelt beside him again. Raising it high above my head, I brought the jagged end down, plunging

it into his chest—

There!

The corpse bucked as though I’d struck it with an electric current. Its eyes flared open, gaze locking on mine. It was a stranger’s gaze. The corpse’s hands scrabbled weakly against my arms, but my leather jacket kept me safe from its nails. It was too soon for him to have reached the full power of a
shilmullo
. His hands were weak. His eyes could glare, but not bend me to his will.

It took longer for the corpse to die than I had thought it would.

When it finally lay still, I leaned back on my heels, leaving the fiddle’s neck sticking up out of the corpse’s chest. I tried to summon tears—my sorrow ran deep; I had yet to cry—but the emptiness just gathered more thickly inside me. So I simply stared at my handiwork, sickened by what I saw, but forcing myself to look so that I would have the courage to finish the night’s work.

Bebee Yula had been a wealth of old sayings. “Where you see Rom,” she had said once, “there is freedom. Where you do not, there is no freedom.”

I had traded our freedom for tattoos. Those tattoos did not mean safety, but
prikaza
—misfortune. Bad luck. We were no longer Rom, my family and I, but only Bebee Yula had seen that.

Until now.

* * *

I had a recital the following night—at a gala of Stansford’s at the Brewer Theatre. There was a seating capacity of five hundred and, knowing Stansford, he would make certain that every seat was filled.

I walked from the tenement with my fiddlecase in hand. A new piece I’d composed for Stansford last week was to be the finale, so I didn’t have to be at the theatre until late, but I was going early. I stopped only once along the way, to meet my brother Vedel. I had explained my needs to him the day before.

“It’s about time,” had been his only response.

I remembered Bebee Yula telling me she would not be an obligation on any member of her clan and wondered if the rest of my family agreed with her the way that Vedel seemed to. I had always told myself I did what I did for them; now I had learned that it had been for myself.

I wanted to live. I could not bear to have my family unprotected.

Many of the legends that tell of the
shilmullo
are false or embroidered, but this was true: there are only three ways to kill them. By beheading. By a stake in the heart. And by fire.

What Vedel brought me was an explosive device he’d gotten from a member of the local
Gaje
freedom fighters. It was small enough to fit in my empty fiddlecase, but with a firepower large enough to bring down the house. Five hundred would burn in the ensuing inferno. It would not be enough, but it was all I could do.

I embraced Vedel, there on the street, death lying in its case at my feet.

“We are Rom,” he whispered into my hair. “We were meant to be free.”

I nodded. Slowly stepping back from him, I picked up the case and went on alone to the theatre.

I would not return.

* * *

Let it be recounted in the
swato
that while Kata Petalo was first and foremost a fool, she meant well.

Even a fool can learn wisdom, but oh, the lesson is hard.

Mr. Truepenny’s Book Emporium and Gallery

The constellations were consulted for advice, but

no one understood them

—Elias Canetti

My name’s Sophie and my friend Jilly says I have faerie blood. Maybe she’s right.

Faerie are supposed to have problems dealing with modern technology and I certainly have trouble with anything technological. The simplest appliances develop horrendous problems when I’m around. I can’t wear a watch because they start to run backwards, unless they’re digital; then they just flash random numbers as though the watch’s inner workings have taken to measuring fractals instead of time. If I take a subway or bus, it’s sure to be late. Or it’ll have a new driver who takes a wrong turn and we all get lost.

This kind of thing actually happens to me. Once I got on the #3 at the Kelly Street Bridge and somehow, instead of going downtown on Lee, we ended up heading north into Foxville.

I also have strange dreams.

I used to think they were the place that my art came from, that my subconscious was playing around with images, tossing them up in my sleep before I put them down on canvas or paper. But then a few months ago I had this serial dream that ran on for a half-dozen nights in a row, a kind of fairy tale that was either me stepping into Faerie and therefore real within its own perimeters—which is what Jilly would like me to believe—or it was just my subconscious making another attempt to deal with the way my mother abandoned my father and me when I was a kid. I don’t really know which I believe anymore, because I still find myself going back to that dream world from time to time and meeting the people I first met there.

I even have a boyfriend in that place, which probably tells you more about my ongoing social status than it does my state of mind.

Rationally, I know it’s just a continuation of that serial dream. And I’d let it go at that, except it feels so damn real. Every morning when I wake up from the latest installment, my head’s filled with memories of what I’ve done that seem as real as anything I do during the day—sometimes more so.

But I’m getting off on a tangent. I started off meaning to just introduce myself, and here I am, giving you my life story. What I really wanted to tell you about was Mr. Truepenny.

The thing you have to understand is that I made him up. He was like one of those invisible childhood friends, except I deliberately created him. We weren’t exactly well-off when I was growing up. When my mother left us, I ended up being one of those latchkey kids. We didn’t live in the best part of town; Upper Foxville is a rough part of the city and it could be a scary place for a little girl who loved art and books and got teased for that love by the other neighbourhood kids who couldn’t even be bothered to learn how to read. When I got home from school, I went straight in and locked the door.

I’d get supper ready for my dad, but there were always a couple of hours to kill in between my arriving home and when he finished work—longer if he had to work late. We didn’t have a TV, so I read a lot, but we couldn’t afford to buy books. On Saturday mornings, we’d go to the library and I’d take out my limit—five books—which I’d finish by Tuesday, even if I tried to stretch them out.

To fill the rest of the time, I’d draw on shopping bags or the pads of paper that Dad brought me home from work, but that never seemed to occupy enough hours. So one day I made up Mr. Truepenny.

I’d daydream about going to his shop. It was the most perfect place that I could imagine: all dark wood and leaded glass, thick carpets and club chairs with carved wooden-based reading lamps strategically placed throughout. The shelves were filled with leather-bound books and folios, and there was a small art gallery in the back.

The special thing about Mr. Truepenny’s shop was that all its contents only existed within its walls. Shakespeare’s
The Storm of Winter
.
The Chapman’s Tale
by Chaucer.
The Blissful Stream
by William Morris. Steinbeck’s companion collection to
The Long Valley
,
Salinas
.
North Country Stoic
by Emily Brontë.

None of these books existed, of course, but being the dreamy sort of kid that I was, not only could I daydream of visiting Mr. Truepenny’s shop, but I could actually read these unwritten stories. The gallery in the back of the shop was much the same. There hung works by the masters that saw the light of day only in my imagination. Van Goghs and Monets and Da Vincis. Rossettis and Homers and Cezannes.