Two and Twenty Dark Tales (36 page)

Ned relieved her from her watch, but she sat at his side and didn’t return to the tarp.

“If a ship passes . . .” She tried to swallow, but she had almost no saliva. “How do we signal?”

He pointed to the supply box. “Flare gun.”

They were all using few words, saving energy, avoiding the pain of cracked lips and thick tongues.

The supplies in that box had to be years old. The crackers had been stale, the tins slightly bulging and filled with odd-tasting fruit. She let her eyelids scrape across her irises and slept, sitting there next to Ned, hoping that her first thoughts about the flare gun were not the right ones. It would work. It had to.

Then one day, Winker didn’t wake her for her midmorning watch, and she knew it was because he’d fallen asleep. Before the sun arrived at its highest point in the sky, she crawled to him, shook him, and took her place.

Even though she struggled to stay awake and scan the horizon, she must have dozed because the sudden and harsh rocking of the lifeboat brought her out of dark dreams. She blinked and looked around her, thinking that if she didn’t hold to the side she might be washed overboard. A wake flip-flopped them in the water. Her mind was slow from dehydration, but she tried to piece together what this meant. Then she got it. There had to be something big that was making those choppy waves. She looked ahead and to both sides. Only emptiness. The same as she’d seen for days. Then she looked to the stern, and there it was. Looming like a great white mirage. A ship.

Miranda stood, shouted, waved her arms. She grabbed up a blanket and flapped it in the air.

Winker and Ned scrambled to her side. Ned opened the supply box. He held the flare gun so it pointed at the sky and pulled the trigger. It fired, sending a red streak into the air. He waited. Staring after the ship, he gritted his teeth. “Come around, damn you.” He fired again, but this time the flare didn’t discharge. Again he pulled the trigger, but nothing happened.

Ned hurled the gun back into the supply box, sank back against the boat, and buried his head in his arms.

Miranda and Winker watched the great white ship become smaller and smaller, until they could no longer see it.

That night they slept apart, shivering in despair. In the morning, Miranda stayed under her blanket, waiting for Winker to call her to her watch and dreading another day of seeing nothing—not a speck of land, not anything resembling a ship. It wasn’t until the sun dipped low in the West that she sat up and realized Winker had never awakened her.

“Winker!” She crawled to his blanket and pulled it back. He wasn’t there. She nudged Ned awake. “Where is he?” she asked when he opened his eyes and looked up at her.

It took a moment for him to understand what she was asking, then he pushed himself up and looked around, as if he expected to find Winker at any moment. “He left us,” he said before lying down, curling his knees to his chest and pulling the blanket over his face.

Loneliness swallowed her, sending her into a pit of hopelessness like nothing she’d ever experienced. She’d thought the day their farmhouse furniture was carted off by strangers would always be her worst one. Then she’d thought the day her dad left with one suitcase and a grim goodbye would be her worst one. She’d never expected to have something more terrible to face. She longed to cry, but she had no tears. She longed to drink the sea dry, but when she tasted her lips with the tip of her tongue, the saltiness reminded her just how terrible even one sip would be.

Sleep was her only escape, so she lay down next to Ned’s bundled form and closed her eyes. She set her mind free and—as if from a great distance, maybe as far away as the moon—looked down on the two of them, the tiny boat and the vast sea. Then she dreamed of Iowa, where the sea only existed in the movies and hot-buttered corn and cool water in tall glasses were taken for granted. At first light, she stared into another cold, clear day, surprised and not a little disappointed to find herself adrift on a sea again and not standing on the Iowa soil of her dreams.

Ned hadn’t moved since last night. She placed her hand on his chest, then snatched it back when she couldn’t feel the beat of his heart. Her quick movement made her dizzy, and for a moment she thought he’d stirred. When her head cleared, she touched him again, feeling for some spark of life. There was none, and a rush of terror shot through her.

Missing the closeness of another, she put her ear against his chest, and that was how she stayed—pressed to Ned’s stillness, her eyes closed, their pile of two growing colder with each beat of her lonely heart.

When she felt the day slip into night, she rolled onto her back and found the moon. She struggled to sit, and when she looked around her she found herself in a world of two moons—one in the sky and one drenched in the sea. Now she was ready to pray to be taken back to the land of the living, and she had to do that before she could no longer form the words.

She said it once, her tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth. “Please bring me home. Please bring all of us home.”

Had either of the moons heard her? If one had, would it find her when it left the night sky or when it left the sea in search of souls? Would at least one of them gather Blakie and Winker and Ned, too?

She prayed one of them would, and then lay down again and went back to thinking about beautiful things, like sweet water. After a while, the boat stopped being a boat and became a cradle, the cradle that had rocked her and her mother and her grandmother. The cradle that used to be tucked into the back corner of the attic in the Iowa farmhouse, waiting for the next generation. Sold, she remembered. Sold at auction. There would be no cradle for her children, so she shouldn’t be worried about not having children. Blakie would see the logic in that. She’d have to tell him.

When the darkness came for her, the cradle rocked her to sleep and the misty sea slapped along the sides. Out of that darkness, she felt Ned’s hand reach for hers. She’d known he wouldn’t desert her. He’d saved her once, hadn’t he? Trusting him again, she let herself be pulled to her knees, a place of prayer. Or was she simply too shaky to stand? She clutched the side of the lifeboat, and, with a smile, said the word as if it was two.

“Life. Boat.”

And then she tumbled into the dewy sea, where the moon watched from above and waited below. Where starry herring nibbled her toes and fanned their silver against her skin. Where Blakie mumbled his perfect math solutions, Winker recited the moon prayers of Eskimos, and Ned Parker offered drops of clear, cool water for her tongue.

– The End –

The Lion and the Unicorn: Part the Second

Nancy Holder

The Lion and the Unicorn

Were fighting for the crown;

The Lion beat the Unicorn

All about the town.

Some gave them white bread

And some gave them brown;

Some gave them plum cake

And drummed them out of town!

– Mother Goose

O
N
the eve of Susana’s seventeenth birthday, a shooting star appeared in the sky and hung there like a candle. Some called it an auspicious omen. Others said it foretold the death of someone important. Susana knew there were some who wished on that star for the king to die.

The people longed for an end to the burning times. It seemed that the more witches the king tortured and killed, the more witches he found. The sheer numbers were beginning to alarm his subjects, but how could one speak against their sovereign lord in such matters? James himself had written much on the divine right of kings. God Himself had anointed him and placed him to rule over his subjects.

For Susana, the star was not a star at all. It was her angel, and she was terrified to see it. She knew very well what its appearance signified: the time had come.

She was to kill the king.

No one else had seen the things that “Robin Fletcher” had seen. No one else knew that most of the accused witches the king ordered thrown into the dungeons were innocents. Nor did anyone know that His Majesty took real pleasure in forcing them to tell lies in order to spare themselves further torment. He liked to hurt them. The pleasure he found in crushing bones and searing flesh was inhuman.

As far as she could tell, the king was himself inhuman.

She remembered the first time she had seen the green mist rise from an old hag in the dungeon. She knew it now for the glow of magic. How some came by it, she was not sure, but it was powerful, and capable of fearsome things. She had spied on the witches in their dungeons, and watched them heal each other’s wounds, and summon vermin to bring little bits of food. Of a dark night, she had seen a witch swear to her cellmates that she would gather the coven to curse the king’s soul to hell, then disappear forever.

Susana had tried to deny what she had heard and seen in the torture chamber, and what she had seen in the king’s black eyes. She tried to tell herself that the streams of green light were attacks on the king, and he was risking his life each time he put a witch to the rack.

But she had to admit what she knew: The king was stealing the magic from the witches, and not for the sake of his people.

King James I, the Unicorn, was a warlock, and he had boasted to his most recent victim that soon he would have amassed enough power as to be unstoppable.

“And then shall my master come forth, and I shall give him my crown, and bow down in triumph before him,” he had told the tormented woman. “And no army on this earth will stop us.”

Fear not
, the knock upon Susana’s heart now called out as she looked up at the star. For while no army on earth could stop the king, “Robin Fletcher” could.

She and she alone served him his wine and bread.

***

“Robin?” the king called impatiently.

Near the entrance to the torture chamber, Susana held the tiny vial of poison over the goblet of wine. She had been promised that it would be quick. Quick for the king, yes. But the punishment for traitors was horrible. Her body would be pulled apart, and all her organs yanked out, and burned. And she would then be beheaded, and she would not lie in hallowed ground.

Fear not
, said the voice. It came from inside her. She felt the tapping inside her heart, and shut her eyes tightly. Then she poured the poison into the goblet and placed it on the tray with two slices of bread, one brown, and one white. She put the vial into her doublet and picked up the tray, and her torch.

The pressure inside her heart seemed to grow, expanding until a warm glow hummed through all her veins. But it couldn’t thaw the icy terror that made her shake as she headed down stairs and into the passageway toward the torture chamber. She stopped once, then was urged on. Stopped a second time. Moved forward.

She saw the green light and heard the screams of an old woman. She heard low laughter—the king’s—and clutched the goblet tightly. She was so afraid that she considered drinking it herself.

“Robin?” the king called.

Her angel must have moved her limbs, for Susana was paralyzed with fright. Forward, then. Slowly.

“I’m here, Your Majesty,” she said, facing him. Green mist was soaking into his skin. His victim was lying in a pile on the floor.

He held out his hand for the cup. Her angel put her hand around the goblet and held it out to him.

“Is it good wine?” he asked her.

“The best, sire,” her angel made her say.

He took the cup and raised it to his lips. Looked at her steadily over the rim. She opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came out.

Then he threw it in her face, grabbed her, and dragged her to the empty rack. She was so stunned, she didn’t fight back—or couldn’t—as he put a manacle around one wrist, then the other. She could only gasp as he fastened the restraints around her ankles.

“Murderer!” he screamed. “Did you think I wouldn’t
know
?”

He snapped his fingers, and an image appeared in Susana’s line of vision. She saw herself putting the poison in the wine. She wanted to deny it, or to lie—say it was an elixir for his health—but she didn’t have time as he hit her, hard, across the face.

“You’ve known,” he said. “For months, you’ve known, and you never told a soul. No one will miss you. No one will come to help you now.”

She felt something
hot
against her leg, and then it burned with unimaginable pain. She screamed.

It happened again.

She screamed again.

He laughed, and bent over her. His eyes were black, and she saw the horns rising up on his head. Writhing, she tried to look away, but he clasped her under the chin and forced her to look at him.

“Such a pious man he was,” the king said. “On his knees every dawn, praying for Scotland, and then for England. But we knew we could take him. And we have.”

She gasped. “Sire, help me,” she managed to grind out. “My king.”

“We’ve buried him deep,” said the king—or the spirits, or demons, pretending to be the king. “He’s nearly gone.”

More pain surrounded her. She couldn’t even scream this time.

It is not the king. It never was
, she thought hazily, although the ability to think was leaving her. Everything seared and burned and
hurt
.

“You’re the only one who knows,” said the demons inside the king.

And more pain.

And more.

Where are you?
she cried out to her angel.
How can you let this happen?

Then there was a knocking in her heart; and the voice whispering,
“Fear not.”
And as her eyes fluttered, barely open, she was enveloped in a haze of white light.

She heard the king scream, and saw the white light rise from her body and hover above his. He threw his head back at the sight of it and began to scream.

“No!”

He batted at it with hands that turned into claws. His nose stretched to a point and huge teeth pushed out from his lips. His skin turned scarlet. He looked like Satan.