Year of Miracles, page 27
part #1 of Collected Stories of the Old Races Series
Mostly a curse.
One foot in front of another, running. Humans could run forever, except they couldn't. They could walk almost forever, though. Long enough to run any prey into the earth. Steady pace, carry forward, one foot in front of another. Eventually their prey collapsed.
Manto didn't know any more if she was prey or predator. She only knew she'd made the bargain, shown the witch how to call blood, told the witch the words to whisper, and watched her mothers be drawn deep into the vellum pages of the grimoire. So many of them, screaming as they went, but then, the harpies always screamed.
They ran in flocks, snapping, nattering, picking at one another, boiling over with loathing for themselves, for the world they were made to live in, and most of all for humankind and its easy endless expansion. They turned on mankind even more swiftly than on themselves; woe betide a solitary traveler or even a small group huddled together for safety. Harpies took glee in swooping from the sky, in screaming until they could no longer hear even themselves over the cacophony, in rending flesh from bones and eating it raw and dripping. They spared the children; even harpies would spare the children. But few of the wild winged women, few enough indeed, ever rose out of the madness enough to wonder whether those children, scarred by fear, might survive to become leaders of the bands that came to hunt the harpies.
Because come they did, if not often then incessantly, inexorably, never truly stopping, as if the hunt was an itching, pressing need that drove humans just as it drove the harpies. Wary men armed with spears and nets, wise enough not to come too close: a harpy's strength could break a man, her claws could rend him, and her venomous spittle blind him. Those who were meant to be the prey of men watched sometimes, watch with the anticipation of madness, as small armies crept into their canyons and ravines and crevasses. They hung upside down like bats, tangled hair falling toward the earth and clawed fingers writhing around each other in hungry anticipation, until they fell upon the humans like the predators they were, screams mortal and immortal echoing off stony walls as the fight was brought to life. When they won—and often the harpies did—when they won they would take the choicest bits, the eyes and soft dense organ meat, back to their males, for the males, rare and precious, were neither able nor allowed to fight.
Nor were they afflicted with madness, the males, or at least, not so deeply as the females. No one knew why, though even the males rarely had the presence of mind to wonder. It was something in the making of them, something in the long dead history of the Old Races. The vampires were said to be first; the vampires claimed they were not of this world at all, but the harpies were thought to be second. At least, they thought it: children of the gods, humans might say, but in their wild hearts they believed themselves to be children of another world, born to this one too soon, not yet fit or suited for it, and thus mad. Why it clung to the females was a mystery, but cling it did, and worst of all were the few driven sane by their madness.
Manto was one such: Manto who was born to see and speak truth, no matter how bitter, and even the best among her people could not believe her; their madness was too great, and her tongue, too sharp. Nor did it help that as a child she had watched her wild mothers and said—with faultless truth—this will be the end of us.
She remembered that day, the first time she knew clearly that they would not, or could not, listen to her. She hadn't yet been able to fly, pinfeathers still ratty and scrawny, but she had gone on the hunt with her mothers. Nothing more than finding wild boar for dinner had been planned, in so far as the mothers could plan anything at all, but they had come upon a little tribe of humans, mortals by far more afraid of the howling, air-born harpies than the mothers were of them. They scattered, those humans, running to hide beneath bushes, under tiny outcroppings of stone, in shallow divots in the earth: anything that might offer the slightest hint of cover. The mothers descended on them, crying with inhumane joy at destroying them, at feasting on them. Manto, too small and perhaps, in the end, too sane to participate, watched bleakly as the mothers slew and ate and bathed in blood, and saw in the eyes of the mortals who died last that their souls would not go easy into the night; that their bodies, when found by others, would bear witness to what had happened, and their spirits would speak to the living, telling tales of the winged monsters who had done this thing.
Humans, the mothers spat, have no magic: their dead cannot speak, they cannot tattle on us, we are free to do as we wish, to which Manto said: no.
Humans had little magic, that was true, but it could never be said that they had none. Even the mothers knew of witches, those appalling creatures born from the darkest secrets that could be whispered into the world, and for harpies to find another being appalling spoke troublingly of witchery. Where the mothers left ground soaked in human blood was rife for secrets to be whispered and witches to be born; if it did not take so very many secrets, so much darkness, to make a witch, harpies alone might have peopled the earth with monsters of human-born magic, instead of monsters like themselves. And there were human magics beyond witches; Manto could taste them in the air, even if she couldn't name them, and so she would never say with certainty that the mortal dead could not speak. Instead she spoke the truth, that the mothers laid the groundwork for their own destruction with their actions, and not one among them heard her.
In despair, Manto crawled back to the nests: climbed the harsh rocky cliff faces, avoiding the excrement, and crept into the divots and depths where the harpies made their homes in the walls. There, in the finest and most open of spaces, she would watch the fathers. They were beautiful, the fathers: gloriously feathered, with strong limbs and voices like silk and water, soft and sweet and cajoling to bring the mothers to them for eager mating.
They were also very, very stupid, of course; almost all of them, and perhaps that was why the madness did not plague them. Manto went among them often, speaking the truths she knew and trying to coax a hint of wit from any of them. With the fathers supporting her she could perhaps convince the mothers to change their ways: the mothers would do almost anything for the beautiful males. From time to time, even Manto forgot all else save sitting and gazing at the fathers while they strutted and preened and sang. Their posturing almost always ended in fights, though: even with less than a handful of fathers for the whole of the flock, they became so agitated with one another that strutting devolved into battle. But where the mothers found that appealing, Manto could only see the cycle that led to their doom, and was helpless to stop it. Still, she spoke to the fathers, hoping to lure them toward the idea of peacefulness, and they at least listened, which was more than the mothers could do.
Manto grew: her feathers came in and she learned to stretch her wings, took to the skies and—time and again—found herself startled at the human reaction to her appearance. Harpies were not beautiful, by human standards; harpies were not even beautiful by their own, not when they had the fathers to compare themselves to. But the face she wore, with its aquiline features, with the huge golden eyes with slit pupils, and the ruff of feathers that no one could mistake for hair adorning her skull, did not seem frightening to her, only alien in comparison to humanity's blunter faces. The winged arms, though, arms that could be, with effort, peeled from the structure of the wings themselves, so that even in her harpy form she might have hands, albeit hands with strangely long and delicate fingers better for clawing than caressing; those wings, and the powerful legs that ended in massive taloned feet, all with something of a human woman's body in between; together they made up a horror, judging from the faces of the mortals who saw them.
Even in human form she disturbed mortals; she could not change the color of her eyes, or shift away the patterns, like owl feathers, of her hair, and so it fell from russet to white to black in narrow bands and speckles, and there was something of those markings to her skin as well. Worse than that, though, was the truth that fell from her lips whether she wanted it to or not, and with that, it was better to speak truth to her own kind. They wouldn't listen, but neither did they seem to remember, later, that she had warned them. Humans did remember, and hated her for it. So she felt that she could belong to neither, not the mad immortal race that had birthed her nor the humans whose sanity made her unwelcome. She endured; she could do no more, and she failed, season after season, to convince anyone, the mothers or the fathers or the humans, that there might be some other way.
Eventually it came to her that she would have to make another way; that she alone could force it, and that she alone would bear the burden of having done so. Humans were plentiful by that time, shockingly plentiful; they bred fast and though many, many of their infants died, many also survived and began another generation in the time a harpy might sit idly waiting for a single egg to hatch.
Not that any of the wild mothers sat idly on her egg, warming it until it cracked forth a shrieking angry infant. They abandoned them through boredom or ruthlessness or forgetfulness, and though no egg would hatch that went wholly unattended, neither was it likely that the mother sitting on it when it birthed a babe was the one who had laid it to begin with. Most mothers would sit a while on any egg they found, though the worst of them would slash the shell and feast on the flesh of the unborn.
The fathers, though; the beautiful, stupid fathers would sit complacently on an egg as long as someone fed them. The less crazed among the mothers would bribe a father into sitting on their eggs; the choicest meals would draw any father from the egg he sat upon to another, where he would stay until something better was offered. Manto had known her father, or at least the father cajoled into sitting on her egg, and he preened with pride over the thirteen years he had perched on her egg: no other father in their flock had ever been so attentive. Manto supposed the mother who had kept him sated for those many turns of the season had perhaps birthed her, but such dedication—such recollection—was unlike any of the mothers; it seemed more likely that the mother intended only to curry favor with the reliable father, that he might later sit on her egg. But perhaps she had known both her parents; it was possible, and, being not a matter of prophecy, unknowable.
It was easier now to be human, at least. In this time, in this era, the soft wildness of her natural skin, the strange patterns and the wild poof of hair: it was as if someone had finally taken pity on her, and made mortal fashion reflect an immortal-but-human form. Even her golden-slit eyes were adored, because they were assumed to be contact lenses. She was admired for her unending dedication to the role: no one ever saw her without the contacts, no one ever saw her at the hairdresser, having the patterns re-done, and no make-up artist would confess to being the one who painted her skin.
She had long since discovered that they would listen to truth if it came in song and stirred their souls, but it had been meaningless for centuries untold to try to speak it that way: she was one person, and alien at that; mortals were more likely to try to burn her than listen to the music she made at summer harvest festivals, or in the dark of winter. But that too had changed, not as recently as this decade of too-pretty, too-soft, too-outrageous fashion that suited her so well; for a hundred and ten years now music had been recorded, and for nearly half of that, radio had carried music into the homes of millions. Records became more accessible, then innumerable other ways to listen: 8-tracks and cassette tapes, then the burgeoning format called CDs, and Manto, in a fit of madness comparable to that of the mothers, began a rock and roll career, singing truth to the wild hearts and troubled souls of teenagers.
They loved her: stars above, they loved her, and she them. First in bars, then in clubs, her words rolling over them: bombastic lyrics, rock and roll fantasies, the price of dreams coming true. From clubs to parks and from parks to fronting for the biggest bands, until it was her golden, alien self on the stage in stadiums, singing as though her heart would break; singing as though their hearts would break, all of them, together, as the world fell down around them.
It enraged some and freed others, and both were better than the endless aeons of being hunted, hiding, running, being prey: harpies were not prey. Not for anyone save mortals, and, in the end, witches.
The youth ought not have taken her unawares, but perhaps he hadn't, at that. Humans didn't, not unless the Old Races wanted them to. Not with their preternatural senses, not with the necessity of knowing who was nearby, for their own safety. And yet she let him approach as she crouched on the cliff's edge, too-long arms curling into taloned hands that dangled between her knees. She could blame the sunset, as if it carried a song in it too mesmerizing to ignore, because it did: light's music, reaching back and forward through time, because light was an infinite and impossible thing and it knew everything it touched. It carried memories of then and now, of tomorrow and yesterday, and for Manto those memories became prophecy.
And maybe that was why she let him approach, too, because she knew before he arrived, bathed in the evening's red-gold light, that it had to begin this way in order to end the way it must.
He carried a sword in one hand and a spear in the other. Enthusiastic, or efficient, or terrified, or all of those things. If he'd wanted to kill her, though, he ought to have flung the spear as soon as he saw her broad-spread back, the wings opening from it to catch the sunset. She saw that possibility rise and fade again, too fast for her to worry, and when he had come close enough to slay her with the blade, he instead said, "What are you?", which was a fair enough question.
"A seer," she replied, and stood, turning, to let him see her.
He did well, only falling back half a step, only tightening his hands around the haft and hilt of the weapons he carried. Beautiful play of muscle in his body, fear knotting his stomach, shock cording his throat, but he did not run. Sun-kissed hair, sandy colored; if he lived in colder climes it would be brown, but here the light took to it, as it did to the warm depths of his skin. Light eyes to go with the sandy hair, and whatever people he belonged to eschewed facial hair: his jaw was clean and smooth, though he was clearly old enough to wear a beard.
She was taller than he; somehow that surprised her. Noticeably taller: a palm's length or more, and the ground she stood upon higher besides, so that he looked up and up and up on her inhuman glory. And then—and this was when all the futures began to tumble together, twining and shaping themselves toward inevitability—then he knelt and placed his sword and spear on the earth. Spread his hands and showed his throat and said to her, "And what do you see for me?"
Manto didn't tell him, of course; no one, no matter how nicely they asked, wanted to be told their lives ended soon and in agony. Neither did she tell him of the brief weeks of ecstatic joy they would find in each other; he came to that soon enough on his own, shy and eager both, exquisite need overruling the difference between them, and her heart shattered when he spoke, softly, of the lives they would have together, quietly, away from the rest of the world, safe from his kind and hers.
And because she was a fool, this once she rebelled against the written future, and tried. Escaped to the mountains with him, and to her surprise—because not even she, it seemed, could see everything the light saw—she fell pregnant, and while she didn't lay an egg like her mothers, neither was the pregnancy done in a mere nine months as a human's would be. Gravid, bound by gravity: that was how she lost him, too mortal to protect him and too alien to be forgiven. Had it been humans who found them, she might even have forgiven them, but it was the mothers, and the mothers laughed as she screamed impotently while they ripped her lover apart. In her rage and fear and loss she told them a thousand times that they must slay her too or face her vengeance.
They left her living, and set their fate in stone.
Not just any witch would do. Manto went from dark place to dark place in the world, crouching low to listen to the secrets that had birthed a witch there. It took so many, such a weight of horror; it was a wonder that any witch could ever be born at all, much less that there were dozens the world over. That was humanity, though: craven and fearful, murderers and thieves. A brother's wife coveted, a killing in the dark of the night, a babe unwanted, an envy to blacken the heart. On and on it went, and nowhere, not one place anywhere, did she find a witch born of joy and hope.
Finally: finally, in the far reaches of the north, in a place where the summer sun never set, where winter's night lasted months at a time, that was where she found what she sought: a witch born with knowledge of the Old Races.
There should have been many, Manto thought. Surely part of the bleak fear that gave witches life had been awakened again and again by the monsters in the dark, the gargoyles and the vampires, the djinn and the dragons. But not until the north, and the unaging hag who called herself Baba Yaga, could Manto be sure that she was not—entirely—betraying her kind to humanity's ugliest magic.
She could see, upon looking at Baba Yaga, that her knowledge of the Old Races was imperfect. That it was a boil under the skin, aching and pushing at her, not clarified enough to burst. She knew of them in the same way a child knew of teething: discomfort with no source, only eased when the tooth broke through the gum.
Manto was that tooth, and she came to Baba Yaga in all her inhuman, arrogant glory, wings spread and talons sharp, ready to eviscerate in her own defense, even if a witch could not die by any method Manto knew.
The witch's eyes lit with greed when she saw Manto, but even a witch knew the power of prophecy, and only quavered in loathing agreement when Manto said, "Of all of us, I am not for you."
"What are you," croaked Baba Yaga, half desperation and half demand.
"We are the Old Races," Manto answered, and a hiss broke free of the witch's throat, a long and terrible sound of release. She crumpled to the earth, scouring it in gratitude, in pleasure, and when she raised her eyes again it was with a need so deep it tasted of rage.
