The Iron Dragon's Daughter (22 page)

Oh, don't stop when we've come so close. Release me. Grant me oblivion. You can tell the witch I told you to.

She didn't move from the chair. "Yeah, oh fine, and what's she going to do when she finds I've smashed her thing? Her bottle. She's sure to be unhappy. She might even punish me."

What do I care what happens to you? She torments me. She weighs too much. She eats live mice. She deliberately clips her toenails too short. She smokes unfiltered cigarettes, drinks the oil off the top of her whiskey and holds a match to her mouth just to feel her lips burn. Her shoes are tight.

"Those don't sound like things she does to you, though. They sound like things she does to herself."

Have you never heard of a sin-eater?

Jane shook her head.

Hush. Here she comes.

Peg strode into the room, threw a cloth over the bottle holding the homunculus, and sat down heavily in an upholstered chair. "Payment first."

From her purse Jane drew out a handful of silver moon dollars and a single gold sequin stamped with a laughing sun. Peg flicked the sequin back in with one long, purple nail, and pocketed the rest. "So what is it? Got knocked up, did you?" She squinted. "No? Boyfriend trouble, then."

Jane nodded.

"What are you after, poison or sorcery? Poison's surer, but sorcery works from a distance and with poison it helps to be on good terms with your intended."

"I just need to learn about birth control."

"Fine." Peg stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray and lit a new one with a disposable lighter. "Well, birth control's easy. The first thing you have to know is that it doesn't work."

"What?"

"Not consistently. No matter how careful you are, every time you play hide-the-salami with the boys, you're running the risk of ending up with a belly full of consequences."

"But—"

"Contraceptive spells are never entirely reliable. That's because their power comes from the Mother, and the Mother wants children. Each cantrip has its loophole, every fetish its flaw. Ultimately, contraception is just a way of luring you into playing her game."

"You mean that sooner or later it's going to fail me?"

"That's not what I said. It works well enough for enough of us that the rest will take their chances. But the odds are never going to be as good as you'd like them to be. There are no guarantees."

"I'd like to learn anyway."

"Of course you would. You're that age." Peg pushed herself up from the chair. She removed a black rubber item from the apothecary cabinet and thrust it at Jane. "This is an exact model of an erect prick. Not necessarily to scale, worse luck." Jane accepted it gingerly, and the witch dropped a foil packet in her lap. "And this is a condom. What you kids call a scumbag."

Peg might be crude, but she knew her business and she was thorough. Hours passed as Jane learned about condoms and IUDs and contraceptive jelly, how to build a windowsill altar and how many doves to sacrifice on it a month. She learned Dame Moon's seven secret names, where to get fitted for a diaphragm, and the medical consequences of getting her tubes tied. Finally, Peg handed her a small stone figurine and said, "This is the two-faced aspect of the Goddess."

Jane turned the figurine over in her hand. It had two fronts. "She's pregnant on one side and not on the other."

"Exactly. It's an especially useful tool in that it can also be used to encourage fertility."

She taught Jane a clapping rhyme and the gestures that went with it, then watched critically as Jane, grateful the homunculus could no longer see her, sang and danced in place in the middle of the room.

It was a spell for regularizing her period. The figurine got turned around two, three, or five times, depending on the number of days it had been since first blood. On days when it ended Maiden-side up, she could do anything she wished. When the Mother was upmost, she must remain chaste. It was reliable, Peg assured her, so long as she made no mistakes in counting, remembered to chant the spell every morning without exception, and never got so drunk or besotted she forgot which side was up.

"That's all," Peg said at last. "Now if you're at all typical, you've got a head full of nonsense and a mouth full of hideously misinformed questions to ask. Well?"

"I want to know… well, this is more witchcraft than contraception, I guess." Jane blushed. "But I want to know when I start getting in touch with my female wisdom."

"Female wisdom? No such animal." Peg lit a fresh cigarette.

"In school they taught us that everything is divided between male and female principles. They said that action arises from the male principle and wisdom from the female. They said that's why girls are discouraged from going into politics."

Peg snorted. "What a typically
male
thing to say! That's all a load of horseshit, young lady. There's nothing special about you just because you possess a cunt. She's a pretty little thing and if you treat her well, she'll be a good friend to you, but as a source of wisdom—? Bah! Her needs are simple and few. You learn here"—she touched Jane's forehead—"and here"—she touched Jane's heart. "Boys have heads and hearts too, you know. Not that they ever use them."

Confused, Jane said, "Well, thank you. Thank you very much."

"No more questions?"

"No," Jane said. Then, "Yes. Yes, there's just one more. I want to know about that thing in the bottle."

Peg's eyes darkened and she smiled. "He used to be my lover. But he dwindled." She reached over to the bottle and whipped off the cloth. "You'll want to be in on this, dearheart. It's your story, after all."

The homunculus's flat gaze said nothing.

"When first we met he was a great whiskery, yellow-toothed ogre. Big as a mountain, with shoulders out to there. What a magnificent creature he was! Even his faults were large faults. The smell from his armpits would choke a goat. His farts were like thunderclaps. He'd pork anything that held still for him.

"Our courtship was rough, but I liked it rough, and when I caught him slipping it up the bottom of some dollymop or curligig, I'd thrash her bloody while he laughed and yanked his pud. We never had a stick of furniture for my smashing it over his thick head. Ah, but what did we care? We were young and in love.

"But then one night the Tylwyth Teg came looking for him. I forget what it was about—he'd eaten somebody's dog, I think. Must've been somebody important to get the Tegs involved. We were living in an efficiency over a bar then, and the window had burglar bars. No time to rip 'em out. He had no choice but to hide in the closet.

"They were a pair, the Tylwyth Teg were, fever-eyed and hound-lean. Cheekbones you could slice bread with. One of them raised his head and sniffed the air. He's here, he said. I can smell him.

"

"Course you can, said I, pointing to the rumpled bed. We haven't changed the sheets in a month.

"The smell's stronger than that, he said.

"It's not him you're smelling then, I said, and gave him a look.

"They exchanged glances, and one of them smirked. Are you trying to bribe us with your body? said the other.

"I looked him in the eye and said, Well I sure as hell ain't gonna give you money!

"So in the end I double-featured them right there on our unmade bed, and it still reeking of their quarry's scent. Eminently corruptible, the Tylwyth Teg are."

Peg scowled. "You look like you've eaten a green lemon, my lass. But I assure you they were glad to have me. I'm not half so bad-looking as you make me out to be."

"Oh, no," Jane said quickly. "It's not like that at all." And it wasn't. It was the story itself that horrified her. For all that she'd had no great expectations for it, sex was turning out to be even more squalid, tawdry, and cynical than she had suspected it would.

"Mmmph. Where was—oh, yeah. We pounded away on that bed for an hour-some, and for me the cream of the jest was that all the time the one they hunted was not three strides distant, watching through the crack in the door, and doubtless with his trousers down around his ankles and playing with himself. How he'd laugh when they were gone, I thought. How he'd roar.

"But when they left and I opened the closet door he did not laugh. No, not at all.

"What did you do that for? he asked me. I said, If you didn't like it, why didn't you stop it? Said he, How could I? I'd've been caught.

"What is it you're telling me, I asked—that you let them do what they wanted with me because you were afraid?

"He looked away. Well, we'll forget it ever happened, he said.

"But forget it I could not. For he was not so large in my sight as he had been a moment before. He had shrunk a little.

"In my eyes he had fallen from grace, you see. So many things happened. I'll tell you just one more, the time I came home to find all my pharmaceuticals gone and half of my clothing. So I grabbed up the baseball bat we kept by the door for intruders and went looking for him.

"He was down by the incinerator in a crap game with a crowd of trolls and a red dwarf. He was as drunk as three boiled owls. The dwarf was wearing my best black lace brassiere as a scarf.

"I screamed and ran at them. They scattered like pigeons, all but him, snatching up bets and bottles as they went. I never saw that bra again. But when I brought that bat down on him, he flinched. He
flinched
. That was what I found unforgivable."

"Why?"

"When you've had a few men under your belt, you'll understand. Well, he grabbed the bat and we fought for it. Neither of us could take it away from the other. He had dwindled down to my own size.

"It went quickly after that. He became furtive, slipping around to Koboldtown to see a mountain ape of a lass with knuckles that brushed the ground where once he would've had her in our very bed while I slept. He began sneaking money from my purse where once when I told him I'd nothing to give, he threatened to put me out on the street to earn it. He lied, he sniveled, he would not meet my eye. I'd've thrown him out, but we had shared our true names and had no choice but to see this thing through to its end. Day by day and month by month, he withered away in my esteem, smaller and smaller, until he was a thing no larger than a hedgehog. Finally I had no choice but to put him in that bottle. And there he remains."

She leaned low over the homunculus and crooned, "Don't you worry, little snugglebunny. Someday your fairy princess will come. She'll be young and beautiful and she'll look you in the eye. You won't have to beg, she'll know what you want. She'll lift the hammer from the anvil and swing it through the air faster than mortal sense can follow. You'll be dazzled, astounded, unable to think. The hammer will descend like a thunderbolt to shatter your narrow little world into a million shards and set you free." She straightened and glanced at Jane.

"But not today."

By the third day in a row that Salome didn't show up for school, it was obvious to all that something was up. In homeroom Grunt announced that she'd had a dirt bike accident and was hospitalized. He said this proved how dangerous unsupervised fun could be and suggested they all think long and hard on this lesson.

But word in the corridors was different. Between classes, Trotteranstinch came lurching up to Jane with their stiff, three-legged walk. Their middle eye was all but swallowed up in flesh now and had a haunted look to it. They grinned cockily. "Heard about Salome?"

"No," she said. "Only what they've told us."

"She's pregnant. They sent her away to a baby farm, and she's never coming back. And guess who's to blame—none other than Hebog!"

"How do you know all this?"

"It's no big secret—Strawwe's been blabbing it to anyone who'll listen."

That afternoon Jane found Hebog standing out behind the school, off by the soccer field. He'd picked up little bits of gravel from the walk and placed them in a neatly spaced line. Holding an old stick as if it were a golf club, he was one by one knocking them into the air. He told her he'd been summoned to appear before the Low Court.

"What will they do to you?"

Hebog shrugged, addressed another bit of gravel and went into the backswing. He knocked it up and away. "I don't know. Probably indenture me to a factory. It's a serious offense, consorting with you tall buggers is. No offense intended."

"Hebog, listen, I want you to know—"

"I don't want to hear it. Fuck your sympathy. This is real and I don't want anybody mucking it over with cheap sentiment, okay?"

So Jane went home and patched herself into the dragon. She had given up trying to get him to talk, but she still liked to watch the meryons at work.

The meryon civilization had fallen on hard times. With the onset of cold weather food was no longer easy to obtain, and with no farms of their own they had grown reliant on raiding their neighbors for provisions. They had no granaries or warehouses to speak of. Their armies had scoured the surrounding land halfway to the schoolhouse. Their supply lines were thus overextended, their patrols more vulnerable to guerrilla action. Their sorties were far less productive than previously.

With the collapse of their economy had come a corresponding physical deterioration. Snug tin houses had become shanties. Starving meryons wandered aimlessly in the streets. Military police in armored cars were everywhere, tense soldiers sitting behind cunningly small machine guns. Jane saw a riot in miniature, followed by a house-by-house sweep of the slum neighborhoods in which hundreds of tiny enemies of the state were hauled out of doors and executed.