The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (36 page)

If so, this may explain occasional depictions of the One alongside
a waterspout or cyclone, natural phenomena which folk belief endows with an almost mystic sense of
quid pro quo
; they were widely thought to serve as conduits or tunnels drawing souls from this plane into another, and those from others into this, thus counterpoising each potential world against the rest.

Similar formations in other charts: the Changeling (Trench Chart, NQ3), Death (Sail Chart,
NQ3).

When Archivist Wasp found the bottle on her doorstep, she knew at once the ghosts had left it there, because it smelled of salt. Most of what she found there in the dawn still wore a stink of dirt and ash, from where someone had exhumed it; or of dirt and sweat and cooking, the close smells of a little house, from where someone had sewn or pieced or woven it in the few hours of ashy light
each day allotted. A heel of acorn-flour bread, a clutch of stunted onions and a seashell; a scarf knitted of nettle yarn and a pair of horseleather gloves, clumsily stitched and too short in the fingers, but warming as she tugged them on. A bright orange plastic pitcher, clouded with its ancientness and warped with some past heat, which sloshed with rainwater as she dethroned it from its
place
of honor in the cairn of offerings. The movement dislodged a sharpening-stone and a sort of torque someone had fashioned out of scavengings: empty cartridges and tarnished rings and bits of colored glass flanking a single tiny locket with a blue-and-white enamel windmill on the front. And someone had shored up her sagging doorframe with the same bits of salvage that the rest of the Archivist-hut
had been pieced of for as long as Wasp had known. Underneath it all, at the time of the first Archivist, it could have been made of anything.

Fear-gifts, blood-gifts, bribes. Most days she left the lot of it to the snuffling shrine-dogs who prowled her hut to ensure her obedience – first subtracting maybe a few dried apples, maybe a bullet for a gun she may yet find, maybe some corpse’s stolen
shoes – only to have new cairns rebuilt by eager hands during the night. After all, there was no other sword between the living and the ghosts than her; no other intercessor, no other keeper of the door. She could purge a poltergeist, send the shades of cradle-deaths to quicken fallow wombs, tether a ghost in place with salt to ward a scraggled field against the tithing of the crows. And it was
she who gleaned the shards of histories and pieced them, tipped voice like sips of water down the throat of a dead world.

And she’d gladly let the gifts rot down to mulch, and their givers along with them.

But the bottle smelled cold and clean and salt as seas she knew were salt because the ghosts had told her so. The smell on it, and the whitegreen of the glass, put her in mind of licking icicles.
Though the icicles she knew were riddled with flaws and streaks of grit, she believed the ghost who’d said the icicles of the Well-Before had frozen clear as windowpanes.

(“As what?” Wasp had asked. “Windowpanes,” the ghost had repeated. Then, “Crystal,” it had offered to her blank look. “Plastic sheeting?” At last she’d understood. In her head – for she possessed neither paper nor the letters
to put on it – she’d written
windowpanes.
Written
crystal.
And tipped the ghost out of its jar to go its way.)

She turned the bottle back and forth in the light, watching how the glass warped the roll of paper within. Of course the ghosts had not brought it there, any more than the sea could bring her shells; only that their migrations had disinterred it from wherever
it had been concealed and
someone had found it, plucked it from the ground as though it might well bite, and brought it to the only person any of them knew who’d bite back harder.

Also odd: the sheet of paper inside the bottle was nothing like the ones she’d seen from time to time on traders’ wagons or bound into books in the Songkeeper’s hut, burned or drowned or gnawed or sweet with rot. She sat on the rock that was
her front step – gingerly, still sore from her last escape attempt, a week ago now by the moon – and studied it, flattened against the tamped-earth path to her hut. The paper unrolled to the length of one of Wasp’s long strides and was peppered with as many dots as there were windfalls in an orchard, skulls in a slagpit, or beans in a bowl.

A map,
thought Wasp, who had seen such things before.
A map of stars.

And then she grew very thoughtful, did Wasp with the ache still in her calves from the fleeing, with the rawness still in her lungs and a lattice of welts from the thornfield she had pushed through with the clamor of the hunt right on her heels, with the smell of the shrine-dogs still in her hair from the last time they’d run her down. With the scars on her ankles from the first
time the Catchkeep-priest had had to drag her back, spitting and slashing, and smashed her feet between two stones. Sheer dumb luck, perhaps, or force of rage, she’d healed.

The next day, hunting, she packed the saltlick and the fruit and blade and bells as usual, but left her jars behind. She brought the map instead.

Catchkeep
Area: 300.492 sq. deg. (appx. 0.73%)
from the Dogwagon Chart: leather
tooling, horsehide Autumn

Sixteen stars: six major, ten minor, most of the latter representing teeth. This dog’s jaw is like a beartrap, too huge for her head, dwarfing even the massive barrel of her chest and the bulging muscles of her thighs. Even today it proves no challenge to see her as the crafters of this chart must have done, the ones who venerated her deeply enough to hold her fellow
dogs in such high regard – the pistons of her legs, the forges of her eyes, the fey flux of that awful guileful grin – and in truth it remains almost
instinctive in the modern heart to cheer her on each night as she runs the moon to earth behind the hills. But she is Catchkeep, ghostherder and sentinel, constant as the stars that shape her nightly steeplechase; and when the lot of us is done to
dust, she will not miss our rallying.

Of all this trickster’s stories – “Catchkeep Chases the Comet’s Tail,” “Catchkeep’s Biting Contest with Grandmother Shark,” etc. – the one that comes to us the most well-preserved by far is “Catchkeep’s Bequest,” wherein a few short paragraphs (or, more pertinent to the experience of its original audience, a few minutes’ telling) find that inimitable bitch
whelping the First Litter, passing the Earth itself as afterbirth, then fashioning the world’s first people out of dogs’ skeletons rearranged to stand upright, inadvertently killing many when she tries to scruff those who dare disobey. It ends with Catchkeep commandeering the first makeshift vehicle of these people, who grew foolhardy or daft enough to try to tame her, and in so doing forming her
sister constellation, the Empty Wagon (NQ3, fig. 2) – possibly a glorification of that people’s own wagons, constructed of rusted-out automobile chassis welded to whatever scaffolding and stretched with whatever rotten fabric or brittle leather was to hand?

“The lot of you,” said Catchkeep, “can go screw.” And she took their wagon and drove it hard across the hills until all the dogs fell down
dead in their traces, glowing bright as arclights through the ash. Then she lifted each of them in her great jaws and tossed them up into the sky, gently as a bitch tumbling pups, and they dug in their footholds on the dark and paced their circles and curled up to sleep the sleep of stars.

What she is perhaps best known as, however, is a herder of spirits: both those of the dead and the unborn.
In this aspect she earns the fear of the diseased, the chased, and the condemned, whose souls it is her charge to bear away; also the veneration of the fallow-wombed, whose custom it was to set out the choicest bits of meat after their evening meal, in hopes of luring Catchkeep to the door.

Her former, baneful aspect is illustrated in a scrap of doggerel, perhaps a fraction of a larger piece
of verse, found scrawled on a
bit of scorch-edged paper rolled into a tube and tied off with a string, worn in a horsehide pouch as a crude little talisman against her inexorable teeth:

Catchkeep [illegible], running free,
Herding the souls out over the trees:
Cold ghosts you are. Till ghost I be,
You have no power over me.

Similar formations in other charts: the Lurcher (Hothouse Chart, NQ4),
the Hunt (Pennon Chart, NQ4).

She turned the first four away with her blessing, for they were faceless, the height of her knees, and moved vaguely, as if underwater – but the fifth ghost Wasp saw up on the lightning-blasted ledge of Execution Hill was a tall one, easily a head higher than herself, and there was something about it that caught her eye. Not exactly awareness, never that; but a sort
of daunted yearning that it broadcast, which she understood too well.

Before she put out the saltlick, she sat her heels a moment to watch it. It fascinated her, the way the ghosts moved, pacing their confines like tethered dogs, sounding their boundaries, back and forth. She saw much of herself in them, so she never watched for long.

This particular ghost was walking down a corridor she could
not see, turning invisible doorknobs. Its mouth moved, shaping the same word again and again, but no sound came out. A name, Wasp thought. It could have been anyone’s. A lover’s, a child’s, a friend’s. Wasp’s mouth twisted: scorn or envy.

She wondered what had done it in, this restive ghost. If she waited long enough she would probably get her answer, but she’d lost her stomach for that long
ago.

Hurriedly she laid the saltlick out and the ghost nosed forward, browsing at the air.

She never knew quite why the saltlick worked. Never quite cared. Another fragment of the ritual, she figured, another step in the dance of call-and-response that kept her here – not exactly like the ghosts, for no Archivist trapped
her
in jars for questioning, and not exactly unlike them, for her path
was prescribed in
lines as clearly-drawn as any one of theirs. The saltlick worked, the Songkeepers said, because it put the ghosts in mind of the flesh they used to wear. The salt of sweat, of tears, of blood. It drew them. It made them remember. But there was no Archivist to lay a trail of salt for Wasp. Her rescue, or else her entrapment, was her own.

The ghost reached the saltlick and began
to feed.

She gave it a moment.

“I am the Archivist,” Wasp said, when the ghost had slowed. She gagged against the cloy of rote, but spat it anyway. “Catch-keep’s emissary, ambassador, and avatar on earth. Her bones and stars my flesh; my flesh and bones her stars. I greet you.”

The ghost looked up at her. This part used to frighten her a little: the sea change in the ghosts’ eyes as the salt
waylaid them, clogged their feet with the memory of clay. The look they’d wear, as though waking from a dream and seeing something wholly frightening which Wasp could not. It had not taken her long to learn that they were only seeing her.

She set the rolled map on the ground and toed it toward the ghost, who for its part was not cowering as most did but instead had drawn itself up to its full
height and was peering down its nose at her as at a turd in the path it would have to step around.

Wasp hid her smile. She’d been lucky. She’d gone out to Execution Hill expecting to keep coming back a week, a month, before she’d found one quite like this. This was the sort of ghost that had retained or salvaged enough of itself to be searching for something, or someone, or somewhere, and the
draw of it was stronger even than the salt. This one sought a
someone,
she was sure, and from the look of it, the days it’d lived out were long past. Then it was looking for a ghost. And it wouldn’t find it on its own.

She hoped it was smart enough, or dumb enough, to bargain with.

“You’re seeking,” she said. The other ghosts walked or flew or fell through their last moments to all sides of
her, oblivious, but this one,
this one
heard. It eyed that map the way a half-starved dog eyes carrion, and she held it up at arm’s-length, keeping the salt between them; the ghost lunged and came up short, collared by the empty air. “Well. So am I.”

The Cinder Girl
Area: 1119.303 sq. deg. (appx. 2.71%)
from the Sinkhole Chart: razor scarring, human skin Autumn

Twenty-three stars: eight major,
fifteen minor, including neither the visual binary blue supergiant representing her heart nor the nebula colloquially known as the Spool; while this latter’s representation remains the subject of some debate, it is generally agreed to be
either
the Girl’s navel or her womb. (If one can use
agreed
in fairness, conjuring as it does more a smiling accord over a glass of fine vintage than the panting
stalemate reached by brawlers, each having succumbed less to his rival’s blows than to his own growing lassitude.)

On some charts this constellation shares two major and one minor star with the Carrion Boy, whereas on others the Girl and Boy only border upon points (e.g. the Blood Quilt Chart, which depicts them handfast, or the Floodplain Chart, which shows them going at each other’s throats
with shivs).

The Lintel Chart (fig. 3) marks one striking departure: the two constellations are drawn together into one, torso to torso, while the stars designated elsewhere as the base of the Cinder Girl’s childbed-pyre, her right knee, and the Carrion Boy’s attendant crow are here shown to represent offerings – water, bullets, seed-fruit – heaped by persons unknown at their feet. The overall
effect is that of a two-headed, four-armed monster god: arguably an attempt, in the spirit of the origin stories of the Well-Before, to explain away cases of severe mutation.

Apparently a light- or fire-bringer, the Cinder Girl was – and in some few rough backwaters of the Waste-that-was, still is – called upon, with that wayworn trinity of incantation, song, and sacrifice, to conjure out the
sun from where it floundered in its yearlong skirts of ash. In fact, whatever demarcating line is sketched in between sun and Girl is vague; most indications hint there’s no line there at all: she either
is
the sun, or else is swollen with it, as any mother is with any child.