The Ravens of Falkenau & Other Stories (22 page)

“You have scars like a man,” Natia says.

“I do,” she says. “And I’ve fought like a man from one end of this
bloodsoaked
continent to the other. I’m not much of a guardian for a little girl.”

“My mother had men who paid her,” Natia says quickly. “I can turn my back. Please don’t send me away! I don’t know where I’ll go!”

Her mouth twitches as though some thought was arrested, but her voice is level. “I’m not going to send you away. Not now, not ever. You are my grandchild, my son’s daughter, and I will never send you away. And I will do my very best not to get you into trouble. I promise that.” She does reach out now and brush back
Natia’s
hair from her brow. “As for being too pretty, well, I hope that you won’t need to get by on your looks. But it’s good to have them just in case. I’m not poor, and I hope you won’t have to use them.”

“To be a courtesan?”

“Or a spy,” she says lightly. “Now I will ring for
Cécile
, and we’ll have some lunch. It will all look better when you’ve had something to eat. I only hope that you won’t hate me when you know me better.”

Natia stands up very solemnly and came closer, looking into her face. Crows feet around blue eyes, graying hair and the scar. She traces it with one finger tentatively. “Where did you get that?”

“Eylau,” she says.

“And that?” She lifts her grandmother’s hand and turns it over. The cut across her palm must have bit to the bone.

“Waterloo. I was wearing heavy gloves, so it didn’t take my fingers off.”

Natia nods quietly. “I won’t hate you,” she says.

“Good,” says her grandmother.

That night, she sleeps for the first time in a room by herself, a pretty little room with toile drapes and a big warm bed. In the morning they are going to order clothes, but tonight she sleeps in one of her grandmother’s chemises. It’s much too big, but it’s soft and clean, white lawn with no lace or ribbons, just sleek thin fabric.

There are no men in the house. It’s just her grandmother in her room and the housekeeper upstairs. If there were supposed to be men they aren’t here. And Natia has her own room. She doesn’t have to turn her back.

She sinks down into the big feather pillows.

Whatever happens next, tonight she is warm.

And at last the dawning twentieth century, a century that can solve all problems through science.
 
It has no need for magic.
 
Does it?

There are things men do, and women who let them do it. She's gotten that far from whispers, from things girls confide one to another in bedrooms where their mothers don't come, whispered among the pillows of a featherbed while the adults have dinner downstairs. She is not yet a debutante. She does not sit at dinner. Not until next winter.

She is fifteen still, not sixteen until the high winter stars of January shine cold on the ice, born under the sign of Capricorn in the Year of Our Lord 1886. There is meaning to that, to the stars that shone upon her birth, but her mother says such superstitions are for the credulous, for Eastern European immigrants who crowd the streets of Boston, dirty and speaking foreign languages she thinks she should understand. If she just listened a little longer, the words would be plain. But she never listens more than a moment. Even the scullery maid who sweeps the ashes is Irish. Her mother will not have filthy Poles in the house.

There are things men want to do. It goes without saying that women don't want to. Women want children and respectable marriages. Women want love. Love is entirely different.

Love is born in music, over songs sung together at the piano, voices mingling like captive birds taking flight. She could imagine a voice to blend with hers, practicing in the music room on long afternoons, when her voice soars sweet and true. She has not got the coloratura range, but it's a light, pretty soprano. She could make her way on it if she had to, some part of her thinks. She'd never be a diva, but she'd eat.

Not that she will ever have to. Her father says she is safe. She will never lack for anything.

She should practice more, her mother says. Music is an accomplishment. She will bend her brain reading so much. She'd like to go to school. There is Radcliffe, but her father disapproves. It turns out suffragettes and anarchists, and she will be a respectable wife and mother. Her tutor has French and a little Latin, but it is enough. Latin comes easily. She suspects she already reads better than her tutor. It's not a matter of
codebreaking
, as her brother says, of taking apart words with suffixes and prefixes, memorizing declensions. She just reads it. Latin is living and breathing.

Once, when they were younger, leaning over the table with Frank, the tutor between them, she saw another table, another boy with light brown hair, his brows creased just so. "It is my father's tongue," he said. "You would think it would be easier."

Her hands are pale, smoothing out the scroll before him, words in Latin cursive flowing off the page. "It gets easier," she says, and what she feels is tenderness for him. He is a son to her, and the memory is tinged with love.

And then it is Frank, frowning at De Bello
Gallico
. "I don’t know why you think this is so easy," he grouses.

"I think I've read it before," she says.

She knows better than to say anything else.

Once, when she was a child, she dreamed that an angel opened her mouth. An angel with a sword of fire stood beside her in a ruined chapel, and he touched her throat and she knew all the songs in the world, spoke every story she had ever known. But when she woke they faded away to scraps and tatters.

Perhaps if she went to school she would have less time to dream, less time to write fragments that never quite fit together in composition books, fairy tales and strange stories.

Once,
Lono
came over the sea in a boat of reeds and sunlight. Gulls followed his passage, and sharks swam beside him…

When Alexander was in Asia, he dreamed of a wheel of fire…

Blood pounded in her ears, drumming out the seconds, the flying wedge elongating, powder smoke blowing straight toward them, curved epee drawing clear, charging unhesitating into shadow…

Sometimes she thinks she is nothing but a vessel, an empty thing meant to hold stories. She will never be a story, have a story. Life is waiting, moving from one beautiful room to another, while her spirit soars.

Except that the body is real. Lying by herself in her room at night, windows open to catch the Cape Cod breeze, the ocean wind does not cool her. Her hands stray over her breasts, stroke the soft curve of her stomach.
Ventre
, some part of her says. That is what someone calls it when they kiss there.

The thought makes her draw sharp breath. The prickle of five o'clock shadow against her skin, warm lips kissing a path down her stomach…

She has never thought such an awful thing in her life! Who would do such a thing? And yet the rush of delight that follows after drowns out guilt. She is only thinking.

Composition books, and neat social script.

I am Undine in the pool

And
Brunnhilde
in the fire

Gyrecompass
and prisoner

Of the wings that I inspire.

Her brother, Frank, hands it back to her seriously. "
Brunnhilde
was a
Valkyrie
doomed to live as a mortal woman," he says, "Not a safe thing."

And so she waits in her ring of fire, sleeping like Briar Rose on a bed of petals, looking out through white curtains at the world.

Once there was a princess sleeping forever in a chapel in a city of brass, where sand whispered over the mosaics on the floor, covering kings and queens among the lotus flowers…

The guns are silent all over the world, the mighty tumults of the last century ended. There will be no more wars, and knights only live in books. The modern world does not need them. King Arthur is beautifully illustrated on her bookshelf, Alexander tamed by
Droysen
. The modern world is tidy, classified, scientific, everything in its place like ornaments in her mother's étagère, curious relics of places and peoples one shouldn't think too hard about, Chinese porcelain and Egyptian boxes, a curious necklace of links of iron wrought into flowers.

I had one like that
, some part of her whispers,
looted when Berlin fell.
It is a cold necklace of iron, a collar of steel, a cold irony that heats against the skin…

She dreams of flying, white wings beating far out to sea, soaring over waves and daring every storm. She wakes with tears on her face and cannot remember why.

"There will be no more wars," her father says. "The Powers have reached entente. And nobody else matters." He leans back in his chair. "You children will inherit a peaceful world."

And yet she hears the whisper in the back of her mind, "Do you think the knights sleep in the hollow hills? That they have nothing better to do?"

Jo Graham lives in North Carolina with her partner, their daughter, and a spoiled Siamese cat.
 
She has a degree in military history and worked in politics for fifteen years before becoming a full time writer.
 
Her other books include the Numinous World series
Black Ships
,
Hand of Isis
and
Stealing Fire
, as well as the Stargate Atlantis novels
Death Game
,
Homecoming
,
The Lost
, and the upcoming
The Avengers
,
Secrets
and
The Inheritors
.
 
Her next book in the Numinous World,
Fortune's Wheel
, will be published in the summer of 2012 by Gallery Books.
 
She can be found online at http://jo-graham.livejournal.com/.

Wanda
Lybarger
, the cover artist, has been a graphic artist for forty years.
 
She lives in Georgia.