Eyes Like Sky And Coal And Moonlight
Read Eyes Like Sky And Coal And Moonlight Online
Authors: Cat Rambo
Eyes Like Sky
and Coal
and Moonlight
Stories by
Cat Rambo
This book is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Introduction to the Electronic Version
Eight Letters of Wonder, by Michael Livingston
Her Eyes Like Sky, And Coal, And Moonlight
I'll Gnaw Your Bones, the Manticore Said
The Towering Monarch of His Mighty Race, Whose Like the World Will Never See Again
Introduction to the Electronic Version
I'll tell you something, Dearest Reader. What you are viewing on your screen is an experiment of the highest order. It's an experiment I'm conducting due to my interest in the future of publishing.
Paper Golem Press published the hardcopy version of this collection in 2009. At the time I signed the contract, I retained audio and electronic rights. The hard copy turned out beautifully, particularly with Mary Robinette Kowal's fabulous work in designing the book, including finding cover art that looked as though the artist, Carrie Ann Baade, had crawled around inside my head for a while and emerged with a frighteningly accurate rendition of the perils therein. Co-editors Michael Livingston and Lawrence Schoen worked hard at arranging the stories, making sure they flowed smoothly, eradicating mistakes, and generally doing a thousand things to make it better.
I was ecstatic to see the first copy when it arrived. I can't begin to say what a thrill it was to hold it in my hand.
But, like most humans, I'm rarely 100% satisfied. So I took the opportunity to change back a couple of decisions I didn't agree with, fix some typos along the way, and add a story that only appears in this edition. So what all is different?
For one, I'd originally written the story notes with an eye to them appearing after, rather than before, the stories, which led to a couple of spoilers here and there. So I've moved them back, and in some cases expanded on them.
Secondly, I've included the document we'd originally intended to use as an introduction, written by Jeff VanderMeer on the occasion of my appearance at Michigan-based (and wonderful, thank you guys so much for a great time) ConFusion.
Finally, I've added a story. Because I can. The story is "Grandmother's Road Trip," and it's dedicated to my grandmother, Nellie Warner McDonald.
Since the book's first appearance, several very nice people have said kind things about it, and it was an Endeavor Award finalist this year. I've sold some other stories, and written a few too. And now I've made my foray into e-publishing. Thank you for buying it.
All the best,
Cat
Eight Letters of Wonder
I’m not a gambling man. Never have been. But I bet the odds are good that I can guess what you, Dear Reader, are thinking as you hold this beautiful book in your hand. After all, almost everyone who encounters Cat Rambo’s work undergoes the same two-step process of thinking. I went through it myself several years ago.
If this is your first exposure to Cat’s work, you’re wondering if that’s her real name. There’s no chance, you’re thinking, that those two nouns actually came together in any natural way. One or both of the names just has to be fake, right? I thought the same thing once. But I was wrong. To quote the Seinfeldian response to a rather unrelated question of authenticity, “They’re real, and they’re spectacular.”
If, on the other hand, you’ve read Cat’s work before—
any
of it—then you’re thinking you know damn well what a good book this is going to be. And I’m pleased to say here at the outset that you’ll not be disappointed.
Cat’s career has been on a space-lift trajectory of late, and Rambo-reading veterans have no doubt why: Cat’s good. Really good. She moves smoothly in and out of genres and voices. Effortlessly, as if her work is the ether that binds them. Fantasy, science fiction, horror . . . Cat takes them on, two or three at a time, mixing and matching them with alchemically fantastic results. Jeff VanderMeer, introducing her as a recent Guest of Honor at ConFusion, called Cat’s fiction “often lyrical but tough-minded, unabashedly mixing traditional tropes with unconventional approaches. You get a sense in her work of someone who has actually lived a life and experienced a lot. That’s something you can’t really fake in fiction.”
As I said, she’s really good.
So good, in fact, that as I sit here staring at the table of contents for the amazing collection of her work that you and I, Dear Reader, are fortunate enough to hold in our hands, I wonder if Cat’s success was somehow fated, if somehow we have here, in the pages of this slender, precious volume, evidence of some fictional providence at work. Just look at that name again:
Cat Rambo
. It’s too striking to be legit—what with the cute purring-ness and the rough Stallone-ness juxtaposed in a violently abrupt eight-letter collision of worlds—yet it is. And more than just being real, it’s almost perfectly apt for the unique web that Cat’s fiction weaves. We are, after all, about to embark on a journey that takes us from memories of magic in strange lands to encounters with pirates, zombie girlfriends, famed elephants, distracted wizards, slave centaurs, and one of the most sweetly heartrending stories with pigs since
Charlotte’s Web
.
Cat Rambo. Colliding worlds in eight letters of wonder. It’s magical enough that it is so, more wondrous still that we get to share it. So let’s begin, shall we?
Michael Livingston, The Citadel
Her Eyes Like Sky,
and Coal, and Moonlight
The first time I saw Alkyone, her eyes were blue, the color of sky in a child’s story. The second time, her eyes were terrible coals, long past their fire. And the third, the third time—her eyes were moonlight, silvery as Lirathu’s benign gaze. That’s the color I remember best.
Almost a King’s Age ago, when I was just a girl, my parents ran an inn, the Blue Pipe. It sat just inside the city walls, serving travelers and merchants coming through Caravan Gate. Gone now, destroyed in the Rebuilding, but it stood through all the tumultuous years of my life: the night of the devastation, the battle between Kul and Isar, the long years of the Occupation.
Offering me some ale now to wet my throat? Very well. I like the dark brew, flavored with groundnuts. If you wish to hear of her, to know about the wind mage, Alkyone, it’ll quicken my tongue.
Smell the storm brewing this evening—that edge of lightning riding the wind? That’s how it smelled that first night they came. Everyone in the tavern was excited. Word had spread there was to be a secret meeting of those who opposed Lord Isar.
The commons were packed to the gills with Tan Muark and Tuluki followers of Kul. Everyone called him Kul, despite his rank, as high as that of Lord Isar. Everyone thought of him as a distinguished friend, an elder brother. The one who would defend us all.
In the back room, several of my siblings and cousins served a gathering too important to be seen. History being made, my brother Amos said, puffing himself up, by the Muark leaders and Kurac merchants, come to discuss what was to be done about the tyrant.
And elementalists. Does that shock you, nowadays when no one can admit to practicing the elemental magics? Even then, most people didn’t speak of it, as though it were something disgraceful. Sometimes I wondered about my father. He had a fiery temper, the way followers of Suk-Krath are rumored to, and once I thought I saw him light the fire in the hearth with a gesture, but I was very small at the time.
Alkyone was an air-mage. A hawk-faced woman who wore her white hair in tiny braids, each tied off with a stone bead, as though to weigh her down, keep her from flying off. Her left cheek was tattooed—a triangle of blue dots, set just below her paler-colored eye. I had never seen anyone like her before, and I pressed forward, staring, until she looked up and caught my gaze.
She smiled at me and shared her honey cakes, crumbling them with long, nervous fingers. Her accent was lilting as she told me she had never had honey cakes when she was growing up.
“
I come from a village where the thornlands give way to the hills, in the east,” she said. “But most lately I am come from Allanak, child. Do you know it?”
Wonders came from the southern city of Allanak: obsidian bracelets, and puppets with joints carved from bone. And sticky dried insects laced with honey that came in big blocks so chunks could be pried off to be chopped and added to pastries. I said this.
She looked around at the press of people. “There were many people in Allanak, and then some, but still I am unused to being among such a crowd. I like the desert. I like sleeping where I can feel the wind on my face and hear what it sings, deep in the night.”
I ate a little honey cake and told her that usually we were not so busy.
“
Do you know why everyone has crowded here?” she asked.
To fight Lord Isar, I said.
“
And why we are fighting him?”
Her teacher’s manner made me impatient. I knew this lesson as well as she did. Two of my cousins and my brother Lucius had been taken by Lord Isar for speaking out against him, I told her.
She looked abashed. “Indeed. Down in Allanak I have been around those that do not understand the need to fight him, and so I have fallen in the habit of lecturing.” She held out the rest of the honey cake. “Am I forgiven?”