Hammer & Air (6 page)

“Are those roses?”

He were right to sound doubtful. We were well into the beginning of winter; there were snow on the ground to our shins, and the bare branches of the trees were black against the dazzling white. But there… it were far enough away for us to doubt our sanity, and almost close enough to touch. It were a cottage on the green. The lawn were a little brown—like a lawn in late fall—and the trees around it were brilliantly colored. They were even the different sorts of trees: fruitless mulberry trees, maple trees, poplars, and honey locusts instead of pines and redwoods. The cottage itself had a millwheel and a stream running to power it, and yes, rose trees. A red one so dark and purple it were the color of blood, and a tree with blooms so purely white they were nearly blue. Each tree twined the boards supporting the awning on the side of the porch.

“That’s odd,” I mumbled, conscious of the idea that everything about it were odd, but fixating on this one thing because I could not seem to leave it be.

“That we’re both having the same dream?” Hammer asked, his grin a little loopy, and I hastened him toward the vision, because if we were going to die, this place looked decidedly warmer than the woods we’d been lost in for nearly a month.

“That the roses haven’t turned colors,” I said, and it were true. Rose bushes that old and that fully grown would have long ago met and melded, become cross-pollinated, sporting blooms the color of a bloody dawn.

Of course, that were the least of the oddities of the cottage, but since the thing were looking more and more solid and more and more welcoming as we drew near, I simply gave a whole and unfettered thanks from my heart for the little dwelling in the first place.

Together, Hammer and I trundled up the porch stairs and to the door, and I pounded on it and prayed for mercy.

No one answered, but the door swung open slowly, revealing a snug and warm kitchen, glowing with golden lamplight.

Were it enchanted? No doubt about it. Were it dangerous? Very probably.

But Hammer were dying, even as he giggled on my shoulder about the damned bloody roses, disobeying my precious laws of science, and I vowed that I would be the one to pay the price for any magic welcome we received.

Part IV
Wishes in the Hearth

The place were empty. It were small—only two rooms and a privy besides the kitchen, currently lit with two lamps hanging from either far corner as we walked in. There were a sitting room, with big stuffed chairs and benches, and a chesterfield, all with cushions and blankets strewn about, as well as a great carpet of furs, stitched together in any order, but tanned and cared for, soft and warm. A fire blazed on the sitting room hearth, hot enough to keep the entire house cozy.

Next to the sitting room were a bedroom, with a great bed, big enough to sleep four hale men, easy, and softly woven blankets and great, fluffy quilts hanging over the end and folded neatly at the foot. The pillows were thick and soft, and it were here that I stripped Hammer to his skivvies and made him lay down on those pristine white sheets.

“Gonna get them dirty,” he muttered. “Nobody to clean them but us. I never learned laundry, did you?”

“No,” I muttered. “They showed girls how to do laundry, which were stupid…”

“Because it’s not like we don’t like our clothes clean, is it, Eirn? I know you like your clothes clean, and your sheets. I made sure, you know, to wash myself every night, so I didn’t have to see your nose wrinkle. You wrinkled your nose at the other boys, going to sleep dirty in soiled sheets. Didn’t want to see your nose wrinkle. It’s a nice nose. A little small, but that makes you pretty. Didn’t want to see it all turned up. You never turned it up at me. I took it as a sign.”

Oh gods. A part of me wanted him to stay sick so he’d keep talking. Two months we’d been wandering. Two months he’d been buggering me nightly, and this were as near to courting talk as we’d ever shared.

“I never minded the smell of your sweat, Hammer,” I confessed, distracted as I pulled out our gear. I had the pulped herbs from the last time I’d had a time and a place to boil some, but I wanted warm water. I wanted to clean him, and the wound, and wrap him in warm blankets. I went into the kitchen and pulled water from the pump. There were a wood stove in the kitchen, but there were also a trivet over the fire, and I used that to hang our pot from to start warming the water.

I’d turned the deer into stew during that long day after the attack, along with the last of our vegetables, and I’d filled a water skin with that (since melted snow weren’t in any shortage, and all we had to do for water were fill our other skin with snow and keep moving until it were water.) I took it out, but Hammer weren’t hungry and I were sure he wouldn’t eat, no matter how savory the stew. I wished rather desperately for some blackberry preserves, because those he’d eat, and I’d feed them to him by the spoonful, if only he’d open his mouth and profess to some hunger. His body, stretched out on those white sheets, were getting thin, and the bulk of his chest and his shoulders that made up my Hammer were being wasted by the walking and the sickness and the time without food.

While the water were heating, I went to the privy; it were the kind with a pump and a water closet, very fancy for the likes of Hammer and me, who were used to running to a hut behind the orphanage when we had to make water and who had, once a week all our lives, hauled in buckets of water to boil for the big copper tub in the kitchen. There were a boiler in the privy, and warm water for the tub, and it looked to be a wonderful thing, but for now, all I wanted were the warm water.

But there, on the shelves, were towels and cloths and soap, and that’s what I’d been looking for in the first place. The soap were milled—and that were a surprise—but it were clean and I figured Hammer were delirious enough to enjoy the smell without being offended that it were flowers.

When I had all I needed, and the water were boiling enough to steep my herbs, I went to bathe Hammer.

Ahhh…

His body, even sick, were such a wonder. He lay there and moved when I asked and babbled. I traced the lines of his muscles, the ones on his side and his chest, his back, his strong core, down his flank and his thigh and even his privates. I parted his bottom and bathed the crease of his arse, and under his stick and stones, and then along his thighs, outside and in. I could almost feel the skin of him relax when it were clean and not stinking of sweat and sickness and pain.

I bathed his wound separate and realized that I’d been fooled by the dirt on the rest of his body to think it were sound. It were infected and feverish, same as the rest of him, and I soaked it in a boiling poultice, thinking hard that maybe a soak in the tub would draw some of the poison out of it, so Hammer could get on with the business of healing.

“You’re so quiet, Eirn, looking so serious. I always longed for you to look up from what you were studying. It weren’t right for a boy to sit so still. You’d play with me, though. That were special. I’d be the only one in the yard who could make you run a race.”

“And sometimes you’d let me win,” I said with a faint smile. I were washing his wound by this time, and my brows were puckered with thoughts of making him better.

“Had to let you win,” Hammer said, sounding so sober that I looked up. “I had to. You wouldn’t play with me if I kept beating you. Who wants to play with someone who’s always on top of the heap? And you let me win too. You let me see bugs. You let me hunt down plants when I didn’t know a daisy from a mushroom. You let me win every day we played.”

I were moved, beyond words perhaps, and my worry leaked out of my voice and my eyes. “There weren’t no letting you anything, Hammer,” I said, rubbing ineffectually at his toxic wound. “You were always first. Anyone on the playground, anyone in the house, you were my first. I were just honored you’d listen to my nonsense. Made me feel real and important, you did, when everyone else made me feel like air.”

Hammer’s good hand coming to grasp my wrist were a surprise. “You’re real, Eirn. You’re everything.”

“You too,” I told him, taking his hand between my own. Words. We needed better words. A fever shudder shook him then, and his hard clasp around my wrist grew weak. He were as clean as he would get, and now I needed to get some food into him.

“Some stew, then?” I asked. I’d heated that up, too, on the trivet, and he bout broke me when he wrinkled his nose.

“It’s not sitting well in my stomach, Eirn. You cook good and all; I were surprised, you know, when your cooking turned out right. But not the stew.” His voice grew dreamy. “Remember those blackberries? The ones we had the night we left. I want those. They… the way it made me feel, that you picked them for me. I’ll feel that, every time I taste them.”

“Blackberries,” I said, my voice rusty and creaking. “Right. Blackberries. I’ll go look for some.”

Madness, I know. But it had seemed to be late fall at the latest outside the cottage. Maybe there were bushes out there. There were water, and there had been the smell of blackberries as we’d thumped up in the less-than-bitter cold. Gods… anything. Maybe soft bread, maybe cheese—please, gods, you gave us this cottage, I were already damned. Anything for Hammer?

I were on my way out the door to search for blackberries in the dark when I heard a noise in the kitchen. Not a loud noise, just a settling of something, and I turned toward the cabinet, next to the pump and the sink.

Something about the cabinet caught my attention.

It were a curious piece of workmanship, and that’s for certain. There were carvings, ornate ones of bears and deer and birds along the outside panels of it, and they latched together curiously; interlocking puzzle pieces of a bear, a cougar, and a deer, and it took me a minute of pushing and finessing to figure them out.

I did, though—the deer went on top—and then the doors to the cabinet swung open, and there it were.

Five or six jars of blackberry preserves, and a loaf of soft bread.

“Right,” I whispered. “Right. Science bows to magic. Not a problem. Not even a question. If magic it is that keeps Hammer alive, I’ll study that instead.”

I reached into the cabinet and pulled out the preserves and the bread and set them on the counter, then ran the pump over my belt knife and cracked open a jar. Ah… gods… the smell of blackberries rolled through the kitchen, and suddenly it were late summer again, and I were feeding Hammer our last meal before we fucked, our last meal before we ran.

Our first meal celebrating that our bodies had started saying things we had no words for.

The smell of it filled me with shivers, the way Hammer’s eyes had, these last two months. Something wonderful—something with magic—would happen soon. I could smell it in the blackberries and hear it in Hammer’s gruff, “Bed now, Eirn?” that he muttered every night. Good things. These were good things.

I found a wooden plate in another, plainer cabinet and brought Hammer as much blackberry jam and bread as I could fill it with.

Hammer were actually singing to himself when I got back to the bedroom—some horribly bawdy ballad about a girl losing her maidenhead to ten men at the very least—and I laughed a little in relief as I set down the tray.

“And were one of those men you, Hammer?” I asked, taking up a piece of bread and offering it to him. He took a bite, surprised, and I actually heard him moan in his throat as the sweetness of the preserves and the bread hit his palate.

But the joy of the food didn’t stop him from shaking his head and talking through a full mouth to answer my playful question. “Only cherry I ever picked were yours, Eirn.”

It were a good thing I’d set the food down on a nearby table, because I might have dropped it, and that would have been a shame. I took one of the pieces of bread myself and started to eat. It tasted like health and sunshine, and I started to have real hope that Hammer would survive.

“Get out! You had lads and maids swooning at your feet. Why wouldn’t you take them up on that?”

He took another bite of the bread and chewed slowly, thoughtfully, and when he spoke, it were the old Hammer, the one without the loose tongue, that gave me his piece.

“’Cause fucking’s fucking. But that first time? That’s a promise. Lots don’t keep the promise, and lots carry ’round little bits of pain. Didn’t want that to be you, that’s all.”

There will always be Hammer and Eirn.

I would have followed him around the world, and twice over. Turns out, he only needed me to follow him into his bed with an open heart. My brow furrowed, and I would have said something then. I had a great swelling thing in my chest that needed to be spoken, but no way to give it voice. Hammer and me; on the surface of it we were so simple. I had no words to tell him that it were more than fucking, more than comfort, more than habit, even more than simple, schoolyard loyalty.

It were a sleeping word, maybe one I’d known as an infant, nestled in my mother’s arms, but like that memory, the word had gone with it. Maybe, like that memory, it were a word Hammer had never heard.

He finished a piece of bread and the preserves, but fell asleep in the middle of the second piece, and I were grateful. He were still sick—so sick—but the women at the orphanage had always held that no one died of fever on a full stomach, so I clung to that. I took our leftovers to the kitchen and wrapped the bread in cloth and capped the preserves with the wax seal, then put it back in the cupboard, but not before saying a surreptitious thank you.

“That were nice,” I whispered, “and I’m grateful to you, whoever you are. If you could have this waiting in the morning, I’d be grateful too.”

There were no answering sound, but I had a little faith and left the magic cabinet alone.

I wanted nothing more than to climb in bed with Hammer then, but two things held me back. One were that he were right—I never did like climbing in bed rank and soiling my sheets. The other thing were that he were sick. I couldn’t sleep next to him when he needed my nursing, when I feared for each breath.