The Third Bear (24 page)

Once, there was a country that became an Empire. Its armies flew out from the center and conquered the margins, the barbarians. Everywhere it inflicted itself on the world, people died or came under its control, always under the watchful, floating gaze of the airships. No one had ever seen anything like them before. No one had any defense for them. People wrote poems about them and cursed them and begged for mercy from their attentions.

The chief engineer of this atrocity, the man who had solved the problems, sweated the details, was finally called up by the Emperor of the newly minted Empire fifteen years after he'd seen a golden shape float against a startling blue sky. The Emperor was on the far frontier, some remote place fringed by desert where the people built their homes into the sides of hills and used tubes to spit fire up into the sky.

They took me to His Excellency by airship, of course. For the first time, except for excursions to the capital, I left my little enclave, the country I'd created for myself. From on high, I saw what I had helped create. In the conquered lands, the people looked up at us in fear and hid when and where they could. Some, beyond caring, threw stones up at us: an old woman screaming words I could not hear from that distance, a young man with a bow, the arrows arching below the carriage until the airship commander opened fire, left a red smudge on a dirt road as we glided by from on high.

This vision I had not known existed unfurled like a slow, terrible dream, for we were like languid Gods in our progress, the landscape revealing itself to us with a strange finality.

On the fringes, war still was waged, and before we reached the Emperor I saw my creations clustered above hostile armies, raining down my bombs onto stick figures who bled, screamed, died, were mutilated, blown apart... all as if in a silent film, the explosions deafening us, the rest reduced to distant pantomime narrated by the black humored cheer of our airship's officers.

A child's head resting upon a rock, the body a red shadow. A city reduced to rubble. A man whose limbs had been torn from him. All the same.

By the time I reached the Emperor, received his blessing and his sword, I had nothing to say; he found me more mute than any captive, his instrument once more. And when I returned, when I could barely stand myself anymore, I found a way to escape my cage.

Only to wash up on a beach half a world away.

Out of the surf, out of the sand, dripping and half-dead, I stumble and the Lady Salt and Blake stand there, above me. I look up at them in the halflight of morning, arm raised against the sun, and wonder whether they will welcome me or kill me or just cast me aside.

The Lady Salt looks doubtful and grim, but Blake's broad face breaks into a smile. "Welcome stranger," he says, and extends his hand.

I take it, relieved. In that moment, there's no Hanover, no pain, no sorrow, nothing but the firm grip, the arm pulling me up toward them.

They come at dawn, much faster than I had thought possible: ten airships, golden in the light, the humming thrum of their propellers audible over the crash of the sea. From behind my bars, I watch their deadly, beautiful approach across the slate-gray sky, the deep-blue waves, and it is as if my children are returning to me. If there is no mercy in them, it is because I never thought of mercy when I created the bolt and canvas of them, the fuel and gears of them.

Hours later, I sit in the main cabin of the airship Forever Triumph. It has mahogany tables and chairs, crimson cushions. A platter of fruit upon a dais. A telescope on a tripod. A globe of the world. The scent of snuff. All the debris of the real world. We sit on the window seat, the Lady Salt and I. Beyond, the rectangular windows rise and fall just slightly, showing cliffs and hills and sky; I do not look down.

Captain Evans, aping civilized speech, has been talking to us for several minutes. He is fifty and rake-thin and has hooded eyes that make him mournful forever. I don't really know what he's saying; I can't concentrate. I just feel numb, as if I'm not really there.

Blake insisted on fighting what could not be fought. So did most of the others. I watched from behind my bars as first the bombs came and then the troops. I heard Blake die, although I didn't see it. He was cursing and screaming at them; he didn't go easy. Shyver was shot in the leg, dragged himself off moaning. I don't know if he made it.

I forced myself to listen - to all of it.

They had orders to take me alive, and they did. They found the Lady Salt with a gutting knife, but took her too when I told the Captain I'd cooperate if they let her live.

Her presence at my side is something unexpected and horrifying. What can she be feeling? Does she think I could have saved Blake but chose not to? Her eyes are dry and she stares straight ahead, at nothing, at no one, while the Captain continues with his explanations, his threats, his flattery.

"Rebecca," I say. "Rebecca," I say.

The whispered words of the Lady Salt are everything, all the Chief Engineer could have expected: "Someday I will kill you and escape to the sea. "

I nod wearily and turn my attention back to the Captain, try to understand what he is saying.

Below me, the village burns as all villages burn, everywhere, in time.

SHARK GOD VERSUS OCTOPUS GOD

(Based on a Fijian Myth)

i. The Shark God Cometh

A long time ago, when Dakuwaqa the Shark God was young and not so wise, he made all who lived in or near the sea fear him. They feared him for his knives that posed as teeth. They feared him for his relentlessness. They feared him for his speed. They feared him because the bloodlust was buried so deep in him that he loved to fight for no good reason.

Dakuwaqa could take many shapes, but he enjoyed the shape of shark the best in those early days. It fit him. It fit his appetite.

When Dakuwaqa swallowed up a fish, he would give a big, bloody, toothy smile, and say, "One more. I'm still hungry! I'm the fucking Shark God. Give me more!"

No matter how full Dakuwaqa was, he still wanted at least one more fish. This made Dakuwaqa dangerous. It also made him take risks.

Sometimes, when Dakuwaqa was bored, he would take human form. In that form, he was a handsome, tall, dark-eyed youth with gleaming white teeth. Then, he would visit an island and lure a young woman down to the edge of sand and tide. Returning to his shark form, he would devour her, the water tunneling red against the white of the surf.

Such pastimes reflected the most animal part of his shark nature. But the game he liked best of all was defeating other gods throughout the ocean. It seemed to be his calling.

"It's what I'm fucking good at," he liked to say, with a bloodstained leer, to his remora advisor, Selqu, as they loitered in some underwater cavern.

ii. Selqu, the Remora Advisor

Selqu had perfected the art of the simpering suck-ass. His bloated gray-black body shuddered with a wild pleasure whenever he was called upon to approve of Dakuwaqa's tyranny. His mad gaze, performing endless circles of his surroundings no matter how motionless he floated, reflected the strain of his abandonment of self.

Selqu longed to become the Lord of the Remoras. He longed to be brought tribute from the least and the mightiest among his species - the flakes and flecks, the cartilage and the bone they had gleaned from whatever species of shark they had attached themselves to.

Smelling of blood seemed to be no great thing to Selqu. Not if he could remain the Shark God's Remora.

So he fed Dakuwaqa the tale of his invincibility in a thousand words as golden as the light that slides through the reef at dawn, making of that heartless, cut-throat community of eaters an illumined castle of enchantment.

"Just one more," Selqu often murmured to himself at night, as he lay attached to the sleeping Shark God's body, the light of deep ocean a blue-black flecked with the tiny pulses of miniature jellyfish. "Just one more."

Soon, they would rule over all.

in. The Shark God's Invincible Army

Dakuwaqa had an army of ten thousand steel-gray sharks at his command: hammerheads, great whites, tigers, and more. Their eyes were cold black coral dots, their hunger as ceaseless as his, their fins sharp as their teeth. With them came their battle-hardened remoras, eager for morsels of stray flesh, starved for foreign parasites. Behind them came battalions of skates, rays, and lion fish, all ready to gobble up whatever remains the sharks and remoras left for them.

This army did not know the value of mercy. When they swam into battle, the water turned the color of storm from their passage. Hundreds of miles away, fish would pause in their travels because they could hear the swishswish of ten thousand dorsal fins, because they could hear the muttered underwater echo, washing across their hearing in waves, that was the shark army's mantra: justonemore, justonemore, justonemore, justonemore...

The sea in their wake turned red with the memories of living flesh.