Seasons Between Us Page 6

  The kitchen was black as pitch when they arrived. Jonnah lay a log on the dim coals, but the house was never warm enough, no matter how the hearth blazed. “I’m chilled clean through,” Firya said. “It’s winter already.”

  “A month yet,” Jonnah said. “My bed will warm you, if you ever come to it.” He left the kitchen, his bones creaking as loudly as the house in the wind.

  Firya curled under a threadbare wrap in the chimney corner and let the fire die in the grate. Narene did not come home.

  High white clouds ran before a dry wind. The day would be clear, the breeze perfect for winnowing. Sheaves of new wheat were stacked by the threshing floor. Firya had been up before the cockerel, cooking by lantern light. Jonnah had invited half of Iden town to the threshing. More hands to work the flails; more mouths to feed.

  “Have you another barrel of ale, Firya?”

  “None fit for Iden town to drown themselves in.” At sunset they’d lose Narene, and Jonnah wanted Firya to host the rabble while she watched her daughter disappear. Lerene was right. The only pride Iden recognized was standing up and spitting when the wishes turned.

  “I’ll send Cade for it.”

  Firya dropped her knife to the board. Her swollen knuckles bent at odd angles. She’d given up on spinning and knitting these past months. The wool chafed so. Even slicing old carrots into the stew left her joints throbbing.

  “Why don’t you rest, Mother?” Bellen’s wife, herself with three boys . . . always boys, in their family. She took up Firya’s knife with heedless skill.

  Firya drifted to the kitchen door. By eventide the swept floor would be mud to her ankles, the washing-up piled to the ceiling. But beyond the yard and the fields were the hills, a tapestry of evergreens.

  The eastern horizon gleamed gold. In this late season, the light wouldn’t reach the steep-sided groves until nearly noon. Firya’s back ached to think of tossing the wheat baskets, again and again, faces coated in rough hay-dust, choking on the chaff. The wedding feast would be eaten by torchlight and by candle. She could be gone and home again long before then.

  Firya walked out the door without reaching for her shawl. Bellen’s wife didn’t notice her leave. Firya passed among the men setting up the flapping canvas tents and shifting the bales of wheat without a glance, and floated across the stubbled fields. Only the mice, scurrying after the gleanings, saw her go. Cold gusts wafted her upward and softened her steps, until Firya came to the grove on feet lighter than a doe’s.

  Kirel stood over the pool. The water was warm enough to steam in the chill air, mingling with Kirel’s mist-grey cloak. “Are those bells I hear, down Iden way?”

  The spreading branches of the ancient firs stirred in the day’s wind. Firya went to the closest. She pressed her palm into the bark to feel the pain bloom in her old hands. “She’s lost to me.”

  “You want Narene to fight for her magic.”

  Kirel’s scree-sharp voice caught on her desire like a barb. Narene had never intended to make her sacrifice. She’d thrown away her power, and every comfort Firya had tried to offer. “She’ll marry Alun,” Firya told the old tree. The tree whispered comfort to her, but she couldn’t hear the words. “She loves him.”

  “No,” Kirel said tenderly. She lifted a hand to touch Firya’s cheek. Her palm was as soft as dew. “She’ll be bound to him. I hear bells on the wind, Firya. I hear a girl weeping because her mother isn’t there.”

  The mourning wind wailed through the trees. Firya’s breath fluttered in her chest like a sparrow netted in a wicker basket. The golden light filling the grove slanted in from the west. Sunset. The wedding. “Narene!”

  “She doesn’t need you now.” Kirel smiled, and it was the smile of an ancient woman, skin rough as bark, fingers as powerful as roots gripping the mountain. “Freedom’s price is wide, Firya. I gave you everything. Five children living. A husband who loved you. A daughter who adored you.”

  Firya’s feet splayed against the living rock. The mountain heaved beneath her. Kirel brought her other hand to Firya’s head and the press of her cold hands rooted deep in Firya’s skull. “These are my trees around you. Every one of them took wishes, and paid in full.”

  The old fir behind her was knotted with years, stronger than the mourning wind. Firya clawed for the trunk and held fast. Lerene’s lips had been blue when Firya, heavy with her daughter, walked at her side to the high groves. It had taken all day, with Lerene’s eyes rolling like a panicked horse as her lungs filled. But they’d come at twilight to the grove, and Lerene’s last breath had been full and clear as a dawn breeze. Lerene hadn’t come for sacrifice, or for power; only for the rest Kirel had promised. “You’re wrong,” Firya said. “My mother gifted you her bones.”

  Kirel’s mouth opened wide around an avalanche of laughter. “Ah, then gift me yours, Firya, and rest with her now.”

  No sacrifice would satisfy Kirel, no payment stand as a final settlement. “No,” Firya said, and closed her eyes. “I will gift you my magic.” Every wish, every mastery bought and paid for, she would return. Let her be a scrubwoman like her mother before her, if she could return to Narene. “That for my price. That for my daughter’s heart.”

  She came from the hills as if from a far greater height. She limped until she could go no further, and sank down to rest in the long shadow of a hedgerow willow.

  When she looked up, a young girl sat across from her. She was dressed in white linen and a green woollen cloak. Her dark hair was cut short and even above her ears. “Narene,” Firya said.

  “Mother.” Narene laughed. Her eyes were bright with tears. “Mother, you came.”

  Firya smiled. Her old bones pained her, as they always did, but the deep cold of the groves had gone. “You should be with Alun.” But no, the light was wrong. It was no later than mid-afternoon. She could hear the rhythmic calls of the men threshing, the women tossing the grain into the windy air.

  “I found the dryads, Mother, when I looked at last.”

  Firya spoke against a thickness in her throat which threatened to stop her breath. “There was never any need to ask them for your happiness,” she said. Kirel had claimed her bones and given her no joy she might not have found for herself.

  Narene ran a thread of grey silk ribbon through her fingers. The ribbon Firya had used to knot her womanhood braid. “What wish could I ask for, on an autumn day?” Narene said, her eyes bright with teasing. “What wish for a girl about to wed?”

  Frost chilled Firya’s breath. The braid was gone. Narene had called on the dryads at last, when she had no need for worthless wishes. The dryads could pluck at her now, cozen her with promises. Unless she’d begged for no more than what she already held dear, her heart’s home. “A fire in the hearth,” Firya begged, “and a husband returning.”

  Narene shook her head. “She’s given you to me.” She took Firya’s bent and broken hands, and raised them to her lips to kiss. “I wished for a grandmother for my daughter,” she said, “a grandmother I can tell her tales of, when I hold the scissors to her hair.”

  Author’s Notes to My Younger Self: I want you to know that it’s okay to be ambitious. It’s worth struggling or striving even when things are going well and there’s no apparent need for effort. Dedication and drive toward a goal are wonderful things that will pay off later.

  Robocare

  Rich Larson

  Maud was doubled over clipping his gnarled toenails—which was a real job, what with the rods in his hip, a kink in his back, and eighty-eight years’ worth of general wear and tear—when the goddamn carebot showed up again.

  Three precise knocks, then: “Good morning, Maud! It’s Berg, and I’m just here to check in with you.” The electronic voice was clear and soothing, enunciating perfectly for all the seniors without cochlear implants, and altogether too happy. “The weather is overcast, fiftee
n degrees Celsius, and . . .” There was a brief data retrieval pause. “The Chicago Bulls lost to the Seattle Satellites last night by a score of 128 to 111. I’m sorry! I know your favourite team is the Chicago Bulls.”

  “I have a phone,” Maud growled from his chair. “I know the weather. I know they lost.”

  “The Chicago Bulls now have a record of 0–8 to start the season,” Berg said. “I’m sorry!”

  “I bet.” Maud clacked the nail clipper shut and stuffed it into his pyjama pocket. He didn’t want the carebot seeing him all hunched over moaning and groaning trying to reach his feet. “Well, come on in. Do your thing. And then get out.”

  The carebot opened the door and walked in, a smooth ambling gait on flexy pneumatic joints, and it was painful to see a robot moving so much easier than he could. They’d come a long way since the herky-jerky Boston Dynamics days. This one was more-or-less humanoid, with a squat and sturdy frame softened by doughy white silicate pads. The big emoji display screen on its front was nearly always smiling.

  “Let’s start with your blood pressure,” Berg said. “May I touch your upper arm?”

  Maud grunted, pulled his sleeve up, and the carebot wrapped one soft manipulator around his biceps.

  “They’ve planted new rhododendron bushes in the garden. Do you enjoy gardening, Maud? I noticed you have a . . .” Berg paused, swiveling one camera. “Aloe vera plant by the window.”

  “It was a gift,” Maud said. “I’m not a gardener. Got a black thumb.”

  The carebot hummed for a moment, processing, before it spoke again. “Is your thumb black because you left it in the toaster too long, Maud? Ha! Ha! Ha!”

  Maud narrowed his eyes. “Are you trying to make a joke? Or are you glitching?”

  “I have made improvisatory jokes since Tuesday,” Berg said. “I’ll stop if you flag the behaviour as inappropriate.”

  “You got a long ways to go. Just finish the checkup.”

  Berg obliged, taking a blood sample and a bacterial swab as it babbled through world news items: Korea’s reunification, the migrant barrier debate, an announcement that seven percent of the oceans were now officially covered in reflective foam.

  “That’ll go wrong,” Maud said. “Guarantee that’ll go wrong somehow.”

  “You made the same prediction about coral reef restoration,” Berg said. “That initiative is widely considered to have been a success, Maud.” It paused. “I can see your sleep cycle is still irregular.”

  “Of course it’s irregular,” Maud said sourly. He jabbed his thumb at the window, past the spiky aloe vera in its scuttling sun-seeking pot, toward the abandoned house on the lot across the street. “Those kids were at it again. Having a fucking party over there in the old house.”

  “Did their fucking party prevent you from sleeping, Maud?”

  “Don’t say that. Sounds bizarre when you say it.” Maud rubbed his bristly scalp. “They’re trashing the place. I saw them sneaking in with spray paint canisters Thursday night.”

  “Did you alert the authorities?” Berg asked.

  “Very first night it happened, yeah,” Maud said. “They sent a drone, showed up about an hour and a half later, and of course the kids had already scarpered. Useless. Then they came again last night, being all quiet about it.”

  “Did their being all quiet about it prevent you from sleeping?”

  Maud ignored that. “They’ve got no respect for old things,” he said. “They think they can do whatever they want. They think they can do whatever they want, and there’s no consequences. Someone needs to put a good scare in them.”

  “Maybe you could ask them to stop, Maud,” Berg suggested.

  “What, me hobble out of bed in the middle of the night to shake my fist at a bunch of teenagers? They’d laugh their asses off.” A thought struck him, and he peered at Berg. “You know, in the dark, you’d pass for a security bot. One of those Taser-toters, the kind they always got prowling around the downtown. Probably outside your programming, though.”

  “What is outside my programming?”

  “Putting a scare in those kids,” Maud said. “Me, they’d laugh at. You, they’d get the hell away from.”

  Berg paused to process the information. “You are requesting that I accompany you off the property on a walk early tomorrow morning to frighten adolescents.”

  “Well. Sounds stupid when you put it that way.”

  “I accept,” Berg said. “Please send me an alert when you are ready. Have a good day, Maud!”

  The carebot marched out of his apartment and closed the door before Maud could tell it he’d only been joking.

  The day, like most days at the Wildrose Court assisted living facility, passed at a trickle. Maud had his routines, of course. Lunch was half an avocado and fried egg on toast, which he could make in the kitchenette of his own suite. While he did the washing up—everything was slow now, everything took time—he listened to his usual astronomy podcast. It wasn’t quite the same, now that Milo wasn’t listening at the same time and messaging him about it.

  The hosts’ voices were smug as they talked about the artificial moons in China finally being dismantled for being ridiculously cost-inefficient, and normally Maud would feel smug too, but Milo had always had a soft spot for the big silvery satellites—thought they were romantic—so Maud felt peculiarly guilty imagining them all controlled-falling out of the sky.

  After soaping and rinsing his few dishes, he slept on the foam couch. He used to set an alarm on his phone, but lately being unconscious was his preferred state, so he slept as much as he could. No aches, no pains, no memories. He woke up groggy about two hours later and read for a while, old French poetry because working both languages supposedly kept the Alzheimer’s away. He knew, vaguely, that he was reading the same stain-covered book of poems over and over, but he liked them so he did it anyway.

  He turned the pages with his left hand because he had no feeling in the right, none at all, and maybe if he’d gone in for surgery all those years ago it would be different, but now he was too old to have them open up his wrist and fix his tendons. The anaesthesia wouldn’t play nice with his weak heart or the medications he took for it.

  He only looked up from his book when the aloe vera started stomping. The little white legs that let the pot trundle back and forth under the window, following the sun, were now tapping impatiently. Maud had taken the aloe vera because it was the one plant of Milo’s he was sure he wouldn’t be able to kill, and he’d bought the smart pot as an extra measure. Now he hauled himself off the couch and over to the window.

  The read-out on the pot showed a rainshower icon; watering instructions scrolled underneath. Maud shuffled back to the kitchen and filled up a kettle with water, then shuffled back.

  “No more mini-moons for Shanghai,” he said, in the plant’s general direction. “Told you that would never last. Maintaining that low an orbit is a big old money-sink.”

  The aloe vera’s pot gave a chirp when enough water had been poured into the dirt, and Maud set the kettle down, rubbing his knotted wrist. Through the window he could see the old house, overgrown lawn rippling in the dusk breeze. Whenever Milo had come over to his place for a beer, he’d lamented about the old house, about how it was going to waste and what a shame.

  And now a bunch of little pricks were spray-painting the walls and probably smashing the windows next, getting high on opioid derivatives or whatever kids were using these days. Maud decided then and there that he would do something about it, whether Berg came along or not. He found a black woollen sweater in his closet and put it on, along with a black cap.

  In the mirror he tried to puff out his chest and look grizzled—a grizzled old security guard. He practiced waving an old solar flashlight from the drawer as he scowled. That helped a little, so long as nobody noticed it was blue with ti
ny cartoon birds on it.

  Prepared, Maud guided his couch over to the window and settled in to wait.

  Supper came by delivery, since Maud had been avoiding the dining hall for the past three weeks, but he ignored it. He didn’t seem to really get hungry anymore. Food was mostly something he took with his medications.

  He watched. He waited. He had the book of poems in his lap but never managed to focus on it for more than a few stanzas. It was possible the kids weren’t going to show up. It was possible they’d never show up again, and Maud was keeping watch over an abandoned house for no reason at all. But at least he was doing something.

  And finally, just before midnight, they showed up. A gaggle of kids in puffy recycled jackets, most of them wearing backpacks, too. No laughing or shouting this time, but they loped off the sidewalk and into the overgrown grass like they owned the place. Maud watched one of them scale the splintering wooden fence to the backyard and open the door for the rest.

  Maud grabbed his phone off the couch beside him, slipping the once-begrudged loop over his wrist out of habit, and flipped past the aid icon to the direct contact line for the Wildrose Court’s carebot. Berg showed up about five minutes later, knocking just as loudly as it did during the day. Maud struggled up off the couch and opened the door.

  “Good evening, Maud,” Berg said. “I see that the adolescents are preventing you from sleeping.”

  “Damn right,” Maud said.

  “Why do they make you angry?” Berg asked.

  Maud stared. Blinked. “Because they think they can do whatever they want,” he finally said. “But you can’t.” He gritted his teeth. Berg was right. He was angry. “You can’t,” Maud repeated. “The bad stuff just happens and you can’t do anything.”

  “Bad stuff, Maud?”