Songs of the Dying Earth

Elizabeth Hand THE RETURN OF THE FIRE WITCH

Elizabeth Hand is the author of ten novels, including Generation Loss, Waking the Moon, Mortal Love, and Winterlong, and three collections of short fiction, the most recent of which is Saffron & Brimstone: Strange Stories. She is a longtime contributor of book reviews and essays to the Washington Post, Village Voice, Salon, and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, among many others. In 2008 her psychological thriller Generation Loss received the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award, and her fiction has also received two Nebula Awards, three World Fantasy Awards, two International Horror Guild Awards, the James M. Tiptree Jr. Award and the Mythopeoic Society Award. She recently completed Wonderwall, a Young Adult novel about the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud. She lives on the coast of Maine with her family, and is currently at work on Available Dark, a sequel to Generation Loss.

Insensibility, melancholia, hebetude; ordinary mental tumult and more elaborate physical vexations (boils, a variety of thrip that caused the skin of an unfaithful lover to erupt in a spectacular rash, the color of violet mallows) — Saloona Morn cultivated these in her parterre in the shadow of Cobalt Mountain. A lifetime of breathing the dusky, spore-rich air of her hillside had inoculated her against the most common human frailties and a thousand others. It was twelve years since she had felt the slightest stirring of ennui or regret, two decades since she had suffered from despondency or alarm. Timidity and childish insouciance she had never known. There were some, like her nearest neighbor, the fire witch Paytim Noringal, who claimed she had never been a child; but Paytim Noringal was wrong.

Likewise, Saloona had been inoculated against rashness, optimistic buoyancy, and those minor but troubling disinclinations that can mar one’s sleep — fear of traveling beyond alpen climes, the unease that accompanied the hours-long twilight marking the months of autumn. Despair had been effaced from Saloona’s heart, and its impish cousin, desire. If one gazed into her calm, ice-colored eyes, one might think she was happy. But happiness had not stitched a single line upon her smooth face.

Imperturbability was an easy emotion to design and grow, and was surprisingly popular with her clients. So it was, perhaps, that she had inhaled great quantities of the spores of imperturbability, because that was the sole quality that she could be seen to possess. Apart, of course, from her beauty, which was noted if not legendary.

This morning, she was attempting to coax an air of distinction from a row of Splendid Blewits, mushrooms that resembled so many ink-stained thumbs. The blewits were saphrophytes, their favored hosts carnivorous Deodands that Saloona enticed by bathing in the nearby river. She disabled the Deodands with a handful of dried spores from the Amethyst Deceiver, then dragged them up the hillside to her cottage. There she split each glistening, eel-black chest with an ax and sowed them with spores while their hearts still pumped. Over the course of seven or eight days, the sky-blue sacs would slowly deflate as the Splendid Blewits appeared, releasing their musty scent of woodlice and turmeric.

After a week, she could harvest the spores. These became part of an intricate though commonplace formula usually commissioned by men with aristocratic aspirations — in this instance, a dull optimate of middle years who sought to impress his much younger lover, a squireen who favored ocelex pantolons that did not flatter him.

It was no concern of hers if her clients were vain or foolish, or merely jaded by a terminal ennui that colored their judgment, much as the sun’s sanguine rays stained the sky. Still, she needed to eat. And the optimate would pay well for his false magnificence. So: arrogance and feigned modesty; a dash of servility to offset the stench of self-love…a few grains from the Splendid Blewits, and the physic would be complete.

But something was wrong.

Yesterday evening, she had unrolled nets of raw linen fine as frog-hair, arranging the filmy cloth beneath those indigo thumbs to catch the spores they released at nightfall. Morning should have displayed delicate spore- paintings, the blewits’ gills traced upon the nets in powdery lines, pollen-yellow, slate-blue.

Instead, the gauze bore but a single bruised smear of violet and citron. Saloona bent her head to inspect it, holding back her long marigold hair so that it wouldn’t touch the cloth.

“You needn’t bother.”

She glanced aside to see a Twk-woman astride a luna moth, hovering near her head. “And why is that?” Saloona asked.

The Twk-woman tugged at the moth’s antennae. It fluttered down and settled on one of the dwarf conifers that kept the fungus garden in shade.

“Give me salt,” she said.

Saloona reached into her pharmocopia bag and handed the Twk-woman a salt pod, waiting as she lashed it to the moth’s thorax. The Twk-woman straightened, adjusted her cap, then struck a pose like that of Paeolina II in his most well-known execution portrait.

“Paytim Noringal came here at moonfall and shook your sporenet. I watched unobserved. The resulting cloud gave me a coughing fit, but my leman swears I appear more distinguished than this time yestermorn.”

Saloona cocked her head. “Why would Paytim do that?”

“More I cannot say.”

The luna moth rose into the air and drifted off, its bright wings lost amid the ripple of jade and emerald trees crowding the hillside. Saloona rolled up the sporenet and set it with those to be laundered. She was neither perturbed nor angered by Paytim’s action, nor curious.

Still, she had to eat.

She had promised the optimate his physic two days hence. If she captured another Deodand this evening, it would be a week before the spores were ripe. She secured the sporenets against rain or intruders, then walked to the paddock beside her cottage and beckoned her prism ship.

“I would see Paytim Noringal,” she said.

A moment where only dappled sunlight fell through the softly waving fronds of cat-firs and spruce. Then the autumn air shimmered as with heat. There was a stinging scent of ozone and scorched metal, and the prism ship hovered before her, translucent petals unfolding so that she could spring inside.

“Paytim Noringal is a harlot and a thief,” said the prism ship in a peevish tone.

“She now appears to have become a vandal as well.” Saloona settled into the couch, mindful that her pharmacopoeia pouch was not crushed. “Perhaps she will have prepared lunch. It’s not too early, is it?”

“Paytim Noringal will poison you in your sleep.” The ship lifted into the air, until it floated above the hillside like a rainbow bubble. “If you’re hungry, there are salmon near the second waterfall, and the quince-apples are ripe.”

Saloona stared down at her little farmstead, a pied checkerboard of fungi, cerulean and mauve and creamy yellow, russet and lavender and a dozen hues that Saloona had invented, for which there was no name. “Paytim is a very fine cook,” she said absently. “I hope she will have blancmange. Or that locust jelly. Do you think she will?”

“I have no opinion on the subject.”

The ship banked sharply. Saloona laid a hand upon its controls and made a soothing sound. “There, you don’t need to worry. I have the Ubiquitous Antidote. It was a twenty-seven-year locust jelly. It was generous of her to send me some of it.”

“She means you harm.”

Saloona yawned, covering her mouth with a small freckled hand. “I will sleep, ship. Rouse me when we approach her enclosure.”

The glorious spruce and granite-clad heights of Cobalt Mountain fell away, unseen by Saloona Morn and unremarked by the prism ship, which had little use for what humans call beauty.