They’ve lost everything. They—
For a long, agonisingly long moment, Lan stares at her—as if she knew, as if she could read straight into Ai Thi’s mind. She smiles again, almost with fondness. “Families. Of course.”
Her hand rests, lightly, on Ai Thi’s shoulder, squeezes once, twice. “I’ll tell them, though not everyone will listen. But you run, lil sis.”
And then she’s gone, and it’s just Ai Thi, walking through empty corridors towards the back of the barracks, the roar of the crowd receding into meaninglessness.
It’s not too late. She can go out of the barracks—go back the way Lan came from—go get her aunt and daughter before the rioters find new targets—she can run, as fiercely, as far away as she can—to the heart of the Quynh Federation if need be. They can make a new life, one that’s no longer in service to the Everlasting Emperor.
They can—
The Emperor is dead, and nothing will ever be right again—the appeaser reaching, again and again, for words, remembering that they mean nothing now.
“Ssh,” Ai Thi says, aloud, to the appeaser. “It’ll be all right. It’s nothing we can’t survive.” And, slowly, gently, sings the lullabies she used to sing to Dieu Kiem when she was a child—again and again as they both run from the shadow of the barracks—again and again until the songs fill the hollow, wordless silence within her.
Finbarr O’Reilly is an Irish speculative fiction writer who likes to explore how broken technologies or unearthly events affect intimate locales. Why would you want to write about alien battleships invading New York when you can imagine little green men asking for directions from a short-tempered undertaker in Carrigtohill, County Cork? Finbarr has worked as a journalist for almost 20 years, most of those as a sub-editor (copyeditor) in newspapers such as the Irish Times, Irish Examiner, and Daily Telegraph. He currently works as the production editor of a magazine for car dealers. He believes it is testament to his powers of imagination that he has never purchased an automobile and doesn’t drive. Like many Irish writers, Finbarr lives in self-imposed exile. He currently resides with his wife and two children in a small town in Lincolnshire, UK, too far from the sound of gulls and the smell of saltwater. He tweets at @finoreilly.
THE LAST BOAT-BUILDER IN BALLYVOLOON
Finbarr O’Reilly
“There are of a certainty mightier creatures, and
the lake hides what neither net nor fine can take.”
—William Butler Yeats, The Celtic Twilight
The first time I met Más, he was sitting on the quayside in Ballyvoloon, carving a nightmare from a piece of linden. Next to him on the granite blocks that capped the seawall lay a man’s weatherproof jacket and hat, in electric pink. The words “petro-safe” were pin-striped across them in broad white letters, as if a spell that would protect him from the mechanical monster he whittled.
Short of smoking a pipe, Más looked every inch a nineteenth-century whaler. Veined cheeks burned and burnished by sun and wind to a deep cherry gloss, thick gray hair matted and flattened from his souwester and whiskers stiff enough with salt to resist the autumnal breeze blowing in from the harbor mouth.
I had arrived in Ballyvoloon early on a Friday morning. My pilot would not fly till Monday, so I spent the weekend walking the town. Its two main streets, or “beaches” as the locals called them, ran east and west of a concrete, T-shaped pier.
It was near the bottom of the “T” that Más set out his pitch every day, facing the water, but sheltered by thousands of tonnes of rock and concrete.
Ballyvoloon was a town best approached from the sea. The faded postcards on sale along the beachfront showed it from that rare perspective. Snapped from the soaring pleasure decks of ocean-going liners long scrapped or sunk, ribbons of harlequin houses rose from coruscant waters, split by the immense neo-Gothic cathedral that crowns the town. Nowadays, the fret-sawn fas-cias of pastel shopfronts shed lazy flakes of paint into the broad streets and squares below. It has faded, but there is grandeur there still.
Between the town’s rambling railway station and my hotel, I had passed a dozen or more artists, their wares tied to the railings of the waterside promenade, or propped on large boards secured to lampposts, but none dressed like Más. Nor did any carve like him.
“That looks realistic,” I said, my heart pounding, as he snicked delicate curls of blond wood from the block with a thick-spined blade.
“There’s not much point sugarcoating them,” he said, his voice starting as a matter-of-fact drawl, but ending in the singsong accent of the locals.
“How long have you been a sculptor?” I asked.
“I’m not a sculptor. This is just something to occupy the hands.”
“The devil’s playthings, eh?”
He stopped carving and looked up at me through muddy green eyes. “Something like that.”
Más lowered the squid he was working on and cast around in the pocket of his jacket. He removed three of the monsters, perfectly carved, but in different sizes and woods, one stained black and polished. The colors seemed to give each one slightly different intents, but none was reassuring.
Other artists carved or drew or painted the squid, but they had smoothed out the lines, removed the barbs, the beaks, gave the things doe-eyes and even smiles and made them suitable to sit atop a child’s bedclothes or a living room bookshelf.
Más did the opposite. He made the horrific more horrifying. He made warm, once-living wood look like the doubly dead, glossy plastic of the squids. These were not the creatures we had released, but their more deadly and cunning offspring.
I hid my excitement as well as I could.
“Sixty for one or one hundred for a pair,” he said.
Más let the moment stretch until the sheer discomfort of it drove me to buy.
His mood brightened and he immediately began packing up his belongings. I had clearly overpaid and he could afford to call it a day.
“See you
