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DETAIL FROM A PAINTING BY HIERONYMUS BOSCH
—first published in Conduit 11—
I am a small, bird-headed demon, skating.
Gliding up a frozen river, I totter from side to side to side; my legs are short, and my crotch is low. In my crossed beak, I carry a letter. I have not read the letter.
I am coming to a bridge. I will pass under the bridge and go on.
I pass fields mummified by winter, all snowless rows of frozen mud and broken stalks of grain. A town is nearing on my right, an abandoned place, curtains flapping from the windows. Smells like plague to me. The evening is clouding up, bringing an unhealthy damp, and I skate a little faster.
That bridge is coming soon. I'm getting closer. I don't know where the road goes, the one that crosses the bridge, or where it comes from. Cities, perhaps. One of gold I suppose, the other of silver. Soaring places, all tall buildings and spiky spires. I won't go there, not to either of them, I don't think, not ever.
When I have delivered my letter, I will be food for some larger, fiercer demon, who will devour me whole. Perhaps raw; perhaps baked in some kind of pastry shell—it is more than I can guess. But I know the letter will continue its journey, carried in the beak of some new courier.
I could stop and rest. Three of my kind are spending the night in an open field near here. I hear their laughter and smell the ribald smoke of their fire. They are playing a game of lots. It's what I would do if I were one of them. Casting divinations for penny bets, each of us with a pile of coins between his feet.
My feet move forward and back, forward and back, and my weight shifts after them with each sliding step. The runners of my skates are ribs, my own ribs, but my chest hasn't hurt in years, and I can hardly even guess where the scars are anymore.
As their game unfolds, those demons—the ones I can sense but not see—they're casting the chances of my life. It is a dull game, and I'm sure they'll give it up early. The better to sleep; the better to be on their way first thing in the morning, toward or away from one or the other of those cities.
To read the note I carry would probably unmake me, turn me into
quivering jelly, leave nothing but a pool of fetid plasm. Unfit for a larger, fiercer demon even to sop a crust of bread in.
The silver city, as I see it with my inner eye, would embrace the hectic whirl of banks and markets as well as the deep, cool shadows and deeper,
cooler ponds of long-established parks.
I do not have a straight beak, or even a beak curved in a single arc. I am not fit for the various joys of sporting about in gardens; I am not equipped for music, or merry discourse, or love. I am fit only for utility, not pleasure. In the end, I am sure I will be more nutritious than tasty.
I am traveling in a great circuit, away from hell and back to hell. The fallen one doesn't want to know the information contained in the message I carry, nor does he want to forget it. From the way my fellow demons shun me, I suspect some taint of heaven about the whole thing.
I pass fields that have lain untended for so many years that their next crop will be forest. I pass the remains of houses that have outlived their inhabitants, barns that now shelter only bats and mice.
In the city of gold, I imagine there are parades and brash music and singing at all hours of the day and night. I dream of the festivals the inhabitants of such a city must celebrate. The costumes! The elaborate masks! Someone strolls through the crowds, wearing a mask, a cross-beaked bird's head. He's carrying an envelope—an invitation, receipt, love letter, or freshly revised will and testament. That one detail, exactly what the missive is, I can't imagine. But I know he'll deliver it, and after that he'll take off his false head and join in the dancing.
The vanes of ruined windmills stir to fits of wind, make feeble attempts to turn all the way around. Gears and grindstones rattle and groan within.
A lucky tumble of the dice—double points to my hooded, spoon-billed kinsman—and I'm destined to wind up in a stew, swimming with the
parsnips and other root vegetables.
What I carry, my master below can neither have near him nor ever
entirely let go of. Under certain shades of darkness, it glimmers like a distant star. A scrap of heaven. In rain and heavy dew, the envelope is pulp-soggy; the ink seeped and suffused the mass many miles and years ago. I will skate to the hut of the saint. All the legions of my fellow demons will pause in the midst of tempting and tormenting him. They'll shy off for a few minutes while the saint copies the letter's blurred script onto a fresh sheet of parchment. I will wait as quietly and still as I can, even if my legs ache, and I expect they will. Then I'll be on my way again.
A child throws pebbles at a corner of broken house wall, every throw another pock in the whitewash. He doesn't see the demons who tussle above him in the middle air. If I didn't know they were there, I wouldn't see them either. And their clash of arms, I would take for more noise of decay from the mills or maybe the sound of ice straining and splitting on the river.
But the river is as solid and smooth as any dance floor. The sound of my skates, forward and back, is the sound of dice skidding across a flat bit of stone. I hold the letter in my beak. If I go a little cross-eyed, I can see it before my face, almost make out the smudged arcs and lines of the letters. . . . But no, here comes that bridge.
Several years ago, one of Rudi Dornemann's brothers built sets for a production of Sunday in the Park with George where the tech crew's running joke was that they'd rather be working on Saturday Night in the Garden with Hieronymus. Recognizing that the title was too good not to steal, Rudi has been trying envision the apocryphal musical ever since. In the meantime, his fiction has appeared in The Fortean Bureau, Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, Flytrap, Electric Velocipede, and Rabid Transit: Menagerie.
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