Cherry Crow Children

By Deborah Kalin

Tulliæn spans a fractured mountaintop, where the locals lie and the tourists come to die. Try the honey.

Briskwater crouches deep in the shadow of a dam wall. Ignore the weight of the water hanging overhead, and the little dead girl wandering the streets. Off with you, while you still can.

In Haverny Wood the birds drink blood, the dogs trade their coughings for corpses, the lost children carve up their bodies to run with the crows, and the townsfolk stitch silence into their spleens. You mustn't talk so wild.

The desert-locked outpost of Boundary boasts the famed manufacturers of flawless timepieces; those who would learn the trade must offer up their eyes as starting materials. Look to your pride: it will eat you alive.

Sooner or later, in every community, fate demands its dues — and the currency is blood.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Twelfth Planet Press
• Release date: Nov 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781922101099

Deborah Kalin

Deborah Kalin is an award-winning writer of literary speculative fiction, author of the collection Cherry Crow Children and The Binding novels. Her work has won two Aurealis Awards and has been shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson Awards, the Ditmar Awards and the Australian Shadows Awards. She lives in Melbourne, subject to the whims of a toddler who thinks she's a cat and a cat who thinks she's a person. Both of them whinge, mostly about sleep and food. (The toddler wants less of each, the cat more. Both want more outside time.) Kalin herself hasn't slept uninterrupted through the night since March 2012.

Book preview

Cherry Crow Children

Cherry Crow Children

A Twelve Planets Collection

Deborah Kalin

Twelfth Planet Press

Contents

About the Publisher

Dedication

Introduction

The Wages of Honey

The Briskwater Mare

The Miseducation Of Mara Lys

The Cherry Crow Children Of Haverny Wood

About the Author

Acknowledgments

Copyright

Twelve Planets Collections

About the Publisher

Twelfth Planet Press is an Australian specialty small press. Founded in 2007, we have a proven record and reputation for publishing high quality fiction.

We are challenging the status quo with books that interrogate, commentate, inspire through thought provoking and provocative science fiction, fantasy and horror.

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for Ada

may you conquer monsters

(in whatever form they arise)

Introduction

The first thing that strikes me on reading a Deborah Kalin story is what a pleasure it is to read. Her prose has texture and precision. The words create their own topography, heights and valleys of description that build setting and character. Lovingly described landscapes turn out to be full of deadly treasures. Her exquisite turns of phrase lull the reader, who then gets undercut by the jarring reality of death. Kalin’s ability to combine beauty and dread astonishes.

Each of these compelling stories sets as its stage a vivid place, compactly measured and intimate as we come to know it. As a reader I rarely find stories that truly capture the isolated feel of life in a rural village, as Kalin does in both ‘The Cherry Crow Children of Haverny Wood’ and ‘The Briskwater Mare’, and the oddly disturbed changes rung through otherwise seemingly ordinary towns, as in ‘The Wages of Honey’ and ‘The Miseducation of Mara Lys’. They unfold like folktales from other worlds, thick with strange but wholly organic customs that make such perfect sense as you are reading that you are sure you have already read about or even visited, once, and were fortunate enough to make it out intact. It is the very mundanity of these settings that heightens the sense of unsettling secrets as their true inescapable dangers are revealed.

In these four stories the main characters (three women and one man) strive and seek. Speculative fiction often glorifies the asking of questions and the quest for answers, and to a great extent as a genre we champion the idea that exploration and discovery will create opportunity and solve problems. But, as Kalin boldly suggests, those who are curious, those who push against the accepted order, those who puzzle out the corruption and secrets that taint the people in power, do not always fare well. The companions they meet in the course of their journeys — the eloquent, arresting sourkinde boy, the quiet scribe Nikias, clever, flirtatious Rue — get caught in their eddy and dragged along after.

Loss and grief loom large. Disintegration turns to transformation. Truth leads to change. In Kalin’s unflinching imagination, change can be dramatic and profound and its consequences are often unfathomable, painful, and stark but, as she writes, always beautiful, even as you wince.

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Kate Elliott

The Wages of Honey

The carriage doors opened with the squeal of perished rubber disintegrating between rusting traces, admitting a wash of air heavy with the scent of honey. No wonder May had been drawn here.

Although if the scatterbrained girl had been talking of bee spit when she dashed off her note about the riches of Tulliæn, he’d wring her scrawny little neck.

Cadan stepped onto the scarred wooden boards of the empty platform, dust sifting along its length. He couldn’t help an irrational sting of disappointment at her absence.

Belching black smoke, the engine chugged and coughed down to silence. A piece of paper tacked to the wall beside the clock, its corner fluttering in the wind, read: Services to Aleinqa: Monday, Wednesday, Friday, second mark of the morning. A second note read simply: Monday service cancelled.

Slinging his scant-packed duffel bag over one shoulder, Cadan set off in search of the town.

A wide road paved with fitted stones, stray weeds working at prising the stones apart, led down the mountain, or up, and no sign to point the way. Cadan headed up. A stray breeze and the sleepy drone of bees at work followed him as he walked past neat-fenced fields choked with flowers of all strains and colours. Cadan shook his head: what regard of fences did bees and flowers show? Or, if instead the flowers were evidence of fields lain fallow for a decade or more, why maintain the fences in such good repair?

The road narrowed as it climbed and, clinging to the mountain’s curve, brought him at last to a pair of red marble gateposts. Together they framed a narrow stone walkway spanning a chasm. Its plunging walls glittered pink and white in the spray thrown up from the river thrashing by below. The echo of his footsteps tumbled down into the deeps until the water swallowed it.

At the bridge’s far end, a gate of iron grillwork barred his way. He put a hand to the chill bars, earning a palmful of flaking black paint, and rattled them in place. The sound summoned an old man from the small wooden hut tucked against the rising flank of the mountain. His hair, combed back from his lined brow, was bright as a new-minted silver sheaf.

Squinting at Cadan, he sucked on his teeth, and said, ‘You’ll be wanting entry.’

Stuck on the other side of a locked gate, Cadan swallowed what he wanted to say, and settled for a simple, ‘Yes.’

‘That’ll be twenty sheaves, then.’

‘What? Twenty sh — ? What for?’

‘Travellers’ tax,’ the gatekeeper said with a calm that told of facing this reaction, and all its kin, many times before. ‘Helps towards the road’s upkeep, not to mention the engine.’

‘Victimising travellers will only drive them away,’ Cadan muttered, but he was already fishing for his coin pouch. There was no train till Wednesday, after all. He pulled forth the twenty sheaves, their silver faces flashing in the thin mountain sunlight, and deposited them through the bars into the gatekeeper’s waiting palm.

A laborious count ensued, during which Cadan, bag dragging at his shoulder, did his best to keep his expression patient. At last the old man produced a key from the cord tied about his neck, and with great ceremony unlocked the gates. They opened without squeak or squeal. Cadan had barely stepped through before they clanged shut, clipping his heels as the gatekeeper hurried to lock them, securing the town against the empty road.

‘Here,’ the gatekeeper called, retreating to the wooden hut, which had a cutaway window revealing an interior as bare and unadorned as the exterior. On the windowsill lay an open book, and to this the gatekeeper was pointing. ‘You’ll be wanting to sign your name. Prove you’ve paid. Authorities’ll come looking, otherwise.’

Isolated the town might be, but they had a firm grasp of the finer oddities of bureaucracy, Cadan thought. Still, records might be of help in his search. So he accepted the proffered pen and carefully printed his name, Cadan Zhu, and asked, ‘People sign this when they leave, too?’

‘Oh, no. They sign the exit book. Those as pay the exit tax, that is.’

So it was easier to leave than to arrive. Welcome news, now he was twenty sheaves poorer.

‘Could I see it?’ he asked. ‘I’m looking for my cousin.’

With a shrug, the gatekeeper reached under the windowsill and fetched forth a second book. ‘This cousin of yourn,’ he said, handing it over. ‘Cheerful sort, would you say?’

Cadan’s fingers stilled with the book half open. ‘Why?’

Again the shrug. ‘Like I said, there’s some don’t sign out. Those as leave by the river, for example. If she came here to die, lad, she’ll not be in the book.’

Cadan eyed the froth-churned river with horror, his voice raw as he said, ‘You get people coming here to die?’

The gatekeeper grinned and said, like it was a point of pride, ‘We get all sorts.’

Tulliæn’s mountaintop location leant it isolation and quaintness aplenty, but that was only the beginning of its eccentricities.

Sprawling over the tors and crags of the mountain’s shattered slopes, the town was like an incomplete jigsaw puzzle. Ravines and cliffs and gullies criss-crossed the town, bisecting streets without warning. Sometimes bridges of stone or wood or rope spanned the gulf, or stairs or a ladder united the disparate levels; more often bridge and stairs were broken, or absent altogether. It was as if, once built level, the breaking of the mountaintop had similarly fractured Tulliæn — and the locals, instead of fixing their home’s deficiencies, were content to live around the inconveniences presented.

The first bridge-less ravine left Cadan bemused, but when the next two streets he tried delivered the same result, he cursed. Narrow and winding and crowded on either side by featureless walls, the streets provided him no chance to scan ahead in search of a sure path. Adding to the problem, there were no signs or sigils anywhere. Every building was of a piece, windowless walls daubed with a white clay facing in varying states of disintegration, punctuated by narrow arched doors set in deep recesses over high thresholds. Only the doors’ colours varied, black and green, blue and red and yellow. Those doors were his only proof he wasn’t continually circumnavigating the same block.

‘The Sorrowful Stair has rooms,’ the gatekeeper had said before relinquishing Cadan into this godforsaken jumble of architecture and fractured geometry. ‘It’s on Grieve Parade, which is a ridge-top road. So head left, and whenever the streets let you, climb. You’ll know the road by the thicket of thorn trees it overlooks, and as for the Sorrowful, well, can’t miss it. It’s a great gargoyle of a place, with blue facing and the old woman’s turret and exterior windows without shutters. That old woman knows every story there is to know in Tulliæn; like as not she’ll know your cousin’s. Oh, and you’ll want to look sharp. Night falls fast, this time of year.’

Eager to be on his way, Cadan hadn’t bothered to ask for more detail. A decision he was now regretting.

After an hour of winding through the outer streets, turning left whenever given the choice and yet endlessly confounded by dead ends of all description, including a handful of commonplace cul-de-sacs, just as he was wondering whether he should retrace his steps (or if he even could), a girl’s giggle stopped him in his tracks.

Save for him, the street was empty. Scanning all sides, alert for any sign of movement, he called out, ‘Hello…?’

‘…hello?’ came her response.

Her voice was too light to be pinpointed, and there was no movement to betray her location. No windows overlooked the street — but probably there was a private courtyard on the other side of one of these walls.

‘Mmm,’ the girl said, as if savouring a pleasant aroma. ‘You have a smell of secrets about you.’

It appeared cheerful lunacy was not solely the province of the gatekeeper. ‘I think I’m lost,’ Cadan said, and from wherever she loitered the girl sighed.

‘Clever,’ she murmured. ‘That was truth. You should try the honey while you’re here.’

‘I don’t suppose you could tell me how to find The Sorrowful Stair?’

‘Left,’ she said. ‘Always left.’

‘Oh, because it’s worked such a treat so far,’ he muttered, watching the dusk bleed across the sky.

‘Hurry now. Night’s almost here.’

‘What happens at night?’

The girl laughed. ‘It gets dark,’ she said. ‘And cold.’

Cadan shook his head. The locals were as cracked as the geography. But the girl was right: night was like to be cold at this altitude. So he continued on turning left, always left, and he climbed, and with every step he promised himself precisely what he’d do if May’s explanation for picking this place proved flimsy.

It was too gloomy to spot the promised thorn trees, whatever they were, but when he gained a ridge-top road swept by a swift and cloud-heavy wind, his destination was clear enough. Perched on a perilous shoulder of land, The Sorrowful Stair was everything the gatekeeper had promised. Four storeys tall, faced in a pale eggshell blue, with corners of undressed stone and drain-spouts fashioned in the shape of fantastical creatures. The southwest corner sported a squat spire which must command a view of the entire region for miles around.

The front door stood open. Inside, Cadan found an interior dark and cool, lit by a single gas lantern hissing and popping on a reception desk.

Haloed by its fitful glow was a woman with her dark hair caught up in two long pigtails hanging over the bodice of her dress. She didn’t bother with a greeting.

Irked, Cadan shifted his duffel bag to his other shoulder, and said, ‘You should look into a sign or two.’

‘Most people seem to find us, sooner or later,’ she returned, her spite perfectly equal to his ire.

‘And the name — in honour of the weeping your visitors are driven to by the time they finally find you, is it?’

‘Ha. I like that,’ she said, her manner warming a little. ‘But in case you’re truly curious, it’s named for the suicides. Popular spot, and all.’

‘Cheerful bloody town, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, we locals have made peace with our choices well enough. It’s the tourists who’re troubled,’ she said. ‘The fare’s two sheaves a night, which includes breakfast. Follow me.’

‘I suppose there’s no point quibbling over the price.’

‘Quibble away,’ she said, already walking toward the stairs. ‘But we’re the only hostel in town.’

The sway of her hips as she preceded him up the stairs reminded him his stay needn’t be completely dismal.

‘I’m Cadan,’ he offered as they reached the first floor and he drew level with her.

She shot him a belligerent look, one that said patrons who followed her up the stairs often accosted her, and said, ‘Rue.’

‘Strange name.’

‘After the medicinal herb, my mother assured me. Although my great-aunt also has a canary named Rue. I suspect the bird came first. Anyway.’ As brusquely as she spoke, she steered him around a corner. Halting to unlock a room for him, she added, ‘Breakfast is from dawn. I recommend the honey, in whatever form you prefer — it’s a local specialty.’

Cadan was not so easily dismissed. Before she could make good on her escape, he said, ‘You said this was the only hostel in town…?’

A slight hesitation before she answered betrayed her wariness. ‘You’re looking for someone.’

‘My cousin, May,’ he said. ‘She was looking — ’

‘Everyone who comes to this town is chasing a dream, and we’ve no one of that name staying with us.’ Rue shook her head, forestalling his attempt to elaborate. ‘I’m not one for remembering visitors overmuch. Did you ask the gatekeeper? He has a sharp eye for a pretty girl, not to mention his ledgers.’

‘I didn’t say she was pretty.’

‘You said she was your cousin,’ Rue began, then broke off with a blush.

Cadan laughed, delighted by the slip, however inadvertent. ‘I’m flattered.’

‘I just meant he particularly remembers girls,’ Rue said, stiff and still scarlet with it. ‘Anyway. Was she unhappy at all?’

‘Let’s say she remarkably did not come here to kill herself,’ Cadan snapped. ‘She must have stayed somewhere. Someone must have seen her. Tell me where to start, if it’s not you.’

‘If she didn’t stay here, she may have tried a local family. They’re cheaper, if trickier to arrange.’

‘So, what, I knock on every door in town?’

‘Well, tomorrow’s market day. Which should cut down your legwork.’

Irritation at her dispassion made him want to goad her in turn. ‘The gatekeeper said something about an old woman living here who might know.’

Rue only scoffed. ‘My great-aunt could be described as the town confessor. Almost everyone visits her, and chatters at her when they do. But she’s also … not entirely well. I wouldn’t look to find any meaning in her mutterings, if I were you. You’d do better to check the prefecture for your cousin’s likeness first. In case she’s feeding the flowers already.’

‘If you don’t mind, I haven’t ruled out finding her alive first.’

‘That’s not how searching works here. But by all means, approach it however you wish.’

‘Fine! If it will stop you all asking…!’ he snapped. ‘This prefecture would be where, precisely? And please keep in mind that if you tell me to head left, always left, I may have to punch a hole through your wainscoting.’

Fighting back a glimmer of a smile, she reeled off a path that, while more detailed than always choosing left, seemed no less asinine. ‘Directions in Tulliæn can sound whimsical,’ she added in answer to his unspoken scepticism. ‘But that doesn’t make them inaccurate.’

He didn’t have a counterargument, so he only nodded and made for the stairs. Rue followed him, but at the base of the stairs, as she turned for the reception desk and he for the front door, she apparently realised he meant to leave immediately. And at that, the woman went pale at the roots and reached out as if to restrain him by brute force, and squawked, ‘You’re not going now?’

Her alarm checked him mid-step. ‘I was,’ he said. ‘Why?’

She lowered her hand, as if only now realising she’d made a grab for him, and with a flustered air said, ‘It’s all but night.’

‘Aye,’ he said. ‘I hear it gets dark. And cold.’ Then he remembered the infrequent train timetable, and said, ‘Don’t tell me the prefecture won’t be open. Provincial bloody — ’

She drew herself up straighter and met his eye without flinching. ‘No, it’s not that. There’s a night prefect. But it’s not safe at night for travellers.’

‘Some alpine variety of the theriomorphs that plague the salt pans of New Persia?’ he quipped. ‘Or perhaps it’s rocs — I hear they hunt at night.’

‘Or perhaps a cocksure tourist could follow a street right off the edge of a cliff,’ she interrupted his mocking. ‘Or trust the stairs leading down a precipice, not realising

Reviews for Cherry Crow Children

[fred_mouse · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Holds together beautifully, with a overarching feel to the stories. The stories are all good, but hard work to get through. They are lush, and the world-building and characterisation are consistently strong. Strongly recommended. I received a copy of this book as a judge for the Aurealis awards; I would have bought it anyway.