Bards and Sages Quarterly (October 2021)

By Bards and Sages Publishing

Welcome to The Bards and Sages Quarterly, a journal of speculative fiction. With each issue, we strive to bring readers a wide range of character-driven fiction from established and emerging authors in the fantasy, horror, and science fiction fields. The Bards and Sages Quarterly is the perfect sampler to explore the incredible range of storytelling found in the speculative genres.

Some of the tales in this issue include:

When a chicken's heart beats longer than it should, Mathilde must choose what to believe in if she hopes to save her sick daughter in The Movement of a Heart.

In Speak, a man tries to provide for his family in a world where your economic circumstances determine how well you can communicate.

A group of social outcasts selected by aliens to escape the upcoming destruction of earth decide to hold one last party before they go in About last Night.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bards and Sages Publishing
• Release date: Oct 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005258993

Bards and Sages Publishing

Established in 2002, Bards and Sages Publishing is a micro-press that publishes speculative fiction and roleplaying games. To find our line of RPG products in digital format, please visit Drivethrurpg.

Book preview

The Corpse-Fisher’s Daughter

By Elana Gomel

MY FATHER WAS A CORPSE-fisher.

I was too young to realize how shameful his occupation was when he first took me to the Candlemas Cove to look for the bodies washed upon the shore. I was only six, and this outing was an opportunity to escape the stench and crowds of Llyn Dian. My mother was already ill at the time, lying on the sweaty rags in our tenement flat, staring at the dim yellowish window beyond which the smoke and the fog combined into the poisonous mix that was eating away at her lungs. We were poor but my father had hired a priest to read the Verses of Humanity over her. I was afraid of his monotonous voice spewing incomprehensible syllables and of my mother’s glazed eyes. So, I was happy to join my father.

We rode a dogcart to the shore. It was a bright, windy day, the scuttling clouds casting quick shadows upon the green downs. I was astonished by the emptiness of the countryside. Pretty villages nestled among the rolling hills but there was barely a human being to be seen. My father was muttering something to himself. I glanced timidly at him, bursting with questions but afraid to ask.

The road lined by blooming hedges passed near a larger village, and I saw a bunch of people standing in the empty field. I realized they were watching a man digging a hole. There was something so angry about them that I could not help myself.

What are they doing, Dada? I asked.

Taking bad rubbish out! he replied gruffly.

I forgot all about the gravediggers – because, of course, later I realized that was what they were – when the road emerged onto the open plain and I saw the sea. At first, I did not even understand what I was seeing: my experience of open water being limited to the thick flow of the Tamesas, so polluted that it looked like tar. Here it seemed to me that the land just came to an end abruptly, as if cut off by a knife, and a vast gulf of emptiness began, the sky wrapping itself around the edge like flowing blue silk. And then I saw that the blue gulf was roiling with rhythmic motion, spurs of whiteness rising and rushing toward us like a herd of stallions. I was so enchanted I forgot about my father until he called me.

Lisa!

He had hobbled our sturdy little pony and was going down the stairs cut into the side of the low cliff. I ran after him as fast as I could, the salty air intoxicating in my lungs.

The dancing blue was water, so much of it that I felt as if I was dissolving in its immensity. And there were more marvels: the pale sand yielding under my feet; the clumps of tough iron-grey grass that caught on my petticoat; the strange objects that littered the beach: long smelly cables ending in bulbous protrusions; elaborate china knickknacks; mounds of quivering gel...It was only later that I learned to contain their wonder with proper names: kelp, seashells, jellyfish.

Don’t go far! my father commanded. And holler if you see something strange.

Since everything was strange to me, his order was meaningless. I kept my mouth shut and followed him like a puppy. He went along the hissing edge of the surf, poking at its bounty with his long, hooked staff. He was also carrying a large sack.

I picked up a beautiful, curved seashell and saw an eye on a stalk pop out and blink at me.

My father stopped suddenly ahead of me and was bending over something large lying on the wet sand. I tiptoed closer and peeked over his shoulder.

The thing was different from all the other denizens of the miracle beach because it was recognizable. Or rather, a part of it was recognizable. The lower part: two slender legs, splayed out in a way that made me blush, the shallow mound of a belly. But above the waist, the body narrowed down into a blunt torpedo-like protrusion surmounted by a fish-head, its murky eyes dull and unseeing, its lipless mouth hanging open and seeded with sharp bony teeth. The hips and legs of a woman melded with the body of a giant eel.

My father poked it with his stick. It flopped. Black sea lice scuttled from underneath it. I screamed. He looked at me with a frown.

This is your bread and butter, Lisa, he said. This is what pays for you fancy school and your mother’s medicine. The sea provides.

He knelt by the body and turned it around. It was of a sickly pink color, all of it; the eel part had the same skin texture as the human part and there was no dividing line. And tied to one slender ankle, there was something that gleamed gold in the sunlight. With a triumphant shout, my father yanked it off. It was a delicate chain and tied to it, was an embossed plaque. He showed it to me.

Can you read it?

My fancy school which, I realized later, was indeed too expensive for out uncertain finances, trained me well: even at six, I was a more fluent reader than my parents.

It’s a name, I said. Countess Lara Fairlie.

My father smiled. He was a taciturn man with a cragged face that I seldom saw lit up by pleasure. But now he seemed delighted. He pocketed the chain and clumsily stroked my hair.

Good girl! he said. Lucky Lisa! Now help your old man.

And he grabbed the mermaid, as I later learned the dead Countess was to be called and shoved her corpse into his jute sack.

THE MERMAID AFFLICTION, or simply the Affliction as it was called when mentioned in polite company (which was not often), had apparently come about when the first settlers showed up on the marshy banks of the Tamesas and founded the city of Llyn Dian in its estuary. The city faced the sea and grew as quickly as a kelp forest, fed by the swelling streams of trade and manufacture. The port of Llyn Dian was the biggest in Europa.

But it turned out, the sea wanted its share.

Mermaids were born of ordinary people –children of God-fearing families, proudly displaying the Verses of Humanity in their living rooms. They grew up entirely normal, girls and boys, so mermaids with a maid in it was too narrow an appellation, but nobody quibbled with it. The girls became young wenches, or young ladies; married and had families of their own. The boys became factory hands, or bankers, or manufacturers. But when they died, of whatever cause, their bodies underwent a transformation displaying to the world the shameful truth. You had to acknowledge that your son or daughter, husband or wife, father or mother, were not human beings but sea-touched monsters. And the judgment was swift and implacable: the body would be burnt, the remains buried in the potter’s field in an unmarked grave, and the name of the deceased would be struck off all official registers, bringing disgrace upon the family. No surprise that families tried to do everything they could to hide a mermaid in their midst.

And that was where my father’s occupation came in.

I FIRST JOINED MY FATHER on the Tamesas when I was twelve. I had been to the coast with him many times before, poking in the wet sand with my own stick, combing the beach for stray coins, jewelry, and the occasional mermaid corpse. The latter were hard to come by. The luck of my first outing had never been repeated. I did find once a little shriveled thing that at first, I believed to be a strange fish. Its head and flippers were covered in rainbow scales. But when I carefully turned it over, I saw tiny indrawn legs with the pathetic dangle between them. I showed it to my father. He wrinkled his nose.

A baby, he muttered. Not worth much!

But then he lifted a tag attached with a twine to its middle. Embroidered on in in a fine cross-stitch was a name.

Proper people, after all, he said with satisfaction.

The Verses of Humanity were unambiguous on that point: what distinguished people from animals and monsters was a name. Your name was the depository of your soul. Those buried without a name were doomed to the eternal limbo of Sheol. And while the Verses of Humanity also taught that mermaids had no souls, you could not convince the bereaved mother or the despairing widower that their nearest and dearest were no more than offal, to be tossed away and forgotten. And so, in defiance of the authorities, people, both rich and poor, gave their mermaid relatives back to the sea but marked with their proper name, so their souls could find repose.

The name on the baby’s tag was common, nothing like Countess Fairlie, but my father and others like him had a network of contacts that enabled them to trace almost any mermaid corpse to its relatives. He apparently managed to do so with the baby because next day he came back home in a good mood, carrying a mince pie and a clanking bottle in a bag. By this time, my mother had passed away. My father and I had sat by her corpse through the night, watching and waiting. I was whispering the Verses of Humanity, but my father’s face was clenched as tight as