Hub - Issue 23 Read online

  Hub

  Issue 23

  8th September 2007

  Editors: Lee Harris and Alasdair Stuart.

  Published by The Right Hand.

  Sponsored by Orbit.

  Issue 23 Contents

  Fiction: As the Crow Flies by Dave Hoing

  Reviews: Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal, Dead Men’s Boots, The Servants

  Feature: The Future in Eight Pages or Less – A Profile of 2000AD

  Competition: Win – Bucketloads of 2000AD Audio Drama

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  About Hub

  Every week we will be publishing a piece of short fiction, along with at least one review (book, DVD, film, audio, or TV series) and we’ll also have the occasional feature, too. We can afford to do this largely due to the generosity of the people over at Orbit, who have sponsored this electronic version of the magazine, and partly by the generosity displayed by your good selves. If you like what you read here, please consider making a donation over at www.hub-mag.co.uk.

  As the Crow Flies

  by Dave Hoing

  When my granddaughter Caemyin ain’t helping me tend my crows, she’s off watching the cutters harvest the peat moss that’s Finchlan Glan’s only claim to fame. Says she likes hearing the men cuss as they load their wagons, but I know what she really wants is to see a dead body. One was found, oh four, five years ago now, buried deep in the peat and perfectly preserved, only with skin tanned to leathery black by the acids in the swamp. Happiest corpse I ever saw. Throat had been cut, yet he went grinning to his death like me and mine might sit down to a meal with good friends.

  Today she’s with me in the rookery, learning to swab cages. Not much in this world stinks worse’n chicken shit, but my crows come close. Caemyin—Yinnie—is none too thrilled with this task. “How’d you like it if you had to live in a room with your own filth?” I ask, and she says, quick as you please, “Well, Grandah, if you can train ‘em to talk and carry messages, how hard can it be to make ‘em poop outside?”

  Hello? croaks Syba, the eldest and, once, the best of my brood. Almost 20 now, Syba has grown huge and fat and blustery. He’s got some bald patches on his breast and under his wings where he’s pecked at a few too many mites. I retired him from his routes years ago, but he still rules the rookery, or believes he does. The other birds hear his voice, get excited, and start helloing and cawing at the same time. They think it’s feeding time. They always think it’s feeding time, and make such a to-do about it. Gives me a headache. I focus my augraam on Syba’s tiny bean of a brain, Shhh, Shhh, which calms him and then the rest. “Waste of time training a bird to talk, Yinnie,” I say. “He either learns it on his own, or not at all. And as for the other, unless you cork ‘em, they’ll sling their droppings where they will.”

  I’m joking about the corking, but Yinnie’s eyes light up like a gas streetlamp. “Can we try it, Grandah? Can we?”

  I give her a look and she deflates. But then she giggles and I know she’s having me on, too. “Why ruin good corks?” she says.

  I tousle her hair and send her out to the pump for a pail of water. Most everybody’s got running water these days, pipes everywhere, going underground into their houses and barns and sinks. Even got indoor toilet rooms, I hear. You just do your business in a big porcelain pot, pull a chain or push a button or some damn thing, and water carries the waste through another pipe and off to gods-know-where. Seems like a lot of bother and confusion, when an outhouse works just fine. Still, the crows do stink, ‘specially on hot, still days like this one, and it might be nice if I had a little plumbing to keep down their smell.

  When Yinnie comes back with the pail, I put my glove on and reach into Syba’s cage. He eyes me suspiciously—like we’ve never done this before!—and helloes. No sense wasting my augraam on this, so I tap his breast with my wrist and say, “Come on, stupid, you know what to do.” When he finally decides to hop onto the glove, I take him to the tether post. Most of my crows have the new cages, with bars on the bottom and a removable tray underneath. Makes cleaning real easy, and you never have to take the birds out. Syba, though, he never did like changes too well. Just threw a fit till I put him back in

  his old cage. Age’s got its privileges, I guess.

  If he’s lucky he’s got another five, maybe ten years left in him, so Yinnie’s gonna have to learn to handle him. She’s only eight, though, and that’s too young. Syba’s my favorite, but he can be one mean bastard when he’s got a mind to. Pecks and flaps and screeches and cuts with his talons, and if that don’t work, he craps on you. Well, maybe that cork ain’t such a bad idea after all. And a muzzle ...

  Yinnie hands me the pail, then fetches a rag. She tries to give this to me, too. “Nope,” I say. “Cleaning’s your job. Part of being a crowmaster’s apprentice.”

  “Yuck,” she grumbles as she dips the rag in water. Her hair is golden now, but it’ll turn black, like mine did, before she’s grown. Like the old lore says, the hair of a true crowmaster will seek the color of the birds. One of the benefits of our profession. I’m looking back on sixty, yet my hair’s as dark as it was forty years ago, not even a streak of gray. “Don’t wanna be no dumb apprentice,” Yinnie says, “if this is all I get to do. Crowmaster, neither.”

  “It’s not all you get to do, and sometimes, child, your profession picks you, not the other way around. You got the augraam, so you will be a crowmaster.” She hates it when I call her child. “So swab the shit and stop your whining.”

  “Bad word, Grandah! Bad word!”

  My daughter Ana would have my tongue in a bucket, she ever heard me cuss in front of Yinnie. But Yinnie don’t really mind, she’s just being pouty ‘cause I’m making her do the dirty work. Swearing’s one of the things she likes about the peat cutters. I smile and wink at her. “You don’t tell your Momma I said shit and I won’t tell her I saw you kissing a boy up in the loft.”

  “I did not!”

  “Let’s see, who was that now? The Jori boy? Or was it Ril? Maybe it was both.”

  “Grandah!”

  She wipes the bottom of Syba’s cage with the rag, then flicks foul water at me. Hits me right in the eye, too. I gather myself up with fake anger, but can’t keep a straight face, and we both start giggling so hard we have to stop to get our breath. Then the tickling starts. With her it’s the ribs, with me the side of my neck.

  We roll around on the straw floor, tickling and laughing, me making kissy sounds and her launching new attacks, while Syba sits on the tether post and watches us with that bird-curious look.

  *

  My messenger crows bring news from all over Arra, even a note or two from the new government that set itself up in Bylar. Never been but one kind of people in Finchlan Glan, so their fancy equality laws don’t mean too much to us up here. And the other stuff, that’s just words, some lawyery notion that what you call a thing is more important than the thing itself. Makes no sense, you ask me; but then, nobody ever does. Anyway, the government usually leaves us alone, except to collect taxes on our peat—that didn’t change!—but today I got a message by bird announcing some o-fficial mouth-man’ll be coming to Chamal in a few days to, well, make an announcement. The note wasn’t in code and so, not being confidential, I gave it to Yinnie and let her take the pony in to see the ma
yor. That way she’ll get a chance to play with some of her town friends. Crowmaster’s apprentice or not, she’s still a kid.

  ‘Course, when the mouth-man comes, I’ll need to go have a listen in case he accidentally says something worthwhile.

  I watch the west end of her eastbound mount. She waves and rides off into the green

  marshes, muck sucking at the pony’s hooves even now, at the beginning of summer.

  The province of Finchlan Glan (oh, all right, the county of Finchlan Glan) is in the northwest part of Arra. The seasons we get are winter, winter, stinking-hot, and winter. Our cold ain’t the clean, snowy cold of, say, Dallya, but that dreary, miserable damp that worms into your bones and shivers you from the inside out. Rain clouds bump up against the Tombs Mountains to the east and dump their load on us most every day for three quarters of the year. And summer? The air’s so heavy and dead that if you fart in the morning the smell will still be hanging there when night falls.

  “Father!”

  That would be Ana, calling from the barn. By now she’s noticed the pony is gone, and Yinnie with it. Gods, what a fit she’ll pitch! Always does, every time I dare let Yinnie do grown-up things. But taking the message was just an excuse. The main thing is to let the girl play, which ain’t grown up at all. Ana won’t like that neither, she thinks Yinnie’s too good for her friends. How’d that woman ever spring from my seed?

  Yinnie’s almost out of sight now, sloping down the ridge toward Chamal. The Korcen River’s straight ahead of her. From here I can’t see the river or the town, but I can see the mountains rising out of the mist across the plain. That mix of white and purple and sun overhanging the green sure is pretty, the only real scenery this swampy wasteland’s got. Otherwise the Glan’s dull as a sack of stale manure.

  “Father!”

  Much as I don’t want to, I turn around and head back to the barn. Ana meets me

  halfway, already shaking her finger.

  “Don’t start,” I say, but she starts anyway.

  “I thought I told you to go into town,” she says. “We are out of butter and yarn and nails, and the chickens need feed, and it wouldn’t hurt if you bought yourself some decent shirts. Your crows have fouled your old ones so bad I’ll never get them clean. And ice for the cellar, so we can keep fresh meat for a change. I’m tired of chicken and salted beef.”

  I’ve heard all this before, too. “Thought maybe I’d wait till the roads dried up a bit. Major supply run means taking the carriage, and it’s just a pain in the ass digging wheels out of the muck every ten paces.”

  “Language, Father ...”

  “Anyway, everything’s so expensive this time of year ...”

  The Korcen River corkscrews out of the Tombs and follows the ridge all the way down to Sorl. We depend on Sorl for most everything. Not many paved roads up here, ‘cause the, whatcha call it, the con-crete never sets right in this climate. Except in high summer, mud and slop make wagon caravans near impossible, which leaves only barges to deliver goods the rest of the time. And that ain’t easy, neither, on account of the Korcen’s strong current. Getting boats upriver to Chamal is so much work that merchants feel the need to skin us for the extra cost and effort. And skin us they do. Poorer folks can barely afford to eat.

  “Always the excuses,” Ana says. “Are we short of money? No. Are we short of

  supplies? Yes. This is how it works: we use the money, which we have plenty of, to buy the supplies, which we don’t. Now, when I tell you to go, go.”

  My wife Bet, she’s gone now some fifteen years, not too long after I bought Syba. Ana’s husband’s dead, too. Got his stupid self kicked in the head shoeing an ox. Ana took Bet’s place at my side when he died, doing everything Bet used to do—well, except that,

  which I don’t remember enough about to miss anyhow.

  Times was, old Bet used to blister my ears with her complaining, but Ana’s better at it than my wife ever was.

  I mutter a cuss word under my breath.

  I know she can’t hear, but she says, “Stop mumbling! You know how I hate that. And don’t think I don’t know about Caemyin and the pony.”

  Sometimes I wonder if her husband didn’t maybe stick his head in front of that ox’s hoof on purpose ...

  *

  “You have to concentrate, Yinnie.”

  The girl hasn’t settled down since she got back from Chamal. Chatter, chatter, chatter about a steamsailer, some damn new-fangled boat her town friends are blabbing over—like “new” means “better.” Meantime, Syba sits in his cage, looking bored with the whole thing. I use him with Yinnie ‘cause his patterns are as set as they’re ever gonna be, while the young crows, they got a lot of wildness inside them bitty little brains. Yinnie needs to learn the difference ‘fore she can start molding them into true messenger birds. “Now, the augraam ain’t a substitute for real training,” I tell her. “It’s just a way to ... to condition them, you might say. To make them want to be trained.”

  Yinnie stares into Syba’s eyes, but he don’t react, not even a hello. Usually we know when we’re making contact with crows, ‘cause they’ll squawk or get jittery or plump their feathers up to show their indignation. It’s a kind of violation, I guess, worming our minds into theirs and peeking at what’s inside. But it’s just part of the process, nobody’s hurt in the end,

  and the birds are better for it.

  “I don’t know what I’m s’posed to see, Grandah.”

  “Patterns, girl. Patterns. I know it just looks like squiggles and dots now. But it’ll all make sense soon enough. Focus on old Syba. See how his squiggles sort of line up?”

  “Maybe ...”

  “Good.” I walk her over to the cages with the nestlings. “Now look into these chicks. Their squiggles’re all over the place, no order to ‘em.” ‘Course this ain’t completely true; all living things got a grid inside that keeps them in the flow of nature; but what we crowmasters do, we lay down a human compass on top of their wild patterns and steer them in the direction we want. Teaching Yinnie, though, I try to make things as simple as possible.

  The young birds panic at her augraam’s touch, which sets the rest of the crows to bellowing. Quiet! I think at them, and they shut up. When I’m this forceful, they know I mean business. The young ones quiver on their roosts, gawking up in terror as Yinnie probes them.

  “It’s just the same ...” Yinnie says, real pissy-like. Her mind’s off on that asinine boat this morning. “Inside, the babies look the same as Syba.”

  “They are not the same, child. Concentrate!”

  “I am not a child!”

  Full of tears and fury, she stomps away from the cages and out the rookery door. A willful one, this girl. Gets that from her mother ...

  I give her a few moments to calm herself, then follow behind her. The sun’s throwing shadows off the Tombs Mountains and across the plain, and the mist is on the marshes. Yinnie herself is a shadow against the rising sun, its light a glowing outline around her. The Glan’s all she’s ever known, and while I think she prefers town to country, she does like the view out here. The ridge blocks the river straight east, but way on to the south, at just this time of the morning, the sun paints a thin ribbon of sparkle where the Korcen jags out of bluffs on its journey toward Sorl.

  “Grandah,” she says, sniffling, though I’ve made no sound. The augraam is so strong in her. She senses patterns she don’t even know are there, and that includes mine. She turns to face me, and her cheeks are still wet, but her eyes are bright with wonder. Never was one to stay upset too long. “How’s a steamsailer work?”

  I wish now I didn’t let her take that note into Chamal. The father of one of her friends rode down to Sorl some time back and heard stories about this new kind of boat, s’posedly can come up the river easy as going down it. The rumor’s not news to me—I got crowmaster friends all over Arra who send me stories of every bonehead notion ever concocted by man. Well, crowmasters gossip like anyone else, and
just ‘cause we can train birds to carry our messages, that don’t make our gossip any more or less true than anybody else’s. I’ve seen this steamsailer nonsense often enough, but still ain’t decided whether I believe it or not. Yinnie does, though, and I can’t get her mind off of it and onto her work. Maybe I should just let her talk it out of her system.

  “That’s assuming,” I say, “there’s even such a thing—”

  “There is, Grandah!”

  “All right, then. Do you know what an engine is?”

  “A machine?”

  “Something like that.”

  “So a steamsailer’s an engine?”

  “No, it’s a boat that’s got an engine. Sails, too. It uses the sails most the time, but

  when there’s no wind, or when the wind or current’s against it, it’s got this engine that runs on steam.” Yinnie looks confused, and no wonder—I don’t have the first idea what I’m talking about! “You know how oil lights a lamp? The oil’s called fuel. Well, steam is the fuel that runs this engine.”

  “But what does the engine do? How can it make a boat go against wind and current?”

  “It’s got this thing called a propeller.” I take her hand and spin her like we’re dancing. When she giggles, her laughter is the prettiest music in all of Arra. “The propeller goes ‘round and ‘round, and pushes against the water. And that makes the boat move forward.”

  She pulls away, her face clouding up. “But how, Grandah?”

  Now, it’s no easy thing to admit to my grandchild that I don’t know everything there is to know. But I’m a crowmaster, not a ... whatever it is you call a man who builds engines. Truth is, I don’t understand how steam makes the engine work, or how that engine spins the propeller, or even how a spinning propeller can push a boat against the current. I don’t know any of that. I just know what I read in the messages, and that ain’t much. Maybe the whole steamsailer business is just gossip anyway. Least, that’s what I want to believe.