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Heading out for the East Coast, Lord knows I've paid some dues
And now for something reasonably different.
"How Many Miles to Babylon?" was written in February 2002 with no real expectation that it would ever be published: one could consider it godfic.* And in fact, everywhere I sent the story responded apologetically that it was well-written, but too reminiscent of American Gods (which I had not yet read at that point; I thought I was ripping off The Folk of the Air), and in time it fell into silence and despair.
Or I decided that it was not actually that terrific a story, although the characters and their not quite friendly relationship have never completely cleared out of my head, and shelved it. I had sort of forgotten it existed, until I ran across it tonight while tidying up my computer. I do not think it will ever see print. I do not think any of the other stories about its characters will ever be finished. Therefore, internet, to you I make this sacrifice. Enjoy. It's at least more like content than a silly quiz.
How Many Miles to Babylon?
My muse has a flat.
—Jeannelle Ferreira
The Muse looked at the flat tire, looked at the map, looked at the sky, and said, "Fuck."
The young man in the back seat of the car, knees bent as though he lay in a hammock with his head against the rolled-down window and one wrist behind his neck to cushion it, put down the book he had been holding with his other hand and craned his head a single uncomfortable inch to see her out the other, rolled-up window. "What? What happened?"
"What do you think happened?" snapped the Muse, who had felt the car jerk and slither out of her control not five minutes ago, nearly hurling her through the windshield and wrapping her passenger in a bone-broken pretzel around the back of the driver's seat, before she managed them off the road onto a shoulder of dust and stingy grass, where she was now dripping with sweat and choking on exhaust fumes and nearing the end of what had been, up until that point, an almost infinite patience. "We've got a flat. And we don't have a spare, do we?"
"Um," said the young man. He had hair the color between copper and rye, that caught the light as though it were spangled; he needed a haircut and kept pushing the bright strands out of his eyes and mouth as he read, absently, with a gawky, adolescent gesture of unfinished bones and uncertain reach. He and the Muse looked of an age, done with schooling and far from done with learning, though their eyes were not quite the same. "I think if you check the trunk—"
"Did that. Twice. Fuck."
"You said that already."
"So I'm repeating myself, is there a law against it? Inventiveness, please, put inventiveness in the middle of a four-lane highway and it becomes an inventively colored little smear on the asphalt, did you know that?" The Muse crumpled the map in one fist, threw down the tire iron with a clang and wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. "We're never going to get there."
"Can't you call—"
"No! No, I can't! Do you think if I had any other resources we would have rented a car in San Francisco, San Francisco, ototoi!" Her hair spiraled over her shoulders, olive dark and gritted now with road dust; she had the face that statues tried to find in curves and planes of painted marble, eyes socketed with agate and bronze to imitate her gaze that went farther back than the human eye could follow, and it was screwing tight into something resembling tears as the young man with the book watched. Panicked, he dropped the book into the back seat and fumbled open the car door, almost spilling himself out on hands and knees as he caught the doorframe and pulled himself around to stand beside the Muse, touching her tensed shoulders very gently, as though she might fracture beneath his fingers, or scald his skin to ash. "San Francisco," the Muse repeated, dragging in a breath that made him feel as though he had been buried in sand; he had to catch his breath too. It was a reflex effect she sometimes had. "All the way to Rhode Island. We should have caught the straight flight."
"From the big island? You'd have been jet-lagged into oblivion." He swallowed, because her shoulders clenched again at that, and put one hand carefully on the sweat-hot nape of her neck. He always forgot how tall she was. As with all her people, a stranger could only mistake them for human so many times. "Remember when we went to Lesbos, direct from Seattle?"
"No." Her arms were tight across her breast, her head bent forward; she spoke in the knotted voice of frustration.
Fingers combing the serpent-curls of her hair, he told her, "That's because you were travel-sick for the first three days."
"Well, we're going fucking nowhere now. I should be fine."
"Will you stop—" He choked on his question, because she had looked at him in the way that suggested crickets, or lightning, or stone: nothing personal, only the shape a god's temper took when it blew. He would much prefer a crater blasted out of the interstate than an eternity spent as some small, deathless, withered insect. "Er. Can you—you know? Somebody pull over and pick us up?"
"I'm a Muse. Not a miracle worker."
"You've been waiting to say that."
She thought for a moment. "That's probably true." Then she laughed, and it made her face into all the songs that the poets of Keos and Lesbos and Samos had ever sung, male and female, singing to the girls or boys of their love, the wind that came into the mind and breathed out words on the voice and the kithara, and the oldest one was oh, you. "But you could try it."
"Me?" The young man with the copper-grain hair turned the color of the scrubby dust underneath the car's three working tires. "But you're— I can't do that!"
"You're more born for it than I am." The Muse spread the map out on the car's dinted hood, traced a continent's arteries of roadwork with one finger until she reached a small spot on the eastern seaboard, tapped on it. "Should only take us, what, a couple of days?"
"You've never driven across America, have you?"
"Have you?"
He swallowed miserably. "No."
"Well then, miracle worker. Get us a car." The Muse unfolded his fingers, placed the map against his palm and curled his hand back around it. Her voice was much less sharp than her words; still he mumbled, "We should have stayed in Maui."
Her voice stiffened. "We could go back to Iceland."
When he finished shaking, and could uncurl from his child's crouch against the wheel-well, and swallow down the scream that had been bursting in his throat, he raised his head and said, "That was not fair." All the bones still pushed at his face from underneath, straining the skin white; there was something torn and edged in his clever, aimless features that had not been there before she spoke.
"Under the ice," the Muse repeated, like an incantation. "Under the stones. Where he writhes beneath his son's guts and the poison burns his mouth when he screams. You've seen it, in your dreams; I've been there. It's an old blood, but it goes far back, and you'll never leave that place as long as you deny it. You've some of his power in you. And you're the only one of his children"—he gave her such a stabbing, bewildered look that she amended the word, and knelt down beside him to look in his eyes that were the sliding color of white wine, his ancestor's eyes—"of his descendants that's still alive and sane. And not a monster."
"Oh. Thanks. Why don't you call Jormungandr while we're at it?"
"Because he's at the bottom of the ocean. And he couldn't get us a car anyway. And I've got to—on the name of my mother, Jónatan, on Mnemosyne's name—I've got to get to Bristol. You don't know what it feels like, the pull from a suppliant. The lesser ones, you can reach out to them without needing to cross space to do it. But the strong ones get into your bones, needing, and you can't but follow. Like you—you've got so much myth in your blood, you were like a story telling itself. I couldn't tell what you were until I found you. Maybe this is one of the same. Maybe just some stuck poet who's desperate enough to make me hurt for them. I don't know, and it doesn't matter. If I don't follow it, it's like somebody dragging my ribs out." He twisted his mouth at the image, a little wild still around the eyes. The Muse touched his bright hair, very softly. "Who knows? Maybe it'll be Vali." He flinched. "Ah, Jónatan, I'm sorry. I didn't mean . . ."
"No. It's all right." He put up one hand to stop her apologies, because he had never gotten used to hearing a goddess apologize, no matter how well meant, and got to his feet with one hand braced against the side of the car. In full sunlight, the color of his hair looked much closer to something burning; she was taller than he, but never looked it. He whispered, "I hate doing this . . ." Carefully, he spread both hands to the hazed California sky—one hand still clutching a map—and said, in the language his mother had spoken before she moved from Keflavík to Toronto, though she had learned English as a matter of course, she had told him stories in their old language, "All right. Now."
When the pickup truck skidded to a stop not ten feet from where the Muse stood with a startled, wicked grin like no Greek statue ever carved, and the driver leapt out and pelted off into the dry fields at the side of the road, clearly under the impression that his car had caught fire and was less than thirty seconds from blowing sky-high and taking him with it, Loki's grandson a thousand years removed caught his breath, dropped his hands, and reached into the back seat for the book he had been reading when the tire blew out. "Come on," he said, shifting-eyed, fire-haired, looking more than ever like his ancestor for those scant few seconds before the humanity in his blood reasserted itself, "let's go to Bristol."
"Rhode Island, ototoi," said the Muse, and climbed into the driver's seat.
*That word still looks like an Anglo-Saxon name.
"How Many Miles to Babylon?" was written in February 2002 with no real expectation that it would ever be published: one could consider it godfic.* And in fact, everywhere I sent the story responded apologetically that it was well-written, but too reminiscent of American Gods (which I had not yet read at that point; I thought I was ripping off The Folk of the Air), and in time it fell into silence and despair.
Or I decided that it was not actually that terrific a story, although the characters and their not quite friendly relationship have never completely cleared out of my head, and shelved it. I had sort of forgotten it existed, until I ran across it tonight while tidying up my computer. I do not think it will ever see print. I do not think any of the other stories about its characters will ever be finished. Therefore, internet, to you I make this sacrifice. Enjoy. It's at least more like content than a silly quiz.
How Many Miles to Babylon?
My muse has a flat.
—Jeannelle Ferreira
The Muse looked at the flat tire, looked at the map, looked at the sky, and said, "Fuck."
The young man in the back seat of the car, knees bent as though he lay in a hammock with his head against the rolled-down window and one wrist behind his neck to cushion it, put down the book he had been holding with his other hand and craned his head a single uncomfortable inch to see her out the other, rolled-up window. "What? What happened?"
"What do you think happened?" snapped the Muse, who had felt the car jerk and slither out of her control not five minutes ago, nearly hurling her through the windshield and wrapping her passenger in a bone-broken pretzel around the back of the driver's seat, before she managed them off the road onto a shoulder of dust and stingy grass, where she was now dripping with sweat and choking on exhaust fumes and nearing the end of what had been, up until that point, an almost infinite patience. "We've got a flat. And we don't have a spare, do we?"
"Um," said the young man. He had hair the color between copper and rye, that caught the light as though it were spangled; he needed a haircut and kept pushing the bright strands out of his eyes and mouth as he read, absently, with a gawky, adolescent gesture of unfinished bones and uncertain reach. He and the Muse looked of an age, done with schooling and far from done with learning, though their eyes were not quite the same. "I think if you check the trunk—"
"Did that. Twice. Fuck."
"You said that already."
"So I'm repeating myself, is there a law against it? Inventiveness, please, put inventiveness in the middle of a four-lane highway and it becomes an inventively colored little smear on the asphalt, did you know that?" The Muse crumpled the map in one fist, threw down the tire iron with a clang and wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. "We're never going to get there."
"Can't you call—"
"No! No, I can't! Do you think if I had any other resources we would have rented a car in San Francisco, San Francisco, ototoi!" Her hair spiraled over her shoulders, olive dark and gritted now with road dust; she had the face that statues tried to find in curves and planes of painted marble, eyes socketed with agate and bronze to imitate her gaze that went farther back than the human eye could follow, and it was screwing tight into something resembling tears as the young man with the book watched. Panicked, he dropped the book into the back seat and fumbled open the car door, almost spilling himself out on hands and knees as he caught the doorframe and pulled himself around to stand beside the Muse, touching her tensed shoulders very gently, as though she might fracture beneath his fingers, or scald his skin to ash. "San Francisco," the Muse repeated, dragging in a breath that made him feel as though he had been buried in sand; he had to catch his breath too. It was a reflex effect she sometimes had. "All the way to Rhode Island. We should have caught the straight flight."
"From the big island? You'd have been jet-lagged into oblivion." He swallowed, because her shoulders clenched again at that, and put one hand carefully on the sweat-hot nape of her neck. He always forgot how tall she was. As with all her people, a stranger could only mistake them for human so many times. "Remember when we went to Lesbos, direct from Seattle?"
"No." Her arms were tight across her breast, her head bent forward; she spoke in the knotted voice of frustration.
Fingers combing the serpent-curls of her hair, he told her, "That's because you were travel-sick for the first three days."
"Well, we're going fucking nowhere now. I should be fine."
"Will you stop—" He choked on his question, because she had looked at him in the way that suggested crickets, or lightning, or stone: nothing personal, only the shape a god's temper took when it blew. He would much prefer a crater blasted out of the interstate than an eternity spent as some small, deathless, withered insect. "Er. Can you—you know? Somebody pull over and pick us up?"
"I'm a Muse. Not a miracle worker."
"You've been waiting to say that."
She thought for a moment. "That's probably true." Then she laughed, and it made her face into all the songs that the poets of Keos and Lesbos and Samos had ever sung, male and female, singing to the girls or boys of their love, the wind that came into the mind and breathed out words on the voice and the kithara, and the oldest one was oh, you. "But you could try it."
"Me?" The young man with the copper-grain hair turned the color of the scrubby dust underneath the car's three working tires. "But you're— I can't do that!"
"You're more born for it than I am." The Muse spread the map out on the car's dinted hood, traced a continent's arteries of roadwork with one finger until she reached a small spot on the eastern seaboard, tapped on it. "Should only take us, what, a couple of days?"
"You've never driven across America, have you?"
"Have you?"
He swallowed miserably. "No."
"Well then, miracle worker. Get us a car." The Muse unfolded his fingers, placed the map against his palm and curled his hand back around it. Her voice was much less sharp than her words; still he mumbled, "We should have stayed in Maui."
Her voice stiffened. "We could go back to Iceland."
When he finished shaking, and could uncurl from his child's crouch against the wheel-well, and swallow down the scream that had been bursting in his throat, he raised his head and said, "That was not fair." All the bones still pushed at his face from underneath, straining the skin white; there was something torn and edged in his clever, aimless features that had not been there before she spoke.
"Under the ice," the Muse repeated, like an incantation. "Under the stones. Where he writhes beneath his son's guts and the poison burns his mouth when he screams. You've seen it, in your dreams; I've been there. It's an old blood, but it goes far back, and you'll never leave that place as long as you deny it. You've some of his power in you. And you're the only one of his children"—he gave her such a stabbing, bewildered look that she amended the word, and knelt down beside him to look in his eyes that were the sliding color of white wine, his ancestor's eyes—"of his descendants that's still alive and sane. And not a monster."
"Oh. Thanks. Why don't you call Jormungandr while we're at it?"
"Because he's at the bottom of the ocean. And he couldn't get us a car anyway. And I've got to—on the name of my mother, Jónatan, on Mnemosyne's name—I've got to get to Bristol. You don't know what it feels like, the pull from a suppliant. The lesser ones, you can reach out to them without needing to cross space to do it. But the strong ones get into your bones, needing, and you can't but follow. Like you—you've got so much myth in your blood, you were like a story telling itself. I couldn't tell what you were until I found you. Maybe this is one of the same. Maybe just some stuck poet who's desperate enough to make me hurt for them. I don't know, and it doesn't matter. If I don't follow it, it's like somebody dragging my ribs out." He twisted his mouth at the image, a little wild still around the eyes. The Muse touched his bright hair, very softly. "Who knows? Maybe it'll be Vali." He flinched. "Ah, Jónatan, I'm sorry. I didn't mean . . ."
"No. It's all right." He put up one hand to stop her apologies, because he had never gotten used to hearing a goddess apologize, no matter how well meant, and got to his feet with one hand braced against the side of the car. In full sunlight, the color of his hair looked much closer to something burning; she was taller than he, but never looked it. He whispered, "I hate doing this . . ." Carefully, he spread both hands to the hazed California sky—one hand still clutching a map—and said, in the language his mother had spoken before she moved from Keflavík to Toronto, though she had learned English as a matter of course, she had told him stories in their old language, "All right. Now."
When the pickup truck skidded to a stop not ten feet from where the Muse stood with a startled, wicked grin like no Greek statue ever carved, and the driver leapt out and pelted off into the dry fields at the side of the road, clearly under the impression that his car had caught fire and was less than thirty seconds from blowing sky-high and taking him with it, Loki's grandson a thousand years removed caught his breath, dropped his hands, and reached into the back seat for the book he had been reading when the tire blew out. "Come on," he said, shifting-eyed, fire-haired, looking more than ever like his ancestor for those scant few seconds before the humanity in his blood reasserted itself, "let's go to Bristol."
"Rhode Island, ototoi," said the Muse, and climbed into the driver's seat.
*That word still looks like an Anglo-Saxon name.
no subject
I think these two characters would need more time and space than they've gotten here.
no subject
That's the recurring problem . . .