Scaring and Daring, page 15
Animals, wearied horses with broken backs and crushed souls, lumbered wagons and carriages along the cobbled streets, their heavy hooves crunching on the frost. Pigeons fluttered, black and gray, from rooftop to rooftop, seeking the warm patches beside the smoke-clouded chimneys. Cats hissed from mounds of spilled rubbish in the alleyways, and mangy dogs raced between the legs of horses. They yelped and barked, but there was no meaning to their noise, no song. Just desperate panic, fear, rage, hopelessness.
Was this London, the heart of the empire? A vast, soul-sucking parasite growing out of despair, out of corruption?
Mowgli gasped and his eyes sprang open as a wave of hope hit him. Flowers, rich with vibrant smells of earth and perfume and bee-summoning sweetness, of sunshine and fields and—
“Penny for a bunch, mister?” A girl, half his age, stretched her hand into the window, a cluster of flowers in her bony fist. She’d leaped onto the outer step, letting the carriage carry her along.
The basket of flowers blazed against the gloomy gray of the stone steps. Raw fire of the oranges and yellows and reds shone beside the emeralds, sapphires, and white pearls of petals upon the roses. She held the jewels of nature, yet she wore no shoes, and her threadbare shawl did nothing to stop her from shaking. Eyes sunken into her skull, drawn cheeks, and a pale smile; she held the flowers forcefully, her eyes locked on his. “Just a penny, mister.”
“Rudyard?”
Rudyard handed over a few coins and Mowgli took the flowers. Rudyard sighed. “It’s not as if there aren’t beggars in India, Mowgli.”
“And it is terrible there, too, Rudyard.” Mowgli pressed the petals against his face. “But London is the richest city on Earth. How can there be poor?”
“Not all the wealth is shared equally.”
“Then man is less than a beast. The pack shares.”
“It’s more complicated than that, Mowgli. And you’re a man.”
“So you tell me.”
The carriage stopped suddenly, throwing Rudyard out of his seat. His glasses jumped off his face and he knocked his forehead against the opposite wall. Mowgli’s hand, serpent quick, snapped hold of the grab strap as the horses whinnied and the coach driver swore at someone outside. “Oi, what d’you think you’re playin’ at?” The carriage rocked back on its springs and Rudyard crashed backward, slamming his head again.
Out the window Mowgli saw a figure standing in the middle of the road. The two horses kicked their front hooves inches from her face, but she just gazed back, uncaring. Mowgli swung himself out from the window, while Rudyard pressed his handkerchief against his bleeding nose.
Flurries of snow danced around them, blown down off the heavy tree branches and whipped up from the roadside where piles of it had been shoveled. The flakes brushed upon the girl like ghosts.
Black haired, the locks shabbily cropped and jagged, she watched Mowgli with eyes colder than frost, pale blue, almost diamond clear and as hard. A head taller than him, she just stood there before the flailing hooves, arms rigid against her sides, wearing a coarse ankle-length smock, yellowed with age. Her skin was pale, a stark contrast to the raven shade of her hair and the brilliance of her eyes.
“They said you would come.” She spoke in a low, even tone.
Mowgli patted the horse and it settled. The driver carried on swearing, and his whip cracked overhead. Then cumbersomely the carriage rolled back and Mowgli stood before the strange girl, who was barefoot in the snow.
“Do I know you?” Mowgli asked.
“I know you, wolf-boy.”
Mowgli wiped the snowflakes from his face and came closer.
Ammonia—sterile, sharp, and noxious—clung to her, and there was the stench of fear encrusted under her jagged nails and blisters of pain, misery on her frail skin. But something else, something new. Not steady odors, not layers, but ever-changing, uneven, chaotic. A metamorphic mix. She was one thing and many altogether, as if the caterpillar and butterfly simultaneously. Within her breath were potions and elixirs, none Mowgli recognized.
But beneath that . . . nothing.
The girl had no smell.
Impossible.
He rubbed his nose, circled her, sniffing.
No sweat, no oil or muskiness of flesh and blood. None of the bodily stench of life. Yet there she stood, pale yet heart beating, still but breathing, the cloud of mist forming between her parted lips.
“Who are you?” he asked. What he meant to say was How can you be?
“Alice. I am Alice, though they say I can’t be.” She shook her head. “I went through the glass and it took me so long coming back. I think . . . I left some of me behind.”
Nonsense. What could she mean?
His eyes widened. Had someone stolen her smell? The idea of it sickened him.
“Get away from her!” Two large men approached. They marched through the snow wearing heavy coats and stern expressions.
The first one pushed Mowgli back as his companion took hold of Alice’s wrist. Each was barrel-chested with round, moonlike faces and nearly identical. She screamed and slashed her nails across the man’s face. The second man wrapped his arms around her. She sank her teeth into his hand.
“The stupid witch, she bit me!” The man tried to pull himself free, but the girl worried at the juicy, fat-fingered hand, and blood seeped through her lips. He swore and cuffed her hard.
“How did she get out again?” one shouted, trying to duck her nails as she swiped at him. “She’s meant to be locked up!”
Mowgli growled. The noise came from a deep, savage cave in his guts and rose, low, threatening, and cruel through the dark tunnel of his throat. The snowflakes falling quivered as the weird noise, both wolf and human, vibrated through the air. The men hesitated and turned toward him. “Leave her.”
Rudyard put his hand on his shoulder. “Mowgli, let them do their job.”
Two more figures rushed out of the curtain of snow. Another burly fellow, and the other one dressed smart, trim and slim. A pair of pince-nez, red-lensed glasses sat on a stub of a nose, and his face was almost hidden by the thickest white muttonchops. “Apologies, gentlemen”—addressed at Rudyard, but he gave Mowgli a piercing, analytic type of look, as Mowgli would have given some strange new caterpillar he might have found in the jungle. “I hope she hasn’t frightened you.”
Rudyard cleared his throat. “No, not at all. We’ll be on our way.”
What was happening? Two of the men wound leather straps around the girl’s upper arms and swiftly tied a thick belt to her, buckling her wrists to the sides. The third turned her around as if she were a rag doll. She fought on, but against three men, each twice her size, the fight was futile.
The man wearing the glasses sucked at his long buckteeth. “Of all our patients, she does cause the most inordinate amount of mischief.”
“Patient?” said Mowgli. “She is ill?”
“Here.” He tapped his forehead. “Her flights of fancy we can accommodate, but she is rather violent and that cannot continue. Thankfully we have developed a new procedure that will cure her of her . . . wild nature.”
Mowgli shivered and it had nothing to do with the cold. The man inspected his pocket watch. “My, how late it’s getting. Gentlemen, take her in.”
Mowgli watched them lift her up and between them carry her toward a high iron gate. In the confusion he’d hardly noticed it. Beyond lay a white lawn and a monolithic building with a towering, imperial facade of stone. Long wings struck out to either side and lights glimmered in the tall, narrow windows. While gas lamps glowed, casting a sullen, weak amber light upon the winding path through the rose beds, the building itself only generated a pitiful light of its own. The trees, bushes, and flower beds could not lift the gloom that hung over the bricks and faceless stone.
“What is this place?” Mowgli muttered. He looked at the bronze plaque beside the gates and furrowed his brow as he tried to decipher the scratchings. “Bethlehem?”
“Bedlam. It’s an asylum,” said Rudyard. “Come now, Mowgli.”
Reluctantly, Mowgli approached the carriage. He knew of the mind sickness. The beasts got it as well as men. But he had looked in the girl’s eyes and that sickness, dewanee, was not in her huge blue irises. Her gaze was too clear, as if she knew too much truth, too much knowledge of terrible things. His old mentor, Kaa, would have warned him about gaining too much wisdom at too early an age. He looked back.
The girl called Alice stared back. Her hair fell across her face in a thick tangle, but she returned a snarl, her teeth still red with the man’s blood. “Beware!” she screamed, struggling anew against her two captors. Then her neck stretched and, face raised to the sky, she cried out, “Beware the Jabberwock! Beware the Jabberwock!”
“I read about the Liddell case last year. It even made the news in India.” Rudyard dabbed his mouth with the serviette, taking extra care to ensure none of his dinner remained upon his mustache. “The family home was destroyed—arson—and that young girl you met was found responsible. The Liddells are a powerful family and the girl is quite clearly mad.”
“Why ‘clearly’?” asked Mowgli.
“She said she was Alice Liddell, a member of the family, and that she’d been trapped in some magical realm, only just recently escaped. She had some fantastical tale of a mirror and rabbit hole and queens, I can’t remember all the details. But she can’t be Alice Liddell.”
“Why not?”
“The Liddells are in society. I’ve a copy of Debrett’s somewhere in the study and you’ll find their entry. Alice Liddell was born in the 1850s and I met her a few years ago. She is a rather strikingly beautiful woman. She’ll be in her mid-thirties by now. And how old do you think the girl was you saw in the snow?”
“Twelve. Thirteen. The same age as me, I suppose.”
“There you are, then. The child is insane, Mowgli, there is no more to it than that. She has some irrational hatred toward the real Alice Liddell, hence the arson attack on her home. Why so interested?”
“She seemed to know who I was.”
“You are a most unique individual, Mowgli.” Rudyard cleaned his glasses and then, after carefully hooking them behind each ear, leaned across the table. “There have been articles about you, you know.”
“The man-cub.” He bristled under that term.
“She may have heard of you, recognized you from a photograph in the Times. Or do you believe she possesses some extrasensory perception?” He shook his head. “When I met you, I thought you had some unexplainable gift. Your senses, your ability to absorb your surroundings and understand them at a level that far exceeded human made me believe you possessed ‘magical’ abilities. Then, when you explained them, I realized it was all a high level of perception and the wisdom to see the connections. There’s a chap in Baker Street who demonstrates similar abilities. Building the most complex pictures from minute observations. To us his deductions are marvelously clever, but he refers to them as ‘elementary.’ The criminal underclass is in absolute fear of him and no doubt the gullible believe he has supernatural powers.”
“What is a Jabberwock?”
“There is no such thing. It lives only in her broken mind.”
Rudyard must be right. This Alice, or whatever her real name was, was just a poor lunatic, safer within the walls of Bedlam than out on the streets. Why had she affected him, then?
“You’ve hardly touched your dinner,” said Rudyard.
Mowgli looked down at his plate. The gravy congealed on a pile of peas and a few lamb chops. He rarely ate anything but meat, yet these tasted of ash, burned black and all the blood and life gone. He wanted meat red, raw, juicy, and hot from the kill, not turned over a spit. He made a face, a scowl, and pushed the plate away. “I’ll eat later.”
“Hmm. I’ll leave you to it. I want to get some writing in before I sleep.”
Mowgli smiled. “More stories about me?”
“A few, yes. But others, too, from India. I’m going to call it The Jungle Book. What do you think?”
“I like it, Rudyard.”
There was something else, something he hadn’t mentioned to Rudyard because the civilized Englishman wouldn’t have understood. The girl had no smell. He’d been told tales of such creatures by his mother, Raksha, warning him and the other cubs of things that through some curse or punishment had lost their smell. She warned them to stay far, far away from such lost and pitiful things.
Yet why? And how? What did Alice mean by the mirror? And she’d been waiting for him.
Jabberwock? What was a Jabberwock?
Was it as deadly as Shere Khan? He’d defeated the old tiger and, lying on his bed, the room lit by the moon shining through the open window, Mowgli grinned. Wolfishly.
He sprang to his feet.
Rudyard was sleeping in the room next door.
Sydenham. This was the place they’d come to. It was up on a hill. Mowgli peered out of the window, ignoring the snowflakes drifting in. He gazed up at the moon.
It was full and bright and made his heart ache. He and his brothers would have howled their hymns to her on nights like this. He felt very alone.
It was deep night. Lamps lined the streets, their amber pools of light upon the fresh-settled snow. Spiderwebs of ice formed on the windowpane.
What was a Jabberwock? How had she lost her smell? How had she known him?
Wearing just his pajama bottoms, Mowgli slipped out the window and squatted on the windowsill. The roof was within easy reach. He sprang up, grabbed the black iron guttering, and, as it creaked under his weight, swung himself to the roof, scarpering up the frosty tiles to the top, among the smoking chimney stacks.
Bedlam. He closed his eyes, allowing himself to absorb the trail, the vapor of the route the horses had taken. The scent was faint, but it was there.
He called on the Wild.
Rudyard wouldn’t have understood. He was already afraid. Try as he might, the Englishman’s heart would tremble at times when Mowgli gazed at him and raised his lips to reveal his teeth.
Rudyard had no idea. If he had known the truth, he would never have brought Mowgli here, to the heart of the empire.
A heart Mowgli would feast on.
He was hot, that was how it began. He gritted his teeth even as they lengthened into fangs. His nails stretched into claws and he bent over, panting hard as the fur spread over his skin.
He’d hidden the true secret of the Wild for months, struggling whenever the moon was full, bathing him with its pearly light, but not tonight. Tonight he would be free.
He shook his head, his ears pricking at a thousand new sounds no human ear could ever detect. He opened his predator eyes and looked out at the world with awe. He saw colors beyond the pathetic spectrum of his human eyes, colors he couldn’t describe with the limited vocabulary of the monkey babble. There was only one language pure enough to express his joy.
Mowgli threw back his head and howled. His howls echoed among the soot-stained houses of Sydenham. His howl rolled down the hill, spreading over the city.
He turned his head and his black lips peeled back from his fangs. His claws cracked the clay roof tiles as he tensed his thick, muscle-locked hind legs.
He leaped. Impossible for a man, nothing to the wolf-thing he was. His pack brothers would have howled with praise. He wished they were with him.
Mowgli raced across the rooftops, howling with joy. How bright was the moon! Her light transformed his pelt to silver, so should anyone glance up from below they’d gasp, bewildered at the impossible sight of a silvery wolf jumping across the city’s roofs. London was his.
It was time to hunt.
About the Author
A lifelong gamer, SARWAT CHADDA decided to embrace his passion for over-the-top wild adventure stories by trading in a stable, twenty-year career in engineering for a highly unstable, brand-new one as a writer. That resulted in his first novel, Devil’s Kiss, back in 2009. Since then he has been published in a dozen languages, writing comic books, TV shows, and novels, preferring non-European settings and legends, such as the award-winning Indian mythology–inspired Ash Mistry series; the epic high fantasy Shadow Magic trilogy (as Joshua Khan); and City of the Plague God for Rick Riordan Presents, featuring the imprint’s first Muslim hero, and now the magical Storm Singer series with Simon & Schuster. While he’s traveled far and wide—including Africa, the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and the Americas—he’s most at home in London. Feel free to visit www.sarwatchadda.com.
Vessel Eaters
(in homage to “The Ballad of Mulan” [木蘭辭], oral tradition from the Northern Dynasties of China)
by Ai Jiang
I am weaving by sunlight when the trumpets sound and the imperial message bearers arrive to tear families apart. Father is already outside, having picked up his cane and taken slow but sure steps toward the entrance the moment he heard the approaching horse hooves thudding against the grass in the forest outside our village, then on the dirt ground leading from the marketplace.
In front of the message bearer, Father kneels with his cane tucked next to his folded legs, head bowed, arms raised with palms facing the sky. The message bearer lowers the scroll into Father’s hands before leaving to notify the next man of his conscription.
“You cannot go.” Mother reaches for Father as he picks up his cane to rise.
Father shakes his head but allows Mother to hook her arm around his.
“For our family, our village, I must return to sea,” he says, and looks directly at the entrance of our home, the wall hiding me as I peek outward, Father’s half-woven cloak still clutched in my hands. Out the back entrance, my younger sister, Mushan, rushes to the markets, likely unable to watch our father’s summoning.
