Apex Book Company

by Bryn SparksJuly 2006

I was traveling to St Ives, met a man with seven wives.

Each wife had seven sacks, each sack held seven rats, each rat had seven pups.

Pups, rats, sacks, and wives; how many were traveling to St Ives?

It was a trick question of course, and over the ages many answers have been given.

An ancient poem for an ancient profession.

St Ives is the largest market in the Dog Zone and the people that fill that market come from every corner of the continental ring-city, Urb. Beneath the Hundred Man-Mountains of the Dog Zone, St Ives market seethes and pulses in a valley created by ponderous buildings rising to excruciating heights.

How many were traveling to St Ives? More than anyone could ever hope to count. If only one Urban in ten million made their way to the perpetual twilight of St Ives market, there would still be a million people living and loving and buying and selling there. And a million more trying to get to the market. And another million dying trying to get away.

But that wasn’t the trick.

White Pistol sat on her sack of rats and whispered the words of the poem over and over, turning it into a litany. Her battered steel helmet served as an impromptu footrest–the slits in the helmet’s full visor looked up at her from beneath her worn-out leather boots. Human-skin boots with rubber soles. Very supple. Good for running when the need arose. Her arms were bare in accordance with Duelist custom so the tattooed icon of her patron saint was plain for all to see. Her chest was encased in a metal breastplate that had obviously stopped more than one bullet in its time.

How many were traveling to St Ives? It was tempting to answer ‘one’. That if the man with seven wives was from the market then the person telling the poem was the only person traveling St Ives–and that was a good answer. But everyone knew a man alone with seven women so burdened would travel slowly and would soon be caught up by someone traveling alone. It was reasonable then, to say that nine were traveling to St Ives: the lone traveler, the man he had caught up with, and the man’s seven wives (property notwithstanding).

But for Duelists, that wasn’t the trick either.

Noon approached. Far above the roaring tide of people in St Ives market, fingers of rust-colored sunlight stabbed through the gloom between the enormous buildings. Despite the best efforts of electric lights and burning gas flares, much of the market

remained smothered in hot darkness. Tents and hawkers and piles of merchandise created islands of particular brightness around which the sea of people swirled and flowed. Eddies formed in front of stalls–people pausing to buy a meal or some spices, to sell a bolt of cloth or a body part. Few took notice of the red sunlight so high above as it crawled slowly down the westernmost buildings. But the Duelists in the market were aware of that slow crawl as if the fingers of sunlight moved over their own bodies.

White Pistol sat with several other Duelists in an area of deep gloom. Even so she was hot and uncomfortable and was about to take off her breastplate when the first pair of Antagonists for the day approached them through the crowds with a young torchbearer leading the way. She stood, and beside her the six other Duelists stood also. They were all mirror images of each other: bald heads, nut-brown skin, thick necks, cord-like muscles. More than that though–they even had identical features. They were women cut from the same genetic cloth.

Clones.

How many were traveling to St Ives? The Church condemned polygamists. How then could the man in the poem have seven wives?

The Church taught that whereas machines could be used to fashion bodies, only God could invest them with souls. Therefore the Church considered separate instances of the same clone to collectively represent only a single person. That it was easy to make women clones (and almost impossible to make men) merely reinforced the moral imperative.

How many were traveling to St Ives? Three. The traveler, the man he met, and the man’s wife (take your pick).

Clones don’t count as people.

And that was the trick.

# # #

‘We have a dispute that has become a matter of honour,’ the shorter of the two Antagonists declared as they drew near. He was dressed in rich robes of office–-a tech-broker, or perhaps an engineer.

White Pistol glanced at the man’s fingers and saw only silver. A tech-broker then, but highly ranked judging by the number of rings on his chubby fingers even if they weren’t gold. The other man wore a black cassock stretched tight over his large belly. A priest. Each man had a personal field. The telltale nimbus surrounding them seemed bright here in the deepest shadows, despite the electric light their torchbearer carried. Their features were blurred and their voices muffled.

‘A matter of honour that we have agreed to settle by duel,’ the priest said. His voice was not loud, and therefore difficult to distinguish against the vast market’s background hubbub. It was customary for Antagonists to look only at each other while in the presence of Duelists. The priest was either unaware of the correct form or else disdainful of it. Heappraised the Duelists as he spoke, oblivious to the tech-broker’s discomfiture at his departure from custom. ‘I invoke the Rule of Alms,’ said the priest. He paused to mop his brow with a damp kerchief, and nodded for the tech-broker to speak.

‘I too invoke the Rule of Alms,’ said the smaller man.

White Pistol closed her eyes. She knew the red sunlight signaling the approach of noon had traveled more than halfway down the window-pocked cliff-faces of the mountainous buildings across the market. She inhaled deeply: smoke and sweat, fragrant spices and roasting meats. Today I might end. Not ‘die’–clones don’t ‘die’, they ‘end’. Only people die. White Pistol held her breath and felt her hands start to shake even though she was more than three-years-old and had survived twenty-seven duels.

Three long years.

Venerable.

For a clone.

‘Are there any here who have received alms from the Order of St Theodore Tyro?’ the priest asked.

White Pistol let out her breath. The priest was looking at one of the other Duelists, a woman wearing white ablative body armor (but bare arms displaying the tattooed icon of her patron saint) and a bronze-colored scimitar. Bronze Sword stepped forward. She had an old field-shield generator on her left forearm. Worn-out crystal coils protruded from gaps between the generator’s riveted plates.

‘My patron saint is Theodore Stratelates,’ she said in accordance with the custom and forms of the Rule of Alms. ‘The feast days differ but we are taught that Stratelates and Tyro are the same. I received alms from the Order yesterday. A sack of dog meat.I will fight for your honour,’ but the priest had already turned away from her. The matter had never been in any question. His donations to the Order of St Theodore obligated her. The tech-broker relaxed visibly now that the priest was finally following custom. His own eyes did not flicker from the larger man’s face, although it was the group of other Duelists his words were meant for.

‘Are there any here who have received alms from the Order of St Sebastian?’ White Pistol bowed her head for a moment, and then took a step forward. Her hands stopped trembling. Even thought she feared it, hearing the words always came as a relief when her own Saint was invoked, as if she knew even before hearing that this time it would be her turn to fight.

Again.

‘My patron saint is Sebastian,’ she said in a quiet voice. The tattoo on her arm depicted a naked youth pierced with arrows and tied to a tree. ‘I was given wine and olives and a sack of rats by the Order four days ago. I will fight for your honour.’

Each sack held seven rats, each rat had seven pups.

As relief came on the heels of fear, so now did anger come on the heels of relief. She was to fight to the death for another’s honour.

Again.

The other Duelists all moved then, lighting red lanterns and spreading out to pushing people out of the way. They quickly created an open ring several yards to a side. White Pistol picked up her helmet and followed her opponent onto the worn cobblestones in the middle of the empty ring just as the red sunlight pierced the first deep shadows on the other side of the market.

People shouted ‘A duel! A duel!’ and within moments eager onlookers formed a wall held in check by the other Duelists spaced evenly around the ring–weapons drawn and facing the crowd. The Duelists had all been in the ring themselves and had no need to watch. The outcome was inevitable:according to the ancient Rule of Alms the matter of honour would be settled through duel-by-proxy.The Rule of Alms meant that one of their sisters would continue, and one would end.

A matter of honour.

There was a flurry of activity in the crowd nearby. A power-armored merc passing far overhead in the heavy aerial traffic of the God Zone must have caught sight of the red lanterns forming the dueling arena in the gloom of the market below, and decided to descend to watch. The woman (for the hard-suit was form-fitting and betrayed her gender) landed with a hiss of escaping steam and cries of pain from the closest people burnt by the jet-flares and hard radiation pouring from the suit’s EM shielding.

White Pistol heard a man screaming: ‘Mecha bandito, mecha bandito’ over and over. The man’s accent was unfamiliar to White Pistol, but the word sounded like gang-slang from the South. She could see a clear space forming around the merc’s hard-suit standing alien and implacable in the midst of the St Ives market. Those too injured to escape to a safe distance on their own were being carried and dragged by friends and strangers alike.

Despite the differences they held with each other, the people of the Dog Zone always united when those from above came among them.

For just a moment a clear line of sight opened between White Pistol and the merc. She looked into black ceramic eyes staring back from the hard-suit’s helmet, and she wondered if the woman inside was a real person or a clone. They were not so very different in what they did: White Pistol fought for honour, and the merc fought for money, but they were both creatures of Urb. She wondered whether the woman in the hard-suit would die if she were mortally wounded or merely end And then the crowd jostled back into position and blocked the merc from her view, but the unanswered question lay heavy in her. She could not think why it mattered to her, but it did, and she felt the loss of never knowing.

White Pistol stood in the centre of the impromptu arena with Bronze Sword. Clones were grown with many higher functions pre-sequenced in their brains. Martial skills, knowledge of their environs, speech (with sufficient contextual pseudo-memory to allow them to function and interact with real people), and an unflinching instinct for the customs and forms associated with ritual combat in the Dog Zone. But the Duelists were not machines. They hungered for understanding. And so a tradition had arisen among them: before engaging, each Duelist would pass on to the other the most important thing she had learned thus far in her short life. In that way the one who survived the duel would carry with her the understanding of both and could decide which was the more important to pass on at the next combat.

In that way, the collective wisdom of the Duelists grew through the ages.

And the ages had been both long and hard.

White Pistol spoke in a low voice so that only Bronze Sword could hear her. ‘Before she ended a woman once told me that the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of her that shed it. This is the most important thing I have learned.’

Bronze Sword nodded and pursed her lips. Then she reached out a gloved hand to grasp the armoured shoulder of the woman whose face was a mirror of her own. She leaned close and whispered in White Pistol’s ear: ‘Before she ended a woman once told me that we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. This is the most important thing I have learned.’ Bronze Sword searched White Pistol’s eyes for a second as if trying to see if the importance of her words could be read there. Whether she saw what she was looking for or not, White Pistol could not tell, and it troubled her that even one of her own seemed so beyond her capacity to know

The time for words was over and White Pistol put her helmet on over her head.

The two women turned.

They each walked ten paces from the centre of the ring and stood facing the crowd. At White Pistol’s end the tech-broker nervously wrung his hands a few feet away from the Duelist. At the other end Bronze Sword faced the priest who had adopted a very bored expression and was glancing back over his shoulder as if to ensure none of the dirty crowd got too close.

Noon.

Red sunlight crashed into St Ives market. The baleful sun burned full in the narrow strip of sky between the Man-Mountains.

White Pistol whirled and drew her gun in a motion born from countless generations of genetic programming and endless hours of practice. Her pistol was a heavy steel weapon with a single hand-made cartridge primed and ready in the chamber at the base of the long ostentatiously decorated barrel. The gold filigree and white enamel flashed in the sudden brightness. She expected to see Bronze Sword weaving toward her from behind a flickering field-shield, closing the gap between them in a few critical seconds (just long enough to fire that one shot).

That was how it should have happened. That was how it always happened.

Instead, White Pistol watched with detached curiosity as the priest’s head tumbled from his shoulders and fell with a graceful motion to land at the feet of Bronze Sword. And yet through the detachment, this completely new thing touched White Pistol’s own dull and voiceless anger. Bronze Sword’s blade was black with the priest’s blood. She held her scimitar poised above her head in the guardant position–killing stroke completed.

We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities.

The entire market seemed to hold its breath. Even on the other side of the fighting ring, White Pistol heard the sound of the priest’s body dropping and his boots drumming on the worn cobbles. Blood poured from the severed neck.

How can a man have seven wives?

Only if they aren’t real people.

And White Pistol’s anger erupted into consciousness.

‘To me!’ Bronze Sword yelled, and her words loosed the throats of the crowd. With a deafening roar the multitude surged forward. The sheer weight of numbers swept White Pistol from her feet and carried her several yards before she managed to stand her ground. Above the many-voiced cry of the crowd White Pistol heard a high-pitched scream nearby, and for a split-second she caught sight of the tech-broker being torn limb-from-limb by several emaciated youths. They were Tricksters: hermaphrodites who whored themselves at the market for scraps of food. But they were also para-empaths (which made them much better at fucking than their buying price would suggest) and so the sudden tidal wave of ugly emotion from the crowd had turned them feral.

White Pistol’s own anger turned cold and sour as she watched the Tricksters tear hunks of flesh with their teeth from the still-living tech-broker. ‘Oh, Jesu,’ she whispered, and then she gagged on bile rising in her throat. Blood splashed the Trickster’s faces. They howled and hooted while they tore silver rings and fat fingers from the tech-broker’s corpse. The crowd knocked White Pistol sideways and she lost sight of the grisly attack as her helmet went crashing to the ground.

Another gap opened and White Pistol seized the lower edge of an awning, almost losing her grip on her gun. She leapt and her momentum carried her up over the awning on to the top of the tent stall. From that vantage White Pistol could see the knot of Duelists who had gathered around Bronze Sword. Their weapons flashed in the red sunlight-–swords and tridents, energy weapons and guns. They had formed a wedge to fight their way through the crowd toward the nearest edge of the market. Half the crowd around the Duelists seemed to be trying to fight them, and the other half were fighting each other. Someone had impaled the priest’s head on a tent-pole, turning it into a macabre standard around which the fighting was particularly fierce-–a gang of gutterdwarfs kneecapped the defenders. The priest’s head would be the gang’s trophy any moment.

White Pistol was about to leap down to join her own kind when a flash of blue flame to her left drew her attention. The hard-suited merc warrior laboured into the sky, listing heavily and barely rising above the crowd. Blue exhaust flares cut a trail of burnt and screaming people to mark the merc’s erratic passage across the market. Men were hanging from her arms and one leg, yelling ‘mecha bandito’ at the top of their lungs and hammering at the black ceramic armour with knives and fists.

‘The land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of her that shed it,’ thought White Pistol, and she knew then that all the riotous people of the Dog Zone–not just the Duelists–were her people. She raised her dueling pistol and took aim, the heavy ornamented barrel tracking toward the merc warrior’s helmet. The precarious stance White Pistol had on the unsteady tent roof cost her precious seconds. A flicker of purple energy signaled the activation of the merc’s EM shield. The men hanging off her erupted into flames and fell blazing into the crowd. An eyeblink, and the merc righted herself. She rocketed skyward heading back up through the red light into the God Zone, rising amid the roaring tumult of the rioting crowd.

It was louder than thunder, that sound, and every bit as elemental.

Shots and shouts and screams and the clash of metal on metal echoed off the walls of the massive buildings and washed over White Pistol. She staggered and fell, crashing heavily to the cobbles below. Several people trampled over her but she managed to get up on one knee, looking up as a man and several identical women pushed past her. White Pistol struggled to her feet, turned, and shot the man in the back of his head. The man’s skull exploded and he was blown forward by the concussion of the heavy round.

How can a man have seven wives?

Only if they aren’t real people.

‘Here’s another poxy clone!’ someone yelled, and White Pistol started punching and kicking; fighting desperately to escape to the relative safety of one of the Man-Mountains. She gripped her pistol by the barrel and swung it like a cudgel, blindly bludgeoning anyone in her way. Fighting them as they all fought each other.

She was one of them.

She made about ten yards progress before someone pushed her into a gas flare. She stumbled out of the flare–her lungs red agony and her skin smoking. A blow to the head dropped her to her knees, and several kicks rolled her onto her back. She stared up through the forest of bodies trampling over her and with dim awareness saw the sky darkening. ‘Quarter past noon,’ she thought, but she was wrong. A gigantic battle-blimp blocked the red sunlight shining into St Ives market. The airship descended–ponderous and irresistible–from the God Zone.

The cannons on the battle-blimp spoke with a single voice, and White Pistol’s ruined body was hammered and tossed through the air like a rag-doll.

As I was traveling to St Ives, I met a man with seven wives.

‘I’m not ending,’ White Pistol croaked as she tumbled through the air, ‘I’m dying.’

And she was triumphant.

END

-New Zealand writer Bryn Sparks, although Aotearoan, owns no sheep. His was first published in “Frothing at the Mouth” in 2004, and has since had speculative fiction short stories published in several Australian and American collections such as the award winning Agog! Smashing Stories, and Apex Digest. He has had two finalist entries in the Writers of the Future contest, and his stories have been nominated for Aurealis, Fountain, and Pushcart awards.-

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Bryn Sparks’s short story “On the Shoulder of Giants” appears in the Apex Publications anthology Aegri Somnia. Order your copy today.