Take No Prisoners by John Grant Read Free Book Online Page B

of slavery.
    ~
    Qinefer, my flass, is telling the weans a story. They are draped, one to either side, across her thighs as she sits cross-legged on the sand; their eyes are upturned shiningly towards hers, which are brown and deep like peaty, slow-moving river water. Tickles and hair-tugs punctuate the tale.
    "So Brightjacket speaks again to the gathering," she says, for she is well past the once-upon-a-times in her telling, "and this time he punches his chest like so and he draws himself up to his finest height, and he says, 'The Ironfolk will see us dead, or will bend us to their chores. Have they not already banished the songs out of the streams? Is not even the cool voice of moonlight stilled, so that she and the wind can no longer sing their wistfulness together in the pine-branches? Have they not cast their nets of crafted metal across all the land, caging us? Yes!' – and here he strikes his chest again, only harder (harder than I would strike yours, my little glad) – 'All of this destroying they have done in their lack of grace, and there is no one who can tell when they will cease to do so. We have watched them in silence, if we have dared not to flee.'"
    It's an old story, of course, one that dates right back to the times on Earth before it melded with The World. I grin and listen in on it, pretending that she won't know I'm doing so.
    "'The Ironfolk's railways,' says Brightjacket, 'are like the spores of a dandelion clock, drifting everywhere, coming down anywhere, stiffening the land's music – our music – with the crafted metal of which they are shaped. When was the last time the Finefolk could dance in the Vale of White Horse? Or in a ring around the Cairngorms? Or among the tors – the tors our folk built – of Dartmoor? Twenty years? Fifty?'
    "And the eldern among them nod, as so do the fly weans – even those who can ill recall ten years past, leave alone fifty. For metal that is shaped is graver to our kind than viper's bite or scorpion's sting – which are, my bonny young flass, more painful far than even your mother's skelp."
    The two of them laugh together, the mother and her daughter. In this moment the two of them are of a single age. Which is as it should be. For all her words, Qinefer has felt neither snake's nor scorpion's wrath; the creatures of my world are peaceful with us, obeying the notes I instructed the inshore breeze to pluck on the sea-reeds. But I gave her my memories when first she swam ashore from the probability sea, which is why she knows of bites and stings. And why she knows the story of Brightjacket, and of how he led our kind to the Freedom. Though some memories I kept from her.
    "'You nod in the simulation of wisdom!' cries Brightjacket angrily, and all hush at the anger in his voice. 'Wooden puppets can nod like that, when their strings are tweaked!' he says. 'But wisdom is more than knowing, or its pretence: wisdom is also doing , when the doing is wise!'
    "None of them there like this overmuch. The eldern can recollect the times before the Ironfolk came, and all the Earth was a room for play. Even after, once the shaping of metal had begun, there were places in plenty where people could escape its bindings. Such places, indeed, there yet were; but they were shrinking, like rainpools in the hot sunlight. Always there still seemed to be enough, even if this year's enough had to be a bit less than the last year's. Even here where they've forgathered, deep in a cavern that some forgotten hand once carved out beneath Snowdon, it's as if they can hear the dead noise of the chains wafting close to them. What Brightjacket was doing, my wind-haired ones, was looking ahead, seeing a time when the rainpools would be all gone, as the interstices in the net of the railways were filled in by the roads where crafted-metal creations likewise roared. The seas were not immune to these monsters, and neither the skies overhead – although not even Brightjacket foresaw how the scattered