Year of Miracles Read online

  Contents

  Year of Miracles

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author's Note

  THE THING WITH FEATHERS

  SKINCHANGER

  ST GEORGE & THE DRAGONS

  THE DEATH OF HIM

  MOUNTAIN'S DAUGHTER

  LONGEST NIGHT

  YEAR OF MIRACLES

  EARTH-BOUND MISFIT

  LEGACY

  SALT WATER

  FALLING

  FORETOLD

  Also By C.E. Murphy

  Acknowledgements

  Special Thanks

  About the Author

  YEAR OF MIRACLES

  Collected Stories of the Old Races

  C.E. Murphy

  YEAR OF MIRACLES

  ISBN-13: 978-1-61317-131-8

  Copyright © by 2016 by C. E. Murphy

  All Rights Reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any means, now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the author, [email protected].

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Editor: Betsy Mitchell / betsymitchelleditorial.com

  Cover Art: Tara O'Shea / fringe-element.net

  Dedication

  for Katrina Lehto

  Author's Note

  Author's Note

  The author would like to suggest that the

  Old Races Universe books are best enjoyed

  in order of publication, which is as follows:

  HEART OF STONE

  HOUSE OF CARDS

  HANDS OF FLAME

  BABA YAGA'S DAUGHTER

  YEAR OF MIRACLES

  KISS OF ANGELS (forthcoming)

  THE THING WITH FEATHERS

  She was born of secrets: of whispers at a well, and a white stone rubbed for luck. She was born of the hope for a child, the first blush of love, the thanks given when illness passed and health returned. They said, later, that she was the first human woman, created of clay and risen from the earth, and half of that was true: she had sprung fully formed from the earth, but it had been humanity itself that gave her the power to live. She came with boons, when she rose: she came with the touch that begot a child where none had come before, with the knowing hands to raise grain from the soil, with the herbal wisdom that sent sickness scurrying away. She carried the elements of her magic in a box, and inscribed her mark on the forehead or arm or belly of those who sought her out, until they named her for what she was: Anesidora, the girl who gives the gifts.

  She might have stayed where she was birthed, and been mother to a people like no others: all strong and gentle, untouched by disease or sorrow, but the world was wide, and its varied souls called to her. She learned she could not cross any stream wider than her stride, and so circumvented rivers: climbed mountains, crawled through jungles, entered deserts, and ran freely across plains. She found people wherever she went, living in the most extraordinary of places, and shared her gifts with them, freely, generously, joyfully, for she knew little other than happiness in her wandering ways. She traveled half a world this way, and found that when her path crossed her own, that her spirit had lingered on: she had become Gaea and Shala, Iusaaset and Prithvi, all the daughters of the earth who gave gifts to their mortal progenitors. Or perhaps they were not her reflections at all: perhaps they were the names of her sisters, born of magic in the way she had been, though she never met them. Her kind were few enough to begin with, and most were born of darkness.

  She was old, if goddesses could be said to age, when gods and their sons began to come to light. Old when those gods, the Titans, the sons of Titans, began to swim the seas and touch the skies, when they took on form and walked the earth as she did. But not as she did: never in all her years had she heard of a god being born of secrets. Only goddesses came from the earth, and their own children were daughters, almost always. She had daughters herself, and had let them go long ago; they, more than others born of secrets, might have become Shala and Prithvi and all the others. Perhaps she had known that once and forgotten; it was a thought new and familiar all at once, and Anesidora knew herself as one who did not linger on philosophy.

  The gods she met gained names later, in legend and in history, or changed their names to suit the times, as her own name would change. The two she remembered best, and loved the most, were as taken with intemperate humanity as she, making them alike as brothers and different as men could be.

  The taller one was Prometheus, scarred from giving fire to man, but the other, Epimetheus, was perfectly formed and more beautiful. He was slight and black-haired, with eyes that glittered like star-lit nights, and his skin, sun-brown, carried summertime's warmth beneath it.

  Prometheus, red-haired, jade-eyed, and as pale and cool of skin as Epimetheus was brown and warm, played at an air of noble suffering—what he had done to serve man! What horrors he had undergone, for the benefit of mortals!—while Epimetheus darted about like a bee seeking pollen, always intrigued by the moment. He angered easily and forgot that anger even more quickly; he spoke the thoughts in his mind and in doing so released them; he could not be contained or reprimanded for what he had done, for its memory had always already left him. He was her favorite of the two, for that reason: she lived as immediately as he did, only reminded of the past by moments of synchronicity.

  He ran across an ocean for her once, or so he claimed: the great wide stretch of water she could find no way around, no matter how far she walked, and she had walked across the ice and back again in her time. Perhaps he lied, but he returned with an armful of plants and herbs she had never seen, and the lingering scent of sunshine burning into unfamiliar earth. There were humans there, he told her: beautiful and brown-skinned, often small but strongly built, with wide noses and wider smiles, as if they were Anesidora's children all. Their elders were striking, with grey and white grizzled hair, and their children sun-streaked blonde. Some of the plants he brought back, when mashed and mixed with dirt, made for colors subtly different than she had found in other lands, and she would not let him paint them on her: they would have meaning for those far-off people she had never met, and she had no wish to disrespect them.

  He was quick, though, faster than any mortal man could be, and in the space of a breath she was painted anyway, white like a spirit, with red on her feet to tie her to the earth, and blue on her palms to reach the sky. Epimetheus was so pleased she could hardly be angry with him, and that night she took him as her lover, while he still smelled of the rich distant earth she had never seen. Prometheus sulked, somewhere in the distance, and Anesidora laughed at that. Laughed more at Epimetheus's smug delight, but taught him, some little while later, that her favoritism would not be held by possessiveness: Prometheus was entirely different, and no less entertaining, as a lover. Then Epimetheus sulked and Anesidora laughed again, drawn back to him because he was her favorite, and knew now not to parade that as a prize.

  And so they went: she was inconstant and did not care, for no man could hold a goddess for long, though Epimetheus brought her gifts from all the world over to win her attention back for a time. Mankind had fire, given to them by Prometheus, but the other creatures of the world had gifts Epimetheus claimed to have laid at their feet. Stealth for the cats, cunning for wolves, strength for the rhinoceros, speed for the horse. Wisdom for the elephant, and when he spoke of that, Anesidora laughed again, and wondered would it not have been—well, wiser!—to offer men wisdom, but no: Epimetheus lacked foresight, and had given all the gifts away before he came to man. br />
  "So your brother has given them fire," said Anesidora, and as ever, Epimetheus frowned a moment before recalling red-haired Prometheus to mind.

  That was how it was with them, Prometheus had once said. They traveled, together and apart, and had done so for as long as the sun had risen, but Epimetheus had no better memory than he had foresight. Each time they parted for too long and re-met, Prometheus was like new to his beautiful brother. Epimetheus's constant ability to recall Anesidora, that her memory was a constant within him, was against the grain of who he had always been. He has never met a goddess before, Anesidora had replied, and Prometheus had bowed deeply, kissed her fingertips, and retreated with a secret smile upon his lips, to—in time—give fire to humankind.

  "He has," Epimetheus agreed, and, remembering now, looked pleased. "And paid for it: you've seen his scar."

  "I have," Anesidora said drolly. "So he is scarred for his gift, and you had none at all left to give them? You're a poor sort of guardian, my love. Gods and their children should be more careful."

  Scorn took the stars from Epimetheus's eyes. "Gods are of human make. We are more than that."

  Carefully, dangerously, Anesidora murmured, "I am of human make, Epimetheus."

  "And we are more than that." It was Prometheus who usually wore arrogance, so easily it could be mistaken for charm. Settled on Epimetheus's shoulders it took his beauty and made it strange, as if his very flesh was changeable and could mold to disdain.

  Anesidora was not afraid: nothing save the secret that had birthed her could undo her from the world, but she was stricken by the change in him, and brightly curious, and unfamiliarly offended, for men worshiped her and even the sons of gods should not show contempt. "What more, then?"

  "We are the secrets." Epimetheus swayed with his whisper, and in the fading sunlight made shadows against the earth. Impossible shadows, his hands twisting beyond convention, but it was the dance of beasts he drew with them that held Anesidora's gaze even when she wanted to look upon the dread wrongness of his fluid bones. "We are old, older than men, older than the gods men have made. Anesidora, sweet child, the girl with all the gifts, you are old for what men have wrought, but we are so much older still."

  Secrets crawled from his shadows: serpentine and sinuous, winged beauty that struck a chord in the very core of her: dragon, that thing was called, and its father lay coiled around her own mother's body, the heart of the earth. The dragon's watery brethren, the sea serpents, swam with dolphin-women and soul-eyed seals who shed their skins to look like men, and in the skies other creatures flew with the dragon: stone men whose visages were solemn to look upon, and feather-winged women whose fragile male children were nurtured carefully and still most often lost. Giant shuffling beasts, so fur-covered they could only live in the highest, coldest places, and desert-loving breezes that could shift to beautiful, brightly-bejeweled men: on and on the shadows went, giving lie to what had once been truth, that man was the only and most thinking animal that walked the earth.

  They were not quite terrible, the things that she was shown. Not themselves: they might have drawn her to them as humans did, save for the thing that wrapped around their ankles, slithered and twisted between them and hunted them from time to time. Only rarely, though; only rarely, for the other beasts, the cunning wolf and the stealthy cat, the wise elephant and the quick horse, they were easier, and mankind the most satisfying prey of all. All of humanity knew there were dangers in the night: what better feast than one that understood it was being eaten?

  "What are they," Anesidora whispered, and Epimetheus, so beautiful and deadly, sneered.

  "They are Old, and my kind is the father of them all. You think yourself a goddess? You are only a witch. I've listened to the secrets on the wind and killed a dozen like you. Your blood is sweeter than humanity's, rich and full of magic."

  "And is that why you've wooed me?"

  As quickly as it came, the darkness in Epimetheus vanished: vanished into astonishment, as though the monster had never even lurked beneath. "Not at all. Why would I do that? I saw you and I loved you."

  An anger, unfamiliar, heated Anesidora's chest. "To covet is not the same as to love, Epimetheus. Coveting is a wish to possess, and you know that I am not to be owned." As she spoke to him, the earth her mother spoke to her, and these things rose to bind him: iron, earth, wood and water. Coarse and pitted iron, raw from the depths below them and formed by the power of her will alone into a shroud. Trees leapt to her call, shooting branches and tendrils that wound around him and pierced his skin, begetting a scream each time. They plunged him deep into the ground, and rain fell to weigh the earth until he struggled in a slurry, and Anesidora stood above him all the while.

  His beauty was gone, the darkness of his hair and the brown warmth of his skin both turned to ichorous black. His jaw gaped, muscle stretching like tar, and within it his teeth were gashes of night, ready to raze. His voice ran high and thin, forced from a throat not meant to speak: no one, he said. No one looks upon my true form and lives.

  She leaned close, close enough to taste the rankness of his breath and to look into the flat rage of depthless eyes, and from there whispered, "I have. I will tell the world, Epimetheus. All of your secrets, all of you demons who hide in the night. I will release you from the hidden places you have stayed within, and I will name you all, that man might know you and be ready to stand against you. I will show them how to kill and capture you, and in that, I will have put something into your box of secrets that you can't control. There will be hope for mortal man to end you, and that hope will plague you, demon, until the very end of time."

  She left him there; walked away without looking back, and carried on until his thin screams faded with distance. Farther still, until the earth beneath her feet no longer reverberated with his cries, and beyond that until she admitted to herself that the weariness in her body was more than the fatigue of travel. She sat then, for a month beneath the changing moon, to ask herself whether she wanted to carry the demon's child. The moon gave her no guidance, pulled her neither one way nor the other, but its clear silver light on its brightest night cast the world into starkness, bright and dark, and in those sharp lines she saw the hope she had threatened Epimetheus with.

  She was not human, but she was of human make, and Epimetheus was another thing entirely, ancient and alien. The child growing within her walked between her world and his, could be what neither of them were, and what she might need to protect her progenitors. Satisfied, she rose from where she sat, and, shaking off the stillness of a month, walked again, until a deep and warm crevasse in the earth, a cave marked with the scars and bones of old life, called to her.

  There she stayed, watching the depth that the sunrise could stretch to, until the morning came that she squatted to bear her daughter. The breaking day showed the girl to have Epimetheus's beauty in her black hair and ebony eyes. Her skin was red ochre beneath its brown, as if the paint Anesidora had once been adorned with had become part of the child, and her name, she told her mother under that first light of dawn, was Ushas.

  All children grew quickly, but none moreso than the children of immortals, for whom time's passage means nothing. It seemed an hour until Ushas crawled; a day until she walked; a week until she ran, and a month until she stood tall and strong and brown and lovely. In the wake of that passage of days, goddess and daughter came from the caves, birthed anew from the earth, and went once more among the people.

  Wherever they went, Anesidora was revered, but Ushas worshiped: her beauty and comfort with humanity surpassed Anesidora's, her laughter and her memory for faces making her more of the people than the goddess could ever be. This was as it should be, as it must be, if she was the harbinger of hope to the world, and Anesidora, pleased, let herself age as she had never done before, becoming the storyteller, the shaper of worlds, and shaped her daughter's story as the loving protector goddess.

  More, Anesidora named the demons in her stories. She set them l
oose in the world so that all mankind might know them in the night, and spoke too of the hope that came with day. It took no magic to make humanity look to Ushas as that hope, for they could see in her, and therefore in themselves, the strength and the darkness that would protect them from the demons known as the Old Races.

  From one settlement to another they went, on and on, the world and time over, and where they went, their memory became history and their history became legend, until legend was myth, and known in the very bones of the mortals whose lives they had touched.

  Prometheus found his tattered brother long before that: found him while history still lived in the minds of men, not yet relegated to generations past. Found him screeching and struggling still, held in the earth's grasp, and, sighing, said to him, "What have you done, Epimetheus? Try to remember what you've done."

  "Try?" Even Prometheus had not often seen a hint of Epimetheus's true form; in that shape, even mangled by bonds, he could hiss any word, spit it from his throat with sibilants and hate. "I will never forget."

  "I doubt that," replied Prometheus, and sat down to wait. He could wait nearly forever, and Epimetheus had always loathed the keeping of secrets; they were there to be exposed, for a creature who neither recalled nor forethought could see no reason to hide them. But neither was his brother inclined to confess, this time: Prometheus sat for months, perhaps years, under the barrage of Epimetheus's screams and rage, until the truth slipped free.

  "I told her. I told her everything about the Old Races. She was so complacent, so smug in her godhead, and I told her that she was only a witch, and the least among the magic of this world. I told her who and what we were, and she promised to tell all humanity in return."

  Prometheus raised a jade gaze to the bound vampire, and laughed without kindness. "And this least of magics has bound you. You fool. Epimetheus, you utter fool. You'll undo us all."