Uncanny Magazine Issue 41 Read online

  “I found the owner of the land in Reykjavik. She agreed to the fence and the cross,” Magnus said. “I have the legal right.”

  “‘The land is built on law,’” Atli quoted. “‘And through lawlessness it is brought down.’ That’s very well, but the ghosts died long before that line was written down in the Njals saga. I don’t think they would understand. Right now, they blame me. But if they knew you were the one responsible—”

  Magnus finished his brennivin. Atli refilled the glass.

  “All right,” Magnus said, his voice blurry. “I will agree. Take down the cross. I won’t bother the people in that graveyard any longer. I’ll be glad to be back in Minnesota, where things like this don’t happen.”

  Soon after that, they both went to sleep, Atli in his bed and Magnus on the couch in the living room. They both woke with hangovers in the morning. Atli made coffee. After they had drunk that, Magnus left.

  “I’d like your permission to sell the fence and cross,” Atli said before the American went. “I’ll send you a check for the money.”

  “Don’t bother,” Magnus replied. “Keep the money for your trouble and your hospitality. I expect I’ll decide this was all a dream, once I get home to Minneapolis.” He shook Atli’s hand. “In any case, I will take your advice and not tell my minister. If you are ever in the Twin Cities, look me up.”

  Then he heaved his bulky body into the driver’s seat and drove away.

  Atli spent most of the day at home, too hungover for work. In the late afternoon, he went back to the graveyard and took down the cross. It was harder without help and with an aching head, but he managed. He got the cross back into his shed and went to bed, not bothering with dinner.

  In the middle of the night, the ghosts woke him.

  “Thank you,” they said. “We can rest peacefully now.”

  “Aren’t you angry that you weren’t taken up to Valhalla?” Atli asked.

  “That was long ago. Now we want rest.”

  Just before they left Atli, one of the ghosts quoted a famous old verse from the Viking era.

  “‘Cattle die. Kinfolk die.

  We ourselves die.

  There is one thing that does not die.

  The fame of the dead.’”

  But the ghosts were not famous, Atli thought. They were ordinary folk who had died before Iceland became Christian. Their names might survive in genealogies, but nowhere else. Did it matter? They were satisfied now. If they could take comfort in an old verse, good enough. He would take comfort in a good night’s sleep.

  Later, when the ghosts did not return, he went back to the historical site and told the curator the rest of the story.

  “Your original question was, do we in Iceland believe in ghosts?” the curator said to me. “Atli told me that he believes in the ghosts from the graveyard. ‘You cannot quarrel with experience,’ he told me. He was less certain about other ghosts, since he had not met them. As for me,” the curator went on, “I never saw or heard the ghosts. I didn’t see Magnus Thorvaldsson after he spent a night with Atli. So I never got his version of the night he spent with Atli.

  “I have no proof that Atli’s story is true. But he seems as he always did: a solid, practical man, not someone to play a prank or lie to his neighbors. I believe that he was honest to the best of his ability.

  “Did he imagine the ghosts? That doesn’t seem likely, if Magnus also heard them.” The curator paused, obviously thinking. “Magnus thought he could impose his ideas on the past, because he’s an American. They either ignore the past or try to remake and improve it.

  “The land is built on law, as Atli said when he was quoting Njals saga – the greatest of all our sagas, as you ought to know. The land is also built on history. You can change how you understand the past. But you can’t change the past itself. You cannot turn the dead into something they were not. They are set in their ways.

  “As for the rest, I am reserving judgment.”

  ( Editors’ Note: Eleanor Arnason is interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)

  © 2021 Eleanor Arnason

  Eleanor Arnason published her first short story in 1973. Since then she has published six novels, three short story collections, a couple of chapbooks and some poetry. Her novel A Woman of the Iron People won the James Tiptree Jr. and the Mythopoeic Society Awards; her novel Ring of Swords won a Minnesota Book Award; and her short story “Dapple” won the Spectrum Award. A collection of her Icelandic fantasies came out in 2014. She has since written four more stories about Icelandic ghosts, trolls, elves and ordinary people. This is one.

  Diamond Cuts

  by Shaoni C. White

  The stars were diamond-hard. I reached up and plucked one from the sky. It spat white-hot sparks against my fingertips. I placed it in my mouth and scraped my tongue against its burning edges—it rattled against my teeth. I tasted ozone, iron, blood. I bit down. As it broke, it thrummed both its agony and mine. I spat out onto my hand and held out what was in my palm: shards of glass coated in spittle and blood. My tongue was bleeding. The remains of the star glinted in the cruel light of the others.

  I let the moment hang in the air. The audience held its breath with me. It was the catalyst of the play, where the lady—me—realizes that grasping the crackling power of the world around her will always cause her unbearable pain. Once I’d given the shock and beauty of the moment just enough time to sink in, the curtains descended. The first act had ended. I let my shoulders curl inward and trudged offstage.

  Maria, director and resident sorcerer, waited for me in the wing, which was odd. She usually chatted with the nobly born members of the audience during intermission. She wore her usual smile, but I knew her well enough to spot the tension tugging at her eyes. “We have a bit of a problem,” she said.

  I dug out some ground glass stuck between my teeth with my tongue and spat it out onto the floor, along with a mouthful of blood. The pain was as familiar a part of my daily rhythm as sunrise or nightfall. Before more blood had time to well up from my cuts, I said, “What’s wrong?”

  “We’ve had to find an understudy for Elias.”

  We didn’t have understudies. It was just me and Elias playing the only two characters the kingdom needed to see over and over. The magic that enshrined the theater gained its strength from perfect, cyclical repetition, so Maria couldn’t switch out the actors willy-nilly. We were born and raised in the chambers under the stage. We would be here until we keeled over under Maria’s sorcery-forged “stars” that hovered above the stage.

  “Is Elias okay?” I asked.

  “He’s had a slight, ah, difficulty.”

  Slight difficulties did not prevent Elias and I from performing. A year ago, a crate of enchanted props exploded next to me right before a show, tossing me into the wall and leaving me with four broken bones. Maria took me by the collar of my dress and dragged me out onto the stage. Her magic kept me upright, but it didn’t dispel the agony.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “He fell. Tripped on the catwalk, if you can believe it.”

  My heart thudded in my chest. How bad a fall was it, to force Maria to find an understudy? “I want to see him.”

  “After your performance. I don’t want you distracted beforehand.”

  “I can’t just—it will be more distracting if I’m wondering what happened. I’ll be more focused once I’ve seen him for myself. Please.”

  She studied me for a long moment, then said, “If you insist.”

  I followed her further backstage. The stage crew, ordinarily bustling, now huddled together in small groups, speaking to each other in low, urgent voices. They fell silent as we passed. Maria led me down a set of stairs that transitioned from metal to the same cold bedrock that the lowest halls were chiseled from. We came to a storage room I’d only been in a few times. The door was ajar. I went to open it, but Maria lay a hand on my arm. “Remember your composure,” she warned me.

  I nodded. I pushed
the door open.

  At first Elias looked like he could’ve been sleeping, but then I saw what remained of his skull and knew that wasn’t the case.

  I was still for what seemed like several days, although it couldn’t have been for very long. At some point during that blank eternity when I tried to convince myself that he was dead, and tried and failed to understand what that meant, I realized that Maria was talking to me. She and the rest of the world felt curiously distant. I didn’t register most of her words, unable to think through the buzzing in my ears. My hands shook, but stillness blanketed my mind. Whatever emotions I felt were too strong to be named or felt in full; I knew them only as a pounding in my skull and a wrenching sickness in my stomach.

  By the time I became capable of hearing Maria properly, she had given up on scolding me for my distraction and had moved on to a clinical recitation of facts. The crew had found the body during my last scene, apparently, and brought it here where it wouldn’t get in the way. She said the cleanup would be extensive. She told me she’d found an understudy from the audience. She told me to come and meet him.

  “No,” I said. There was an eerie calm in my voice.

  “We have less than twenty minutes until the intermission ends. We don’t have time to dawdle.”

  When I was younger, I hated how she would use the word “we” to pretend that this whole endeavor was something that I participated in for any reason other than that I would be struck dead by sorcery if I tried to leave. At this point I’d grown too used to it to complain. “I’ll meet your understudy onstage, then. What do you want me to talk to him about, anyway?”

  “The familiarity between you and Elias, it’s indispensable to your performance. You can’t exactly manufacture that in a few minutes, but it’s better than…” She kept talking, but I stopped listening. My mind was an empty roar. Elias’s costume was perfectly pressed, but his hair looked like he’d forgotten to comb it that morning.

  I was surprised when Maria gave up on getting through to me and left, presumably to tend to whoever she’d dragged into this endless, circular nightmare. It was the first time that I could recall that Maria had ever actually left me alone when I wanted her to. It occurred to me that beyond the theater’s walls, mourning was probably allowed to last longer than a twenty-minute intermission; but here, even that amount was a luxury.

  The second act started with the lady’s most famous soliloquy, in which she laments the fact that she still wants to grasp the power that threads through the universe, even though it hurts her every time she tries. When I went back on stage, my limbs followed the right movements and my mouth spoke all the right words, but I saw nothing but Elias’s body. I wanted to withdraw fully into the horror of it, but the acrid smoke-scent that hung over the stage—a byproduct of Maria’s work—kept me alert. My performance wasn’t lackluster. I couldn’t remember how to perform badly anymore. But the soliloquy was sharp and brittle, bringing the lady’s distress to the fore, barely touched by the gentler yearning that usually was its heart.

  As I gasped out the last line, I loathed how even this bitter grief, both the lady’s and mine, took on a jewel-bright loveliness under the conjured starlight. Everything was beautiful here, no matter how awful.

  Now it was time for the lady to suddenly have her epiphany and dash offstage. I found Maria in the shadows, gripping the shoulder of a young man who had to be the replacement. He had blond hair, nothing like Elias’s, and watery, painfully earnest eyes. He smiled at me hopefully and seemed about to say something, but then Maria leaned down and hissed, “Your cue!”

  Panic flashed across his face, but he steeled himself and marched outside. This next scene was just him alone on stage: the palace alchemist puttering about his workshop and wondering aloud about what mystery to research next. I watched him perform for only sixty seconds before saying to Maria, “He’s awful.”

  “He’s the most talented actor the kingdom has. We’re lucky he was in the audience tonight.”

  “Most talented according to whom?”

  “It’s true that here we have somewhat… higher standards, but it’s better than stopping the show entirely.”

  “He’s enthusiastic,” I noted. I couldn’t quite wrap my head around someone gladly taking up this task. The role of the alchemist was less painful than that of the lady by a large margin, but later on in the play there was a part where the alchemist grinds up a star in his hands so he can look at it through his magnifying lens. It left Elias’s hands permanently scarred and burned. It wasn’t as if the audience didn’t know it hurt; the nature of this theater was common knowledge. Everyone knew how it told the story of how magic was summoned into the world and how by telling it again and again, night after night, it kept that magic pinned where it was. If we failed to put on a show, then the realm would wither and die as its sorcery left it. And no ritual has power without pain. “Are you planning to keep him?”

  Maria smiled.

  The actor sighed melodramatically and slumped down onto his chair, head in his hands. My cue. I pushed my shoulders back and let myself feel the lady’s desperate hope as I dashed onstage.

  This was the scene where she tells the alchemist about the star she stole from the sky and how it hurt her. She eventually convinces him to invent a safe way to access the power that the star-stealing was an allegory for: magic. My performance with the understudy lacked the crackling chemistry that Elias and I had perfected, but at least he already knew the lines. Before long we’d reached the last act, in which the lady and the alchemist learn that for magic to stay in the realm, a sacrifice must be made. The lady does the selfless thing, of course, and gives up her life in order to let the kingdom keep its newfound power. Finally, the alchemist turns her corpse into a crystal statue so that she may forever be filled with light. By that point a solid half of the audience was openly sobbing, like usual. I never had the faintest idea why. They already knew how it had to end.

  Maria told me it was customary practice at ordinary theaters to emerge after the final curtain to greet the audience’s applause, but we didn’t do that here. She liked to say that it was because we needed no thanks for our duty, but in truth it was due to how long it took for me to recover after the last act. Maria’s sorcery was skilled, and it ensured that each night I spent an average of an hour frozen in place, lungs entombed in crystal and limbs imprisoned in skin of cut diamond. Most of it wore off by the time the crew cleared the stage around me, but several minutes after that I still couldn’t speak. Rubies spilled from my tongue in place of words. That was why, when Maria came to my bedroom and told me her decision, I could do nothing except listen.

  “We don’t have time to train someone up properly,” she said, leaning against the door. “So he’ll have to do. You can help him adjust.”

  Did he volunteer, or will it be a surprise when he can’t go past the threshold anymore? I wanted to ask, but couldn’t.

  “Good night,” she said.

  The first thing I did upon waking was go to my closet and run my hands through the embroidered silks and satins. Then I pulled a dress from the wardrobe and tore it apart with my hands. I went seam by seam. I didn’t cry. I started from the decorated collar and moved down. I took each crystal sewn into the bodice and placed them next to the lamp so they caught the light. I watched the glinting crystals as I worked. It wasn’t angry work or even sad work. I wasn’t sure I was feeling anything at all. Once I had reduced that dress to a pile of scraps and thread, I moved to the next, and to the next, and to the next. Finally I piled the remains of the clothes into the wardrobe and latched it shut, letting it be a coffin for the silken scraps.

  That was when Maria came into the room. “You didn’t come to breakfast,” she said, setting down a tray piled high with food.

  I didn’t speak to her. I methodically threw the food onto the ground. I poured the coffee out onto the carpet. She watched me silently, then left and came back with another tray. By the time she returned, whatever unknown f
orce motivated me to engage in such mechanical destruction had ceased. I ate.

  It was strange. I’d thought I no longer had that kind of destruction in me anymore. When I was a teenager, when I’d just barely grown out of the unknowing love of childhood and realized what Maria was doing to me, I would tear apart my costumes. I knew, even then, that it wouldn’t change anything, but I had to try. I had to. Destruction was a mode of survival. And then that, too, had slipped away from me when I wasn’t looking.

  Elias’s replacement was named Sebastian. Over the next year, our acting sharpened to perfection, but the disruption to the cycle still showed in the state of the theater. The sorcery that mortared its foundations wavered. The pipes rusted. The stone began to crumble. But Maria hired stonemasons and metal-magicians to reinforce it and the theater became strong again.

  “I didn’t know it would be this hard,” Sebastian said. I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just finished bandaging one hand and moved to the other. He and I were hunched in the shadows that puddled beside a stack of prop crates, out of sight of Maria or the stage crew. I was taking care of the burns on his hands.

  In the early days of our acquaintance, I’d refused to speak to him any more than was absolutely necessary, resentful of his attempt to replace Elias and his blithe willingness to embrace the life I’d do almost anything to escape. I watched Sebastian’s slow awakening to the true horror of his new role, and his subsequent escape attempts, in silence. But Elias’s absence was an open wound; it was lonely and frightening to be without allies in a place like this. And when Sebastian’s escapes failed again and again, he knew he needed an ally as well. Eventually something akin to friendship grew between us. By now I’d learned that he had a fondness for sweets, that he’d wanted to be an actor since his sixteenth birthday, and that he desperately wanted my approval.

  “Have you ever thought about just not performing?” he asked.