Tales of the Peculiar Read online

  He said his name was Englebert, and as she had nowhere else to go, he invited her back to his camp. It was a ragged settlement of tents and open cook fires, and the few dozen people who lived there were every bit as strange as Englebert. They were so strange, in fact, that most of them had been chased out of other villages—just like Ymeene. They welcomed her even after she showed them how she could turn herself into a hawk, and in turn they showed her some of the unusual talents they possessed. It seemed she was not alone in the world. Perhaps, she thought, there was a place for her after all.

  These were, of course, the early peculiars of Britain, and what Ymeene didn’t realize was that she had joined them during one of the darkest periods in their history. There had been a time when peculiars were accepted—even revered—by normal people, with whom they mixed easily. But an age of ignorance had dawned of late, and normals had grown suspicious of them. Whenever something tragic happened that couldn’t be explained by the rudimentary science of the day, peculiars were made the scapegoats. When the village of Little Disappointment woke one morning to find all their sheep burned to a crisp, did the villagers realize that a lightning storm had killed them? No, they blamed the local peculiar and drove him into the wilderness. When the seamstresses of Stitch didn’t stop laughing for an entire week, did the villagers blame the wool they had just imported, which was infested with mites that carried Laughing Flu? Of course not: they pinned it on a pair of peculiar sisters and hanged them.

  Such outrages were repeated across the land, driving peculiars out of normal society and into bands like the one Ymeene had joined. It was no utopia; they lived together because they could trust no one else. Their village leader was a peculiar named Tombs, a red-bearded giant cursed with the squeaky voice of a sparrow. His tenor made it difficult for others to take him seriously, but he took himself quite seriously, and never let anyone forget that he sat on the Council of Important Peculiars.6

  Ymeene avoided Tombs, having developed something of an allergy to prideful men, and instead spent her days with her funny, occasionally headless friend, Englebert. She helped him till the camp’s vegetable patch and collect wood for cook fires, and he helped her get to know the other peculiars. They took to Ymeene instantly, and she began to think of the camp as her adopted home and the peculiars as her second family. She told them about life as a hawk and amused them with her trick of repeating things—once looping a moment where Tombs tripped over a sleeping dog until the whole village hurt from laughing—and they regaled her with tales of peculiardom’s colorful history. There was, for a while, peace. It was the happiest time Ymeene could remember.

  Every few days, though, the village’s tranquil bubble was punctured by woeful tidings from the outside world. Desperate peculiars arrived in a steady stream, seeking refuge from terror and persecution. Each had a familiar tale to tell: they had lived peacefully among normals their whole lives, until one day they were accused of some absurd crime and chased out, lucky to escape with their lives. (Like the unfortunate sisters of Stitch, not all were so lucky.) The peculiars welcomed the new arrivals just as they had welcome Ymeene, but after nearly a month of influx the village swelled from fifteen peculiars to fifty. There wasn’t enough space or food for things to continue this way indefinitely, and a sense of foreboding began to weigh heavily upon the peculiars.

  One day another representative from the Council of Important Peculiars arrived. He wore a grim expression and disappeared into Tombs’s tent for hours, and when he and Tombs finally emerged, they gathered everyone together to deliver some distressing news. The normals had already driven peculiars out of many of their towns and villages, and now they had decided to drive them out of Oddfordshire altogether. They had assembled a force of armed fighters that would soon be on the peculiars’ doorstep. The question now was whether to fight or flee.

  Needless to say, the peculiars were alarmed, and not a little hesitant.

  A young woman looked around them and said, “This hill and these flimsy tents aren’t worth dying for. Why don’t we pack our things and go hide in the woods?”

  “I don’t know about all of you,” said Tombs, “but I’m tired of running. I say we stand and fight. We must reclaim our dignity!”

  “That is also the council’s official recommendation,” added the grim-faced councilman, nodding.

  “But we aren’t soldiers,” said Englebert. “We don’t know the first thing about fighting.”

  “They’re a small force, and lightly armed,” said Tombs. “They think we’re cowards who will flee at the first sign of force. But they underestimate us.”

  “But won’t we need weapons?” asked another man. “Swords and clubs?”

  “You surprise me, Eustace,” Tombs replied. “Can’t you turn a man’s face inside out just by pulling his nose?”

  “Well, yes,” the man said sheepishly.

  “And, Millicent Neary, I’ve seen you light fires with only your breath. Imagine how terrified those normals will be when you set their clothes ablaze!”

  “You paint quite a picture!” said Millicent. “Yes, it would be something to send them running for a change.”

  At that, the crowd began to mutter.

  “Yes, it would be something.”

  “Those normals have had it coming for a long time.”

  “Did you hear what they did to Titus Smith? Cut him into bits and fed him to his own pigs!”

  “If we don’t stand up for ourselves now, they’ll never stop.”

  “Justice for Titus! Justice for us all!”

  With little effort, the councilmen had whipped the peculiars into a fervor. Even mild-mannered Englebert was spoiling for a fight. Ymeene, whose stomach had turned at the first mention of a battle, couldn’t listen anymore. She slunk out of the village and went for a long walk in the woods. Returning at dusk, she found Englebert by his cook fire. His temper had cooled, but his resolve to fight had not.

  “Come away with me,” Ymeene said to him. “We’ll start over somewhere else.”

  “Where will we go?” he replied. “They want to chase us out of Oddfordshire!”

  “Wontshire. Therefordshire. Peacewickshire. You’d rather die in Oddfordshire than live elsewhere?”

  “They’re just a few dozen men,” said Englebert. “How would it look if we ran away from such a puny threat?”

  Even with victory practically assured, Ymeene wanted no part of it. “How it looks isn’t worth sacrificing a single hair from our heads, much less a life.”

  “So you won’t fight?”

  “I lost one family to war already. I won’t watch another throw itself willingly into the furnace.”

  “If you leave, they’ll think you a traitor,” said Englebert. “You’ll never be able to come back.”

  She looked at him. “What will you think?”

  Englebert stared into the fire, struggling for words. The silence between them seemed answer enough, so Ymeene slipped away and walked to her tent. As she lay down to sleep, a great sadness stole over her. She was sure it would be her last night as a human.

  Ymeene left at the first inkling of dawn, before anyone else had woken. She couldn’t bear to say good-bye. She walked to the edge of the camp and turned into a hawk, and as she leaped into the air, she wondered if she would ever find another group that would accept her, human or avian.

  Ymeene had only been flying a few minutes when she spotted the normals’ fighting force massed below. But it was no loose brigade of a few dozen men—it was an army of hundreds, and they blanketed the hills in glinting armor.

  The peculiars would be slaughtered! She turned around at once and flew back to warn them. She found Tombs in his tent and told them what she’d seen.

  He didn’t seem surprised in the least.

  He had known.

  “Why didn’t you tell them so many soldiers were coming?” Ymeene said. �
��You lied!”

  “They would have been terrified,” he said. “They would not have comported themselves with dignity.”

  “They should be terrified!” she shouted. “They should have fled by now!”

  “It wouldn’t have done any good,” he said. “The normals’ king has ordered Britain cleansed of peculiars from mountains to sea. They would find us eventually.”

  “Not if we leave Britain,” Ymeene said.

  “Leave Britain!” he said, shocked. “But we’ve been here hundreds of years!”

  “And we’ll be dead a lot longer than that,” Ymeene replied.

  “It’s a matter of honor,” Tombs said. “I suppose a bird wouldn’t understand.”

  “I understand all too well,” she replied, and went out to warn the others.

  But it was too late: the normals’ army was on their doorstep, a swarm of well-armed soldiers already visible in the distance. Worse yet, the peculiars couldn’t even run—the normals were closing in from all sides.

  The peculiars huddled in their camp, terrified. Death seemed inevitable. Ymeene could easily have changed form and flown to safety—the peculiars urged her to, in fact—but she could not bring herself to leave. They had been tricked, lied to, and the sacrifice they were about to make was no longer voluntary. To leave now would not have felt like an exercise of her principles, but like abandonment and treachery. So she walked through the camp, embracing her friends. Englebert hugged her the hardest, and even after he’d let go, he spent a long moment gazing at her.

  “What are you doing?” she asked him.

  “Memorizing the face of my friend,” he said. “So that I might recall it even in death.”

  Silence fell over them and over the camp, and for a while the only sounds were the thunder and clang of the approaching army. And then the sun came out suddenly from behind a dark cloud, bathing the land in glinting light, and Ymeene thought the sight so beautiful that she wished she could see it once more before they were killed. So she repeated it, and the peculiars were so mesmerized that she repeated it a second time. Only then did they notice that, in the minutes they had spent watching the sun, the normals’ army had not come any closer. With every repetition, their enemies faded and reappeared farther away, many hundreds of yards in the distance.

  It was then that Ymeene realized her time-looping talent had a use she’d never fully understood—one that would change peculiar society forever, though she couldn’t have known it then. She’d made a safe place for them, a bubble of stalled time, and the peculiars watched in fascination as the normals’ army advanced toward them and then faded away, over and over again, in a three-minute loop.

  “How long can you keep this going?” Englebert asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I’ve never repeated something more than a few times. But for quite a while, I think.”

  Tombs burst out of his tent, baffled and angry. “What are you doing?” he shouted at Ymeene. “Stop that!”

  “Why should I?” she said. “I’m saving all our lives!”

  “You’re only delaying the inevitable,” Tombs replied. “I order you, by authority of the council, to desist immediately!”

  “A pox on your council!” said Millicent Neary. “You’re nothing but liars!”

  Tombs had begun to enumerate the punishments that awaited anyone who defied the council’s orders when Eustace Corncrake marched up to him and pulled his nose, which caused Tombs’s face to turn inside out. He ran away yelping and threatening recriminations, his head all pink and soft.

  Ymeene kept looping. The peculiars rallied around her, cheering her on, but worrying quietly that she would not be able to keep it going forever. Ymeene shared their concern: she had to repeat the loop every three minutes, so she could not sleep—but eventually her body would force her to, and the army that loomed perpetually in the distance would close in and finally crush them.

  After two days and a night, Ymeene could no longer trust herself to stay awake, so Englebert volunteered to sit beside her, and every time her eyes fell closed he would nudge her. After three days and two nights, when Englebert began to fall asleep himself, Eustace Corncrake volunteered to sit by his side and nudge him, and then, when Eustace began to lose his battle with sleep, Millicent Neary volunteered to sit by him and drip water on his face whenever his eyes closed—so that eventually the whole camp of peculiars were sitting in a long chain, helping one another to help Englebert to help Ymeene stay awake.

  After four days and three nights, Ymeene still had not missed a loop reset. She had, however, begun to hallucinate from exhaustion. She thought her lost brothers had come to see her, five goshawks flying loops of their own above the camp. They screeched words at her that made no sense:

  Again!

  Another!

  Again! Again!

  Loop-the-loop to double its skin!

  She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head, then drank some of the water Millicent Neary was dripping on Eustace Corncrake. When she looked up again her ghostly brothers were gone, but their words stayed with her. She wondered if her brothers—or some part of her own, embedded instinct—were trying to tell her something useful.

  Again, again.

  The answer came to her on the fifth day. Or rather an answer: she wasn’t sure if it was the right one, but she was entirely certain that she wouldn’t last another day. Before long, no amount of nudging would keep her from sleep.

  So: she reset the loop. (She’d long since lost count of how many times she’d made that sun peek out from behind that cloud, but it had to be thousands.) And then, just a few seconds after having looped the loop, she made another one—inside the first loop.

  The results were instantaneous and bizarre. There was a strange sort of doubling of everything around them—the sun, the cloud, the army in the distance—as if her vision had blurred. The world took a short while to come back into focus, and when it did, it was all a bit older than before. The sun was farther behind the cloud. The army was farther away. And this time it took six minutes, not three, for the sun to come out from behind the cloud.

  So she looped the loop twice a second time, and then their loop was twelve minutes, and she did it a third time and it was twenty-four. And when she’d gotten it up to an hour, she took a nap. And then she looped the loop again and again, and it was like she was filling a vessel with air or water; she could feel its skin expanding to hold all this new time, until it was as tight as a drum and she knew it would hold no more.

  The loop Ymeene had made was now twenty-four hours long, and it began the previous morning, long before there was an army on the horizon. Her fellow peculiars were so impressed and so grateful that they tried to call her Queen Ymeene and Your Majesty, but she wouldn’t let them. She was just Ymeene, and it was the greatest joy she’d known to have made a safe place—a nest—for her friends.

  Though they were safe from the normals’ aggression, their problems were far from over. The army that had nearly destroyed them went on to terrorize peculiars across the land, and as word spread of a time loop in Oddfordshire, survivors and refugees arrived with increasing frequency.7

  In a few weeks their number grew from fifty to twice that. Among them were several members of the Council of Important Peculiars (including Tombs, whose face had flipped right side out again). While they no longer seemed interested in shutting down the loop, the councilmen tried to assert their authority by insisting that no new arrivals be admitted. But everyone deferred to Ymeene—it was her loop, after all—and she wouldn’t hear of turning people away, even though the camp was bursting.

  The councilmen grew angry and threatened everyone with punishment. The people grew angry, too, and accused the council of lying to trick them into going to war. The councilmen pointed their fingers at Tombs, claiming he had acted alone—though this was obviously not true—and that his decep
tion had not been sanctioned by the other councilmen. They further pointed their fingers at Ymeene and accused her of usurping their rightful authority, an offense punishable by banishment to the Pitiless Waste. At which point the people rose up in her defense, threw mud (and possibly a bit of excrement) at the councilmen, and drove them out of the loop.8

  In the weeks that followed, the peculiars looked to Ymeene for leadership. In addition to making sure the loop kept looping, she was called upon to resolve personal disputes, to cast deciding votes about which of the council’s many rules should be retained and which jettisoned, to punish breakers of what rules they kept, and so on. She adapted quickly to her new role, but was baffled by it, too. Of all the peculiars in the loop, she was the newest and the least experienced. She’d only been a full-time human for six months! But her comrades viewed her inexperience as a boon: she was fresh and unbiased, neutral and fair, and had about her a quiet, dignified wisdom that seemed more of the avian world than the human.

  But for all her wisdom, Ymeene still could not solve their biggest problem: how more than one hundred peculiars could live in a space that was only three hundred feet from end to end. Once established, a loop can be made to hold more time, but not more space—and Ymeene had only enlooped their small camp’s few dozen tents. They hadn’t much food, and though their stores reappeared each day with the cycling of the loop, it was never enough to feed all of them. (Outside their loop a hard winter had set in, so there was little to be hunted or foraged; they were more likely to find a roving gang of normals than a meal, for the normals had become obsessed with finding the peculiars who had disappeared right in front of their eyes.)

  Ymeene was talking it over with Englebert one night as they sat around a crowded cook fire.

  “What are we to do?” she said. “If we stay here we’ll starve, and if we leave we’ll be hunted down.”

  Englebert had removed his head and placed it in his lap so that he could scratch the top of it with both hands, something he did when he was deep in thought. “Could you make a larger loop someplace with plentiful food?” he asked. “If we’re careful not to be seen, we could all move.”