Excerpt
George R. R. Martin Presents Wild Cards: House Rules
Longing for Those LostStephen LeighPart ISalt spray sent droplets dancing on Gary Bushorn’s woolen flatcap and doused his already sodden trouser legs and trainers, though his long, rubberized weather jacket was stoutly resisting the water’s assault. Still, the frigid seawater felt good on his skin and the late October wind didn’t bother him. Faint tendrils of steam rose from where clothing met skin.
He pulled out an old pocket watch, secured to his belt loop by a silver chain, from where it was nestled in the coin pocket of his jeans, shielding its face from the corrosive spray. The watch was his late wife Caitlyn’s. A few decades before, Gary had repaired the then-broken timepiece—originally an anniversary gift from Caitlyn’s mother to her father—as a gift to Caitlyn. She had in turn gifted it to her daughter, Moira, just before her death. Moira had returned it to Gary for safekeeping a few months before she drew the Black Queen and died herself.
The watch was Gary’s most prized possession, representing as it did all his memories of Caitlyn and Moira. He glanced at the time—twelve thirty-five—and placed the watch back in its pocket.
“You say you’ve fished down this way before, Cody?” Gary steadied himself on the wall of the wheelhouse cabin of Codman Cody’s boat, the Fear na Gcrúb. The water was choppy, feathered with whitecaps. The prow of the Fear na Gcrúb tore a foaming path through the waves as the boat lifted and fell and lifted again. Gary was holding tightly to the gunwale as the boat rolled heavily in the cold, gray swells; Codman Cody simply swayed easily with the motion, his hands (four fingers on the right hand, two on the left that looked more like the claws of a crab than anything human) tight on the ship’s wheel. The Fear na Gcrúb—“Man of Hooves” in English, and the term in Irish for the Joker playing card—was a working boat, smelling of fish and brine and Cody’s own unique odor, her flanks draped with nets and ropes, her planks slick with fish scales despite continual scrubbing.
Gary had hired Cody’s boat to take himself, Duncan MacEnnis, and Jeremy Fingers down to Cornwall. The trio had been invited to a weekend on Keun Island. They’d left Rathlin Island in Northern Ireland the previous evening, spending an uncomfortable night on the boat.
“Aye,” Cody offered in answer to Gary’s question, though his gaze didn’t leave the waves. “Though not often. Diesel fuel’s too dear and the fisherfolk here know the local shoals and banks better’n me. Besides, they ain’t overly friendly toward foreign boats takin’ fish from their waters. I stay farther north, generally. So are yeh gents lookin’ forward to this posh party?”
“Don’t know how posh it’ll be, but the invitation surely was. I could show you—handmade calligraphy in gold ink on thick vellum from some Lord Jago Branok. You heard of the man?”
Cody managed a shrug. “I know the name if not the man. Caught a few whispers when I’ve been down this way about how this Branok could buy and sell most’a the billionaires in Russia and the Middle East. Could just be talk, though. Y’know how people exaggerate such things. He puts on parties regularly at his mansion. Word is he’s snagged several well-known people for guests, like Golden Boy or that German ace Lohengrin with the gleaming armor. All kinds a’famous folks have visited. Yeh can tell me more after yeh meet this Lord Branok. How’d he happen to invite yeh?”
“Not a clue,” Gary answered. “I don’t know the man. Never met him, never heard of him before. Maybe it was Constance Russell—y’know, the woman who comes to Rathlin every so often to recruit people for her sewing business? After all, Jeremy Fingers got an invite, too, and he used to be one of Constance’s tailors. Maybe that’s where this Branok got my name, though I still don’t know why. ‘Former mayor of Rathlin’ ain’t anything all that special.”
Cody grinned at that and spat over the gunwale into the waves. “I think yer wrong about that. The people of the island kept reelecting yeh, y’know. An’ the way yeh cared for poor Caitlyn and Moira . . .”
Rathlin Island—long the home and refuge for the jokers of Northern Ireland—now lay well to the north and east, but it felt more distant than that. Another place, another time. Gary suddenly was assailed by homesickness and the sense of loss. “Feck,” he muttered. His inflection was now somewhat more Irish than American—a testament to the decades he’d been on Rathlin. The mention of Caitlyn and Moira’s names caused Gary to reach under the hem of his jacket. His fingertips circled the outline of the pocket watch snuggled there. “That was a long time ago, Cody.”
“I remember, though, and so does Rathlin. Leastways, all of us older folk do, and hell”—Cody spat again; Gary watched the spittle hit the gray swells and vanish—“even young Lorcan and Lucan know that story. On Rathlin, yer about as famous as they come.”
“That tells you more about Rathlin than it does about me, my friend.”
They both chuckled.
“Don’t let Cody’s blatherin’ bother yeh, Gary.” That was Duncan MacEnnis, another Rathlin joker. Duncan was holding tightly to the rail of the Fear na Gcrúb with one hand and clutched a quad-based cane desperately with the other. Gary’s invitation from Lord Branok had said Gary could invite one guest to accompany him; he’d chosen Duncan, one of his oldest friends. Duncan was the now retired police chief for Rathlin, as Gary was now the retired mayor. In 1974, as a young constable in the Belfast police, Duncan’s own card had turned. His flesh had run like candle wax in a flame before hardening again into furrows and ripples along his body. His skull was hairless and pitted; his eyes jutted out from bony sockets: “The Melted Man” they called him behind his back.
Duncan had been forcibly sent to Rathlin, as many jokers had in that time. He’d also become Gary’s friend, not long after Gary had ended up on Rathlin himself in 1995. Since his retirement, Duncan’s health had started to deteriorate—mainly, in Gary’s view, due to the ravages the wild card virus had inflicted on the man’s body. Gary worried about him. He had, in the final week before their departure, tried to dissuade Duncan from coming, or at least to see one of the doctors on the mainland beforehand. He hadn’t been successful. “Nothing lasts forever and every last one of us is going to die, me probably sooner than yeh,” Duncan had told him. “I’ve come to terms with that, Gary—no feckin’ doctors for me. Not never.”
Gary reached out to grab Duncan’s arm as the boat lurched; the crest of a wave sent foam cascading over the deck and Gary felt Duncan stagger under the impact. He tightened his grip until Duncan steadied himself again. “Rough weather out here t’day,” Gary said. “Good thing we’re nearly there.”
Lorcan and Lucan, the twin jokers who were Codman Cody’s crew, poked their heads up from belowdeck, along with Jeremy Fingers, who towered above the other two. Lorcan and Lucan looked like they’d stepped out of Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream, with elongated, sagging faces and mouths that drooped open. Jeremy appeared almost normal except for his height, until one noticed that his muscular arms were studded up and down with long human fingers he could independently control—one of the reasons he was an excellent and very fast tailor.
“Got the pumps runnin’, boss,” Lorcan said. The words that emerged from the long, slack, and nearly uncloseable mouth were indistinct and difficult to understand for anyone who didn’t know the twins. “We’re gonna get lunch ready before it becomes any rougher out here, since we’re still a few hours out.” Lorcan waved to Cody. “Poor Jeremy’s looking a little green, though. We already told him that if he loses his lunch below, he gets to clean it up.” Lorcan and Lucan slapped Jeremy on the back and laughed as the trio vanished again belowdecks.
“There ’tis, boys,” Codman Cody said, and pointed one of his fat, webbed fingers toward the southeast. “Keun Island. We’re slidin’ along the southern headland of Cornwall now, and Keun’s that large island out where you see the bay openin’ up. Too far away yet to see much, though. Branok owns a fancy mansion on top of the seaward cliffs. Some say they’ve seen strange things around the place, especially at night, and there are all sorts of odd stories about Keun Island in general. Some’a the folk who live there don’t seem entirely natural—not jokers like us, yeh ken, but somethin’ else entirely.”
Duncan cleared his throat. His fingers were white with the pressure of holding himself upright as he clutched at both rail and cane, and he was breathing heavily. “I checked out Branok through my police connections, but honestly I didn’t get much. The man does seem as rich as feckin’ Croesus. There’s ain’t much information about Branok out there—which to me is more than a bit suspicious.”
