Issue #151 • July 10, 2014

“Rappaccini’s Crow,” by Cat Rambo

“Crossroads and Gateways,” by Helen Marshall

For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

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RAPPACCINI’S CROW

by Cat Rambo

        Doctor Rappaccini has a pet crow named Jonah. He says he raised it from a chick, but I have trouble imagining Doctor Rappaccini patiently nursing anything, tucking a blanket around it to keep it warm or feeding it mealworms and apple shards. If he has such a faculty for tenderness, he doesn’t exhibit it towards any of the patients here.

        Today he made an appearance to supervise Mr. Abernathy’s removal from his wheelchair.

        Someone should have realized Abernathy was never moving from it, but the orderlies probably welcomed not having to lift him back and forth. Bedsores must have formed while he sat there. Over the weeks, they split and healed, split and healed, finally fusing him to the wicker.

        The orderlies left him there, looking out over the garden’s distant purple leaves. Never showing any sign of pain, till his flesh grew into the chair. Today at 2:45 PM, he screamed while they cut it away, and Doctor Rappaccini and his crow watched, unspeaking. When they were done, he leaned forward to listen to Mr. Abernathy’s heart with his stethoscope. By then Abernathy had lapsed into silence, but I wondered that Rappaccini could hear the beat of the man’s heart over the painful wheeze of his lungs.

        The Doctor wears a pad on his shoulder for the crow to shit on. It misses most of the time, and gray and white clots the black coat’s backside.

        It’s hit or miss whether Abernathy will survive. I don’t know that he cares either way.

        Before this, all he did was stare out his window, day and night, past purple and green leaves towards the east, towards the mountains the white men call the Cascades.

        Over the mountains, they tell me, the sun shines all the time.

        Thunder last night. Not natural thunder, but echoes from the unending battle being waged far out among the San Juans. The great phlogiston-fueled battle rafts crash against each other day and night, pushing their claim to territory back and forth. We’re close enough to those battle lines that many people have fled south to Oregon. Others have stuck it out, saying that the lines will shift again, in a different direction.

        I have stayed. Where else would I go?

* * *

        I wheel the Colonel out into the watery sunlight. He can walk, but he prefers the dignity of the chair, in spite of its awkwardness, to having to struggle for every step.

        Two days ago, when he surrendered his artificial leg to me after a visit from his niece, the Colonel said, “I knew every man of the three who owned this before me.”

        He slapped the cloudy brass surface of the calf. “And some fella will get it after me. Maybe someone I know, maybe someone I don’t. Do you think ghosts linger around the objects they leave behind? If so, I’d be surprised if there weren’t three ghosts riding this one.”

        I didn’t answer, and he didn’t expect me to. He knows my vocal cords were seared away in the same war that stole his leg. The same war that’s furnished most of the inhabitants of this asylum. Broken soldiers, minds and bodies ground-up by its terrible machines.

        Used to be an injury was enough to get you out. Now if they can, they turn you into a clank, half human, half machine, and send you back to the endless task of pushing the lines back and forth. Nowadays we receive only the men who cannot be repaired, and here they sit or lie in their beds, waiting to die a slower death than the war would have given them, tended by orderlies like me, other broken men and women who can function enough to pretend to work.

        People forget. Even though I can’t speak, I can still hear. Or maybe they don’t forget that. Maybe they just figure I’ll never be able to tell anyone.

        True enough. I don’t have many who understand hand signs here in the asylum. But I can write out messages, even if it takes me a long time to construct the letters, even if they waver and bobble in a way that got me beaten over and over by the nuns back in school. As though your relationship with God was reflected in the character of your handwriting.

        I don’t see Dr. Rappaccini that much. But that crow goes everywhere in the asylum. No one pays it much mind. It flaps along corridors and perches on the back of chairs, goes into patient rooms and pokes through their dressers. Mr. Whitfield told me it took his wife’s wedding ring, which he’d had on the night table in a china saucer so he could look at it when he first woke up.

        Maybe the crow took it. Or maybe another orderly slipped it in his pocket, thinking to himself that we’re not paid that much, or at least not enough to be able to resist temptation. I don’t know.

        Either way, even if Mr. Whitfield lost it himself, he cried when he told me about it; ineffectual old man sobs. I patted his shoulder, feeling how thin and bony it was under the threadbare garment. Dr. Rappaccini says Mr. Whitfield is one of the lucky ones. His body wasn’t harmed by the war. Instead he has war shock, pieces of his mind blown away instead of his flesh.

        Is he truly one of the lucky ones? Sometimes I think that must be; having something broken in your head must be better than having something broken in your body, visible to anyone who looks at you.

        Other times I’m not so sure.

* * *

        I watched the crow this morning, thinking that if it had taken Mr. Whitfield’s ring, it would have put it somewhere. That it would have some treasure trove of what it’d stolen, somewhere in the asylum, and that I’d be able to retrieve the ring from it.

        Mr. Whitfield was so upset. His white hair stood up in startled tufts and his eyes oozed tears. It was as though all his soul was in that ring. He told me that it was the only thing that let him remember his wife.

        So I watched the crow. It made its rounds like a doctor, room to room, checking on each patient. I hadn’t noticed that before. Who would; who has time to watch a crow, here where we are overworked, where every idle hand is quickly put to labor?

        It’s odd how everyone seems to defer to it, almost as though it is Dr. Rappaccini himself. The only person who dares defy it is the cook, when she shoos it away from the beef roast being readied for the dinner.

        She never speaks of her past, but it surfaced in her language, the spray of invective, filthy and informative, spat in the crow’s direction.

        She flung a saucepan at the crow as well. The crash as it hit the wall cupboard made everyone in the kitchen jump. Everyone looked around, afraid that Doctor Rappaccini might have seen .

        He wasn’t there, but the crow was indignant enough for both of them. She was lucky it couldn’t talk, couldn’t tell the doctor what she had done to his beloved pet. It hopped away on the counter, then flapped up to the high shelf held up with iron corbels and perched there, clacking its beak and cawing at her as though about to explode with indignation.

        She went over to the window above the sink and opened it, stepped back, and gestured at it. As though it understood her, the crow flapped and flew out, still berating her with squawks and quonks.

        By evening though, it seemed to have forgiven her. Or maybe it was taunting her, I don’t know which. Either way, it hopped on her shoulder as she was trying to ladle out dinner to the shuffling rows of patients. She couldn’t push it off, since the doctor was standing there watching.

        But it couldn’t resist payback. She showed me later the blood on her arm where its claws had dug in, a cluster of discolored oozing marks. If I could have, I would’ve told her to wash it. I tried to mime that out. Demons live where there is dirt, and who knows what kind of demons a crow harbors? Instead she wrapped it back up, winding the bandage around her arm, hiding the damage.

* * *

        Last night I dreamed I was the crow.

        Crows aren’t male and female the way we are. Or at least it’s a matter of indifference to humans, and something that presumably only matters to other crows. I flew among men and women and all of them looked at me and knew that I wasn’t like them, but that was all right, because I was a crow.

        Other parts of being a crow were less appealing. I flapped my wings and made a gravelly sound in my throat as I plucked an eyeball from a corpse. I popped it in my beak like a grape squeezed between thumb and forefinger, full of juice, to the point where it burst, spattering liquid over my wings.

        I woke with a coppery taste in my mouth.

        Over breakfast, I watched outside where Jonah sat on the fence post, calling to the other crows. None of them came down to sit with him, no matter how much he cooed or wheedled. Several times he flapped up to try and land beside them. Each time they pecked at him until he flew away.

        No one else seemed to notice except the Colonel. He caught my eye and said, “Probably doesn’t smell right to them. Doesn’t smell the way a proper crow should.”

        So Jonah pays some price for his life here. It must seem worthwhile to him, or he wouldn’t stay.

        Perhaps that’s why his temper is so nasty; why he cannot stand to be thwarted.

        I wonder what the other crows must think of Jonah. A crow that’s allowed itself to be tamed in order to make its life more comfortable. Do they envy it, or think it’s sold its soul?

        If there was someone else like me, what would that reflection say about me?

        Would he envy me?

        Or think I’ve sold my soul?

        Sometimes prejudice works to my advantage. I don’t have to share a room with any of the other orderlies, because they are white and don’t want to sleep with the dirty Indian.

        That saves me trouble. I can unwind the bandages around my breasts and breathe.

        I’m still a man. That’s what I feel like.

        But sometimes my body doesn’t agree.

        It’s always been that way. I knew I was a man, even when everything else was telling me differently. It wasn’t until I ran away from the orphanage, lied and enlisted in a war that was eating up soldiers faster than anyone could produce them, that I could live the way I wanted to.

        It wasn’t something I could have accomplished on my own. Here and there people have helped, looked the other way or let me slide by. When I was injured, of course the doctors knew. They could’ve caused a scandal. As it was, all they did was make sure I couldn’t draw on my pay, because I’d accumulated it under false pretenses, or my pension, which fell into the same category.

        But there is plenty of work for those no longer fit to be soldiers. My options, the options offered an Indian who could no longer speak, were certainly not those offered someone with paler skin or whose gender was unquestionable, but I did all right.

        I could probably find better employment than an asylum for those broken by the war. But here, there are so few questions, so little time for looking at those around us, that it hopefully will always be safe for me, even though all of us are overworked and underpaid. I can find what comfort I can here, in a world where there is so little.

* * *

        Cook died last night.

        Sepsis, Doctor Rappaccini said. From some small injury she must have sustained in the kitchen and carelessly left untreated. He said the word “carelessly” as though her death was just a matter of her being too stupid to take care of herself.

        He didn’t say that she was a careful woman who kept things as clean as she could. He didn’t say that she tried her best for the patients, to comfort them not with her body as she once had but by making the food less wretched. She was good at bargaining on the black market, and she never used those skills to enhance her own table, only to get suet or sugar or spices that might make them happy for a moment when they tasted a favorite dish.

        The replacement that Dr. Rappaccini finds for her will not make anyone happy but him. He doesn’t own the asylum outright but he might as well, having been appointed by the board of directors after he’d convinced them that he could make it turn a profit. That seems odd, to think that an asylum can be profitable, but at the heart of things it is a business.

        And a business that the doctor knows well, in terms of how to cut corners. Before he came, patients wore their artificial limbs every day, a practice that Rappaccini says only leads to wear and breakage. Back then whenever someone died, their artificial limbs were buried with them. Now they’re wiped down with a solution of Condy’s Crystals and put away to be used again and again.

        Food arrives from the War Office each week. Never enough. The cook used to send the off-duty orderlies out to forage for greens to supplement what there was. Some grumbled, but it was in our best interest to cooperate.

        The first day I foraged, I was so pleased to bring her back several armloads of fiddleheads. I knew they were edible, although I had never seen ones before with such a faint purplish hue to them.

        She made a face and picked one up to sniff it. She shook her head, setting it down, and said, “Boy, you took these from the Doctor’s garden?”

        I had been here only a few days and didn’t know what she meant. My face showed it.

        She said, “Come with me.”

        She led me to the garden where I’d found the ferns. Surrounded by cypress, it seemed half-abandoned at first. A fountain, its white marble confines crumbling, burbled and splashed in the center, wild iris flowering around it in shades of blue and purple. But when I looked closer, I realized many of the plants were caged in urns and other containers. The largest stood next to the fountain, a bush covered with purple flowers, brilliant as gems, so lovely they seemed to illuminate the garden when a cloud flickered over the sun.

        “You don’t come here, and neither do you bring me any food from it,” the cook directed. She was thin and wiry. Freckles splotched her skin, the color of weak cocoa. “You stay away from it.” She pointed at the flowering plant. “See that? Another month and it’ll fruit. Don’t go eating those or you’ll regret it. This is the doctor’s personal garden.”

        I can glimpse that garden now as we line up around the grave, in the cemetery that adjoins our grounds. An unobtrusive white stone, skull-sized, rolls in the grass to mark each dead patient. Name and dates applied with black paint that wears away quickly, leaving a shadow like a day’s worth of stubble on the cold stone.

        The priest says, “Let us pray.”

        I close my eyes to hear the breathing of the men around me, the shuffle of their feet and crutches, the creak of wheelchairs.

        “Requiem Aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis....”

        I always associate the sound of Latin with furious whispers, with sharp pinches. With eyes like freshly broken blue/black/brown glass beads, pressing down from an adult’s height over my vantage point as a child.

        The nuns were unhappy with their assignment to an institution devoted to making Navajo children assimilate into white culture, and the children were the closest outlet for that frustration.

        I was six when they came for me and my two brothers. They split us up and sent us to different schools. That was the rule, break up the families. They didn’t want Indian children banding together, didn’t want them telling each other memories of home, reminding each other of what they had left behind.

        We could not call ourselves The People any longer. They wouldn’t let us speak our own language. If we spoke in Navajo, they beat us; forced us to find the English words to say what we wanted. Not that they would have given us anything we wanted.

        In the mornings, we ate burned bread and cold oatmeal and listened to Sister Perpetua barking out the day’s reading from the Old Testament. She looked like a china doll from a Christmas tree, but she didn’t talk like one. She never seemed to pick the Bible’s kinder parts, only the pieces calculated to frighten us. The story of the prophet Elijah telling bears to eat the wicked children who’d mocked his bald head was her favorite.

        We heard the Bible at breakfast, and at the noon snack, and at dinner. We swam in stories from the Bible, all of them telling us how wrong we were. They told us we could never be like whites; they told us we had to be like whites. On Sundays, they prayed over us from dawn to dusk. I never understood how they could despise us so yet devote their lives to teaching us.

        So few of them seemed happy. So many of them seemed ready to lash out at us, swift as a scorpion, angry in a way that confused and bewildered me.

        But for every few dozen scorpions, there was someone whose presence outweighed the rest. Like Father McNeill.

        He was tall, so tall. I’d never seen a man stretch that high before. You would’ve thought it would have made him frightening. But he had a way of leaning down to listen, blue eyes intent, that made him comforting.

        He was head of the school when I came there. He stood at the entrance as they marched us in, two dozen Navajo children from Monument Valley and the Bears Ears and Moenkopi. Unhappy and frightened, and not knowing what sort of place we had come to.

        His smile made us feel better, at least some of us. Others had learned already that when whites smile, sometimes they don’t mean it.

        Father McNeill meant it. He talked to each of us. He told me that Jesus was my friend, a friend I could always rely on. A friend who would comfort me.

        I liked that. I liked the idea of a friend in those lonesome times. And some of the pictures of Jesus didn’t make him look like a white man. I couldn’t imagine him a Navajo like me, but I could imagine him a cousin from very far away. I liked the Jesus that Father McNeill talked about, a kind and loving and honorable man. A man someone could try to emulate.

        In years that followed, I got a chance to compare stories with other children who’d been shipped off to places that didn’t have anyone like Father McNeill. It was only then that I realized how lucky we’d been.

        He kept things sane for us. It could have been much, much worse.

        Much, much worse came later, after he died, and the school became like all the rest.

        When I was sixteen and they finally let me leave, I tried to go home. I went back to Bears Ears, three days of hitching and walking. When I got there, my family was gone. No one remembered them. One fellow thought they’d moved over to Calamity Springs, so I went there too, but the trail was even colder there.

        I had no money, no family, no home. So I signed up to serve in the War.

* * *

        Once you’ve noticed something, you notice it always. I watched Jonah the Crow. I couldn’t help but notice him now.

        At least I thought the crow was a him. Something about the way it cocked its head whenever Rappaccini spoke to it made me think that the two of them must share a gender.

        The bird made his rounds every day like clockwork, checking to see what was happening, as though worried that he would come across a situation Rappaccini would not approve of. I could imagine the bird reporting to him, squawking out stories of inefficiencies and broken rules; informing on us all.

        People ignored the crow, the same way that they ignored me. If you can’t talk, you become just part of the background.

        It’s more comfortable being part of the background, being unnoticed and unquestioned. Neither the crow nor I were the first to discover that. But it’s something that had served me well, during my time in the war.

        We are not supposed to talk to the Colonel about the war. Dr. Rappacini is convinced too much emotion will cause apoplexy, that his heart will collapse under the strain. He doses the Colonel with opium, which gives him strange dreams.

        Yesterday the Colonel told me his leg talks to him when he’s asleep. He said, eyeing me, “Is that the strangest thing you’ve ever heard?”

        I shrugged and shook my head.

        “There’s plenty of odd things in war, my boy,” he said. He saw me raise an eyebrow at him and shrugged himself, although he flushed. “Yes, I know you’re not my boy. You’re just an Indian. But you’re a man, like I am. You had a father. I had a son.”

        I didn’t say anything, of course. More importantly I didn’t gesture to contradict him.

        He continued, hurriedly, as though to not give me time to reply, “Anyhow, the war is about phlogiston. You know what that is, how it powers the great engines that drive the city’s heart. Not as much now, since almost all of that is devoted to the war effort.” He spoke with conviction now, animated by his own words. “That’s the contradiction at the heart of the war, see! Fighting over a precious resource, and using all of that resource in the fight. They keep saying that once the war is over, humanity will advance, once it’s got all that phlogiston to devote to its own noble needs. But that will never happen. They’re too evenly matched. And too many people are making money from supplying the machines to fight the wars. It won’t stop.” He paused and lowered his voice, forcing himself calm. “It won’t stop till all of us are dead.”

        If I’d been able to speak, I would have. But all I could do was pat his shoulder and hope he understood.

* * *

        It’s quiet here when no one is screaming. That’s the biggest difference between here and the war: the noise.

        There, it’s everywhere—the cannons’ boom, the machines’ roar, the furnaces’ blast, rockets shrieking, voices screaming. When I think of the war, that’s what echoes through my head, pushing out the smell of iron and electricity and blood and salt water.

        I lied about so many things when I enlisted. They didn’t question any of it. They knew that most of the boys signing their names to enlistment papers were too young for it to be legal. But a war requires bodies, and it is not choosy about what kind they are.

        I was assigned as a driver to a captain. Even now, when times are so desperate that they are taking thirteen year-olds, they don’t allow the People to be soldiers. We were support staff only. I couldn’t fight, but I could fly the little ornithopter that took him from ship to raft, from one battle to another.

        The first time I saw the captain, I thought he was ugly. His face looked as though someone had thrown it together from lumps of clay. But his eyes were dark and long-lashed, like a woman’s, almost too pretty. He was tall but stooped, as though to hide just how tall he was. His hair was so black it had a blue sheen underneath, like sunlight on a crow’s wing.

        He didn’t like me anymore than I liked him. He didn’t think he needed a driver; saw it as a way for the high command to restrict what he did. But after a while, he came to realize that I was useful and discreet.

        He didn’t start talking to me, really, until after a trip in which the side got blown off the ornithopter. I’d kept flying, pulling forward as shells clattered and boomed beside us.

        It was early morning and the sun was rising, revealing us. I knew I had to get us to safety, and I steered up, trying to gain the shelter of the clouds even as a shell exploded a few feet to my left, throwing smoke and fragments across the windshield, darkening the interior before the slipstream swept it away, a metal shard rasping across the glass.

        The captain knew better than try to direct me, for which I was grateful. So many people think the best response to a crisis is to inject themselves into it. Instead he kept quiet and let me fly. Some corner of my mind, not occupied like the rest of it with the simple matter of survival, was warmed by that trust.

        I earned it. We were shaken but unscathed by the time we landed. The only mark of the journey was the arc the shard had cut into the windshield, a curve that glinted in the full morning sunlight.

        I was so glad to be alive.

        The captain said, clapping me on the shoulder, “That was fine flying.” He mistook my flinch at his touch and apologized.

        I just nodded. Let him think that I didn’t like other people touching me. That was easier than the truth.

        I don’t know when I realized he wasn’t ugly anymore. It would’ve been some time after it was already too late. I had already fallen into love.

        I didn’t do anything with it. I’d never felt like that before. So I kept it like a hand-warmer in my pocket. Every once in a while I stole a glance at him and put the picture away in my mind, and used it to warm my heart, in the nights when I could hear the shells and everything was cold and lonely and too, too close to death.

        I thought so many times about revealing myself to him. Telling him who I was.

        But what did I expect would happen? Every time I played it out in my head, it never went the way I would’ve wanted it to. That dream required too much taking-in at the seams. It didn’t fit what would happen. It was impossible to make it fit what would happen.

        What does it say, when your deepest yearnings are so unrealistic you can’t make them work even in your imagination? Does that say something about imagination’s limitations, or, as it seems more likely to me, does it say something about that dream?

        It’s not that he didn’t like women. He did, I knew that for sure. But I didn’t want to come to him as a woman. That’s not how I wanted him to love me. I wanted him to love me in the way that two men love each other.

        Was that unreasonable?

        It didn’t seem that way at the time.

* * *

        The crow can tell one person from another. He knows who will flap at him and who will not notice his presence. And it uses that information.

        I saw it hop onto Mr. Paper’s shoulder. It had realized that he would just keep staring forward at the horizon, as he has done for three years now. The crow leaned over and grabbed a tuft of white hair in its beak and pulled, savage and fast.

        Mr. Paper still didn’t react, but I did. I ran forward and flapped my hands at the crow until it flew away, the hair still dangling from its beak and blood dripping down to Mr. Paper’s back.

        That was when I decided to kill it.

        I couldn’t do it openly. Dr. Rappaccini would have wreaked revenge on anyone who killed his pet. I had to think the murder through as carefully as though I were plotting to kill a human. Had to do it surreptitiously, in a way that couldn’t be traced.

        I thought about violent ways to do it. Catch it in a window and smash it, or find some cat or dog to kill it. But that seemed unworkable.

        Here in the hospital it’s easy enough to find poison, if you need it.

        I took the potassium permanganate crystals from the Condy’s Crystals jar, purple as sunset hills. If I could get the crow to ingest them, it would surely die.

        I spent today watching to see what it ate, what delicacies tempted him.

        Cheese. He liked cheese. So I took a lump of greasy orange cheddar from the icebox where it was stored for the doctor’s snack and put the crystals inside. I rolled it into a lump, warming it against my flesh so it would be malleable, a yellow sticky lump with death at its center. I set it out in a room where I knew the crow would come, on a china plate on Mr. Paper’s bedside table, because I knew he wouldn’t take it before the crow.

        It was a terrible mistake.

        I underestimated the crow, silly though that sounds.

        At first I thought my plan would work. But when has anything in life ever gone the way I thought it would? The crow hopped forward on the table, head tilted to see the cheese, turning its beak to see around it and to look with first one eye and then the other, as though weighing it.

        I held my breath.

        It looked at me.

        It saw me. It looked at me watching it, and it realized what was going on, stabbed its beak into the cheese, not to pick it up but to reveal what lay at the core. And then, watching me all the while, it ate every bit of cheese from around the crystals but left them lying there.

        It stared at me. I stared back. It was seeing me, not just an anonymous human. Me and me alone.

        Who would have known that a bird could become your enemy? It seems comical. But those blank, black eyes, glittering at me, were anything but funny. It turned its head again, examining me first with one eye then the other.

        I knew it would remember me. I knew it knew what I had meant to do.

        But what could it do, really? It was just a bird. Not capable of speech. Or at least of communicating what it knew to anyone.

        Still, it scared me.

* * *

        When I was twelve, Sister Madonna came to the school. She came all the way from Italy, across the ocean, very far away. She was dark-skinned like an Indian, although her face was the wrong shape. But she looked, if you squinted, a lot like the women at home.

        She was kind, too. Like Father McNeill, she was someone who managed to make all the others seem as though they didn’t matter so much. When she patted you on the shoulder, you could feel the touch much later like a ghost; could lie in bed and summon up the way that the pressure had felt, reassuring. Full of love.

        I had learned by then to hide myself away. My soul was like a turtle that had stuck its head out too many times, until all it wanted to do was stay inside the shell. But even turtles like the sunshine, like to crawl up on logs and feel the fierce heat beat down upon the plates of their hard shell. Sister Madonna was like that sun, that kind and welcoming heat.

        That was why I confided in her.

        I might not have been able to write much, might have had to struggle with that to the point where the nuns shrilled at me for the way my letters straggled, but it didn’t mean that I was stupid.

        I was clever in other ways. I could add up numbers at a glance or sort formulas fuzzed with x’s and y’s and z’s into coherency as easily as combing out a greasy hank of wool. I was quick at counting, good at estimating. That’s why I was tapped to help her when she took inventory in the storeroom, counting the papers and pencils and notebooks and all the other school supplies that they sent from the East in order to make us civilized.

        It was a spring day. She asked me several times if I would rather be outside, but I was content to sit there listening to her chatter in her thick accented voice. She had a habit of humming to herself, and you’d hear scraps of hymns and sometimes whatever had been sung in chapel that Sunday.

        I didn’t bring it up. She asked me first. She said, tilting her head to one side to examine me, “What’s troubling you, Vivian?”

        When I came to the school, I tried to keep my old name, but this was the one they gave me, Vivian. By then it felt as natural to me as the other one. Which is to say, it was a woman’s name and therefore not something that I wanted. But then I learned that it could be a man’s name too.

        I said to her, “Did you ever hear of women changing into men?”

        She said, “Why would they ever want to do that?” And she laughed, but not in an unkind way.

        I said to her, “I don’t want to be a girl, Sister Madonna. If I pray to God hard enough, will he make me a boy?”

        She took a breath and put the box down that she’d been counting through. She looked at me directly. She said, “God has decided what you are.”

        I said, “Then didn’t God make it so that I would want to be a boy?”

        She said, “Maybe it’s a test from God. Is that what it feels like, a test?”

        I shook my head.

        She didn’t say anything.

        I said, “I don’t feel like this body is mine.”

        I was afraid she would turn away, that she would tell me I was a bad thing, that all of these thoughts had been sent from the devil who, apparently, was the origin of many bad things, including the Navajo language and all the old ways.

        But she didn’t.

        Instead she said, “Sometimes people are not suited to what the world wants of us. To know yourself in the right place is a comfort, and there is so little comfort in the world. Traditionally that’s why many men and women have entered the church. Do you think that’s where your calling is?”

        I shook my head immediately. I didn’t mean her any disrespect, but I had been there long enough to know that the church and I were not suited to each other.

        “Well,” she said, “sometimes what the world wants of us and what God wants of us are not the same. If you ask Jesus, he will tell you what to do. You can always turn to him. You know that, don’t you?”

        I did. Most of us resisted what we were told, but I had picked out bits to keep. Jesus was love, Father McNeil and Sister Madonna insisted. I liked that. I liked the idea of someone made from love, incapable of feeling hate.

        Sister Madonna was the one who taught me how to bind my breasts when they emerged, so I could pass for a man when I wanted. She taught me that men and women move differently, not because their bodies are so different but because the world looks at them in such a different way.

        The first day I walked out in boy’s clothes, I couldn’t believe that anybody didn’t see I was a girl; that God didn’t look down and make me burst into flame. But it felt so natural, like I had put on shoes that had been made just for me.

        At least a few of the military recruiters knew I wasn’t a boy. But I wasn’t the only woman enlisting. They would have looked the other way even if we had been some new species. That’s how desperate they were for bodies to wage their war. It didn’t matter whether those bodies had a particular set of organs or not. They died the same either way.

* * *

        The crow kept watching me. Wherever I went, I could look up and see its eyes upon me. Was it that it had realized I posed some danger to it, that it didn’t want to let me sneak up on it again?

        It wasn’t that though. I was its next prey.

        I didn’t realize that until I saw it out in the moon garden. It hopped up on the edge of the center urn and reached out, not with its beak, but with a foot. It took a purple berry in its talons and squeezed until juice oozed out over its claws. It repeated the act with its other foot.

        I remembered the marks on the cook’s arm, the festering wounds. So small to have killed her. So very small that no one realized it was no accident.

        That thought came with another one. I was as crazy as any patient ever shipped back from the lines, whose mind had been blasted to bits by the sound of the guns, by the deaths, by the senselessness of it all. Now I was imagining things, thinking that a bird was capable of thought, of premeditation. Of plotting someone’s death.

        I went outside for a walk, to try to clear my head, but all I could do was look at the birds and wonder. Maybe they were all part of it together. Maybe they all had some plot at their heart, of revenge.... But revenge for what? For schoolboys taking eggs from their nests? For women wearing feather plumes on their hats? It seemed so trivial.

        I remembered the crows watching Jonah, staring down at him from the drooping lines of a cedar tree’s branches. No, there was no mass conspiracy among the birds. I did not need to flinch whenever I saw a sparrow. I only needed to concern myself with Jonah.

        But how to go about that, I wasn’t sure.

* * *

        I woke, not knowing what had pulled me out of sleep. The war had left me, unlike so many, more capable of sleep than when I had entered; the soldier’s ability to grab a few quick winks whenever the opportunity presented itself.

        For a moment, I thought I was back there. That I could lift my head from my cot and see the captain in the tent’s vestibule going over papers and maps while I waited in case he needed me to fly him somewhere. Anywhere.

        But instead this was my room in the asylum, part of the converted slave quarters, a narrow and noisome space unadorned by any amenity. Other inhabitants of the ward pinned up postcards or silky scarves or drew on the boards in chalk, at any rate did something to make the space their own, to make it show some mirror of their personality.

        I had no interest in anyone finding out more about me than they needed to. My walls were bare.

        I had gone to sleep with the window open. Seattle stays cool until the beginning of July, when it hurtles into heat. I’d hoped for a cool wind to stir the stagnant, warm air. No breeze whispered, but there was something outlined in the window.

        Jonah, perched on the sill. Watching me. I saw the glitter of his eyes. There was no reason to think some errant crow had come to investigate me. I had never seen a crow at night before. It could only be my enemy. Watching me sleep.

        What plans might a bird hatch?

* * *

        The Colonel died yesterday. Last night I dreamed of him, but he washed away and I was back in the dream.

        It’s the one that comes each night. Every time, the same. I see the gas cloud hanging there, roiling with red shadows. Try as I might to dodge it, its depths swallow me again. I try to hold my breath but cannot, eventually taking a breath that sears my lungs, burns away the tissues.

        I’ve stood beside Rappaccini while he dissected a corpse. I know what ordinary vocal cords look like; where they are buried in the body. Rappaccini has pointed them out to me, beneath the epiglottis, above the trachea, talking all the while about how mine must differ, scarred by the harsh gas, as though it was my throat beneath his knife.

        I remember flying through the cloud, thinking that if I moved fast enough we’d escape. I told the captain to throw the blanket over himself, to crouch down. That saved him. But the crimson gas seeped into the ornithopter, fingers prying into the window cracks, drifted up through the vents. I breathed it in, swallowed it despite how each gulp burned in my throat, keeping it from reaching him.

        I was lucky. Another year and they might have made me into a clank. But back then, they were still dismissing people when they were injured, not holding onto them the way they do now.

        The captain came to see me in the field hospital carrier, so close to the lines that the guns still thundered to punctuate his words. He cried, though not much, just a few tears as he held my hand and told me how sorry he was, how he’d put me in for a medal. Told me that he’d look for me after the discharge.

        I thought about telling him then. But I couldn’t speak; could only have tried to explain through pantomime and writing, knowing that the words would be inadequate. I couldn’t tell him enough, couldn’t say that I didn’t want him to love me for the body that had been forced on me, I wanted him to love who I was, a man loving him.

        That was important. But how could I convey that to him in my poor attempts at written language, that awkward scrawl that Sister Perpetua had burned my knuckles for?

        I prayed that night for guidance, the way that Father McNeil and Sister Madonna had told me that I could always do. I turned to Jesus, my friend Jesus, to tell me what I should do, how I should act, and I laid all of that in his hands.

        The next morning I felt refreshed and strengthened. Jesus would help me endure. I’d tell the captain, and he would be surprised at first but accepting, or perhaps he would tell me he’d suspected it all along.

        Together, we would work it all out.

        They wheeled me out into the morning, and I saw him walking towards me on the deck.

        The guns thundered again.

        Everything was noise and confusion and shouting and the smell of blood. My ears rang, and every sound came to me as though I were underwater.

        The smoke cleared, drifted down as though unable to hold itself in the air any longer, and I saw him lying there.

        His head was half gone, torn away by the shell. You could see his brains, the color of cold oatmeal, darkened by burns, lying in a pool of red. His eye was open and surprised, still long-lashed and pretty.

        Still so pretty, even then.

        That was God’s message. That he hated me so much he would rather kill a good man than let him be sullied by my love.

        God’s writing was as ugly as mine. But it told me what I needed to know. That Father McNeil and Sister Madonna were wrong.

        Jesus didn’t love me. He wasn’t my friend.

        He was like all the rest of them.

        I could have gone back home after the war. But it wasn’t my home anymore. The school hadn’t made me white, but it made me no longer a Navajo, no longer understanding those ways or those stories. I had come to Seattle because it was so green back then, back before the factories had grimed all the trees.

        I was helping clean Mr. Abernathy’s old room, readying it for the next occupant. Doctor Rappaccini had made us try to clean the wheelchair up so it could be used again, but such a stench had permeated the wicker that even he was forced to admit it would never serve another patient. The stench even clung to the room’s faded wallpaper, and I’d been directed to wipe that down with bleach-water.

        I turned around and found the Doctor standing in the doorway. Jonas was perched on his shoulder. He said, “Mr. Zonnie, I’d like to talk with you.”

        That phrasing made me shiver. I’d never heard him call anyone Mister before, and it wasn’t that there was respect edging the tone. Only menace.

        He said, “There’s been some things reported missing. Small thefts. A wedding ring, a medal.”

        I widened my eyes and looked puzzled.

        “Some cheese intended for my meal,” he continued, watching my face.

        I kept it impassive, trying not to react. I don’t know that I succeeded. The Doctor kept staring at me. I could smell the acrid, sour smell from the birdshit on his back. Jonah clacked his beak at me.

        “You could be sent back to the war,” the doctor said. Each time he paused between words, the crow clacked its beak again. Its head darted forward and I flinched.

        The doctor noticed. “You’re scared of a bird?”

        I just kept still.

        He said with scorn in his face, “What do you think a bird can do to you? Let’s see.”

        He shrugged his shoulder. Jonah flew at me, all sharp beak and extended talons, raking at my face.

        I made a noise—something rough and ragged and painful in my throat—and flung my arm up, trying to dislodge it. Warmth ran down my face and the beak plunged once, digging itself into the skin at the corner of my eye.

        I rocked back, thinking he wanted my eye, that he wouldn’t be satisfied till it was gone. I doubled over, shielding my head as the crow tore at me and Rappaccini watched.

        Finally the Doctor said, “Enough.”

        The crow stopped stabbing at me. I heard the flap of its wings as it returned to his shoulder.

        The Doctor’s voice was cold. “Tomorrow’s an inspection. Take the brass appliances and make sure they shine.”

        After the two of them were gone, I washed my face, thinking of the crow dipping its claws in the berries. I stole more crystals and dropped them in water, seeing the pink tinge spread across it before I used it to wash the wounds, ignoring its sting. The damage was bad, but my eye was unscathed, despite the torn skin beside it.

        I tried not to think of the crow as I washed brass limbs with soapy water before drying them and taking up the brass polish, which smelled of ammonia and dust. I tried not to think that I had been asleep while that black thing hopped across the floor, perhaps perching on the end of the bed to look at me, to watch my eyeballs rolling beneath the paper-thin skin while he thought about plucking them out.

        What was the crow?  Because that’s how I think of it, not by the name the doctor has given it. It seems unlikely that it is the name it would have chosen for itself.

        Back with the nuns, they would have told me it was an instrument of the devil, summoned by sin, bent on taking souls down to hell, to drown in the lake of fire and brimstone. If not the devil himself, one of his imps.

        Someone else might wonder if it was a human soul, born anew into the feeble body of a bird, frustrated by its lack of hands and speech, bent on destroying those born into superior bodies or else carrying out some ancient grudge incurred before it was ever hatched.

        Or a skinwalker, a witch who takes on animal form?

        Or maybe it was just a monster.

        Just because the world held monsters didn’t mean that God had made them.

        When I was done, I staggered back to my room, hands aching. Something tapped on the window. I looked up to see the crow sitting there, silhouetted against sunset’s purple sky. I thought it was Jonah. It seemed unlikely it would be any other crow come visiting. It tapped on the window again and cocked its head. It wanted me to let it in.

        I didn’t move. Staring back at it, I shook my head.

        That sent it into an angry frenzy. It tapped on the glass, so hard I thought it would crack the thin pane. I looked away, and that made it angrier. I stared at the wallpaper, tracing the pattern of green leaves, faded now, and the even more faded yellow flowers, so pallid they were almost imperceptible, and pretended I didn’t know it was there.

        I sat down on the bed, which squeaked conversationally underneath me then fell silent. I folded my hands in front of me and stared down at them. Long-fingered hands, strong hands. Hands that had flown me through shells and explosion and death.

        They fell into the shape of prayer without my even thinking about it.

        Father McNeill and Sister Madonna would have approved. They would have told me that if I talked to God, he would listen. All my prayers would be answered, and that was good, even if it was in a mysterious way that you couldn’t understand at the time but which unraveled itself into meaning years later.

        But I had talked to God many times, until his reply had been far too mysterious for me. Death was a shitty answer to a prayer. That betrayal still burned at me, as fresh and bitter tasting as yesterday.

        I missed my friend Jesus. I used to think of him as someone I could talk to. I carried on a conversation in my mind, addressed to him, and I never worried that he wasn’t listening or didn’t want to hear what I was saying.

        I’d put that away the day the captain died, the day he and God betrayed me.

        I wondered if Jonah would hurt himself, the way he was squawking and flapping. I raised my head and said, not out loud but in my head: I won’t compromise myself. Take me as I am, but not any other way.

        I felt the silence listening. The way Jesus used to listen.

        I said, Take it or leave it.

        A rap again at the window.

        Maybe that was my answer. Vile creature of a viler God, a God of poison and birdshit, of malicious eyes and sooty feathers.

        Let him come in, then, and give me my answer.

        When I swung the window open, he exploded in at me, a wrath of feathers and squawks. Instinctively I flailed and swatted, using all my strength.

        He hit the wall with a thump and a noise, quiet as a twig snapping, as his neck broke.

        But he was still alive. The angry beads of his eyes glittered as he lay, a feathery lump whose only motion was the in and out of its breaths. A line of sunset-orange light played over his belly and fingered a crack in the wall, awaking an answering glint inside.

        I wrapped my hand in the pillowcase before I pulled his body away from the wall. He made a rattling sound of hatred and pain, and died.

        I tugged the wall board aside to widen the crack. Inside were rings, a watch, more. A cufflink set with diamonds. A $20 gold piece with the Queen’s face on it.

        I felt dazed, wrapped in cotton wool that kept the world away from me, perceived through a layer of confusion or in a darkened mirror.

        God had answered my prayer.

        Or had he? Was the world so random that none of this meant anything?

        Either everything is random, or God’s hand moves all the pieces, including me, and Father McNeill, and the Doctor, and Jonah. A God who calculates things so precisely that when a bird falls, you see the last trace of sunlight answering you. Setting you free. A patient God waiting for something so large that Jonah and I were unimportant cogs. Maybe that God calls upon us according to our nature and doesn’t care what we are, or what we call ourselves.

* * *

        Tonight I’m leaving. Rappaccini has looked for Jonah all day, calling and calling, but he hasn’t thought to search the grounds yet. Eventually he will.

        I’ve packed the few supplies I have. They’ll take me over the mountains, I think, into the sun.

        I have a travelling companion, an old acquaintance. He’s invisible, inaudible. I don’t know what he wants, precisely. Maybe he’s a figment. Maybe he’s not.

        But if I think he’s there, it comforts me. And there is so little comfort in this world.

Copyright © 2014 Cat Rambo

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Cat Rambo has worked as a programmer for Microsoft and a Tarot card reader; professions which, she claims, both involve a certain combination of technical knowledge and willingness to go with the flow. Her stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Weird Tales, Clarkesworld, and Strange Horizons, among others, and her work has consistently garnered mentions and appearances in year’s best anthologies. Her collection, Eyes Like Coal and Moonlight, was an Endeavour Award finalist in 2010 and followed her collaboration with Jeff VanderMeer, The Surgeon’s Tale and Other Stories. Visit her website at http://www.kittywumpus.net/blog/.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

CROSSROADS AND GATEWAYS

by Helen Marshall

        Dajan faced east, as he did every morning, greeting the Sun with a toothy smile that split the creases of his face. His spear was planted in the sand beside him, gripped by a fist hard and calloused. The wind tugged at the bright red cloth that hung from it. The sand dunes seemed smooth as elephant bones in the morning, limned in a brilliant gold. Brown and gold—the colors of the desert. Dajan’s colors.

        He shaded his eyes as he scanned the horizon. In the distance, he made out the silhouette of a man approaching. This was unexpected. So little was unexpected in the desert. So little changed. The desert was its own kind of prison—parched, loveless, limitless.

        Dajan leaned against the shaft of his spear and waited.

        “There are no crossroads here, Esu,” Dajan called out. The approaching stranger was naked but for the stretch of cloth about his waist. Today, Esu had the look of an old man. He wore his skin like a threadbare blanket over muscles lean and hard as baked clay. His white hair, tangled in beads and bones, gleamed against the darkness of his shoulders.

        “All men are crossroads,” Esu answered with his hyena grin—mouth stretching wide, too wide, to reveal uneven teeth. “You more than most.”

        Like the flickering of a flame, Esu shifted faces—ancient wanderer to teasing boy-god. The lanky body was smaller now and rounded with baby fat. The lines in his face smoothed like the wind sweeping away footprints in the sand. Still, the hyena grin was the same.

        “All men are crossroads,” Esu repeated with a sly look, “and all women are gateways. It is unfortunate that you are not a woman. Women deserve gifts.”

        “Women have gifts of their own,” Dajan answered cautiously.

        Esu cackled at this, now turned white-haired and old once more. “As do you, as do you. Have you no questions for me, dead one?”

        “No,” Dajan said. Asking questions of Esu—in any of his form—was dangerous. His tongue gave shape to lies. He was a deceiver. He broke the world apart and knitted it together as he pleased. He might grant favors, yes, but there was always a price.

        “You’ve learned wisdom, I see,” Esu said as he pressed his face close. Dajan refused to flinch when the wrinkled lips whispered into his ear. “Or the desert has taught it to you. A question for a question then. What was the name of the first woman you loved?”

        Dajan paused. In his mind’s eye, he saw her, hips swaying beneath the crimson cloth, mouth slightly parted, eyes full of a thousand secrets.

        Silence had its own price. There had been silence for so many years. Years of wandering. Years of waiting.

        “Duma,” Dajan whispered, his chest constricting at the thought. Duma. Cheetah.

        Esu threw back his head and shrilled like the bird. “Did she mark you with her claws? Or did she simply run faster than you?” There was something hungry in the old man’s eyes that set Dajan on edge. “Wise, you are. Wise as a woman’s eyes. Sly as a woman’s eye. It doesn’t open easily. Did hers?”

        “One question, you said.”

        “Aye,” Esu crowed. “A question, a question. Would you know how to please her?”

        Dajan’s throat was dry. The Sun was higher in the sky than it should have been, scorching him with its rays. The desert was no longer the warm golds and browns of dawn. Instead, it had bleached into the blinding white of midday. Bone light, his people had once called that color. Only Esu’s crooked body darkened the surroundings. “Why are you here?” Dajan asked.

        “Wise, of course. Always whys.” Esu grinned again, his wrinkled face broken by the white gleam of his teeth. “I have come, Dajan of the Sands, to open a gateway for you.”

* * *

        “Tell me a story, hunter,” Esu said as he began to climb towards the top of the dune. His feet made tiny dimples in the sand as he walked. He had taken the face of the child: snub-nosed, heavy-lipped, and dark-eyed. The whites of his eyes seemed to dance like twin Moons.

        “I thought you were here to open a gateway,” Dajan replied wryly.

        “You are lost in the desert of Zamani. The past. You must see the way you have come before you go further.” He pointed at the footsteps.

        “I don’t understand.”

        “Of course not! No one ever understands me,” Esu whined. “You are at a crossroads. Speak, and take the first step.”

        Dajan knelt down and ran his fingers through the smooth sand as he mulled over the boy-god’s words. He held a handful for a moment. The grains ran in thin streams as he gathered his thoughts.

        “Once,” Dajan said, “there was a hunter—very young. He had barely seen the sun of sixteen summers, but he was keen-eyed, long-armed.”

        “Ah,” Esu whispered as he beckoned Dajan with his hands.

        “Women thought well of him, and many had laid necklaces at his tent in hopes of a fond welcome. He decorated himself with their gifts for he was as vain as Nyani, the baboon, but he never touched the women who offered them.”

        “Foolish as Nyani,” the boy-god replied with a giggle.

        “Of course,” Dajan replied, “but he was keen-eyed, long-armed, so he wore each of their hearts around his neck as a trinket.

        “One morning, during the Season of the Spear, he set out among the heartlands in search of antelope. Keen-eyed as he was, it was late in the day before he found a herd. As the spear left his hand, the herd scattered as if forewarned of his attack. Long-armed as he was, his throw went astray. That was when he saw her. She was... beautiful,” Dajan murmured. “Golden as the Sun and graceful as the wind through the grass. She was like him: a hunter. She was aduma.” Esu’s eyes flickered at this. “He crept towards her, careful lest she catch his scent.”

        “It is dangerous for a duma to catch a man’s scent,” Esu said softly.

        Dajan paused for a moment, glancing towards the Sun. Then he turned towards Esu with a sly look. “The day grows hot and I am thirsty. Now is not the time for stories.”

        “Bah!” Esu’s young voice took on the plaintive tones of a grandfather. He shook his skinny arm at Dajan. “It is always the time for stories.” With that, he took a cowrie shell from his pouch and threw it towards the heavens. It gleamed for a moment, and then it was no longer a shell but the bright face of the Moon come to chase down the Sun. The Sun fled towards the hills, fearing today the hunter might catch her. In a moment, there was darkness. “Finish the story!”

        “Soon,” Dajan replied, secretly pleased at the tantrum. “First, you must answer my question. Why am I a crossroads?”

        Esu chewed the bottom of his lip sullenly. Dajan waited. When no answer was forthcoming, he turned away from the dark child and began to walk.

        “Where are you going?” Esu asked, but before he had even finished speaking his eyes widened at his mistake. He let out an animal sound of frustration—a howl as loud and long as a hyena’s. The noise meant a brief victory.

        Dajan turned.

        “You would ask me a question, little god?” His tone was insolent. Foolishly so. But pride had ever been his weakness. “I go towards the tribe of my brother. I would know if all you say is true.”

        “I do not lie,” Esu spat. “You have passed from Sasa into Zamani—history, the past. You are beyond their memory. You can’t go back unless....”

        “Yes?” Dajan asked, pretending nonchalance.

        “Ah!” Esu’s frown transformed into a smirk. “One question. You are a crossroads because Sasa and Zamani meet within you.”

        “I thought I was within Zamani,” Dajan said. He shifted his weight onto his spear.

        “Sasa lies ahead. If you can open the door,” Esu replied, leaping in the air. “But come, come! We must walk. And it is the time for stories.”

        Dajan nodded, then trudged after Esu who had set off in a new direction. It was always this way with the gods. Nothing held fast. Nothing held still. They were the wind and he was the grain of sand blown heedless in their wake. He licked his lips. It tasted of salt, but he smiled anyway. He had tricked this boy-god once. There was more to be gained from him.

        “Very well,” Dajan said. He closed his eyes. Reached for the rhythm of the story.

        “The hunter was close now. With his keen eyes, he could see the pattern of her soul upon her skin. He knew her by it and knew he would never mistake her for another. The skin of a duma is like the fingerprint of a man. With his long arms, he could almost reach her. But the necklaces, the necklaces he had worn to please his pride, clattered as he moved. She heard, and knew the scent of heartbreak and pride, for she was a woman as well as a hunter. So she turned on him. He was weaponless and in love, so he did not fear her claws.

        “She carved the pattern of his soul onto his skin. It was one of pride and heart’s blood. When she left him, he was keen-eyed, and long-armed, and broken on the sand.”

        There was silence for a time as, in the dark desert of the sky, the Scorpion wheeled overhead.

        “A good story,” Esu said, charmed out of his usual impishness. Perhaps it was the blood, Dajan thought. For a moment, he could catch the gleam from Esu’s hair in the moonlight before it returned to its boyish darkness. “Another story then.”

        “I am empty of others.”

        “Then I shall teach you.” The hyena grin, once more. “Once, there was a mound of skin and bones dyed red with the blood of a hunter.”

        Dajan looked up sharply, but Esu continued in his singsong voice, his hands carving a space in the darkness between them. “And a duma came, a huntress blooded once by a man. Her claws were red in the light of the setting Sun, and she touched him. Touched him again. Where her claws met his skin, it was re-joined, stitched together once more until she lay atop him and he was whole.”

        Dajan felt a flicker of fear within him. For a moment, he could see the shape of trees in the distance beyond the edges of the desert. Jagged as teeth against the stars.

        But trees did not last. They could not last. The desert was too strong.

        “She left him, of course, as is the way of mothers and lovers, and his necklace clattered as he tried to touch the fur of her coat. She was gone. The hunter rose from the sand and the blood and collected his spear, never looking back, for he had forgotten her, as is the way of sons and lovers. Still, for all his pride, each night he placed a necklace by the door of his tent and each night a woman reclaimed her heart until his throat was bare and he was simply a boy again.”

        “If only it were so easy to change the past,” Dajan muttered.

        “Perhaps it could be. With help. You live within Zamani, hunter.”

        “This is not Zamani,” Dajan snapped. “I know it. My brother’s children, they still offer milk and honey to my memory. I have not been forgotten.”

        “Once, they did,” Esu said. He became again the ancient traveler, his body flensed of its youth and promise. “But you have passed from Sasa. The now. Your brother’s children are gone. As are their children.”

        Esu’s eyes were milky and half-blind, skin folded into thick creases when he squinted. Body bent and burdened. Dajan could read the passage of time in that transformation. Could see the years he himself had spent in the desert. When had he last tasted the gifts of the living? When had he last drunk in their memory of him? How long had he wandered the desert while his brother’s line fell to the sands?

        “Why are you telling me this?” Dajan demanded. His hands clenched into fists. He did not want to think about such things.

        “To open your eyes!” He paused. Spat again. “Fweh. You are careless with your questions.” He waved a hand in disgust. “For that answer, you must tell me another story.”

* * *

        It was midday once more. The Moon had let the Sun chase her from the sky, dancing ahead, vanishing beneath the line of the horizon.

        Dajan and Esu continued to walk the dunes, leaving a trail of footprints like the spots on Ghana’s long neck. Dajan knew these hills. Had travelled them ceaselessly as the Sun hunted the Moon. But could he be sure they were the same hills? Did his footprints show the path he had come or the path he still must tread?

        The past mattered. It meant something. But the bowls had been empty for so long. The children’s bones licked clean by sand. Baked to dust by the sun. He could not remember the faces of his brother’s sons and daughters. None remembered his face. Perhaps none of it mattered anymore.

        Yet a story was owed. The old laws still meant something. He would give the boy-god his due.

        “Once, there was a beautiful woman named Mayasa,” Dajan began. “Her arms were dark as the coals of a fire burnt out, long and slender. Her hair was plaited and wrapped in a band of crimson cloth beaded with cowrie shells. When she walked, her movements were swift and sure. She was a princess of her tribe.”

        They crested the top of a dune, and Dajan paused for a moment to survey the land. It stretched towards the horizon in an arc of mottled gold and brown. Empty. With a sigh, he took another step and led the way down the mound.

        “Her mother,” Dajan continued, “broached the topic of marriage one evening as she knelt at the loom. Mayasa smiled obligingly and said: ‘There is a little while yet before I must find a husband.’ And her mother was satisfied and went away.

        “The seasons passed, and Mayasa’s mother returned to her to speak. Again, Mayasa smiled and put aside the question, for she loved her freedom more than any man.

        “Finally, during the season of the Sun, when the old men complain of water and the young ones lay quiet in the shade of the trees, her mother returned. This time, Mayasa could not put her off. ‘I shall marry he who catches Ubora, the King of the Antelopes,’ she said, and her mother was pleased. Such was a task fit a prince.”

        Esu chuckled to himself as they walked over the sand. “Only a princess would bind her eye in gold.”

        “Perhaps. But is the right of a woman to name her own price.”

        “As you say.”

        Dajan resumed his tale. “So each of the hunters came to ask Mayasa for her blessing, and she paused before each as she judged him. She said to them in turn: ‘Go forth and bring me Ubora.’ None ever returned with the King of the Antelopes.

        “Finally, the youngest hunter came to her, saying, ‘I would have your blessing in my hunt, princess.’ She paused before this one longer than before the others, for he was handsomer than most, keen-eyed and long-armed. But she knew his heart, as is a woman’s way, and she knew that he did not love her.

        “The King of the Antelopes was clever and fleet, but Mayasa was afraid. Even a King could stumble. This hunter would make an ill-fitting husband for her. He was too proud. Too full of disdain. There was no room in his heart for love. But what was there to do? She nodded once to the hunter and said: ‘Go forth and bring me Ubora.’

        “She turned to leave, but the hunter spoke again. ‘I will, princess. But I would ask a gift of you.’ Mayasa was startled, for none of the others had dared to approach her thus, but she was a princess above all else, and she knew her duty. ‘What would you have of me?’ The hunter paused for a moment and Mayasa almost blushed at the way he stared at her. ‘The cloth from your hair.’

        “Softly, Mayasa cursed, but she unwound the red scarf and let her hair fall in a dark cascade down her back. When the hunter left, Mayasa knew that she had been right to fear him. That night, she followed him from the city. Her unbound hair was a cloak of shadows that hid her from his eyes. He, in turn, tied the cloth around the head of his spear.

        “After several days, he found the herd that followed Ubora. Approaching through the tall grass, he drew nearer. The King of the Antelopes scented the hunter, but when he searched the grasslands, all he could see was the head of the spear bound in the red scarf. He mistook it for the princess herself and was unafraid.

        “Mayasa, seeing the danger her gift presented, slipped out of her skin in the way that all of her mother’s line could. When she was free of the rags of human flesh, she was a duma, sleek and deadly.

        “This scent Ubora knew, for it was the scent of wild death on the plains, and he ran. The spear that the hunter had thrown missed its mark, but the hunter did not care. He had seen Mayasa in the form of the duma, and he knew that she was the true prize.

        “Weaponless, he approached her, thinking that he could tame her with his bare hands. But the love of a duma is reckless and wild and cuts deeper than a knife. She knew that, clever and handsome though he was, she would never run free if he caught her. So she caught him with her claws and her teeth, and she left him for dead on the plains.”

        “Ah,” Esu whistled through his teeth. “That was well-told.”

        “It will be well paid-for,” Dajan said.

        “Double-tongued, as I am double-faced. I like you, hunter,” cackled Esu, throwing his hands into the air. “Perhaps I shall give you a gift. You speak like a woman.”

        Dajan caught his arm and held him for a moment. His fingers dug into Esu’s sinewy flesh. “Tell me how I can return to Sasa.”

        Shaking away the hunter’s grasp as if it were nothing, Esu replied, “Surely you know stories. It is not yet time.”

        “Then what gift?”

        “A story, of course. Words are the currency in Zamani, hunter. Which shall you hear? How the hen scratched away the continents of the world? How Tembo gained his mighty tusks?”

        “I know those stories,” Dajan replied with an irritable wave of his hand. “Tell me a story about you.”

        Esu preened for a moment at the request. “Of course, of course. Walk with me, hunter, and I shall tell you.”

* * *

        The Moon still hung in the sky, casting a silvery light over the sands until they gleamed like the hair of a newlywed bride. There was not a hill here that Dajan had not climbed, not a grain that had not tickled his skin as he walked. Still, Esu seemed satisfied to simply wander as he talked, so Dajan shrugged and kept pace. He had the patience of a hunter, and he knew his prize was near.

        “Once, there was a man as handsome as Ghana is tall and as wily as Ubora, King of the Antelopes,” Esu began, his hyena grin dividing his head like two halves of a split calabash fruit.

        “Better to say as proud as Tembo the elephant,” Dajan snorted.

        “Quiet, hunter.” Esu commanded, aiming a swat at Dajan’s head. “This man knew the secrets of the world and was a trickster at heart. During the Season of the Sweet Grain, he met a hunter in the desert.”

        “I believe I know this story,” Dajan muttered.

        “And the hunter was rude, but the trickster, who was patient as the wind, spoke with him a while. You see the hunter was no ordinary hunter. Of course not. The trickster never talked with ordinary men. The hunter was a spirit. He had been foolish and had lost his life for it. His brother’s sons offered honey and milk to his memory, but as is the way of mortals, they grew old, and their sons grew old, and their sons grew old until the honey became rare and milk was needed for the babes of the family. None remembered the foolish hunter. As is the way of such spirits, he passed into the desert. Into Zamani.”

        “Stop!” Dajan ordered. “Do not mock me.”

        Esu rolled his eyes. “Are you deaf? I do not lie. Besides, this is a story.”

        With regal dignity, Esu began to speak once more. “So the trickster found the hunter in the desert and was well-pleased with his tales. Still, the hunter did not understand why the trickster had come to the desert. ‘Why are you here?’ he cried with all the impatience of a child. And the trickster answered, for he was kind as the honeybird who always aids mankind, ‘I am here for a trade.’ ‘I have nothing,’ the hunter replied, but the trickster was wily as Ubora, and he knew this was not true. ‘You have many gifts, hunter. I but require one—a red strip of cloth so I might bind up my hair.’”

        “Be quiet!” Dajan pleaded. “I do not want to hear your story anymore!” And he clutched the spear closer to his side. Esu only clicked his tongue and grinned a wide grin, his ancient teeth gaping.

        “Of course, the hunter was loath to part with the gift, for it had been dyed with his heart’s blood and would look foolish in the hair of an old man. ‘What would I gain in return for such a prize?’

        “‘Why, I shall tell you the end of a story,’ the trickster replied. ‘All the tales I know end sadly,’ the hunter told him, and his face was dark because he could not see. ‘Bah!’ cried the trickster. ‘There is no sadness in Death. Death is a Woman, and sometimes taking is less sweet than being taken.’”

        “That is no story,” Dajan grunted. “It is not true. Death is not a Woman. I know this!”

        “You know nothing, hunter!”

        And before Dajan could stop him, Esu pulled the scarf free from Dajan’s spear. He danced out of reach and tied it into his own hair.

        “No!” Dajan cried. Something was breaking apart inside him. A pain lanced at his heart. The pain of claws and sharp teeth. He had not felt pain such as this for many years.

        He advanced wildly on Esu. His eyes, a hunter’s eyes. They saw, keenly, as the hunter sees. His limbs were long and tireless. And the god? The god was skinny and old, his body bent like a grandfather. For a moment, only, Dajan was allowed to forget that this was no grandfather. This was no old man.

        “Be quiet,” Esu commanded. His voice was sharp. Dangerous. Free of the sidling whispers and mocking grins. “It was won fairly.”

        And in that moment of forgetting—that moment of bitter reprimand—Dajan felt himself begin to come undone. It was as if that scarf had bound him together for these long years. Set his shape in place.

        “Please,” Dajan cried. “It is all I have of her! It is all the hold I have upon this world. There is no milk, no honey, to keep me in this place! Only her.”

        “Foolish boy!” Esu’s voice rang out across the desert. His mouth was impossibly wide. He could have plucked the Moon from the heavens like a calabash fruit and ground it between his teeth. “Have you learned nothing? Listen! It is the knot that holds you fast. Would you stay?” He smacked Dajan on the side of the head. “Look!”

        Dajan turned with a snarl to see.

        And froze.

        He knew the desert. He knew the feel of the sun baking on his back as he climbed the dunes. He knew the taste of dust on his tongue. He had counted every grain of sand. He had memorized the curve of the hills.

        But, in the distance, he saw something he did not recognize: the rippling waves of the grasslands.

        Esu clicked his tongue. “Ah,” he whispered with a satisfied sigh, “the savannah.”

        “What?” Dajan asked. Heat could drive a man mad. He knew this. And there was a kind of madness in that image. The beautiful, shimmering waves of grass: soft as a woman’s hair.

        But this was not madness. This was Sasa.

        “Now the time is right, hunter. The crossroads. What will you choose?”

        “What do you mean?”

        “You would have another gift from me? You truly are a woman,” Esu said, his hyena grin wide as the arc of a spear. “You are the border between Sasa and Zamani. You carry the desert within you.”

        “I may leave, then?” Dajan murmured in wonder. His eyes searched the landscape like a lover’s hands in the darkness. Long swells of tall grass rippled with the passage of the wind. Beyond the savannah he could make out the dark smudge of the jungle on the horizon. Sasa.

        “Are you ready to walk through this gateway, hunter?” Esu asked, shaking his cowrie shell as if it were a child’s rattle.

        “All gateways are women, are they not? What is her name?” Dajan answered.

        The old man clicked his tongue again. Dajan didn’t think he would answer, but after a moment, Esu said: “Duma.”

        Dajan clenched his spear in surprise. Surprise and something else. Desire. As the cowrie shell shook, he saw her on the plains—beautiful as the Sun at the edge of night.

        “Go!” Esu hooted. “Make me a story!”

        Dajan was running. He left his spear on the dunes, knowing that he must do this on his own. If he were to tame her, it would be with his hands. He let out a whoop of joy as his feet landed on the cool grass of the savannah. Then, as he disappeared into the sweet embrace of the grassland, he was silent once more. His body made no more than a whisper as moved, the stalks sliding around him like water around the prow of a coracle. It was infinitely sweet, the tickle of grass in his nostrils, the moonlight on his back, the breeze teasing the tips of his braids.

        It was life.

        It was home.

        It was the hunt.

        He was close now. The silver light lit up her coat in a soft copper sheen. He knew the mottled spots on her skin, knew them as he had known his own footprints in the desert. It was a part of him. Taking a breath, Dajan held his hands out before her, not to touch her this time—he was wiser than that now—but in a gesture of supplication. He saw the duma’s muscles tense.

        There was a smile touching his lips as she pounced.

        He was keen-eyed and long-armed, yes, as he had told the boy-god. That had not left him over the years. But in this place he was armed only with the wisdom of the desert. There was nothing between him and her claws.

        She was a duma, a huntress in her own right. She was prey for no man.

        And she tore through him easily.

        Dajan cried out, stumbling in blood beneath the weight of her body.

        Esu, watching from the distance, furrowed his brows. He mumbled words beneath his breath and continued to shake the cowrie shell.

        “All men are crossroads,” he whispered in a singsong voice, “and all women are gateways.”

        Out on the plains, Dajan died. The claws of the duma flayed the skin from his body. But there was a smile on his face.

        He was wise.

* * *

        The duma stood over him, claws and teeth red from the kill. She made a noise deep in her throat and began to nose through the still-warm remains of the hunter. Her claws swept through the rags of skin, searching, always searching. She saw a movement among the bloody strips and nudged the refuse away. Beneath, she saw the first glimmer of gold. Then an eye dark as desire. Gold and brown.

        With a low growl she swiped away the last pieces like the hen scratching away at the earth to form the continents of the world. From the space she had cleared crawled the lean form of a cat. The duma knew the pattern of his skin, knew it from long ago. There was no pride this time. He smelt of the desert, the sharp scent of sand and the lonely wind.

        The second duma rose and shook free of the remnants of his former life. He could feel a change within him, another path, another story.

        Warily, he took a step towards her. She snarled and batted at his head with her paw. He hesitated, but the gesture was playful—coy.

        He tilted his head slightly, keeping it low to the ground, and made an inquisitive noise.

        “Shall we hunt?” he asked in the language of the duma.

        “Our prey?” she growled in a voice as soft as the feather of a guinea fowl.

        With a soft huff of breath he said, “Ubora, King of the Antelopes.”

* * *

        Atop the hill Esu watched with a half-mocking grin as the two of them raced through the tall grass, little more than a blur of gold and brown. Absent-mindedly, he scratched at his crotch.

        “Sly,” he mumbled, “sly as a woman’s eye.” He ran his hand through his stubbly black hair and carefully bound it up within the stretch of red cloth.

        With that, his arms stretched out into the wings of a heron. In a moment, he was nothing more than another flash of silver in the night sky, an arrow shot from the bow of the Moon towards the fleeing light of his prey.

Copyright © 2014 Helen Marshall

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Helen Marshall is an award-winning author, editor, and book historian. Her debut collection of short stories Hair Side, Flesh Side on the Sydney J Bounds Award from the British Fantasy Society and her second collection Gifts for the One Who Comes After will be released in late 2014. She lives in Oxford, England.

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COVER ART

“Kaybor Gate,” by Alex Ries

Alex Ries is a Melbourne- based illustrator and concept artist. His artworks have been featured by publishers including Clarkesworld Magazine, Pearson Education Canada, and the Discovery Channel. He worked with THQ’s Bluetongue Entertainment studio and contributed to four published titles. His studies in diverse visual media such as painting, 3D visualization, and film, coupled with an interest in biology and real-world technology, have fostered an artistic style that can not only accurately illustrate life from the real world but fictional life as well. View his work at www.alexries.com.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1076

Published by Firkin Press,

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Compilation Copyright © 2014 Firkin Press

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