TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 103, December 2018

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: December 2018

SCIENCE FICTION

Remaking History
Kim Stanley Robinson

Mouths
Lizz Huerta

Vade Retro Satana
Maurice Broaddus

Under the Sea of Stars
Seanan McGuire

FANTASY

A Love Story Written on Water
Ashok K. Banker

Of a Sweet Slow Dance in the Wake of Temporary Dogs
Adam-Troy Castro

Grandma Novak’s Famous Nut Roll
Shaenon K. Garrity

The Counsellor Crow
Karen Lord

NOVELLA

All The Flavors: A Tale of Guan Yu, the Chinese God of War, in America
Ken Liu

EXCERPTS

Mirah Bolender| City of Broken Magic
Mirah Bolender

NONFICTION

Book Reviews: December 2018
Arley Sorg

Media Reviews: December 2018
Carrie Vaughn

Interview: S.A. Chakraborty
Christian A. Coleman

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Ashok K. Banker

Lizz Huerta

Shaenon K. Garrity

Seanan McGuire

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

Support Us on Patreon or Drip, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2018 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Marcel Mercado

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial: December 2018

John Joseph Adams | 170 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 103rd issue!

This month, our cover art comes from Marcel Mercado, illustrating the first story in a new series of fantasy shorts by Ashok K. Banker—“A Love Story Written on Water.” Plus, we have a mouth-watering new short fantasy piece by Shaenon K. Garrity (“Grandma Novak’s Famous Nut Roll”), and fantasy reprints by Adam-Troy Castro (“Of a Sweet Slow Dance in the Wake of Temporary Dogs”) and Karen Lord (“The Counsellor Crow”).

For science fiction, we have original shorts by Lizz Huerta (“Mouths”) and Seanan McGuire (“Under the Sea of Stars”). We’re also featuring SF reprints by Kim Stanley Robinson (“Remaking History”) and Maurice Broaddus (“Vade Retro Satana”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns.

For our ebook readers, we also have an ebook-exclusive novella reprint—“All the Flavors” by Ken Liu—and an excerpt from Mirah Bolender’s debut novel, City of Broken Magic.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Joseph Adams is the editor of John Joseph Adams Books, a science fiction and fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, as well as the bestselling editor of more than thirty anthologies, including Wastelands and The Living Dead. Recent books include Cosmic Powers, What the #@&% Is That?, Operation Arcana, Press Start to Play, Loosed Upon the World, and The Apocalypse Triptych. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a two-time winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been a finalist twelve times) and an eight-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of the digital magazines Lightspeed and Nightmare, and is a producer for WIRED’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. He also served as a judge for the 2015 National Book Award. Find him online at johnjosephadams.com and @johnjosephadams.

Remaking History

Kim Stanley Robinson | 5130 words

“The point is not to make an exact replica of the Teheran embassy compound.” Exasperated, Ivan Venutshenko grabbed his hair in one hand and pulled up. “It’s the spirit of the place that we want to invoke here.”

“This has the spirit of our storage warehouse, if you ask me.”

“This is our storage warehouse, John. We make all our movies here.”

“But I thought you said we were going to correct all the lies of the first movie,” John Rand said to their director. “I thought you said Escape from Teheran was a dumb TV docudrama, only worth remembering because of De Niro’s performance as Colonel Jackson. We’re going to get the true story on film at last, you said.”

Ivan sighed. “That’s right, John. Admirable memory. But what you must understand is that when making a film, true doesn’t mean an absolute fidelity to the real.”

“I’ll bet that’s just what the director of the docudrama said.”

Ivan hissed, which he did often while directing their films, to show that he was letting off steam and avoiding an explosion. “Don’t be obstructionist, John. We’re not doing anything like that hackwork, and you know it. Lunar gravity alone makes it impossible for us to make a completely realist film. We are working in a world of dream, in a surrealist intensification of what really happened. Besides, we’re doing these movies for our own entertainment up here! Remake bad historical films! Have a good time!”

“Sure, Ivan. Sure. Except the ones you’ve directed have been getting some great reviews downside. They’re saying you’re the new Eisenstein and these little remakes are the best thing to hit the screen since Kane. So now the pressure is on and it’s not just a game anymore, right?”

“Wrong!” Ivan karate-chopped the air. “I refuse to believe that. When we stop having fun doing this”—nearly shouting—“I quit!”

“Sure, Sergei.”

“Don’t call me that!”

“Okay, Orson.”

“JOHN!”

“But that’s my name. If I call you that we’ll all get confused.”

Melina Gourtsianis, their female lead, came to Ivan’s rescue. “Come on, John, you’ll give him a heart attack, and besides it’s late. Let’s get on with it.”

Ivan calmed down, ran his hands through his hair. He loved doing his maddened director routine, and John loved maddening him. As they disagreed about nearly everything, they made a perfect team. “Fine,” Ivan said. “Okay. We’ve got the set ready, and it may not be an exact replica of the compound—” fierce glare at John—“but it’s good enough.

“Now, let’s go through it one more time. It’s night in Teheran. This whole quarter of the city has been gassed with a paralyzing nerve gas, but there’s no way of telling when the Revolutionary Guards might come barreling in from somewhere else with gas masks or whatever, and you can’t be sure some of them haven’t been protected from the gas in sealed rooms. Any moment they might jump out firing. Your helicopters are hovering just overhead, so it’s tremendously noisy. There’s a blackout in the compound, but searchlights from other parts of the city are beginning to pin the choppers. They’ve been breaking like cheap toys all the way in, so now there are only five left, and you have no assurances that they will continue to work, especially since twice that number have already broken. You’re all wearing gas masks and moving through the rooms of the compound, trying to find and move all fifty-three of the hostages—it’s dark and most of the hostages are knocked out like the guards, but some of the rooms were well sealed, and naturally these hostages are shouting for help. For a while—and this is the effect I want to emphasize more than any other—for a while, things inside are absolutely chaotic. No one can find Colonel Jackson, no one knows how many of the hostages are recovered and how many are still in the embassy, it’s dark, it’s noisy, there are shots in the distance. I want an effect like the scene at the end of The Lady from Shanghai, when they’re in the carnival’s house of mirrors shooting at each other. Multiplied by ten. Total chaos.”

“Now hold on just a second here,” John said, exaggerating his Texas accent, which came and went according to his convenience. “I like the chaos bit, and the allusion to Welles, but let’s get back to this issue of the facts. Colonel Jackson was the hero of this whole thing! He was the one that decided to go on with all them helicopters busting out in the desert, and he was the one that found Annette Bellows in the embassy to lead them around, and all in all he was on top of every minute of it. That’s why they gave him all them medals!”

Ivan glared. “What part are you playing, John?”

“Why, Colonel Jackson.” John drew himself up. “Natch.”

“However.” Ivan tapped the side of his head, to indicate thought. “You don’t just want to do a bad imitation of the De Niro performance, do you? You want to do a new interpretation, don’t you? It seems to me a foolish idea to try an imitation of De Niro.”

“I like the idea, myself,” John said. “Show him how.”

Ivan waved him away. “You got all you know about this affair from that stupid TV movie, just like everyone else. I, however, have been reading the accounts of the hostages and the Marines on those helicopters, and the truth is that Colonel Jackson’s best moment was out there in the desert, when he decided to go on with the mission even though only five helicopters were still functioning. That was his peak of glory, his moment of heroism. And you did a perfectly adequate job of conveying that when we filmed the scene. We could see every little gear in there, grinding away.” He tapped his skull.

“De Niro would have been proud,” Melina said.

John pursed his lips and nodded. “We need great men like that. Without them history would be dead. It’d be nothing but a bunch of broken-down helicopters out in a desert somewhere.”

“A trenchant image of history,” Ivan said. “Too bad Shelley got to it first. Meanwhile, the truth is that after making the decision to go on with the raid, Colonel Jackson appeared, in the words of his subordinates, somewhat stunned. When they landed on the embassy roof he led the first unit in, and when they got lost inside, the whole force was effectively without leadership for most of the crucial first half-hour. All the accounts of this period describe it as the utmost chaos, saved only when Sergeant Payton—not Colonel Jackson; the TV movie lied about that—when Payton found Ms. Bellows, and she led them to all the hostage rooms they hadn’t found.”

“All right, all right.” John frowned. “So I’m supposed to be kind of spaced out in this scene.”

“Don’t go for too deep an analysis, John, you might strain something. But essentially you have it. Having committed the force to the raid, even though you’re vastly undermanned because of the damned helicopters breaking down, you’re a bit frozen by the risk of it. Got that?”

“Yeah. But I don’t believe it. Jackson was a hero.”

“Fine, a hero, lots of medals. Roomfuls of medals. If he pinned them on, he’d look like the bride after the dollar dance. He’d collapse under their weight. But now let’s try showing what really happened.”

“All right.” John drew himself up. “I’m ready.”

• • • •

The shooting of the scene was the part they all enjoyed the most; this was the heart of the activity, the reason they kept making movies to occupy their free hours at Luna Three. Ivan and John and Melina and Pierre-Paul, the theoreticians who traded directing chores from project to project, always blocked the scenes very loosely, allowing a lot of room for improvisation. Thus scenes like this one, which were supposed to be chaotic, were played out with a manic gusto. They were good at chaos.

And so for nearly a half-hour, they rushed about the interior of their Teheran embassy compound—the base storage warehouse, with its immense rows of boxes arranged behind white panels of plywood to resemble the compound’s buildings and their interiors. Their shouts were nearly drowned by the clatter of recorded helicopters, while intermittent lights flashed in the darkness. Cutouts representing the helicopters were pasted to the clear dome overhead, silhouetted against the unearthly brilliance of the stars—these last had become a trademark of Luna Three Productions, as their frequent night scenes always had these unbelievably bright stars overhead, part of the films’ dreamlike effect.

The actors playing Marines bounded about the compound in their gas masks, looking like aliens descended to ravage a planet; the actors playing hostages and Revolutionary Guards lay scattered on the floor, except for a few in protected rooms, who fought or cried for help. John and Pierre-Paul and the rest hunted the compound for Melina, playing Annette Bellows. For a while it looked as if John would get to her first, thus repeating the falsehood of the De Niro film. But eventually Pierre-Paul, playing Sergeant Payton, located her room, and he and his small unit rushed about after the clear-headed Bellows, who, as she wrote later, had spent most of her months in captivity planning what she should do if this moment ever came. They located the remaining comatose hostages and lugged them quickly to the plywood helicopter on the compound roof. The sound of shots punctuated the helicopters’ roar. They leaped through the helicopter’s door, shafts of white light stabbing the air like Islamic swords.

That was it; the flight away would be filmed in their little helicopter interior. Ivan turned off the helicopter noise, shouted “Cut!” into a megaphone. Then he shut down all the strategically placed minicams, which had been recording every minute of it.

• • • •

“What bothers me about your movies, Ivan,” John said, “is that you always take away the hero. Always!”

They were standing in the shallow end of the base pool, cooling off while they watched the day’s rushes on a screen filling one wall of the natatorium. Many of the screens showed much the same result: darkness, flickering light, alien shapes moving in the elongated dance-like way that audiences on Earth found so surreal, so mesmerizing. There was little indication of the pulsing rhythms and wrenching suspense that Ivan’s editing would create from this material. But the actors were happy, seeing arresting images of desperation, of risk, of heroism in the face of a numbingly loud confusion.

Ivan was not as pleased. “Shit!” he said. “We’re going to have to do it again.”

“Looks okay to me,” John remarked. “Son of Film Noir Returns from the Grave. But really, Ivan, you’ve got to do something about this prejudice against heroes. I saw Escape from Teheran when I was a kid, and it was an inspiration to me. It was one of the big reasons I got into engineering.”

Pierre-Paul objected. “John, just how did seeing a commando film get you interested in engineering?”

“Well,” John replied, frowning, “I thought I’d design a better helicopter, I guess.” He ignored his friends’ laughter. “I was pretty shocked at how unreliable they were. But the way old De Niro continued on to Teheran! The way he extricated all the hostages and got them back safely, even with the choppers dropping like flies. It was great! We need heroes, and history tells the story of the few people who had what it takes to be one. But you’re always downplaying them.”

“The Great Man Theory of History,” Pierre-Paul said scornfully.

“Sure!” John admitted. “Great Woman, too, of course,” nodding quickly at the frowning Melina. “It’s the great leaders who make the difference. They’re special people, and there aren’t many of them. But if you believe Ivan’s films, there aren’t any at all.”

With a snort of disgust, Ivan took his attention from the rushes. “Hell, we are going to have to do that scene again. As for my theory of history, John, you both have it and you don’t. As far as I understand you.” He cocked his head and looked at his friend attentively. On the set, they both played their parts to the teeth: Ivan the tormented, temperamental director, gnashing his teeth and ordering people about; John the stubborn, temperamental star, questioning everything and insisting on his preeminence. Mostly this was role-playing, part of the game, part of what made their hobby entertaining to them. Off the set, the roles largely disappeared, except to make a point, or have some fun. Ivan was the base’s head of computer operations, while John was an engineer involved in the Mars voyage; they were good friends, and their arguments had done much to shape Ivan’s ideas for his revisionist historical films, which were certainly the ones from their little troupe making the biggest splash downside—though John claimed this was because of the suspenseful plots and the weird low-gee imagery, not because of what they were saying about history. “Do I understand you?” Ivan asked curiously.

“Well,” John said, “take the one you did last time, about the woman who saved John Lennon’s life. Now that was a perfect example of heroic action, as the 1982 docudrama made clear. There she was, standing right next to a man who had pulled out a damn big gun, and quicker than he could pull the trigger, she put a foot in his crotch and a fist in his ear. But in your remake, all we concentrated on was how she had just started the karate class that taught her the moves, and how her husband encouraged her to take the class, and how that cabbie stopped for her even though she was going the other direction, and how that other cabbie told her that Lennon had just walked into his apartment lobby, and all that. You made it seem like it was just a coincidence!”

Ivan took a mouthful of pool water and spurted it at the spangled dome, looking like a fountain statue. “It took a lot of coincidences to get Margaret Arvis into the Dakota lobby at the right time,” he told John. “But some of them weren’t coincidences—they were little acts of generosity or kindness or consideration that put her where she could do what she did. I didn’t take the heroism away. I just spread it around to all the places it belonged.”

John grimaced, drew himself up into his star persona. “I suppose this is some damn Commie notion of mass social movements, sweeping history along in a consensus direction.”

“No, no,” Ivan said. “I always concentrate on individuals. What I’m saying is that all our individual actions add up to history, to the big visible acts of our so-called ‘leaders.’ You know what I mean; you hear people saying all the time that things are better now because John Lennon was such a moral force, traveling everywhere, Nobel Peace Prize, secular pope, the conscience of the world or whatnot.”

“Well, he was the conscience of the world!”

“Sure, sure, he wrote great songs. And he got a lot of antagonists to talk. But without Margaret Arvis, he would have been killed at age forty. And without Margaret Arvis’s husband, and her karate instructor, and a couple cabbies in New York, and so on, she wouldn’t have been there to save his life. So we all become part of it, see? The people who say it was all because of Lennon, or Carter, or Gorbachev—they’re putting on a few people what we all did.”

John shook his head, scattering water everywhere. “Very sophisticated, I’m sure! But in fact it was precisely Lennon and Carter and Gorbachev who made huge differences, all by themselves. Carter started the big swing toward human rights. Palestine, the new Latin America, the American Indian nations—none of those would have existed without him.”

“In fact,” Melina added, glancing mischievously at Pierre-Paul, “if I understand the Margaret Arvis movie correctly, if she hadn’t been going to see Carter thank his New York campaign workers for the 1980 victory, she wouldn’t have been in the neighborhood of the Dakota, and so she wouldn’t have had the chance to save Lennon’s life.”

John rose up like a whale breaching. “So it’s Carter we have to thank for that, too! As for Gorbachev, well, I don’t have to tell you what all he did. That was a hundred-eighty-degree turnaround for you Russkies, and no one can say it would have happened without him.”

“Well—he was an important leader, I agree.”

“Sure was! And Carter was just as crucial. Their years were the turning point, when the world started to crawl out from under the shadow of World War Two. And that was their doing. There just aren’t many people who could’ve done it. Most of us don’t have it in us.”

Ivan shook his head. “Carter wouldn’t have been able to do what he did unless Colonel Ernest Jackson had saved the rescue mission to Teheran, by deciding to go on.”

“So Jackson is a hero, too!”

“But then Jackson wouldn’t have been a hero if the officer back in the Pentagon hadn’t decided at the last minute to send sixteen helicopters instead of eight.”

“And,” Melina pointed out quickly, “if Annette Bellows hadn’t spent most of a year daydreaming about what she would do in a rescue attempt, so that she knew blindfolded where every other hostage was being kept. They would have left about half the hostages behind without her, and Carter wouldn’t have looked so good.”

“Plus they needed Sergeant Payton to find Bellows,” Ivan added

“Well shit!” John yelled defensively, which was his retort in any tight spot. He changed tack. “I ain’t so sure that Carter’s reelection hinged on those hostages anyway. He was running against a flake, I can’t remember the guy’s name, but he was some kind of idiot.”

“So?” Melina said. “Since when has that made any difference?”

With a roar John dove at her, making a big splash. She was much faster than he was, however, and she evaded him easily as he chased her around the pool; it looked like a whale chasing a dolphin. He was reduced to splashing at her from a distance, and the debate quickly degenerated into a big splash fight, as it often did.

“Oh well,” John declared, giving up the attack and floating in the shallow end. “I love watching Melina swim the butterfly. In this gravity it becomes a godlike act. Those muscular arms, that sinuous dolphin motion . . .”

Pierre-Paul snorted. “You just like the way the butterfly puts her bottom above water so often.”

“No way! Women are just more hydrodynamic than men, don’t you think?”

“Not the way you like them.”

“Godlike. Gods and goddesses.”

“You look a bit godlike yourself,” Melina told him. “Bacchus, for instance.”

“Hey.” John waved her off, jabbed a finger at the screens. “I note that all this mucho sophisticated European theorizing has been sunk. Took a bit of Texas logic, is all.”

“Only Texas logic could do it,” Pierre-Paul said.

“Right. You admit my point. In the end it’s the great leaders who have to act, the rare ones, no matter if we ordinary folks help them into power.”

“When you revise your proposition like that,” Ivan said, “you turn it into mine. Leaders are important, but they are leaders because we made them leaders. They are a collective phenomenon. They are expressions of us.”

“Now wait just a minute! You’re going over the line again! You’re talking like heroic leaders are a dime a dozen, but if that were true, it wouldn’t matter if Carter had lost in 1980, or if Lennon had been killed by that guy. But look at history, man! Look what happened when we did lose great leaders! Lincoln was shot; did they come up with another leader comparable to him? No way! Same with Gandhi, and the Kennedys, and King, and Sadat, and Olof Palme. When those folks were killed, their countries suffered the lack of them, because they were special.”

“They were special,” Ivan agreed, “and obviously it was a bad thing they were killed. And no doubt there was a short-term change for the worse. But they’re not irreplaceable, because they’re human beings just like us. None of them, except maybe Lincoln or Gandhi, was any kind of genius or saint. It’s only afterward we think of them that way, because we want heroes so much. But we’re the heroes. All of us put them in place. And there are a lot of capable, brilliant people out there to replace the loss of them, so that in the long run we recover.”

“The real long run,” John said darkly. “A hundred years or more, for the South without Lincoln. They just aren’t that common. The long run proves it.”

“Speaking of the long run,” Pierre-Paul said, “is anyone getting hungry?”

They all were. The rushes were over, and Ivan had dismissed them as unusable. They climbed out of the pool and walked toward the changing room, discussing restaurants. There were a considerable number of them in the station, and new ones were opening every week. “I just tried the new Hungarian restaurant,” Melina said. “The food was good, but we had trouble, when the meal was over, finding someone to give us the check!”

“I thought you said it was a Hungarian restaurant,” John said. They threw him back in the pool.

• • • •

The second time they ran through the rescue scene in the compound, Ivan had repositioned most of the minicams, and many of the lights; his instructions to the actors remained the same. But once inside the hallways of the set, John Rand couldn’t help hurrying in the general direction of Annette Bellows’s room.

All right, he thought. Maybe Colonel Jackson had been a bit hasty to rush into the compound in search of hostages, leaving the group without a commander. But his heart had been in the right place, and the truth was, he had found a lot of the hostages without any help from Bellows at all. It was easy; they were scattered in ones and twos on the floor of almost every room he and his commandos entered, and stretched out along with the guards in the rooms and in the halls, paralyzed by the nerve gas. Damn good idea, that nerve gas. Guards and hostages, tough parts to play, no doubt, as they were getting kicked pretty frequently by commandos running by. He hustled his crew into room after room, then sent them off with hostages draped over their shoulders, pretending to stagger down the halls, banging into walls—really tough part to play, hostage—and clutching at gas masks and such; great images for the minicams, no doubt about it.

When all his commandos had been sent back, he ran around a corner in what he believed to be the direction of Annette Bellows’s room. Over the racket of the helicopters, and the occasional round of automatic fire, he thought he could make out Melina’s voice, shouting hoarsely. So Pierre-Paul hadn’t gotten to her yet. Good. Now he could find her and be the one to follow her around rescuing the more obscurely housed hostages, just as De Niro had in the docudrama. It would give Ivan fits, but they could argue it out afterward. No way of telling what had really happened in that compound twenty years before, after all; and it made a better story his way.

Their set was only one story tall, which was one of the things that John had objected to; the compound in Teheran had been four stories high, and getting up stairs had been part of the hassle. But Ivan was going to play with the images and shoot a few stair scenes later on, to achieve the effect of multiple floors. Fine, it meant he had only to struggle around a couple of narrow corners, jumping comatose Revolutionary Guards, looking fierce for the minicams wherever they were. It was really loud this time around; really loud.

Then one of the walls fell over on him, the plywood pinning him to the ground, the boxes behind it tumbling down and filling the hallway. “Hey!” he cried out, shocked. This wasn’t the way it had happened. What was going on? The noise of the helicopters cut off abruptly, replaced by a series of crashes, a whooshing sound. That sound put a fine electric thrill down his spine; he had heard it before, in training routines. Air leaving the chamber. The dome must have been breached.

He heaved up against the plywood. Stuck. Flattening himself as much as possible he slithered forward, under the plywood and out into a small space among fallen boxes. Hard to tell where the hallway had been, and it was pitch-dark. There wouldn’t be too much time left. He thought of his little gas mask, then cursed; it wasn’t connected to a real oxygen supply. That’s what comes from using fake props! he thought angrily. A gas mask with nothing attached to it. Open to the air, which was departing rapidly. Not much time.

He found room among the boxes to stand, and he was about to run over them to the door leading out of the warehouse—assuming the whole station hadn’t been breached—when he remembered Melina. Stuck in her embassy room down the hall, wouldn’t she still be there? Hell. He groped along in the dark, hearing shouts in the distance. He saw lights, too. Good. He was holding his breath, for what felt like minutes at a time, thought it was probably less than thirty seconds. Every time he sucked in a new breath he expected it to be the freezing vacuum, but the supply of rushing, cold—very cold—air continued to fill him. Emergency supply pouring out into the breach, actually a technique he had helped develop himself. Seemed to be working, at least for the moment.

He heard a muffled cry to one side, began to pull at the boxes before him. Squeak in the gloom, ah-ha, there she was. Not fully conscious. Legs wet, probably blood, uh-oh. He pulled hard at boxes, lifted her up. Adrenaline and lunar gravity made him feel like Superman with that part of things, but there didn’t seem to be anywhere near as much air as before, and what was left was damned cold. Hurt to breathe. And harder than hell to balance as he hopped over objects with Melina in his arms. Feeling faint, he climbed over a row of boxes and staggered toward a distant light. A sheet of plywood smacked his shin and he cried out, then fell over. “Hey,” he said. The air was gone.

• • • •

When he came to, he was lying in a bed in the station hospital. “Great,” he muttered. “Whole station wasn’t blown up.”

His friends laughed, relieved to hear him speak. The whole film crew was in there, it seemed. Ivan, standing next to the bed, said, “It’s okay.”

“What the hell happened?”

“A small meteor, apparently. Hit out in our sector, in the shuttle landing chambers, ironically. But it wrecked our storage space as well, as you no doubt noticed.”

John nodded painfully. “So it finally happened.”

“Yes.” This was one of the great uncontrollable dangers of the lunar stations; meteors small and large were still crashing down onto the moon’s airless surface, by the thousands every year. Odds were poor that any one would hit something as small as the surface parts of their station, but coming down in such numbers . . . In the long run they were reduced to a safety status somewhat equivalent to that of mountain climbers. Rockfall could always get you.

“Melina?” John said, jerking up in his bed.

“Over here,” Melina called. She was a few beds down, and had one leg in a cast. “I’m fine, John.” She got out of bed to prove it, and came over to kiss his cheek. “Thanks for the rescue!”

John snorted. “What rescue?”

They laughed again at him. Pierre-Paul pointed a forefinger at him. “There are heroes everywhere, even among the lowest of us. Now you have to admit Ivan’s argument.”

“The hell I do.”

“You’re a hero,” Ivan said to him, grinning. “Just an ordinary man, so to speak. Not one of the great leaders at all. But by saving Melina, you’ve changed history.”

“Not unless she becomes president,” John said, and laughed. “Hey Melina! Go out and run for office! Or save some promising songwriter or something.”

Ivan just shook his head. “Why are you so stubborn? It’s not so bad if I’m right, John. Think about it. If I am right, then we aren’t just sitting around waiting for leaders to guide us.” A big grin lit his face. “We become the masters of our fate, we make our own decisions and act on them—we choose our leaders, and instruct them by consensus, so that we can take history any direction we please! Just as you did in the warehouse.”

John lay back in his bed and was silent. Around him his friends grinned; one of them was bringing up a big papier-mâché medal, which vaguely resembled the one the Wizard of Oz pins to the Cowardly Lion. “Ah hell,” John said.

“When the expedition reaches Mars, they’ll have to name something after you,” Melina said.

John thought about it for a while. He took the big medal, held it limply. His friends watched him, waiting for him to speak.

“Well, I still say it’s bullshit,” he told Ivan. “But if there is any truth to what you say, it’s just the good old spirit of the Alamo you’re talking about, anyway. We’ve been doing it like that in Texas for years.”

They laughed at him.

He rose up from the bed again, swung the medal at them furiously.

“I swear it’s true! Besides, it’s all Robert De Niro’s fault anyway! I was imitating the real heroes, don’t you see? I was crawling around in there all dazed, and then I saw De Niro’s face when he was playing Colonel Jackson in the Teheran embassy, and I said to myself, well hell, what would he have done in this here situation? And that’s just what I did.”

©1988 by Kim Stanley Robinson. Originally published in Other Edens II, edited by Christopher Evans and Robert Holdstock. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kim Stanley Robinson is the bestselling author of sixteen novels, including three series: the Mars trilogy, the Three Californias trilogy, and the Science in the Capitol trilogy. He is also the author of about seventy short stories, some of which have been collected in the retrospective volume The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson. He is the winner of two Hugos, three Nebulas, six Locus Awards, the World Fantasy Award, the British Science Fiction Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His latest novels are Galileo’s Dream, 2312, Shaman, and the forthcoming Red Moon.

Mouths

Lizz Huerta | 3570 words

Times were strange, and those who survived the collapse had a jarring mixtape of skills. Plumbers were holy men, exorcising the encampments of the demons of human waste. They brought forth, stored and dispensed the holiest sacrament of all, clean water. Warriors emerged from the strangest of places, sex workers commanded respect and were offered it gladly.

Fai had been working a mussel farm off the rocky coastal desert that once had been Baja when one foot slid on algae and she fell onto a barnacle crusted jab of rock. Her shoulder was popped out of joint and her nose cracked. Worst of all, two molars shattered into shards, cutting up the inside of her mouth. Fai couldn’t breathe through her broken nose, each inhalation was a twisting knife of pain. The healer she limped to was of the chanting , hand-laying sort. She told Fai there was a man who had once been a dentist. He was willing to trade. Fai hitched a ride on a panga down-coast half a day. She hiked inland over scrub and treacherous earth until El Oasis shimmered into view. Fai’s mouth was packed with cloth, her eyes black, rimmed red. Pink crust surrounded her swollen lips. The guard at El Oasis grimaced at her and directed her to the man who would offer her the chance to chew again.

El Buitre loved both bones and mouths, beast and man. His shoulders slumped forward from the years bent over reclined bodies. He didn’t mind the name he’d been given. His birth name had been Fausto, so El Buitre made sense to him. He was used to looking at the wet insides of things . . . He was thin in body and strength, but his trade allowed him a power he’d never known before, for there was a horrible period during the months after everything fell apart when the survivors were reduced to using their teeth as tools, and there was no pain as constant and cruel as mouth pain. He could have demanded anything, and at first set himself up in one of the larger camps. Instead, he traded the removal of wisdom teeth for a motorhome trailer. He made a deal with the plumber lords of that encampment and they provided him clean enough water. In return they had first choice of his offerings, other than whatever food he chose to keep for himself. And even then, if a patient had provided something the plumbers wanted, he gave it to them. Water was essential for his practice. He worked, and accumulated and traded until he was exhausted. The encampment had grown to a town and instead of emergency care, he was cleaning teeth, replacing crowns. He had hired an assistant to refurbish toothbrushes, but he was dissatisfied with what his life had become. He hitched his trailer to a small modified tractor and headed South to El Oasis.

• • • •

Fai’s exhaustion caught up to her. She collapsed on a shaded bench outside the modified trailer decorated with the jawbones of various animals. She panted, resting her elbows on her knees, her jaw pain a mask of fire that radiated into her left eye and shoulder, the rest of her body tense in compensation.

A weight settled onto the bench beside her. Her eyes were closed.

“Drink this.”

A cup was pushed into her hands, a stainless steel straw protruding from it. Luxury, Fai thought, sipping and spilling as her swollen lips split, unable to close around the straw. The liquid she was able to swallow was cool, astringent. Almost immediately the pain flared up, then began to dissipate. Fai sucked in her saliva as her mouth numbed, she moved her jaw tentatively back and forth. Pain. She grimaced. The voice spoke again.

“Not so soon. Drink a little more, this will cost you nothing.”

Fai spent a day contemplating El Buitre’s offer. He told her no rush, he could show her how to grind her food to maintain an appropriate nutrition level, for a small exchange of labor. Or, he could fix her mouth, rebuild her molars, adjust her nose. Her skills were scant, but chewing was something she could not let go of. There had already been so much to let go of; deviled eggs, smoothies, a reasonable expectation to live out a mundane life, she could not go without chewing.

“I will accept nothing from you that you do not willingly offer,” El Buitre said, polishing a scalpel. “I can teach you to assist me, in my practice, my life. My life is my practice.” He smiled, mouth closed. Fai distrusted him, a dentist who smiled without showing his teeth. But she needed to chew, to sink her teeth into food, clench her jaw in frustration, to nip at a lover, gnaw a little. She thought of her beloved Flaquis. Flaquis of jagged smile. Flaquis of wide laugh. Flaquis knee-deep in low-tide, her chisel and mallet prying the mussels loose.

“How long?” Fai murmured. Though her swelling had gone down, her mouth was still a wound in her head. It was just after sunset, she had spent the day in contemplation.

“Sixteen months,” he said, “But you will chew long before then. You can be free of pain in three days.”

Fai thought of the years behind her, then stopped. It did no good to look back, to imagine herself—it didn’t matter. She was no longer who she had been, the world no longer the same. The wind blew in, gritty, dusty, dry.

“I want to chew again,” she said, doing her best not to move her mouth. El Buitre held out a hand, they shook.

• • • •

El Buitre wondered where, if anywhere, there was room for romance in the world they were living in. Fai was under, a heavy dose of analgesic tea and herbs. He didn’t look at her body, floppy and loose on the chair, her mouth held open with retractors he’d made from the horn of big-horned sheep. They were nasty breaks, the tooth shattered below the gumline, an abscess starting to turn into a cyst. Messy, but El Buitre was used to messy. He cleaned up as best he could, packing the wounds with a numbing moss he traded for. He placed the mold of her mouth he’d made into a jar and stood to stretch. He looked at her body, akimbo in the white tent he operated in, a system of mirrors suspended to catch the sunlight and reflect it into the patient’s mouth. The light on Fai’s face wavered, her mouth attempting to form a name.

Flaquis had been away when Fai fell. Gone South to learn how to throw a net from the hips, for the shrimp that were returning. It would be weeks until the shrimp returned to their depths, diminished. Fai had no choice but to leave. She knew Flaquis would understand, they had that between them. Her body fit against her beloved’s bone, Fai nested in Flaquis, and Flaquis loved her with a ferocity enhanced by survival. There were no casual relationships anymore. Fai dreamt of her lover, watched her casting a net beneath a moon, hauling in the wriggling insects of the sea. She knew Flaquis would wait for her return.

Fai was pain free as promised. El Buitre had taken his time with her new teeth, picking through the boneyard, examining jaw after jaw. He took Fai with him, piling bones in her arms, muttering to himself, yelping in fear whenever he shook free a scorpion. El Oasis was a pit stop between the larger encampments to the North and South, a stop between coasts. A watering hole, a few medics, a spot for traders and refugees to gather and pass through. El Buitre was the bone man, de-facto doctor. Fai kept quiet, gathering the bones he gave her, watching every move he made.

It wasn’t his fault he fell in love with her; he hated clichés as much as anyone. Fai worked for him, but she never served him, and El Buitre was intrigued by her reticence. A classic story, he told himself as he was falling asleep at night, the stars above like salt spilled on asphalt. He missed asphalt, the smell of tar, of rubber on road. Fai was exactly the kind of woman who would have ignored him before the collapse. She confirmed for him all the ways he hated himself. He was never cruel in what he asked of her; he didn’t have it in him.

“Fai, this new world has medicines the science of the past could never have imagined,” he confessed to her one evening, after a patient had traded a box of wine for an extraction. “What we called modern medicine was lazy, privileged. Look at this world.” He leaned back so his body dipped outside the light of the fire. “It is only after being broken open that we found what we are capable of.”

El Buitre swerved back up, nodding at the fire, staring into it as if it were oracular. Fai sipped at the small cup of wine she’d accepted from him. Her jaw moved back and forth, a habit she’d developed when the mammal bones had been rooted into her mouth. Her jaw felt alive to her, as if it carried the knowledge of the body that had made it. As if the bone were reborn, adhering its knowledge to hers.

“This is a beginning for us, the first step to something greater. A whale bone, whittled down to fit your mouth. What can come next? The land itself is offering us more than it ever has before.” He gesticulated to the desert beyond El Oasis.

The land was offering up more than it had, but only because a hungry child makes its mother produce more milk, Fai thought to herself. It was a conversation she and Flaquis had many nights and mornings. Flaquis had recounted the feathery starts of trees that sprang up after a forest fire. Life kept going, no matter the destruction. Fai yawned, her body calling out for a deep sleep of waves and silence.

He wanted to make jaws, Fai finally figured out. He spent hours with his fingers in her mouth, asking her to open and close, making notes in a small journal he kept with him always. Her mouth was used to his intrusions; it had taken months for the whale bone to take root. The glass teeth he had made her shattered in her sleep. The bighorn sheep bone rotted to blackness within days, giving Fai fever dreams where Flaquis dove in and out of the sea, coming up only to breathe. El Buitre would sometimes disappear for a half a day to follow a trader out of the outpost. He took his tools with him but never Fai. She knew he was experimenting.

Winter came, dry and cold with cruel hours of extreme heat. Fai’s period of service would end as soon as the winds gasped their way Southward. Too soon, too soon: El Buitre made it into a mantra.

The morning of her last day, El Buitre gave Fai a cup of astringent liquid to drink. She was ready, each breath a victory against giving up. The liquid was tepid, bitter with ferment gone old. Fai swallowed and left her mouth open, jaw unhinged, tongue flaccid.

El Buitre adjusted the tent so that the new wind wouldn’t blow grit into his eyes, Fai breathed through her nose, her mind already moving toward Flaquis, the salt of their connection. El Buitre’s fingers in her mouth were nothing new. He kept his fingernails trimmed and filed so that he wouldn’t cut the membrane of her inner cheeks. He traced over the familiar tendon, inhaled the damp inside smell of her. Over their months her skin had darkened and dried, scaling over in some places to protect itself against dryness. El Buitre tapped on the molars he had carved from bone; he had rooted them into her body with sea lion placenta.

“Your mouth belongs to the sea,” he said.

Fai kept her eyes soft beneath her closed lids. It wasn’t only chewing he had given her. She knew bones now, their patterns of breakage, how to feel for the story beneath the skin. She would take with her knowledge she had gleaned from his arrogance. The sutures she’d seen would go far, as would the ways of packing the open parts of a body to keep it alive. It wasn’t just chewing.

“You can stay,” El Buitre offered. “In this part of the world there are always wounds, and we work well together.”

Fai pushed his fingers out of her mouth with her tongue. The bone in her jaw vibrated. She was being called. Flaquis. Harvests. Songs at the water’s edge. The brine of saltwater mollusks sliding down her throat, all the gifts the sea offered. Her skin ready to slough. And there were other gifts offered. Her purpose was one of community, a tendril that came from the vast network of roots that were forming beneath the land, to move them from surviving to thriving. In the mussel camp, she was loved.

In her previous life she had waited tables. Spent her nights in cross-trainers, delivering endless breadsticks to people on cheap first dates. Her days had been a gauntlet, taking care of her diabetic mother in an apartment filled to bursting with the detritus of misspent fear and credit cards. Fai had stayed with her mother for days after the first long blackout. She had traded something she never thought of again for a case of insulin. But there was no ice. Fai decided she had suffered enough and kissed her swollen mother goodbye. A chance encounter on the street with a grade school friend who’d turned gangster and she was on her way South, beyond the wall.

Fai thought of mussel camp, the workers and their wounds. There were wounds everywhere in this new world, and few who knew how to tend to them with the resources available.

El Buitre sat still, hands in his lap. Fai’s eyes were fixed on a point beyond his left shoulder. He counted his breaths to calm himself.

“Teach me,” Fai said.

Who knew there was such glory in bones, El Buitre sang to himself each morning he awoke to Fai, unbound and willing, at the woodfire. She made teas, tinctures, medicine. She bartered with traders and refugees. They trusted her more than they trusted him. Her skill with people paired with his skill with bones made El Buitre feel a fear he had never known. He knew, in his own bones, he was halved without her.

She was able to procure tools and bones he never would have wished for. She knew the line between a seduction and a sale and rode it well. He had gas for the first time since the collapse, a recliner and a stool on wheels. A woman at his side. He had never been so rich. Syringes of composite, trays, a headlamp.

Fai was falling in love with what El Oasis offered. As she learned from El Buitre there was another knowledge accepting its way into her body. It was the bones, she often thought during long nights, nights she unhinged herself from thinking of Flaquis. Flaquis who had never come. But the bones in her mouth were a part of something; what that something was, she couldn’t tell, but it was coming. It sang to her, those nights she unhinged herself.

Winter came again, twenty-one months since Fai had stumbled into El Oasis, crusty and swollen. She had her own roof, a windowless minivan. She’d claimed a narrow ridge of rocky outcrop for herself, a hard haul for water. She’d bartered a gunny sack of the death root for the van. She had no use of the root, there was no chance she’d ever risk being a mother.

Fai was asleep in the gutted vehicle when a clenching roused her from sleep. Every bone in her body hummed. Struggling to sit up, she realized she could barely open her mouth. She clutched at the side of the van, grasping for the handle that would open the sliding door. The door opened, Fai stumbled out, her bare knees hitting the earth hard. The impact reverberated through her muscle-tight body. Lights wavered against her closed eyes. The hum, the song came up through the skin on her knees. Beyond the sand grit, beyond the layer cake of stone, deeper to the memory of fire. Memory of the first brine. Her teeth turned to bristle, she took in a mouthful of brine, clenched, expelled it for what was left behind. Something in the brine embedded itself into her jaw. A wound formed. Hardened. Fai came to belly up in the moonlight, a body’s length away from her roof. She didn’t go back to sleep.

When Flaquis came, El Buitre was drinking the broth Fai made at sunset, made from the hint of fat gleaned from fish bones, kelp, husks of agave flower. It was his favorite time of day, when the sideways light from the West limned each scraggy plant in what looked like grace. The birds overhead who went sea to sea called out their goodbyes to day. Fai was at the fire, knees splayed in the dirt as she fed chollas into the fire. She glanced up when her Flaquis appeared, gasped.

El Buitre spilled his broth. It soaked through the fabric of his pants, the liquid hot and itchy against his thighs. Fai, his Fai was on the dirt, rolling against a taller, leaner body. Fai who had never shed anything was crying, shouting, sending up clouds of dry earth in her eagerness to press her body against a body that was not his.

El Buitre didn’t sleep that night. He imagined too much. The cries he heard were not animal, or not any animal he had encountered. He imagined Fai leaving, he would give her everything, anything she asked. He imagined himself following her, taking his best tools. He had lived without before. He finally attached a mask over his mouth, turned the nozzle on a canister. A hiss of gas entered his body, his blood went drunk, he closed his eyes.

Fai contemplated the futures Flaquis described. The war with trawlers was new, ugly. Old beasts from the past trying to rise up. The fish camps were engorged with fresh blood, warriors sent from other outposts. They scuttled the boats. Divers with hand-crank drills were easily injured. Fai had a new set of skills, new instincts, they could have their own home. Or, Flaquis offered, they could stay at El Oasis, the choice was hers. Fai gazed out the sunroof, arms folded behind her head.

There was a small crowd gathered outside the trailer where El Buitre lived. Fai quickened her step. A woman emerged from the crowd, triumphant, a package of gauze clutched under her armpit as she elbowed her way out. Fai pushed her way through the crowd, she could feel Flaquis behind her, following close.

El Buitre was hauling item after item from the trailer and tossing it to the crowd, not noticing who took what. The word had gone out through El Oasis, the bone man was giving up. Giving up was allowed in their world, and it was understood. People who had survived sometimes chose their death. No one judged them. El Buitre smelled Fai before he saw her; salt, sweat, sex. She looked softer than he had even seen her before. He reached into the trailer for the silver case he had carried with him since the beginning. Razors and knives, scalpels, tools he kept bright, polished with sand. He handed her the case.

“This is yours,” He said. His eyes watered. Her eyes met his. He gestured behind him, “Anything you want, is yours.”

Flaquis stepped forward, tall and scarred. Fai held the case against her chest. Flaquis pulled Fai a step backwards so that their bodies were one unit. El Buitre stared at his nemesis who was also his love, death and the opposite of death. Flaquis stared back, eyes older than any eyes had the right to be.

“I have nothing left to teach her, show her. I have skills but Fai has gifts.” He choked on the words, his throat was dry. No tea had been made that morning.

“There are other gifts,” Flaquis said, grinning. Perfect teeth, El Buitre noticed, just sharp enough for tearing.

He saw Flaquis, then, truly saw. Skin that was barely skin, a film of sweat that was just seawater. He began to laugh, belly laugh, madman laugh. Here he was worried about who he would be without Fai, and Fai was in love with the dark lady herself.

“Of course I will follow you,” El Buitre said. Fai handed his tools back to him. They packed and began the trek to the coast where a panga was waiting to take them upcoast. They would have to wait until darkness, to avoid the trawlers.

“There are more bones in the sea than you could imagine,” Fai told him, “Cartilage, beginnings, songs.” He rubbed the desert dust from nail beds, and went to step his feet into the water.

©2018 by Lizz Huerta.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lizz Huerta is a Mexi-Rican working class writer from the borderlands of Southern California. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Portland Review, Duende, Lumina, and other journals. She is currently working on a high fantasy trilogy informed by mesoamerican cultures and landscapes. More of her work can be found at lizzhuerta.com.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

Vade Retro Satana

Maurice Broaddus | 4990 words

::SO-COMMAND\TEMPLAR-NAVCOM-INFO: All systems functioning within normal parameters::

Peacekeeping missions were always the most difficult assignment for Lieutenant Macia Branson. Not that she longed for the combat which had been much of her duty in the Service of the Order, but the reality was that it was still war conditions, only with the setting lowered to a slow broil.

The Ouje villagers sat around a fire. Led by one of the church novices, their idols and totems were piled high and lit aflame. Several members pounded out a rhythm that was both mournful and hopeful. The drumming tugged at a part of Macia’s soul, the way an old vidgraph of distant relatives was both familiar and alien. Memories locked in a box, hidden in the back of a closet where all memories were treasured and then forgotten.

The planet’s atmosphere was perfectly hospitable and the Ouje people not that different from humans like her. However, the Service of the Order required all Service of the Order soldiers who provided security for a missionary colony to remain in their biomech suits. The world and its sensations filtered through its mechanical membrane. It provided a barrier between their people and the disciples; her surroundings appeared through digital feeds along her visor. Macia stood on the outside of the sacred circle.

“Look at them,” Prefect Sergeant Rhys Moll stalked the perimeter of the circle. He was a short pug of a man; even the hand unit of his biomech suit looked like five bolts fitted on a stump. When out of his suit, he smelled of onions suffused with garlic, and a hint of something vaguely alcoholic always lilted on his breath. His hair was a nest of greasy curls; his nose looked as if it had been flattened by a plank. “They’d be lost without us. We’ve done some good work here.”

“Daniel told me that this was usually when their Alawe Modu festival would occur,” she said. A twinge of guilt nagged her when she referred to Unoko as Daniel. Daniel, like her parents, was what the church referred to as an “indigenous leader.” These leaders were either locals who quickly took to the Gospel and demonstrated promise as a teacher or someone who held such sway in the community that they became a key target for conversion. Unoka was targeted for acquisition early on. The Order decided his new designation would be Daniel. “The family elders gather the tribe and sacrifice a yamma to their ancestors. The blood soaks into the ground for those who had gone before them to enjoy, the meat cooked and eaten by the family. Any boys and girls coming of age carve masks for themselves for their masquerade dance, to learn the secret language of the tribe.”

“See what I mean? Lost. We saved them.”

“Salvation is the point,” Macia said.

“Not just their souls. We saved them from themselves. They were hacking each other to bits long before we came here.” Rhys was the kind of devout who liked to hear his opinion spouted without contradiction. He was one of the first soldiers Macia met when she was assigned to the Templar Paton. Though she’d received the Purple Cross, he was suspect of her readiness as a soldier. He had no concept of how much blood she’d spilled in Jesus’ name. She’d grown quite adept at ignoring him.

“Not according to Biafra Oshun.” Macia mentally chided herself for taking his bait. She hated to be drawn into these conversations. She had the same lessons in training and didn’t need them regurgitated on duty.

“We bring order and civility,” Rhys continued. “It takes, what, two languages just for one of them to leave one village and get to the next.”

“It’s pretty typical for an Ouje to know six languages. The language of their family, the language of the tribe, the language of commerce . . .”

“Ridiculous,” Rhys cut her off.

The words of a devout had a way of crawling under her skin with the sting of guilt for not believing more. Some nights she wondered if she missed the point of her own faith. Left alone in her quarters, hour after hour waiting for sleep until time lost all meaning, with only her thoughts and the silence of the Lord. Snatching up spiritual crumbs—a verse here, an encouraging word there—to knit the thing she called her faith together. She felt like an incomplete bad poem. She prayed against her heathen thoughts late at night. It was the easiest way to come down from the adrenaline rush of being on constant alert and stims administered by the biomech. When she did close her eyes, she dreamt of blood, but she always awoke covered in a thin sheet of sweat.

The Ouje milled about, dressed in their finest tunics and embroidered karosses. Each family’s clothing was patterned or colored according to an Ouje cultural theme. Many people traveled great distances to celebrate the successful harvest. The village was hundreds of kilometers from the central megalopolis and quite rural. The people roasted wollof, a tuber of some sort, and stewed yamma, a small animal which looked rather like a goat, for Alawe Modu. Herds of yamma grazed in a fenced in berne just outside of the village. The spices from the stew wafted throughout the village, its scent so thick and cloying it set off Macia’s biomech air filtration unit. Bowls of leafy vegetables soaked in a cream produced by the yamma were set on each table. People wandered about and ate as they willed. Most ate to excess.

“I see we haven’t wrung out all of their pagan traditions and superstitious ways of thinking.” Rhys took any prolonged silence as an invitation to speak.

“I never thought we had to. My parents always thought that the best novices took a people’s customs and stories and redeemed them. They viewed all culture as opportunities to connect to worshiping the Lord.”

“How did that work out for them?” Rhys eyes widened as if realizing he had stepped over a line. Rather than apologizing, he quickly moved on. “There is a great danger to the path of syncretism. One day you are ‘communing’ with the spirits and then are told to think of it as prayer to the Holy Spirit, next thing you know, we’ve added all sorts of new rituals to the church and forgotten the name of the God we serve. It only leads to spiritual confusion and dilution of the faith.”

“I think I’ll check the perimeter.”

Macia walked away from him, each step weighted by the obligations of faith. When the church came to her planet, some of the novices doubted that her people even had souls because of the language barrier. Her family’s facility with languages brought them to prominence. The hardest part of her transition to Christianity was how she had to shed her culture to find acceptance. For the church to believe that she believed and repented of her old ways. In all of her travels since, she had never returned to her home village. She would be as much a stranger there as a novice on their first mission.

The children began their ritual. Wearing masks too big for their heads, they danced around the fire. Excited, their joy almost contagious, happy for a moment to hide who they were. To pretend to be something else. To be seen as something almost ready. Tonight they hid behind masks and called down the spirits of their ancestors. On Sunday, as the Service of the Order had implemented a new calendar week for the Ouje, they would serve as altar attendants.

Lord I believe. Help me with my unbelief. It was the centurion’s prayer from the New Testament and the only prayer that truly resonated with her.

• • • •

::SO-COMMAND\TEMPLAR-NAVCOM-INFO: Establishing parietal operculum::

Though the planet Nambra was on the outer rim of the Galactic Mission, the Service of the Order quickly took over the spaceports of the Angwen territory, which became the staging area for their missionary work. Only a couple of conflict-free years had passed, but the novices, church planters with mission command, now saw a record number of converts. Angwen was one of the most religious colonies on the planet. Churches dotted the landscape. The Angwen borders secure, the Ouje people’s life was finding a measure of routine again.

Security had been heightened after a bomb threat to the marketplace. The presence of so many Service of the Order soldiers only made the fear more of a reality. Food shortages and power interruptions were one thing, but checkpoints and the constant parade of armed guards wouldn’t allow the Ouje to push their fears to the back of their minds. But there was something more, something on the Ouje peoples’ faces when they saw Macia. People who looked like her, people from a colony much like hers, flinched away from her as she strode by. Their village recalled her ancestral home. So much so, she half-expected her cousins to come tearing out of the dondo doors, having snuck a piece of baked pastry from her grandmother’s counter.

An older gentleman sidled towards her. Out of reflex, she re-gripped her pulse rifle before she recognized him. Daniel wore the robes of a village elder. Close-cropped silver hair topped Daniel’s head and led into a beard which framed his dark-skinned face and came to a point on his chin. His bushy eyebrows made his face seem severe. Tall and thin with a slight stoop, he leaned heavily on his walking staff most of the time, but when he approached young women, he straightened to full attention. A mad twinkle filled his eyes, as if he engaged in a secret courtship ritual with every woman he talked to.

“There are many here who believe as your friend does.” Daniel wore an odd expression, like a man watching a frog work out calculus.

“He’s . . . not my friend.” It took a moment for her translator matrix to recalibrate. The Ouje people’s constant language switching proved challenging for her biomech to keep up with. Macia wished that she could try to learn some of the Ouje’s tongue for herself, working alongside them. That her gift with languages would be put to more use than her skills at killing.

“Still, some believe in the . . . Word, as you put it, so much they are gripped with a fervor. I look around the village I once knew and many have taken to destroying shrines which had stood for generations and oppose any local tradition or culture that they cannot trace back to your Bible. Alawe Modu isn’t what it used to be,” he said. “Attendance is down this season. I worry that when my generation passes away, this celebration of life and rebirth and gratitude will die with them.”

“Some churches have banned all Alawe Modu festivities entirely. We were lucky to have this version of it sanctioned.”

“Thankfully, some churches can find room for both traditions.”

“Maybe this version of the Alawe Modu can unite all of the Ouje villages.”

“Maybe. As our people say, when a group urinates together, it foams.” Daniel smiled widely.

“It may be too much Horta for some.” Macia threw her head back in laughter. Horta was the religion that the Ouje practiced before the Order arrived. The Ouje’s culture and religion was so intertwined, and the Order frowned on any remnants of either.

“Christian or Horta, this isn’t about faith. It is about being Ouje. Anyway, I shouldn’t tarry. I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble for speaking to a ‘dirty’ Horta.”

“I consider this part of the Service of the Order’s evangelism mission. Building bridges between faiths to create a dialogue.”

“You are a wise woman, Macia Branson.”

Macia was never good at accepting compliments, believing each one was actually meant for someone they confused with her. She began to inspect her weapon. “I still suspect such a dialogue would be frowned upon.”

“By many sides. Your suit is little more than a large target.” Daniel bowed, leaving her to her security sweep.

Her patrol took her past a series of dondos. Each structure housed several families. In the shadows of a doorway, a grandmother passed a few slips of paper to her granddaughter. Like so many of the artisan class, her fingers were painstakingly gnarled, having worked intricate detail into wood during her many years, imbuing them with life and spirit. The words on the paper translated to the Republic of Nia’quong. The notes were the protocurrency a few of the Ouje had begun to circulate. The old woman clutched her granddaughter’s hand with the bill inside as if an important part of her Ouje identity was in the tiny grasp. Like a ghost haunting their national identity. Macia pretended to not see it.

The idea of countries, or borders, was a concept the Ouje lacked until the church arrived. It carved up regions for those they had converted and armed borders from those they hadn’t. Nambra had been held up as a model of missionary work until civil war broke out a few months ago. The Ouje who secretly practiced Horta attempted to create a refuge: Nia’quong, a country within the country Angwen, sparking a civil war. After months of brutal fighting and countless dead, and with the peacekeeping militia of the church in place, the surviving Ouje were one country again. It was a chapter of their history they sought to forget.

Except for Biafra Oshun. A pro-Nia’quong independence activist, she led protests across the region. She protested the economic, social, and political marginalization of the Horta Ouje. None of them were a part of the ruling council appointed by the church. Though the Ouje were mixed on separatist cause, her last protest turned violent: The Service of the Order had to open fire on them. Charged with conspiracy, part of an illegal operation due to her work with underground militia, there was an open warrant for her detention.

Watching the grandmother reminded Macia of the first time she met her new family after her parents were killed on the mission field. They welcomed her with all smiles and hugs. They ushered her to her room, her very own room she wouldn’t have to share with anyone. Crisp sheets folded over the bed. The tall window peered over a wide yard. They closed the door behind them to allow her time to acclimate. She dropped to her knees and sobbed. Her aunt slipped back into her room and knelt down beside Macia, even though the little girl was beyond consoling.

“I’m not going to tell you not to cry,” her aunt said. “I’m not going to lie to you and tell you everything is going to be okay. In these short years of yours, you already know that’s not the case. So you cry. Cry for your mother and father who are gone from you now. Cry for the childhood lost to you now. Cry for all the hardness you have yet to face.”

Her aunt patted Macia on the back with her left hand and fished in her pockets with the other. She remembered what her aunt wore: a simple blue frock, hand-sewn and ill-fitting. Over it was an apron. The entire front of it was a series of pockets. It seemed like her aunt had all the secrets of the universe carried in those pockets. She removed a small wooden bird carrying an egg on its back. The bird’s head was craned backwards as if attempting to peck the egg away. Macia’s tears ebbed, now curious, as her aunt placed it before them.

“There was a custom our people had, before the coming of The Order. We believe it is not wrong to go back for that which once was or is lost to us now. The best way to hold onto who we are has always been through the stories we pass onto our children.”

And every night, Macia’s aunt told her stories right up until Macia joined the Service of the Order. That was the way she chose to remember it now. Back then, the stories got on her nerves and she quickly tired of hearing the same old tales over and over again.

• • • •

::SO-COMMAND\TEMPLAR-NAVCOM-INFO: Navcom interface offline::

The digital telemetry of her helmet subsystem went blank. Macia’s military experience reduced her first response to equipment failure to tapping it, and she tapped her wrist panel as her displays failed. Next she attempted a partial re-boot of her navcom system. The link was an information tether to her orbiting ship, the Templar Paton. The roar of the approaching airship alerted her just as quickly as her malfunctioning proximity detector.

The ship hovered above the village, its thrusters scattering the yamma as it prepared to land in the berne.

“Rhys, you copy?” Macia yelled.

“Barely. Lots of interference.”

“You have a skimmer due to land?”

“None on the schedule. I already have a squad moving to intercept.”

“Good. I’ll meet you there.”

Macia broke into a half jog, the motors in her leg units speeding her along. She arrived in time to see the ship pivot, lock onto the arriving troops, and open fire. The inhuman whine of missiles screamed across the berne. Macia dropped to her knees. Three soldiers opened fire over her head. The ground shook with the impact of two more missiles. The ship lurched. Its cargo hold opened like a yawning mouth and deposited a contingent of enemy combatants.

“What do we have?” Macia ran across the berne to provide cover for Rhys and the rest of her men to reach an outcrop.

“A mass of hostiles. Fifteen meters from our position. We lost navcom just before the ambush.”

“I don’t believe in coincidence. This sounds coordinated. Wounded?”

“It’s bad. They lured us in, took a lot of us out. What’s the plan?” Rhys peeked around the corner to survey the scene.

“Same as it ever was. Catch them between us and other units. I’ll take point. You and you,” she pointed out two men, “on my six. Rhys, bring up the rear.”

Small weapon fire erupted from all sides. The ship crashed into the side of the building next to her. Without telemetry readings, she lost her bearings. Another blast of heat, and the air grew thick with hot gases. Something exploded, sending her biomech suit hurtling through the air. Her flight was stopped short by a metal wall, and though her biomech suit absorbed much of the blast, the force and the impact made her head swim.

• • • •

::USER-COMMAND\TEMPLAR-NAVCOM-INFO: Catastrophic systems failure. Initiate shutdown and self-repair protocols::

Macia hated unconsciousness. Drifting off to sleep often proved difficult enough, but the slow murky confusion of regaining consciousness left her nauseous. Like swimming to the surface of black waters. Pressure bubbled about her head, making her feel vague and uncertain.

Her eyes open, she craned her head about as best she could within the biomech suit. Without power to the servos in her arms that aided her movements, her arms slumped like leaden weights at her side. She was trapped inside her biomech suit, which was little more than a form-fitting coffin in this state. She sat against a wall, her legs akimbo, and her weapon useless at her side. Her head rang. Another wave of nausea swept over her. Unable to move, she was little more than a monument to a fallen soldier. A few meters away, Rhys struggled to his feet, the left arm of his biomech suit shorn off. It took a few moments for her to process that it meant his arm was also missing. He limped about, lost and uncertain.

A contingent of enemy troops rounded up the remaining soldiers of The Order. They dragged the novices out to the center of the clearing in full view of the soldiers. Macia struggled to move, but she feared something was broken because every movement sent a fresh spike of pain to her skull. The troops parted as their leader approached.

Biafra Oshun appeared a lot younger than Macia had imagined. She moved to a beat that was soft at first but seemed to gain force with each step. She had a power, an intensity about her that buffeted the novices like they were caught in a windstorm. Her face remained unadorned, striking in its cold beauty. She wore her head shaved clean. Her skin was as dark as unearthed pottery, the darkest shade of brown Macia had ever seen. Biafra’s eyes, both haunted and weary, scanned the crowd.

“Who is in charge here?” Biafra demanded, refusing to speak any of the commerce tongues, instead using one of the old languages.

“I am.” A novice struggled to his feet. One of Biafra’s men shoved him forward.

Biafra drew a weapon with such speed, Macia didn’t register it until the woman had already fired. The novice’s body stood erect for a heartbeat or two until it realized it was dead and dropped. “I’ll ask again. Who is in charge here?”

• • • •

::SO-COMMAND\TEMPLAR-NAVCOM-INFO: Partial power established. Back-up systems nominal. Non-essential systems offline while charging::

“You are in charge,” Macia said. Her biomech suit needed time to regain power. All eyes turned toward her. “But I am responsible for these people’s lives.”

“You?” Biafra spat. She turned to face the crowd of Ouje that had gathered around the spectacle. “These people prey on the vulnerable and desperate. These people come armed with a Bible and guns, and I don’t know which of the two is more destructive. These people come to tell us to reject our customs and history and teach us to self-hate. These people have taken away our spirituality and left us with religion.”

“If I have a credit, it can be used for good or evil,” Macia managed. “Whose hands it is in, what lies in their heart, determines how it’s used.”

“Funny how you gravitate straight to currency to plead your case. Your mission trips provide an excuse for you to mine our resources and ‘trade’ with us. You prop up a few leaders, make them wealthy, so they are more amenable to spread your ‘Word.’ I feel sorry for you. The things you must do to yourself and your thinking to remain so . . . conditioned. You are thrice damned: a tool of the oppressor, a traitor to your people, and a betrayer to yourself.”

“Don’t pretend to know me.”

“Abducted as a child, indoctrinated, and forced to commit acts of violence against your people. I don’t need to know you—the story of the ‘church’ is the same all over. If I had my way, I’d put you on trial and indict you for the same crimes that were initially perpetrated against you. There is a kind of poetic beauty to that.”

“I know who I am. I found my faith.” I know who I am, Macia thought. Lord, I believe. Help me with my unbelief. She rubbed her hand against the inside of her biomech suit, feeling the hum as her suit recharged. Her fingertips had developed callouses from years of holding weapon grips and she still felt the occasional ghostly itch of them against her skin. Soon her suit would be fully powered up. She only needed to stall a little longer. “Who are you?”

“I have seen how the church treats dissenters. They have made me what I am today. They hobble us with religion while stripping away our spirituality. They came here with their Bibles and guns, put the guns to our heads and told us to worship. Herded to their churches like prisoners of war. They murdered our . . . ancestors.” Biafra drew her weapon again. “You are responsible for their lives? Then you are responsible for this.”

Biafra motioned for one of her men to bring Rhys over. She pressed her weapon to the side of his head, then leveled her eyes at Macia with a cool detachment. Rhys’ mouth moved wordlessly, rhythmically. Was it a prayer? Was it a plea for Macia to do something, anything to save his life? Without her internal filters, she smelled only her own fear sweat, which made bile rise in her throat. She screamed, feeling every bit the helpless prisoner in her biomech suit. As if enticed by Macia’s screams, Biafra squeezed the trigger and Rhys’ brains splattered against the nearby wall. His blood ran down the wall in an imperfect smear. It looked no different from the blood of any of the Ouje dead.

Macia counted her opponents. By the way she moved, sure-footed and fluid, Biafra was the most dangerous. Despite the swelling chaos, the jeers of Horta supporters among the crowd, and the waving of weapons, only a half dozen people remained of Biafra’s ambush party. Even without a pulse rifle, with her biomech suit pumping stims into her system, she would soon satisfy the cry of innocent blood.

Macia had been taught that she fought for the church and the safety of its people. Throughout her training she was told that she was a “holy soldier” under divine provision. Many a senior novice absolved their soldiers of any crimes committed if they had obeyed their orders, orders passed down directly from the Holy Spirit. So in the eyes of God, the soldiers were blameless, they were simply carrying out God’s will. God judged soldiers differently from civilians. Once the “hostile relations” conditions were met, judgment protocols were in effect. This could only end with the death of either Macia or Biafra.

There would be blood.

“Kill us together or leave them alone.” Daniel pushed through the gathered crowd. He stared down Biafra’s men, taking the steel from the spines of many who had been jeering only moments ago. Some of Daniel’s followers slipped past him and stood in front of Macia and the novices.

“This doesn’t concern you, Unoka,” Biafra said.

“You do this in our name.”

“What I do, I do for all Ouje.”

“We aren’t threatened by stories, we learn from them. We don’t believe one story should destroy another.”

• • • •

::SO-COMMAND\TEMPLAR-NAVCOM-INFO: Systems restored. All systems functioning within nominal parameters::

Macia’s hand crept toward her weapon. Her biomech suit was as close to optimal as she needed. She locked eyes with Biafra.

• • • •

::SO-COMMAND\TEMPLAR-NAVCOM-INFO: All systems functioning within normal parameters::

“You let her go.” Daniel’s gaze was shrewd.

Macia had been young once. Lost and angry, searching for any life preserver to cling to. To provide her direction. In the church, in the Service of the Order, her anger found purpose. She wondered if her eyes mirrored Biafra’s. Macia wondered what her superiors suspected. The official story was that the rebels, having made their point, left before the Service of the Order reinforcements arrived from the Templar Paton.

“Consider it a judgment call,” Macia said. “We were outnumbered. Too many civilians around. Casualties would’ve been high on all sides and I didn’t want to risk innocent lives. We can send in a fully armed squad into the mountains after her if need be.”

“Assuming she hasn’t gone completely underground.”

“Assuming.”

Daniel convinced the village to continue with the Alawe Modu. The rains had stopped and it was neither too hot nor too cold nor too dry. The first kits returned with the season and songs welcomed them. This season of the year was worth celebrating, he cajoled. Old men sat on logs and warmed their bodies, waiting for the masquerade dance to begin.

“I watched you throughout the festival. You’re curious,” he said.

“Faith is a curious thing for me. So fleeting and uncertain.”

“What she said about your story, the kidnapping and indoctrination, how close was she?”

“It is a chapter of my life I consider closed and don’t choose to remember.”

“What a people choose to remember about their past, the stories they pass down, informs who they are. Sets the boundaries of their identity. We remember the pain of our past to mourn, to heal, and to learn. Only in that way can we ensure the same mistakes are not repeated.”

“What I lost is my faith in humanity.”

“Do you recall what your Jesus said about the faith the size of the mustard seed? It’s not about the amount of the faith so much as the object of it. Doubts are what makes it real. What makes it yours.” He took her hand, gently steadying her, helping her forward. She withdrew her hand.

“I got it. I can find my own way.” Her tone was almost accusatory.

“I had no doubt.” Daniel held his hands up. “I simply tend to leap at any excuse to invite a young woman to dance.”

She looked at him for a moment and then to the masquerade dancers. Her body ached, though not from the usual bruises that followed a skirmish. Hers was a soul-weary fatigue. Each exhalation burned her chest. Her breath hitched. Her ribs would be sore in the morning. Her legs wobbled under her full weight, but the suit did most of the work.

• • • •

::USER-COMMAND\TEMPLAR-NAVCOM-INFO: Initiate exit protocols::

Her biomech suit released a slow hiss as it unsealed. The black stocking of her exosoma served as an interface between her and her biomech suit. Without the suit, she feared her legs might betray her.

The frantic rhythm of the drums rode the same current as her own heartbeat. Her eyes locked onto the dancers. Waiting. Emptying herself of the contradictions and shedding all that was unnecessary. Letting the rhythm of the drumbeat enter her. Find a true place in her. Not worrying about her steps, only being caught up in the music. Returning to a simple truth. To be free.

And Macia danced.

©2017 by Maurice Broaddus. Originally published in FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A community organizer and teacher, his work has appeared in magazines like Lightspeed Magazine, Weird Tales, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Asimov’s, Cemetery Dance, Uncanny Magazine, with some of his stories having been collected in The Voices of Martyrs. His books include the urban fantasy trilogy, The Knights of Breton Court. And the (upcoming) middle grade detective novel, The Usual Suspects. His latest novella is Buffalo Soldier. As an editor, he’s worked on Dark Faith, Dark Faith: Invocations, Streets of Shadows, Nightmare’s People of Colo(u)r Destroy Horror special issue, and Apex Magazine. Learn more at MauriceBroaddus.com.

Under the Sea of Stars

Seanan McGuire | 5530 words

The True Accounting of The Whitmore Expedition, What Was Found, and What Was Lost Forever

June 9, 1882

We have traveled here, to this most innocuous of country landscapes, to make good on a promise made by my grandfather, Carlton Whitmore, to a girl he loved in his youth. How foolish that sounds, writ down so! But it is true. Grandfather met her on the banks of the Bolton Strid, where she stood naked and confused, water drying on her skin. His notes state that she knew no modesty, and that “she was pale as the belly of a deep-river fish, one which had never seen the sun, and like them, she glittered in the light, covered as she was in an innumerable quantity of tiny scales, which were soft as skin when I touched her.”

His notes continue in this vein for several pages, and verge upon something which a proper young woman, however scientifically minded, should not willingly touch. I have often wondered whether that strange girl from the Strid might be more properly termed my grandmother, for my mother was pale as thin milk, and I burn in seconds in direct sun. More damning for my grandfather and his claims to have been faithful to his wife, Mother sometimes seemed to glitter in the light, as if she were covered with innumerable tiny scales.

Regardless of my grandfather’s fidelity, he kept meticulous notes describing where he had found the stranger, who “spoke perfect English, but seemed not to understand any of the things around her, from hedge and fen to the Strid itself.” He carried her home as if she were some sort of prize—not uncommon for men such as he, when faced with a mystery—and named her “Molly,” keeping her at his estate until her untimely death a year later. His lady wife announced my mother’s arrival shortly thereafter.

Grandfather pledged that one day, he would uncover Molly’s origins, and carry news of her death back to her family. He died without having kept his word, and my mother promised him that her sons would return to the Strid and finish what he had started. Mother had no sons, and so here I, Amelia Whitmore, am preparing for adventure.

The Bolton Strid is not a likely place for adventures to begin. Were we to follow this modest-seeming stream for a time, we would see it widen into the respectable River Wharfe, despite it having neither tributary nor access to the sea. The banks are narrow, deceptively so, tempting several members of the expedition—who think this a lark, a girlish fancy, and never mind that I pay their salaries—to speak jocularly of leaping across to the other side. I have thus far been able to deter them with tales of drownings and unrecovered bodies, but I will not be able to hold them for long.

The farmer whose land we are to camp upon has visited twice since this morning’s arrival, asking questions about what we hope to find. He wishes to be sure he is not cheated of gold or jewels. Upon his second visit, I confessed that we had traveled from London in the name of scientific endeavor and family pride. I described Molly to him, and told him of her meeting with my grandfather. He grew quiet then, and looked on me with new suspicion.

“This is no place for a lady,” he said finally, and stalked away from us, as if he had been dirtied by my words.

Tomorrow we go below.

June 10, 1882

The Bolton Strid is one of Britain’s quiet mysteries, known but virtually forgotten in the face of newer, flashier wonders. None who has fallen into the Strid has ever been recovered; all are lost. Had Ophelia floated down this stream, her family would have carried home no body to bury. Its depths are unknown, its mysteries unplumbed, although many—my grandfather among them—believe that the water conceals a system of hidden caverns, allowing a river of startling depth and ferocity to masquerade as a simple country stream.

M. Delacroix, who made a name for himself exploring the underwater caverns of the Mendips and the Italian Mediterranean, has been responsible for planning our descent and seeing to the soundness of our diving suits, which are some of the finest ever built. They will keep my men safe during our descent. As for myself, I shall be using my self-contained breathing apparatus, modified and improved from the design of Mr. Henry Fleuss, who has shown his original to such wide-reaching effect. To him, I wish a fortune. To me, I wish only not to be crushed against the stone walls that wait for us beneath this deceptive stream’s pastoral surface.

Perhaps a diving suit would be safer. But I will not arrive in a place never before seen by human eyes so encased in metal that I cannot see the wonders around me.

M. Delacroix has informed me that we are prepared to descend.

Soon, I shall see what wonders wait below, in the depths of which my grandfather dreamt.

Later

I do not know the time. I do not know whether it is day or night, or whether I should measure now by some means entirely new, by tides or by the subtle changes of water. Oh, but I shall learn. I shall learn!

We began our descent into the Bolton Strid when the clock struck nine. Five men and M. Delacroix were stationed on the shore to run the machinery of our dive, slowly unspooling the heavy cables which would keep us connected to the surface. Four more men were pressed into their suits: John, David, Michael, and Joseph. Each of them carried a harpoon, for safety’s sake, and to be used to remove rocks or other detritus, should we become wedged below. The fifth cable was for me, although I would not be tethered to it, but would instead cling like a lamprey to its promised stability.

“The currents in the Strid cannot extend more than a certain distance beneath the surface, for they depend upon the motion of the water,” I said.

M. Delacroix looked unsure. “You are not accounting properly for the caverns. Water can form great knots when it moves through trapped places. You may find the current travels deeper than you think.”

“Even the deepest caverns cannot be without bottom,” I said. “Your expertise is valued and necessary, but I assure you, I have considered all the possibilities, and have arrived upon this as the safest option open to me.”

M. Delacroix sighed. “As you wish,” he said, and moved to ready his men, while I moved to ready mine.

We entered the waters of the Strid at the stroke of nine. John was first to strike the surface, and vanished in an instant, pulled down by the weight of his suit and by the current of the Strid itself. The machinery tethering him to shore groaned and held, proving to the rest of us that the descent could be made safely. We entered thus in the following order: John, Michael, David, Joseph, and finally myself, for I would have more flexibility than my fellow divers, but also greater risk from the deep and unforgiving currents.

I seated my mask of tempered glass above my eyes, adjusted my bathing costume, which was less modest than it might have been, having been tailored to remove any fabric which might catch or keep the current, and looked one last time upon the daylight world. The wind was rippling the grass of the fields. M. Delacroix’s face was pale and drawn, his lips heavy with unspoken warning.

I stepped off the bank and into the deceptive violence of the Strid.

The current was my immediate companion. Had I not gripped tightly to the metal cable which was my anchor, I would have been gone in a twinkling. Even clinging to the cable, I found myself knocked quite unkindly against the bank. The weights at the cable’s end were preventing it from being pulled horizontal by the weight of the water, but it was a near thing, and as I descended, I did not see any of the men who had entered the Strid with me. If they were present, they were blocked out by the darkness of the Strid itself.

I activated my torch, which was connected to my eye protection by a complicated series of welds that had thankfully thus far been able to withstand the current. The light was bright enough to show me the granite walls around me, and I was immediately overcome with a feeling of claustrophobia. The Strid surrounded me like the mouth of some great, unmoving beast, widening as I descended down into its gullet. Panic clawed at my chest, and I was tempted—ah, sweet temptation!—to turn and pull myself back along the cable to the shore, where we could pull my divers back to surface, and to safety.

The moment passed. As has always been the case, curiosity got the better of me, pulling me downward.

The waters of the Strid were cold, and grew colder as I descended. I saw beams of light in the near distance, signaling the placement of my men, yet for all their closeness, I was alone in the gloom. No fish moved in the light of my torch; the current was such that any fish would have been whipped away before it could begin to swim. All around us were the granite walls, and the potential for dire disaster. Still I continued to descend, my weight-belt keeping me from bobbing back toward the surface, my grip on the anchor cable keeping me from being swept away.

Then, with no warning, the current stopped.

All around me, the beams of light jittered in apprehension. I counted quickly, but could find only three. Four men had entered the Strid, and three had made it to this place below the crushing currents. I risked removing one hand from the cable long enough to pulse my torch three times, signaling that all were to continue downward.

The descent was smoother now with no current to tear at us. The water grew warmer around me, until it was less a slap and more a caress upon my skin. The lines continued down, and so did we, until with less warning than even the current had given, we broke through the surface of the water and fell.

Being lighter than the men of my expedition, and being equipped with good gripping gloves, I was able to stop my fall before I struck the ground, which was some twenty feet below the pulsing ceiling of water that hung, somehow suspended, in the air. Our broken anchor lines came to an end eight feet above the ground. Fine silver sand covered everything in sight. It should have provided a soft and easy landing, but my men were wearing full diving suits. Two fell cleanly, landing so as to cushion the impact. The third—dear John!—landed upon his head, and did not move again.

I finished my descent as quickly as I dared, shimmying down the anchor cable to the sand below. Gravity had not reversed, even as it denied the water above me: when I set foot upon the sand, it held me. The bottom of the Strid, suspended as it was, glimmered like a sea of liquid stars.

The nearest of the men was sitting up and groaning. I hastened to help him remove his helmet, and was rewarded with the puzzled face of Michael, the most experienced of my divers. “Are you well?” I asked.

“Miss Whitmore?” He blinked at me. “Where are we?”

“A cavern below the surface of the Bolton Strid! See, the water is suspended above us, no doubt due to some quirk of the Earth’s magnetic fields! The mystery is close at hand.”

Together, we were able to revive Joseph. John, as I have said, was beyond saving, having died on impact with the floor, and David was nowhere to be found. My two surviving divers have been charting the cavern in which we find ourselves, attempting to determine a means of climbing back to the surface without passing through the Strid. I have been taking notes on our voyage so far. M. Delacroix laughed when I sealed my expedition notebook in a jar to carry at my waist, but see now who has the last laugh! I have discovered something never before seen by human eyes, and I shall document it, every step.

Why, if I did not, then who would ever believe me?

Later still

We are not alone here.

Joseph and Michael returned from their search to report that they had found three tunnels branching off from the main cavern, all seeming to descend deeper into the living Earth. We have decided to separate. Each of us has taken a different tunnel, agreeing to walk for as long as it takes to reach a count of five hundred. Then, regardless of what we might have found, we would turn back. Both men were of course resistant to my taking the same risks as they were, but when I pointed out that I was paying their salaries, and that they would indeed be paid even if I did not return with them, they acquiesced. Truly, I feel that their protests were more a matter of observing social niceties than any real concern for my wellbeing.

I chose the center of the three tunnels, where my screams—were I given occasion to scream—would carry farthest, and be best heard by the two men remaining in my employ. I carried my torch with me, assuming that its light would be needed. By the time I reached a count of one hundred, the ground had begun to slump subtly downward. I was traveling deeper. Still I pressed onward. There was a chance the angle could change, and aside from that, I was burning alive in my own curiosity. Had any footsteps ever traced this path before? I, a mere female, was doing what my father and grandfather alike had failed to do!

As I reached a count of two hundred, I realized my torch was no longer the sole source of illumination. The walls, which were covered in strange, spiky crystals the length of my hand, had begun to glow. It was a soft, silvery light, delightful in its delicacy, and it seemed to emanate from everything around me. It traveled through the crystals, but did not originate with them.

By the count of five hundred, I had found no exit. I took samples from the walls—a small crystal, some of the silver sand which was everywhere—and walked back to the main cavern. The light died behind me.

When I reached the cavern, I found Joseph and Michael already there . . . and John, who had landed so badly when first we arrived in this strange place, was gone. Drag marks on the cavern floor marked where he had been taken, moving away from the three caverns Joseph and Michael had found.

I wish to follow. If we are not alone, perhaps we have found Molly’s people, the ones who live beneath the currents of the Strid. More later.

• • • •

We followed the drag marks in the sand until we came to a place where the wall, despite seeming whole, yielded somewhat beneath our fingers. Pushing together, Michael and Joseph were able to shift the stone, revealing a fourth cavern. This one tilted sharply downward, and was well lit by the illumination I had observed on my solitary walk. The drag marks continued on the tunnel floor.

“This seems unwise,” said Michael. “We should climb back up our anchor ropes, and find the surface thusly.”

“The anchors were not designed with the true depth of the Strid in mind,” I said. “Unless you can fly straight into the air, you’ll never catch the bottom, nor pull yourself upward. We must continue on.”

“Or we can wait for rescue,” said Michael doggedly.

I sighed. “I shall double your salary, and more, tell all who ask of your bravery and quick-wittedness. You shall be the toast of the adventuring community, gentlemen, and all that stands between you and that glorious future is a little cavern. What is a cavern when faced with men?”

Perhaps it was my stirring oration, although it seems more likely to have been the promise of greater rewards, but Michael was first into the tunnel, with Joseph close behind him. I followed the two of them at a more leisurely pace, taking advantage of the light as I looked around me.

The base of the wall was clearly granite, but overtaken quickly by the crystals, which grew in great profusion, and matched no mineral of which I am aware. The closest might be a glowing, silvery quartz, but pure, with none of the fissures or cracks to which quartz is prone. I imagined myself a dowry of silver crystals, necklaces and rings fit for a queen. I am not ashamed to admit this. I am a woman, after all, and have long been aware of what is and is not fitting for my imaginings.

The silvery sand which covered the floor seemed to absorb and refract the light from the crystals. I took several samples. Based on texture alone, I began to suspect the “sand” was in reality formed from the crystals themselves, ground down into something approaching powder. That would make everything around us, save the granite, something which had been previously unknown to science. I dismissed thoughts of jewels, and thought instead of awards from the Royal Adventurer’s Society. Surely they would allow me admission, regardless of my gender, after so great a find!

But once again, I was getting ahead of myself. It was an easy pitfall, given the wonders surrounding me. We walked on, Michael drawing far enough ahead that when he dropped out of sight, I did not notice immediately. Then Joseph called for me to halt, saying that a great pit had opened in the tunnel floor, and that Michael was feared lost. He might have said more, had not the ground crumbled beneath his feet, sending him falling to the same unknown fate. He did not scream. I have been sitting here for some time, waiting for signs of life, and I have held to that: if he did not scream, perhaps he did not fall so far, and is finding his way back to me now.

I do not dare approach the pit.

• • • •

I cannot be ruled by fear. I am a woman, yes, but I am also a Whitmore, and Whitmores do not allow ourselves to be held back by petty weaknesses. If I believed the constraints of my gender, I would never have made it here, to this unseen world beneath the Bolton Strid. I will approach. May God keep and protect me.

• • • •

The ground gave way at my approach, as I had feared it might. I scrabbled for purchase, grabbing at the crystals on the walls, but succeeded only in slicing my left palm lengthwise, drawing blood. I fell, like my men before me, and like my men before me, I did not have time to scream, for scarcely had I left the tunnel behind but I was plunging into warm, limpid waters, like those described by adventurers who have journeyed into the tropics! It was as if I had been dropped into some unseen giant’s bathtub. The water glittered with more of that silvery sand, here suspended in solution, and a light shone in the distance. I swam toward the light, for what else was there for me to do? I could not return to the surface: there was no way back, even if I knew how to find the place where I had entered this unnamed subterranean lake.

As I swam, I thought of Michael, and of Joseph. They had stripped out of their diving suits when we first went to investigate the tunnels. Hopefully, that would have reduced the weight of them enough that they could swim without faltering, and I would find them waiting at whatever safe haven was up ahead. I couldn’t allow myself to think that there was no safe haven, not even for an instant; to lose hope would be to falter, and to falter would be to drown.

The light grew brighter as I grew closer. It was not the same as the light from the crystals on the walls above—the crystals which also covered the bottom of this lake in vast profusion, their light throwing an ambient glow over all they touched. I swam on, distantly aware that I would be running out of air soon, yet still willing to hold to hope.

The source of the light was yet another tunnel. I had no choices left to me, no hope of finding my way back: I swam on.

The crystals grew more thickly here, their points like jagged barbs cutting through the water, forcing me to take care as I pulled myself along. Michael and Joseph were both larger than I, which did much to explain the faintly coppery taste of the water. They had no doubt cut themselves attempting to navigate this narrow space. My lungs were not yet burning, and so I continued onward, until my head broke the surface. I gasped, first out of the habitual need for air, and then a second time, in amazement.

The crystals grew from the water up onto the walls, and then onward, onto the ceiling of the great cavern, so great that the crystals at its top twinkled like stars in the natural darkness. Everything was in twilight, and everything glittered silver and bright and beautiful.

Michael and Joseph stood on the shore, surrounded by people with silvery hair and pale, pale skins, like the bellies of deep-water fish. They wore light, delicate gowns of transparent fabric and pearls the size of my thumbnail. They were barefoot, and their toes were long as fingers, webbed with delicate spans of skin. Their hands held spears, and those spears were directed at my men.

One of the people on the shore turned toward me. She could have been my grandfather’s portrait of Molly, brought to sudden life on this unexpected shoreline. Then she smiled, and I knew the rumors had all been true, for she had my mother’s smile, so long absent from my life, so dearly, dearly missed.

“They said they traveled with a woman,” she said, and her voice was sweet, touched with an accent I did not recognize, but rather thought that I had heard in my dreams. The gills in her throat fluttered when she spoke. She was beautiful, but she was strange. “Welcome, sister. Welcome home.”

More of the silvery folk hastened to help me from the water, offering their hands to me with such reverence that it took my breath away. In no time, I was safe upon the shore.

“These are my men,” I said, gesturing toward Michael and Joseph, who looked upon me with relief. “They intended no harm in coming here, nor do I. My name is Amelia Whitmore. I am an explorer from the land above, and I am very pleased to meet you.”

“Ah. We did not know that they belonged to you.” The woman who had first greeted me waved her hand, and the spears were lowered. “It makes sense that you would have made preparations for so great a journey. How did you pass through the current above? It keeps us safe and keeps us captive, and none have made it to the depths in so very, very long.”

“I mounted a full expedition to dive below the surface of the Strid—the water which keeps the currents,” I clarified, remembering Grandfather’s reports of Molly and her basic ignorance of the world around her. If she came from this subterranean world, then her inability to recognize things such as the sun began to make perfect sense. As well ask your average Londoner to recognize the surface of Mars! “I came to keep a promise made by my grandfather.”

The woman looked at me thoughtfully. “What promise was that?”

“There was a woman.” The sand was warm beneath my feet. I stood a little straighter. “I don’t know what name your people would have known her by, but my grandfather called her ‘Molly.’ She was my mother’s mother. My grandfather promised he would try to find the place she had come from, but he died before he could. Now here I am.”

The woman lit up, smiling so brightly that there was no question she recognized the woman I was claiming as my grandmother. “Moliansha! You’re Moliansha’s tributary! Truly, this is a day to be thankful for. Oh, you must come to the city. You will meet your sisters, and your brothers, and we will have a grand feast to celebrate your return to your family!”

Then she embraced me. Her skin was soft, despite the scales.

In that moment, I knew that I was home.

• • • •

It is impossible to mark time here, in this space below the Strid, and perhaps that is by design: perhaps time, as we know it in the world above, does not truly matter here.

We walked through their city, which was as something from a fairy tale, carved from the bodies of crystal spires tall enough to rival any church steeple, and all of it dusted with the silvery sand. The streets were cobblestone—strangely ordinary, until I looked closer and saw that all the cobbles were made of beaten silver, soft under our bare feet. The feeling of warmth that I had experienced on the beach continued to spread through me as I walked, like something in my blood was responding to a magnetic pull I had never felt before.

Our guide, whose name was Soriana, walked at the head of our small formation; my men brought up the rear. As we traveled, she spun stories of the city, describing in intricate detail a history that seemed to span centuries. Writing it all down will be the work of years, and far too great in scope for this small journal! This is the archeological find of the century, if not the millennia. A whole race of underground humans, living unseen beneath our very eyes? Truly, this will make my name among the archeological community.

But what happened next I must write down, for it is almost beyond believing.

She led us to the palace, built within the tallest of the city’s spires. My men and hers she bid to remain outside, and led me deep, to a room where a woman who could have been Molly sat upon a crystal throne.

“My queen,” she said, and bowed. “I bring you lost Moliansha’s tributary, who has dared the currents to come back to us, despite the cost, and has brought riches from the surface world.”

“Bring her closer,” said the woman on the throne.

Soriana led me to the queen of this glorious, nameless place, who looked at me gravely, making careful study of my eyes, my hair, and the planes of my face. Finally, just as I began to fear I had been rejected, she smiled.

“My daughter’s daughter’s daughter stands before me,” she said. “The tributary runs true. Take her to the pools. Give her strong wine and ripe berries; make her welcome. We feast tonight.”

“I thank you, my queen,” said Soriana, with a deep bow. She sounded . . . relieved. Perhaps feasts are rare in this city beneath the world? It would only make sense for that to be so. Sources of food must be limited here, with no sun and little fertile ground.

My men, and hers, were gone when we left the queen’s chamber. “We shall see them later,” said Soriana, and led me to a great crystal bathhouse, where women with skins of silver dipped in and out of warm, limpid pools that swirled with glittering sand. She bid me disrobe, and oh! Perhaps it is shameful for me to admit this, but I was among the company of women, and I did as she had asked, standing naked and shivering before this relative stranger’s eyes.

For her part, she plucked at my hair and looked critically at my skin, until I felt quite the curiosity in her eyes. Finally, she said, “All will be made well with some bathing,” and guided me into the first of the silver-swirled pools.

The water wrapped around me like a velvet hand. I sunk down to my chin, closing my eyes and allowing it to soothe away the worst of the bruises from my travels. Soriana pressed sweet berries between my lips, the likes of which I had never tasted. I swallowed, and felt my skin tingle.

I did not mean to fall asleep. I know only that I did.

Final entry

I will seal this journal as tightly as I can, in hopes that it will survive its passage through the currents and out to the surface of the Bolton Strid. If you should find this message, know that I am lost: do not look for me, for what you find will not be what you seek. Beware the water. Beware the currents. Beware the Bolton Strid.

I woke after a time uncounted to find that the pools around me were abandoned, and I was alone. The silver sand adhered to my skin, refusing to come off when I dried myself on the robes that had been left for me. I thought nothing of it. Who hasn’t gone to the beach and come away with a handful of dust sticking in their hair? I was more distracted by the robes, which were filmy and revealing and quite indecent, but were all that I had been left to wear.

I followed the path back to the outside, where the streets were filled with the subterranean peoples, who laughed and shouted and fired rockets of silver sparkles into the air. Soriana was there, and she smiled to see me. “Come, come,” she cried, laughing as she grabbed my arm. “The feast begins!”

She led me through those beautiful streets and crystal-lined avenues, into a great amphitheater carved into the living, silvery stone. Tables had been set up there, and what seemed to be the city’s whole population was present. The queen sat at the head of the longest table. Spaces had been left beside her for the guests of honor: Soriana, and myself.

I did not realize what they had done until the servants began carrying out the feast.

I cried out, leaping to my feet, and Soriana was quick to comfort me, saying, “No, no, Amelia, be not afraid, for look: you belong. Look.” She indicated my hands, where the silver sand had adhered most thickly, and I saw to my horror that they were webbed to the first knuckle. There was no sand. There were only scales, the gift of my long-dead grandmother, growing in response to her natural environment.

“You are of our kind; we do not feast upon our own,” she said, and I ran.

No bodies have ever been recovered from the Strid: what it takes, it keeps, because what it takes, it gives to those who dwell beneath. I have been given to them. I can no more return to the surface than can my poor men, only two of whom knew the mercy of a natural death.

This is my home now, this nameless kingdom below the crushing currents. I am lost. I have found too much, and I am lost. The webbing continues to spread on my hands and feet; my gills are forming. Whatever is in the waters here, below the world, it keeps us safe once we are chosen. My grandmother has saved me from devouring. She has damned me to become a monster, as she was, before she somehow made her way to the land above.

I will not follow in her footsteps. If I cannot be who I was, I will remain here, and suffer my punishment for what I have done. I leave you with this warning:

Do not go near the Bolton Strid. Dear God in Heaven, avoid those limpid waters. What waits below . . .

What waits below is a different form of drowning.

• • • •

Ed. Note: This notebook was found floating in a sealed diver’s jar in the River Wharf, carried there by the currents from the Strid. It is believed to be a work of fiction, penned by M. Sebastian Delacroix, who is to stand trial for the murder of Miss Amelia Whitmore, feared lost in the waters of the Bolton Strid, along with the men who accompanied her.

No bodies have yet been found.

©2018 by Seanan McGuire.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Seanan McGuire was born and raised in Northern California, resulting in a love of rattlesnakes and an absolute terror of weather. She shares her home with a variety of cats, far too many books, and enough horror movies to be considered a problem. Seanan publishes about three books a year, and is widely rumored not to actually sleep. When bored, Seanan tends to wander into swamps and cornfields, which has not yet managed to get her killed (although not for lack of trying). She also writes as Mira Grant, filling the role of her own evil twin, and tends to talk about horrible diseases at the dinner table.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

A Love Story Written on Water

Ashok K. Banker | 12460 words

1

Bhi’ash was a king of the Axe clan. Truthful and courageous, he was renowned for having performed one thousand Black Horse sacrifices and one hundred Fire sacrifices. For his devotion, upon his demise he attained entrance to the heavenly realms and was honored by the Stone Gods.

One day, Bhi’ash—accompanied by many other king-mages and some of the Stone Gods themselves—went to pay homage to Agar, the highest of Stone Gods. Jeel, queen of all rivers on Arthaloka, also came to pay her respects, clad, as always, in a flimsy garment as white as moonlight. Just as she presented herself before Agar, a wind blew away her insubstantial garment and she was left completely exposed.

Embarrassed, all present averted their faces, except for King Bhi’ash who found himself unable to avoid admiring Jeel’s beauty.

Aware of his unabashed gaze, Jeel felt her emotions stir and was curious as to who this king-mage might be who dared to look upon her undaunted when even the Stone Gods had lowered their eyes.

As Bhi’ash continued to stare at her nakedness, completely lost in contemplation of her beauty, Agar took offense at his rudeness. “Shameless one, for this you shall be reborn once again in the mortal realm.” But because his sin was only a minor one, the Creator also decreed that once that mortal life was ended, Bhi’ash would once again attain the heavenly realms. Bhi’ash did not protest or object to the punishment, which only increased Jeel’s curiosity. He only asked Agar, with a humility that was ironic considering the boldness of his request, if he could be born as the son of a great ruler in his own lineage. After seeking a suitable candidate, he proposed King Shapaar. His request was granted and he prepared to descend one last time to the mortal realm to accept his danda, or karmic punishment, without complaint.

After a last glance at her admirer who had willingly accepted punishment for the simple act of gazing at her, Jeel departed the court of the Stone God.

2

Around this time, a similar penalty had been imposed upon the eight Vessas. These divine dwellers in the heavenly realms had committed a grave error and as a result were also cursed to take rebirth in human form on Arthaloka for a single lifetime.

The great Lord Mage Kenikyu, son of Vrrun, lived upon Mount Coldheart, king of mountains. In that idyllic place, he performed his austerities and sacrifices. Needing a plentiful supply of ghee to offer, he sought out a cow. He appealed to Sage Yapashk, who fathered upon Rabhi, daughter of Shask, a magical cow capable of fulfilling every desire. Despite her magical properties, Kenikyu only used the cow sparingly to obtain the milk product he required for his sacrificial offerings.

One day, the divine Vessas came to Mount Coldheart. It was common for Stone Gods, seer-mages, and other divine personages to rove the idyllic forests of Mount Coldheart. The Vessas came with their wives and made love upon that scenic slope. Afterwards, wandering near the hermitage of Kenikyu, the wife of Kwayg chanced upon the magical cow. Realizing by the power of her own divinity as well as the cow’s extraordinary qualities that it was no common animal, she tested its nature. She was astonished by its powers and rushed back to her husband. Kenikyu was away at this time. Urged by his wife, Kwayg came to see the cow and was equally amazed by its celestial beauty and powers. He saw the hermitage and immediately knew that it was Kenikyu’s. He told his wife, “I know of this divine cow. It belongs to Runya’s son, Kenikyu, who lives here. Apart from its ability to produce anything one desires, this creature’s milk grants anyone who drinks it ten thousand years of undiminished youth!”

Hearing this, the wife of Kwayg was struck by a thought. Her dearest friend Jinnavati, daughter of King-Mage Shianarr, was the most beautiful young woman and dearly desired to retain her youth and beauty forever. “How wonderful it would be if we could give to her this cow’s milk to drink. She would be able to stay young and lovely always!” The only way to do so would be to take the cow as well as its calf to Jinnavati, in order to draw the milk fresh before drinking. Kwayg was hesitant but his wife seduced him with amorous promises and he succumbed. With the help of the eldest Vessa Thuir and their other brothers, they stole the cow and her calf and took her to Nnava’s domicile.

Kenikyu had left the hermitage to collect fruits. When he returned and found the cow and calf missing, he grew concerned for their welfare. Worried they might have gotten loose of their tethers, he searched for them in the forest. But when he could not find them anywhere, he knew something was amiss. Resorting to his divine sight, he perceived that they had been stolen by the Vessas to please one of their wives. Enraged, he cursed the Vessas. As divine beings who had never set foot on Arthaloka, the worst punishment possible for them was to be sent down to the mortal realm where they could never enjoy the same powers and pleasures they enjoyed here in heaven. Therefore he cursed them to be reborn in human form for a single lifetime.

Feeling the effect of the curse, the Vessas raced back to Mount Coldheart. They prostrated themselves before Kenikyu and pleaded for clemency. But for a very long time, he remained adamant. Finally, acknowledging that all of them were not equally responsible for the transgression, he modified his curse. “As you only did your brother’s bidding, you will be permitted to return to the heavenly realms after spending a year on Arthaloka. But Kwayg, who was fully aware of his crime, shall remain in the world of men for the entire duration of his mortal lifetime. In addition, because he was seduced into committing this crime by promises of amorous pleasure, therefore he shall be denied the pleasure of cohabitation during his time on the mortal plane. He shall remain celibate and shall sire no offspring. He may devote himself to the pursuit of Krushan law in order to learn right from wrong, and attain skill in the use of weapons, remaining always among men and neither gaining pleasure from nor giving satisfaction to women.”

3

Remorseful and stricken, the Vessas left the heavenly realms and were making their way to the mortal world when they met Jeel, who had only just departed the Stone God’s court. She heard their voices and saw their agitated state and enquired what the matter was. They told her the story. She sympathized with their plight and told them of King Bhi’ash, who had just been sentenced with the same penalty, albeit for a different reason.

When the Vessas heard that Bhi’ash was to be reborn as Sha’ant, the son of King Shapaar in the great line of Krushan, they saw an opportunity. “Great goddess of the river, grant us your grace. We have never entered the womb of a mortal woman before. Our divinity shall be diminished if we do so now. You are the purest epitome of womanhood in all the worlds. Descend upon Arthaloka and allow us to be born as your children.”

Jeel had sympathy for the plight of the Vessas but she was hesitant for one reason. “In order to do as you wish, I would have to cohabit with a mortal man. His seed would have to enter my womb.”

“Let the man be this same Emperor Sha’ant in whose mortal body Bhi’ash will take rebirth. Sha’ant is destined to be a great king and Bhi’ash’s illustriousness is already legendary. We would be honored to have such a personage sire us in the mortal world.”

Jeel thought of the way Bhi’ash had stared openly and unashamedly at her nakedness in the Stone God’s court and also of the powerful emotions that had stirred within herself when she returned his unabashed gaze. There had been a great sharing of erotic energy between them at the time, and she could still feel her loins stir with desire for him. If she consented to help the Vessas, she would have an opportunity to copulate with Bhi’ash in his mortal form as Sha’ant, and fulfill her suppressed desires. It would not be for selfish fulfillment but for a righteous cause.

She agreed to do as the Vessas requested. “Very well. I will agree to cohabit with Emperor Sha’ant on Arthaloka and give birth to you. But once born, you will have to live out your lives as mortal men. Is that acceptable to you?”

The Vessas discussed the matter and said, “Seven of us are permitted to return home after spending one year on the mortal plane. Therefore, all you need do is to hurl each of your newborn sons into your own waters after birth. Through your divine channel, which connects all three worlds, we shall ascend back to heaven. Cruel as this may seem, it is in fact a blessed release, for to stay mortal is greater suffering for us than for mortal children to be drowned at birth.” They added wistfully, “Only our brother Kwayg shall have to remain on Arthaloka for the entire span of his mortal life. That is part of the curse.”

“It is good,” Jeel said thoughtfully, thinking of Sha’ant. “Slaying the seven of you may release your souls for ascension, but it deprives Sha’ant of his sons. This way, at least one will remain with him to be his heir.”

“It shall be so,” they agreed, “but there are certain conditions. The eighth son cannot have children of his own or mate with any woman.”

Jeel nodded sadly. “If that is what the curse demands, so be it.”

4

King Shapaar was a deeply devout man. He spent every moment he could spare in meditation. His favorite spot was a certain place on the banks of the Jeel. One day while he sat cross-legged, lost in silent contemplation, Jeel rose in human form. Emerging from the river in droplets and spray that coalesced to form the shape and solidity of a human woman, she stepped onto the bank and approached Shapaar. So absorbed was he in meditation, he did not notice her approach. So she sat on his right thigh.

Opening his eyes, Shapaar was unperturbed by this sudden appearance of a beautiful woman. As a king and a warrior, he had seen and experienced all the ways of the world. He asked Jeel kindly, “Blessed Goddess, what is your desire?”

Jeel replied coyly, “I desire you, great king. Take me and love me. I offer myself freely of my own will. I am brimming with desire and cannot be spurned.”

Any other man might well have accepted her without question or further comment, but Shapaar was a spiritual man more concerned with seeking the delights of the soul than the pleasures of the flesh. “Lady, you are beautiful and desirable. But I do not know you. I cannot cohabit with any woman without knowing her in some detail. It would be against Krushan law.”

Jeel replied, “Making love to me can never be forbidden or against Krushan law. This much I assure you. I bear no ill will or malice towards you, and have no ulterior motives. I genuinely desire union with you. Love me as I wish to love you.”

But still Shapaar resisted temptation. “In that case, you are greatly desirable, that I cannot deny. But alas, you have chosen to seat yourself on my right thigh. That is reserved for daughters, daughters-in-law, and granddaughters. If you desired to have pleasure with me, you should have seated yourself on my left thigh, as that is the proper place for a lover to seat herself. This choice suggests that it is not appropriate for us to cohabit, no matter how great your desires. It would most certainly be against Krushan law and I cannot condone that.”

Jeel was not disappointed, for she had known all along what she was doing. “O king, you say the right thigh is the proper seat for a daughter-in-law. Therefore make me your daughter-in-law. Unite me with your son. I am sure a king as magnificent as you are in appearance and wisdom will have an equally illustrious son. It would be my privilege to mate with him and add my contribution to the famous Krushan line.”

“So be it,” said Shapaar gladly. “However, wise and insightful as you are, you must also know that I have no son and heir as yet.”

“I do know this,” Jeel admitted. “Yet I am of divine nature and can wait as long as need be without aging or losing my beauty. Therefore I shall gladly wait until you sire a son, for I have decided that he alone shall satisfy my desires. Whenever you have a son and he becomes of marriageable age, bring him here to this very spot and I shall appear to offer myself as his mate. I shall bear him many sons and enhance the reputation and glory of your dynasty, of this you can be assured.”

“It shall be as you say, divine one,” Shapaar said, understanding that a being of great power was blessing his lineage.

Jeel rose to leave, then paused and turned briefly. “King Shapaar, I ask only that you do not reveal my divine nature to your son. Do not tell him who I am, even if you suspect the truth yourself. Also tell him that if he wishes me to bless your bloodline, then he must never question what I do, no matter what the circumstances. These are the only two conditions I lay upon you. If they are acceptable to you, then know that your descendants shall be blessed with divine power and fame as a result of this union.”

Shapaar accepted all her conditions and watched as she walked slowly from the bank onto the rushing waters of the river. She stepped across the raging surface of the Jeel as if she were stepping on kusa grass. Dolphins leaped and sang in greeting, turtles swam around her in homage, and her power over the river was evident. When she was in mid-river, her body itself turned to water and fell back into the spate from whence it had come, leaving only her clear grey eyes lingering in mid-air for a moment. Then they too melted into spray and were absorbed by the river. The sound of the Jeel’s roar filled Shapaar’s ears once more and in its steady torrent, he recognized the voice of the beautiful stranger who had accosted him. But he kept this knowledge of her divinity and true identity a secret within his heart for all time and spoke of it to no one.

In time, Shapaar and his wife performed austerities to obtain the blessing of an heir. Despite their advanced age, a son was born to them. This was in fact Bhi’ash reborn under the terms of his danda. Shapaar’s son came to be known as Sha’ant, because he was created after his father had achieved the state of quietude, Shanti, and gained control of his senses. Indeed, the moment he knew he had a son and heir, Shapaar began preparing him for kingship, and himself for retirement.

Sha’ant grew up to become a magnificent young prince, intelligent, well-versed in Krushan law, and an expert archer. When he was of age, his father summoned him to the throne chamber and sent away everyone else. When they were alone, he confided in Sha’ant. “My son, your mate in life has been pre-ordained.”

Sha’ant was an obedient son who was willing to do whatever was asked of him. “Father, if you have chosen a wife for me, I am sure she is no less than Sri herself descended on Arthaloka. Whomever you choose is acceptable to me.”

Shapaar was pleased by his son’s response, but this was no ordinary arranged match he was referring to. He attempted to explain, choosing his words carefully in keeping with Jeel’s wishes. “The match is somewhat unorthodox,” he admitted to his son. “For one thing, you cannot ask who she is, nor seek any knowledge of her family, lineage, background, or any other details of her life.”

Sha’ant was surprised but did his best to be supportive. “Your word is law for me, father,” he replied. Though he did wonder at the strangeness of an arranged marriage wherein nothing was known about the bride or her family background.

Shapaar clapped a hand on his son’s shoulder. Even at his young age, Sha’ant had a neck that the court scribes described as being “as thick as a conch shell” and shoulders and arms as strong “as elephant tusks.” The exaggerations were not far off the mark; Sha’ant took pride in building his own strength and his many activities kept his body fit and strong. Shapaar had no doubt the boy would grow up to be a great warrior and a conqueror of his enemies. It was Sha’ant’s judgement as a lover and husband that now concerned him.

“All you need know,” Shapaar said, “is that she is no ordinary woman. Her beauty is extraordinary, and you will find great pleasure in her company. You shall enjoy great satisfaction in her charms.”

Sha’ant was not sure how to react to his father’s description of a woman in such terms, so chose to say nothing. But his father’s next words frankly shocked him.

“She first offered herself to me,” Shapaar confessed, “a long time ago. I refused only because I did not deem it appropriate.”

Sha’ant could not contain his curiosity. His princely upbringing and teachings urged him to remain silent but the boy in him got the better of his grooming. “Why, father?” he asked. “If she was such a great beauty, why did you refuse her?”

Shapaar smiled a wistful smile. “I loved your mother well enough for one lifetime. Carnal pleasure was never a great attraction for me. It is the spiritual delights of the mind that attract me far more than those of the flesh. But also, the signs were not right.” He frowned, staring into the distance thoughtfully. “Indeed, looking back on that day, I later thought . . .”

“What, father?”

“I thought perhaps she intended not to seduce me, but only pretended to do so. It was you she was after all along.”

“Me?” Sha’ant was flabbergasted by the idea of a woman pretending to seduce his father in some past time in order to seduce him at some future date. “But that makes no sense at all. You said this happened before I was even born!”

Shapaar nodded. “That is why I know, and you know as well, that she could be no ordinary woman. No ordinary mortal woman. Do you follow my meaning?”

Sha’ant did. His father was suggesting that the mystery woman was some kind of . . . goddess? Avatar of a goddess? A serapi or harva perhaps? They were considered supremely beautiful. “Who do you think she—”

Shapaar raised a finger, his wrinkled face turning severe. “Enough. No more questions about her. That is a firm condition she insisted upon. This is why I had this talk with you, so that you would understand and accept these terms before you went to her.”

Sha’ant glanced around, his emotions roused. “Where is she then?”

“First promise that you are ready to accept her conditions.” Shapaar spelled them out clearly and carefully for his son.

Sha’ant considered for a moment: Mate with a woman who was clearly of divine or otherworldly origin, unspeakably breathtaking to look upon—if she could have such an effect even on his ascetic father she must truly be a legendary beauty—and capable of giving a man immense carnal pleasure, who wished to confer herself on him, indeed, had desired him since even before he was born, and produce beautiful, magnificent children with her, of whom one would rule his kingdom someday and be a legendary and historical king of the Krushan? What was there to consider? Except . . . he desperately wished to know who she was and what was her purpose in seeking him for so long. What part did he play in this divine game? But that was the first and most important condition: He could never ask who she was or anything else about her.

He hesitated only briefly, but for a boy of his impetuous age and great appetites, even that hesitation was a foretelling of things to come. Perhaps I shall find a way to learn her secret without her knowing, he thought to himself, to know everything without breaking the promise. Yes, I am sure I shall be able to do so. For he was a prince of a great empire, heir to the Burning Throne, and of the age when anything seems possible, even the most extraordinary feat imaginable.

Aloud, he said simply: “I agree.”

5

Soon after this curious conversation, King Shapaar installed Sha’ant upon the Burning Throne and retired to the forest with his wife, where they spent the rest of their days in pursuit of spiritual ascension.

Sha’ant went on to fulfill all the promise of his childhood and youth, becoming a powerful young king. Intelligent and gifted with many physical skills, he grew renowned for his archery. Like many kings of his line, he spent his spare time hunting in the forest. His favorite game were deer and buffalo.

One day, while hunting alone on the banks of the Jeel, he encountered a vision: The most beautiful woman he had ever seen seemed to suddenly appear out of nowhere. He had been watching the bank carefully, tracking a deer, and she could not possibly have come from the treeline, which meant she must have come from the river, but there was no sign of boat or raft. One look at her and it suddenly failed to matter where she had come from. She was the supreme epitome of womanhood, comparable to the great Stone Goddess herself, as that great deity was described in puranas and tales of gods and demons. Her physical form was perfect in every respect, with not a single fault or blemish. When she smiled at him, her teeth flashed white, brilliant and perfect. Her face was so beautiful, he could have gazed at her all day and never tired of looking at her. Enhancing her beauty further, she was dressed in golden bejewelled ornaments of a design he had never seen before, scintillating pieces of great workmanship and art. Her splendid body was barely concealed by flimsy translucent garments that swirled around her in the gentle lotus-fragrant wind from the river.

At the sight of her, Sha’ant’s every hair stood on end, and he dropped his bow as well as the arrow he had been holding. He was stunned by the sight of her. Even more astonishing than her beauty was the fact that she gazed at him with a look that bordered on pure adoration. She came closer, her diaphanous garments moving about her as her ripe, full body undulated with each step, and as she approached, he could see that the look in her eyes was nothing less than pure wanton lust. Her own gaze moved up and down his own body, admiring his masculine figure and assets. Never before had he been admired so boldly by a woman, never before had he looked so unabashedly upon a woman of such perfection.

“Who are you?” he asked in a voice hoarse with desire. “Are you a god perhaps? An urrkh? Harva, serapi, shael, or pannacron?” Belatedly it occurred to him to add, “Are you human at all? You cannot be! Human, I mean. You are surely a goddess of some kind.”

Through all these questions, and the spaces between them, spaces in which he could hear nothing but the thundering of his own waves of lust washing upon the shore of his mind counterpointed by the roaring of the Jeel in spate, she remained silent. Only the wanton abandon in her eyes and the sultry movements of her body, clearly aimed at arousing him further, served as her replies.

Finally, he said, “Goddess or otherwise, whoever you are, please be mine!”

He said these words gently, not in command. And as he said them, he moved slowly towards her, raising his hands in a gesture of wanting, of pleading.

She smiled slowly, and he could not help but smile back, and that simple act of exchanging smiles seemed as intense and satisfying as coupling with most other women. He realized then that he had never truly known love, desire, or lust—not until now. What he felt now, this was true desire, real lust, and perhaps true love. He knew only that he wanted her and was willing to pay any price to have her in his bed, in his life. At that precise moment, so consumed was he by his desires, he did not even recall the prophecy that Shapaar had made before leaving for the forest: “She will come to you one day, and change your life forever.” Only much later that night, looking back on the day, would he remember those words his father had spoken, and realize that this was that day, and this the very woman. His body, his nerves, his heart and his organs of desire, they all knew what his conscious mind had yet to accept at the moment of meeting: this was she. The one who had promised to come for him, who had been waiting since long before his own birth. And suddenly everything made sense.

“I shall be yours only in marriage,” she replied softly, her voice as musical as the song of the river itself. “And only on the conditions your father laid down. Do you recall those conditions? Can you promise them to me once more? If you can make those little promises and abide by them, we can be married this very day and spend this night itself together, as man and wife.”

Sha’ant swallowed. Nervousness was never one of his traits. A strong, powerful man with great gifts of mind and body, he had been raised without reason to doubt himself or his abilities. Yet before this vision of a woman, he felt tongue-tied and as nervous as an errant disciple before a stern guru. “Yes,” he said softly.

She smiled. And took a step closer. Now he could smell her fragrance, the soft musky perfume of womanhood mingled with something undefinable: It smelled like the river itself, lotus and fresh glacial water and the Coldheart Mountain wind that travelled down with it. It was intoxicating as soma and almost drove him to his knees. It was all he could do not to crush her in his arms and have his way with her there and then. And from the look of mischievous teasing in her own lustful eyes, he knew that she was well aware of the effect she had on him.

“Let me repeat it for our mutual benefit,” she said, stepping slowly around him, like a bride around the sacred Stonefire at the time of wedding nuptials. “You shall never ask me who I am or whence I come. You shall never question anything I do or try to stop me. You shall never even speak harshly to me of those acts or attempt to dissuade me by word or tone of voice, gesture or expression. So long as you give me complete freedom to do as I please and go where I please to do it, I shall be your queen and make your every desire a reality. The instant you break these vows, I shall leave you and you shall never see me again in this form.”

He did not know if she had circumambulated him once, twice, thrice, or more. All he knew was that she had now stopped, and was before him once again, her body, her beauty, her face, her voice, all driving him to unbearable heights of lustful longing. “Give me your answer now or go your own way,” she said. “The choice is yours. I shall not repeat myself nor come before you again if you refuse.”

At this he paused. So he had a choice. That was good. Some part of him, the most kingly, mature part, the part that had been schooled so thoroughly in Krushan law, that still sane part whispered that it was a fair offer: He was free to reject it and go his own way. There was no coercion involved.

Of course, sometimes the most powerful form of coercion is the illusion of free will itself. Thus does destiny tempt and seduce us time and again. I chose, we say proudly. But what other choice did we truly have?

He could refuse her conditions. They were strange, unacceptable conditions. It did not matter whether they were being demanded by a woman or a man; what spouse could demand unconditional acceptance of any act of commission by their spouse? Without fear of censure, without even the power to dissuade or comment? That was not a marriage; it was an autocracy!

And yet.

And yet.

He desired her more than he had desired any woman before. Or anything.

He wanted her.

He must have her.

And she wanted him just as badly. That was evident in her eyes, her body, her every movement, the gentle shudder she released when her hip had accidentally brushed against his rear as she circumambulated him. The quick intake of breath when she leaned closer to him and spoke her most recent words. The blazing flames of desire in her eyes. Those could not be feigned so well. She desired him and had carried the torch of desire aflame and alight for a great length of time. He was new to this. She had been waiting here a long time and her lust burned brighter and sharper for that long wait.

And within himself, he felt a stirring of some ancient memory. As if he too had seen her once before, and desired her. A memory, half-formed, of her in the same flimsy garments, wind-blown, then laid naked by a gust of wind. And he shuddered in the paroxysm of lust as he recalled the sight of her naked body. And he knew that his free will and choice were as good as no will or choice.

He must have her.

He would have her.

On any condition.

“Yes,” he said hoarsely.

“I accept,” he added.

And then he moved towards her, and she towards him, in a blurring of emotion and flame.

And the rest was white satin bliss.

6

The next several months of Sha’ant’s life passed in that same blurring rush of lust and fire, hot seminal passion spent upon cool satin skin. His nameless wife, whom everyone addressed simply as “Queen” or “Your Highness,” exchanged with him every manner of pleasure imaginable between man and woman. He had her whenever he desired, as often as he desired, with never a complaint, look of weariness, or gesture of denial. She was like a waterfall in spring, roaring with passion, brimming with desire, overflowing her banks with lust and love. Her body undulated between his hands and his hips like water poured into a human vessel, taking whatever shape he desired.

But she was not merely an adept lover; she was equally immaculate in her conveyance of the arts of queenship: Her conduct, behavior, speech, generosity, social skills, and royal bearing won the hearts of the entire court and the love of the people as well. Nobody could desire more in a queen, and even more amazingly, no one did. Nor was she dominating or interfering: She let him have his way with the kingdom as he did with her body, and yet somehow that only made him feel more responsible for his every action or word, more considered and just in his judgement, more exacting in his pursuance of Krushan law.

Those were golden days and they passed with the speed of a dolphin racing downriver. Even the kingdom flourished, for the rich alluvial plains of the kingdom, nourished by the Jeel and her sister rivers, seemed to pour bounty upon them, producing the most plentiful crop ever recorded, and the most bounteous quality of harvest.

When she gave him the news that she was to be the mother of his child, he was overjoyed. It was the diamond atop her tiara of accomplishments. He knew she would be a perfect mother just as she was perfect in all else she did. And she would give him the most beautiful, intelligent and capable child ever.

He sighed and lay back against the ornate golden rack of the enormous bedstead. They were laying in their bedchamber after a session of lovemaking. The moonlight was soft on the marbled floor, the wispy curtains fluttered in a cool night breeze, and somewhere a nightbird was singing to its mate a song of sweet sad love. His life was perfect and about to be enhanced by the arrival of a new level of perfection: parenthood.

“How long?” he asked, smiling up at the curved ceiling, inlaid with precious stones and carvings.

“Soon,” she said.

He assumed she meant a few months. He had heard that women often did not show their condition of motherhood until several months after conception. He did not know the exact numbers, but he knew that the total gestation was about ten moon-months, so he assumed she meant three or four or five months still would pass before she was to give birth.

“When our child is born,” he said, “we shall have a grand celebration. I shall declare a feast day. There shall be—”

And he went on to describe all the wonderful things that would be done to mark the occasion of his first child. He did not even assume it would be a boy, merely that it would be his child, their child, and that was enough happiness for now. If it did indeed turn out to be a son, well, that would also satisfy the legal requirements of producing an heir and fell two deer with a single bow-shot. In which case, he would also . . . And he rambled on, spelling out the various things that he would be expected to do if it was a son and heir to the kingdom.

When he looked around, wondering why she had not spoken for a while or participated in his plans, he was surprised to see her gone from the chamber. Evidently, she had walked away while he was still speaking and he had no idea whether she had left a moment ago or several moments earlier.

Puzzled, he rose and walked through their chambers, expecting to find her at any moment. His search took him all the way to the queen’s apartments where he was surprised to find an old flinty-faced woman barring his way.

“My apologies, your highness,” she said, “The queen cannot receive you at this time.”

He frowned. “I don’t understand. She was with me only a short while ago.” He resisted addressing her as “daiimaa,” even though he knew she was a wet nurse.

The old woman looked up at him with a strange inscrutable expression. “It is her time, sire. She must be alone.”

He had no idea what she meant. “Time? What time?”

She gazed up at him with the same infinitely patient look which all aging wet nurses seemed to reserve for princes and yuvarajas. “A woman’s time, my lord. Her confinement.”

He stared at her. “Confinement?” He had heard of this before. “You mean to tell me that she is with child. Yes, I know this already. I wish to see her and have words with her.”

But she raised a hand as he tried to step around her. “Please, sire, I dare not bar your way, but she bade me tell you personally that if you enter her chambers now, you do so against her will and thereby break your promise.” The daiimaa swallowed nervously and joined her palms together. “I am only repeating my mistress’s message. Please, do not judge me harshly for it.”

“No, of course not,” Sha’ant said, irritated by her obsequiousness and her sudden concern. He was not the sort of king who went about ordering the execution of wet nurses simply because they prevented him from . . . from what exactly? Bursting in on his own wife while she was pregnant with his child? He could not fathom how there could be anything objectionable in that. But he knew that the mysteries of women’s bodies, especially those mysteries they chose to keep to themselves, were sacred and unassailable. And those words by the wet nurse—“if you enter her chambers now, you do so against her will and thereby break your promise”—had chilled him to the bone.

So it had begun at last. The things that she chose to do which he could neither question, comment upon, criticize by word, deed, gesture or expression, and never stop her from doing herself. This was apparently the first.

She intended to confine herself to her chambers for the duration of the pregnancy and only see him . . . when would she see him again? After the birth of their child? Months from now? He felt a surge of panic, as an addict of soma feels when told that there would be no further supply of his precious honey wine for an untold length of time. Months? He could not stay without her for months! Not like this, without even being able to see her, speak with her, touch her!

“How long do these things usually last?” he asked tentatively, not looking directly at the wet nurse because he was quite sure that she had been one of his many wet nurses in his infancy, which meant he had probably suckled at her wet teats at some time and it embarrassed him to be asking questions that reminded them both of that bond that linked them.

“In her state, your majesty,” he heard her reply with evident relief, “no more than a day or three. Perhaps even hours, if the goddess wills it.”

He had a moment of disorientation wherein he was confused about whether, by the term “goddess,” she meant his wife. But the earlier part of her reply obfuscated that query altogether. “You mean months, of course,” he said, certain that he must have heard her wrong. Of course she meant months. He had only just made love to his wife less than an hour earlier, and at that time her belly had been flat as ever. She could hardly conceive, gestate, and produce a child within a few hours! It was impossible.

Not to a goddess, he thought. And you know she is no ordinary mortal woman.

He looked at the wet nurse and saw her looking up at him strangely. “Why, no, your highness. She is almost ready! I saw her only moments ago, before she sent me out here to await you, and she was in the final stages of her laboring. The child has already turned and is coming soon. Perhaps even within the hour. The queen is blessed in her womanly perfection and it is possible she might deliver herself of your heir within—”

He turned on his heel and walked away, unable to listen to more.

Madness!

A woman who had made love to her husband only an hour earlier, then told him she was with child, then came to her chambers and summoned her midwives to her, and was now “in the final stages of her laboring” and about to deliver herself of child “within the hour.”

Impossible!

But not for a goddess.

He went to his throne room rather than his bedchamber, and sat in the vast empty hall, upon the great seat where his father and ancestors had sat before him, surrounded by the might and splendor of the Krushan nation and the Krushan race.

And he waited.

It was all he could do.

7

“Your majesty!”

The old daiimaa’s cry was cracked and heart-rending. She shambled in as quickly as she could, raising her arms in relief as she caught sight of the lone figure seated upon the throne at the far end of the hall.

“Come quickly!” she cried. “You must stop her!”

Sha’ant rose at once from his seat, soma spilling from the goblet, running over his hand. He cast the goblet aside and ran from the throne chamber. The palace corridors were brightly lit and there seemed to be people clustered everywhere, speaking in whispers—the atmosphere was tense and curiously unnatural. The night on which the heir to the Krushan line was born should be a bright, cheerful night, a night of feasting and revelry. But he sensed that the unusual circumstances of the birth had unnerved everyone, just as they had unnerved him.

He caught fragments of conversation as he raced through the corridors, the footfalls of his mandatory king’s guard echoing behind him: Yesterday . . . slender-waisted as a newlywed . . . today delivered of child . . . Unnatural . . . Uncanny . . . Impossible . . . All his own anxieties and fears spoken aloud, the echoes of the whispers filling the endless corridors of the great house.

He burst into his queen’s chambers, startling the wet nurses, all of whom were sitting or standing around in a state of distress. Some cried out as if fearing the entrance of some demon, but quickly silenced themselves perforce when they saw it was their king.

The sleeping chamber was in disarray, the usual evidence of childbirth—hot water vessels, towels and cloth, some blood and unguent bodily fluids drying stickily on the bedding. All the things one might expect after a queen had birthed a child.

There was no sign of his wife or the newborn life she had just released from her body.

The wet nurses avoided his eyes, looking down as if in shame.

“Where is she?” he thundered.

One woman, nervous but strong, younger than the old wrinkled one who had come to him in the throne room—and was no doubt still shuffling her old bones back here again—pointed to a doorway.

He leaped across the bed and went through the doorway.

Racing through antechambers and seemingly endless corridors, he found himself in an unfamiliar part of the palace: the bhojanalya where all meals were prepared. The bhojanalya staff, busy kneading, frying, grilling and roasting, turned to stare at their Emperor, suddenly appeared in their midst.

“Which way?” he shouted.

A fat young chef pointed.

Sha’ant went through the doorway and found himself in the rear courtyard, near the palace staff quarters.

There was no sign of her, but he knew that the gate ahead led outside the palace compound and from thence, out of the city.

But why would a newly delivered mother take her newborn and leave her bed, her home, and walk out of the city itself? It was madness, all madness.

Suddenly, he understood the reason why his father had forewarned him. He had been too young then to understand, had only thought of pleasure, of taking, of getting, of enjoying.

There was another side to such things; there always was. He had learned that painful lesson often as a king, and as a warrior and a commander of armies.

He was about to learn the same painful lesson now as a man.

8

Sha’ant leaped on the first horse he saw, throwing off the man who had been riding it. The man grunted in surprise as he fell, landing on his side with a thump, but recognized his king and bowed his head silently, joining his palms, making no complaint.

Sha’ant rode through the city, startling the few citizens out and about at this late hour. Most appeared to be milling about in groups near the palace complex. The word had surely spread about the queen delivering a child as well as of the strange circumstances surrounding the event. He glimpsed nervous faces turned up towards him as he flashed past. Until today, everyone had accepted the queen as she was, her considerable charm, wit, intelligence, eloquence, and numerous other good qualities negating the obvious mysteries: Who was she? From what family did she come? Where was her homeland? What was her name? But now, everyone’s unspoken doubts and suspicions had been proven true: The queen was no normal woman.

What that meant exactly, Sha’ant would soon discover.

From time to time, when people saw him coming and recognized him, they pointed the way the queen had gone. Some even called out to each other: “The king! The king! Show him where she went.” And others standing farther on the road lifted their hands and pointed.

He left the city behind and rode through the darkness of a moonless night, finding his way by instinct. Once outside the city avenues, there were a dozen different ways to go, depending on one’s destination. There were no citizens here to point the way—evidently none had wished to follow the queen on her strange night errand. But he was certain he knew where she had gone.

The river.

The place where they had first met, or close by.

He burst through the thicket, the horse exhausted, and ran out towards the river. He wanted to call out her name, but he knew of no name to call her. All the words that seemed so charming in the bedchamber—“Queen of my heart,” “Empress of passion,” “Sovereign of my body and soul”—he could hardly run about on the bank of the Jeel yelling such endearments.

He looked this way, then that, harried, at wits’ end, unable to understand what she could be doing here in the dead of night. More than that, he found it hard to believe that a woman who had just been delivered of child could have walked this long distance so briskly. He feared that perhaps he had come to the wrong place after all. Perhaps she had gone some other way, to the city of his enemies perhaps . . .

Then he saw her.

Exactly as she had been the day of their first encounter. Clad in the same white garments that swirled around her like white mist—or like the white spray flung by cascading waves. She clutched the baby in her arms, gently, lovingly, exactly as a mother should. She appeared as slender as ever, and as strong; neither her outward form appeared altered in any way, nor her inner resilience reduced a whit—indeed, she moved, even now, with that same sinuous grace that drove him mad with desire.

Except that this time, it was not desire she evoked in him, but awe and terror.

For she was not standing on the bank of the river.

She was standing upon the river itself.

The raging waters bore her weight as easily as solid ground. The fauna of the river, dolphins, turtles, fish of all sizes, broke surface around her, seemingly worshipping her.

She stepped gracefully out to the middle of the vast concourse, midway between banks, too far for him to reach even if he dove in and dared the swim.

She turned to face him.

Somehow, despite the lack of moonlight, he found he could see her face as clearly as if in daylight. The river itself seemed to glow with energy, a palpable power exuding a luminescence that illuminated her from below. In that glaucous light, she appeared more beautiful than ever, but forbidding as well, like a woman far, far older than the young nymph who shared his bed . . . a being of great age, energy, power and wisdom.

She raised the newborn babe in both hands, cradling it gently upon her palms, holding it out above the rushing waters.

Sha’ant, until that moment mesmerized, broke out of his reverie and began racing towards her.

As he ran, it seemed as if the river itself raced alongside him, rushing downstream towards her. At first, he thought it was a blurring of his vision due to his emotional state, but then he turned his head and saw that the river itself was rising up, to form a maw, a great open mouth of white water that roared towards her. He cried out and increased his speed, pushing himself to the limit of his abilities. Yet he knew he could not win this race. These were forces far greater than he could possibly comprehend, let alone control. Still, he ran. For that was his son she was holding. If she did not care for him, he did. And if he had to wrest the child from her by force and violence, he would do so as well.

The maw of water grew until it resembled a great white serpent, and as it reached her, it released a bellow of such power and intensity that the resulting blast of air and waterspray blasted Sha’ant sideways and off his feet, raising him up in the air for several feet, to land with a cushioned thump on a midden of lavya grass. He lay there, winded and drenched, staring at the incredible sight.

His wife, standing in mid-river, surrendered their newborn babe to a great serpent made of water. The serpent snatched the babe in its giant maw, roaring as it did so, and swept over and through and around his queen, overwhelming her.

Sha’ant cried out in horror.

Then the cascade of water passed by, leaving behind a backwash that sloshed on both banks before falling back and settling.

And he made out the figure of his wife, walking back towards the shore on which he lay, stunned and breathless.

She stepped out of the river and onto the bank. He saw that the water clung to her with longing tentacles, as if reluctant to release her. He saw also that her feet were no longer wholly human feet; now they were something else, an amalgam of water and fish-tail that formed, as he watched, into flesh, blood, and bone, transforming into the perfect replica of human female feet just as she stepped on solid land. Her form clarified, and she was once again the woman he knew, the eager young loving wife who pleasured him and took pleasure with such intensity night after night. His beauty, his queen, his empress of desire, his sovereign of body and soul.

As she strode up the bank to where he lay, a smile playing on her lips, the wind whipped away her garments, snatching them with a single rough action, and she was left naked, perfect, flawless as ever, with no sign that she had ever been a mother, or that so much as a single day had passed since the first day he had met her here, in this very spot. Naked and undulating like water in human form, she came towards him, and despite the circumstances and his emotional turmoil, he was aghast to find his body aroused at the sight of her nudity.

Unable to stop himself, he raised his hands to greet her as she fell upon him, laughing with pleasure and desire. And despite himself, he found that he was smiling in response as well. Unable to prevent what was happening, he entered into loveplay and cojoined with her, the actions familiar and all the more pleasing for their familiarity. Men who seek comfort in the arms of new women each night are men who have not discovered the supreme pleasure of the perfect union. Those few, those lucky few, who are blessed with the perfect mate, achieve heights of pleasure that no grunting copulation between strangers can ever attain. For it is love which is the ultimate aphrodisiac, and without that emotional bonding and joining of souls, the act itself is merely violence without weaponry. An act of rage rather than of pleasure.

Sha’ant’s love and desire for his woman outweighed all else and he found himself unable to even speak out against what she had done—for he knew that the instant he spoke, all would be over between them. Those were the terms of their marriage, and he had no doubt she would abide by them to the letter. So he kept his silence and took his pleasure and, by morning, he somehow was even able to pretend that nothing had happened at all, that it had only been a bad dream. How could she have conceived, gestated, and borne a child, then killed it, all in one night? It was impossible of course. He had probably drunk too much soma the night before and suffered an impossible nightmare.

And like any nightmare, it was easy to push aside and pretend it had never occurred at all.

Until the next time.

9

In retrospect, it was extraordinary how easily life went back to the way it had been before. The events of that night might never have happened: The palace staff knew better than to spread tales openly and the citizens who heard the rumors quickly wondered at their veracity. After all, here was their Queen, flat stomach and beauty intact, as winning as always. And the King beside her at all times, rarely apart for long, mooning over her as much as ever.

The sight of them riding together in their royal vaahan, the ornamental bejeweled carriage, brought people running out of doors, leaving aside their work to watch the king and queen pass by. Shouts of joy were heard everywhere and those who possessed conch shells—or rather, those merchants and nobles rich enough to possess their own guard—ordered them to blow the conch shell trumpets, heralding the approach of the royal couple. They were too dearly loved for the rumored scandal of that one night to cast a shadow upon their reputation. People quickly dismissed it as an idle rumor and soon even the palace staff wondered if that really had been the Queen’s newborn son she had been carrying with her that night, or merely a bundle of clothes. People even surmised their own explanations, assuming that in her homeland—wherever that unknown place might be—they had such unusual customs as walking to the river and throwing in articles of clothing as a means of appeasing the gods and asking for the gift of an heir. This theory, that it was all an arcane ritual designed to obtain a son, was the most favored, for it explained everything quite neatly.

The only ones who knew the truth were the wet nurses who had been present in the queen’s bedchambers when she gave birth to that beautiful black-skinned child-prince. They were accustomed to keeping secrets and silencing rumors, and so they did so. For they understood that the King loved the Queen and she loved him as well, madly. Whatever reason she had had for that extraordinary deed, or how in fact she had been able to produce a child within an hour of copulation and conception, were things they did not dwell on for long. They were superstitious women given to the wearing of amulets and sacred threads and chanting of mantras designed to ward off evil eyes and spirits. They accepted supernatural impossibilities as a part of life.

Time passed, healing all wounds, annulling all hurtful memories. The human spirit survives by selective forgetting.

When a year had gone by, on another night much like the first one, Sha’ant and his Queen were in their bedchamber, entwined in the grip of passion. When their ecstasy was spent, she looked at him in a certain way, rose, and left him. This time, he knew at once that something was amiss. He rose as well and followed her—and was just in time to see her slip into her bedchambers. The wet nurses were already there, waiting with pans of steaming hot water and cloth. They looked at him sadly as they went into the chamber and shook their heads in commiseration before shutting him out.

After the child was born, he followed his wife once again, this time close on her heels.

On this occasion, the wet nurses had not informed anyone of the queen’s impending delivery, even though she had asked them to make arrangements for the same. They had thought it best to wait and see. If this was to be a normal birth—or as normal as an hour’s gestation and delivery could be—then they would inform the whole city. Until then, it seemed best to hold their silence.

So the streets were empty and silent when Sha’ant followed his wife. It was a long walk and he dearly wished he could offer her a ride on a horse or chariot or even a carriage if she preferred. But he dared not speak a word or delay her progress in any way, for the terms of the agreement had been quite specific on those points. And so, he only followed at a discreet distance, going on foot this time as he felt ashamed to ride when his own wife could walk the distance.

Things went as they had the previous year. She reached the river, stepped out onto the water, then walked out to the middle of the concourse. Raising her hands, she held the baby out. Sha’ant felt a great piercing pain enter his chest and flood his being with sorrow. That was his son, their son! How could she do this? Why? Was it a sacrifice? For what? What deity could demand the sacrifice of one’s own newborn child? And two sons in as many years? Why?

But the terms of the agreement caused him to keep his silence. And he watched in silent anguish as the river came once again, roaring with deafening rage, and swept the child away as before. Once again, she walked back to the bank, stepped onto the ground, and came towards him, growing visibly younger and more beautiful than ever. Once again, he succumbed to his love and lust and received her in his welcoming arms. As he held her tightly, feeling the stirring in his groin belie the sorrow in his heart, he shed a tear from each eye. Just the two. One for each lost son.

The next one, he promised himself silently. The next child she will keep. This is some ritual to ensure that the third child will be a great king of kings. It was the only explanation that appeased him and allowed him to accept her cruel actions as necessary in some fashion.

But of course, the next year, she did it again.

And again.

And yet again.

Seven times in all, over as many years, she threw his newborn sons into the river.

Finally, a day came when he could take it no longer.

The past eight years, he had wept silently, containing his grief within himself, keeping it all a secret between himself and the wet nurses. Nobody else suspected or knew, and those who heard the rumors dismissed them out of hand. One child might have been believable, for some arcane ritual. But eight children? Impossible! Even a rakshasi would not sacrifice eight of her newborn children for any reason.

On the eighth night when he followed her to the river, he broke down. “Stop,” he cried out just as she stepped out onto the water. “I beg of you, stop!”

She paused upon the water, standing as easily as if on an unseen rock beneath the surface. He knew she was not standing on any rocks, for he could see the water rushing beneath her feet, even the occasional fish or turtle swim beneath. She was standing upon the water itself, her feet melding with the fluid to become partly water as well.

He fell to his knees on the bank. “Goddess, serapi, demoness, whoever you are . . .” He pressed his palms together in supplication. “I cannot stand by silently anymore. Please. Do not kill our son.”

She looked back at him, her face still set in that resolute expression she always had during these nights, when she seemed older, wiser, more powerful than the woman he shared his bed with, and said, “It is what he wants.”

It took him a moment to realize that she meant the child in her arms. “He? How can he possibly know what he wants? He is a babe! Newborn! How can a newborn wish to commit suicide?”

She sighed and shook her head. “It is for his own good.” There was a tone to her voice that suggested that he could still back away and let her continue, and she might not consider the agreement broken yet.

But he no longer cared. “Who are you? What sort of mother would kill her own newborn children? Eight years! Eight beautiful, perfect young children. Sons! Why do you do this? Who are you?”

She paused and nodded. Turning around, she walked back to the bank and stopped just short of solid ground. Still on the water, she looked at him with the same loving expression he knew so well. “Very well then. Since you have asked, I must tell you. For I cannot lie, nor can I conceal truth once it is demanded of me. I am transparent as clear water, as the glacial Coldheart Mountain ice from whence I come, and to do otherwise would be to dishonor my father. Therefore I shall tell you the truth as plainly as possible.”

He could not make head or tail of what she said, except that she was offering to answer his questions. His confusion only made him more belligerent. “Tell me then. What sort of evil creature are you to do this terrible thing year after year? Answer me!”

A peculiar expression came over her face then, one that he had never seen, not even in her most vulnerable, naked moments. “I am Jeel,” she said, “daughter of Coldheart Mountain.”

He stared at her, then at the river, then at the place where she stood, upon the rushing water. And he knew she told the truth. Everything made perfect sense then. If she was indeed Jeel, the river-goddess, then it explained how she could appear and disappear at will on the banks of the river, how she could walk upon its waters—for she herself was water—how she could be so passionate and tempestuous, as the river was, and numerous other half-glimpsed half-understood mysteries and doubts were cleared up at once. All save one.

“Then why do you do this terrible thing?” he asked. “As Jeel, you are the most honored of all seer-mages, sacred river of the Gods themselves. How can you commit such a heinous crime? How could you kill your own newborn sons?”

She smiled. Tears sprang into her eyes and trickled down her face, and as she rolled down those smooth unblemished cheeks, he saw that the water was the reality and the flesh the illusion, for each teardrop erased the skin and body down which it ran.

She was turning back to water again even as she spoke. “These were the eight Vessas, great demi-gods from the heavenly realms. Due to a curse by Kenikyu, they were compelled to spend a year each on Arthaloka. They approached me and asked for my help. I agreed to take human form and give birth to them and to destroy each one at the time of his birth so that he could return at once to his true place in the heavenly realm. I was killing our sons, it is true, for I was destroying the physical bodies in which they took birth upon this plane. But by doing so, I was freeing their immortal souls, which were never destined to remain here. If not by my hands, they would have died anyway. Better to throw them into my own waters for a quick, merciful death, than for you and I to watch them grow for a full year only for them to die by some unimaginable unexpected method each time. Cruel as this was, and difficult for me to do—you cannot imagine how difficult—it still had to be done. It was the only way. Surely you can see that now, Sha’ant, my love?”

He passed a hand across his face roughly. He was already drenched from the riverspray. His head swam with understanding and shock. A curse! A remedy. And each one a demi-god, herself a goddess. Then nothing was what it had seemed. All this was part of some cosmic plan that would have unfolded regardless. What she said was true: To live with each child for a full year and watch them grow, until their every action, expression, gesture, and sound became intimately familiar, and then lose them . . . that would have been unthinkable. And to endure that eight times over? Impossible. He would have been driven insane, he was certain of it. There was a limit to how much any person could endure.

He rose to his feet. “I had no idea . . .”

She nodded. “I know. But it was impossible to tell you. As a mortal, I could not share such knowledge with you. It is forbidden. Besides, it was necessary for things to proceed exactly in this manner, for even this was part of the plan.”

He looked around, stunned. “You mean that even my protesting before the death of the eighth son was part of your intention?”

“Yes, my love. For I wished you to have the pleasure of raising one son from my womb. And by testing your patience all this while, I knew that you would eventually stop me. Thus, I am now entrusting to you your lawful son, born of our union. Take him now.”

She handed out the newborn to him. Sha’ant took the bundle of warmth and softness, scarcely able to comprehend what was going on. The child began to wail and cry, dismaying him further.

“He will be a great man, a great king. He will do great things and when he takes a vow, any vow, no matter how terrible, it will be as rigid and unyielding as the sky and the earth in resoluteness. He will do all he does for your sake and the sake of your kingdom and your lineage. He will do the Krushan race proud, and be a shining example of the Krushan line. This is my last, my only gift to you, my beloved.”

And now her tears came faster and thicker, as her lower body melted away, turning into a whirlpool of raging water. Only her head and upper body remained recognizable as the woman he had loved for so long. In his arms, the child’s crying grew more plaintive and mournful.

“But I don’t wish to lose you!” he cried. “Now that I understand everything, I forgive you! I didn’t know, my love. Do not blame me. Do not leave me.”

“I must,” she said, “for that too was foretold.”

“Stay for the sake of our son,” he said. “Stay and rear him with me.”

“I cannot,” she said, “stay another day in the world of men. Once even a single mortal knows my true identity, I must return to my original form. That is the law that binds me.”

He shook his head and held out the child again to her. “Then take him with you. Raise him yourself. Raise him like a god, a great being. His true place is with you, not on this wretched mortal plane. Let him not suffer the misfortunes of mortal living when he can live like a god among gods!”

She hesitated then dipped her head. Already, he could see, the back of her head had turned to water, only the face and ears remained intact. Her arms were melting too. She reached out hands that were more water than flesh and accepted the child once more. She cradled him to her watery bosom, and he gurgled as if content and fell asleep again.

“I shall keep him and rear him as befits your son and heir,” she said. “When he is ready, I shall send him to you again. Thereafter he must live out his time on Arthaloka. Indeed, he shall live a great length of time, for he has taken his brothers’ ages on the mortal realm upon himself as well. He shall live all their mortal lives in his own lifespan, and only by his own choice shall he eventually succumb to death, only when he has endured and suffered enough to atone for them all.”

Sha’ant had nothing to say to that. He joined his palms together. “I am honored to have been your mate in this world. I have loved you as I can love no other woman ever again. I shall remain without a wife for the rest of my life henceforth. For no other woman can ever take your place in my heart.”

She smiled sadly, her face melting away even as she spoke her last words. “Matters of the heart do not always turn out the way we plan, Sha’ant. As a man, you may desire to live alone, but as a king, you owe it to your people to produce an heir. In time, you may learn to love again. Until then, remember, I am always here, always running beside you, as fast as you run, sharing in your every triumph and achievement. Come to me anytime you please. Except for that one limitation of the physical form, I shall always be your beloved Jeel forever.”

And with those terrible final words, she fell back into the river, the waterspout that had been her body dissolving back into the body of fluid from whence it came.

10

Sha’ant grieved for his lost wife and sons. The official word given to the people was that the Queen had dropped her child still-born and had taken her own life by flinging herself into the Jeel. This matched the rumors and gossip that had circulated for years and was in keeping with the Queen’s legendary love for the river. The people grieved with their king, for they had also loved her dearly.

In time, they got over the loss and went on with their lives. There were enemies seeking to overthrow the might of the Krushan and take over Hastinaga’s territories, there were great swathes of newly conquered dominions to govern, and the countless other duties of any king.

In time, Sha’ant, too, overcame the loss of his beloved Jeel. From time to time, he went to the spot by the river and sat upon the bank as his father had once done, but instead of meditating, he talked to the river, confident that the steady roar would prevent his words from being heard by anyone within sight. He spoke of matters of kingship and governance, of palace intrigues and political maneuvering, of skirmishes and rebellions, fights and outbreaks—all the usual things that kings talk about to their wives at night behind closed doors.

The river listened and in its steady, relentless roar, he often thought he heard an occasional word or phrase or sound of commiseration, sympathy, or even, on rarer occasions, a few words of advice. Once, when discussing a certain noble and his daughter who were needlessly haranguing the ministers with constant demands, he was taken aback when a face appeared in the water below him. The face was exactly that of his former Queen and wife, if formed of water. “Beware. They mean to assassinate you,” she said in a watery gurgle that none but he could hear. Then smiled, pursed her lips in an action that resembled an affectionate kiss, shut her watery eyes, and melded back into the river. The following week, the noble and his daughter did indeed try to use a clever ruse as a cover for an assassination attempt—and failed because Sha’ant had been having them watched constantly since the day by the river.

In time, his visits grew less frequent as the empire grew and his responsibilities increased. He admittedly threw himself more completely into his work and vocation than he had before, as if conquering new territories or suppressing distant barbarian rebellions in foreign lands could ever compensate for the loss of his beloved mate. They did not, of course, but they did help keep him from thinking as often of her. In his travels, he found also that while the river was always benign to him—on more than one occasion, he was able to cross her in spate under impossible weather conditions, always to the astonishment of his own local allies in the region—the special bond he shared could only be explored in that particular spot on her bank, near his own capital city. At all other places, she would listen intently, but only here would she speak aloud or show herself: a wave of butterflies risen from the water itself, dissolving into a cloud of spray as they rose up in the air; a pack of dolphins mating in the water within sight of him; patterns in the water that defied the tide and made pleasing designs that reminded him of places they had been and things they had done together.

These intimate secret communications kept his heart alive and kept love awake within him. Even though he had long since accepted that he could never have her back again, the sheer glorious intensity of their years and experiences together kept him emotionally afloat for another decade and a half. If nothing else, these platonic dalliances kept him from growing bitter and from hating the sight and touch of all women.

In time, gradually, he began to form the idea that perhaps, just maybe, someday, he might learn to love again.

©2018 by Ashok K. Banker. | Art © 2018 by Marcel Mercado.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ashok K. Banker is the author of more than sixty books, including the internationally acclaimed Ramayana series. His works have all been bestsellers in India and have sold around the world. His latest novel is the first in a new epic fantasy series, Upon a Burning Throne. He lives in Los Angeles.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

Of a Sweet Slow Dance in the Wake of Temporary Dogs

Adam-Troy Castro | 10340 words

Before

1.

On the last night before the end of everything, the stars shine like a fortune in jewels, enriching all who walk the quaint cobblestoned streets of Enysbourg. It is a celebration night, like most nights in the capital city. The courtyard below my balcony is alive with light and music. Young people drink and laugh and dance. Gypsies in silk finery play bouncy tunes on harmonicas and mandolins. Many wave at me, shouting invitations to join them. One muscular young man with impossibly long legs and a face equipped with a permanent grin takes it upon himself to sprint the length of the courtyard only to somersault over the glittering fountain at its center. For a heartbeat out of time he seems to float, enchanted, over the water. Then I join his friends in applause as he belly-flops, drenching himself and the long-haired girls wading at the fountain’s other rim. The girls are not upset but delighted. Their giggles tinkle like wind chimes as they splash across the fountain themselves, flinging curtains of silver water as their shiny black hair bobs back and forth in the night.

2.

Intoxicated from a mixture of the excellent local wine and the even better local weed, I consider joining them, perhaps the boring way via the stairs and perhaps via a great daredevil leap from the balcony. I am, after all, stripped to the waist. The ridiculous boxers I brought on the ship here could double as a bathing suit, and the way I feel right now, I could not only make the fountain but also sail to the moon. But after a moment’s consideration, I decide not. That’s the kind of grand theatrical gesture visitors to Enysbourg make on their first night, when they’re still overwhelmed by its magic. I have been here nine nights. I have known the festivals that make every night in the capital city a fresh adventure. I have explored the hanging gardens, with all their deceptive challenges. I have climbed the towers of pearl, just down the coast. I have ridden stallions across Enysbourg’s downs, and plunged at midnight into the warm waters of the eastern sea. I have tasted a hundred pleasures, and wallowed in a hundred more, and though far from sick of them, feel ready to take them at a more relaxed pace, partaking not as a starving man but as a connoisseur. I want to be less a stranger driven by lust, but a lover driven by passion.

So I just take a deep breath and bask in the air that wafts over the slanting tiled roofs: a perfume composed of equal parts sex and spice and the tang of the nearby ocean, all the more precious for being part of the last night before the end of everything. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that this might be the best moment of my life: a life that, back home, with its fast pace and its anonymous workplaces and climate-controlled, gleaming plastic everything, was so impoverished that it’s amazing I have any remaining ability to recognize joy and transcendence at all. In Enysbourg, such epiphanies seem to come several times a minute. The place seems determined to make me a poet, and if I don’t watch out I might hunt down paper and pen and scrawl a few lines, struggling to capture the inexpressible in a cage of fool amateurish june-moon-and-spoon.

3.

The curtains behind me rustle, and a familiar presence leaves my darkened hotel room to join me on the balcony. I don’t turn to greet her, but instead close my eyes as she wraps me in two soft arms redolent of wine and perfume and sex. Her hands meet at the center of my chest. She rests a chin on my shoulder and murmurs my name in the musical accent that marks every word spoken by every citizen of Enysbourg.

“Robert,” she says, and there’s something a little petulant about the way she stresses the first syllable, something adorable and mocking in the way she chides me for not paying enough attention to her.

By the time I register the feel of her bare breasts against my bare back, and realize in my besotted way that she’s mad, she’s insane, she’s come out on the balcony in full view of everybody without first throwing on something to cover herself, the youths frolicking in the fountain have already spotted her and begun to serenade us with a chorus of delighted cheers. “Kiss her!” shouts a boy. “Come on!” begs a girl. “Let us see!” yells a third. “Don’t go inside! Make love out here!” When I turn to kiss the woman behind me, I am cheered like a conqueror leading a triumphant army into Rome.

Her name is Caralys, and she is of course one of the flowers of Enysbourg: a rare beauty indeed, even in a country where beauty is everywhere. She is tall and lush, with dark eyes, skin the color of caramel, and a smile that seems to hint at secrets propriety won’t let her mention. Her shiny black hair cascades down her back in waves, reflecting light even when everything around her seems to be dark.

I met her the day after my arrival, when I was just a dazed and exhausted tourist sitting alone in a café redolent with rich ground coffee. I wasn’t just off the boat then, not really. I’d already enjoyed a long, awkward night being swept up by one celebration after another, accepting embraces from strangers determined to become friends, and hearing my name, once given, become a chant of hearty congratulation from those applauding my successful escape from the land of everyday life. I had danced the whole night, cheered at the fires of dawn, wept for reasons that puzzled me still, and stumbled to bed where I enjoyed the dreamless bliss that comes from exhaustion. It was the best night I’d known in a long time. But I was a visitor still, reluctant to surrender even the invisible chains that shackled me; and even as I’d jerked myself awake with caffeine, I’d felt tired, surfeited, at odds.

I was so adrift that when Caralys sauntered in, her hair still tousled and cheeks still shining from the celebrations of the night before, her dress of many patches rustling about her ankles in a riot of multiple colors, I almost failed to notice her. But then she’d sat down opposite me and declared in the sternest of all possible tones that even foreigners, with all their worries, weren’t allowed to wear grimaces like mine in Enysbourg. I blinked, almost believing her, because I’d heard words just like those the previous night, from a pair of fellow visitors who had caught me lost in a moment of similar repose. Then she tittered, first beneath her breath and then with unguarded amusement, not understanding my resistance to Enysbourg’s charms, but still intrigued, she explained much later, by the great passion she saw imprisoned behind my gray, civilized mien. “You are my project,” she said, in one expansive moment. “I am going to take a tamed man and make him a native of Enysbourg.”

She may well succeed, for we have been in love since that first day, both with each other and with the land whose wonders she has been showing me ever since.

4.

We have fought only once, just yesterday, when in a thoughtless lapse I suggested that she return with me on the ship home. Her eyes flashed the exasperation she always showed at my moments of thoughtless naïveté: an irritation so grand that it bordered on contempt. She told me it was an arrogant idea, the kind only a foreigner could have. Why would she leave this place that has given her life? And why would I think so much of her to believe that she would? Was that all she was to me? A prize to be taken home, like a souvenir to impress my friends with my trip abroad? Didn’t I see how diminished she would be, if I ever did that to her? “Would you blind me?” she demanded. “Would you amputate my limbs? Would you peel strips off my skin, slicing off piece after piece until there was nothing left of me but the parts that remained convenient to you? This is my country, Robert. My blood.” And she was right, for she embodies Enysbourg, as much as the buildings themselves, and for her to abandon it would be a crime against both person and place. Both would be diminished, as much as I’ll be diminished if I have to leave her behind.

5.

We leave the balcony and go back inside, where, for a moment in the warm and sweet-smelling room, we come close to collapsing on the bed again, for what seems the thousandth time since we woke sore but passionate this morning. But this is the last night before the end of everything, when Enysbourg’s wonders emerge in their sharpest relief. They are not to be missed just so we can keep to ourselves. And so she touches a finger to the tip of my nose and commands that it’s time to go back into the world. I obey.

We dress. I wear an open vest over baggy trousers, with a great swooping slouch hat glorious in its vivid testimony to Enysbourg’s power to make me play the willing fool. She wears a fringed blouse and another ankle-length skirt of many patches, slit to mid-thigh to expose a magnificent expanse of leg. Dozens of carved wooden bracelets, all loose enough to shift when she moves, clack like maracas along her forearms. Her lips are red, her flowered hair aglow with reflected light. Two curling locks meet in the center of her forehead, right above her eyes, like mischievous parentheses. Somewhere she wears bells.

Laughing, she leads me from the room, and down the narrow stairs, chattering away at our fellow guests as they march in twos and threes toward their own celebrations of this last night. We pass a man festooned with parrots, a woman with a face painted like an Italian landscape, a fire-eater, a juggler in a suit of carnival color, a cavorting clown-faced monkey who hands me a grape and accepts a small coin in payment. Lovers of all possible, and some impossible, gender combinations flash inebriated grins as they surrender to their passions in darkened alcoves. Almost everybody we pass is singing or dancing or sharing dizzy, disbelieving embraces. Every time I pause in sheer amazement at something I see, Caralys chuckles at my saucer-eyed disbelief, and pulls me along, whispering that none of this would be half as marvelous without me there to witness it.

Even the two fellow tourists we jostle, as we pass through the arched entranceway and into the raucous excitement of the street, become part of the excitement, because I know them. They are the ones I met on that first lost day before Caralys, before I learned that Enysbourg was not just a vacation destination offered as brief reward for a earning enough to redeem a year of dullness and conformity, but the repository of everything I’d ever missed in my flavorless excuse for a life. Jerry and Dee Martel are gray retirees from some awful industrial place where Dee had done something or other with decorating and Jerry had managed a firm that molded the plastic shells other companies used to enclose the guts of useful kitchen appliances. When they talk about their jobs now, as they did when they found me that first night, they shudder with the realization that such things swallowed so many years of finite lives. They were delivered when they vacationed in Enysbourg, choosing it at random among all the other oases of tamed exoticism the modern world maintains to make people forget how sterile and homogenous things have become. On arriving, they’d discovered that it was not a tourist trap, not an overdeveloped sham, not a fraud, and not an excuse to sell plastic souvenirs that testify to nothing but the inane gullibility of the people who buy them, but the real thing, the special place, the haven that made them the people they had always been meant to be. They’d emigrated, in what Jerry said with a wink was their “alternative to senility.”

“Was it a sacrifice for us?” Jerry asked, when we met. “Did it mean abandoning our security? Did it even mean embracing some hardships? Of course it did. It meant all those things and more. You may not think so, but then you’re a baby; you haven’t even been in Enysbourg long enough to know. But our lives back home were empty. They were nothing. At least here, life has a flavor. At least here, life is something to be treasured.”

Living seven years later as natives, spending half their time in the capital and half their time out in the country exploring caves and fording rivers and performing songs they make up on the spot, they each look thirty years younger than their mere calendar ages: with Jerry lean and robust and tanned, Dee shorter and brighter and interested in everything. They remember me from nine days ago and embrace me like a son, exclaiming how marvelous I look, how relaxed I seem in comparison to the timid creature they met then. They want to know if this means I’m going to stay. I blush and admit I don’t know. I introduce them to Caralys and they say it seems an easy choice to them. The women hit it off. Jerry suggests a local inn where we can hear a guitarist he knows, and before long, we’re there, claiming a corner table between dances, listening to his friend: another old man, an ancient man really, with twinkling eyes and spotted scalp and a wispy comic-opera moustache that, dangling to his collarbone, looks like a boomerang covered with lint.

6.

“It’s not that I hate my country,” Jerry says, when the women have left together, in the way that women have. His eyes shine and his voice slurs from the effects of too much drink. “I can’t. I know my history. I know the things she’s accomplished, the principles she’s stood for, the challenges she’s faced. I’ve even been around for more of it than I care to remember. But coming here was not abandoning her. It was abandoning what she’d become. It was abandoning the drive-throughs and the ATMs and the talking heads who pretend they have the answers but would be lucky to remember how to tie their shoes. It was remembering what life was supposed to be all about, and seizing it with both hands while we still had a few good years still left in us. It was victory, Robert; an act of sheer moral victory. Do you see, Robert? Do you see?”

I tell him I see.

“You think you do. But you still have a ticket out, day after tomorrow. Sundown, right? Ach. You’re still a tourist. You’re still too scared to take the leap. But stay here a few more weeks and then tell me that you see.”

I might just do that, I say. I might stay here the rest of my life.

He dismisses me with a wave of his hand. “Sure, you say that. You say that now. You say that because you think it’s so easy to say that. You haven’t even begun to imagine the commitment it takes.”

But I love Caralys.

“Of course you do. But will you be fair to her, in the end? Will you? You’re not her first tourist, you know.”

7.

Jerry has become too intense for me, in a way utterly at odds with the usual flavor of life in Enysbourg. If he presses on, I might have to tell him to stop.

But I am rescued. The man with the wispy moustache returns from the bar with a fresh mug of beer, sets it beside him on a three-legged stool, picks up a stringed instrument a lot like a misshapen guitar, and begins to sing a ballad in a language I don’t understand. It’s one of Enysbourg’s many dialects, a tongue distinguished by deep rolling consonants and rich sensual tones, so expressive in the way it cavorts the length of an average sentence that I don’t need a translation to know that he’s singing a hymn to lost love long remembered. When he closes his eyes, I can almost imagine him as the fresh-faced young boy staring with earnest panic at the eyes of the fresh-faced young woman whose beauty first made him want to sing such songs. He sings of pain, a sense of loss, a longing for something denied to him. But there is also wonder, a sense of amazement at all the dreams he’s ever managed to fulfill.

Or maybe that’s just my head, making the song mean what I want it to mean. In either event, the music is slow and heartfelt until some kind of mid-verse epiphany sends its tempo flying. And all of a sudden, the drum beats and the hands clap and the darkened room bursts with men and women rising from the shadows to meet on the dance floor in an explosion of flailing hair and whirling bodies. There are children on shoulders and babies on backs and a hundred voices united in the chorus of the moustached man’s song, which seems to fill our veins with fire. Jerry has already slid away, his rant of a few moments before forgotten in the urgency of the moment. I recognize nobody around me but nevertheless see no strangers. As I decide to stay in Enysbourg, to spend the rest of my life with Caralys, to raise a family with her, to keep turning pages in this book I’ve just begun to write, the natives seem to recognize the difference in me. I am handed a baby, which I kiss to the sound of cheers. I hand it back and am handed another. Then another. The music grows louder, more insistent. A wisp of smoke drifts by. Clove, tobacco, hashish, or something else; it is there and then it is gone.

I blink and catch a glimpse of Caralys, cut off by the crowd. She is trying to get to me, her eyes wide, her face shining, her need urgent. She knows I have decided. She can tell. She is as radiant as I have ever seen her, and though jostled by the mob, she is determined to make her way to my side. She too has something to say, something that needs to be spoken, through shattered teeth and a mouth filled with blood.

During

8.

There is no sunlight. The skies are too sullied by the smoke of burning buildings to admit the existence of dawn. What arrives instead are gray and sickly shadows, over a moonscape so marked with craters and shattered rubble that in most places it’s hard to tell where the buildings stood in the first place. Every few seconds, the soot above us brightens, becomes as blinding as a parody of the light it’s usurped, and rocks the city with flame and thunder. Debris pelts everything below. A starving dog cowering in a hollow formed by two shattered walls bolts, seeking better haven in a honeycomb of fallen masonry fifty meters of sheer hell away. But even before it can round the first twisted corpse, a solid wall of shrapnel reduces the animal to a scarlet mist falling on torn flesh.

I witness its death from the site of my own. I am already dead. I still happen to be breathing, but that’s a pure accident. Location is all. The little girl who’d been racing along two paces ahead of me, mad with fear, forced to rip off her flaming clothes to reveal the bubbling black scar the chemical burns have made of her back, is now a corpse. She’s a pair of legs protruding from a mound of fallen brick. Her left foot still bears a shoe. Her right is pale, naked, moon-white perfect, unbloodied. I, who had been racing along right behind her, am not so fortunate. The same concussion wave that put her out of her misery sent me flying. Runaway stones have torn deep furrows in my legs, my belly, my face, my chest. I have one seeping gash across my abdomen and another across one cheek; both painful, but nothing next to the greater damage done by the cornice that landed on my right knee, splintering the bone and crushing my leg as close to flat as a leg can get without bursting free of its cradling flesh. The stone tumbled on as soon as it did its work, settling in a pile of similar rocks; it looks like any other, but I still think I can identify it out from over here, using the marks it left along the filthy ground.

I have landed in a carpet of broken glass a meter or so from what, for a standing person, would be a ragged waist-high remnant of wall. It is good fortune, I suppose; judging from the steady tattoo of shrapnel and rifle fire impacting against the other side, it’s that wall which for the moment spares me the fate of the little girl and the dog. Chance has also favored me by letting me land within sight of a irregular gap in that wall, affording me a view of what used to be the street but which is right now is just a narrow negotiable path between craters and mounds of smoking debris. My field of vision is not large, but it was enough to show me what happened to the dog. If I’m to survive this, it must also allow me to see rescue workers, refugees, even soldiers capable of dragging me to wherever the wounded are brought.

But so far there has no help to be seen. Most of the time even my fragmentary view is obscured by smoke of varying colors: white, which though steaming hot is also as thin and endurable, passing over me without permanent damage; black, which sickens me with its mingled flavors of burning rubber and bubbling flesh; and the caustic yellow, which burns my eyes and leaves me gagging with the need to void a stomach already long empty. I lick my lips, which are dry and cracked and pitted, and recognize both hunger and thirst in the way the world pales before me. It is the last detail. Everything I consumed yesterday, when Enysbourg was paradise, is gone; it, and everything I had for several days before. Suddenly, I’m starving to death.

9.

There is another great burst of sound and light, so close parts of me shake apart. I try to scream, but my throat is dry, my voice a mere wisp, my mouth a sewer sickening from the mingled tastes of blood and ash and things turned rotten inside me. I see a dark shape, a man, Jerry Martel in fact, move fast past the gap in the wall. I hear automatic fire and I hear his brief cry as he hits the dirt in a crunch of flesh and gravel. He is not quite dead at first, and though he does not know I am here, just out of sight, a collaborator in his helplessness, he cries out to me anyway: a bubbling, childish cry, aware that it’s about to be cut off but hoping in this instant that it reaches a listener willing to care. I can’t offer the compassion Jerry craves, because I hate him too much for bringing fresh dangers so close to the place where I already lie broken. I want him gone.

A second later, fate obliges me with another burst of automatic weapons fire. Brick chips fill the air like angry bees, digging more miniature craters; one big one strikes my ravaged knee and I spasm, grimacing as my bowels let loose, knowing it won’t matter because I released everything I had inside me long ago. I feel relief. He was my friend, but I’m safer with him gone.

10.

I smell more smoke. I taste mud. I hear taunts in languages I don’t recognize, cries and curses in the tongues spoken in Enysbourg. A wave of heat somewhere near me alerts me that a fire has broken out. I drag myself across ragged stones and broken glass closer to the gap in the wall, entertaining vainglorious ambitions of perhaps crawling through and making it untouched through the carnage to someplace where people can fix me. But the pain is too much, and I collapse, bleeding now from a dozen fresher wounds, having accomplished nothing but to provide myself a better view.

I see the elderly musician with the huge moustache stumble on by, his eyes closed, his face a sheen of blood, his arms dangling blistered and lifeless at his sides, each blackened and swollen to four times its natural size. I see a woman, half-mad, her mouth ajar in an unending silent scream, clutching a tightly wrapped but still ragged bundle in a flannel blanket, unwilling to notice that whatever it held is now just a glistening smear across her chest. I see a tall and robust and athletic man stumble on by, his eyes vacant, his expression insane, his jaw ripped free and dangling from his face by a braided ribbon of flesh. I see all that and I hear more explosions and I watch as some of the fleeing people fall either whole or in pieces and I listen as some are released by death and, more importantly, as others are not.

Something moving at insane speed whistles through the sky above, passing so near that its slipstream tugs at my skin. I almost imagine it pulling me off the ground, lifting me into the air, allowing me a brief moment of flight behind it before it strikes and obliterates its target. For a moment I wish it would; even that end would be better than a deathbed of shattered rock and slivered glass. Then comes the brightest burst of light and most deafening wave of thunder yet, and for a time I become blind and deaf, with everything around me reduced to a field of pure white.

11.

When the world comes back, not at all improved, it is easy to see the four young men in identical uniforms who huddle in a little alcove some twenty meters away. There is not much to them, these young men: They all carry rifles, they all wear heavy packs, they’re all little more than boys, and their baggy uniforms testify to a long time gone without decent food. When one turns my way, facing me and perhaps even seeing me, but not registering me as a living inhabitant of the corpse-strewn landscape, his eyes look sunken, haunted, unimaginably ancient. He is, I realize, as mad as the most pitiful among the wounded—a reasonable response to his environment, and one I would share if I could divest the damnable sanity that forces me to keep reacting to the horror. He turns back to his comrades and says something; then he looks over them, at something beyond my own limited field of vision, and his smile is enough to make me crave death all over again. His comrades look where he’s looking and smile the same way: all four of them showing their teeth.

The three additional soldiers picking their way through the rubble bear a woman between them. It is Caralys. Two stand to either side of her, holding her arms. A third stands behind her, holding a serrated knife to her throat with one hand and holding a tight grip on her hair with the other. That soldier keeps jabbing his knee into the small of her back to keep her going. He has to; she’s struggling with every ounce of strength available to her, pulling from side to side, digging her feet into the ground, cursing them to a thousand hells every time they jerk her off her feet and force her onward.

She is magnificent, my Caralys. She is stronger, more vibrant, than any one of them. In any fair fight, she would be the only one left standing. But she is held by three, and while she could find an opportunity to escape three, the soldiers from the alcove, who now rush to help their comrades, bring the total all the way up to seven. There is no hope with seven. I know this even as I drag myself toward her from the place where I lie broken. I know this even as she struggles to drive her tormentors away with furious kicks. But these boys are too experienced with such things. They take her by the ankles, lift her off the ground, and bear her squirming and struggling form across the ravaged pavement to a clear place in the rubble, where they pin her to the ground, each one taking a limb. They must struggle to keep her motionless. The soldier with the darkest eyes unslings his rifle, weighs it in his arms, and smashes its butt across her jaw. The bottom half of her face crumples like shattered pottery.

There is nothing I can do but continue to crawl toward her, toward them.

Caralys coughs out a bubble of fresh blood. Fragments of teeth, driven from her mouth, cling to what’s left of her chin. She shrieks and convulses and tries to kick. Her legs remain held. The same soldier who just smashed her face now sees that his job is not yet done. He raises his rifle above his head and drives the stock, hard, into her belly. She wheezes and chokes. She tries to curl into a ball of helpless misery, seeking escape within herself. But the soldiers won’t even permit that. Another blow, this one to her forehead, takes what little fight is left. Her eyes turn to blackened smears. Her nose blows pink bubbles which burst and dribble down her cheeks in rivulets. She murmurs an animal noise. The soldier responsible for making her manageable makes a joke in a language I don’t know, which can’t possibly be funny, but still makes the others laugh. They rip off her filthy dress and spread her legs farther apart. The leader steps away, props his rifle against a fragment of wall, and returns, dropping his pants. As he gives his swollen penis a lascivious little waggle, I observe something wrong with it, something I can see from a distance; it looks green, diseased, half-rotted. But he descends, forcing himself into her, cursing her with every thrust, his cruel animal grunts matched by her own bubbling exhalations, less gasps of pain or protests at her violation than the involuntary noises made as her diaphragm is compressed again and again and again. It doesn’t last long, but by the time he pulls out, shakes himself off, and pulls his pants back up, the glimpse I catch of her face is enough to confirm that she’s no longer here.

Caralys is alive, all right. I can see her labored breath. I can feel the outrage almost as much as she does. But she’s not in this place and time. Her mind has abandoned this particular battlefield for another, inside her head, which might not provide any comfort but nevertheless belongs only to her. What’s left in this killing ground doesn’t even seem to notice as one of the other soldiers releases his grip on her right arm, takes his position, and commences a fresh rape.

12.

There are no words sufficient for the hate I feel. I am a human being with a human being’s dimensions, but the hate is bigger than my capacity to contain it. It doesn’t just fill me. It replaces me. It becomes everything I am. I want to claw at them and snap at them and spew hatred at them and rip out their throats with my teeth. I want to leave them blackened corpses and I want to go back to wherever they came from and make rotting flesh of their own wives and mothers. I want to bathe in their blood. I want to die killing them. I want to scar the earth where they were born. I want to salt the farmland so nothing ever grows there again. If hatred alone lent strength, I would rend the world itself. But I cry out without a voice, and I crawl forward without quite managing to move, and I make some pathetic little sound or another, and it carries across the smoky distance between me and them and it accomplishes nothing but advise the enemy that I’m here.

In a single spasm of readiness, they all release Caralys, grab their weapons, scan the rubble-field for the source of the fresh sound. The one using her at the moment needs only an extra second to disengage, but he pulls free in such a panicked spasm that he tumbles backward, slamming his pantless buttocks into a puddle of something too colored by rainbows to qualify as water. The leader sees me. He rolls his eyes, pulls a serrated blade from its sheath at his hip, and covers the distance between us in three seconds.

The determined hatred I felt a heartbeat ago disappears. I know that he’s the end of me and that I can’t fight him and I pray that I can bargain with him instead, that I can barter Caralys for mercy or medical attention or even an easier death. I think all this, betraying her, and it makes me hate myself. That’s the worst, this moment of seeing myself plain, this illustration of the foul bargains I’d be willing to make in exchange for a few added seconds of life. It doesn’t matter that there aren’t any bargains. I shouldn’t have wanted any.

I grope for his knife as it descends but it just opens the palms of my hands and christens my face and chest with blood soon matched by that which flows when he guts me from crotch to ribcage. My colon spills out in thick ropes, steaming in the morning air. I feel cold. The agony tears at me. I can’t even hope for death. I want more than death. I want more than oblivion. I want erasure. I want a retroactive ending. I want to wipe out my whole life, starting from my conception. Nothing, not even the happy moments, is worth even a few seconds of this. It would be better if I’d never lived.

But I don’t die yet.

13.

I don’t die when he walks away, or when he and his fellow soldiers return to their fun with Caralys. I don’t die when they abandon her and leave in her place a broken thing that spends the next hours choking on its own blood. I don’t even die when the explosions start again, and the dust salts my wounds with little burning embers. I don’t die when the ground against my back shakes like a prehistoric beast about to tear itself apart with rage. I don’t even die when the rats come to me, to enjoy a fresh meal. I want to die, but maybe that release is more than I deserve. So I lie on my back beneath a cloudscape of smoke and ash, and I listen to Caralys choke, and I listen to the gunfire and I curse that sociopathic monster God and I do nothing, nothing, when the flies come to lay their eggs.

After

14.

I wake on a bed of freshly-mowed grass. The air is cool and refreshing, the sky as blue as a dream, the breeze a delicious mixture of scents ranging from sea salt to the sweatier perfume of passing horses. From the light, I know it can’t be too long after dawn, but I can tell I’m not the first one up. I can hear songbirds, the sounds of laughing children, barking dogs, music played at low volumes from little radios.

Unwilling to trust the sensations of peace, I resist getting up long enough to first grab a fistful of grass, luxuriating in the feel of the long, thin blades as they bunch up between my fingers. They’re miraculous. They’re alive. I’m alive.

I turn my head and see where I am: one of the city’s many small parks, a place lined with trees and decorated with orchid gardens. The buildings visible past the treeline are uncratered and intact. I’m intact. The other bodies I see, scattered here and there across the lawn, are not corpses, but sleepers, still snoring away after a long, lazy evening beneath the stars. There are many couples, even a few families with children, all peaceful, all unworried about predators either animal or human. Even the terror, the trauma, the soul-withering hate, the easy savagery that subsumes all powerless victims, all the emotional scars that had ripped me apart, have faded. And the only nearby smoke comes from a sandpit not far upwind, where a jolly bearded man in colorful suspenders has begun to cook himself an outdoor breakfast.

15.

I rise, unscarred and unbroken, clad in comfortable native clothing: baggy shorts, a vest, a jaunty feathered hat. I even have a wine bottle, three-quarters empty, and a pleasant taste in my mouth to go with it. I drink the rest and smile at the pleasant buzz. The thirst remains, but for something non-alcoholic. I need water. I itch from the stray blades of grass peppering my exposed calves and forearms. I contort my back, feeling the vertebrae pop. It feels good. I stretch to get my circulation going. I luxuriate in the tingle of the morning air. Across the meadow, a little girl points at me and smiles. She is the same little girl I saw crushed by masonry yesterday. It takes me a second to smile back and wave, a second spent wondering if she recognizes me, if she finds me an unpleasant reminder. If so, there is no way to tell from the way she bears herself. She betrays no trauma at all. Rather, she looks as blessed as any other creature of Enysbourg.

The inevitable comparison to Caralys assigns me my first mission for the day. I have to find her, hold her, confirm that she too has emerged unscathed from the madness of the day before. She must have, given the rules here, but the protective instincts of the human male still need to be respected. So I wander from the park, into the streets of a capital city just starting to bustle with life; past the gondolas taking lovers down the canals; past the merchants hawking vegetables swollen with flavor; past a juggler in a coat of carnival color who has put down his flaming batons and begun to toss delighted children instead. I see a hundred faces I know, all of whom nod with the greatest possible warmth upon seeing me, perhaps recognizing in my distracted expression the look of a foreigner who has just experienced his first taste of Enysbourg’s greatest miracle.

Nobody looks haunted. Nobody looks terrorized. Nobody looks like the survivors of madness. They have shaken off the firebombings that reduced them to screaming torches, the bayonets that jabbed through their hearts, the tiny rooms where they were tortured at inhuman length for information they did not have. They have shrugged away the hopelessness and the rampant disease and the mass graves where they were tossed beside their bullet-riddled neighbors while still breathing themselves. They remember it all, as I remember it all, but that was yesterday, not today, and this is Enysbourg, a land where it never happened, a land which will know nothing but joy until the end of everything comes again, ten days from now.

16.

On my way back to the hotel, I pass the inn where Caralys and I went dancing the night before the end of everything. The scents that waft through the open door are enough to make me swoon. I almost pass by, determined to find Caralys before worrying about my base animal needs, but then I hear deep braying laughter from inside, laughter I recognize as Jerry Martel’s. I should go inside. He has been in Enysbourg for years and may know the best ways to find loved ones after the end of everything. The hunger is a consideration, too. Stopping to eat now, before finding Caralys, might seem like a selfish act, but I won’t do either one of us any good unless I do something to keep up my strength. Guilt wars with the needs of an empty stomach. My mouth waters. Caralys will understand. I go inside.

The place is dim and nearly empty. The old man with the enormous moustache is on stage, playing something inconsequential. Jerry, who seems to be the only patron, is in a corner table waiting for me. He waves me over, asks me if I’m all right, urges me to sit down, and waits for me to tell him how it was.

My words halting, I tell him it doesn’t feel real anymore.

He claps me on the back. He says he’s proud of me. He says he wasn’t sure about me in the beginning. He says he had me figured for the kind of person who wouldn’t be able to handle it, but look at me now, refreshed, invigorated, ready to handle everything. He says I remind him of himself. He beams and expects me to take that as a compliment. I give him a weak nod. He punches me in the shoulder and says that it’s going to be fun having me around from now on: a new person, he says, to guide around the best of Enysbourg, who doesn’t yet know all the sights, the sounds, the tastes, the joys and adventures. There are parts of Enysbourg, both in and outside the capital, that even most of those who live here don’t know. He says it’s enough to fill lifetimes. He says that the other stuff, the nasty stuff, the stuff we endure as the price of admission, is just a reason to cherish everything else. He says that the whole country is a treasure trove of experience for people willing to take the leap, and he says I look like one of those people.

And of course, he says, punching my arm again, there’s Caralys: sweet, wanton Caralys, whom he has already seen taking her morning swim by the sea. Caralys, who will be so happy to see me again. He says I should remember what Caralys is like when she’s delighted. He says that now that I know I can handle it, I would have to be a fool to let her go. He chuckles, then says, tell you what, stay right here, I’ll go find her, I’m sure the two of you have a lot to talk about. And then he disappears, all before I have said anything at all.

On stage, the man with the enormous moustache starts another song, playing this time not the misshapen guitar-thing from two nights ago, but something else, a U-shaped device with two rows of strings forming a criss-cross between ends and base. Its music is clear and resonant, with a wobbly quality that only adds to its emotional impact. The song is a slow one: a relief to me, since the raucous energy of Enysbourg’s nights might be a bit much for me right now. I nod at the old man. He recognizes me. His grin broadens and his eyes slit with amusement. There’s no telling whether he has some special affection for me as a person, or just appreciates the arrival of any audience at all. Either way, his warmth is genuine. He is grateful to me for being here. But he does not stop playing just to greet me. The song continues. The lyrics, once again in a language unknown to me, are once again still easy to comprehend. Whatever the particulars, this song is impossible to mistake as anything but a tribute to being alive. When the song ends, I toss him a coin, and he tosses it back, not insulted, just not interested. He is interested in the music for music’s sake alone, in celebration, because celebration is the whole point.

17.

I think hard on the strange cycle of life in Enysbourg, dictated by law, respected as a philosophical principle, and rendered possible by all the technological genius the modern world can provide: this endless cycle which always follows nine days of sheer exuberance with one day of sheer Hell on Earth.

It would be so much easier if exposure to that Tenth Day were not the price of admission.

It would be so much better if we could be permitted to sail in on The Day After and sail out on The Night Before, enjoying those nine days of sweet abandon without any obligation to endure the unmitigated savagery of the tenth. The weekly exodus wouldn’t be a tide of refugees; it would be a simple fact of life. If such a choice were possible, I would make it. Of course, I would also have to make Caralys come with me each time, for even if she was determined to remain behind and support her nation’s principles, I could never feel at peace standing on the deck of some distant ship, watching Enysbourg’s beautiful shoreline erupt in smoke and fire, aware that I was safe but knowing that she was somewhere in that no man’s land being brutalized and killed. And there is no way she would ever come with me to such a weekly safe haven, when her land was a smoking ruin behind her. She would know the destruction temporary the same way I know it temporary, but she would regard her escape from the regular interval of terror an act of unforgivable treason against her home. It is as she said that time I almost lost her by proposing that she come back home with me, a suggestion I made not because home is such a great place, but because home would be easier. She said that leaving would be cowardice. She said that leaving would be betrayal. She said that leaving would be the end of her. And she said that the same went for any other attempt to circumvent the way things were here, including my own, which is why she’d despise me forever if I tried. The Tenth Day, she said, is the whole point of Enysbourg. It’s the main reason the ships come and go only on the Day After. Nobody, not the natives like Caralys, and not the visitors like myself, is allowed their time in paradise unless we also pay the price. The question that faces everybody, on that day after, is the same question that faces me now: whether life in Enysbourg is worth it.

I think of all the countries, my own included, that never know the magic Enysbourg enjoys nine days out of ten, that have become not societies but efficient machines, where life is all about keeping that machine in motion. Those nations know peace, and they know prosperity, but do they know life the way Enysbourg knows life, nine days out of every ten? I come from such a place and I suffocated in such a place—maybe because I was too much a part of the machine to recognize the consolations available to me, maybe because they weren’t available to be found. Either way I know that I’ve never been happy, not before I came here. Here I found my love of being alive—but only nine days out of ten.

And is that Tenth Day really too much to endure, anyway? I think about all the countries that know that Tenth Day, not at safe predictable intervals, but for long stretches lasting months or years or centuries. I think about all the countries that have never known anything else. I think about all the terrorized generations who have lived and died and turned to bones with nothing but that Tenth Day to color their days and nights. For all those people, millions of them, Enysbourg, with that Tenth Day always lurking in recent memory and always building in the near future, is still a paradise beyond comprehension. Bring all those people here and they’d find this choice easy, almost laughable. They’d leap at the chance, knowing that their lives would only be better, most of the time.

It’s only the comfortable, the complacent, the spoiled, who would even find the question an issue for internal debate. The rest would despise me for showing such reluctance to stay, and they’d be right. I’ve seen enough, and experienced enough, to know that they’d be right. But I don’t know if I have what it takes to be right with them. I might prefer to be wrong and afraid and suffering their disdain at a safe distance, in a place untouched by times like Enysbourg’s Tenth Day.

18.

I remember a certain moment, when we had been together for three days. Caralys had led me to a gorge, a few hours from the capital, a place she called a secret, and which actually seemed to be, as there were no legions of camera-toting tourists climbing up and down the few safe routes to the sparkling river below. The way down was not a well-worn path, carved by the weight of human feet. It was a series of compromises with what otherwise would have been a straight vertical drop—places where it became possible to slide down dirt grades, or descend from one rock ledge to another. Much of the way down was overgrown, with plants so thick that only her unerring sense of direction kept us descending on the correct route, and not via a sudden, fatal, bone-shattering plunge from a height. She moved through it all with a grace unlike I had ever seen, and also with an urgency I could not understand, but which was nevertheless intense enough to keep me from complaining through my hoarse breath and aching bones. Every once in a while she turned, to smile and call me her adventurer. And every time she did, the special flavor she gave the word was enough to keep me going, determined to rush anyplace she wanted me to follow.

The grade grew gentler the closer we came to the river at the gorge bottom. It became a mild grade, dim beneath thick forest canopy, surrounded on all sides by the rustling of a thousand leaves and the chittering of a thousand birds. Once the water itself grew audible, there was nothing but a wall of sound all around us. She picked up speed and began to run, tearing off her clothes as she went. I ran after her, gasping, almost breaking my neck a dozen times as I tripped over this root, that half-buried rock. By the time I emerged in daylight at a waterfront of multicolored polished stones, she was well ahead of me. I was hopping on one leg to remove my boots and pants and she was already naked and up to her waist in mid-river, her perfect skin shiny from wet and glowing from the sun.

She had led us directly to a spot just below one of the grandest waterfalls I had ever seen with my own eyes. It was an unbroken wall of rushing silver, descending from a flat rock ledge some fifty meters above us. The grotto at its base was bowl-shaped and just wide enough to collect the upriver rapids in a pool of relative calm. The water was so cold that I emitted an involuntary yelp, but Caralys just laughed at me, enjoying my reaction. I dove in, feeling the temperature shock in every pore, then stood up, dripping, exuberant, wanting nothing in this moment but to be with her.

She caught my wrist before I could touch her. “No.”

I stopped, confused. No? Why no? Wasn’t this what she wanted, in this perfect place she’d found for us?

She released my arm and headed toward the wall of water, splashing through the river as it grew deeper around her, swallowing first her hips and then her breasts and then her shoulders, finally requiring her to swim. Her urgency was almost frightening now. I thought of how easy it might be to drown here, for someone who allowed herself to get caught beneath that raging wall of water, and I said, “Hey,” rushing after her, not enjoying the cold quite as much anymore. I don’t know what fed that river, but it was numbing enough to be glacial runoff. Thoughts of hypothermia struck for the first time, and I felt the first stab of actual fear just as she disappeared beneath the wall.

The moment I passed through, with sheets of freezing water assaulting my head and shoulders, was one of the loudest I’d ever known. It was a roaring, rumbling, bubbling cacophony, so intense that it drowned out all the other sounds that filled this place. The birds, the wind, the softer bubbling of the water downstream, they were wiped out, eliminated by this one all-encompassing noise. I almost turned around. But I kept going, right through the wall.

On the other side, I found air and a dark dank place. Caralys had pulled herself onto a mossy ledge just above the waterline, set against a great stone wall. There she sat with her back to the wall, hugging her legs, her knees tucked tight beneath her chin. Her eyes were white circles reflecting the light passing through the water now behind me. I waded toward her, found an empty spot on the ledge beside her, and pulled myself up, too. The stone, I found without much surprise, was like ice, not a place I wanted to stay for long. But I joined her in contemplating the daylight as it prismed through a portal of plummeting water. It seemed brilliant out there: a lot like another world, seen through an enchanted gateway.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

She said nothing, so I turned to see if she was all right. She was still staring at the water. She was in shadow, and a trick of the light had shrouded most of her profile in darkness, reducing her outline to a dimly lit crescent. The droplets balancing on the tip of her nose were like little glistening pearls. I saw, too, that she was trembling, though at the time I attributed that to the cold alone. She said, “Listen.”

I listened. And heard only the sound of the waterfall, less deafening now that we’d passed some distance beyond it. And something else: her teeth, chattering.

She said, “The silence.”

It took me a second to realize that this was the miracle she’d brought me here to witness: the way the waterfall, in all its harmless fury, now insulated us from all the sounds we had been hearing all morning. It was as if none of what we’d heard out there, all the time it had taken us to hike to this place she knew so well, now existed at all. None of it was there. None of it could touch us.

It seemed important to her.

At that moment, I could not understand why.

19.

I am in the little restaurant, thinking all this, when a soft voice calls my name. I look up, and of course it’s Caralys: sweet, beautiful Caralys, who has found me in the place where we prefer to think we saw each other last. She is, of course, unmarked and unwounded, all the insults inflicted by the soldiers either healed or wiped away like bad rumors. She looks exactly like she did the night before last, complete with fringed blouse and patchy dress and two curling strands of hair that meet in the center of her forehead. If there is any difference in her, it lies in what I now recognize was there all along: the storm clouds of memory roiling behind her piercing black eyes. She’s not insane, or hard, the way she should be after enduring what she’s endured; Enysbourg always wipes away all scars, physical and psychological both. But it does not wipe away the knowledge. And her smile, always so guileless in its radiance, now seems to hold a dark challenge. I can see that she has always held me and my naïveté in the deepest possible contempt. She couldn’t have felt any other way, in the presence of any man who had never known the Tenth Day. I was an infant by Enysbourg’s standards, a man who could not understand her or the forces that shaped her. I must have seemed bland, dull, and in my own comfortable way, even retarded.

I find to my surprise that I feel contempt as well. Part of me is indignant at her effrontery at looking down at me. After all, she has had other tourists. She has undertaken other Projects with other men, from other places, trying time and time again to make outsiders into natives of her perverse little theme park to savagery. What does she expect from me, in the end? Who am I to her? If I leave, won’t she just find another tourist to play with for ten days? And why should I stay, when I should just see her as the easy vacation tramp, always eager to go with the first man who comes off the boat?

It’s hard not to be repulsed by her.

But that hate pales beside the awareness that in all my days only she has made me feel alive.

And her own contempt, great as it is, seems drowned by her love, shining at me with such intensity that for a moment I almost forget the fresh secrets now filling the space between us. I stand and fall into her arms. We close our eyes and taste each other’s tears. She whispers, “It is all right, Robert. I understand. It is all right. I want you to stay, but won’t hate you if you go.”

She is lying, of course. She will despise me even more if I go. She will know for certain that Enysbourg has taught me nothing. But her love will be just as sincere if I stay.

It’s the entire reason she seeks out tourists. She loathes our naïveté. But it’s also the one thing she can’t provide for herself.

20.

Jerry Martel stands nearby, beaming and self-congratulatory. Dee has joined him, approving, cooing, maternal. Maybe they hope we’ll pay attention to them again. Or maybe we’re just a new flavor for them, a novelty for the expatriates living in Enysbourg.

Either way, I ignore them and pull Caralys close, taking in the scent of her, the sheer absolute ideal of her, laughing and weeping and unable to figure out which is which. She makes sounds that could be either, murmuring words that could be balms for my pain or laments for her own. She tells me again that it’s going to be all right, and I don’t know whether she’s telling the truth. I don’t even know whether she’s all that sure herself. I just know that, if I take that trip home, I will lose everything she gave me, and be left with nothing but the gray dullness of my everyday life. And if I stay, deciding to pay the price of that Tenth Day in exchange for the illusion of Eden, we’ll never be able to acknowledge the Tenth Day on the other days when everything seems to be all right. We won’t mention the times spent suffocating beneath rubble, or spurting blood from severed limbs, or choking out our lungs from poison gas. I will never know how many hells she’s known, and how many times she’s cried out for merciful death. I’ll never be able to ask if what I witnessed yesterday was typical, worse than average, or even an unusually good day, considering. She’ll never ask about any of the horrors that happen to me. These are not things discussed during peacetime in Enysbourg. We won’t even talk about them if I stay, and if we remain in love, and if we marry and have children, and if they grow up bright and beautiful and filled with wonder; and if every ten days we find ourselves obliged to watch them ground beneath tank-treads, or worse. In Enysbourg such things are not the stuff of words. In Enysbourg a certain silence is just the price of being alive.

And a small price it is, in light of how blessed those who live here have always been.

Just about all Caralys can do, as the two of us begin to sway together in a sweet slow dance, is continue to murmur reassurances. Just about all I can do is rest my head against her chest, and close my eyes to the sound of her beating heart. Just about all we can do together is stay in this moment, putting off the next one as long as possible, and try not to remember the dogs, the hateful snarling dogs, caged for now but always thirsty for a fresh taste of blood.

• • • •

“The mere absence of war is not peace.”

—President John F. Kennedy

For J.H.

©2003 by Adam-Troy Castro. Originally published in Imaginings: An Anthology of Long Short Fiction, edited by Keith R. A. DeCandido. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam-Troy Castro made his first non-fiction sale to Spy magazine in 1987. His twenty-six books to date include four Spider-Man novels, three novels about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, and six middle-grade novels about the dimension-spanning adventures of young Gustav Gloom. The final installment in the series, Gustav Gloom And The Castle of Fear, came out in 2016. Adam’s darker short fiction for grownups is highlighted by his most recent collection, Her Husband’s Hands And Other Stories. Adam’s works have won the Philip K. Dick Award and the Seiun (Japan), and have been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stokers, two Hugos, and, internationally, the Ignotus (Spain), the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and the Kurd-Laßwitz Preis (Germany). His latest projects are a mainstream thriller currently making the publishing rounds, and an audio collection he expects to announce early in 2019. He lives in Florida.

Grandma Novak’s Famous Nut Roll

Shaenon K. Garrity | 2670 words

From: Lanie Novak
To: Aunt Katarina, Aunt Anka, Aunt Svetlana, Kat, Mary Kate, Annie, Lana, Katelin, Katelynn, Anna
Subject: Grandma’s Recipes

Hello, family! As everyone who follows my sister on Facebook knows (and who isn’t reading Kat’s posts? Twenty lashes with a wet noodle, and you bet it’ll be Grandma’s kluski!), last weekend she and I visited Grandma Novak for . . . baking lessons!

Though Grandma’s strong as she ever was (just try to tell her otherwise) she IS getting on in years. Kat and I agreed we ought to get her recipes down in writing while we can. Everyone in the family knows one or two of the “classics,” of course, but can any of us say we’ve mastered them all? I’ve always just made the sugar cutout cookies (as yinz know from my holiday cookie platters, I am the master!!!), and until last weekend I’d never even tried to make Grandma’s legendary nut roll.

Kat’s youngest, Anna, was nice enough to stay over at my place and feed the cats while I was gone. Thanks a bunch, Anna! I figured you could use a little quiet while resting up from your doctor visit.

Kat took pictures and has the whole gallery up on her Facebook (private to family only, but you don’t need me to tell you that!). It’s my job to send you the recipes themselves, transcribed by yours truly from Grandma’s lips.

Kolachky

Grandma learned this recipe from her mother, who brought it over from the old country. She doesn’t make most of the really old recipes because you can’t get the ingredients over here. I asked her to share a few anyway, but she just gave us that snaggletoothed grin. You know Grandma!

She did say the older version of this recipe didn’t use margarine. Her mother switched it up at some point, probably during the Depression. You can sub in butter or lard and make just as nice a pastry. Sometimes Grandma does that after a hunt if she has more suet than she can fit in the deep freeze. (I knew her kolachky tasted a little richer last Christmas!)

Of course the jelly is the same as they used in the old country. I like it best when Grandma dusts her kolachky with a little powdered sugar. It’s so pretty over the dark plum-red jelly, isn’t it? Like something out of a fairy tale.

Kat’s planning to make these for Anna’s high school graduation in a few months. We’ll need to make the jelly too, Kat!

½ cup sour cream
1 pound oleo
5 cups flour
Granulated sugar
Jelly

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Mix first three ingredients. Roll dough in sugar. Roll out dough approximately ¼ inch thick. Cut into small squares. Place jelly in center of each square. Fold into crescent shapes. Bake for 15 minutes.

Russian Tea Cookies

It isn’t a Novak wedding without a tray of these on the dessert table, each one handmade with love!! My mother used to be an expert at the Russian Teas. I’ll never forget her at my wedding reception at the Elks, standing behind a card table piled with cookies she and Grandma had stayed up all night rolling in sugar. Mike’s family thought she was with the catering staff! (Remember, Kat?)

I suspect even then my mother knew the marriage was a bad idea, but she never showed her disapproval, not even after Mike was gone. She just brought me boxes of Kleenex and foil-wrapped packages of Grandma’s stuffed cabbage.

That was Mom for you. Sometimes you wondered how a tough old bird like Grandma Novak raised someone as sweet and gentle as my mother. Of course Grandma was fiercely protective of her, even above her other daughters. I feel the same way about dear Kat, who takes after Mom in so many ways, and Kat’s Anna.

The variant version isn’t for parties, of course! I’ve never used it because I always worry about getting rid of the leftovers. The older ladies in the family may remember that ugly business when my father tried to walk out on Mom, Kat, and me. Grandma used this very recipe to bring him back, but we didn’t burn the leftovers like we were supposed to and we had trouble for weeks. I’m sure Aunt Anka and Cousin Annie would rather not talk about it.

And that’s why I don’t make a habit of bringing out this recipe. NOT because I’m too lazy to make proper Russian Teas, Mary Kate! I know exactly what you’re thinking!

1 cup butter
½ cup confectioner’s sugar
2 ¼ cups flour
½ tsp. salt
1 tsp. vanilla
¾ cup chopped nuts

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Toss ¼ tsp. salt over your shoulder. Mix all other ingredients. Form one-inch balls in hands. Bake 14-17 minutes. While still hot, roll in powdered sugar. Roll again when cooled. Leave two cookies on a back doorstep or windowsill. If they’re gone the next morning, your luck will hold.

These cookies make a good gift before the hunt. Leave a few at the bank of any river you might cross, and a few at any gate you need to enter. It takes a little planning but it’s worth it!!!

VARIATION: Use ¼ tsp. salt and do not throw any over your shoulder. While cookies are still warm, crush one under your heel. Eat another cookie while picturing your desire. You will have a strong scent of your quarry and companions for the hunt. Leave the rest of the cookies on your back doorstep. If any are left the next morning, burn them (in the fireplace or an open fire, NOT in the oven!) at once.

German Tarts (Tassies)

I’m not a big fan of nuts in desserts (except for Grandma’s nut roll, but that’s something special!). I just don’t see what the big deal is. Even so, they’re useful in many of the old recipes. Grandma likes to use hazelnuts in her tassies, but she says almost any kind of nut will work.

Kat loves nuts. You could say she’s “nutty” for them!! She got chatty while mixing the filling and let slip that she miiiiight be looking for some special Grandma advice on top of the cooking lessons.

Grandma’s memory is a little scattered lately, but she remembered that Kat’s never been out on a hunt. Oh, did Grandma used to scold me for going out on my own, way back when! Hunt with a sister, she’d tell me, so you leave two footprints like an ordinary person. Well, this isn’t the old country and we have sidewalks anyway, but try telling Grandma anything!

Where was I?

Oh! So it turned out Grandma knew all about Anna’s trouble. She said Anna came to her about it. Good work, Anna, that was the right thing to do! Grandma was happy to help, of course. Especially when she found out it was the AP math teacher at North Hills. You can’t leave someone like that around kiddies, she said.

Grandma thought Anna ought to take care of it herself, but Kat put her foot down there. Like you haven’t been through enough already, sweetie! When Kat and I promised we’d go out together as sisters, Grandma said it was all right. She got her old stone mortar and pestle down from its place on top of the fridge and showed Kat how to crush nuts very, very fine.

1 cup flour
3 ounces cream cheese
1 stick oleo
1 cup chopped nuts
1 tsp. vanilla
¾ cup brown sugar
1 tbl. softened margarine
1 egg, beaten

Mix flour, cream cheese, and oleo. Refrigerate for at least one hour. Meanwhile, mix remaining ingredients to create nut filling.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Press chilled dough into mini-muffin tins, then add filling. Spit twice into each tart reserved for special use and mark with a deep thumbprint (don’t want to mix them up!). Bake tassies for fifteen minutes.

Thumbprint Cookies

This is one of the pretty cookies I always admired but never bothered to make myself. Even last weekend, with Grandma helping me every step of the way, I had trouble mixing them right. It’s such a trick to go from a hard beating to those quick, delicate strokes near the end. But Kat took to it like a duck to water! She got all Mom’s cooking genes, I don’t mind telling you!!

Even Kat had to use the KitchenAid to mix up her dough. Grandma does it ALL by hand. At her age! She said it keeps her arms strong. A woman needs one arm to be as strong as a man’s two, she said. That way she can make do with one and leave the other at home to guard her heart. She kept switching the bowl from arm to arm, beating the dough just as hard with her left as her right.

It reminded me of a few years ago, when Grandma broke her arm after one of her nights out. She had to have three pins put in, remember? Didn’t slow her down one bit, and after a couple of weeks the pins started itching her and she yanked them out herself. She brought them to the doctor in her big suede purse. Everyone who thought the injury would put an end to Grandma’s hunts sure had egg on their face! (You know I’m just teasing you, Mary Kate.) What I’m saying is, Grandma’s a model for us all. This is what the kids Anna’s age call “squad goals”!!!

1 cup butter
½ cup brown sugar
2 eggs, divided
1 tsp. vanilla
2 cups sifted flour
½ tsp. salt
1-1/2 cups nuts
Jelly

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Cream butter and sugar until fluffy. Add egg yolks and vanilla. Beat well. Add sifted flour and salt. Mix well. Roll into one-inch balls.

Lightly beat egg whites. Dip balls into egg whites, then roll in nuts. Place onto ungreased cookie sheet, about one inch apart. Bake five minutes. Quickly remove from oven and imprint thumb lightly. Return to oven and bake an additional eight minutes.

Cool, then fill indentations with jelly. After the cookies have been eaten, you can always find the one who ate them by biting your thumb.

Cutout Sugar Cookies

My favorite! As much as I enjoyed making all these recipes with Kat and Grandma, there’s no replacing the cutouts as my go-to baking specialty. (They’re crispy, not burned! Right, Anna?) They’re so easy, and you can do so many things with them. All it takes is a little creativity.

½ cup butter
1 cup sugar
1 egg
½ tsp. vanilla
½ tsp. salt
2 tsp. baking powder
2 cups flour

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. If the cookies are for a certain person, burn a slip of paper with that person’s name in the heated oven.

Cream butter and sugar. Blend in eggs and vanilla. In a separate bowl, sift together flour, salt, and baking powder. Blend dry ingredients into wet ingredients. Whisper a name over the bowl. Form dough into several balls to work with.

Roll dough to about ¼ inch thickness. Make cookies with favorite cookie-cutter shapes. (HINT: dip cutter in flour to keep it from sticking.) If making cookie people, use cloves to pierce the part of the body you wish to affect. Or remove parts with a butter knife. (HINT: pulling off the legs will cause lameness during the hunt.) If the cookies represent you, alter as desired. (HINT: slice down the middle, each side equally strong. Push a cinnamon heart into the side that will stay at home).

Other cookie shapes have other uses.

Bake on greased cookie sheet for eight to ten minutes. Cool on sheet for a few minutes, then remove. When cool, ice decoratively. Cookies will be especially effective with dabs of Grandma’s jelly.

Grandma’s Famous Nut Roll

This isn’t really hard, but it takes time and experience before you get the knack of it. (This is where I bow out and have a glass of wine while Grandma and Kat take over!) The nuts need to be ground very fine, and you almost can’t have too much filling.

This recipe makes 8 good-sized nut rolls. As we all know, Grandma loves to bake them in big batches and freeze for later. Her deep freeze is always packed with nut rolls and stuffed cabbage, unless she’s cleared out room for a hunt. And nothing preps you for the hunt better than one of these rolls, let me tell you! I still remember how that wholesome sweetness sustains you after you leave your heart at home.

I made the mistake of telling Grandma I was a little past my prime for hunting. Did she ever laugh at me! There she is, at her age, still going out with her children and grandchildren and even great-grandchildren, and from what I hear they can barely keep up with her.

For this hunt, though, Grandma is staying home. Before we left, she took down two of her good copper pots, the ones Mary Kate got her for Christmas the one year, and put them on the stove. Save me the teeth and the ears, she told us, and gave us that snaggletoothed grin.

She knows I used to forget, and then she’d run out of jelly.

For the Dough

5 cups and ½ tsp. flour
½ lb. softened butter
½ tsp. salt
4 tbl. and ½ tsp. sugar
1 cup warm whole milk
3 eggs
1/3 of a 2 oz. cake yeast (or 2 tsp. dry)
¼ cup warm water
additional flour as needed
suet (Crisco if not a hunting batch)

For the Nut Paste

4-5 lbs. walnuts ground very fine
½ lb. butter
6 egg whites (save yolks)
1 tsp. lemon juice
3 cups sugar
1 tsp. salt
2 tsp. vanilla
some milk as needed

Mix yeast and warm water in a cup. Use your fingers to make sure all the yeast is dissolved. Then mix ½ tsp. flour and ½ tsp. sugar into the yeast mixture and let stand for several minutes until thick and bubbly.

In a large bowl, mix flour, sugar and salt. Cut in softened butter until crumbly. In a separate bowl, beat eggs into milk. Add the liquid to the flour mixture and mix with a fork. Add the yeast mixture. Stir together until moist and sticky. Can you stir with one hand as well as the other? Add flour as needed, up to another cup, until dough is “just right” (NOT helpful to us amateur cooks, Grandma!). Work dough until elastic.

Rub suet inside a bowl. Place dough in bowl and rub suet all over dough as well. Cover and refrigerate overnight.

Dream of the smell of that suet, well-aged from the previous hunt.

To make nut paste, melt butter until “red” (Grandma’s words—I think she means hot but not burned). Mix all other ingredients in a bowl. Add melted butter. Add milk to moisten if needed.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

While waiting, make the other preparations for the hunt: take off your jewelry, put on your red cloak, open your eyes wide.

Using a knife, cut dough into eight equal pieces. On a surface covered in flour and powdered sugar, roll out one section at a time into a sheet, making the dough as thin as possible. (Important!) Spread ample filling on dough. Roll the smaller edge into the larger, forming a roll, and place seam-side down on cookie sheet. Brush with egg yolk. Cook 2-4 rolls at a time for 30 minutes each. Brush baked roll with melted butter to keep moist.

Cool—wrap with plastic wrap and foil—easily frozen.

(P.S. to Anna: Grandma invited you special to the next baking session.)

Share a roll with your hunting partner. Split in two. Leave your heart at home.

©2018 by Shaenon K. Garrity.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Shaenon K. Garrity is a cartoonist best known for the webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse. Her prose fiction has appeared in publications including Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Escape Pod, Drabblecast, and the Unidentified Funny Objects anthologies. She lives in Berkeley with a cat, a man and a boy.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

The Counsellor Crow

Karen Lord | 1970 words

Covering Note

 Dear Lord Chancellor,

When Cole Franklin, Chief Counsellor of the Royal Court of Ildcrest, decided to resign, he did so by putting on his black boots, black trousers, black tunic, and black ceremonial robes, and walking out into the black night. He walked up to Ashbridge to wait on the tracks for the passing of the midnight freight train. The spot he chose was one hundred feet out from the western bank of the gorge and two hundred feet up from the River Ash. The driver, who knew Ildcrest as thoroughfare and not destination, probably never knew what he hit. It was an inauspicious way for a man of peace to exit this world. Some uncharitable folk have speculated that he jumped before the train arrived, an even more inauspicious end.

For Iwan Brandis, my fellow archivist and civil servant, any end was inauspicious. Cole Franklin was his mentor and friend.

Thus it was with mixed feelings that he took possession of a package from Intercontinental Post four weeks after the incident. It had Franklin’s bold but challenging scribble on the label, something which might have contributed to the lateness of its arrival. Inside the package was a journal. Brandis wasted more precious weeks struggling with feelings of propriety before he read it and realised that it was not, in fact, a personal account, but the careful report of a scientific observer. At last he employed speed, recognising the seriousness of the matter, and composed a presentation for the next meeting of the Zoological Society, a lecture which created such controversy and debate that it was immediately adapted for publication in the Annals of the Zoological Society. Given the nature of the contents, copies have been forwarded to the Journal of the Museum of the History of Warfare, Diplomacy and Heraldry, and the Gazette of the United Councils of the Commonwealth.

Urged by Brandis, I send this additional copy to you, my Lord Chancellor, in every expectation that you will know the appropriate action to take.

As for myself, I have an appointment to see a man about a falcon.

I have the honour to remain, sir,

Your obedient servant,

Linsey Cumberbatch, Court Archivist.

The Counsellor Crow of Ildcrest (Corvus ildcrestensis sapiens)

Description

The Counsellor Crow is a large bird, ranging in height from twenty to twenty-five inches and possessing a wingspan of forty to fifty inches. Some specimens have exceeded this average, inspiring tales of remote, cliff-dwelling birds with five-foot wingspans. The plumage is uniformly black and glossy, but occasional mutations can produce patches of dark brown at the legs and head. Unlike the other corvids of the region, the eyes of the Counsellor Crow show a bright yellow iris. However, due to cross-breeding with Corvus valensis, the Scholar’s Crow (a common pet in neighbouring Ildervale), rare instances of black-eyed variants have also been encountered. Conclusive identification can only be achieved at close range when the distinctive curvature of the lower portion of the beak becomes evident.

History

Crows and ravens are a common feature on the heraldic devices of Ilderia, the ancient kingdom from which the modern-day counterparts Ildcrest, Ildervale, and the failed state New Ilderia (formerly Ilderland) are derived. The very name of the Counsellor Crow originates from the large urban colony which has inhabited Ildcrest’s Halls of Parliament for over three hundred years, giving rise to a number of superstitions and traditions. It is said that they bring luck to the deliberations of the Halls, and that the ceremonial dress of the Counsellors of Parliament is based on their black plumage. It is also said that Ildcrest shall endure for as long as the crows remain at Parliament. The sayings of country folk betray a more sinister side to these birds. Disobedient children are told that unless they mend their ways, the crows will come to pluck out their eyes. A trio of Counsellor Crows sitting on a church spire is said to foretell a death in the village.

This duality in nature likely stems from the former role of the Counsellor Crow. Ilderians of prehistoric times were wont to place their dead on ceremonial platforms to be consumed by the crows and the elements. Only priests or royalty were granted the permanence of a cairn. By the Iron Age, the practice of cremation had become the norm; however, those who fell in battle were treated in the same manner as in days of yore: their bodies reverentially stripped of weapons and gear and arrayed in close-set rows for the crows to feast. The erstwhile battlefield became for a while sacred, with no one allowed to set foot on the newly-hallowed ground, and this separation was enforced by both sides of the conflict. Modern warfare, with its small-group tactics and fast-moving, hard-carapaced technology, eventually rendered this tradition obsolete. As a result, the crow population began to decline in the rural areas, and urban crows adapted to a diet of butcher’s scraps and small animals. There were occasional rumours of attacks on lambs or small children, but if they did occur, they were isolated incidents that were not sufficient to turn Ildcristans against their favoured mascot.

The turning point in the evolution of the Counsellor Crow took place not in Ildcrest, but in neighbouring Ilderland, where a new Prince and a resurgent nobility developed a strongly nationalistic and anti-modernist ideology that called for a return to old values and old ways. Modern technology was banned, foreigners were ousted, and the nobility tried a motley assortment of centuries-old garments, weaponry, and rituals in an attempt to replace a Golden Age that never was with a New Age of their own devising. Naturally, with all the permutations and combinations of available customs, there were disputes, rebellions, and then civil war. The sacred battlefields of Ilderia returned, and the Counsellor Crows fed and grew fat.

Recent Developments

In spite of its geographical proximity, Ildcrest has always remained politically moderate, if somewhat slow to act during the greatest excesses of the New Ilderian regime. Some ascribe this hesitancy to the fact that Ildcrest’s capital was the original seat of ancient Ilderia, and any interference in neighbouring conflicts might have been construed as a bid to seize power. When New Ilderia finally collapsed on its own, Ildcrest stepped in to assume a caretaker role which was largely confined to the repatriation of refugees and the rebuilding of the principality’s shattered system of public services. At no time did the Ildcristan Court show sympathy for the radical policies that had torn New Ilderia apart.

That changed about a decade ago with a relatively innocuous step: the passing of the Act to Restore Honour to Combat, which limited the use of technology and long-range weaponry in warfare. A year later, the Annual Ilderian Games, long on hiatus due to the unrest in the region, were revived. They ran for three years before the Royal Court of Ildcrest made the remarkable proposal to introduce armed contests with edged weapons, both single combat and melee. The Ildervale government reacted first with disbelief, then with dismay, and finally with severe displeasure. A number of diplomatic and not-so-diplomatic exchanges ensued, some disagreements with respect to trade and access to seaports added fuel to the fire, and the result was the initial skirmishes of what is now being called the Second Ilderian War.

Thus far, it has resulted in disruption of the rail service through Ildcrest and the closing of the main port of Ildervale. Ildervale’s military strategists, too long accustomed to having a strong ally and high mountains on their inland border, are finding their naval expertise to be of little help in this war. Eyewitness reports from refugees indicate that once more carrion feasts are being laid out on battlefields for the Counsellor Crows.

My zoological colleagues may be forgiven for wondering at this point whether I am outlining a brief for the Foreign Affairs Club. I ask them to bear with me a moment longer.

The strategy of mimicry, where a predator entices prey by way of a harmless or attractive disguise, is usually achieved by fooling the senses in some way: the floral patterning on the back of the Orchid Spider, the soothing pseudo-pheromones from the Carnivorous Tube Rose, or the repertoire of counterfeit mating calls employed by the Giant Western Shrike. The case of the Counsellor Crow may be the first recorded instance of a predator that mimics not the voice, nor the appearance, nor the scent of its prey, but their thoughts.

The intelligence of the Counsellor Crow has been a matter of debate for some time. The vocabulary of the Scholar’s Crow is well known, and Corvus nauticus, the Sea Crow, is famed for its tool-making abilities, but the Counsellor Crow, unlike its gregarious and semi-domesticated cousins, has provided few opportunities for deeper study. Cole Franklin, Chief Counsellor of Ildcrest, undertook to correct this oversight. By examining the content and mood of Parliamentary debates and the timing and degree of Counsellor Crow infestations, he was able to infer that certain decisions taken within the Halls were radically, even bizarrely different from the result predicted at high-level discussions which had taken place in other locations—but only for legislation which in some way touched on death, warfare, the disposal of animal carcasses, and so on. From this analysis, details of which are available in an auxiliary paper to this Note, he came to the conclusion that the Counsellor Crow has evolved from predator to parasite, and its host is an entire country.

In one respect, he underestimated his enemy. His field was crowd psychology, and he expected the crows, possessing as they do their own highly sophisticated social structures, to be particularly gifted at manipulating the herd mentality of humans. He did not consider that predator and parasite are not mutually exclusive roles, and he forgot their unique talent for making the surreal seem normal and the impossible practical.

They could, for example, convince a man that he could fly.

The final pages of Franklin’s journal contain a rambling discourse on the prevailing winds, the funnelling effect of a narrow gorge, and the probability that a human body, boosted by the velocity of, say, a passing freight train and the lift of a voluminous ceremonial robe, could coast safely down to the riverbank.

This may prove to some that Chief Counsellor Franklin was not a reliable observer, but a tragic figure in the grip of progressive psychosis. Before such a conclusion can be drawn, a number of other factors must be considered.

Keeping a crow or raven as a pet has become the latest fad among both the nobility and nouveau riche of the continent, a practice inspired by ceremonial gifts of birds from diplomats of Ildcrest and Ildervale to the royal houses of the Commonwealth.

There is a proposal to add a clause to the Commonwealth Ban on Nuclear Arms and Weapons of Mass Destruction. This clause would require governments to support the promotion of “combat rituals of historical and cultural significance.”

The population of Counsellor Crows is at its highest since records began. There is now a Counsellor Crow for every man, woman and child on the continent, and their territory is no longer limited to Ildcrest.

At the very least, the case of the Counsellor Crow requires that further research be conducted and adequate precautions taken.

©2015 by Karen Lord. Originally published in The Bestiary, edited by Ann Vandermeer. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Barbadian author, editor and research consultant Karen Lord is known for her debut novel Redemption in Indigo, which won the 2008 Frank Collymore Literary Award, the 2010 Carl Brandon Parallax Award, the 2011 William L. Crawford Award, the 2011 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature and the 2012 Kitschies Golden Tentacle (Best Debut), and was longlisted for the 2011 Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and nominated for the 2011 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. Her second novel The Best of All Possible Worlds won the 2009 Frank Collymore Literary Award, the 2013 RT Book Reviews Reviewers’ Choice Awards for Best Science Fiction Novel, and was a finalist for the 2014 Locus Awards. Its sequel, The Galaxy Game, was published in January 2015. She is the editor of the 2016 anthology New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean.

All The Flavors: A Tale of Guan Yu, the Chinese God of War, in America

Ken Liu | 27610 words

“All life is an experiment.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

“For an American, one’s entire life is spent as a game of chance, a time of revolution, a day of battle. ”

—Alexis de Tocqueville

Idaho City

The Missouri Boys snuck into Idaho City around 4:30 a.m., when everything was still dark and Isabelle’s Joy Club was the only house with a lit window.

Obee and Crick made straight for the Thirsty Fish. Earlier in the day, J.J. Kelly, the proprietor, had invited Obee and Crick out of his saloon with his Smith & Wesson revolver. With little effort and making no sound, Obee and Crick broke the latch on the door of the Thirsty Fish and quickly disappeared inside.

“I’ll show that little Irishman some manners,” Crick hissed. Through the alcoholic mist, his eyes could focus on only one image: the diminutive Kelly walking towards him, gun at the ready, and the jeering crowd behind him. We might just bury you under the new outhouse next time you show yourselves in Idaho City.

Though he was a little unsteady on his feet, he successfully tiptoed his way up the stairs to the family’s living quarters, an iron crowbar in hand.

Obee, less drunk, set about rectifying that situation promptly by jumping behind the bar and helping himself to the supplies. Carelessly, he took down bottles of various sizes and colors from the shelves around him, and having taken a sip from each, smashed the bottles against the counters or dashed them to the ground. Alcohol flowed freely everywhere, soaking into the floors and the furniture.

A woman’s scream tore out of the darkness upstairs. Obee jumped up and drew his revolver. Not sure whether to run upstairs to help his friend or out the door, down the street, and into the woods before he could be caught, he hesitated at the bottom of the stairs. Overhead came the sound of boots that no longer cared about silence, followed by the crash of something heavy and soft onto the floor. Obee cursed and jumped back, his big, dirty hands trying to rub out the coat of dust that just fell from the ceiling into his eyes. More muffled screams and cursing, and then, complete silence.

“Woo!” Crick appeared at the top of the stairs, the gleeful grin on his face limned by the light of the oil lamp he held aloft. “Grab some rags. Let’s burn this dump down.”

• • • •

By the time the 7000 people of Idaho City had tallied up the damage of the Great Fire of May 18th, 1865, the Missouri Boys were miles away on the Wells Fargo trail, sleeping off the headache from hard drinking and fast riding. Idaho City lost a newspaper, two theaters, two photograph galleries, three express offices, four restaurants, four breweries, four drugstores, five groceries, six blacksmith shops, seven meat markets, seven bakeries, eight hotels, twelve doctor’s offices, twenty-two law offices, twenty-four saloons, and thirty-six general merchandise stores.

This was why, when the band of weary and gaunt Chinamen showed up a few weeks later with their funny bamboo carrying poles over their shoulders and their pockets heavy with cold, hard cash sewn into the lining, the people of Idaho City almost held a welcome party for them. Everyone promptly set about the task of separating the Chinamen from their money.

• • • •

Elsie Seaver, Lily’s mother, complained to Lily’s father about the Chinamen almost every evening.

“Thaddeus, will you please tell the heathens to keep their noise down? I can’t hear myself think.”

“For fourteen dollars a week in rent, Elsie, I think the Chinamen are entitled to a few hours of their own music.”

The Seavers’ store had been one of those burned down a few weeks earlier. Lily’s father, Thad (though he preferred to be called Jack) Seaver, was still in the middle of rebuilding it. Elsie knew as well as her husband that they needed the Chinamen’s rent. She sighed, stuffed some cotton balls in her ears, and took her sewing into the kitchen.

Lily rather liked the music of the Chinamen. It was indeed loud. The gongs, cymbals, wooden clappers, and drums made such a racket that her heart wanted to beat in time to their rhythm. The high-pitched fiddle with only two strings wailed so high and pure that Lily thought she could float on air, just listening to it. And then in the fading light of the dusk, the big, red-faced Chinaman would pluck out a sad quiet tune on the three-stringed lute and sing his songs in the street, his companions squatting in a circle around him, quiet as they listened to him and their faces by turns smiling and grave. He was over six feet tall and had a dark, bushy beard that covered his chest. Lily thought his thin, long eyes looked like the eyes of a great eagle as he turned his head, looking at each of his companions. Once in a while they burst into loud guffaws, and they slapped the big, red-faced Chinaman on his back as he smiled and kept on singing.

“What do you think he’s singing about?” Lily asked her mother from the porch.

“No doubt some unspeakably vile vice of their barbaric homeland. Opium dens and sing-song girls and such. Come back in here and close the door. Have you finished your sewing?”

Lily continued to watch them from her window, wishing she could understand what his songs were about. She was glad that the music made her mother unable to think. It meant that she couldn’t think of more chores for Lily to do.

Lily’s father was more intrigued by the Chinamen’s cooking. Even their cooking was loud, the splattering and sizzling of hot oil and the suh-suh-suh beating of cleaver against chopping board making another kind of music. The cooking also smelled loud, the smoke drifting from the open door carrying the peppery smell of unknown spices and unknown vegetables across the street and making Lily’s stomach growl.

“What in the world are they making over there? There’s no way cucumbers can smell like that.” Lily’s father asked no one in particular. Lily saw him lick his lips.

“We could ask them,” Lily suggested.

“Ha! Don’t get any ideas. I’m sure the Chinamen would love to chop up a little Christian girl like you and fry you in those big saucepans of theirs. Stay away from them, you hear?”

Lily didn’t believe that the Chinamen would eat her. They seemed friendly enough. And if they were going to supplement their diet with little girls, why would they bother spending all day working on that vegetable garden they’ve planted behind their house?

There were many mysteries about the Chinamen, not the least of which was how they managed to all fit inside those tiny houses they had rented. The band of twenty-seven Chinamen rented five saltbox houses along Placer Street, two of them owned by Jack Seaver, and bought three others from Mr. Kenan, whose bank had been burned down and who was moving his family back east. The saltbox houses were simple, one-story affairs with a living room in the front that doubled as the kitchen, and a bedroom in the back. Twelve feet deep and thirty feet across, the small houses were made of thin planks of wood and their front porches were squeezed so tightly together that they formed a covered sidewalk.

The white miners who had rented these houses from Jack Seaver in the past lived in them alone, or at most shared a house with one roommate. The Chinamen, on the other hand, lived five or six to a house. This frugality rather disappointed some of the people in Idaho City, who had been hoping the Chinamen would be more free with their money. They broke down the tables and chairs left by the previous tenants of the houses and used the lumber to build bunks along the walls of the bedrooms and laid out mattresses on the floors of the living rooms. The previous occupants also left pictures of Lincoln and Lee on the walls. These the Chinamen left alone.

“Logan said he likes the pictures,” Jack Seaver said at dinner.

“Who’s Logan?”

“The big, red-faced Chinaman. He asked me who Lee was, and I told him he was a great general who picked the losing side but was still admired for his bravery and loyalty. He was impressed by that. Oh, and he also liked Lee’s beard.”

Lily had heard the conversation between her father and the Chinaman by hiding herself behind the piano. She didn’t think the big Chinaman’s name sounded anything like “Logan.” She had listened to the other Chinamen calling out to him, and it sounded to her like they were saying “Lao Guan.”

“Such a strange people, these Celestials,” Elsie said. “That Logan scares me. The size of his hands! He has killed. I’m sure of it. I wish you could find some other tenants, Thaddeus.”

No one except Lily’s mother ever called her husband “Thaddeus.” To everyone else he was either “Mr. Seaver” or “Jack.” Lily was used to the fact that people had many names out here in the West. After all, everyone called the banker “Mr. Kenan” when they were at the bank, but when he wasn’t around they called him “Shylock.” And while Lily’s mother always addressed her as “Liliane,” Lily’s father always called her “Nugget.” And it seemed that the big Chinaman already got a new name in this house, “Logan.”

“You are my nugget of gold, sweetie,” he told her every morning, before he left for the store.

“You’re going to puff her up full of vanity,” Lily’s mother said from the kitchen.

It was the height of the mining season, and the Chinamen began to head out to look for gold the moment they were settled in. They left as soon as it was light, dressed in their loose blouses and baggy trousers, their queues snaking out from under their big straw hats. A few of the older men stayed behind to work in the vegetable garden or to do the laundry and the cooking.

Lily was largely left alone during the day. While her mother went shopping or busied herself around the house, her father was away working at the site for the new store. Jack was thinking of setting aside a section in the new store for preserved duck eggs, pickled vegetables, dried tofu, spices, soy sauce, and bitter melons imported from San Francisco to sell to the Chinese miners.

“These Chinamen are going to be carting around a lot of gold dust soon, Elsie. I’ll be ready to take it from them when they do.”

Elsie didn’t like this plan. The thought of the Chinamen’s strange food making everything smell funny in her husband’s store made her queasy. But she knew it was pointless to argue with Thad once he got a notion in his head. After all, he had packed up everything and dragged her and Lily all the way out here from Hartford, where he had been doing perfectly well as a tutor, just because he got it in his head that they’d be much happier on their own out West, where nobody knew them and they knew nobody.

Not even Elsie’s father could persuade her husband to change his mind then. He had asked Thad to come to Boston and work for him in his law office. Business was good, he said, he could use his help. Elsie beamed at the thought of all the shops and the fashion of Beacon Hill.

“I appreciate the offer,” Thad had said to her father. “But I don’t think I’m cut out to be a lawyer.”

Elsie had to placate her father for hours afterwards with tea and a fresh batch of oatmeal cookies. And even then he refused to say goodbye to Thad the next day, when he left to go back to Boston. “Damned the day that I became friends with his father,” he muttered, too loud for Elsie to pretend that she hadn’t heard him.

“I’m sick of this,” Thad said to her later. “We don’t know anybody who’s ever done anything. Everyone in Hartford just carries on what his father had started. Aren’t we supposed to be a nation where every generation picks up and goes somewhere new? I think we should go and start our own life. You can even pick a new name for yourself. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

Elsie was happy with her own name. But Thad wasn’t. This was how he ended up as “Jack.”

“I’ve always wanted to be a ‘Jack,’” he told her, as if names were like shirts that you could just put on and take off. She refused to call him by his new name.

Once when Lily was alone with her mother she had told Lily that this was all because of the War.

“That Rebel bullet put him on his back in less than a day from when he got onto the field. This is what happens to a man when he has to lie on his back for eight months. He gets all sorts of strange notions into his head and not even an angelic manifestation can get those ideas out of him.”

If the Rebels were responsible for getting her family out here to Idaho, Lily wasn’t sure they were such evil people.

Lily had learned the hard way that if she stayed in the house, her mother would always find something for her to do. Until school started again, the best thing for Lily was to get out of the house the first chance she had in the morning and not return until it was dinnertime.

Lily liked to be in the hills outside the town. The forest of Douglas firs, mountain maples, and ponderosa pines shaded her from the noon sun. She could take some bread and cheese with her for lunch, and there were plenty of streams to drink from. She spent some time picking out leaves that had been chewed by worms into shapes that reminded her of different animals. When she was bored with that, she waded in a stream to cool off. Before she went into the water, she took the back hem of her dress, pulled it forward and up from between her legs and tucked the hem into the sash at her waist. She was glad that her mother was not around to see her turning her skirt into pants. But it was much easier to wade in the mud and the water with her skirt out of the way.

Lily waded downstream along the shallow edge of the stream. The day was starting to get more hot than warm, and she splashed some water on her neck and forehead. Lily looked for bird nests in the trees and raccoon prints in the mud. She thought she could walk on like this forever, alone and not trying to get anything done in particular, her feet cool in the water, the sun warm on her back, and knowing that she had a good, filling lunch with her that she could have any time she wanted and would have an even better dinner waiting for her later.

Faint sounds of men singing came to her from around the bend in the river. Lily stopped. Maybe there was a camp of placer miners just downstream from where she was. That would be fun to watch.

She walked onto the bank of the river and into the woods. The singing became louder. Although she couldn’t make out any of the words, the melody told her it wasn’t any song that she recognized.

She carefully made her way among the trees. She was deep in the shadows now and a light breeze quickly dried the sweat and water on her face. Her heart began to beat faster. She could hear the singing voices more clearly now. A lone, deep, male voice sang in words that she could not make out, the strange shape of the melody reminding her of the way the Chinamen’s music had sounded. Then a chorus of other male voices answered, the slow, steady rhythm letting her know that it was a working men’s song, whose words and music came from the cycle of labored breath and heartbeat.

She came to the edge of the woods, and hiding herself behind the thick trunk of a maple, she peeked out at the singing men by the stream.

Except the stream was nowhere to be found.

After they found this bend to be a good placer spot, the Chinese miners had built a dam to divert the stream. Where the stream used to be, there were now five or six miners using picks and shovels to dig down to the bedrock. Others were digging out bits of gold-laden sand and gravel from between the crevices in areas where the digging had already been done. The men wore their straw hats to keep the sun off their head. The solo singer, Lily now saw, was Logan. The red-faced Chinaman had wrapped a rolled-up handkerchief around his thick beard and tucked the ends of the handkerchief into his shirt to keep it out of his way as he worked. Every time he bellowed out another verse of the song he stood still and leaned on his shovel, and his beard pouch moved with his singing like the neck of a rooster. Lily almost giggled out loud.

A loud bang cut through the noise and activity and echoed around the banks of the dry stream bed. The singing stopped and all the miners stopped where they were. The mountain air suddenly became quiet and still, and only the sound of panicked birds taking flight into the air broke the silence.

Crick, slowly waving above his head the pistol that fired the shot, swaggered out of the woods across the stream bed from where Lily was hiding. Obee came behind him, his shotgun’s barrel shifting from pointing at one miner to the next with each step he took.

“Well, well, well,” Crick said. “Lookee here. A singing circus of Chinee monkeys.”

Logan stared at him. “What do you boys want?”

“Boys?” Crick let out a holler. “Obee, listen to this. The Chinaman just called us ‘boys.’”

“He won’t be saying much after I blow his head off,” Obee said.

Logan began to walk towards them. The heavy shovel trailed from his large hand and long arm.

“Stop right where you are, you filthy yellow monkey.” Crick pointed the pistol at him.

“What do you want?”

“Why, to collect what’s ours, of course. We know you’ve been keeping our gold safe and we’ve come to ask for it back.”

“We don’t have any of your gold.”

“Jesus,” Crick said, shaking his head. “I’ve always heard that Chinamen are thieves and liars, on account of them growing up eating rats and maggots, but I’ve always kept an open mind about the Celestials. But now I’m seeing it with my own eyes.”

“Filthy liars,” Obee affirmed.

“Obee and me, we found this spot last spring and claimed it. We’ve been a little busy lately, and so we thought we’d take pity on you and let you work the deposit and pay you a fair wage for your work. We thought we were doing our Christian duty.”

“We were being nice,” Obee added.

“Very generous of us,” Crick agreed. “But look where that’s gotten us? Being kind doesn’t work with these heathens. On our way here I was still inclined to let you keep a little gold dust for your work these last few weeks, but now I think we are going to take it all.”

“Ingrates,” Obee said.

A young Chinaman, barely more than a boy really, angrily shouted something in his own language at Logan. Logan waved his hand at the youth to keep him back, his gaze never leaving Crick’s face.

“I don’t think you have your facts straight,” Logan said. Even though he didn’t shout, his voice reverberated and echoed around the valley of the river and the woods in a way that made Lily tremble with its force and strength. “We found this deposit and we put the claim on it. You can go check at the courthouse.”

“Are you deaf?” Crick asked. “What makes you think I need to check at the courthouse? I just told you the facts, and after conferring with the law”—he waved his pistol impatiently—“I’m told that the claim is indeed mine and you are the claim jumpers. By law I’m entitled to shoot you dead like so many rats right where you are. But as I am unwilling to shed blood needlessly, I’ll let you hand over the gold and spare your worthless lives. I may even let you keep on working this deposit for me if you agree not to pull a stunt like this and deny us our gold in the future.”

Without any warning that he was going to do it, Obee fired his gun. The shot shattered the rocks at the feet of the boy who had angrily shouted at Logan earlier. Obee and Crick doubled over in laughter as the boy jumped back and dropped his pickaxe, giving out a startled yelp. A piece of shattered rock had cut his hand, and he slowly sat down on the ground, staring incredulously as the blood from the wound in his palm quickly soaked the tan sleeves of his shirt. A few of the other Chinamen gathered around to tend to him. Lily barely managed to stifle her own scream. She wanted to turn around and run back into town, but her legs would not hold her up if she didn’t hug tightly the tree she was hiding behind.

Logan turned his attention back to Crick. His face had turned an even darker shade of red, so that Lily was afraid that blood would pour from his eyes.

“Don’t,” he said.

“Hand over the gold,” Crick said. “Or I’ll make him stop breathing instead of just getting him dancing.”

Logan casually threw the shovel, which had been dangling from his hand until now, behind him. “Why don’t you put down your gun and we’ll have a fair fight?”

Crick hesitated for a moment. If it came to that, he thought he could take care of himself in a fight, having survived enough brawls in New Orleans to know exactly how it felt to have your ribs stop a knife. But Logan was taller by about a foot and heavier by about fifty pounds, and though that beard made him look ancient, Crick wasn’t sure whether Logan really was old enough to have his reflexes slow down. And in any case Crick was a little scared of the red-faced Chinaman: He looked angry enough to fight like a crazy man, and Crick knew enough about fights to know that you didn’t come out of fights with crazy men without at least a few broken bones.

The plan was going all wrong! Crick and Obee knew all about Chinamen, having spent years in San Francisco. They had all been scrawny midgets, giving him and Obee barely more trouble than a bunch of women, which was not surprising considering all they did was women’s work: cooking and laundry, and not one of them had ever put up a real fight. This band of Chinamen was supposed to fall down on their knees and beg for mercy as soon as he and Obee showly walked out of the woods, and hand over all their gold to them. The red-faced giant was ruining their plan!

“I think we have a pretty fair fight right now,” Crick said. He pointed his revolver at Logan. “Almighty God created men, but Colonel Colt made them equal.”

Logan untied the handkerchief around his beard, unrolled it, and tied it around the top of his head like a bandana. He took off his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. The leathery, brown skin covering the wiry muscles on his arms was full of scars. He took a few steps towards Crick. Though his face was redder than ever, his walk was calm, like he was taking a stroll at night, singing his songs back in front of Lily’s house back in Idaho City.

“Don’t think I won’t shoot,” Crick said. “The Missouri Boys don’t have a lot of patience.”

Logan bent down and picked up a rock the size of an egg. He wrapped his fingers around it tightly. “Get out of here. We don’t have any of your gold.” He took another few calm steps towards Crick.

And in another moment he was running, his legs closing up the distance between him and the gunmen. He cocked his right arm back as he ran, looking steadily into Crick’s face.

Obee fired. He didn’t have the time to brace himself and the force of the shot threw him on his back.

Logan’s left shoulder exploded. A bright red shower of blood sprayed behind him. In the sunlight, it looked to Lily like a rose was blossoming behind him.

None of the other Chinamen said anything. They looked on, stunned.

Lily’s breath stopped. Time seemed frozen to her. The mist of blood hung in the air, refusing to fall or dissipate.

Then she sucked in a great gulp of air and screamed as loud as she could ever remember, louder even than the time she was stung on the lips by that wasp she hadn’t seen hiding in her lemonade cup. Her scream echoed around the woods, startling more birds into the air. Is that really me? Lily thought. It didn’t sound like her. It didn’t even sound human.

Crick was looking into her eyes from across the river. His face was so filled with cold rage and hatred that Lily’s heart stopped beating.

Oh God, please, please, I promise I’ll pray every night from now on. I promise I won’t disobey Mother ever again.

She tried to turn around and run, but her legs wouldn’t listen to her. She stumbled back, tripped over an exposed root, and fell heavily to the ground. The fall knocked the air out of her and finally cut off her scream. She struggled to sit up, expecting to see Crick’s gun pointed at her.

Logan was looking at her. Incredibly, he was still standing. Half of his body was soaked with blood. He was looking at her, and she thought he didn’t look like someone who had just been shot, someone who was about to die. Though blood had splattered half of his face, the other half had lost its deep, crimson color. Still, Lily thought he looked calm, like he wasn’t in any pain, though he was a little sad.

Lily felt a calmness come over her. She didn’t know why, but she knew everything was going to be all right.

Logan turned away from her. He began to walk towards Crick again. His walk was slow, deliberate. His left arm was hanging limply at his side.

Crick aimed his pistol at Logan.

Logan stumbled. Then he stopped. The blood had soaked into his beard, and as the wind lifted it, droplets of blood flew into the air. He took a step back and let fly the rock in his hand. The rock made a graceful arc in the air. Crick stood frozen where he was. The rock smashed into his face and the thud as the rock cracked open his skull was as loud as Obee’s gunshot.

His body stayed up for a few seconds before collapsing into a lifeless heap on the ground. Obee scrambled to his feet, took a look at Crick’s motionless body, and without looking back at the Chinamen began to run as fast as he could deep into the woods.

Logan fell to his knees. For a moment he swayed uncertainly in place as his left arm swung at his side, useless for stopping his fall. Then he toppled over. The other Chinamen ran to him.

It all seemed so unreal to Lily, like a play on a stage. She thought she should have been terrified. She should have been screaming, or maybe even fainted. That’s what her mother would have done, she thought. But everything had slowed down in the last few seconds, and she felt safe, calm, like nothing could hurt her.

She came out from behind her tree and walked towards the crowd of Chinamen.

Whiskey and Wei Qi

Lily wasn’t sure if she would ever understand this game.

“I can’t move the seeds at all? Ever?”

They were sitting in the vegetable garden behind Logan’s house, where her mother wouldn’t be able to see her if she happened to look out the living room window as she finished her needlework. They were both sitting with their legs folded under them, and Lily liked the way the cool, moist soil felt under her legs. (“This was how the Buddha sat,” Logan had told her.) On the ground between them Logan had drawn a grid of nine horizontal lines intersected with nine vertical lines with the tip of his knife.

“No, you can’t.” Logan shifted his left arm to make it easier for Ah Yan, the young Chinaman who had been the target of Obee’s first shot, to run the wet rag in his hand over the wound in Logan’s shoulder. Lily gingerly touched the bandage on her leg. Her fall against the tree root had scraped off a large patch of skin on the back of her left calf. Ah Yan had cleaned it for her and wrapped it up in a plain cotton bandage that was coated in some black paste that smelled strongly of medicine and spices. The cool paste had stung at first against the wound, but Lily bit her lips and didn’t cry out. Ah Yan’s touch had been gentle, and Lily asked him if he was a doctor.

“No,” the young Chinaman had said. Then he had smiled at her and given her a piece of dried plum coated in sugar for her to suck on. Lily thought it was the sweetest thing she had ever tasted.

Ah Yan rinsed the rag out in the basin next to Logan. The water was again bright red and this was already the third basin of hot water.

Logan paid no attention to Ah Yan’s ministrations. “We’ll play on a smaller board than usual since you are just learning. This game is called wei qi, which means ‘the game of surrounding.’ Think of laying down each seed as driving a post into the field as you build a fence to surround the land you are claiming. The posts don’t move, do they?”

Lily was playing with lotus seeds while Logan’s pieces were watermelon seeds. The white and black pieces made a pretty pattern on the grid between them.

“So it’s kind of like the way they get land in Kansas,” Lily said.

“Yes,” Logan said. “I guess it’s a little like that, though I’ve never been to Kansas. You want to surround the largest territory possible, and defend your land well so that my posts can’t carve out another homestead in your land.”

He took a long drink from the gourd in his hand. The gourd looked a little like a snowman, a small sphere on top of a larger one, with a piece of red silk tied around the narrow waist to provide a good grip. The golden surface of the gourd was shiny from constant use in Logan’s rough, leathery palm. Logan had told her that the gourd grew on a vine. When the gourd was ripe, it was cut down and the top sawn off so that the seeds inside could be taken out to make the shell into a good bottle for wine.

Logan smacked his lips and sighed. “Whiskey, it’s almost as good as sorghum mead.” He offered Lily a sip. Lily, shocked, shook her head no. No wonder her mother thought these Chinamen barbaric. To drink whiskey out of a gourd was bad enough, but to offer a drink to a young Christian girl?

“There’s no whiskey in China?”

Logan took another drink and wiped the whiskey from his beard. “When I was a boy, I was taught that there were only five flavors in the world, and all the world’s joys and sorrows came from different mixtures of the five. I’ve learned since then that’s not true. Every place has a taste that’s new to it, and whiskey is the taste of America.”

“Lao Guan,” Ah Yan called out. Logan turned towards him. Ah Yan spoke to him in Chinese, gesturing at the basin. After looking at the water in the basin, Logan nodded. Ah Yan got up with the basin and poured out the water in a far corner of the field before going into the house.

“He’s gotten as much of the poisoned blood and dirt and torn rags out as possible,” Logan explained. “Time to sew me up.”

“My dad thinks your name is Logan,” Lily said. “I knew he was wrong.”

Logan laughed. His laugh was loud and careless, the same as the way he sang and told his stories. “All my friends call me Lao Guan, which just means Old Guan, Guan being my family name. I guess it sounds like Logan to your dad. I kind of like the ring of it. Maybe I’ll just use it as my American name.”

“He also picked out a new name for himself when we came here,” Lily said. “Mother doesn’t think he should do that.”

“I don’t know why she should be so against it. This is a country full of new names. Didn’t she change her name when she married your father? Everyone gets a new name when they come here.”

Lily thought about this. It was true. Her father didn’t call her “Nugget” until they lived here.

Ah Yan came back with a needle and some thread. He proceeded to stitch up the wound on Logan’s shoulder. Lily looked closely at Logan’s face to see if he would wince with the pain.

“It’s still your turn,” Logan said. “And I’m going to capture all of your seeds in that corner if you don’t do something about it.”

“Doesn’t it hurt?”

“This?” The way he pointed at his shoulder by wagging his beard made Lily laugh. “This is nothing compared to the time I had to have my bones scraped.”

“You had to have your bones scraped?”

“Once I was shot with a poisoned arrow, and the tip of the arrow was buried into the bones in my arm. I was going to die unless I got the poison out. Hua Tuo, the most skilled doctor in the world, came to help me. He had to cut into my arm, peel back the flesh and skin, and scrape off the poisoned bits of bone with his scalpel. Let me tell you, that hurt a lot more than this. It helped that Hua Tuo had me drink the strongest rice wine he could find, and I was playing wei qi against my First Lieutenant, a very good player himself. It took my mind off the pain.”

“Where was this? Back in China?”

“Yes, a long time ago back in China.”

Ah Yan finished his sutures. Logan said something to him and Ah Yan handed a small silk bundle to him. Lily was about to ask Ah Yan about the bundle but he just smiled at her and held a finger to his lips. He pointed at Logan and mouthed “watch” at her.

Logan laid the bundle on the ground and unrolled the silk wrap. Inside was a set of long, silver needles. Logan picked up one of the needles in his right hand and before Lily could even yell “Stop,” he stuck the needle into his left shoulder, right above the wound.

“What did you do that for?” Lily squeaked. For some reason the sight of the long needle sticking out Logan’s shoulder made her more queasy than when Logan’s shoulder had exploded with Obee’s shot.

“It stops the pain,” Logan said. He took another needle and stuck it into his shoulder about an inch above the other one. He twisted the end of the needle a little to make sure it’s settled in the right spot.

“I don’t believe you.”

Logan laughed. “There are many things little American girls don’t understand, and many things old Chinamen don’t understand. I can show you how it works. Does your leg still hurt?”

“Yes.”

“Here, hold still.” Logan leaned forward and held out his left palm low to the ground. “Put your foot in my hand.”

“Hey, you can move your left arm again.”

“Oh, this is nothing. The time I had to have my bones scraped, I was back on the battlefield within two hours.”

Lily was sure that Logan was joking with her. “My father was shot in the leg and chest in the War, and it took him eight months before he could walk again. He still has a limp.” She lifted her foot, wincing at the pain. Logan cupped her ankle with his palm.

His palm felt warm, hot actually, on Lily’s ankle. Logan closed his eyes and began to breathe slowly and evenly. Lily felt the heat on her ankle increase. It felt nice, like having a very hot towel pressed around her injured calf. The pain gradually melted into the heat. Lily felt so relaxed and comfortable that she could fall asleep. She closed her eyes.

“Okay, you are all set.”

Logan released her ankle and gently deposited her foot on the ground. Lily opened her eyes and saw a great silver needle sticking out from her leg just below her kneecap.

Lily was going to cry out in pain until she realized that she didn’t feel any. There was a slight numbness around where the needle went into her skin, and heat continued to radiate from it, blocking any pain from her wound.

“That feels weird,” Lily said. She experimentally flexed her leg a few times.

“As good as new.”

“Mother is going to faint when she sees this.”

“I’ll take it out before you go home. Your skin won’t heal for a few more days, but most of the poison in your blood should be gone with the medicine Ah Yan put on the bandage and the acupuncture should have taken out the rest. Just get the bandage changed to a clean one tomorrow and you shouldn’t even have a scar when this is over.”

Lily wanted to thank him, but she suddenly felt shy. Talking with Logan was strange. He was unlike anyone she had ever met. One moment he was killing a man with his bare hands, and the next he was holding her ankle as gently as she would a kitten. One moment he was singing songs that seemed as old as the earth itself, and the next he was laughing with her over a game played with watermelon and lotus seeds. He was interesting, but also more than a little scary.

“I like playing with the black seeds,” Logan said as he placed another seed on the grid, capturing a block of Lily’s seeds. He picked them up and popped the handful of lotus seeds into his mouth. “Lotus seeds are much better to eat.”

Lily laughed. How could she be scared of an old man who talked with his mouth full?

“Logan, that story about the poisoned arrow and the doctor scraping your bones, that didn’t really happen to you, did it?”

Logan tilted his head and looked at Lily thoughtfully. Slowly, he chewed the lotus seeds in his mouth, swallowed, and grinned. “That happened to Guan Yu, the Chinese God of War.”

“I knew it! You’re just like my father’s friends, always telling me tall tales just because I’m a child.”

Logan laughed his deep, booming laugh. “Not all stories are made up.”

Lily had never heard of the Chinese God of War, and she was sure that her father hadn’t either. It was now twilight, and the sounds and the smell of the loud and oily cooking of the Chinamen filled the garden.

“I should go home,” Lily said, even though she desperately wanted to try some of the food that she was smelling and hear more about Guan Yu. “Can I come and visit you tomorrow, and you can tell me more stories about Guan Yu?”

Logan stroked his beard with his hand. His face was serious. “It would be an honor.” Then his face broke into a smile. “Even though I’ll have to eat all the seeds myself now.”

The God of War

Before Guan Yu became a god, he was just a boy.

Actually, before that, he was almost just a ghost. His mother carried him in her belly for twelve months, and still he refused to be born. The midwife gave her some herbs and then told her husband to hold her down while she kicked and screamed. The baby finally came out and didn’t breathe. Its face was bright red. “Either from choking or too much barbaric blood in the father,” the midwife thought.

“It would have been a huge baby,” the midwife whispered to the father. The mother was asleep. “Too big to have a long life anyway.” She began to wrap up the body with what would have been his swaddling clothes. “Did you have a name picked out?”

“No.”

“Just as well. You don’t want to give the demons a name to hang on to on his way down below.”

The baby let out an ear-splitting cry. The midwife almost dropped him.

“He’s too big to have a long life,” the midwife insisted as she unwrapped the body, a little peeved that the baby dared to defy her authority on these matters. “And that face. So red!”

“Then I’ll call him Chang Sheng, Long Life.”

The dry summer sun and the dusty spring winds of Shanxi carved lines and sprinkled salt into the chapped, ruddy faces of the Chinese who tried to make a living here in the heart of northern China. When the barbarians climbed over the Great Wall and rode down from the north on their raids on the backs of their towering steeds, it was these men who took up their hoes and melted their plows to fight them to the death. It was these women who fought alongside the men with their kitchen knives, and when they failed, ended up as the slaves and then the wives of the barbarians, learning their language and bearing their children, until the barbarians began to think of themselves as Chinese, and they, in turn, fought against the next wave of barbarians.

While weak men and delicate women who were afraid to die fled south so that they could row around on their flower boats and sing their drunken verses, those who stayed behind, matching the music of their lives to the rhythm of the howling rage of the desert, grew tall with the barbaric blood mixed into their veins and became full of pride at their life of toil.

“This is why,” Chang Sheng’s father said to him, “the Qin and Han Emperors all came out of the Great Northwest, our land. From us come the generals and the poets, the ministers and the scholars of the Empire. We are the only ones who value pride.”

In addition to helping his father in the fields, it was Chang Sheng’s job to gather the firewood and kindling for the kitchen. Chang Sheng’s favorite time of the day was the hour or so before the sun set. That was when he took the rusty axe and the even rustier machete from behind the kitchen door and climbed the mountain behind the village.

Crack, the axe split the rotting trunk of a tree. Zang, the blade swung through the dry grass. It was hard work, but Chang Sheng pretended that he was a great hero cutting down his enemies like weeds.

Back home, dinner was stir-fried bitter melon and pickled cabbage to go with scallions dipped in soy sauce and wrapped in flat sorghum pancakes. Sometimes, when his father was in a particularly good mood, Chang Sheng would even get a sip of plum wine, sweet on the tip of the tongue, burning hot down the throat. His face grew to an even darker shade of red.

“There you are, little one,” his father said, smiling as Chang Sheng’s eyes teared up from the alcohol burn while his hand reached out for another sip. “Sweet, sour, bitter, hot, and salty, all the flavors in balance.”

Chang Sheng grew up to be a tall boy. His mother was forever sewing new robes for him as he outgrew the old ones. The drought that had already lasted five years showed no signs of letting up, and even though the men labored harder than ever in the fields, the harvest seemed to grew smaller year after year. There was no money to send him to school, so his father took up the task of teaching him.

History was his favorite subject, but there was always something sad in his father’s eyes when they discussed history. Chang Sheng learned to not ask too many questions. Instead, he spent more time reading the history books. Then, when he was out gathering firewood, he acted out the great battles with his axe and machete against the endless hordes of the barbaric woods.

“You like to fight?” his father asked him one day.

He nodded.

“I’ll teach you to play wei qi then.”

• • • •

“Did Chang Sheng’s father use lotus seeds and watermelon seeds, too?”

“No, he used real stones.”

“I prefer your way of playing wei qi. Using seeds is more fun.”

“I think so, too. And I like eating too much. Now, where was I?”

• • • •

Within a day, Chang Sheng was able to win one game out of three against his father. In a week, he was losing only one out of five. In a month, he was winning every game even when he gave his father the advantage of a five-stone handicap.

Wei qi was even better than plum wine. There was sweetness in the simplicity of the rules, bitterness in defeat, and burning hot joy in victory. The patterns made by the stones were meant to be chewed over, savored.

While out walking, he got lost staring at the patterns made by black streaks of mud thrown up by passing oxcarts against the whitewashed house walls. Instead of chopping firewood, he carved the nineteen-by-nineteen playing grid into the floor of the kitchen with his axe. During dinner, Chang Sheng forgot to eat while he laid out formations on the table with grains of wild rice and black watermelon seeds. His mother wanted to scold him.

“Let him alone,” his father said. “That boy has the makings of a great general.”

“Maybe he does,” his mother said. “But your family hasn’t been in the Emperor’s service for generations. What is he going to be a general of? A flock of geese?”

“He’s still the son of queens and poets, generals and ministers,” his father insisted.

“Playing a game is not going to put rice in the pot, nor wood into the stove. We are going to need to borrow money again this year.”

The neighboring villages sent their best players to challenge him. He defeated them all. Eventually, Hua Xiong, the son of the county’s wealthiest man, heard about Chang Sheng, the wei qi prodigy.

Hua Xiong’s family made its fortune by acquiring a coveted license to sell salt. There was a large lake in the county, its waters made salty by the blood of Chi Yu after he was defeated by the Yellow Emperor and his body chopped into pieces. The Han Emperors taxed the salt trade as their principal source of revenue and the imperial salt monopoly was strictly enforced. Hua Xiong’s grandfather placed some strategic bribes, and the family had been growing fat from the salt fortune ever since.

Hua Xiong was the same age as Chang Sheng. He was the sort of boy who tortured cats and delighted in galloping his horse through the fields of his father’s tenants, trampling down the sorghum and wheat so that the tracks formed his name. That was how he showed up at the door of the Guan house when he came to play a game of wei qi with Chang Sheng, high on his horse, a swath of trampled sorghum behind him.

He brought his wei qi set with him: the board made from the pine trees of Mount Tai; the black stones were green jade while the white stones were polished pieces of coral. Chang Sheng made the game last as long as he could so he could finger the cool, smooth stones a little longer.

“The game is getting boring,” Hua Xiong said. “I haven’t lost to anyone in years.”

Chang Sheng’s father smiled as he thought to himself, “Doesn’t he know that people who have to borrow money from his father would make sure he wins the game?”

Hua Xiong was actually a pretty good wei qi player, but not as good as Chang Sheng.

“Very impressive,” Hua Xiong said to Chang Sheng’s father. “Brother Chang Sheng has a gift. I am ashamed to say that I am not his match.”

Chang Sheng’s father was surprised. He was too proud to ever tell his son to deliberately throw the game to Hua Xiong. He had expected Hau Xiong to throw a tantrum. But not this.

“He’s not so bad,” he thought. “He’s graceful in defeat. That’s a quality that belongs to a phoenix among men.”

• • • •

“What’s so impressive about that? I never get mad when my father beats me at checkers. I know I just have to get better.”

“Those are wise words. Not everyone sees a loss as an opportunity.”

“So is this Hua Xiong really a good man?”

“If you don’t interrupt me, you’ll soon find out.”

“I’ll have more watermelon seeds. I won’t be able to talk if my mouth is full.”

• • • •

The harvests grew even worse in the next five years. Locusts hit the province. A plague sealed off the next county. There were rumors of cannibalism. The Emperor raised the taxes.

Now eighteen years of age, Hua Xiong was the head of the family after his father choked to death on the leg bone of a pheasant cooked in rice wine. He took advantage of depressed property prices to buy up as much land as possible in the county. Chang Sheng’s father went to see him on New Year’s Eve.

“Don’t worry, Master Guan,” Hua Xiong said as they both signed the deed. “I have fond memories of the games Chang Sheng and I used to play as children. I will take care of you and your family.”

In exchange for selling his land to Hua Xiong, Chang Sheng’s father got enough money to pay off the family’s mounting debt. He was then supposed to lease back the land from Hua Xiong, and pay a share of the proceeds from the harvest each year as rent.

“He gave us a good deal,” he told Chang Sheng’s mother. “I always knew he would grow up to be a good man.”

That year, they worked especially hard in the fields. The locusts came again to the county but missed their village. The sorghum stalks shot up tall and straight, bobbing in the dry winds of late summer. It was the best harvest they had had in years.

On New Year’s Eve, Hua Xiong arrived with a retinue of burly servants.

“May the new year bring you good fortune, Master Guan.” They bowed to each other at the door.

Chang Sheng’s father invited him in for some tea and plum wine. They knelt down on the clean, new straw mats, across from each other, the small table with the pot of warm wine between them.

They toasted each other’s health and had the customary three cups each. Hua Xiong gave a little awkward laugh. “Well, Master Guan, I came for the little matter of the rent.”

“Of course,” Chang Sheng’s father said. He called for Chang Sheng to bring out the five taels of silver. “Here you are, Master Hua. Five percent of my year’s proceeds.”

Hua Xiong gave a little cough. “Of course I understand how things have been rather hard on you and your family for the last few years. If you’d like some time to prepare the rest of the payment, that is perfectly acceptable.” He got up and bowed deeply.

“But I have all the money here. I can show you the books. I had a good year, and took in ninety-three taels of silver at the market. Five percent of that is four taels and eight coins. But since you were generous to me in the original sale, I thought I would pay you full five taels to thank you.”

Hua Xiong bowed even deeper. “Surely Master Guan is having a joke at lowly Hua Xiong’s expense. Some evil persons have been saying that Master Guan is going to try to get out of paying the full amount of the rent this year, but lowly Hua Xiong did not believe them. Lowly Hua Xiong was sure that everything would be cleared up as soon as he came to see Master Guan in person.”

“What are you talking about?”

Hua Xiong looked as if a spider were crawling up his spine. He spread out his hands helplessly. “Is Master Guan asking lowly Hua Xiong to produce the deed and the lease?”

Chang Sheng’s father’s face became an iron mask. “Show me.”

Hua Xiong made a great show of searching for the documents. He patted down his sleeves and the breast pockets of his robe. He shouted at his burly servants to look in the wagon. Finally, one of them, a big man with gigantic, misshapen knuckles came up to Hua Xiong and presented the rolled-up document to him, giving Chang Sheng’s father a hard, long sneer.

“Whew,” Hua Xiong wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “I almost thought we lost it. I had not thought it would be necessary.”

They knelt down again, and Hua Xiong spread out the lease on the table between them. “The rent is to be eighty-five percent of the proceeds from the year’s sale of crops,” he read, pointing to the characters with his delicate, long fingers.

“Perhaps you could explain to me why the ‘eighty’ is written in such narrow characters as compared with the rest of the document,” Chang Sheng’s father said, after examining the lease.

“The clerk who drafted the lease was indeed a poor writer,” Hua Xiong said. He gave an ingratiating smile. “No doubt Master Guan is a much more cultivated calligrapher. But for a lease you will agree that it does not matter that his hand was poor?”

Chang Sheng’s father stood up. Chang Sheng could see that the hem of his sleeves trembled. “Do you think I would have placed my seal on a lease like that? Eighty-five percent? I might as well go join a band of bandits if I want to live on that.” He took a step towards Hua Xiong.

Hua Xiong backed up a few steps. Two of the big, burly men stepped up and formed a screen between him and the older man. “Please,” Hua Xiong said, his face twisted in a show of regret. “Don’t make me take this to the magistrate.”

Chang Sheng looked at the axe leaning behind the door. He began to walk towards it.

• • • •

“Oh no. Don’t do it!”

• • • •

“Go to the kitchen and see if your mother needs more wood,” his father said.

Chang Sheng hesitated.

“Go!” his father said.

Chang Sheng walked away and the burly men relaxed.

• • • •

“Sorry I interrupted.”

“No, it’s fine. You were trying to save Chang Sheng, like his father.”

• • • •

Later, after Hua Xiong left, the family ate the New Year’s Eve dinner in silence.

“A phoenix among men indeed,” his father finally said after the meal. He laughed long and hard. Chang Sheng stayed up the whole night with him, drinking the last of their plum wine.

The father wrote a long petition to the magistrate’s court, detailing Hua Xiong’s treachery.

“It is a sad thing that the bureaucrats must be involved,” he said to Chang Sheng, “but sometimes we have no choice.”

The soldiers showed up at their house a week later. They broke down the door and hauled Chang Sheng and his mother into the yard and proceeded to overturn every piece of furniture in the house and break every plate, cup, bowl and dish.

“What is the charge against me?”

“Crafty peasant,” the captain said as his soldiers locked the cangue around the neck and arms of Chang Sheng’s father, “you are plotting to raise a band of bandits to join the Yellow Turbans. Now confess the names of your co-conspirators.”

Four soldiers had to hold Chang Sheng back, eventually wrestling him to the ground and sitting on him, as he struggled and cursed the soldiers.

“I think your son also has a rebellious spine,” the captain said. “I think we’ll bring him in too.”

“Chang Sheng, stop fighting. This is not the time. I’ll go see the magistrate. This will be cleared up.”

His father did not come back the next day, or the day after that. Runners from the town came to the village to tell the family that he had been thrown into jail by the magistrate, pending his trial for treasonous rebellion. Horrified, mother and son made the trip into town to appeal to the magistrate at the yamen.

The magistrate refused to see them, or to let them see Chang Sheng’s father.

“Crafty peasants, out, out!” the magistrate threw the scholar’s rock that he used as a paperweight at Chang Sheng, missing him by a foot. Swinging their bamboo poles, the guards drove Chang Sheng and his mother out of the halls of the yamen.

Spring came, but mother and son let the fields go fallow. Hua Xiong’s henchmen came to cart away any thing of value left in the house that hadn’t been broken by the soldiers. His mother held him back as Chang Sheng clenched his teeth and ground them together until he felt the saltiness of blood on his tongue. His face grew redder and redder so that Hua Xiong’s servants were frightened and left before they could take everything.

He took his axe and machete and spent the days in the mountains. He cleared out entire hillsides with his swinging blade. Crack! Boys playing in the mountains ran back to their mothers and spoke of how they had seen a great eagle swooping among the trees, breaking down the branches with its iron beak. Zang! Girls doing the washing by the river ran back to the village and told each other how they had heard an angry tiger crashing through the woods, tearing down saplings with its great paws.

The bundles of firewood and kindling were exchanged for sorghum meal and pickled vegetables from the neighbors. The son waited while the mother swallowed the food in silence, flavoring it with her tears. He seemed to survive on sorghum mead and plum wine alone. With each drink, his face grew darker and redder. The blood hue of sorghum and plum would not fade from his face.

The Meal

“Chila, chila!” Ah Yan called out, interrupting Logan’s story.

“It’s time for dinner,” Logan said to Lily. He set down his bowl of watermelon seeds. “Will you join us? Ah Yan is making Mala Wife’s Tofu and Duke of Wei’s Meat, his best dishes.”

Lily didn’t want Logan to stop. She wanted Hua Xiong to get what he deserved. She wished she could see Chang Sheng angry in the forest, flying and dancing like an eagle or a tiger. But the Chinamen were bustling about, arranging empty crates and benches around the garden in a circle, talking loudly and laughing amongst themselves. The smell emanating from the open kitchen door made Lily’s stomach growl. She had been so absorbed in Logan’s tale that she didn’t even know she was hungry.

“I promise we’ll finish the story some other time.”

The miners were in high spirits. Logan had told her that the spot that they had been working on turned out to be a rich deposit, yielding gold by the panful. Ah Yan had checked on her leg as soon as he came back with the other Chinamen and pronounced himself satisfied with her healing process so long as she kept up with plenty of good food and exercise to keep up her strength.

“I have a good story for you,” Ah Yan said.

During the day, the Chinese miners were visited by the Sheriff, Davey Gaskins. The territorial legislature had passed a Foreign Miner’s Tax a few years earlier at the rate of five dollars per person per month and he was there to collect it. The tax was meant to drive out the Chinamen, who were pouring into the territory like so many locusts. But the towns had a lot of trouble collecting it. Gaskins hated the monthly rounds to the Chinese mining camps, it made him feel like he was losing his mind.

First of all, the camps were so far apart that he could never hit all of them in a single day. And somehow they always knew when he was coming to collect the tax. There he would be, standing in a middle of a camp with enough picks, pans, and shovels strewn about for twenty or thirty men at least, and only five or six Chinamen would greet him, insisting that the extra tools were there because they worked so hard that the tools “wore out quickie quickie.”

And even worse, they seemed to constantly move about.

“Howdy, Sheriff,” Ah Yan greeted him that afternoon. “Good to see you again.”

“What’s your name again?” Gaskins could never tell the Chinamen apart.

“I’m Loh Yip,” Ah Yan said. “You came for our taxes on Monday, remember?”

Gaskins was sure that he had not come to this camp on Monday. He was on the other side of the town, collecting the taxes from three claims that were each supposedly just being worked on by five men.

“I was over near Pioneerville on Monday.”

“Sure, so were we. We just moved here yesterday.”

Ah Yan showed the Sheriff the tax receipts. Sure enough, there was the name “Loh Yip” and four others, followed by Gaskin’s own signature.

“Sorry I didn’t recognize you,” Gaskins said. He felt for sure that he was being tricked, but he had no proof. There were the receipts, written out in his own hand.

“No problem,” Ah Yan said, giving him a huge grin. “All Chinamen look alike. Easy mistake to make.”

Lily laughed along with the miners as Ah Yan finished his story. She couldn’t believe how silly Sheriff Gaskins was. How could he not recognize Ah Yan? It was absurd.

As they worked to set up the makeshift table and chairs in the vegetable garden, the Chinamen talked and joked with each other loudly and easily. Lily found it amusing to try to pick out the English words in their conversation. She was getting used to their accent, which she thought was like their music, brassy, percussive, and punctuated by a rhythm like the beating of a joyous heart.

“I have to tell Dad about this later,” she thought. “He always told me that the Irish accent of his uncles and aunts reminded him of his favorite drinking songs.”

Lily hadn’t been able to go out to see the miners during the day while they were working. Her mother was adamant about keeping her inside the house after her “accident” yesterday.

“I just tripped, that’s all. I promise to be more careful.”

Her mother just told her to write out more verses in her copy book.

Lily knew that her mother suspected that there was more to the accident than she was telling her. She had been dying to tell her dad about everything that happened to her yesterday, but her mother became so alarmed at the sight and smell of her bandaged leg that she insisted Lily wash off all of the “Chinamen’s poison” immediately. After that it was simply impossible to tell them the truth.

It was only after Jack Seaver got home that Lily managed to get out of the house.

“Elsie, she’s a child, not a houseplant. You can’t keep her in the house all day. She’s got to get some skin scraped off now and then. Someday maybe you can put a corset on her and wrap her up for her husband, but not for a while. For now she needs to be out in the sun, running around.”

Elsie Seaver was not happy with this, but she let Lily out. “Dinner is going to be late tonight,” she said. “Your father and I need to talk.”

Lily slipped out of the house before she could change her mind. The sun was low in the west, casting long shadows on the street, where a cool breeze carried the voices of the returning miners far among the houses of Idaho City. The two Chinamen at the door of the house across the street told her that Logan was in the vegetable garden. She had gone there directly, and, when Lily lost their wei qi game from yesterday, Logan began to tell her the story of Guan Yu, the God of War, to console her.

The results of Ah Yan’s cooking were carried out of the kitchen into the garden in large plates and set on a makeshift table made out of overturned crates in the middle of the circle. The Chinamen, each holding a large bowl of steamed white rice, milled around the table to pile food on top of the rice. Ah Yan emerged from the crowd and handed Lily a small blue porcelain bowl decorated with pink birds and flowers. The rice in the bowl was covered with small cubes of tofu and pork coated in red sauce and dark pieces of roasted meat with scallions and slices of bitter melon. The smell from the unfamiliar hot spice made Lily’s eyes and mouth water at the same time.

Ah Yan handed her a pair of chopsticks and headed back into the crowd to get his own food. He was so small and thin that he nimbly ducked under the shoulders and arms of the other men like a rabbit running under a hedgerow. Before long he ducked back out with his own large bowl of rice piled high with tofu and meat. He saw that Lily was watching him, anxious that he got his fair share. Lifting his bowl from his seat on a stool across the circle from Logan, he told Lily, “Eat, eat!”

Lily sort of got the hang of using chopsticks, after Logan showed her how. It amazed Lily to see his big clumsy hands manipulating his chopsticks so skillfully that he could pick up the delicate pieces of tofu and carry them to his mouth without crushing any of the pieces, causing them to fall, as Lily did the first few times she tried to eat the tofu.

Lily finally managed to get a piece of tofu into her mouth, and she gratefully bit down on it. Flavors until then unknown filled her mouth. Her whole tongue delighted in the richness of the taste: the saltiness, a hint of hot peppers, the almost-sweet base of the sauce, and something else that tickled her tongue. She tried to chew the tofu a little, to bring the flavor out so she could identify that new component more clearly. The taste of hot peppers became stronger, and the tickling grew into a tingling that covered her tongue from tip to base. She chewed yet a little more . . .

“Awww!” Lily cried out. The tingling suddenly exploded into a thousand hot little needles all over her tongue. The back of her nose felt full of water and her vision became blurring with tears. The Chinamen, stunned into silence by her yelp, burst into laughter when they saw what caused it.

“Eat some white rice,” Logan said to her. “Quick.”

Lily gulped down several mouthfuls of rice as fast as she could, letting the soft grains massage her tongue and sooth the back of her throat. Her tongue felt numb, paralyzed, and the tingling, now subdued, continued to tickle the inside of her cheeks.

“Welcome to a new taste,” Logan said to her, a mischievous joy in his eyes. “That was mala, the tingling hotness that made the Kingdom of Shu famous throughout China. You have to be careful with it, as the taste lures you in and then hits you like a mouthful of flame. But once you get used to it, it will make your tongue dance and nothing less will do.”

Following Logan’s suggestions, Lily tried a few pieces of bitter melon and scallions to rest her tongue a little between pieces of tofu. The bitterness of the melons contrasted nicely with the mala of the tofu.

“I bet you’ve never liked anything bitter before,” Logan said.

Lily nodded. She couldn’t think of a single dish her mother made that tasted bitter.

“It’s all about the balance of the flavors. The Chinese know that you cannot avoid having things be sweet, sour, bitter, hot, salty, mala, and whiskey-smooth all at the same time—well, actually the Chinese don’t know about whiskey, but you understand my point.”

“Lily, it’s time for dinner.”

Lily looked up. Her father was standing beyond the edge of the vegetable garden, beckoning for her to come over.

“Jack,” Logan called out. “Why don’t you join us for some of Ah Yan’s cooking?”

Taken aback by the suggestion, Jack Seaver nodded after a short pause. He could barely hide his grin as he strode between the rows of cucumbers and cabbages, coming up next to Logan.

“Thank you,” he said. “I’ve been wanting to try this since the first time I smelled it back when you first moved in.” He turned to the rest of the circle. “How’s the mining been so far, boys?”

“Wonderful, Mr. Seaver.” “The gold is everywhere.” “Logan has the touch.”

“That’s just what I want to hear,” Jack said. “I’m about to put in an order to San Francisco for my store. Tell me what you want from Chinatown, and I’ll work on getting some of that gold out of your hands into mine.”

While the circle laughed and shouted out suggestions which Jack scribbled down on a piece of scrap paper, occasionally pausing so that one of the Chinamen could write down the suggestion in Chinese characters for his agent in San Francisco if the men didn’t know the English name for something, Ah Yan ran back into the kitchen to retrieve a new bowl of rice for Jack.

Jack stared at the dishes in the middle of the circle, licking his lips appreciatively. “What are we having today?”

“Mala Wife’s Tofu,” Lily told him. “You have to be careful with it. It has a new taste. And Duke Wei’s Meat.”

“What kind of meat is it?”

“Dog meat roasted with scallions and bitter melon,” Logan said.

Lily, who was about to eat a piece of the roasted meat, dropped her bowl. Rice and tofu and meat and red sauce spilled everywhere. She felt sick.

Jack picked her up and hugged her closely. “How can you do such a thing?” He demanded. “Whose dog did you kill? There’s going to be trouble from this.” His frown grew more pronounced. “Elsie is going to be hysterical if she hears about this.”

“Nobody’s. It was a wild dog running in the woods. It looked like a dog that’s been abandoned out in the woods since it was a pup. I killed it when it tried to bite me,” Ah Yan, who had come out of the kitchen holding the new bowl of rice for Jack, said.

“But don’t you have dogs as pets? Eating a dog is like . . . like eating a child,” Jack said.

“We also have dogs as pets. We do not eat them if they are pets. But this dog was wild, and Ah Yan had to kill it to defend himself. Why would you let a wild dog’s meat go to waste when it is delicious?” Logan said. The rest of the Chinamen had stopped eating, intent on the conversation.

“Whether it was wild or not, eating a dog is barbaric.”

“You do not eat dogs because you like them too much.” Logan thought about this. “I thought you also do not eat rats.”

“Of course not! What a disgusting thought. Rats are dirty creatures full of disease.” Jack’s stomach turned at the very idea.

“We don’t eat rats, as a rule,” said Logan. “But if we are starving and there’s no other meat, it could be cooked to be palatable.”

Was there no end to the depravity of the Chinamen? “I can’t imagine when I would willingly eat a rat.”

“I see, ” said Logan. “You only eat animals you like a little, but not too much.”

There really wasn’t anything to say in response to that. Cradling Lily, who was trying hard not to throw up, Jack Seaver walked out of the vegetable garden back to his own house. Elsie had made a chicken pot pie, but neither he nor Lily was any longer in the mood for eating.

Feather, Long Clouds

The eastern sky was still as grey as the belly of a fish when Chang Sheng climbed over the wall. By the time he had finished, the rooster had yet to crow for the first time. The old house, its beams and walls hollowed out by termites and rats over the years, burned easily. By the time the villagers raised the alarm, he was already twenty li away.

The rising sun burned the clouds that were draped across the mountains on the eastern horizon in an unbroken chain to a hue red enough to match his face. “Blood-red long clouds,” he thought. “Even the Heavens are celebrating with me.” He laughed long and loud at the joy of vengeance. His felt light as a feather, like he could run forever towards the east, until he ran into the long clouds or into the ocean.

“I will need a new name now,” thought Chang Sheng. “I shall henceforth be known as Guan Yu, the Feather, also styled Yun Chang, Long Clouds.”

A month ago, the Autumn Assizes had taken place. Because the penalty for rebellion was death, the Circuit Intendant had overseen the trial himself. The Elder Guan had been hauled into the hall of the yamen in chains and made to kneel on the hard, stone floor while Chang Sheng and his mother watched from among the crowd that had gathered for the trial.

Hua Xiong, now fatter than ever and shaking like a leaf in the wind in front of the Intendant, a young scholar judge fresh out of Luo Yang and filled with the arrogance of the Emperor’s favor, produced the lease for the Intendant’s inspection. He recounted how he had tried to help out the Guan family during their time of need and was dumbfounded when the Elder Guan insisted on setting the lease at eighty-five percent.

“I asked him, ‘How could you live on that?’ And Your Reverence, he told me, ‘Everyone is going to starve if that’—and here he disrespected the Son of Heaven’s name—‘is going to rule the country by the advice of his eunuchs and the flattering courtiers that pass for scholars these days. I might as well give all the harvest to you as to lose it all in taxes. It doesn’t matter. I’ll have a better chance joining the Yellow Turbans and live as a bandit.’” He bowed his head before the Intendant and continued to tremble.

The Intendant glanced at the kneeling figure of the Elder Guan below the dais of the yamen, the corners of his mouth turned down in displeasure. “Humph. ‘Flattering courtiers that pass for scholars these days.’ Indeed, peasant, is there no respect for the Emperor and the majesty of the law in your eyes? Have you lost all sense of piety? What do you have to say in answer to these accusations?”

The Elder Guan straightened his back as much as he could in his shackles. He looked up at the severe, young face of the Intendant. “It is true that I believe the Emperor has been misled by unscrupulous advisors who view the people as so much fish and meat to be squeezed for their last drop of wealth without regard for their suffering. But I have not forgotten my duty towards the Emperor or my family’s many generations of service in the Imperial Army, and I would never raise my arm in rebellion to him. My accuser has fabricated these lies in order to impoverish my family and disgrace me, simply because my son had humiliated him in a game. The Emperor has entrusted you with the power of life and death no doubt because you have wisdom despite your youth, and I have no doubt that your wisdom will reveal the truth of my innocence to you.”

Even though he was kneeling, the air that he spoke with made him seem to tower over everyone in the hall of the yamen. Even the Intendant seemed impressed.

Noting the change in the Intendant’s mien, Hua Xiong fell to his knees and kowtowed three times in rapid succession. “Your Reverence, I should never have dared to accuse Master Guan unless I had solid evidence, seeing as how his son and I have been childhood friends. I am merely a lowly merchant, while Master Guan is descended from a distinguished family of generals and scholars in the Emperor’s service. But I was motivated by love and zeal for the Emperor, so much so that I dared to accuse such a man. It was my fear that he would use his family’s glorious record as a shield to cover up all his impious vices. I pray that you would uphold justice.” He kept on kowtowing after this speech.

“Stop that,” the Intendant said impatiently. “You need not fear his family’s history of glory. The Emperor’s law is to be administered blindly and impartially. Even were he the son of a Duke or a Prince, if he plotted against the Emperor, you need not fear accusing him.” He took another look at the Elder Guan, his face hardening. “I have known many evil men like him: Puffed up with the honors heaped upon their families by the Emperor for their ancestors’ loyal service, they think they are beyond the law. Well, I will be sure to punish them extra harshly. What other evidence do you have?”

Hua Xiong nodded towards three young girls cowering in the corner behind him. “These young women have seen and heard Master Guan practicing with his axe and machete in the woods. They saw him leaping about, pretending to . . . to . . .”

“To do what?”

“To be visiting those blows upon the Son of Heaven.” Hua Xiong went back to his incessant kowtowing, drawing blood on his forehead.

“That is a lie,” Chang Sheng cried out from the crowd. He was livid at those young girls for agreeing to back up such a blatant falsehood. But then he saw that they were all from families who owed a great deal of money to Hua Xiong. He felt as if the veins in his neck would burst if he didn’t speak. “I was the one—”

“Chang Sheng, whatever happens, do not speak,” the Elder Guan shouted. “You must take care of your mother.”

“Come,” the Intendant called out to his soldiers, “drive that lawless child and his unchaste mother from the yamen. I will not have them make a spectacle of my court.”

To keep himself from striking back, Chang Sheng bit down on his tongue until he drew blood. He tried to shield his mother from the blows of the soldiers as they stumbled away from the yamen.

The Elder Guan was sentenced to death that afternoon for plotting treason, and his head soon afterwards was hung on the flagpole outside the yamen. That evening, Chang Sheng’s mother put her head in a loop of rope tied to the beam in the middle of the kitchen and kicked the stool out from under herself.

• • • •

Chang Sheng had left Hua Xiong alive until the end. After he had dispatched the rest of the Hua household (some twenty people), he woke Hua Xiong from his slumber (pausing first to slit the throats of the two concubines in bed with him with quick flicks of his wrist). In the dim light of the torch that Chang Sheng was carrying with him, Hua Xiong thought he looked like a red-faced demon, a soldier from hell coming for his soul.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he blabbered and lost control of his bowels.

Chang Sheng used his knife to cut the ligaments in Hua Xiong’s shoulders and hips, completely paralyzing him. He laid down the heavy, drooping body back on the bed, cuddled between the lifeless bodies of the two concubines.

“I will not give you a clean death. You said my father was a bandit, I will now show you how a bandit deals with people like you.”

He proceeded to set fire throughout the house. Soon the smoke was so heavy that Hua Xiong could no longer scream for help. His coughing grew spasmodic and panicked; he was choking in his own spit.

Guan Yu continued to run to the east, where the blood-red long clouds beckoned to him. His heart was light as a feather, and it seemed as if love of the fight and joy in vengeance would never leave him. He felt like a god.

Impressions

There was a clearing in the middle of the woods on the side of the hill opposite the river from the Chinamen’s mining camp. Now that it was late June, the syringa bushes were in full bloom in the rocky soil along the edge of the clearing, filling the air with its fresh, orange-like scent. The yellow of the blooming arrowleaf balsamroot carpeted the middle of the clearing, with a touch here and there of the purple-blue of the chicory to break the monotony.

Lily loved to sit in the shade of the trees at the edge of the clearing, and stare at the colors in front of her. If she sat still long enough, the gentle breeze and the slanting rays of the sun would conspire to blend the individual flowers into an undulating field of light. The world seemed then made afresh to her, full of tomorrows and undiscovered delights. And singing seemed the only thing worth doing.

A plume of smoke rose at the edge of the clearing, breaking her reverie.

She walked across the clearing towards the smoke. The dark figure of a man crouched by it. He was cooking something that smelled delicious to Lily. But there was also a hint of something unpleasant in that smell, like burning hair.

Lily was close enough now to see that the man was large, even larger than Logan. Just as Lily realized that the man was roasting the whole carcass of a large dog whose hide was red as blood. He turned around and grinned at Lily, revealing a mouth full of sharp, dagger-like teeth.

It was Crick.

Lily screamed.

• • • •

Jack told Elsie to go back to sleep.

“It’s all right. I’ll make some tea for her.”

The sound of water boiling and the comforting warmth of her father’s arms dissipated the last traces of the nightmare from Lily’s mind. Sipping tea and whispering lest they be overheard by her mother, Lily told Jack what she had seen of the fight between Logan and Crick.

“What happened to Obee?”

“I don’t know, he ran off.”

“And what did they do with Crick’s body?”

Lily wasn’t sure about that either.

“And you definitely saw Obee shoot first? And the bullet hit Logan in the shoulder?”

Lily nodded vigorously. The image of Logan’s shoulder exploding was carved indelibly into her brain. And she marveled again at how calm she felt when Logan looked at her, as if he had some power to pass his strength onto her, letting her know that she would be safe.

Jack pondered this. If Lily was right, the wound to Logan was serious, yet he had been back at work with his companions less than twelve hours later. Either the Chinaman was the toughest human being he had ever known, or Lily was exaggerating. But he knew his daughter. She was an imaginative child, but not one who lied.

Obee and Crick were notorious outlaws, and lots of people in town suspected that they were behind the fire that had ruined so many people in town and killed the Kellys. But there were no witnesses to the fire and the murders, and no charges had been brought. Now if Obee decided to accuse Logan of murder, he might indeed have a chance of getting Logan hanged, since he and Lily and all the Chinamen actually saw it happen. The Chinamen weren’t well liked by the whites, on account of their taking claims away from the white miners—never mind that most of these claims had been abandoned by the whites since they didn’t have the Chinese rice farmers’ skill and patience with water management or their willingness to survive on rice and vegetables and to squeeze as many people as possible into the tiny saltbox houses in order to save money. There was no telling what a jury might do even if it sounded like Logan killed Crick to protect himself and the others.

“Dad, are you angry with me?”

Startled from his reverie, Jack collected himself. “No. Why should I be?”

“Because you said Logan looked like a killer and you told me to stay away from the Chinamen, and . . . and I almost ate a dog last week.”

Jack laughed. “I can’t be angry with you for that. The Chinamen’s cooking smelled so good that I was interested in the dog myself—and still am, a little. You didn’t do anything wrong. Although it was dangerous for you to get mixed up in their fight, it wasn’t by any means your fault. And I guess it turned out all right. You weren’t hurt.”

“I was, a little.”

“Luckily the Chinamen’s medicine seemed to have fixed it. That Logan is quite a character.”

“He tells good stories,” Lily said. She wanted to tell him about the battles of Guan Yu, the God of War, or the songs of Jie You, the Princess Who Became a Barbarian. She wanted to describe to him how she felt, listening to Logan recite those stories in the rhythm of his clanging, whiskey-sharpened accent so that they sounded at the same time so fantastic and so familiar while the long, gnarled fingers of his large hands made the scene come alive with comic and solemn gestures. But it was all still so new and confusing, and she didn’t think she knew the right words yet to paint a proper picture of those moments for her father.

“I’m sure he does. This is why we are out here, where the country belongs to nobody and everyone is a stranger with a tale of his own. The Celestials are filling up California and soon, Idaho Territory. Soon everyone here will know their stories.”

Lily finished her tea. She was comfortable, but the lingering excitement from the nightmare kept her from being sleepy.

“Dad, will you sing me a song? I can’t sleep now.”

“Sure thing, Nugget. But let’s go outside and take a walk, or else we’ll wake your mother.”

Lily and Jack threw jackets over their nightclothes and slipped outside the house. The summer evening was warm, and the sky, cloudless and moonless, glowed with the light of a million stars.

Some of the Chinamen were still up on the porch. They played a game with dice by the weak light of an oil lamp. Jack and Lily waved at them as the two of them strode down the street.

“Guess they can’t sleep either,” Jack said. “Don’t blame them. Can’t imagine how you’d sleep with five other guys packed in like sardines with you, all of them snoring and with smelly feet.”

Before long they had left the weak light of the Chinamen’s oil lamp behind them, and then they were beyond the edge of the town. Jack sat down on a rock by the side of the road into the hills and lifted Lily to sit beside him, his arm wrapped around her.

“What song would you like to hear?”

“How about the one that Mom would never let you sing, the one about the funeral?”

“That’s a good one.”

Jack took out his pipe and lit it to keep the insects away from them, and he began to sing:

Tim Finnegan lived in Walkin’ Street,
A gentle Irishman mighty odd;
He had a brogue both rich and sweet,
And to rise in the world he carried a hod.
Now Tim had a sort of a tipplin’ way,
With a love of the whiskey he was born,
And to help him on with his work each day,
He’d a drop of the craythur every morn.

Lily looked up into her father’s face. Lit by the flame from the pipe, it took on a red glow that brought a sudden rush of love and comfort to her heart. Smiling at each other, father and daughter belted out the chorus:

Whack fol the dah O, dance to your partner,
Welt the floor, your trotters shake;
Wasn’t it the truth I told you,
Lots of fun at Finnegan’s wake!

Jack continued with the rest of the song:

One mornin’ Tim was feelin’ full,
His head was heavy which made him shake;
He fell from the ladder and broke his skull,
And they carried him home his corpse to wake.
They rolled him up in a nice clean sheet,
And laid him out upon the bed,
A gallon of whiskey at his feet,
And a barrel of porter at his head.

His friends assembled at the wake,
And Mrs. Finnegan called for lunch,
First they brought in tay and cake,
Then pipes, tobacco and whiskey punch.
Biddy O’Brien began to bawl,
“Such a nice clean corpse, did you ever see?
“O Tim, mavourneen, why did you die?”
“Arragh, hold your gob,” said Paddy McGhee!

Then Maggie O’Connor took up the job,
“O Biddy,” says she, “You’re wrong, I’m sure,”
Biddy she gave her a belt in the gob,
And left her sprawlin’ on the floor.
And then the war did soon engage,
‘Twas woman to woman and man to man,
Shillelagh law was all the rage,
And a row and a ruction soon began.

Then Mickey Maloney ducked his head,
When a noggin of whiskey flew at him,
It missed, and falling on the bed,
The liquor scattered over Tim!
The corpse revives! See how he raises!
Timothy rising from the bed,
Says, “Whirl your whiskey around like blazes,
Thanum an Dhoul! Do you think I’m dead?”

“Feeling sleepy yet?”

“No.”

“All right, we’ll sing another one.”

They stayed out under the stars for a long, long time.

The Apotheosis

It was whispered among the soldiers of all of the Three Kingdoms that Guan Yu could not be killed. The generals of the deceitful Cao Cao and the arrogant Sun Quan tried to laugh at this rumor and executed those who spread it. All the same, when it came time to face Guan Yu on the battlefield, even the invincible Lü Bu hesitated.

But I have gotten ahead of myself. How did the Han Dynasty fall? How did the Three Kingdoms rise? Who were the heroes among whom Guan Yu made his way?

The Yellow Turbans ravaged the land, their rallying rebel cry that the Emperor was a child who had never set foot outside the Palace while his eunuchs preyed upon the blood and flesh of the peasants. Taking up arms against the rebels, the dreaded warlord Cao Cao made the Emperor a hostage in his own capital and ruled in his name from the plains and deserts of the North.

In the South, the rich rice fields and winding rivers propelled Sun Quan, the Little Tyrant, to hold sway over ships, and hunger for the title of Emperor.

Everywhere there was sickness and starvation, and armies marched over fields empty of cultivation.

Liu Bei, a man so full of charm that his ear lobes reached his shoulders, was merely a peddler of straw shoes and straw mats when he met Zhang Fei, the butcher, and Guan Yu, the outlaw who was still running. Guan Yu now had the beginning of his famous beard, a bushy and vibrant beard that made him look old and young at the same time. It made a nice addition to a handsome face, whose smooth features looked like they were carved out of the red stone of the Crimson Cliffs of the Yangtze River.

“If I had men who could fight like tigers with me, I would restore the glory of the Han Dynasty,” Liu Bei said to the two strangers who shared a bowl of sorghum mead with him in the peach orchard.

“And what good is that to me?” asked Zhang Fei, whose face was black as coal and whose arms daily wrestled oxen to the ground for the slaughter.

Liu Bei shrugged. “Maybe you do not care. But if I were Emperor, the magistrates would again mete out justice, the fields would be cultivated with industry and virtue, and the teahouses would again be filled with the songs and laughter of scholars and dancing women.” His eyes lingered a moment longer on Guan Yu’s face, which was familiar to him from the many posters putting a price on his head that he had seen around the city. “There are many men who are outlaws in this day and age, but many of them are outside the law only because the laws have not been administered with virtue. Were I Emperor, I would make them the judges, not the criminals.”

“And what makes you think you will succeed?” asked Guan Yu. His face darkened to the color of blood, but he stroked his beard carelessly, like a scholar stroking his brush as he was about to pen a poem about girls collecting flowers in May.

“I don’t know I will succeed,” Liu Bei said. “All life is an experiment. But when I die, I will know that I once tried to fly as high as a dragon.”

In the peach orchard then, they became sworn brothers.

“Though we were not born on the same day of the same month of the same year, we ask that Fate give us the satisfaction of dying on the same second of the same minute of the same hour.”

They headed West, and there, in the mountainous Province of Shu, where Guan Yu first tasted mala, they founded the Kingdom of Shu Han.

All-Under-Heaven was thus split into the Three Kingdoms of Cao Cao, Sun Quan, and Liu Bei. Of the three, Cao Cao had the valor and wildness of the Northern Skies, while Sun Quan had the wealth and resilience of the Southern Earth, but only Liu Bei had the virtue and love of the People.

Guan Yu was his greatest warrior. He had the strength of a thousand men and the love of even more.

“He is not made of flesh and blood.” Cao Cao sighed when he heard the report of how Guan Yu slew six of his best generals and broke through five passes to rejoin Liu Bei on his Long March of a Thousand Li.

“He is a phoenix among swallows and sparrows.” Sun Quan shook his head when he heard how Guan Yu laughed and played wei qi while his bones were scraped free of poison. Guan Yu was back on his horse and swinging his sword the next day.

War raged between the Three Kingdoms for years, neither one able to subdue the other two. Guan Yu’s face never lost its blood-red color, and his dark beard grew longer and longer until he wore it in a silk pouch to keep it clean and out of the way in battle.

Though Liu Bei was virtuous, the Mandate of Heaven was not with him. His armies fought and lost, lost and fought, in battle after battle. During a retreat on one of their campaigns to the North, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei were separated from the main army, and their detachment of one hundred scouts became surrounded by the army of Cao Cao, numbering more than ten thousand. Cao Cao asked for parley with the two.

“Surrender and swear fealty to me, and I shall make you into Dukes who do not have to kneel even in the presence of the Son of Heaven,” Cao Cao said.

Guan Yu laughed. “You do not understand why men like me fight. There is the joy of battle, of course, but that is not all.” He opened up his old, faded battle cape to show Cao Cao the holes in the fabric, the frayed edges and patches upon more patches. “This was given to me by my sworn brother Liu Bei. Before I put on the cape, I was nobody, a murderer running from the law. But after I put on the cape, every swing of my sword was in the name of virtue. What can you offer me better than that?”

Cao Cao turned around and rode back to his camp. He ordered his army to begin attack immediately. The generals gave the orders, but the soldiers, thousands upon thousands of them lined up in rank after rank, refused to advance against Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, and their small circle of one hundred men.

Cao Cao ordered the soldiers standing in the back killed on the spot. The panicked soldiers pushed against their comrades in front. The tide of men surged slowly forward, closing in on Guan Yu and Zhang Fei.

The battle lasted from morning till night, and then throughout the night till the next morning.

“Remember the Oath of the Peach Orchard,” Guan Yu yelled to Zhang Fei. He was riding through Cao Cao’s men on his war stallion, the great Red Hare, whose skin matched the hue of Guan Yu’s face and who sweated blood as he trampled men beneath his giant hooves. “If Fate will have us succumb this day, then we will have at least fulfilled our oath.”

“But then our brother Liu Bei will be late,” replied Zhang Fei, as he impaled two men at once on his iron-shafted spear.

“We will forgive him,” Guan Yu said. The Brothers laughed and separated once again for the battle.

Wherever Guan Yu rode, swinging his moon-shaped sword, the soldiers of Cao Cao fell over each other to get away from the rider and his horse, parting before them like a flock of sheep before a tiger or a brood of chickens before an eagle. Guan Yu mowed them down mercilessly, and Red Hare frothed at the mouth, the bloodlust overcoming his exhaustion.

“When I am fighting next to you,” Zhang Fei said, wiping streams of blood from his black face, “I do not know what fear is. My mind is harder, my heart keener, my spirit the greater as our might lessens.”

The one hundred men with Guan Yu and Zhang Fei gradually became fifty men, and then fifteen, and finally, only Guan Yu and Zhang Fei were left, charging back and forth through the sea of swords and spears that was Cao Cao’s army.

It was evening again. Cao Cao called for a halt to the battle, pulling his troops back. Rivers of blood ran across the field, and hacked-off limbs and heads littered the ground like seashells on the beach at low tide. The evening sun cast long, scarlet shadows over everything so that one could no longer be sure whether the redness was from the light or blood.

“Surrender,” Cao Cao called out to them. “You have proven your courage and loyalty to Liu Bei. No god or man would ask more of you.”

“I would,” Guan Yu said.

Though Cao Cao was a man with a cold heart and a narrow mind, he was overwhelmed with admiration for Guan Yu.

“Will you drink with me,” he said, “before you die?”

“Of course,” said Guan Yu. “I never say no to sorghum mead.”

“No sorghum mead here, I’m afraid. But I have some barrels of a new drink the barbarians of the West have given to me as tribute.”

The drink was made from grapes, a new fruit brought over the desert by the barbarian emissaries of the West.

• • • •

“You mean wine?”

“Yes, but that was the first time Guan Yu had seen it.”

• • • •

Guan Yu and Cao Cao drank it in jade cups, whose cold stony surface complemented the warmth of the wine excellently. It was getting dark, but the jade from which the cups were made had an inner glow to them that lit up the faces of the two men. The pretty barbarian girls who were part of the tribute to Cao Cao played a mournful tune on their strange pear-shaped lutes, which they called pi pa.

Guan Yu listened to the music, lost in his own thoughts. Suddenly he stood up, and began to sing to the tune of the barbarian lute:

Give me grape wine overflowing night-glowing cups,
I would drink it all but the pi pa calls me to my horse.
If I should fall down drunk on the battlefield, do not laugh at me,
For how many have ever returned from war, how many?

He tossed the cup away. “Lord Cao Cao, I thank you for the wine, but I think it is now time to get back to what we have to do.”

• • • •

“So, that banjo-thing you were playing, that’s a pi pa, isn’t it?” The mournful song Logan had been singing was still in Lily’s head. She wanted to ask Logan to teach it to her.

“Yes, it is.” He shifted the pi pa around on his knees, cradling its pear-shaped body lovingly, like a baby. “This one is pretty old, and it sounds better with every year that passes.”

“But it’s not really Chinese, is it?”

Logan was thoughtful for a moment. “I don’t know. I guess you’d say it’s really not, not if you look back thousands of years. But I don’t think that way. Lots of things start out not Chinese and end up that way.”

“That’s not what I would have expected to hear from a Celestial,” Jack said. He was still trying to get used to the taste of the sorghum liquor that Logan assured him was what every Chinese boy drank along with mother’s milk. Swallowing it was like swallowing a mouthful of razors. Lily saw his furrowed brows as he took another drink and laughed.

“Why not?”

“I thought you Celestials were supposed to be mighty jealous of your long history, Confucius being from before Christ and everything. I didn’t think I’d hear one of you admit that you learned anything from the barbarians.”

Logan laughed at this. “I myself have some blood of the northern barbarians flowing in my veins. What is Chinese? What is barbarian? These questions will not put rice into bellies or smiles onto the faces of my companions. I’d much rather sing about pretty girls with green eyes from west of the Gobi Desert and play my pi pa.”

“If I didn’t know better, Logan, I’d say you sound like a Chinese American.”

Jack and Logan laughed at this. “Gan bei, gan bei,” they said, and tossed back cups of whiskey and sorghum liquor.

“I want to learn ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ from you. Ever since I heard the two of you singing that night, I can’t get it out of my head.”

“You have to finish the story first!” Lily said.

“All right. But I have to warn you. I’ve told this story so many times, and each time I tell it, it’s different. I’m not sure I know how the story ends any more.”

• • • •

How long did the battle last? Was it still against the treacherous Cao Cao or the deceitful Sun Quan? Guan Yu could not remember.

He did remember telling Zhang Fei to leave, and get back to Liu Bei.

“I am in charge of the men, and because of my carelessness, I have led them into death. I cannot show my face back in Cheng Du, where the wives and fathers of those men will ask me why I have returned when their husbands and sons have not. Fight your way out, Brother, and seek revenge for me.”

Zhang Fei halted his horse and gave a long cry. At the piercing sound of that cry, full of sorrow and regret, the ten thousand men around them shook in their boots and stumbled back three steps each.

“Goodbye, Brother.” Zhang Fei spurred his horse to the west, and the soldiers parted to make way for his spear and horse, fought with each other to get out of his path.

“On, on!” Cao Cao shouted angrily. “The man who captures Guan Yu shall be made a Duke.”

Red Hare stumbled. He had lost too much blood. Guan Yu deftly leapt off the back of the war stallion just as he fell to the ground.

“I’m sorry, old friend. I wish I could have protected you.” Blood and sweat dripped from his beard, and tears carved out clear channels through the dried blood and dirt on his face.

He threw down his sword and put his hands behind him, looking for all the world like a scholar-poet about to recite from the Book of Poetry in front of the Emperor at his court. He stared at the approaching soldiers with contempt.

• • • •

“They cut off his head at the next sunrise,” Logan said.

“Oh,” said Lily. This wasn’t the ending she had wanted to hear.

The three of them were silent for a bit, while the smoke from Ah Yan’s cooking in the kitchen drifted into the clear sky. The sound of spatula on wok sounded like the din of sword on shield to Lily’s ears.

“You are not going to ask me what happened next?” Logan said.

“What do you mean?” Jack and Lily said at the same time.

• • • •

“What do you mean?” Cao Cao shouted and stood up in a hurry, overturning the writing desk in the process. The ink stone and brushes flew everywhere. “What do you mean you can’t find it?”

“Lord Cao Cao, I am telling you what I saw with my own eyes. One minute his head was rolling on the ground, and the next his head and body were simply nowhere to be found. He . . . he disappeared into thin air.”

“What kind of fool do you take me for? Come!” Cao Cao gestured to the guards. “Tie him up and have him executed. We’ll hang his head outside my tent since he lost Guan Yu’s head.”

• • • •

“Of course he’s not dead,” the grizzled veteran said to the pink-faced new recruits. “I was there the day Lord Guan Yu was captured. Among the one hundred thousand men of the Army of Wei, he fought as if they were nothing more than motes of dust. A man like that, do you think he would succumb to an executioner’s axe?”

“Of course he’s not dead,” Liu Bei said to Zhang Fei. They were both covered in the white armor of mourning, and they had raised an army of every last able-bodied man of the Kingdom of Shu for vengeance. “Our brother would not die when he still has the Oath of the Peach Orchard to fulfill.”

“Of course he’s not dead,” Sun Quan said as he lay on his deathbed. “Guan Yu had no fear of death, and my only regret is that I will not have his company where I am going. I had hoped we might one day be friends.”

“Of course he’s not dead,” said Cao Cao to Liu Chan, Liu Bei’s son, as he gave the order to break the Seal of the Kingdom of Shu, now that he had finally united the Three Kingdoms. “I have never thought much of your father or you, but if Guan Yu was willing to serve your father, then he must have seen something that I couldn’t. As Lord Guan Yu may still be watching over you, I would show him that I am not without virtue. I will not harm you and you will always live in my house as an honored guest.”

“Of course he’s not dead,” said the mother to the child. “Lord Guan Yu was the greatest man the Middle Kingdom has ever produced. If you have even one hundredth of his strength and courage, I will never need to fear thieves and bandits.”

“Let us pray to Lord Guan Yu,” said the scholar to his students. “He was a poet and a warrior, and he lived each day as a test of his honor.”

“Let us pray to Lord Guan Yu,” said the Emperor as he dedicated the Temple to the God of War. “May he grant us victory over the barbarians.”

“Let us pray to Lord Guan Yu,” said the player with the black stones. “All of us wei qi players wish we could play a game against him. If we play well today, perhaps he will deign to come and give us lessons.”

“Let us pray to Lord Guan Yu,” said the merchants as they prepared to set out across the ocean for the fabled ports of Ceylon and Singapore. “He will watch over us and subdue the pirates and typhoons.”

“Let us pray to Lord Guan Yu,” said the laborers as they boarded the sailing ships headed for the Sandalwood Mountains of Hawaii and the Old Gold Mountain of California. “He will help us endure the journey, and he will break apart mountains before us. He will keep us safe until we have made our fortune, and then he will guide us home.”

The Chinese Restaurant

By late summer, the stream that fed the Chinamen’s claim had dried to a trickle. Though Logan and his men were good at managing water, the onset of the dry season meant that it was no longer possible to mine the placer deposit effectively. They had to settle in and wait until next spring.

Though they had done well with the mining season during spring and summer, the Chinamen had by no means accumulated a large fortune. As they settled in to the life of Idaho City and waited out the rest of the year, they tried to figure out other ways to make ends meet.

Ah Yan and some of the younger men looked for work around the town and talked amongst themselves. They noticed that there were plenty of single men in town who simply refused to or couldn’t wash their own shirts, and there simply weren’t enough laundresses taking in the washing for all the men.

“But that’s women’s work! Have these men no sense of decency?” Elsie was incredulous when Jack told her the Chinamen’s plan.

“Well, what of it? Why do you seem to hate everything the Chinamen do?” Jack said, amusement and annoyance struggling in his voice.

“Thaddeus Seaver,” Elsie looked sternly at her husband. She knew better than to expect that her husband would show any proper sense of shock at the antics of these outrageous Chinamen when Thad was the one who encouraged them to become bolder and bolder everyday. But then she hit upon an argument that even Thad had to acknowledge.

“Why, think about it, Thad,” she said. “I’ve seen the way these heathen Chinamen go about their work. When they set up their laundry shops, they’ll work seven days a week, sixteen hours a day. They’ll do it since their hearts are filled with greed for gold and pumped full of sinful opium so that they never stop for a moment to think about the Glory of God, not even on Sundays. And I’ve seen the way they eat. The Chinamen are like locusts: They survive on nothing but cheap rice and vegetables when honest Christian men and women need to eat meat to keep up their strength. And they do not spend money on honest wholesome entertainment and camaraderie that keep the town’s shops and taverns afloat as our men do, but rather waste their evenings away wailing their cacophonous songs and telling their secretive stories. Finally, when night rolls around and every Christian family withdraws around the privacy of the familial hearth”—and here she paused to give Jack a meaningful stare—“the Chinamen squeeze as many bodies into as few beds as possible to save on rent.”

“Why Elsie,” Jack laughed uproariously. “I’ve heard of faint praise before, but I do believe this is the first time I’ve ever heard of faint damnation. The way you go on, I’d think you are a lover of the Chinese if I didn’t know better. You claim to be showing me their faults, but all you’ve said simply show that they are industrious, frugal, clever, happy with each other’s company, and willing to bear hardships. If this is the worst you can say about the Chinamen, then it is all but certain that the Civilization of Confucius is going to triumph over the Civilization of Christ.”

“You are not thinking,” Elsie said coldly. “What do you think the inevitable result of the cheap labor of these Chinamen will be? These Chinamen are going to undercharge Mrs. O’Scannlain and Mrs. Day and all the other widows. These women have a hard enough time as it is, working day and night, their fingers all red and raw from the constant washing, and they barely make enough to feed themselves and their children. Naturally the weak men of this town, uncertain of their Christian duty, will give their work to the Chinamen, who’ll charge them less than the honest widows who must keep God and their virtue close to their hearts. What will you have these widows do when their work has been stolen from them by the Chinamen? Will you have them throwing themselves at the mercy of Madam Isabelle and her house of sin?”

For once, Jack Seaver didn’t know what to say in reply to his wife.

• • • •

“How about carpentry? Furniture finishing? I could hire you to come and work in my store as clerks,” Jack said to Ah Yan.

“You can’t afford me,” Ah Yan said. “We charge twenty-five cents a shirt, and that means almost ten dollars a day from the bachelors alone. I’m not even counting the money from the blankets and sheets from the hotels. I’ve been told that we do a better job ironing than the women used to.” Ah Yan gave a rueful smile and flexed out his wiry right arm to look at the distended thumb at the end. “Even my thumb is getting bigger from pushing that iron all day. My wife back home will be tickled pink to hear that I’m a master of the iron now.”

To hear Ah Yan talk of his family was jarring to Jack, reminding him that Ah Yan, who looked so young to Jack’s eyes, wasn’t just some clever young man who knew how to cook and wash, but rather a husband and probably a father who was forced to learn how to do these things because his wife couldn’t be with him.

Lily had told Jack a few days earlier that the Chinamen were coming up with some new ideas that they wanted to ask his advice on. Finally, this morning, he could leave the store for a few hours to come over with Lily, who ran into the backyard to be with Logan as soon as they arrived. Jack thoughtfully bit into the steamed bun that Ah Yan had given him for breakfast; the bun burst open in his mouth, filling his tongue with the juice and flavor of sweet pork and hot and salty vegetables.

“Wait.” Jack swallowed quickly, regretting that he couldn’t enjoy the taste as long as he would have liked. “I have an idea. Before tasting your cooking, I would never have believed that cabbage and beans could taste better than beef and sausage, or that bitterness that lingered could be something that you liked. But you’ve been able to prove me wrong. Why not show the other people in Idaho City? You and the others could open up a restaurant and make a lot more money.”

Ah Yan shook his head. “Won’t work, Mr. Seaver. My friends in Old Gold Mountain tried it. Most Americans aren’t like you. They can’t stand the taste of Chinese food. It makes them sick.”

“I’ve heard of Chinese restaurants in San Francisco.”

“Those aren’t Chinese restaurants. Well, they are, but not the kind you are thinking of. They are owned by Chinese people, but all they serve is Western food: roast beef, chocolate cake, French toast. I don’t know how to make any of that stuff, not even well enough to the point where I’d want to eat it myself.”

“But I’m telling you, you are good, really good.” Jack looked around and lowered his voice. “You cook a lot better than Elsie, and I know she cooks as well as most of the wives out here. If you open your restaurant and I pass the word to the men discreetly, you’ll have filled tables every night.”

“Mr. Seaver, you are too generous with your praise. I know that in the eyes of a husband, there’s no way for anyone’s cooking to best his wife’s.” He paused for a moment, as if his thoughts were momentarily somewhere far away. “Besides, we are not chefs. All the stuff I make is just home-style cooking, the kind of thing the real chefs in Canton would not even feed to their dogs. There can’t be a Chinese restaurant in America until there are enough Chinese people in America and rich enough to want to eat at one.”

“That just means more Chinese will have to become Americans,” said Jack.

“Or lots more Americans will have to learn to be more Chinese,” said Ah Yan.

A few of the other Chinamen had gathered around to listen to the conversation. One of them offered a comment in Chinese at this point, and the group exploded in laughter. Tears came out of Ah Yan’s eyes.

“What did he say?” Although Jack was making an earnest effort to learn the language by singing drinking songs with Logan, he was nowhere good enough to follow a conversation yet, though Lily seemed to have picked it up much more easily and now often conversed with Logan half in Chinese and half in English.

Ah Yan wiped his eyes. “San Long said that we should name the restaurant ‘Dog Won’t Eat Here and You Won’t Eat Dog.’”

“I don’t get it.”

“There’s this really famous kind of steamed buns in China that’s called ‘Dog Won’t Eat Here,’ and you know how you Americans have this thing about eating dog meat”—Ah Yan gave up when he saw the expression on Jack’s face. “Never mind. This humor is too Chinese for you.”

San Long now picked up some twigs from the ground and mimed doing something with them and looked to Jack as if he were drunkenly throwing darts at some target a few inches in front of this face. Ah Yan and the others laughed even harder.

“He’s saying that a Chinese restaurant will never work in America since every customer will have to learn to use chopsticks,” Ah Yan explained to Jack.

“Yeah, yeah, very funny. Fine, no restaurant for you. And while we are on the subject of dogs and compliments that don’t sound like compliments, you did manage to make me curious about eating a dog for the first time in my life that evening.”

• • • •

“Dad is worried about the laundresses who are now out of work,” Lily told Logan.

They were walking down the middle of Chicory Lane together, side by side. Logan had a bamboo pole over his shoulder. At each end of the pole hung giant woven baskets filled with cucumbers, green onions, carrots, squash, tomatoes, string beans, and sugar beets.

“He’s not sure what to do. He says Ah Yan and the others are charging too little for the washing and the ironing, but if they don’t charge less, the white men won’t give them any work.”

“Two dollars for a dozen cucumbers, a dollar for a dozen green onions!” Logan called out in his booming voice, which reverberated in all directions until the echoes disappeared into the alleyways between the tightly packed houses. “Fresh carrots, beans, and beets! Come and have a look for yourself. Girls, fresh vegetables make your skin soft and smooth. Boys, fresh vegetables get rid of sailor’s lips!”

He called out his prices and offerings in a steady, rolling chant, not unlike the way he led the others in their work songs.

Doors opened on all sides of them. The curious wives and bachelors came out into the street to see what Logan was singing about.

“You should bring some of this up to Owyhee Creek, where Davey’s crew is still working their claim on account of that spring the Indians helped them find,” said one of the men. “I know they haven’t had any greens for a week now, and they’d pay you five dollars for a dozen of those cucumbers.”

“Thanks for the tip.”

“Where did you get the produce?” one of the wives wanted to know. “It looks a lot fresher than what you find in Seaver’s store, though I know he ships them in quick as he can.”

“It’s all grown right in our backyard, ma’am. Plucked those carrots from the ground myself this morning not even a hour ago.”

“In your backyard? How do you manage it? I can’t even get a bit of sage and rosemary to grow properly.”

“Well,” said Logan, “I started in China as a dirt-poor farmer. I guess I just have the knack for getting food to come out of dirt, one way or another.”

“Sure wish I had these fresh green onions and cucumbers to eat back in the spring instead of having to chew on potatoes soaked in vinegar every other day,” one of the older miners said, handling the giant cucumbers and tomatoes from Logan’s basket lovingly. “You are right that scurvy is a terrible thing, and fresh vegetables are the only thing for it. Too bad none of the young men believe it till it’s too late. I’ll have a dozen of these.”

“I don’t think we are going to let you leave today without emptying out your baskets,” another one of the younger wives said, to the sound of approval of the other women. “Did you save any for yourself and your friends?”

“Don’t worry about us,” Logan said. “I think we can get five or six harvests out of the garden this year. Buy as much as you want. I’ll be back again in a few weeks.”

Soon Logan sold all the vegetables he had with him. He counted out twenty dollars and handed the bills to Lily. “Give ten dollars to Mrs. O’Scannlain; I know she doesn’t have much saved up and she’s got two growing boys to feed. Ask your father who should have the rest.”

The old man and the young girl turned around and began the long, leisurely walk back to the Chinaman’s house on the other side of the town. In the empty street bathed in the bright, shimmering sunlight of high noon, the loping gait of the tall Chinaman and the baskets swinging lazily at the end of the bamboo pole over his shoulder made him look like some graceful water strider gliding across the still surface of a sunlit pond.

And in a moment, the man and the girl disappeared around the street corner and all was still again in the street.

Chinese New Year

It had been snowing nonstop for a whole week. The whole of Idaho City seemed asleep in the middle of February, resigned to wait for the spring that was still months away.

Well, almost the whole of Idaho City. The Chinamen were busy preparing for Chinese New Year.

For the whole week, the Chinamen talked about nothing except the coming New Year celebration. Strings of bright red firecrackers shipped from San Francisco were unpacked and laid out on shelves so that they would be kept dry. A few of the more nimble-fingered were set to the task of folding and cutting the paper animals that would be offered along with bundles of incense to the ancestors. Everyone worked to wrap pieces of candy and dried lotus seeds in red paper to be handed out to the children as sweet beginnings to a new year. Two days before New Year’s Eve, Ah Yan directed all the men in the preparation of the thousands of dumplings that would be consumed on New Year’s Day. The living room was turned into an assembly line for a dumpling factory, with some men rolling out the dough at one end, others preparing the stuffing of diced pork and shrimp and chopped vegetables mixed with sesame oil, and the rest wrapping scoops of stuffing into dumplings shaped like closed clams. The finished dumplings were then packed into buckets covered with dried sheets of lotus leaves and left outside, frozen in the ice, until they could be cooked in boiling water on New Year’s Eve.

Lily helped out wherever she could. She sorted the strings of firecrackers by size until her fingers smelled of gunpowder. She learned to cut pieces of colorful paper into the shapes of chickens and goats and sheep so that they could be burned in the presence of the gods and the ancestors and allow them to share in the feast of the people.

“Will Lord Guan Yu be there to appreciate the paper sheep?” Lily asked Logan.

Logan looked amused for a moment before his face, made even ruddier than usual because of the cold, turned serious. “I’m sure he will be there.”

In the end, Lily proved most valuable as the final step in the dumpling assembly line. She was an expert at sculpting the edges of the dumplings with a fork to create the wavy scallop shell pattern that signified the unbroken line of prosperity.

“You are really good at that,” Logan said. “If you didn’t have red hair and green eyes, I’d think you were a Chinese girl.”

“It’s just like shaping a pie crust,” Lily said. “Mom taught me.”

“You’ll have to show me how to make a proper pie crust after New Year’s,” Ah Yan said. “I’ve always wanted to learn that American trick.”

The activity of the Chinamen stirred up all kinds of excitement in the rest of Idaho City.

“Everybody gets a red packet filled with money and sweets,” the children whispered to each other. “All you have to do is to show up at their door and wish them to come into their fortune in the new year.”

“Jack Seaver has been raving about the cooking of the Chinamen for months now,” the women said to each other in the shops and streets. “Here’s our only chance to try it out. They say the Chinamen will serve anyone who comes to their door with pork dumplings that combine all the flavors in the world.”

“Are you going to be at the Chinamen’s when they celebrate their New Year?” the men asked each other. “They say that the heathens will put on a parade to honor their ancestors, with lots of loud music and colorful costumes. At the end, they’ll even serve up a feast such as never before seen in all of Boise Basin.”

• • • •

“What was Logan like back in China? Does he have a large family there?” Lily asked Ah Yan as she helped the young man carry large jars of sweet bamboo shoots into the house. She was tired from all the work she had done that day and couldn’t wait until the feast tomorrow. Truth be told, she felt a little guilty. She was never this eager when her own mother asked her to help around the house. She resolved to do better after tomorrow.

“Don’t know,” Ah Yan said. “Logan wasn’t from our village. He wasn’t even a Southerner. He just showed up on the docks on the day we were supposed to ship out for San Francisco.”

“So he was a stranger even in his own land.”

“Yup. You should ask him to tell you the story of our trip here.”

• • • •

“It is hardly the happy and the powerful who go into exile.”

—Alexis de Tocqueville

When in America

On a good day, the captain allowed a small number of his cargo to come up on deck from steerage for some air. The rest of the time, each man made do with a six-foot bunk that was narrower than a coffin. In the complete darkness of the locked hold, they tried to sleep away the hours, their dreams mixtures of unfounded hopes and cryptic dangers. Their constant companion was the smell of sixty men and their vomit and excrement and their food and unwashed bodies crammed into a space meant for bales of cotton and drums of rum. That, and the constant motion of the sailing ship, as it made the six-week journey across the Pacific Ocean.

They asked for water. Sometimes that request was even granted. Other times they waited for it to rain and listened for leaks into the hold. They learned very quickly to cut salted fish out of their diet. It made them thirsty.

To keep the darkness from making them crazy, they told each other stories that they all knew by heart.

They took turns to recite the story of Lord Guan Yu, the God of War, and how he once made it through six forts and slew five of Treacherous Cao Cao’s generals with the help of only Red Hare, his war steed, and Green Dragon Moon, his trusty sword.

“Lord Guan Yu would laugh at us as mere children if he heard us complaining about a little thirst and hunger and taking a trip in a boat,” said the Chinaman whom the others called Lao Guan. He was so tall that he had to sleep with his knees curled up to his chest to fit into his bunk. “What are we afraid of? We are not going there to fight a war but to build a railroad. America is not a land of wolves and tigers. It is a land of men. Men who must work and eat, just as we do.”

The others laughed in the darkness. They imagined the red face of Lord Guan Yu, fearless in any battle and full of witty stratagems to get himself out of any trap. What was a little hunger and thirst and darkness when Lord Guan Yu faced down dangers ten thousand times worse?

They sucked and nursed on the turnips and cabbages they had carried with them from the fields of their villages. The men held them up to their noses and inhaled deeply the smell of the soil that still clung to the roots. It would be the last time they would smell home for years.

Some of the men became sick and coughed all night, and the noise kept everyone awake for hours. Their foreheads felt like irons left for too long on the stove. The men had no medicine with them, no cubes of ice sugar or slices of goose pear. All they could do was to wait in the darkness silently.

“Let us sing the songs that our mothers sang to us as children,” said Lao Guan. He was so tall he had to stoop as he felt his way around the dark hold, clasping the hand of each comrade, sick and healthy alike. “Since our families are not with us, we should do as Lord Guan Yu did with Lord Liu Bei and Lord Zhang Fei in the Peach Orchard. We must become as brothers to each other.”

The men sang the nonsense songs of their childhood in the stifling air of the hold, and their voices washed over the bodies of the sick men like a cool breeze, lulling them to sleep.

In the morning, the coughing did not resume. A few of the men were found in their coffin-wide bunks, their unmoving legs curled close to their still bodies like sleeping babies.

“Throw them overboard,” said the Captain. “The rest of you will now have to pay back the price of their tickets.”

Lao Guan’s face was redder than the fever-flushed faces of the sick. He stooped next to the bodies and cut off locks of hair from each of them, carefully sealing each lock into an envelope. “I’ll bring these back to their ancestral villages so that their spirits will not wander the oceans without being able to return home.”

Wrapped up in dirty sheets, the bodies were cast over the side of the ship.

At last they made it to San Francisco, the Old Gold Mountain. Although sixty men boarded the ship, only fifty walked down the planks onto the quays. The men squinted in the bright sun light at the rows of small houses running up and down the steep, rolling hills. The streets, they found, were not paved with gold, and some of the white men on the quays looked as hungry and dirty as they felt.

They were taken by a Chinaman who was dressed like the white men to a dank basement in Chinatown. He didn’t have a queue, and his hair was parted and slicked down with oil whose strange smell made the other Chinamen sneeze.

“Here are your employment contracts,” the white Chinaman said. He gave them pieces of paper filled with characters smaller than flies’ heads to sign.

“According to this,” said Lao Guan, “we still owe you interest for the price of the passage from China. But the families of these men have already sold everything they could in order to raise money to buy the tickets that got us here.”

“If you don’t like it,” said the white Chinaman, picking between his teeth with the long, manicured nail of his right pinkie, “you can try to find a way to go back on your own. What can I say? Shipping Chinamen is expensive.”

“But it would take us three years of work to pay back the amount you say we owe you here, even longer since you have now made us responsible for the debts of the men who died on the sea.”

“Then you should have taken care that they didn’t get sick.” The white Chinaman checked his pocket watch. “Hurry up and sign the contracts. I don’t have all day.”

The next day they were packed into wagons and taken inland. The camp in the mountains where they were finally dropped off was a city of tents. On one side of the camp, the railroad stretched into the distance as far as they could see. On the other side was a mountain over which the Chinamen with spades and pickaxes swarmed like ants.

Night fell, and the Chinamen at the camp welcomed the new arrivals with a feast by the campfires.

“Eat, eat,” they told the new arrivals. “Eat as much as you like.” The Chinamen had trouble deciding which was sweeter: the food that went into their bellies, or the sound of those words in their ears.

They passed around bottles of a liquor that the old-timers said was called “whiskey.” It was strong and there was enough for everyone to get drunk. When they ran out of drink, the old-timers asked the new group whether they wanted to visit the large tent at the edge of the camp with them. A red silk scarf and a pair of women’s shoes dangled from a pole outside the tent.

“You lucky bastards,” grumbled one of the older men, whose name was San Long. “I gave all my money to Annie on Monday. I’ll have to wait another week.”

“She’ll run a tab for you,” said one of the others. “Though you might have to be with Sally instead of her tonight.”

San Long cracked a huge smile and got up to join his companions.

“This must be heaven,” said Ah Yan, who was barely more than a boy. “Look how free they are with money! They must be making so much that they paid off their debt early and can save up a fortune for their families while having all this fun.”

Lao Guan shook his head and stroked his beard. He sat next to the dying embers of the fire and smoked his pipe, staring at the big tent with the silk scarf and the pair of women’s shoes. The light in that tent stayed lit until late into the night.

The work was hard. They had to carve a path through the mountain in front of them for the railroad. The mountain yielded to their pickaxes and chisels reluctantly, and only after repeated hammering that made the men’s shoulders and arms sore down to the bones. There was so much mountain to move that it was like trying to gouge through the steel doors of the Emperor’s palace with wooden spoons. All the while, the white foremen screamed at the Chinamen to move faster and set upon anyone who tried to sit down for a minute with whips and fists.

They were making so little progress day after day that the men were tired each morning before they had even begun their work. Their spirit sagged. One by one, they laid down their tools. The mountain had defeated them. The white foremen jumped around, whipping at the Chinamen to get them to go back to work, but the Chinamen simply ducked away.

Lao Guan jumped onto a rock on the side of the mountain so that he was higher than everyone. “Tu-ne-mah,” he shouted, and spit at the mountain. “Tu-ne-mah!” He look at the white foremen and smiled at them.

The mountain pass was filled with the laughter of Chinamen. One by one they took up the chant. “Tu-ne-mah! Tu-ne-mah!” They smiled at the white foremen as they sang, and gestured at them. The white foremen, not sure what was wanted, joined in the chanting. This seemed to make the Chinamen even happier. They picked up their tools and went back to hacking at the mountain with a fury and vengeance directed by the rhythm of their chant. They made more progress in that afternoon than they had all week.

“Goddamn these monkeys,” said the site overseer. “But they certainly can work when they want to. What is that song they are singing?”

“Who knows?” The foremen shook their heads. “We can’t ever make heads or tails of their pidgin. It sounds like a work song.”

“Tell them that we’ll name this pass Tunemah,” said the overseer. “Maybe these monkeys will work even harder when they know that their song will be forever remembered every time a train passes this place.”

The Chinamen continued their chant even after they were done with their work for the day. “Tu-ne-mah!” they shouted at the white foremen, their smiles as wide as they’d ever smiled. “Fuck your mother!”

• • • •

At the end of the week, the Chinamen were paid.

“This is not what I was promised,” said Lao Guan to the clerk. “This is not even as much as half of what my wages should be.”

“You are deducted for the food you eat and for your space in the tents. I’d show you the math if you can count that high.” The clerk gestured for Lao Guan to move away from the table. “Next!”

“Have they always done this?” Lao Guan asked San Long.

“Oh yeah. It’s always been that way. The amount they charge for food and sleep have already gone up three times this year.”

“But this means you’ll never be able to pay back your debt and save up a fortune to take home with you.”

“What else can you do?” San Long shrugged. “There’s no place to buy food within fifty miles of here. We’ll never be able to pay back the debt we owe them anyway, since they just raise the interest whenever it seems like someone is about to pay it all back. All we can do is to take the money that we do get and drink and gamble and spend it all on Annie and the other girls. When you are drunk and asleep you won’t be thinking about it.”

“They are playing a trick on us then,” said Lao Guan. “This is all a trap.”

“Hey,” said San Long, “it’s too late to cry about that now. This is what you get for believing those stories told about the Old Gold Mountain. Serves us right.”

• • • •

Lao Guan went around and asked men to come and join him. He had a plan. They would run away into the mountains and go into hiding, and then make their way back to San Francisco.

“We’ll need to learn English and understand the ways of this land if we want to make our fortune. Staying here will only make us into slaves with nothing to call our own excepting mounting debts in the white men’s books.” Lao Guan looked at each man in the eyes, and he was so tall and imposing that the other men avoided looking back.

“But we’ll be breaking our contract and leaving our debts unpaid,” said Ah Yan. “We will be burdening our families and ancestors with shame. It is not Chinese to break one’s word.”

“We’ve already paid back the debt we owe these people twenty times and more. Why should we be faithful when they have not been honest with us? This is a land of trickery, and we must learn to become as tricky as the Americans.”

The men were still not convinced. Lao Guan decided to tell them the story of Jie You, the Han Princess whose name meant “Dissolver of Sorrows.”

• • • •

She was given away in marriage by the Martial Emperor to a barbarian king out in the Western Steppes, a thousand li from China, so that the barbarians would sell the Chinese the strong war horses that the Chinese army needed to defend the Empire.

“I hear that you are homesick,” wrote the Martial Emperior, “my precious daughter, and that you cannot swallow the rough uncooked meat of the foreigners, nor fall asleep on their beds made from the hairy hides of yaks and bears. I hear that the sandstorms have scarred your skin that was once as flawless as silk, and the deadly chill of the winters have darkened your eyes that were once bright as the moon. I hear that you call for home, and cry yourself to sleep. If any of this is true, then write to me and I shall send the whole army to bring you home. I cannot bear to think that you are suffering, my child, for you are the light of my old age, the solace of my soul.”

“Father and Emperor,” wrote the Princess. “What you have heard is true. But I know my duty, and you know yours. The Empire needs horses for the defense of the frontier against the Xiong Nu raids. How can you let the unhappiness of your daughter cause you to risk the death and suffering of your people at the hands of the invading barbarian hordes? You have named me wisely, and I will dissolve my sorrow to learn the happiness of my new home. I will learn to mix the rough meat with milk, and I will learn to sleep with a nightshirt. I will learn to cover my face with a veil, and I will learn to keep warm by riding with my husband. Since I am in a foreign land, I will learn the foreigners’ ways. By becoming one of the barbarians, I will become truly Chinese. Though I will never return to China, I will bring glory to you.”

• • • •

“How can we be less wise or less manly than a young girl, even if she was a daughter of the Martial Emperor?” said Lao Guan. “If you truly want to bring glory to your ancestors and your families, then you must first become Americans.”

“What will the gods think of this?” asked San Long. “We will become outlaws. Aren’t we struggling against our fate? Some of us are not meant to have great fortunes, but only to work and starve—we are lucky to have what we have even now.”

“Wasn’t Lord Guan Yu once an outlaw? Didn’t he teach us that the gods only smile upon those who take fate into their own hands? Why should we settle for having nothing for the rest of our lives when we know that we have enough strength in our arms to blast a path through mountains and enough wit in our heads to survive an ocean with only our stories and laughter?”

“But how do you know we’ll find anything better if we run away?” asked Ah Yan. “What if we are caught? What if we are set upon by bandits? What if we find only more suffering and danger in the darkness out there, beyond the firelight of this camp?”

“I don’t know what will happen to us out there,” Lao Guan said. “All life is an experiment. But at the end of our lives, we’d know that no man could do with our lives as he pleased except ourselves, and our triumphs and mistakes alike were our own.”

He stretched out his arms and described the circle of the horizon around them. Long clouds piled low in the sky to the west. “Though the land here does not smell of home, the sky here is wider and higher than I have ever known. Every day I learn names for things I did not know existed and perform feats that I did not know that I could do. Why should we fear to rise as high as we can and make new names for ourselves?”

In the dim firelight, Lao Guan looked to the others to be as tall as a tree, and his long, slim eyes glinted like jewels set in his flame-colored face. The hearts of the Chinamen were suddenly filled with resolve and a yearning for something that they did not yet know the name for.

“You feel it?” asked Lao Guan. “You feel that lift in your heart? That lightness in your head? That is the taste of whiskey, the essence of America. We have been wrong to be drunk and asleep. We should be drunk and fighting.”

• • • •

“To exchange the pure and tranquil pleasures that the native country offers even to the poor for the sterile enjoyments that well-being provides under a foreign sky; to flee the paternal hearth and the fields where one’s ancestors rest; to abandon the living and the dead to run after fortune—there is nothing that merits more praise in their eyes.”

—Alexis de Toqueville

Chicken Blood

The Idaho City Brass Band played “Finnegan’s Wake” at the insistence of Logan.

“There’s not enough noise,” he told them. “In China, we’d have all the children of the village setting off firecrackers and fireworks for the whole day to chase off the greedy evil spirits. Here we have only enough firecrackers to last a few hours. We’ll need all the help you boys can give us to scare the evil sprits off.”

The men of the brass band, their bellies now full of sweet sticky rice buns filled with bean paste and hot and spicy dumplings, set to their appointed task with gusto. They had not played with as much spirit even for Independence Day.

All the rumors about the Chinese New Year celebration were true. The children’s pockets were filled sweets and jangling coins, and the men and women were laughing as they enjoyed the feast that had been laid out before them. They had to shout to make each other heard amidst the unending explosions of the firecrackers and the music blasting from the brass band.

Jack found Elsie among the other women in the vegetable garden. An open bonfire had been lit there so that the guests would be warm as they mingled and ate.

“I’m surprised at you,” Jack said to her. “I’d swear that I saw you take three servings of the dumplings. I thought you said you’d never touch the food of the Chinamen.”

“Thaddeus Seaver,” Elsie said severely. “I don’t know where you get such strange notions. It’s positively unchristian to behave as you suggest when your neighbors have opened up their houses to you and invited you to break bread with them in their feast. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were the heathen here.”

“That’s my girl,” said Jack. “Though isn’t it time for you to start calling me Jack? Everyone else does now.”

“I’ll think about it after I’ve tried a piece of that sweet ginger,” Elsie said. She laughed, and Jack realized how much he missed hearing that sound since they moved here to Idaho City. “Did you know that the first boy I liked was named Jack?”

The other women laughed, and Jack laughed along with them.

• • • •

Abruptly the brass band stopped playing. One by one the men stopped talking and turned to the door of the house. There, in the door, stood Sheriff Gaskins, who was looking apologetic and a little ashamed.

“Sorry, folks,” he said. “This isn’t my idea.”

He saw Ah Yan in the corner and waved to him. “Don’t think I won’t recognize you next time I come for your taxes.”

“Time enough for that later, Sheriff. This is a day of feasting and joy.”

“You might want to wait on that. I’m here on official business.”

Logan walked into the room, and the crowd parted before him. He was face to face with the Sheriff before another man darted into view behind the Sheriff, and just as quickly, skulked out of sight.

“Obee has accused you with murder,” said the Sheriff. “And I’m here to arrest you.”

• • • •

As a child growing up in Mock Turtle, Pennsylvania, the last thing Emmett Hayworth thought he would end up doing one day was to be a judge out in the middle of the Rocky Mountains.

Emmett was a big man, the same as his father, a banker who had retired from Philadelphia to live quietly out in the country. Before he was twenty, Emmett’s greatest claim to fame was that he had won the all-county pie-eating contest three years in a row. It was assumed that Emmett would never amount to much, since he would have enough money to not have to work very hard, and not enough money to really get into much mischief. Everyone liked him, for he was always willing to buy you a drink if you called him Sir.

And then came the War, and back then everyone still thought the Rebels would fold like a house of cards in three months. Emmett said to himself, “Why the heck not? This will probably be my only chance in life to see New Orleans.” With his father’s money he raised a regiment, and overnight he was Colonel Emmett Hayworth of the Union Army.

He took surprisingly well to being a soldier, and while his body slimmed down with riding and getting less than enough to eat, his good cheer never flagged. Somehow his regiment managed to stay out of the meat grinders that were the great battles that made newspaper headlines, and they lost fewer men than most. The men were grateful for Emmett’s luck. “Oh, if I were a woman as I am a man,” they sang, “Colonel Hayworth is the man I’d marry. His hands are steady, and his words are always merry. He’ll bring us to New Orleans.” Emmett laughed when he heard the song.

They did get to New Orleans eventually, but by then it wasn’t much of a party town any more. The War was over, and Emmett had scraped through with no bullet holes in him and no medals. “That’s not so bad,” he said to himself. “I can live with that.”

But then he got the order that President Lincoln wanted to see him, in D.C.

Emmett did not remember much about the meeting, save that Lincoln was a lot taller than he had imagined. They shook hands, and Lincoln began to explain to him about the situation in Idaho Territory.

“The Confederate Democratic refugees from Missouri are filling up the mines of Idaho. I’ll need men like you there, men who have proven their bravery, integrity, and dedication to the cause.”

The only thing Emmett could think of was that they had the wrong man.

The trouble, as it turned out, had entirely been the fault of that song his men made up as a joke. It grew to be popular with the other regiments, and spread its way wherever the Union marched. New verses were added as it passed from man to man, and the soldiers, having no idea who Emmett Hayworth was, attributed great acts of courage and sacrifice to him. Colonel Hayworth became famous, almost as famous as John Brown.

Be that as it may, Emmett Hayworth packed up everything he owned and left for Boise, and only when he arrived did he find out that the Territorial Governor had just appointed him to be a district judge for the Territory of Idaho.

• • • •

Jack Seaver looked across the desk at the plump form of The Honorable Emmett Hayworth. The Judge was still working on a plate of fried chicken that served as his lunch. Life out here in the booming territory of Idaho had been good to him, and he showed it in his barrel-like chest, his sack-like belly, his glistening forehead dripping with sweat from the effort of licking strips of juicy meat from the chicken bones.

The man was supposed to be some kind of war hero. Jack Seaver knew the type: a man accustomed to living off the money of his father who probably bought himself a cushy commission managing the supply lines and then puffed up his every accomplishment in the name of Union and Glory until he weaseled his way to a sinecure here while man like Jack Seaver dodged bullets in the mud and froze their toes off in winter. Jack clenched his teeth. This was neither the time nor the place to show his contempt. He did reflect upon the irony that despite what he had told Elsie’s father back East, he now wished that he had studied to be a lawyer.

“What is this I hear about chicken blood?” Emmett asked.

• • • •

“That’s outrageous,” said Obee. “I won’t do it. Why are you even letting the Chinaman talk? This is not the way it works in California.”

“You are going to have to,” Judge Hayworth said to him. He hadn’t been very enamored of the idea of the Chinamen’s ceremony at first, but that Jack Seaver had been very persuasive. If he ever decided to become a lawyer, he’d eat the other guys in town for lunch. “Maybe in California they’ll just take a white man’s word for it since the Chinamen can’t testify in court, but this isn’t California. The accused has the right to a fair trial, and since he has agreed to swear with his hand on the Bible as is our custom, it’s only fair that you agree to swear the way that his people have always sworn in witnesses.”

“It’s barbaric!”

“That may be. But if you won’t do it, I’ll have to direct the jury to acquit.”

Obee swore under his breath.

“Fine,” he said. He stared at Logan, who was across the courthouse from him. Obee’s eyes were so filled with hate that he looked even more like a rat than usual.

Ah Yan was called for, and he came up to the witness box. In his left hand was a struggling hen dangling by her legs while in his right hand was a small bowl.

He set the bowl down in front of Obee. Taking a knife from his belt, he slit the hen’s throat efficiently. The blood of the hen dripped into the bowl until the hen stopped kicking in Ah Yan’s hands.

“Dip your hand into the blood and make sure it covers your whole hand,” Ah Yan said. Obee reluctantly did as he was told. His hand shook so much that the bowl clattered against the wooden surface on which it was set.

“Now you have to clasp Logan’s hand and look into his eyes, and swear that you’ll tell the truth.”

Logan was escorted over to the witness box by Sheriff Gaskins. Since his legs and arms were shackled together, this took some time.

Logan looked down at Obee, contempt was written in every wrinkle in his blood-red face. He dipped both of his shackled hands into the bowl of chicken blood, soaking them thoroughly. Lifting his hands out of the bowl, he shook off the excess blood and stretched the open palm of his right hand towards Obee. The color of his hands now matched his face.

Obee hesitated.

“Well,” Judge Hayworth said impatiently. “Get on with it. Shake the man’s hand.”

“Your honor,” Obee turned towards him. “This is a trick. He’s going to crush my hand if I give it to him.”

Laughter shook the courtroom.

“No, he won’t,” said the Judge, trying to control his smirk. “If he does, I’ll personally thrash him.”

Obee gingerly stretched his hand towards Logan’s hand. He eyes were focused on the shrinking distance between their palms as if his life depended on it. He wasn’t breathing, and his hand shook violently.

Logan stepped forward and made a grab for Obee’s hand, and he gave a low growl from his throat.

Obee screamed as if he had been stabbed with a hot poker. He stumbled back frantically, pulling his hand out of Logan’s grasp. A spreading, wet patch appeared at the crotch of his pants. A moment later the Sheriff and the Judge were hit with the unpleasant smell of excrement.

“I didn’t even get to touch him,” Logan said, holding up his hands. The pattern of chicken blood on his right palm was undisturbed with the print from Obee’s hand.

“Order, order!” Judge Hayworth banged the gavel. Then he gave up and shook his head in disbelief. “Get him out of here and cleaned up,” he said to Sheriff Gaskins, trying to keep himself from smiling. “Stop laughing. It’s, uh, unbecoming for officers of the law. And hand me that chicken, will you? No sense in letting perfectly good poultry go to waste.”

• • • •

“All you have to do is to tell the truth,” Lily said to Logan, “that’s what Dad told me to do. It’s easy.”

“The law is a funny thing,” said Logan. “You’ve heard my stories.”

“It won’t be like that here. I promise.”

Earlier that day, she had told the jury what she saw on that day by the Chinamen’s camp.

Mrs. O’Scannlain, who was in the front row of the courtroom, had smiled at her as she walked up to sit in the witness box next to the judge. It had made her feel very brave.

The faces of the men in the jury box were severe and expressionless, and she had been terrified. But then she told herself that it was just like telling a story, the way Logan told her his stories. The only thing was that it was all true, so she didn’t even have to make any of it up.

Afterwards, she couldn’t tell if they believed her. But Mrs. O’Scannlain and the others in the courtroom clapped after her testimony and that made her happy, even after the Judge banged his gavel several times to get the crowd to settle down.

But now was not the time to tell Logan that. “Of course they will believe you,” she said to Logan. “You have all these people who saw what happened.”

“But except for you, they are all just worthless Chinamen.”

“Why do you say that?” Lily became angry. “I’d rather be a Chinaman than someone who’d believe Obee’s lies.”

Logan laughed, but he was quickly serious again. “I’m sorry, Lily. Even men who have lived as long as I have sometimes get cynical.”

They were silent for a while, each lost in their own thoughts.

“When you are freed,” Lily broke the silence after a while, “will you stay here instead of going back to China?”

“I’m going home.”

“Oh,” Lily said.

“Though I’d like to have my own house instead of always renting. Maybe your father will consider helping me build one?”

Lily looked at him, not understanding.

“This is home,” Logan said, smiling at her. “This is where I have finally found all the flavors of the world, all the sweetness and bitterness, all the whiskey and sorghum mead, all the excitement and agitation of a wilderness of untamed, beautiful men and women, all the peace and solitude of a barely settled land—in a word, the exhilarating lift to the spirit that is the taste of America.”

Lily wanted to shout for joy, but she didn’t want to get her hopes up, not just yet. Logan had yet to tell his story to the jury tomorrow.

But meanwhile, there was a still a night of storytelling ahead.

“Will you tell me another story?” Lily asked.

“Sure, but I think from now on I won’t tell you any more stories about my life as a Chinaman. I’ll tell you the story of how I became an American.”

When the band of weary and gaunt Chinamen showed up in Idaho City with their funny bamboo carrying poles over their shoulders . . .

Epilogue

The Chinese made up a large percentage of the population of Idaho Territory in the late 1800s.¹ They formed a vibrant community of miners, cooks, laundry operators, and gardeners that integrated well with the white communities of the mining towns. Almost all of the Chinese were men seeking to make their fortune in America.²

By the time many of them decided to settle in America and become Americans, anti-Chinese sentiment had swept the western half of the United States. Beginning with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a series of national laws, state laws, and court decisions forbade these men from bringing their wives into America from China and stemmed the flow of any more Chinese, men or women, from entering America. Intermarriage between whites and Chinese was not permitted by law. As a result, the bachelor communities of Chinese in the Idaho mining towns gradually dwindled until all the Chinese had died before the repeal of the Exclusion Acts during World War II.

To this day, some of the mining towns of Idaho still celebrate Chinese New Year in memory of the presence of the Chinese among them.

• • • •

¹The Chinese were 28.5% of the population of Idaho in 1870.

²For more on the history of the Chinese in gold-rush Idaho, see Zhu, Liping. A Chinaman’s Chance: The Chinese on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1997.

© 2012 by Ken Liu. Originally published in GigaNotoSaurus. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ken Liu is an author of speculative fiction, as well as a translator, lawyer, and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings (2015), is the first volume in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, The Dandelion Dynasty. It won the Locus Best First Novel Award and was a Nebula finalist. He subsequently published the second volume in the series, The Wall of Storms (2016) as well as a collection of short stories, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (2016). He also wrote the Star Wars novel, The Legends of Luke Skywalker (2017). In addition to his original fiction, Ken also translated numerous literary and genre works from Chinese to English. His translation of The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin, won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2015, the first translated novel ever to receive that honor. He also translated the third volume in Liu Cixin’s series, Death’s End (2016) and edited the first English-language anthology of contemporary Chinese science fiction, Invisible Planets (2016). He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

EXCERPT: City of Broken Magic (Tor Books)

Mirah Bolender | 5533 words

Five hundred years ago, magi created a weapon they couldn’t control: an infestation that ate magic—and anything else it came into contact with. Enemies and allies were equally filling.

Only an elite team of non-magical humans, known as sweepers, can defuse and dispose of infestations before they spread. Most die before they finish training.

Laura, a new team member, has stayed alive longer than most. Now, she’s the last—and only—sweeper standing between the city and a massive infestation.

Available November 2018 from Tor Books.

Is he going to know?

Laura gripped the handles of her bike harder and squinted, taking in the building before her. No, she decided, no one was visible through the windows. Perfect. All she had to do was sneak in, sit down, pretend she’d been there the entire time. She grabbed the handle, pushed lightly inward . . . and the hinges groaned.

“Shit!” she hissed. An answering sound came from inside, and she grimaced.

“Someone’s running late,” a voice drawled.

She kicked the door open with no more attempt at subtlety. No bell jingled by the door, but a cheap set of wind chimes clinked as a breeze filtered in. Apart from that chime, there wasn’t much decoration to be had. The place looked like it had once been a candy shop, with a long counter along three sides of the room, wood on top but glass below to display shelves there. All these shelves and the majority of the countertop were cluttered with glass bottles, tubes, and flasks. Some were held by wiry frames, others suspended above open flame, still others connected by a myriad of tubes, the entire contraption being called “the Kin system.” Throughout the maze of glass, golden liquid simmered and frothed. Odds and ends were strewn about in the clear spaces, lingering close enough to the Kin to blacken, or spread amid the glass-encased shelves: papers, a stray fountain pen, small clips and fasteners. Behind the glass sat a large metallic briefcase, long lengths of wire, tools, and a mess of mismatched objects and papers. Four rickety stools were scattered about in the open space between door and counter; on the right wall hung black drapes, and in the back wall was a closed door. It was warm in the room, the bottles and flasks hissing and steaming around her and making the heat even worse than it was outside.

Her boss sat on a stool just behind the Kin machine. He looked at her through the steam, partially obscured and in a position to block the drapes, as was his wont. No wonder Laura hadn’t seen him through the windows. Clae Sinclair was fairly young to be running his own business. Laura didn’t know his exact age, but he couldn’t be any older than thirty. His face was arranged in a look of nigh-permanent bored tranquility, though when he was angry, it showed in his eyes. He bore three small scars on his face: two on the rise of his left cheekbone, one above his eyebrow; other scars marred his hands and lurked out of sight under his sleeves. Otherwise he was fairly attractive, shorter than the average man, with dark hair curled loosely to frame his face and hanging about halfway down his neck. His eyes were nearly as dark. On the job, Laura had heard some other women twittering loudly about his looks, but for her he held all the appeal of a flowering cactus.

While he practically teemed with quirks, there was one so intertwined with his existence that it seemed just as ingrained as all his scars: the black drapes he sat in front of. No one was permitted to venture beyond them or even catch a glimpse of whatever was there. He guarded these drapes with a zeal hard to detect but terrifying to witness the scarce times it hit full force, and this had garnered the attention of some neighbors (who of course talked, and the whole thing was distorted and spread). When people weren’t talking about his attitude or latest stunts, they muttered about black curtains. What could he be hiding? A treasure, a monster, an heirloom? Nothing at all? Could it be the cause of his madness? It was rumored that he killed someone who tried to get behind those drapes. The one time someone had mentioned it to his face he’d smiled—actually smiled—and snapped his pocket watch closed with the most menacing click Laura had ever heard. This was the only “proof,” so it remained only jeering hearsay. These simple scraps of fabric were the eternal conundrum of the neighborhood. Laura didn’t know what was there, and she was somewhat obsessed with the mystery herself.

Laura took her sweet time leaning her bike against the only open wall and taking a seat.

“Good morning,” she muttered.

Clae didn’t reply, just looked at her with that same blank expression. The flasks and tubes continued to spit, and smoke wreathed around him to make a halo above his head.

“I’m not going to make excuses.”

“I wouldn’t listen to them anyway.”

Of course not. “Sorry.”

“Don’t let it happen again. This job is time sensitive. There’s a reason we have hours.”

“Right. What are we doing today?”

“There’s an infestation in the Second Quarter,” he replied, finally taking his eyes off her to look at the pseudo chemistry lab around them. “Judging by the description in the report, it’s been working away for nearly two months now.”

“Two months?” Laura felt her face pale. She’d never encountered a monster that strong.

“It seems to have taken root in a house, eaten the insides.”

“And the people inside?”

“I did just say it ate the insides.”

Laura felt nauseous. “How big is it, exactly?”

“It’s overtaken the entire house, and Second Quarter houses are usually much larger than the Third ones.”

“Damn,” she breathed.

“All entrances to the building will probably be sealed off, so the creature can hide from the light. It took advantage of the early morning to bulk up its defenses.”

She remembered another time with only a month’s growth, where tables were pressed to the windows and couldn’t be moved.

“We’ll have to attack through an entrance it hasn’t noticed. We may not be able to use bombs or anything highly destructive though, as that may damage the root amulet and make the situation worse.”

He pulled out one of the long lengths of wire and unraveled the end. He squinted at it, as if to be sure the silvery material was undamaged, before coiling it up to store in one of the many bags on his belt.

“How do we find one of those entrances?” questioned Laura, slipping off her own stool. “It wasn’t exactly hard for you to find one last time.” But last time was in June; Laura hadn’t been at all knowledgeable at the time. No other high-level incidents had happened since. “What’s the secret?”

“It varies. We’ll have to investigate the house itself, figure out which is the most opportune place, and once we know that, we can come up with a plan of attack.” He plucked a small gun from somewhere in the mess of Kin. “Once that’s settled, it’s fairly straightforward.”

“Can we keep a distance?”

“As usual, all that stands between us is the walls of the house.”

In Laura’s cheap Third Quarter apartment, the walls were thin enough that she could hear people in other rooms and outside talking. It seemed like little protection.

“Second Quarter houses are better, right?”

“Of course. They’re only a step down from First, after all. But if we seriously piss this thing off, a few more inches won’t stop it.”

If Laura thought about it too much, she’d psych herself out and end up getting herself killed. She had to do something, occupy her hands and her mind. She rolled up her sleeves, took a glance at the briefcase, and asked, “Okay, what else do we need in there?”

• • • •

There was a crowd down the street, in front of the row of trendy houses. The black uniforms and silver badges of the police stood out amid the brighter fashions of the residents. The sight made Laura nervous again. As usual, Clae’s face betrayed nothing. One of the policemen spotted them and jogged over.

“You’re the Sweepers?” he asked hopefully.

“We are,” Clae answered. “Any change in the situation?”

“Another death. There was a relative. She seemed calm, but the moment we turned our backs . . . She got into the house before we could catch her.” The policeman mopped his face with a handkerchief. “Got in through the cellar. We tried to pull her out, but the door shut and we couldn’t get it open again.”

Clae opened his mouth to reply, but a voice cut him off. “Is that the Sweeper?”

A policewoman approached, a gold badge on her uniform instead of silver. She glared at them through thick glasses that magnified her brown eyes, and she gestured at the house.

“Get him to work! I’ve had enough of this crap!”

The policeman looked highly embarrassed. “Please don’t mind the chief,” he muttered. “We’ve had a number of calls today, and she’s a little stressed.”

“Pleasant as always, Chief Albright!” Clae called.

He gave a slight, mocking bow, holding his briefcase out to the side. The chief’s eyes narrowed further. The little nameplate under her badge did, indeed, wink H. ALBRIGHT, just as the policeman’s read W. BAXTER.

“I’m not willing to deal with your sass today, Sinclair,” she retorted. “Just take care of this and get the hell out.”

“Of course.”

As Clae strode toward the building, Laura asked, “You know her?”

“Police of a certain rank have to deal with Sweepers, so they’re required to do patrol with us,” Clae explained. “She and a group tagged along with me last year, before she was promoted.”

“She’s only been police chief about as long as I’ve been apprentice, right? Three months?”

“Sounds right. I’d say she’s got more experience than you, but it isn’t by much.”

Laura pursed her lips as she watched Albright moving more police into position, quelling any arguments as the onlookers were shuffled away. “She seems to have settled into it already.”

“They’ve debriefed her on the situation, so she knows how to carry it out.”

Ah, the situation. The situation was laughable.

Laura turned her gaze on the building as well. The house in question appeared nearly identical to all the others on this row. They were tall and thin, like dominoes stacked side to side, and their gently sloping roofs came within inches of brushing their neighbors’. Every roof had dark shingles, but homeowners added their unique flair in the color of siding and trim, this one being pale blue. Three ornate windows lined the front, all of them blocked. A dresser was pushed up against one with drawers facing out, a table’s surface was against another with a fabric table runner stuck between, and the last had curtains drawn but something pressed up behind it. The cellar door was in a dip next to the stairs, seemingly harmless.

“What do we do with Mr. Two-Months?” Laura asked, pleased when her nervousness didn’t show in her tone.

“We can’t break in through the cellar. One person already got through, so it’s probably most wary of that. Front door is too obvious. They’ve learned about front doors. Back doors, too. Not that this district even has back doors. Design flaw, really. It’s 1233, you’d think they’d have done something about that.”

“The Collective knows about the doors, you mean?”

“Collective, hive, whatever.” He looked sideways at her, apparently judging now to be an opportune quiz time. “Considering the hive mind. What to remember?”

“It’s not particularly smart, but it picks up on routines,” Laura recited. “If Sweepers use the same tactics enough times in a row, it learns to expect that. Since the hive mind shares its knowledge with its offspring, all the monsters will start operating on that information. The further south you get, the smarter they are, because they’re closer to the hive mind and it’s easier to communicate. Being in southern Terual, Amicae is close enough to the source for the creature to be more dangerous, but not so much the intelligent breed of the far south, Zyra.”

“You sound like a textbook.”

“It’s right, isn’t it?”

“Correct.” His voice fell flat and bored. “This creature was created by the indigenous kingdom,” he prompted.

“Created as an anti-magic defense against invading kingdoms during the high age of magic. They lost control of it, and the monsters destroyed the creators and spread northward.”

“Textbook,” he repeated. “I’m not teaching you for a test. Parroting a book at me isn’t going to help you fight these things.”

“So long as I can act on the information, what do you care?” Laura challenged, crossing her arms.

“Hettie was book smart but couldn’t apply the information. Froze up. Got eaten. I’m not having another apprentice go the same route. We lose far too many people to these monsters.”

People including the last police chief.

Laura backed down, uneasy. “You’re the one assigning tests in front of an infestation. Let’s go beyond the books and backstory. What are we doing with it?”

“The unpredictable, to confuse the hive mind.”

“How do we do that?”

“My guess is the chimney.”

“Are we going to use it like a Pit?”

“It’s probably sealed off at the bottom since this Quarter has been converted to central heating, but we can still get it. A chimney here is near twenty feet. We can jump down. It won’t expect that.”

Laura leaned back and glared at his impassive face.

“Twenty feet.” She was sure her voice carried her indignation.

“Yes,” he replied, like he didn’t see a problem.

“You’re expecting me to jump twenty feet down a chimney shaft, into the lair of a monster.”

“You, certainly not. I’ll take care of this one. Stay back with the police. Maybe if you’re with them you can impart some semblance of sense.” He turned and walked back toward the police, barking something about a ladder.

There were no ladders nearby, and with all of the neighbors evacuated to another location it wasn’t viable to ask them for help. After some haggling, Chief Albright called in one of the heavy-duty robots. The bot was nearly as tall as the house, even in its permanent hunched position. Its eight arms moved fluidly, always shifting in movements that made Laura think of spiders. She hated these things. She kind of understood that the drive mechanics had to replicate the human form—something about the human body being the most perfect of all machines, she’d heard her neighbor ramble about that before—but never understood why they pursued it when the outcome looked either unnervingly fake or downright creepy.

The robot rolled in close to the building, mechanical hands looping around to skim the stairs, the doorknob, the gate. Judging by the dust and the amount of smashed brick it carried in the metal basket on its back, it must’ve been helping with some demolition site. They all looked up at it, and Laura shuddered at the sight.

“Will that do?” Baxter muttered, dubious.

“It better,” Albright grumbled.

“It will,” Clae assured them.

He deposited the briefcase on the ground, planted his foot on one of the wheel spokes, and pulled himself up. Now off the ground, he pulled his bandana over his mouth and nose and fished a set of goggles out of his coat pocket. Once they were secured, he looked back, eyeing Laura in particular.

“Keep an eye on things out here. I doubt it’ll make a break for it, but you can’t always apply logic to monsters.”

“You’re sure you don’t need backup in there?”

“You don’t have proper protection. We haven’t gotten that kin-treated equipment for you yet. You’re as good as a sitting duck.”

The bandana around Laura’s neck was saturated with kin, but it was just a scrap of cloth. She suspected it would do her no good in this situation.

“Next time, though?”

“I’ll consider it.”

“What should I do if I see anything happening?”

“Your instincts are good. Follow them.”

Because that made so much sense.

Clae turned, grabbed hold of the trash container on the robot’s back, and heaved himself higher. A series of bumps mimicking a spine provided footholds on his way up. He balanced at the top, wavering on the robot’s head and judging the distance before taking a leap. He soared and landed soundlessly on the shingles. He must’ve activated the magic-producing amulets in his boots. Pausing a moment, he turned and gave a thumbs-up. A policewoman waited on the other side of the robot, elbows deep in a control panel. As she made a twisting motion, one of the robot’s limbs moved, scooping up the briefcase and bearing it to the roof. Clae retrieved it and crept away, disappearing from sight.

Laura shifted her footing and looked around at the gathered people. Even without the excuse of shepherding a civilian crowd, their police squad stayed several houses away, watching the house as if afraid it would explode at any moment. Only one seemed interested in getting closer: a young woman in an ill-fitting uniform, who stepped slowly forward. Laura tried to wave her back again but only caught her attention.

“He’s going in?” the woman whispered. “I thought a mob hit would mean the po—we would go in first.”

No wonder she was sneaking closer. She wasn’t aware of the situation. Laura had been under the impression that police had it drilled into them from day one, but on second thought, a new recruit might spill the secret, believing they were doing the right thing.

“Your squad hasn’t filled you in yet?” said Laura.

“I—A little.” The woman stuck her hands in her pockets, as if tempted to pull something out. “You’re . . . Sweepers?”

“That’s right.”

“And you’re the spiritual successors to the MARU? You tackle mob business?”

“Something like that.” Laura wanted to say more—always had—but contracts were a damnable thing. She could hint at the bigger problem, though. “You’re aware of infestations, right?”

The policewoman looked lost. “Like rats?”

“No, like—” Laura shot a glance at the chief, judged Albright far enough away. “I mean monsters.”

It took a moment for the implication to set in, and the woman’s eyes widened. “Wait, a monster? There’s one in—”

“That’s why we’re going in first. Don’t worry.” Laura threw on her most cinema-star smile, hoping she was convincing. “My boss is an expert.”

A thunk from the roof caught her attention and she whipped around. More sounds reached her ears; was the creature trying to get out? But it wouldn’t. Leaving the house meant facing sunlight, and sunlight burned . . . but it wasn’t perfect repellent.

“What was that?” the policewoman squeaked. “You don’t think it’s—”

“It’s fine,” Laura assured her but wasn’t too sure herself. “I’m going in to check it out. You head back to the group, right? If we need help we’ll shout.”

It wasn’t the initial plan, but better to move in and understand what was going on than get caught by surprise, right? Laura pulled her own bandana up, goggles down, and the world was tinged slightly orange. She climbed the robot, clinging to the trash container and the bumps on its back. It was hot from the sun and her hands stung, but she gritted her teeth and kept on until she pulled herself onto the robot’s shoulders.

She could see Clae kneeling by the chimney, fussing with it while the briefcase lay open nearby. Nothing looked wrong. Did he make the noise on purpose? It could be something she didn’t know about yet, something routine on big infestations. She’d only dealt with small ones and training exercises, so she didn’t know whether to worry or not. She glanced down, noticed the drop, and snapped her head up. Climbing up had been manageable, but she hadn’t thought of how to climb down. She wavered a moment before deciding, hell with it, she’d tag along with Clae anyway. She’d never be a good Sweeper if all she did was sit on the sidelines.

An amulet of her own was clipped to Laura’s belt: a pale gray circle the size of her palm, round and curved outward with simple line carvings to form a smiling downturned face. One tap and a silent command activated its magic, and she felt a faint echo from the smaller amulets in her shoes. While she hadn’t been on a lot of infestation jobs, she had enough practice with the amulets that it was almost effortless to jump, gravity halved, using the robot’s still-raised hand as a stepping-stone to reach the roof. The click of her heels on the shingles was quiet but still noticeable, and Clae looked around.

“The duckling’s here to wing it, I see. Didn’t I tell you to stay down there?” he scolded, but with no real force. Maybe that had actually been a test to see if she would follow. He’d sprung stranger ones before.

“I heard noise. Is this some kind of routine you didn’t talk about before? Because I was pretty sure we were supposed to be silent.”

“I was testing,” Clae explained. “Seeing how nasty this infestation is. I think we’ve got an introvert on our hands.”

“Introvert?”

“It’s shifting down there but not reacting otherwise. Either it’s digesting or it’s just shy. They’re rare, but introverts exist. Shouldn’t be as hard to root it out, either way. Meals slow them down too.”

“Great. Still doing the chimney plan?”

“Naturally.”

Laura sighed. She tapped the amulet on her belt again, giving a new order, and the magic shifted so she could walk more easily—the roof slanted toward the neighboring house, so without magic she’d have to crouch and shuffle to keep from falling. Despite her using three amulets at once, they worked in unison and could only handle one specific instruction at a time, so as she tiptoed to the other side of the roof, her feet made more noise than the initial landing. The chimney wasn’t a big structure, jutting a foot up at its deepest side and made of white-painted brick. Some sort of metal covered the top.

“Is this the seal you meant?”

“The chimney’s likely blocked down at the bottom too.”

“How are we going to get through it?”

“We’ll remove this and check out how it’s stopped up below.”

Clae pulled a screwdriver out of his pocket. He frowned at the screws and fit the tool into the grooves. It wasn’t the right size, and on a few twists it lost grip and skipped right over into the next groove, but Clae was determined, and he worked fast. It wasn’t long before the first screw was out and rolling down the roof. Laura didn’t bother to catch it, so it dropped away between the houses.

“So, where did it come from?”

Laura was surprised for a moment and gestured down at the house below. “It? Well, it got into an amulet. That’s where they grow.”

“Yes, but where did this broken amulet come from? What type of family lived here?”

“Second Quarter, obviously. Pretty wealthy. As far as I can tell, no one important. Why?”

“We need to rule out the possibility of murder.”

This being the source of the “mob business” the policewoman had mentioned. Things like this one were sometimes planted in houses to assassinate the residents. It wasn’t nearly as common as the Council liked people to believe, though.

“For all we know, they could’ve had jealous neighbors.”

“Would this family use amulets, be able to afford the upkeep? Would there be one in their house?”

“I don’t think so.” Laura glanced at the rest of the street and the neighboring ones, all the same with thin houses in row upon row. “There can be much bigger houses in Second Quarter. Someone wealthy enough to own amulets would probably be in one of those. Since it’s near the outer wall this is a lower district, so amulets aren’t so common.”

“It’s true. Magic users, even in the higher districts, tend to be closer to the inside wall and the First Quarter.” He focused on the next screw.

“So in this lower district, amulets aren’t common. One wouldn’t be in their house. Why do we need to know this?”

“Because amulets can be obvious, and if the family didn’t own an amulet, the killer wouldn’t set one in plain sight. Judging by the average design of the houses here, the fireplace will be very big, very open, very obvious, so the amulet won’t be sitting there. We won’t be dropping right on top of it or risk breaking it further by jumping down.”

Clae removed the last screw and gingerly moved the cover, setting it down atop the briefcase so it rested against the chimney and ran no risk of falling. Clae peered down the chimney. Peeking around him, Laura could only see darkness.

“We’re seriously jumping down there?”

“Just activate the belt and boots.”

“I hear chimney sweeps get stuck in chimneys, and those are just kids.”

“Far as I can see, this one’s big enough if we go down straight.”

He climbed onto the edge of the chimney and gave her a short, mocking salute. Before she could comprehend what he was doing, he hopped into the air and did a pencil dive right down into it.

“Clae!” She grabbed the edge of the chimney and leaned over, trying to see if he was okay.

A thunk came from below. Laura flinched.

“Clae?”

“Shush.”

Well, he sounded okay. Laura crouched farther down, wrinkling her nose as she eyed what little she could see of his dusty brown coat.

“How is it?”

“Brick,” he replied quietly. Laura could barely hear it. “We’ll have to force our way through.”

“How’s that?”

“I’ll take care of it. Just grab the drill from the case.”

Laura searched through the strange devices inside the briefcase. She made a mental note to ask what some were, but she did recognize a portable drill. She pulled it out, checked that it worked, and then leaned over the opening.

“How should I get it down?” She glanced at the toolbox. “Is that wire okay? Can I lower it with that?”

There was silence from Clae’s end. Laura began to think he’d heard the monster down there, but he replied, “Sure. Just be careful with it or you’ll get stung.”

Laura pulled out the wire and unwound it. The material was metallic gray, somewhat malleable. She wrapped it around the drill, using multiple angles in the hope it would hold better. When she tied a knot it sparked. It wasn’t painful, but still a surprising sting. She cursed the mutinous equipment as she tied it tighter and then leaned over the chimney and began to lower it. Every time it dipped farther down, the knot glowed red, fading just in time for it to duck deeper again. There was movement on the line as he caught it and undid the knot (though not without some faint cursing as it stung his fingers too).

“Right, you can bring that back up.”

Laura reeled the wire in, wrapping it around her hand and setting it aside. From below she heard a faint, grating, whirring sound. He’d started drilling. She settled herself on the roof, ready to wait awhile.

It really did take a while, but not as long as she expected. She’d been checking on the police—the woman she’d spoken to had fallen back but still watched the house with rapt attention—when she heard a faint sound from the chimney. She hurried over.

“Did you say something?”

“I said it’s done.”

“Do you need more equipment, or—”

“I’m coming up.” A shuffling sound.

“Need any help?”

“Nah.”

She sat and waited, watching carefully as the dusty coat grew closer, his form becoming more discernible as he shimmied awkwardly up the flue. A few wisps of ashy blond hair snuck into Laura’s sight, and she shoved them away with one hand. In the process she skimmed her face and was irritated by the amount of sweat there.

Clae finally emerged, fumbling to keep from getting stuck. His amulets did a good job getting him up, but didn’t seem to have the capacity to push him out. Despite his earlier scorn, Laura grabbed on and helped heave him onto the roof. He looked as sweaty as the policeman before, a few looser waves of hair sticking to his cheeks and forehead. Laura fought the urge to tell him to take off the damn coat.

“We’ve got a hole,” he announced tiredly. “It’s not huge, but it’s enough.”

“Enough for what?”

“The Bijou.”

“Run that by me again?”

“Bijou.”

“I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Clae rolled his eyes and turned to the briefcase. He replaced the drill, grabbed the coiled wire, and unraveled it. He trailed it down the chimney, looking very focused as he did. Once satisfied with that, he reached into the briefcase and picked up what looked like a marble. There was a swirl of sparkling gold inside and a hole bored through the middle.

“Bijou.”

“Isn’t that a bead?” questioned Laura, and he tutted at her.

“No. Everyone has beads. Beads are common. Useless. These are special. They’re little grenades.”

“Oh.” She looked at it with newfound respect. “You didn’t bring those up before.”

“I have mentioned them,” he defended, but elaborated anyway. “They’re not exactly ‘aim and shoot,’ and a hell of a lot more difficult to practice with.”

“More difficult than Eggs?”

Clae nodded at her understanding and threaded the wire through it. “Hand me five others, one at a time.”

The Bijou were warm in her hands, but pleasantly so. She gave them to Clae one by one and he strung them on the wire, using one hand to keep them up. Once they were all on, he adjusted the wire so it stuck straight down.

“Now, there’s going to be a big bang,” he explained. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the house is damaged as a result. But the monster won’t die so easily. You’ve got an Egg?”

Laura patted the bag on her own belt, partly to reassure herself. “I’ve got two.”

“Good. Stay steady and be ready to jump.”

“. . . Really?”

“Really.”

With that, he let go of the Bijou. They slid down the wire without a sound, careening into the dark. Clae flicked the tip of the wire. It sparked like before, but now that spark traveled after the Bijou like flame down a fuse. Laura watched it descend almost halfway down before realizing what was going to happen, and she clutched the chimney again.

There was a hiss below, and then the promised “bang.” The entire building shook, creaking and groaning as the walls twisted and warped. Shingles leapt off the roof at random points, others sticking straight up instead. Smashing sounds came from the front as windows blasted outward, and through it all golden light shone like a beacon from the chimney and there was a terrible, screeching, wailing noise.

Laura had trouble just keeping upright and steady, but Clae gave a whoop and leapt down the chimney. Laura didn’t want to be left behind. She clawed her way up, swatting at her amulet for a new command as she did, clambered over, and dropped into the light.

Copyright © 2018 by Mirah Bolender. Excerpted from City of Broken Magic by Mirah Bolender. Published by permission of the author and Tor Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mirah Bolender graduated with majors in creative writing and art in May 2014. A lifelong traveler, she has traveled and studied overseas, most notably in Japan, and these experiences leak into her work. City of Broken Magic is her debut fantasy novel. She currently lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Book Reviews: December 2018

Arley Sorg | 1684 words

The Wren Hunt
Mary Watson
Hardcover / Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9781681198590
Bloomsbury, November 2018, 416 pgs

Mary Watson has woven a tale of modern-day Irish druids and romance in this YA thriller. Wren is from a tribe of Augurs, a faltering druidic tradition under threat of extinction by the machinations of their rivals, the Judges. The matriarch of the Augurs hatches a plan to undermine the Judges and sends Wren into the proverbial nest of vipers: Wren becomes an intern at the manse of a powerful Judge matriarch, Calista Harkness. Wren must find the source of Judge magic while masking her identity from the cunning perceptions of the enemy. Along the way, she meets a boy, and she discovers that everyone, even the people she loves, has secrets.

The Wren Hunt plays out in clean, occasionally elegant prose. The narrative draws the reader in with the senses, especially—as might be expected of a story about druids—with poetic and beautiful imagery utilizing the natural world. Just as there is darkness in the woods, there is darkness in the story: A creepy, tense, and disorienting opening sets the stage for a tale where loss and death and the end of a people are the stakes.

Here, magic is subtle but fascinating; culture is intricate, with politics, complications, and long histories. Culture and magic are inextricable, as might be said of culture and language. Within a few pages, this narrative will have you believing that if you book a flight, you might find this village, that stone of power, stumble across the dusty old book with Ogham symbols, and maybe even hear chanting in the night, across the fertile fields where animals were slaughtered. Meanwhile, cleverly layered throughout is a conversation around the nature of perception, utilizing concepts of varied myths to frame skewed perspectives.

There are a few of the expected plot points found in many YA stories. Most obviously, the love interest is a Judge. They have a standard but charming meeting and their romance follows the usual rises and falls. More unfortunate than this, the mysteries/secrets/weird events used as plot devices start to pile up, each individually becoming less effective for the mass of them. But, along with some nice pacing, there are also some nice surprises—which I will leave as nice surprises.

While some of the characters are a bit cut-out, many of them are cast in unique and unusual ways. The relationships between Wren and her family are familiar enough to lure a reader, and fraught enough to entangle. The turns they take help drive the story. Moreover, Wren is engaging as a character, and her journey is compelling. She is terrified of the enemy, which makes her courage more striking. She’s smart, inquisitive, and flawed. She feels real and this lends greatly to what ends up being a lovely read and a satisfying conclusion.

Alice Payne Arrives
Kate Heartfield
Trade Paperpack/ Ebook
ISBN: 9781250313744
Tor.com publishing, November 2018, 169 pgs

In Georgian-era England, Alice Payne is the daughter of Colonel Payne, a veteran changed for the worse by the war in America. Once wealthy and respected, the colonel is losing money quickly. Alice’s prospects for marriage have diminished significantly with her age and status. Alice, however, is strong-willed and adventuresome. She has no intention of marrying whatever low-ranking noble is foisted on her; besides, she’s perfectly happy with her secret lover, Jane. Alice dons a mask and makes herself into a highwayman, robbing the wealthy to keep her house.

Not quite “meanwhile” but “meanwhen” (in another place and time), Major Prudence Zuniga is caught in a time war between two ideological armies, the “Misguided” and the “Farmers.” Each side believes time travel should be used in a different way, and the two sides are incompatible. Ostensibly a soldier for the Farmers, Zuniga plots to destroy time travel completely in the hopes that the time travel war will end. To achieve her treasonous plan, she needs an individual who lives in 1788, a native to that time, one such as Alice, or maybe even Jane.

Alice Payne Arrives is a fun, fast story. The main characters are stubborn women of action. Chapters are short, making for a quick, always-moving read. The narrative starts with action, stumbles a bit through exposition, but smooths out early on. Light-handed social commentary with subtler depths makes for a thoughtful and thought-provoking but entertaining adventure.

For the science fiction fans: time travel. Despite the well-worn topic, this novella brings a few new, cool, sparkly ideas to the genre, melding some of them into a steampunk sensibility. There’s enough science fictional meat for people to argue over, while the backdrop sizzles with interesting, intelligent social ideas.

A great deal of the story takes place in 1788. The descriptions are convincing and the writing is confident, but remains unencumbered by overuse of archaic styles, keeping the read smooth and easy. Most of the prose is fairly straightforward, but strong dialogue propels the narrative, with occasional clever lines and sprinkles of great humor. While much of the tale is couched in a narrative voice of adventure—evoking The Count of Monte Cristo, for example—the story isn’t afraid to touch on the darker aspects of war and conflict. It simply does so without becoming entangled in the darkness. Better yet, and perhaps even more to the author’s credit, Alice Payne Arrives hits home with moments of genuine, effective emotion.

A Cathedral of Myth and Bone
Kat Howard
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9781481492157
Saga Press, October 2018, 368 pgs

Kat Howard’s offering brings together different takes on myths and folklore. In the introduction, Howard tells us that “not every story here is a retelling of something older.” Nonetheless, the stories share a certain sense of the fabulous, the strange, and the strangely familiar. Readers far more schooled in the classics and fairy tales than I will find layered levels of engagement: There is a clear depth of knowledge and understanding on display here. Older tales and tropes are interrogated, turned inside out, examined with critical lines and clever strokes. But there is plenty—a cornucopia—for the casual dabbler as well, since so many of the stories in this collection stand as fine narratives regardless of precursors.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, transformation stands as a strong theme throughout. Myth and fairy tales often deal in transformations. But the how and the why of transformations are surprises in these journeys. The mundane and the magical meet, and the mundane is usually left behind. From a modern twist on miracles and divinity in “The Saint of the Sidewalks,” where a woman seeking a miracle becomes an unwilling dealer in miracles, to the hallucinatory “Murdered Sleep,” where a decision at a masquerade fantastique can change both the dancer and the world around her, familiar transformations lay new curses or empower in new ways.

There is also an unflinching examination of violence. This violence can take a variety of shapes; it can be bloody, but it can also be neat, hidden. In the striking and deceptively powerful “A Life in Fictions,” violence is an act of control, sometimes complicit, sometimes negotiated, where a man inadvertently vanishes his muse into his stories, to gently devastating effect. Violence can be revenge and claws, but it can also be obsession. It can be the act of claiming, of imposing one’s will regardless of the other’s desires. Violence is highlighted as a selfish, self-absorbed thing mistitled love, called to light in the deliberate, dark plot points of “Returned,” or in a simple, passing thought in “Breaking the Frame”: “I thought about what it would be like, walking out of death . . . and what if I didn’t want to go with him?” (Editors’ note: “Breaking the Frame” was a Lightspeed original short: lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/breaking-the-frame.)

Hand in hand with these themes, this collection deals with relationships, though not always in the romantic sense. “Painted Birds and Shivered Bones” begins with the relationship between an artist and their art, as well as their inspiration, but grows more complex as a curse is revealed, shifting the relationships between artist and inspiration/muse. “Saint’s Tide,” a quietly incredible tale, deals with a woman and her relationship to the enigmatic saints that haunt her town, her faith, and her family.

Some of the selected stories seem to follow few rules, focusing instead on the sensory, the lush imagery, and an exploration of mystery. Characters in certain tales might be wanderers stumbling through a narrative. In fact, “The Speaking Bone” is more about than being any particular individual’s story. But the imagery in these stories is consistently strong, the ideas are genuinely fascinating, and the dialogues created by them are socially important: control, power, gender—strength and loss; how we live with ourselves and each other. Moreover, wonderfully structured tales such as “The Calendar of Saints” and more traditional, linear narratives, such as “Dreaming Like a Ghost” are proof of an incredible range of storytelling technique and mastery of character.

I have my (very minor) occasional quibbles. And of course I have my favorite stories. But this really is a book you should explore for yourself.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arley Sorg grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado. He studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, and usually writes in local coffee shops. A 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, he is an assistant editor at Locus Magazine. He’s soldering together a novel, has thrown a few short stories into orbit, and hopes to launch more.

Media Reviews: December 2018

Carrie Vaughn | 2250 words

Portals and Space Travel

The House with a Clock in Its Walls
Directed by Eli Roth
Produced by DreamWorks, Amblin Entertainment, Mythology Entertainment
September 21, 2018

The old-school Universal and Amblin logos at the start of The House with a Clock in Its Walls set the tone of the film straight off—retro. Anachronistic. It makes me wonder a bit who the target audience is—children, who won’t recognize those logos unless they were raised on a steady diet of ’70s and ’80s kid SF&F; or their parents, who were. The film itself is set in the ’50s. It’s supposed to feel like a throwback, I think.

Based on a novel by John Bellairs, this is the story of Lewis, whose parents have just died. We meet him on the bus, traveling to his Uncle Jonathan, who will be caring for him now. In typical kid-story fashion, Jonathan is enthusiastic and kind but he has no experience with children. He’s also a warlock, and his house is filled with dangers and wonders. Lewis is fascinated, learns a little bit of magic himself in the course of trying to get along in his new situation. And then ends up raising from the dead the evil magician who previously occupied the house, and secretly hid within its walls a clockwork device that will bring about the end of the world. Now Lewis, Jonathan, and Jonathan’s neighbor Mrs. Zimmerman have to save the world.

This is the kind of movie I mainly go to see for the cast: an impeccable Cate Blanchett as Mrs. Zimmerman, and Jack Black as Jonathan. As usual, Black succeeds best when he is at his least Jack Black-like and decides to actually act. The heart of the film—the relationship between these three heroes, the friendship between Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmerman, both of them trying to connect to this traumatized young kid, all of them coming together to help each other—is good and pure, a story about families and grief and being true to oneself and finding one’s own magic. A bit heavy-handed but honest.

The effects are wondrous, particularly the sound effects—the thunking of the doomsday clock, which doesn’t sound much like a typical clock, or a heartbeat, which would have been easy shorthand; this sound is its own thing and permeates the film at just the right moments to build tension. That sound may be my favorite part of the movie. This is kid scary rather than actually scary, a visual spectacle with lurking dread rather than in-your-face shocks. Which might be why I was astonished to see that this is directed by Eli Roth, who made his name with the Hostel torture-porn films. Has he recently reproduced and suddenly realized he hasn’t made any movies he can safely show his children?

The film is too long and the pacing is off. In a subplot, Lewis tries to make friends with local tough-kid Tarby, a hilariously pint-sized ’50s greaser who I just never believed in. If there’s a joke, the movie will tell it two or three or four times. It’s predictable. But then, I suspect I’m not really the target audience after all. Someone who hasn’t spent forty years with this kind of story might not think so.

I will give the movie this: It has made me reconsider the whole idea of portal fantasy. Technically, this isn’t a portal fantasy. It’s a haunted house story, a sorcerer’s apprentice story, it fits into all kinds of clearly established genres of kid fantasy that aren’t portal fantasy. But when we first meet Lewis, he’s traveling to a new world: a world without his parents in it, and everything is new and strange and scary. This is portal fantasy, with death and grief as the portal. There is no more terrible doorway into another world than losing one’s parents as a child. This leads me to the rather jarring thought: In The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, the portal isn’t the wardrobe, but the War. The fantasy there really begins when the Pevensie children leave London and enter a completely different world they have no experience with. They’d never have entered the second portal without having passed through the first. (The House with a Clock in Its Walls also has a World War II connection—the adult characters all trace their wartime experiences as the thing that brought them to this point.)

Technically, yes, portal fantasy is about magical doorways that carry the characters from our world into an entirely different world. But I’m quite certain that Lewis, sitting on that bus, felt like he was traveling into a world that wasn’t real. How often in these stories does death and trauma open a space that brings the fantastical into these characters’ lives? The space between life and death is a threshold, and fantasy thrives on thresholds. Maybe portal fantasy doesn’t just send characters to other worlds, but lets other worlds seep into ours as well. The House with a Clock in Its Walls is a decent film that I don’t regret going to see, but it won’t live through the ages. Still, I’ll always be grateful to it for giving me that bit of insight.

First Man
Directed by Damien Chazelle
Universal Pictures, DreamWorks Studios, Temple Hill Productions, Amblin Entertainment
October 12, 2018

I love that the science fiction community embraces films that, technically speaking, are not science fiction, but rather historical dramas about the space program. Obviously, anything involving space in any way, shape, or form automatically falls under the purview of people who love science fiction. In fact, in 1970, “News Coverage of Apollo 11” won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation. The Right Stuff was nominated for the award in 1984, Apollo 13 in 1996, and Hidden Figures in 2017. Don’t be surprised if First Man, a historical drama based on the biography of Neil Armstrong by James R. Hansen, makes it onto the ballot for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation next year, despite being a mixed bag.

First Man is primarily about the subjective experience of being Neil Armstrong, the first human being to set foot on ground that isn’t Earth. A good chunk of the film focuses on Ryan Gosling’s face, us watching Neil watch whatever he’s experiencing. Another good chunk of the film sets the camera as Neil’s eyes, seeing what he sees. The film is at its best when it puts us in his place during his most iconic moments, showing us the technical and visceral details of the Gemini 8 mission, the lunar module’s approach to the lunar surface, and so on. Watching from eye level as his foot makes that first step in the regolith, and even better, looking back up the ladder to the lunar module, was a view I’d never thought to imagine before.

These scenes are worth the price of admission, but there’s a lot of other stuff to wade through to get there.

Like most biopics, there isn’t a plot to speak of; rather, this presents the major events that made Armstrong a historical figure. What we look for in these films are insights. The insight here is the degree to which the death of Armstrong’s toddler daughter Karen in 1962 affected him, and the idea that this introverted, undemonstrative, yet deeply feeling and hyper-competent man was the best person to occupy that historic role as first person on the moon. Karen’s death seems to give Armstrong a powerful perspective on the grief and loss that follow him through the space program, through the death of friends in aircraft accidents and the horror of the Apollo 1 disaster. The film also suggests that the lunar voyage helped him reconcile with Karen’s death in a way he hadn’t been able to before.

I think a movie about the subjective experience of being Neil Armstrong is a fine idea, but this film can’t resist indulging in the cliché tropes of its context. So it also spends a lot of time with Janet Armstrong, because movies like this always show us the personal lives of the stoic and long-suffering wives. I’m glad they do—growing up with an Air Force pilot father during the Cold War, I have some small idea of what these families went through. But this is familiar ground covered better by other movies. When we get to the Apollo 11 launch, we get exactly the same inspiring shot of the Saturn V rocket slipping up past the gantry, and that same familiar shot of the cylindrical rocket housing tumbling away against the backdrop of a receding Earth that we always, always get in every super-earnest film, dramatic or documentary, about the Apollo program. When the film isn’t focused on Armstrong, it feels derivative.

First Man is trying to do too much, I think, being intensely personal on the one hand but also trying to portray the whole enormous sweep of the times and the space program. It seems to self-consciously want to slot itself right between The Right Stuff and Apollo 13. It begins where The Right Stuff leaves off, with a test flight in the desert—Armstrong in the X-15, in one of the film’s most spectacular sequences, giving us a jarring pilot’s eye view of traveling to the edge of space—and Chuck Yeager himself standing there after the landing suggesting that Armstrong doesn’t have the Right Stuff. It ends right after his return from the Apollo 11 mission, setting us up for the adventure of Apollo 13, which begins with a recap of Apollo 1 and the dangers of space travel. First Man spends a huge amount of time on Apollo 1 and almost seems to set up that callback in the next film.

Intimate biopic or historical epic, whatever the film is, it takes a long time getting there, and I think I felt its length (two hours and twenty minutes) most during the Apollo 1 sequence. This is the problem with historical dramas—we know what happens. The film takes us inside the capsule, and then spends an excruciating amount of time there, just waiting for that spark we know is coming. The film builds up a friendship between Neil and Janet and Apollo 1 casualty Ed White and his wife Pat, just to be sure we feel the emotional punch all the more. But in a movie about the subjective experience of being Neil Armstrong, the most important part of that whole sequence is, of course, the look on Neil’s face when he’s on the phone with Deke Slayton, telling him what happened. The rest feels manipulative, maybe even exploitative.

The film’s strength is also the reason science fiction fans love these movies: space, and the intense and loving depiction of the technology that gets people there. I’m fascinated that a couple of sequences seem directly inspired by science fiction movies. The boarding of the Gemini 8 capsule is framed almost exactly like the scene in Contact when Elli boards her craft, right down to the weird vibrations in the gantry, the subtle humming sound effects, the white-coated technicians waiting solemnly, and so on. During the Eagle’s descent to the lunar surface, we’re watching Neil’s face, with the view he watches reflected in his helmet’s faceplate. We’ve seen similar framing through the whole movie, but in this scene the multi-colored lights of the module’s control panel are reflected back, and it looks very much like the image of Dave Bowman during his surreal last flight in 2001: A Space Odyssey. These similarities are so pointed that they seem intentional, but it might also be parallel development—all these films were heavily influenced by the actual space program, it makes sense they should make use of the same images and emotional resonances.

I wish First Man had focused more on the things science fiction fans love about these films: the spacecraft, the tech, and the experience of being a thinking, feeling human in these extraordinary situations, because the sequences where Armstrong is actually doing his job are riveting. The Apollo 11 landing becomes a work of art, trading in the familiar epic sweep of the event for an intense view of one man connecting with the bleakest of landscapes, because his own quiet disposition makes that connection possible. On the other hand, the standard, predictable angst surrounding it all—likely intended to humanize the man and the situation, ironically enough—feels rote and forced. Sign me up for First Man: The Space Nerd Edit.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carrie Vaughn is the bestselling author of the Kitty Norville series, as well as the superhero novels Dreams of the Golden Age and After the Golden Age, the young adult novels Voices of Dragons and Steel, and the fantasy novel Discord’s Apple. Her recent books include Martians Abroad and Amaryllis and Other Stories, as well as her post-apocalyptic mysteries for John Joseph Adams Books, the Philip K. Dick Award-winning Bannerless, and its sequel, The Wild Dead. Her Hugo Award-nominated short fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, from Lightspeed to Tor.com, as well as in George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards series. She lives in Boulder, Colorado. Learn more at carrievaughn.com.

Interview: S.A. Chakraborty

Christian A. Coleman | 2960 words

S.A. Chakraborty is a speculative fiction writer from New York City. Her debut, The City of Brass, was the first book in The Daevabad Trilogy and has been short-listed for the Locus, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy awards. When not buried in books about Mughal miniatures and Abbasid political intrigue, she enjoys hiking, knitting, and recreating unnecessarily complicated medieval meals for her family. You can find her online at sachakraborty.com or on Twitter at @SAChakrabooks where she likes to talk about history, politics, and Islamic art.

• • • •

The Daevabad Trilogy is your very first. Tell us about what the experience of writing The City of Brass and The Kingdom of Copper has been like.

They’ve been very different experiences. The City of Brass was the first book I ever wrote, my first true foray into creative writing, and it started simply as this weird little worldbuilding experiment I never intended to show anyone. It was a passion project, and the story that resulted was the work of several years of tweaking. The Kingdom of Copper was the opposite. Though I had an old draft, it was the first time I wrote on a deadline, trying to manage publisher and reader reactions, as well as find a way to grow creatively. And it was a shock, I’ll be honest, and far more stressful than I think healthy, but I definitely learned a lot by going through it.

What have reader reactions been like so far?

The reaction has been amazing. It’s still astonishing to me that I’m now sharing characters and stories that were in my head for so many years with the rest of the world; it’s a gift that has made the difficult parts worth it. I really didn’t think I’d sell this book; you can probably imagine the reaction from American agents when I pitched a six hundred-page epic inspired by anything called a “caliphate” in 2016. But I landed with an agent and publishing team that believed in it and pushed it.

Especially heart-warming to me is the incredible enthusiasm and support I’ve gotten from fellow Muslim fantasy readers. I really wrote this book for my community first, envisioning it as sort of the swashbuckling adventure tale we don’t often get to see in the West, and when I see people connecting with the book, cosplaying the characters with their own hijab, running RPG campaigns in Daevabad . . . it makes me want to do this for the rest of my life.

That’s so cool! Now, you’re a history buff who grew up reading science fiction and fantasy. What were some of your favorite books?

Ironically enough, though I’m a fantasy writer now, science fiction was my first love. I devoured Animorphs as a kid and then moved on to pretty much any SF book I could get my hands on at the library, from the old Star Wars expanded universe to the Rama series. I joke that I’m a speculative fiction writer because I like to secretly write science fiction, even if it never sees the light of day.

Your trilogy began as a historical fan-fiction project to explore medieval Islamic history. Did you always know this story was going to expand into three books?

I did. Though much has changed in terms of characters arcs and lore, all three books are set to have largely the same beginning and end that I envisioned for each. I wanted to tell an overarching story of the clash of these peoples, of the way history repeats itself and empires destroy, rise, and fall, but I also wanted each book to feel somewhat contained. Our characters complete part of their journey—Nahri embraces her heritage to fight for her people, Ali finally stands up to his father—only to have the political gameboard thrown over at the end of each book.

What attracted you to medieval Islamic history?

I’ve loved history since I was a kid, but the medieval Islamic world grabbed hold in my teens and hasn’t let go. For one, the period I particularly enjoy—the Abbasid Caliphate—was in many ways a bridge between the ancient world and the more “modern” medieval era, witnessing an incredible syncretism of different cultures, languages, religions, and customs. I like seeing the way places and people change: that a proudly Arab Muslim court might be modeled on a Persian Zoroastrian one, led by a wazir whose family had been Buddhist priests centuries earlier, and that it would have employed Greek scholars and Hindu surgeons and sent trade missions to China. I don’t have any illusions that this was always peaceful, but these were teeming, fascinating, and diverse cosmopolitan cities.

And quite frankly, it’s fun. There are figures in the political and cultural landscape that would make Game of Thrones seem dull, from the world’s most backstabbing mother to foodie princes, poet courtesans, and “let’s collect my dead enemies in a secret chamber” caliphs. These people’s lives jump from the page, the snark and wit of a courtier, the wonder of sailors exploring the Indian Ocean, the cunning of thieves. It’s incredibly rich world to explore.

In the first book The City of Brass, Nahri, a talented con artist living in Cairo, and Ali, the idealistic yet naïve prince of Daevabad, are your point-of-view characters. In The Kingdom of Copper, you add Dara, the mysterious djinn warrior Nahri accidentally summons in the first book. Why did you want to add Dara’s POV to the narrative?

I didn’t want to originally; I liked the idea that although Dara is in many ways the most magically powerful character in the world, he’s also a pawn and only gets his story told through the eyes of others. But in the second book, I really wanted to delve into the ways a person’s choices in the face of adversity define them. I think we like to imagine we’d always be a hero, that we’d make the right choice even if it meant standing up to our families or a political system we knew we could never beat. The reality is that a lot of people don’t; that’s how systems of oppression survive. With Dara, I wanted to walk a fine line, creating a character I knew readers would initially sympathize with and come to love and then showing how this otherwise good man could make monstrous choices. And I wanted to do it in a way that didn’t let him off the hook; fantasy is filled with male heroes and their tortured backgrounds who are then redeemed, often by a heroine burdened with the task of doing so. Without spoiling things, that isn’t the direction I wanted to go with Dara, and I felt we needed to get inside his head to see this.

I like the dynamic you set up between Nahri and Ali. She’s a hustler turned doctor who saves the life of a naïve but well-meaning prince again and again. He’s sort of like the dashing prince in distress.

I think that’s my new favorite description of Ali, and a very apt one. However, this question gets more at the core of who Nahri is: that despite being a hustler, she’s a doctor, a healer who believes saving lives is her basic responsibility, no matter how she feels about the patient. This gets complicated with Ali, a man who should be her enemy ten times over, but one with whom she forges a genuine partnership that’s getting difficult to pretend is entirely political. And when things get to the point where saving him isn’t the pragmatic thing to do, I think how Nahri responds says a lot about who she is.

In The City of Brass and The Kingdom of Copper, I’m struck by how often homesickness comes up for your characters. Nahri longs to be back in Cairo; Ali pines for Am Gezira, the country where he was exiled for defying his father, after returning to Daevabad, his homeland. I was wondering if this stems from your experience studying at the American University of Cairo. You said in a previous interview that you were homesick but found refuge in the stories and lore you were reading.

This question is going to get me in trouble with my mother if I say my homesickness was cured by a library! But yes, I was certainly homesick in Egypt. I was homesick as well going away to college and then starting a family in a state away from my parents; I’m very close with my family, and I certainly pulled on how it felt to miss them, particularly when writing how Ali misses his own family.

But what I wanted to show with Ali and Nahri being homesick is that they’re not so much longing for other places as they are longing for other lives, other paths they might have taken. Everyone has their “what ifs” in life, fearing they’ve made a terrible mistake and should have done something differently. Nahri and Ali are walking difficult, uncertain paths; it would be difficult for anyone in their situation not to dream of the “simpler” life they might have enjoyed back home.

With shifting allies and political unrest in Daevabad—on top of homesickness—Nahri feels very alone, even though she’s living and thriving in a world that strongly revolves around family and community. Why did you want to explore this idea?

We have a lot of mysterious lonely orphans in fantasy, but with Nahri, I really wanted to dive into the effect that would have on someone’s personality. She grows up on the streets of eighteenth-century Cairo, a world that revolved around kin and community, not only alone, but with abilities that would rightly terrify anyone she ever dared get close to. That would be a profoundly traumatizing experience, one that would stay with her and impact how she formed relationships for the rest of her life.

Also, because so much of culture is under the surface and learned from childhood, I think it would take her years to feel fully “Daeva.” There are jokes and body language and all the small, unspoken markers of identity that take a long time to pick up. Being thrust into this—and then touted as a leader—would be an incredibly disorienting and intimidating experience. I mean, talk about imposter syndrome!

You’ve mentioned that Buffy from Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of your favorite female characters and that you like to see women who work with a team to save the day. In The Kingdom of Copper, Nahri has to collaborate with the Qahtanis—Ali’s family—and others to rehabilitate the hospital of her ancestors so that she can treat more patients. Tell us about what you like about seeing this kind of teamwork.

I like seeing this type of teamwork because quite frankly, this is how political progress actually occurs. It’s painful, incremental work with people who might drive you mad and work that often takes two steps back for every one step forward. As storytellers writing in some rather difficult times, I think we have a responsibility to point out that heroes who save the day aren’t just the lone ranger type who take out a corrupt sheriff—they’re the bickering civilians who crowd around a table for six months to hammer out a new town charter.

This line in The Kingdom of Copper really stuck out to me: “Egypt had been freshly subjugated by the French when Nahri left, ruled by the Ottomans before that—it was seemingly Nahri’s destiny to belong to an occupied people wherever she went.” We see this play out not only in the human realm but also in the realm of the djinn. What drew you to explore the theme of occupation in the series?

This is a rather complex topic I’m not sure I can do justice to in a few sentences, but it goes back to what I said about medieval history. So many of these cities and civilizations were the products of waves of conquest. How does that shape the societies that survive them generations later? How do conqueror and conquered influence each other and how do their stories and legends of what happened get transmitted? Can you ever make a new world that properly addresses the wounds of the past?

When it comes to Daevabad, I wanted to show how incredibly messy all of this is. The cause that brings the Qahtanis to Daevabad is an undeniably just one—freeing the shafit, people with mixed djinn and human blood, from persecution. But no war is bloodless, and their invasion seeds its own conflicts that continue to present day, when the newest generation of Qahtanis is oppressing the shafit, again in the name of security—the vague concept so many rulers use to ruthlessly control their people. How does this play out in the lives of our characters? How does Ali handle the slow realization that the father he loves might be a far worse threat than the long-dead Nahids he was raised to curse? How does Nahri break bread and make small talk with the people oppressing her tribe? Why should the shafit trust any of them, let alone risk their lives further?

Since djinn are long-lived spirits that have watched the rise and fall of many human civilizations, would you say that they’re like a time capsule or an archeological museum for humankind? This came to mind seeing how the djinn in your series built their cities taking architectural inspirations from a mix of bygone eras.

This was exactly what I was going for. I’ll go further and say it was my own type of wish fulfillment, because I envisioned them having copies of all the ancient texts, inventions, and secrets humans had lost over the centuries which I think would be very cool.

Your bio says that you enjoy preparing unnecessarily complicated medieval meals for your family. What’s one of the most complicated recipes you’ve come across?

A huge number of recipes and cookbooks have been preserved from the medieval Middle East. The culinary arts were highly revered, and among the nobility, a matter of often personal competition! A favorite dish that I’ve made, sikbaj, is a type of vinegar-based stew that can be adapted to many types of meat and vegetable. I was content with lamb and eggplant, but apparently the Caliph al-Amin preferred one consisting of “a sheep cut into five pieces, a whole lamb, three hens, five chickens, five chicks, thrushes, carrots, eggplants, onions, vinegar and saffron, various spices, herbs, cheese and choice cakes of wheat flour.” This, of course, was only after the cooking vessels had been relentlessly scoured, doused with musk, and the meat then smoked with amber and Indian aloewood.

I . . . did not do this. At a certain point there’s only so much you can do in a New York City apartment kitchen.

When does the third installment of the Daevabad Trilogy come out? And what can you tell us about it?

I don’t know what I can say about the third book that won’t entirely spoil The Kingdom of Copper. Nahri and Ali find themselves somewhere very unexpected and have to handle the ramifications of that. Dara, who has once again committed an atrocity in the name of “saving his people,” is learning the hard way the cause he’s dedicated himself might not be more than an illusion.

I can say we’ll be seeing more of the magical and the human world, including places both new and old.

Are there other writing projects you can tell us about?

The Daevabad Trilogy has completely consumed my writing time (and personal time!) as of now. I have a short story I’ve been toying that’s much lighter, but in general, while I’ll be sad to leave Nahri and Ali behind, I’m eager to step into some new worlds. I was working on a historical fantasy while querying about pirates and treasure hunters in the eighth-century Indian Ocean that I think will be fun to return to.

Is there anything else you’d like your readers to know about your trilogy?

One thing I don’t get to talk about often is that my decision to make Nahri a doctor was very deliberate. I was working in healthcare at the time and wanted to show another side of the “magical healer” trope—one that crashed with the realities of medicine. Nahri’s work is hard and unending, and it’s constant practicing that makes her good, not some innate gift. Medicine requires your everyday life to consist of the worst days of other peoples and not let that swallow you. And though Nahri is a survivor, I think she’s coming to a point where she can only distance herself so much.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Christian A. Coleman is a 2013 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. He lives and writes in the Boston area. He tweets at @coleman_II.

Author Spotlight: Ashok K. Banker

Wendy N. Wagner | 1282 words

“A Love Story Written on Water” is the first in a series of stories we’ll be running in Lightspeed. Can you tell me a little about how you wound up doing these?

Legends of the Burnt Empire, of which “A Love Story Written on Water” is the first, were a part of the novel Upon a Burning Throne, releasing April 2019. Originally, I intended them to be like the short passages quoted from ancient texts that appear at the beginning of chapters in epic fantasy novels, but they grew in the telling until they became monsters in their own right! I kept them in the book, interspersed with the main narrative, serving the function of “flashbacks.” During the editing process, John and I discussed these stories and whether or not they ought to be in the book. There was also the question of length: My word count limit was 250,000 words and the final submission draft came in at just over 280,000. Finally, we agreed that while they added depth and resonance to the main narrative, they were best left out. John was the one who suggested that he publish them as individual stories in a series of Legends of the Burnt Empire. So they get to see the light of day! At some point, if the Burnt Empire series does well—which will depend a great deal on how Upon a Burning Throne does—it’s possible that John may publish them as a collection of their own. For what it’s worth, I have several more such Legends in the series, apart from the five that John bought for Lightspeed.

Having said that, though, I do think (and John agrees) that they do stand on their own as individual stories as well. They’re not in the same style as Upon a Burning Throne, because they’re meant to be legends of the same world, and my attempt when writing them was to convey a sense of timelessness and stand apart from the style of the main narrative. As for Upon a Burning Throne, the published version is now a slim and sprightly 236,000 words!

There are so many wonderful settings in this story—the forests of Mount Coldheart, the banks of the river Jeel, the fabulous palace. Are any of these places inspired by real places that you’ve been?

I wish! I think the reason we read and write epic fantasy is so we can visit places as we desire them to be, not as they really are. In reality, I’ve been as far as the foothills of the Himalayas, barely 17,000 feet high, and it was magnificent but not something I’d want to do often. The world of Arthaloka, where this story and the entire Burnt Empire series is set, is a single massive continent five times the size of all the land masses on our Earth put together, a kind of Pangea super-continent. (It doesn’t stay that way over the course of the series, but that’s another story for a much later discussion.) Everything on Arthaloka is gargantuan. Mount Coldheart is several times the height of our Mount Everest; nobody in that world knows or cares precisely how high. Because Arthaloka is a single super-continent, parts of it have entirely different climates and ecologies. The only thing that unites them all is the living river, Jeel, which feeds the entire world. Jeel is inspired by the Ganges, or Ganga as we call her in India, but she is much, much bigger. And because Upon a Burning Throne and this short story are set in a much earlier age, the land and water are pristine, as perfect as can be. She’s also a living goddess and can take living forms, as this story shows us.

At its heart, this is a love story. Some writers really struggle to write about love and romance. Was this piece hard for you to write?

I love writing romance. I’ve published a few in my career, but have always longed to write more. I especially love the intersection of love stories and fantasy. There’s something so immersive about that space. Whether it’s urban fantasy, YA, contemporary fantasy or epic fantasy, I always enjoy novels that don’t shy away from depicting a full-blown romance or love story, even if it ends tragically. In fact, I’d say the attraction of writing romance within a fantasy story is that you aren’t expected to have things end happily ever after.

I think this story does a great job capturing the strangeness inherent in the relationship between Jeel and Sha’ant. When he sees her outside of her human form, her power and weirdness—weird in the magical, uncanny sense—is really made clear to us. It reminded me of work by writers like Terri Windling and Charles de Lint, who write about human relationships with mythical beings, but from a Western tradition. I’d love to hear a little about what it’s like, digging into mythology and then spinning your own tale from it. How do you make it uniquely yours?

That’s high praise! Those are both great writers in that tradition. But I was inspired by sources much closer to home. Indian mythology is suffused with strange, inexplicable people and events that are never explained. There’s no pressure to clarify or rationalize things. Sometimes, I feel, SF, fantasy, and especially YA fantasy, shows too much, letting everything hang out, make sense, and at the end, ties it all up in a neat bow. This makes for a dependable commercial read, but it’s also too machine-manufactured. All too many characters in American fantasy are recognizably American, even the ones that are supposed to be from other worlds and cultures. There’s a sameness in the writing, the editing, and even the plot and character choices, that are predictable. It’s like every author and editor has a guidebook that tells them exactly what they can and cannot do, and there can be no exceptions. That can be stifling for a writer, and tiresome for a reader: Every author’s work reads the same!

Indian mythological characters are not just un-American in thought, word and action, they’re un-Indian. These are not people that represent South Asians of today, definitely not South Asians of the diaspora, and they’re as alien from present day Americans as can be. When writing such mythological characters, I start by accepting the story and characters as they are depicted. I don’t argue with the myth or its morality or its representation, because it’s not meant to be representative, or moral, or modern. These are artifacts from the past; I curate them and present them in a re-imagined, reinvented form that stands on its own but still carries the scent and texture of that ancient era. At least, that’s the attempt!

What’s next for you, Ashok? Any fun projects we ought to know about?

Right now, Upon a Burning Throne is looming like a gargantuan. I can’t describe how excited I am to finally have a major epic fantasy novel published, in hardcover as a lead title (pinch me). April 2019 can’t come soon enough for me. I have other books, and other writing projects, all going full steam ahead, but for now, I want to savor the anticipation of Upon a Burning Throne and the start of the Burnt Empire series.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Wendy N. Wagner is the author of more than forty short stories and has also written two novels for the Pathfinder role-playing game. Her third novel, An Oath of Dogs, is a sci-fi thriller from Angry Robot Books. She serves as the managing/associate editor of Lightspeed and Nightmare magazines. She is also the non-fiction editor of Women Destroy Science Fiction!, which was named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2014, and the guest editor of Queers Destroy Horror! She lives in Oregon with her very understanding family.

Author Spotlight: Lizz Huerta

Setsu Uzumé | 1059 words

What was the seed for this story?

I had a terrible toothache and didn’t have the money to go to the dentist. I began imagining ways I could barter with a dentist for fixing my tooth and soon, like always, my imagination ran off with the idea.

As I began writing this story, my uncle was dying. My father’s family is from Mexico and sometimes they practice interesting ancestral medicine. One of the treatments for cancer and leprosy involves boiling a vulture, bones and all, down to a thick stew and making the sick person eat it. A tía from Mexico somehow caught a vulture, killed it, and fed vulture stew to my dying uncle. I was trying to explain to a bewildered friend the reasoning behind making my dying uncle eat vulture: In the wild, vultures eat what is dead and decaying, therefore by ingesting vulture medicine, it will eat the death within the sick person. In my head, I anthropomorphized the vulture into a person and El Buitre was born, a dentist who extracts decay and death from living bodies. Sadly, the vulture did not save my uncle and he joined our ancestors. I did end up bartering with a dentist to fix my tooth. I painted his front gate and let him read an early draft of this story.

I loved the plumber lords and everything that said about the social structure and post-apocalyptic survival. How did you build out the world and the characters? Did one shape the other?

This world is one I’ve been working in for multiple short stories, one wherein the United States of America collapses because of an inept, racist dictator and his ruinous border wall. Ahem. In this world, Mexico becomes a haven for refugees who are escaping the cruel world ushered in by the collapse. Years ago, I read a book called Flushed: How the Plumber Saved Civilization. The author wrote about how post-nuclear disaster, plumbers would be heroes. That stuck with me, so I made them the lords of the encampments in this piece. I eventually want to write plumbers their own love story one day, as they are essential to our society but not really respected because they deal in so much literal human waste. We should throw them parades; water is life and they bring it forth. I make it a point when I interact with plumbers, to acknowledge how vital they are to the world and how much I respect the work they do. Forget getting an MFA, go apprentice to a plumber; you’ll always have well-paying work and great fodder for your writing. Plumbers know the strangest stories you’ll ever hear.

Sometimes the words bruja-lit or bruja-myth come up in discussions of your work—what is a bruja story? Are there certain textures or feelings that evoke that space, relative to other kinds of magical realism? Have you seen other writers capture that essence?

In my mythic fiction, women come into their ancestral powers, powers that were hidden during the forced erasure of the divine feminine. This not only happened in the post-contact Americas, but in almost every culture where patriarchal monotheism violently swooped in and tried to stomp out the power of women and practices aligned with natural cycles of the living Earth. For me, bruja-lit is one where a woman comes into the powers her ancestors hid away in her DNA. It shows up in intuitions, in Dreaming, in divine coincidence and listening. Tananarive Due explores those powers in The Good House. Her protagonist Angela Toussaint is not only dealing with a broken lineage of her ancestral powers, but the curses borne of that broken lineage. The Dreamoir Bruja by Wendy Ortiz captures that awakening in the chronicling of her dreams. In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés really dives into the divine feminine, how to realign with what our bodies and spirits intuitively know but have lost along the way.

El Buitre and Flaquis seem to represent two opposing paradigms of how to treat the environment. What does Fai choose in the end? What did you want readers to take away from this story?

More than the treatment of the environment, El Buitre and Fai represent opposing aspects of how to live in and listen to the natural world. El Buitre comes from a patriarchal culture that collapses because it has taken without replenishing, it dishonored the living Earth and her children. The world El Buitre left had its gifts as well; Fai is able to live because of the skills El Buitre learned in that world. Flaquis is an aspect of the folk saint, La Santa Muerte, divine death. In Death’s eyes, we are all equal, we will all be delivered into her embrace one day. Death is a vital part of creation (and creative) cycles. Fai as fisherwoman has come to live in a world of natural cycles and has fallen in love with Death. El Buitre, in falling in love with Fai, is falling in love with the cycles and voices of the natural, living world. I wanted the reader to come away with a sense of possibility. We live in a world that hates being broken, when the breaking of what we’ve known is a gift to greater possibilities. Live alongside your inevitable death, accept the offered gifts.

What can we look forward to next from you?

I’m finishing the last round of edits on the first book in a YA high fantasy trilogy that takes place in a world informed by pre-contact Mesoamerican mythology and landscapes. The fantasy book I needed when I was growing up, with badass women living in a sacred world that is based on my ancestral homelands. Instead of castles and faerie, I have jungle pyramids and jaguar women, sacred Dreamers, elemental powers that are dying, or being put into hibernation for survival. It’s the same world all my fiction takes place in, the same world as “Mouths,” just a couple thousand years in the past. The book is (currently) called The Lost Dreamer.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Setsu grew up in New York, and spent their formative years in and out of dojos. They like swords, raspberries, justice, the smell of pine forests after rain, and shooting arrows from horseback. They do not like peanut butter and chocolate in the same bite. Their work has appeared in Podcastle and Grimdark Magazine. Find them on Twitter @KatanaPen.

Author Spotlight: Shaenon K. Garrity

Jude Griffin | 721 words

How did this story come about?

Naturally, it’s based on a true story. The recipes are all standards baked by my Grandma Garrity, who was the daughter of Slovenian immigrants (Garrity is her married name) and knew a lot of the recipes that used to be common in the Eastern European community in Pittsburgh. She made enormous batches of cookies for parties and church events and usually had a couple of dozen nutrolls stored in her basement freezer. She was my dad’s mother, but my mom’s family loved her baking.

A few years back, my mom and several of her relatives went to Grandma Garrity’s house for a baking intensive so they could write down her recipes and pass them down the line. My grandma passed away a few years ago, but now my Aunt Kerry makes her cookies and my Aunt Karen makes the nut roll.

The story about Grandma breaking her arm and yanking the pins out is also true.

The recipes in this story are my grandma’s real recipes. One thing I noticed while transcribing them is that they’re probably Depression-era versions, because the fat is usually shortening or margarine (“oleo”) rather than lard or butter. If you want to make these, you can try substituting butter. What’s the worst that can happen?

I cannot provide details on making Grandma’s jelly.

Can you talk about the challenges of dropping hints of horror in between recipes? What felt like too much, too little.

I generally subscribe to a philosophy of “less is more,” so if anything I erred on the side of too little. I hope I set the right pace of normal-to-weird as the story progresses. I like stories in which the strangeness creeps up by degrees so you can’t pinpoint exactly when everything went off the rails to Bananas Valley.

I confess the story made me hungry, especially for Linzer tarts: Did you find yourself eating your way through the writing?

My dark confession: I don’t personally like these sweets! These crisp, dry Eastern European pastries, usually mildly sweetened with nuts or fruit, were ubiquitous at family gatherings growing up and I never warmed to them. I like disgustingly gooey over-sweetened chocolate things. When I’m done with this interview, I’m going to go eat spoonfuls of Hershey’s Syrup.

What else would you like readers to know about “Grandma Novak’s Famous Nut Roll”?

I wanted to be vague about what the spells do and what type of monster these women are, but all the details are based on folklore from Slovenia and neighboring regions. There really is a traditional creature that splits in two and hops around leaving a single footprint! “Novak” is a Slovenian name meaning “new,” which the family got because they used to move around a lot and were newcomers wherever they lived.

Whose horror writing do you admire?

Shirley Jackson above all. Her horror stories are dark and cynical about human nature, but often slyly funny, and everything she writes is crafted with exquisite care and intimidating intelligence. Just the best. I recently went on a tear through the short stories of Robert Aickman, a great oddball. He wrote creepy, impenetrably symbolic weird fiction, disturbing the way a David Lynch movie is disturbing. Supposedly whenever he read one of his own stories aloud he’d just laugh and laugh through it. Who else? Arthur Machen and Kelly Link.

Any news or projects you want to tell us about?

Anyone who enjoys horror is required to check out my sketchblog, Horror Every Day (horrormovie.today), in which I recommend the correct horror movie for each day of the year. I try to include all types of horror, though I lean a little hard on my favorite categories, witches and lesbian vampires. My daily online comic strip Skin Horse (skin-horse.com), co-written with Jeffrey C. Wells, is swinging into its climactic arcs. Oh! And my husband, Andrew Farago, and I have written a useful guidebook, The Zombie Gnome Defense Guide.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.

Author Spotlight: Seanan McGuire

Arley Sorg | 834 words

How did this story start for you, in terms of inspiration, first thoughts, and so on, and how did it develop?

The Bolton Strid is a real place that really exists and I really want to go there, except for the part where I am a fairly clumsy person and I would very shortly be swept away forever, and my friends would miss me. So the story started with the Strid.

Regardless of the date posted at the outset of the story, there are cues in the language that go far to establish setting and culture. Some are quite elegant while still capturing the feeling of the era, such as: “The current was my immediate companion.” Even in the opening line: “We have traveled here . . .” evokes not only the period but the adventure. Do you do any specific research or preparation when writing in this sort of style/voice? Do you have advice for writers attempting narratives in similar styles?

Read a lot of works published in the era you want to emulate. That’s how I do it, and how I will continue to do it, because gosh, it’s fun to read things that come off as “archaic” but were once the norm.

While focused on the adventure and very enjoyable as an adventure story, the narrative also deals a lot with gender. Are there specific challenges to writing a female protagonist in this time period? And how do you deal with those challenges?

I sort of . . . ignore most of the challenges that common wisdom will say exist, because I can. I’m telling a fantasy story about a river, I think I can roll with “I would have wanted to read this story with a female protagonist when I was a kid, so I’m going to write it now.”

I feel like one of the side effects of the story is that while I’m reading it, I’m like, okay, this aspect of gender actually hasn’t changed that much. All right—we still really struggle with this. It’s like a measuring stick or a touchstone for comparing gender equality in two different eras. Is this a happy accident, or did you set out to write an awesome adventure story that also makes people think? Is it important to address social issues in fiction—or can a story sometimes be “just a fun story”?

Happy accident. I almost always write female protagonists, because they make me happy, and sometimes this, combined with the setting, will make my story read more like it’s addressing social issues. Which I also do, but in this case, I just wanted to drown some people.

I didn’t realize this until I looked up our last Lightspeed spotlight interview, for “Dragonflies” (Issue 84, May 2017), but that story also featured a character named Molly. Coincidence? Or . . .?

I like the name Molly! You will also find a lot of Elizabeths and Alexes in my work.

Since I brought up our prior interview, I’d be remiss in my duties as interviewer if I failed to query on the progression of the Poképocalypse (Pokémon Apocalypse), and more importantly, the quest to catch them all, and your cause to train them?

The quest . . . continues. The quest shall never end.

For people who loved this as a great adventure story featuring a female protagonist, do you have any recommendations for other adventure stories they should check out? If this is their first Seanan McGuire story and they loved it, what do you think they should read next?

Not in quite the same vein, era-wise, but check out Ruthanna Emrys’s incredible Mythos stories, beginning with “The Litany of Man” and continuing into Winter Tide, and Becky Chamber’s exquisite Wayfarers series, beginning with The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. If this was someone’s first encounter with me, well, there’s a lot to read in this very magazine’s archive—gasp!—or they can start my novel-length work with either Rosemary and Rue, Discount Armageddon, Sparrow Hill Road, or Every Heart a Doorway.

You post updates on forthcoming works, appearances, and so on at your site: bit.ly/2OkpcOP. And cat pics and more can be found on your Twitter feed: @seananmcguire. Is there anything coming up or anything you’re working on that you’d really like new fans to know about?

Oh, gosh! I have my first big literary fantasy novel coming up, Middlegame, releasing in May of 2019, and I am so excited for it, and I hope everyone will give it a try. It’s my weird baby, and I adore it, and I really hope everyone else will adore it, too.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Arley Sorg grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado. He studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, and usually writes in local coffee shops. A 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, he is an assistant editor at Locus Magazine. He’s soldering together a novel, has thrown a few short stories into orbit, and hopes to launch more.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 234 words

Coming up in January, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by A. Merc Rustad (“With Teeth Unmakes the Sun”) and Tony Ballantyne (“Midway”), along with SF reprints by Roger Zelazny (“The Engine at Heartspring’s Center”) and Sarah Micklem (“The Book Collector”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Ashok K. Banker (“Son of Water and Fire”) and Meg Elison (“Endor House”), and fantasy reprints by Emily B. Cataneo (“The Emerald Coat and Other Wishes”) and E. Lily Yu (“The Pilgrim and the Angel”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns.

For our ebook readers, we also have our an ebook-exclusive reprint of the novella “What There Was to See,” by Maria Dahvana Headley, and of course a book excerpt.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

• • • •

Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got a veritable plethora of stories forthcoming! In the next few issues you can expect more stories in Ashok K. Banker’s series of fantasy shorts, plus new work from Matthew Baker, Kathleen Kayembe, Caroline M. Yoachim, and Violet Allen.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that speculative goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

Here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Lightspeed:

Website

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

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Newsletter

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter

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Subscribe

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Subscriptions and Ebooks

The Editors

Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed more than 100 stories (about 700,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain! For more information, including about third-party subscription options, visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe.

Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), the Mega Bundle (issues 1-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-48). Buying a bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So if you need to catch up on Lightspeed, that’s a great way to do so. Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

• • • •

All caught up on Lightspeed? Good news! We also have lots of ebooks available from our sister-publications:

Nightmare Ebooks, Bundles, & Subscriptions: Like Lightspeed, our sister-magazine Nightmare (nightmare-magazine.com) also has ebooks, bundles, and subscriptions available as well. For instance, you can get the complete first year (12 issues) of Nightmare for just $24.99; that’s savings of $11 off buying the issues individually. Or, if you’d like to subscribe, a 12-month subscription to Nightmare includes 48 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction), and will cost you just $23.88 ($12 off the cover price).

Fantasy Magazine Ebooks & Bundles: We also have ebook back issues—and ebook back issue bundles—of Lightspeed’s (now dormant) sister-magazine, Fantasy. To check those out, just visit fantasy-magazine.com/store. You can buy each Fantasy bundle for $24.99, or you can buy the complete run of Fantasy Magazine— all 57 issues—for just $114.99 (that’s $10 off buying all the bundles individually, and more than $55 off the cover price!).

Support Us on Patreon or Drip, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

The Editors

If you’re reading this, then there’s a good chance you’re a regular reader of Lightspeed and/or Nightmare. We already offer ebook subscriptions as a way of supporting the magazines, but we wanted to add an additional option to allow folks to support us, thus we’ve launched a Drip (d.rip/john-joseph-adams) and a Patreon (patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams).

TL;DR Version

If you enjoy Lightspeed and Nightmare and my anthologies, our Patreon and Drip pages are a way for you to help support those endeavors by chipping in a buck or more on a recurring basis. Your support will help us bring bigger and better (and more) projects into the world.

Why Patreon and Drip?

There are no big companies supporting or funding the magazines, so the magazines really rely on reader support. Though we offer the magazines online for free, we’re able to fund them by selling ebook subscriptions or website advertising.

While we have a dedicated ebook subscriber base, the vast majority of our readers consume the magazine online for free. If just 10% of our website readers pledged just $1 a month, the magazines would be doing fantastically well. So we thought it might be useful to have an option like Drip and Patreon for readers who maybe haven’t considered supporting the magazine, or who maybe haven’t because they don’t have any desire to receive the ebook editions—or who would be glad to pay $1 a month, but not $3 (the cost of a monthly subscriber issue of Lightspeed).

Though Lightspeed and Nightmare are separate entities, we decided to create a single “publisher” Drip and Patreon account because it seemed like it would be more efficient to manage just one page on each platform. Plus, since I sometimes independently publish works using indie-publishing tools (as described above), we thought it would be good to have a single place where folks could come to show their support for such projects.

Basically, we wanted to create a crowdfunding page where, if you enjoy my work as an editor, and you want to contribute a little something to help make it easier for us to produce more cool projects, then our Drip or Patreon are the place to do that.

What Do I Get Out of Being a Backer or Patron?

Well, you get the satisfaction of helping to usher the creation of cool new short fiction projects into the world! Plus, the more support we get, the better we can make the magazines and compensate our authors and staff. By becoming a supporter via Patreon or Drip, you help fund our growth and continued publication of two award-winning magazines. Of course, if you’re already one of our ebook subscribers (thank you!), you are already supporting us. This is for those who prefer to read the issues each month on our free websites, or wish to support our efforts more generally.

By becoming a supporter, you are also bestowed a title, such as Dragonrider, or Space Wizard, or Savior of the World and/or Universe, thus making you instantly the envy of all your friends.

Thank You!

If you’ve read this far, thanks so much. We hope you’ll consider becoming a backer on Patreon or Drip. Those URLs again are d.rip/john-joseph-adams and patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams.

Thanks in advance for your time. We look forward to hopefully being able to make the magazines—and my other publishing endeavors—even better with the support of people like you.

About the Lightspeed Team

The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

John Joseph Adams

Managing/Associate Editor

Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects

Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher

Robert Barton Bland

Reprint Editor

Rich Horton

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

Art Director

John Joseph Adams

Assistant Editor

Laurel Amberdine

Editorial Assistant

Jude Griffin

Reviewers

Arley Sorg

LaShawn Wanak

Chris Kluwe

Carrie Vaughn

Christopher East

Violet Allen

Copy Editor

Dana Watson

Proofreaders

Anthony R. Cardno

Devin Marcus

Webmaster

Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

The Editors

If you enjoy reading Lightspeed (and/or Nightmare), you might also enjoy these works edited by John Joseph Adams:

ANTHOLOGIES

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: The End is Nigh (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: The End is Now (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: The End Has Come (with Hugh Howey)

Armored

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (with Karen Joy Fowler)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 (with Charles Yu)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 (with N.K. Jemisin)

Brave New Worlds

By Blood We Live

Cosmic Powers

Dead Man’s Hand

Epic: Legends of Fantasy

Federations

The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects

Lightspeed: Year One

The Living Dead

The Living Dead 2

Loosed Upon the World

The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination

Operation Arcana

Other Worlds Than These

Oz Reimagined (with Douglas Cohen)

A People’s Future of the United States (with Victor LaValle) [Feb. 2019]

Press Start to Play (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Robot Uprisings (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Seeds of Change

Under the Moons of Mars

Wastelands

Wastelands 2

The Way of the Wizard

What the #@&% is That? (with Douglas Cohen)

NOVELS and COLLECTIONS

Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey

Shift by Hugh Howey

Dust by Hugh Howey

Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn

Sand by Hugh Howey

Retrograde by Peter Cawdron

Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey

Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer

The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp

The Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty

The Wild Dead by Carrie Vaughn

The Spaceship Next Door by Gene Doucette

In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey

Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks

The Chaos Function by Jack Skillingstead

Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker

Gather the Fortunes by Bryan L. Camp

The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear

The Chosen One by Veronica Roth

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.