The Fifth Season

by N. K. Jemisin

  You step onto the rough wooden platform outside your door and squint down over its completely inadequate safety railing. Whatever the hour, it seems there are several dozen people going about their business on the ground below. Well, you need to know more about this comm, anyway. Before you destroy it, that is, if they really try to stop you from leaving.

  (You ignore the small voice in your head that whispers, Ykka is a rogga, too. Will you really fight her?)

  (You’re pretty good at ignoring small voices.)

  Figuring out how to reach the ground level is difficult, at first, because all the platforms and bridges and stairways of the place are built to connect the crystals. The crystals go every which way, so the connections do, too. There’s nothing intuitive about it. You have to follow one set of stairs up and walk around one of the wider crystal shafts in order to find another set of stairs that goes down—only to find that they end on a platform with no steps at all, which forces you to backtrack. There are a few people out and about, and they look at you with curiosity or hostility in passing, probably because you’re so obviously new in town: They’re clean and you’re gray with road ash. They look well fleshed, and your clothes hang off your body because you’ve done nothing but walk and eat travel rations for weeks. You cannot help resenting them on sight, so you get stubborn about asking for directions.

  Eventually, however, you make it to the ground. Down here, it’s more obvious than ever that you’re walking along the floor of a huge stone bubble, because the ground slopes gently downward and curves around you to form a noticeable, if vast, bowl. This is the pointy end of the ovoid that is Castrima. There are crystals down here, too, but they’re stubby, some only as high as your chest; the largest are only ten or fifteen feet tall. Wooden partitions wend around some of them, and in some places you can make out obvious patches of rough, paler ground where crystals have been removed to make room. (You wonder, idly, how they did this.) All of it creates a sort of maze of crisscrossing pathways, each of which leads to some comm essential or another: a kiln, a smithy, a glassery, a bakehouse. Off some of the paths you glimpse tents and campsites, some occupied. Clearly not all the denizens of this comm are comfortable walking along bundles of lashed-together wooden planks hundreds of feet above a floor covered in giant spikes. Funny, that.

  (There it is again, that un-Essun-like sarcasm. Rust it; you’re tired of reining it in.)

  It’s actually easy to find the baths because there’s a pattern of damp foot traffic along the gray-green stone floor, all the wet footprints leading in one direction. You backtrail them and are pleasantly surprised to find that the bath is a huge pool of steaming, clear water. The pool has been walled off a little above the natural floor of the geode, and there’s a channel wending away from it, draining into one of several large brass pipes going—somewhere. On the other side of the pool you can see a kind of waterfall emerging from another pipe to supply the pool. The water probably circulates enough to be clean every few hours or so, but nevertheless there’s a conspicuous washing area over to one side, with long wooden benches and shelves holding various accessories. Quite a few people are already there, busily scrubbing before they go into the larger pool.

  You’re undressed and halfway done with your own scrubbing when a shadow falls over you, and you twitch and stumble to your feet and knock over the bench and reach for the earth before it occurs to you that maybe this is overreacting. But then you almost drop the soapy sponge in your hand, because—

  —it’s Lerna.

  “Yes,” he says as you stare at him. “I thought that might be you, Essun.”

  You keep staring. He looks different somehow. Heavier, sort of, though skinnier, too, in the same way you are; travel-worn. It’s been—weeks? Months? You’re losing track of time. And what is he doing here? He should be back in Tirimo; Rask would never let a doctor go…

  Oh. Right.

  “So Ykka did manage to summon you. I’d wondered.” Tired. He looks tired. There’s a scar along the edge of his jaw, a crescent-shaped pale patch that doesn’t look likely to regain its color. You keep staring as he shifts and says, “Of all the places I had to end up… and here you are. Maybe this is fate, or maybe there really are gods other than Father Earth—ones who actually give a damn about us, that is. Or maybe they’re evil, too, and this is their joke. Rust if I know.”

  “Lerna,” you say, which is helpful.

  His eyes flick down, and belatedly you remember you’re naked. “I should let you finish,” he says, looking away quickly. “Let’s talk when you’re done.” You don’t care if he sees your nudity—he delivered one of your children, for rust’s sake—but he’s being polite. It’s a familiar habit of his, treating you like a person even though he knows what you are, and oddly heartening after so much strangeness and everything that’s changed in your life. You’re not used to having a life follow you when you leave it behind.

  He moves off, past the bath area, and after a moment you sit back down and finish washing. No one else bothers you while you bathe, although you catch some of the Castrima people eyeing you with increased curiosity now. Less hostility, too, but that’s not surprising; you don’t look especially intimidating. It’s the stuff they can’t see that will make them hate you.

  Then again… do they know what Ykka is? The blond woman who’d been with her up on the surface certainly does. Maybe Ykka’s got something on her, some means of ensuring her silence. That doesn’t feel right, though. Ykka is too open about what she is, too comfortable speaking of it to complete strangers. She’s too charismatic, too eye-catching. Ykka acts like being an orogene is just another talent, just another personal trait. You’ve only seen that kind of attitude, and this kind of comm-wide acceptance of it, once before.

  Once you’re done soaking and you feel clean, you get out of the bath. You don’t have any towels, just your filthy ashen clothes, which you take the time to scrub clean in the washing area. They’re wet when you’re done, but you’re not quite bold enough to walk through a strange comm naked, and it feels like summer within the geode anyway. So as you do in summer, you put the wet clothes on, figuring they’ll dry fast enough.

  Lerna’s waiting when you leave. “This way,” he says, turning to walk with you.

  So you follow him, and he leads you up the maze of steps and platforms until you reach a squat gray crystal that juts only twenty feet or so from the wall. He’s got an apartment here that’s smaller than the one you share with Tonkee and Hoa, but you see shelves laden with herb packets and folded bandages and it’s not hard to guess that the odd benches in the main room might actually be intended as makeshift cots. A doctor must be prepared for house calls. He directs you to sit down on one of the benches, and sits across from you.

  “I left Tirimo the day after you did,” he says quietly. “Oyamar—Rask’s second, you remember him, complete idiot—was actually trying to hold an election for a new headman. Didn’t want the responsibility with a Season coming on. Everybody knew Rask should never have picked him, but his family did Rask a favor on the trade rights to the western logging trace…” He trails off, because none of that matters anymore. “Anyway. Half the damned Strongbacks were running around drunk and armed, raiding the storecaches, accusing every other person of being a rogga or a rogga-lover. The other half were doing the same thing—quieter, though, and sober, which was worse. I knew it was only a matter of time till they thought about me. Everybody knew I was your friend.”

  This is your fault, too, then. Because of you, he had to flee a place that should have been safe. You lower your eyes, uncomfortable. He’s using the word “rogga” now, too.

  “I was thinking I could make it down to Brilliance, where my mother’s family came from. They barely know me, but they know of me, and I’m a doctor, so… I figured I had a chance. Better than staying in Tirimo, anyway, to get lynched. Or to starve, when the cold came and the Strongbacks had eaten or stolen everything. And I thought—” He hesitates, looks up at you in
a flash of eyes, then back at his hands. “I also thought I might catch up to you on the road, if I went fast enough. But that was stupid; of course I didn’t.”

  It’s the unspoken thing that’s always been between you. Lerna figured out what you were, somewhere during your time in Tirimo; you didn’t tell him. He figured it out because he watched you enough to notice the signs, and because he’s smart. He’s always liked you, Makenba’s boy. You figured he would grow out of it eventually. You shift a little, uncomfortable with the realization that he hasn’t.

  “I slipped out in the night,” he continues, “through one of the cracks in the wall near… near where you… where they tried to stop you.” He’s got his arms resting on his knees, looking at his folded hands. They’re mostly still, but he rubs one thumb along the knuckle of the other, slowly, again and again. The gesture feels meditative. “Walked with the flow of people, following a map I had… but I’ve never been to Brilliance. Earthfires, I’ve barely left Tirimo before now. Just once, really, when I went to finish my medical training at Hilge—anyway. Either the map was wrong or I’m bad at reading it. Probably both. I didn’t have a compass. I got off the Imperial Road too soon, maybe… went southeast when I thought I was going due south… I don’t know.” He sighs and rubs a hand over his head. “By the time I figured out just how lost I was, I’d gone so far that I hoped to just find a better route if I kept going the way I’d gone. But there was a group at one crossroads. Bandits, commless, something. I was with a small group by then, an older man who’d had a bad gash on his chest that I treated, and his daughter, maybe fifteen. The bandits—”

  He pauses, his jaw flexing. You can pretty much guess what happened. Lerna’s not a fighter. He’s still alive, though, which is all that matters.

  “Marald—that was the man—just threw himself at one of them. He didn’t have weapons or anything, and the woman had a machete. I don’t know what he thought he could do.” Lerna takes a deep breath. “He looked at me, though, and—and I—I grabbed his daughter and ran.” His jaw tightens further. You’re surprised you can’t hear his teeth grinding. “She left me later. Called me a coward and ran off alone.”

  “If you hadn’t taken her away,” you say, “they would’ve killed you and her, too.” This is stonelore: Honor in safety, survival under threat. Better a living coward than a dead hero.

  Lerna’s lips quirk thinly. “That’s what I told myself at the time. Later, when she left… Earthfires. Maybe all I did was just delay the inevitable. A girl her age, unarmed and out on the roads alone…”

  You don’t say anything. If the girl’s healthy and has the right conformation, someone will take her in, if only as a Breeder. If she has a better use name, or if she can acquire a weapon and supplies and prove herself, that will help, too. Granted, her chances would’ve been better with Lerna than without him, but she made her choice.

  “I don’t even know what they wanted.” Lerna’s looking at his hands. Maybe he’s been eating himself up about this ever since. “We didn’t have anything but our runny-sacks.”

  “That’s enough, if they were running low on supplies,” you say, before you remember to censor yourself. He doesn’t seem to hear, anyway.

  “So I kept on, by myself.” He chuckles once, bitterly. “I was so worried about her, it didn’t even occur to me that I was just as bad off.” This is true. Lerna is a bog-standard midlatter, same as you, except he hasn’t inherited the Sanzed bulk or height—probably why he’s worked so hard to prove his mental fitness. But he’s ended up pretty, mostly by an accident of heritage, and some people breed for that. Cebaki long nose, Sanzed shoulders and coloring, Westcoaster lips… He’s too multiracial for Equatorial comm tastes, but by Somidlats standards he’s a looker.

  “When I passed through Castrima,” he continues, “it looked abandoned. I was exhausted, after running from—anyway. Figured I’d hole up in one of the houses for the night, maybe try to make a small hearth fire and hope no one noticed. Eat a decent meal for a change. Hold still long enough to figure out what to do next.” He smiled thinly. “And when I woke up, I was surrounded. I told them I was a doctor and they brought me down here. That was maybe two weeks ago.”

  You nod. And then you tell him your own story, not bothering to hide or lie about anything. The whole thing, not just the part in Tirimo. You’re feeling guilty, maybe. He deserves the whole truth.

  After you’ve both fallen silent for a while, Lerna just shakes his head and sighs. “I didn’t expect to live through a Season,” he says softly. “I mean, I’ve heard the lore all my life, same as everyone else… but I always figured it would never happen to me.”

  Everyone thinks that. You certainly weren’t expecting to have to deal with the end of the world on top of everything else.

  “Nassun’s not here,” Lerna says after a while. He speaks softly, but your head jerks up. His face softens at the look that must be on yours. “I’m sorry. But I’ve been here long enough to meet all the other ‘newcomers’ to this comm. I know that’s who you’ve been hoping to find.”

  No Nassun. And now no direction, no realistic way to find her. You are suddenly bereft of even hope.

  “Essun.” Lerna leans forward abruptly and takes your hands. Belatedly you realize your hands have begun shaking; his fingers still yours. “You’ll find her.”

  The words are meaningless. Reflexive gibberish intended to soothe. But it hits you again, harder this time than that moment topside when you started to come apart in front of Ykka. It’s over. This whole strange journey, keeping it together, keeping focused on your goal… it’s all been pointless. Nassun’s gone, you’ve lost her, and Jija will never pay for what he’s done, and you—

  What the rust do you matter? Who cares about you? Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? Once, you did have people who cared about you. Once there were children who looked up to you and lived on your every word. Once—twice, three times, but the first two don’t count—there was a man you woke up next to every morning, who gave a damn that you existed. Once, you lived surrounded by the walls he built for you, in a home you made together, in a community that actually chose to take you in.

  All of it built on lies. Matter of time, really, till it fell apart.

  “Listen,” Lerna says. His voice makes you blink, and that makes tears fall. More tears. You’ve been sitting there in silence, crying, for a while now. He shifts over to your bench and you lean on him. You know you shouldn’t. But you do, and when he puts an arm around you, you take comfort in it. He is a friend, at least. He will always be that. “Maybe… maybe this isn’t a bad thing, being here. You can’t think, with—everything—going on. This comm is strange.” He grimaces. “I’m not sure I like being here, but it’s better than being topside right now. Maybe with some time to think, you’ll figure out where Jija might have gone.”

  He’s trying so hard. You shake your head a little, but you’re too empty to really muster an objection.

  “Do you have a place? They gave me this, they must have given you something. There’s plenty of room here.” You nod, and Lerna takes a deep breath. “Then let’s go there. You can introduce me to these companions of yours.”

  So. You pull it together. Then you lead him out of his place and in a direction that feels like it might bring you to the apartment you were assigned. Along the way you have more time to appreciate just how unbearably strange this comm is. There’s one chamber you pass, embedded in one of the whiter, brighter crystals, that holds racks and racks of flat trays like cookie sheets. There’s another chamber, dusty and unused, that holds what you assume are torture devices, except they’re incompetently made; you’re not sure how a pair of rings suspended from the ceiling on chains are supposed to hurt. And then there are the metal stairs—the ones built by whoever created this place. There are other stairs, more recently made, but it’s easy to tell them from the originals because the original stairs don’t rust, haven’t deteriorated at all, and are not purely utilitarian. There ar
e strange decorations along the railings and edges of the walkways: embossed faces, wrought vines in the shape of no plants you’ve ever seen, something that you think is writing, except it consists solely of pointy shapes in various sizes. It actually pulls you out of your mood, to try to figure out what you’re seeing.

  “This is madness,” you say, running your fingers over a decoration that looks like a snarling kirkhusa. “This place is one big deadciv ruin, just like a hundred thousand others all over the Stillness. Ruins are death traps. The Equatorial comms flatten or sink theirs if they can, and that’s the smartest thing anyone’s ever done. If the people who made this place couldn’t survive it, why should any of us try?”

  “Not all ruins are death traps.” Lerna’s edging along the platform while keeping very close to the crystal shaft it wends around, and keeping his eyes fixed straight ahead. Sweat beads his upper lip. You hadn’t realized he’s afraid of heights, but then Tirimo is as flat as it is boring. His voice is carefully calm. “There are rumors Yumenes is built on a whole series of deadciv ruins.”

  And look how well that turned out, you don’t say.

  “These people should’ve just built a wall like everyone else,” you do say, but then you stop, because it occurs to you that the goal is survival, and sometimes survival requires change. Just because the usual strategies have worked—building a wall, taking in the useful and excluding the useless, arming and storing and hoping for luck—doesn’t mean that other methods might not. This, though? Climbing down a hole and hiding in a ball of sharp rocks with a bunch of stone eaters and roggas? Seems especially unwise.

  “And if they try to keep me here, they’ll find that out,” you murmur.