Black Sun

by Rebecca Roanhorse

  “Twenty-two.”

  “Hells,” she muttered. “I’m five years older than you?” She sighed gustily and snuggled in closer.

  They were silent for a while, and he thought about not telling her his story at all, but this might be their last opportunity to be alone. Once they were moving upriver and their cabinmates had returned, he would not have the chance. And he was unsure what awaited him in Tova the day before the Convergence. It had to be now.

  “I am a vessel,” he said.

  “Hmm…?”

  “I am…” He wanted her to understand, but he wasn’t sure how to explain it. He decided to start again. “I wasn’t always blind.”

  “An accident?”

  “No. It was purposeful. My mother did it.”

  He felt her shift under his arm, knew she had propped herself up on one elbow to stare at him. “How? Why?”

  “She had her reasons. It made me a proper vessel. My eyes served as an entry point for the power of a god.”

  He felt her flop back down. Her arm draped across his chest. “I’m not sure I believe in gods,” she admitted. “I mean, you’ve definitely got something happening, don’t get me wrong. And your birds are undeniable. And the sun…” She trailed off.

  “What is your magic if not the power of a god?” he asked, curious. “Is not your sea a goddess?”

  He felt her shrug. “That’s not Teek thinking.”

  “It is Tovan thinking.” He thought of the Watchers and the Sun Priest and corrected himself. “Carrion Crow thinking. The old ways.”

  “Well, Teek is about as old as it gets.”

  “What happened to you there in your homeland that you can’t return?”

  It was only a moment, but he felt her stiffen, felt anxiety rise from her like a dark wave.

  “My mother was an abusive monster, too,” she whispered against his chest.

  He did not think of his mother as a monster any more than he did himself, but he understood what she meant and that this was a confession, so he did not counter her.

  “She and my aunt drove me out. Told me that if I ever came back, my life would be forfeit. Banishment is usually a death sentence for a Teek. We don’t do well out in the mainlander world. We tend to meet poor ends at the hands of unscrupulous men or drink ourselves into an early grave.”

  “Is that what you’re doing?” He had smelled the liquor on her breath when she arrived, remembered the balché from the sea crossing.

  “I was giving it a shot,” she admitted. She pressed a hip against him as she rolled onto her back, and he moved closer to the wall to give her space, but there was precious little to concede. They lay skin to skin, the long slide of their bodies touching.

  “How does it feel to be going home?” she asked. “You’re returning to your family, aren’t you? Once we get to Tova, you’ll go to Crow Clan. What did Loob call it? Odo? And then you’ll be like a long-lost son. Will they all have red teeth and haahan like you, I wonder?”

  “I am not returning to be reunited with my family,” he said, his voice soft with surprise. Is that what she thought? “I told you I am going to see the Sun Priest, the Watcher in the celestial tower.”

  “Sure,” she said, “but then what? What happens after that? I mean, once you’ve had your meeting with this priest, then you’ll go back to your clan. Or will you go all the way back to Obregi? It seems a long journey for one day.”

  “Xiala…” He didn’t know what to say. She made it sound so normal.

  She waved a hand. “Never mind. It was only a thought. I’m sure you’ll be busy doing whatever the vessels of gods do. I’ll just…” She sighed, long and heavy. “I’ll find something. A job. But what kind of work do you think there is in a place like that for a Teek? The sea is distant, even now. I was in the river, and it didn’t know me, Serapio. It didn’t recognize me as its child.”

  He pressed a soothing hand to her head, ran a palm down the long plane of her hair. He could hear her soft sobs.

  “Ah, shit,” she said, her breath a soft hiccup. “Maybe I am drunk. And I think I left that bottle of xtabentún down by the river.”

  “Leave it,” he told her. “Stay with me instead.”

  And she did, her breath steadying in slumber and her body limp against him. Only when he was sure she was dreaming did he begin to drift off, destiny untold, deciding that tomorrow was soon enough.

  CHAPTER 31

  THE OBREGI MOUNTAINS

  YEAR 325 OF THE SUN

  (5 MONTHS BEFORE CONVERGENCE)

  And one day Crow came upon Eagle, who said, “Lo, Lord Crow. What fine feathers you have. I would like to admire them up close. Will you let me?” But Crow knew that she and Eagle were natural enemies and said, “You may admire me from where you stand, but come no closer. I do not trust you. It is in your nature to eat my kind.” And Eagle, who had indeed intended to eat Crow, was chastened.

  —From the Crow Cycle, an oral history of the Crow clan

  “Did you kill the other tutors?” Powageh asked.

  They were sitting under the giant pine outside Serapio’s old rooms. He had been practicing calling the shadow. Shortly after they had met four years ago, Serapio had told his tutor about the trick with the mirror he had used to defeat Eedi. Powageh had listened and then scoffed.

  “Only priests and magic users need objects to channel the god’s powers, Serapio. You are something else.”

  “Explain.”

  “You are an avatar of the crow god. Your power does not come from somewhere other. You do not need to draw it from the sky or the fireplace or even your blood, although I imagine your blood would be quite potent.” Xir mind seemed to drift off for a moment, lost in the possibility of Serapio’s blood sacrifice. It should have been unsettling, but he was used to it.

  “Anyway,” xe said, concentration coming back, “Saaya already did that for you. It is inside you, now, all that power. Can’t you feel it?”

  He could. The shadow seemed closer to the surface of his skin every day, a living, rippling presence. When he let it come, he could draw it to his fingertips, feel its icy fingers dance around his own, hear the muffled roar of its arrival like the rush of beating wings.

  “Is that what I will do when I confront the Sun Priest?” he asked. “Bring forth the crow’s shadow to smother his light?”

  “Her light. The new Sun Priest is a woman. But the body doesn’t matter. It’s the institution we’re after.”

  Serapio said nothing. He was used to Powageh’s rants against the celestial tower, the evils of the Watchers, the wrongs they had done to xir and countless others. He also remembered Paadeh’s grievances of abuse as a child in a district of Tova called the Maw and how the woodworker had blamed his impoverished beginnings on the tower and the Sky Made clans. Serapio often wondered if his condemnation of the clans included Carrion Crow, but since he had already marked Paadeh for death after their first meeting, he did not bother to inquire. Eedi’s complaint had been a strategic one. She wanted a weakened Tova so that her own people, a people who seemed to have soundly rejected her for a transgression she never made clear, could sweep in and conquer the Holy City. Serapio was happy to learn all he could from her, but he was not keen on her plan of conquest. When the crows forced her to fly, he did not mourn her.

  “I said, did you kill them?” Powageh said, xir question cutting into Serapio’s reverie and bringing him back to the present.

  He thought carefully on how to answer. He decided that Powageh must already realize that he did if he was asking.

  “How did you know?”

  “That staff, for one. That was Eedi’s. She would have to be dead for it to be in your hands. I knew it from the first time I met you under the tree, when you took me down with it.”

  Serapio ran a hand over his staff. “I made it my own.” And he had, adapting the skills he had learned to carve wood to the more challenging bone. He had marked hand placements at both center and top with elegant and detailed designs
that resembled the interlocking wings of crows.

  “It is a spearmaiden’s armament,” Powageh said. “No one else carries a bone staff, and they are almost no more. It is the weapon of a different era, before the Hokaia Treaty.”

  “And now I carry one and have no interest in their Treaty.”

  Powageh sighed, and Serapio was not sure what xe was thinking.

  “They were not good people, Powageh.”

  His only remaining tutor chuckled. “No, they were not. Are any of us? Am I? Are you?”

  Serapio mulled the question over. It was a strange thing to ask. He had spent the better part of his adolescence being molded into what he was by these people: his mother and her co-conspirators. His father had all but abdicated responsibility for him from the day of his transformation, but in earnest after his seventeenth birthday, when Serapio had moved to a caretaker’s cottage far from the main house. He did not know what Powageh had told Marcal to convince him to let Serapio go so easily. Perhaps not much at all except “burden” and “free of,” but he had not seen his father since.

  “Can a bad person become a good person by performing a good deed?” he asked.

  “How do you mean, crow son?”

  “If we agree that Paadeh and Eedi, and perhaps yourself, Powageh, are not good people, but you have trained me to a higher cause, the cause of justice, then perhaps you are a good person after all.”

  “The crow god a god of justice?” The old priest scoffed. “I’ve not heard that before.”

  “Vengeance, then. But what is vengeance if not justice?”

  “Vengeance can be for spite. It can eat you up inside, take from you everything that makes you happy, makes you human. Look at what it did to your mother. Would justice do that?”

  Serapio considered. He did not much feel like a human most days, although he was not sure what it felt like to be a god, either, despite Powageh’s insistence that he was an avatar. And he thought that the thing that made him happy was vengeance, or at least the idea that he would travel to Tova and exact it for his ancestors since they could not do so for themselves.

  “You did not train me for four and a half years to fulfill a promise of spite,” he said confidently.

  “Why did you kill them, then?” his tutor asked.

  Serapio answered honestly. “Paadeh whipped me repeatedly. Often. He wanted me to make physical pain my friend and labored hard at it. But I forgave him that.”

  Powageh grunted noncommittally.

  “But he also threatened my crows. Said if I didn’t do as he told me, he would whip them, too. It would have killed them.”

  “He always was a petty tyrant of a man,” Powageh muttered. Serapio could feel the weight of xir scrutiny. “So you killed him because he threatened your friends.”

  Serapio nodded.

  “And the spearmaiden? Eedi? What did she threaten?”

  “My clan.”

  After a while Powageh let out a heavy exhale. “She always did talk too much for her own good. Figured it would get her killed one day.” Another sigh. “And how do you plan to kill me, crow son?”

  Serapio had been thinking about this, too. “You saved my mother’s life. Gave her shelter, loved her.”

  “I did.”

  “I do not think she would want you to die.”

  A startled laugh from the priest. “But my transgressions are many, Serapio. I have killed people in the name of the priesthood, many from your clan alone. You, the Crow God Reborn, the harbinger of vengeance incarnate, would let me live?”

  Xir tone was jesting, but Serapio knew xe was serious. He had long ago realized Powageh carried a great burden, something dark that drove xir.

  “Sometimes it is better to let one live with their misdeeds than to free them through death. A dead priest cannot atone. A live one… well, there is always the choice.”

  “Well, crow son,” xe said, voice weary with the weight of age and choices, “perhaps my life has not been a mistake after all. But do not be so quick to grant me your mercy. There is one last lesson I must impart to you: your task on the Day of Convergence.

  “The Sun Priest and the Sky Made matrons will arrive at Sun Rock before sundown. The Convergence should occur while the sun is just above the horizon line. The Convergence will last only minutes, twelve at the most, and those minutes you must use to your advantage.”

  “But there will be Knives,” Serapio said.

  “Yes, the Society of Knives will no doubt be there, along with the Sky Made matrons and their Shields. You will have to find a way through them all.”

  “You mean kill them.”

  “Yes, but once you have had your fill of blood, shadow will be your knife.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Saaya had a theory. It was only a theory, mind you, but she was right about so much. Right about shaping you, after all. She believed the Watchers had once been instruments of gods.”

  “Vessels?” Serapio asked, surprised.

  “No. Or perhaps once, but no longer. The priesthood believes their powers are simply a product of natural talent honed through study, and there is merit in that opinion. For those of us who rose no further than dedicant, perhaps that’s all there is. But Saaya believed there was a deeper essence in those that wore the masks, something that came in the moment of investiture as head of one’s society that imbued them with a god’s essence.”

  “What do you mean by investiture?”

  “An ascension to rank.”

  “A ceremony, then. Sorcery,” he said confidently.

  Powageh’s laugh was short and sharp. “Ritual magic? Perhaps, but the priesthood would kill anyone where they stand for heresy if they suggested such a thing.”

  “That doesn’t make it any less true.”

  “Of course not. The crow and the sun are long enemies,” xe continued, “some say from before the God War. Saaya believed that if the crow god at the height of his influence were to devour the essence of the sun invested in the Sun Priest at the nadir of hers, then the power in our world could be flipped to favor the crow.”

  “So it’s not only the institution you and my mother are after, it is the god itself. The very ordering of the world.”

  Powageh said nothing, but Serapio could hear the breath rattling through xir faulty lungs and knew he had guessed right.

  “You must think us arrogant fools,” xe finally said.

  “How will I kill her?” Serapio asked. “The Sun Priest. I would not ask such a thing of my crows.”

  “No, I do not believe your crows are meant for that.”

  Another heavy sigh, and Serapio could hear Powageh’s reluctance to continue in xir belabored breath, the nervous shifting of xir feet.

  “What do you fear, Powageh? Do not be afraid for me. I am not.”

  “And here I am sweating,” the old priest said with a self-deprecating laugh. “Because in the end, I do not wish you to judge me harshly, but it is selfish of me to want your love.”

  Serapio’s breath caught. No one had loved him since his mother, and he was unsure how he felt about the priest’s declaration.

  “Eedi said you are not my friends, that I must not get attached because I will be leaving.”

  “Ah, well, perhaps I should have had Eedi here to counsel me,” xe said, xir voice a thin wavering laugh that dissolved into a quaking exhale.

  “Are you… do you weep, Powageh?”

  “Have I not earned a few tears?”

  And suddenly he understood. “I am going to die, aren’t I?” He had suspected it for a while, understood intuitively that the power he had inside him would consume him. He was a vessel. Powageh had said it from the beginning. He was the kind of vessel one must break to release what was held inside if one hoped to devour another god.

  “I… skies and stars, boy. I am sorry.”

  “No,” he said shortly. “My destiny has been inevitable since the day my mother closed my eyes, perhaps since she gave me birth. I am a vessel,
am I not? The avatar of a god.” He cleared his throat. “Tell me what I must do.” He only hoped that the pain would not be too great. He had made friends with it, yes, but it was a wary friendship.

  “You must do nothing but exist,” the priest said. “And when the time comes, you will speak your true name, your eyes will open… and you will exist no more.”

  He had hoped to witness the end of the Sun Priest and the aftermath of the crow god’s justice, but he understood that it could not be. The Convergence would be his end, too, a final sacrifice to his god on behalf of a people he would never know, and who would never know him.

  CHAPTER 32

  THE TOVASHEH RIVER

  YEAR 325 OF THE SUN

  (3 DAYS BEFORE CONVERGENCE)

  They say to us,

  Eat ash and drink bile

  And be glad that you are spared.

  Better we were dead and food for crows.

  —From Collected Lamentations from the Night of Knives

  Xiala woke up alone. For a moment, she panicked, trying to place the low ceiling of the bed above her, the slow motion of water below her, and the strong smell of an unfamiliar soap in her hair. And then she remembered the barge and the bath in the freezing river and the dent she had put in the bottle of xtabentún before coming back to climb into bed with Serapio.

  She laughed, pressing a hand to her head. The look on his face when she had joined him had almost been enough for her to try to kiss him again. She had seen raw need there, and it had sent a satisfying thrill through her body. She was sure that if she had asked him for more last night, he would not have refused. But he had wanted to tell her something, something important, so she had not. Only now she couldn’t remember what exactly he had said. Damn the xtabentún.

  She sat up and swung her feet off the side of the bed. The pilgrims had returned at some point last night. She vaguely remembered voices and laughter. But they were all gone now, as was Serapio. She looked out the small window, trying to gauge the time of day, and guessed it to still be morning, but she had clearly slept in.