From the day the witch first laid her snare, Whistlecage has known nothing but music. There are peaceful times and there are times of war, and Whistlecage had the fortunate good luck to drop from her mother during a stretch when fish silvered the waters and hazelnuts grew in abundance and no one really felt hungry enough or belligerent enough to go clubbing and spitting their neighbors like lemmings. Brief famines had come and gone, and winters when the people were reduced to boiling leather to survive, but through it all there had always been a need for songs, reminders of warm sun and full bellies, a bird in a cage whose sweet melodies could ward off despair. Like hanging a painted eye around a sickly infant’s neck, it was a charm to send the cold wind shrieking back down whatever malicious throat had coughed it.
Whistlecage does not have a song to drive these beast-men away. Shriveled like a dried current, bent double by the years, she staggers to her feet, knowing exactly how useless and ridiculous the gesture is as she does so. Her knees crunch stones between their jaws. Something seizes in the arch of one foot. Her heart pounds so hard the breath catches in her throat.
“Go,” she says to the children. “Run. Don’t look back and don’t stop until you reach the woods. No crying. Just go.”
The bigger ones herd the littler beneath the tent’s edges and away into the oncoming night. Most of them do as they are told. A few linger, watching, too scared to move or slow to miss seeing what happens next. They are the ones who will carry the story with them as they flee, scattering to other villages as their own burns. They will whistle and flute the song to their own babes, a lullaby about a badger sow and a stag and the power of planting your feet and never letting up. Time will sand it down to a gentle child’s toy, but if one lifts it to their ear and gives the thing a shake, they will hear the bones of truth rattling deep down inside.
Staring up at the stag-fighter, a dead man at her feet, Whistlecage knows the only thing left her song can buy is time. She does not take her eyes off the enemy. Hands thickened by leaf-deep years fumble at her belt for the bone flute. Fire shoots from her knuckles and wrists up the length of her forearms as she goes through the familiar movements, arranging her clumsy fingers just so.
Ahh, what did I tell you? Immortal, girl. The witch’s voice is as clear and close as if she’s speaking directly into Whistlecage’s ear. Take off that worn old skin and become the song you’ve longed to be since you were small and lonely, sitting beneath a treeful of birds.
The stag-man steps forward, a flint knife in his hand. Whistlecage closes her eyes and plays.
• • • •
Why the girl does what she does next will remain a mystery to her all the days of her legendary life, throughout all of the alchemy that will change her from a mudlark to a great leader of people. Maybe it was hunger, she’ll consider absentmindedly as she plays for a curious circle of onlookers, a half-hearted child’s hope that a dried-up old bone might somehow stop her belly from growling. Maybe I just wanted something to eat.
Or perhaps, she’ll sleepily ponder on the morning before the ambush, nestled close to a best beloved who will drown facedown in the mud—perhaps it was something else.
Maybe, she’ll think to herself, fluting the badger sow’s glory-song at the head of a charging, desperate band of ragged survivors, dancing her way between explosions and shells that land howling like the hounds of Hell—maybe it was Anonymous. Maybe the Land sent me this song and the instinct to play it. Maybe I am Her awakening.
But before the girl becomes a woman who becomes a revolution—before any of these other things can happen, for good or ill—she lifts the bone flute to her lips and breathes a single curious note.
* * *
Brooke Bolander’s fiction has won the Nebula & Locus Awards and been shortlisted for the Hugo, Shirley Jackson, Sturgeon, World Fantasy, and British Fantasy Awards. Her work has been featured in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Uncanny, Tor.com, and the New York Times, among other venues. She currently resides in New York City.
The Dead, In Their Uncontrollable Power
By Karen Osborne
The funeral is nearly over when the dead captain explodes.
Roses turn to shrapnel. The cathedral is lost in fire. I am drenched in blood. Bone buries itself in the wall next to my head, my arm, my howling, open mouth. I am standing at the back of the room where a sin-eater’s child belongs, and that is why I live when everyone else dies.
• • • •
I used to be a girl. Now I am a hundred. The dead whisper me awake and stay with me while I dream. The oldest have forgotten their names, but never their rage or their jealousy. The newest bicker in my brain like they’re still alive: bloodstained Madelon, scandal-tongued Pyar, power-mad Absolon, all of them captains of our broken and beautiful spacebound Home.
My destiny was always this: to drink the sin-cup and to hold the sins of the captains in my body where they cannot harm our people on their journey to Paradise. I can stand in the cathedral under the wheeling stars until my feet give out, or pray until my throat shreds with the effort, but truth is truth. The captains must be sinless. They must lead our generation ship with confidence, with a mind tuned to moral truth. Our new captain, Bethen, is responsible for the hundred thousand lives that breathe inside the hull and all the lives that will come after. Someone else must take her family’s sins upon herself, lest the dead walk and breach our hurtling world to black vacuum. Someone else must rock themselves to sleep, white-knuckled, licking spittle from their lips, so Bethen can lead.
That someone is me.
• • • •
This is the bombing: I am covered in blood. In chunks of wet meat. My own memories of this horror will still be worse than anything broken Absolon shows me. I wipe my face, my hands, my hair, but there is blood everywhere. There are rose petals, shredded, still burning, at my feet. My hands are shaking. I am not sure they are my hands. I am screaming. I am not sure it is my voice. I look around for my father.
I cannot find my father.
• • • •
Gossip rules steerage in the days following the bombing. Those of us who survived drink too much, trying to kill the memories. Police from first class sweep through the steerage dormitory where I used to live, flipping mattresses and shoving workers against the walls. A mutiny, an assassination, plain and able terrorism: this abomination is unheard of inside the hull of Home. There has never been an uprising against the dazzling mercy of first class. Why would there be, when the captain of our ship sees only the truth of beautiful things?
We wonder. But here in steerage, we can do little more than that. So we eat. We talk. We sleep. We work, in hydroponics and the maintenance gangs. The elders are merciful, and even let me go back to the deck-scrub team for a while, until the sins in my bloodstream find their way to my brain and I can no longer control the things I do and say. I open my mouth to warn them: you cannot trust the captains, there have been mutinies, there have been so many deaths, I have seen children pushed from airlocks—
—but then Absolon fills my mouth with obscenities instead of truth and Madelon makes me piss my pants in the middle of the workday. The elders tell me I am scaring the children and put me out of the common dormitory. I try to scrawl my bloody truths on paper so everyone can know what is really going on, but Pyar slips his fingers into mine, and all that comes out are drawings of stuffed animals with knife-cut throats and bouquets of broken roses, and then he makes me rip it all into small chunks and eat it anyway.
The people in steerage know I have the truth burning an abyss in my head. Why do they turn away? Why can’t they listen?
Why do they think I can handle it when they cannot?
• • • •
I dream about this day. The bombing.
I dream about this day all the time.
“Mey.”
The sacristan is bleeding from his belly, but he knows his duty even through his pain; he knows what he must do. He was kind to me before all this. He takes
my hand; it is wet with blood, and he tugs me towards the ruined altar, under the windowed canopy, under the streaking stars. Somewhere in the part of my brain that is not screaming, I know this is what must be done. He is a sacristan and this is a funeral and I am the last sin-eater.
I know I am the last, because the bloody mess he has just asked me to step over used to be my father.
• • • •
My father didn’t mean to have me. He wanted to end the cycle. He never wanted to know that a child of his would have to go through the horrors he experienced. I was a mistake. My father did love me, though, and before he died he taught me to paint the sin-eye on my forehead—the red lid, the white iris, the black center—and live at the mercy of steerage, of old friends from school who avert their eyes as they drop rations in my lap. Things have changed, they whisper. My mother will not let me see you anymore. My father is afraid of the things you might do.
I am afraid of the things I might do, too.
Things settle down after steerage is searched. The police question me, too, hoping that the dead captains saw something I did not. I tell them: I do not know who set off the bomb. I do not even know who would have the strength to try.
Whenever I get the courage to tell them anything more, Absolon delights in silencing me. The words feel like broken glass against my tongue. He shows me one particular mutiny, over and over again, thrilling at my reaction, the way I cannot look away, the way I squirm at the blood. He knows I cannot stand it. He shows me how he shot seven men and women in a light-soaked steerage chapel, as alien light poured through an emerald window onto a beautiful planet below. He shows me how easily that could happen to me. Had I not known that we had not yet reached Paradise, I would have guessed he was already there.
The conversation at the end of the scene would always go the same way. “Find a place to put the bodies,” Absolon would say to the second-class constable, who would nod, his chin stiff, and mention the sacristy.
I teach myself to handle Absolon’s torture by concentrating on the details of the chapel in the background: the beautiful stained-glass window, the waystop world beyond. The window in my vision is a smaller twin of the one in the cathedral, emerald-green swirled through with marshy azure, a forgotten artist’s representation of our future Paradise, and the world below is lush and green. Beyond, I see the sin-eye painted on the bow of the starship, in an angle that could only be seen from steerage.
The window looks familiar.
I try to tell the others about the vision that evening in the mess, but Absolon twists a knife in my head, and the pain is so much that my words come out in tongue-tripped babble. The others respond with shaking heads, moving their trays to eat somewhere else.
Of course they won’t listen. I smell like onions and sweat and oil and shit. I am graceless. I totter and I yank myself around and fight the voices in my head. I think myself mad for a long time, until I realize where I have seen the window before.
• • • •
Captain Pyar’s family is dead. Their graceful words and golden robes did not protect them from the bomb: from having their stomachs opened, their skin blackened, their eyes burned out. The only survivor is Bethen, the youngest. She is my age. Black hair, thin hands, skin bright like the hull of our ship. She is on her knees. Her robes are on fire, but she does not seem to notice.
She holds the virtue-cup in her left hand, and the sin-cup in her right. Somehow, she has saved the sacrament inside. I can see the nanobots squirming in the black liquid—the good memories for her, the sins for me.
We just stare at each other. I don’t think she wants to do it. I sure as hell don’t.
“You must drink,” pleads the sacristan.
Bethen holds a calming hand in his direction and drinks. What else can she do? She is Pyar’s only surviving child. She is the captain now.
• • • •
There is an unused storage room in the loudest quarter of steerage, near the compartment where the engines whine and whirl and scream. My old scrub-team boss keeps broken cleaning tools there and extra chemicals for the deck ablutions, and I’d spent a decent amount of time there over the years stocking and restocking tall grey boxes. It takes me a few minutes to navigate through the towers of boxes to the dark green glass, and a few minutes more to move the stack in front of the window, but then I am face-to-face with Absolon’s dream, seeing the truth for the first time.
The window is shrouded in decades-old breachcloth that hangs careless and open at the bottom. I feel the rough stained glass under my dirty fingers, searching for the telltale language of a repaired hull breach: rivets, autosealant, desperate chill. There is no evidence of a hull breach underneath the cloth—just the darkness of tough grey metal on the other side, covering the window so no alien sun could ever light it again.
I yank the breachcloth away. The window is just as I remembered from Absolon’s bloody memories: an artist’s rendition of green, azure, life waiting for the faithful. A chapel window, like the ones in second class.
First class had the cathedral. Second class had a smaller church. Here in steerage, work was our worship.
But this had been a chapel.
A space of our own.
My vision goes grey, and then bloody—Absolon is showing me the execution again. I know by now that he means to distract me from my investigation with this blank horror, but I have seen this memory so many times by now that I can use it for research instead. In my head, Absolon kills the mutineers again, then tells his functionary to hide the bodies, and then the man asks about the sacristy.
The sacristy.
I push aside some dusty chairs, running my hands along the tight angle where the wall meets the decking. I know I am moving in the right direction, because Madelon takes my breath and hangs it from her dead fingers until I see stars. I claw at the sides of my head to make the pain stop. I feel like passing out. Darkness is pooling in the corners of my eyes when I find the door I am looking for, a thin square flush with the wall—just like the one in the cathedral.
None of the dead want me to go in.
So I go in.
• • • •
This is what happens:
The tradition of the sin-eater goes back almost as far as our memories of the burning homeworld itself. When a captain dies, their blood is removed and scrubbed of the nanobots that have been circulating in their body since they took the throne, collecting their memories like drops of water on a leaf in hydroponics.
The captains know this. The sin-eaters know this. The people do not. The captains won’t let me tell them. The truth is lost in the babble I sing. But does it not make sense, now that you think about it? You can’t expect all these people to live quietly in a tin can their entire lives and not dream or wish or explode or rub themselves up against the truth or want something more than what they have. The solution is simple: if you know the leader rules with grace, if you are sure they are benevolent, you can more easily live with your quiet submission.
In the moment after the bombing, with the blood of hundreds dripping through the strands of my hair, on my shoulders, over my lips, into my eyes, with the sin-cup extended, with my father gone—I am still like my friends back in steerage. I am complicit with my own repression and more frightened than I’ve ever been.
I still believe all of this is necessary.
• • • •
Going inside the sacristy is like going back in time. The air is stale and gritty and tastes of dust and rot. It is dark, and once my eyes adjust, shapes form around the column of light let in by the storage room: cabinets, closets, closed drawers, all made of rough wood from the homeworld. I check the closet for the golden robes of the captain’s family, but find only green jumpsuits so delicate they fall apart at my touch—green jumpsuits, those most ancient of sacred robes, in the style that we had all thought lost with time. I look for cups, laid out for sacrament and sin-eating, but there is nothing in the drawers.
I am movi
ng over to the cabinets when I trip over a pile of bones.
Absolon laughs at me, the bastard.
The bones have been left in an unkempt, haphazard jumble, like the bodies they’d once belonged to had been shoved together quickly and dropped one on top of another. I count seven skulls, each with its own little round hole in the center of its forehead. I run my thumb over the smallest, and one of the elder ghosts—one of the nameless, from the nameless time—imagines what my head would look like if it had been treated like that.
I drop the skull, my fingers suddenly numb. When I go to pick it up again, I see something new.
Under the lattice of ribs is a photograph.
I have only seen photographs in school. This one is old—faded, covered in dust, barely legible. I push the bones aside, making sure to be respectful, because respect for these long-dead mutineers makes Madelon so angry—and pick it up. This is a picture of a group of seven people in green jumpsuits, with joyous smiles like welcoming stars on their faces, standing on the bridge of Home, holding hands, the yawning window overlooking a green planet as familiar as a fever dream. I know all seven faces. I have seen these seven faces murdered by Captain Absolon over and over again, and their bones are scattered at my feet.
Above are obtuse, boxy lines I know to be words, because I have seen words written in the missals the first class use in the cathedral.
The world in the photograph is Paradise.
I can tell it is Paradise because it looks exactly like the artists’ renderings they showed us in school. I can tell it is Paradise because Absolon is screaming. Because Madelon has taken my breath for her own. Because my eyes are needles and my body is burning. Because Pyar has my courage in his dead hands. But I can still think. They try to take the truth away from me, but like all truth, it is there in my head, it speaks in tongues, it is loud as a sunrise: we have already been to Paradise.
The Long List Anthology Volume 6 Page 9