Master of Poisons

by Andrea Hairston

  The night before the crossover ceremony, Isra made a new loom and Yari crafted a double-headed talking drum. Vie decorated it with Aido cloth, cathedral seeds, and glass beads. Gifts for Bal—Awa was pleased and jealous. Isra and Yari wouldn’t let Awa open a bag of story-spells and Lahesh wim-wom. Awa hoped this was her gift. As everyone gathered for the Sprites’ last story celebration, Yari slipped with Isra behind a midnight tree and used hand-talk from the Ishba people. Awa picked berries across from them unnoticed, not spying, just overhearing.

  “We haven’t seen these people for years.” Yari pointed at a man and woman, Elders Awa had never met, Zamanzi perhaps, with spiral scars on brown cheeks and thick locks arranged in a crown. “Anyone could betray us.” Vie pointed at Bal talking with shadow warriors. “Our own Sprites.”

  “Not Bal. Stop worrying.” Isra pulled Yari to the enclave fire. Awa joined them. Yari kissed the top of her head. Isra stroked her cheeks and whispered in Yari’s ear, “Take better measure of yourself.”

  Griots told a story on the sentimental griot of griots and the fearsome scout vie loved:

  Once, a great brood of Sprites crossed over, as many as would become Elders or who knows what tomorrow. After the ceremony Yari wandered off to Smokeland, weeping and howling, “What world will these Sprites conjure?” Isra feared doubt would rip Yari apart.

  Despite great scouting skill in the everyday, Isra was a terrible smoke-walker. Luckily a wild dog had Yari’s scent and led Isra to Smokeland. Yari was slumped against black lava rocks, tongue drying up, heart a faint ember. The dog vanished, stranding Isra with Yari who was too feeble to smoke-walk them back to the everyday.

  Isra scolded Yari, “You rescued me, but the good or evil I do is not yours, you arrogant wolf! Sprites belong to themselves. Let them fly!”

  Yari’s heart burned bright again and vie brought them back to the everyday. Yari grinned at Isra and said, “Never let the enemy know your heart—until you marry them.”

  This could have been a tall tale but Awa felt the truth of it as Yari hugged each Sprite. Isra touched a forehead to their open palms then jumped on a boulder and shouted, “Yari won’t mope with me after you all cross over. Vie goes off to find an exiled master, an old lover.” Isra sounded jealous and excited.

  Yari jumped on the boulder too. “You said he’s lost his way; go find him.”

  Isra poked Yari. “Come back to me.”

  “Always.” Yari kissed Isra. “You are my rhythm, my reason.”

  Sprites cheered the romantic scene, then Isra gave Bal the loom.

  “I’ll tell stories tomorrow,” Yari shouted. “On all of you.”

  “My story too?” Bal asked.

  “No secrets too dangerous to play on this drum—yours tomorrow.” Yari handed Awa the bag of scrolls and wim-wom. “I give you my yesterdays.” Awa thought she might burst. Yari hugged her and Bal until Isra pulled them all into a barbarian jig.

  * * *

  Awa passed her last night as a Sprite wandering vivid vision-scapes. Smokeland got tangled in the everyday. Iron horses with red eyes trotted across Father’s fields to nibble Mother’s berries. Kenu built a tower to the scar moon and smiled as she and Bal rode wild horses through waterfalls and across black lava sand. Behemoths danced in waves and doused Awa with warm, salty water. She woke, drenched and laughing.

  In the dark before dawn, Awa and Bal outlined their eyes in black kohl, twisted seeds in unruly hair, and rubbed their skin with green and red mica. Over green shifts, they donned cloud-silk robes, light as air and warm as fire. Dressed as Elders, they poured a libation to the ancestors and gave thanks to the bees, cathedral trees, and spiders, to the seas, green lands, Mama Zamba, and the sweet desert. Who would anybody be without rock, rain, and sand? Filled with anticipation, Awa and Bal joined other Sprites singing and dancing on a carpet of purple sand-bells to the enclave circle.

  Everything you believe could be wrong.

  Patience, forgiveness, that is our song.

  Elder musicians lost the beat and melody. Dizzy, they dropped kora harps and drums. The Sprites stumbled to a halt. Warriors in lion masks raced down Mama Zamba’s stone hills and burst through sand drifts carrying axes and swords: Zamanzi, ambushing them.

  Nobody brought weapons to a crossover ceremony. Shadow warriors wore cloud-silk robes, not Aido spider-weave, and couldn’t disappear.

  Yari brushed unruly braids from a sweaty face. Vie clutched a heaving chest. “Something in the wine.”

  They were all drug-addled except the two Elders with spiral scars.

  Awa gasped. “Anyone could betray us.”

  Zamanzi warriors surrounded them. Nobody put up a fight. Yari dumped salt into a gourd of water then guzzled it. Shock gripped Awa. She clutched Bal’s hand. A Zamanzi war chief shouted commands and warnings in Empire vernacular. “Decide to live right or face the ax!” They’d come to liberate Sprites and vesons who agreed to be griots, wives, or soldiers.

  Blood splattered across feast tables. Several Elders and Sprites refused to choose quickly and lost their heads. Bal lunged at a warrior twice her size. Awa held her back. He laughed. Three Zamanzi men doused a white-haired veson with tree oil and set vie on fire. The burning Elder raced across the enclave circle. Yari vomited on the purple sand-bells and howled.

  The one who burned was Isra, Yari’s partner of twenty-five years, the love Yari always returned to, the weaver who taught Bal to fashion spiderwebs into dreams and shadows into Aido cloth, the friend to horses and wild dogs, the scout who never let anybody get lost. Yari and Isra had rescued Awa before Father sold her to a mine, brothel, or Hezram’s huts.

  Isra died rolling in a sand dune. Vie suffocated the fire before it could spread to anyone else. Tears blinded Awa. Her breath was a wheeze. Her heart cracked and muscles gave out. She and Bal collapsed. The burly axman headed for them. Yari blocked him, sober and ferocious, hair a bristling storm cloud. The axman hesitated.

  “Basawili, Isra.” Yari spoke the Anawanama prayer for the dead, then helped Awa and Bal up. They almost fell again. “Not the end, more breath to come.” Vie shook them. “Survive. Find each other.” Turning to the axman, Yari shouted, “I choose griot.”

  “Prove yourself.” Spiral scars decorated the axman’s naked cheeks, just like the traitor-Elders. Thin braids with bones on their tips fell to his shoulders. He raised his blade.

  “I know secrets about everyone and everything.” Yari swaggered in full griot trance. “I’ve traveled farther than any griot and listened to many hearts. I hold all the people. I’ve persuaded emperors to peace. Xhalan Xhala. I carry the past to the future. Take heart in the story I tell.” Looking at Awa and Bal, Yari chanted an epic in the language of Zamanzi ancestors:

  When the Arkhysian Empire invaded the northlands, a petulant scoundrel, Mmendi, refused to surrender his horses, his women, or give up his fine tent to work an Empire farm and war against barbarian thief-lords in the Golden Gulf. Empire soldiers locked the rascal in a cage and took what they wanted. They paraded Mmendi’s horses, children, and women, chained and branded, in front of him. The pampered chief went mad with grief, tearing out his beard, talking only to haints. The beard never grew back.

  Seeing Mmendi raving, his people were subdued, beaten. One afternoon the captain of his Empire guard, Thalit, a strong woman with northern roots, recognized his true spirit. Thalit seduced Mmendi or he her—who can say? They ran away together, hiding and eating roots and rats at first, with no thought of much but survival and pleasure.

  One night, Mmendi and Thalit raided Empire caravans for mangos, goats, and nut bread. Mmendi’s people delighted in this defiance and deserted the Empire in droves. All the men shaved their beards; the women cut their hair short as a fighting woman’s. They joined the rascal and his warrior wife and harried Empire caravans, outposts, and patrols. Mmendi and his people claimed the shadows, the caves, the night. They forced the Empire to withdraw from this desert.

  Mmendi and Thalit’s spirit
s guide the People still.

  Awa looked from Isra’s body to Bal, who trembled with rage. Yari’s story craft and man-masquerade drew cheers and whistles from the savages. Yari hated that word, but they’d burned Isra alive—what else to call them?

  “Only Zamanzi know the whole tale.” The axman squinted at Yari. “How did you learn this? Unless—the walking library!” He lowered his ax. “You are Yari, the Lahesh griot who seduces husbands, wives, emperors, and snakes, who drums up the past and the future.” He pounded the ground in front of the traitor-Elders. “I won’t cut Yari’s neck and risk Xhalan Xhala. Only a fool courts Lahesh reckoning fire.”

  Yari’s name moved through the crowd like a sandstorm. Three chiefs clashed blades to possess the griot who knew something about everything. Bal snatched a sword from a careless guard and challenged the chiefs. Archers aimed bolts at her, but the war chief stayed their hands and let Bal fight. “For the show if nothing else,” he growled.

  The cocky chiefs underestimated Bal. They lunged at her halfheartedly, winking at women who huddled with horses and goats at the edge of feast tables. Bal slashed tendons and foreheads and danced away from disabled foes. Limping around with blood dripping in their eyes, the cocky chiefs skewered each other. A shadow warrior defeated enemies without killing. The war chief claimed Bal as soldier and Yari as his griot praise-singer.

  “Join me,” Bal shouted to Awa. “Wife is too perilous.”

  “Yes, choose,” the axman said, “or die.”

  Awa’s tongue knotted as the axman lifted his bloody blade again. Zamanzi considered women too weak-minded to be griots. Awa was no shadow warrior like Bal and desired no husband. What choice was this? As a warrior, she’d die quickly. “I choose…” She ached to pour a libation to the crossroads gods. No time. “Chief’s wife.”

  “No,” Bal cried, and Awa’s heart wrenched. “Too dangerous.” Bal dumped sword and spear at Awa’s feet. “Don’t leave me.” She pressed her Aido cloth bag at Awa’s chest. The axman did not notice. Aido cloth was every color strong but a play of shadows for untrained eyes.

  While Zamanzi warriors laughed at Green Elder sentiment, Yari snuck a catalpa anklet in Awa’s hand and whispered in Lahesh, “Survive. We will find each other.”

  “How?” Awa whispered Lahesh too.

  “You’re the mapmaker, the storyteller. You’ll make a way.”

  The axman snatched a weeping, thrashing Awa away from Bal and Yari. He forced a bitter, intoxicating potion down her throat, locked her in a cage, and dumped her in a wagon with two other caged Sprites. Awa banged against the bars as the wagon lurched off. Bal and Yari faded in the mist. Two families lost.

  * * *

  Sprite discipline deserted Awa. Her spirit was too scrambled to make any sort of map for tomorrow. Zamanzi held her in a cage for ritual cleansing—drug potions, cold water baths, hot stones on her belly. The drugs made it hard to think right or feel herself. She was haunted by Yari’s hard eyes as Isra burned alive and Bal’s tearstained cheeks when she chose chief’s wife.

  Awa might have done mortal damage to herself, but Yari said, Survive. The moon turned to a pale scar leaking silver light, and her blood came with cramps and heartache for two families lost. Old men leered through the bars, happy she could produce Zamanzi sons and daughters. One must have been her husband to be. Survive. Awa blotted out mottled faces and recited from The Green Elder Songs for Living and Dying.

  “Hush that noise,” the axman declared one night. “Tomorrow, twenty-first wife.”

  Awa whispered every song, losing herself in the words, rhythms, and rhymes. Better that than go mad. What you know is always yours.

  * * *

  On Awa’s wedding day, the southern barbarians raided during the final cleansing mutilation. Zamanzi women were fracturing her leg—to ensure she couldn’t run away from a chief five times her age—when thief-lords tromped in on elephants. They pierced her husband-to-be with fire arrows. The ancient chief lurched into her, trying to escape.

  Awa caught fire too. The barbarians laughed as she rolled in the dirt like Isra and smothered the fire. They let the old chief burn alive, then wrapped Awa’s burnt arm and set her broken leg. Thanks to Zamanzi potions, pain was a distant throb. Survive. We will find each other.

  A thief-lord transported her to Holy City as a blood offering to the gods of Ice Mountain. High priest Hezram paid well for Sprites—good blood, no family, and not yet dangerous.

  Awa’s first transgression was singing tree song under the scar moon, actual sacred cathedral tree melodies that only high priests should know. She’d learned tree song in Smokeland. Her second transgression was talking to the Amethyst River. The river was sick. Anyone could hear that. A person didn’t need medicine-woman skill or priestly dispensation.

  The barbarians didn’t know that Awa was a smoke-walker. Women supposedly polluted Smokeland. One transgression meant exile, slave labor on an Empire caravan or merchant ship. Two meant a slow death, toiling and bleeding for the glory of the supreme god. For three transgressions, the punishment was spirit torture too terrible to speak of.

  Awa wanted to curse the crossroads gods, but she refrained. Cursing the gods wouldn’t help her survive.

  15

  The Future from the Past

  Many conjurers collected fire-spells. They showed off at carnivals, throwing sparks, exploding leaves, even eating flames. Only the Lahesh burned through this moment to ones that were coming: reckoning fire. Everyone said Xhalan Xhala was impossible conjure, but Djola had yet to admit defeat. Samina would never forgive that. Impossible was what lazy, ignorant fools said when they reached their limits. Djola had to push beyond himself. Hadn’t he always done that? He was the first northlander at the stone-wood table, and for twenty years, second only to Azizi! After mastering Xhalan Xhala, he’d sit at the emperor’s table again.

  Pezarrat and his pirates were well-fed and spirited. They cheered a clutch of merchant vessels sailing in on a good wind. Hefty boats with bright sails rode low in the water. Pezarrat hurled Djola’s acid-conjure at one ship. When the hull dissolved into sludge and sizzling vapor, the other ships blew horns signaling surrender. Pirates looted the ships without suffering many casualties, although a few merchants lost their heads protecting trinkets. Grateful for an empty sick bay, Vandana and Orca joined the victory celebration. They gobbled shrimp, drank too much wine, and slept like the dead on plush pillows and blankets—merchant booty.

  Up on the deserted deck, Djola swept feathers, medicine bags, and discarded trinkets into the sea. A scar moon sank into rippling water. Samina’s moon. He was clean-shaven and clear, his fortressed heart a faint smolder, closer to the chill he needed to pull fire. He found a merchant blade and stowed it in an empty sleeve. Dead merchants floated by, and he wondered if they’d been slavers. A few unlucky pirate lads floated with them. Djola turned away, unmoved thanks to his heart fortress. Orca and Vandana had helped him fashion silver-mesh gloves, cold conjure impervious to hot spells. Singing, he put on one glove and left one hand bare.

  Two knobby-headed behemoths, their tail flukes almost the size of a ship, floated in a placid sea and observed him with unblinking eyes. A thrill shivered past his defenses. He’d only come face-to-face with water giants in Smokeland, never in the everyday. They wailed high-pitched long notes—a greeting? warning? question?

  Djola displayed the silver-mesh glove and explained. “I’m practicing Xhalan Xhala.”

  The behemoths sang again, rumbles and warbles that soothed his itchy skin. They ended with throaty chirps and a geyser of seawater. He offered one of Yari’s melodies to them. The behemoths swam closer. Shell-encrusted skin and tongues the size of elephants dazzled him. Their eyes were spots of light as they warbled and chirped.

  He climbed out on the bowsprit, dangled over them, and sang. “You are the ocean and I am the air. The clouds are our children.” He mimicked their sounds as he ran out of words. One jumped close enough for him to touch cold skin. He fill
ed himself with their oily chill. Shivering, he swung his legs up and climbed back to the deck. “Holding yesterday and today, I call tomorrow’s fire.”

  Djola squinted his right eye at the catapult bowl used to hurl acid-conjure at merchant ships just hours ago. Caressing its waxed surface with the bare fingers of his left hand, he recalled the attack in vivid detail. Ships dissolved in his mind. Pain sliced him and stole balance. The bowl burst into flames. He wore a silver-mesh glove on his right hand and clutched the flaming bowl without burning flesh. The bowl turned to a puff of void-smoke. Dizzy and nauseous, Djola almost blacked out, dropping like a felled tree toward the deck.

  A net broke his fall. Tangled in stiff threads was a letter with a resin seal. A sharp cathedral tree scent jolted him back to his senses. He patted his skull, surprised he hadn’t cracked himself open. He gripped the railing and vomited. The behemoths stood on their tails, flapping long pectoral fins. Cavernous mouths dripped foam and seaweed strings. Djola sputtered at this wonder. The behemoths dove back into black water and disappeared. A flick of their tails rocked the ship.

  Singing the sea giant’s song, Djola grabbed the letter as it bounced free of the net. He hugged the scroll to his chest. It was damp and thick, a long tally of bad news. Why open that? He shoved it in his shirt.

  16

  River Children

  Behemoths swim down the coastal waterway from one river delta to the next, escaping lightning storms and foul waters. Leagues and leagues they swim to reach cold waters to feed. More storms than ever churn up sour waves and tainted food. Many Behemoths have been hungry and sick. This water tastes good. Bubble nets are full, a good catch.