The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-II

by Jonathan Strahan

  Which is what we at first thought had happened when Mylitta, who had hours before wandered off into the woods with Irra, returned in tears. (This was late in the summer, when we had been dancing for months.) Mylitta and Irra were lovers, a station or distinction we of the second generation had created on our own. None of the First had lovers, but rather coupled with whoever caught their fancy; but we, being younger and, we thought, wiser, preferred our own arrangements. Even though they did not always bring us joy.

  As, we thought, now. Everybody assumed the worst of Irra, of course. But when Mylitta's friends gathered around to comfort her, it turned out that she had been frightened by some creature she had seen.

  "What was it like?" Silili asked.

  "White," Mylitta said, "like the moon. It came up from the ground like . . . something long and slithery that moves its head like this." She moved her hand from side to side in a sinuous, undulating motion.

  "A snake?" somebody said.

  Mylitta looked puzzled, as if the word meant nothing to her. She shook her head, as if dismissing nonsense and, still upset, said, "Its mouth was horrible, with teeth set in circles. And it . . . and it . . . talked!"

  Now the forgotten lion came to my mind again and, apprehensively, I asked, "Did it say anything? Tell us what it said."

  But to this Mylitta could only shake her head.

  "Where is Irra?" Silili asked.

  "He stayed behind to talk some more."

  There was then such a hubbub of talk and argument as only the young can have. In quick order we put together a party to go after our friend and bring him back to us safe. Snatching up knives and staves—knives had been invented long ago, and even then staves had been employed as weapons—we started towards the woods.

  Then Irra himself came sauntering out of the darkness, hands behind his back, grinning widely. Mylitta ran to his side and kissed him, but he pushed her playfully away. Then he made a gesture that took in all of us, with our knives and staves and grim expressions, and raised one eyebrow.

  "We were going to look for you."

  "Mylitta said there was a . . ." With Irra's eyes boring into mine, I could not think of the word for snake. "One of those long, slithery things. Only large. And white."

  "Why won't you talk?" Mylitta cried. "Why don't you say anything?"

  Irra grinned wider and wider. And now a peculiar thing happened. His face began to glow brighter and brighter, until it shone like the moon.

  He held out his hand, fingers spread. Then he squeezed it into a fist. When he opened it again, the fingers had merged into one another, forming a smooth brown flipper. "The . . . whatever . . . showed me how to do this."

  Nobody knew what to make of his stunt. But then Mylitta started crying again, and by the time we had her soothed down, Irra was gone and it was too late for dancing anyway. So we all went home.

  After that evening, strange creatures appeared in more and more profusion at the edges of our settlements. They were never the same twice. There was a thing like an elephant but with impossibly long legs, like a spider's. There was a swarm of scorpions with human faces that were somehow all a single organism. There was a ball of serpents. There was a bird of flame. They arrived suddenly, spoke enigmatically, and then they left.

  Every time somebody talked to one of these monsters, words vanished from his or her vocabulary.

  Why didn't we go to our elders? The First had powers that dwarfed anything we could do on our own. But we didn't realize initially that this was anything to do with them. It seemed of a piece with the messy emotional stuff of our young lives. Particularly since, for the longest time, Irra was at the center of it.

  We did not have a name for it then, but Irra had become a wizard. He had a wizard's power and a wizard's weirdness. He would pop up without warning—striding out of a thicket, jumping down from a rooftop—to perform some never-before-seen action, and then leave. Once he walked right past Mylitta and into her house and before her astonished eyes urinated on the pallet where she slept! Another time, he rode across the fields on a horse of snow, only half-visible in the white mist which steamed off its back, and when the children came running madly out to see, shouting, "Irra! Irra!" and "Give us a ride!" he pelted them with snowballs made from the living substance of his steed, and galloped off, jeering.

  These were troubling occurrences, but they did not seem serious enough to warrant bothering the First. Not until I lost Silili.

  I was working in the marshes that day, cutting salt hay for winter fodder. It was hot work, and I was sweating so hard that I took off my tunic and labored in my trousers alone. But Silili had promised to bring a lunch to me and I wanted her to see how hard I could work. I bent, I cut, I straightened, and as I turned to drop an armful of hay I saw her standing at the edge of the trees, staring at me. Just the sight of her took my breath away.

  I must have looked pleasing to her as well for, without saying a word, she came to me, took my hand and led me to that same meadow where we first made love. Wordlessly, then, we repeated our original vows.

  Afterwards, we lay neither speaking nor touching each other. Just savoring our closeness. I remember that I was lying on my stomach, staring at a big, goggle-eyed bullfrog that sat pompously in the shallows of the stream, his great grin out of the water, his pulsing throat within, when suddenly the ground shook under us and a grinding noise filled the air.

  We danced to our feet as something like an enormous metal beetle with a kind of grinder or drill in place of a head erupted from the ground, spattering dirt in all directions. The gleaming round body was armored with polished iron plates. A crude mouth opened at the end of an upheld leg and said, "Who." Then, "Are." And finally, "You?"

  "Go away," I said sulkily.

  "Goooooooo," it moaned. "Waaaaaaaaaay. Aaaaaaaaa."

  "No!" I pelted the thing with clods of dirt, but it did not go away. I snatched up a stick and broke it across the beetle's back, to no visible effect. "Nobody wants you here."

  "Noooooobody." Its voice was rough and metallic, like nothing I had ever heard before. It reared up on its four hind legs, waving its front pair in the air. "Waaaaaaants." I smashed a stone against one of those hind legs, snapping it off at the joint. Untroubled, it snatched up Silili with its forelegs. "Yoooooouuuuu!"

  Then the monstrosity disappeared into the forest.

  It had all happened too quickly. For the merest instant I was still, stunned, unable to move. And in that instant, faster than quicksilver, the beetle sped through the trees so nimbly that it was gone before I could react. Leaving behind it nothing but Silili's rapidly dwindling scream.

  "Silili!" I cried after her. "Come back! Silili!"

  Which is how, fool that I was, I lost her name.

  Afterwards, however, I discovered that the limb I had torn from the beetle was that same one which held the creature's mouth. "Where is she?" I demanded. "Where has she been taken to?"

  "Ur," it said. "Dum." A long silence. "Heim."

  I ran back to Whitemarsh. There was an enormous copper disk, as tall as I was, leaning against the side of the redsmith's forge. I seized a hammer and began slamming on it to raise a great din and bring out everyone within earshot. They say that this was the first alarm that was ever sounded, but what did I care for that?

  All the village came running up. Several of the First—Ninsun, Humbaba, two or three others—were among them.

  I flung down the hammer.

  "Girl!" I cried. Then, shaking my head, "Not girl—woman!" I had questioned the beetle-limb most of the way back to Whitemarsh before concluding that I would learn nothing useful from it and throwing it away in disgust. The interrogation had been a mistake, however, for it half-drained me of language. Now, because I had lost the word lover, I slapped my chest. "Mine." And, howling, "Gone, gone, gone!"

  A gabble of voices, questions, outraged cries rose up from the crowd. But Ninsun slammed her hands together and silenced them all with a glare. Then she folded herself down an
d patted the ground beside her.

  "Sit," she said to me. "Tell."

  It took time and labor, but I eventually made myself understood.

  "When did this begin?" Ninsun asked and, when everybody began talking at once, "You first," she said, pointing. "Then you. Then you." The story that she eventually stitched together was clumsily told, but the old woman nodded and clucked and probed until it had all been brought to light. At last she sighed and said, "The Igigi have come, then."

  "What are the Igigi?" Mylitta asked. My body had caught up with the horror of Silili's loss by then. I was heavy with grief and speechless with despair.

  "'Igigi' is just a name we gave to them so we could talk about them."

  "Yes, but what are they?" Mylitta insisted.

  "There are not the words to describe the Igigi."

  A frustrated growl rose up from the assembled young. I noticed the First scowling at each other when this happened.

  "It is the Igigi," Ninsun said, "who ruled over us in Urdumheim. Surely I have told you about them before?"

  Some of us nodded. Others shook their heads.

  "The Igigi are logophages." Ninsun regarded us keenly from under those bushy eyebrows of hers. "Nimrod put much of his power into words, and they make us strong. The Igigi feed upon words in order to deny us that strength. Thus they gain power over us."

  "Girl-woman-mine," I reminded her. I flung an arm out toward the forest and then drew it back to me. "Woman-to-me. Woman-to-me!"

  "Enmul," Ninsun said. A boy who was known to all for his speed and endurance stepped forward. "Run to the top of Ararat. Bring Nimrod here."

  King Nimrod came down from the mountain like a storm cloud in his fury. His hair and robes lashed about him, as if in a mighty wind, and sparks shot out from his beard. "You should have told me this long ago," he said to me, glowering, when Ninsun had told him all. "Fool! What did you think language is for?"

  Humbly kneeling before him, I said, "Girl-woman-mine." Then I slammed my heart three times to show that I hurt. "Lost-fetch-again!"

  With a roar, the king knocked me flat with his enormous fist. When I stood up, he struck me down again. When I stretched out a hand in supplication he kicked me. Finally, when I could not move, Ninsun snapped an order and I was lifted up by the arms and carried away. Radjni and Mammetum laid me down in the shade of a tree, cleaning my wounds and applying mint leaves and mustards to my bruises.

  Miserably, I watched as King Nimrod sent runners to every village and outlying house, to gather the People together. Already the First were gathering (they did not need to be sent for), and it was not long before there was such an assembly as had never gathered before nor has since, nor ever will again: all the People in the world.

  King Nimrod then spoke: "Oh ye of little faith! I sang high the mountain so that it might be a fortress and protection for the People in times of peril. When I was done, Ararat was to tower so high it would touch the sky, where no demon would dare go. Then would we have made our homes there and been safe forever.

  "Alas, our enemies have arrived before my work was done. The slopes of Ararat will slow but not stop them. So before their armies converge upon us, we must prepare to defend ourselves."

  All this I narrate as things I have heard and know to be true. Yet, even though I was there, Nimrod's speech was incomprehensible to me. This is what I actually heard:

  faith! mountain

  fortress protection Ararat

  tower demon

  safe forever.

  Alas enemies Ararat

  armies converge

  After a hurried consultation among the First, Shaleb the Scribe began sketching plans for a defense. With a gesture, he stripped the land before him of vegetation. Enkidu handed him a staff and he drew a circle: "Ararat," he said. Along its flanks, he drew three nested semicircles: "Curtain wall. Barbican. Palisades." Squiggly lines made a river. He drew a line across it: "Dam." Other lines represented streams. He reshaped them: "Channels."

  So it began. At King Nimrod's orders, we cut down trees and built palisades. We dug trenches, redirected streams, created lakes. Foodstuffs were brought in and locked away in warehouses we built for that purpose. Weapons were forged. All this was done under direction of the First. Those of the second generation who'd had the least exposure to the Igigi were made overseers and supervisors, in proportion to their ability to understand directions. Those who could follow only the simplest orders were made runners and carriers. Down at the very bottom of the social order were those such as I who could not be trusted to comprehend the plainest commands and so were used as brute labor, hauling logs or lugging stones, driven to obedience by kicks, cuffs, and curses.

  I will not dwell upon my misery, for all that it was compounded by being so richly deserved. Suffice it to say, I suffered.

  Then one day a pillar of smoke appeared on the horizon. We put down our shovels and axes—those who were trusted with tools—and as we did so a second pillar arose, and then a third, and a fourth, and a hundredth, until we could no longer count them all. Dark they rose up and wide they spread, until they merged and turned the sky black.

  Inanna, who was best-liked of all the First, passed through the camp, handing out strips of cotton cloth. So quick was she that her feet never once touched the earth, and to each one she met she said, "The Igigi are burning the forests. When the smoke comes, fold this cloth like so, dip it in the water, and hold it to your face. This will make breathing easier." When she saw that I did not understand her instructions, she took me by the hand and comprehension flowed through me like a stream of crystal-clear water.

  All in an instant, I understood the magnitude of her sacrifice. For the trickle of power that had flowed out of her was gone forever. She would never have it again.

  Shocked, I bowed low before her.

  My face must have revealed my every thought, for Inanna smiled. "I thank you for your sympathy," she said. "But your gratitude comes too soon. I cannot stay here, holding your hand, and without my touch you will revert to what you were before. But be patient. Be brave. Work hard. And when all is done, there will be a time of healing."

  Then she was gone, and with her the temporary gift of understanding.

  That night, for the first time, I wept for myself as well as for Silili.

  In the morning, walls of flame converged upon us, destroying forests and reed marshes alike. But Inanna's charm was strong, and Shaleb had so cunningly redirected the waters that the flames could not reach us. Even so, the sun did not shine that day, and when night came, we could see the campfires of the Igigi, ring upon ring of them through the murky distance. Their numbers were legion. My heart grew cold at the sight.

  For an instant I felt a bleak and total despair. And in that instant, I leapt up from where I had been lying, exhausted, and seized a rope, looped it around a nearby log, and turned to the nearest supervisor. It was Damuzi, who had never been particularly fond of me.

  I snorted, as if I were an ox. Then I tugged at the rope. I looked around me, from one quarter of the camp to another. Then I snorted again.

  Damuzi looked astonished. Then he laughed. He pointed to a far section of our defenses where the palisades were incomplete. His finger moved from palisades to logs, back and forth repeatedly, until I nodded my comprehension: As many logs as I could manage. Mylitta, who, through her frequent exposure to Irra, had become a man-beast like myself, had been watching us intently. Now she leaped up and looped a length of rope around the far side of my log. She looked at me and snorted.

  Together we pulled.

  The next day, the Igigi had advanced so close that they could be seen, like swarming insects, on the far side of the lake we had created as our first line of defense. Those who could—those with wings or the ability to swim—attacked us directly. A monstrous feathered serpent came twisting through the water and smashed into the lakefront wall with such force that logs splintered and buckled. Meanwhile, creatures that were something like bears and somet
hing like squids descended from the sky and tried to seize People in their tentacles.

  Though we cast them back, they kept returning. Pain meant nothing to the Igigi and so varied were their forms that it was difficult to find a way to cripple them all. Even King Nimrod was hard pressed to counter them.

  It was then that Humbaba came lumbering forward. "Great hunter, draw your bow!" he cried. And when Nimrod had done as he directed: "Point it toward the nearest of the foe. Let loose thy arrow. Speed it toward the abomination's body!"

  The arrow sped. When it struck the feathered serpent, the demon threw back its head and howled. Then it fell and did not rise again.

  "What wonder is this?" somebody asked.

  "It is my greatest gift, for once given it cannot be taken back," Humbaba said. "I call it death."

  At his direction, we set upon the invaders with sticks and knives and rocks. They fell before our onslaught and, briefly, all was satisfactory. But in the aftermath, there lay one body on the ground which was not that of an Igigi. It belonged to Shullat, who was gentle and fond of animals and of whom nobody ever had a bad word to say.

  Shullat's death saddened us all greatly, for she was the first of the People ever to die.

  That same day, shortly after sundown, Atraharsis passed through the camp distributing spears and knives as long as a tall man's arm. These latter were unknown to us before this, and he had to demonstrate their use over and over again, the sweat on his face glistening by the light of our campfires.

  He did not offer any to the oxen, of course, for we were no longer People. But I watched carefully and when I thought I understood how the knives were to be used, stood before him and made a coughing sound to get his attention. Then I pointed to the long-knife, made a slashing motion, and said, "Swssh."