Farther and farther you will go, and slower and slower in the going. It is dark here with no moon to guide you. You forget why you entered the water; you forget when you entered it. You have been swimming all your life. The wrinkles you see forming on your skin must be your own imagination.
Farther and farther, slower and slower, your limbs heavier and heavier, until …
Ink in water. Fat sizzling on a pan. Your self melting away.
The water embraces you. You join it. You become it. You have always been in the water, and the water has always been in you.
So it is.
The water never loses its lust for the shore. Not the eastern shore—it knows that one well enough. From there the swimmers are born, from there they emerge, from there they make their ill-fated journeys.
It is the western shore the waters want. The western shore, its banks lined with red flowers.
Up, the waves! For this is their breath, this is their will. Forward, forward! What they could not reach as individuals they may yet reach as a whole—multitudes of drops forcing themselves forward with no wind to guide them, rushing and roaring with their thousands of voices—
Only to meet a wall of wind.
For there is such a wall around the western shore, around the western island. A woman in an old boat conjures it by twirling her scythe. Around and around the island she goes, spinning the scythe in hand—and the waves meet their untimely ends against it. She hums to herself a song as she does, an old melody she heard before all this began—and she looks on the eastern shore with an unspeakable longing.
And what lies beyond the wall? For there is water there, lapping at the very edge of the island. The ocean knows the taste of it. Those souls are the luckiest of all, for if they could only wake, they would know …
They would know what lay on that distant shore.
But it is not the place of the water to wake. It has never been the place of the water to wake. We are born, we rise from the mouth on the eastern shore, we try to reach the west, we die.
So it has always been.
Not everyone is granted the chance to make the swim. On occasion, the crane-headed guardian will emerge from the mouth of the cave with a clay jar in hand. This is full of souls who could not pay the toll. He will walk to the water and he will dump the jar into it, all the while shaking his head.
It has not always been the crane-headed guardian, but it is at the moment. There were others. They joined the water.
And there is the matter, too, of rain. An uncommon occurrence, but not unheard of—rain in the dark landing like a punishment against the ocean. Souls joining the water with no idea of where they are or who they are—and soon all their ideas are wiped away.
On this day—the first of Qurukai—it rains.
On this day, thousands of fat drops slap against the surface; on this day, there is a single drop of silver.
The silver does not know where it is—only that it is sinking. Silver is far heavier than water, one must understand. The natural thing for it to do is to sink. At the very bottom of the ocean, where no light can dream of reaching, there is more silver. There is gold. There are gems, and jade, and precious things that can never join the water.
If this silver drop continues to sink—as all the other silver drops have before it—it will join the others. It will lie there, in the dark, feeling the motion of all the other souls against it, locked away forever from the sky it once loved.
But this drop …
This drop does not want to sink.
And yet what is a drop to do when submerged? Sink or dissolve into the surface—those are the only two choices. Those are the only two options to speak of. If it will not sink, then it must dissolve.
The water strains to tell it this. The silver feels the water around it as it sinks farther down, feels the ripples and the eddies offering it another path. You do not have to go to the bottom, they say. Join us.
But I have something to do.
And there, yes, there—that word! The silver refuses to sink, refuses to dissolve, refuses to see itself as anything but silver—and refuses to speak of itself in any other way. I have something to do.
Ripples strengthen into something more, something like the waves but farther down. If the silver had eyes, it could see the shock running through the water—large circles shooting out in the four cardinal directions as the silver’s words reverberated through the sea. I have something to do.
Don’t they all?
Bubbles rise through the water. Some intercept the drop of silver, buoying it up further, but the sea cannot tolerate their existence for long. The bubbles burst beneath the pressure and weight of the water.
Stop. It’s futile to try. We all have, and it’s gotten us nowhere.
I’m not you, is the silver’s answer.
And yes, yes, the water is truly boiling. I’m not you! What a thing to say, what a thing to think! They are all the same here, they are all one, they are united and perfect in that unity.
Who is this drop to speak otherwise?
And yet the thought’s already been loosed. That is the trouble with being so united—there’s no way to stop the spread of ideas. This one, now spoken, becomes an idea they’ve all entertained. I am not you.
Again the eddies and the currents rise—but this time, they pull the silver drop upward. And—look! Watch how a sphere forms around the silver drop! Watch it grow, as the others feed itself to the silver! For they, too, are not the same as the rest. These are the souls that remember their swim, these are the souls that remember what it was like to strain against the inevitable.
Growing and growing, and yet crushed by the weight of the sea—the silver starts to take shape.
You are all of us, says the sea to the silver. We cannot leave this place. The wind will stop us.
It won’t stop me, says the silver.
And what a flurry! The once smooth surface of the sea is choppy. Waves form only to break long before reaching the wall of wind. The woman on her boat staggers—this is the first time in thousands of years there’s been such a disturbance in the water. She turns toward the east and narrows her eyes, but it is no use—she cannot see the cause in all this darkness.
The cause is growing. The silver’s thoughts become those of the rest of the ocean, awakening them, calling them to action. It won’t stop me.
Why had they surrendered? For united as the sea, they are unstoppable. Anything that tries to face them will surely drown.
And united as this silver, united in this form …
Like wildfire, the idea spreads. Join. Join the silver.
She grows.
And it is “she,” now. She’s remembering herself.
All around you are those who have tried. Millions of us. More of us than there are grains of sand in all the world. You think you can succeed where we have failed? Cease your struggling; you are only going to get hurt.
I don’t care, she thinks.
And she doesn’t. She’s never cared about getting hurt. Pain is an old friend of hers and cannot possibly scare her.
Two arms, a little long, but well defined from all her years of archery.
Two legs, thick around the thighs, bowed out from all her years of riding.
How the sea roils! For those who cannot join the silver woman nevertheless pull her upward, upward. It is only the desolate souls who do not assist her, do not assist their brethren that have joined her.
Thousands of years and no one has reached the shore.
This woman can.
The thought spreads and spreads: she can. She can do it, and if we join her, then we can do it, too.
She feels it in the stomach now forming, feels it in her kelp-ridden guts, in the castaway wood of her bones. We can do it, too.
But how bitter the oldest souls! How deep their hatred for this hope that now lies within their midst! For if they could not reach the shore, then why should this young upstart? Have they not flung themselves agains
t the wall of wind for thousands of years? Have they not struggled? She cannot know, she cannot possibly know—
The sea tears itself apart for her.
Higher and higher up the currents carry her. The bubbles that propel her are the size of horses. She remembers horses now. She remembers the steppes. She remembers, with a bit of a laugh, that she never learned how to swim.
Two eyes, two cheeks, two lips, two lungs.
You are going to drown, the sea says to her.
You will not drown me, she says in return. And she is sure of that now. It is impossible to tell how close she is to the surface, but in truth, it does not matter—she will kick and she will pull herself higher and higher.
For she is not only herself anymore.
Her blood is full of seawater, full of the souls of the departed.
She cannot betray them; she must take them to the shore.
Higher and higher, stronger and stronger.
The water is heavy with souls but it will not weigh her down. All her life she has borne it. From the moment two pine needles fell between her brows, from the moment she took her first breath, from the moment her mother decided she wanted a child of her own. Yes, she knows that now—she knows how she came to be. That secret is part of her.
Burqila Alshara kneeling in a ger with a clipping of her husband’s hair.
Five sanvaartains gathered around her.
Magic, thick as smoke, clinging to the felt.
She gave up your brother, her body says to her, she had no child of her own. No one to inherit.
And so her mother enlisted the sanvaartains. And so those six women defied nature to create her.
Is it any wonder that a woman born in such circumstances should refuse to die?
Higher and higher, stronger and stronger, the name at the tip of her tongue.
This is the weight I have always carried. This is the weight of my people.
A weight that is not a weight, a weight that is a lightness—for her people are among her now. So many of them, drops that had joined the ocean, so many of them who longed to see the sky once more—she cannot let them down.
Her hand breaks the surface. The cold of the water cannot compare to the cold of the air above—that her hand isn’t immediately rimed with frost is a miracle. The memory of how to swim rises to the surface of her mind just as she rose to the surface of the water. A gift of one of the souls from which she’s forged herself.
One arm over the other, kicking forward. Water fills her mouth and she thinks to herself that it is blasphemous and foul, but she must keep her mouth open if she is to breathe. Currents tug at her body, threatening to pull her under, but she will not allow them to. She is stronger—they are stronger—than the bitter souls that wish to see her fail.
Darkness has never deterred her, never hidden the world from her. She can see with perfect clarity the woman on the boat twirling her massive scythe. As she comes closer and closer to the shore, she thinks of what she might say, thinks of what she might do. A guardian, to be sure—but what price can she pay?
It does not matter. She will reach the western shore.
Forward, forward. It is not until she is nearly at the wall that she realizes she is in no pain. Her shoulders do not trouble her; there is no stiffness to her joints. In this place beyond creation, she is free of the agony she’s known so long. Strangely, it feels as if she’s lost a part of herself—as if she is less herself because it is no longer there.
But she does not miss it.
The choppy waves slap against the wall of wind. With no care for whether or not it will stop her, she throws herself against it.
Wind may stop water, wind may waylay arrows—but it cannot defeat a daughter of the steppes. All it can do is carry her soul further, make her legend more well known. So it is, let us hear the name: Barsalai Shefali passes through the wall of wind and lands on the white sand of the western shores.
The woman on the boat sees this. Her breath catches in her throat and she thinks for a moment of stopping her eternal dance. If she does that, the waves will surely overwhelm the shore—she cannot. Yet it is her job to guard the shores, and she has clearly let someone through …
But it will be such effort to catch her.
Better to stand on her boat and keep the others from getting any ideas.
Barsalai, for her part, lies catching her breath on the sand. The starlight granted to her by her ancestors allows her to get a good look at herself for the first time. She holds her hands up in front of her face. Black, her skin—black as the night that surrounds her. Silver, her nails.
But her nails—they are human nails. Not talons.
The corners of her mouth rise into a smile; hope blossoms in her heart. She touches her face. The plump cheeks of her youth sink a little beneath her fingers. When she laughs, they rise up; she can feel them hurting a little from all the smiling.
She’s her old self, isn’t she?
And yet when she touches her left eye, she knows she isn’t—there, her steel eye, still in place. Tugging at a handful of her hair reveals that it has turned to silver.
Her smile shrinks.
If she goes to the water, if she looks on the mirror of its surface, she knows well the image she will see. She knows that her teeth will be silver, and her left eye, too.
This—this—is the face she had always been born to wear.
But this isn’t why she came here; this isn’t her focus.
Her wife needs her help more than ever.
Thinking of Shizuka brings all her old pain to her at once—though this time concentrated in her heart.
There is no time to waste.
Barsalai Shefali stands among the red flowers of the western shore. Thin, graceful things—like chrysanthemums but more delicate. Though she cannot remember the name for them, it soon springs to mind: spider lilies.
Shizuka never liked them.
Akane. She needs to see Akane—the woman must be around here somewhere. Her eyes trace the horizon. There: an old Hokkaran castle.
She starts walking.
It occurs to her then, as she tramples a flower underfoot, that she is naked. Her hair, too, is unbound. She was not raised Hokkaran, she has no shyness about her nudity—but it would be preposterous indeed to confront the Mother this way. She must be ready for anything.
“Grant me my mother’s deel,” she says to the stars above her.
And they listen. When she next blinks, a deel is sitting a little ahead of her, neatly folded atop a pair of riding pants, with a set of boots standing next to it. It is not her mother’s deel—perhaps it was foolish to ask for a thing that belongs to another. Black, its color, with silver embroidery so delicate that no mortal hand could have made it.
She stops to put it on. It fits, of course. There are pockets sewn into the chest to make it easier to carry things. The thoughtfulness of her ancestors returns the smile to her face—she has never owned a deel so nice in all her life.
The boots and the pants fit just as well, with no need for breaking either of them in.
Five more steps forward. She stops.
“I have no bow, and no arrows to shoot,” she says.
In the same way, she takes two steps and sees them.
Sees it.
Resting atop the flowers is a bow of purest silver. How luminous! She cannot look away from it, cannot bring herself to, for she knows in truth what it is. With reverence, she drops to her knees before it. It is then that she sees the lightning dog leather quiver, then that she sees the windcutter arrows tucked within.
Tumenbayar’s crescent moon bow and sacred arrows.
She swallows. Though she has died now and re-formed herself, she is, at her core, the same girl. The same drop of silver. To be in the presence of something like this is humbling. She looks up at the Sky above and mouths a question: Why?
They have always been yours, is the answer. The voice sounds familiar to her, though she cannot quite place it. The accent �
�� We have only been holding them.
She picks up the bow. It flares bright at her touch, cold shooting up her arm and into her heart. When she breathes, a cloud of vapor leaves her. Such power courses through her that her hands start to shake.
But she does not let go. This is hers now. This has always been hers—it’s only that she forgot. With every breath, more of the memories return to her: she and the others looking up as the sun plummeted toward the earth. Her husband’s stern expression, and the softness of his stomach against her back. Thousands of gers gathered at the base of Gurkhan Khalsar, tens of thousands of brown faces watching her as she sounded a horn …
Yes. This has always been theirs.
She isn’t the same woman anymore. She isn’t Tumenbayar, just as that Tumenbayar was not like her predecessor. Their lives are too different for this. The Tumenbayar of her childhood is all jokes and riddles, all cunning and laughter, for she was raised in a time of relative peace. This Tumenbayar—Barsalai Shefali—was raised with determination and yearning in her belly, knowing she could never fit into either of her parents’ domains.
But enough of her is the same that the bow sings to her. She strings it, noting how thin it is, noting its delicate curves and almost-invisible bowstring. How a thing like this can hold more power than her old bow perplexes her—but ah, she remembers. She remembers.
With the quiver belted around her hip and the bow in her hand, she feels nearly complete. It gives her some small joy to see that Tumenbayar fletched her arrows with starling feathers, the same as her mother did.
“Thank you,” she says to the stars above.
Go and meet her, they say to her in turn.
And so she does. Step by step, Barsalai makes her way to the Mother’s castle. It strikes her that the gates are much like those of the Jade Palace: two lightning dogs rampant holding a bar between them. She braces herself for any guardians, but they never come.
This place is abandoned.
There is a holy stillness, though, a sacred lack of life.
She passes a garden where every flower has withered—and yet every flower remains on its stem without drooping. Petals curled and dried, but eternal.
She passes the stables, where there are no horses—only their bones stood up as if eating from a hostler’s hand. This sight fills her with dread, for she can think of no worse omen than a dead horse, and yet there is something reassuring about it as well. The horses seem so at peace—and there are so many blankets, so many treats left uneaten—that she cannot help but conclude they lived good lives. And with no meat, every part of them found a use.
The Warrior Moon Page 40