The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2015

by Paula Guran

  “Quickly.”

  Even so, I was wondering what it could be. We hadn’t robbed anyone since we’d been in Beloisa, we weren’t known to the authorities, and she didn’t have a husband. She threw me my coat and I dragged it on. She was holding the door open for me.

  “What?” I insisted. She pointed. At the window.

  For a moment I couldn’t see anything. Then it hit me, and my heart stopped. The sea was in the wrong place. Instead of being down where it usually was, it was right up high. It wasn’t the sea, it was a huge, enormous wave, and it was heading straight at us.

  I turned to her. I think what I wanted to say was, it’s no good, we can’t outrun that. But no words came out, just a pathetic sort of a squeal—pig-language, in which during moments of stress I am remarkably fluent. She didn’t speak either, she grabbed me by the arm and said something I didn’t quite catch, and suddenly we were somewhere else.

  Historians have a lot to say about the freak tidal wave that overwhelmed Beloisa on the 15th Aulularia AUC 667. It was that, they claim, that triggered the extraordinary events that were to follow. The destruction of the third largest city in the Empire—fifty thousand dead, a quarter of a million homeless and destitute—was significant enough. More momentous still was the fact that with Beloisa ruined and out of commission, the vast quantities of grain and other commodities required to feed the citizens of the capital had to travel an additional six hundred miles, a hundred of those by road. Quite simply, it couldn’t be done. Prices in Cornmarket doubled, quadrupled in a week; angry crowds were driven out of Victorinus Square by the palace guards, fell on the six state granaries and broke into them, only to find them empty, because the Grain Commissioners—so the rumor quickly spread—had been using the funds to play the commodities markets instead of maintaining the emergency supply, as they were legally mandated to do. The rumor was not, in fact, true; the granaries were empty because the Commissioners were playing brinkmanship with the grain cartels over a proposed price increase. Explaining this to the people only made them angrier, if anything. Questions were asked about the huge sums of money that should’ve been spent on building the new road from Helmyra to the City, along which the rerouted grain shipments should’ve been traveling, thereby cutting three days off the transit time. Where had the money gone? The government hedged. The fact was, it didn’t have the money, because of overspending on the Pancorian war, and had refused to countenance increased taxes because of the brittle state of the general economy. But they daren’t say that, and so said nothing, and their silence led the people to draw their own conclusions.

  Just when the Council of Ten reckoned things couldn’t get any worse, a remarkable thing happened, an event for which no credible explanation has been advanced to this day. One Favorian, a distant descendant of Victorinus, had a dream; his ancestor appeared to him and told him to go to a cave in the mountains near Plesi, where he would find a great treasure. This is my legacy, the ghost told him, put aside by me against the day when my people will need it the most; use it well. So strong was the impression that the dream made on him that Favorian went to the cave; he found a floor-to-roof stack of wooden chests, each one crammed with gold and silver coins. He managed to drag a small chest onto his chaise all by himself and drove back to the City. In Victorinus Square, which had been reoccupied by the mob, he announced his discovery, told them about his dream and produced the chest; the effect can easily be imagined. Amid unprecedented scenes, the hapless Favorian was carried shoulder-high to the Council Chamber (the Ten had sensibly evacuated it a few days earlier) and enthroned on Victorinus’ throne, where he was hailed as a reincarnation of his glorious forebear. The Ten, meanwhile, had sent well over half of the palace guard to the cave to secure the treasure. Surviving records indicate they had only the best of motives and fully intended to use the windfall to relieve the crisis. To the people in the Square, however, there could only be one interpretation. Victorinus had sent them his legacy to save them from starvation, and the Ten were trying to steal it for themselves.

  Had the Ten not sent quite so many of their few remaining loyal soldiers out of the City at that particular moment, the situation might possibly have been contained. As it was, a mere five thousand soldiers, no matter how dedicated and well trained, stood no chance against the fury of the urban mob. They fought to the last man, in the very best traditions of their regiment, and took an estimated thirty thousand citizens with them, but it was all over within the hour. The Ten were caught trying to sneak out of the City through the sewers; within minutes, their heads were on pikes above the triumphal arch in the Square, and the wretched Favorian, officially renamed Victorinus II, was installed as First Citizen in a makeshift but hugely emotional coronation in the Blue Spire Temple.

  Piece of cake.

  You’re mad, I told her, you’re completely insane; it’s the only possible explanation. You just slaughtered a quarter of a million people—

  She gazed at me blankly. “You said. You wanted.”

  “Me?” I wanted to hit her. “Don’t you dare blame any of this on me. I wanted to help people.”

  “Yes,” she said patiently. “But you said. People are too stupid. You’ve got to make them angry.”

  Later, I thought about that. Too stupid. Got to be angry. Yes, that was me, all right.

  By that point, we’d lapsed into bitter silence. I realize now how deeply hurt she must’ve felt, after all she’d done, to make my dream come true. You should have told me first, was one of the things I’d hurled at her, and when she said, “But I wanted it to be a surprise,” I actually thought she was trying to be funny.

  At that time we were still at Sulimbesia, which is where she’d magicked us to on our way out of Beloisa. It was relatively safe there in the mountains. As soon as the news broke, the canton authorities quite sensibly closed the passes so nobody could enter or leave, though of course that wouldn’t have hindered us for a moment. But I didn’t want to go. Right then, it didn’t really matter to me where I was. So many deaths on my conscience. I did the maths, which disproved my original belief that I was the worst person in history—that honor goes to Philocarpus, responsible for over a million deaths in the Great Social War, with Eusippa a close runner-up at nine hundred thousand (you’ll recall that he deliberately introduced the plague into Meseura). I was way back, about twelfth or thirteenth, but in distinguished company nevertheless. I’d have killed myself, if I thought she’d have let me. I’d have killed her, but what would’ve been the point?

  Hence the clever idea about killing her and then getting hung for it. A lovely plan. I knew it took her about forty-eight hours to come back from the dead. So: kill her, then immediately confess and get myself hung (in Breunis, where summary justice is very summary indeed). By the time she came to life again and realized what I was up to, my body would’ve been cold for so long, even she wouldn’t be able to revive me. It nearly worked. Ah well.

  The revised plan, entirely based on the sawmills of Kuvass City, was rather more hopeful. Those saw-blades wouldn’t just kill me, they’d shred me into little scraps of mincemeat. There was no way, I felt sure, that she’d be able to put me back together again after that.

  I underestimated her. I always do

  One of the first things I deduced about her is that she’s not exactly a reliable source. However, there are some things she has no reason to lie about, though I suspect she doesn’t always need a reason. This, then, for what it’s worth, is what she told me.

  Her father worked in a tannery—you see? Why would anyone make that up?—in the city of Aracho. Don’t bother looking for it on a map. There’s a low hill there now, and from time to time, when they plow, they turn up bits of pottery and fragments of bone. At one stage, the Arachenes had a small empire in the southern region of what’s now the Vesani Republic, but they came off a bad second in some war, and that was the end of them. There aren’t any written records because (she says) writing hadn’t been invented then. Well. All women
lie about their age, but usually the other way around.

  They couldn’t read and write, but they could cure leather, and the tannery was quite a substantial concern; a dozen men worked there, and fresh hides came in on carts from miles around. Apparently the Arachenes went in for large families. She told me she had four brothers and two sisters, and that none of them died in childhood. She was the second youngest. When she was born, her eldest brother was already out to work, in the slate quarries. They weren’t well off, but she says she can’t remember them ever going short of anything. She loved all her family, but her absolute favorite was the second eldest son. His name was Taraxin, and he was a head taller than any of the others. At fourteen, he could lift and carry as much as his father, and he was wonderfully clever with his hands. His father reckoned there’d be no trouble getting him apprenticed, to a carpenter or maybe even a bronzesmith, a real step up in the world for all of them. All in all, the impression she gave was of a loving, happy home, and a future full of promise and hope.

  All that changed when her mother murdered her father.

  He died quite suddenly, when she was seven years old. She remembered her mother in tears and her brothers being unusually quiet. Then a neighbor came in and went away, and some time later the magistrate arrived, with a dozen soldiers. The neighbor, she learned later, had come to see if there was anything she could do to help; she happened to notice flecks of dried white foam at the corners of the dead man’s mouth, and a few crumbs of dried blood in his ears. As luck would have it, the neighbor’s brother had died from eating poison mushrooms many years earlier, so she knew the signs. That worried her, because it wasn’t mushroom season, so how could he have eaten the things by accident? The magistrate searched the house and found dried mushrooms in a small pottery jar, hidden behind the water-butt in the yard behind the house. The jar had been carefully sealed with wax, and the seal was broken.

  Her mother admitted what she’d done almost immediately. It had all been for the children, she said. Her husband had been a good man, in his way, but he was never going to amount to anything, he had no ambition, he was perfectly content to go on working in the tannery all his life—which wouldn’t be very long, because tanners die young, and then she’d have been left a widow, and how would she have coped then? But she was still fairly young; if her husband died now, she’d have a good chance of marrying again, someone with prospects, who could give the children a better life. The tannery foreman admired her, she could tell, but he was far too honorable to do anything about it while her husband was alive. She’d collected the mushrooms in the autumn, meaning to kill him then, but not long after he’d gone down with a bad fever. It seemed quite likely that he’d die of it, which would save her the risk and worry of killing him. She’d dried the mushrooms, just in case he got better, and hid them. In time he recovered from the fever; in the meantime, she confessed, she rather lost her nerve, and several times came close to throwing the mushrooms away and forgetting the whole idea. But then her eldest boy started work in the slate quarries, and it upset her to see him come home each night dirty and exhausted, coughing from the dust. If she married the tannery foreman, or the factor at the corn chandlery—who seemed quite taken with her—there was every chance that either of them would be able to find good positions for all her sons, and suitable husbands for the girls as well. So she cooked up about half the mushrooms into soup, on a day when all the children were out of the house. She only pretended to eat her portion, and then threw it away.

  In due course the case came up before the Prince, who had recently succeeded his father. The Prince was a fine, idealistic young man, much given to the society of philosophers and priests. Above all, he had a passion for truth and justice—the twin sisters of God, he called them, without whom nothing good could survive in this world. He made a point of hearing all the evidence and interviewing everybody involved, including the dead man’s only surviving relative, a sister. She, of course, was heartbroken, having been devoted to her brother. He asked the accused several times if she had anything to say in her defense. All she came up with were the same basic facts, and her insistence that she’d done it for the children, not herself. The Prince, visibly distressed, found her guilty and sentenced her to death.

  After that, things got very bad. The house they all lived in belonged to the tannery, so they had to leave. Her eldest brother lost his job in the slate mines, because nobody wanted to work with a murderer’s son. They ended up wandering the streets, sleeping where they could and begging, until they were arrested for vagrancy. The Prince had strong views on begging, which he maintained was damaging to the moral health of the nation. He sympathized (he told them), particularly since they were orphans, and their misfortunes were patently not their fault. The law, however, was the law, and every misguided act of mercy served to undermine the principles of law and justice that elevated humanity above the level of wild animals. Accordingly, he had no option but to commit them to the care of the superintendent of public works, who would find work for them on some project conducive to the general welfare of the community.

  What that meant in practice was working on the aqueduct. It’s all gone now, of course, she told me, not a trace remaining, but in its day it was a wonderful sight to behold, a slender arch spanning an impossible gap between two mountains, a days’ walk from the city. It had been the special dream of the Prince’s father to bring clean water to the city, where hundreds died every year from drinking the foul water from the wells. He had started the work, and his son devoted all his energy and resources to completing it. When it was eventually finished, thirty years later, there was free running water in fountains on every street corner, and the dry, sandy plain to the south-east of the city was turned into a wide expanse of market gardens, supplying the citizens with cheap fresh vegetables.

  Building the aqueduct was a daunting task. To get the inclines right, so that water would flow, the whole of the top of the nearer of the two mountains had to be cut away. The stone for the aqueduct itself had to be cut in quarries fifty miles away, since the local material was too soft for the purpose. It proved impossible to build carts strong enough to carry the blocks from the quarry to the site, so the Prince’s engineers built a road, perfectly flat and smooth, along which the blocks could be dragged on rollers. To get the blocks to move at all, the road had to be greased with tallow, but this meant that oxen couldn’t get a foothold. The blocks had therefore to be dragged by men and women, with children walking in front of them smearing tallow on the compressed clay. Once the stone had reached the site, it had to be lifted into position on giant cranes, then eased precisely into place with levers. At any one time there were at least fifty thousand people working on the project, often more. About half of these were prisoners of war, captured by the Prince’s armies in his wars with his neighbors. The rest were poor citizens. In the inscription that the Prince had cut into the lintel of his tomb, he made a point of mentioning that during his reign, there was no unemployment, no beggars, no hungry children in the streets; there was work for everyone, regardless of age or infirmity. To pay for the aqueduct, the Prince was forced to conquer the other smaller cities on the edge of the western plain; the tribute and the prisoners taken in battle made the whole thing possible, and the Prince was at pains to acknowledge the contribution they’d made in his inscription; it was, he said, only fair that their sacrifice should be properly recognized.

  To begin with, she told me, she and her family worked in the quarry. This was mostly because the eldest boy had had experience of quarry work, and experienced men were at a premium. Most of the workers didn’t know what to do, which made things very inefficient and dangerous. Because iron hadn’t been discovered back then, they had to cut and shape the blocks with stone tools. It was miserable work, and they were forever cutting themselves with the sharp splinters of rock that flew off as they pounded away the waste, flake by flake. Her elder sister lost an eye. The middle brother had a cut that turned bad, and he died
of blood poisoning. They always had enough to eat—the Prince was particular about that—and at night they slept in tents, with watchmen to keep away the wolves.

  They’d been in the quarries for just over a year when the eldest son was conscripted into the army. The war with the Clastanes wasn’t going all that well, so the call-up age was lowered to seventeen. He was quite happy to go, figuring that soldiering had to be better than quarry work. He did quite well, being promoted to corporal and then sergeant, before he died of camp fever at the siege of Clasta City, shortly before it finally fell. Since he had been the experienced quarryman in the family, the rest of them were no longer eligible for quarry work and were reassigned to the transportation division.

  The transfer had its benefits. For the two girls, smearing tallow was a good deal less arduous than chipping stone. The brother, her beloved Taraxin, was assigned to a dragging team mostly made up of women and old men. He was big and strong, and although the work was exhausting, he was glad to be away from the dust and the flying splinters, and the terrible dull ache in the hands and shoulders that comes from hammering rock all day long. The food wasn’t quite as plentiful or good, but there was plenty of fresh water when they stopped to ford a river—the water at the quarry was always full of dust; it was like drinking mud, she told me. They worked on transportation for about six months. Then her sister, the half-blind girl, slipped on the greasy track and fell down just as a stone broke loose on a steep slope. She was crushed flat, every bone in her body broken, and died instantly.

  A few days later, she had a long talk with her brother, when everyone else was asleep. As far as he was concerned, their sister’s death was the last straw. So far, he said, they’d done exactly what they’d been told, gone along with the decisions of their elders and betters, and where had it left them? Two brothers and a sister dead, their mother hanged, their father murdered. If they stayed on the aqueduct, he was sure they wouldn’t last much longer either. It struck him as odd, he said, how all this could have happened. Their parents, after all, had been good people and had loved them. Their mother had loved them too much, as it turned out, but she’d only been thinking of them, which is what mothers do. He supposed the Prince had been right to hang her, since she’d admitted killing their father, and for all he knew, if they hadn’t been sent to work on the aqueduct they might well all have starved to death a long time ago. All along, he didn’t deny it, everyone had been trying to do right by them, obeying the law and doing what was fair and just. Maybe it was simply bad luck that things had turned out so badly. He didn’t know, he wasn’t one of the Prince’s wise men, who knew all about that sort of thing. But from now on, Taraxin said, he wasn’t going to concern himself too much with what was right, just, or fair. All he was interested in was keeping the two of them alive for as long as possible. If they stayed on the aqueduct, he had an idea that wouldn’t be very long. So, he said, he thought they should leave, go somewhere else, try something different. He had no idea where or what. Probably they’d have to make it up as they went along, just the two of them against the whole world. But, the way he saw it, they didn’t exactly have a lot to lose. So. How about it?