Ndincede nkosi, she thinks. Please, Jesus, help me.
Ndincede nkosi undiphe amandla. Please, God, give me strength. Yiba nam kolu gqatso. Be with me in this race.
She can feel it. The golden glow that starts in her chest, or if she is truthful with herself, lower down. In the pit of her stomach.
She sucks in her abdominals and presses her hand to her sternum to stop her heart from sliding down into her guts – where her guts used to be, where the hotbed factory sits.
God is with me, she thinks. What matters is you feel it.
Pearl Nitseko runs.
MORIABE’S CHILDREN
Paolo Bacigalupi
Paolo Bacigalupi (www.windupstories.com) has been published in Wired, High Country News, Salon.com, OnEarth Magazine, F&SF, and Asimov’s Science Fiction. His short fiction has been collected in Locus Award winner and PW Book of the Year Pump Six and Other Stories and has been nominated for three Nebula Awards, four Hugo Awards, and won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best science fiction short story of the year. Debut novel The Windup Girl was named by Time Magazine as one of the ten best novels of 2009, and won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Compton Crook, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards, among others. His debut young adult novel, Ship Breaker, is a Printz Award Winner, and a National Book Award Finalist, and was followed by The Drowned Cities, Zombie Baseball Beatdown, and The Doubt Factory. His new novel for adults, The Water Knife, will be published later this year. He currently lives in Western Colorado with his wife and son, where he is working on a new novel.
ALANIE HAD NEVER seen a kraken, but her people spoke of them often. The kraken were out beyond the breakwaters of Serenity Bay, the hungry children of Moriabe. They writhed in the depths and sometimes rose to the surface to hunt. A kraken’s tentacles could encircle a sailing ship and crack its spine. Kraken snapped masts like kindling, and swallowed sailors whole. None but the most foolhardy and desperate hunted kraken. But sometimes, it was said, a captain might return from the open ocean with the prize of one of Moriabe’s children, his ship wallowing low in the waters as he tied to the Prince’s Pier, his fortune assured thanks to the bloody mountain of flesh piled in his hold. Alanie sold oysters in Greyling Square, and she had seen hopeful ships set sail on hunts, but she had never seen one return with a kraken in its hold – and most ships never returned at all.
ALANIE SOLD OYSTERS and accepted whatever prices High Street cooks offered when they came down from the mansions that ringed the white cliffs of the bay. After her father died, Alanie prayed to Moriabe that she might find and sell enough oysters so that she and her mother would not be forced from their home on Middle Street, and each day she returned home with too little for her efforts.
Alanie often lingered in Greyling Square until darkness fell and then stumbled home by the light of the stars. And while she lingered, she listened to the talk of the other fishmongers as they compared their business days and their netted catch, and sometimes they would speculate on what it might be like to return to port with a hold overflowing with kraken spoils.
“I saw Greyling when he caught his prize, so long ago,” old Bericha said, as she plucked out the last of her flankfish and beheaded it for Tradi Maurch’s cook.
“The prince threw a fete. Maidens tossed rose petals at his feet as he went up the cliffs to the prince’s manor on the point. And behind him, his sailors came, too. Urn after urn, full to the neck with reddest blood and greyest poisons and blackest inks.”
The ink went to lovers’ notes, a syrup-sweet filigree to the protestations of devotion that suitors spilled on vellum. The blood went to wealthy bedrooms and was mixed with wine, an aphrodisiac said to besot lovers for days. And, of course, the poison also had its place. Wrung from the kraken’s tentacles, the grey viscous poison was slipped via servant entrances to the betrayed – the ones who had been foolish enough to believe the sweet calligraphy of love, and yielded to the madness of trust. Kraken poison found its way into Calagari wine and Rake Point mead and flankfish stuffing, and former lovers thrashed and collapsed, frothing blood and spittle, praying for forgiveness as they gave up their lives.
Ink and blood and poison, tender meat, powdered tentacles – all found ready markets in the High Street mansions where they ringed the bay atop white marbled cliffs and kept sharp eye over the prince’s commerce.
The fishmongers gossiped and wished, and packed up their water carts and dragged them sloshing from the deepening shadows of Greyling Square, with copper bits in their pockets and visions of untold wealth in their tired dreams.
ALANIE HAD NEVER seen a kraken, but her mother spoke of them often. Sinolise spoke bitterly of the creatures that had taken the Sparrow and her crew. She spoke of Alanie’s father, whom Alanie remembered as a giant of a man, black-bearded and laughing.
Alanie’s mother said the kraken were always hungry, spawned from a cold trysting between Moriabe and Stormface, an object lesson that lovemaking in anger resulted in terrible things.
Sinolise said the kraken were always hungry, and it wasn’t just a man’s body they sought to consume, but his mind.
A man could lose his head hunting kraken, mad for the profit that might result. He forgot wife and child, love and life. Kraken muddled a man’s thoughts until he dreamed of becoming another Orin Greyling, a legend who might be spoken of for generations. It happened all the time. A man lost his wits in pursuit of kraken, and when he did, it was his family who suffered. It was his family who were forced to flee to pastures far beyond the city. It was his wife who was forced to find a new man who would accept a pauper woman and daughter into his home.
The kraken stole not only sailors’ lives, but also the lives of all those people who had been foolish enough to believe in them.
ALANIE HAD NEVER seen a kraken, but her father had spoken of them often. “I saw them, Alanie. With my own eyes, close as touching, just beneath our Sparrow’s beam.”
He told her how the Sparrow had wallowed, half drowned, leaking between her boards as Moriabe and Wanem clashed in a lovers’ battle and the Sparrow was trapped in the heart of the tempest.
“Half of Moriabe was down in our hold. Every time a wave crested, I was sure poor Sparrow would founder and we’d all be dragged down. “For two days and two nights, we fought that storm. We bailed and bailed.
We lost Tomo and Relkin to Moriabe’s and Wanem’s fury. We fought Moriabe’s waves, and we battled Wanem’s torrents, and none of us believed that we could survive. Waves taller than our masts, Alanie! Winds yanking us about like a toy on a string. It was all I could do to keep the Sparrow’s prow to the rise of Moriabe’s next embrace. Every time we climbed a wave, I was sure it would be our last. . .” He trailed off, and then abruptly smiled.
“When dawn came, we were so exhausted and waterlogged and broken down that at first we thought we had drowned and gone to the distant shore, but instead of the warm song of the Rising Lands, it was the sun, giving us all her warmth.
“The waves steamed mist, and the sky was bluer than the shell of a bluestem clam, and Moriabe was as still and calm and loving as a cat nursing kittens, and our only company was a pair of dolphins bearing Tomo back to us. It was as if Moriabe herself had decided old Relkin was enough sacrifice, so she gave us back our skinny cabin boy.
“We thought we were blessed that day, Alanie. We bailed water from our hold, and every time we dumped a bucket into the sea, we thanked Moriabe for making peace with Stormface. She was so still and calm in that moment, just sunshine and wavelets, all the way to the horizon. Bitty little wavelets, gleaming like mirrors...
“That’s when we saw them. Just below our hold. Huge, Alanie, so big... I’ve seen a black whale breach and knock a frigate aside like a toy, and a black is nothing to the kraken. A snack, perhaps. The kraken are so large, you can’t fit them in your eye. You cannot see the whole of them, not when you’re close.
Nothing holds a candle to the size of them, except maybe bluebacks, and no one dares hunt them.
“We stood there, staring. Me and all the rest of the men, jam-jawed, every one of us. All of us looking down into the water, and not a one of us making a sound as they passed and passed and passed. It was something extraordinary, seeing Moriabe’s children. Huge long tentacles trailing behind them, down there in the water. Dozens of them, and any one of them might have dragged our mortal Sparrow down without a second thought. They are greater than we, by far.” He paused. “Everyone talks of kraken, but no one knows the truth. That prize Orin Greyling brought home in his hold? The one they say was as big as his ship?” Her father shook his head. “It was but a babe, Alanie. Nothing but a tiny little babe.”
Alanie’s father had seen the kraken, and he never forgot its awe. And when he was near poverty, ruined by poor trade, and with hundreds upon hundreds of useless black-whale oil casks turning rancid in his warehouse, he remembered how the kraken surfaced after Wanem and Moriabe fought in a tempest and then made amends, and he would hunt.
Armored with his own desperation, armed with poisoned harpoons and the lore of Greyling’s triumph, Alanie’s father sailed the Sparrow into the teeth of a building storm, his crew a band of hopeless souls who anticipated nothing but debtors’ labor in the marble quarries of the white cliffs if they failed in their mission – a ragged band of gamblers, betting on a future that was already beyond their reach.
Alanie had never seen a kraken, but they spoke to her often. In her dreams the kraken spoke to her, and when they did, they called her by name.
Alanie. Alanie.
In the darkness of her new father’s chink-stone manor, wrapped in quilts before his hearth, listening to her mother and the man she had chosen for shelter as they rustled and groaned in the man’s bedroom, Alanie stared into the flickering fires as the kraken called to her.
The kraken sang of ocean currents and cities beneath the waves. They sang of shipwrecks and gold and the lost wines of ancients. They sang of urns of olives and whale oil, the marbled statuary of Melna and Calib, a carpet of treasures spread across the seafloor, woven with the bones of sailors. The kraken called to Alanie when she was asleep and stalked her when she was awake. They sang to her as she walked the pastures learning the trade of shepherd from her stepbrother, Elbe. They whispered to her when she scrambled down the cliffs to the beach where she hid from her new family and hunted for oysters. They chuckled predatory in her mind when she straightened from scrubbing shells and caught her stepfather standing too close, his gaze lingering too long on her body.
Every night as the embers of the kitchen fire turned to ash and glow, the kraken came calling.
Alanie, Alanie.
ALANIE HAD NEVER seen a kraken, but she remembered the first time she heard their song.
She’d stood at the end of Prince’s Pier, a tiny girl alone on the longest finger that poked into the bay, looking out across calm waters to the froth of the breaks and the channel where her father would return. Around her, sailors loaded bales of wool brought into the city from the pastureland. The great storm rains had soaked the bales, and the sailors and stevedores cursed the weight of the wool, while owners and captains argued over the merits of drying the wool or shipping it immediately.
All across the pier’s oiled planks, water beaded and steamed as the sun rose and warmed the white cliffs that ringed Serenity Bay, and it was then that Alanie heard the singing. She heard the snap of timbers and felt the prick of barbed steel in her skin and tasted blood in her mouth.
Alanie stood at the tip of the pier, bathed in sunlight, trembling, listening to the delighted singing of the kraken as they fed.
That night she told her mother that Father was dead and would not be returning, and her mother beat her for the news. Her mother beat her for cursing a sailor beyond the breaks, and beat her for telling lies, and beat her for her lack of faith; and Alanie fled her home for the streets, and all the time Alanie heard the kraken singing as they ran their tentacles through the shattered Sparrow and ferreted out the last drowned bodies of her father’s crew.
When Alanie returned home, she found Sinolise sitting in the shadows, a single candle flickering on her mother’s face, turning her bones to hard, sharp angles. The woman did not look up at Alanie’s return, and Alanie saw that her mother was afraid.
Her mother – who had seemed so important and authoritative as she ran her Middle Street household and its servants – was now adrift. A bit of storm wood tossed into an ocean of uncertainty.
With a surge of fear, Alanie realized that her mother was weak. Sinolise was not a woman who supported herself as the fishmongers in Greyling Square. She was a woman who wanted others to care for her. She’d chosen a man with a ship to his name on the assumption that her marriage would bring her servants and a house farther up the white cliffs, far away from the fish guts among which she’d been raised. Sinolise had chosen a man of the sea in order to abandon it, and more foolish she to have thought that way.
Alanie went to bed, knowing that she was lost in an ocean greater than any her father had ever navigated. She wondered how she was meant to sail its currents and shallows with no knowledge or skill of her own.
A week later news came of the Sparrow wreckage, and Alanie found her mother down on her knees in the kitchen, burning her father’s clothing in the fire. Alanie saw her mother’s hatred and fear – that Alanie had known of her father’s death before it could be known.
A month after that, without money to pay them, their two servants were gone, and not long beyond, just before Summerturn, Alanie’s mother announced that they would be living in the country.
Alanie would have a new father – a stepfather – a man who was a widower, and who had lands and sheep.
Eliam was a man who didn’t mind a woman who brought with her the child of another man, and came without means to his doorstep.
ALANIE HAD NEVER seen the kraken, but she remembered the first time they spoke her name.
The man who was meant to replace her father called himself Eliam. His wealth was known, his generosity as well. He was tall and strong, his beard was brown, and he kept his hair in a long braid. He was as powerful as her father, but different in the eyes in a way Alanie couldn’t name.
Eliam smiled as Alanie’s mother presented her. He touched Alanie’s hand and exclaimed over her and complimented her dress and tresses.
“Why, you’re nearly a woman,” he said.
“You look the age of my son, Elbe,” he said.
“Such a lovely daughter,” he said.
Sinolise took Eliam’s attention as a compliment, but Alanie turned rigid with fear, for she heard the kraken whispering.
Do you know how we hunt blueback, Alanie? That whale is greatest and most powerful, but we together are stronger. We do not hunt the blueback – we hunt the blueback’s young, for the blueback must forget herself, then.
We hunt and poke at the children of old blueback, and of course she must defend. Parents must save their little ones, and so the great ones forget themselves and dive deep, chasing us away, and then we seize a great mother and we hold her to us, and we twine our tentacles in seafloor corals, and we hold her fast.
All our kinfamily come, and we hold that mother to us, and we nip at her flesh, and the salt water turns misty black with the blood of her great heart, and at last she tires and sips of Moriabe, and then we have her to us.
And later, if we like, we snack on her children, too. Once we’ve drowned the mother, the children are no match.
That is how we hunt the blueback. We trick the mother and seize her and drag her down.
We are the children of Moriabe, and the blueback, though she swims in Moriabe’s embrace, she is not one with the sea. We breathe the waters, but old blueback must needs breathe the air above, and if we hold blueback tight enough, she may thrash and twist and beg, but in time, the great one breathes of our mother, and once a creature has sipped of Moriabe, that one is ours.
See how your mother sips and drowns?
She is gone, and you are vulnerable.
Above or below the waves, it is the same.
The hunt is the same.
The kraken whispered to her, and Alanie saw it was true. Her mother fluttering to impress the man, using words to tend and flatter, while the man’s eyes lingered only on Alanie. Eliam was no husband and no father, Alanie realized. He was a wolf who tended lambs.
Alanie bolted for her room and slammed her door, and plastered her body against its planks, and wished that her father was not dead in the embrace of Moriabe, and that the kraken did not speak true, and that she had not tasted her father’s own blood in her own mouth as he died.
ALANIE SOBBED AND wished for impossible things while the kraken whispered that her father was no salvation. His Sparrow lay beneath the waves, and they themselves nested within its hold.
Alanie’s mother pounded on the door and begged to be allowed in, and Alanie heard her apologizing to the man who would devour her. “This isn’t like her,” Alanie’s mother said, again and again. “Alanie is a good girl. She will listen to you. I will make her listen.”
Terror of abandonment made her mother’s voice rise and crack as she sought to assuage her future husband, and Alanie heard her mother’s words and Eliam’s indulgent chuckle, and knew that her mother was lost. Sinolise would sacrifice anything for this new man. Eliam was meant to preserve Sinolise from fish guts and sea, and she would do anything to serve him. The kraken chuckled and rolled lazily in the deeps of Moriabe. The young blueback is the sweetest to consume. No gristle at all. They drown easy once the mother’s gone. We wrap our tentacles around them and drag them down, whenever we like.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine Page 4