Martha rips the buds from her ears, but she still can't escape the past. She's back at this waystation, but she's young again, and the colours are brilliant, and she's here with Karl Yann, full of Politics and Philosophy and righteous anger at the state of the world. And he's got this handgun that he's merely using as a prop for all his agitprop posturings, when she has a much clearer, simpler, cleverer idea. The final performance act, right? The easiest, most obvious, one of all… Come on, Karl, don't say you haven't thought of it…And fuck you if you're not interested. If you're not prepared, I'll just do the damn thing myself…
Martha flouncing out from the waystation. Into the darkness. Hunching alone through the glass and rubble streets. The gun a weight of potentiality in her pocket and the whole world asleep. She feels like she's in the mainstream of the long history of resistance. She's Ulrike Meinhof. She's Gavrilo Princip. She's Harry Potter fighting Voldemort. A pure, simple, righteous deed to show everyone – and her Dad especially – that there are no barriers that will keep the truth of what's really happening away from these prim, grim estates. Not this shockwire. Nor these gates. Not anything. Least of all the glass of their kitchen door which breaks in a satisfying clatter as she feels in for the old-fashioned handle and turns. Not that this isn't a prank as well. Not that there isn't still fun to be had. After all, that fucking thing of a dog isn't really living anyway, it's nothing but dumb property, so what harm is being done if she shoots it properly dead? Nothing at all, right? She's doing nothing but good. She's shoving it to the system. She's giving it to the man. The darkness seethes as she enters, and she feels as she always feels, standing right here in her own kitchen, which is like an intruder in her own life.
That roaring again. Now stronger than ever, even though the seashell's buds are off and its batteries have gone. After all, how is she to tell one shape from another in this sudden dark? How could she know when she can barely see anything that the thing that comes stumbling threateningly out at her is Damien and not that zombie dog? It's all happened already, and too quickly, and the moment is long gone. A squeezed trigger and the world shudders and she's screaming and the dog's howling and all the backup lights have flared and Damien's sprawled in a lake of blood and the gun's a deathly weight in her hand – although Martha Chauhan doubts if she could ever understand how she felt as she turned it around so that its black snout was pointing at her own head and she squeezed the trigger again.
* * *
Her father's with her now. Even without looking, and just as when she lay in her bedroom surrounded by pain and humming equipment, she knows he's here. After all, and despite her many attempts to reject him, he never really went away. And, as always, he's telling her tales – filling the roaring air with endless ideas, suppositions, stories… Talking at least as much about once-upon-a-times and should-have-beens as about how things really are. Using what life and energy he has left to bring back his daughter. And if he could have found a way of sheltering her from what really happened that terrible night, if he could have invented a story that gave her a reason to carry on living, Martha knows he would have done so.
She sniffs, tastes bitter salt, and feels a deep roaring. It's getting impossibly late. Already, the sun seems to be setting, and the beach is growing cold, and the cricket match has finished, and that last gritty samosa she's just eaten was foul, and all the dogs and the kite flyers have gone home. But there's Dad, walking trousers-rolled and hand-in-hand with Damien as the tide floods in. Martha waves cheerily, and they wave back. She thinks she might just join them, down there at the edge of everything where all islands meet.
FADE TO GOLD
Benjanun Sriduangkaew
Benjanun Sriduangkaew (beekian.wordpress.com) spends her time on amateur photography and writing love letters to cities. Her fiction can be found in Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Dark and numerous anthologies.
They say the afterlife is a wheel and that is true, but I am between and so for me the way is a line. It unspools interminably into a horizon that shows the soft gold of dawn, always just a little out of reach.
Before the war this was only packed earth and grass and dirt to me; before the war I trod this path from home to capital thinking of the sweetness of rare fruits. Now that my back is to Ayutthaya the ground is sometimes baked salt where nothing grows and sometimes wet mud bubbling with the voices of the dead. Inside my arteries there is blood which throbs and pumps, and my belly growls at emptiness as might a bad-tempered dog. But it is difficult to be sure, after so much soldiering, that one is still alive. It is difficult to be certain this is not all a fever dream.
It can be difficult to remember who you are, having watched Queen Suriyothai die.
These are the common ailments of any soldier, though few will admit them.
A burnt village, a burnt temple. I see such often, these days, defaced by the Phma who melted off the gold and stole every metal coin. Sometimes in their savagery they kill the monks, even though theirs and ours wear much the same saffron. The Phma have faces no different than any mother's son, four limbs and a head each, but it strains belief that anything human could have slaughtered holy men. Do they not have luang-por like second fathers, who taught them to read and write? Are some of them not orphans taken in by a temple, to shelter beneath the steeple and the bodhi shade?
Slaughter is what might have happened here, or else flight, for I find neither a living voice nor a body thick with flies. Toward the end everyone fled for Ayutthaya until the walls strained at the seams, until every house and hovel splintered at the edges. It should have been comforting, so many people, but when there was so much desperation all I could feel was desperation in turn, a sour and unrelenting fear that turned everything I ate – and even the king's soldiers hadn't much to eat – into rotten meat on the tongue, with an aftertaste of cinders.
I take shelter where I find it, in spite of ghosts that must've seeped into the fissured walls and the desecrated murals. In spite of knowing that Phma soldiers have been here too, that the air bears the stink of their sweat, the reek of their filth. Being a soldier has taught me to forget delicacy.
It has also taught me to put on sleep light as dead petals, to be shaken off and scattered at a blink. So when the mud makes sucking noises I am already awake; when the woman comes into view I have a hand around the carved wood of a hilt.
She must have seen the blade glint, for there is a hiss of breath.
"I thought you might be a thief," she says.
"What could a thief rob from a place already thieved to every final clod of dirt?"
"There is always one last bit of painted glass, one last talisman." She closes the distance, her apparent fear set aside. "One last child to murder."
"Have you lost one then?" There's still room in my breast for softness, still room to be cut by another's hurt.
"It's a season for losing children." The luster of her lips and hair seems brighter than dawn's light warrants. "You can only be passing by. Which way calls you?"
"East, to Prachinburi."
"The same direction then." She gathers her braid in one hand, twisting it. "Might we not share company?"
I have collected myself, spine straight, eyes clear. In the back of my mind phantom flies buzz. There is no escaping the noise. No battlehardened veteran ever tells you it is the flies that haunt you most, over the cannon fire and your fellows' screams, over the throb and burn of your own veins. "You would trust a strange soldier?"
"When she is a woman, why not?"
My alarm must have been immediate, for she laughs.
"Even officers go bare-chested the moment they're free from uniform. You remain as neat behind yours as a captain newly promoted and pledged to His Majesty." Her head moves from side to side. "I'll not pry – too much. I want only safety, for if you've survived the Phma you must be as fit to the business of combat as any man."
I should ask how she has been unscathed so far. I should ask from whence she came, and where she
was going other than in the same vague direction as I am. But in the army I've been solitary out of need, and there comes a point where a person must hear another human voice or break upon the cliff-face of loneliness. My secret is already laid bare to her, so where's the harm?
We set out at daybreak, keeping parallel to but avoiding the road, for not all soldiers recently unyoked from duty are vessels of honor, and I've heard news of Phma stragglers along this way, ready to avenge themselves upon any Tai.
She breaks open one of her bamboo tubes as we walk, and hands me half the sweet roasted rice. Her name is Ploy, a widow, and when she hears my name is Thidakesorn she smirks at the florid grandeur of it. "A princess's name," she says.
"My parents had expectations." Years living with an aunt who married upward, wife of a merchant grown wealthy on trade with the Jeen. So successful he's sailed to the Middle Kingdom twice, and his fortune tripled by a wife shrewd with numbers and investment. She would tutor me, it was hoped.
"Instead you took up the sword."
How do I say that I went to the capital to learn to be a lady and fell in love with the queen despite the hopeless stupidity of that; how do I say it was for this love that I fought and that when she fell it shattered me? How do I say that I resent the king's continued life, for she was the braver of the two, the finer being, and that he did not deserve a wife as incandescent as she? So I seal my lips and pronounce none of these wounds. Better they suppurate than my shame be cast into the day.
She may have the secret of my gender, but this is mine alone to nurse.
The day brightens and Ploy acquires a clarity of features. Before I thought her soft and plain; now there is an angle to her eyes and mouth I've failed to notice in the dim. Sharp from nose-tip to chin-tilt. It does not make her beautiful, if such a comment may be leveled from someone as blunt-featured as I, but she would snag the attention and hold it fast. A little like the queen. The dead queen, whom I must not think about, whom I must bury under the blackest soil of memory.
When I shut my eyes I see elephants draped in black and silver, trumpeting for death. I see the edge of a glaive passing through flesh and bone, opening a queen inside out.
Noon claims the sky with fingers bright and fever-hot. It is a month for rain, but I harbor a childish fancy that the season has upended for Queen Suriyothai's demise.
Between my waking delirium transmuting earth to a sanguine river and us stopping to drink from a pool, we hear the Phma.
Away from the shields bearing the king's crest, away from his banners and helms, it can be difficult to tell Phma deserters from our own men. Loinclothed and bare-chested like any Ayutthaya soldier, bearing much the same type of blade. There is a wild look to them that I can spot even as we take to hiding, and I wonder if the penalty for desertion is as harsh for them as for us. Harsher: victors can afford generosity that losers may not.
When they are gone Ploy murmurs, "I thought you'd challenge them, for are these not your sworn enemies and murderous animals?"
"There were five of them, and one of me."
Her sneer is vicious. "If I needed confirmation you were a woman before, I would've required none now."
"What did you lose to the Phma?"
"A family." Her mouth tightens; she says no more.
I study her more closely for signs of who she is or might have been. Widow says little, designates merely a specific sorrow. Strange that we will confess but one loss at a time – I am a widow, I am an orphan; how to say in one concise word I've lost everything?
Evening approaches, and Ploy looks to me, asking of game and hunt. I mean to scavenge and work for food on the way, and point out that the army taught me to ambush enemy warriors, not edible meat.
"You make an inadequate man." She passes me her satchel. "I'll be back."
I wait beneath a tabaek whose trunk is garbed in a purple sash. There's not much of worth on me, but I smooth out the cloth as best I can and pour out a handful of rice for offerings.
Ploy returns with frogs fat and glistening, her arms wet to the elbows, pha-sbai and pha-nung damp. "Tell me you can make a fire."
"That at least I was taught. You must've been very fast, or those frogs very old."
"And you do not know how to flatter anyone. How are you going to find a husband?"
"By changing out of this into silk and silver." I touch the edge of my helm. "By combing out my hair." In truth I aspire to spinsterhood, for how do I explain the battle scars once all that silk is stripped away? Not evidence that I was wayward as a child. Marks left by a blade resemble in no wise marks left by a switch.
I sharpen twigs and skewer her catch. The meat is succulent, and she carries a jar of the best fish sauce I've had in months. I leave two crisped frog legs by the tabaek's roots, among bruised flowers, for the tree's spirit.
The next village is empty too. I begin to think perhaps all the villages in my path will be unpeopled save by wraiths, that this is beyond death after all and I'm rotting beneath a fallen war-elephant – but I must not think so, for when I do the trumpeting and the cannon fire gain strength between my ears, and if those are bearable the buzzing is not.
Ploy is as disinclined as I to the sin of theft, and so we limit our looting to two rattan mats and some oil. We find a creaking riverside house and rest on its veranda back to back. I remain awake enough to know she slips away long before dawn. When the sun is up she comes back with two roosters. It was not a clean kill: blood everywhere, on her and them, their bellies ragged as if they've been chewed to death.
She sets them down. "A wild dog must've been at them."
This time we've banana leaves to wrap the meat, and proper seasoning – sugar, garlic, coriander root. Afterward we find a rain jar and a coconut-shell dipper. No jasmine water to scent ourselves with, but I've been long crusted in sweat and filth, and Ploy is glad to shed her gorestained clothes.
She looks on, frowning, as I disrobe and breathe in relief to have the binding off at last. "How did you have those cuts tended without the entire army discovering you have breasts?"
"I had patronage." Her Majesty's handmaids understood so simply a woman's need to be in arms.
Ploy produces yet another wonder: a pot of tamarind paste and turmeric. She bids me turn my back and spreads that across the width of my shoulder-blades, down my spine, in a bright tart-smelling lather. My breath catches once and she asks if there's a wound as yet unhealed.
"It's nothing." There is no way of saying that I've never had another woman's hand on me so except that of kin; there's no way of saying that her touch pulls the strings of my nerves taut, a note so loud in my skull that for a moment all else is mute.
I make myself indifferent while she, nude, washes her clothing. But my eyes stray and my skin craves. Is it any wonder that the monks tell us earthly desire is a shackle, material lust a disease? Rest comes slow, and I am not even drowsing by the time Ploy steals away.
"I've no appetite," she says when I offer her chicken in the morning. Then she scrubs at her teeth with a khoi stick, rinsing her mouth over and over as though she's swallowed unutterable foulness.
We circle back toward the main road. For a relief we meet a family: two grandparents, their daughter and son-in-law, a buffalo-pulled cart laden with supplies and children. Ploy takes my arm before I can speak, introducing me as her husband. The breastplate and helm purchase respect and welcome; they share food with us and their spirits are high. Here is a family that went through war untouched by tragedy.
I keep my words few, my voice low. I've allowed myself to speak freely with Ploy, and if I never trilled or chirped as some women do, still my natural pitch would have given me away.
They would have missed it, and I might have too if not for the flies. That sound – I would know it anywhere. Gorge rising I stride into the bushes; Ploy calls but she is muted, for black clouds close in about me, red eyes the size of longans, wings larger than open hands. When they disperse and my sight clears there are the corpses.
Phma, by the color of their bandannas. A painful death, by everything else. Their bellies torn out, entrails wetting the earth, dense with ants and flies as though they're both sweet and savory.
The son-in-law has followed to see what's afoot. "This wasn't done by knife or arrow," I say, turning to him. "Do you know of any blade that could make wounds so messy?"
One look at the carcasses and he recoils. "I'm no fighter."
Ploy is not far behind him, and when she bears witness to this massacre she merely says, "A tiger."
"This close to the road?"
"Who knows? It is justice."
"We could cremate them."
"A waste of oil." She tugs at my hand. "Leave them for the worms. Were you reborn one you'd have been glad of the gift."
I should like to think I haven't been so heinous as to reincarnate so low, but then I was a soldier. We do not burn the bodies.
At a river's crossing we part company with the family, them turning south while we continue east. Ploy's gaze follows them as they go out of our sight. "I wasn't entirely truthful," she says. "I don't have a home left to return to."
"I know."
"You aren't going to ask why I disappear after dark?"
"You never ask why I became a soldier, or any of the hundred other questions you could've put to me."
She looks away, but her hand slides into mine. "Could there be a place for me in Prachinburi?"
"There'll be work." I hesitate, this close to pulling my fingers away from hers, but they knit and there is an easy fit to our hands. "My grandmother might want another woman in the household. Toddlers running underfoot."
Her gaze lifts, fastens to mine. "We could see each other every day then."
My pulse races. It is a terrible affliction, to have your heart lurch this way and that at nothing more than another's glance, another's breath. "If you like."
"What a shame it is you aren't a man." Ploy's smile is only one half edged; the other, perhaps, is turned inward to cut herself. "Then I could have married you, you'd have returned garnished with not just a rank but also a wife, and all this would have been so perfect."
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eight Page 43