Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World

by Caroline M. Yoachim

  Odion ran his fingertips up the seam of the woman’s left arm, then down the seam of her right. His touch was firm enough to feel both the surface seam and the muscles underneath, allowing him to test the depth of the stitches. He tested the woman’s legs, her chest, and finally her face. He didn’t speak as he worked.

  “Flawless,” he said. “You never make mistakes.”

  “I’m well-practiced now,” Njeri answered. “I made my mistakes before your time.”

  She laid her fingers on the cool flesh at the base of the woman’s neck. Odion might be more likely to catch a mistake, but that did not relieve Njeri of her obligation to check her own work. She pressed her fingers along the center seam, sliding her hand between the woman’s breasts and over the gentle rounding of her belly. Her body was softer than Njeri’s, an alluring contrast to the fierceness she had shown in facing the wall. Where Njeri was lean and angular, this woman was feminine and curved. Njeri lost her place and had to backtrack her pattern along the seams.

  “Did I miss something?” Odion asked, frowning. He placed his hand over Njeri’s.

  “No,” Njeri said. She moved her hand away and finished tracing the seams.

  Confident that she had made no errors, Njeri slipped her thumb and index finger into the woman’s mouth, which was dry and cool, preserved in a state of half life. She grasped the mindstone and pulled it free. The woman’s muscles tensed, then relaxed.

  Odion held out a cup of hibiscus mint tea, but Njeri waved it away. Too soon. The woman’s eyes were closed, she wasn’t ready to face the world. She remained motionless, as though the stone was still in her mouth. Even her breath was shallow, as though she begrudged the rising and falling of her chest.

  Odion shifted his weight from foot to foot, refusing to be still. Patience was not a virtue he possessed. Perhaps the young were never patient. Njeri had not been, when she was Odion’s age. Noticing her attention, Odion thrust the cup forward again. Njeri took it.

  The woman’s eyes opened, clear and dark.

  “The light of the wall shines upon us and reveals our shadows,” Njeri said. “Its light is the gift of a race long gone from this earth. You have faced the wall and returned. Speak your name and you may go.”

  These were the ritual words that Talib had taught her, when she was in training. There was a falseness to them, for no patient was ever ready to leave so soon after being awakened, and none saw their ordeal as a gift. But the speaking of names was good, for it confirmed that the mind had returned from the stone. A name provided continuity between time before the wall and time afterwards.

  “Kanika.” Her voice was breathy and weak. Odion pulled her shoulders up and pushed a wedge of bundled straw behind her back so she could sit. Njeri tipped the cup against Kanika’s lips, slowly pouring tea into her mouth. For every sip she swallowed, two spilled down her neck and over her chest. Njeri gave the empty cup to Odion to refill it.

  “My son?” Kanika asked. “Bahtir’s men came for my son.”

  General Bahtir put only his most powerful enemies on the wall, for fear that if he killed them they would curse him from the Valley of the Dead. A child, even one with royal ancestry, did not pose enough of a threat to be spared.

  Odion returned with more tea. “Drink,” he said, pressing the cup into Kanika’s hands. Njeri reached to take it from her, but she clutched the carved wood in her fingers and drained the cup.

  “I remember,” she said, “I feel myself open on the wall. Like looking in from the outside.”

  Her hands shook. Had there been any tea left, it would have sloshed over the sides. “So much darkness I never knew was there, and my son is dead by now, because I couldn’t protect him. I failed him. You should have killed me. There’s nothing left of me worth saving.”

  Njeri took the cup. She wanted to cradle Kanika in her arms and comfort her, but she had to act as a surgeon, not as a friend. She searched for something she could do to ease Kanika’s pain. The stone that had held Kanika’s mind still sat beside her on the table. Rainbows swirled beneath the clear surface of the smooth stone. It was a relic of the Ancients, made from the same glassy material as the wall.

  “Here.” Njeri picked up the mindstone and pressed it into Kanika’s hand. “To remind you that there is light inside you too. The colors in this stone are the echoes of your mind.”

  “There are not so many stones that we can give them freely,” Odion said. He scowled at Njeri. “You’re treating her differently because she’s a woman, because you knew her before the wall.”

  There was truth to that, but Njeri did not retract her offer. Kanika stared into the stone. “So pretty. Light without shadows. I could swallow it, and drift away from my pain.”

  “You would have no way to return, if you changed your mind,” Njeri said.

  Kanika smiled, but her eyes were sad. “I speak of escape, but that has never been my way, you know that. Holding life at such a distance would be like not living at all, too big a price to pay.”

  Odion reached for the mindstone, to take it from her, but she closed her fingers over it.

  “I may not be able to use the stone,” she told him, “but I cannot give it up. It is my light, and I carry much darkness.”

  Heat rose from the cracked-mud earth. The stars winked in and out of existence at the edge of Njeri’s senses, their light distorted by miles of wavering sky. Beyond the thatched rooftops of the village, rolling hills of dry grass stretched into the darkness. Kanika leaned against Njeri as they walked across the village to the healer’s hut.

  “I wish I could go home,” Kanika said. “I want to pull into myself and sleep. I feel like I could sleep forever.”

  “Your punishment is ended. You could leave for home tomorrow, if you wished,” Njeri said, but she hoped that Kanika would stay.

  “Ended? The wall was the worst, Njeri, but my punishment will last until I die. Anyone who sees my skin will know that I hung on the wall. Do you think people will forgive me? Embrace me into their lives?”

  “Any man worth having would want you still,” Njeri said. “Or any woman.”

  Njeri couldn’t read Kanika’s expression. Was there interest there?

  “You don’t know what it’s like to be up on the wall. The things I saw . . .” Kanika brought her hand to her heart, digging her fingers into the fabric of her shirt to press against the seams in her skin.

  “Dreams from the mindstone. Many of my patients have spoken of such visions.”

  “No. There is only truth on the wall,” Kanika said. “I thought, before I went on the wall, that I wouldn’t have shadows. But I was only adding self-deception and arrogance to the list of my flaws.” Her words came in a steady stream, with only the barest pauses for breath. “No one can understand me, not with these scars. Not because of how I look, but because I know my shadowself.”

  Kanika fell silent as they approached a cluster of Bahtir’s guardsmen. Normally they patrolled the periphery of the village in pairs, so it was unusual to see them gathered in the road. Several men shook their shields, zebraskins stretched taut over oval frames. Strands of human teeth hung below and rattled as the shields moved. One man ran his fingers over the tigers-eye clasp that held his threadbare orange cloak closed, and another tapped the butt of his spear against the dirt. The guardsmen were on edge tonight.

  One of the men stepped forward to stop the women, then recognized Njeri and saw Kanika’s scars. He signaled to the others, and the entire group turned and headed back towards the guardhouse, a large clay-brick building at the outskirts of the village. When they had gone, Kanika pulled out her mindstone. In the moonlight there were no rainbows, only swirls of a silvery blue. “This is what I thought I was. I was so foolish.”

  “That is as much a part of you as the shadows are,” Njeri said.

  “We all have darkness,” Kanika said.

  Njeri had heard this from many of her patients. It was a source of great comfort for them to think that they were not alone in hav
ing shadows. Sometimes Njeri wondered if there was truth in their assertion. There was no way to know; the innocent weren’t sentenced to hang on the wall. “You’ve lived your life well, despite your darkness. Doesn’t that give you some comfort?”

  “No, don’t you see? We all have darkness. All of us,” Kanika pulled away. “The wall is pointless. You torture people for no purpose.”

  Kanika took a few steps, then stumbled. Njeri caught her. Her skin was moist with sweat—heat and exertion were taking their toll. “The wall is about revealing a person’s darkest truth. If they see their darkness, they can fight it. The knowledge can heal them.”

  “It destroys them. It destroys me. And you condemn people to this torture.”

  “I am the hands that do the work,” Njeri said. “I don’t decide who faces the wall.”

  Kanika tried to pull away a second time, but she was too weak. “You pass judgment every time you open someone onto the wall. Don’t pass the responsibility to someone else. We all judge, and we all mete out our punishments. You saw how all the guardsmen fled at the sight of me.”

  “Superstitious fools,” Njeri said.

  They walked in silence to Durratse’s door. Njeri knew the old healer well, for he had cared for her for several months after her mother died. She watched carefully for his reaction when he opened his door. He hid his revulsion well, but she could see the slight flare of his nostrils, the falseness in his smile. She wondered how she’d failed to notice it with the other patients she’d brought him. Or perhaps he’d been more forgiving of the men.

  “We all judge,” Kanika repeated.

  Durratse led Kanika inside. It was late, so he did not invite Njeri in. He simply nodded his head and closed the door.

  The roughly hewn wood of the door had shrunk with weather and age, and she could still see them through the gaps in the wood. She wanted to argue with Kanika, to defend herself. Kanika insisted on focusing on the worst of the wall, the worst of her, the cutting. Like Odion, she paid no mind to the important work of sewing. She healed people, just as Durratse did, and her patients needed more healing than anyone.

  When Njeri went out to stoke her cooking fire shortly after sunrise, the village was bustling with unfamiliar guardsmen. The new arrivals were Upyatu—a tall people, with broad flat feet. She watched them as she boiled plantains for breakfast. They were more boisterous than Bahtir’s men; they spoke in loud voices punctuated with barking laughter. Their heads were covered with elaborate beaded headdresses, and their shields were round and crimson. It could mean only one thing. The capitol had fallen.

  Njeri pounded the boiled plantains into mash. It made little difference to her, the struggle for power. One general was replaced by another, but they all wanted the same work done. She wished for peace not out of support for any current ruler, but because in times of war she had to put more people to the wall. She took her mash back to the hut, where Odion was waiting.

  “The new general brought two prisoners for the wall,” he said, speaking quickly. “He wants to hang them together.”

  Njeri divided the mash into two bowls and topped each one with slices of green mango. How could Odion be excited about such a thing? The Maiwatu were his people. Besides, to put criminals on the wall was one thing, but to leave one there for the time it took to flay a second was cruel. Dissecting them simultaneously, but slowly, would be no better. “Cruelty. Already I dislike the man.”

  Odion stirred his mash. “I thought, with two men, I might be charged with opening one of them.”

  “We have but one obsidian blade,” Njeri said, “and the new general will want the services of a surgeon, not an apprentice. I will open them, and you will assist, as we have always done.”

  A guardsman came to fetch them before they’d finished their morning meal. He was paler even than Odion, with a reddish tint to his skin, like dry dusty earth. Shorter, too, than most Upyatu warriors, and injured. Njeri could just make out the outlines of a bandage beneath the guardsman’s tightly fitted leather tunic.

  “General Yafeu commands your presence.” The guardsman’s voice was nasal, and far higher pitched than Njeri expected. Not a man at all, but a woman with her breasts bound. The warrior laughed at Njeri’s surprise. “Call me Zola, and a woman. Bahtir would not allow women in the fight, he wanted them only for his bed. Yafeu is better. With him I can show my strength in both places.”

  Zola grinned at Odion, exposing teeth sharpened into points. Her stare had an animal quality to it, something almost predatory. Judging from his reluctance to meet the woman’s stare, Odion did not find her aggression appealing. Njeri didn’t like it either; Zola had a showiness about her that was distinctly off-putting. Not like Kanika’s understated strength.

  Njeri took up her obsidian blade, protected in its leather sheath. “The general will set us to work immediately then?”

  “In a land where power shifts like flowing water, there is no later. Everything worth doing is worth doing now.” Zola glanced again at Odion, but again he gave her no response. She shrugged and led them to the guardhouse. A pair of goats were tethered outside, undoubtedly part of her payment for serving the new general.

  Before they entered, Zola tapped the door three times with one end of her bow, announcing their arrival to those inside. The guardhouse looked the same as it always had. Sleeping bunks lined the walls, and supplies were stacked in neat piles beneath and around the beds. Only the occupants had changed, the Maiwatu guardsmen replaced by the Upyatu.

  General Yafeu sat atop a makeshift throne at the back of the room. He was a young man, barely older than Odion, and he had surrounded himself with female guardsmen. His guards were in full uniform, but the general’s chest was bare except for a piece of vibrant yellow citrine that hung on a leather cord. It was carved into the shape of a lion’s head, reminiscent of the decorations on the citrine throne in the capitol. Two other stones hung from his belt, Bahtir’s tiger-eye and the rose quartz of Bahtir’s predecessor. At the base of Yafeu’s throne were two men, bound and gagged. Njeri was unsurprised to see that Bahtir was one of the prisoners. The other was a man she did not recognize.

  Zola stood to left side of the general’s throne and whispered something into his ear.

  “So you are the Surgeon of Stonewall,” Yafeu said.

  “Yes,” she replied, “and this is my apprentice.” She did not bother with her name, or Odion’s, for Yafeu had the look of a man who cared not about such things.

  “And the wall will show these men for the evil creatures they are?” Yafeu asked, gesturing at his prisoners and curling his lips as though the very thought of them repulsed him.

  “The wall reveals the innermost secrets of our nature,” Njeri replied. “Those placed on the wall can hide nothing.”

  Odion stepped forward. “If they have shadow in them, the wall will expose it.”

  Njeri resisted the urge to rebuke her apprentice, but only because she didn’t wish to fight in front of the general. It was not his place to speak in this situation, and it diminished Njeri that he would misbehave like this.

  General Yafeu laughed. “I like this apprentice of yours. He shows spirit, and a willingness to please.”

  Njeri forced herself to nod and smile, even as Yafeu let his gaze linger on her apprentice. The general’s words held the promise of intimacy that Odion had long sought with Njeri, and the boy was lonely enough that he might be swayed by the man’s attention. She would have to be careful.

  A guardsman entered without knocking and knelt, with his head bowed, in the center of the room. He was coated in sweat and dirt, and panted as though he had run the entire way from the capitol.

  “Go.” Yafeu waved them away. “I will send you the prisoners when I’m finished here, and you can begin your work.”

  The wall was three times as tall as Njeri, and thicker than the length of her arm. It stretched twice the length of the village, winding east into the hills like a crystal snake. The morning sun glinted bright off the
stones, if they could really be called stones. The wall was made from blocks as clear as glass, irregularly shaped but fit together so seamlessly that there was no need for mortar. According to Talib, the wall had once enclosed the entire nation of the Ancients. The fragments that remained were laid roughly in a circle, with the capitol in the center.

  “The stone wall,” Yafeu said. “It’s more impressive than the pitiful fragment in Zwibe. Though neither looks anything like stone.”

  Odion showed no reaction to the mention of his home village. Instead, he answered the unasked question in Yafeu’s comment. “They call it the stone wall because people used to throw stones at the condemned while they hung. You can see the cracks where rocks flew wide of their targets.”

  “The practice was discarded centuries ago,” Njeri added, before Yafeu got any ideas. “You can see how damaging it was to the wall.”

  Njeri did not mention that it also damaged the people that hung on the wall, making it impossible to sew them back together. General Yafeu shrugged, then waved his hand at the guardsmen. The two prisoners were marched out to stand before the wall. Njeri pressed her palm to the forehead of each man in a silent blessing. It was ironic that Bahtir, who had once feared the ghosts of the valley, now received a blessing that asked those same ghosts to protect him.

  “Don’t do this,” Bahtir pleaded. She had heard such pleas before, many times, but never from a man who had ordered others onto the wall. The former general had always seemed so brave, but that had been an illusion of his power. Now that he had no power, he had no courage.

  Njeri brushed her fingertips against the icy surface of the two mindstones in her pocket. She wondered if she would be brave, in Bahtir’s place. She liked to think that she would be, knowing that the wall revealed only the truth—nothing more and nothing less. Kanika had been brave. The thought of her called back her assertion that Njeri had been wrong to put people on the wall. Did these men deserve such punishment? It wasn’t her place to decide, it couldn’t be. Her job was to cut and to sew.