The Long List Anthology 2

by Aliette de Bodard

  The caravan pressed on. There was no talk, no sound, except the jingling of harness and the vague shush of sands shifted by their passage.

  Every night the brazen sphere dissolves in a molten line, compelling the gaze westward when the sky’s dark otherwise. With a similar compulsion, the least dampness in the driest wastes would seize Demane’s whole attention. No stopping at nightfall, nor for midnight, either: the caravan was still going after moonset. Under cloudless constellations, the camels trudged along the banks of a dead river, extinct since prehistory. They came to a stretch of arroyo where humidity hovered, where some deep spring leaked up even to the surface. Demane snapped the reins of his camel, hurrying the beast from midpack to the caravan’s forefront, where Captain rode.

  Master Suresh kept watch on all such urgencies. He too brought his camel up abreast, in time to see Demane’s gesture and hear the offending word. “Water?” the caravanmaster cried. “Succubee of thirst and mirage! They have fucked out that man’s brains, Captain. Tell your fevered brother: this river died before the dragons burnt Daluça!”

  The captain ran every day, and much farther on some, whether for penance or harder exercise, who knew. That day he’d run from Ajeric’s wells until after sundown. He’d only just mounted his camel. With heart-spoke fatigue, he looked at Demane. Are you sure? Don’t make a fool of me.

  “I’m telling you, Captain.” Demane pointed again down the arroyo’s draw. “It’s good water right there.”

  Captain turned to the caravanmaster and gave beautiful corroboration. “It’s yours to say: stop or go on. But the water is here, Master Suresh.” The master muttered vile curses—not really doubting, though. The captain’s word had weight.

  “Hold here!” the master bellowed to his caravan.

  Spades, mallet, chisel. Demane chose Messed Up, Michelo, Wock, and the captain himself: the men strongest in the caravan. The long draw was more rock than sand, but not steep. By dim stars, the chosen picked their way down. The silver night ablaze for him, Demane ran ahead to where wetness rose richest, near a boulder.

  Bent over, noses in the sand and pressed to the rim of the half-ton slab, even the others could smell it. But there was no trickle, only a dark stain in the sand. Nor could they shift the stone, and to bring down more hands would only crowd and hinder, not help.

  “Let me try something,” Demane said. He had the captain give his highest, sharpest cries, and listening to echoes the rock returned, chose a spot to crouch. He milked his third eye for vitriol. It took time, and to the others it seemed that Demane only knelt, lost in thought or prayer for water. He’d once accomplished this feat as a boy, when still a novice, but never since in earnest.

  Master Suresh called down bitterly.

  Dolce, the captain called back.

  Some time later, Messed Up nudged Demane’s shoulder. “Damn, Sorcerer.” He breathed by mouth, and poked Demane again. “Why you just setting there?” Demane tried to wave him off, focusing on the contract-release of the tiniest, most obscure muscles.

  Captain pulled Messed Up back.

  Mouth full, Demane bowed and pressed his lips to a crack under the rock. He spat hard. Weak phosphoros was hid by his body, but the rock cried out—inorganic cavils and groans. “¡Coño!” “The fuck was that?” the brothers exclaimed. Virulent potency sheared deep feet through rock, and then sinking, smelted and cracked the stone. Igneous fumes, hot, hissed out. Demane jumped up and back with the rest. When the fiery stink had cleared, Captain waved Demane beside him, and the other three to the rock’s opposite side. This time their strength sufficed to tip the boulder out from the greater shelf beneath. They sent it on its way, sliding to the sandy bottom.

  “Pero no veo naá . . .” Wock began, and then heard. So did they all: a burbling sigh, the sweet sound of water pissing through fractured stone; then saw the starlit froth too, as it welled up, running away in glitters over the thirsty sand and gravel. Messed Up fell greedily to hands and knees.

  “Water,” Captain sang to the ridge above. “Come down.” The caravan came.

  • • • •

  Abundant water flowed with the effect of wine. The caravan drank and drank and lay down anywhere. Brothers should have known the routine. Five different men guarded each quarter of the night, while four slept the night through. They’d done so more than eighty times already, at every sleep-camp when Captain called the watch. But by the lucky springs, so late it would dawn soon, Captain sat for a moment in the sand. And it must surely have felt soft to him, for he began to nod, his lips slackening. Across camp, watching between slow blinks, Demane lay stretched out already. It had been a long day of highs and lows; he too was at lowest ebb. His knack for medicinals, as it turned out, had proved no help at all with venoms. That feat had drained Demane to the dregs. He ought to practice more, but why, nasty stuff . . . Demane slept too.

  Some nightmare woke him. The fleshcolored sky was sallowing in the orient. Over the lip of the ridge, down the arroyo’s east bank, ragged shapes with machètes or spears loped from rock to rock, sliding where their footing crumbled, descending on the caravan asleep in the bottom sands. Thirty? No, there were fifty of them at least!

  Desperados.

  Demane’s alarums woke the camp. Snoring brothers took hard kicks. Some sleepers he snatched up by the hair and dropped on foot awake. As soon as Demane began to yell, every bandit set up whooping, lunatic as hyenas. Twice the number of blades bristled downslope as up, and there was nobody silent, everyone screaming. Before the teeth of spears could chew them, the merchants scrambled past the brothers to cower against the western bank; and then top and bottom jaw of the skirmish closed. The merchants all lived. Brothers died.

  Where was Captain? Amidst the enemy already, a blur of black robes, quarter-way-up the eastern slope in the thick of them. The captain went from one to another, inspiring shrill agony or utter silence as he passed. By sixes and sevens the bandits would close with him before he got the numbers down. A full half dozen pressing together could scrawl shallow wounds on him, or rend his robe. Captain in turn pocked the crush with every movement.

  Chickenty thought he was a hero too. Though Demane called him back where the brothers rallied at the bottom, Chickenty ran on upslope. He speared one desperado, and then another behind that first. He engaged a third. Weeks before, in the last raid, he’d worked wonders with his quick feet on firm ground. But sand shifts and rolls, worse on the uphill, and no one’s feet can be as fast or sure. Some fourth desperado came driving in on Chick’s blindside, and he did hear Demane’s warning shout. But his step sideways was not quick enough, and he slipped. The spear skewered Chick kidney-to-kidney. Crumpling sidewise, he vomited blood, and was the first brother to die.

  There is a principle called TSIM. Through deep time the universe complicates, all things whatsoever arising from the mother quantum, precisely so this man (writhing now on Demane’s spearpoint) might enjoy sentience, choice, and love. This is TSIM. And all who claim to follow the principle must have hands loath and cold when it comes time to kill. You’re sworn to better work than murder. Unreckoned aeons gone by, and incalculable effort spent, for what? To kill a man, your unctuous shaft dragging, slippery and bone-caught, through your grasp? Demane braced his foot to the deadman’s chest, crushing ribs and sternum under his heel, until his spearpoint pulled loose. Clear as day he heard the Tower laughing on its left side: TSOA. Chaos and pointlessness are the point! That is TSOA. But divinity knocked about inside Demane like some great-winged bird caught indoors, frantic to find that one open window again; and so, however slow and reluctant, still he had faster hands, stronger arms, than anyone facing him.

  Xho Xho, Walead, and Bou, clumsy runts all three, wisely kept together. Four times they repeated the same maneuver—scatter, flank, triple-thrust—that Captain had taught them. But then Walead came up tardy on the left and Bou, in front, died for it. So too might have Xho Xho, when the bandit whirled right, wolf-howling. Demane threw his spear into the ma
n’s warcry. Bad teeth had clamped onto the shaft when Demane wrenched his spearhead out.

  Messed Up roared and stabbed. A wattle of gore, long and red, dangled off his jaw. The seemly flesh had been laid back, his bloodwashed molars in naked discovery, also the bones of his cheek and jaw, and much busy undergristle besides. Desperados scattered away from him. But Messed Up caught them, and killed them, anyway. Rats in rout, with the ratter giving chase! Behold the wake of strewn bodies, and here comes the big one himself, red-toothed and crazed. About the business best suiting him.

  No one could save Wock. Nor the twins, Cruz and Glório. Demane didn’t even know they’d died ’til afterwards.

  Teef and Barkeem, hemmed in by mayhem. Hard pressed by two bandits, T-Jawn scrabbled for footing on a steep patch of sand. He fell, slaughter-ready, before both spears. Demane was too far away to rescue any of the three. Not the captain, though; he swooped in, with the same acts dealing death and deliverance. The point and edge of his spear opened red lips in one bandit’s throat. Lifesblood emptied from that new mouth, while the other bandit took the same blow’s downstroke, which cored his heart. Captain made the body dance with the twist-jerk of freeing his spear. Beside the two abruptly dead, one of the desperadoes attacking Teef quailed and ran. Captain threw his spear half through the fleeing man’s back. He left the corpse transfixed, and yanked his old-style Daluçan knife from its baldric. Called, properly, “sword,” the blade was arm’s length, and much too long to ply for eating, hunting, or any use apart from war. Barkeem backed from some long-armed bandit who had two daggers, twin snakes, striking from either hand. Captain, in the act of drawing his sword, took the top off that bandit’s head. Crown and brow slid, widthwise, from cheeks and jowls. Walead and Xho Xho were in straits again. The captain flew to their salvation—not as some crow might, but his robes as black as wings, and covering the ground as swiftly.

  Demane killed the man he fought, and the hot excess of bandit’s blood provoked a vision, a moment of retrospect, or of some life unlived. Bangles, khol’d eyes, ankles chiming tiny bells. The captain’s naked torso, lithe and rippling. His thighs half-clad in gauze of gold, loins in leopard suede. Some history that might have been, or had been: the captain dancing for the Olorumi sovereign or Kidanese empress. When that august hand waved to clear a marble hall, one hot glance said to him: You, stay. Demane glimpsed shadows of a world forgone in Captain’s prosecution of the counterattack. Had nimble limbs turned to other purposes, had they cultivated a different grace. Demane saw some brother down.

  Faedou rolled apart from a throttled corpse, the dead man still clutching a knife driven into living flesh. Faedou pried off the futile grip, and plucked the blade from his thigh. On first and second attempt, he couldn’t stand. By the third, Demane had reached him and was kneeling. “Sorcerer . . . , “Faedou panted shallowly, “. . . head up!”

  Some mother’s son tilted downhill. About thirteen years old, maybe twelve, the bandit boy held his spear as mounted men hold a lance. There was time and space enough for Demane to throw his spear, but he didn’t. Even a moment later, his reach being much longer, Demane might have simply angled up his spear. Running headlong, the boy would have impaled himself on the point, like a chunk of meat on a skewer. Instead, Demane dropped his spear and caught the boy’s with one hand, just below the point.

  Though slowed, the boy wasn’t stopped. Faedou howled and curled like a beetle, his leg kicked or trod in the scuffle. Demane’s palm burned as the spearshaft greased down his bloodslick grip. The leverage was all wrong for him, perfect for the boy: on the downhill, speeding weight behind him, a two-handed grip. Demane had thrown his right and stronger hand back, braced to the ground, to keep himself from reeling ass over end. The child bore down, driving with desperate strength. Chapped lips snarling back from whitest teeth.

  This was not the way he’d thought he’d die. But as the spearpoint broke skin on his chest, Demane felt only sublime relief: TSIM. No one else’s son would die by his hands today, or ever again. Then red gleamed, sunlight on wet steel. Smitten off, the boy’s head flew, fell, rolled away downhill. Arterial jets from the stump spewed brighter amidst darker dribble. It listed, its knees buckled, and rather than drop the corpse went subsiding down in stages, to bow over and decant headless onto the sands. Captain—

  • • • •

  “No, wait!”

  Xho Xho grabbed Demane’s arm, swinging off his feet for a moment like a little monkey on a big branch. “We cain’t go in Mother of Waters like this. We gotta go in through there.” Through the great gates puncturing the squat tower on the east, the boy meant, pointing a finger thither. Thick as a man was tall, and painted over with bright murals, adobe ramparts walled only the eastern boundary of the Station. Demane would have led them into town up a shepherds’ path, on the south side.

  “Yeah, I know it’s strange, Sorcerer,” the boy said. “I can see what you mean about the walls. But the fo-so don’t play.” Xho Xho had been born at Mother of Waters—or in a tent outside the Station, anyway. “It’s the rules: caravans come in through the gates.”

  Foreign taboos, Demane decided.

  He sent them on ahead, where fort soldiers were collecting spears beneath the tower. Waving Cumalo to follow, he crouched outside, beside the painted walls. “Stand there, will you?” Demane pointed him into place. The two of them hailed from the same remote spur of the continent, and in these parts that made them countrymen. After the native fashion, Cumalo dressed in a voluminous black robe: perfectly suited to blocking the view of passersby.

  Demane opened his bag. He stuck his seven-foot spear down into it.

  “Hey, as long as you’ve got that bad boy open . . . ,” Cumalo said. “Do you care if I hold a couple pennies for you, at least ’til we get to Olorum?”

  Demane dug out a careless pinch of savings. He stood and handed the coins over uncounted.

  “Aw, Sorcerer. This is too much! All I need is—”

  “Don’t worry about it. Come on.” Demane laid a hand on Cumalo’s back, guiding him back toward the gates. There was a hard talk about gambling in the offing. Cumalo had never made bride-price, and so his lady up north in Philipiya still lived with her parents: two big boys, one baby girl, and twelve long years into an uneasy approximation of marriage. An ugly possibility troubled Demane’s mind. Could a good friend, your homeboy, also be a shiftless, trifling ne’er-do-well?¹ He looked up at the painted wall.

  A hero and his second, beset on all sides by a multinational host, were putting down the enemy with extreme prejudice. No man Demane had met was his match for strength, but the one painted centermost might surpass him in girth and brawn, if true to life. The hero’s right arm bulked with muscle still within human bounds. But that left arm was superhuman, and would have massed as thick as Demane’s thigh. It was the left hand, too, that gripped a rock-hewn axe depicted midstroke, dashing open fully half the front rank of foemen’s skulls. Five heads were as many eggs of bone, blood, brains bursting behind the sweep of the spiked stone that crowned the hero’s weapon. Five more crouched in a desperate scrum, transfixed before the fall of the meteor toward their heads. Beside the hero, his second lay about him with a Daluçan knife—a “sword”—scything the close-ranked enemy as might a farmer his corn. Scattered fingers, another hand still on its forearm, a head cloven crosswise, the crown of another with the cranial bowl dumping its jellies: these and other fruits of the flesh tumbled pell-mell in a grisly harvest. Neither the expression nor appearance of the hero’s second was marked out in particular detail, save for the coloring of his warrior braids. Those paints glistened as bright as agate or lapis lazuli.

  “It’s showing the battle of Sweet Wells Station,” Cumalo said.

  Demane asked, “Who’s he?”

  “Big one’s the Lion of Olorum. Generalissimo and the prince the old King chose to rule after him. But a two-headed mamba bit him and he died. The one with the long knife is—was—his right hand. The Lion loved his women an
d left twentysome wives, twice as many children; but those two, well, they say . . .” Cumalo looked at Demane askance, and, thinking again, said only, “That blue hair is really something, huh?”

  Demane shrugged.

  Through the gates was a view down the Mainway, to the bustle on the piazza at the Station’s center and farther, to the glimmer of Mother of Waters. Folk and beasts glutted the Mainway’s length with all the noise and stench to be expected in-town.

  Under-tower, a dozen fort soldiers mingled with the brothers. The fo-so handed out reclamation chits, collecting spears. They wore black robes, strung-bead commemorials of past actions; the youngbloods’ hair was plaited in looping designs, the oldheads in simple cornrows. The fo-so were all unmixed Olorumi, and therefore beardless as babies; their right cheeks smooth, the others finely mutilated. Insignia of a thornwasp, the one-stinger drone, was cut into every left cheek.

  “. . . vouchsafed none but them keeping to the Road. Certain doom befalls . . .”

  “This for that? Unt uh! This spear was my . . .”

  “Naw, you niggas right on time, matterfact. They got all the fights going today. Dogs, birds, dudes . . .”

  A wealthy merchant, in robes dyed the deepest color of lilies, remonstrated with the garrison’s commandant, whose cicatrix boasted three stingers, a thornwasp prince-of-nest. A handful of fo-so wore breastplates weathered by rust or verdigris; the commandant’s, however, was made of some mirror-polished alloy, flashing even in the shadows under-tower. Not quite able to make out the discussion between the merchant and elite soldier in so much crosstalk and din, Demane sidled closer.

  The merchant had just come in with that smaller caravan, fresh off the route Master Suresh l’Merqerim meant to follow tomorrow. Standing attendance on the merchant was a man prepossessing as only brothers were: thick-thewed, with a brawler’s ears, nose, and scars. His master was most insistent: “And yet, that is precisely what we did do. Do you think us fools? All the way through the Wildeeps, not a man jack set foot off the safe way!”