The Long List Anthology 2

by Aliette de Bodard

  A single gobbet of bright jelly had splashed out of the wood tower, and glowed amidst the puddles of the Road. Undimmed by rain, like some imp from the firefields of Sol, it danced in the mud. Demane conjured a jar from his bag and with a single spilled drop quenched this molten errancy. He and Michelo kindled the other pyre.

  The merchant Qabr refused to sleep fireside with the rest of the caravan; not for this evening, no. Too many eyes on him, the others all murmuring, and with Dom Iuliano’s . . . absence, it was all rather too much, just now. Sincere thanks, however, for the concern, very kind—too kind. Demane spoke of the safety in numbers, of the dangers to the outlier who wanders from the herd; but with poignant little gestures and appalled stares, the merchant inspired in Demane such a feeling of brutish presumption that his tongue tripped over these warnings. “Bay, would you talk to him? See what you could do?” But neither could the captain’s most suasive song convince. Qabr sent back his nephews—one pale, one dark—to sleep among the crowds about the bonfires, after the boys had pitched the two-man tent in the darkness up-Road from the caravan proper. He went into the tent alone.

  Captain quartered the night, as always. No brother was to stand still or sit while on watch. Five would walk up and down with their spears at all times. On nights past the captain himself had often watched three full quarters, and slept only when Demane—“You, nobody else”—was awake and on watch. It seemed he meant to do the same tonight. Captain stalked restlessly, with the camp, the Road, and Wildeeps at either side, all under his fierce regard. Never did you see such an enemy of sleep!

  For his part, Demane had no quarrel with the body’s requirements, sleep least of all. Master Suresh had held the caravan to a cruel pace, with little rest: that, and stoking his metabolic blaze so high, had taken a toll on Demane. The sleepers lay tight-packed around the sorcerous fires. Ceding his spot to someone needing it, Demane spread his groundscloth outside those spheres of brightness and warmth. He sat crosslegged, spear easy to hand, and closed his eyes. Sleet fell on him, steamed away, and more fell. His trance deepened.

  Now and again he surfaced. Sleepless and unflagging, the captain could always be seen either pacing, or else startling to wakefulness some night’s watchman just beginning to nod. Captain had ridden hardly at all today, although keeping pace on foot at the caravan’s forefront had meant flat-out running. Demane thought, as often before: The littlest children do this. A baby rages against the eyes closing as if nothing were more hateful. Infants fight for every last instant awake, before being pulled suddenly under, as the captain soon would be, into a vortex of compulsory sleep.

  Demane at times could seem to be reading the soul’s deepest secrets, but no; it was the body he read. Or that was usually so. Now, in a trance mixing full consciousness with deepest dream, he could glimpse, and even read, a line or two of the soul’s secret script. “Hey,” he called, beckoning to Captain—who looked first to the sentries: Cumalo, Messed Up, Kazza, Faried, Michelo.

  Kazza, in soft falsetto crooning. I love my wife. She went away from me. What more is there to say? The other four brothers whose watch it rightly was were all alert too, and pacing up and down. So the captain came over and sat. Say you were a big and burly man who by nature was greatly radiant of heat; then you must learn that your lover would in hot oppressive weathers prefer some distance between you at the hour of sleep, and must learn never to take that move away personally, for it wasn’t meant so, not at all. Still, how deeply gratifying, on a raw chill night, to be so jealously pressed against, when you gathered him in snug under a heavy arm. Some other night, Captain would have flung the arm off, overcautious of any touch nearly to the point of giving himself away (for the deeply secretive cannot grasp that protecting your secret too fiercely exposes it). I’d give my life to set eyes on her again. I loved my wife. Tonight, Captain’s robe was soaked through, and he might be agile, might be quick, but when hawk blew like this, you wanted thickness, not rawboned whipcord—or at least a thick lover. Here, under this arm and against this body, there was vast and soporific warmth.

  “Now you free,” Demane said, not quite whispering—nor quite awake. “He been dead and gone, you know.”

  Captain sleepily rolled his head on Demane’s shoulder to look at him. What and who are you talking about?

  “That man that tangled fingers in your hair and took away your choice. A prince, I think. No, wait: a king? King-prince. Lion-prince. The Lion.”

  At Demane’s words the captain’s face went slack with horror.

  “So young back then, you made a bad choice, Captain. Amante, bailarín, cantante. My Isa of the Song and Inner Chambers. But it was a very long time ago, wasn’t it? Free now, you could make another choice. A good one. For your happiness—”

  Captain slapped a hand over Demane’s mouth. “Sorcerer: hush.”

  Demane blinked slowly, and came fully awake. “Sorry, Captain,” he said once the reluctant palm allowed him speech. “Sometimes in trance I get to talking out of turn. Did I say what I had no business knowing? Don’t let it worry you. I always forget by morning.”

  Would this prophetic indiscretion put him to flight, drive the captain back out prowling in the cold? No. Though a mind twists and turns, most complicated of all things, the body is a simple creature, and prefers love and comfort, to be where it feels safe. On a freezing night, this one spot right here, ahhh . . . Captain fell asleep. Cumalo glanced over. He signed with a hand as folk did back home in the green hills, when the hunt was successful, or some athlete won in the games, or sweethearts were finally wed. Victory, blessings, congratulations! Cumalo thankfully did not whoop out the ululating cry as well. Demane smiled, made a shooing gesture, and closed his eyes. He set himself to wake at the final quarter of the night, his watch.

  The adept will keep an ear out, even when asleep. Such a big camp never ceases to rustle with a thousand small sounds, but the deepest part of the mind, although sleeping, can sort out that noise which doesn’t fit. That one there. Bone cracking? Demane opened his eyes and spotted Cumalo, up-Road—and there: the sucking withdrawl of deep-embedded fangs?—leaning over at the tent of the merchant Qabr. Sir? Are you well? Cumalo whispered. Then from within the tent, a great dark hand swiped out, brushing his brother’s belly.

  Cumalo toppled backwards, screaming. His innards rippled greasily forth. Blasted out of sleep, Demane lurched upright, spear in hand: already running. Captain came afoot beside him, passing him by the third stride. A red maw emerged from the tent’s flaps, its tusks and teeth all golden-plaqued. They snapped onto Cumalo’s shoulder, and bones cracked loudly again, this time such that everyone heard. The tent collapsed just as he and the captain had closed nine and twelve of the twenty strides’ distance. Bulk crashed into the nightwood on the east, and all the noise and disturbance of leaves and branches that could be made was made. They’d reached the fallen tent by their sixth heartbeat, but still too late.

  The screaming stopped.

  Hell broke loose, the whole camp awake. Anarch of the chaos, Messed Up ran to the dark edge of the Road. “Where it at? Where it go?” There, haranguing the wall of brush—though not entering it, mind—Messed Up scuttled back and forth. “I just need to see that mammerjammer to kill it!” He stabbed his spearpoint into leaves. Silhouetted in orange shadows about the fires, better than one hundred heads raised up, all of them shouting the same, what just happened, what was that, the whole camp like a yard full of dogs baying at the night, though the house was already plundered, the thief long fled.

  “BE STILL.”

  Captain’s voice smote and crushed the uproar. These words rang out huge and bronze as peals struck off some twelve-ton bell, STILL echoing back and subsumed by BE, and this rich noise continuing to compound as it diminished in slow opulence.

  Struck dumb, no one in the caravan missed Cumalo gag his last. That noise, and the rain hissing into the fires: otherwise the camp was silent. The caravan heard that moan, cut short. From the noctuarium, on its own
ground, the great cat purred resonant malice. Captain took the bait and bolted toward the monster, which seemed to lurk in shadows only a few steps off-Road. To step off here, however, was to cross planets and millennia; for all the worlds were in flux, and poised to change on the moment for anyplace in the wild depths of time and space. A trap: to fling any pursuit into a random point of infinity—

  Demane lunged, catching Captain’s shins, and bore them both down to the ground.

  “Stop, Isa, stop. I couldn’t catch him like this, at night under a cloudy sky. No way you can!” Demane brought his weight to bear, pinning the thrashing man beneath him. “Tiger killed him already, and will eat you too.” Wildly Captain fought to rise, but Demane was stronger. “By day, Isa, in the sun. When we can see the signs. We both go and catch him then, that jukiere!”

  The captain’s frenzy stilled. One of his hands touched Demane’s wrist and, suddenly by some wrestler’s black magic, Demane found himself stunned and on the bottom, Captain on top. He got off and to his feet, looking blankly down—but accepted an outstretched hand, to pull Demane up beside him.

  The caravan watched its two best. No differently would children watch mama and papa squabble in the parlor as the house went up, the heat intolerable, and fire washing over the walls: desperately hanging on to every word, for their lives depended on this outcome. Firelight flickering on wet skin picked out the dark crowd in orange glimmers. Then a pyre came crashing down upon itself, and grown men gave the shrieks of merest girls. There was sheepish silence afterwards, in which they heard heavy meat dragged away through thicket and underbrush. The bitter wind already was warming and dying down. Hot raindrops fell more and more among the cold, and soon only hot.

  They drew the merchant Qabr out feet first through the slashes in the tent’s back side. Nor were any wounds to be seen on his feet or legs, his robe all unstained, not one mark upon his torso: such that, at first, it seemed the merchant might emerge in their arms alive, only in a swoon. Then a stir of condolence moved through the littler brotherhood of merchant boys. The pale and dark nephews, one a fifth son, the other a seventh, had become sole and sudden inheritants of two fortunes. By their grief and its abandon, however, they’d rather had the uncles than coin. Below the neck, Qabr’s body was pristine and unharmed. His head, caught and crushed by long teeth, was a torn and punctured bag, slopping bloody curd and shards of skull.

  “For this we pay you full-weights of gold, Captain Isa Johnny?” Master Suresh l’Merqerim declaimed like a politician in the marketplace. “That some bitching whore out of Hell should come and go, butchering us merchants with impunity?” He gave them high-flown hands, outraged finger-pointing, the whole bit. “How will you make this good? Two excellent men dead already, two! And a brother.”

  “No one else will die,” sang the captain to the caravan basso profundissimo, that voice which is palpable in teeth and bones. “At daybreak, I’ll go into the Wildeeps and kill the jooker tiger.”

  That, obviously, wanted amending: “Me and Captain, both,” Demane said.

  The night was raw no longer, now sultry, without nip to the breeze. Still, an outcry went up when Demane moved to quench the fires. So he left the lights burning. In that hellish heat, son huddled beside father, nephew by uncle, brother with brother. The caravan had stopped quite early for the night; day therefore took its sweet time coming. A few more tired than afraid succumbed to sleep, and Captain among them. Several times, as a swimmer drowns, he nodded up to wakefulness, but slipped always back under, until his head came up no more.

  Man or woman, everyone in the green hills was permitted three days after any death during which to howl out their grief. On the fourth day you had to begin picking up your responsibilities again. Here, though . . . a tight jaw, a little red-eyed blinking, was meant to be the extent of it. Cumalo! Not being made for such noiseless tears, Demane cheated, storing away his grief.¹ He breathed in the measured way Aunty had taught him, and opened his senses fully to the surroundings, allowing his observation of every stimulus to hone ever finer and more granular until he became a sentinel unbeholden to thought or feeling, only alert, only watching.

  The sleepless faced the east. And hardly did dawn extend a rosy finger to caress the sky before Master Suresh crossed the mud from one of the lowburning fires. He made to kick Captain’s foot and waken him, but thought better and checked, seeing Demane’s face. There, something deep—fell and deep—came very near the surface. The Sorcerer shrugged and the captain’s head rolled upon his shoulder—he jerked awake. They stood. From the gore-spatter in the mud up-Road, and thence into the greenish murk of the Wildeeps, they followed the dragtrail of Cumalo’s body.

  ¹ You will knock, and a sharp-eyed old man answer. “Yes?” He’ll look you over and see what you hold: a fist-size pouch, fat with coin. “What do you want?”“To talk to the lady of the warrior Cumalo, please. I was a friend of his.” You see the elder grasps at once what news you bring, but he’ll bridle and bluster anyway, in the tedious way of northern men. “No call to go bothering my daughter. And it ain’t proper, nohow, you calling on a married lady. Speak your piece to me.” Not to bandy words on some doorstep will you have come fifteen hundred miles, nor yet will you have learned to fully bank the fires of godhead—still there will be flares—and this with nothing said of divinity’s concomitants: the great arrogance, the small sufferance of fools. “Bring me before his wife, little man, and you’d best not make me say it again.” Through successive dark rooms you will follow toward a doorway full of white glare, the old man calling Janisse, somebody come for you! Sun shall beat upon a courtyard. Hen and pullets scratch the dust. Two olivos grow ancient and gnarled. Mother wash child. The woman, her skirts wet, lifts a towel-wrapped baby into her arms from gray water filling a tub. She’s taller than you, long-armed, smelling of benignity and fatigue: everything as Cumalo described. It’s the sight of the baby, however, that undoes you. Three years old and very much alive, she has the same heavy-lidded eyes, same untroubled air, as the dead man who was her father. “Ma’am . . . ,” you’ll say, holding out the little bag of full-weights. “Your husband . . .” Then your voice clots, and your eyes spill the first tears they will have shed for poor Cumalo; Janisse shaking her head slowly at first, and then with vehemence. These will be the gesture and instant comprehension of someone who’s always known she’d have to hear what’s about to be said. The child, too young to understand, sleepily sucks her thumb, looking between weeping mother, weeping stranger.

  Whereof no one dared speak but all did wonder, that among them a single disciple should be held, and he alone, in deeper confidence. Once in bitter jest a brother called that preferred disciple the Lover: hence the name, not his own, which comes down to us. None save for the Lover accompanied the Patriarch upon the unknown errand when nights were dark, nor did anyone see them again before the morning . . .

  from Commentaries on Holy Recitature

  Seventh of Seven

  . . . into a place of deciduous gigantism, the air too rich and stinking of sulfur, of ozone, some unearthly black snow—ash, rather—sifting down: another world, and bright midmorning here. Muttering earthquake, muttering pyroclastic surge, the ground underfoot thrummed. “You near about beat,” Demane said, urgency giving his tone an edge. “Snatch that off your head, and you won’t be.”

  Captain glanced over his shoulder at the Road. A few from the caravan, like children standing before a mirror, gaped blindly back at him.

  “They cain’t see you,” Demane snapped. “It’s another world from there. And we gotta go—so, right now, Isa.” To stand atop a supervolcano, nine months gravid and about to blow, was nerve-wracking. “Quick!”

  Not so quick: just a headscarf, but there have been many shy virgins who shimmied from their drawers more boldly. Uncovered, Captain’s hair flashed once blindingly (Demane—eyes closed, a hand thrown up to shield them further—saw that red flare) and then, gorging widely upon EMR, the heliophages dimmed and darkened past m
atte, past black, to the fuliginous. Some other time, Demane would have lingered over this sight, for it was wonderful to see how Captain’s eyes, bloodshot and purple-shadowed, instantly clarified, and every sign of fatigue and endurance sloughed from him, exchanged for the fretful antsiness of a superb and rested athlete. But they were standing on a continent that was about to halve in size. Demane rechecked the spoor and trail, seized the captain’s hand, and flung him forward through dense foliage into the next world, himself right behind . . .

  . . . pulling the captain second to take point himself, as soon as the leaves snapped closed behind them. “Come here,” he said; Captain came into his arms. “Close your eyes.” Demane’s pores drenched them both, misting aroma herbaceous and evergreen. The air around them cleared, clouds of midge and mosquito falling away.

  The captain screwed up his face, blinking away tears. “Ah! Stinks like rosemary.”

  Nothing would scent their approach or passage now, either by nose or tongue. They would still, of course, have to watch out, and take care about making noise. And on, to the next world . . .

  Had he gone home to the green hills, Demane would have seen men dressed sensibly for the heat, women walking boldly about their business; he could again have expressed himself in the mothertongue, and stopped trying to uphold foreign ways. Going off-Road into the Wildeeps was a joyful homecoming of another kind. Only in the most perilous wilderness could wild power safely unleash itself.