Ages of Wonder

by Julie E. Czerneda

  Hong Yen frowned. “It’s the spirit of a pond. Of course there’s only one.”

  “So, assuming it exists, what if it’s already filling the gap in another mourner’s life?”

  “I’ll kill that other mourner,” Hong Yen said, her expression serious.

  Chilled, Trinh stepped back from her.

  “Tell me,” Hong Yen said, pushing herself out of bed, her hair a tangled mass hanging down to her waist, her robes parting, revealing new bruises. She limped toward Trinh. “Where is it?”

  Trinh’s heartbeat quickened. What would Hong Yen do if she didn’t answer? Where had the bruises come from? What had Van and Hong Yen been doing? Why shouldn’t she tell Hong Yen where to go and be rid of her?

  “Look out the window. See those three mountains? Suong Ma Mountain is the tallest one.”

  Hong Yen’s wild eyes burned wilder. “That close?”

  Trinh nodded.

  Hong Yen rushed out barefoot, leaving the front doorway gaping in the morning sunlight. Trinh hurried outside and watched for trouble. Villagers stopped cleaning nets. Some of them asked Hong Yen where she thought she was going and that she should at least wear some shoes.

  Carrying a basket of clams, Van’s sister turned to Trinh. “Why the rush?”

  “She had a dream about her son. She’ll return when she realizes it was nothing but a dream,” Trinh said hastily.

  Van’s sister shook her head. “You let her dream too much.”

  The villagers resumed their chores. Relieved, Trinh went inside and continued mending baskets as she thought about her future. Once Hong Yen discovered there was no Wraith, she would leave forever. Her departure would anger Van, but hopefully not for long. Trinh envisioned how she might comfort him and how he might come to love her.

  The front door banged open. Van hung his hat on a hook and marched toward her.

  “My sister says you let Hong Yen go. Why didn’t you stop her?”

  Trinh hesitated. “I couldn’t. She would go or die.”

  “Where does she think her son is?”

  “The tallest mountain,” Trinh said, uncertain why. Perhaps it came from guilt.

  “She’ll search that mountain till she starves. I have to stop her,” Van said, turning and leaving the house.

  Trinh dropped her basket, ran outside, and caught Van’s arm. “She’s already gone mad. What’s the use?”

  Around them villagers paused, watching them.

  “People don’t have to stay mad,” Van said. “They can recover. I can save her.”

  “How courageous of you!” his mother said, mending clothes in her shaded chair.

  Seeing no way to dissuade Van at the moment, Trinh said, “Let me help you.”

  They searched the fields of slipper and cuckoo flowers and yelled for Hong Yen. As they neared Suong Ma Mountain, the flowers thinned and finally disappeared. The lush land sloped upward, the top half buried under fog. Trinh looked wistfully at a flock of geese flying in the opposite direction.

  Van studied the mountain trail and found tracks, seemingly human. He ran. Trinh chased him. She stumbled over rocks. She breathed hard. But she would not lose him. Van slowed as the tracks faded and the fog thickened, hanging like layers of spider webs speared on the evergreens. The cold, pine-scented vapor was heavy in Trinh’s every breath. Feet hurting, she glanced at the afternoon sun, a weak blur behind white veils.

  They climbed higher. Pine trees leaned, their branches reaching sideways, the shape of their foliage cloud-like. Something nagged at Trinh. When she realized she had neither seen nor heard any animals in the past hour, the emptiness became terrifying.

  The trail passed a small, stone house and forked. Van searched both paths for tracks, but fog overwhelmed him. He retreated to the house and knocked.

  The door creaked open enough for a skinny man with matted, gray hair to peek out. “What do you want?”

  “Have you seen anyone pass by here?” Van asked while Trinh looked over his shoulder.

  “Oh!” the man said, his mouth melting into a huge grin. His teeth were rotting, and he smelled moldy. He opened the door wide. “Come in, friends.”

  Trinh stared at his strange outfit. A ripped purple vest. Yellow baggy pants tight at the waist and ankles. On his left foot, a green slipper that curled up at the toes. The right foot bare. Behind him were piles of rusting swords, pieces of armor, ratty clothes and shoes. Poor, rich, ancient, exotic. He had plenty of every style. Trinh wondered how someone so isolated could possess such a varied collection.

  “I don’t have time to waste,” Van said. “Tell me if you’ve seen anyone pass by here.”

  “Plenty,” the gray-haired man said.

  “Today. What about today?”

  “Today. Yesterday. What’s the difference? Everyone at the pond. Everyone the same.”

  Van thought about that. “Where’s the pond?”

  “I can lead the way.”

  Van studied the man and wrinkled his nose. “No thank you. Give me directions.”

  Still grinning, the man pointed to the path on the left. “That way.”

  “Thank you.”

  As the man shut the door, Trinh thought she spotted a familiar cotton robe among the clothes, but she couldn’t be sure. Van plunged into the fog.

  “Stop!” Trinh cried, running after him.

  The path took them higher and ended at a precipice. Nearby pines scattered before a pond. Evening sun-rays bled through mist, glistening red on the water.

  “Hong Yen!” Van yelled as he approached. Dirt softened into mud. He avoided weeds and kept to rocks. “Where are you?”

  Trinh blocked his way. “Turn back. Haven’t you noticed how strange this place is? No animals anywhere. Only that strange gray-haired man. Don’t you have a bad feeling about this?”

  “I’m waiting here until Hong Yen arrives. Go back on your own,” Van said as mist coiled into brief shapes around him. A mass of tangled hair. A nose with a mole beside it. Hong Yen caressing him.

  Horrified, Trinh didn’t react in time when Van shoved her. Rocks scraped her hands. Mud grasped her skirts.

  “Go on,” Van said with a jerk of his head.

  Trinh caught his ankle. “Please, Van, let Hong Yen go and return to the village.”

  “Oh, I know,” Van said, his eyes narrowing at her. “You killed Hong Yen.”

  Trinh scrambled backward. “How can you think so?”

  “You hid her body and told everyone she had left,” Van said. In his eyes burned the wildness that had been in Hong Yen’s.

  “Everyone in the village saw her leave. Ask them,” Trinh said, panic rising. She glanced side to side for an escape.

  Van yanked a sharp, mossy rock out of the mud with both hands. “You’ve acted well. So patient. So helpful. But your show is over.”

  He advanced, raising the rock. Screaming, Trinh kicked his shin and rolled aside. Van fell, his rock hitting the ground, his head hitting the rock.

  A crack. Silence.

  Trinh watched for movement before finding the courage to near him. Van’s eyes were open but no longer blinking. Trinh turned his head and smoothed away warm, bloodied hair. The side of his skull had been smashed.

  Losing Van meant losing her honor. Trinh couldn’t return to the village or to her parents.

  She had to undo this damage. She had to repair his skull. She would do this, and he would recover. She would apologize for hurting him. He would understand and be sorry for scaring her. They would go home together. Ignoring the blood and its coppery smell on her fingers, Trinh worked and worked, piecing together her dream until she fell asleep beside him.

  Night settled, waking her with chills. The moon slid out from behind black clouds. The world appeared in gray. Van was gone, leaving his shape in the moss and mud. Fresh tracks, the left of a shoe and the right of a bare foot, led back to the path. Trinh followed them to the precipice. She leaned over. She couldn’t see the bottom through the fog, but she knew the gray-h
aired man had dumped Van’s body down there, stripped of clothes and sandals like everyone else who had died in their quest for the Wraith.

  Mist rubbed against her legs. She stumbled to the pond, half mad with the intention of making the Wraith restore everything, half hopeful she was wrong and Van had simply gone for a stroll. Her haggard face looked back through floating pine needles and jutting rocks. She sank to her knees, tears falling on her bloodstained hands.

  “Trinh, don’t cry.”

  She was imagining her husband’s voice. She knew this. She was imagining his arm worming around her, pulling her against his side.

  “I’m sorry about Hong Yen. You won’t leave me, will you?”

  She looked up. In his straw hat and rolled-up pants, Van sat beside her, absorbing her tears as he brushed his fingers across her cheeks. Trinh didn’t want a spirit, but she couldn’t help clinging to it.

  Smiling, the Mist Wraith solidified in her arms.

  Written in Smoke

  Karina Sumner-Smith

  Coils of white rose slowly, smoke twisting into the air like rope unwinding. Blinking, Nasrah leaned over her makeshift incense burner and inhaled, drawing the haze deep into her lungs. She tried to focus on the smoke’s sweet fragrance, its taste, its gentle movement through still air, as if such details could shield her from the sounds of her family dying outside the tent walls.

  Before her bent knees small chips of resin smoldered in a clay cup, pale yellow flaring to red as they burned. They were so tiny, Nasrah thought. So few. She did not let the thought go further, only clenched her hand around the ruins of the golden pendant that had concealed the resin, long hidden beneath the layers of her dress. Her neck still stung from the bite of the cord on which it had hung, the silken necklace snapped in her haste.

  Her other hand trembled against her gently rounded stomach, as if mere fingers could protect her unborn child.

  Just outside, her aged father-in-law screamed curses at his attacker, his oiled blade hissing through the air. Nasrah closed her eyes as he gasped and choked wetly, and then came the thump of something large falling. There was a sound of steel entering flesh once, twice, and the crunch of heavy footsteps. Farther away, a child’s cry rose shrill, and was silenced.

  She had to bite her lip to keep from sobbing.

  These tents had been her home, her safety. Here she had lived as A’isha, an identity birthed in empty sand from lips cracked and bloody, earned with humility and a willingness to work. Dark and quiet, A’isha had gained their trust, had been taken as wife by a man as strong as he was gentle, had been loved. Now the name seemed a curse, and the one who called herself “she who lives” breathed fragrant smoke as the people who had given her a home died for that shelter.

  The slaughter felt endless, but at last the screaming stopped, the ring of blade on blade ceasing, the final pleas and whimpers of the dying whispering away to nothing. Then there was only the slow sound of footsteps across the stony ground—pausing, scuffing, kicking at unmoving bodies, and moving on.

  On her knees, Nasrah stared ahead and watched through tears as breath and smoke mixed in the darkened confines of the tent. Then, the resin’s fog steady and sweet all around her, she waited. They searched the largest tents first, as she’d known they would, the silent attackers speaking for the first time since they’d ridden up and greeted offers of spiced tea with drawn blades. Nasrah heard claims of ownership of the few treasures the tents held, though most of the attackers would leave empty-handed; her in-laws had not been rich in anything but laughter.

  At last one approached the small tent at the camp’s edge, its front closed and sides lowered despite the afternoon heat. A man brushed aside the heavy goat’s-hair fabric, letting in a wave of fresh, dry air, and crouched to enter. He started when he saw Nasrah kneeling silently in a ring of worn cushions, and drew breath to cry out, hand reaching for his weapon.

  Nasrah watched as he blinked in sudden confusion, his intent expression turning vague, mouth opened to cry words he had forgotten. He inhaled again, and his gaze slipped from Nasrah’s face, slid down her body unseeing. At last his eyes settled on the clay cup and the last wisps of smoke rising above its lip. He sniffed.

  “Al-lubán,” he murmured. Frankincense.

  He hadn’t even struggled.

  Cautiously, he stepped into the tent’s shadowed interior, letting the flap fall closed behind him, trapping the rest of the precious smoke inside. Nasrah did not move as he began to search their few belongings, her husband’s leather traveling bag and carved pipe, her sh’ela headdress beaded in blue; merely closed her eyes as A’isha’s life was laid bare beneath the hands of this stranger.

  He was soon joined by another, and this man’s awareness of Nasrah’s presence fled quicker, swept away in a breath of frankincense-scented air. Her skill, it seemed, had not faded in her years of hiding.

  In silence she listened as they derided the threadbare clothes, the worn silver jewelry, as if they had believed they would find more. Why, she wanted to ask; why her family? But the frankincense smoke was too thin to coax answers from the strangers’ distracted minds, too little to force them to talk. And in truth, what could they say that she didn’t already know, hadn’t learned in the first moment she’d seen the up-raised blades: they had come for her. More than three years and uncounted stretches of desert sand lay between A’isha and her true identity as Nasrah bint Shahin, and never in that time had she revealed herself in the smoke or spoken the name of her lost people. And still they’d found her.

  When they finally left the tent, they already spoke of the journey away. For a time she could hear them outside, one calling orders as others loaded the camels with stolen goods and water. She listened as they moved on, the camels’ gait unhurried; listened as the sound of their small caravan faded; listened until she could hear nothing but sand.

  And though she knew they were gone, Nasrah knelt in the center of the tent and shivered, suddenly more afraid than even swords or the screams of the dying had made her. For as the men passed but a hand’s length from her face, she’d smelled something on their clothes that the tang of blood and sweat had hidden. A scent both sharp and bitter, with a faint and lingering sweetness.

  The scent of her people’s enemy.

  Myrrh.

  The afternoon had begun to cool, light lengthening, before Nasrah gained the courage to enter the smoke. Much of the frankincense had escaped, gusting out the opened tent’s flap and seeping slowly through the walls themselves. Still, she thought as she brought herself to the edge of trance, there would be enough. It was not a tool, now; merely a door.

  As she slipped into the smoke, the details of her surroundings sharpened while the feel of her body receded. Her awareness drifted with the smoke, senses swaying in eddies of air through the tent’s shadowed interior, easing through gaps in the fabric’s weave and expanding into the desert’s heat. Rising to the farthest edges of the incense she had burned, Nasrah leapt, her awareness flying outward until it caught on another cloud of smoke, burning leagues distant: a small temple on the edge of the desert, its stone altar attended by a prone worshipper. Caught in the smoke and all it touched, Nasrah knew she could influence this man as she had the attackers, but left him to his silent prayer.

  Again she leapt, and again, again: to a small house filled with young children, to a jewelry shop on the southern coast, to an amir’s harem. And with each leap something of her stayed behind, as if she drew a map of the world in her mind with the twisting passage of frankincense clouds.

  At last Nasrah slowed, not wanting to reach all the way to Egypt or Parthia, though leaps of such distances were possible. Instead she peered at the whole, seeking through smoke those who meant her harm. Here and there she felt sharp sense of another mind of her blood, attuned to the smoke, but they were rare and scattered, the secret network of her people in disarray.

  Perhaps, Nasrah thought, others hid from the smoke, as she had. A thin hope, and one she couldn’t t
ruly believe. Besides, she had been found even with her talent damped; she would not wait to be caught again unaware. Instead, she sought places where myrrh tainted the smoke, a shadow across the white, a sharp scent amidst the sweet.

  Such flaws pulled—yet she found herself moving not towards the coast or foreign lands, but the desert’s heart. With a cold shock, she recognized the place: the golden stone, the outline of a tumbled outer wall. The ruins of her true home. Irem’s fallen pillars were before her, neither seen nor felt nor sensed, but something of all three. No frankincense burned here now, no people of the smoke waited: she found only silence and places unfilled. Yet the smoke lingered, years of its burning staining the city’s very stones.

  And here, even years distant, lay the evidence of a slaughter as terrible as the one outside her tent. The frankincense shuddered with the memory of fear and pain, as if the air itself still held the city’s dying cries. And worse—

  Nasrah jerked, eyes opening wide as if light could banish what the smoke held. But sight of the tent’s dark walls couldn’t hide what had been written in smoke for her to find. Through the lingering smoke burned a dark streak of myrrh, the Romans’ funeral scent mocking the vast grave of her people, vivid against the frankincense like a bruise across flesh.

  Smoke so new, so plentiful, could only be a sign. Even now, she realized, the enemy had a spy that stood in the ruins of her city and burned myrrh, plumes of incense rising skywards to remind her scattered people of their defeat and promise their deaths.

  What did they want? Nasrah placed her head in her hands, her cheeks soaked with tears. Power hungry, her father had called the Romans, thieves and conquerors beneath the rule of a madman. A madman driven to rage by the thoughts of a talent he could not possess; driven to murder by knowledge of spies who could influence him, even kill him, through the very incense burned across his vast empire.

  Who had whispered the secret of the Ad into the Roman emperor’s ear, none had learned; not before the emperor had caused the fall of their great desert city. Was that not enough, she asked silently. Must he drive each survivor into the ground until all that was left of their blood was powder?