Scorched Earth

by Tommy Wallach

  “Yes,” Clover said without hesitation, as if he’d been prepared for exactly this proposition—which, of course, he probably had.

  Clive was delirious from hunger, thirst, and exposure, so he assumed he must’ve heard Chang wrong. “Wait, did you just say something about Da?”

  “He’s alive,” Clover said. “I know that sounds crazy, but—”

  “That’s not possible. We saw his body.”

  “Sophia faked his death, so the Descendancy wouldn’t know he’d been taken. I’ll explain everything, but first, what about Gemma and Flora? Are they at Mitchell’s place?”

  “Flora ran when we were taken prisoner. But Gemma…” Clive trailed off.

  “Gemma what, Clive? What happened to her?”

  Clive couldn’t bring himself to tell the whole story. Some part of him still felt the need to protect Paz. “She’s gone. I’m sorry.”

  “I think that’s enough catching up,” Chang said. “Clive, enjoy your last night in the stocks. Tomorrow morning I’ll be moving you to the Bastion.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if I leave you out here, someone’s bound to kill you sooner or later.”

  “What about Burns?”

  “Yes. What shall we do with Burns?”

  “Just fucking kill me already, would you?” Burns said. “I’m that sick of listening to you talk.”

  Chang smiled. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? If I put you out of your misery.”

  “Damn right I would. But I’m sure you’ve got some idiot reason for boring me with another ten years of—”

  It happened too quickly for Clive to track: Chang drawing his sword—a strange weapon, steeply curved, without a cross guard—and chopping downward; Burns shouting out some incomprehensible presentiment of disaster; the blade biting into his left thigh just above the knee and sliding on through flesh and bone and flesh, until it burst free and the bottom half of his leg fell away like a dead tree branch. Blood gushed from the wound, a black cataract making canals of the cracks in the cobblestones. Not twenty feet away, a woman in white petticoats fainted. Burns’s eyes rolled back into his head and he went limp in the stocks.

  “Take him out and tie the leg off loose,” Chang said to his honor guard. “Let him bleed out in the dungeon nice and slow.”

  Two of the guards took Burns out of the pillory and carried him away. The others marched a dumbstruck Clover off toward the Bastion. And Clive was left alone with the riot of his thoughts. His father was alive. Burns would soon be dead. He and his brother were now firmly trapped under Chang’s thumb.

  One of the stray dogs who frequented the square, a good-natured mutt who’d managed to get her front paws up onto the pillory once so Clive could pet her jowly face, approached Burns’s amputated limb. The dog looked at Clive, something like shame in her eyes, then grabbed the half-leg between her teeth and ran off into the night.

  5. Athène

  THE VILLENAîTRE: ATHèNE’S HEART SEEMED to wither in her chest at the very sight of it. Here, she’d been happier than she’d ever been before, happier than she would ever be again. Here, Gemma had ceased to be a citizen of the Descendancy and become Wesah in mind, body, and spirit. Here, they had pledged their undying love to each other.

  Foolish, really, to associate so much irretrievable joy with a place that had been important to her long before she met Gemma. She’d probably been to the Villenaître a dozen times over the course of her life; yet the months she’d spent here in the full flush of love stood out so brightly that all the others became mere shadows—so much wasted time. That contrast cut even deeper now that Gemma was gone. The Villenaître had become the tomb in which Athène’s contentment would be permanently interred.

  She realized Flora was watching her, judging the upwelling sadness in her eyes. “It is only memories,” she said. “Not grief.”

  Flora blinked—a sort of micro-shrug—and looked away: sure it is. Athène liked to think she’d become expert at reading the girl’s facial expressions by now; she’d had to, as Flora hadn’t spoken a word in weeks. Athène felt attuned to the girl’s moods and needs as she’d never been to anyone else’s—even Gemma’s. Something told her when Flora was hungry or thirsty, when she might need to answer the call of nature, when she was too tired to travel any farther. Was this what it was like to be a mother? Whenever Athène had imagined herself raising a child, suckling some squalling newborn at her raw nipple, the baby had seemed an implacable nuisance at best, and an insatiable parasite at worst, leaching time and energy in equal measure. But in taking care of Flora, she’d begun to understand the strange comfort one could derive from being depended on by something helpless; it was a burden, yes, but more in the manner of a heavy blanket than an overladen basket.

  In a few minutes, they would pass beneath the inscribed archway of the Villenaître: MAY ALL YOUR DREAMS BE NIGHTMARES. At the tooroon, Andromède had enjoined the Wesah to travel to the Kikiwaak di Noor—their permanent colony in the north—but that was before Chang had unleashed his weapon, before the Wesah nation found itself facing annihilation. There was no doubt in Athène’s mind that the tribe would convene here at the Villenaître, where they always came in times of trouble.

  “You must stay by my side at all times,” she said to Flora. “There has never been much trust for those who are not raised in the tribe. Now, it will be very much worse. Do you understand?” A moment of eye contact was all Athène could expect as acknowledgment.

  She steeled herself for what was to come. Andromède undoubtedly blamed herself for what had happened at the tooroon, which meant she’d be thinking defensively now, about how best to ensure the survival of the tribe. She had to be convinced this was a mistake. Maybe it was too late to avenge Gemma’s murder, but there was still time to avenge the sisters they’d lost to Chang’s savagery. However much it hurt to be here, Athène would not leave the Villenaître until her mother agreed to lead what remained of their proud nation to war against the Descendancy.

  * * *

  It was the first time Athène had ever passed through the gates of the Villenaître to find no one waiting on the other side of the archway. The empty plaza pulsated with summer heat; a dust devil lifted a few blades of golden grass and tumbleweed, dropped them silently back to earth. The totems that used to decorate the square had all been ripped out, leaving deep gouges in the red earth.

  Athène looked to Flora. The girl’s eyes were closed; she was listening to something. And now Athène heard it too—an atonal murmur floating on the air like a scent. They followed it across the dirt square and up the wide, shallow steps of the central longhouse. Athène pushed aside the thick woolen curtain and the murmur immediately became a full-throated moan, so loud as to feel like an assault, especially when paired with the noxious odor of festering wounds—casualties from the massacre at the tooroon—and the feeble light that crept in at the edges of the curtained windows. Inside the longhouse, many hundreds of Wesah knelt on rugs or the bare floor, all of them facing toward Grandmother, the tribe’s most senior otsapah, who stood on a plinth at the far end, leading the lamentation. Athène swallowed a lump of bile and pulled Flora into the miasma.

  She’d heard of this ritual—li Shansoon de Kornay, the Song of Crow—though as far as she knew, it hadn’t been enacted in decades. It was the ultimate funeral service, observing the death and rebirth of the world itself, carried out from sunrise to sunset for one full cycle of the moon. There was no way to know how far it had progressed, but Grandmother had almost certainly waited for Andromède’s arrival to begin, which meant there were probably weeks remaining. Athène moved quickly down the rows of mourners, seeking her mother. There would be no pride of place here, no hierarchy. All were the same in the eyes of Crow, the great god of death, who maintained the balance between Fox and Wolf. It was difficult to differentiate faces—there was so little light, and every tribeswoman wore the same tormented expression—but Athène eventually managed to disqualify all of them. Was
it possible that Andromède had decided not to come to the Villenaître? Could her shame really run so deep that she couldn’t bear to face her people at all?

  Grandmother stepped down from the plinth as Athène and Flora approached. The keening continued undiminished while they spoke.

  “That girl should not be here,” she said, nodding at Flora. “She is an outsider.”

  Athène bristled at the use of the term dahor; she remembered how it had made Gemma feel. “Where is my mother?”

  “She does not wish to be disturbed.”

  “But she is here? In the Villenaître?”

  The otsapah didn’t answer; she was staring intently at Flora, as if trying to read something behind the dead crystals of the girl’s eyes. Her expression softened. “Gemma is gone, isn’t she? And this is her sister.”

  “Her name is Flora. She is under my protection.”

  The otsapah nodded, as if something she’d predicted a long time ago had finally come to pass. “Andromède is at Pchimayr, doing penance.”

  “Thank you, Grandmother.”

  “I hope when you have finished speaking with her, you will join us here. We owe it to the spirits of those we’ve lost.”

  Athène took a page out of Flora’s book, and said nothing in response.

  * * *

  “Your sister was coming here every morning. All day, she works. Like a missive.” They’d stopped outside the otsapah’s hut; some new girl could be seen moving about inside, preparing the place for Grandmother’s return from the ritual. “She was so frightened that I think she has no magic inside her, only illness. So one day, she steal a drink of the dreamtea.” Athène had to imagine where a normal girl would be asking questions, creating a dialogue with a version of Flora not traumatized by loss. “The dreamtea gives people—how do you say?—like dreams, but awake. Your sister sees very clearly when she drinks. She had much magic in her, I think.”

  And just what was it Gemma had seen that night, while wandering the sands of Pchimayr, the Little Ocean? She’d said it felt like watching the past and the future intermixing, and discovering that both were brimming with death. Perhaps the gods had been trying to forewarn her about what would happen at the tooroon—but what good were signs you couldn’t interpret? What use were warnings without solutions? They were merely reminders of your impotence, of the absurd fantasy of free will.

  Or maybe the journey engendered by the dreamtea really was just a delusion. Maybe those fits of shaking that had overtaken Gemma now and again were merely symptoms of a disease. Magic or madness? Divine intervention or cosmic indifference? It didn’t matter one way or the other anymore. Maybe it never had.

  They walked past the fields where the Wesah raised and kept their horses and up the dunes, stopping to gaze out over the stone jetty that projected across Pchimayr only to coil back on itself like the tip of a fiddlehead fern. Andromède stood at the very center of the spiral, still as a statue.

  “Stay by the water,” Athène told Flora. “If anyone comes, run to me.”

  She removed her moccasins and began to walk along the smooth stones. She’d always liked the way it hurt, like someone angrily massaging the soles of her feet. Her mother was kneeling on a blanket, cleaning something in the ruddy water of the lake. Silver and scarlet, the blade glinted in the sunlight. Andromède’s bangles lay in a pile among the rocks, and thin lines of blood ran down her arms. There was historical precedent for this sort of self-mutilation—specifically with chieftains who’d suffered losses in the internecine wars that had once been a mainstay of Wesah culture—but like the ritual going on in the longhouse, Athène had never seen it firsthand.

  “Did Grandmother tell you to do this?” she said.

  Her mother splashed water across her arms to rinse away the blood. “It was my decision. To help with the grief.”

  “And has it helped?”

  “Yes.”

  Athène knelt down next to her mother and drew her own dagger. She pulled up her skirt and placed the blade against the skin of her inner thigh. Press and release: a thin white line where the blood fled in terror. The pain called to her like a siren, promising a very specific sort of relief.

  “That is not yours to do,” her mother barked.

  “No?”

  “I am Andromède. The tribe is my responsibility. You have nothing to pay penance for.”

  Athène laughed at the absurdity of that statement. “Gemma is dead.”

  “Many of our sisters are dead.”

  “But I was responsible for Gemma. I promised I’d keep her safe.”

  Her mother sniffed, gave a curt nod. “One then. Just one.”

  Athène pulled the blade a short ways across her thigh; it burned cool, shed ruby drops down her calf and onto the blanket. When she was finished, her mother took the blade and shook it clean in the water.

  “I want to know your plan,” Athène said.

  “Plan?”

  “After Grandmother finishes the Song of Crow.”

  “It will be as I said. The tribe will travel to the Kikiwaak di Noor.”

  “You want to run.”

  “This war has only just begun. Countless more will die. I cannot prevent that. It was a mistake to think I could. But I can ensure that no more of the corpses will be Wesah.”

  Athène stood up, momentarily towering over her mother, rivulets of blood running like bright veins along her leg. “We are a part of this war now.”

  “No. The war is between Sophia and the Anchor. It had nothing to do with us until they tried to use us.”

  “Only one side tried to use us. The other tried to exterminate us.”

  “Even if we were to join with Sophia, we would still be fighting their war.”

  “So don’t join with Sophia.”

  “Are you suggesting we fight for the Anchor?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Then what? There are only two sides, Athène! What is it you want to convince me of?”

  Athène fumbled to make herself understood. Her mother had lost sight of the fact that there was more to existence than just existing. There was honor. There was principle. There was courage. “That you are being a coward!” she finally said.

  At any other time, a statement like that might have seen her banished from her mother’s presence for a month. But Andromède took the blow with equanimity; when she spoke, there was only sadness in her voice.

  “Perhaps I am. Perhaps it is wrong to run. But I would rather be remembered as a coward than for there to be no one left to remember me at all. Now leave me to my grief, and I’ll leave you to yours.”

  Her mother turned away, setting the blade to her arm again, rocking it back and forth to widen the next scar. Athène was too full of anger to risk saying anything else. She strode back along the spiral, splashing through the shallow water as if she might make a point merely by making noise. Flora was waiting at the water’s edge, her expression as impassive as always.

  “My mother will not see reason,” Athène said in English. “She thinks we should do nothing about the men who kill thousands of our sisters! She wants a whole nation to flee like a little boy frightened of his mother! Can you believe this?”

  But there was no point in talking to Flora, who would give nothing back, who had nothing to give. After a moment of staring wrathfully into the girl’s face, Athène stormed back up the dunes and down again toward the square. She felt capable of any act of violence or heresy, and when she caught the first strain of the keening from the longhouse, she followed it like a bloodhound, not knowing if she was going to run screaming into the middle of the ritual, or slap Grandmother across the face, or break down in tears in the doorway.

  So it was no conscious decision that saw her fall to her knees next to her sisters and take up their lament as her own. She couldn’t have explained why that suddenly seemed the most natural thing to do, except to say that even if she’d begun to come to terms with the loss of Gemma, she had yet to contend with that other, la
rger tragedy, or with the fact that the Wesah people, to say nothing of her mother, would never be the same again.

  After a few minutes, she noticed that Flora was kneeling beside her and had begun to wail along with everyone else. If the Wesah were bothered by the audacity of this yellow-haired dahor, they didn’t show it. Perhaps grief this profound knew no nation but the purely human. Athène moaned until her voice was raw, until she was nearly dizzy. Then she kept going. She would see this demon out of her; she would reach the shore on the other side of this ocean of sorrow.

  And when that was done, she would deal with her mother.

  6. Clover

  THERE WAS NO LIGHT BEHIND any of the windows, and all the curtains were drawn. Clover knocked, but no one answered. He tried the handle.

  “Hello?”

  The door creaked, far louder than his voice had been. Dust particles danced in the light from the gas lamp outside, swirled where he passed. (And what did the lungs do with all those glittering splinters, once they were inhaled? Did they live on in the body forever?) The house looked derelict. Thick cobwebs hung from the rafters like streamers, and the floorboards were gritty with dried mud and leaves; no one had swept the place in a long time. He went to the kitchen and found the cupboard bare. Clearly Mitchell didn’t have the first idea how to keep house without a woman’s help.

  The plangent sound of sawing floated up from beneath Clover’s feet. He took the stairs slowly, not wanting to surprise the old man into cutting off a finger. But when he was only a few steps from the bottom, the sawing abruptly stopped.

  “Gemma?” Mitchell said. The desperate hope in his voice nearly broke Clover’s heart. “Is that you? Flora?”