by Yoon Ha Lee
for cohomology
The Mermaid’s Teeth
The mermaid sat on the island and sang without words. She had lost her teeth to the last sailor passing by, which made it hard to form words. Words of foam-rush and and storm-sweep, words of coral uprooted, words of clouds spun upended into the sea’s endless churning cauldron. Still, the mermaid was possessed of great determination and creativity. She shaped her words through the tension of her throat, forced them into seduction-verses.
Through all this she combed out her hair. It was beautiful hair and she didn’t see why she should neglect it because of a little bad luck with a sailor. It hung heavy and dark and ripple-sheened. Her lovers had told her that they could see the colors of the sea caught in it, or luminous moon-weave; they had told her about its silk, its salt perfume, the way it tangled them almost as surely as her kisses. The mermaid kept a diary of these compliments, written in the vortices around her island. Only the most ardent and perceptive sailors could navigate those vortices to embrace her.
Ah: here came a sailor. She sang louder, tossing the comb toward him so that the sun flashed against its curve. I wear nothing but the salt spray, she sang. I am cold on my island. Also, as long as it has been for you, I guarantee that it has been longer for me. Come and clasp my cold limbs, come and help me comb out my hair, explore the tide pools of my body.
The sailor heard her, although not his comrades. She only needed one anyway. He was sun-browned and lean, and she liked the quick fire of his movements as he dived to meet her, the way he knifed through the water.
When he reached her, she kissed him all the way from the bottom of her throat, all the way from the empty space where mortals have hearts but mermaids do not, mouth stretching wider and wider, and ripped out the sailor’s teeth to use for her own. They didn’t fit her mouth, but she had a lot of time and the sea was good at grinding down things to fit.
for dormouse_in_tea
The Dragon Festival
Once, on a tidy planet whose clouds wrote combinatorial equations across the sky in the morning and sieved the light into rich colors in the evening, there was a city of robots. The robots had governed themselves for almost 496 of their years, and since they had a fondness for number theory, they planned a festival to celebrate.
The robots gathered in a gloriously orderly convocation, with representatives from every segment of their society. There were robots who recorded the thrumming of the city’s shimmering bridges and the tread of robot or alien pedestrians or the murmuring of the wind, and arranged these sounds into clattering symphonies. There were robots who repaired other robots and painted them with the finest fractal designs. There were robots who sculpted careful habitats for the birds who lived among them, and robots who delved the planet’s shadowed depths for rare minerals and robust metals.
Robots do not sleep the way we sleep, and for twenty-eight nights and days they deliberated. As marvelous as their city was, they felt something was missing. On the twenty-eighth day, they agreed that their world lacked one special thing: a dragon.
Since dragons did not exist in their part of the galaxy, the robots decided to build one. They spent the better part of the year in research and design. They consulted symbologies burned pixel by pixel into old starships and oral histories collected from deep-dreaming visitors in ages past. They tested exoskeletons based on various luminous alloys, for robots are nothing if not empirically minded. And when they had any doubts, they erred in the direction of beauty.
At last came the day of completion, when the dragon was released from its protective shell and powered on. It was silver-bright and keen of visage and sleek, and its wings hummed with the stardrive that the robots had given it in case it wished to travel.
The robot dragon was pleased to make their acquaintance. To the robots’ surprise, a second dragon soared down from the sky to join it. This second dragon flew on wings of storm, although it limited its electric discharges out of consideration for its hosts.
The robots politely inquired as to how the storm dragon had become aware of the city’s endeavor. The storm dragon replied that, above all things, a dragon is a state of mind, and it, like the storm dragon, had been born of their welcome. It was particularly pleased that another of its kind was to be found here.
The two dragons were eager to travel. But they promised to visit once a year, and the annual dragon festival became one of the robots’ favorite holidays.
for an Anonymous Benefactor
The River Soldier
Every year, in the City of Ravens Feasting, people toss rings into the river. In the old days the river demanded rings of metal: steel, or silver, or bright iridium. In return, the soldier who lived in the river would guard them from raiders.
One day, the people of the city battle among themselves, in a bloody war that lasted two generations. The cause was not important, but at the end of it a merchant drowned their wealth in the river and demanded to know why the soldier hadn’t protected their family. The soldier walked out of the river, clad in armor of rings and coins, dark and glorious of face. She said, “I can protect you from the wars that walk out of the world and to your gates, but I cannot protect you from the wars that you nourish in your own hearts.”
Ever since then, the city’s people have thrown in rings of anything but metal. Whether this is a repudiation of the soldier’s words, or a way of honoring them, is a matter of opinion.
The Fox’s Forest
In the darkest reaches of a forest whose trees never whispered its name, there lived a fox. She was not the smallest of her sisters and brothers, but her family reckoned that she was unlikely to continue the family’s tradition of grand seductions and shadowy games. Even so, her mother said philosophically that there was more than one way to steal a chicken, and she would find her way into some foxish story.
The fox found a certain contentment in her days: lapping dew from flowers (there was a family legend that one of her great-aunts had delighted in starting contradictory trends in the language of flowers during her days at court), or fitting her paws into the patterns made by fallen branches, or gnawing on bones until they were as white as death, as white as desire deferred. It was not a bad life for a fox.
One day the fox pricked her ears up at a human’s tread. Although she was not the cleverest fox in the forest, she knew enough to watch from the shelter of a tree, whispering to it that her fine red pelt was the color of the shadows.
The human was a black-haired woman in a coat that had once been beautiful, with maple leaves embroidered in a zigzag across the breast. She carried a sword knotted with a gray cord, and the fox knew enough to know that some great shame had befallen her. The woman was looking directly at the fox.
“I am not a hunter of foxes,” the woman said. “I know your people are cunning and worldly beyond compare. I come to beg a boon.”
“If you know the tales of my people,” the fox said, “then you know that we always ask a price, and that we ask for things that no one wise would ever give.”
The woman’s face was still like water on a windless day. “Perhaps that’s so,” she said. “But I am desperate, and the desperate have few choices.”
“Tell me,” the fox said, noticing how the woman looked too thin for her bones.
“To unknot my honor,” the woman said. “I must bring to my liege red leaves from a forest whose every leaf is red. I thought such a place might be known in the lore of foxes.”
“Is a lord who would ask such a thing worthy of your service?” asked the fox. Her oldest sister, who delighted in impossible tasks, would have despaired of her.
“I wronged her,” the woman said. The fox knew it was improper to inquire further. “But you see, that is why I came in search of foxes.”
The fox’s youngest brother would have known of such a forest, and he would have sent the woman to fetch a peony carved from pink jade, or the heart of a stag with three antlers, or the moon’s name written on spider silk. But the fox had
never had any talent for such games. She said, simply, “I would offer you a bargain if I could. But the truth is that I have no answers for you. You will have to seek elsewhere.”
The woman was still again. “I suppose I will,” she said. “Thank you in any case.”
The fox knew it was no use asking her family. They were foxes, after all. She did not offer comfort in velvet words or kisses, but walked with the woman to the edge of the forest. During those nine days, the woman told her of the lands she had seen, of cranes dancing and crows calling and temples of carved stone high in the mountains. By the time they said their farewells, the fox was quite in love, but she would never say so. She would have worried the gray knot loose with her teeth if it would have helped, but she knew that human honor did not admit such easy solutions.
After the woman left, the fox began telling the woman’s stories to the wind and the rain and the trees. It was as if the woman had left a piece of her heart behind, and the fox was enough of a fox to savor hearts. And if sometimes the fox dreamed dreams of the woman’s thin face, the woman’s ungloved hands, she kept them to herself.
Trees in a great forest—and any forest where foxes make their home is great in some way—can see a long way, and trees talk even when foxes are not there to whisper to them. Trees also do not share foxish notions that every gift must end in a bite. They saw the woman coming back on the road she had departed by, and they saw that she came empty-handed.
As the fox slept, as the woman neared the forest, the trees, without any fuss, changed their leaves from green and gold to red.
“I know that this is your doing,” the woman said, “and I know there is a price to be paid. Name it.”
The fox would not speak, but as she looked at the woman, her eyes said what her mouth would not.
The woman could have listened to the fox’s mouth, but instead she listened to the fox’s eyes, the fox’s heart. She had asked the price, after all; and sometimes prices are gladly paid. Perhaps, during her days away, she had thought about the kind of liege she served, and what that was worth to her.
As for the fox’s mother, she said that she had always known her daughter would find herself in a foxish tale one way or another, and no one could argue with her.
for sara
The Melancholy Astromancer
At the yearly cotillion ball, in the palaces of cloud and thunder and seething plasma, astromancers were introduced to the Society of the Sky. One of these astromancers was a young woman who looked out the windows of her room and sighed mournfully every night. She was attentive enough to her studies, in which she studied spiral density waves and the chemical composition of gas giants. In the mornings (as determined by the celestial bells), she embroidered constellations on cloth-of-void, paying particular attention to her favorites in the shape of dipper or dragon, and the pale luminescent thread gleamed in her hands and over the sliver of her needle. In the afternoons she attended serious lectures on the proper forms of address for a magister of red giants, and practiced her handwriting with a dip pen and shining ink, and learned to fold handkerchiefs into the shapes of generation ships. In the evenings, she brewed tea fragrant with starblossoms and flavored it with the honey of distant worlds.
As the day of the ball approached, the astromancer’s teachers noticed that, for all her diligence, she continued to look out the windows and sigh. They asked her if she was nervous about her presentation to the Society of the Sky, and assured her that her work was of more than adequate standard; that she would find suitable partners aplenty at the ball. The young woman smiled inscrutably at them and said that no, she suffered no such loss of nerve, and that all she needed was some quiet time to compose herself.
During the nighttimes—and nighttimes in the cloud palaces were dark indeed—the young woman stayed up and worked on an outfit of her own devising. She knew her teachers would not approve, and yet she was compelled by the vision, or perhaps not-vision, that came to her with the clarity of a mirror in the dark. Her teachers had taught her well: by now she knew her tools so thoroughly that she could work with only the faintest of candle flames to guide her eyes, and her fingers wielded needle and thimble and scissors without drawing blood. And if she was listless during the day from lack of sleep, well, her teachers attributed this to her customary melancholy, and convinced themselves that, as with most young astromancers, her full entry into the Society of the Sky would prove the cure for her moods.
At last the morning of the ball dawned. The dance hall was bright with lanterns from which shone clear silvery light, and one by one the young astromancers entered with the decorum to which they had been trained. They wore dresses in flamboyant crimson, highlighted with beads of spinel and speckled amber; robes of shining blue trimmed with lace like quantum froth; earrings from which beads of lapis and snowflake obsidian spun orrery-fashion, and bracelets that chimed with pleasing dissonances. Each astromancer appeared in the bright colors of the finery they had made for themselves—all but one.
The melancholy astromancer, unlike all her peers, showed up in a suit of black that she had embroidered with black threads, so that she was the only one in the hall entire dressed in that color rather than the radiant colors of living stars. A strand of black pearls and onyx circled her throat, and her black hair was caught up in a net hung with polished chips of obsidian. She raised her chin at the stares and smiled, in her element at last; and if she was not the most popular of the season’s astromancers, still she did not lack for offers to dance, or suitors to bring her petits-fours and glasses of radiant liqueur.
for Andrew S.
Harvesting Shadows
They say the mountains in this land are so numerous that the smallest of them have no names. This is not true; it is just that mountains are circumspect about the people they tell their names to.
On one of these mountains, where snow lies in wing-shaped drifts beneath the sweet pines, there is a temple. Its timbers are painted with the emblems of lantern and candle, sun and moon. Most importantly, it has windows open wide, so that whatever light travels through the pines can find its welcome there.
The priests of this temple are diligent in their worship, which centers around harvesting shadows. Nothing escapes their notice: the shadows of tumbling tiger cubs, the shadows of the great boulders that record the passing seasons on their faces, the shadows of fallen azaleas. The shadows of discarded straw sandals. Lost celadon pendants grown over with moss. Mismatched chopsticks worked into magpies’ nests.
It is a common misconception that the temple serves some god of dark places, as even mountains have their roots in the earth’s hidden halls, or perhaps the queen of dead things. But the truth is simpler than that. The dead have no need of shadows. It is the living who require them to remember the importance of sunlight and moonlight and heartlight.
for chomiji
The Stone-Hearted Soldier
In a war-torn land, the queen had a habit of demanding her soldiers’ hearts removed, and replaced with hearts of stone, that they might serve her better. Only the finest of stone was quarried for her soldiers’ hearts: cuttingly brilliant diamond for her generals, lushly veined marble for other officers, granite for the rank and file. None of her subjects objected to this practice, which had been customary for generations.
For all the queen’s cleverness and the hardiness of her army, however, her realm was defeated by dragon-eyed conquerors. Foreign observers agreed there was not a great deal she could have done differently. The harvests had been poor for several years running, and the queen’s predecessor had allowed the treasury to run dangerously low with their love of lavish banquets.
One of the queen’s soldiers, more pragmatic than most, carried out the last of her orders and then deserted when she heard the palace had been razed, the queen captured and beheaded. This soldier shed her uniform for simple clothes and traveled far beyond her home’s old boundaries, until the people she met no longer recognized her accent. She was not too proud to do what
ever chores came her way in exchange for food and hearth-warmth, a virtue her time as a soldier had taught her. As for bandits, she had little to fear from those. Even if not for her sword, a stone-hearted soldier is more difficult to kill than the ordinary kind.
In the course of her travels, the former soldier met people both good and wicked, people of all professions and philosophies. She became preoccupied with her own nature. She knew the reputation her kind had outside their land of origin, that they understood nothing of mercy or rage or the usual human emotions, even in the thick of battle; that they committed the most terrible atrocities without qualm if so commanded. Yet she knew returning to her homeland would do her no good. For one thing, she expected it was still ruled by the dragon-eyed invaders. For another, her heart of flesh had been consumed by the great and pitiless magics that had replaced it with the heart of stone. She had watched the ritual with the rest of her company.
The former soldier knew the sum of her deeds, both glorious and cruel. She had been a good soldier, as these things were reckoned. Yet she knew that a good soldier and a good person are not always judged the same way. Perhaps, she thought, if she could resolve the matter of her stone heart, her course of action would come clear.
Eventually she heard a foreign saying that all wisdom is to be found in the sea. She was skeptical, but she had always wanted to visit the sea—her old homeland was landlocked—so she set out. It took her the better part of a year to reach it, but at last she came to the stern cliffs and salt winds of the sea where, the locals claimed, the Sea Oracle sometimes deigned to receive petitioners.