Electric Velocipede 27

by John Klima

  The midwife runs to the drum room to fill the empty nama sack she carries, her footsteps echoing back to them. It is the only sound in the grotto other than Anolea’s moaning: they are the only people beneath the ice. All the other Nama Singers are in the fields, working. Mary is thankful for this; she doesn’t want a crowd around the struggling mother-to-be.

  After another moan, Anolea reaches for Peatro’s hands; she claws at him as if drowning.

  “What have we done?” she says. “They aren’t ready.”

  “Quiet,” Peatro says.

  “We’ll lose them all,” Anolea says.

  “Quiet, woman.”

  “What does she mean?” Mary says.

  “She’s delirious,” Peatro says, but Mary doesn’t believe that.

  The midwife returns, carrying a gutsack full of nama.

  She left with an empty sack, Mary remembers.

  “You said you gave her nothing,” Mary says to the midwife. “Yet you carried an empty nama sack.”

  The midwife looks at Peatro, who will not look at any of the three women who surround him. The midwife provides no answer either; instead she starts to trill a nama song.

  “What was in the nama sack?”

  None of them answer.

  In the silence, Mary hears something. Sounds too dim for a human ear, yet they are human sounds. Cries of pain. Roars of rage. A bone cudgel breaking living bone.

  Without realizing it, she floats toward the nearest stairway.

  “Wait, Old Mother,” Peatro says. “We need you here.”

  On the ice, the sounds are clearer. Grandfather knives cutting through skin. Children weeping for mothers, and the sudden end of that weeping. Skulls and ice colliding. And beneath all that, people struggling for breath.

  The fields are empty, only wind walks beneath the trees in the orchards. All the Nama Singers and the heavy sacks of nama they carried are gone.

  “Don’t go,” Peatro says.

  He’s followed her onto the ice.

  “They’re dying,” she says. “My children are dying.”

  “Seven in ten must die,” he says. “It was either us or them.”

  The Song of Gasping. It wasn’t meant for the pika. And she marked the path for the Nama Singers to cross the ice. She led the elders with their sacks full of poison.

  “I can stop it.”

  “You can save some, maybe,” he says. “But if you go to them, Anolea and my children will die.”

  And then she realizes: they wanted her here, away from the Col and the True People. Bora must have planned it from the moment Mary told her of the hardship to come. Maybe even before that.

  “What was in the midwife’s sack?” she says.

  “The Song of Quickening.”

  To induce Anolea’s labour.

  “But why, Peatro?” she says. “They are your people, too.”

  He shakes his head.

  “There is only one people now,” he says. “Bora gave me a choice: if I agreed to help hide the attack from you, my children would be of the people; if I refused, my children would never be born. Help us, Mary, so my choice won’t be for nothing.”

  He turns, back toward the hole in the ice where his young mate lets out another agonized cry. From across the ice, on the Col Sera, she hears the sound of slaughter. Of genocide. She is light and shadow, sound and silence. Peatro is right, maybe she can save some of the True People, but what then? How will the two peoples continue?

  Before he descends, Peatro says: “We are no better than the old people. You had to know that.”

  No better and no worse. She has kept them human, even after all this time.

  She floats above the ice, staring down the dark cylinder of the world. She is memory and absence. She will remember it forever, for however many more thousands of years she will endure. Life or death, birth or genocide.

  But she can choose what will be memory and what will be absence.

  #

  She roams far and wide across the ice, but never near the Col.

  A darkness clings to the Col, a shadow Mary doesn’t want to brighten. The Col hangs from the roof of the world above the fields and orchards, the ice of the Col dark and stained; a constant reminder of events no one admits to remembering.

  Only half the Nama Singers who departed for the Col returned, but they don’t call themselves that anymore: they are just the People. They always were. Neither Bora nor any of the other elders survived; they perished when they opened their sacks full of the Song of Gasping and incapacitated the True People’s strongest hunters. The People still number more than the one-hundred and fifty that the Pacifica claims it can sustain, but they are working on the Song of the Long Sleep. Already, some sleep beneath the ice.

  She isn’t sure what she is looking for as she floats across the ice, wrapped in silence and shadow. Survivors, maybe. She finds none.

  Four of Anolea’s five infants survived the birth and three still suckled the last time Mary visited. That was many days ago. She found the grotto overstuffed ever since the People returned from the Col. They brought meat with them. Pika meat, they called it, cut and portioned so that no one can claim it was anything else.

  Mary finds it much too crowded in the grotto.

  So she roams the ice. She’s been roaming for days. She still has a long time before the Pacifica throws her across the void to the empty desolation of the Savanne, but that day can’t come soon enough.

  Then one grey morning, she spots two huddled forms leaning into the wind.

  Peatro carries two children on his back, Anolea a third. They each also drag a sledge loaded with hides, bones, bamboo, mats, tendons, gutsacks, and two nama sacks.

  “Where are you going?” Mary says.

  “We can’t stay down there,” Peatro says.

  “Our children have True People blood in them,” Anolea says.

  “When times get rough again,” Peatro says. “They’ll be next.”

  “But you can’t survive on the ice all alone,” Mary says.

  “We can try,” Peatro says.

  They keep walking. The Pacifica is dark, the sunbeam a sick grey slash against the curving walls of the world. Peatro prods the ice ahead of him for crevasses.

  She floats in front of him.

  “Let me light your way.”

  THE END

  Dream Vision

  by Megan Arkenberg

  In this country, dawn is forever.

  The sky—an infinite blue cup

  edged in blood. Clouds—tracks left

  by the trampling feet of ghosts.

  This is their country.

  Restless sand, uncertain rivers that smooth

  the hills like simple stones.

  And always, the anxiety.

  This land is theirs,

  a land that knows the endlessness

  of dawn and spring and newness

  rising like another lost child.

  The dead are forgetful. They ask—

  Which one are you? Who are you?

  They squint in the red light.

  You are less than a memory to them.

  This country is theirs:

  This is a land where nothing is buried.

  The Girls of the Forest

  by Margaret Ronald

  Her sisters are waiting for her. They don’t judge, at least not in front of Mammana, but she recognizes the look in their eyes. She had it herself, seeing cousin after cousin return, sometimes to collapse weeping on Mammana’s breast, sometimes stone-faced, sometimes refusing to meet anyone’s gaze. I would never be so stupid, she had thought then, and she sees the same assured superiority in their eyes.

  But it’s been a long flight, and her legs are cramping again, and her belly is a round stone of pain, and she is tired from the act of leaving as much as from the journey itself. And so she lets them help her as she descends into the forest, nods her thanks as they guide her in. Her pride will ache later, but it’s already been maimed.
<
br />   When she lands on the lowest branches, the ones so gnarled that they’ve formed their own paths, her feet stutter on the bark before finding purchase. She shifts, and the long, graceful crane’s feet become the swollen, weary lumps she’s walked on for far too long. The old ash is strong enough to hold her weight—strong enough to hold all of the crane sisters and all the cousins no matter their chosen form. Strong enough even to hold Mammana herself.

  Mammana is the same as ever, and there is no judgment as she takes Cynthia’s hands. “Oh my dear,” she says, and this is as close as she will ever get to saying I told you so. “Oh, my dear. Did he hurt you?”

  Cynthia shakes her head, but even that small movement hurts after the long flight, cramps from the crane’s shape translating to outright pain in woman’s shape. “Not . . . like that.”

  “That’s good.” Mammana puts one hand to her cheek, the palm of it soft like the silks Cynthia used to make for the street fairs and art shows. Soft as moonlight, Peter had called them, but even that simple magic is nothing compared to the bright robes her sisters wear, the one she cannot quite bring herself to weave round her aching body just yet. The bright chaos she remembers from those days is so far from the forest’s high cathedral silence that for a moment the world outside seems like the dream. “That’s good. Now,” she continues, ever practical Mammana, “how far along are you?”

  Cynthia puts one hand over her belly, and sore as she is she still feels the answering flutter. “About seven months.”

  Mammana sucks air slowly through her teeth, but it’s a thoughtful hiss, not a worried one. “That gives us a little time. Let’s get you off your feet.”

  She follows Mammana down the steps, past her sisters, who do not offer to help this time. “I hope at least he was worth it,” one mutters just low enough that Mammana can pretend not to hear. Cynthia lowers her gaze, unable to reply.

  #

  She’s given her old place, overlooking the marshy patch by the stream, cradled in the ash’s branches. There’s even fresh straw, brighter than golden wool, though a good deal scratchier. It’s suited more to her crane shape, but after the long flight she has no stomach for changing back. She’s not sure her body could take another such change now.

  To her surprise, there’s a steady stream of visitors. It takes her only two visits to figure out why: these are the ones like her, who went outside and got themselves hurt as well. They’re here to hear her story, to confirm that yes, someone else has been as foolish as they were. Some sisters, more often cousins—swans, herons, even crows—and because it’s a story as old as the forest, the other girls of the forest as well, even from the realms that cannot even truly be called forest.

  Even Mellie comes up from her half-flooded house, dripping on Cynthia’s clean straw, carrying a string of trout. Cynthia at first demurs—only one serving of fish per week for pregnant women, think of the baby—but it’s been ages since she’s had fresh-caught fish from a river that didn’t have the sheen of oilslick on it, and she downs them one after the other, scales slipping coolly down her throat. “I guess you were hungry,” Mellie says in her deepwell voice, and Cynthia pauses, remembering how Peter said the same thing after she first got cravings. She’d polished off a pint of strawberries in five minutes flat, and he’d laughed and upended the change jar to buy more. The next day she’d found a masking-tape label across the empty jar: STRAWBERRY FUND.

  “What did he do to you, sweetie?” Mellie asks, and when Cynthia looks up she knows Mellie’s guessed her train of thought. She shakes her head, hands curled over her belly, straw crackling under her.

  Mellie shrugs, the eloquent movement of her white shoulders translating all the way down to her scales, the undulant coils winding past the edge of the nest and down to the water. “Mine refused to give me a little alone time once a week. A woman needs that, you know? And then it was the body issues.” Cynthia looks up at that; it’s a phrase from outside, a phrase meant more for Cosmo or Elle than Mellie’s damp lips. “I couldn’t always look presentable for him, and he didn’t understand that.” She shakes her head; water droplets scatter across Cynthia. “There was a lot he didn’t understand.”

  After she leaves, it takes Cynthia hours to bail the water out of her nest, and even after that there’s a heavy, damp clinginess to the straw. The long streamers of sunlight that reach down this far only glance across her nest, never warming nor drying it.

  More visit, sometimes with gifts, sometimes just to see her. Mistress Blanche from the cold lands drops by briefly, though she doesn’t come up to the branch for fear of hurting the tree. “He couldn’t keep a secret, could he?” she asks, her voice cracking like ice on an unsafe crossing. “For all that they call us gossips, they’re worse. Even when he knew there’d be consequences, he had to talk.” She casts a covetous and scornful glance at Cynthia’s belly, and when she leaves her footprints are brown under a thin layer of frost.

  And still others: Honeychild whose husband gabbed about her to his boss, Lupita whose husband damn near nailed her hide to the floor, and, coming up through Mellie’s house, Kelsey whose husband hit her—though it was only the three times, she says, twisting her heavy-callused hands in her lap, and never very hard. “Didn’t it go right for any of us?” she finally asks Mammana, exasperated after a long day of visitor after visitor. Each of their stories matches hers in shape if not in detail—the girl of the forest, the human lover, the promise broken—and each of them regards her with the same mix of disdain and longing. If it were the old women of the forest, like Mammana, Holly, or the Yag, she’d be more certain of what they said, but it’s always the young ones, or the ones who chose to stay young.

  Mammana, because she is Mammana, only shrugs. “If it did, they didn’t bother coming back.”

  It makes sense—obviously, the ones who came back are the only ones whose lovers broke their promises—but it doesn’t mitigate the weight of their stories. Sample bias, she tells herself. A term from outside, a concept from outside, where stories bear less strength, and so one that’s harder to hold on to. It’s easier to believe that all of their stories are the same, all of their husbands were the same, just as one crane-girl is much the same as another.

  As she was once the same. As the growing difference in her flesh tells her she is not.

  As the days pass it’s those sisters who visit, usually without warning, drifting down through the trees in a moon-pale glimmer to land, swaying, on the branch of the old ash tree. They stare at her, one eye then the other, before shifting form and joining her in the nest. Like her, they know both flight and the world outside the forest, but unlike her they have returned to what they were: unencumbered, pure.

  Only one, Yoko, comes to her as a woman, and Cynthia dimly remembers that this is because Yoko can no longer fly. Perhaps this is why Cynthia finally tells Yoko what happened.

  “I sold painted silks,” she says, the words accreting slower than threads on a loom, and Yoko bows her head. “I’d made them the—the traditional way, you know?—but then I painted them myself. It was just for fun, right?” She thinks of the feathers softer than silk, the pluck and weave of construction, and then the touch of ink on the completed canvas, like a single cloud across the moon. The silks didn’t bring in much money, enough for maybe a nice dinner now and then, but neither did her work in the coffee shop or Peter’s three part-time jobs. “But after we’d moved in together, I told him to stay out of the workroom when I was weaving—we were going to turn it into the nursery, we’d even put the crib together and moved my worktable to the far end—” She bites her tongue, hard. “I made him promise not to look, not while I was working.”

  Even now, she remembers the hesitant creak of the floorboards, the realization that she hadn’t latched the door, the sweep as she’d spread one wing in a useless, stupid attempt to hide the silk she’d woven of her own feathers. She’d been in the shape between, fingers and feathers both, in that monstrous space that was neither one nor the other. Sh
e could still hear his gasp and the one thing she’d thought to say: You broke your promise.

  And then she was gone, out the window and in flight, no time for explanations or discussions or even argument.

  “It was the only promise I ever asked, even joking,” she says finally, after the long silence that Yoko refuses to break. “He wasn’t—wasn’t supposed to see me.”

  Yoko finally rises, but when she approaches it’s not to embrace Cynthia but to lift up her arms, to sweep one knotted hand over them, checking for scars that are not there in either form. “You’re lucky,” she finally says in a whisper like wind through tight-stretched threads. “You didn’t have to keep weaving. I wove too long, drew too much from myself. Now . . .” She shrugs. “I should have told him no, but a woman didn’t, in those days.”

  The thought of Peter forcing her to weave is ridiculous. But so was the thought of him breaking his promise.

  Of course the story will make it through the forest in no time, no matter how discreet Yoko is. Of course her sisters will hear, and shake their heads, and promise themselves that even if they do go out into the world, even if they do take the risks that Cynthia did, they won’t be that stupid.

  Still, Cynthia lies awake, more often now that seven months has grown to eight and then eight and a half, and no amount of rearranging the straw of the nest or building little forts out of pillows will relieve the pressure. She thinks not of Peter, but of the coffee shop where she worked before meeting him, the little apartment, the half a stall she shared with a shifting roster of jewelers and potters and cranks at farmers’ markets and art shows with her painted silks.

  “I didn’t make them for him,” she says aloud, but only the old ash tree hears.

  #

  The birth is excruciating and messier than she could ever have imagined, even more so than the albumen-sticky births of her younger sisters. This is not how it was supposed to be, she thinks, and in the seemingly never-ending cycle of push and breathe and push again the thought skips like a damaged recording. Not how it was supposed to be, not the joyous experience she and Peter had discussed with the doula, not the careful clinical birth that she had steeled herself for after one too many labor horror stories at the coffee shop, not even one of those horror stories. Not how it was supposed to be, the simple laying of an egg, the long hungry days with food brought on the wing and Mammana coming by to tap the shell and tut at her for not eating right. None of the first crack of the egg tooth breaking through, the slow breach of the dome while she and her sisters sing the chick into sunlight.