“Assassinated? How?”
“He was trying to negotiate with the Sons of Sarmatia, and a radical pulled out a gun that had gotten through security. You never watch the news, do you, Pati? I watch it a great deal. It is important for me to learn the names of the world leaders, learn about international diplomacy. That is more important than organic chemistry, for a Khanum.”
“A what?”
“Don’t you understand? Now that Malek is dead, I am next in the line of succession. Someday, I will be the Khanum of Cimmeria. That is what we call a female Khan. In some countries, only male members of the royal family can succeed to the throne. But Cimmeria has never been like that. It has always been cosmopolitan, progressive. The philosopher Amirabal persuaded Teshup the Third to make his daughter his heir, and ever since, women can become rulers of the country. My great-grandmother, Daddy’s grandma, was a Khanum, although she resigned when her son came of age. It is the same among the Scythians and Sarmatians.” This was Lisa’s doing. It had to be Lisa’s doing. She was the one who had come up with Amirabal and the philosophical school she had founded in 500 BCE. Even Plato had praised her as one of the wisest philosophers in the ancient world. I silently cursed all Birkenstock-wearing feminists.
“What does this mean?” I asked.
“It means that tomorrow we fly to Washington, where I will ask your President for help against the Sarmatian faction. This morning on one of the news shows, the Speaker of the House criticized him for not supporting the government of Cimmeria. He mentioned the War on Terror—you know how they talk, and he wants to be the Republican candidate. But I think we can finally get American aid. While I am there, I will call a press conference, and you will stand by my side. We will let the American people see that my husband is one of them. It will generate sympathy and support. Then we will fly to Cimmeria. I need to be in my country as a symbol of the future. And I must produce an heir to the throne as quickly as possible—a boy, because while I can legally become Khanum, the people will want assurance that I can bear a son. While you were out, I packed all our clothes. We will meet Daddy’s plane at the airport tomorrow morning. You must wear your interview suit until we can buy you another. I’ve set the alarm for five o’clock.”
I should have said no. I should have raged and cried, and refused to be complicit in something that made me feel as though I might be sick for the rest of my life. But I said nothing. What could I say? This, too, was Shaila.
I lay in the dark beside the woman who looked like my wife, unable to sleep, staring into the darkness. Shaila, I thought, what has happened to you? To your dreams of being a pediatrician, of our children growing up in America, eating tacos and riding their bikes to school? You wanted them to be ordinary, to escape the claustrophobia you had felt growing up in the palace, with its political intrigue and the weight of centuries perpetually pressing down on you. In the middle of the night, the woman who was Shaila, but not my Shaila, turned in her sleep and put an arm around me. I did not move away.
• • • •
You are pleased, Afa, that I have returned to Cimmeria. It has meant a promotion for you, and you tell everyone that you are personal assistant to the American husband of the Khanum-to-be. You sell information about her pregnancy to the fashion magazines—how big she’s getting, how radiant she is. Meanwhile, Shaila opens schools and meets with foreign ambassadors. She’s probably the most popular figure in the country, part of the propaganda war against the Sons of Sarmatia, which has mostly fallen apart since Malek’s death. The SDA was absorbed into the Cimmerian Democratic Party and no longer presents a problem. American aid helped, but more important was the surge of nationalism among ethnic Cimmerians. Indeed, the nationalists, with their anti-Sarmatian sentiments, may be a problem in the next election.
I sit at the desk in my office, which is no longer near the servants’ quarters, but in the royal wing of the palace, writing this article, which would be suppressed if it appeared in any of the newspapers. But it will be read only by JoIA’s peer editors before languishing in the obscurity of an academic journal. Kala and one of her sisters lies at my feet. And I think about this country, Afa. It is—it was—a dream, but are not all nations of men dreams? Do we not create them, by drawing maps with lines on them, and naming rivers, mountain ranges? And then deciding that the men of our tribe can only marry women outside their matrilineage? That they must bury corpses rather than burning them, eat chicken and goats but not pigs, worship this bull-headed god rather than the crocodile god of that other tribe, who is an abomination? Fast during the dark of the moon, feast when the moon is full? I’m starting to sound like a poet, which will not be good for my academic career. One cannot write an academic paper as though it were poetry.
We dream countries, and then those countries dream us. And it seems to me, sitting here by the window, looking into a garden filled with roses, listening to one of the thousand fountains of this ancient city, that as much as I have dreamed Cimmeria, it has dreamed me.
Sometimes I forget that the other Shaila ever existed. A month after we returned to Cimmeria, an Arizona state trooper found a body in a ditch close to the Life Sciences Building. It was female, and badly decomposed. The coroner estimated that she would have been about twenty, but the body was nude and there was no other identification. I’m quoting the story I read online, on the local newspaper’s website. The police suggested that she might have been an illegal immigrant who had paid to be driven across the border, then been killed for the rest of her possessions. I sometimes wonder if she was Shaila.
This morning she has a television interview, and this afternoon she will be touring a new cancer treatment center paid for with American aid. All those years of listening and waiting were, after all, the perfect training for a Khanum. She is as patient as a cobra.
If I ask to visit the bazaar, the men who are in charge of watching me will first secure the square, which means shutting down the bazaar. They accompany me even to the university classes I insist on teaching. They stand in the back of the lecture hall, in their fatigues and sunglasses, carrying Kalashnikovs. Despite American aid, they do not want to give up their Russian weapons. So we must remember it: the stalls selling embroidered fabrics, and curved knives, and melons. The baskets in high stacks, and glasses of chilled mint tea into which we dip the pistachio biscuits that you told me are called Fingers of the Dead. Boys in sandals break-dancing to Arabic hip hop on a boombox so old that it is held together with string. I would give a great deal to be able to go to the bazaar again. Or to go home and identify Shaila’s body.
But in a couple of months, my son will be born. (Yes, it is a son. I’ve seen the ultrasound, but if you tell the newspapers, Afa, I will have you beheaded. I’m pretty sure I can still do that, here in Cimmeria.) There is only one of him, thank goodness. We intend to name him Malek. My mother has been sending a steady supply of knitted booties. There will be a national celebration, with special prayers in the churches and mosques and synagogues, and a school holiday. I wish Mike could come, or even Lisa. But he was offered a tenure-track position at a Christian college in North Carolina interested in the Biblical implications of Imaginary Anthropology. And Lisa is up in the mountains somewhere, close to the Scythian and Sarmatian border, studying woman’s initiation rites. I will stand beside Shaila and her family on the balcony of the palace, celebrating the birth of the future Khan of Cimmeria. In the gardens, rose petals will fall. Men will continue dying of natural or unnatural causes, and the cats of Cimmeria will lead them into another world. Women will dip their water jugs in the fountains of the city, carrying them on their heads back to their houses, as they have done since Cimmeria has existed, whether that is three or three thousand years. Life will go on as it has always done, praise be to God, creator of worlds, however they were created.
Reprinted from the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology 4.2 (Fall 2013).
Dr. Patrick Nolan is also co-author of “Cimmeria: A Proposal” (with
M. Sandowski, L. Lang, and A. Farrow), JoIA 2.1 (Spring 2011), and author of “Modern Cimmerian Funerary Practices,” JoIA 3.2 (Fall 2012). Dr. Nolan is currently a professor at Kursand University. He is working on A History of Modern Cimmeria.
© 2014 by Theodora Goss.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. Her publications include the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting; Interfictions, a short story anthology coedited with Delia Sherman; Voices from Fairyland, a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems; and The Thorn and the Blossom, a novella in a two-sided accordion format. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, and Mythopoeic Awards, as well as on the Tiptree Award Honor List, and has won the World Fantasy Award.
To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.
A HOLE IN THE WORLD
a Kaslo Chronicles Story
Matthew Hughes
*
Previously on The Kaslo Chronicles: Magic now rules the universe and hardboiled confidential operative Erm Kaslo, henchman to the wizard Diomedo Obron, returns from a mission to the underworld to find that a flood of strange creatures have carried off the survivors of civilization’s collapse who had taken shelter at Obron’s castle. To read the other stories in the series, visit lightspeedmagazine.com/kaslo.
*
“I’m taking Bodwon with me,” Erm Kaslo said. “He’s handy.”
Diomedo Obron did not look up from the ancient tome in which he had been immersed when his security chief entered his work room. “All right,” he said.
“That means there’ll be nobody handy here,” Kaslo said. “So you’ll need to keep everybody inside the perimeter.”
The wizard’s finger traced a line of handwritten text. “Uh huh.”
“Really. Everybody. Inside.”
His tone caused Obron to look up. “I assure you,” the wizard said, “I understand.” He glanced down at the page again. “At least that much.”
Kaslo studied his employer for a moment, then made a sound that signified minimal agreement. But as he saw Obron return to the text, he had to admit that the former magnate of the Grand Foundational Domain of Novo Bantry had come a fair distance since he had first hired Kaslo’s services as a confidential operative. The job had been to track down and apprehend the fraudster Binnie Varshun who had gulled Obron into an off-world mining investment and absconded with the funds.
The op’s impression of his client back then had been that of a man who had inherited vast wealth and spent his life dreaming of becoming a wizard in a world ruled not by rationalism but by magic. Subsequent events had shown that the man’s ambition had been no idle dream. The universe had changed, suddenly and drastically, and the once-hesitant version of Obron was now almost completely submerged beneath the increasingly decisive and powerful thaumaturge who could raise a castle by incantation and surround it with a spell—Plackatt’s Discriminating Delimiter—that could keep out a howling whirlwind and a fire elemental.
Kaslo now saw something else behind the concentration in the other man’s face: fatigue. “Have you been up all night?” he said.
The finger traced another line. “Yes.”
“Following Phalloon’s clues?”
Obron raised his gaze and used thumb and forefinger to massage his eyelids. “As far as I can.”
“You are more intelligent than Phalloon. What he found in all of this,”—he gestured to the shelves of ancient books—“you must surely be able to discover. And probably more.”
Obron sighed. “You are thinking like a man of the previous age.”
“I am such a man.” Kaslo was practical, logical, rational—all the qualities that were next to useless in a universe that now operated by intuition, willpower, and what in the times now gone by had been called mere coincidence. “What am I missing?”
Obron rotated his thin shoulders and stretched his long neck forward and back. “These books,” he said, “they are not inert. They were inert during the previous age of rationalism; now that we have returned to the rule of sympathetic association, they are regaining their mana.”
Kaslo blinked. “Are they sentient?” he said.
“Like our integrators used to be? No.” Obron held his open hand palm-down over the page. His brows drew down as he concentrated momentarily. “But over centuries, even millennia, wizards of considerable power—even supernal power—used these to exert their will. The books acquired and retained a . . . call it a residue of that power.”
“And they use it against you?” Kaslo said. He ran his gaze over the ranked spines, black and red, blue and green, of old leather and strange cloth. “Have we no allies in this new world?”
“They are not inimical,” said the wizard. “Better to think of them as spirited steeds that will let you ride them if you’ve got what it takes.”
“Have you?”
“A blunt question.” Beneath the fatigue, the other man’s face showed strength. “To which the blunt answer is, increasingly, yes.” He touched the dry parchment with its serried rows of spiky black script. “We are reaching an accommodation. A sense of mutual respect.”
“Out of which comes what progress?”
Phalloon’s shade, located in the underworld, had told Kaslo that in life the wizard had identified a powerful entity. Phalloon had meant to raise the very castle in which Kaslo and Obron stood on an intersection of ley lines, in the hope that it would protect him from the unknown enemy’s force.
But, even in the underworld, the ba of Phalloon still feared the adversary and dared not speak plainly. Instead, it offered three cryptic clues: the Twentieth Aeon, a face of black iron, and the blood of a dragon. It was these hints that Obron had been researching.
“Progress?” the wizard said and rubbed his eyes again. “I have at least learned that the secret to deriving answers from a book like this is first to discover the right question.”
Kaslo was learning to tamp down his natural impatience when dealing with his employer. This was not an age that encouraged straightforward discourse. “And have you?” he said.
Obron’s response was a question of his own. “Why send,” he said, “a fire elemental?”
“How am I to know?” said the op. “I have been reduced to the level of a child, and not a very promising one.”
“I didn’t expect an answer from you.” Obron touched the book again, almost like a man patting a favorite mount. “But that seems to be the question I should be exploring.”
“All right,” said Kaslo. “Why a fire elemental? Because whoever sent it has an affinity for fire?”
Obron’s lips moved in a kind of shrug. “Perhaps, though it doesn’t feel right.”
“A matter of reach or range? After all, we don’t know how far away this enemy is, or what its strength may be.”
“I think we can assume great strength,” Obron said, gesturing to indicate the castle Phalloon had hoped would shield him. “And therefore probably operating from a distance, else it would already be battering at our gates. Which means that its ability to come here and batter must be constrained.”
Kaslo thought of the lonely shade of Phalloon on the windswept desert of the underworld. “Another plane?”
“It could be,” said Obron. “Time and space are not as we know them in the other realms. If a power, a great power, from the previous age of magic had sought to retain its puissance when the universe reverted to reason, it might have secreted itself in a hideaway in another plane.”
“And now,” said Kaslo, “it will be looking to return.”
“Return and rule.” Obron looke
d down at the page again. “And yet it hasn’t. Why not?”
“Because it can’t. It needs something.”
“And it sent a fire elemental to get that something,” the wizard said. “What does that tell us?”
That was obvious to the op. “It is something that will not burn.”
“Indeed,” said Obron. He laid his hand on the page again. “And how do we feel about that?”
Kaslo could not receive an answer from the book; the tome Obron had called a “spirited steed” would not even acknowledge him. But the look on Obron’s face told him that the wizard had garnered some kind of response. The op looked toward the unglazed slit of a window. The gray light of dawn was growing rosier. “I need to get going,” he said.
“Do you really expect to rescue any of them?” the wizard said.
Kaslo shook his head. “Probably not. But I can at least try to find out where they went, and who or what took them.” His gaze hardened. “And perhaps some way to strike back.”
• • • •
Bodwon was waiting beside the small port in the castle’s main gate, rubbing his arms against the morning chill. But Kaslo didn’t think the cold was why Bodwon was shivering.
“Listen,” he told the man, “this is only a reconnaissance. We’re not going to war.”
Bodwon rubbed his hand over his scalp, where his burned-off hair had now grown back in. Relief and embarrassment contended in his face. “It’s just . . .” he said.
“Say it. Nobody’s judging you.”
The man shivered again. “It’s just that you didn’t see them. They were like machines, I mean like machines used to be. They knew what they were doing, and they did it fast. One minute, the village was full of people, the next they were being hauled off. The women were screaming, some of the men, too.”
Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 50 Page 10