A pair of hands softly clapping in the wings intruded upon her reverie.
Aisa’s head whipped up, her eyes darting to where her dagger lay sheathed beside the flickering candle.
A figure, features obscured by darkness, stepped out from the shabby draperies, brushing them aside with a smooth, sparse gesture. Although she couldn’t see his face, Aisa knew that step, that familiar sweep of arm.
“Balege?” she gasped.
She started to run to him, her first impulse to embrace him, spilling over with questions and gladness. But she hesitated. The set of his shoulders, the rigid posture of his spine—so attuned was she to the signs and discourse of her partner’s body she understood that for whatever reason, Balege wanted to keep his distance.
“What is it? What’s the matter?”
“I came to dance with you, Aisa.”
“Of course you did.”
“But I’m not the same as I once was.”
Was he afraid his technique had declined, that she would spurn him for missteps, mistakes in tempo or timing?
“We are neither of us as we once were,” she said. Scrabbling with an old man for a crust of bread in the gutter, the brittle crunch of a cockroach between her teeth. “But there was never a better partner for me than you, Balege.” Aisa lifted her arm in the formal language of dance, her fingers held out to say, simply, Dance with me.
Balege stepped into the lighter circle of shadows contained by her candle. She saw what the greater darkness had hidden—the fogged sheen of his eyes, the gray pallor of his flesh, and beneath the sweet scent of rose water he favored, the taint of decay.
Aisa flinched back, her heart leaping in her chest. For the first time since she had attained the rank of premier soloist, her body flouted her will, frozen in place as she screamed for it to run away, flee for her life.
“You–you have the death plague,” she whispered.
Balege’s eyes shifted aside, a familiar expression of discomfort when he was embarrassed or shy. “Do you not want to dance with me, after all?”
“They say plague victims go mad . . . killing and eating their victims.” Unspoken between them, that the plague killed all of its victims, and then those damned unfortunates got up again—mindless, violent, and hungry.
He gazed out, stage center, over the empty blackness of the absent audience. “You know, it was always my greatest desire to be good enough to partner you. I watched your other partners, saw how they stumbled beside you, how they weren’t good enough for you, and I learned from their mistakes.”
It was true. Balege had never dropped her, unlike some of the worthless oafs she’d danced with over the years. From the beginning he’d seemed to know instinctively how to move with her, matching his reach and steps to hers, always where she needed him to be. From his very first audition, she had trusted Balege to catch her.
Aisa relaxed a little, the muscles in her legs and shoulders loosening from their rigid paralysis. “You were the best partner I’ve ever had.”
“We were perfect together.”
“We were.” Aisa extended her hand to him with an imperative flourish. Dance with me.
Balege bowed, a dancer’s benediction that said, Forever.
They moved together in unison, fingers clasped, his body wrapped in a lithe frame around hers. There was no awkward shifting or repositioning of limbs. There had never been between them.
“The finale,” he murmured. “On my count. One-two, one-two-three-four.”
The music started silently in two heads in complete synchrony.
She twirled in his arms and skipped away, springing like a gazelle back again. He steadied and braced her, always there, the inverted complement of her movements. They danced, and she reveled in the strength of his arms around her, the metered cadence of his legs, the matched beat of two bodies moving in seamless fluidity. It was as it used to be. And for now, nothing else mattered. How he’d found her, how he could be so himself still and not one of the mindless monsters the plague-bearers became. How he’d . . . died.
He bore her overhead in a spinning lift, effortlessly committing her to the air, only one hand supporting the full weight of her body. By an accident of threadbare hose and skirt, his fingers gripped skin where they should have glided over layers of once immaculate costume. The unnatural chill of his dead fingers cut to the bone. When he set her down, light as a fallen leaf, Aisa stumbled.
Balege was there, one hand on her hip, the other at her elbow, taking the weight of her misstep into the turn of his body. Shielding her. Catching her. None but the most discerning eye in the audience would have seen anything amiss, and even that discerning eye would have noted only a stray half beat, the smallest of errors.
How many times had Balege’s strong arms held her, lifted her, carried her? Balege was frame and scaffold, launching her into the air and catching her as she spun back to earth, his virtuoso utterly focused on making her scintillate.
Without a word, they continued their duet, and Snowbird’s Lament spooled out to its final steps: the lovers united, torn apart, reunited. The grand finale, as it should be danced, an explosion of turns and fleet footwork, culminating in a dead run to the end of the stage and a magnificent hurtle into Balege’s arms, just before she could plummet off it. It was a feat of athleticism and absolute trust. If he ever miscounted the beat, had a slight misalignment of timing or balance, she would fall, badly, from the high stage and onto the unforgiving floor below. Battered and bruised certainly, broken bones possibly, a career-ending fall. But Balege had always caught her.
Aisa didn’t hesitate now, flinging herself into the air, her body arched, giving herself over with complete abandon.
It was like flying—the moment stretching to infinity, suspended in the limbo space between earth and weightless freedom. No fear, no hunger, no pain, nothing but this perfect moment.
Dying now, like this, it wouldn’t be so bad. If Balege didn’t catch her, she might fall poorly enough to snap her own neck. That wouldn’t be so bad. Quick and fast.
Where had that thought come from?
The world’s weight found her. Aisa fell.
And Balege caught her.
The silent music ended. Aisa curtsied. Balege bowed. The illusory audience applauded. The phantom curtain came down.
Facing each other, their arms dropped away, no longer speaking the language of bodies and movement, relegated to the far less elegant communication of words and speech.
“You always catch me,” Aisa said.
“Yes,” Balege replied, softly almost a whisper.
“I had a thought, this time. What would happen if you didn’t?”
He straightened and stepped back, his eerie, undead eyes shifting sidelong. “You always forget. No matter how often we dance and I remind you, you forget.”
Aisa frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“One time, I didn’t catch you.”
Sudden outrage and disbelief, disproportionately livid and irrational. “Don’t be ridiculous. You always catch me.”
“Our first night on this stage. Remember again, Aisa.”
She wanted to stomp her foot. “This is our first night.” Lightning flash images skittered and popped behind her eyes. “Isn’t it—?” Her words faltered, taking her indignation with it. Hunger. So much hunger.
“You came here, why?” Balege asked, his voice gentle, coaxing.
She shivered, suddenly chilled. “After the theaters closed down, I–I sold myself into slavery. Better to be a fed slave in the upper city than starving and free in the slums.” Bruises and humiliation. “But the man I sold myself to, he wanted me to do such unspeakable things.” The instrument of her art desecrated. Blood on the walls. “I ran away. Found this place, this stage.”
“And I found you here, dancing.”
Aisa lifted her head. “How?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it was the light of your candle, or the shifting shadows through the cracked walls. I
was drawn to you as those who have succumbed to the death plague are drawn to ravage and devour the still-living. But when I saw you dancing Snowbird’s Lament, it was like an awakening. Mesmerized, I watched and remembered you and me, and us. You were afraid of me at first. But in the end, we did as we always do.”
“We danced,” she said.
“Yes.”
“And then?”
“At the end, right before Makira’s final vault off the stage, you called to me, ‘Don’t catch me! Let me go!’“
Hunger. Ceaseless, ravenous hunger.
“I still tried to catch you,” Balege said.
Juxtaposed images of pale flesh transposed with gray, splattered bursts of crimson across faded posters in the sunlight. “But I didn’t let you,” Aisa murmured. “I twisted away at the last moment.”
“Yes.”
“I fell.” Aisa lifted her hands to her face, noted the dead flatness of her skin, the black, broken nails. She listened to the still-quiet in her chest where her heart should beat, inhaled the scent of rotting flesh, her own. Her once fine dress, not just ragged and grimy, but grave-worn with filth and gore.
“We hunt and feed together,” he said. “You don’t remember who I am, who you are except when we’re dancing. But I do. Somehow, I do. I remind you.”
Aisa smoothed the soiled creases of her skirt, tucked a wisp of matted hair back into its unraveling chignon. All dancers knew their springtime was short. A dancer’s fate was to break or fade away, a short season of glory, if they were lucky. And Aisa had been lucky, very lucky. Until all the luck went away, for everyone. But this was a new kind of luck.
It would do.
“Remind me again, Balege,” she said and lifted her arm, fingers outstretched. Dance with me.
He bowed. “From the top. One-two, one-two-three-four.”
The tarnished moon spilled through the cracked and rent ceiling of the dilapidated theater, the only audience to the two dancers as they leaped and twirled together in matchless harmony. Dead flesh moved together with graceful elegance, lithe and nimble and strong, his and hers. An eternal performance.
And when it ends, he catches her.
“THE FISHER QUEEN”
ALYSSA WONG
Besides this Nebula Award nomination, Alyssa Wong has been nominated for Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, British Science Fiction Association, and World Fantasy Awards. “The Fisher Queen” was published in Fantasy and Science Fiction.
My mother was a fish. That’s why I can swim so well, according to my father, who is a plain fisherman with a fisherman’s plain logic, but uncanny flair for the dramatic. And while it’s true I can cut through the water like a minnow, or a hand dipped over the edge of a speedboat, I personally think it’s because no one can grow up along the Mekong without learning two things: how to swim, and how to avoid the mermaids.
Mermaids, like my father’s favorite storytale version of my mother, are fish. They aren’t people. They are stupid like fish, they eat your garbage like fish, they sell on the open market like fish. Keep your kids out of the water, keep your trash locked up, and if they come close to land, scream a lot and bang pots together until they startle away. They’re pretty basic.
My sisters tried to talk to a mermaid once. It was caught up in one of Dad’s trammel nets, and when they went to check the net out back behind the house, they found this mermaid tangled in it. It was a freshwater one, a bottom-feeder, with long, sparse hair whose color my sisters still argue about to this day. Iris, the oldest, felt bad for it and made May splash some water on its fluttery gills with her red plastic pail. She asked the mermaid if it was okay, what its name was. But it just stared at her with its stupid sideways fish eyes, mouth gaping open and closed with mud trickling out over its whiskers. Then Dad came home and yelled at Iris and May for bringing in the nets too early and touching the mermaid, which probably had sea lice and all kinds of other diseases.
I was just a kid then, but my sisters tell that story all the time. Iris is a marine biologist wannabe, almost done with high school but too dumb to go to university, who lectures us on fishes like we haven’t been around them our whole lives. She sleeps with the biology textbook I stole from the senior honor kids’ classroom under her pillow. May doesn’t give a shit about school and will probably get married to one of the boys living along the dock so she doesn’t have to repeat tenth grade again. The mermaid is one of those shared childhood memories they have, a little spark of magic from a time when they still believed that our mom really was a fish and maybe that mermaid was a cousin or something.
But I’m fifteen now, a full-fledged deckhand on a trawler and too old to be duped by some story Dad made up so he wouldn’t have to explain why our very human mom took off and dumped the three of us with him. I don’t care about stories of kids touching a glorified catfish either. It actually makes me sad, to think that my sisters really believed that our mom could be a dumb animal like that mermaid.
I’m lacing up my boots and getting ready to leave for the boat when May flops down from the top bunk, her black hair tumbling over my face. “Here.” She fumbles for her necklace and presses her carved-shell Buddha into my palm. “Come back safe, okay?”
I slip the waxed string over my head. It’s still dark out; the sun won’t be up for another few hours. “Yeah, of course. Go to sleep.”
She gathers the sheets up around her, their folds cresting like the ocean’s breakers. “I mean it, Lily,” she mutters. “Don’t come back a ghost.”
I tuck the dangling tail of her blanket under her belly. Iris, snoring on the bottom bunk, doesn’t even stir. “Ghosts are silly,” I tell May, grabbing my knapsack from where it hangs on the edge of the bed. Our little house is only two rooms, a blue tin roof over bedroom and kitchen, balancing on stilts above the river. Dad’s bedroll is gone, so I figure he’s aboard Pakpao already. “I’ll see you in a few days.”
I always check the nets out back for any fish that might have wandered in overnight, drawn by the ripe scent of trash. They’re empty tonight, no silver tilapia or pacu with their human teeth. No spindly-armed mermaids, either. I let the nets slip back into the water and trot down the walkway that connects the neighborhood of ramshackle houses above the river, wooden boards yawning underfoot. The green, thick smell of the river creeps up over the piers, rising into the night sky.
Our rickety trawler, Pakpao, waits at the edge of the docks, the crew drifting through the moonlight like specters. Pakpao looks like a child’s toy boat built out of scrap metal and blown up to the twentieth scale. Colored flags flicker in the damp wind, and rust creeps up the ship’s sides. My father’s stout, compact figure crouches over the nets, winding them up.
“Hey, Lily,” says Ahbe as I jog up the pier. At nineteen, he’s the deckhand closest to my age. “Ready for another four days at sea?”
“You must be feeling lucky if you think we’ll fill the hold and make it back home in four days,” grumbles Sunan, hauling a crate of plastic floats past us. His shirt has wandered off somewhere. “Cook’s looking for you, Ahbe. He wants to know what happened to the other batch of rice.”
“Gan was supposed to bring it in,” complains Ahbe, but he disappears downstairs anyway. Taking my cue, I follow Sunan to the nets.
Dad doesn’t look up from his work, patting the deck beside him for Sunan to drop off the crate. I sink down next to it, crossing my legs and pulling the nets into my lap. When the light’s better, it’ll be my job to fix the floaters and the heavy bobbins to the net’s mouth, widening it to span the surface of the river and weighing the bottom layer down to skim the mud below.
“I tried to wake you but you were fast asleep,” Dad says. He sounds apologetic. “Captain Tanawat wanted me here early to double-check the motor and our course to the ocean. Monsoon weather makes the fish finicky.”
I glance at him. My dad’s shoulders pump as he draws in the last of the nets. He’s the strongest, slyest fisherman I know. Someday, I want to be just like h
im. “Even the deep-water species?”
“Even those.” Dad sighs and lets the nets pool at his feet, kneeling beside me. His weathered hands coax the nylon strands out of their knots. “We might not find any mermaids for a week.”
“I don’t mind missing school,” I say. “I’d rather be here with you.” This is better than school, I figure; the algebra of the nets, the geometry of Pakpao out at sea, are more valuable lessons to me.
Dad smiles and ruffles my hair. “You’re a good girl, Lily.” Standing, he unclips his pocket flashlight from his belt and hands it to me. “I need to make sure we have enough ice in the hold, but you might as well start on the nets now.”
As he walks toward the cabin, I twist the flashlight on and grip the metal handle between my teeth, working in the small circle of electric light. I tie on the plastic floats and metal bobbins until the sky lightens and Ahbe hurtles from the kitchen. “We’re leaving! Are the nets ready?”
“Just about,” I reply. “They’ll be ready by the time we need ‘em.”
He grins, raking back his hair. “Awesome. I’ll let Captain Tanawat know that we’re all set!” He dashes off again, thin brown limbs flashing. I wonder if May will marry Ahbe out of all the fishing boys. I think he would be a good choice.
The motors roar, churning the green water below. Other ships are pulling into the docks, unloading their catches of basa, perch, and stingray for the fish market starting to construct itself on the shore. I don’t see any mermaids on sale, not even the pesky local catfish ones. Maybe they’re saving them for international markets.
Pakpao barely clears the heavy-limbed trees clustered by the riverside, their branches drenched with musky river-scent. I duck, keeping my attention on the nets. By the time I finish fixing on the last bobbin and remember to look up, our stork-legged village has disappeared from sight.
The monsoon rains catch us an hour into the journey downriver, so we don’t end up letting out the nets until the next day, when we’re almost at the delta that opens up into the sea. Dad, Sunan, Ahbe, and I work together, feeding out the bottom nets with their bobbins first, then the large central net, and finally the top nets. The nylon stings my fingers as it’s yanked through the water, but I won’t complain, not in front of Dad and the others. I’d rather nurse my wounds in private.
Nebula Awards Showcase 2016 Page 9