by Jane Yolen
You walked in mud,
You braved the deserts,
Swam the flood.
There were no walls
To keep you out,
But doors locked tight.
And haters shout.
The lady with the lamp
Has gone,
And yet your seeking
Still goes on.
The welcome mat
Sits all forlorn.
The safety net
Is tattered, torn.
A few doors creak
And open wide,
To bid you all
To come inside.
But Lady Liberty
Has fled.
Few offers of a meal
Or bed.
How did we come
To play these parts?
To close our eyes, and
Close our hearts?
So, when to heaven
We all fly,
Immigrating
As we die,
And try to enter
Heaven’s gate,
St. Pete will say
You’re much too late.
You’re laden with
The worst of sin.
Your door was closed,
You can’t come in.
…all they’ve left on the road’s side, the photographs and the jewels and the sandalwood box holding useless visitors’ cards from dead people—and everything they’ve lost hits her like a spike through the heart.
Aliette de Bodard
At the Crossroads of Shadow and Bone
Aliette de Bodard
Then
In Vy’s world, there is only the road.
She walks, ceaselessly, ignoring the ache in her legs and arms—a low, growling thing that never flares up, that never quite goes away. One foot after the other and another one—through the rice paddies and the forest, and the deserted remnants of villages. In the air, the dry, exhausted smell of sand and dust and the sour one of sweat and fear, grit that clogs up nostrils and lungs. Ahead, behind, the others—children, adults, her family, strangers, all with the same set to their faces—gaunt and taut, their clothes stained with dust and ashes.
Behind them—
No. They can’t afford to look behind them.
Her throat is dry, her legs hurt—and on the road, those who didn’t sleep keep walking, a ceaseless thunder of feet that’s since long dried out of the mud. The sky is black, smelling of smoke, the sun a pallid, wavering miracle in the distance. Behind them is only the shadow of the Maw—a black cloud covering up the glint of lips and teeth, creeping forward, eating up trees and cities and villages, faceless, relentless.
“Here,” Mom says. She hands Vy one of the rice cakes they made, back before they left Rong An, now so dry they’re barely edible. The salty smell of fish sauce wafts up, so strong it’s almost intolerable. “Eat up, and we’ll start up again.”
“What about you?” Vy asks.
“I already ate.”
Adults always think they’re so good at lying, but they’re not. But Vy’s found the key to turn that particular lock. She breaks the rice cake in three parts, and nibbles the first one slowly and deliberately. When Mom’s attention has wandered back to little Huong—the baby nestled on her chest, hands scrabbling at she desperately suckles to get the milk flowing—Vy hands back the second third. “Here. For Huong.”
Mom makes a face that hovers between pride of Vy and fear for her, but doesn’t say anything. “She’s right, lil’sis,” Second Aunt says. “The baby needs it.”
“I’ve kept a bit,” Vy says, holding up the last third. She keeps a bright and insincere smile plastered to her face. Mom would see through it in a heartbeat, if she was well rested.
Mom frowns. “All right,” she says. “But keep that one.”
Vy slips it in her sleeve, wordlessly. She’ll find a way to smuggle it to Second Aunt or Mom later, when they inevitably lose track of what she’s kept for herself.
They’re falling behind, Vy knows: because Mom and Second Aunt have a baby, because Vy is at that awkward age of eight, when she’s too slow, but too heavy for an adult to carry. Three days ago, the family with them, the one with a child about the same age as Vy, rested on the edge of the Maw—because they had to, because they couldn’t walk fast enough anymore. Mom thinks Vy didn’t hear anything, and Vy didn’t contradict her—but she woke up to a crunch of bones in the night. She looked: a fraction of a second only, caught the gleam of fangs in the Maw, a hundred thousand mouths covered by the darkness; and the sheen of blood and bones, swiftly swallowed up.
She’s not scared. She can’t afford to be scared. She has to be strong, to survive. But more importantly, to make sure the others make it to the border: to the wall defended by the Empire’s alchemists—to a land without the war, without the Maw.
An explosion, somewhere in the distance. Vy tenses, ready to run on jellied legs, but it’s only a government drone obliterated by three smaller rebel ones.
While Mom eats, Vy helps Second Aunt change Huong. The baby wriggles and smiles, and for a moment the world isn’t grey or exhausting or ringed with fear—for a moment only, everything breathes out and opens, and a tight feeling of warmth spreads to fill the emptiness in Vy’s chest. She tickles Huong, once, twice—all she dares to do. She expects Second Aunt to tell her off, but Second Aunt doesn’t speak; merely looks at the baby with an exhausted smile on her face.
“Time to go,” Mom says. She straightens up her hair, wrapping it in a loose topknot, and Vy helps her wrap Huong in a scarf on her chest. Mom smells, faintly, of sandalwood and peony—a perfume that’s souring into sweat and sickness as time goes by. Second Aunt shoulders the bag with the food—they’ve since long left everything else that might have mattered on the side of the road, all the pretty jewelry, all the letters from the dead—the box of sandalwood with the Double Happiness character, which used to contain the visitors’ business cards, lifelines in times of war. Vy has kept her scuffed tiger toy, and Mom the picture of Mama from before the war, the second mother Vy barely remembers—but what’s left is food and baby clothes, and not much else.
And then they’re back on the road, slipping in between a family of Dao nomads and a group of Ho, now all indistinguishable, spattered in mud and dust and blood. The four women in front of them alternate to carry an old grandmother—it’s a miracle they’ve made it this far without falling behind. There are no children of Vy’s age, not anymore, and if there were she doesn’t have the energy to talk, though Second Aunt is soon keeping up a steady patter of gossip with the four women, asking where they’re from and how it’s been for them.
“Lao Song, on the border...”
“The rebel alchemists dropped bombs on the village...”
“The Maw...”
Vy hugs Tiger against her, and keeps walking. The clouds are swallowing up the sun, nibbling at it like ten thousand teeth; it feels as though night is coming, even though it’s broad daylight. She can’t resist turning, just for a moment—just enough to catch a hint of the Maw from the corner of her eye—a black shadow spreading like ink stains across the landscape, and a gleam when it moves, and the smell of chewed-on, rotten meat.
When she turns back to face the right way, she sees something that wasn’t there before, a flash of red by the side of the road. A red tunic and white trousers—and the woman wearing them, standing and staring at her.
Now
Vy has always known she would return, and always known how hard it would be.
Back then, the road they had walked on seemed endless. Now it’s a short trip, except that that it’s hard to get there.
Vy had to come on foot from the border of the Empire, begging soldiers to take her a little way in, and then making her way through the arid wilderness, sweat trickling down her back, dripping into her clothes. Her throat is dry; the water in her canteen tasting stale and too warm to be refreshing. The heat pierces the thin soles of her shoes like spears. As far
as she can see, nothing: a desert with no people, no trees, no birds.
Where the Maw chewed, nothing will grow: it’s just ashes left, and things that crunch underfoot. Vy could tell herself she walks on grit and sand, but she’s older now, and she’s meant to face the past. Bones. She walks on a carpet of bones: of gnawed-on shards, of broken arms and legs, of skulls cracked open and finger knuckles scattered like some nightmarish children’s games. From time to time, buildings by the side of the road: deserted villages, houses open to the sun and rain—the Maw ate anything organic, but not stone, or wood, or wattle-and-daub.
Vy looks up, into the sky. Blue and cloudless, and a shining sun. It should make everything easier—tell her that the horrors are gone, that she’s safe now.
Such lies adults tell themselves.
Ahead lies Rong An, the city of her birth—the compartment where she grew up, memories of cavernous spaces under tables, of the smell of garlic and fish sauce—and of bombs falling like rain on metal roofs, new year’s yellow garlands going up in ashes and smoke—and the Maw.
Even now, they don’t know who used the Maw, whether it was the rebels, or the government, or their imperial allies. In the wave of war crimes trials—theatrical, stage-managed affairs that seem to comfort Huong, but do nothing for either her or Mom—no one will admit to making or triggering it. All she remembers is how it started: how the sky curdled into blackness, the streets washed away, the market stalls swallowed up with a crunch of teeth and knives. How it grew slowly at first—a fist of shadow in the heart of the city, while they worried about bombs and riots and empty rice jars—and then spread faster and faster as it consumed more and more.
It’s gone now, or so they told Vy. Stopped at the border with the Empire by the wall the alchemists have built—and, with nothing to feed on but itself, the Maw faded away, but not before it ruined the land past mending.
Gone.
Vy’s hands have shut into fists—all she can see is dark skies above her, and she remembers the sheen of oil and metal in the blackness at their heels—her shoulders aching with the strain of not looking, of always walking ahead. And the years afterwards: the refugee camps with chlorine-laced water and boiled, tasteless rice—the adults’ quiet and exhausted conversations about what they’d do, if the Empire decided to send them all home. The nightmares of finding the Maw on sidewalks and gardens that woke her up, gasping. The years in the Empire—the people shouting at her for stealing jobs and food, the well-meaning, barbed condescension of her co-workers, telling her how grateful to be for her rescue.
It will be all right. She doesn’t need to go all the way to Rong An, all the way into the birthplace of the Maw. Just far enough to bring the loop to a close. She looks at the road again, trying to parse faded and imprecise memories. Every day seemed the same, when she was eight—is this where she first saw the woman by the side of the road?
Close enough.
A voice, in her mind. “You’re shaking, and your heartbeat is well above normal.” Lan says.
“Did you—”
“Put a tracking spell on you?” Her wife sounds amused. It’s a simple spell: triggered by Vy’s heartbeat, and the only reason it works with both of them so far apart is because of the golden necklace Vy wears around her neck—a wedding present, a deeper connection between her and Lan. “I’m an alchemist, lil’sis,” Lan says. “What do you think I do for a living?”
Bomb cities, Vy wants to say, but it’s unfair. They’ve talked about the past; about what each of them did and didn’t do—what they let happen and what they didn’t. Neither of them sleeps well at night. Lan makes her amends volunteering at a Buddhist kitchen, and even before the end of the war she was spearheading rescue efforts for refugees. Vy—Vy just wakes up, gasping, shuddering at memories of the Maw.
The war has been over for twenty-three years now; it’s been twenty-five years since she walked past the border wall and entered the empire’s refugee camps.
Twenty-five years since she saw the woman from the future.
“You can still come home,” Lan says. Behind her, she can hear the twins Bach Cuc and Bach Dao giggling, banging toys against the tiles of their kitchen. Thanh Yen seems so far away, the city with its wide tree-lined avenues a mirage, a years-long dream she’s come up with on the road, to keep her mind from wandering. “You could—” Lan doesn’t speak, for a while, and when she does, her voice is quiet. “You don’t have to do this.”
“I really do,” Vy said. For twenty-five years she’s lived with the knowledge of this, like a sword over her head: that, at some point, she would come back to the road—that she would speak to her former self—give her the hope that kept her walking.
“You don’t even know who you saw,” Lan says. It’s a well-practised argument, one they’ve had time and time again, Lan’s hands smelling of cut garlic and fish sauce, with the wind blowing, softly, in the trees of their gardens. “You’ve thought about it and come to this conclusion it must have been your elder self, but you can’t be sure. And even if you’re right—you could still walk away. What do you think you’ll do, if you don’t speak to Younger Vy? Break the fabric of time? Things will rearrange themselves. They always do.”
If there’s one lesson Vy has learnt on the road, it’s the opposite. Things don’t rearrange themselves. Doing nothing—not walking, not helping—merely got people killed… or worse.
Vy was a child then: a child who saw a woman in a red dress abruptly appear by the side of the road. They had a conversation together, one that Vy can’t remember in detail—everything bleeding and merging together in the heightened fugue state of the road. But she remembers what it felt like, to know she had a future.
“You know I have to do this.” She’s woken up at night, listening to Lan’s calm breathing and hearing only the crunch of bones on the road—going out to the twins’ room, the floor under her naked feet the grit of the refugee camps, and seeing only bones beneath her daughters’ chubby cheeks, and empty sockets beneath closed eyelids. “Call it... amends.”
Lan’s laughter is low, and bleakly amused. “You’re not the one who needs to make amends.”
“You’ve made yours.”
“Can I ever?” Lan asks. There’s no answer to this. There will never be. “At least think on it.”
“I’ve thought for too long.” And, with nothing but bleak amusement in her voice, “What do you think I do for a living?”
Lan is serious too. “I know,” she says. “I’m not dictating what you can and can’t do. But this isn’t an exorcism, lil’sis.”
Vy’s not arrogant enough to think she can exorcise this place—even an immortal with a peachwood sword wouldn’t make a dent on this road and its massed ghosts. No, she needs to do one small, simple thing: speak to a child and give her hope.
It should be small. It should be simple—and it feels like neither.
She takes a deep, shaking breath—holds it for a moment, until her lungs start to burn, distracting her from memories of the pain in her legs and in her stomach. Then she lets it go, and kneels, her hands going deep into the grit—scattering ashes and bones, and bringing up the breath of the earth beneath her feet.
There’s almost nothing beneath her. The dragon coiled beneath the earth is wounded and broken, antlers broken, lustrous scales flaking away like so much dead skin—she feels their breath, slow and laborious. She can do nothing—it’s far too late for her to intervene.
I’m sorry, great-grandparent. I need your help.
The dragon shifts, stretches. Vy feels, flowing through her, the slow rhythm of breath—the boundaries of her self stretching, fading—she’s no longer locked in that body, in those memories, but part of something larger, the earth that always endures—the heavens above her, forever bright and unchanging.
It ought to be comforting—it always is—but here, in this time, in this place, it merely feels... weak. Inadequate, a child waving a flimsy stick to defend against alchemical fliers and bombs. Because
she remembers the Maw, how it clogged the earth, how it covered up the skies until nothing of blue or of sun remained.
Vy starts walking. As she does, the road twists and changes in front of her—and a hundred, ten thousand translucent ghosts shimmer into existence, young and old, from babies to the grandmothers and grandfathers making their slow way out of the shadow of the Maw.
She can’t look at the Maw. She’s not meant to.—But it’s there—the smell of rotten meat, the darkness that never ends, the teeth that bite, again and again, the bones that crumple upon the floor, the shadow that stretches all the way, coming to finish what it started, such a long time ago...
She can’t.
Then
Vy stops, staring at the woman. She kneels by the side of the road, wavering and bending like a mirage. She wears an embroidered silk ao dai, without a trace of smoke or ashes; her face awash in a soft blue radiance that smooths out her features. She looks... otherworldly, like a goddess in a temple, or an ancestor returned to earth to bless their descendants—and yet somehow curiously familiar. Vy looks from her to Mom, and from Mom to Second Aunt—there’s something in the woman’s face, something in the way she holds herself, that speaks to both and to neither of them. A distant cousin, perhaps?
“Who is that?” she asks.
Second Aunt throws a glance to the side of the road, and then back to Vy. “Who what?”
“The woman.” Vy points, hugging Tiger closer to her chest.
“There’s no one. Don’t be silly,” Second Aunt says, shaking her head, and moving back to gossip with their neighbours.
If she were younger, Vy would tug at Mom’s sleeves, and ask her the same question, but she’s no longer that stupid. Instead, she watches Mom, and the Lao Song villagers—the way their gazes move to either side of the road, and then back again to the long ribbon of dust leading them out of the country. Their gaze never stops on the woman, and neither do they show any surprise.