by Jane Yolen
They can’t see her.
A ghost, a spirit? Why isn’t she fleeing as well, then? She’s looking at the road and the people passing her, her face twisted as if she were about to cry.
And why can Vy see her? She’s not a medium or an exorcist—but perhaps that’s how it starts—how you become one?
It’s everyone for themselves and their own, on the road. Vy should pass the woman by; to look away as she looked away when Ngoc Bich died. Instead, she runs up to the woman, keeping a wary eye on Second Aunt and Mom. They’re slow—trudging along the road, and the four women with them, and their grandmother being passed from hand to hand, makes them easy to find again, should she need to. Pain flares, briefly, in her legs, becomes a dull, familiar thing—and the world wobbles and contracts, every sound receding into the distance, and everything from the road to the skies taking on a yellow tinge. She’s going to faint—she can’t afford to, because she’ll be left behind –she...
A heartbeat, and then it passes, though her legs still feel like they won’t support her. “Are you all right?” she asks the woman. Every word feels like a struggle.
For a brief moment she thinks the woman won’t see her, either. But then her eyes focus on Vy, and widen. “Child?” she asks. It’s slow and hesitant, as if she’d been able to call Vy something else and changed her mind.
Adults are weird.
“I didn’t remember...” Her voice trails off.
“You can’t stay here,” Vy says. She pulls at her—again, she’s expected her hand to go right through, but instead it connects with an odd buzzing sound—and for a moment she’s hanging, weightless, in something larger than her—it’s not scary like the Maw, merely a feeling that someone, somewhere, counts her as their own. “Come on.” Overhead, the sky is darkening again, and their own fliers have turned. Something is coming.
The woman gets up, stumbling—comes walking after Vy. “I can’t...” she struggles, again, to get words out. “I’d forgotten it was so hard.”
“You have to walk,” Vy says, slowly, quietly. “People who fall behind—”
“I know,” the woman says.
She looks... old and exhausted and ill, but in some odd way Vy can’t define. It’s not just the road, not just the fatigue—something more fundamental has given way in her. She lets Vy lead her back to the road—slipping in, effortlessly, some distance behind Mom and Second Aunt. The woman flicks them a worried glance.
“They can’t see you,” Vy says, patiently. She hugs Tiger to her, breathes in the smell of wet fur and the fainter one of sandalwood. “Or hear you. They’ll just think I’m talking to Tiger.” A low whine: in the distance are three fliers, and they don’t look like they’re from the government. Might as well ask: she’s never believed in awkwardness, and there’s so little place on the road for adult rules of politeness. “Are you a spirit?”
The woman’s expression goes through an odd change. She looks at Vy again—that adult thing again, wondering how much of the truth she should tell her. “No,” she says. “I’m flesh and blood, same as you. Just...” She takes in a deep breath. “This is going to sound impossible—”
Vy points back, to the Maw; to the fliers overhead. “No rules,” she says, shortly. “You’ve been here long enough. You should know.”
“I haven’t.” The woman’s laugh is low and amused, and still completely wrong—hollow and drained. “Where I’m from, there is no road. Just a carpet of bones. The Maw ate itself out.”
It makes no sense. “Where you’re from—”
“The future,” the woman says. “After the war is over. After—” She shakes her head. Surely, if the war is over—if there is no Maw, if there is food and shelter and more to life than the endless road—then she should be smiling and plump? But she’s not, and that’s scarier than anything. “After we get out of here.”
Vy thinks, for a while. Not impossible or shocking, just... unexpected. She wants to say, prove it, but the woman wavers and fades from sight, her feet never quite touching the surface of the road, never throwing up dirt or mud. Her clothes are still pristine—she’s not there, not with them. And yet...
Vy says, slowly, carefully—because it all sounds like madness, the stuff of dreams and fairytales and bedtime stories, the ones Mom keeps telling each night with increasing desperation—“I need to know—”
The woman’s gaze focuses on her—again, that odd disconnect, as if she’d forgotten that Vy was there. “—what happens?” She laughs, again.
Now
Vy had forgotten, but it’s never been far from her, after all.
She’s on the road again. Walking in the shadow of the Maw, which has grown and grown until she doesn’t have to avoid looking at it, because she can’t look at it, because the fear of what it’ll do to her is enough to make her stomach clench, and for the acrid, burning taste of fear to flood her mouth—gnawed flesh and bones, teeth scraping against her cheeks and eyes.
Vy looks down, at the child she once was—grime-covered, pale-skinned, her cheekbones so large they swallow her entire face, her belly protruding from under her torn clothes—and that expression on her face—not the despair she remembers, but a simple dogged stubbornness.
She laughs. She can’t help it. It comes welling out of her, a thing of broken shards that rakes the inside of her throat and leaves the salty taste of blood in her mouth. “We survive,” she says. “It gets better.” She thinks of breathless, sleepless nights, tossing and turning for a safety she can’t find; but there are no words that can encompass this.
“You’ve been crying,” the child’s face is scrunched up in thought. Vy looks at Mom—so much younger, so much thinner than the steely-eyed woman she’s become—and then back at her. The child turns, briefly—not long—towards the Maw. “You can see it, can’t you? Why would you come here, if you don’t have to?”
“Sometimes we get no choice,” she says. I had to give you hope, she wants to say, but it’s not the expression on the child’s face—and perhaps not even what the child needed. She’s looking at Vy with a frown, as if she couldn’t quite believe what she’s staring at.
Overhead, the drones have moved to meet the three fliers—the first shots hit the side of the road. She flinches. The child doesn’t even move: she keeps a wary eye on them, on the road. “There’ll be a stampede, if they do hit the road,” the child says, with an assurance far beyond her years. “Have to watch out.”
With every word, Vy could reveal things she wasn’t meant to say—but does it matter, if the child—Vy—doesn’t remember any of it? Would she start another timeline, if she did that—would she simply cease to be? All questions to which she has no answer—her teachers in the pagoda say time is like a dragon that eats its own tail, forever unchanging, all moments as one—that everything that will be has already happened, and the past cannot be changed any more than ink can be erased from paper without destroying it.
“You said it gets better,” the child says. She shakes her head. “You don’t look like it does.”
She startles, stares at the child again. “I have children,” she says, finally. Bach Cuc, slow and careful; Bach Dao, who’ll pile up stools and steps and chairs if she thinks there’s a chance of reaching a toy. A wife she loves. “A house with a garden, in the suburbs of a city, where the cicadas sing, come summer.”
“Like they used to, in Rong An.” The child shakes her head. She says, finally, “Younger Aunt—you know what happens to—to us.”
“You live,” Vy says, slowly, carefully. “Most of you.” She stops, then. What good would it do, to the child, to know what awaits them—little Huong and Mom almost dying of dehydration, Second Aunt breaking her arm in the stampede to the border—the interminable, hollowed-out hours in the refugee camps with nothing else to do but worry and wait and pray?
“And get houses?” The child’s gaze is on her again—weighing her, dissecting her. She didn’t remember she’d been that way, at eight. “And families?”
She opens her mouth, then—heedless of the consequences on the timeline or whatever rot she’s filled her mind with—she has to tell the child who she is, what happens—everything that will sustain her, on the road—that will keep her walking until she gets to the refugee camp.
And then she sees the child’s gaze.
Not hope, not despair; but merely concern, and a faint, growing horror.
“You’re...” The child stares at her, shakes her head. “It broke you. The road. The Maw—“
She escaped the Maw. She walked all the way into the Empire—she lifted herself out of the nightmare of the road, of the camps, of the city—“I survived,” she says—and the words taste like blood on her tongue.
“But you never left.” The child’s voice is almost gentle—toneless and matter-of-fact, ringed with exhaustion.
It’s that, more than the rest, which finally breaks her.
Then
Vy hadn’t expected the look on the woman’s face. It’s like the day she broke Mom’s favorite celadon plate, the only thing they had left of Grandmother besides the pictures on the ancestral altar—that same slow disbelief as the world rearranges itself, as it becomes clear that nothing can be undone or erased or walked back.
“I’m sorry,” she says, quickly, words crowding themselves into her mouth before she can call them back. “I didn’t mean—”
The woman’s legs tense—she’s going to run away, lose herself into the crowd. “Wait,” Vy says, “Wait.” She starts running; stops, as the world pulses and contracts around her, yellow bleeding out of the clouds overhead. Her legs feel pulped to jelly—she stands, shivering, shaking.
The woman has stopped, looking at her with horror on her face.
“I’ll be fine,” Vy says. She takes a deep, shuddering breath—finds the third of rice cake she’s slipped in her sleeve that morning. It slides down into her belly, warm and comforting—not much, never much. But enough. “As long as I keep walking.”
The woman’s voice is low and spent. “It’s not a life.”
Vy shrugs. “It’s not an entire life. It ends,” she says; and then stops, realising what she’s said—to a woman for whom this has never ever ended. “I’m sorry.” She looks at the woman again. What could have gone wrong, that the road never left her—and then she tries to think of herself in the future; of a place where she can sleep that doesn’t have her fearing she’ll never wake up; somewhere where her legs don’t ache anymore, where her stomach doesn’t feel empty all the time. For a moment—an eyeblink, a heartbeat—it feels so wrong, so alien to her to be safe—for a moment only, she dances on the edge of the abyss, seeing the woman’s future reflected in her own.
No. That way lies madness. She can’t afford that; can’t afford doubts or regrets. Keep walking. Never look back.
But—
The woman is looking at her as if she were dying of thirst, and Vy held water. But she has nothing she can give the woman—nothing that would change anything. “It’ll be all right,” she says, before she can think. She hugs the woman, quickly—that same odd buzzing filling her. “You’ll be fine.” And, because the woman looks so broken, so forlorn, “We left everything behind. Ghosts and memories and the past. You have to travel light.” She thinks of their house in Rong An—of cicadas’ songs, and wooden cars and dolls, of Grandmother’s paintings, and the smell of apricot flowers and anise star in the yard, the cool touch of white tiles on her skinned knees, the distant voices of adults at table—of 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.
No doubts. No regrets. She pushes these where they belong—once, she’d have said the distant past, but now, she knows they’re also part of the future.
Where I’m from, the Maw ate itself out.
One day, she’ll come back.
Now
The child hugs her—it’s an odd and disquieting feeling—she looks just a little like the twins—enough that she could be their sister or cousin.
“You’ll be all right,” she says. “It all ends.”
It doesn’t; and yet...
Vy watches the ghosts by her side; the road that’s now bleached skulls and bones, but nothing else. Ghosts and memories and the past. She’d say they can’t harm her, but of course that’s a lie. Under her feet, the dragon in the earth stretches and turns, and she remembers she was the one who summoned the ghosts.
She stares at herself, at the inside of her wrists; at skin darkened by the sun, scarred by chips of rock and shrapnel—and hears, again, Lan’s calm, reassuring voice, the steady sound of Mom cutting up aubergines in her small compartment in Thanh Yen, Second Aunt’s laugher, the twins’ excited babbling. “I’ll be all right,” she says, aloud. The road twists and fades, the ghosts leaving her—her younger self receding in the distance, consigned to confused memories and dreams.
Vy turns, slowly, to face the darkness of the Maw—it shimmers and fades under sunlight, transparent and unreal, a thing that died a long time ago. Beyond it lies the beginning of the road and the city of her birth; the house where they lived, the streets where she grew up; memories and keepsakes to be salvaged, ghosts to be exorcised, answers to look for—every choice spread out in front of her like pieces of jade on a jeweler’s mat.
She stands up and starts walking through the ruins—away from the ghosts of the road, and back to where it all started.
We were told to count ourselves lucky when all he did was banish us, rather than set himself, sword and soul, against us.
Seanan McGuire
River of Stars
Seanan McGuire
The River of Stars shimmered bright and clean in the night-dark sky, each individual fish etched in a point of enduring light. The Maiden fled before it, her fins splayed wide, and the Fisher followed close behind, his star-sketched hands holding the bright illusion of his net. Clear weather, then. Good for sailors, poor for those who had no wish to be finned and scaled and sold.
Making final note of the stars and their positions, Kaida turned in the water, preparing to dive. Her father would be displeased to learn that they had so little cover. Storms were better than clear skies, at least when there were fishers in their territory. Storms drove humans back to shore, where they belonged.
Someone in the distance screamed.
Kaida froze, the spikes along her sides flaring in instinctive threat response. No matter that the threat was not to her: she could dive and be away from this place in seconds. But someone was screaming above the surface, and that meant humans were causing trouble again, causing pain and turmoil, in these, her family’s waters. They had no right. They had no claim here, no stars to guide them. They needed to be reminded of their place.
Like a knife swept along the belly of a fish, Kaida slashed through the water, spines slicked flat, flukes driving her forward. The scream had come from the landwise direction, and so she swam that way, surfacing only once, to see that she was in the correct position. A ship appeared before her, brought into view by her own movement, and as if to signal the accuracy of her choices, another scream rang out across the dark sea.
Kaida frowned. This would not do at all. The humans forgot their place.
She swam the rest of the distance to their ship in an instant, reaching up to grasp the ropes which ran down its wooden bulk to the sea. There were hooks at their bottoms, intended to snare unwary fish. If she had come across this vessel under more casual circumstances, she would have cut their lines, reminding them that these were Nyimi waters, and not intended for the likes of them.
She left the lines alone. She needed them for other purposes. A mermaid grasped them, and a mermaid pulled herself free of the ocean’s comforting embrace. A mermaid on two legs, swarming up the side of the ship like she had been born to climb the rigging and not to explore the depths of an unforgiving sea.
Ka
ida was almost to the top when she felt the first thin flickers of doubt. Perhaps she should have gone looking for her brothers, who were fishing these waters, and would be carrying good, sharp knives for the gutting and beheading of their catch. Landers respected knives as they did not always respect naked striped women, although most who survived an encounter with a Nyimi learned respect in short order.
Reaching up, she grasped the rail and pulled herself over, landing lightly on the deck…
…and found herself facing a circle of swords. A woman was tied to the mast, dark-haired, dark-eyed, and with several visibly broken fingers. She struggled against her ropes when she caught sight of Kaida.
“I’m sorry!” she shouted. “I’m sorry! They said they would kill my brother if I didn’t scream for them! I didn’t know!”
Kaida whirled to dive back over the rail, back to the sea, back to safety. The pommel of a sword caught her on the base of her skull, and she fell, and knew no more.
~*~
When she woke, it was in the hold of what could only be a human vessel. Only they built their ships so low, so tight, or allowed them to stink so. She could map the age of three separate catches, all of them slowly decaying in their barrels of salt and stench. Two of them were fish. The others…
Kaida closed her eyes. She would find the bodies, if she could. She would read enough of the stripes on their skin to chart their stars and guess their names, and she would swim every school she knew of until she found the one which sang a song of disappearance, of uncertainty. She would bring them certainty. It would cause them pain, but none as great as the pain of never knowing.
Too many schools swam now under that cold burden, their choruses never answered by the depths of an unyielding sea. More with every passing tide were forced to sing a song of sorrow.
Her school would never sing that song. She would escape this place, kill every cursed lander who swarmed the decks of this damned ship, and bring the songs of the lost ones home, as they belonged.