This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar

It lays its head on her shoulder.

  Then it leaves, and two feathers remain.

  Red clutches them to her for a long time before she reads.

  Later, farther south, a great horned owl takes the goose, and the seeker, weeping, eats its heart.

  When Red enters the clearing, only footprints and the cored goose remain.

  * * *

  My dear Miskowaanzhe,

  I write to you in the dark before dawn, slowly, longhand, chalk on slate—later I will translate these words into feathers. There is a small hill from which I can watch the sun set over the Outaouais River; every evening I see a red sky bleed over blue water and think of us. Have you ever watched this kind of sunset? The colours don’t blend: the redder the sky the bluer the water, as we tilt away from the sun.

  I’m embedded, now, in a strand beloved of Garden—one of the ones where this continent wasn’t critically overrun by settlers with philosophies and modes of production inimical to our Shift—on a research mission, tugging at and wicking fibres for easier braiding into other strands. Always a balancing act, of course, to give without losing, to support without weakening. Everything a weaving.

  I’ve been placed here to convalesce, I think. Garden doesn’t always spell these things out but does know my fondness for hummingbirds and migrating geese. I’m grateful. It is good to write with leisure. I hope, while here, to stretch my letters out, if only because they will have to find you at a lived pace—it will be a long while before I walk the braid again.

  I’m married and will soon wake my husband with rose-hip tea and breakfast before sending him out to train. He’s a good man, a runner and a scout, and the days are getting cooler, so there are a great many messages and supplies to send and share before the storytelling season sets in and blankets us indoors.

  It is such luxury to dwell in these details—to share them with you. I want, Red—I want to give you things.

  Have you ever tasted rose hips, in tea or jam? A tart sourness that cleans the teeth, refreshes, smells like a good morning. A mash of rose hips and mint keeps me steepling my fingers all day long, to keep those scents in my head. Sumac, too—I think you might like sumac.

  I find myself naming red things that aren’t sweet.

  Your letter—your last letter. Be certain that I won’t drop it where any of your fellows can read it. It’s mine. I am careful with what belongs to me.

  Few things do, you know—belong to me. In Garden we belong to one another in a way that obliterates the term. We sink and swell and bud and bloom together; we infuse Garden; Garden spreads through us. But Garden dislikes words. Words are abstraction, break off from the green; words are patterns in the way fences and trenches are. Words hurt. I can hide in words so long as I scatter them through my body; to read your letters is to gather flowers from within myself, pluck a blossom here, a fern there, arrange and rearrange them in ways to suit a sunny room.

  It amuses me to think of liking your Commandant. What a strange Strand that would be.

  I keep turning away from speaking of your letter. I feel—to speak of it would be to contain what it did to me, to make it small. I don’t want to do that. I suppose in some ways I’m more Garden’s child than she knows. Even poetry, which breaks language into meaning—poetry ossifies, in time, the way trees do. What’s supple, whipping, soft, and fresh grows hard, grows armor. If I could touch you, put my finger to your temple and sink you into me the way Garden does—perhaps then. But I would never.

  So this letter instead.

  I ramble, it seems, when writing to the darkness by hand. How embarrassing. I’m quite certain I’ve never rambled a day in my life before this. Another thing to give you: this first, for me.

  Yours,

  Blue

  PS. Should this find you near a library, I recommend Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison. It’s the same in all strands in which it exists. It might be a comfort to you on the move—I can tell you’re moving a lot right now.

  PPS. Thank you. For the letter.

  * * *

  Blue walks in the hush-light before dawn and looks for a sign.

  Her work here is slow but never boring; one of Blue’s virtues as an operative is the thoroughness she brings to every life. Her husband will be important to the daughter of a rival’s friend, and the conversations Blue has with him, the gifts she makes him, the dreams towards which she rocks him in their bed will spiral tendrils of possibility from this strand into others, send tremors to shift and shake the future’s boughs in Garden’s direction.

  It is a gift from Garden that her role here requires such thorough, deliberate in-dwelling; that to wander in the woods and think of birds and trees and colours is expected of her, is mission critical. Blue loves cities—their anonymity, their smells and sounds—but she loves forests, too, places other people call quiet that are anything but. Blue listens to jays, woodpeckers, grackles, laughs at hummingbirds jousting on the wing. She holds out her hands for nuthatches and chickadees, black-and-white warblers, and they flit to her, make branches of her fingers. She strokes sapsuckers’ crests without naming the colour, makes a needle and a thread of the thrill she feels in touching it, then stitches it into the joy Garden expects her to feel in the woods.

  • • •

  There’s a scar on her shoulder in every shape now, a puckered tracery of trauma. Wolves shy from her, love her from a distance.

  Because she is expected to amble in this way, it’s relatively easy to disguise her searching; because she has been turning the last season’s leaves, picking up crow skulls, the shed and drying velvet of antlers, foxes’ teeth, it is not at all noteworthy that she goes still as prey in the presence of a great grey owl, its wizard face inclined to her, the sheen of its feathers ruffling a colour like the retreating night.

  It stands, serene and dignified, in the hollow of an oak and looks at her.

  Then it horks up a sizeable pellet, ruffles itself, and flies away.

  Blue laughs—sudden, sharp—and stoops to pocket the pellet. She turns it over in the fingers of one hand without looking at it, just another curio for her collection. She does not take her hand off it until she is back home; she waits until sunset, when she can be looking at the scarletting sky as she cuts carefully into the pellet and finds something there to read.

  Years later, a seeker scours the area just shy of the speed of sound, blurs in and out of sight, and carries tiny fragments of bone back into the braid.

  * * *

  Dearest Lapis,

  Yes! I’ve been moving. They have us—well, me, really—all over these days, upthread and down, new assignments gathering by the minute. Your side’s tricks and traps took their toll, so our missions multiply to make up the difference. But enough of the war. Enough to say: I write at haste.

  I was about to ask you to forgive my brevity. As I went to write that, though, I saw you shaking your head. You were right, back when—I have built a you within me, or you have. I wonder what of me there is in you.

  Thank you for your letter, more than I can say. It found me in a moment of hunger.

  Words can wound—but they’re bridges, too. (Like the bridges that are all that Genghis left behind.) Though maybe a bridge can also be a wound? To paraphrase a prophet: Letters are structures, not events. Yours give me a place to live inside.

  My memories of you spread through millennia, and each highlights you in motion. This picture of you at home, with husband, with rose-hip tea, with sunset and river, swells my heart. A stippling of sea skin indicates the whale beneath—or dots of star shape a bear light-years big—so I trace your life now, from these hints. I imagine you waking, sleeping, watching geese, working hard outside, with arms and back and legs and period technology. I will find some sumac when next I’m where it grows. I confess I’m only familiar with the poison variety, which I don’t think you mean.

  Perhaps someday they’ll assign us side by side, in some small village far upthread, deep cover, each watching each, and we can make t
ea together, trade books, report home sanitized accounts of each other’s doings. I think I’d still write letters, even then.

  Read the Mitchison. Loved it. (Though that seems too quick a summary—I get what you mean about words, now.) It hit me. Especially the dragons and Odin and the ending. I had a harder time with the Constantinople section—I may be missing some context there, though I can see what place it holds in the book, and the trickery reminds me of pieces of Don Quixote. But the final revelation—about the kings and the dragons—yes. Funny how we always think of knights as fighting dragons, when in fact they work for them.

  Garden seems to like roots, and this book roots in rootlessness. Are you a tumbleweed, then? A dandelion seed?

  You are yourself, and so remain, as I remain,

  Yours,

  Red

  PS. Owls are fascinating creatures, but it’s harder than I’d thought to convince them to take food. Maybe this one didn’t trust me.

  PPS. I don’t mean to unnerve you, but—are you seeing shadows? I may have picked one up. No proof yet, and I may well be paranoid, but paranoia doesn’t mean I’m wrong. Commandant hasn’t let on she suspects anything, at least not yet. Take care.

  PPPS. Really. That book. In a moment of daring I commended it to the attention of a few major critics in Strand 623; hard to generate momentum, but you never know—new strands rise all the time. Send me more.

  * * *

  Red wins a battle between starfleets in the far future of Strand 2218. As the great Gallumfry lists planetward, raining escape pods, as battle stations wilt like flowers tossed into flame, as radio bands crackle triumph and swiftskimmers swoop after fleeing voidtails, as guns speak their last arguments into mute space, she slips away. The triumph feels stale and swift. She used to love such fire. Now it only reminds her of who’s not there.

  She climbs upthread, taking solace in the past.

  Red rarely seeks company with others of her kind. They are oddballs all—decanted after being found, at some point in their development, deviant. Or, the most deviant of all, those who decanted themselves. They are not at peace and play in the celestial rose. They carve their bodies off, they introduce asymmetry.

  They would make this war, she thinks, if there were not a war already made for them to make.

  But she seeks company now, in one of the places she can always find it.

  Sun hammers the streets of Rome. A man with a lean face and a sharp nose and a laurel crown walks, attended, past the Theater of Pompey. Others intercept him, summon him inside. A crowd’s waiting there, in the shadows: the senators, their servants, and others.

  “Have you,” Red asks one of the others, “ever felt you’re being followed? That Commandant is spying on you?”

  One senator offers Caesar a petition.

  “Followed?” says the man with the broken nose to her left. “By the enemy, sometimes. By the Agency? If Commandant wanted to spy on us, she could read our minds.”

  Caesar waves off the petition, but the senators cluster close.

  “Someone’s dogged my tracks,” Red says. “But they’re gone as soon as I think to catch them.”

  “Enemy agent,” says the woman to her right.

  “These are jaunts of my own, research trips, not counterplay. How would an enemy agent know where I was going?”

  One senator draws a knife. He tries to stab Caesar in the back, but Caesar catches his hand.

  “If it is Commandant,” says the man with the broken nose, “why worry?”

  She frowns. “I would like to know if my loyalty is being tested.”

  The man whose hand has been caught shouts for help in Greek. Knives slither from senators’ sheathes.

  “That would defeat the purpose of the test,” observes the woman. “Come on. We’ll miss the fun.” She has a wide grin and a long blade.

  Caesar shouts some words, but they’re lost in the din as the killers descend. Red shrugs and sighs and joins them. Their war holds few enough chances to cut loose, and she can’t be seen to pass them up. Blood sticks to her hands. She washes them later, in another river, far away.

  Leaves are turning in the Ohio woods when the geese land. One departs from the flock to approach. Red ponders the fate of the last goose to bring her a letter and feels a moment’s guilt.

  Twine loops the goose’s neck, and from the twine hangs a pouch of thin leather.

  Her hands tremble as she opens the pouch. Six seeds lie inside, tiny crimson teardrops with tinier numbers scratched into their surface, one through six. On the leather, in an ink too blue for this continent or strand, handwriting she knows well, though she’s only seen it once, traces Do you trust me?

  She sits in the woods, alone.

  She does.

  Red trusts her so far down in the bone she has to ponder a long while to realize what distrust might imply—what these seeds might be, what they might do to her if she’s wrong.

  She eats the first three seeds one by one. She should be sitting beneath a baobab tree, but she slumps under a buckeye instead, surrounded by spiked shells.

  As each letter unfolds inside her mind, she frames it in the palace of her memory. She webs words to cobalt and lapis, she weds them to the robes of Mary in San Marco frescoes, to paint on porcelain, to the color inside a glacier crack. She will not let her go.

  The third seed, with its third letter, drops Red into a swoon.

  She wakes at a rustle of buckeye shells to find the last three seeds still clutched in her fist, but the leather bag missing. She hears footsteps in the wood and pursues them: A shadow darts before her, always out of reach, and then it’s gone, and she falls panting to her knees in the empty wood.

  * * *

  Dear Price Greater Than Rubies,

  I have been needle-felting for my lover’s sister’s children: an owlet for one, a fawn for the other. Curious to use so delicate a tool for such savage work—you take a needle so fine you wouldn’t feel it in your flesh, then stab it through a mess of roving over and over until the fibres settle into shape.

  I feel you, the needle of you, dancing up and downthread with breathtaking abandon. I feel your hand in places I’ve touched. You move so fast, so furious, and in your wake the braid thickens, admits fewer and fewer strands, while Garden scowls thunderclaps and bids me deepen my work.

  I like to think of all the ways I could have stopped you, were I so inclined.

  Sometimes I am inclined. Sometimes I sit here stationary, and know you so swift and sure, and think, I must prove myself her equal again—and the sharp, electric ache to stop you just to see you admire me is a kind of needle too.

  I have six months to fill before I can send this to you, so I am writing in pieces—parcelling out the words I wish you to have, though you’ll of course read them all at once. Or perhaps you won’t? Perhaps you’ll want to save these seeds to absorb at your leisure, perhaps even at the pace of my writing them. But why waste so much time? More dangerous to keep them on you, where they can be found. Better to read them all at once.

  At any rate, this is staghorn sumac: not poisonous, delicious mixed into meats, salads, tobacco. Taste how tart it is, how tangy; grind it into a spice to sprinkle or smoke, or soak the berry heads whole and get something like lemonade.

  These seeds, for you, are best eaten one at a time, rolled around your tongue and broken beneath your teeth.

  Yours,

  Blue

  PS. I love writing in aftertaste.

  PPS. I hope you noticed the difference between this sumac and the poisonous one. Only one of them is red.

  • • •

  My dear Sugar Maple,

  We’re tapping the trees, boiling sap down for syrup and hard candy. I like you to know, with my words in your mouth, the places and ways in which I think of you. It feels good to be reciprocal; eat this part of me while I drive reeds into the depth of you, spill out something sweet.

  I wish sometimes I could be less fierce with you. No—I feel sometimes like
I ought to want to be less fierce with you. That this—whatever this is—would be better served by tenderness, by gentle kindness. Instead I write of spilling out your sap-guts with reeds. I hope you can forgive this. To be soft, for me, is so often pretense, and pretense does not come easily while writing to you.

  You wrote of being in a village upthread together, living as friends and neighbours do, and I could have swallowed this valley whole and still not have sated my hunger for the thought. Instead I wick the longing into thread, pass it through your needle eye, and sew it into hiding somewhere beneath my skin, embroider my next letter to you one stitch at a time.

  Yours,

  Blue

  • • •

  Dear Sailor’s Delight,

  The snow’s gone and everything is warming, as if the sun were knuckling into the earth with both hands and kneading it into release. Planting time on the horizon—and I take this phrase and turn it over, smile at how Garden seeds time, makes time a planting more subtle than desert seasons, and the horizon is a promise.

  I have waited until now to address your concern about shadows. I have paid careful attention. There was a time, earlier in our correspondence, when I was absolutely certain of being trailed—little things, faint, difficult to name, but you know the feeling of walking into a room where someone has recently been and left? Like that, but in reverse. Never followed, quite, but . . . trailed.

  But I’ve not felt this since being embedded, which may be cause for concern. When Garden embeds an agent—as I’m sure your Commandant has noticed—they are near impossible to approach, indistinguishable from their surroundings, so thoroughly enmeshed in the fabric of strands that to cut us out would tear unsightly holes through which Chaos pours, Chaos no one downthread wants, not even your Oracle, who lives and breathes the stuff. Too unpredictable, too difficult to manage, the cost/benefit all askew—so you catch us on the move, in between, while we’re dancing the braid as well, touching lives only lightly. Even Garden has difficulty reaching us with the more nuanced branches of their consciousness; to be an agent out of time and approach someone embedded you’d need to practically wear their skin before the braid would allow you within fifty years or a thousand miles of their position.