AfroSFv2

by Ivor W Hartmann

  Rina’s mother had died two years earlier. After delivering Rina her health deteriorated, she could no longer bear as many children, nor could she offer any contribution to the Divine Undertaking. Community members had tried to convince her father to let her go, but he had stuck with her.

  Dror and Ora, Rina’s mother, had had five children. Rina had two younger sisters and two younger brothers from her mother, two older brothers and an older sister, Hadar, from a woman she had never met, whom Dror had married before Ora. With Chaya’s baby boy, Noah, asleep in her father’s room, they totalled at nine.

  Rina’s painful memories of her mother, frail and weak, too tired to move some days, were disappearing into Chaya’s warm smile and food.

  Chaya was happy to have someone around the house helping her, first while she delivered and recovered, and now more than ever with Noah piercing the neighbourhood with screams, to help her stay sane. Rina looked up. Her second mother was leaning over the window, her face tense and hard.

  “Rina,” she said, without turning away from the street. “Go fetch your little sisters; your father and brothers are coming up. Get the table ready.”

  Bless the grain from Neptune’s winds

  Bless the bread from Hades’ warmth

  Bless the seeds sown by our hands

  Freeze the world and warm our hearts.

  Dror was pale throughout the blessings and even paler throughout dinner, unable to take more than a bite at a time. He left the table early, followed by Chaya, leaving Rina and her siblings to finish the meal alone.

  After a few minutes of silence, Rina asked for permission to go to the bathroom. She walked to the small hallway where her father’s room stood across from the bathroom. After pretending to go, she instead tiptoed across the hall and stuck her ear to a small crack in the wooden door.

  “...losing it...get worse every day...forget their orders and beat us for not following them, forget why they are beating us halfway through and beat us for it...” Her father coughed heavily, a wet, pulpy sound that made Rina’s dinner lurch in her stomach.

  “Rest, husband,” Chaya said.

  Rina checked the hall, and listened for footsteps from the dinner table; when she was sure they were still all seated, she glued her eye to the crack, trying to see her father.

  Only glimpses of him were visible in the thick steam rising from a bowl at the foot of the bed by Chaya’s toes. She dipped a piece of cloth inside it and wiped his brow and face gently.

  Dror caught his breath between fits of coughing. “...Eitan...go get...Eitan...”

  The cough was getting worse. Rina could not make out the words her father formed, and stumbled forward when her second mother pulled the door open. “Rina!” she started.

  “It’s alright,” Dror interjected. “It’s alright...let her in...you get Eitan...I’ll talk to him...later.”

  Chaya gave Rina a long look, as if her second mother was for the first time, seeing her not as a child to care for, one in a long list of many, but unique, and foreign.

  Rina shoved her way into the room, pushing past Chaya, diverting her eyes from her wearying gaze, and up to her father’s bed.

  The shadows that danced on Dror’s face by the dinner’s candlelight revealed deep bruises around her father’s eyes now that she was close. He coughed up blood and doubled over. Rina yelped.

  “It’s ok, sweetheart... just Hades...bubbling up... haha... nothing...we haven’t seen in the caves....a hundred times...” He attempted a smile, but his lips twisted in a rictus as he tried to stop himself from hacking up more blood.

  A knock rang at the door, and her oldest brother Eitan walked in. She ran into his arms and started crying. Eitan rested a hand on her head and ran it through her hair. Hadar was standing in the doorstep, her eyes heavy and wet.

  “It’s gonna be alright, Rina,” Eitan tried to reassure her, but her father chose that moment to go into a bout of damp, raspy breaths.

  Hadar walked in to draw her out of her brother’s arms. She would not let go. Eitan forced her to the door with Hadar’s help, and closed it on them. The sliver of light under the door went out, and Rina heard a whisper coming from the room followed by another fit of coughing.

  A storm was brewing on the horizon when Rina walked into the common room in the morning. Sirens rang from the perimeter wall, alerting the rest of the colony to the incoming onslaught of wind and water. From beyond the wall, the wind carried the sound of Fish drummers beating at the storm. Rising and falling with the gusts of wind between sirens, sticks thumped a deep bass rhythm on taut goatskin punctuated by rapid fire staccatos.

  Dror, Eitan, and the rest of her brothers, were already underground and would not come back until the tempest had abated. In a few minutes, a Priest would come knocking to home-school the girls for the duration of the storm.

  Chaya rose from her chair and shut the window when the wind began to knock candles over and blow cutlery off the table.

  Rina sat down with a cup of tea at a table still spattered with red dots from when her father had sat less than an hour earlier. She reached over and found most of the stains were dry though some stuck wetly to her finger. She scrubbed them frantically with her pocket tissue, removing some, while leaving little pieces of lint glued over others.

  She scrubbed until the Priest knocked and Hadar went to open the door for him, scrubbed until his hand stopped her, and he sat at the table.

  Narcissus leaned over the pond, catching his own reflection in the stillness of the water. Water had not always been still. His Will and his Will alone had made it so. What trees would not bend to it would crack. What water did not still to it would spill. The land would bear forth the fruits of his desires, lest it wither and dry and crumble from sand to dust to powder, dissolving before his Will.

  Narcissus leaned over the pond, catching his own reflection in the stillness of the water. But the sun rose high above and reflected in the water, blinding him to his image. So he built walls around the pond and a roof over his head so the sun would bother him no more.

  Narcissus leaned over the pond, catching his own reflection in the stillness of the water. But the waters were dark and the weather grew cold. So he set about starting a fire to warm himself and mock the sun.

  Narcissus leaned over the pond, catching his own reflection in the stillness of the water, in the shade of the roof, and the warmth of the fire. But the smoke burned his eyes, the roof trapped the air, and the water grew warm. From its depths rose a shape, a shape that was a hand, a hand that was a fist. And Neptune drew Narcissus into the pond, into the boiling waters which bubbled and bled, fiercer and louder and higher until they overcame the fire, burst through the roof, put out the sun, and spilled over the world...announcing a new Time.

  — Narcissus’ Folly

  “Rina! Rina Arfazadeh?!” A short, blond girl walked out of the examination room at the other end of the long hall, behind the Priestess calling out Rina’s name, her head low, but smiling faintly. Rina stood up.

  Hadar had left only a few days after the storm. Dror had never come back. Eitan’s face had been sombre and he’d become unusually dark in the following days, but he’d never said what happened to their father. Even now, almost two years later sitting in the Priestess’ anteroom, waiting for her Fertility & Fitness Evaluation, she could still feel the honey-like stickiness of his drying blood on the table tingling under her fingertip. The Priest’s dismissive look at it—raising his eyebrows cynically as if telling her to grow up, it was time for Mole female duties—brought something up in her. Trembling with memory she walked into the medical room.

  It was her first time seeing the kind of equipment used for Fitness & Fertility testing. These medical facilities were less clustered, and admitted only girls and women. This room had a bed larger and longer than her own or her father’s—Eitan’s now—and medical equipment she had never seen and did not understand. Everything gleamed with a weapon-like sheen and seemed invasive somehow, angry an
d intimidating.

  A group of Ants was busying around the machines, making last-minute adjustments before leaving Rina alone with the Priestess. She pulled a chair behind a table, and sat in front of a list of names on a sheet.

  “Grab a seat, girl... Rina Arfazadeh... have you turned fourteen yet?”

  Rina looked down at the paper and smiled inside. Why else would I be here? “Yes, Priestess,” she answered meekly.

  Her inner smile must have broken through, because the Priestess’ face hardened suddenly. She slammed the pencil down and grabbed Rina’s chin, pulling her forward and madly scanning her face. “Are you fresh, girl?”

  Rina struggled with her grip, growing dizzy with the Priestess’ antics.

  “Are you even fresh?! Girl!”

  Rina was fresh. Eitan had refused to keep Chaya after Dror passed, claiming she was not fresh enough. Noah was her only child with Dror, but she had twelve other children from her two previous husbands, and Eitan was right to think she would not be as good a wife or mother as a younger girl. Later, Rina had asked Hadar what not being fresh meant—Hadar was pregnant for the third time now, and both of her children were girls—Hadar had told her and Rina had giggled that it must tickle.

  The Priestess let go of her face, and she rocked back into the chair. “We’ll find out soon enough if you let Narcissus tempt you, girl. Makes my job easier if you have,” she said, ticked her name off the list, and nodded over Rina’s shoulder. “Head over to that bunk and take off your skirt.”

  Rina looked up to the door from the couch and put down her drink. There was something familiar about the man who entered the comfort house. She felt an invisible hand pat her head, a sense of confusion and of being admonished. Dan!

  The man smiled at her; if he recognised her he gave no sign. She remembered falling in the gardens—it seemed long ago but could not have been more than four years— and being picked up and saved from a hideous old man by a handsome young hero. What would her hero turn into inside these walls?

  Eventually, you give up on heroes.

  “...and then what?”

  “Then? Haven’t you listened? Then we...”

  The conversation had started before she had even left the room. The two Beasts inside were fools, or did they think her as deaf and mute as the couch she lounged on?

  Furniture has few privileges, listening in on sex-drunk, over-confident patrons was one of them. She would not be the first girl to curry favour with the Fish by reporting to them things said carelessly by patrons from other Castes.

  Life is made of little things. People waste it looking for the one big thing instead of building it themselves out of tiny moments. She was one of those things now, a tiny thing, and a short moment.

  The Priestess had confirmed Rina’s freshness with a hint of disappointment; it would have made her job easier indeed if she had let Narcissus tempt her, but not by much. The Fertility & Fitness Evaluation had been conclusive. Rina was barren, and for barren women, the choices were simple. Either leave for another Caste, hoping a male would take an infertile woman for wife and you could live the life of a house slave. Or choose the comfort houses, where you would be cared for, fed, and lodged until you were too old to serve the house’s patrons and you would serve as a maid. Un-fresh Mole girls did not get to choose, having chosen Narcissus over Hades.

  She had chosen the comfort house as much out of ignorance as out of fear of living her life at the hands of non-Moles and their families—being at the mercy of libidinous husbands, jealous wives, cruel children, and the mockery of other Moles. Her mother had told her about Cast-outs, ‘at least you can eat goats; when a goat dies you can skin it for its hide.’ Rina had added that goats were also too stupid to know better. Her mother had liked that, even as she was bleeding internally, dying from a failed pregnancy.

  Shutting the door behind her, she stepped onto the balcony overlooking the common room. Rina doubted she would have chosen otherwise even if she had known. An older woman bumped into her, cursed under her breath and disappeared into a room, letting smoke and the hint of string-music drowned in male and female voices drift out into the hallway. She avoided the common room and headed for the staircase.

  Rina went to her room in the basement, where all the girls bedded. When she had first seen her room, almost six years earlier, she had giggled again, remembering what Hadar had told her about her freshness, and pounced on the soft, large bed that was to be hers in a room with five other young Mole girls. The room had been empty when the Priestess handed her off to one of the maids to show her to the girls’ quarters, and start her training.

  There were no windows in the basement, but all the rooms on the upper floors had views over the colony and onto the ocean. The better rooms had verandas, and the best rooms, for councilmen, larger balconies. Girls were only allowed to leave once a year for two weeks to visit their fathers, or oldest male relative, and were thus especially fond of the councilmen.

  Training lasted for a year, night after night. Try though she did, there are some things you can never learn, but of the few things she did some could not be unlearned. The body has a memory. Some lessons just stay etched into the skin. No matter how many showers you take, how many drinks you have, no matter how hard you scratch, through the dermis to the raw nerve, some itches never stop, and you learn to live with a prickling under your skin. And when the shaking stops and the sobs subside, either the itch becomes energy, or you scratch yourself to death.

  “We can’t afford these daily affronts to our authority much longer Amirpour. You and your Caste have assured us that you had dealt with the dissident Moles years ago.”

  Amirpour wasn’t used to being addressed by his surname by anybody outside his Caste, but Supreme Councilman Marandi wasn’t one for protocol. “We have, Councilman, which is why nothing happened since we crushed most of their suspected leaders, but you know as well as I how fragile we are. Moles will outnumber the other Castes eventually, but there is no rebellion here I can assure you.”

  “Then how do you account for the fifty beheadings the first six months this year, and the other fifty since?”

  “Copy-cats, Councilman. No doubt we have a killer, killers, on our hands but there is no coordination to any of this, no rise in contraband, no one with enough authority to pick up where we left them. I can assure you, again, for the seventh time I recall, that this is not a rebellion.”

  The Fish had good reason to worry. Beheading and dismemberment leave an indelible mark. They barely left their quarters except to patrol the colony or patronise the brothels and even the latter seldom anymore. But Amirpour had wasted his last two sentences and admonishments on a mad man.

  Marandi was an old man. It was amazing in fact that he hadn’t dived over the cliff years ago, but in these circumstances... He was staring straight at him, his eyes completely unfocused but his face holding on to its seriousness. He must be well practiced, even though the fish secret had been out of the net for a hundred years now. They were all mad, every last one of them, and they still believed only the priesthood knew the extent of it.

  The Councilman’s eyes gradually regained their focus, and he nodded absently at whatever had been said. “Do you have a lead? We will crack down on the mines like they’ve never seen-”

  “That might be hasty, Councilman, we do not know who this is yet, and have you considered that it might not be Moles at all? General discontent has spread among the Castes as you well know.”

  “So you do have a lead?”

  “No, Councilman, we do not.”

  Marandi’s face grew hard, and suspicious. “You Priests have always known how to play your hand haven’t you? You imply more than you know and yet you seem confident. What do you hide, Amirpour?”

  “Nothing, our fate is tied into yours,” he said in mock alarm. “If anything were to happen to you we would-”

  “It does work for you that way doesn’t it? You tried your best to stop us from leaving the caves when the wa
ters receded, then you insisted on the Divine Undertaking, and somehow the Moles still despise us more than they do you. Things always work out for the priesthood.”

  Amirpour wondered how much of this conversation Marandi would remember. They weren’t usually this insightful anymore, but it wouldn’t matter, all they needed was some nudging in the right direction. “They will be found, Councilman, they all will, but we can’t be everywhere, I would advise you, and its up to you to take it, to apply mild pressure on the other Castes, nothing excessive, just enough to get names, and follow the trail.”

  Marandi looked out his window to the perimeter wall. Guards changed rotations, trading weapons and shields. In almost four hundred years since they had left the caves they had never encountered anyone else. The Fish guarded nothing, their weapons had always been pointed at the colony. “Yes,” he nodded. “Yes, mild pressure, and more when it’s needed...that will be all, Amirpour, my regards to Priestess Gilani, we’ll reconvene next week.”

  Even among the Priests, Gilani stood out, a priestess with white-blond hair, red eyes, and almost translucent skin that enabled visions of Hades in the profoundest of unbelievers. Tall as your average Beast, Gilani was a force to be reckoned with among most of the Castes and indeed in the Council.

  When Amirpour walked in to her office, he found her staring at her window, also appraising the guards circulating the wall in Marandi’s manner, a glass of something deep red in her hand. “Marandi sends his regards.”

  “As he would...” She turned away from the window. “But the situation is to our advantage if we stir things well, the rebellion might just succeed this time.”

  Amirpour paused to think, and Gilani smiled. They made a wonderful pair, always at odds in public, or often enough that few suspected their relationship, its efficiency and intimacy.

  Amirpour was always the smarter one. “We might. Dror was sloppy, getting rid of him was best, but the elder Moles are corrupt and lazy, they prey on the comfort girls, hoard rations for favours and they will never act. Eitan is...impressive, insane, but impressive, but he is just as reckless as his father, worse even.”