Black Sun

by Rebecca Roanhorse

  Her tail.

  “Mother waters,” she breathed, heavy with shock.

  She wanted to ask him how he knew, what he had heard or seen when he could not see, but she knew it didn’t matter. She had heard of it happening, like the legends and stories she had shared with him these past nights. Teek in extreme danger who had transformed to another nature, becoming a true child of the sea.

  “Xiala…” he repeated, softer still.

  “I don’t remember,” she said, picking her words carefully. A feeling she couldn’t quite name filled her heart. Pride, awe, but also terror. “But I know.”

  * * *

  They kept them in the room for two days, letting them out once in the morning and once in the evening to take care of toilet needs. Xiala’s guards had thick cotton stuffed in their ears but they stuck a rag in her mouth anyway as a precaution, and because she’d cursed them out using turns of phrase that made even the hardened sailors blush. They took Serapio out under similar guard but didn’t bother with a gag since he didn’t speak or Sing. Xiala contemplated taking the rag out of her mouth, but what good would it do? They’d just put it back, likely tying it tight to her head. She decided that she could be patient, wait to see how this mutiny played out. She would bide her time, wait until they needed her and came begging for her to steer them to land. Then she would decide whether to let them live or Sing them to the bottom of the sea.

  She felt the canoe change course during the first night, the shift in wave pattern making a different sound against the hull. Too subtle for most sailors to notice, but she was Teek and had napped in tidepools as an infant. She guessed they were following the sun by day and under a clear sky, navigating by the brightest north star. Blunt, unsophisticated, but likely to get them to shore if they weren’t picky about where they landed. Nowhere near the mouth of the Tovasheh, that was for sure, unless by foolish luck.

  By her count they were down to nine days. Nine days to get Serapio to Tova. Which for her had become a lesser worry than simply keeping herself and Serapio alive.

  Serapio himself didn’t seem concerned with their course. She thought he would, but after that initial amusement at finding out Patu wanted him dead, he didn’t mention it. He seemed tolerant of his confinement, as if this state was not unfamiliar to him. And, to be fair, it was not wholly unfamiliar to her, jail being an old but unwelcome friend. But she had never been imprisoned for this long and in quite this close quarters.

  On the third day, as they shared a single corn cake someone had shoved under the door, Serapio snapped to attention.

  “What is it?” she asked, sensing the danger.

  He held up a hand, listening. Made his way to the wall and pressed an ear against the wood.

  “Patu’s dead.”

  She stared at him. “Did you…?” She wasn’t sure he could do such a thing while locked in this room, but she remembered how casually he had agreed that she should have let Baat drown.

  “No,” he said, a small smile lifting his lips. “As much as it would have pleased me. Callo believes it was the illness he carried.”

  “Shit.”

  Perhaps Serapio did not understand the dangers of illness on a ship, but she did. She was on her feet, stuffing the last of her breakfast into her mouth. She hurried to the corner and pressed an ear to the wall. She’d found this was the best place for eavesdropping, although all she ever caught was a word here or there. But she had learned to identify voices without seeing their speakers, and that helped some.

  Cries and a great splash.

  “They’ve thrown his body overboard,” Serapio narrated.

  “I got that much.”

  “He had a…” He shook his head. “I’m not sure of the Cuecolan word. A rough knot? A rough… bump? All over his body.”

  “A rash.” Her voice was tight. “Callo should have never let him on the ship.”

  “Will it spread? Kill everyone?”

  So he did understand. She listened some more, but the voices were too jumbled to decipher. “Maybe,” she said, voice grim and bitter. “We can always hope.”

  “You assume we would be immune.”

  She glanced over at him. “If it’s catching, no doubt we all already have it. At least those bastards will go down with us.” She sauntered over to the bench and sat in the spot she now thought of as her own.

  “You seem pleased,” he said. “Tell me why.”

  She had long given up on how exactly he could tell such things. Could he hear the shift in her gait? Smell the satisfaction rolling off her like a perfume? She had no idea, but he was right. She was pleased.

  “I give it a half hour and they’ll be coming to us, asking for help.”

  “Help?”

  “People like us are always hated until they need us—isn’t that always the way?”

  He tilted his head to the side as he sometimes did, as if it helped him hear. “Not a half hour. They’re coming for you now.”

  He said it in a rush and then pulled his leather pouch free, dipped a finger in, and stuck it in his mouth, sucking the delicate crystal powder off his skin. He’d done it twice before, once every day while they’d been in here together, and she’d not asked him what it was, but now she did.

  “What is that stuff? Medicine?”

  “Medicine,” he agreed, repeating her word. “After a fashion.”

  “It is for your eyes?”

  “Yes. Again, not the way you mean it, though.”

  He pressed his back against the wall, and she knew he was going to do that thing again, where he seemed to go into a trance. She had thought it a nightmare the first time she saw him but understood it now as more like a willing unconsciousness, a time when his mind went somewhere else far from this room. But to what end, she still didn’t know.

  “When they take you, Xiala, stall them. Help is on the way.”

  “You misunderstand, Serapio,” she said, confident. “They need my help now. They won’t hurt me.”

  But he was already gone to wherever he went when he ate that powder that resembled broken moonlight on the open water.

  The door banged open, and she turned, grinning. Three men crowded into the room, two grabbing her arms and one sticking a cloth down her throat.

  “Hey, careful,” she mumbled around the filthy fabric.

  They dragged her out onto the deck into weak watery daylight. A wall of gray clouds as big as an island hid the sun, and below the clouds, a mirror of seawater so flat she could skip a stone across it. She took it all in with a glance. The water was too still, the sky too unreadable. They’d cut too far south and hit the early-winter doldrums.

  Land fuckers, she thought to herself. Rank amateurs. Novices, fucking farmers, indwellers. She laughed around her rag.

  The two crewmen holding her arms forced her onto a bench, which was a shade nicer than making her kneel, she supposed. Callo sat across from her, eyes wary. He studied her, his perpetually wistful face even more so.

  “Patu’s dead,” he said, big brown eyes searching hers. “Two men sick and unable to row, and soon maybe more.”

  She widened her eyes theatrically, hoping he read her lack of empathy.

  He sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. And to think she’d thought marginally kind things about that face. Well, he could go to all seven hells now.

  “We’re stuck here, Xiala,” he said. “We could row out, but without the wind to tell me which way, I could be sending us in circles. You know the stories of the doldrums. Men get lost in them. Die in them. And we’ve got sick men. We need land, and we need it fast.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “You can help us!” one of the crew said from behind Callo. Her first mate—no, he was just a mutinous bastard now—waved him quiet.

  She tried to talk through the gag, but it came out a mumble.

  Callo sighed. “I’ll take it out, but no Singing, or Baat slits your throat.” He looked up at someone behind her, just off her shoulder, and she felt the
cold press of a blade against her neck. Rage welled up in her chest, not fear. Fuckers!

  Callo reached over and removed the gag.

  “Fuck you, you rank traitorous—”

  He stuffed the cloth back in her mouth. She growled around it, eyes flaring in rage.

  Casually, he leaned forward and slapped her. An open hand across her cheek, so hard her head spun, and she was stunned to silence. The rage in her became something hot, molten. He had touched her. Not just touched. Hit.

  Oh, he was going to die. She just wasn’t sure how or when. She let that sentiment show in the look she gave him, and he leaned back.

  “Please, Xiala!” he said, voice rough with something that sounded like desperation. “I don’t want to hurt you anymore. I want…”

  “I say we gut her like the fish she is,” Baat said, the blade back against her neck.

  “Shut up,” Callo snapped. “Don’t you understand what’s happened to us? Where we are?” He wiped his palm across his sweating forehead.

  Xiala’s eyes narrowed. Callo didn’t have any rough bumps, as Serapio had called them, but he was perspiring more than normal for an overcast morning, and he did look gray under his brown skin. Was he already ill with Patu’s disease?

  “We’ll try again, right? I’ll take the gag out, and you’ll talk nicely. Not this swearing. Agreed?”

  The rage was still there, simmering, and the sting of his hand against her skin lingered, but she was focused now. She wouldn’t waste her chance. She had to be smart.

  She nodded.

  He sighed, and reached out a second time and removed the gag. This time, she kept her mouth shut.

  Callo watched her, waiting. Baat pressed the blade closer, and she felt the prick of the obsidian and a trickle of blood drip down her neck.

  “Calm,” Callo said, either to her or to Baat or to both.

  “What do you want?” she asked, and her voice only shook a little.

  “Get us out of here, and once we see land, we let you go. Separate ways, no hard feelings.”

  She would have laughed had she not been worried Baat would cut an artery.

  “After what you’ve done to me? Mutinied? Taken my ship? My fucking ship!”

  “Xiala,” he said, sounding resigned. “You promised.”

  “I did not fucking promise you anything!”

  He started to lift the rag again.

  “Okay, okay,” she said quickly. “No more ranting. I… I’ll talk.”

  He looked at her, long and thoughtful. “Lord Balam—” he started.

  “Gave me this ship,” she said, voice as calm and dead as the waters around them. “He made me captain. You think he won’t have you hanged for mutiny, you’re wrong.”

  Callo exhaled, dipping his chin, eyes on the deck between his feet.

  “You’re dead, Callo,” she hissed. “You were dead as soon as you locked me in that room. If Patu’s sickness hasn’t already gotten you, Cuecola justice will.”

  “Stop.”

  “Some of you may get out alive,” she said, pitching her voice to the crew. “Tell them Callo made you do it, that the mutiny was his idea.”

  He looked up, his eyes narrowed. “I fought to keep you alive. They wanted to kill you as soon as Loob died.”

  “You did it for yourself, not me. You know I had to cut that rope to save this asshole.” She rolled her eyes upward to indicate Baat. “Pretty sure Loob was dead when I got to him, and this one”—again she gestured toward Baat—“panicked. Probably kicked his friend in the head on the way down. Killed him himself…” She trailed off, the truth dawning as she said the words.

  “Kill her now,” Baat said, pressing the blade deeper into her skin. It didn’t hurt as much as sting where the air hit the wound, but the blood felt plentiful, too plentiful, as it started to pool in her collarbone and stain her borrowed shirt.

  “Hold.” Callo raised a hand for Baat, eyes still on her. “Is that it, then? We all die together?”

  “I’m not dying, you traitorous shit. Did you already forget why you locked me in that room? I can swim.”

  He stood. Paced away from her, hands behind his back, shoulders tense.

  “What are we waiting for, Captain?” Baat growled. “Let me gut this Teek.”

  How quickly he had turned against her. She remembered him at the feast on Little Moth, joining in her joke about Loob’s wife.

  “What are you so scared of?” she asked.

  “Shut your dirty mouth.”

  “Are you scared of me, or are you scared because you know what I said about you panicking was true? That you’re the one who killed Loob, not me.”

  “I said, shut the fuck up!” He pushed the knife deeper into her neck, and this time something inside her throat gave. She cried out, and it came out a gurgle. Her heart thundered, her pulse so loud in her ears that Callo’s protests on her behalf came to her as a distant roar, like waves crashing against a faraway shore. She was choking on her own blood.

  “Xiala!”

  Her name was a thunderclap, a sound that saturated the air. A single word that seemed to fill the space around them, freezing Baat as he withdrew the blade, stopping Callo as if encased in stone, and immobilizing the rest of the crew just as they were turning to see who or what had spoken.

  It was Serapio who had shouted her name. He stood just outside their shared prison door.

  Xiala could see him plainly. It was the same as that first time he had appeared on the deck, although this time he wore his black robe. The world seemed to shudder, as if it recognized him and feared what it saw. The sun, hidden behind the clouds, seemed to dim even further, as if cowering from an old enemy, and the wind, which had been nonexistent moments before, rose up screaming across the deck, tossing Xiala’s hair around her face.

  Then the world blinked and righted itself. All but the sun. It was completely gone.

  The sky had become a black wall. A living, undulating, screeching wall of feathers and claws and beaks that was descending on them like a nightmare.

  The first crow struck Baat. Quick and sharp as an oyster blade, a deep slash that ripped his scalp away. She watched him drop, feeling light and strangely detached. I’ve lost a lot of blood, she thought absently, as the birds fell upon them.

  Men jolted back to life, screaming as birds ripped flesh from cheeks and plucked eyes from sockets. She watched a black-feathered body use its beak to tear Callo’s lips from his face. Watched as he dropped dead in front of her as heavy as a felled log. Watched as the birds took his eyes, and his ears, and continued to rip apart the rest of his body.

  She looked away, tears leaking from her own eyes. She had wanted to kill the bastard, hadn’t she? But mother waters, not like this.

  Her eyelids drooped closed, and she tumbled from the bench.

  She didn’t know how long it had lasted when the screaming finally stopped. She thought perhaps she had lost consciousness for a while, her body’s small mercy granted to her to survive the whirlwind of death.

  Her lids fluttered open.

  Serapio hadn’t moved. His robe flared around him like black wings, and the crows he had called, from where she couldn’t fathom, came to him as if to their master. They flowed around his form in a tight spiral, round and round, until they broke and surged upward. They seemed to shatter across the sky in bands of shadow, radiating from his body like the feathered rays of a black sun.

  Serapio’s face was radiant, caught in ecstasy, his broad smile showing teeth red enough to match the blood that soaked the deck.

  She wanted to say something, call to him. But her throat didn’t want to work.

  He seemed to sense her there, reaching for him.

  When he spoke, his voice was the sound of a thousand beating wings.

  “I am not the sea,” he said, “but I have children, too.”

  CHAPTER 22

  CITY OF TOVA

  YEAR 325 OF THE SUN

  (12 DAYS BEFORE CONVERGENCE)

 
The costliest mistake one can make is to underestimate one’s opponent through low expectations.

  —On the Philosophy of War, taught at the Hokaia War College

  It took a day for the streets of Tova to settle. All the Sky Made clans called their personal guards to service to disperse crowds and enforce a curfew. Those who were caught loitering or out on the street without demonstrable business were detained and escorted home. Tova did not possess a civil police force, only individual clan militias and makeshift jail cells meant for temporary use. The most common punishments among the tight-knit Sky Made clans were banishment and, for lesser crimes, a system of restitution to make the injured party whole. Things were different in the Maw, where crime bosses ruled the streets, but the system, even there, worked much the same. Restitution, banishment, and, for the truly horrendous, a quick and merciful death.

  “My guard will escort you back to the tower,” Ieyoue offered to a restless Naranpa. She had been confined to Water Strider’s Great House for almost a full twenty-four hours with no news of what had happened. Ieyoue had sent word to the tower that she, Naranpa, was well and safe, but they had not sent news back.

  “Thank you for all you’ve done,” she said to the matron. “I and the Watchers will not forget it.”

  Ieyoue took the declaration in stride, no doubt tallying the favor for later use, but Naranpa didn’t mind. She was grateful.

  She returned to the tower in a blue hooded robe, her priestly raiment and mask hidden in a nondescript bag she carried on her back. The great doors were barred, for Shuttering or because of the riots, and she had to petition the tsiyo at the door for entry. The girl recognized her, small miracles, and let her pass. The main room was empty, as were the stairs, and she made her way back through the tower in eerie silence. She stopped at the terrace, but it was empty. The only place left was the observatory.

  She hurried to the roof to find her people engaged in debate. Her eyes searched the room, looking for one face.

  There xe was, arguing about something with Haisan, and the banality of it, the two of them at each other’s throat as they always were, brought a sob of relief to her lips. They both turned at the sound.