by Paula Guran
As they ran from the man with the gun, the wildfire’s flames seemed to be running toward them, as if to meet them, to embrace them.
Then, Zhuyin was there—she saw it peripherally, shimmering off to their left, its whickering sound mixed in with the crackling of flames . . .
Smoke billowed toward them, as they ran, and they coughed. “Up the hill, Logan, we—” Bridey broke off, coughing.
Logan tried to follow her up the slope, slipped down the steep loose dirt of the hill. She found herself on her hands and knees, and turned to look at the black, serpentine hulk of the Zhuyin limned in flame. She saw it was coiled like a cobra but turning attentively back toward Miles. Clearly it was listening to him.
Black smoke drifted in front of her, itself like a Chinese spirit serpent, and she lost sight of it.
“Logan!”
She got up, coughing, reached out to Bridey’s offered hand and caught hold. They struggled up the hill . . . but the flame was there before them.
A thick bank of Madrone and scrub pine burst into flame up ahead, as if it had been dipped in kerosene—prepped by the endless drought the dry half-dead foliage ignited, and in seconds there was a wall of flame blocking the way.
One hand raised against the heat and glare, Bridey seemed to hesitate, as if despairingly stunned by all that had happened. The serpent. Miles cutting Chris down. The fire. Harve. Zhuyin.
Eyes stinging from smoke, Logan looked around, and thought she saw a way out up to the right. “This way!” She tugged on Bridey’s arm.
Bridey turned to follow, and staggered. She fell to her knees, shaking her head. “I don’t know what to do, I don’t understand what’s—” The rest was swallowed in a coughing fit as smoke swirled more thickly around them.
It wasn’t just the brush. The very ground under the plants was burning: “dead fuels” they called it, fallen twigs, desiccated plant matter, the ground’s coating becoming an instant carpet of flames. The world was filling with crackling and the hissing of living white static.
The flame rushed toward them. Bridey turned and embraced Logan, covered her as if to take the fire on herself.
“Mom! Mom, we have to go back to Miles—maybe he—”
But as she spoke Logan looked toward Miles, and saw the dead fuel catching fire up the dry creek bed, like ignition running along a fuse. It was filling the valley, and closing in around them, rippling sinuous heat waves and stealing oxygen as it came.
Logan felt a thump on the back of her legs, a hard push, unstoppable and weirdly cunning, and Logan was suddenly up in the air, Bridey clinging to her. Both of them were hoisted up, now too weak from the smoke to resist, and Logan saw that they were just behind the head of the Zhuyin. They had been lifted up by the enormous snake.
Bridey started to slip off—she would fall into the fire that closed in around them. She clawed at the slippery scales. But Zhuyin writhed purposefully in place, shifting so that Bridey remained aboard its wide serpentine back just behind Logan. Then the great serpent swayed upward, raising them above the flames, and went sailing toward Miles like a water snake, skating atop a lake of red and blue fire, until it had passed clear, out of the smoke and spreading flame.
Twenty seconds more—they had were getting close to Miles who was partway up the hill, backing away and coughing.
Logan clung to the scaly body just behind the Zhuyin’s cold head, clinging to her sanity at the same time, rasping and gasping between sobs.
Something gleamed on its head—the glass node, a small transparent hemisphere impregnated with hyper-attenuated wires that pulsed with reflected firelight.
She looked past it and through smoke-teary eyes Logan could see Miles, closer now, talking into his headset with a fierce pertinacity. The Zhuyin slithered closer to him . . .
Take it off me. Take it off me. Take it off me.
Whose voice was that? Take it off me. Arising out of the white static sound, the hissing, the crackling, the whickering, all of it together, and somehow bound into it: a voice.
A voice Logan heard in her mind.
Take it off me. Take it off me. Pull it off. Take. It. Off.
Logan gripped the serpent with her legs, and reached with both hands to claw at the glass node.
Yes. Take it off. Tear it away.
It was implanted into the Zhuyin’s scaly black head—and into what remained of her father. She couldn’t get a good grip on the glass node. Her fingers were slippery; the glass offered no purchase.
Take it off. Tear it away.
Logan dug her fingers under scales near the node, and ripped at it with all her strength . . .
The effort threw her off balance and she fell, sliding off the Zhuyin, thumping heavily onto dirt and gravel.
Flame cooked up, close by . . .
“Mom!” Logan shouted. Feeling the bloody glass thing in her hand. She’d torn it from the Zhuyin.
Bridey slipped down beside her. She put her arms around Logan, helped her stand.
Zhuyin was flowing along beside them, toward Miles, who was backing away, shouting at it.
“Go back! Pick them up, both females, and bring them to me!”
Zhuyin bore toward him . . .
There was a black flash, and Miles yelped.
Zhuyin was rearing up with Miles clasped in its widening jaws—jaws unhinging to make more room. The assault rifle was rolling away down the slope.
Zhuyin tossed Miles screaming into the air—caught him, headfirst, gulped him partway down. Then it turned, and slithered toward the rushing wildfire. Which was spreading, charging up the hill like a herd of translucent yellow-red beasts, surrounding them . . .
Zhuyin didn’t look at Logan, or Bridey. It glided past, toward the heart of the fire, undulating a little left and a little right, left and right, the whole long length of it wending back to the inferno . . . and it spat. It flung Miles into the flames.
Smoke rose thick and black, and there was screaming and hissing behind a roiling, thickening curtain of smoke. Logan couldn’t see the great black serpent now.
Bridey tugged Logan away, and up the gravel scree toward Miles’ car. They were almost at the top, and then Logan slipped and fell, rolled yelling for Mom, her mama, not Bridey anymore, Mama now . . .
Smoke closed around her. Fire burst through. Somewhere Bridey called her name. Then the shining eyes . . .
A week later, Bridey was driving a rented pickup smoothly along the highway between wide, blackened stretches of landscape, a no-man’s land that had almost consumed their farmhouse. It was a cooler day, clouds had blown in from the north, bringing a soft faintly damp breeze. She wanted to turn back. But she made herself go on, her mouth dry, her stomach fluttering. She kept going.
There—the ravine.
Bridey slowed and pulled over. Hands trembling, she got hesitantly out, and thought, I shouldn’t look. The Army had used canine teams to find what little remained of Captain Miles Winn, Sergeant Christopher Eckhardt, and Logan Kelly. Forensics experts identified them from DNA and dental records.
Or so they said. But she didn’t trust them.
Bridey sighed and walked stiffly onto the cold ashes, so very black, toward the edge of the ravine. Puffs of ash rose up around her footsteps.
She paused at the edge and looked down into the small, ashen valley.
It took her a few moments to make out the wreckage of the government car they’d crashed into the tree. There it was, in the old creek bed, so blackened that at first she’d thought it was a boulder.
Then she saw something else, along the edge of the burn, past the burned out car, on the other side of the ravine. The breeze was exposing it, now. Blowing ash aside . . .
The numb thought came to her that it must be what was left of Zhuyin. Maybe that was its skin, its skeleton. Or Logan’s.
At the very end Logan had called her Mama.
Bridey skidded down into the ravine. Hesitated. Then went a little closer. She stared.
There were n
o bones. But on the edge of the burned, blackened earth, was an empty snakeskin. It was an impossibly big snakeskin, big as an ancient myth. She knew the look of it, she had seen shed snake skins many times.
It was the shed skin of Zhuyin, parts of it slightly charred. And nearby, a long ashen track was pressed into the ground, where something big had slithered off, up the slope, and into the countryside.
She clambered up along the snake track, a mark big as the print of a semitruck’s wheel. The grade was steep, and sometimes she had to claw her way up, coughing from disturbed ash.
Sweating, she got to the top, her hands and knees black with ash . . .
Nothing. Just countryside. And the track fading as it approached the thick growth. Unburnt close-growing copses of Sierra shrubbery and small trees; bitterbrush, deer brush, buck brush, sage, Manzanita. Dense and dark.
Hissing, rustling . . .
Then—something reared up, shedding petals from the flowering buck brush. It was a serpent—with two heads, one a little more petite than the other.
Another kind of hybridization, Miles had said . . .
There were two faces forking from the serpent’s body. Her ex-husband’s. Her daughter’s. Faces flattened, scaly, faintly recognizable. There was a deep hiss, a soughing of static . . . and she heard a voice in her head.
I love you, Mama. . .
And then Zhuyin turned and slid away, into the shadows within the shadow-woven, fragrant underbrush. She could see its outline, a purposeful motion rippling the top of the bushes. That direction . . .
Goodbye. Hungry now.
And Bridey knew just where Zhuyin was going. It was heading straight for the Army base.
“IMMORTAL SNAKE”
RACHEL POLLACK
Long ago, in a time beyond memory, Great Powers owned the land, the water, and even the air. Of all these empires, the strongest was a land called Written In The Sky. The soldiers of this land, who called themselves the Army of Heaven, traveled in rolling multi-level engines covered in sheets of black glass so that pillars of darkness moved across the earth.
And yet, despite the strengths of its forces, the true power of the country lay in the wisdom of a group called Readers, priests trained to follow the tracks of heaven known as God’s writing in the sky. The priests lived in an observatory called the Kingdom of God, high above the palace of the country’s ruler. Every night they watched and calculated the slow movements of the stars, and the swifter movements of the planets. If any clouds dared to obscure the night, the Readers let loose their white bulls, whose bellows of rage cleared the air of rebellious vapors.
Through their perfect knowledge the Readers could tell the Army of Heaven where to strike, or the owners of mines where to dig for copper or gold, or the creators of spectacles what grand images of beauty and desire would entice audiences to love them and long for them.
Most of all, however, the Readers studied the sky for the greatest of all messages, the secret that caused the finger of heaven to stroke Written In The Sky with power—the death of its ruler.
Though the merchants and slave traders managed the empire’s wealth, and the Army commanded obedience, all power officially belonged to the ruler who lived in a palace in the central circle of a city called The Nine Rings of Heaven and Earth. The name of this man was always the same, no matter who it was that sat on the Throne of Lilies. They called him Immortal Snake.
During the time of his reign, each Immortal Snake enjoyed more delights than any single person could imagine. Whole teams of people worked beyond exhaustion to devise new pleasures for him to experience. And everyone loved him. Every house contained portraits of him, and figurines to set above the bed, and there were statues in even the smallest towns. Children were taught to write letters to him, grateful for his love and protection. In every wedding the bride swore love to Immortal Snake and then her husband, who in turn declared himself a stand-in for the beauty and devotion of the ruler.
And yet, all of it, all the adulation and the pleasure, could end at any moment. For as the Readers insisted, it was only the willing death of the Snake—the “shedding of the skin”—that convinced God of the country’s worthiness.
No one knew when it would happen, but a night would come when all the stars and planets locked into place. Then the Readers would put on their purple hoods and march through the city, blowing copper trumpets blackened by age, and driving their herds of white bulls maddened by loneliness, through the streets of The Nine Rings of Heaven and Earth. All through the city people doused their fires, even the lanterns in their kitchens, and then locked themselves in rooms without windows or chairs.
At the beginning of his reign each Immortal Snake chose a male and female “companion,” two people who served only one function. They died first. The Readers alone knew the exact manner of their death, but their hearts and lungs and genitals went into a dish cooked in a stone pot. Every Immortal Snake knew something very simple. If he wanted to live he must resist the food the Readers brought to him. It was so easy. But lights flashed in the bubbles of steam; and the smell excited tiny explosions all up and down his tongue; finally, like every Immortal Snake before him, he would tell himself that just a taste, just a drop, could not possibly harm him.
When he had eaten the entire dish he would begin to vomit. All his insides would pour out, even his bones, which the food had turned to brightly colored jelly. When nothing but the skin remained the Readers would drape it over a wooden cross they then would carry through the city back to the vaults underneath their observatory. And then, from the directions written in the sky, they would choose a new Immortal Snake. And everyone would celebrate.
In front of the Kingdom of God the Readers would hoe a small patch of earth, into which the new Immortal Snake would plant a seedling tree. As the tree grew the people would take seeds from it to plant in their own villages, a promise that they would never go hungry. When the new Snake in turn would shed his skin the priests would uproot the tree, then prepare the ground for the next planting.
So it happened once again, after so many times. The man who had ruled for a span of years and months that no one was allowed to count (for according to doctrine there was only one Immortal Snake, and his reign was eternal) vanished into a torn skin flapping on sticks. A new ruler emerged, a young man called Happier Than The Day Before. When the Readers came to tell him of his ascension he shouted with joy, for he could hardly imagine all the gifts and pleasures that would pour into his life at every moment. When they left him he stood on tiptoe, stretched his arms out to the sides, and spun around until he fell down laughing. “Immortal Snake,” he said out loud. “I’m Immortal Snake. I’m the ruler of the world!”
And indeed, over the next weeks countless marvels and delights arrived from all the lands that owed tribute to Written In The Sky. There were carpets woven from the wings of butterflies. There were bottles of wine sprinkled with the tears of old women remembering the kiss of the first person who’d ever loved them. Performers and teachers from every level came to entertain and instruct the new ruler. Hermits who’d sealed themselves in caves for half a century reported on what the shapes of stalactites taught them about human longing. People marched in and announced they’d committed atrocities just so they could come to The Nine Rings and recount all the details to Immortal Snake, who laughed as he pretended to cover his eyes in horror. Poets who’d been torn apart by wild dogs and then brought back to life as babies floating on the sea arrived to solve any riddle anyone had ever devised.
The spectacle lasted fifteen days. and in all this time only two things wounded the Snake’s pleasure. The first was his minister, a pinched looking man named Breath of Judgment, who insisted that Immortal Snake consider his duties, a subject that did not interest the new ruler in the slightest. As far as Immortal Snake could tell, these duties consisted primarily in choosing his male and female companions. And that was a subject he did not want to think about at all.
The second annoyanc
e was his sister, an unpleasant young woman named More Clever Than Her Father and Everyone Else. Even before her brother’s glorious rise the woman had always done everything to make him feel impure and trivial. She would never go to any of his parties, never laugh at his jokes, never accept the boys he chose for her. She ate only the simplest foods, drank only the smallest sips of wine, and spent her days studying ancient texts, or writing poetry, or designing elegant furniture, or filling the walls of her rooms with murals depicting the mysteries of Creation. She wore long dark dresses buttoned to the neck (though they always contained streaks or panels of intense color), and shoes made of flat soles and worn leather straps that wound round and round her ankles. When her brother and his friends staged elaborate parties More Clever Than Her Father would trace her way through the Nine Rings until she emerged into the desert. There she would spend hours watching tiny creatures scurry back and forth to no purpose.
And now that her brother had ascended to his glory, the woman strode into the throne room, rudely ignored all the acrobats, contortionists, and life-size wind-up giraffes, and simply demanded that he use the power of Immortal Snake to raise the lives of the poor and helpless.
Her smugness made him want to jump off the throne and tear her hair out. But then a better idea came to him. With a smirk he turned to Breath of Judgement. “Good news!” he said. “I’ve chosen my female companion.”
More Clever stepped back. “No!” she said. “Don’t say it. There’s still time. You can stop.”
Slowly, her brother shook his head so that his wide grin swept all across her. He said, “I choose my sister, More Clever Than Her Father And Everyone Else, to accompany me through all the worlds as my female companion.” And then, because it sounded so good, he added, “Blessed forever is Immortal Snake.”
More Clever said nothing, only marched out past the laughter of all the courtiers who hoped to become the ruler’s special friend. She went to her bedroom, where she pulled out a small wooden trunk from under her bed. Shaking, she took out the strands of hair from her first haircut, done at her name enactment, along with the pale blue dress she’d worn, and the black doll in a gold dress her mother had given her as a present after the ceremony. She put these in a basket and took them to the farthest ring of the city, where a small stone building inside the walls housed the Temple of Names.
