The Long List Anthology Volume 4

by David Steffen

  And the Prophet and his people followed the directions on the tablet, and walked by moonlight, and for thirty years, they came ever closer to the Land of Plenty.

  • • • •

  And the Prophet Spoke.

  “I hereby deny you, Ducky, daughter of Fisher. You are banished. Be forever cast out from your people, a stranger to them from this day until the day of your death. Never return to this place.”

  A chill washed over me. This was the Gods’ own magic, working through the Prophet, banishing me from my home and into the wastelands that surrounded our camp. He paused for breath again. He coughed, seemed to deflate around the sickness that had crept into his lungs. No, please — but then he licked his lips and the hand on my forehead warmed with the last of his life, and this was it, and I wasn’t ready, but that didn’t matter.

  It was time.

  “Greetings, foundling. I hereby name you in the sight of the Gods and their people: Fisher, Prophetess, leader of the children of the Gods. By this name you shall be known to your people; by this name they shall follow you. Go forth, Prophetess, and lead your people to the Land of Plenty.”

  As his voice faded, a wail rose from the people of the camp. Unfamiliar, unnatural warmth stole through me, and a shimmer crossed my vision, and I knew that the next child to see my eyes would know the fear I’d felt when I was a girl. The Gods’ own magic, passing from him to me.

  He whispered one more thing, in a voice that was only for my ears. “You will lead them well,” he said, and I shivered like a wet lamb.

  My father died with one palm resting on the tablets, and the other still resting on my forehead. As his breath left him, my new name settled over me.

  Leader of the children of the Gods. Fisher. Prophetess.

  Orphan.

  Chapter 2

  Cycle

  The Gods Whispers woke me in the night. My eyes opened and at first I grabbed for Marc, but I stopped myself before my hand could land on my sleeping husband’s bare chest. My palm hovered over his heart, just above the thick carpet of blonde hair that stretched between his nipples and his navel.

  When they come, I remembered my father the Prophet saying, you’ll know to listen.

  So I rose from our sleeping mat and stood with my palms open. And I listened.

  The Gods Whispers were unintelligible, shushing and sloshing and occasionally making me feel unsteady on my feet. I closed my eyes and practiced breathing the way the Prophet had taught me to, as though the air was thick and heavy, and I caught a single word out of the strange rush of sound.

  Go.

  So I went.

  • • • •

  I stood outside beneath the light of a sharp crescent moon. The desert sand retained a little of the day’s warmth, but the night air still bit at my elbows and throat, and I pulled my cloak tighter in an attempt to transform the itch of the fabric into warmth.

  Behind me, my new tent: large, with two flaps in the front and enough room to stand comfortably. It was patched and wearing thin at the folds. It was fragrant, the odor of decades of human occupation masked by the recent smells of clove and beeswax and juniper. It was the tent in which my father had died.

  In front of me, my old tent: low and small and identical to the sixty other tents in the camp. The sides fluttered, and the lantern in front of the stakes was dark. Even before I peeked inside, I knew that its new occupant was not inside. Hanna, the huntress, was gone.

  I let the tentflap fall, and the Gods Whispers began afresh. The light of the crescent moon fell upon a shadow near my feet.

  I looked down. I was wrong: it was not a shadow.

  It was blood. Rich and fragrant. The breeze that bothered Hanna’s tentflap lifted the smell of it to me, and I made the sign of the moon over my head.

  “Thank you, Holiest, for your gift of blood.” I whispered the same blessing I’d said every month since my girlhood, a reflex at the sight and the smell of the blood. It took on a new meaning as I realized that the Gods must have gifted Hanna with an especially heavy month, to leave such clear footprints in sand. I knelt and touched my fingers to the sand next to the stain, tracing the outline of a footprint. “Where are you going, Hanna?”

  • • • •

  Perhaps she just needed to relieve herself. Perhaps that’s why she wandered into the desert in the middle of the night without alerting anyone to her departure. Perhaps she ate something spoiled, and she had to leave urgently, and that’s why she didn’t light the lantern that sits outside of every tent to indicate that the occupant is coming right back. Perhaps she was tracking some night-dwelling creature and she heard it, and she ran out of her tent without thinking to grab the bow that leaned against the side of the canvas.

  I came up with many answers as I followed Hanna’s red-brown footprints into the desert. The Gods Whispers hushed around me, and I knew that none of my answers were correct.

  “I can’t believe she’s making us wait another night to break camp.” The voice travelled to me from the other side of a dune, and I stopped moving. The Gods Whispers fell silent. I crouched and held my breath as the sand nudged against my feet.

  “Can Fisher even read the tablets?”

  “Her father said—”

  “Her father is dead.” Hanna. That was Hanna’s voice, flat and calm and authoritative. She’d always been good at speaking fact into uncertainty. There were four other voices — no, five. I tried to identify them as they argued about whether I could be trusted with leadership. The Prophet would have been able to identify them. He would have known them by a single word, by a single breath.

  “I think — hm. I think that we should wait and see.” There, I knew that voice — that was Liam, the seed-tender. That was his funny little cough. I’d heard it dozens of times, playing in the seed-wagon as a girl. I sat back on my heels, pressing my fingers into the sand, digging for the warm layer that would be a foot beneath the surface. “Maybe she’ll be useful. And if she’s not—”

  The Gods Whispers started up again. The same as the ones that had woken me up. Go.

  I fled back to my tent. Stupid, I thought as I ran across the sand, stupid — if they had come over the dune, there would have been nowhere for me to hide. They would have known that I’d heard them. And if she’s not…?

  I crawled into the bed beside Marc, my feet tracking sand onto our sleeping mat, my cloak a dusty puddle of wool at the entrance to our tent. He shifted to accommodate me, his arm nudging under my head, his stubble rasping at the back of my neck.

  “Everything all right?” His baritone whisper was so much clearer than that of the Gods.

  “Do you think I can do this?” I whispered back. His lips brushed the nape of my neck.

  “Your father thought you could do it,” he said. “Where did you go?”

  I let a few breaths pass before answering. “Nowhere,” I finally replied. “We should break camp tomorrow,” I added.

  “Mm.” His breath slowed, and then he was asleep behind me, his chest pressed close to my back, our legs tangled together.

  Silently, so as not to wake him, I started to thank the Gods for showing me the bloody footprints in the sand. I thanked them for the fact that Hanna had chosen to rally against me at the same time that she was being visited. I was going to thank them even for her treachery — I couldn’t see how it was a gift, but the Gods give only gifts, and they must be thanked for each and every one.

  But something caught in my mind as I was giving thanks.

  Hanna’s bloody footprints in the sand. The fragrance of Hanna’s blood, sacred and sharp and musky on the night air.

  It was a fragrance I hadn’t smelled in too long.

  I thought back to the last time I’d left bloody footprints of my own. It had been on the rock-flats, after we’d passed the giant arches of stone but before the Prophet had taken ill. I counted moons in my mind: dead, crescent, quarter, gibbous, Godsmoon, waning, quarter, crescent, and then the dead moon when the healer had fai
led and the Prophet had died — and then again, all the way until tonight’s crescent.

  I counted again. It could not be. It could not be.

  I counted a final time, and then the Gods Whispers began to rustle, and I could not deny it any longer.

  I made the sign of the moon, and I thanked the Gods even as I wept for the blood that I knew would not come for seven more months. I lay awake, weeping and praying, as careful footfalls passed outside my tent. I rested a palm against my belly, and I did not wake Marc. Not yet.

  “The Gods give only gifts,” I reminded myself. I repeated it a hundred times over before the dawn broke over the tents of my people.

  Chapter Three

  Increase

  “You should eat more.”

  Marc made as if to hand me the remainder of his bread. It was all he’d have to eat that day — the tablets had predicted a shortage of food during the end of the first quarter-moon, so we were on rations. I pushed it back to him.

  “I’m not hungry,” I lied. Outside, the sound of mallets driving stakes through the corners of tents echoed throughout the camp. Under the constant high drone of emptiness in my stomach, a tiny heartbeat fluttered.

  “Please, Fisher,” he said. He hadn’t called me Ducky since the night of my father’s death. No one had. “I don’t need it. You do. You… both do.” He aimed a significant glance at my abdomen and I had a sudden urge to hit him.

  “We all do,” came a voice from behind me. I turned and saw Rand, the child-minder. Marc’s older brother. He had a face like a dog’s, soft-eyed and worried, but his mouth was eternally pinched into an I-know-better line.

  The tablets say not to hate anyone, and so I did not hate Rand.

  “Why are we on rations, Prophetess?” Rand asked. “There’s more than enough food to go around. Why are my children hungry?”

  “I told you yesterday, Rand,” I said in a tone that I hoped was a model of patience and understanding. “The tablets say that there will not be enough food for everyone as we leave the desert to enter the rock barrens. The tablets recommend—”

  “Can you even read the tablets?”

  Marc took a step forward, radiating anger like a live coal. “Of course she can read the tablets, look at her eyes, any damned fool can—”

  “What?” Rand challenged. “Can what? Can take all the food for herself while she leaves her people to starve? Just because your brat is in her belly—”

  “Watch yourself, brother,” Marc growled, and they were too close together and Rand’s lip was lifting into a snarl—

  But then Hanna came running, shouting my name. She skidded to a halt just a few feet from where the two men stood. “Sorry,” she said breathlessly, “there’s an emergen— there’s a situation.”

  I nodded for her to continue, leaving Rand and Marc to either fight or cease their snarling.

  “I was in the sands,” Hanna said, her breathing already slowing. I took in her scarves and her long sleeves and her tight-wrapped legs, and I knew that she had almost certainly been hunting. She almost certainly hadn’t snuck into the desert again to plot against me. Almost certainly. “I was getting a sense of the land — looking for spoor, tracks,” she continued, “and I saw — I saw people. I found people.”

  I stared at her. “What?”

  “I found people,” she repeated.

  I was dumbstruck. The route the tablets took us on kept us far from the high-walled cities of the North, East, and South, and we weren’t crossing into any of the Western mining territories or military training facilities of the Citadel. “That can’t be,” I said stupidly. “There’s… there’s nobody here.”

  She shook her head. “I thought I was seeing things, but… come see for yourself,” she said.

  “You brought them back with you?!” My voice was shrill in my own ears, and I put up a hand before she could respond. “Sorry, I— this is a lot to take in. Where are they?”

  She looked uncomfortable. “They’re in your tent,” she said in a low tone. “Sorry, Fisher. I figured you’d want to decide what to do with them before we let anyone else see them.”

  Without another word, we started walking to my tent. Her stride was long, longer than mine, but she shortened it so as not to make me jog after her, and I was grateful. I glanced at her sidelong and wondered if I’d been wrong to question her loyalty.

  • • • •

  It took a few seconds for my vision to adjust to the darkness of my tent. I must have looked imposing to them — a strange, breathless woman bursting through the canvas and then standing silently for the space of five heartbeats. Finally, my eyes acclimated, and the vague shadows before me resolved into the shape of a person. A stout woman in a full skirt, her hair a redder brown than that of any of the travelers in my camp. Her strangely-shadowed face was so sunburnt that I flinched to look at it; a blister stood out on her nose.

  “I thought you said there were two?” I muttered. Hanna nodded, gestured, and a piece of the woman’s skirt broke away. I made an involuntary noise and felt my fingers brush my lips before I knew I was covering my mouth.

  The woman was not stout, and her skirt was not full. There was a boy. Five, I thought, or a malnourished seven. He had her same strange, red-brown hair. He’d been hiding his face, and his dust-shrouded clothing had blended perfectly with her robes. The two of them stood side-by-side, and I realized that the strange shadows on the woman’s face were the outlines of her skull.

  They were starving.

  “Broth,” I murmured to Hanna. “Bring broth, now.”

  “But the rationing—”

  “Now,” I snapped, and she gave me a cold, close-lipped nod before leaving the tent.

  I took a deep breath, then heard a sniffle behind me. I turned around to see the skeletal boy wiping his nose on his sleeve. “There’s no need to cry anymore,” I said, attempting a beatific smile. “You’re home now, friends.”

  The boy lifted his eyes to mine. The moment he saw my God-stained eyes, he burst into terrified, uncomprehending tears. The woman’s knees buckled, and the boy let out a wail as she collapsed.

  • • • •

  “They can’t stay,” Marc murmured into my ear as people — my people — gathered in the center of the encampment. “There’s not enough food.”

  “They won’t eat much,” I said back. “It’ll take them at least a couple of weeks to re-acclimate to a normal diet, and by then we’ll be in the grasslands again.”

  “They’ll slow us down, and we’re already behind,” he hissed at me. “We can’t afford to wait for them to be well, and we can’t afford the resources.” Liam, standing a few feet away, turned to see what we were whispering about. He was still holding the mallet he’d been using to stake down tents. I gave him a tight smile.

  “This isn’t a discussion, Marc,” I said. “I’m not sending them back into the sands to die.”

  “I’m just saying what everyone else is going to say,” he replied mulishly. “We don’t even know who these people are. They could be criminals.”

  “The tablets are clear on this,” I said, and turned to him with my eyes wide, so he could see the expansive blackness of the Gods Sight. “Sanctuary shall be offered to any traveler in their hour of need, be they crawling creature or vast leviathan. Forget not the Sanctuary, lest you be turned away onto the sands.”

  He frowned at me, not looking directly into my eyes. I laid a palm over my abdomen to remind myself that I loved him. That we loved each other enough to make a child. That we loved each other enough to disagree. I offered my cheek, and he kissed it once, lightly, before taking his seat in the crowd.

  I turned to face my people, and raised my hands high. “Friends,” I began, “I have gathered you here today to welcome two newcomers into our midst.” A murmur began in the crowd, and I cleared my throat. I kept my hands up and spoke over them. “These two—”

  “What are they gonna eat?” I followed the direction of turning heads until my eyes landed
on Liam. His arms were folded over his barrel chest.

  “That is for the healer to decide.” I did not mention that Margot had been weak and unsteady since her failure to heal the Prophet. “I anticipate that it will be little, as they have been starving since at least the last gibbous moon,” I said, before continuing in the formal voice with which a Prophetess should address her people. “These two newcomers come from a city far to the North.” There was murmuring as people began to speculate about the notoriously brutal cities. I cut it off with a raised hand. “They have been wandering for many days and many nights. They are injured, starving, and ill. We have offered them Sanctuary, and with eyes open to our mission, they have accepted. We are gathered tonight to name and welcome them. They are in Margot’s tent tonight, but have consented to be named in absentia.” Another murmur from the crowd. I ignored it.

  I looked up at the rising moon, just two handspans above the horizon, and opened my throat to the Gods. When the time comes, my father had said, you’ll know how.

  “Greetings, foundlings,” I said, my arms held out to the side as though I would embrace the low-slung moon. My voice echoed throughout the encampment, over the sands. I knew that the woman and the child could hear me. For all I knew, the city they’d fled could hear me, too. “I, Fisher, hereby name you in the sight of the Gods and their people, the names you have chosen in the sight of the Prophetess, the Healer, and all the Gods: Maia and Samuel. By these names you are welcomed. By these names you shall be known to your people; by this name they shall harbor you. Maia and Samuel, welcome home.”

  All around me, my people cheered. I looked into their faces, and saw the silence that rested heavily on some of their faces. More than just Liam and Rand and Hanna.

  I raised my hands skyward and repeated myself for the benefit of the silent, looking at each one in turn. “Welcome home.”