The Long List Anthology Volume 4

by David Steffen

  I looked to Sam. “Can you fix it?”

  He lifted his shoulders. “I don’t know how,” he said.

  Naomi twisted a lock of her short, curly hair between two fingers, an old, anxious habit that always grated on my nerves. “How do you feel?”

  “Like a dinosaur,” I snapped. “Like a monstrously huge beast that can’t rest because everything is too hot and—” I cut myself off. Shit. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t talk about the dinosaur boneyard I’d found, the Gods Words etched into the ribs of one of the great beasts.

  “Um…” Naomi was looking at me as though I’d grown an extra leg out of my forehead. “What?”

  “Nevermind,” I said quickly. “Nevermind, I just… I’m tired, is all.”

  She stood, dusting off her palms. “Well, you won’t be tired for long,” she said. “We’re staying here. I’ll tell the group that you need to—”

  “Wait,” I said, grabbing her leg. “No. Tell them…” I glanced at Sam, who was watching me with rapt attention. “Tell them one of the oxen pulled up lame,” I said, lowering my voice as though that would keep the boy from hearing his Prophetess tell a lie.

  Naomi nodded. “Fine,” she said. “But that will only buy us a few days.”

  “I’ll figure something out,” I snapped. Naomi left, taking Sam with her.

  I rested a palm on the swell of my belly and wondered what unasked-for gift the Gods were trying to give me this time.

  • • • •

  I must have fallen asleep in the middle of my prayers. When I opened my eyes, it was dark; my hand still rested over the shifting hill of my baby. Outside of my tent, voices rose and fell like waves crashing on some distant shore.

  I struggled to sit up, listened to the voices outside. There was a rumble of wheels, a shout, a thump. By the time I made it to the tentflap and looked outside, the commotion had passed. Sam sat outside of my tent, a fresh bruise swelling under one eye.

  “Sam?” I asked. “What’s going on, what happened? Who hit you?”

  He raised his fingers to his eye. “They’re leaving,” he said. He looked up at me, tears shining in his eyes.

  “Who’s leaving? Where’s Naomi?”

  Naomi ran up to me, breathless, Marc trailing behind her. “I’m sorry, Fisher,” she said. “I couldn’t stop them.”

  “What happened?” I said. I didn’t realize I’d shouted until I looked at their shocked faces.

  “Hanna, Liam, Rand… a few others,” she said. “They’re leaving. They took the seed and water wagons. They said they’ll meet us at the Promised Land.”

  “But— no,” I said, “no, they can’t— what?” I felt like I’d swallowed a live bird, like it was frantically beating at the inside of my throat and chest, trying to escape.

  “They checked the oxen,” Sam muttered. “They looked and saw that none of them were lame and they said that—”

  “Don’t, Sam,” Marc warned. Sam shut his mouth and stared at the ground, sullen.

  “But that’s all of our seeds, all of our water, all of the feed for the animals—” my head swam.

  “The animals will eat grass, and we’ll find a stream, I’m sure,” Naomi said. “We’re so close, Fisher. We’ll make it.”

  I pressed at my temples with the heels of my hands. “We have to,” I whispered. “Just five more months and we’ll be at the Promised Land. The tablets said—”

  “The Gods said,” Marc corrected me. “The Gods are leading us to them. Even if there’s no water anywhere between here and the Promised Land, we’ll make it there.” He rested a hand on my shoulder and I leaned into the warmth of his palm.

  “Prophetess,” Sam said. I looked up, followed his gaze.

  Four dark drops of blood had fallen to the dust between my feet.

  “We’ll make it,” Marc said again, his eyes on the sharp crescent of the moon overhead. “Sooner than we know.”

  Chapter 9

  Sundering

  The tablets foretold the shadow that passed over the moon on the day of my daughter’s birth.

  The pain was worse than I had feared and better than I had hoped. It was consuming and distant, a fire at my feet and water in my lungs. It was everything, and then my daughter cried for the first time, and the pain was nothing at all.

  The tablets foretold the shadow, but they did not tell me how I would reach down between my legs and feel my daughter’s head there. They did not tell me how soft her hair would already be, before she even finished emerging into the world. She had dark hair. Like mine.

  I held her to my chest and I whispered into that dark hair, which smelled of musk and blood. “I name you Ducky, daughter of Fisher.” She kept breathing on my chest, her ribs flexing with every breath. Her eyes were shut tight. I ran a fingertip across the soft, narrow curl of her ear.

  Naomi came crashing through the tall grasses a moment later.

  “Fisher?” she looked frantic. She saw me, lying there on a bed of bent stalks with blood pooling around me. “Fisher, oh my Gods, Fisher where have you—” And then she saw the baby. “Fisher, wh— what is, what is that?” She stammered, ran a hand through her own blonde curls. “What did you— are you— is she—”

  “We’re both fine,” I murmured into Ducky’s hair. “We were born tonight, weren’t we, Ducky?”

  The shadow passed away from the moon, and my daughter opened her eyes to look blearily up at the sudden light.

  • • • •

  It was a Godsmoon that night, as full and lush and round as I felt. The tablets foretold the shadow. They hadn’t said how long it would linger. I had never seen a shadow pass over the moon before. Most of us stayed inside on the nights that the shadow was due — it was an awful thing, a dark thing. It was a silencing of the Gods’ own brightness. When the tablets predicted a shadow over a Godsmoon, it was a warning: let there be no feasts on this night, no celebrations, no dancing. Go to bed early and stay there until daylight.

  But on his deathbed, the Prophet had told me about the shadow. He had told me about the first time he had defied the Gods.

  “It was just after your mother died,” he’d said. “You had a fever, and the Gods Whispers were relentless, telling me that danger was on the way, and greater loss than I’d ever known.” The Gods Whispers had been right — I remembered that season of torment. My mother and ten others had died of the fever, and then, not a month later, a whole wagon of seed had fallen off a cliffside, taking three children with it. “They wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t quiet, and I was going out of my mind, Ducky, you have to understand.” I had tried to offer him a cup of water, but he waved it away. “I went outside, just to get some air. I’d forgotten that the shadow was coming, and when I walked outside, it was passing over the Godsmoon.”

  “You saw it?” I’d gasped.

  “I saw it, and as it crossed over the Godsmoon, Ducky… the Gods were quiet.”

  I’d been horrified at him. He was telling me that he had voluntarily silenced the voices of the Gods. “How could you?” I’d whispered.

  “Oh, Ducky,” he’d said, patting my hand. He closed his eyes, remembering. “After that, I went outside every time the shadow passed over the Godsmoon. You’ll understand.”

  “I’ll never understand that,” I’d snapped. “I would never silence the Gods.”

  But then, my belly was ripe to bursting and a quarter of my people fled from me to find the Promised Land for themselves, and the Gods Whispers were constant and urgent, insisting that there was always more to do, that my work wasn’t done yet and never would be. And then there were waves of pain, and the Gods Whispers had grown louder with every single one.

  And I found that I did understand, after all.

  • • • •

  Later, after Ducky and I were both clean and dry and warm, Marc asked me why I did it. “Why didn’t you tell me where you were going?” he asked.

  “I didn’t know,” I said. It was mostly a lie. I had slipped out of our bed in the ni
ght to relieve myself for the third time — or the fourth, I couldn’t be sure — and the baby came while I was outside. That’s what I told him, and Naomi, and anyone who asked. But the truth is that I had known she was on the way. My waters had broken that morning, and the pain had been building throughout the day.

  When I left my tent that night and walked out into the tall grasses of the plain, I knew that I would be coming back with a baby in my arms.

  Naomi was furious, of course. She should have been there, and Marc, and Sam, just in case I needed a healer. Just in case the baby needed a healer. But the tall grasses beckoned, and I wanted to watch the shadow pass over the moon.

  And maybe I wanted to be alone. Just for a moment. Maybe I wanted to be a woman birthing her first child, and not the voice of the Gods to their fearful, exhausted, thirsty people. Maybe I wanted a moment of silence, a moment to be alone with the pain and the fear and my own animal need to scream.

  “I didn’t know that she would come so fast,” I told Marc when he asked why I did it. And that was true — I didn’t know how suddenly she would slide out of me, how hard it would be to catch her before she touched the ground.

  But I knew she was coming. How could I not know?

  She was mine.

  Chapter 10

  Nearness

  Ducky had just finally fallen asleep when the rear flap of canvas on the back of my wagon snapped open.

  “You need to see this.”

  I nearly screamed with frustration as Ducky’s head jerked. Her eyes fluttered open, and she drew breath to start wailing. Again.

  “What is it, Marc?” I snapped. The tablets say not to hate anyone, and so I did not hate my husband. But I was not particularly in love with him that day, either. He’d taken to praying through the night, refusing to interrupt his devotion to the Gods even when Ducky stirred and cried. Even when I hadn’t slept for days.

  “You need to come, Prophetess,” he said, inclining his head in the formal bow that most of my followers had taken to performing. I wanted to throw something at him.

  “Fine,” I said through gritted teeth. I climbed from the moving wagon, stumbling as I landed. It was loud outside of the wagon — the noise of the wheels crunching through the gravelly dirt of the scrubland combined with the shouts of the children who ran behind us, waving sticks and occasionally hitting each other. The wagons were moving at a fervent pace. Marc tried to get me to follow him, but I ignored him, planting my feet until Naomi caught up to us.

  “Can you take Ducky?” I asked, handing my daughter to her before she could answer. “Apparently I’m needed.”

  “Oh, I’ll say,” she replied, her ruddy face grim. “I already had Sam pull a mule for you. Hino is waiting for you up front.”

  “Hino? Jasper’s boy?”

  “He took over as lead scout when Jonah… um.” She trailed off, and I didn’t answer. I started off toward the front of the wagon train, half-jogging to beat the pace we were setting. I lifted my hand in thanks without looking back.

  What she hadn’t said — what she hadn’t been willing to remind me — was that Jonah had left along with nineteen other Children of the Gods. Back between Marc’s awakening and Ducky’s birth, I’d lost twenty followers, along with all the stored water and the seed that we’d been able to save throughout all of the floods and storms and fires and deserts we’d survived.

  Everyone who remained had been wonderful during the long month of my confinement, labor, and recovery. But now we were behind schedule, and we needed to catch up to the brothers and sisters who had abandoned us. They’d sworn to follow the trail mapped out by the Gods. They’d sworn to meet us in the Promised Land.

  So after Ducky’s birth, we jettisoned every scrap of weight that we could spare, and we raced to meet them.

  “This way, Prophetess,” the boy who met me at the front of the wagon train said. He waved an arm at me as I mounted the mule that was waiting.

  “Hino, right?” I asked as we began to ride ahead of the group. “When did you get so tall?”

  “I’m not sure, Prophetess,” he said. I shifted uncomfortably on the mule’s back.

  “Where are we going?”

  He didn’t answer, and I watched his face as he stopped himself from — what? Crying? Vomiting? We rode in silence for the time it took sweat to begin etching a course through the grit on my back. Hino stopped next to a broad swath of scrub, and helped me off my mule.

  “Hino, what’s here?” The sun seemed to be perched directly on top of us. The bleached-blue expanse of the sky was broken only by a few huge black birds, circling in the distance. I wiped at my face with one corner of the scarf I wore whenever we crossed through sands or scrubland.

  “Come with me, please,” he replied, and his eyes begged me not to make him explain. I reminded myself that Marc and Naomi had both thought I should come with this young man, and I swallowed back my doubts.

  We picked our way through the scrub, leading our mules, dodging spiny leaves that attempted to gouge our legs. Sweat stung my eyes, and I wished that I’d worn a less threadbare scarf over my dark hair to keep the sun from cooking my scalp. My eyes were on the ground, and I nearly bumped into Hino when he stopped short in front of me.

  “There,” he said, pointing. It took a moment for my eyes to follow his finger. At first I thought he was pointing to the shadow of the great bird that circled overhead.

  Then, the shadow passed, and I saw them. They were lined up like pearls on a necklace: twenty heads, arranged from largest to smallest. They looked strange, gape-mouthed and staring, and it took me a moment to realize that their eyes, lips, and tongues had been removed.

  “What… what happened to them?” I asked, hearing how stupid I sounded even as the words left my mouth.

  “Scavengers, most like,” Hino answered. “They always go for the softest parts first.”

  “What came before the scavengers?” I wondered aloud.

  I moved closer and crouched in front of the heads, staring into the faces. Even mutilated as they were, I recognized them. On one end, the massive head of Rand, the child-minder. On the opposite end, the tiny head his daughter. I paced along the line, looking into each of their faces.

  Jonah, the old scout, was somewhere in the middle.

  “Who did this to you?” I whispered. The Gods replied with only the faintest of murmurs. I closed my eyes, trying to listen harder.

  The Gods whispered “justice” in my ear.

  “No,” I muttered. “No, this is not justice. This is not right.”

  The Gods had no answer for that.

  “Where are their bodies?” I asked Hino. He shrugged, studying a tick on his mule’s back. “Who killed them? Why?” He shrugged again, although I hadn’t expected an answer to those questions.

  I scrubbed my face with both hands, trying to discern what message I was meant to take from this display.

  “I, um, I found the wagons, Prophetess.” He cleared his throat. “They’re just over that ridge.”

  Hope swelled in me like a rising tide.

  “They’re burned out,” he said. “Seeds and all. Unsalvageable.” He wouldn’t look at me.

  I breathed heavily through my nose. “Shit,” I spat. “Shit.”

  “Prophetess?” Hino said softly. I looked back and saw that he was still staring at his mule’s back. He wiped at his face with the back of one arm.

  “What is it, Hino?”

  “Would… would you pray with me?” He looked up at me, and his face was as broken as a dropped egg.

  The Gods’ own stillness settled over me like a mantle. I walked over to him, rested my hand on his shoulder. “Of course, my son,” I said, my voice heavy with comfort and authority. The buzzard that had been circling overhead landed heavily behind me, having finally decided that I wasn’t a threat. As it began tearing the flesh off one of the faces that rested in the line on the ground, I prayed to the Gods for mercy, comfort, and peace. Under my hand, Hino’s shoulders shudde
red.

  In the distance, I heard the oncoming rumble of our wagon train, catching up to us at last.

  Chapter 11

  Recognition

  I stared at the chest that contained the tablets. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the water that rested in the divot on top of the chest. The sacred water — the Gods tears, shed for their sadness in missing their children. The divot was carved into the wood, deep and narrow. Salt crystals filmed the edges of the divot, white and patchy, interrupted only by a single dark smear of blood.

  I stared at the blood, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. It was old blood, brown and flaking, but I knew that it was blood the same way that I would have known my own daughter’s cry from the cries of a hundred other children.

  My memory darted between the present moment and a moment three weeks before, the night before I found the dismembered heads of the dissenters that had left our camp to find the Promised Land for themselves. It had been the middle of the night, and Ducky had been stirring and grumbling, and I had woken to take care of her.

  Marc had been kneeling beside the chest.

  He was praying, and I remembered stifling bitter resentment at the sight of him on his knees, attempting to commune with the Gods while I cared for our child. I remembered watching him touch his fingers to the top of the chest, and I remembered thinking that I should tell him not to. That I should tell him the water in the divot was intended only for the Prophetess of the Gods.

  In the aftermath of finding those twenty half-eaten heads in the desert, I had forgotten to tell him. It was important, but I was taking care of my people and I forgot to tell him. But I thought back now, as I stared at that drop of blood, and I tried to remember if Marc had been wearing his sandals or not. I tried to remember if there had been a pink tint to the wash water in our basin the next morning. I tried to remember if I’d seen him wearing those same clothes again, or if they’d disappeared.

  The more I tried to remember, the larger the blood loomed before me. The more I tried to remember, the louder the Gods whispered: Look, Fisher. Look at what he has done.