Sunspot Jungle

by Bill Campbell

  “Sisters,” she called out, making a point to make eye contact with the smiths as well as the engineers, “brother masons, we have one last problem to solve before we can bring the scarab into the sunlight and test it. The mechanism requires a ba-spirit as well as a living pilot to operate. And I have no idea how we can make that happen.”

  “How did the Ancients do it?” one of the smiths asked.

  An engineer standing in the front answered. “There’s an incantation in the records. We think it’s meant to compel a ba-spirit to do the work. But it’s written in the old tongue.” The language they spoke evolved out of that, but few scholars knew it completely enough to translate even back before the invasion.

  “It compels them? Why not ask?” another engineer said.

  “What ba-spirit would remain in this world disembodied for longer than they needed to? Ba take up another life, or they pass through the Door of the West with the Osiris,” Kemanut said.

  “It’s been more than a generation since we’ve had a king that properly transitioned,” one of the masons said. “There must be many lost ba waiting.”

  “There are.”

  The voice came from the middle of the room and was quiet enough that Amatashteret didn’t hear it. All she saw was the turn of a dozen heads in the speaker’s direction. It was a young man she’d seen working with the masons, but from the look of him, he wasn’t old enough to be a full member of the brotherhood. He also didn’t look like he could deal with the pressure of so many eyes on him.

  “Say again, Neferu. Speak loud,” the Supreme mason commanded.

  “There are many spirits here, waiting, hoping for the king to open the Door for them.”

  “Here as in Khemet or here as in this room?” Amatashteret asked.

  “Both, auntie. More here at the Library than upriver where we came from. They gather here because of the Great Lion, I think.”

  The boy was clearly a ba adept, a person gifted with the ability to see and communicate with the spirits. If things ran as they were supposed to, the Superiors of the Spirit Houses would have found him years ago and trained him.

  “So we can find them,” the Supreme mason said. “How do we get them to understand how the machine works?”

  “Neferu, were any of the spirits here engineers?” Amatashteret asked.

  The boy’s eyes turned gold—a sign he was communicating with the ba around them. “Yes. Many. One says to tell you her name is Aneski.”

  Most of the other engineers reacted just as Amatashteret did, hands automatically touching the space over their hearts in remembrance.

  “The last Superior Engineer of the High House,” Kemanut explained to the younger people. “Building the copper scarab was her idea.”

  Amatashteret cut through the crowd to take Neferu’s hand—“Ask her to follow us, please”—and led him back through the tunnels to the giant scarab. She had him stand on a stool so he could see inside the ba-spirit nest.

  “Can she get there? Or …” Did it require the spell? She wasn’t sure.

  “She is there. She says …” he looked to the Supreme mason. “We have to make it in harmony with her?”

  No one looked as if they understood what that meant. Her stomach clenched, braced against defeat. They were so close!

  “I think she means we have to create a resonance in the copper the same way the Brothers of Anpu create one in the stone when they consecrate the Door in a tomb.” Kemanut stepped up to the machine and placed her palm on the head. After a few breaths she began to hum, modulating up and down until the copper vibrated in kind. “Before, I was a musician in the Spirit House of Iset. I know of the technique, but I don’t know the exact resonance. And metal is different from stone.”

  “We can work with you to discover it,” the Supreme mason said. “And with Neferu’s help, the ba will be able to guide us.”

  Elated and hopeful again, Amatashteret crossed her hands over her heart. “Let’s begin.”

  In the darkness before dawn on the equinox, Khemetans who came from across the delta and White Fortress region gathered around the base of the Great Lioness. Their voices quiet, reverent; their bodies newly wet with water from the still anemic Nile; they sat with eyes trained on the eastern horizon. Like the giant stone Lion of the Horizon, their faces would greet the dawn directly on the day marking the beginning of the harvest season. Most of them tried not to think about how poor that harvest would be this year, just as last year and possibly all the years to come. Instead, they waited for the life-giving rays of the sun to warm their skin and remind them of the first eternal truth: Everything changes, but the dawn always comes.

  Half a shade after the sun disk pushed fully over the horizon, the Lioness seemed, impossibly, to shudder. Sounds emerged from under the ground that ricocheted around the still quiet crowd—vibrations that didn’t make sense.

  They had begun to murmur when the copper scarab emerged from the sand between the stone paws, hissing and clicking and gleaming in the sunlight. The people’s silence held for one breath, two, before everyone reacted at once. Amatashteret watched from a short distance as some scrambled away in fear, some fell to their knees in shock or in reverence, and some ran to get a closer look. The engineers surrounded the scarab, lifting the copper wings to the right position and ensuring the steam pressure stayed at the right level. Once they gave the ready signal, she and the other chariot riders rolled past the machine, heading into the desert and upriver toward the capital.

  She looked back at the massive scarab, watched the legs’ deliberate movement as it walked on the stone pavement like a spider, then switched to a sweeping, swimming movement when it reached the sand between the pyramids. The size, the weight, the fact that it wasn’t perfectly built didn’t keep it from moving along just as fast as the slow trotting horses.

  Amatashteret had one small stab of regret that they hadn’t been able to figure out how to make it fly. Soon, she told herself. If this worked, she and the Sisters would have many years to work on it.

  Once away from the Library district, the chariots formed a wide circle around the scarab with Amatashteret and Kemanut in front. The engineers, smiths, and masons who didn’t fit in the dozen chariots rode behind on mules, followed by the Khemetans who had seen the machine emerge. The group kept to the sand but hewed close enough to the farmlands that people from villages along the bank of the river, alerted by excited criers, trickled out to watch them pass or to join. By the time the Ra-sun looked down on them from above, hundreds of Khemetans followed in their wake. And so they entered the capital on a wave of cheers and hymns that reached deep within the walls of the High House.

  As planned, the chariots parted, and the copper scarab reached the courtyard of the palace first. Amatashteret came to stand in front of it when she saw Yacob-Hur coming down the long front steps, his white hot fury apparent even from this distance. She turned her back to him and took in the sight of the machine standing in the full sunlight. It towered over her, carapace gleaming yellow-red, outer wings up as if just about to fly, alive and vibrating. She looked at all the engineers and smiths and masons that helped build it, all the people fascinated and buoyed by it. This creation would change everything for her people. All her people. With that thought firm in her heart, she turned and faced the chieftain.

  For many breaths he stood two arm lengths away, eyes jumping between her and the looming machine above them. Finally, he locked on her. “Speak, woman.”

  “After today you will never use that tone with me again.”

  He flinched as if punched, too surprised to form an immediate answer.

  “Do you know what this is?” she said, arms raised to encompass the machine’s presence. “No, I can see you don’t. This is a scarab beetle. We Khemetans hold it sacred. It represents the celestial Kheper that brings the dawn, pushing it above the horizon to launch it on the daily journey across the sky.”

  “If you don’t start making sense—”

  “I’ll
put it in terms you can understand. The scarab is a god. I brought it to life.”

  That silenced him.

  “Look behind me. Do you see all those women? They’re engineers and metalsmiths. Together we designed and crafted this. Do you see all those men? They’re masons. Together we built and sang this to life. Do you see all the people behind them? They know we’re the ones who made that happen.

  “Do you see the choice you have in front of you?”

  A range of dark emotions passed over Yacob-Hur’s face before he took a deep breath to laugh. “So I’m to give over all my power to you because you come back here at the head of a mob of peasants?”

  “That isn’t how this works,” Amatashteret said. “Without balance, power dwindles away to nothing, just as with the Nile. Women and men rule together in Khemet. Why do you think the throne sits on top of Iset’s head?” She pointed at the carving of the netjeret on the lintel surrounding the door.

  “This is your choice: Join me, re-establish balance, and see the Black Land restored to glory.”

  “Or?”

  At a signal from her, Neferu had the scarab take two steps forward.

  “Get stepped on.”

  Fear and anger swirled in Yacob-Hur’s eyes. “You harm me, and you won’t live out the day.”

  “Oh? Who will punish me? Them?” He followed her gaze to the upper balcony where three of the Amorite Patriarchs watched the scene below. “They came to warn you their patience is about to run out, didn’t they? Or that it has already.”

  From his look she knew her second guess was right.

  “Show them you’re wise enough to rule, not just strong enough to conquer.”

  “By giving in to a woman?”

  She didn’t respond. She waited. After a time his breathing slowed, his eyes fixed on the copper scarab, and his rational mind finally asserted control of his emotions. He still couldn’t fix his mouth to utter the necessary words, only managing a hard nod of acquiescence.

  Without speaking, she walked past him toward the High House steps. Before he could react to this, the engineers and smiths streamed past him to join her. Amatashteret waited at the top for them to coalesce around her just as the masons moved to form a circle around the scarab. When Yacob-Hur finally came to stand beside them, the message was clear: I am protected. We are protected.

  “Can you trust him?” Kemanut had asked in the hours before dawn. “Even if he agrees, can you be sure he won’t take control back?”

  “No. Never,” she’d said. “We can never stop watching for him to betray us. He’s not fit to be king in Khemet and never will be. We still need him, for now. Once we reestablish the kinswomen, we can search for and anoint a king who has the respect of the Amorites and respects the ways of Khemet.”

  Even in this moment, standing before the High House as Kemanut announced her as the Great Mother, Amatashteret could see this future as if it already happened. Later, she would gather more women, the daughters and granddaughters of Khemet, to set things in order. Later, she would become the Superior Engineer and lead the Sisters of Seshet in creating more copper scarabs. Later, she would see her daughters take on these responsibilities and carry on her work.

  For now, she placed her hand on Yacob-Hur’s shoulder, accepted the regalia Kemanut brought out of hiding for her, took one last breath as Amatashteret, orphan and widow, and made her first official act as Great Mother and Queen.

  The Arrangement of Their Parts

  Shweta Narayan

  The Englishman’s workshop nestled close to his people’s fortified factory, outside its walls but well within its influence. A night guard watched over it—if keeping to the doorway, eyeing the street from his puddle of lantern light, and turning occasionally to spit paan could really be called watching.

  The guard had reason for complacency; plastered walls offered no handhold and the workshop’s windows, set into the sloping roof, were too high and small for human reach. But the Artificer Devi had not worn human form in many years. She cut the wooden trellis out from one window, spread her tail feathers for balance, and telescoped out her neck to peer into the room.

  It could as well have been a butchery. The air was rank with stale machine oil. Moonlight spread flat on tile and whitewash, caught on gears laid out in disconnected imitation of their proper form. Inked and labelled diagrams, pinned to walls and tables, recorded the workings of legs, eyes, boilers; and on the main workbench a half-dismembered voice box stood ready to play one cylinder of its speech. Its other cylinders stood in rows beside it, sorted by size instead of tone. Dead husks shaped the shadows: a soldier’s head pried open; pieces of a half-golden mongoose; the ungeared skeleton of a large cat, frozen before it could pounce.

  The trail ended here. Of course. Anything might be found in Surat, greatest port in the world, for a price.

  She landed with barely a whir on the main bench, next to the voice box, and reached for three heartsprings coiled naked on a sheaf of paper. Paused. The springs’ thin metal had ripped in places; the pattern of dents said they had been flattened out, then rolled back up. Well, that could all be repaired. But—she held one up to the moonlight, then checked the others, shivering. Every graven word was gone. Scratched over, rubbed down to a lifeless blur.

  Not even she could bring someone back once their heartspring was destroyed.

  A prayer for her dead then, gone to power that great mechanism marked by stars; and three more notches in her own spring. There was only metal left here. And paper, rubbed over with wax to make imprints of each ruined heartspring.

  But remains could, at need, become parts. The hunting cat’s skeleton was still fully articulated. The soldier’s head still held his steam boiler, though the ruby lens that heated it was gone. And for the rest—she shredded the paper into a crucible, set the springs gently on their bed of copied words, and turned to build up the fire.

  Four brahmins met in a village one day and, in the way of learned men everywhere, got to talking about their learning. Now each believed his own knowledge to be the most essential; but brahmins value humility and nonattachment, so none were willing to admit it. In consequence, each one heaped praises on the rest, and so they all became great friends and decided to travel through the jungle together.

  On the way they came across new bones scattered by the side of the road. “My dear friends!” cried the first brahmin. “While my knowledge is a drop to your monsoon clouds, yet I believe it would reveal the mystery of these bones.”

  “Do please show us,” said the second, “for we have nothing but awe of your mastery of form, and virtue can only increase when learning is shared.” For he was hoping to overhear his new friend’s mantra and steal its power for himself.

  So the first mouthed his sacred words and scattered water from the three holy rivers onto the bones, and they rose from the ground and arranged themselves into the skeleton of a tiger.

  The sun was risen when the workshop door squeaked open, letting in the day’s dust on a rush of muggy air. The Englishman glanced in, then turned to give his guard a low-voiced command before stepping inside.

  All but one of the windows cast trellis-shadows on the far wall. From that one, the Artificer raised her wings. The Englishman wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, smirked at her shadow, and said in passable Hindustani, “Well, isn’t this curious?” Behind him, the door pulled shut. The outer bar dropped with a thump.

  She tucked her wings neatly back, keeping her good eye fixed on him. His skin showed red through his light muslin jama, and it sat oddly with his English hat and boots, but there was nothing silly about the pistol at his hip. “You seem, Sir James,” she said, “to find a great many things curious.”

  “With all Creation so full of wonder, how could I not?” He looked up at her directly then, shading his face; his eyes gleamed in appreciation. He said, “And I would be loath to damage so lovely a mechanism before even seeing it fly.”

  “Am I to be grateful?”

&nb
sp; “Another man might choose revenge.” He gestured from the cooling crucible to his disturbed mallets and gravers. His hand drifted down to the gun, jerked away from it again. “Or use this violation to cause trouble for your Emperor. I am a natural philosopher and prefer understanding.”

  By Imperial edict, the British could not be touched. Much the bird cared. “Understand this, then,” she said. “You murdered my own.”

  “Oh, murdered, is it now?” The Englishman sounded only amused.

  “You think your studies justify their deaths?”

  “Excellent show. One would almost think there was meaning to it. But it was Man, after all, whom God made in His image, not clockwork; so clockwork cannot be murdered.”

  She rattled her feathers. “Ah? Then mere clockwork could hardly violate your workshop.”

  “Argued like a native! And indeed you may be right despite yourself.” He grinned. “For I have discovered that it takes only Descartes’ four principles of inanimate form to explain you.”

  “So you need only know—” She shifted into French. “—the motion, size, shape, and arrangement of my parts.” Back to Hindustani. “What’s left to understand?”

  His mouth opened. Shut. “’S blood, you’re a saucy one,” he said. “I wish to know why, of course.”

  “We have our last rites, as you do yours.” Sunlight crept down the far wall, towards the skeletal forms, reaching lower now than the man’s head. “We do not leave our dead unmelted. You’ve had your dismantlement and your diagramming. Trade me for what is left, and I shall take no further action.”

  He glanced along the row of windows; then, gaze calculating, back at the bird. “And what is it you offer?”

  “A tale of our own natural philosophers, whose understanding might inform yours.”

  The second brahmin was impressed, which irritated him because he hadn’t managed to hear the mantra. So he said, “That is very clever!”

  Such meager praise drew a thin smile to the first brahmin’s lips. “You are far too kind, my brother,” he said. “But indeed, I don’t aspire to cleverness. Only to knowledge of Truth within the world.”