Brood of Bones

by A. E. Marling

  The Once Flawless had spoken the most intolerable claims. A few minutes observation of the city would provide all the evidence necessary to prove her wrong. With a clack of hooves, the carriage rolled up the street, and I gazed out a window.

  Morimound rose from the savanna on a man-made hill of golden-brown brickwork. A pair of step pyramids crowned the city, one ziggurat for each god. The highest third of the White Ziggurat gleamed with the sun behind it, the fiery orb appearing to balance on the structure’s highest terrace.

  Wood smoke from kilns enticed my nose, teasing me with memories of childhood that tiredness kept just outside my mind’s eye. Above the rooftops, canvas blades revolved on windmills, which drove pistons to sluice water into the city’s wells and flush refuse through an unsurpassed sewer system. I felt joy at the sight of Morimound, the greatest city in the world, alongside my fear that someone would recognize me, point, and laugh.

  On the street, men backed into merchant tents to let the carriage pass. Three children ran after us, their pregnant mother struggling to keep up. I clicked my tongue in annoyance, although one more woman with child hardly attested to anything. I would need a larger sampling to form a judgment.

  My eyelids began to droop. Deepmand’s shouting from the front of the carriage faded to a mumble as if liquid filled my ears.

  “The elder enchantress returns! Make way for the....”

  My blurry eyes distorted the world, and I felt I was underwater and gazing up through the rippling surface. Brick houses three stories and taller seemed to sway and bend over the street. My head lolling with fatigue, I floated away from reality.

  Once I had seen a girl who fell into a city well; her head had struck on the way down. She had sunk with arms open, hair fanning around her, peaceful because of the concussion. Now I wondered if she had been struggling in her mind, but had only been able to twitch her fingers as she drowned. I felt as helpless.

  Flashes of wakefulness came like gasps of breath; I watched in numb terror as the next woman entered my view, leaning back in her gait to counterbalance the weight of the child inside her. The following woman was similarly blessed, her belly bobbing at each turn of crank as she drew water from a well.

  I dipped back into my own private well, the transition between world and dream.

  This time, I did not fight the sinking sensation. The heat had saturated my innermost gowns with sweat, and drowsiness never failed to numb my mental faculties to the point that a ten-year-old could outthink me. I must not have really seen seven pregnant women in a row, one old enough to be a great grandmother; my own bias had mistaken their plumpness for motherhood. To dry myself of sweat and to gain perspective, I would sleep.

  In the blackness of my mind, marble steps appeared before my feet. I descended them, feeling heavier and heavier as I trudged closer to dreaming. Upon reaching the hundredth step, the stair vanished, and I leaped.

  My weariness dissolved, the muddle of my thoughts clearing. I became weightless.

  I brushed one slippered foot on a circular dais comprised of one thousand glittering diamonds. The black slab of an operations table lay before me, the stone indented to accommodate the average human figure. A wall of the same basalt rock ringed the laboratory, with a series of stone platforms rising up to them; in each step, a shelf glowed with a luminance of tools and baubles.

  The wall possessed no ornamentation, and neither doors nor windows marred its black surface. Above the shelves, my favorite jewels drifted through the air, lighting the round room with their multicolored hues. Sapphires in flight shone like the blue of hot flames, while clusters of rubies and amethysts orbited like flocks of songbirds.

  I Attracted a towel embroidered with gold to my hand, and it flew from a shelf through the air to my outstretched fingers. An enchantress’s primary power was to draw objects toward her, and Attracting came so naturally to me by now that I did not consider it a spell so much as a polite invitation for an item to jump into my palm.

  All the shelved baubles stored memories of complex magic scripts, and the golden cloth I held was no exception. At my touch, the cloth shone, and hundreds of targeted Attractions pooled the sweat in my gowns into droplets, which were Burdened until they rolled down my stockings and away.

  I swiveled in the air, streams of bright fabric trailing my arms, until I faced a full-length mirror. The levitating looking glass did not reflect my image but my memories; it would reveal visions of my past, whether or not I had been sufficiently clear-headed to acknowledge them at the time.

  Sri the Once Flawless appeared in the mirror, and understanding flashed into me. A tumor in her liver had swelled within her abdomen, mimicking the shape of pregnancy. Its corruption had spread to her brain and there increased the production of her feminine oils, which stimulated her hair follicles and mammary glands. Dementia then explained the rest of her ravings.

  Having restored reality, I beckoned to the mirror. Images of the other six women blinked by within its crystal-covered silver, their imminent motherhood revealed not only in their bellies but also in the fullness and vibrancy of their black hair. Two even flaunted pregnancy masks: The darker pigmentation speckling their cheeks and brows would have arisen in the second trimester.

  I could not believe it. The probability of seeing six pregnant women one after another was a thousand times less likely than one in forty-eight hundred. I calculated the vast numbers by visualizing beads in piles and then counting the colorful mountains all in a glance.

  Desperate to break the trend, I batted a few floating rubies away from my head and commanded my mirror to show a memory from earlier in the day. I had parted a window curtain as the carriage had rolled through a gatehouse in the city’s Flood Wall. Seventeen feet tall and seven and three-quarters thick, the wall would protect Morimound from summer torrents as well as from greedy invaders. I knew its specifications because I had designed them and planned its construction in an idle hour at the Academy, and my gold had paid for its stone.

  We had entered the fringe of the city, Stilt Town, where shanties and shacks stood on wooden platforms, five feet above the ground. The elevation would prove unnecessary now, due to the Flood Wall, and thus newer buildings squatted closer to the mud. Wooden structures rotted in this climate; an odor of mold tingled the back of my throat when I recalled the scene.

  Men had stared at our passing, as had one woman, who had paused in stringing fish out to dry. I jerked my eyes away from the reflection of her round belly.

  “Your point is made, goddess,” I said. “No need to direct more pregnancies into my path.” The Fate Weaver must be punishing me, for returning to Morimound before ridding myself of the sleeping disease.

  My somnolence was part of the goddess’ divine plan. It had to be. Her gift—her curse—gave me tremendous advantage in the study of enchantment because the magic could only be accessed during sleep. Only when I had fulfilled my role in the Academy would the Fate Weaver allow me to find a cure and return to a life of wakefulness in my birth city.

  I had even hosted the funerals of my parents outside the Flood Wall, amid ripened rice fields, in order not to offend the goddess. I never should have heeded Sri’s letter. Passing through the gates had been a sacrilege.

  Each pregnancy I saw was a penance, a reminder of my own insufficiency. I had always imagined myself with a family, yet everything came in its proper time. Before children should come marriage, and before marriage should come a bride’s capacity to stay awake at her wedding.

  Ache spread from my chest to my abdomen, and my throat contracted by thirty-five percent as a desire to cry tingled behind my eyes. I disallowed myself tears in my dream.

  Forcing my mind away from thoughts of childlessness, I willed my mirror to depict what I had seen in the Bazaar of Fallen Stars. Sri’s yellow skin warned me that I would need to obtain help for her immediately: If the Feaster did not kill her tonight then her wormwood-destroyed liver would drown her in her own toxins tomorrow.

  T
he people in the crowd now appeared before me in perfect clarity. The faces of the men were strained, the skin below their eyes swollen from poor sleep; I detected more alcohol in their collective breaths than I would expect. They eyed each other with distrust, one scowl even suggesting murderous wishes. When they looked upon my gowns and me, they displayed a mix of hope, avarice, and uncertainty.

  Not particularly pleased, I shifted my concentration to the women. The first I observed sold green and orange melons, and her belly was comparable in shape to the sizable fruits. Another female lifted sheets of blue and pink cloth, draping them for display over her prominent midsection.

  Feeling increasingly breathless, I focused my mirror on the faces of the women. Even when they smiled to entice customers, their facial musculature displayed undertones of apprehension common to potential mothers. Less usual were the daze and paranoia detected in their wide, skittering eyes.

  One woman’s visage opened in fear when a man cornered her between two merchant stalls to demand who had fathered her child. I should have liked to remind him to be civil, yet the carriage would have moved well past by now.

  In the cold serenity of my laboratory, I could control my panic. The explanation for all the pregnant women needed not be divine in origin. Morimound’s priests perhaps had ordained that only women bearing children should venture outside today, for some inscrutable reason.

  This would also account for why so few women traversed the streets, a mere one for every eight men. The rest would be residing in their homes. My focus swept over the buildings, up ladders leading to doors that stood an average of ten feet above street level. Per custom, people had painted messages beside the ladders, conversations between residents, passersby, and guests.

  “At their table I ate the finest melon-seed curry in my life,” read one line.

  Below it was scrawled, “You are always welcome, Saral Manjeet.”

  “I hope to enjoy it again tonight. May your bricks never crack and your gems ever shine.”

  On another home’s wall, I read, “The Fate Weaver has blessed Uma with beauty. May she bear many sons.”

  Lower down appeared, “Basu Trillspa and Uma are wed on this day. Let them Ever Thrive.”

  Those salutations I expected. Closer to street level, the more-recent messages caught my attention.

  “Yami either swallowed a nest of crocodile eggs, or she should get married.”

  “The home of Parth, a bad thread who has wronged my sister.”

  “She is no Flawless.”

  “Preeta couldn’t keep her skirt on.”

  “They are all rotten threads.”

  “Damodar will die for what he did to Kanti.”

  “Never Flawless.”

  “Fate Weaver spins ugly web, not even Flawless spared.”

  The view of my mirror zoomed from one wall to another, from painted insults to anger chiseled into brick. I had never seen such hatred here, and all were written within the last two months.

  The accusations drove me to re-inspect the pregnant women I had seen. I bobbed toward one mirror, and swaths of velvet and silk flowed around me, weightless and drifting. Only half the women wore twined marriage necklaces; the rest were unmarried. I checked them all again and again, multiple times a second, their reflections spinning past.

  This could not be right. I must be missing something, some citywide jest of which I was not aware. Or Diamond Way had an uncharacteristic amount of ill will between competing merchants, who had written their arguments on walls. And as for the unmarried, pregnant women, I must have observed a sample unrepresentative of the city.

  A peculiarity even more difficult to explain was that all the women had appeared to be in the same trimester: the final one. I had always prided myself on my ability not to speculate prematurely, yet this last detail splintered my composure into shards of boggling color.

  “All the women of Morimound are with child.” The memory of Sri’s words echoed in my dream laboratory; jewels trembled in the air. “And all for just as long.”

  She had to have lied. Rather, the Fate Weaver must be guiding me toward a future of insanity. The mirror now showed myself, mouthing my promise not to return to Morimound, while the images of the recently seen women squeezed around me, entwining me in tangled arms and between rotund bellies.

  It was too much. I had to stop thinking. I had to flee my laboratory.

  To exit my dream, I Burdened myself, my magic increasing my weight until I smashed through the diamond dais below me; sparkling jewels scattered and faded into blackness.

  I awoke in a blissful stupor, in the shadow of the White Ziggurat. As we traversed to the west side of the step pyramid, its gypsum plaster shone red in the late-afternoon sun. The carriage rolled past lotus gardens and beneath arches formed of the draping roots of banyan trees; we stopped alongside the elliptical court of God’s Eye.

  Deepmand the Spellsword opened the carriage door and announced me. “Elder Enchantress Hiresha, recipient of twenty and seven honorary gowns, and the Mindvault Academy’s Provost of Applied Enchantment.”

  Of course, I did not wear all twenty-seven gowns. That would be ridiculous. I only wore six; the rest were interwoven over my back and trailed behind in a procession of resplendent color.

  The occupants of the court gawked at me, and I returned their stares, open-mouthed. Women stood in a line around the circumference of the court, yet, no, I could not call them women. All younger than fourteen, these girls had not yet accustomed themselves to their maturing bodies, and their gangly limbs teetered as they tried to support the weight of their pregnancies.

  Two girls backed away from the rippling spread of my gowns as I staggered forward. I searched their faces and those of male acolytes in the center of the court for signs of suppressed humor. This had to be a jest. The priests had known I would return today and had prepared an elaborate and reprehensible hoax at my expense.

  Their faces seemed surprised and otherwise indecipherable. I would know no more until I slept.

  I asked, “What is the meaning of this conspiracy?”

  A cluster of acolytes bowed their heads and parted around Abwar, the Priest of the Ever Always. I recognized him by his robes; he wore the representation of the sun adorning cloth the shade of green peridot, and a long sleeve flowed behind his arm as he gestured to the girls.

  “Praise the Ever Thriving, Always Dying! These pregnant women are all virgins.”

  “We have you to thank, Elder Enchantress,” Priest Abwar said, “for this miracle.”

  I slumped on my cane for support, and my head rolled up then down as the world seemed to tilt under my feet, to the point that I might fall over backward into the sky. Nothing here made sense. Everything was wrong.

  Spellsword Deepmand said, “Lustrous Priest of the Ever Always, I assure you the elder enchantress was not responsible. She has not left the Academy for over three years.”

  “Observe the bowed head of the elder enchantress.” Priest Abwar strutted among the acolytes, his green sleeves flapping as his hands beat the air in time to his words. “Her humility is commendable before the deeds of the divine, of which she served a part. Five times by flood and once by raider’s blade, the holy city of Morimound has been cleansed by death. The Ever Thriving, Always Dying reaps and sows. He takes life and births it anew.”

  The eyes of the girls bulged at the priest, and not simply from alarm. The internal pressure caused by their pregnancies doubtless contributed to their ocular protrusion.

  “Morimound has reaped six floods of death. There will be no Seventh Flood, thanks to the Flood Wall constructed by this lustrous enchantress, this jewel of our city. Now the Ever Thriving, Always Dying has repaid our suffering. He has sown in these wombs a harvest of life.”

  Priest Abwar slapped his hands onto two distended bellies, and the girls cringed, one backing a half step away from him.

  “Now that the Flood Wall protects us from another catastrophe, the souls of the drowned are safe
to return to life once more. This renewal heralds a diamond age for Morimound, a time of growth and wealth.”

  He lifted his arms toward the Garden Ziggurat, its terraces lush with fruit trees and ferns. The sun dipped below one of its lower sections.

  “Tell the city, my acolytes. The steps of the Garden Ziggurat will run with the blood of twenty oxen. No, fifty oxen! I will perform the sacrifices myself for this divine gift.”

  Among all these pregnant girls, the mention of blood reminded me of childbirth. Women so young tended to die in delivery, along with their babies. The thought wracked my insides with nausea, and stomach acid burned its way up to my tongue before I could swallow it down.

  The words of the priest confused me, and I hesitated to believe them. I had lost faith in the Ever Always. Sacrifices of the lives of animals as well as my own years of life had yielded me nothing.

  If Priest Abwar spoke truth, then this miracle would rival the ones I had learned as a child: The Ever Always had rained fish on the city to feed the hungry. A bestowed melon had grown with each cut of a knife. An army of attackers had transformed into monkeys.

  “Look around you, Enchantress,” Priest Abwar said as he beamed with ruddy face and swinging jowls. “We are witnessing the wonder of the city’s Seventh Age.”

  Each woman in Morimound was pregnant, except for me. The thought stunned me, and Abwar of the Ever Always was grinning about it.

  “This is a matter most grave,” I said. “Pregnant women face seven deathly dangers. The yellow-eyed death. The shaking death. The bleeding death....”

  Spellsword Deepmand cleared his throat, an unwelcome distraction. I strove to remember all seven deaths.

  “...The white-bloat death. The childbed death. And the fainting death.”

  I feared I had forgotten one. Deepmand sighed, and I noticed the raised brows and horrified faces of the pregnant girls.

  Abwar of the Ever Always shrugged. “He reaps and He sows.”