by Larissa Lai
From the head table comes much raucous laughter and shouting. Kora doesn’t understand a word of it, until she’s hit in the head with a buttermilk biscuit. She hasn’t seen anything made of wheat since she was six or seven, and there are no biscuits at the children’s table. She snatches it up and crams it into her mouth. The hilarity at the head table increases as she chews.
“How’s the biscuit?” calls a girl with memory scales sticking out of her ears.
“Good,” Kora says, not knowing how else to respond.
“She likes her biscuit, Our Lady of the Flu,” says the frightful girl. “You’ve fallen a long way, Flu Lady!”
“We’re all flu ladies,” Kora says, as blandly as possible. “Because we live in a time of flu. What makes me so special?” She continues to chew her biscuit.
“What makes you so special?” the girl repeats. She’s missing a front tooth. “What makes Lady Kora so special, my friends?”
Scowling, Myra raises her head from her steaming bowl. “Don’t you even know, Kora Ko?”
“She doesn’t know …” whisper the girls at the head table, giggling.
“She doesn’t know,” says the frightful girl. “Better tell her, Sister Myra.”
Sister Myra smiles broadly. All her teeth have been replaced with hard memory scales, and her grin glints with their metallic light. “If not for you,” she intones, “all of the men—our brothers, fathers, uncles, and sons—would be alive today. Saltwater City would be a city of prosperity and wellness. If not for you, there would be no Cordova School.”
Kora swallows her fear and holds her head up. “I am most deserving of a space here then,” she snarls, with all her mightily mustered courage.
“She doesn’t even know,” says the frightful girl.
“She doesn’t know …” whisper all the others, shocked.
“Tell her, tell her now,” the frightful girl says.
“How can you be so ignorant of your own past? How can you not know what you are?” Myra calls.
Kora shakes. She can no longer control it. She glances at Velma, but Velma only looks at Kora in horror and wonder. Kora is truly on her own. “You invited me into your midst,” she says. “Why would you do such a thing if you don’t want me here?”
“She doesn’t know, she doesn’t know …” the girls at the head table whisper.
Kora’s ignorance and mortification will kill her if she lets them. She grits her teeth. “What’s the big deal?!” she shouts. “If you can’t say it to my face, then it can’t be true.”
“Ha,” says Myra. “Of course it’s true, Lady Kora of the House of Ko, re-animators of the Caspian tiger and purveyors of Caspian tiger-bone wine. How could you not know that you and your family are the source of the tiger flu? How could you not know the misdeeds of Lennox Ko, your very own grandfather? Madame Dearborn wants you here because of it.”
Kora is stumped. She searches her memory for any hint of tigers in her family’s past. Uncle Wai never said anything to her about them. Nor did her mother, nor K2. She’s never met her father, Kai Tak, or the brother, Everest, whom Kai Tak took to ease Charlotte’s burden and his own loneliness. She’ll never meet Everest now.
There are, of course, those jars, big enough to hold a tiger and cover it with water, oil, or wine. She pushes away the thought.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says. “It can’t be true.”
“Of course it’s true,” says the frightful girl.
“As true as the life and being of this school,” says Myra. She begins to laugh. “Gotcha, Lady Kora. Don’t you know the place you come from? We want you here because of it. How can anyone be so ignorant of the place from which she comes?”
“Yes, how?” whisper the girls.
“In order to survive in the world that is coming, we need to know our history,” says Myra. “Knowledge, my sisters, is the most important tool we have. We must learn everything Madame Dearborn has to teach us. We must learn from our families—those of us who still have them. And what we don’t have, we will get from the marvellous memory scales that the great inventor Isabelle Chow has deigned to send us. Make use of all the technologies you’ve been given, sisters. Technologies come and technologies go. So we must make use of everything we’ve got.”
Madame Dearborn enters the room then. She’s tall and stately, with high cheekbones, a flat nose, deep brown eyes, and bright red hair streaked with white. “I apologize for my lateness, girls. I had a lead on a new litter of kittens. Kora, go sit at the table with the girls your own age. I hope they are treating you well.”
Kora gives a little smile. She can’t say why, even to herself, but something about Madame warms her.
14
BOMBYX MORI’S SURPRISE
KIRILOW GROUNDSEL // GRIST VILLAGE
NODE: GRAIN IN BEARD
DAY: 5
MY SISTERS BUILD AN INFERNO AT MOURNING ROCK, TALL AS AN OFFICE building from the time before. It’s bad for the sky, but the rites must be observed. A green-robed delegate from the New Origins Archive oversees the proceedings as proxy for the high priestess. Her name is Vera. She is young but seems self-assured. My sisters take direction from her without complaint.
Now the oldest of the Grist sisters, Glorybind Groundsel watches disapprovingly as my sisters add more and more logs and branches. “The Salties will see us and come for us.”
“It’s the Night of the Firefly,” Calyx Kaki tells Glorybind Groundsel, as though she doesn’t already know. “Bonfires will burn all through Old Cascadia. So don’t worry, Auntie Glory. Salties be celebrating their own Midsummer Festival, the end of oil, the ascent of Our Mother, and the ancient launch of Chang and Eng. They won’t notice us in any particularity.”
Old Glorybind still has her doubts, but the young sisters shout her down. She does not have the gift of governance that Auntie Radix had. Some say she had it, but she lost it when she lost the power to double, right after the birth of yours truly, born live, and the rest of my sister litter, all stillborn. The sisterhood needs a new queen, and a queen should be a doubler or a starfish. It should have been Peristrophe Halliana, I think bitterly. It is a starfish’s turn.
Every kind of wood that migrated north to us as the climate changed feeds the fire that burns in the wide clearing: blue gum eucalyptus, canyon oak, scrub oak, incense cedar, ponderosa, Torrey pine, Tecate cypress, pinyon pine, and the bark-peeling arbutus that some sisters call madrona. All the varieties of trees that grow around Grist Village must be used so that Our Mother doesn’t feel we’ve neglected any of her children, long established or newly arrived.
There is food for the feast too, from our forest gardens, cultivated with seeds from the New Origins Archive, where Mother Glory took me for the first time just last year—zucchini, kabocha, butternut, carrots, potatoes, and beans. Also shared are some of the newer fruits that began to take at Grist Village with help from the New Origins Archive around the same time the Caspian tiger was brought back. All these returned within the span of my own life: bananas, pineapples, coconuts, mangoes, starfruit, lychees, dragon fruit, and durian. They require a lot of water and a lot of care, but they grow. And there are meats to stew or roast: elk, deer, rabbit, bear, and pheasant. There are renewed meats too: Queen Charlotte caribou, passenger pigeon, great auk, and Pyrenean ibex, in addition to Caspian tiger. Some of the sisters are against eating tiger. They say that tiger is the source of the flu the Salty brought to us, the flu that killed Peristrophe Halliana. But others say the Caspian tiger is no different from us—a creature that would not live now except by human intervention. We should embrace it in love and sacrifice.
I sit at the darkest part of the circle and watch my fifty-two sisters celebrate through a haze of grief. In the sandy soil that surrounds the firepit, I draw a long row of eyes with a stick. I should have said no to Auntie Radix a surgery ago. I don’t care what we eat or drink. I don’t care how high the fire goes. If the New Origins Archive could return Peristrophe
Halliana to me, that would be a gift worth having. Otherwise, I don’t care about much.
“She’s with you all the time,” says my mother double. “Look around you, Kirilow.”
All around the fire my sisters gather, their beautiful faces lit by orange light. Each is the slightest variation of the next. Give or take a scar here, a wrinkle there, the length of hair, the choice of dress, any of them could be Peristrophe Halliana. If Auntie Radix were still with us, her partho breasts would mark her variation from the rest of us. As would the wrinkles in her face.
“They look like Peristrophe, but they are not Peristrophe,” I tell Glorybind Groundsel. “She is gone and Auntie Radix is gone, and soon it will be as if Grandma Chan Ling never escaped Saltwater City and Grist Village never existed at all. We’ll be remembered as captive mutants without honour, who all died in the first wave of tiger flu in the crowded scale factories of Saltwater City.”
“Not all city sisters died. That Salty’s new hand is proof,” says Mother Glory. “Grandma Chan Ling used to talk about a Grist commune in Saltwater City. Maybe it still exists. Maybe it’s time for a journey.”
“Don’t look at me,” I say. “Whatever I had is burning on that pyre. Ask someone else to go.”
But Old Glorybind does look at me. “You’ve also got duty, Kirilow. Don’t forget duty.”
“Please, Mother Glory,” I beg. “Don’t talk to me about duty today.” If I had courage, I’d jump into the fire. Instead, I move away from my sisters to the edge of the forest and lurk there like the creepy creep I’m bound to become.
I’m leaning against a tree, smoking a pipe of pot and sage with a pinch of forget-me-do, when someone tugs at my arm. The smoke has sent me elsewhere. It takes me a long moment to realize who it is. Auntie Radix’s young groom.
“My name is Bombyx Mori,” the groom says. “In case you ever wondered.”
“I know,” I lie.
“I’m sorry I was such a jerk the day my Radix died,” she says. “It was more than I could bear.”
“It was more than I could bear too.”
“I’m sorry about Cousin Peristrophe,” she says.
“I’m sorry about Auntie Radix.”
She gazes at me to see if I’m sincere. “I’ve got something I think you should see,” Bombyx Mori says.
Chang hangs close tonight, in sinister sympathy with the Grist sisterhood and our double loss. “Maybe another time,” I say. “I have to get back to the fire. It’s my Peristrophe Halliana they are burning.” A small family of bats zigzags out from their nest, a hole high in the body of a tall Tecate cypress.
“It’s my Radix Bupleuri,” she says. “Peristrophe Halliana would want you to see what I’ve got to show you.” Her eyes shine clear and brown as earth.
A shadow moves across the open face of Chang, large and oblong. The pipe I’ve smoked helps me see it as a floating whale, turning the sky to water as it moves.
“By Our Mother’s stinky hole,” Bombyx Mori curses. “It’s a batterkite.”
“Batter … who?”
“The latest invention of Isabelle Chow. Don’t you know?” Smugness. I trust it more than her seeming honesty, though I have no idea where the young ones get their knowledge. “It’s a ship that works as its own battery. Isabelle engineered it from seal bladder and oyster material. It’s a hydrogen cell and a transport vehicle both.”
It pulses across the sky, horrible, gorgeous, and shimmering. I shiver. I’ve got to find Old Glorybind.
But we are both mesmerized by the sheer size of the bio-ship. It glides above us, smooth and slow, covers two-thirds of Chang’s face. Figures begin to drop from its underbelly. My stoned eyes see the sky bloom with airborne jellyfish, militia men dangling from their spindly tentacles. My senses turn inside, feel for cell-knowledge of my relation to the awful life forms coming at us.
“Come on, come on, Kirilow, they saw our fire. We’re under siege. You have to come with me! No choice now, hurry!”
“I’ve got to find Mother Glory—”
But the young groom has got my arm and drags me through pinyon and succulent so fast my feet don’t touch the ground.
“Kirilow, come on, snap out of it. There’s no time.”
I am stoned and writhing inside. The outside world turns on a giant wheel so slow. She pulls me jarringly fast. How can anyone move so quick against this slow horror?
“My duty—I can’t leave Mother Glorybind—I’m the only daughter double she has—” I groan.
Oily jellyfish swarm through drifting ash above us. Each grows larger, like the pupil of a giant eye trying to see in the dark. I tug away from Bombyx. There’s screaming now from the bonfire.
“Mother Glory!” I try to cry with them, but my cry creaks from my throat as an unearthly groan.
I don’t see the jellyfish directly above us until it crashes through the treetops. I surrender to Bombyx Mori’s pull, and we fly through the trees in a furious, woozy stupor, zigzagging wild as the little bats I saw. Could it have been just seconds earlier? A cold wind rushes at us and the wails of the sisters at the fire reverberate in my drug-addled ears as though the sisters themselves flail in my auditory canals. Their pain knifes my eardrums and I wail-howl with them, “No, no, no, get away from me, you monster, you Mother-cursèd Saltwater beast, you animal, you human, you scum of the sky, not Our Mother, you heaven and hell demons who destroy everything dear and warm and earthy and good.”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up, Kirilow!” Bombyx Mori yell-whispers. “It’s following us.”
“Our Mother of milk and mildew, Our Mother of dirt,” I chant, soft now, both here in the murderous present and there in the genocidal past. The wind sears my skin cold and sharp, and the branches of trees whip my face. We run through the terrified forest all curls and whorls, run until there is no breath left in our lungs, run until our legs threaten to collapse beneath our furiously pumping hearts. Run so fast and long we don’t notice we’re no longer being followed. Praise be to our generous Mother, surely she is kind. We slow to a walk, search for our bearings. The wind keeps coming. It reeks of bonfire smoke, but there’s also a cold dampness in it.
I recognize a secret wild olive patch, the one that hides the abandoned magic bus. I mean, the tour bus that Grandma Chan Ling pirated to take the first Grist sisters from Saltwater City eighty years ago. It lies on its side now, rusted and rotting. We have to climb up its underside to go in the broken door, once at its side, now open at its top. We climb into the dark. It reeks of shit and decay. And something else, animal and sweet. I hear a soft keening.
Bombyx Mori pulls a small jar of fireflies from her vest.
At the back of the crumbling bus, hunkered down in a bed of ancient seat cushions, leaves, and dry grass, lies a young girl I recognize as one of this year’s initiates.
How did I not notice until now the partho marks, three pale yellow moles in the cup of the clavicle? Her belly is swollen so huge it seems twice the size of the rest of her. She moans and heaves with a squirming strength no one so young should have.
“Please,” says Bombyx. “I’m sorry I was such an asshole before. Please help Corydalis Ambigua pop her puppies.”
“I’m trained to groom starfish, not parthos,” I tell her, my drugged eyes bugging wide.
Corydalis wails. Her womb contracts visibly.
“Did your mother double not teach you?”
“Theory, yes. Practice, no.”
Bombyx bursts into panicked tears.
“Okay, by Our Mother’s teats, don’t cry!”
Through the waves of my own terror, I find a soldier’s calm. I go to Corydalis. Her legs are open and drawn up by the wisdom of instinct. I squat between them. Bombyx holds her hand, mops her sweating forehead with a cleanish rag from inside the folds of her tunic.
“You need to breathe,” I tell Corydalis. “Inhale deep.”
She does, eyes wide.
“Okay. Now exhale and push. Scream if you want, no one’s listening.�
�� For all I know that batterkite has the ears of a bobcat, but it can’t be helped.
She bawls like a demon from the other side.
“Inhale.”
Again, she does.
“Exhale and push.”
“I can’t,” she howls, gripping Bombyx’s hand so hard that Bombyx howls too.
“You have to.”
She screams. She pushes.
“One more. Inhale.”
She whimpers.
“Inhale.”
She draws the air in, thinner than I’d like.
“And exhale.”
She breathes out, and gives a steady, controlled heave.
“One more time.”
They both bawl and scream like the animals they are. I guess we are all animals.
“Again.”
By the grace of Our Mother’s loving heart, the downy head of a sister puppy appears between Corydalis’s damp legs.
“One more. Inhale.” I nod encouragingly. “Exhale. Push.”
“Mama!”
“Come on.”
She groans and pushes. The little sister slips out of her holy hole covered in blood and womb snot. One section of umbilical cord attaches to the belly button, but another section branches back into Corydalis. I know what that branch means. Mother Glory taught me that a young partho can birth as many as ten.
“First is worst,” I tell Corydalis, as her womb contracts again. “Breathe in.”
The howling hours pass in a bath of blood and mucus. Finally, all the sister puppies are out.
There’s more new grooming to do. May Our Mother guide me. I snip the umbilical cord at each of seven branches and tie the knots for their little belly buttons. We wipe them off with rags that Bombyx had the foresight to gather and put two of them on Corydalis to suckle. I swab up blood. I suture the dark place below where she’s torn. She’s so young, her extra breasts are barely developed, though when I place two more puppies at them, the youngsters seem to latch and find milk.
“Were you given the nursing surge?” I ask Bombyx.
