The Sybil mocked this outcry. “Not yours,” she said. “The pride and joy of that other man. You are daughterless.”
That was just noise to Aqib. His heart spat it out for nonsense. Lucretia had clutched no fingers but his, toddling her first few steps. He had carried her bloody to the healers, when she’d faced down and slain the marauding lion. And he’d spoken such bitter words—though in truth admiring her, envying her—when she’d refused marriage to her cousin, the Most Holy of Olorum, City and Nation, in favor of unwedded freedom. They were his grandson, his great-grandchildren . . . but in this life there were two other, more proximate youngsters, weren’t there? Covering his face with his hands, Aqib said, “It was just a dream, only a dream . . .”
Croakingly the Sybil laughed. “No indeed!” she said. “It’s you who are the dream, that other man who is flesh and real, the dreamer.”
Existential horror seized Aqib. At her words, he thought he might vomit forth his soul onto the floor, and his body break up into its constituencies: here a soft heap of empty flesh, there neatly stacked bones, his glistening organs all colorfully in a row, and the divided whole of him pooled around by lacquered blood . . . That other Aqib was the dream, or he was?
Giddy with malice, the Sybil clicked her talons against the jar’s insides, then scratched dreadfully at the glass. “You’re the dream,” she cackled. “He is real!”
And didn’t Aqib remember longing for this self and this life and these outcomes, mere fantasies? Then how, but who . . . ? His sanity rattled like a shack in high winds, verging on collapse. What shored him up was the memory of Lucrio’s warning. “The Sybil never lies. But she tricks you with sly and partial truth, leaving out the crucial piece. Sic cave, mi carissime; cave! The Sybil drives many petitioners mad . . .” Aqib’s saving thought: I am the dream but so is he. And that felt right to him, as did the thought: He is real but so am I.
The madness abated, and with it the Sybil’s gleeful tantrum. “So then,” she said resentfully, “did I requite your question, Aqib amans Lucrionis? Did I answer to your satisfaction?”
Face cupped in the bowl of his hands, he said, “Yes.”
“Then I find my mind changed,” said the Sybil. “Now, I want the whole of your hand.”
Aqib’s head snapped up. “You said one finger only!”
“Very well.” The Sybil spoke as if indifferent. “You may keep your hand and fingers all. I’ll just have back what you know of that other life, and the value of its lessons, too. Does that suit you?”
It didn’t, no. Untopping his little pot of honey, sticking a finger in—a hollow knock inside the glass; a jolt that rocked the jar; the Sybil shrieked, “The whole of your hand!”—Aqib scooped out a fat and glistening dollop onto his other hand, stickily smearing palm, the back, and every finger. He climbed onto the high stool. He leaned against the rough thick glass and reached his left arm up to the mouth of the great jar, then bent his elbow, lowering his honeyed hand down into it. He screamed.
Trying to wrench himself free, he couldn’t. Incontestable strength held his arm steady while sharp teeth bit out gobbets of his palm, savaged the marrow from his cracked fingerbones. Aqib kicked the stool away in his frenzy, and so hung for a long time against the glass, supported mid-air by teeth and only teeth, which rent and ground upon his hand. At length the agony ended, suddenly gone even beyond recall. His arm was loosed. Aqib fell down amidst the dust and coins, the bony debris. Fearfully he drew up his arm, peering in the gloom to examine his wound.
Weeping gore, a raw stump all thorned with bone-splinters? No. The end of his arm was smoothly sealed, just as scarless as if he’d never had a left hand, been born without.
“Now fuck off,” the Sybil said. Aqib crouched down on all fours (three now) and crawled arduously back through the long narrow dimness of the tunnel, toward the outer light.
They’d awakened before dawn and climbed up the Sybil’s Mount in a rush. One visit, on the appointed day, at the appointed hour: in a lifetime, one got no second chance. Aqib had crawled on alone through the deep tunnel, to live out the ordeal of a second life. Now, he emerged into sunlit mid-morning. First to catch sight of him was Lucrio.
He was nothing boyish anymore, everything distinguished, his brown hair shot through with silver, the laughlines deeply etched. Lucrio gave a cry no sooner than Aqib stuck his head from the tunnel’s mouth. Then Olivy cried out too—Lucrio’s niece whom they’d taken in some years back. She’d dallied with a god, and had to flee to them penniless and pregnant from her parents’ fury. Four years old already, the baby jumped up. Aqib-sa, Aqib-sa! cried kohl-eyed Lucretius.
Aqib took in these faces. Of course home was here! The love hurt him it was so intense. He hadn’t gone wrong in any sense, but rather found his very place, the one Saints had meant for him. Most would only ever guess at who and what was most precious to them—up until the day of loss: then they’d know—and most would also have to guess at why and how, or what might have been. They could never truly know, not as one who’d lived both paths, seen two lives. That crazed noise was his own laughter.
The hills of Daluz preened under the heights of Mt. Sibylline: shining white in late morning sun, the Cararian marble of the tenements, mansions and temples; the verdure, green and flowering, of the civil gardens and orchards of rich families; the whole, an orderly grid of streets and avenues. No sight possessed more wonderful powers to relieve, after having trudged with Lucrio some twenty years—through snow and mud, sand and forest—across the farflung provinces of Imperial Daluz. Now a general, now a governor, his lover had only lately been called home to the capitol, to assume Consulship.
Ecce homo: scrambling up the slope from the lower stony shelf where families waited for the supplicant gone within. Lucrio crushed him close in an embrace. “What happened? Are you leaving us?”
Beside himself, Aqib couldn’t speak. He rolled his forehead side to side on Lucrio’s shoulder, meaning, “No, of course not,” but signifying quite ambiguously under the circumstances. Even as a shipwrecked sailor clings to his floating spar, so did he cling to Lucrio.
Finally Aqib found the breath to speak. “You said you’d tell me, once I came from the cave, what the Sybil told you so long ago.”
Lucrio held him out at arm’s length. “Are you leaving me, Aqib?” First things first was Lucrio’s tone. “Or will you stay?”
“I want to stay for so long as you’ll have me.”
“Forever, then.” Lucrio drew him back in close. “For good. I asked the Sybil where in this world could I find a man to love so well as the sailor I’d lost,” Lucrio said in Aqib’s ear.
“Ah.”
“She told me, ‘Across the sea, in Olorum.’ The Sybil said, ‘You’ll glimpse him by moonlight walking not alone, and you’ll know, and yet also doubt. Maybe doubt so much that he pass you by forever.’”
“But you called out to me from the fondac’s door,” Aqib said.
“Yes.”
“And what coin did you pay the Sybil with, Lucrio?”
“With future tears. She said she’d be content to wait, and then drink up all the tears I’d surely weep someday. ‘Bitter tears are sweet to me,’ the Sybil said,” and Lucrio quoted: “‘You’ll cry me an oceanful, I think. The likeliest outcome is that you win your love for just a little while, and then regret his loss forever. Yes, go. Seek him out. I could happily wait upon such folly and sorrow. There’s every chance of grief.’ But you can’t imagine, Aqib, how sick at heart I was in those days, before I met you. So I went to Olorum.”
“Do you know that I nearly refused to leave the Menagerie with you that day? I almost said, ‘I’ll come to you tonight.’ But I would have been prevented, and this life we’ve lived together . . . I’m glad you persuaded me.”
With difficulty Lucrio smiled, cheeks wet with tears. This was the first smile to emerge after a long and uncertain anguish, a smile possible only now that he might trust things could come out fine, after all. In Olor
umi Lucrio said, “I’m glad about that too!”
Mother and child had climbed up to join them. Little Lucretius seized onto Aqib’s leg, saying, Don’t leave us. Won’t you stay, Aqib-sa? Stay!
Aqib scooped up the baby to perch on his strong arm, and kissed the boy’s cheek. Of course I’m staying! I wouldn’t be anywhere else in the world.
Yay! The boy embraced him round the neck. I’m glad.
Me too, Lucreti.
Lover and niece stared at Aqib, still no one commenting on his missing hand. They behaved as if they’d always known him thus and didn’t notice the lack.
“Avuncule,” said Olivy, “what are these strange noises you make? Since you come from the Sybil’s cave, you can now understand the boy’s babble?”
With her question, it was borne in on him that the god-provoked fluency he’d gained in the garden on that fateful day—in that other life—had somehow carried over into this one. The speech of all creatures was plain to Aqib. “But your son never babbles at all, mea filia,” he exclaimed, looking back and forth between Olivy and Lucrio. “It’s only that he speaks in the language of swans!”
About the Author
KAI ASHANTE WILSON’s story “Super Bass” can be read online at Tor.com, as can his novelette “The Devil in America,” which was nominated for the Nebula, Shirley Jackson, and World Fantasy Awards. His story “Kaiju maximus: ‘So Various, So Beautiful, So New’” is available online as well at Fantasy-magazine.com, and his story «Légendaire.» can be read in the anthology Stories for Chip. His debut novella, The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, was nominated for the Locus and won the 2016 Crawford Award. Kai Ashante Wilson lives in New York City.
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Also by Kai Ashante Wilson
The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps
“The Devil in America”
“Super Bass”
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
About the Author
Also by Kai Ashante Wilson
Copyright Page
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A TASTE OF HONEY
Copyright © 2016 by Kai Ashante Wilson
Cover art by Tommy Arnold
Cover designed by Christine Foltzer
Edited by Carl Engle-Laird
All rights reserved.
A Tor.com Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
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Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
ISBN 978-0-7653-9005-9 (ebook)
ISBN 978-0-7653-9004-2 (trade paperback)
First Edition: October 2016
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