The Tangled Lands

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  She enveloped me, and I didn’t hug her back.

  Feeling my resistance, she let me go. “You will move in here, with us. Now,” she said.

  “No.” I shook my head.

  “You must leave your family,” Djoka finally said. “And join with ours. There is nothing we can do for your parents, but we can save you.”

  “And you are worth saving, little berry,” Anshoula said. “It took a great deal of bravery to come to us without your parents knowing. Now you need to find the bravery to stay with us and not look behind you.”

  I still shook my head.

  They were family. My mother and father. Mother, father, child. The three faces of Mara. All the world could tell me to leave them, but I would stand against that great stinking wind.

  After all, only Borzai could judge me in the end.

  Not them.

  I stood up, somewhat unsteadily. “I must go.”

  Ivica spoke up. Quiet all this time as Anshoula had held the reins, he now sought to reach through and shake me from my path. “Your mother and father are dead, child. Understand this. It is as sure as if they had fallen into bramble, and someone is coming to give them the mercy cut. Their lungs may fill and empty, but they are dead. They just don’t know it yet.”

  If I had wavered, I now strengthened. “Then I am dead as well,” I told him. “And it is you who just doesn’t understand this.”

  He nodded. “Yes. That is what I will tell Djoka when you walk out of these doors.”

  Djoka stood up, the bench barely able to withstand the sudden explosion of movement. “Father!”

  Anshoula took a long pull of wine and said, “It is not necessary to give bad news with the smell of bramble sap, when you can deliver it with fresh mint, Husband.”

  “But it is true, and you all know it.” Ivica turned his back to me, and looked into his wife’s eyes. “You of all people should know what comes of working for the velvet ones.”

  She poured more wine with an unsteady hand, and I left them to whatever bitter cloud hung in the room that had stolen their hearts.

  Djoka ran outside after me. “Sofija! Sofija! Wait.”

  He had to run to get in front of me. I stopped, a puff of dust kicking up around our knees because I had to halt hard to avoid hitting him.

  “What?”

  Djoka caught his breath. “Please . . .”

  “I can’t.”

  He grabbed my shoulders. Leaned down to move his face closer to mine. “He isn’t wrong, you know.”

  “What is it that eats you inside?” I asked. “What is it you won’t talk about?”

  Djoka looked around. Then he lowered his voice. “My parents used to live on Malvia Hill. My father was blacksmith for a duke. Until one night. And now, neither my mother nor father will talk about it. You make of it what you will, but we left the next morning for Lesser Khaim, and we never talk about it. And we never deal with the velvet ones. Ever.”

  His voice wavered at the end. Anger, humiliation.

  And defeat.

  He handed me a small leather pouch. It clinked. Copper. I could tell the sound of the metal.

  Loose copper, not even wound to a string yet for counting.

  What good would it do me?

  “Keep it,” I told him, while damning my pride. “Keep it because it’s not enough to help me, and so you might as well give me toy wooden coins. It will give you something to remember me by. As well as this.” I handed him back his bracelet, which he’d given me when he’d promised that we would join houses.

  Because what use did I have for a husband who couldn’t help me right now? Who didn’t at least counsel that we run away with my parents? Or offer to fight, even if he didn’t really mean it? Maybe the red wine was speaking, and I was not thinking correctly. But I made the decision—it was iron and strong, and I’d forged it well within myself.

  He may have been a mountain of a man, but I demolished him. Like a magician of Jhandpara destroyed hills in their way to create flat plains for their summer cities. He dropped the pouch in the dust, slunk back into his family’s forge, and shut the door heavily behind him.

  After a long moment, I picked up the pouch of coppers and began the walk home.

  Halfway home I stopped where the dirt road met cobblestones. A clatter echoed through a nearby alley, and the screams of little children pierced the air.

  Two censori strode out from the alley, swinging their brass boxes. The holes vomited neem smoke, and they waved them from side to side as they moved quickly and efficiently on. A gaggle of street children followed along, dancing in the smoke.

  The children were hoping to spot anyone who glowed blue, and to catch the reward for turning them in. Because sometimes the marked ones ran. Along the street, merchants looked up from their tents and stalls and stiffened as the censori approached.

  The whole street held its breath as the censori threw smoke between the tables and canvas, over the boxes of breadfruit, gooseberries, honey apples, and into the faces of the flies on the butcher’s tables.

  But no one took blue today, and the censori continued quickly on into the distance.

  I turned onto the street, away from my home. I should take the coppers home and see what we could buy with them. But I wasn’t stupid. The fifteen or so coins in my hand would do nothing. They were no answer to our problems.

  I wandered the streets of Lesser Khaim and saw them for the first time. Always I’d been passing through, my jaw firm and my destination in mind. I was always going to somewhere, from somewhere else.

  Now I wandered aimlessly.

  The Xun weavers begged me to feel the tight fibers of their bold red-and-yellow squared carpets, and I stopped to eat fresh cooked lamb sliced right from the leg over a sizzling fire in the Amber Aisle. I passed the soft streets, and heard the moans from behind the barred windows.

  Would I ever make sounds like that again? When Djoka stood with me behind my parent’s forge he’d slid his fingers under my linens. I’d made that sound, and pushed myself down while kissing him so hard our teeth hurt.

  I’d thrown that behind me.

  Somewhere near the spice merchants, where the curry was mixed with dust and carried through the air, I stopped and just breathed.

  “You look lost,” a voice said.

  “I’m near the spice streets,” I told it. “I am not lost.”

  “Not that sort of lost,” the voice said.

  A beggar sat in the dirt. An Alacan refugee with his mustaches cut off, the reek of poppy around him. At his long, curled toes, a bowl for alms or food.

  “I remember looking like that, the day after my city fell,” he said. And I heard a note of pity in it. I stood on a street, with a beggar giving me pity. “My whole world fell apart, and what I thought was up was down. Down became up. I once could hold handfuls of gold and wore only the finest silks, now I wear rags, beg for copper. I once commanded thirty servants. Now I am lucky to empty a lord’s night-soil buckets. I once ran up the side of a mountain, now I’m sickly with bramble cough. It made no sense to me to see these things change, just as right now, the world makes no sense to you.”

  He was right.

  I sighed. “What should I do?” I asked.

  The beggar snorted. “Piss on it all if I know. I once would have lectured to you about the treatises of Zizabar, and of how you should approach your life via the quadrant of righteous harmonies. But knowing that did little to prevent hunger in my case. I’m just praying you’ll give me one of those coppers you have in your leather there.”

  “Praying,” I said as I bent to give him a copper. “I’ve been praying for so long. Why would the gods start answering now, when they haven’t all this week yet?”

  “Well, they just answered my prayer,” the beggar said. He stood up, flipped the copper, and turned to leave.

  “Alacaner,” I said to his back. “When your city fell, what were the roads like? What was it like out there past Khaim?” I’d heard about the trade
caravans that trundled through the old roads and fought to keep them clear of the bramble, so that trade could live. And I knew about the legend of the Executioness, who had thrown every Paikan raider from the high city walls until the blood ran through their fields and their crops grew in bright red. Some said the sea-facing cities still thrived, but who really knew?

  Maybe this beggar had actually seen such things.

  He paused. Thought about it. He didn’t turn back to face me, but I could hear memory strong in his voice. “There was a lot of bramble. Not enough clean roads. Many died. There used to be raiders.” He shrugged. “I made it here, at least.”

  I didn’t sleep at home that night. For a few coppers I rented a locked bed in the Mudflats. The old building perched next to the Sulong’s banks on eroded pillars that looked like a sap-sniffer’s crooked teeth, next to another ancient, stilted mansion that had slumped over into the mud. The ruins of the riverside vacation homes of the mighty Jhandpara, now turned into housing for hundreds of refugees.

  Tradesmen had ripped the inner walls out of the old stilt house. Then carpenters built wooden cages not much larger than chicken crates when viewed from the front. But they extended back seven feet. Hundreds of them, stacked fifteen high, crammed and bolted into any spare nook or crevice in the ancient swooping walls.

  Like coffins, I thought as I climbed up a ladder to my numbered cage.

  The front doors of my cage shut solid when I slid myself down onto the straw, and the bar I dropped from the inside was as thick as my forearm.

  The warmth of hundreds of other bodies choked the air.

  Did I fear my parents would prick me with bramble and sell me to the soft-eyed men? I didn’t know. And that scared me. Because I couldn’t say for sure.

  Like the beggar, my life was turning upside down.

  I didn’t think they would do such a thing. But I knew nothing.

  When I woke up to the bustle of cooks shouting in the common room, the smell of cinnamon and stewed fruit hitting my nose, I sat up to smack my face into the wooden ceiling just a foot above my nose. But this was why I’d come here.

  Refugees fresh from the road stayed here, if they had any means. Men, women, and children from the outer towns and fallen cities of the world. The constant sound of bramble cough floated in the air, and many had a far-off look to their eyes that terrified me.

  The families huddled together with their fearful children as I sat on the row benches next to a green-eyed girl who stared at my steaming bowl of noodles. Recognizing the hunger, I slid it over, and her parents gushed with gratitude at the sudden kindness, but eyed me warily at the same time.

  “I just want to ask you about the roads,” I said.

  “You want to leave Khaim?” they asked, shocked as their child slurped noodles. “Do you understand what the bramble has done to the land?”

  I didn’t explain my business, but I poked them with questions until their child finished my bribe of food and they fell to quiet. And then the censori arrived, the crowd of smelly, hopeless humanity parting before them in fear.

  “They come every morning and wave those metal boxes,” the little girl said. “Yesterday some men from Tussetia lit up all blue, and the men in the robes and swords cut them in half, right there. I saw it.”

  She pointed at a spot among the tables where the dirty wooden floor planks were splotched brown.

  City guardsmen followed the censori through the crowds of hungry refugees. It made sense, to come here every day. These would be the people most likely to still be in the habit of using small magics. The censori would break them of that habit quickly enough.

  So I moved on to other recent arrivals and ignored the smoke. I looked for the hungry children and repeated the act four more times, until the tables cleared and the food stopped, and people left the stilt house to seek work or beg. The censori, maybe slightly disappointed, also left. They left behind a faint lingering of smoke and neem in the air as a sign of their passage.

  My parents looked up when I entered the forge, and my mother wept openly when she saw me. “You shouldn’t have come back,” she said.

  That terrified me, for a moment. Fear spilled out of me that they would hold me down and apply bramble’s tendrils to my arm.

  But that wasn’t what my mother meant. “You can leave us. Stay with Djoka’s family. Leave your father and me to our fate. Don’t burden yourself with what comes next.”

  Now I cried with them. “You spent what little you had saved for Borzai’s gift on the armor. I can’t watch you condemned to risk judgment for eternity. . . .”

  “Let us worry about the judgment our lives might bring,” my father said. “We lived honorable lives! How much should we fear judgment? And dry your tears, child, we are not dead just yet.”

  I looked up.

  “You were right,” my mother said. “When you said we should run, you were right. We were hoping you would stay with Djoka, and by the time you found out we had left it would be too late. We are going to leave the city this hour. We spent our night packing what we could not live without into a small cart. It holds enough bricks to make a simple village forge and the most basic tools.”

  “I can’t go back to Djoka,” I said, and held up my bare forearm.

  My mother swept me into a hug, and I didn’t fear it. I relaxed into it. “Oh, my child,” she whispered, and kissed my hair and pulled me even tighter.

  “I’ve talked to the refugees in the Mudflats about the roads,” I said. “I think I know some clear ways, and the names of some towns. There may be need for blacksmiths, when so many have fled. And I have some coppers to help our way. Please let me come with you.”

  They nodded, then helped me bundle my own tools and put them in the small cart. For the first time in days a small smile flickered around my lips. But it was snuffed when I realized we’d all been walking around the edges of something in the room: the dummy made of straw, draped in a Coat of a Thousand Nails, muscular breast gleaming its evil yellow.

  “What about the armor?” I asked. The gold hammered into its lines would be enough for us to make our way through the world outside Lesser Khaim with full bellies and comfortable rooms. “We should take some of the gold.”

  It had been my father’s plan to earn enough off making it to change our lives. Why not let it do just that? If we were going to run, why did we think we had to leave the armor for the duke?

  My father shook his head. “The duke never intended to pay us the other half, he wanted his armor cheap. But we are not thieves. Leave it for him. Let’s be just be on our way.”

  “Thieves?” my mother spat as she stared at my father angrily. “Cedomill, we spent weeks and weeks on this armor and have nothing, and we are to leave with nothing?”

  My father slumped slightly. “I know. I know,” he muttered.

  My mother walked up to the straw dummy, and pulled the gauntlets off. “Sofija is right. So are you. We are not thieves,” she said. “So we will take only what we are owed and no less.”

  We wrapped the gauntlets in oily rags and threw pig iron in with them, to confuse any one who looked through the contents of our cart. We left in the noon, the sun high overhead. The last of the forge’s fire guttered as we shut the door. It felt strange to watch the last swirls of smoke from its mouth of embers escape the chimney, then scatter on the wind.

  My father pulled the cart swiftly down the dirt, and then onto cobblestones. We passed beggars and censori, smelled spice on the wind, and paid it little attention. We had a direction and purpose. The three of us moved as one. Mother, father, child: a family under Mara’s gaze.

  3

  NO GATES MARKED THE EDGE of Lesser Khaim. No River Sulong cut it off like at the edge of Khaim. Instead, Lesser Khaim exhausted itself and trailed away into smaller and smaller claims as we walked on through the afternoon. The outer farms, with men hunched over plows and fields, was often rimmed by the ghost-white tangle of bramble.

  The one hard edge of Lesse
r Khaim, the new estates, were being carved back out of the bramble that choked around the main trade road. We could see the glow of fire in the fields as teams of hundreds burned back more bramble in their lines. They were far enough away that they looked like the little figurines given to the Ahadita, the ones with the purple dye daubed on the spot you begged a healing for.

  My father sweated in the sun, but we were used to sweating in forge heat. We sipped watered wine that I had purchased, along with bread and dried meat and fruit, on the way out of Lesser Khaim with the copper coins Djoka had given me.

  We were so focused on leaving Lesser Khaim that we didn’t notice the sound at first. But eventually it become unmistakable: hoofbeats pounded down the road from behind us.

  My mother looked back. “Off the road,” she ordered us both. “There are city guards coming.”

  It didn’t occur to any of us that the horses rode for us until the pale, awkward Duke Malabaz veered off the stones and into the grass.

  “There!” the duke screamed. “These are our thieves.”

  Five spear tips lowered smoothly from the height of horseback, pinning us with our backs to the cart’s rough, gray wood as we cowered in place.

  “Where are the gauntlets?” Malabaz shouted. “Where are they? Tell me now!” He kicked his horse forward and looked at the cart, as if we would have left the preciously decorated armor sitting on top of our bundled possessions.

  Too cowed to speak, we huddled together as the guards descended to yank everything from our cart and scatter our possessions across the road. I saw the bundle with the gauntlets in it picked up, and the pig iron fell out. But the guards shook things out too quickly to realize what they held, and threw the bundle into the ditch after they stabbed it with knives to shake out only more cheap iron.

  My father opened his mouth, but Malabaz had sat long enough watching this. “I knew you useless mud fish wouldn’t have the strength to do what was right. I placed a watcher on you. They called me to the forge and I saw what you had stolen. Had you run without my gauntlets, maybe I would not have bothered. But that isn’t what you did.”