Nebula Awards Showcase 2006

by Gardner Dozois

  The castle warder, listening with obvious disapproval to such familiarity, made to pull his horse back and fend off the tiresome woman, but Ista held up her hand. “Peace, dy Ferrej.” He raised his brows, but shrugged and held his tongue.

  Ista continued to the pilgrim, “I am a widow of . . . Valenda.”

  “Ah, indeed? Why, and so am I,” the woman returned brightly. “My first man was of there. Though I’ve buried three husbands altogether.” She announced this as though it were an achievement. “Oh, not all together, of course. One at a time.” She cocked her head in curiosity at Ista’s high mourning colors. “Did you just bury yours, then, lady? Pity. No wonder you look so sad and pale. Well, dear, it’s a hard time, especially with the first, you know. At the beginning you want to die—I know I did—but that’s just fear talking. Things will come about again, don’t you worry.”

  Ista smiled briefly and shook her head in faint disagreement, but was not moved to correct the woman’s misapprehension. Dy Ferrej was clearly itching to depress the creature’s forwardness by announcing Ista’s rank and station, and by implication his own, and perhaps driving her off, but Ista realized with a little wonder that she found Caria amusing. The widow’s burble did not displease her, and she didn’t want her to stop.

  There was, apparently, no danger of that. Caria of Palma pointed out her fellow pilgrims, favoring Ista with a rambling account of their stations, origins, and holy goals; and if they rode sufficiently far out of earshot, with opinions of their manners and morals thrown in gratis. Besides the amused veteran dedicat of the Son of Autumn and his blushing boy, the party included four men from a weavers’ fraternity who went to pray to the Father of Winter for a favorable outcome of a lawsuit; a man wearing the ribbons of the Mother of Summer, who prayed for the safety of a daughter nearing childbirth; and a woman whose sleeve sported the blue and white of the Daughter of Spring, who prayed for a husband for her daughter. A thin woman in finely cut green robes of an acolyte of the Mother’s Order, with a maid and two servants of her own, turned out to be neither midwife nor physician, but a comptroller. A wine merchant rode to give thanks and redeem his pledge to the Father for his safe return with his caravan, almost lost the previous winter in the snowy mountain passes to Ibra.

  The pilgrims within hearing, who had evidently been riding with Caria for some days now, rolled their eyes variously as she talked on, and on. An exception was an obese young man in the white garb, grimed from the road, of a divine of the Bastard. He rode along quietly with a book open atop the curve of his belly, his muddy white mule’s reins slack, and glanced up only when he came to turn a page, blinking nearsightedly and smiling muzzily.

  The Widow Caria peered at the sun, which had topped the sky. “I can hardly wait to get to Valenda. There is a famous inn where we are to eat that specializes in the most delicious roast suckling pigs.” She smacked her lips in anticipation.

  “There is such an inn in Valenda, yes,” said Ista. She had never eaten there, she realized, not in all her years of residence.

  The Mother’s comptroller, who had been one of the widow’s more pained involuntary listeners, pursed her mouth in disapproval. “I shall take no meat,” she announced. “I made a vow that no gross flesh would cross my lips upon this journey.”

  Caria leaned over and muttered to Ista, “If she’d made a vow to swallow her pride, instead of her salads, it would have been more to the point for a pilgrimage, I’m thinking.” She sat up again, grinning; the Mother’s comptroller sniffed and pretended not to have heard.

  The merchant with the Father’s gray-and-black ribbons on his sleeve remarked as if to the air, “I’m sure the gods have no use for pointless chatter. We should be using our time better—discussing high-minded things to prepare our minds for prayer, not our bellies for dinner.”

  Caria leered at him, “Aye, or lower parts for better things still? And you ride with the Father’s favor on your sleeve, too! For shame.”

  The merchant stiffened. “That is not the aspect of the god to which I intend—or need—to pray, I assure you, madam!”

  The divine of the Bastard glanced up from his book and murmured peaceably, “The gods rule all parts of us, from top to toe. There is a god for everyone, and every part.”

  “Your god has notably low tastes,” observed the merchant, still stung.

  “None who open their hearts to any one of the Holy Family shall be excluded. Not even the priggish.” The divine bowed over his belly at the merchant.

  Caria gave a cheerful crack of laughter; the merchant snorted indignation, but desisted. The divine returned to his book.

  Caria whispered to Ista, “I like that fat fellow, I do. Doesn’t say much, but when he speaks, it’s to the point. Bookish men usually have no patience with me, and I surely don’t understand them. But that one does have lovely manners. Though I do think a man should get him a wife, and children, and do the work that pays for them, and not go haring off after the gods. Now, I have to admit, my dear second husband didn’t—work, that is—but then, he drank. Drank himself to death eventually, to the relief of all who knew him, five gods rest his spirit.” She signed herself, touching forehead, lip, navel, groin, and heart, spreading her hand wide over her plump breast. She pursed her lips, raised her chin and her voice, and called curiously, “But now I think on it, you’ve never told us what you go to pray for, Learned.”

  The divine placed his finger on his page and glanced up. “No, I don’t think I have,” he said vaguely.

  The merchant said, “All you called folk pray to meet your god, don’t you?”

  “I have often prayed for the goddess to touch my heart,” said the Mother’s comptroller. “It is my highest spiritual goal to see Her face-to-face. Indeed, I often think I have felt Her, from time to time.”

  Anyone who desires to see the gods face-to-face is a great fool, thought Ista. Although that was not an impediment, in her experience.

  “You don’t have to pray to do that,” said the divine. “You just have to die. It’s not hard.” He rubbed his second chin. “In fact, it’s unavoidable.”

  “To be god-touched in life,” corrected the comptroller coolly. “That is the great blessing we all long for.”

  No, it’s not. If you saw the Mother’s face right now, woman, you would drop weeping in the mud of this road and not get up for days. Ista became aware that the divine was squinting at her in arrested curiosity.

  Was he one of the god-touched? Ista possessed some practice at spotting them. The reverse also held true, unfortunately. Or perhaps that calf-like stare was just shortsightedness. Discomforted, she frowned back at him.

  He blinked apologetically and said to her, “In fact, I travel on business for my order. A dedicat in my charge came by chance across a little stray demon possessed by a ferret. I take it to Taryoon for the archdivine to return to the god with proper ceremony.”

  He twisted around to his capacious saddlebags and rummaged therein, trading the book for a small wicker cage. A lithe gray shape turned within it.

  “Ah-ha! So that’s what you’ve been hiding in there!” Caria rode closer, wrinkling her nose. “It looks like any other ferret to me.” The creature stood up against the side of the cage and twitched its whiskers at her.

  The fat divine turned in his saddle and held up the cage to Ista’s view. The animal, circling, froze in her frown; for just a moment, its beady eyes glittered back with something other than animal intelligence. Ista regarded it dispassionately. The ferret lowered its head and backed away until it could retreat no farther. The divine gave Ista a curious sidelong look.

  “Are you sure the poor thing isn’t just sick?” said Caria doubtfully.

  “What do you think, lady?” the divine asked Ista.

  You know very well it has a real demon.Why do you ask me? “Why—I think the good archdivine will certainly know what it is and what to do with it.”

  The divine smiled faintly at this guarded reply. “Indeed, it is not much o
f a demon.” He tucked the cage away again. “I wouldn’t name it more than a mere elemental, small and unformed. It hasn’t been long in the world, I’d guess, and so is little likely to tempt men to sorcery.”

  It did not tempt Ista, certainly, but she understood his need to be discreet. Acquiring a demon made one a sorcerer much as acquiring a horse made one a rider, but whether skilled or poor was a more open question. Like a horse, a demon could run away with its master. Unlike a horse, there was no dismounting. To a soul’s peril; hence the Temple’s concern.

  Caria made to speak again, but the path to the castle split off at that point, and dy Ferrej reined his horse aside. The widow of Palma converted whatever she’d been about to say to a cheery farewell wave, and dy Ferrej escorted Ista firmly off the road.

  He glanced back over his shoulder as they started down the bank into the trees. “Vulgar woman. I’ll wager she has not a pious thought in her head! She uses her pilgrimage only to shield her holiday-making from the disapproval of her relatives and get herself a cheap armed escort on the road.”

  “I believe you are entirely right, dy Ferrej.” Ista glanced back over her shoulder at the party of pilgrims advancing down the main road. The Widow Caria was now coaxing the divine of the Bastard to sing hymns with her, though the one she was suggesting more resembled a drinking song.

  “She had not one man of her own family to support her,” dy Ferrej continued indignantly. “I suppose she can’t help the lack of a husband, but you’d think she could scare up a brother or son or at least a nephew. I’m sorry you had to be exposed to that, Royina.”

  A not entirely harmonious but thoroughly good-natured duet rose behind them, fading with distance.

  “I’m not,” said Ista. A slow smile curved her lips. I’m not.

  ANDY DUNCAN

  Andy Duncan made his first sale, to Asimov’s Science Fiction, in 1997, and quickly made others, to Starlight, SCI FICTION, Amazing, Science Fiction Age, Dying For It, Realms of Fantasy, and Weird Tales, as well as several more sales to Asimov’s. By the beginning of the new century, he was widely recognized as one of the most individual, quirky, and flavorful new voices on the scene today. His story “The Executioner’s Guild” was on both the Final Nebula Ballot and the final ballot for the World Fantasy Award in 2000, and in 2001 he won two World Fantasy Awards, for his story “The Pottawatomie Giant,” and for his landmark first collection, Beluthahatchie and Other Stories. His most recent book is an anthology coedited with F. Brett Cox, Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic. Coming up is a new collection, Alabama Curiosities. A graduate of the Clarion West writers’ workshop in Seattle, he was born in Batesberg, South Carolina, and now lives in Northport, Alabama, with his wife, Sydney, where he edits Overdrive magazine, “The Voice of the American Trucker.”

  About “Zora and the Zombie,” he says:

  “My stories ‘Beluthahatchie,’ ‘Lincoln in Frogmore,’ and ‘Daddy Mention and the Monday Skull’ are all homages to the great Zora Neale Hurston, but ‘Zora and the Zombie’ is my first attempt to base a character on Zora herself.

  “I long had been fascinated by Zora’s brief account, in her 1937 book Tell My Horse, of her encounter with the Zombie Felicia Felix-Mentor, and by the photo of Felix-Mentor that she snapped in that hospital yard. For years, whenever Zora crossed my mind, I would think, ‘One day I’ll write a story about Zora and the Zombie.’ When I finally realized that was the title, I was able to begin.

  “My wife, Sydney, loves this story but not the title, which she thinks belongs on a pulp horror story. I think it’s fitting, though, because the story is less about the Zombies of Haiti than about Zombies as they were adopted and adapted by U.S. pop culture in the 1930s and 1940s—by Zora, yes, but also by the contributors to Weird Tales and its rival ‘shudder pulps.’ So I like that the title would have fit the contents page of, say, Terror Tales. Now that the story has been nominated for a Stoker Award, my first such nomination, I wonder to what extent the title caught the attention of the Horror Writers Association!

  “A note for the copy editors in the house: I capitalized Zombie because Zora did, partially out of her respect for this elect group of Haitians and partially, I suspect, to emphasize the alliteration of the word with her name—for in the reader’s mind she’s never Hurston, always Zora.

  “I have been stunned to realize, since the story was published, that many of its readers had never heard of Zora before. I hope my story inspires even a few of them to go read her, but if I had known at the outset that I would be making introductions, I likely wouldn’t have dared write the story at all!

  “Thanks to everyone at the Sycamore Hill Writers Conference who helped me with this story, especially L. Timmel Duchamp, Karen Joy Fowler, and Kelly Link for their enthusiasm; to Ellen Datlow for publishing it in SCI FICTION; to Kelly Link and Gavin Grant for reprinting it in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror; to John Kessel for too many reasons to list; and to Sydney for more reasons still.”

  ZORA AND THE ZOMBIE

  ANDY DUNCAN

  “What is the truth?” the houngan shouted over the drums. The mambo, in response, flung open her white dress. She was naked beneath. The drummers quickened their tempo as the mambo danced among the columns in a frenzy. Her loose clothing could not keep pace with her kicks, swings, and swivels. Her belt, shawl, kerchief, dress floated free. The mambo flung herself writhing onto the ground. The first man in line shuffled forward on his knees to kiss the truth that glistened between the mambo’s thighs.

  Zora’s pencil point snapped. Ah, shit. Sweat-damp and jostled on all sides by the crowd, she fumbled for her penknife and burned with futility. Zora had learned just that morning that the Broadway hoofer and self-proclaimed anthropologist Katherine Dunham, on her Rosenwald fellowship to Haiti—the one that rightfully should have been Zora’s—not only witnessed this very truth ceremony a year ago, but for good measure underwent the three-day initiation to become Mama Katherine, bride of the serpent god Damballa—the heifer!

  Three nights later, another houngan knelt at another altar with a platter full of chicken. People in the back began to scream. A man with a terrible face flung himself through the crowd, careened against people, spread chaos. His eyes rolled. The tongue between his teeth drooled blood. “He is mounted!” the people cried. “A loa has made him his horse.” The houngan began to turn. The horse crashed into him. The houngan and the horse fell together, limbs entwined. The chicken was mashed into the dirt. The people moaned and sobbed.

  Zora sighed. She had read this in Herskovitz, and in Johnson, too. Still, maybe poor fictional Tea Cake, rabid, would act like this. In the pandemonium she silently leafed to the novel section of her notebook. “Somethin’ got after me in mah sleep, Janie,” she had written. “Tried tuh choke me tuh death.”

  Another night, another compound, another pencil. The dead man sat up, head nodding forward, jaw slack, eyes bulging. Women and men shrieked. The dead man lay back down and was still. The mambo pulled the blanket back over him, tucked it in. Perhaps tomorrow, Zora thought, I will go to Pont Beudet, or to Ville Bonheur. Perhaps something new is happening there.

  “Miss Hurston,” a woman whispered, her heavy necklace clanking into Zora’s shoulder. “Miss Hurston. Have they shared with you what was found a month ago? Walking by daylight in the Ennery road?”

  Dr. Legros, chief of staff at the hospital at Gonaives, was a good-looking mulatto of middle years with pomaded hair and a thin mustache. His three-piece suit was all sharp creases and jutting angles, like that of a paper doll, and his handshake left Zora’s palm powder dry. He poured her a belt of raw white clairin, minus the nutmeg and peppers that would make it palatable to Guede, the prancing black-clad loa of derision, but breathtaking nonetheless, and as they took dutiful medicinal sips his small talk was all big, all politics: whether Mr. Roosevelt would be true to his word that the Marines would never be back; whether Haiti’s good friend Senator King of Utah had larger ambitions; whether
America would support President Vincent if the grateful Haitians were to seek to extend his second term beyond the arbitrary date technically mandated by the Constitution. But his eyes—to Zora, who was older than she looked and much older than she claimed—posed an entirely different set of questions. He seemed to view Zora as a sort of plenipotentiary from Washington and only reluctantly allowed her to steer the conversation to the delicate subject of his unusual patient.

  “It is important for your countrymen and your sponsors to understand, Miss Hurston, that the beliefs of which you speak are not the beliefs of civilized men, in Haiti or elsewhere. These are Negro beliefs, embarrassing to the rest of us, and confined to the canaille— to the, what is the phrase, the backwater areas, such as your American South. These beliefs belong to Haiti’s past, not her future.”

  Zora mentally placed the good doctor waistcoat-deep in a backwater area of Eatonville, Florida, and set gators upon him. “I understand, Dr. Legros, but I assure you I’m here for the full picture of your country, not just the Broadway version, the tomtoms and the shouting. But in every ministry, veranda, and salon I visit, why, even in the office of the director-general of the Health Service, what is all educated Haiti talking about but your patient, this unfortunate woman Felicia Felix-Mentor? Would you stuff my ears, shelter me from the topic of the day?”

  He laughed, his teeth white and perfect and artificial. Zora, self-conscious of her own teeth, smiled with her lips closed, chin down. This often passed for flirtation. Zora wondered what the bright-eyed Dr. Legros thought of the seductive man-eater Erzulie, the most “uncivilized” loa of all. As she slowly crossed her legs, she thought: Huh! What’s Erzulie got on Zora, got on me?

  “Well, you are right to be interested in the poor creature,” the doctor said, pinching a fresh cigarette into his holder while looking neither at it nor at Zora’s eyes. “I plan to write a monograph on the subject myself, when the press of duty allows me. Perhaps I should apply for my own Guggenheim, eh? Clement!” He clapped his hands. “Clement! More clairin for our guest, if you please, and mangoes when we return from the yard.”