The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012 Edition

by Fowler, Karen Joy

  “Call us that again and we’ll cut out your tongue,” Leandro said.

  “Please,” I said. “I mean no harm. I wish to marry your sister. I—”

  “Oh, you mean to marry her?” Leandro advanced with the knife. He shoved me against the wall and held the tapered blade to my throat. “You mean you wish to marry her after you’ve violated her? After you’ve left her unfit for any other man’s bed? Well, by all means. Telo, have you any objections?”

  “Don’t,” Sofia began. “Please—”

  “Quiet,” Telo said.

  “But I asked him—” Sofia said.

  Telo slapped her hard across the face. She fell against the wardrobe. Its sharp wood edge sliced her brow and blood streamed from the cut.

  I struggled to go to her, but Leandro pushed his forearm into my throat. Telo turned from his sister to me and stalked across the room to where I stood naked, trapped against the wall.

  “You come to our land.” Telo leaned in close, his voice quiet and charged with menace. “Your force your Prophet on us. You raid our holy places. And now you have the gall to defile my sister in our own home.”

  “Telo,” Leandro said warningly.

  “No.” Telo turned to his brother. “These Moors need a lesson. Hold him.”

  I tried to jerk away in panic, but Telo shoved me over the edge of Sofia’s bed, and Leandro pinned me belly-down, his knife nicking behind my left ear. The bedclothes still held Sofia’s warm smell, mixed with fresh blood and my own sharp fear. Telo’s belt clicked.

  “Please. . . . ” I tried to turn, but Leandro’s knife pressed below my jaw.

  Telo knocked my legs apart with his boots. I felt pressure, and then pain ripped up through my bowels.

  “No!” I screamed and strained my arms against them, but Leandro held me still as Telo forced himself into me. Oh, God, this is happening, this is happening. God, stop it, God have mercy. This is happening.

  “Stop, please, stop.” Sofia’s voice shook.

  My feet scrabbled uselessly on the floor.

  “You’ll pay a hundredfold for what you’ve done to our sister,” Telo grunted in my ear.

  He finished and drew back. I slumped beside the bed, shaking with shame and shock. How could this have . . . oh, God, I am . . . why did you let this happen?

  Without warning, Telo leveled a kick at my ribs. I heard the pop of bone before I felt the pain. I fell to my side. Another kick, to my head this time. It caught my left eye, and one side of my vision exploded in a white starburst. Leandro joined in. One of them brought his foot down on my femur. I heard it snap and the room swam close to blackness. I rolled onto my stomach, tried to drag myself away from the blows, but they came at me from all sides. Adán, I thought, but no, he was far away in Córdoba, safe, presiding over his mother’s table. I curled my arms around my head and tried to hold still in my own half-darkness, praying for it to end.

  And then they were finished, the room silent except for Sofia’s ragged crying.

  “What have you done?” I heard Sofia say, somewhere far away.

  “You stupid bitch,” Telo said, out of breath. “Did you think your virtue was yours to give?”

  “He is Ishaq ibn Hisham, the heir to the caliphate,” she said. Her voice canted higher. “What have you done?”

  The room went quiet. I blinked the darkness away from my open right eye. My left eye was already beginning to swell shut, and strange patterns of light danced across my field of vision. A surge of anger rolled over me, followed by shame and blackening pain. Anger. Shame. Pain.

  “No one would blame us.” Leandro’s words swam close. “It’s simple vengeance. Breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.”

  “No,” Telo said. His footsteps sounded near my head. He snarled his hands in my hair and tugged me up sharply. “Help me, Leandro.”

  “That’s enough,” Leandro said.

  “Enough?” Telo laughed. “For ruining our sister?” He took hold of my wrists and began pulling me from the room.

  Leandro hung back, uncertain.

  “What are you doing?” Sofia’s voice shot high.

  “Taking him to Grandmère,” Telo said. “Let her judge what’s to be done with him.”

  Telo pulled me to the stairs. Leandro followed. Fire shot up my side as the muscles tugged on my fractured rib. Lamia. Hope and dread clouded together in my chest. A woman with books might be civilized, might put an end to this, but the recipes for poisons and the stories, the boys’ stories of her cursing them over mere oranges. . . . My broken leg fell limp against the landing. I cried out and all my thoughts dissolved in a burst of pain. A cold sweat broke over my body, mixing with the blood that slicked my neck where Leandro’s knife had bitten me.

  “Please,” Sofia said, faint now.

  My back hit the cool, smooth flagstones of the house’s ground floor. Blearily, through my open right eye, I saw we were coming into the central hall, where a steady fire burned in the hearth. A woman in a red-hemmed gray dress sat before it. The fire’s heat and the billowing darkness over my eye warped her face. The windows reflected the flames, backed by the dense blackness of the country night.

  Telo dragged me up on my knees before her. I swayed. He grabbed the back of my neck and stood behind me, holding me upright.

  Slowly, Lamia de Rampion turned her face from the fire. She was aged, but younger than I expected, regal in the way of women who have not forgotten what it was to be beautiful in their youth. Her hair waved black and silver in equal parts into a low, loose bun. My mind sparked and fever-wheeled with the notion that perhaps she was Sofia’s mother after all, not her grandmother.

  “What have you found?” she asked, cool and calm, the tone a cat’s mistress would use when he made a present of his kill.

  “A rat.” Telo tightened his grip on my neck. “Glutting himself on our stores.”

  She lifted her chin to Leandro, standing at the bottom of the stair. “And where did you find him?”she asked, as though she already knew his reply.

  “Upstairs,” Leandro answered. “As you said.”

  “Please, doña.” My voice trembled and scraped as I spoke. “If you would let me make amends . . . ”

  Lamia’s eyes drifted down and hooked into my own. A chill washed over me. I could make out nothing of mercy in their depths.

  “Amends?” She leaned forward, as if I had made an interesting point. “How do you propose to compensate me for what you have taken from us, hmm? Can you restore my granddaughter’s virginity? Or perhaps you mean to repay us in horses and lands. Is that it, Moor? Will you heap us with gold if my granddaughter’s legs prop open for you whenever you happen by?” Her voice stayed even, furiously calm.

  “No, never—”

  Lamia cut my words short with a curt lift of her hand. She stood, and I saw her then as she was, a woman with the full swell of her powers come to fruit. “Bind him, please, Telo,” she said, nodding to a straight-backed wooden chair facing the fire.

  I tried again. “Doña, please.” I turned to Leandro. “Peace, brothers—”

  “What did we say?” Telo asked. He heaved me into the chair and bent to bind my ankles to its legs with horse rope. “We’re not your brothers.”

  “Grandmère,” Leandro said from the stair. “What are you doing?”

  “Please,” I said. It hurt to breathe around my broken rib. “Let me go. I won’t say a word. We can forget all this.”

  Telo twisted my arms and bound my wrists together behind the chair back in answer.

  “You’re Christians,” I pleaded. I strained my arms against the ropes, but they held me fast. “Does your Christ not love mercy?”

  Lamia walked behind me to the stairs. I craned my neck to see. “Lend me your knife, Leandro,” she said.

  “Grandmère—” Leandro said.

  “Your knife,” Lamia repeated.

  Leandro handed it over slowly. Lamia rustled past me and knelt by the fireplace, shuffling her grandson’s blade in
the coals. “Do you know what our Christ says, Moor?” She turned her head to regard me over her shoulder. “Do you?”

  My throat would not part to let me speak. “No,” I whispered.

  She spoke into the fire. “If thine eye do cause thee to offend, pluck it out and cast it from thee.” She turned the knife within the coals. “Lest thy whole body should be cast into hell.”

  “I meant no offense to you or your granddaughter.” I fought for enough breath to speak as the blade turned from dull silver to red. “Please, I love Sofia.”

  At that moment, Sofia’s footsteps sounded on the stair behind us, light and bare. Lamia turned. The tip of the knife blade shone white, like a pale thorn, as if a little piece of noonday sun rested on its tip.

  “No!” Sofia shouted behind me.

  “Keep her back,” Lamia said. Her voice crackled.

  Sofia’s screams grew to a hysterical pitch. Her feet fell in muted thuds against the floor as she tried to kick out of Leandro’s grasp. My own heart beat like a piece of tin beneath a blacksmith’s hammer, and my breath came gasping and shaky.

  “Please,” I tried one last time. “Te suplico.”

  Lamia took my chin in her hand and shoved my head back so I was forced to look up into her eyes, black and dilated with carefully composed rage. “Here is my mercy, Moor. Remember my face when your world is dark.” Then she pointed the tip of the knife at my open right eye and thrust the white-hot blade into its center.

  We are packing up the wagons after a week’s stay in Madrid to buy provisions and fit the horses with fresh tack when the cry goes up from the back of the line.

  “God, no. It cannot be. Ojalá que no.” A woman’s voice wavers above the crowded plaza.

  And soon other voices echo her prayer, spreading through the crowd all at once like water coming to a boil.

  “Madinat al-Zahra,” someone says.

  I drop the water bucket I am holding to Pulga’s mouth and fumble blindly for the nearest man’s arm. “What of the palace?” I ask.

  “It’s fallen,” the man says. “It’s been razed, and the fires seen burning five whole days from the Córdoban gates.”

  A cold chill slaps my body. I cannot stop myself from picturing all my familiar books blackened and shrunk by flames, the deep fountains boiled bare, the gilt ceiling raining molten drops of gold as the roof catches fire.

  “Who was it?” I ask. “The Northern lords? Or the Abbasids? Have they sent ships from Baghdad?”

  “Neither,” the man says. “Vizier Sanchuelo lost control of his Berbers, and they took it on themselves to destroy the palace city.”

  My hands tremble in their grip on his coat. “And the caliph?” I ask.

  “Abdicated,” the man answers, and pushes past me to repeat his story for other ears.

  I grope my way to the wagon’s tail and sink down beneath it, by the tall wheels. The world spins too quickly around me, and behind my ruined eyes all I can see are tongues of fire spreading like oil over the glossy leaves of the towering hedges, the tapestries ash, carved ivory doors blackened and hanging ajar, boot prints in the soot. I clutch at the braid around my neck like a drowning man.

  Is this Your punishment? I ask God. To know I could have stopped this, and yet stand fettered by blindness as my world burns?

  “Ishaq?” a woman’s voice says.

  For one reeling moment, I think it’s Sofia. But then the wheels of my mind start turning in tandem again, and I realize it’s Mencia. My given name is common enough I’ve told it to her.

  “They’ve burned Madinat al-Zahra,” I say.

  “Ishaq, get up.” Her strong hand grips me at the elbow. “We have to move. They’re barring the city gates.”

  I cling to the back of the wagon as our caravan lurches forward. The watchmen at the gates shout after us that we’ll be safer inside the city walls with the other refugees fled from al Andalus, but I know Lázaro has his reasons for wanting to push on. The horses rise to a canter as we hurry north.

  I broke into black consciousness with Adán crouched over me. Pain wormed in every inch of my body. An animal moan rose deep in my throat.

  “Softly, brother,” Adán said. “I don’t know if they’re coming back.”

  The overlapping criiii of cicadas pulsed in the air. I felt dirt and dry, sparse grass beneath my hands. “Where are we?” I asked.

  “The eastern edge of the Rampion lands,” Adán whispered. “I dragged you from the house.”

  “Your men . . . ?” My throat sounded stripped to my own ears.

  “No,” Adán said. “I followed you alone.”

  “Sofia?”

  “I saw four horses galloping from the gate. Two men and two women.” Adán paused. Dirt scraped beneath his feet as he stood. “I’ll send word to the caliph. Our men will catch them before the night is out. They’ll be executed at dawn.”

  “No.” I flailed my hand blindly and grasped the hem of his cloak.

  Adán knelt beside me again. “No?”

  “If they kill them, the Northern lords will take it as cause for open war.” My chest ached. I felt sick. “I have to protect—”

  “Brother, they’ve taken your eyes. And your leg. . . . ” He stopped, unable to name the other thing they had done to me.

  My left eye burned with tears behind its swollen lid. The right stayed dead. “No,” I repeated, trying to sound firm. “I’m to blame. Please, Adán. . . . ” My voice broke.

  Adán smoothed his hands over my brow. “We’ll wait, then.” He kissed my forehead. “I’ll get my horse.”

  “Anadil is by the river,” I said.

  Adán paused a beat too long. “Don’t worry. I’ll come back for her.”

  He returned a few minutes later, heralded by the faint clop of his stallion’s hooves. He wrapped me in his cloak and heaved me onto the horse’s back. Pain ripped through my leg and side, and nausea rolled over me as my innards shifted, but I clung to the horse’s mane. Adán led the horse quietly past the outer palisades of the Rampion estate, into the open country.

  We made our way to a small village along the road to Córdoba, where Adán roused a doctor he knew.

  “God have mercy,” the doctor breathed over me when Adán unwrapped the cloak from my shoulders.

  Together, he and Adán brought me into his kitchen and laid me on the broad table. The doctor reset the bone in my leg and woke his wife so she could help him make a poultice for my eyes. Afterward, they washed me and prayed over me and wrapped me in a quilt, and for some time, I lost all knowledge of what happened to me.

  I woke to the sound of running water, a courtyard fountain. For a moment, I thought I had been allowed passage into Paradise, despite what my life had been. But the high burn raking the marrow of my bones thrust that thought from my mind. I remembered the doctor and raised a hand carefully to my ribs. My whole chest had been wrapped in soft bands of cloth, my wrists in the same where they had rubbed raw against the horse rope. I felt something clutched in my left hand. Sofia’s braid. I tried to open my eyes, but couldn’t.

  Someone shifted beside me. “Brother?” Adán said quietly.

  “Adán?” I said.

  “Yes.” His hand was cool on my forehead.

  “Am I going to die?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Where am I?” I asked.

  “You’re safe,” Adán said. “My friend Nasir has given us room in his house. He’ll keep us safe here, keep us hidden.”

  “Sofia?”

  Adán took my hand in his. “Her whole estate is empty, the doors left open to the dogs.”

  I tried to raise myself on my elbows, but the pain flared through me again. I fell back to my pallet with a whimper.

  “Rest,” Adán said. “I promise I’ll find her. Te lo juro. Only rest.”

  I drifted beneath the surface of a fever. Nightmares plagued me, where Lamia cut open my chest and used my body as a cauldron for poisons, while Sofia lay beside me and held my hand. Adán came a
nd went from the house, gathering news from Córdoba and coming back to whisper to me what he had overheard. My mother and father and sisters were safe at Madinat al-Zahra, so the attempt had been on my life alone, he said, still ignorant of my part in what had happened. My father had detached his own guard to search the countryside for me, in addition to the vizier’s foot soldiers, and they had offered to reward any man who could lead them to me.

  “Sanchuelo tries to accuse the Jews of a plot to murder the caliph and his family,” Adán said, kneeling by my couch in the shaded eaves of Nasir’s courtyard. “He uses my name. Though they say your father won’t believe it.”

  A rare breeze touched my neck. Earlier in the day, Nasir and his wife had propped me up on a bank of pillows in the corner of the courtyard, where they said the open air would help me recover. I hadn’t spoken since I first awoke in their house.

  “Ishaq,” Adán said. “Why did they do this to you? Tell me.”

  My lips had dried together. I pulled them apart to answer. “Sofia.”

  “What about her?” Adán asked in frustration.

  “I . . . I shouldn’t have . . . without her brothers’ consent. . . . ” My throat closed around the words. I pressed my nails into my palms.

  “You took her for a lover?” I could hear the anger in Adán’s voice, but I didn’t know if it was meant for me or Sofia’s kin.

  “Yes.” I leaned forward into the pain in my ribs. I deserve it, I deserve it. Oh, God.

  Adán didn’t speak. His leather coverlet creaked as he rose. He scuffed around the perimeter of the courtyard’s smooth flagstones, and then came back and knelt beside me. “You loved her?”

  “I would have married her,” I said.

  He fell silent again.

  “God has delivered His judgment,” I said, so quietly the steady rush of the fountain nearly hid my voice. “With their hands He marks me unfit to rule.”

  Adán took my head in his hands and kissed my forehead again, as he had done the night he found me. “Brother, you know better than to ascribe the will of God to the works of men.”

  A hard tear burned my left eye. I wished to God for Him to consume me in flame or let the earth open up for me—Oh, God, let me cease to be—but the quiet heat of the sun continued, and the water bubbling from the fountain, and the birdsong from the roof, and I did not cease to be. I reached out to Adán. “I cannot go back to my father’s house. He can’t know.”