Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2015

by Nino Cipri

  “Come back to us, Moon,” Tabitha said, expecting the returned silence. “Bring us life. Bring us rain. Za’tse katch, Tsichtinako.”

  She wondered what her grandfather had expected when he’d come to this reach and prayed, too—that last time, just five years after Gray Feather was killed for dancing, for singing an outlawed language. She wondered if it was when he had heard nothing that he jumped. Like the two women of Kadzima. Sudden death before starvation.

  Tabitha looked down toward the base of the cliff as if she were tracing his fall with her gaze. The shadows were already thick down there, slow-moving in silence.

  Tabitha slipped a single gray-and-red goose feather from the long leather pouch at her side. She smoothed it to a point, then stretched her arm out into the great void of air and wind and sound and sight and scent and possibility and used the feather-edge to trace the sign of the Spider across the plains far below her.

  A good-bye.

  And in that moment, from somewhere in the distance, from somewhere beyond the horizon to the west, she heard a rumbling sound. The waking of an angry god.

  * * *

  Tabitha turned at the throaty sound of the approaching skiff. It was coming down behind her, kicking the sun-dried clay into clouds of choking dust that blurred away the fading adobe walls. Lights flashed. Another skiff circled loudly overhead.

  Doors opened. A ramp crashed. Even through the sudden haze of backlit dust-fog, she could see the dark helmets of the lancers making their way through and around the pueblo. Surrounding her. Some of them were already in place, already aiming.

  Tabitha looked away from them, her gaze sweeping out to the horizon, where billow-black clouds rose up from the dry canyons to meet and swallow the setting sun.

  To swallow them all.

  * * *

  Tabitha’s arms were outstretched to the void. Feather in hand. Visions of Great Eagle swirled behind her eyes. But a gust of wind pushed back against her. She felt the wind, and she knew it for what it was.

  She stepped back from the edge, opening her eyes as she turned to look at the gathered lancers. “Za’tse katch, Tsichtinako,” she said to them.

  There was an officer among them, standing nearest the ramp. He stepped forward into the cleared, dry dust between the flechemuskets and the condemned. He was wearing a gray-to-black uniform emblazoned with two bars that attested to his good service to the state. A captain. His hair was close-cropped, peppered gray. His grin was full of vanity and loathing pride. He held a d-reader in his hand and he lifted it up. “Ms. Hoarse Raven, yes?”

  Tabitha looked around at the flechemuskets, most of them pointed at her head. She glanced back over her shoulder to the west. Clouds were moving fast across the sky, carried on the wind. Already the first reaches of them stretched overhead. “Ha, diya hatch,” she said to the captain.

  He blinked at her, caught off guard for a moment, before he smiled. “Then I suppose you’re admitting guilt.”

  “Ha,” she said.

  “You shouldn’t have come back here,” the captain said. “Not on the anniversary with the moon and all, especially.”

  Tabitha shrugged. “Sa’ma.”

  The captain smirked, then keyed a button on the d-reader as if he was initiating an injection. A part of Tabitha, a small and shrinking part, thought it unfortunate that a recording was used these days. She would’ve preferred the personal touch of a reading.

  “One language, one people,” the d-reader said, its disembodied voice deep with authority.

  Tabitha stood in half-amused silence, listening to the litany. Halfway through, great raindrops began to fall to the parched earth, impacting like soft bullets, pounding out little craters in the dust. Father’s tears, falling to Mother.

  Some of the lancers looked upward. Tabitha did not. She was watching the walls of the pueblo behind them, where the blur of dusk was turning to sharp shadow and light as the moon came up and shone its light beneath the storm. She needed to raise her voice to be heard over the d-reader. “Ta’-u-atch,” she announced.

  Only the captain was listening, and he didn’t care. He didn’t understand.

  The water was cold as it soaked into her linen garments, but at the same time, it felt good. It felt right. Thunder rolled in the depths of the clouds thickening overhead, the low growl of Black Bear Mother protecting her cubs. Tabitha felt it vibrate around her ribs. She felt its tone quickening in her chest.

  At last, she looked up through the drops of rain into the dark and churning clouds that had gathered over the mesa. The lights of the circling skiff looked obscene against the belly of the storm. “Ho-ak’a katch,” she said, for the sky was, indeed, raining.

  The d-reader ended its speech, which had always been more about helping those doing the slaughter than those being slaughtered. “One culture, one country,” the recording intoned.

  “One culture, one country!” the lancers replied. The sights of the flechemuskets re-centered.

  Tabitha felt the hairs on her arms perk up, the gooseflesh raised by something more than the cold rain on her skin. She breathed deep of the ozone washing through the curtains of water. It was raining very hard now.

  “Ho-ak’a ma’-me katch,” she said. She eyed the skiff in the air, and she began to sing a new song, with new power.

  As Tabitha’s voice split the air, Father Thunder’s first strike hit the skiff above her, a whip cracking down from the heavens. The airship flashed white-hot, turned left, right, left, then nosed down and fell earthward like a child’s broken toy. Ripples of electric fire coursed across its surface, the energy crackling in audible static as the craft plummeted.

  The crippled skiff came down at a sharp angle, hitting one of the outbuildings. It fragged the adobe, blasting the ancient mud-brick and wood into splinters and rubble. The ship pounded deep into the hardpack, momentarily cratering the earth, and then it was airborne again, metal screeching as it bounced back off the bedrock and flipped through the air. Many of the lancers on the ground began screaming, trying to run. The airship that was already on the ground tried to move, bucking on its pads as its engines kicked into gear, but all too late. The hurtling, broken thing punched into its side with a terrible crunch, a spear breaching a wounded deer.

  There was a half-second pause, a heartbeat of realization. Then a second bolt of lightning branched down from the clouds into the bundle of freshly twisted metal. The knot of the two ships exploded in an eruption of red light and redder sound.

  A wave of force slapped Tabitha back from the fiery skiffs, knocking the wind and the song from her chest as it sent her flying. The few flechemuskets still aimed at her went off, and she sensed the angry hornet buzz ripping the air around her. But then she hit the clotting mud and slid into rock as the next concussive detonation wave rolled forward across the mesa.

  Tabitha looked up and saw men in flames, trailing smoke. They were screaming, but she couldn’t hear them now. Tangled, shadowed shapes of machinery popped from the wreckage as remaining stores of fuel combusted. The captain was only a few meters away, sprawled sideways in the mud. Fragmented bits of metal protruded from his back, but he was moving. Lightning coursed across the sky in great pulsing veins. Waiting.

  Tabitha gasped air back into her lungs, began to sing again. She couldn’t hear her voice, but she could feel it, reverberating in her core. She felt it as sure as the wind and the rain and the mud and the sky.

  One of the lancers had stumbled through the mud, had somehow avoided the scattering shrapnel. He came and stood above her, eyes fierce and determined. He raised the gun.

  Tabitha stopped singing so she could smile at him.

  Bright light flashed against his face, and an instant later, his chest caved in and out all at once and he fell backward into the mud.

  Joseph Man of Sorrows knelt beside her, chambering another shell. Beams of moonlight had somehow pierced the churning veil of the clouds overhead, illuminating his face. He said something to her, but she couldn’
t hear it. She knew there was no stopping this now. Not after what had come before. Not with the power of Tsichtinako in the air.

  She nodded. He smiled grimly, then stood and walked over to the still-twitching officer. He lowered the barrel to the back of the man’s head.

  Pulled the trigger.

  Reloaded.

  Walked to the next dying man.

  By the light of moon and lightning, Tabitha could see a small group of the few remaining lancers firing fléchettes at a low building not yet in flames. Its thick adobe walls glistened with the tiny slivers of plastic, but still, from a little window, an old-style handgun flashed, one-two, one-two. And down they went.

  A handful of remaining lancers, scattered around the wreckage, saw their skiffmates go down by the little building, and they ran in that direction. But already a third shape was rising where the others had fallen. Malya had picked up one of the flechemuskets from the ground, and she trained it on them slow and steady. The military men stopped, hesitated, then dropped their own weapons one by one. Red Rabbit came out from the little building, and he, too, picked up one of their weapons.

  The lancers circled up, hands raised. Lit by the burning wreckage and contorted with fear, their faces were the red of blood. Malya and Red Rabbit marched forward at them, pushing them closer and closer to the edge of the mesa. Tabitha motioned at them to stop. Great Eagle would not welcome the lancers. And this hunt was over. There had been enough death.

  The others nodded. They began to herd the men toward one of the stronger buildings away from the fires. Perhaps, Tabitha thought, she would eventually teach them new ways of speaking. Or perhaps she would just let them go, let them explain to the world that gods grew old, but they didn’t die.

  Joseph came to her side, and when sound finally began to return to her senses, the first thing she heard beyond the roll of the thunder and the tremor of the sky was his voice, speaking her name.

  * * *

  Beating war drums, the voices of gods thundered in time to the strikes of lightning that fell in a living rain upon the mesa: heavy, pounding, unrelenting. Occasionally, another skiff tried to approach the old ruins, but the flashing anger turned each of them back. Alone, Tabitha and Joseph knelt on the floor of the kiva, which sat untouched in the conflagration atop the mesa. The fires of the gutted skiffs poured heat through the walls, and their naked bodies glistened with sweat. There would be time to leave, they knew, time to reach the old forgotten canyons far to the west and there make a new home. Others would come. “We are few and weak,” Red Jacket once said, “but may for a long time be happy if we hold fast to our country, and the religion of our fathers.”

  The dance her father had left unfinished, the song he’d never ended, was done. More storms were coming. They needed only to follow them.

  But not yet. Not this moment.

  For now, in the darkness, Tsichtinako was between them. And they thanked Her for what they had.

  Malya’s basket sat at the foot of the ladder, near the tsiwaimitiima altar that marked the place of emergence. The basket held many different kinds of seeds.

  Together, Tabitha and Joseph went about creation. He was no longer a man of sorrow. And the raven’s voice was soft, like fresh butter in spring.

  And many moons later, when the next tsatia hochani would be born, she knew what they would sing to him.

  * * *

  At night, when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The White Man will never be alone.

  Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless. Dead, I say? There is no death. Only a change of worlds.

  —Chief Seattle of the Duwamish (1780–1866)

  #END#

  About the Author

  MICHAEL LIVINGSTON holds degrees in History, Medieval Studies, and English. He is an Associate Professor of English at The Citadel, specializing in the middle Ages. His short fiction has been published in Black Gate, Shimmer, Paradox, and Nature. The Shards of Heaven is his first novel. You can sign up for email updates here.

  Copyright © 2015 by Michael Livingston

  Art copyright © 2015 by Greg Ruth

  “When the Spirit World appears in a sensory Form, the Human Eye confines it. The Spiritual Entity cannot abandon that Form as long as Man continues to look at it in this special way. To escape, the Spiritual Entity manifests an Image it adopts for him, like a veil. It pretends the Image is moving in a certain direction so the Eye will follow it. At which point the Spiritual Entity escapes its confinement and disappears.

  Whoever knows this and wishes to maintain perception of the Spiritual, must not let his Eye follow this illusion.

  This is one of the Divine Secrets.”

  The Meccan Revelations by Muhiyuddin Ibn Arabi

  For fifteen years my grandfather lived next door to the Mughal princess Zeenat Begum. The princess ran a tea stall outside the walled city of Old Lahore in the shade of an ancient eucalyptus. Dozens of children from Bhati Model School rushed screaming down muddy lanes to gather at her shop, which was really just a roadside counter with a tin roof and a smattering of chairs and a table. On winter afternoons it was her steaming cardamom-and-honey tea the kids wanted; in summer it was the chilled Rooh Afza.

  As Gramps talked, he smacked his lips and licked his fingers, remembering the sweet rosewater sharbat. He told me that the princess was so poor she had to recycle tea leaves and sharbat residue. Not from customers, of course, but from her own boiling pans—although who really knew, he said, and winked.

  I didn’t believe a word of it.

  “Where was her kingdom?” I said.

  “Gone. Lost. Fallen to the British a hundred years ago,” Gramps said. “She never begged, though. Never asked anyone’s help, see?”

  I was ten. We were sitting on the steps of our mobile home in Florida. It was a wet summer afternoon and rain hissed like diamondbacks in the grass and crackled in the gutters of the trailer park.

  “And her family?”

  “Dead. Her great-great-great grandfather, the exiled King Bahadur Shah Zafar, died in Rangoon and is buried there. Burmese Muslims make pilgrimages to his shrine and honor him as a saint.”

  “Why was he buried there? Why couldn’t he go home?”

  “He had no home anymore.”

  For a while I stared, then surprised both him and myself by bursting into tears. Bewildered, Gramps took me in his arms and whispered comforting things, and gradually I quieted, letting his voice and the rain sounds lull me to sleep, the loamy smell of him and grass and damp earth becoming one in my sniffling nostrils.

  I remember the night Gramps told me the rest of the story. I was twelve or thirteen. We were at this desi party in Windermere thrown by Baba’s friend Hanif Uncle, a posh affair with Italian leather sofas, crystal cutlery, and marble-topped tables. Someone broached a discussion about the pauper princess. Another person guffawed. The Mughal princess was an urban legend, this aunty said. Yes, yes, she too had heard stories about this so-called princess, but they were a hoax. The descendants of the Mughals left India and Pakistan decades ago. They are settled in London and Paris and Manhattan now, living postcolonial, extravagant lives after selling their estates in their native land.

  Gramps disagreed vehemently. Not only was the princess real, she had given him free tea. She had told him stories of her forebears.

  The desi aunty laughed. “Senility is known to create stories,” she said, tapping her manicured fingers on her wineglass.

  Gramps bristled. A long heated argument followed and we ended up leaving the party early.

  “Rafiq, tell your father to calm down,” Hanif Uncle said to my baba at the door. “He takes things too seriously.”

  “He might be old and set in his ways, Doctor sahib,” Baba said, “but he’s sharp as a tack. Pardon my boldness but some of your friends in there…” Without loo
king at Hanif Uncle, Baba waved a palm at the open door from which blue light and Bollywood music spilled onto the driveway.

  Hanif Uncle smiled. He was a gentle and quiet man who sometimes invited us over to his fancy parties where rich expatriates from the Indian subcontinent opined about politics, stocks, cricket, religious fundamentalism, and their successful Ivy League–attending progeny. The shyer the man the louder his feasts, Gramps was fond of saying.

  “They’re a piece of work all right,” Hanif Uncle said. “Listen, bring your family over some weekend. I’d love to listen to that Mughal girl’s story.”

  “Sure, Doctor sahib. Thank you.”

  The three of us squatted into our listing truck and Baba yanked the gearshift forward, beginning the drive home.

  “Abba-ji,” he said to Gramps. “You need to rein in your temper. You can’t pick a fight with these people. The doctor’s been very kind to me, but word of mouth’s how I get work and it’s exactly how I can lose it.”

  “But that woman is wrong, Rafiq,” Gramps protested. “What she’s heard are rumors. I told them the truth. I lived in the time of the pauper princess. I lived through the horrors of the eucalyptus jinn.”

  “Abba-ji, listen to what you’re saying! Please, I beg you, keep these stories to yourself. Last thing I want is people whispering the handyman has a crazy, quarrelsome father.” Baba wiped his forehead and rubbed his perpetually blistered thumb and index finger together.

  Gramps stared at him, then whipped his face to the window and began to chew a candy wrapper (he was diabetic and wasn’t allowed sweets). We sat in hot, thorny silence the rest of the ride and when we got home Gramps marched straight to his room like a prisoner returning to his cell.

  I followed him and plopped on his bed.

  “Tell me about the princess and the jinn,” I said in Urdu.

  Gramps grunted out of his compression stockings and kneaded his legs. They occasionally swelled with fluid. He needed water pills but they made him incontinent and smell like piss and he hated them. “The last time I told you her story you started crying. I don’t want your parents yelling at me. Especially tonight.”