Asimov's SF, February 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "We all judge,” Kanika repeated.

  Durratse led Kanika inside. It was late, so he did not invite Njeri in. He simply nodded his head and closed the door.

  The roughly hewn wood of the door had shrunk with weather and age, and she could still see them through the gaps in the wood. She wanted to argue with Kanika, to defend herself. Kanika insisted on focusing on the worst of the wall, the worst of her, the cutting. Like Odion, she paid no mind to the important work of sewing. She healed people, just as Durratse did, and her patients needed more healing than anyone.

  * * * *

  When Njeri went out to stoke her cooking fire shortly after sunrise, the village was bustling with unfamiliar guardsmen. The new arrivals were Upyatu—a tall people, with broad flat feet. She watched them as she boiled plantains for breakfast. They were more boisterous than Bahtir's men; they spoke in loud voices punctuated with barking laughter. Their heads were covered with elaborate beaded headdresses, and their shields were round and crimson. It could mean only one thing. The capital had fallen.

  Njeri pounded the boiled plantains into mash. It made little difference to her, the struggle for power. One general was replaced by another, but they all wanted the same work done. She wished for peace not out of support for any current ruler, but because in times of war she had to put more people to the wall. She took her mash back to the hut, where Odion was waiting.

  "The new general brought two prisoners for the wall,” he said, speaking quickly. “He wants to hang them together."

  Njeri divided the mash into two bowls and topped each one with slices of green mango. How could Odion be excited about such a thing? The Maiwatu were his people. Besides, to put criminals on the wall was one thing, but to leave one there for the time it took to flay a second was cruel. Dissecting them simultaneously, but slowly, would be no better. “Cruelty. Already I dislike the man."

  Odion stirred his mash. “I thought, with two men, I might be charged with opening one of them."

  "We have but one obsidian blade,” Njeri said, “and the new general will want the services of a surgeon, not an apprentice. I will open them, and you will assist, as we have always done."

  A guardsman came to fetch them before they'd finished their morning meal. He was paler even than Odion, with a reddish tint to his skin, like dry dusty earth. Shorter, too, than most Upyatu warriors, and injured. Njeri could just make out the outlines of a bandage beneath the guardsman's tightly fitted leather tunic.

  "General Yafeu commands your presence,” the guardsman's voice was nasal, and far higher pitched than Njeri expected. Not a man at all, but a woman with her breasts bound. The warrior laughed at Njeri's surprise. “Call me Zola, and a woman. Bahtir would not allow women in the fight, he wanted them only for his bed. Yafeu is better. With him I can show my strength in both places."

  Zola grinned at Odion, exposing teeth sharpened into points. Her stare had an animal quality to it, something almost predatory. Judging from his reluctance to meet the woman's stare, Odion did not find her aggression appealing. Njeri didn't like it either; Zola had a showiness about her that was distinctly off-putting. Not like Kanika's understated strength.

  Njeri took up her obsidian blade, protected in its leather sheath. “The general will set us to work immediately then?"

  "In a land where power shifts like flowing water, there is no later. Everything worth doing is worth doing now.” Zola glanced again at Odion, but again he gave her no response. She shrugged and led them to the guardhouse. A pair of goats were tethered outside, undoubtedly part of her payment for serving the new general.

  Before they entered, Zola tapped the door three times with one end of her bow, announcing their arrival to those inside. The guardhouse looked the same as it always had. Sleeping bunks lined the walls, and supplies were stacked in neat piles beneath and around the beds. Only the occupants had changed, the Maiwatu guardsmen replaced by the Upyatu.

  General Yafeu sat atop a makeshift throne at the back of the room. He was a young man, barely older than Odion, and he had surrounded himself with female guardsmen. His guards were in full uniform, but the general's chest was bare except for a piece of vibrant yellow citrine that hung on a leather cord. It was carved into the shape of a lion's head, reminiscent of the decorations on the citrine throne in the capital. Two other stones hung from his belt, Bahtir's tiger-eye and the rose quartz of Bahtir's predecessor. At the base of Yafeu's throne were two men, bound and gagged. Njeri was unsurprised to see that Bahtir was one of the prisoners. The other was a man she did not recognize.

  Zola stood to the left side of the general's throne and whispered something into his ear.

  "So you are the Surgeon of Stonewall,” Yafeu said.

  "Yes,” she replied, “and this is my apprentice.” She did not bother with her name, or Odion's, for Yafeu had the look of a man who cared not about such things.

  "And the wall will show these men for the evil creatures they are?” Yafeu asked, gesturing at his prisoners and curling his lips as though the very thought of them repulsed him.

  "The wall reveals the innermost secrets of our nature,” Njeri replied. “Those placed on the wall can hide nothing."

  Odion stepped forward. “If they have shadow in them, the wall will expose it."

  Njeri resisted the urge to rebuke her apprentice, but only because she didn't wish to fight in front of the general. It was not his place to speak in this situation, and it diminished Njeri that he would misbehave like this.

  General Yafeu laughed. “I like this apprentice of yours. He shows spirit, and a willingness to please."

  Njeri forced herself to nod and smile, even as Yafeu let his gaze linger on her apprentice. The general's words held the promise of intimacy that Odion had long sought with Njeri, and the boy was lonely enough that he might be swayed by the man's attention. She would have to be careful.

  A guardsman entered without knocking and knelt, with his head bowed, in the center of the room. He was coated in sweat and dirt, and panted as though he had run the entire way from the capital.

  "Go.” Yafeu waved them away. “I will send you the prisoners when I'm finished here, and you can begin your work."

  The wall was three times as tall as Njeri, and thicker than the length of her arm. It stretched twice the length of the village, winding east into the hills like a crystal snake. The morning sun glinted bright off the stones, if they could really be called stones. The wall was made from blocks as clear as glass, irregularly shaped but fit together so seamlessly that there was no need for mortar. According to Talib, the wall had once enclosed the entire nation of the Ancients. The fragments that remained were laid roughly in a circle, with the capital in the center.

  "The stone wall,” Yafeu said. “It's more impressive than the pitiful fragment in Zwibe. Though neither looks anything like stone."

  Odion showed no reaction to the mention of his home village. Instead, he answered the unasked question in Yafeu's comment. “They call it the stone wall because people used to throw stones at the condemned while they hung. You can see the cracks where rocks flew wide of their targets."

  "The practice was discarded centuries ago,” Njeri added, before Yafeu got any ideas. “You can see how damaging it was to the wall."

  Njeri did not mention that it also damaged the people that hung on the wall, making it impossible to sew them back together. General Yafeu shrugged, then waved his hand at the guardsmen. The two prisoners were marched out to stand before the wall. Njeri pressed her palm to the forehead of each man in a silent blessing. It was ironic that Bahtir, who had once feared the ghosts of the valley, now received a blessing that asked those same ghosts to protect him.

  "Don't do this,” Bahtir pleaded. She had heard such pleas before, many times, but never from a man who had ordered others onto the wall. The former general had always seemed so brave, but that had been an illusion of his power. Now that he had no power, he had no courage.

  Njeri brushed her fingertips agains
t the icy surface of the two mindstones in her pocket. She wondered if she would be brave, in Bahtir's place. She liked to think that she would be, knowing that the wall revealed only the truth—nothing more and nothing less. Kanika had been brave. The thought of her called back her assertion that Njeri had been wrong to put people on the wall. Did these men deserve such punishment? It wasn't her place to decide, it couldn't be. Her job was to cut and to sew.

  Odion paced in the periphery of her vision.

  She put a mindstone into the mouth of the older man first, and left him on the ground at the base of the wall. She moved on to Bahtir. Two guardsmen held him in place, one gripping each of his arms. She slid the glassy stone between his lips, and the life flowed out of his body. The guardsmen held him against the wall, and she pinned him there, driving shards of amethyst through the nine sacred points—palms and feet, hips and shoulders, and the final point through the nook at the base of his throat. The amethyst penetrated through his flesh, just until the tips touched the wall, and yet the attraction between the lavender shards and the clear stone held Bahtir firmly. His head drooped as though he bowed it in remorse, but once he was opened, smaller amethyst pins would hold the muscles of his face, and his head would no longer hang.

  Odion handed her the obsidian blade. Like the wall itself, the blade came from an older time. Mbenu, who made tools for the village, could knap a blade from obsidian, but his tools did not have the power of the Ancients in them. This blade slipped between the cells, and Njeri had learned through many years of training to trace the exact paths that would peel a man open without spilling a drop of blood.

  Her first cut sliced only skin, beginning at the top of Bahtir's forehead and moving down the midline, over his nose, and to his lips. There she paused and traced the outline of his mouth with the blade before picking up the midline once more. Chin, neck, chest, groin, all without a drop of blood. The only loss was a strand of his hair that grew exactly on the midline. Sliced away by her blade, it fell to the base of the wall.

  She sliced down the inner edge of each leg to the ankle, then drew the blade around to the front of each foot and into a gentle curve to the tip of the middle toe, completing the first vertical sequence. After that came a series of horizontal lines, branching out from the center. One cut along each arm, branching into five lines at the fingers. Evenly spaced cuts along the torso and legs so the skin would lie flat against the wall. Last, a series of lines radiating out from the center of his face, so that it would open like an exploding sun.

  Light streamed through his skin. Any darkness on his surface was artificial, a trick of the eyes and not an indication of his being. On the wall, skin of every color let the same amount of light pass through. Njeri passed her blade to Odion and wiped the sweat from her face.

  When she looked up, she saw Kanika, standing on the hillside, one face among many watchers. She stood near the top of the hill with the people of Stonewall, all of them staying as far from the wall as possible. The villagers had seen this many times, and attended now only because the general demanded it. A foolish demand, Njeri realized, for even if no one watched, the shame of these men would be forever sewn onto the surface of their skin. No army would follow a sewn general.

  Everyone on the hill judged these men. All except Kanika. She was there to judge Njeri, and simply by having begun the flaying, she had failed. Standing at her side, Odion held the obsidian blade lightly, as though it was made of air from the night sky. When she took it from him the weight of it pulled her down toward the earth. She had to ease the burden on her heart; she had to prove that Bahtir deserved this punishment. Instead of moving on to the next man, Njeri stayed with the former general, peeling away the muscles to get down to his bones.

  She placed the tip of the blade on Bahtir's breastbone, and leaned into it with all her weight. His breastbone split in two. She pried his ribcage open and revealed his shadows. They crawled like slugs from the core of his being, leaving trails of black slime behind them. This was her vindication, her proof that the punishment was just—but it was a hollow victory.

  Njeri could feel the eyes of every man, woman, and child on the hillside, boring into the back of her neck. They looked at Bahtir, not at her, but she felt as though she was the one whose heart was exposed. She wanted to throw down her blade, or smash it to slivers against the wall.

  The sunlight that passed through the wall cast no shadows. Even the stones that were flawed with a spiderweb pattern of cracks—scars from poorly aimed rocks of generations past—even those stones contained no darkness. Those imperfections on the wall simply broke the light into rainbows. It was a mockery of mankind. A mockery of Bahtir, whose shadowed heart was exposed for all to see.

  Judging from the sun, it was mid-afternoon now, and a plate of untouched food sat behind her. Odion must have offered it, but she did not remember waving it off. The boy stepped forward and sprinkled water on Bahtir's body to keep the tissue from drying out. When he finished, he came to her and put his hand on her shoulder. He could see that she was suffering, and Njeri knew he would gladly take over her task.

  The second man lay unconscious in the dirt, his mind still locked away in stone. He was older, his hair a pale gray, almost white in the bright glare of the wall. Njeri could see the outline of his bones; he was underfed, or ill, or both.

  Njeri didn't know the man's name.

  Two guardsmen held his limp body against the wall and Njeri pinned him into place. She raised her blade, holding it at the man's head, at the starting point for the series of incisions she had made a hundred times before. It didn't matter that the man was old. It didn't matter that she didn't know who he was or what he had done. She had opened Kanika, she could do this.

  "Do you tire?” Odion whispered when the pause grew too long. “I can bear this burden for you."

  Njeri could not pass the blade to her apprentice, not at this moment, not in this way. Not even if the boy was ready, which Njeri doubted. This was a decision she had to make, to cut or not to cut. If she couldn't open this man, it meant that Kanika had been right—that in thinking it was not her place to pass judgment, she had been judging just the same. The blade quivered in her hand, and a droplet of blood appeared on the man's forehead.

  "Give me the blade,” Odion said, holding out his hand.

  "No,” Njeri said. This was her duty, and had been for many years. She could not escape from this, not now, not ever. To fail in her duty would be an act against General Yafeu. She could feel his gaze boring into her from the hillside, waiting, judging, finding her wanting.

  "What is the delay?” General Yafeu called out. “Your task is not yet finished, woman."

  "Who is this man?” Njeri asked. “What is his crime?"

  "That is no business of yours.” Yafeu's voice held amusement. He found this entertaining. Like a circus act, or a play. This was the man who Njeri had trusted to pass judgment. If she had believed herself unfit to decide the fate of others, surely this man was worse. Which made Njeri worse for having accepted his orders.

  Njeri couldn't do it. She couldn't open this man that she didn't even know. She tore an amethyst pin out of his hand and reached for the one in his shoulder. Guardsmen rushed in to restrain her, and she put up no fight. The obsidian blade was taken from her.

  "Open him,” Yafeu said, speaking to Odion.

  "No!” Njeri cried. “Please, let him go."

  "At last, a statement with conviction.” Yafeu smiled. “Will you take his place, then? Do you believe so strongly in this man that you would face the wall instead of him?"

  Njeri knew her motives weren't pure. She wanted to save the man, yes, but not for his sake. She wanted to save him to make up for all the times she'd cut people open blindly. She wanted to make amends for opening Kanika without even asking of her crime. But surely it was better to do the right thing for the wrong reason than to not do it at all.

  Odion stood before her. His eyes brimmed with tears. He had wanted to prove himself toda
y, but not this way. Even with all his impatience and ambition, he still loved her. There was hope for him yet.

  "Yes,” Njeri said. “I will take the man's place."

  "Pin her up,” the general ordered. “Boy, you can gut them both."

  Njeri managed two steps toward Yafeu before the guardsmen closed in and restrained her. “It could kill him. Especially at the hands of the inexperienced."

  "You had your chance to do it, and if the boy kills him, the ghost will curse him, not me,” Yafeu said. “I can't let an enemy go free."

  Njeri turned to Odion. “Open me first. I can stand to lose a few drops of blood, and you will do better with the old man if your hands are practiced with the blade."

  "I don't have a mindstone,” he said. His whole body shook, and he reeked with the sweat of fear. “We only brought two mindstones."

  The general would not be pleased. She wondered if he would order her opened without the stone. That way would surely mean death.

  "Take this one.” It was Kanika, her voice soft and close. In her hand was the mindstone that had held her mind, the one Njeri had given her to keep. The guardsmen moved to encircle her, but backed away at the sight of her scars. She was a ghost, a curse, a plague. Njeri couldn't believe she hadn't noticed it before, the punishment that continued after the wall.

  "I will be there when you wake. We can face the world together,” Kanika said. She brushed her hand against Njeri's cheek.

  "Touching,” General Yafeu said, “but it's time for you to go back to the hill. Unless you'd like another turn on the wall? I don't think anyone has ever faced it twice."

  Kanika kissed Njeri's forehead, exactly on the spot that Odion would begin the first incision. She lingered a moment more, then walked past General Yafeu and up to the top of the hill. Odion stepped forward. It hurt the boy to see Njeri with someone else, sharing the intimacy that he himself longed for.