Clarkesworld Magazine
Issue 83
Table of Contents
Cry of the Kharchal
by Vandana Singh
Shepherds
by Greg Kurzawa
Found
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
The Lovers
by Eleanor Arnason
Cilia-of-Gold
by Stephen Baxter
The Candlelit World: The Dark Roots of Myth and Fantasy
by Christopher Mahon
Decadence & Buckets of Blood: A Conversation with Holly Black
by Jeremy L. C. Jones
Another Word: Circles Rise Again
by Daniel Abraham
Editor's Desk: Returning to the Scene of the Crime
by Neil Clarke
Launch Point
Art by Julie Dillon
© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2013
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com
Cry of the Kharchal
Vandana Singh
She was no more than a breath, a tongue of air, tasting, sensing, divining. She swept through the hotel ramparts like the subtlest of breezes. She had done it: made time stand still. Her people, so scattered now, so weak, had helped her draw the power from the sandstorm, turning its energy against itself so that, for a brief moment, it lassoed time itself. Perhaps the moment would be long enough . . .
Incorporeal though she was, she still thought in physical terms. Thus she thought of the threads of stories that she held in her hands, ready to be woven into something that would change the fabric of reality. She thought of the heavy attire she had worn as queen, and the wings, the yearning for flight over the desert sands, the flight west. All that was gone, but she was still here. Six hundred years against the next few hours—how could mere hours matter against the weight of those years? And yet, if the stories came together . . .
The manager. The foreign poet. The woman. The boy.
It was time.
Avinash, running, crashed into a pillar at the edge of the courtyard. The physical pain brought him to his senses. He leaned against the pillar, panting, and surveyed the scene. Something had happened to the sandstorm. It rose above the hotel ramparts, a tsunami of sand, a hundred-headed cobra, a dark wave against the darkness, absolutely still. A faint susurrus of sand seemed only to amplify the silence. What had happened to the blaring alarm, the roar of the approaching storm? There were only soft sounds, the sigh of sand grains falling against a window, or the dance of a wisp of sand across the floor, borne on a breath of wind. And the bodies. Before him, in the great central courtyard, bodies sat in chairs, or leaned against pillars, or stood frozen in mid-run. Thin skeins of sand still blew about, filling plates and tureens, laps and elaborate hairdos, and the corners of eyes. But none of the eyes even blinked. Were they dead or alive? And why was he alone able to move?
“I am Avinash,” he said shakily into the darkness, as though to remind himself that he was real, that he had to live up to his name. He searched for her again, that comforting, mysterious presence in his mind, but she was turned away from him. “Queen!” he spoke without words, begging for her attention. She did not respond. Sometimes she got like that. He looked around the courtyard. The hotel had been rebuilt on the ruins of a medieval fort to bring to the twenty-first century the lost grandeur of that era. The courtyard had been designed on the same grand scale. Usually its vastness reminded him of his insignificance: he was only the tech person for the hotel’s computer system, a young man with no past and even less of a future. He had come here empty as a gourd, his small, inadequate soul rattling like a seed in the dried shell of his body, so that the scale of the rebuilt fort walls and the lavish excess of the decor always reminded him that he was nothing. Even the long-dead Queen rode his mind as though he was a beast of burden . . . yet what sweet possession! Surely she was the key to his coming glory.
Had time, itself, stopped? Why had he been spared, then?
The queen would know, but she was still turned from him. For months now he had indulged her machinations and schemes, petty though they seemed to him: collecting information, and acting on it to obtain desired results. “If you are to control people’s lives, Avinash,” the Queen had told him, “you must start small, by manipulating the little lives around you. Only then will you be able to touch the power within you.” So he had been doing according to her instructions, developing story-lines in real time, with real people, collecting information, informing, manipulating. He had found out that the manager was a closet alcoholic; the aged movie star, had a thing for young girls; and that the mad Bolivian poet was in love with an elusive woman . . . Then a word here, an act there, and events could be made to unfold according to plan. But the storm was something else. Surely he wasn’t yet powerful enough to conjure up a sandstorm, or to stop time? He asked the queen in the depths of his mind, but she was quiet, preoccupied, as though waiting.
Maybe, he thought, striding into the courtyard as he had never dared to do before—maybe it is I who have wrought this. Even if he hadn’t bargained for a sandstorm, perhaps it was a consequence of some unintended magic, an unleashing of power. He had finally grown large enough in spirit and sheer boldness to fill out and own his name: Avinash, the indestructible. He was somebody. He had power over the guests, frozen as they were—look at that young woman in the white silk, frozen in her chair—he could have his way with her if he wanted. He reached toward her.
But quite abruptly a swift, cold, feeling came over him, a wave of aloneness so sudden and icy that he withdrew his hand, trembling. The vastness that he had felt in himself vanished. He was nothing, nothing but a small child abandoned in a large, noisy, frightening railway station. Come back, he shouted to her in his mind, but there was only silence. The queen was gone right out of his mind. He staggered about, pleading with her, forgetting his moment of triumph, his arrogance, begging her forgiveness seeing nothing, feeling only the terrible emptiness. After a while the queen sighed back into his mind; everything slipped back into place and he was himself again, shaky but sane. She was playing with him; perhaps she was angry, jealous that he had thought of another woman (if only!). Although he had never seen her face, he had imagined it from the old paintings that remained from the original fort. Those almond-shaped eyes, the stern, sorrowful, remote gaze. She had kept herself remote from him also, refusing to reply to his first hopeless adoration of her, until he accepted that she needed only companionship, a tenantship in the spaces of his mind. He could never think of her as a ghost, although the hotel staff did embellish upon the old tragedy when they entertained the foreigners.
Out of habit, he glanced up at the balcony from which she had fallen to her death six hundred years ago. Now it was a place to be pointed to, and talked about, and the room adjoining it was a small museum commemorating the dead queen. Here some of the old paintings still hung, dreadfully marred by time, and on the shelves were the stone statuettes of the birds she had loved, the ones immortalized then and now in the window latticework, the kharchal of the desert—long-necked, with goose-like bodies and long, swift legs. Their eyes were set with semi-precious stones. The old story didn’t mean much to him; not as much as her presence now, with him, a constant companion, someone to talk to, an advisor, guide to his own greatness.
Standing in the courtyard, he heard a sound. Half-lost in the sibilant whisper of sand and wind, there was a distant, unmistakable tapping. Someone was using a computer keyboard.
He followed the sound through the hazy dark until he realized he was going to his own room, and what he heard was someone using his own computer. Angry, fearful, he ran down the employees’ corridor until he reached his door. It was open; a tiny spiral stairway led down to the floor. From the top of it he could see, firstly, that the haze here was considerably thinner than outside, and secondly, his desk lamp was on, the only electric light in the entire hotel as far as he knew. Before his laptop at the desk sat a familiar figure: the odd-jobs boy and itinerant goatherd, Raju.
The boy turned before Avinash could call out. The round, obstinate face, the guarded gaze, the somewhat mocking adolescent smile. Stick-thin, wearing a second-hand pair of blue jeans, and a faded green t-shirt. What was he doing here? He wasn’t supposed to come to Avinash’s room without permission. But before Avinash could scold him the boy got up, sighing with relief, gesturing Avinash to the chair he had vacated.
“Boss, you are alive, thank god. I’ve looked and looked for you. Listen, you have to do something!”
“What are you doing here? How is it you aren’t like . . . like the others? Oh never mind, get away!”
Avinash shoved him lightly and sat down before the computer. The boy had opened the secret window to the Queen’s Game, the tangle of storylines and manipulations, and had been checking status. All right, so no harm done. The story of the Bolivian poet was important, or so she had told him, and he had located the woman whom the poet sought, and he had sent her a message purportedly from a state government minister about funding for a nature preserve. She was on her way. Was she here yet? Hard to tell because she only stopped at the Maharajah, the 4-star hotel restaurant, on her way to Delhi or Jaipur. She’d never checked in as a guest on her earlier visits. He looked at the other stories that were currently in progress. Expose the manager’s drinking so as to ultimately humiliate the man into resigning. Arrange it so that the two gay men could get a room together. Find a way for the movie star to fund a sound-and-light show—a little bribe and threat had proved effective. All of these stories showed progress, and one was complete. The manager had departed in disgrace, and his room, the best in the old wing, (once a royal storeroom) was in the process of being re-done. Avinash checked his online bank information and saw that the money, from whatever unknown source, had already poured in for the successful outcome of the manager’s story.
Nowhere in the tangled web of stories was there any hint of a sandstorm.
He turned to the boy who was his accomplice. Raju had been good at gathering information, and in return Avinash had helped him learn to read and write. The boy claimed to be descended from the old kings, which Avinash had dismissed with a show of hilarity—partly because he suspected it could be true. He’d heard that the descendants of so many of the old rulers now lived in poverty, having lost wealth and prestige. Raju had had neither, only a burning ambition to make something of himself. His dream was to live and work in a big city like Jaipur or Delhi, to have a job with some dignity. He didn’t think running errands for hotel staff or herding goats in the off-season were dignified enough. Avinash found his mixture of precocity and innocence sometimes annoying, sometimes touching.
“There’s nothing I can do . . . now,” he said reluctantly. He didn’t like to appear less than competent before this boy, who seemed to believe quite readily that Avinash had something to do with the storm. “There is a reason why the timelines have stopped.” Yes, that sounded plausible, even to his own ears. “The timelines of all the stories got in a knot, see. All tangled. We have to wait.”
The boy gave him a skeptical look, then grinned.
“You don’t know what’s happening either. But it will come to you, boss! You always come through.”
Avinash had not told him about the queen. The voices, the conversations in his head, the reassuring feeling of companionship, of guidance. But what he said about waiting was true. He had to wait for her to start talking to him again. He felt her presence lightly, as though she was preoccupied. Perhaps she, too, was waiting.
The poet peered out of his balcony. Never had he seen anything like it: the great, rearing heads of the sandstorm held immobile so many hundreds of meters up into the sky. He coughed and wrapped his linen handkerchief more closely about his face. The haze was thick here. When the storm’s roaring had given way to the sudden silence, he had found his way out to the darkened lounge and had seen with horror the silhouettes of figures frozen in various postures. Why had he been spared? Pachamama, he whispered, what have you wrought now? He hadn’t spoken that old name, the name of the earth mother, for years. All he had suspected of the world—that the mundane was only a veneer—he now knew to be true. Some deep power had stirred, and caused everything to stand still, even the storm. He thought about Lalita, and the first time they’d met, and how sure he had been that he would meet her again. The fellow Avinash seemed so certain. But who knew where she was, now, the elusive Lalita? He hoped fervently that she hadn’t been at the steps of the hotel when the storm hit, that she wasn’t among those so grotesquely frozen. A terror came upon him that if he ventured out he would find her among the others, suspended between life and death.
And then upon its heels came a thought that he dismissed immediately: perhaps this was the way his talent would return. His once prodigious talent, honed in La Paz, blossoming in Spain and Italy, driven mysteriously from him one night in Madrid some seven years ago, after which he had been unable to write another word. He could write letters, instructions, but not poetry. He had tried deceit; he’d written a shopping list and edged it toward poetry, without success. He lived off his already famous work for a while, and then he had taken to the road, journeying as far as Siberia, South Africa, and now India, hoping his power over words would return. Nothing had happened so far. The only poetic thoughts in his head were those of other poets, most notably Bolivia’s Jaime Saenz, posthumous mentor, Poet-in-Residence of his mind. Even his meeting with Lalita, when he’d had a thought as close to poetry as he’d come in years, had not yielded anything.
He had met her in the Thar desert a year and a half ago. He had thought that a landscape matching the privation of his soul and his bank account would work some kind of magic on him, but it hadn’t been that kind of magic. He had been captivated by the stark and unpretentious beauty of the scrublands and the sand dunes, the small villages with the sparse, thorny trees, and the people and animals who made their home in this inhospitable place. So different from the arid beauty of the altiplano where he’d grown up—yet the vastness of the sky felt like home.
He was sitting outside a tea stall at a village one afternoon, awaiting his first sandstorm. Most of the people who frequented the tea stall had already left to prepare their belongings and families for the storm. The owner of the stall had packed up too, but Felipe Encina Amaru, child of the Andes, wanted to stay and see the storm approach so he sat outside on a wooden chair after everyone had fled, sipping tea in a thick glass with bubbles, watching the western sky darken. The sandstorm, approaching, was an enormous brown, roaring wave, dwarfing all that lay before it. There was a stillness in the air, and grit, and he felt the great, pregnant pause.
She came out of the storm. So it seemed to him. In fact her rented jeep had broken down before she had reached the village and she had been walking for a while. But when he raised his eyes from the glass she was striding toward him, in a long orange shirt over gray pants, her blue scarf blowing behind her in the sudden, swift wind. Her hands fumbled at her neck adjusting her scarf, but to the poet she was manipulating the reins of the storm, which towered behind her, a beast of impossible proportions. She walked to the tea stall, looked in, seemed disappointed that it was empty. She looked directly at him for the first time.
“Got a car?” her voice was urgent but unhurried. He felt himself drowning and had to gather himself to nod wordlessly toward the blue Zen.
“ . . . I wish to know what wind carries you,” Felipe declaimed silently in the words of Sa
enz, as he started the car. A wild hope filled him as they rattled toward Jaipur.
She was an ornithologist studying an endangered bird, the Great Indian Bustard. She described it with her voice and hands. A large bird, friendly, inquisitive eyes, swift runner through the desert scrublands. “Think of it like a little ostrich. Or a large goose. ” She laughed easily, but her eyes were sad. She told him she fell in love with the bird at a fair in New Delhi when she was a child. He imagined her face pressed to the glass, the bird coming up to her unafraid, curious. “I actually felt a kind of recognition,” she told him, looking at him directly, as though to see whether he understood. She had questions for him about Bolivia’s new law granting rights to Mother Earth. “You guys got it right,” she said. She wanted to know more about it. He told her he hadn’t been back in a long time, and all he knew was that it was hard to implement the law. “Greed,” he said.
He found himself talking to her without effort. He had spent his childhood tagging along with his mother, hawking herbs in the Mercado de las Brujas. The streets and alleyways, the women with their charms and amulets and dried animal parts, the light of the sky between the narrow, upwinding lanes—had been his world until his uncle took him in. His uncle worked as a janitor in an office building in the modern part of the city. In the two-room tenement that was his home, there were all kinds of strays—a cousin from a remote village, a runaway child, a street dog or two. Always, there would be someone in need, knocking at the door of his uncle’s heart. The uncle would frown and wonder how he would house the next abandoned soul. “Hell, what’s another one?” he’d say at last, resignation mingled with relief, nodding to the boy or animal, finding a place in the already crowded rooms for the newcomer. Some weekends Felipe would spend with his mother, south of the city, gathering herbs. From here he could see the city of La Paz reaching up the mountainsides, higher every year; if he turned around, there was the white peak of the Illimani, a wave flung up into the sky. His poet’s heart had been forged here, in the thin air of the altiplano, in the market’s narrow alleyways, among his uncle’s rescued flotsam, under the clear blue sky of winter, in the spring rain.
Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 83 Page 1
