Silk & Steel

by Ellen Kushner

  I awoke to the silence of the snowy forest, imprisoned by the iron-strong grip of two skeletons. Above me stood the necromancers’ leader, his white robes stained red, his shaven head tattooed with the symbol of their order. His smile was triumphant, and his sword flashed silver-blue as it descended like the unfurling of a broken promise down into my chest.

  I die, and the memory starts anew.

  I cannot stop remembering. My breath comes fast and sharp and uncontrolled and I grip the stone beneath me, desperate for something to hold. I feel hunted without my hammer.

  * * *

  This is how the librarian finds me, crying on the steps of her library. I flinch at her hand on my shoulder. She helps me up, and I follow her inside and up the stairs to her living quarters. If she says words, I do not parse them. She places a mug of steaming beef broth in my hands, and I am brought back to my body.

  I sit at her kitchen table and watch her cook dinner. She flows from one task to another, like a dancer who has practiced their moves five thousand times before.

  It is hard not to admire her, to be grateful for her late-coming mercy. I want to stare at the way her wide hips move beneath the blue of her gown. But I must hold tight to my anger. I must not forget how she dismissed me. She is just like the Iolans, who prioritize their legalities over kin and compassion.

  As she cooks, and the scope of the meal becomes apparent, I fear she hopes to trap me with a debt of hospitality. I have nothing to offer in return but myself, and I am bound by other obligations.

  “Are you cooking all this for me?” I ask. “You don’t have to do that.” Secretly, I am joyous, my nose intoxicated with the scent of her food, my stomach desperate for sustenance after days of scant meals during the strike.

  She turns and smiles and takes a taste of the sauce she is reducing. “Oh! I cook this much every night. What’s the point of being dead if you can’t enjoy yourself?”

  I do enjoy myself. There are spices I have never tasted before; everything is smothered in peppers, though not all the dishes are spicy. After the meal, we drip honey on hollow fry-bread. Cmlech have mercy on my stomach—I am stuffed, yet I cannot stop.

  She watches me, eyes obscured by the steam rising from her mug. “So, my mysterious Btta. You appear in my library with no card, and no entry record. And there aren’t any passages to the surfaces nearby, so I doubt you walked here still alive.” She raises an eyebrow. “You have no idea how it happened?”

  “No.”

  “And you follow a death god, but won’t say which one.” She grins. “You’re going to make me guess, aren’t you?”

  “I would prefer if you didn’t.”

  “Your clothes and your accent make me think you’re from Iolas.”

  “Ytarra,” I correct her reflexively with my island’s true name.

  “Does anyone still call it that? But if you’re Iolan—sorry, Ytarran—and you worship a death god you won’t talk about...” She taps her chin. “Cmlech!”

  A hiss escapes my lips. “Keep that name out of your mouth. My god has enemies, and a bad death comes to those who don’t keep their worship hidden.”

  Cmlech is a god of death, but not the death of the individual. The servants of Cmlech work for the death of empire, the death of the systems that press their boots on the necks of the powerless. This is why worship of our god must be done in secret.

  She laughs with more sadness than mirth. “Dear, we are already dead. We get to leave all that behind us when we die.” She takes my hand. Her pulse is warm beneath her soft skin. I cannot look up into her eyes. “Feel my hand. Look around you. You are safe here.”

  I pull my hand away, as my eyes blur with tears. How can I be safe with this woman who ferrets out my secrets, who tempts me with compassion I so badly want to accept? She is too much like the Iolans, usurper-lords of our island, who hold gold and paper in one hand and a whip in the other, who consort with necromancers that plot not just to steal our wealth but defile our dead.

  I surge upward, knocking my chair backwards, and flee to her sitting room.

  Unlike the Iolans, Librarian Hillie knows when to stop tugging a thread with pain on the end of it. She lets me be in her sitting room, and when she comes to apologize, she does so without touching or staring. She accepts my stone silence as response, not pressing me for forgiveness.

  When she offers her bed, I refuse. In Ytarra, a bed is just a place to sleep—my kin-workers and I all share a bed—but I have heard that foreigners conflate beds with couples and sex. I don’t know what she means with her offer, or how to ask. I refuse her three times before she relents and makes up the couch.

  Sleep takes me quickly, but so do dreams of my death. I awaken with a desperate scream, my body sweat-stained and sheet-tangled. Hillie rushes in and envelops me in a hug. She is so soft, and her scent reminds me of huddling beneath a warm quilt on a snowy day.

  I want so badly to sink into her embrace; I hate my desire for this woman who is simultaneously enraging and compassionate. My skin is suddenly too hot. I roar and I curse her for invading my privacy. She flees the sitting room with an apology. My pillow is wet with tears before I fall asleep again.

  * * *

  In the morning, she serves fried eggs on a bed of spicy beans and rice. She does not mention the night before. Why should I be grateful for that small mercy? Instead, she explains the difficulties in getting me to Cmlech.

  The underworld is a physical place, with real geography. It is full of gods who work against each other, and full of humans who bring their notions of borders and fear of foreigners.

  Working out a route to Cmlech’s domain—and acquiring the necessary paperwork for safe passage—will be a difficult and time-consuming task. Librarian Hillie tells me this with a grin, as if the challenge excites her.

  In the meantime, I am trapped in the library, surrounded by books and indebted to a woman whose questions I do not wish to answer.

  Hillie puts me to work: mopping floors, cleaning bathrooms, fighting the book-borer beetle infestation. She instructs me in the fire-prevention protocol, carefully demonstrating the emergency fire-suppression failsafe: a god-stone–powered device that will flood the library with an inert gas—suffocating the flames and anyone not wearing a breathing mask.

  When I have learned the routine of the library, she asks me to help shelve books.

  I tell her I cannot read, and she gasps like I murdered her goat. Then her face turns joyous. “I can teach you! We’ll do daily lessons after closing time.”

  I cringe at the idea. “A kind offer, but no, thank you.”

  I try to change the subject, but she is so bewildered by my refusal to learn, so desperate to understand, that she hounds me to explain.

  There is a reason Ytarrans keep their history orally. The Iolans weren’t the first to invade our island; they won’t be the last. Books can be burned or altered to suit the invader’s narrative, but the words in our head are beyond their reach. Our children do not learn to read so they cannot be taught false words. We Ytarrans know our true history; we will always resist assimilation and extermination.

  As I explain this, horror spreads across her face. She doesn’t argue with me, but our conversations wither down to polite things like, “Would you pass the pepper flakes?” or, “Please tell the young couple in row thirteen to go have sex somewhere else?” Does my illiteracy offend her? Does she think I hate her because she is a librarian? She isn’t Iolan; my unease around reading has nothing to do with her.

  A part of me relishes the silence. Yet at night, my mind cannot help but dwell on the idea of Hillie and me on the couch, our thighs touching, her hand guiding mine as I trace out the letters on the book before us. I hate the way the thought slips into my head in the undefended moments before sleep. Yet it is preferable to the dreams of my death, of the falling sword, the silent grin of the skeletons, and the screams of my kin-workers.

  When I awaken crying, Hillie does not come to me in her intricately embroi
dered nightgown. She does not surround me with the softness of a hug, wipe the tears from my eyes, and bring me a cup of something warm and soothing. Why do I even want that?

  I must miss my kin-workers, whom I shared a large bed with. If I awoke in the night, it was to the soft sounds of sleep, knowing I was surrounded by love and mutual protection.

  Now when I wake, I am utterly alone.

  * * *

  One morning, breaking the silence of breakfast, she says, “Would you mind if I asked how you died?”

  “I was murdered. My kin-workers...” I struggle for words, for breath, for respite against the sudden pounding of my heart. She waits for me to say more, and while I still fear the memory of my death, the pressure of holding it in wears on me.

  I tell her of the quarry, of Myrna and our legal struggles. When I mention the necromancers, she sucks her breath in.

  I ask, “They’re here too?” The back of my neck tingles. I feel the need to check that the door is locked.

  Hillie nods. “The Order for the Utilization of the Spirit. I’ve had trouble with them.” Hillie tenses, like she, too, fears they might walk through the door. “We have an original set of The Eight Deaths of the Mantean Hetwoman. I think we’re the only branch that has all eight original volumes.”

  “Why do they want it?”

  “I haven’t read all eight volumes, but my understanding is that the Hetwoman’s autobiography contradicts their accounts of the founding of their order—and contains several gorgeously illustrated schematics of their bone-rites. They claim it as their property, and want me to either hand it over or destroy it, along with our entire section on bone-lore.”

  “Will you?”

  She looks like I slapped her. “Of course not! Joal preserve me. I moved the volumes to the restricted reading room. But they kept coming round, threatening me, and vandalizing the library. So I confiscated their library cards and escorted them out. They won’t be coming back.”

  I don’t share her confidence. The necromancers have been here, and I am sure they will return. They will come for the book; they will come for me.

  I cannot be defenseless again. I flee downstairs to the supply closet. Surely in this mess of janitorial supplies and bookmaking tools there is a weapon?

  I search through the bookbinder’s knives; the blades are sharp but short, useless against a sword’s reach. My hands shake and my grip is weak, but I can’t stop to calm myself.

  I grin when I see the book-backing hammers. I pick up the largest, an iron head and a nearly two-foot haft. Small compared with my rock-breaking hammer, but it feels achingly familiar in my hands.

  When I show up for work, Hillie sees the hammer strapped to my belt. She catches herself before she asks me about it, and I have to hide my smile.

  She does not protest when I take the hammer to bed with me. A day later she has—without comment—installed a bracket next to the bed for me to hang the hammer.

  * * *

  At dinner, I ask if she has made progress on a route to Cmlech. She frowns and says, “It would go faster if you could help me, if you learned to read.”

  I grunt and look away. It’s good she doesn’t know how tempted I am, how much I hate my own uselessness.

  We explore other options.

  Hillie asks, “Weren't you a quarry-worker? Why not tunnel upward, back to the surface and the world of the living? Like the legend of Boros Rock-Breaker.”

  I try not to laugh. Stone is my expertise—I explain in detail the difficulties involved in traversing a mile of bedrock with nowhere to put the removed stone. She smiles as I talk, basking in the breadth of my knowledge.

  The next day, Hillie explains that when a person dies in the underworld, they will return to their god’s domain, just like when they originally died.

  She tells me this while making dinner, a knife in one hand and her eyebrow raised. I jump up from the table, eyes locked on the knife. She thinks she is being funny, but I still remember the feeling of the blade that killed me. I am not willing to die again to test her theory. I fear that whatever sent me to this wrong underworld—whether necromancer’s magic or cosmic accident—still clings to me, and could return me somewhere worse.

  Despite myself, I fall into a routine. After weeks of nightmares, I sleep through the night for the first time. Every corner of the library is familiar to me now. When did it begin to feel more like a home than a prison?

  * * *

  On the day we have cumin-crusted leg of lamb, Hillie places a large book on the kitchen table. The wooden cover bears an illustration of the Cloister of the Setting Sun, done in gold, silver, and coral. I stay silent; I don’t pick it up. I won’t rise to her bait.

  I avoid looking at the book, not wanting to see her smile when I take an interest. Yet how can I resist? Ytarrans still tell stories of the glory of the art held within the Cloister, of the beauty of the building itself, of the way the sun would shine through the god-stone–veined marble. I have only ever known it in its present form: crumbling and blackened by the Iolans’ burning-oil throwers.

  I make it three days before I succumb to temptation. The book is full of illustrations of Ytarra the way it used to be. There are people who look like me, but wearing expensive and old-fashioned clothes. On the last page, there is a picture of a massive, marble tower rising from the hill where the Iolans’ brick administrative palace now stands.

  There are words, too, but not written in the Iolan script. For the first time in my life, I want to read.

  The next morning, I confront Hillie. She must tell me what this book is, what it says. She smiles that damnable smile and I almost throw the book across the room. Instead, I clutch it to my heart. Yes, it is a book, but it contains something precious.

  It happens like one of my daydreams. We sit on the couch together, her soft hips touching mine. I struggle between flinching away and pressing myself closer to her.

  She guides my hand as I sound out the letters. Her perfume smells like the wind in the pine trees of home, and my heart thumps and my stomach drops. It is too much; I pull my hand away and hold myself tense.

  Do I want her to kiss me? I don’t even know how to ask. There are no pine trees here, and Hillie would not understand if I gifted her a sap-smeared branch. What I really want is to stop wanting her.

  I can feel her looking at me. Time grinds slow as I stare at the floor until I cannot bear to look away. I bring my head up slowly, trembling at the effort. Our eyes meet and she is full of concern for me; her smile tentative.

  “Btta,” she says, then pauses. “You are so strong.” One of her hands grips the muscles of my arm, the other she places on the space just below my neck. I cannot breathe; I quiver with the desire to leap away, but I fear what I will lose if I do.

  She dips her head. “I thought that meant I couldn’t hurt you, but...” She bites her lip, searching for words. “I want to know you. To know what you need...”

  She moves her hand to my cheek, holds it gently, and pulls me toward her. Her kiss is soft and sweet and far too short. No! Why did she stop?

  Hillie jumps up from the couch and stands before me, her face a page I cannot read.

  She asks me, “Do you want this?”

  I panic. Why did she have to fucking ask? Why is she always so full of questions I can’t answer? I am pinned to the couch, shaking apart with the wanting of her, and with the hating of myself for the wanting. She waits patiently for my answer, no fear or judgment on her face.

  I can’t speak, but I nod and she takes my hand and pulls me up and leads me to the bed. She shoves me down onto the mattress and climbs over me and I cannot stop smiling. My tightly wound heart unfolds in the gentle heat of her embrace.

  I awaken beside her the next day and I am still smiling. The quilt is warm, the mattress soft, and I am an unrippled pool of joy. She wakes and I look away until I feel her hands on me, her skin on my skin, her warmth to my warmth.

  After we emerge from the quilt, I watch as she ca
refully chooses her outfit.

  “Were you very rich before you died?” I ask from the bed, wondering how she could afford such an expensive wardrobe.

  She turns, surprised, and I meet her eyes. “Have you never met a librarian before? I suppose not. I read that the last one we sent openly to your island was murdered as a spy.”

  “The last one you sent openly?”

  “Joal—god of libraries—demands we collect all information everywhere. Even the most inhospitable places or people must be documented.” She shivers at some uncomfortable memory.

  “Even if they don’t want to be? Neither my people nor my god want our secrets exposed on the pages of your books.”

  She throws her hands up, frustrated. “We aren’t publishing your secrets! Do you really think you’re the only people with a mystery cult? The library would have been burnt long ago if we revealed the secrets of other gods.”

  She comes to the bed, sits beside me, and holds my cheek. “We only write down what we see with our eyes.”

  She takes my hand in her own. “What we feel with our hands.”

  She brings my hand to her round belly. “What we taste with our mouths.”

  She draws a finger along my earlobe. “And what we hear with our ears. We only take what is freely given.”

  I open my mouth to argue, and she tries to quiet me with a kiss. I push her away. “No! Don’t try to silence me.”

  “I just wanted... No. You’re right, I’m sorry.” She draws back, face marred by shame.

  She reaches out for a hug, and I’m torn whether or not to accept. What do I do with this mess of contradictions? Her mercy and beauty and skill on one hand, and on the other hand her boundary-crossing obsession with learning and knowing things.

  She sees my hesitation and turns away. I curse silently. Perhaps I can teach her, perhaps not, but for now, I need her and I want her and I care for her. I grab her hand and pull her close and in a moment we are whole again.