“Yes,” our mother said, when we had thought fury sealed her lips. “ ‘She’s a bold one,’ the princess told me. ‘I pray the sun won’t burn her.’ And now I sting at the reproach in her eyes that day, the sorrow of the blight and of each year’s first morning.”
Our mother fell silent, and in that moment we all three realized the house was still. An ominous absence, colored gray as slate after the rains.
Below us, no one cried. Then our father’s footsteps, heavy on the stairs.
“It’s done,” our mother said, and held us so we could weep.
iv.
If the sun cannot mourn, the moon will.
If the moon cannot mourn, the earth will.
If the earth cannot mourn, may the river?
And if not the river, at least the hollow reeds
Whistling along its banks.
Leave him be, the one who whispers hoarsely there.
You have forsaken his joy,
You have buried his heart in the river’s clay.
What is left to him now but the memory of a song
The sweet red seed never tasted?
The years had twisted my husband, my Mazatlin, the way an oak tree will grow gnarled and hard around the persistent flowering of honey mushrooms. But I had always thought of his heart, like that of the oak, as strong and unblemished. I had not thought the rotting threads reached so deep. Now, I recall the heartsblood, the dreaded spore that shoots its threads through our veins, reaching blindly and steadily for the heart. And when it arrives, it takes root. It grips like a choke vine and when it grows, it blooms.
A fortnight, a death’s face, the saying goes. And I have never seen the heartsblood bloom, but he had. He told me the misshapen floret of that deadly mushroom does resemble a face, never revealed until the host’s life has fled. It bursts through the chest wall at the very end—a stranger’s face to bring you to death.
He had seen his uncle die like that, when he was a child. He understood why the gods enjoined us to never break the skin, to never profane our hearths with blood.
And yet he sliced her with the natleoc, he made her bleed before he killed her. The priests told him to, he said, as though I should congratulate him for his careful adherence to their instructions.
I told him I was leaving.
He had not stopped weeping since the moment her cries finally ceased, but he did then, his face frozen with shock.
“You too?” he said, as though our daughter had wanted to have her blood spilled, her throat crushed.
I saw our wedding in his eyes, heard the singers’ twining harmonies as we walked through the streets. I saw the nun break the pomegranate, scattering it seeds.
“I put the jeweled seeds between your lips,” my love had said, because he was no fool or illiterate, ignorant of his Ilticloc.
“Oh, to be the ruby in your lips,” I said.
“The longing and the light on your tongue.”
And so we had kissed, and if the seeds that day were bitter, I did not notice. I named my daughter for them.
“Where can you go, woman?” my husband asked, arm raised as though he would strike me, too. “Who would take in a disobedient wife?”
“The lady Xocotzin,” I said, for I remembered the story my sons had told me and held it like one of my daughter’s wreaths.
“You will shame me. We could have so much, soon.”
I shook my head. “They will never give you that post, Mazatlin. It was always meant for Ollin.”
The lady Xocotzin has welcomed me, and lets me share in her cacaotl. Each time, I pray for visions of my daughter, but I see nothing but heartsblood, a man rotting from within.
v.
The nochtli cactus-pear is orange for a princess
And white for the gods.
Merchants hawk their fruit like jewels, this Liminal Night.
But the girl who walks alone has no care for her belly.
Ayamotli lingers like pepper on her tongue.
What sound is that, what skillful notes
Draw her closer to the shadows?
It is the metl, laughing with his kind,
Feasting on Liminal visions, and each bite a song.
Her questions float between them—
After all,
They are traveling together.
The first time she finds you, it’s the Night of Liminal Dreaming, at the start of carnival. You have never met her before, and she is asking for a song.
“Sweet and sticky and rich, like a pear tart with curds and honey,” she says, and because it’s the first night, you understand. A few hours ago you too drank the ayamotli, the nectar of the gods, and in a few hours you too will be traveling.
You lift the reeds to your lips, and they are as familiar to you as your fingers and your breath. You play as she asks, a song of your people and of your childhood. “How far the sun?” cries the flute. “Near as your heart, far as your love’s.” She doesn’t know the tune, but she smiles, for it goes down sweet and sad, just like she wanted.
She is alone this first night, or has slipped away from a parental gaze occluded by visions of gauzy heavens, of powers only annually accessible.
And because it’s a Liminal Night, because the ayamotli has turned words to colors, smells to symphonies, songs to braided carpet, you ask her to go traveling with you. You know you shouldn’t, that hands so soft and hair so dark could only belong to one of them. They have taken your people’s land, outlawed your customs, sacrificed your children to their flaming god. They have shunned and exploited you, and they may kill you if they see you corrupting one of their daughters with your song.
But it is carnival, with more powers abroad than even this insatiable empire can constrain. You look at her clear, enchanted eyes—they are like the river, and she floats upon it. Concentrate, and so can you. You touch her hands and you both hover a few impossible inches above the mud brick pavement.
“Will you write a song for me?” she asks. “For the carnival and the river and the forbidden streets where your people live?”
“Now?” you say, startled.
She won’t meet your eyes. “I cannot stay long from my family. But songs remember where they were born—even on my side of the river.”
Just like one of them, to demand something so precious and pretend to have some right to it. Your fury boils the air around you yellow and green. This means nothing to her. You’re the ball in her game, the carnival is her field.
Her sandals smack the pavement. She’s lost the ayamotli’s grip. “You hate me,” she says.
“No.” And it hovers somewhere near the truth.
You imagine everything this girl represents, every wrong her people have committed against yours, every barbed boundary between your world and hers.
“What’s your name?” you ask.
She tells you as you both float away.
vi.
Only the mother wears mourning red.
Within convent walls, she does not see
The father, passed over and lonely
Finding no solace among the colors of the earth.
The brothers have gone to war—
One wears his sister’s token against his breast
One will die on the sun god’s mountain.
The metl has made a new song:
Yellow, for anger
Blue, for memory
Black, for oblivion.
On the banks of the Nanacoal,
A boar has trampled the reeds.
Father! His beauty is deeper than the sky! He sings, and he will weave a song for me when we marry. His eyes are so light, his hair so sleek. And we have flown through the city, over merchant’s courtyards and temple pyramids. We have slept with our heads pillowed on the waves, we have sunk to the bottom of the ocean and seen great volcanoes on the edge of a monstrous lake. We have sat by the river and stared at the sun and I have understood every song ever written.
Oh, Father! May you bless me, for I am
his.
They Shall Salt the Earth with Seeds of Glass, by Alaya Dawn Johnson
Nebula Nomination for Best Novelette 2013
It’s noon, the middle of wheat harvest, and Tris is standing on the edge of the field while Bill and Harris and I drive three ancient combine threshers across the grain. It’s dangerous to stand so close and Tris knows it. Tris knows better than to get in the way during harvest, too. Not a good idea if she wants to survive the winter. Fifteen days ago a cluster bomb dropped on the east field, so no combines there. No harvest. Just a feast for the crows.
Tris wrote the signs (with pictures for the ones who don’t read) warning the kids to stay off the grass, stay out of the fields, don’t pick up the bright-colored glass jewels. So I raise my hand, wave my straw hat in the sun—it’s hot as hell out here, we could use a break, no problem—and the deafening noise of eighty-year-old engines forced unwillingly into service chokes, gasps, falls silent.
Bill stands and cups his hands over his mouth. “Something wrong with Meshach, Libby?”
I shake my head, realize he can’t see, and holler, “The old man’s doing fine. It’s just hot. Give me ten?”
Harris, closer to me, takes a long drink from his bottle and climbs off Abednego. I don’t mind his silence. This is the sort of sticky day that makes it hard to move, let alone bring in a harvest, and this sun is hot enough to burn darker skin than his.
It’s enough to burn Tris, standing without a hat and wearing a skinny strappy dress of faded red that stands out against the wheat’s dusty gold. I hop off Meshach, check to make sure he’s not leaking oil, and head over to my sister. I’m a little worried. Tris wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important. Another cluster bomb? But I haven’t heard the whining drone of any reapers. The sky is clear. But even though I’m too far to read her expression, I can tell Tris is worried. That way she has of balancing on one leg, a red stork in a wheat marsh. I hurry as I get closer, though my overalls stick to the slick sweat on my thighs and I have to hitch them up like a skirt to move quickly.
“Is it Dad?” I ask, when I’m close.
She frowns and shakes her head. “Told me this morning he’s going fishing again.”
“And you let him?”
She shrugs. “What do you want me to do, take away his cane? He’s old, Libs. A few toxic fish won’t kill him any faster.”
“They might,” I grumble, but this is an old argument, one I’m not winning, and besides that’s not why Tris is here.
“So what is it?”
She smiles, but it shakes at the edges. She’s scared and I wonder if that makes her look old or just reminds me of our age. Dad is eighty, but I’m forty-two and we had a funeral for an eight-year-old last week. Every night since I was ten I’ve gone to sleep thinking I might not wake up the next morning. I don’t know how you get to forty-two doing that.
Tris is thirty-eight, but she looks twenty-five—at least, when she isn’t scanning the skies for reapers, or walking behind a tiny coffin in a funeral procession.
“Walk with me,” she says, her voice low, as though Harris can hear us from under that magnolia tree twenty feet away. I sigh and roll my eyes and mutter under my breath, but she’s my baby sister and she knows I’ll follow her anywhere. We climb to the top of the hill, so I can see the muddy creek that irrigates the little postage stamp of our corn field, and the big hill just north of town, with its wood tower and reassuring white flag. Yolanda usually takes the morning shift, spending her hours watching the sky for that subtle disturbance, too smooth for a bird, too fast for a cloud. Reapers. If she rings the bell, some of us might get to cover in time.
Sometimes I don’t like to look at the sky, so I sprawl belly-down on the ground, drink half of the warm water from my bottle and offer the rest to Tris. She finishes it and grimaces.
“Don’t know how you stand it,” she says. “Aren’t you hot?”
“You won’t complain when you’re eating cornbread tonight.”
“You made some?”
“Who does everything around here, bookworm?” I nudge her in the ribs and she laughs reluctantly and smiles at me with our smile. I remember learning to comb her hair after Mom got sick; the careful part I would make while she squirmed and hollered at me, the two hair balls I would twist and fasten to each side of her head. I would make the bottom of her hair immaculate: brushed and gelled and fastened into glossy, thick homogeneity. But on top it would sprout like a bunch of curly kale, straight up and out and olive-oil shiny. She would parade around the house in this flouncy slip she thought was a dress and pose for photos with her hand on her hip. I’m in a few of those pictures, usually in overalls or a smock. I look awkward and drab as an old sock next to her, but maybe it doesn’t matter, because we have the same slightly bucked front teeth, the same fat cheeks, the same wide eyes going wider. We have a nice smile, Tris and I.
Tris doesn’t wear afro-puffs any more. She keeps her hair in a bun and I keep mine short.
“Libs, oh Libs, things aren’t so bad, are they?”
I look up at Tris, startled. She’s sitting in the grass with her hands beneath her thighs and tears are dripping off the tip of her nose. I was lulled by her laugh—we don’t often talk about the shit we can’t control. Our lives, for instance.
I think about the field that we’re going to leave for crows so no one gets blown up for touching one of a thousand beautiful multi-colored jewels. I think about funerals and Dad killing himself faster just so he can eat catfish with bellies full of white phosphorus.
“It’s not that great, Tris.”
“You think it’s shit.”
“No, not shit—”
“Close. You think it’s close.”
I sigh. “Some days, Tris. I have to get back to Meshach in a minute. What is going on?”
“I’m pregnant,” she says.
I make myself meet her eyes, and see she’s scared; almost as scared as I am.
“How do you know?”
“I suspected for a while. Yolanda finally got some test kits last night from a river trader.”
Yolanda has done her best as the town midwife since she was drafted into service five years ago, when a glassman raid killed our last one. I’m surprised Tris managed to get a test at all.
“What are you going to do? Will you . . .” I can’t even bring myself to say “keep it.” But could Yolanda help her do anything else?
She reaches out, hugs me, buries her head in my shirt and sobs like a baby. Her muffled words sound like “Christ” and “Jesus” and “God,” which ought to be funny since Tris is a capital-A atheist, but it isn’t.
“No,” she’s saying, “Christ, no. I have to . . . someone has to . . . I need an abortion, Libby.”
Relief like the first snow melt, like surviving another winter. Not someone else to worry about, to love, to feed.
But an abortion? There hasn’t been a real doctor in this town since I was twelve.
Bill’s mom used to be a registered nurse before the occupation, and she took care of everyone in town as best she could until glassman robots raided her house and called in reapers to bomb it five years ago. Bill left town after that. We never thought we’d see him again, but then two planting seasons ago, there he was with this green giant, a forty-year-old Deere combine—Shadrach, he called it, because it would make the third with our two older, smaller machines. He brought engine parts with him, too, and oil and enough seed for a poppy field. He had a bullet scar in his forearm and three strange, triangular burns on the back of his neck. You could see them because he’d been shaved bald and his hair was only starting to grow back, a patchy gray peach-fuzz.
He’d been in prison, that much was obvious. Whether the glassmen let him go or he escaped, he never said and we never asked. We harvested twice as much wheat from the field that season, and the money from the poppy paid for a new generator. If the bell on lookout hill rang more often than normal, if surveillance drones whirred through the grass and the wate
r more than they used to, well, who was to say what the glassmen were doing? Killing us, that’s all we knew, and Bill was one of our own.
So I ask Bill if his mother left anything behind that might help us—like a pill, or instructions for a procedure. He frowns.
“Aren’t you a little old, Libby?” he says, and I tell him to fuck off. He puts a hand on my shoulder—conciliatory, regretful—and looks over to where Tris is trudging back home. “You saw what the reapers did to my Mom’s house. I couldn’t even find all of her teeth.”
I’m not often on that side of town, but I can picture the ruin exactly. There’s still a crater on Mill Street. I shuffle backward, contrite. “God, Bill. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
He shrugs. “Sorry, Libs. Ask Yolanda, if you got to do something like that.” I don’t like the way he frowns at me; I can hear his judgment even when all he does is turn and climb back inside Shadrach.
“Fucking hot out here,” I say, and walk back over to Meshach. I wish Bill wasn’t so goddamn judgmental. I wish Tris hadn’t messed up with whichever of her men provided the sperm donation. I wish we hadn’t lost the east field to another cluster bomb.
But I can wish or I can drive, and the old man’s engine coughs loud enough to drown even my thoughts.
Tris pukes right after dinner. That was some of my best cornbread, but I don’t say anything. I just clean it up.
“How far along are you?” I ask. I feel like vomit entitles me to this much.
She pinches her lips together and I hope she isn’t about to do it again. Instead, she stands up and walks out of the kitchen. I think that’s her answer, but she returns a moment later with a box about the size of my hand. It’s got a hole on one side and a dial like a gas gauge on the other. The gauge is marked with large glassman writing and regular letters in tiny print: “Fetal Progression,” it reads, then on the far left “Not Pregnant,” running through “Nine Months” on the far right. I can’t imagine what the point of that last would be, but Tris’s dial is still barely on the left hand side, settled neatly between three and four. A little late for morning sickness, but maybe it’s terror as much as the baby that makes her queasy.
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 508
