I make another obsidian blade rise and drive itself through skin and bone where the jointed knee of armor opens the foreigner to earth. The sudden pain makes his shot go wide. The blades in my hands slash one way, then another, across his throat. He gurgles, then flops forward and the ground takes his blood.
The next foreigner – only half-armored – looks confused when I step up to face him. His eyes slide over my skin, even paler than his own. He hesitates, I do not. The next one does much the same.
As I step over their bleeding, dying bodies, I put it together in my head. The foreigners know nothing of the white demons, so they do not fear me for my semblance. They fear me because I look like one of their young, turned against them and repudiating the savagery of this invasion.
Rightly is the grandmother known for her foresight.
I keep dancing with my blades and beside me the white doe distracts and bewilders, buying me time to slash wider, pierce deeper. We will never be taken.
* * *
When the silence falls, my body is as red as if I had been smeared with achiotl.
At the heart of the plain of Olintepeque, a red-haired foreigner with a dark red animal beneath him meets a lone standing warrior. They are like statues, the light caresses them with love.
Then blowgun and musket rise to sight at the same time.
Umám blows his feathered dart with enough force that it slices half through the animal’s eye and lodges its long thorn in what rests behind. As the beast topples, the foreigner still caught on its back buries his shot in Umám’s thigh.
Umám leaps forward anyway. He reaches for the animal – down and snorting and sneezing as if it could rid itself of the pain in its head that way – pulls a blade and slits its throat. It brays its death, and the foreigner scrambles to get out from beneath it.
I turn back to my own fight. I have a foreigner to unseat, and following him, one of his allies – who looks like one of the people and probably has ancestors in common with us. I’m humming and singing with power, as the grandmother knew I would be when she sent me into battle.
The soles of my feet are hard, but not so much that I can’t discern what I step on as I make my way from one end of the battlefield to the next: kernels of corn; dirt slicked to mud by blood; gobbets of flesh, some squishy, some firm.
Then, my toes curl around something smooth, cold, unyielding. I look down. It is a large nephrite bead – dark green and glossy like the leaves of certain trees. Not too far from it is another bead, this one the paler blue-green of turquoise. And then another.
At the end of the trail is a little mound of beads and cabochons, broken feather and iridescent herl. Umám’s cotton chest armor is covered with bright red blood that pumps weakly from a tremendous hole the foreigner has blown in him. He’s been abandoned to an undignified bleeding out, despite the trappings of royalty and honors due.
I yank the obsidian rounds off my face and drop them to ground so everything can be seen in the harsh, real light of this day: the boy-prince fell before securing victory; the skinny girl confused bloodlust for purpose.
We have failed.
I go to my knees, take Umám’s face in my hands and turn it so what we see is still harsher. Both of us are losing our only friend.
Umám’s eyes meet mine. They are hard and black. Even though he can chose to do so, his animal twin has not abandoned him.
Because even the supernatural can love this life. This earth. These broken human beings.
The grandmother taught me the song to make weapons spring from the earth. The grandmother taught me the song to make life rain from the sky. But the song I sing now is all mine.
I sing for the boy-warrior and his nahual, and for the only certainty that can be wrested from the future: that they will never be forgotten.
Umám’s bones shift with the melody. His shoulders draw back and his arms stretch by another full length. Barbs of brilliant feathers poke out from his dying flesh.
Green, green, green. And red.
Even without the gift of foresight I know that every quetzal after this will bear a red breast in imitation of Umám’s lethal wound.
A deep, rumbling bird call issues from Umám’s beak at the same time as his wings catch the wind. He lifts and makes a slow circuit over the battlefield. Weapons forgotten, the people, even the foreigners and their allies, follow the great bird’s trajectory with their eyes. When he has shown himself to all of them, when he has stilled the battle with his passing, he flies toward our mountains.
I lift my arm in farewell. One of the mountains lifts its arm in greeting.
The battle resumes. My friend is gone. There is only this.
* * *
The grandmother waits for me at the tree of life. She looks long into my pink eyes.
I found the obsidian rounds Umám had made for me ground to powder under the heels and hooves of battle, and my eyes are swollen because the Sun shines on without regard for what happens on earth.
“Even the trap at the palace in Utatlán failed,” I tell the grandmother. “It was a rout. We are finished.”
“Chssst,” she says.
I slump to the ground, looking up the shallow hillside to the dark cavern formed by the roots of what stretches so far below and above I will never knows its end. The grandmother comes to sit behind me. As I lean back, I feel her body – ancient and strong, soft and hard. She strokes my head, comforts me as if I were human. I’m not. Not anymore, if I ever was.
“I promise, the people will not be vanquished by the foreigners,” she says.
“But they will keep dying.”
She nods. “But they will keep living too.”
After a long silence, she taps me on the head to let me know she’s getting up, then walks to the tree and traces the root-cavern’s mouth with deliberation.
“Tekún Umám had become your friend, so you danced your dance of the white demons for him. And with him. And because of him,” she says. “But he is not our last hero. The dance cannot end with his life.”
“One puny white demon,” I say, “is not a dance.”
Her laugh rumbles so it shakes the earth.
She beckons me to the cavern. “Come. Meet my other granddaughters. The dance of the white demons changes when it is danced in unison, and they are waiting for you.”
I don’t budge.
“Hundreds of years from now,” she says, “the white demons will dance again. For women heroes this time. Tenacious ones who discover ossuaries full of bones and the stories that can be read in the remains of bodies. Courageous ones who speak aloud the forbidden history. Righteous ones who will not flinch when calling for justice.
“Surely you will want to call those heroes friends too,” she says. “Surely you will want to dance for and with and because of them.”
I get to my feet, but don’t step toward her. I am slicked by gore, and sickened by its stench on my skin. If I dance again it will not be wielding blades to draw blood.
But she must know this already, for she is the grandmother, the one who came before all others, and nothing is a surprise to her.
“When will your other granddaughters and I stop dancing?” I ask.
“When you grow tired,” she says.
I stay where I am.
“When you lose hope.”
Still.
“When you forget what it is to love.”
“That’ll be never,” I say.
The white doe and I trudge up the little incline until we stand by the grandmother’s side at the root end of the tree of life. She puts her arm around my waist, and with that she’s just the old woman again, and I am just the odd girl who has a way with herbs and things of the earth.
We are ordinary. Our battles are human. Our bodies know this earth from first step to last, and each step demands justice.
This is our dance.
Author Biographies
Sofia Samatar is the author of the novel A Stranger in Olondria (Small Beer Pres
s), winner of the 2014 Crawford Award. She is nonfiction and poetry editor for Interfictions: A Journal of Interstitial Arts. You can find out more about her at www.sofiasamatar.com.
Thoraiya Dyer is a three-time Aurealis Award–winning, three-time Ditmar Award–winning Australian writer based in the Hunter Valley, NSW. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Apex, Nature, and Cosmos and is forthcoming in Analog. A petite collection of four original stories, “Asymmetry,” is available from Twelfth Planet Press. Find her online at Goodreads or thoraiyadyer.com.
Tananarive Due is the Cosby Chair in the Humanities at Spelman College (2012–13). She also teaches in the creative writing MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles. The American Book Award winner and NAACP Image Award recipient is the author of 12 novels and a civil rights memoir. She recently received a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. In 2010, she was inducted into the Medill School of Journalism’s Hall of Achievement at Northwestern University. Due lives in Southern California with her husband, author Steven Barnes, and their son, Jason. Her website is at tananarivedue.com. Her writing blog is at tananarivedue.wordpress.com.
S. Lynn has been wrestling with Multiple Chemical Sensitivity for most of her adult life; to keep herself busy in the absence of the capacity to spend an eight-hour day in a work environment, she has been serialising Trevor’s present-day stories at hiraeth.dreamwidth.org. She lives with her Mum and an evil-genius-cat with attendant unwitting-minion-cat, and her friends are beginning to worry about how quickly she knits. This is her first professional fiction sale.
Sunny Moraine is an occasional author of various flavors of speculative fiction; the flavor in question depends upon a complex conjunction of different variables, the exact nature of which they have yet to specify or untangle. Sunny’s short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Shimmer, Daily Science Fiction, Ideomancer, and the anthology We See a Different Frontier: A Postcolonial Speculative Fiction Anthology, among other places. They are also responsible for the novels Line and Orbit (cowritten with Lisa Soem) and Crowflight, the sequel to which, Ravenfall, will be released in 2014 by Masque Books. They live just outside Washington DC in a reasonably creepy house with two cats and a husband. They are on Twitter as @dynamicsymmetry, and can be found making words at sunnymoraine.com.
Rion Amilcar Scott has contributed to PANK, Fiction International, The Rumpus, Washington City Paper, and Confrontation, among others. Raised in Silver Spring, Maryland, he earned an MFA at George Mason University and presently teaches English at Bowie State University.
Meg Jayanth is a freelance writer and digital producer living in London. Cani Theruvil and Munira Begum appear in Samsara, her storygame of dream-walking, courtly intrigue, and war in 18th-century Bengal, online at samsara.storynexus.com. Find her @betterthemask and megjayanth.com.
Claire Humphrey lives in Toronto, where she works in the book business, and writes short fiction and novels. Her stories have appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Interzone, Strange Horizons, Crossed Genres, Podcastle, and other fine magazines and anthologies. She is also the reviews editor at Ideomancer. She can be found online at clairehumphrey.ca.
L.S. Johnson lives in Northern California. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Interzone, Corvus, Mirror Dance, Fae, and other venues. Currently she is working on a fantasy novel set in 18th-century Europe. She can be found online at traversingz.com.
Robert William Iveniuk is a Toronto-based author, screenwriter, and columnist. His works have been published in Schlock Magazine and both of the Alchemy Press’s Pulp Heroes anthologies. He is also a contributor to BlogTO and Archenemy Magazine.
Jamey Hatley is a native of Memphis, TN. Her writing has appeared in the Oxford American, Torch Poetry, and elsewhere. She has attended the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and the Voices of Our Nation Writing Workshop; received scholarships to the Oxford American Summit for Ambitious Writers and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference; and won the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Award for a Novel-in-Progress. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Louisiana State University.
Michael Janairo‘s work has been published in various newspapers and literary magazines. His story “Out of Japan” won the Tsujinaka Fiction prize and was published in both English and Japanese in the Abiko Quarterly. Recent publications include the poem “Aswang in Eye to the Telescope,“ the short story “The Advanced Ward” in the anthology Veterans of the Future Wars, and the short story “The Duck” in Bartelby Snopes.
He lives near Albany, NY., with his wife, son and dog. (His family name is pronounced “ha NIGH row.”) He blogs at michaeljanairo.com.
Benjamin Parzybok‘s second novel, Sherwood Nation, is forthcoming this fall 2014 from Small Beer Press. He’s the author of the novel Couch, and has had a number of short stories published. He has been the creator/co-creator of many projects, including Gumball Poetry (literary journal published in capsule machines), The Black Magic Insurance Agency (city-wide, one night alternate reality game), and Project Hamad (an effort to free a Guantanamo inmate and shed light on habeas corpus). He works as a programmer and lives in Portland with the artist Laura Moulton and their two kids. He blogs at secret.ideacog.net.
Kima Jones is a 2013 PEN USA Emerging Voices fellow in poetry, a Voices at VONA alum, and 2012 Lambda Literary Fellow in poetry. Kima has been published at The Rumpus and PANK among others. She lives in Los Angeles and is writing her first poetry collection, The Anatomy of Forgiveness.
Christina Lynch is the co-author (with Meg Howrey) of the New York Times bestselling novel City of Dark Magic, and the sequel, City of Lost Dreams, both published by Penguin under the pseudonym Magnus Flyte. She is a graduate of Harvard and has an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles. A television writer and journalist, she teaches writing at College of the Sequoias and UCLA Extension. She lives near Sequoia National Park with too many animals.
Christina says, “While touring Ambras Castle in the mountains of Austria one summer, I came across portraits of the real-life Gonzales family, who had a rare genetic trait now called Ambras Syndrome. All of the historical figures named in the story are real.”
Troy L. Wiggins is from Memphis, Tennessee. His short fiction has appeared in the recent anthology Griots: Sisters of the Spear. He currently resides in Daegu, South Korea, where he teaches English.
Nghi Vo currently lives on the shores of an inland sea, and her fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons and Crossed Genres. Her current interests include old gods, new gods, papercutting, candymaking, revenge tragedy, and the Ottoman Empire. She can be contacted at [email protected].
David Jón Fuller was born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where he now lives, and has also lived in Edmonton, Alberta. He earned an honours degree in theatre at the University of Winnipeg and studied Icelandic language and literature for two years at the University of Iceland in Reykjavík. David’s short fiction has been published in Tesseracts 17, In Places Between, The Harrow and The Mythic Circle. David currently works as a copy editor for the Winnipeg Free Press, and as time allows he blogs at www.davidjonfuller.com.
He would like to thank Cindy Lavallee at Aboriginal Languages of Manitoba, and Roger Roulette for his translations into Island Lakes Dialect Ojibwe for “A Deeper Echo”.
Ken Liu (kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He has won a Nebula, two Hugos, a World Fantasy Award, and a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award, and been nominated for the Sturgeon and the Locus Awards. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts. Ken’s debut novel, tentatively titled The Chrysanthemum and the Dandelion, the first in a fantasy series, will be published by Simon & Schuster’s new genre fiction imprint in 2015.
Kemba Banton, a writer of fiction, poetry and no
nfiction, was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1983. In 1989, she moved to the States to join her parents who had emigrated several years before her. Since then she has moved frequently between Jamaica and the States. Banton earned a BA in Anthropology at Columbia University. In 2007, she was a semi-finalist for a Fulbright grant in the creative arts field. In the same year, her short story “Zebra’s Trod” won a silver medal award in an annual Jamaican national creative writing competition hosted by the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission. She is a freelance writer for Heart and Soul Magazine and the co-founder and editor of TheNobantuProject.com. She is also pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Antioch University, Los Angeles. Banton currently resides in Georgia and is the mother of three children.
Sarah Pinsker is a Baltimore-based singer, songwriter, and author. She has three albums on various indie labels and a fourth in production. Her short stories have been published in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s, Lightspeed, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Daily Science Fiction, among others, and she has stories forthcoming in several anthologies, including The Future Embodied and Crossed Genres’s Fierce Family.
Nnedi Okorafor is a novelist of African-based science fiction, fantasy and magical realism. In a profile of Nnedi’s work titled “Weapons of Mass Creation”, The New York Times called Nnedi’s imagination “stunning”. Her novels include Who Fears Death (winner of the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel), Akata Witch (an Amazon.com Best Book of the Year), Zahrah the Windseeker(winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for African Literature), and The Shadow Speaker (winner of the CBS Parallax Award). Her children’s book Long Juju Man is the winner of the Macmillan Writer’s Prize for Africa. Her short story collection Kabu Kabu was released in October 2013. Her forthcoming works include her science fiction novel Lagoon (scheduled for release in April 8, 2014) and her young adult novel Akata Witch 2: Breaking Kola (scheduled for release in 2015). Nnedi is a creative writing professor at Chicago State. Find her on Facebook, Twitter (@nnedi), and at nnedi.com.
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