by Maya, Tara
For a while, we kept our family alive in this way. But too many other warriors were trying to do the same, most of them outranking us. Hunger narrows your world to your own belly. I spent my days securing crumbs for myself, and Vumo did the same. We didn’t share with one another.
Once, I did have enough – a whole bird – I thought of my family for the first time in two moons. I sneaked home.
There was no one in the yard to greet me. My mother and father were dead, sticks so thin even the flies could only land along their limbs in a single file. Their corpses were fresh, though. My nose had become attuned to the subtle scale of foulness of decaying flesh. If I had come only days before, I might have saved them. I could not find my sister.
I searched for her. I found my cousin instead. Her husband had tried to steal food from the Bone Whistler’s warriors and died fighting them. And my sister? She said my sister had given herself to a band of warriors. She let them use her in exchange for a basket of grain, which she intended to share with our family. But she was so hungry, she couldn’t help herself. She ate all of it and died. Her shrunken stomach burst from the uncooked corn.
"What about you?" I asked. "How did you survive? Where is your baby?"
I will not tell you her reply. It doesn’t matter. She died a few weeks later herself.
How much had changed in merely half a year. Once you could walk from one end of our tribal lands to another and stop to feast at every clanhold. Now if you walked the same path, you would see tatters of corpses strewn in front of those same houses. Fields that had been burnt now turned to dust. Billowing storms of dust crisscrossed the whole valley around the tribehold.
Have you ever known guilt? I don’t mean feeling guilty over sneaking out to play in the stream for an afternoon when you should have been tending the herd. I don’t mean remorse for cheating on your wife. I mean have you ever murdered your own family with your own words, your own foolishness, your own bone-stupid faith in some impossible dream. Have you ever destroyed a whole world and had only yourself to blame. You die slowly from self-hate. You eat away at yourself, until you are nothing left but hard bone under a façade of thin-stretched skin.
The odd thing is, hunger and guilt cancel one another out. A full man has the luxury of suicide. A hungry man is too busy searching for another scrap to eat.
We slaughtered more Imorvae. We were hungry, and they were dead; we had becoming accustomed to staving off famine with desperate feasting. The slaughter of the hidden Imorvae, the last of our enemies, was cause for celebration, but we had no aurochsen left. So we roasted their corpses and feasted. We survived one more day.
Only one eating mat never lacked for food: that of the Bone Whistler. Those warriors he favored would be invited to dance to his flute and then dine with him. It was tiring to dance, but always worth it for the full belly that followed. I was invited several times, while my brother was not, but I knew Vumo could speak a word and bring me down, if I did not denounce him first. On the surface, I was in the stronger position, but I worried. He was crafty. My warriors who spied on my brother reported that he had begun to visit often with Nangi the Thought-Eater.
Summer arrived, full of dust, devoid of rain. Another date approached for the new day -- proclaimed by the Bone Whistler himself, and would he lie to us? My brother had been avoiding me, but one evening he sought me out. "I’m going to the piss-pit. Wait a while, then meet me there."
A trap. But I went.
We met in the dark, over the stinking yawn in the ground behind the lodge, pretending to piss. Private meetings were not allowed, not even between brothers, and warriors patrolled everywhere in the Bone Whistler’s compound. I could not read Vumo's expression. His face was as dry as a riverbed in a drought.
"Will you sit vigil for the new day with me?" he asked.
"Would you not prefer to wait with Nangi?"
He grinned nervously. I knew from his fear that my suspicions were correct, and he had plotted with her.
"I wish I were like you," he said. "I wish I didn’t doubt the new day. I wish I could see Sulula. But if new day doesn’t come, I need to look out for myself."
He had a finer face than mine, but I knew my fist was faster. I hefted my stone mace.
He lifted his own weapon, took a skittish step back. "If you know about Nangi, you must know what I have to do."
"Yes." I threw my mace into the ditch and spread my arms. "Do it."
He looked bewildered.
I knelt at the edge of the piss-pit, breathing the filthy vapors. My eyes stung. "Prove your loyalty to the Bone Whistler. But strike the blow yourself. Cull the diseased part of the herd so the good can survive."
My brother stood over me and placed his hands on my head, so gently, in a position to snap my neck.
"What if I am the one preventing the new day from dawning?" I whispered. "What if I have to be sacrificed so you can survive? Isn’t that worth it?"
He knelt in front of me, his hands on my shoulders. "I’m her particular friend."
I didn’t understand, but he rushed on.
"I told her she was pretty. I told her I liked her. I told her everything she wanted to believe, so she believed all of it. She can’t eat thoughts when her own feelings get in the way." His voice cracked. "Vio, they’re all dead. You’re all I have left."
On the night vigil to wait the new day, my brother decided he would, after all, spend the night with Nangi, his particular friend, while I joined the silent crowd of thin men and women in the plaza. To my surprise, I felt a stirring of hope again. I had thought hope dead. Maybe it was. Maybe it was only desperation I felt.
Let it not be too late, I begged the ancestors. Please come back. Now I imagined my parents, my sister, my cousin cuddling her baby. Please come back and say you forgive me.
Some held hands, but all were silent. We stared at the lightening sky where the sun would rise. And we hoped.
Comments on Tomorrow We Dance
In a novel’s equivalent of collage, strands of parallel stories add up to more than the sum of their parts. Each story strand gains something from the way it is placed in between the other story lines. In my fantasy epic series, The Unfinished Song, each book has at least three storylines, told from the point of view of one of the major characters, often intertwining past and present. One reader pointed out that the storylines from the past were interesting enough to stand as novellas in their own right. So why not pull out a novella and begin the series with that?
There are two reasons, the same two reasons George Lucus didn’t begin the Star Wars Saga with Episode I to III. One, it would give away spoilers for the Empire Strikes Back. ("Luke, I’m your father!" "Duh, dad. Meet my lawyer. You owe me back payments of child support, big time!") The other reason is that those three Star Wars episodes are a tragedy about failure, about how evil, rather than good, triumphs, at a personal and a political level.
That is true of "Tomorrow We Dance" as well.
The main storyline of The Unfinished Song follows a traditional heroic arc: the heroine, Dindi, rises from obscurity and powerlessness and learns to wield great power to save the world. The series ends happily. I believe in happy endings, and I believe in the importance of the classic hero mythos, so I do not apologize for revisiting this ground, even if it has been done before. Many coming-of-age stories have been done before, as have many love stories, but if the story is well told, what matters is how this child comes of age, how this woman and man fall in love, how this hero slays the monsters of his own weakness and betters himself.
However, every story of triumph is also a story of failure. Perhaps someone else’s failure, but without the contrast, how would we know how bad it could have been if the hero had not triumphed? At a deeper level, the real story is the story of failure, because we know that even though the heroine wins, the victory is temporary. Promises of a permanent victory are themselves suspect.
"Tomorrow We Dance" is about a villain, whom Dindi will meet only indirect
ly in the first book of the series, but later confronts in person, known as Vio the Skull Stomper. This is who he was before he began stomping skulls. There is more to his story, but this is as much as I can tell without revealing spoilers for the rest of the books. (Don’t worry, he isn’t Dindi’s father.) I decided to include this story as a single novelette in this collection because I think it reads differently when read as one piece, not part of the collage. I still intend for it to be interwoven into the The Windwheel and the Maze. I hope anyone reading this will want to read the series as well, and not mind too much seeing this part of the story again, seeing how it unfolds transformed by the context of the larger epic.
It took me three years to write this part of the story. It wasn’t the writing that took me a long time, but the thinking. I thought it over and over again, and the thought never came out right. How do I show how people abandon their power to a tyrant, how people abandon their reason to madness? Because The Unfinished Song is a fairytale, I knew I wanted to do a retelling of The Pied Piper and The Emperor’s New Clothes, rolled into one. But that wasn’t enough. I didn’t want to just point and laugh at the foolishness of the people taken in by false promises. I wanted to show why you and I would have danced to the flute too.
I’m a historian, so I looked to history for help. Finally, I found what I needed when I studied the cattle-killing cult of nineteenth century South Africa. In particular, the non-fiction book The Dead Will Arise: Nongquawese and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856-7 by J.B. Peires was a tremendous resource for me. It isn’t often a non-fiction book makes me cry. Although this story is a fantasy, don’t think something like this couldn’t happen in real life. It has. Don’t think we are so much smarter than those people that something like this couldn’t happen again. It could.
Yet just because dreams sometimes die, just because hopes are sometimes false, doesn’t mean that it’s any better to become a cynic and a skeptic about everything. That’s just as dangerous.
At the beginning of the summer of 2010 I had a new baby. Imagine all the cutest LOLcats you’ve ever seen, and then imagine my baby, who was cuter than that, so it was pretty hard to stay depressed. I threw myself back into writing fiction over the summer. I come up with a million Plans, and they are usually silly, and my family laughs at me, but I had a new Plan.
The Virgin’s Choice
(4 of Cups)
The Lady Isameir could not be matched for her purity, and the proof lay in the fact that her father had used her as bait to capture the King of the Unicorns. She had been shut all her life in a garden at the top of a tower of white sandstone. Her father provided her with fountains tiled in sapphire, pillows of cloth-of-gold, and four magic goblets that would reveal the true nature of those who sipped from them. Yet she wept tears like diamonds when the bronze gate slammed shut behind the unicorn lured into the tower prison by her presence. She stroked his mane and his silky white beard.
"Now you are a prisoner in this tower, as much as I am," she said.
As much as you are, Lady, said the Unicorn King. She looked at him in wonder. He did not speak again.
Three lords courted the Lady in the Tower, drawn by tales of her beauty and her innocence. At her father’s behest she invited all three to a banquet that she might choose one to marry.
She served them plates of gold piled with fruits from her garden and pomegranate wine in the magic goblets that revealed a man’s true form.
During the feast, each lord boasted of his love for her. However, after they drank, they assumed their true forms.
The first lord began to bleat. He became a ram. Thus Isameir perceived that he had only offered for her because the rest of the herd hailed her as a great trophy.
The second lord began to snort. He became a boar. Isameir perceived that he longed to wallow in her lucre.
The third lord began to crow. He became a roster. Isameir perceived that he loved her true -- for the moment -- but by tomorrow, he would love another maiden just as passionately, and leave Isameir’s bed empty while he strutted in other henhouses.
She fled the beastly suitors, to the oak at the center of the garden, which grew acorns of solid gold. There she wrapped her arms around the neck of the Unicorn King and wept into his mane.
"How can I choose for my husband a sheep, a pig or a cock?" she asked. She did not expect an answer. Since the day of his capture, though she had poured her heart out to him often, the Unicorn King had only spoken once.
Drink from your goblet, he said, staring into her eyes with his own deep blue pools.
Indeed, she found she still held her goblet in her hand, untouched. She sipped it, then drained it the dregs. She felt the transformation sweep over her, as her true nature became revealed.
The two unicorns leaped the wall of the tower garden that night, never to return.
Comments on The Virgin’s Choice
Tolkien once wrote that fantasy should not be misconstrued as simple allegory. It is rather, imagined history. Yet, history itself is susceptible to turning into an allegory of itself, and how much more so imagined history? This story, one of my Tarot flash fics, veers closer than most to straight allegory. The only thing worse than passing a crass allegory off as a real story would be to interpret it for you….
…but let me just say that in the alchemical work of the occult mystical tradition of neo-platonic and medieval Europe, the Virgin often represented Psyche or the Soul. The soul begins in a state of innocence, but she becomes what she marries. If you marry your soul to something you hold in contempt, eventually, you will hold yourself in contempt. Fiction is a mirror that shows us our true selves, our many possible true selves, and bids us choose.
Over the summer of 2010, I threw myself back into writing fiction. I blogged again. I joined Facebook. Twitter. Etc. (Insert winking, blinking, smiley emoticons here.) I immersed myself in a supportive writing community, where I discovered Indie publishing. I had always associated self-publishing with PublishAmerica typo-fests with atrocious covers, and I had vowed to fall on my own sword rather than come close to it. People whose opinion I respected had warned me not to taint my writing career forever with a self-published book. It was a one-way street, and if I took that route, I could never come back.
I was inspired by the beautiful literary writing of my friend Michelle Davidson Argyle and of Wanda Shapiro; the sassy vampire fiction of Zoe Winters and of Amanda Hocking; and the efforts of heroes in the field, like C.J. Cherryh and Jane Fancher, to keep their backlist on the front shelf by self-publishing. I decided I could do this. If my work had any value to readers, the readers would decide that for themselves. Oh, and if you were sweet enough to be wondering, I also managed to finagle my way back into grad school, at least for the time being. I realize there is no guarantee of a happy ending. But that’s not why you write fiction, or make art, or help the homeless, or try to stop wars, or have babies. That’s not why you marry your soul to the pursuit of something pure and beautiful. You do it because you are alive and because you have an obligation to not let the sun go out.
Afterword: December 2011
I first published Conmergence fourteen months ago.
I sold ten copies.
The next month, I sold twelve copies. I earned $16.23.
But in the next month, I published Initate, the first book of The Unfinished Song, an epic fantasy which will eventually have twelve volumes, and everything changed.
Ok, not really. I sold. thirteen books that month. Total. That included the sales for my new release and continuing sales of Conmergence.
A wiser person would have been discouraged. But we’d already established that I’m a writer. I plugged away at it. I brought Book 2, Taboo and Book 3, Sacrifice. I sat for my exams and earned my decree in December 2011, while also working on Book 4, Root. I gave away copies of the first book, mostly review copies, hundreds of them. The majority of reviewers replied politely, that they did not review self-published books. But a few agreed to rea
d it and began to rave about it. They begged me to send them the next books in the series too. As soon as possible!
When I made Initiate free, the demand for it bowled me over. There were seven thousands downloads in one day; twenty-thousand in one week. For close to a month, The Unfinished Song: Initiate was the beset selling, most frequently downloaded epic fantasy on a major online retail site. Taboo and Sacrifice both rose to the top hundred best-selling epic fantasy books.
I was an overnight success! It just took me ten years.
Many, many readers have written to me. Some are also writers, or other kinds of artists, and they want to know if they dare…dare pursue whatever secret dream they have been nurturing or neglecting. The answer is, if you can give your whole life, and love and trust to your dream, if you can refuse life without dreams, resist the urge to withhold some of your love, reject the temptation to never fully trust your ambition, so you can rescue your pride if you fail; if you can work without guaranteed rewards, if you can ignore it when family, friends and strangers snigger at your failure, if you can learn from others yet not slavishly imitate them; if you can just keep dancing. then yes. Do it.
Dare.
Contact Me
Tara Maya is the author the epic fantasy series, The Unfinished Song. You can read the first book, Initiate, for free. It is available from all online retailers or else write to me and I’ll send you a copy: tara (at) taramayastales.com.
