by Lavie Tidhar
“I… not… no breathe… anymore…” I say, pounding my chest to try and control my emotions. “I thought… best… eat his lungs. To fix mine.”
“Your brain is no longer functioning the way it is supposed to.” The voice says. “And from what you’re telling me, you’ve stopped breathing.”
So many words. I furrow my brows and scratch the itch on my arm. “I no… I don’t understand.”
“You should have come to me sooner. This isn’t a malady that is to be cured through the witchcraft and sorcery of your shamans!”
“You fix me now?”
“I can’t,” he sounds sad, which makes me nervous. He is supposed to fix me in some way. It is all my aching head is telling me. “You’re already dead, and rotting,” he rattles on. “You’re not the first to be plagued by the corpse flower, and if this goes on, you won’t be the last. I have tried many weeks to find another infected victim, like you, but they either rot too quickly or wander off into the jungle before anyone can track them.”
The leaves rustle again, and this time a tall, dark man appears on the path before me. He holds something long, curved and sharp in his left arm. It is all I can see of him. Instinct warns me of danger, and an even stronger feeling urges me to take a step away from him.
“Wait, please. You’re already dead. I can’t fix you, but I can help you stop your actions. You want to stop eating your own people, don’t you?”
Eat. Yes. I must eat soon. I will be hungry.
I am unsure of myself. My instincts tell me that if I stay I will surely die.
“Come with me, please.” the man says. The shiny thing in his hand flashes. It looks like it could hurt me, and I shake my head.
“No,” my jaw hangs open. Spit and blood dribble down my chin. “Noooooo!”
“Please! Come back with me,” the man reaches out a hand, and I turn to run. “No, girl, wait!”
I do not wait or look behind to see if he is pursuing me. The dense undergrowth of the jungle blurs out of focus as I blunder forwards, moving as fast as my legs can carry me. I need to get away. Away from the man who is supposed to fix me but can’t… and back to where I know I can have a feast.
§
The girl re–emerges from the dense undergrowth of the jungle into her uncle’s lawn at the start of dawn. Her eyes are glazed over. Her skin, torn apart and bloody, is swarming with flies. Corpse–like, she ambles across the yard without a care for her appearance, dragging a stick behind her.
The owner of the house pauses at the bottom of the stairs that leads to his front door. The sight of the girl raises bile in his throat, and he snarls out of pure hatred and fury.
“Sailin? Where the hell were you?” The man bellows at the top of his lungs. “What happened to you?”
She ignores him and continues to close the gap between them. She is no longer breathing, but her pace quickens, and she tightens her rotting fingers over her stick.
“Kamit is gone, do you know that?” The man continues to shout. “First Visak, then Kamit, and then y—”
The stick slams into the side of his head with enough force to snap the weapon in two. The large man’s head swings sideways, then back, following the momentum of his heavy body as he falls backwards to the ground. He can only gurgle when the girl lifts what is left of the stick and slams it into his skull. Again, and again, and again.
Some small part of her feels horrified at the viciousness of her actions, but the other part, the more dominant and primal one, continues to bash her uncle’s head until his skull cracks open. The sight of clumps of meat and wetness oozing out of the open wound makes her smile. She scoops the organ up with her fingers and sucks on the juices, feeling more satisfied than she has ever been in her entire life. She is dead, but now, she has the energy she requires to survive in this form and to wait until others like her come out of the jungle. And from the sound of the terrified cries and panicked voices inside the longhouse, she knows she will have enough to eat for a little while.
To Follow the Waves
Amal El–Mohtar
A first generation Lebanese–Canadian, Amal has been nominated for a Nebula Award for her short fiction and published prose and poetry collection The Honey Month. She currently lives in Glasgow.
Hessa’s legs ached. She knew she ought to stand, stretch them, but only gritted her teeth and glared at the clear lump of quartz on the table before her. To rise now would be to concede defeat — but to lean back, lift her goggles, and rub her eyes was, she reasoned, an adequate compromise.
Her braids weighed on her, and she scratched the back of her head, where they pulled tightest above her nape. To receive a commission from Sitt Warda Al–Attrash was a great honour, one that would secure her reputation as a fixed star among Dimashq’s dream–crafters. She could not afford to fail. Worse, the dream Sitt Warda desired was simple, as dreams went: to be a young woman again, bathing her limbs by moonlight in the Mediterranean with a young man who, judging by her half–spoken, half–murmured description, was not precisely her husband.
But Hessa had never been to the sea.
She had heard it spoken of, naturally, and read hundreds of lines of poetry extolling its many virtues. Yet it held little wonder for her; what pleasure could be found in stinging salt, scratching sand, burning sun reflected from the water’s mirror–surface? Nor did swimming hold any appeal; she had heard pearl divers boast of their exploits, speak of how the blood beat between their eyes until they felt their heads might burst like overripe tomatoes, how their lungs ached with the effort for hours afterward, how sometimes they would feel as if thousands of ants were marching along their skin, and though they scratched until blood bloomed beneath their fingernails, could never reach them.
None of this did anything to endear the idea of the sea to her. And yet, to carve the dream out of the quartz, she had to find its beauty. Sighing, she picked up the dopstick again, tapped the quartz to make sure it was securely fastened, lowered her goggles, and tried again.
§
Hessa’s mother was a mathematician, renowned well beyond the gates of Dimashq for her theorems. Her father was a poet, better known for his abilities as an artisanal cook than for his verse, though as the latter was full of the scents and flavours of the former, much appreciated all the same. Hessa’s father taught her to contemplate what was pleasing to the senses, while her mother taught her geometry and algebra. She loved both as she loved them, with her whole heart.
Salma Najjar had knocked at the door of the Ghaflan family in the spring of Hessa’s seventh year. She was a small woman, wrinkled as a wasp’s nest, with eyes hard and bright as chips of tourmaline. Her greying hair was knotted and bound in the intricate patterns of a jeweller or gem–cutter — perhaps some combination of the two. Hessa’s parents welcomed her into their home, led her to a divan, and offered her tea, but she refused to drink or eat until she had told them her errand.
“I need a child of numbers and letters to learn my trade,” she had said, in the gruff, clipped accent of the Northern cities. “It is a good trade, one that will demand the use of all her abilities. I have heard that your daughter is such a child.”
“And what is your trade?” Hessa’s father asked, intrigued, but wary.
“To sculpt fantasies in the stone of the mind and the mind of the stone. To grant wishes.”
“You propose to raise our daughter as djinn?” Hessa’s mother raised an eyebrow.
Salma smiled, showing a row of perfect teeth. “Far better. Djinn do not get paid.”
§
Building a dream was as complex as building a temple, and required knowledge of almost as many trades — a fact reflected in the complexity of the braid pattern in which Hessa wore her hair. Each pull and plait showed an intersection of gem–crafting, metal–working, architecture, and storytelling, to say nothing of the thousand twisting strands representing the many kinds of knowledge necessary to a story’s success. As a child, Hessa had spent hours with the archiv
ists in Al–Zahiriyya Library, learning from them the art of constructing memory palaces within her mind, layering the marble, glass, and mosaics of her imagination with reams of poetry, important historical dates, dozens of musical maqaamat, names of stars and ancestors. Hessa bint Aliyah bint Qamar bint Widad…
She learned to carry each name, note, number like a jewel to tuck into a drawer here, hang above a mirror there, for ease of finding later on. She knew whole geographies, scriptures, story cycles, as intimately as she knew her mother’s house, and drew on them whenever she received a commission. Though the only saleable part of her craft was the device she built with her hands, its true value lay in using the materials of her mind: She could not grind quartz to the shape and tune of her dream, could not set it into the copper coronet studded with amber, until she had fixed it into her thoughts as firmly as she fixed the stone to her amber dopstick.
§
“Every stone,” Salma said, tossing her a piece of rough quartz, “knows how to sing. Can you hear it?”
Frowning, Hessa held it up to her ear, but Salma laughed. “No, no. It is not a shell from the sea, singing the absence of its creature. You cannot hear the stone’s song with the ear alone. Look at it; feel it under your hand; you must learn its song, its language, before you can teach it your own. You must learn, too, to tell the stones apart; those that sing loudest do not always have the best memories, and it is memory that is most important. Easier to teach it to sing one song beautifully than to teach it to remember; some stones can sing nothing but their own tunes.”
Dream–crafting was still a new art then; Salma was among its pioneers. But she knew that she did not have within herself what it would take to excel at it. Having discovered a new instrument, she found it unsuited to her fingers, awkward to rest against her heart; she could produce sound, but not music.
For that, she had to teach others to play.
First, she taught Hessa to cut gems. That had been Salma’s own trade, and Hessa could see that it was still her chief love: the way she smiled as she turned a piece of rough crystal in her hands, learning its angles and texture, was very much the way Hessa’s parents smiled at each other. She taught her how to pick the best stones, cleave away their grossest imperfections; she taught her to attach the gem to a dopstick with hot wax, at precise angles, taught her the delicate dance of holding it against a grinding lathe with even greater precision while operating the pedal. She taught her to calculate the axes that would unlock needles of light from the stone, kindle fire in its heart. Only once Hessa could grind a cabochon blindfolded, once she’d learned to see with the tips of her fingers, did Salma explain the rest.
“This is how you will teach songs to the stone.” She held up a delicate amber wand, at the end of which was affixed a small copper vice. Hessa watched as Salma placed a cloudy piece of quartz inside and adjusted the vice around it before lowering her goggles over her eyes. “The amber catches your thoughts and speaks them to the copper; the copper translates them to the quartz. But just as you build your memory palace in your mind, so must you build the dream you want to teach it; first in your thoughts, then in the stone. You must cut the quartz while fixing the dream firmly in your mind, that you may cut the dream into the stone, cut it so that the dream blooms from it like light. Then, you must fix it into copper and amber again, that the dream may be translated into the mind of the dreamer.
“Tonight,” she murmured quietly, grinding edges into the stone, “you will dream of horses. You will stand by a river and they will run past you, but one will slow to a stop. It will approach you, and nuzzle your cheek.”
“What colour will it be?”
Salma blinked behind her goggles, and the lathe slowed to a stop as she looked at her. “What colour would you like it to be?”
“Blue,” said Hessa, firmly. It was her favourite colour.
Salma frowned. “There are no blue horses, child.”
“But this is a dream! Couldn’t I see one in a dream?”
Hessa wasn’t sure why Salma was looking at her with quite such intensity, or why it took her so long a moment to answer. But finally, she smiled — in the gentle, quiet way she smiled at her gems — and said, “Yes, my heart. You could.”
Once the quartz was cut, Salma fixed it into the centre of a copper circlet, its length prettily decorated with drops of amber, and fitted it around Hessa’s head before giving her chamomile tea to drink and sending her to bed. Hessa dreamed just as Salma said she would: The horse that approached her was blue as the turquoise she had shaped for a potter’s husband a few nights earlier. But when the horse touched her, its nose was dry and cold as quartz, its cheeks hard and smooth as cabochon.
Salma sighed when Hessa told her as much the next day. “You see, this is why I teach you, Hessa. I have been so long in the country of stones, speaking their language and learning their songs, I have little to teach them of our own; I speak everything to them in facets and brilliance, culets and crowns. But you, my dear, you are learning many languages all at once; you have your father’s tasting tongue, your mother’s speech of angles and air. I have been speaking nothing but adamant for most of my life, and grow more and more deaf to the desires of dreamers.”
§
Try as she might, Hessa could not coordinate her knowledge of the sea with the love, the longing, the pleasure needed to build Sitt Warda’s dream. She had mixed salt and water, touched it to her lips, and found it unpleasant; she had watched the moon tremble in the waters of her courtyard’s fountain without being able to stitch its beauty to a horizon. She tried, now, to summon those poor attempts to mind, but was keenly aware that if she began grinding the quartz in her present state, Sitt Warda would wake from her dream as tired and frustrated as she herself presently felt.
Giving in, she put down the quartz, removed her goggles, rose from her seat, and turned her back on her workshop. There were some problems only coffee and ice cream could fix.
§
Qahwat al Adraj was one of her favourite places to sit and do the opposite of think. Outside the bustle of the Hamadiyyah market, too small and plain to be patronised by obnoxious tourists, it was a well–kept secret tucked beneath a dusty stone staircase: The servers were beautiful, the coffee exquisite, and the iced treats in summer particularly fine. As she closed the short distance between it and her workshop, she tried to force her gaze up from the dusty path her feet had long ago memorised, tried to empty herself of the day’s frustrations to make room for her city’s beauties.
There: a young man with dark skin and a dazzling smile, his tight–knotted braids declaring him a merchant–inventor, addressing a gathering crowd to display his newest brass automata. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he called, “the British Chef!” and demonstrated how with a few cranks and a minimum of preparation, the long–faced machine could knife carrots into twisting orange garlands, slice cucumbers into lace. And not far from him, drawn to the promise of a building audience, a beautiful mechanical, her head sculpted to look like an amira’s headdress, serving coffee from the heated cone of it by tipping forward in an elegant bow before the cup, an act that could not help but make every customer feel as if they were sipping the gift of a cardamom–laced dance.
Hessa smiled to them, but frowned to herself. She had seen them all many times before. Today she was conscious, to her shame, of a bitterness toward them: What business had they being beautiful to her when they were not the sea?
Arriving, she took her usual seat by a window that looked out to Touma’s Gate, sipped her own coffee, and tried not to brood.
She knew what Salma would have said. Go to the sea, she would have urged, bathe in it! Or, if you cannot, read the thousands of poems written to it! Write a poem yourself! Or, slyly, then, only think of something you yourself find beautiful — horses, berries, books — and hide it beneath layers and layers of desire until the thing you love is itself obscured. Every pearl has a grain of sand at its heart, no? Be cunning. You cannot know all the worl
d, my dear, as intimately as you know your stones.
But she couldn’t. She had experimented with such dreams, crafted them for herself; they came out wrapped in cotton wool, provoking feeling without vision, touch, scent. Any would–be dream crafter could do as well. No, for Sitt Warda, who had already patronised four of the city’s crafters before her, it would never do. She had to produce something exquisite, unique. She had to know the sea as Sitt Warda knew it, as she wanted it.
She reached for a newspaper, seeking distraction. Lately it was all airships and trade agreements surrounding their construction and deployment, the merchant fleets’ complaints and clamour for restrictions on allowable cargo to protect their own interests. Hessa had a moment of smirking at the sea–riding curmudgeons before realising that she had succumbed, again, to the trap of her knotting thoughts. Perhaps if the sea were seen from a great height? But that would provoke the sensation of falling, and Sitt Warda did not want a flying dream…
Gritting her teeth, she buried her face in her hands — until she heard someone step through the doorway, sounding the hollow glass chimes in so doing. Hessa looked up.
A woman stood there, looking around, the early afternoon light casting a faint nimbus around her, shadowing her face. She was tall, and wore a long, simple dark blue coat over a white dress, its embroidery too plain to declare a regional origin. Hessa could see she had beautiful hands, the gold in them drawn out by the midnight of the blue, but it was not these at which she found herself staring. It was the woman’s hair.
Unbound, it rippled.
There was shame in that, Hessa had always felt, had always been taught. To wear one’s hair so free in public was to proclaim oneself unbound to a trade, useless; even the travellers who passed through the city bound knots into their hair out of respect for custom, the five braids of travellers and visitors who wished themselves known as such above anything else, needing hospitality or good directions. The strangeness of it thrilled and stung her.
