The Jo Fletcher Books Anthology

by Frank P. Ryan

  *

  Both his wives were waiting for him at the entrance to his compound, wearing long skirts and carvings at their wrists and necks. Hands that should have been grinding flour were decked in tusk and stones.

  He opened his mouth, but they each took an arm and guided him to his hut. The whole family, except his son, was assembled outside, dressed in their finest.

  ‘What is all this?’ he said.

  ‘Bembe is to marry tonight.’

  Omaro shook himself free of his wives. ‘I know no Bembe.’

  ‘Naylen’s nephew.’

  Omaro glanced up at the darkening sky. ‘But the moon is not full.’

  ‘Full enough,’ his first wife said.

  ‘I must be made ready,’ he said, glaring at each of them in turn. They hurried into his hut and he knelt, as befitting a frontsman such as he, as his wives dressed and painted him. The clacking of their bracelets bothered him and he swiped at them, but they were too quick for his half-hearted paws.

  ‘Who is this Bembe? Tell me of him,’ Omaro said.

  ‘His village is not far,’ his first wife said. ‘He is big. They say he will call the lines soon, perhaps even next season.’

  Omaro groaned. His wives stopped their work until he waved them on again. ‘There will be no suffering Naylen tonight,’ he said. ‘Spare no paint.’

  He emerged from his hut the death god incarnate, illuminated in the sputtering firelight. His youngest children cowered and he grinned devilishly at one and all, sweeping his arms wide just to hear his feathers on the wind.

  They were late to the festivities, but their place had been held, as was right. Omaro took his seat beside the mai-ring. Dancers still occupied the cleared dirt, but they looked tired, their eyes darting to and fro. His family arranged themselves, his daughters Dorsey and Alvi at his side, his wives behind. He couldn’t see Tajo. He shifted and broke wind and Meera giggled loud enough to be heard over the dancers’ drums. He took her up onto his lap. The dancers bored her quickly and she started grasping towards Dorsey.

  ‘What does she want?’ Omaro said.

  Dorsey sighed. ‘My knuckles.’

  ‘Indulge her.’

  Dorsey reached into her pouch and produced two large bones. Meera held them up to her eyes.

  The dancers finished to a chorus of cheers and whooping, and the two families continued to make a good deal of noise. Most were already drunk; no doubt the celebrations had started early in Bembe’s village and Naylen’s family were not to be outdone. When Naylen looked his way, Omaro bowed his head, but not his eyes.

  ‘You are fighting tonight?’ he asked his daughters.

  ‘Of course, Father,’ they said.

  ‘That is good.’ There was only so much dancing he could watch before entertainment of a richer variety was called for.

  His first wife passed him a full horn and he drained half. The nut wine was pleasing, thick and heady, and he allowed Meera a sip, despite his wife’s tutting.

  There were many strangers in the mai-ring that night. He watched them lazily whilst others roared, clapped and stomped until they became shadows of the great fire in the middle of the ring. More than one fighter was upended into the flames – wedding scars were to be envied. Omaro had his share, and had given a greater share, for which his opponents had been grateful.

  ‘You look tired and thin tonight, Old Omaro.’ Naylen held out a horn, which he drained without taking a breath.

  ‘I was just remembering wedding scars,’ he said, tapping her forearm, marked almost from wrist to elbow.

  ‘To former glory,’ she said, and they drank again.

  ‘He’s a strong-looking boy,’ Omaro said.

  Naylen smiled, showing her gaps. ‘Strong blood, isn’t it?’

  ‘Strong wine.’

  ‘There’s still talk, Omaro.’

  ‘There’s always talk.’

  ‘They say she’s got you cutting down trees.’

  ‘Why not ask her yourself?’ Omaro said, gesturing at the wise woman – wise enough tonight to be betting with his daughters. She was barking and growling along with the crowd.

  ‘I’m not asking anything, just telling.’ Naylen wandered away through the wedding guests.

  Omaro saw his daughters down many that night, men and women from both villages – or at least so he was told. Perhaps it was the days working with his hands or the nut wine from Bembe’s village, but either way he could not enjoy the mai-ring as it should be enjoyed. Naylen’s words had nettled him – they were supposed to, but there was no use in knowing that. He fidgeted on his seat, then stood.

  ‘We’re not going?’ his second wife said. She had not finished her gossiping.

  ‘I need to piss.’

  His family parted before the crestfallen death god, paint smudged, his gait not what it once was.

  He wandered far from the mai-ring, beyond the fire pretending to be the sun. He was more comfortable under the moon and they walked together a while. He pissed against a tree, holding his cock as if it were a mattock, swinging it back and forth. And there was another tree cleared so his son would be a proper man.

  Something snuffled in the distance and Omaro looked about himself properly for the first time. He’d walked all the way to the tusker paddocks. He’d made his journey without Marla or Norna, making his own way there to ask the tusker god to solve his troubles.

  Resting a foot on the fence, he admired the workmanship: heavy, thick pillars, and bars big enough to be whole tree trunks. It took his weight, and would take much more. He’d like to know who built it, ask them how they’d made it so strong, and without rope – and why they’d decided against a mud covering. This fence was to keep in tuskers; his own wouldn’t give a charging tusker a moment’s pause. Was that what was behind the trees beyond the river? An old bull, struggling through the undergrowth while Omaro hoped to finish his fence and the story, only to have the tusker brush it aside?

  A tusker thumped the ground with its trunk. Omaro looked up from his thoughts of fences to find a bull, huge, with eyes that caught the moonlight as a lake might. Its legs were marked by many scars and the cracks on its trunk were deep. He knocked the fence with a fist: one warrior greeting another.

  ‘Tell me, old one,’ he said. ‘Tell me of your troubles, so I might forget my own.’

  The tusker sighed through its trunk and flapped its ears.

  ‘And so it is.’

  Omaro scraped some of the paint from his face, stretched out his hand and painted the mark of Jordner on the old god’s mighty son.

  He wandered home, in no mood for weddings.

  *

  ‘The trees have been cleared. The fence is finished. I will do no more of your work,’ he said.

  ‘That is your choice.’

  ‘Finish the story, so I can fix my son.’

  ‘That is not what was agreed,’ Violine said.

  He towered over her, blocking out the morning sun, but she did not flinch.

  ‘There are stones to clear.’

  ‘What stones?’ he barked.

  ‘Some you can see, some buried like the roots of a tree.’

  ‘Why wake sleeping stones?’

  ‘Why indeed?’ she said.

  He raised his hand. The skin around his eyes was tight and thin and stretched, like the skin of a wedding drum; the nut wine had been too thick by far. Her head was so small it might fit in his palm. He could crush it and her blood might soften the skin she’d hardened with her foolish work.

  ‘Will you bellow, frontsman? Will the mountains quake as you strike me? Is that how your son will know to follow you?’

  Omaro sighed as the old bull had, out through his nose, and he felt himself shrink – just as Naylen had been saying. His only son would never follow him. This frail, small woman knew that – that
was her wisdom.

  ‘Clear stones, hear story,’ she said with some tenderness.

  He took up the mattock and she took up the story.

  It was slow going and he wished he’d eaten that morning, no matter how his stomach had rolled. As Umar and Norna wound their way through the tunnels and caverns of the mountains, he loosened the earth in his own search. The stones he found he piled at Violine’s feet. His back began to ache until he found a rhythm – different from the chopping of trees – and then the ache turned into a kind of warmth. He soon found that a half-swing and a twist told him all he needed to know. He found more than he expected to. Umar and Norna found nothing.

  The great cave of Jordner was empty.

  ‘Empty?’ Omaro said, dropping stones onto the pile, their anger at their wakening made clear as they tumbled onto their neighbours, clunk, clunk, clunk. ‘How empty?’

  ‘The tusker god was not there.’

  ‘Then where was he?’

  ‘Umar did not know,’ Violine said.

  ‘Norna would find him with her cunning, surely?’

  ‘Norna did not know.’

  ‘Leepo had tricked them?’

  ‘Leepo knew less than Norna.’

  ‘Then it was for nothing?’ he said, his voice growing louder.

  ‘That is enough for today.’

  ‘No! You will tell me the rest of the story, now, today, under a full moon if you have to.’

  Violine pursed her dry lips.

  He grabbed her by the neck. It felt no bigger than his mai-stick – the mai-stick she’d stolen from him. She was laughing at him, he could feel it through his fingers. All these tasks she’d given him were to make him look small.

  ‘You will tell me!’ He shook her.

  She didn’t make a noise, but her eyes darted to one side. The river. She was looking to the river. He turned to see the leaves were dancing again. Perhaps he’d roused the old bull with all his shouting. Perhaps there would be a way through this time.

  ‘You must not look,’ Violine whispered.

  She was trying to command him, a frontsman. Well, she could try to command the old bull. She would be Omaro’s offering to the tusker god, this woman with her stories of empty caves and wasted journeys. He started towards the river.

  She squirmed but he’d held his share of hushts and clung tight. ‘Jordner had left this earth,’ she said. ‘He had gone, even before Umar felt the bad things of man.’

  Such lies she was spouting. He laughed. ‘Where would a god go?’ he said.

  ‘Where indeed?’

  He tried to shut out her riddles. The noise of the river was almost enough to cover her voice. Jordner had allowed the rains to run off his mountains and the flow was faster than he’d seen it before. Gone, ha!

  ‘That was Jordner’s message,’ Violine said. ‘Umar couldn’t see it; he raged as you do. But Norna understood.’

  Omaro crashed through his own fence. The spears he’d planted were like twigs. He waded into the river, the current pulling at him, but he would not be stopped; his legs were strong. He was a frontsman, the great Omaro, who had two wives: the dread of the mountain folk, his knuckle-pouch full to bursting.

  ‘Norna said they should all leave, every one of them, every animal that walked or crawled or flew.’

  He lowered her into the water, where her lies could not reach him. He was up to his armpits, but the other bank was close now so he set his teeth and pushed on. Blood pumped through him, his head free of nut wine for the first time that day, washed away by Jordner’s river. The tusker god who ran from nothing, who he would meet beyond the trees, would fix his son without the lies of stories.

  Violine coughed and spluttered when they made the bank, but he pushed through the bushes, ignoring their ripping grasp.

  ‘And they left us. All of them,’ Violine said, her voice weak now.

  ‘Stop lying to me!’ he screamed.

  ‘They were gone so long, so horrible had man become.’

  He knocked her head against a tree and her eyes rolled.

  ‘Gone so long, we forgot their names,’ she mumbled.

  Her story had turned to madness now. He tried to stop listening, to pretend he was the sleeping bern, with no care for her buzzing.

  ‘The animals didn’t always have the names we know. They had other, older names that we forgot. Jordner led the charge, as he always has, and the rest followed him to the stars.’

  Omaro was at the trees now. Their leaves were still, but he could not see through. He was breathing hard, the water cooling on his skin. Thin trails of blood ran down his calves.

  ‘They needed to go away. So we could see them anew.’

  He pushed through the trees and stopped.

  There was a fence – not a tusker fence, not thick enough to hold an old bull, but a neat fence, more ordered than his own. Care had gone into that fence; that much Omaro could see, hours of craft. And beyond it was a clearing of the same size. A man was turning the soil, waking the stones and building his own pile – but it was more than a pile. Omaro watched this man place each stone quietly, without disturbing their slumber. He was building another fence, but one of stone.

  ‘This is what you didn’t want me to see?’ Omaro said, placing the wise woman in front of him. ‘Did you think I would be shamed by another man’s efforts?’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘I have taken men’s teeth from their skulls whilst listening to their screams. What is this to me?’ he said, spreading his arms wide to take in the clearing.

  ‘Then wait here,’ Violine said, her voice returning. She walked lightly over the soil, shivering a little in the setting sun.

  Omaro looked on as she spoke to the man, then they were coming to him, as was right.

  The man wasn’t as small as he’d appeared. He had a tightness to him, long lean muscles, and the way he carried himself was not as a warrior would, but with a different kind of strength: with an understanding of how he was placed in the world.

  When they met, Omaro thumped the ground and the man bowed his head.

  Violine also bowed. ‘How long have you been coming to me, Omaro, frontsman of our village, taker of bones, decider of fates?’

  ‘Three times the moon has grown fat on your lies,’ he said.

  The man was shocked at his tone, but Violine only said, ‘Has it been so little?’ She pushed the man before Omaro. ‘But it has been long in some ways, has it not?’

  ‘I don’t know—’

  ‘Jordner showed the way: that sometimes we need a distance, a time away from what we love, and then we can see it new.’

  They stood almost eye-to-eye, this man who was not so different. Once, Omaro would have been the mountain to this man’s tree, but that Omaro was years gone. They were not so different in their arms, their ribs, their elbows. He and this man who had cleared a part of the jungle as he had, who had made better fences and found a use for sleeping stones.

  ‘Stop spilling lies, Violine, and tell me this man’s name.’

  ‘Father?’ the man said.

  Omaro felt a lightness, a lightness of falling, as if he was in the mai-ring once more: the moments before the ground came rushing up beneath him. His mouth was dry. His shoulders dropped as if he’d found the cave empty.

  But ‘empty’ wasn’t right.

  Tajo was there in the flatness of the nose, in the small downturn of the lips, but the skin wasn’t so soft. Tajo was there in this man who carried himself well.

  The sun cleared the trees for a moment and caught Omaro. He closed his eyes and saw squares of green. Neat squares, one next to the other, with a river running between.

  David Towsey is a graduate of the Bath Spa and Aberystwyth University Creative Writing programmes. Born in Dorset, he moved to Wales and managed to lose himself there for ten years. He�
��s now determined to see what the rest of the world has to offer. David’s The Walkin’ trilogy is published by Jo Fletcher Books and consists of Your Brother’s Blood, Your Servants and your People and Your Resting Place.

  Hebe’s Ocean • Naomi Foyle

  Hebe’s Ocean

  Naomi Foyle

  Liquid gold streaked with candy floss pink and sherbet orange shimmered as far as my vision receptors could detect. On Earth, those colours would dance across the sea to a ravishing sunset. Here, the buoyant substance covering 82.3% of the surface of Hebe glowed with an internal radiance. Standing on its marble shore beneath a pulsing white sky, I applied my association algorithm.

  ‘Nuclear peach juice, molten dawn, spilled pirate’s treasure,’ I murmured. Nothing quite right yet, but it was a start.

  Beside me, the captain grunted. ‘Feel it, Lyricia,’ she ordered. The captain, I had discovered, was hard-wired to respond to similes with irrelevant and possibly, in a rudimentary way, jealous commands. Surely even a construct as devoid of emotion as she must, in some way, resent being literally tethered to the Company. Being myself the very model of tact, I had thus far avoided mentioning her anklet and cable, the latter now snaking obsequiously behind us back to the ship. Oblivious to my compassionate restraint, the captain provoked and dismissed me at every opportunity. Fortunately I had spent most of the journey in stand-by mode or I would have chopped her in two by now with the spaceship’s emergency axe. I employ hyperbole, of course – I am not in fact capable of physical violence, except to defend myself – but after eleven and a half Earth years alone in her company I would certainly have composed an epic murder ballad in which the captain died twelve thousand times.

  ‘I do feel it.’ I tried not to boast. ‘And I have,’ I reminded her, ‘in the Company lab.’

  ‘Laboratory conditions differ from those on-site.’ Her fan whirred audibly. ‘The exploratory crew immersed their hands and feet in Hebe’s sea-like substance for 12.73 hours in total, while gazing silently at the waves.’