Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020, page 45
Ashonda let them drug her. She did not resist. She squeezed her eyes shut as the physicians reached out to her, deadened her body and mind, and repaired her. She clung to her memories.
She dreamed of Nashota. And water clocks. And dead sals.
How long she dreamed, she did not know. There were moments when she thought she was awake, and there were sals looking down at her, babbling in garbled voices. Konaa was there, and three of the other female house sals, all babbling together.
“Nashota says-“
“He’s coming,” they said, and they scurried away.
Then she knew she was dreaming, because her mother was there, sitting at the edge of the bed. Her mother’s hair was dyed a brilliant raven black, and spun and twisted into a deep nest of curls pinned atop her head. She did not wear FiSondra colors; her tunic was green, and reached almost to her knees.
She smiled at Ashonda, a flagrant show of emotion that Ashonda knew was wrong, terribly wrong for a Kell to show.
“You were always quite brilliant, you know,” her mother said, “always a step ahead of the Patron. Always ahead of Nashota. Nashota betrayed us to him. Nashota, who always wanted to go to the Senate. He told him everything. I said you could be fixed, but you were careful and stored the memories here, in our matrix, our link to our sals and ourselves. You have stored our destruction here also, and perhaps our salvation. Will you use it, now that you know?”
In the dream, the vision, Ashonda wanted to ask what she was supposed to know, but then she knew it, just like that. Ashonda had worked with the sals on many devices, many contagions. She had stored a contagion here, in the house matrix, deep in her mind. All she had to do was upload it, and it would do to every family in the region what had been done to her out in the fields.
“The Patron tried to fix Nashota first,” her mother said, “to erase all those things we had taught him, but Nashota, for all his betrayal, could not be a true Kell. He has what we have, Ashonda. And once the Senate realizes what we have they will destroy all those of our House who possess it. The death of the nits releases those memories you stored here in our matrix. As you instructed, the secondary matrix has been disabled. You must act quickly. Talk fast. Think well. There’s not much time left before they discover that you can no longer be monitored, and that you have full access to the House node. They will destroy you far more ruthlessly than they destroyed me. And far more quickly.”
Ashonda woke.
The room was hot, stuffy. Ashonda wondered how long she had been closed up there. She heard movement at the other end of the room, and saw Vonisyn there, outlined in the doorway.
She reached for the links to the sals and found them; calm, complacent, pleasured sals. Perfect sals. She tentatively opened herself up to the House channel and found three messages waiting for her, tapping at the edges of her vision. And then she reached further, further still, and found the House node, just as her mother had promised. We are dying, her mother had told her all those years ago. Her mother had believed they could make it right, but only by profoundly changing everything that made them Kell. They would struggle now. They would lose their control of the sals. Everything would change.
“Is everything all right?” Vonisyn asked.
“Yes,” Ashonda said, and realized she had answered the wrong question. She had answered for her linking matrix, her receivers, not herself. She sensed that the void in her mind had been filled; all she had to do was reach, and she would find her answers there, waiting.
She got out of bed after Vonisyn left her. She walked through the gardens and watched the thornbugs dying in the fountain. She retreated to her study, sat down into her mother’s chair, and gazed up at the water clock.
Her mother once told her that water and time were one thing; they flowed without end, without beginning. “As we do,” her mother said. “The Kell are timeless.”
If she did this thing, they wouldn’t be, anymore. Their nits would die. Their bodies would age prematurely, like sals. They would be subject to mutation and contagion, all those things that changed creatures and allowed them to adapt to the world.
She sat on one of the raised cushions on the smooth wooden flooring. She gently plucked at her sals’ linking matrix. Only four hundred and ninety-five links were still there. The three dead sals were gone, of course, and Konaa and Traal…. She did not sense the loss of those two at all, not physically, as she sensed the loss of the dead sals. Her matrix told her they never existed.
Ashonda wished Nashota was there, to help her, to give guidance, to admonish, or simply to wrap his arms around her. But she was alone. This was a decision she had to make, alone. She gazed out at the sals working in the courtyard.
She laughed. A short, sharp little laugh that sounded strange in the empty room. There was no one left to hear her.
Ashonda reached for the House node, and invited change.
GODSPEAKER
THE DRIVER OF THE MOTORIZED CARRIAGE abandoned Lakisa three kilometers from the ruddy little village on the other side of swamp. He refused to take her any farther. “You want to get eaten by that demon, woman, that’s your business,” he said. “I’ll have no part in it. The beasts are howling, and they’ll eat us both if I stay.”
“I hear nothing,” Lakisa said. “Are you, too, ruled by petty superstition, brother?”
The driver swore at her in the local dialect and revved up his carriage. Lakisa stepped out onto the muddy road and watched him go. Her stilted sandals kept her feet out of the mud, but as she looked behind her to the deep ruts and puddles of the road, she felt as naked and unprepared as the day she was sold to the Nahlians.
She walked for over an hour before she came to the brick-laid walk leading down into the village.
The Nahlian territorial judge waited for her on the walk. He wore his black judge’s robe with red at the cuffs and hem. He had deep gray eyes and a dark complexion. His head was shaved. Lice, Lakisa remembered, were a mainstay of rural villages like this one. Her skin crawled.
Lakisa stepped onto the raised walk beside him. Even with her stilted sandals she barely reached his shoulder. All Nahlians were unbearably tall. She had gotten used to standing up straight among them, but it hardly seemed to make a difference in how she was perceived. They always saw her as one of the natives, never one of them.
“Greetings honorable,” Lakisa said, careful not to look into his lean face. In her school, the teachers had hit all the children with switches when they met the eyes of their Nahlian superiors.
“Greetings clerk,” he said. “You’re a real native, aren’t you? That could be problematic during the interview I need you to witness. I’m afraid you may not be able to be impartial.”
Like him, Lakisa was dark, but her features were flatter, her forehead higher, and her stature much less imposing. She could not pass for Nahlian even if she tried, not without some petty bit of witchcraft.
“I have been duly trained,” she said. “I have lived among the Nahlians since I was six years old. I understand the difference between rational truth and superstition.”
“Welcome, then” he said, “though you may find that such schooling does not prepare you for the villages. I’m Kafele Neb-ala, and you are very late, which is cause for concern. The village is restless, and we must put this issue to bed soon, before they riot. Come along.”
Lakisa opened her mouth to apologize, but he had already turned away and started down the road to the village. A handful of natives were working on the eighth tier of a brick judicial house at the center of town, a Nahilian construction with a heavy, complicated façade and striped brick pattern. The other houses were made of birch logs and sod and were raised up on stout logs, all arranged together in clumps of three and four. The smoky haze from the hearths swirled into the overcast sky. Dirty children played near the river at the other side of the village, the same river that collected the waste of the city. How fitting, Lakisa thought, that the city’s waste all collected here for rural children.
Lakisa mustered up her courage, and made her confession to her new overseer. “The honorable Nethifa Neb-hele could find no native clerk qualified to attend your request,” she said, and risked a sidelong glance at Kafele’s lean face. “There are a number of violent confrontations taking place in the rural areas, and all of the qualified clerks were called away. I’m merely a novice under Nethifa’s guidance. I’m afraid my expertise will have to do, for now. Nethifa deemed by talents suitable enough for the task at hand.”
Kafele stopped walking. She felt his gray gaze on her.
She hated it when they looked at her, when she could not return the look.
“An apprentice,” Kafele said, and shook his head. “And so young. Have you ever seen women turned to ash and come back to life? Demons talk? Ghosts walk among the living? Have you seen the white beasts of the wood?”
Lakisa pressed her lips together tightly, shook her head.
He gazed out past her, as if communing with the ghosts himself. “It’s just as well. I only need a recorder,” he said. “I can do the rest myself. Their priestess refused to tend the gods’ shrines, and her family threatened to burn her. I intervened, but she refused to speak until I called a native clerk to record her final words, as has been traditionally done before a priestess chooses to become a ghost. She insists on being reborn of ash. I am trying to convince her that is not the way of the Nahlians, and does not have to be her only path, either. But I do not anticipate changing her heart.”
As they passed through the center of the little village, several women pulled their children inside their sod houses. Lakisa knew that her presence here set a bad example. Girls without the gift for speaking with gods were to be bearing babies or guarding the village as ghosts, not acting in service of Nahlians.
Along either side of the brick walk leading up to Kafele’s sod house were Nahlian vegetable transplants. This judge had not been here long. The plants were just starting to fold in on themselves, grow gray mold, and rot alive in the damp air. Lakisa felt sympathy for the tall succulents. Come winter they would freeze and die. To one side of the house was a wood and metal mesh fowl cage, and a dozen white turkeys huddled together there in messy nests of colorful three-pronged leaves. The turkeys, too, were Nahlian, but might fare better in the Tishian climate.
Inside, the house was cool and stank of sod and tangy Nahlian pomade. The big blue paper lanterns were lit. Colorful rugs made up the floor at her right, and others were spread over two three-legged chairs of leather and oak. A drab curtain of naturally colored silk partitioned off Kafele’s sleeping area from the living area. As Lakisa’s gaze swept the room, she almost missed seeing the priestess, her shoulders draped in a shawl of the same bright colors as the rugs lining the floor.
The priestess was seated cross-legged near the squat metal stove. She was a fleshy woman in the latter half of her middling years. Her black hair, cut short and straight, was tucked behind her ears. Sooty smudges darkened the area beneath her eyes; an affectation achieved with cooled char. She wore the gray tunic and wide gray skirt of the women of the region. A blue sash hung with bronze coins was knotted at her waist.
The old woman looked up at Lakisa and spoke in a high, warbling Tishinese dialect, “You are much smaller than I hoped.”
Kafele went to the stove to make tea.
Lakisa moved awkwardly into the native vernacular. “There’s talk that you’ve endangered the lives of the village,” she said. “You have refused to tend the shrines. Now you want to be a ghost. But the Nahlian empire provides you with many more options than these.”
The priestess grunted and let out an expletive Lakisa had never heard before, and said, “Don’t talk like you know nothing, girl. Are you recording this? That’s why you’re here. Make marks so I can enjoy my last days in peace.”
Lakisa pulled out her pen, ink, and palm-sized yellow notebook from the pockets of her robe. She sat down in front of the priestess and pressed her pen to the paper.
“I want you to write this,” the priestess said. “Tell them I chose this because I’m bored with tending shrines. I have chosen to become a ghost. That’s the life I want. This one bores the shit out of me. Those Nahlians say there are other paths, but those are the paths of a slave, you understand? To Nahlians we’re just dogs that breed and die or get sold off for our talent, if we got it. You been to the cities? My sister got sold there, sold because she heard gods’ voices and the men here already had me. They threw her away and enslaved her, the way you were thrown away. I’d rather be ash.”
“I’m not a slave,” Lakisa said. “I could be anything I like.”
“Sure,” the priestess said. “Just like I could tend the shrines, or bear babies, or become a ghost. Ha! Choices. That’s all shit. You don’t choose to serve them. You have the bad accent of a child of ours sold off to pay a debt. What choice does a child have?”
Only Tishinese women could talk to gods; few men had the talent for it. Lakisa could not speak to the gods; she was deaf. But instead of birthing babies like the men’s council wanted, her mother took her to the edge of their village and waited for the Outsiders to come. Slavery, her mother said, was better than what her own people would do to her.
“I have no interest in being burned alive,” Lakisa said. “Your people tell stories of –”
“They are yours, too,” the priestess said. “They are ready to do their duty, to burn me to ash, to make a ghost to protect this village. And we need them… desperately. There are not enough of us who choose to become ash anymore, not enough who protect this village, which is why they keep coming.” She sniffed at Kafele. “Outsiders think they’re protecting me. But it’s time to be ash and let the gods speak through me.”
Lakisa stopped writing. She looked up from the little yellow book and into the priestess’s lined face. Lakisa was reminded of her mother scowling down into her face, shaking her, saying: let the gods die! And then the men had taken Lakisa and put her into their carriage. They smelled like pomade and they spoke words she didn’t understand.
Let the gods die.
Lakisa glanced back at Kafele. He poured tea into small wooden cups. She wondered how good his Tishinese was. Flawless, probably. She lowered her voice. “It’s better to be a slave in their cities,” she said, “than to be ash in your own.”
Kafele turned to look at her. She hated it when they looked at her.
A series of sharp raps sounded on the door.
The priestess snorted and squinted at her. “You’ve been gone so long,” she said, “you’ve forgotten who you are. You bought their ideas of who we are. You don’t understand, about the ash.”
“Burning women up is barbarous,” Lakisa said.
“No,” the priestess said. “We are released. We become gods. It’s the men who suffer, who scrape about here on the ground, reborn again and again. You poor fool. You know nothing of what happens here. Only what they have made you.”
Kafele crossed to the entry and opened the door. Three stocky natives stood out on the walk. They carried stones and staffs.
“This woman’s still under Nahlian protection,” Kafele said in Tishinese. His accent was terrible.
Lakisa got to her feet and stood behind him, peering out at the villagers.
“You need to make up your mind before the gods do,” the eldest man at the door said. The other two were women, and much younger. His daughters, Lakisa guessed.
“Your gods have yet to talk sense into your priestess. My superiors sent a native clerk to —”
“What, that ghost?” the man said. “They send a deaf cowbird here to understand the will of the gods? Huh.” He spit at Kafele’s feet.
“You gave up authority when you–”
“Cow dung! That woman belongs to the village. She’s –”
“Get off this walk, Bavram.”
The man spat, this time into Kafele’s face. Lakisa grabbed Kafele’s arm. The Nahlians in the city would have cut down a native in the street for that insult. But Kafele just wiped his face with one lean hand and stared right back at the man.
Lakisa quickly removed her hand.
“Curse you, demon,” Bavram said. He turned from the door. His daughters hurried after him.
Kafele wiped his hand on his robe.
Lakisa hovered at his shoulder. “I apologize for that act, honorable. The native hasn’t learned –”
“Don’t play the obedient bird with me,” Kafele said. He held out his hand, palm down, and brought it across her line of sight, a gesture of permission to gaze into his face. “We aren’t in Nahlia.”
No Nahlian had ever granted Lakisa permission to gaze at them. She had never explicitly looked any of them in the face, and she couldn’t bring herself to do so now.
“You fear violence from them?” she asked, looking out past his shoulder.
“You’re the native clerk. What do you think?”
“That’s an unfair question. I don’t have experience in—”
“Being a native.”
“That wasn’t what I—”
“You’ll see,” the priestess said from her place on the floor. “The gods have turned from conquerors. They gaze back at us here in the villages. We will rise. We will rise.”
Kafele moved past Lakisa to the stove. He offered them both cups of thick green tea, signaling the end of conversation. The priestess wrapped herself in silence. Night spread over the village as he prepared supper.
Outside, voices floated across the road. Lakisa moved from her place on the floor to sit in one of the wood and leather chairs by the window. From there she had a clear view of the rectangular meetinghouse. All the lights inside were lit.
Kafele barred the door with a stout staff of adenoak. “They’ll come tonight,” he said.
