Fantasy Magazine, May 2010

Fantasy Magazine Issue 38, May 2010 Table of Contents Daha’s Son by Keffy R. M. Kehrli (fiction) The Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String by Lavie Tidhar (fiction) Wishes and Feathers by Patricia Russo (fiction) The Sometimes Child by Caroline Yoachim (fiction) Interview: Tim Pratt Author Spotlight: Keffy R.M. Kehrli Author Spotlight: Lavie Tidhar Author Spotlight: Caroline Yoachim About the Editor © 2010 Fantasy Magazine www.fantasy-magazine.com Daha’s Son Keffy R. M. Kehrli Honor. The light dims. Daha looks up from the corn she grinds. He stands before her, five times dead. He holds the obsidian disc, with its edges worn smooth by his fingers and his prayers. He is her son, and even so, Daha wonders whom he prays to. Does he pray to his new name, or to the name of the Fifth whom he will replace? Are there secrets granted only to boys who must become gods? “I won’t come back to you this time.” He says this as if he has ever cared before. His voice is distant and he is dressed in robes of dyed cotton. Patterns of jagged green pass under and over divine black from his shoulders to just above his sandaled feet. Dust lightens the bottom handwidth of cloth; he walks in the dirt as men do. He stands in the doorway to her little house made of clay and straw and the sunlight silhouettes him so all she can see is his outline and the broad patterns of his clothing. He smells faintly of orange blossoms. Daha feels a chill pass down her spine, though she has always known this day would come. For him, it is only another prepared moment in a life of rituals; for her, it is a sixth cut to her heart, wider and deeper than any other. He ducks his head to enter. He resembles her brothers more than his own father, so tall, now, and thin, even though he is fed better than the Berai king. His face still clings to a little fat, for an instant, Daha sees a frightened boy. Then he smiles with easy, cool arrogance and the illusion dissipates. Daha slides coarse-ground corn into the clay bowl on her left and adds a handful of dried kernels to her stone. Neither of them speak as she grinds two passes, her chest aching with the words she would say. Her oldest, he should be inheriting his father’s home and staying near to her when she grows too weak to grind corn or cook. When she doesn’t answer, he paces, stepping lightly over hard-packed earth. In days past, she might have rebuked him for leaving his sandals on. Daha looks up again when he is standing near the stone oven and she can see him better. He has let his hair grow to mid-back and laced it through with crow feathers and sparrow bones, with jade beads and copper rings. In thirteen years, the ways of death have been made his life, and he is the crueler for it. He worries at the obsidian, a hollow where his thumb rests. “I have waited for this all my life,” he says, finally. A little petulance tinges his speech. He is still young. “I must be freely given.” *** Luck. Daha first lost her son before he was born. She had carried him half a year, from the cold dry nights of winter, to the long sunlight of summer. He moved as though running circles in her womb, and she slept many nights with her husband’s hand on the rise of her, fingers splayed to catch the movement. They were a handful of days from the solstice, and she spun cotton dyed the color of the sun with her husband’s sisters. They were all four unmarried, and lived in the small house morningward of Daha’s home. The day was hot and the air was unusually damp, storm weather. Her clothes stuck to her back and sides and her son moved constantly, as if the coming storm made him restless, too. Daha was tired, but she still tried to spin more than the sisters as a matter of pride. Only the youngest liked her enough to speak with her, and the other three tended toward silence, or brief conversations in their late father’s tongue. Alnide was new to womanhood and still fascinated by pregnancy; she had never witnessed a birth. She chattered to Daha like a little bird nesting in the woven-straw roof, but her fingers were so quick that her sisters didn’t pinch her for her words. They waited until she dropped corn or returned from the creek with pretty stones and no water, and then they showed her their jealousy. Daha knew enough of their father’s words to make out what they said, that Alnide was too dark to be pretty, her skin like newly turned soil in the spring. For all they said, however, it was Alnide’s white teeth that flashed smiles at everyone, and her ears that were weighed down with gold rings, gifts from the metalworker’s son. Alnide whistled like a hawk screaming to prey. “Daha, you are too fast! My fingers burn just watching you.” The oldest of her sisters said something sharp that Daha did not understand. Before Alnide could argue, Daha tilted her head graciously. “The heat makes me weak,” she said. “I spin faster so that I can rest.” “Your daughter wants to spin, too,” Alnide said, laughter chasing her speech. “That’s why she moves so much. She makes you quicker, so you spin enough for two.” Daha twisted the cotton easy and even, fingerlengths, then handlengths, then armlengths. Before Alnide could chatter off down some other road of conversation, Daha said, “Mehar wants a son, I think.” It was not a guess, she knew so much from the whispers in her ears, from the loving caresses. A strong son to hunt, to sell pelts and skins and carved bone and obsidian to the men on the coast who lived packed too close in cities to draw back their bows. But she could not simply say this. Mehar’s mind was his own, and Daha should not tell others what she knew of it. “A son!” Alnide laughed again, but she twisted cotton with more speed and skill so that her sisters would forgive her. “What good is a son? The boys in the village sit around and scratch themselves and throw rocks at snakes to make them rattle. Aheben should give you a daughter so you have help when we’re gone and married.” Careless words from a young girl. The silence stretched long and thin as the thread between Daha’s fingers. She sent Alnide to bring water from the creek, and sweat trickled down her neck and between her shoulderblades, between her breasts. Without Alnide, the stares of the sisters fell on Daha alone. She was relieved when she heard the far off rumble, like the sound of a hundred drums, and then the sky opened with a deluge that shattered the oppressive heat. After the rain, water sat in shallow pools, baking to dryness in the sun. Alnide had not come back. Daha put the cotton thread aside and she looked at each of the three sisters in turn, though they did not look up at her. “I will see what has kept Alnide,” Daha said into the silence. She slipped out through the open door. None of the sisters spoke until she was outside, and then Daha caught a burst of words in their father’s language. An argument? A discussion? She wished that she had any luck in convincing her husband to teach her the tongue. The few words she knew were not enough. Steam roiled from what was left of the rain, dissipating small puddles across the land for as far as Daha could see. The puddles were warm and she left her sandals just inside her door. Daha thought first that she would find Alnide on her way from the creek, but as she neared the dark crack in the land where the creek had cut its way down into the red-stone earth, it became clear that Alnide was still there if she were anywhere. “Alnide!” Daha called, but not even an echo answered her. She reached the canyon. It was maybe twice the height of a man, and the creek wound its way through the muddy bottom, racing between large rocks newly dislodged. The bottom and sides of the canyon were still damp in the aftermath of the flood that had flashed through, carrying with it the plants from the base and parts of the walls. There was Alnide’s jar, abandoned along the top of the canyon while she wandered off. The baby moved again, and Daha cursed Alnide quietly. She bent to retrieve the jar. A five-legged toad sat against the side, staring at her with wide, bulging eyes. Five legs, the sign of Aheben, the Fifth. Daha recoiled. She stepped too far and her ankle turned under her. There was a moment when she thought she had only stumbled, and she tried to take another step back to steady herself. Then, she realized that she had turned herself around and behind her was only air and the canyon below. Daha landed in the muddy creek bed, hard enough that the wind escaped her lungs all in a rush, and she spent the next few moments listening to the sound of the creek, thankfully no longer swollen from the rain.

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