2
Before she was Eion’ahisural Apama she was a nameless son of the Auye, just one of many peoples who have lived below the great gulf coast since the Long Before. Her earliest memories were set against the adobe walls of a sun-baked city, always ringing with chatter and birdsong. In one unbroken sequence, her father’s gentle hand on her back guided her toddling steps through a high gate lined with red and green and white streamers, little Merah chattering and playing all the while. Wide plains gave way to forested hills, thin streams crawling over exposed limestone slabs, game trails haunted by peccary and deer. At the end of the trail was Pama.
The Auye who lived there hadn’t built the forty or so ramshackle structures scattered across the clearing in the oak woods, only moved in as the dry years slowly ran on. The creek bubbling along just south hadn’t failed in years. Her mother’s mother, Ahi, had seen this as particularly auspicious in her youth, and it was she who greeted us as we arrived from the city, perpetually bent over a phantom garden plot and grinning toothlessly.
She and Merah were spoiled. The other children were wary of them at first, then outright dismissive, lifted from their caution by the obstinate spirits all small children are possessed by at some point or another. They seemed sure the siblings would disappear just as suddenly as they had arrived and put them easily from their minds. Being exiles suited the siblings; they splashed laughing in the creek together, scaring the fish away; they dug holes in the black soil where the adults tried to grow sorghum, corn, and medicine; they ran through the forest like wild animals, scaring off the actual animals the Auye often depended on for food. Ahi handed down her first and most severe scolding to them a year after they arrived, after an argument between the sisters had grown too fierce and took down the fence to the goat pen in its wake.
Their punishment—spending a long two days and a night tracking down each escaped goat, variously cursing their wise grandmother and sobbing over the thought of a coyote or jaguar eating one of the poor things—seemed to warm the other children up to them, the failed outlaw siblings. She began spending time with some of Engo’s grandkids, while Merah found a confidante in Sudha, who was a year younger than her but the tallest of Pama’s children, who would lead them all on wild adventures across the creek, hunting eight legged three headed monsters hungry for the flesh of the Auye, searching for the last of the great ice walls, shrunken by a sorcerer and hidden in the tall grass, marshalling the kids in a small army that would break itself on the walls of a castle sat upon by a cruel and wicked queen.
Where Merah had been her first friend, Sudha introduced her to cruelty. At the time she didn’t understand why he went out of his way to belittle her as they took group lessons from the elders, to shove her during dances, to take her food during meals. I must have done something wrong, she thought. The adults must have thought so, too; Sudha’s bullying seemed invisible to them.
It was around this time that the child first noticed the bird. She heard its song one morning, long before she ever felt it, while sitting at Ahi’s table, helping to roll out corn dough into flat discs that would eventually be baked into bread. She was somehow aware of her own hand as she rolled a small piece of dough, childlike and clumsy yet seeming to grow until it eclipsed even her father’s. Nausea settled in her throat, and she set her dough down on the table.
“When I grow up, am I gonna look like aba?” she asked Ahi. The old woman scowled, her jowls shaking from some unknown percussion special to the inner workings of elders.
“You’re probably gonna look like some mix of your aba and your mama,” she answered.
“I don’t know what my mama looks like.”
Ahi spat a laugh into the dough. “I would think not. Well, can you imagine someone who looks between you and me in age?” They met each other’s eyes, a mirthful tease behind Ahi’s, sincere investigation behind the child’s.
“No,” she answered after a while. “Because I think you’re too old.”
Ahi snorted more laughter all over the little room. Her grandchild laughed with her. “Well, kid,” she said, because her grandchild had not been named yet. “She was my daughter, and she was beautiful, and you’re a good kid, so I think you’ll be just like her.”
There it was: a trilling tirr-wi-weep, tirr-wi-weep, tirr-wi-wi-weep, the call of a bird so close by, as if it were somewhere among the white blossoms of the plum tree outside Ahi’s window, the sky all hazy with sunlight and smoke. The child looked for it, her arms still chubby at her sides, fingers sticky with dough, but she couldn’t find the source of the song. In her mind’s eye a storm of feathers fluttered from that unseen perch and alighted in her heart. She knew then, fearfully, in the grip of a strange new pain, a longing for something she could not describe, that the bird would nest inside her for the rest of her life.
She came of age at eight. In the dancing light of a bonfire the children of the Auye stood before their elders and proclaimed themselves their own masters, one with themselves and each other, a unique thread binding together the blanket of their lives and the life of Pama. She remembered Merah’s bold face, the pride in her family’s eyes, more distant in her father than in Ahi, as she came of age three years prior, stating her intention to become a hunter, an herbalist, and a caretaker of people. In typical Auye fashion all the adults laughed at her, this scrawny girl pretending to be grown. It was all very good-natured, a light ribbing to keep the kids humble, and they showered her with praise at the feast afterwards, especially for her strong new name, Merah, horse. It still took her a while to stop sulking.
Then her own shadow replaced the memory of Merah’s before the fire, her feet cramping and aching after the long dance, her head still swimming from her quaff of the pungent hollydrink, and she felt for the first time the exact shape of the small bird taking wing deep in her chest, of its soft, delicate head and clever beak, the tailfeathers like knives catching the wind as it flew, how it shimmered from white to green and gold as it crossed stray band of sunlight; and in front of everyone she had ever known, who all thought of her as Merah’s funny little brother, Ahi’s bright grandson, she said: “I want to be a girl.”
No one laughed. Only the fire spoke. Maybe they didn’t hear me, she thought. She repeated herself, louder.
“I want to be a strong girl. I want to be beautiful. I want to hunt and heal people like Merah. When I grow up I want to be a mother, and when I’m old I want to be like Ahi.”
Some in the crowd began to murmur to one another, their eyes darting between one another and her, one or two giggling. The child’s head began to spin, the bonfire and the people of Pama stretching away, leaving her alone. She spotted Merah through the flames, who caught her gaze and smiled.
Ahi stepped out of the circle arrayed around the small, scared girl and the fire, which were one and the same now, and she crossed the empty space towards her grandchild. A pale light shone mischievously in her beady old eyes. She knelt down in front of her.
“Kid,” she said, sighing. “I thought you might say something like that.”
Easy laughter, relieved, rippled through the gathering. Her cheeks and ears were flushed.
“It’s not easy being a woman, you know,” she said, smiling now. “Much less a mother. All these boys run around like nothing matters. You’re gonna have a lot to worry about.”
“It’s hell, kid!” said a woman from the crowd. They laughed again. Tears welled up in the child’s eyes. Ahi, her sweet grandmother, cupped her small face with a wrinkled hand.
“I knew a girl like you once, a long time ago. She wasn’t a mother, but she was brave, and strong, and she had a good laugh, like you. Her light went out early. Yours won’t, so stop crying, okay?”
“I’m not scared,” the child sniffled.
“Right, I know. You’re doing really good. Hey, how about a name?”
The gathered adults whooped and cheered, Merah the loudest, somewhere behind Ahi’s big old head. She started bawling. Ahi moved with her surprising grandmother speed and put her hands on her grandchild’s shoulders, turning to stand behind her and push her further into the light.
“So this kid lives a long life,” she proclaimed. “And so she can be a strong woman and a brave mother, here in Pama or anywhere else, her name will be Eio. The mayfly!”
“Eio,” the crowd echoed, laughing. “The mayfly!”
Then the ceremony was over, which was never very somber to begin with in Pama, and the celebration kicked off in earnest. Music rang out, drums and horns and flutes taking over the hearts assembled and commanding them to dance. Food was produced from one storehouse or another: roasted savory and sweet corn, charred fish, stewed venison and peccary and alligator, warm flatbread with goat butter and cheese and mustang grape jam, several whole succulent turkeys, baskets of pawpaws, persimmons, mayhaw, and prickly pear, and five ancient casks of mulberry wine. As a child Eio had always played on the outskirts of these festivals, never paying any mind to when it would be her turn. Now the light and laughter were dizzying, the promises of sisterhood from the older women becoming less clear, the congratulatory embraces and jokes growing louder and less focused. Too much hot wine, not enough water earlier that day. She slipped backwards between Ahi and her father, an absent look in his eyes and a distant hand brushing her back as she left. The Auye loved to throw a good party and forget why they were dancing and feasting halfway through. They thrummed and sang like one heart. She grinned at them, a woven basket of a hundred of her kin all lit furiously from within, and she went into the night, barefoot on the wild earth, untouchable, everything that ever was, nothing at all.
Sudha found her in a canebrake by the creek. She heard his footsteps and turned, wary. The icy light of the moon, half-peeled, slipped behind a cloud, taking the boy’s features with it. He was standing silhouetted by darkness in the tall grass beside and a little behind her. Eio’s confidence fled. She waited for him to push her, or mock her, but he stood still.
“Only girls can be mothers,” he said. He sounded hurt, like he was being punished for something. “You’re no girl. You’re Merah’s brother.” Crickets sang nearby.
“I’m her sister,” said Eio, trembling, her eyes cast aside. “There are other girls like me. Ahi said so.” The bird sang out wildly, beating its wings in a white hot flash of fury, and Eio dug her heels into the pliable earth, grinding her teeth, eyes flashing. “You can’t tell me who I am anymore, Sudha,” she cried. “Everyone accepted me. It was my coming of age. You already had yours. You don’t have to run me down all the time!” Her fists clenched. “Why do you run me down all the time?”
Sudha started towards her and she blanched. Her legs turned to stone. The weak breeze parted the grass easily for him. They led him right to her.
“You don’t know how to be a mother. You don’t even know how to make a baby.”
Eio shrugged, of course she knew, but she couldn’t meet his eyes. The bird had fled. She didn’t know what he wanted.
“I know how,” he said. He was looking away, too. “I can show you. But you can’t tell anyone. You have to promise.”
She’d never heard him so scared before. I must have scared him, she thought, coming into the fire and saying something so crazy it shut the adults up. Something wet and cold began to undulate deep in her stomach, heavy and clammy, and the bird was engulfed in silence. Eio nodded, yes, agreeing, although she wasn’t sure to what exactly, even as he closed the distance between them and placed his small hands on her. Later she understood. She endeavored to walk tall and proud under the sun and the rain and the moon; she laughed along with Merah, who everyone loved, and their love for each other never faltered, even after their father quietly slipped away from Pama, leaving no trace of himself but them; when hunting was bad and the crops failed Sudha organized them, and his leadership brought the Auye from the brink of starvation. As long as she kept her eyes away from his, and as long as she spoonfed Ahi her warm broth in the cold months, and as long as she kept taking the special herbs meant for women who began as boys to keep them hard and beautiful and swift like the rest of Pama’s mothers and sisters, Eio knew she could go on. She went on for a long time. The sickness only found her the autumn before her thirtieth year.
The Auye, unnoticed and unlooked for except in dire times, held true the stories of the Long Before, when the planet was blanketed in darkness. Mother Gar and Sister Peccary dozed in the twilight, oblivious to the hardships echoing from desert to sea. Hour after hour, the animals and plants cried out for succor, but the shadows were too deep. Eventually, after many sightless generations, it fell to Grandmother Owl to poke holes in the sky with her talons, creating the stars and moon. Seeing the beauty and terror of her wings under the nascent light, Woman and her children grew jealous, throwing stones at Owl, and she became tangled in the net of the sky. Her panicked thrashing tore open a great rift in the firmament, through which the sun cascaded. Grandmother Owl was blinded, but her sacrifice saved our world.
To honor her spirit, and to atone for their primal sin, the Auye hunted at night.
Eio crept through the understory silently. Cicadas sang around her. She parted their noise as snakes parted grass. Light from the half moon danced and wavered above her, suspended in the oak canopy, and she was grateful. Gratitude filled her with elation. She suppressed a giggle.
A twig tensed beneath her bare foot and she paused. Shifting her weight, opening herself wider to her surroundings, she sensed movement to her right. Merah was creeping alongside her some twelve paces away; her sister held her stealth in high esteem, would brag about it around the fire to her friends, but Eio could always find her.
They stopped in their tracks as one. Eio’s mind lagged a step behind her body, its responses automatic. Her eyes unfocused and she inhaled. As if in answer, the wind murmured towards her, rustling the young leaves of a sumac bush in her path. She registered an earthy scent, darker than the soil, like uprooted secrets, stale piss, crushed walnuts, nasal whispers. It was probably a tapir, she thought, maybe thirty paces away. The sisters waited in silence for what seemed like hours before they heard it: leaf litter gently rustling, punctuated by a nearly porcine snort.
She didn’t have to hear Merah to know she had advanced, was circling around the animal, carefully planting her feet where the forest couldn’t betray her. She was always better at getting the jump on prey but Eio held more patience. We make a good team, she thought, the wind blowing tapir sign through her black hair, past her crooked nose, through her totally. The taut muscles in her thighs began to protest. She had been squatting for too long. She could feel her toes going numb. A distant nightjar’s trill washed over the forest. The tapir hadn’t moved, engrossed in browsing, eyes and heart open to the hostile curtains of night. Eio could feel its hooves pawing through the forest floor.
Slowly, with the caution of a climber repositioning herself on a desperately fragile scree, she pulled the spear off the braided cord on her back. Her right hand found its home three fingers from the base, her left wrapped delicately around the middle, right at the edge of its balance. Her burning squat grew grain by grain into an explosive crouch, poised to lunge.
Once more the wind breathed in and out. The upper canopy parted. A lone tear of moonlight glanced off the black obsidian blade at the end of her spear. It gleamed hungrily.
From the darkness beyond her quarry she heard a screech owl’s whinny, only lower. Merah’s signal. Then the forest exploded.
Something louder, farther off, haunting, trembling; a roaring like thunder come alive, of pain from a deep place, of the crushing knowledge of too much time passing. Though she had never heard anything like it before that night, Eio knew, as unmistakably as a heart knows to beat, that she heard the wailing of a living thing, so immensely large its footsteps would shake the world. Nocturnal animals jettisoned themselves into the sky; the understory shook with falling hooves and paws. She fell backwards. A riotous pain erupted in her neck where she landed on a stone jutting from the soil like a rogue wave. She had the sense of feathers falling above her.
The great roar continued—and the tapir sprang out of the bushes before her.
A quiet second passed as they locked eyes. Eio charged forward; the tapir juked right. Her right foot landed in solid dirt and pivoted, nearly twisting, and she thrust the spear with her right arm, guiding with her left. She twisted her core towards the animal and gouged the obsidian blade through its flank. She whooped with joy despite herself as her prey honked.
It didn’t take long for the tapir to succumb, and Eio quickly finished it with her knife, thanking it for its meat, hide, and bones. Ahi would be pleased. Merah found her panting over the corpse, a ways back from where they had parted. Her eyes were shifty and cold; her brow furrowed under her dark wet hair, pulled back loosely into her classic ponytail. Thin lines crept wearily across her face and crinkled beside her eyes.
“We’ll butcher it back home,” she said.
They remembered and waited for the long, sonorous roar again. The forest answered as it usually did, with the percussion of leaves in the breeze and an accompaniment of cicadas. Eio whistled.
“You outdid yourself with your call this time,” she said, forcing a smile. “Who taught you how to do that?”
Merah ignored her and sucked in through her teeth. “I’ve never heard anything like that before,” she said. “I’ve hunted almost my whole life and I’ve never once heard that. The way it echoed it had to have come from leagues away.” She bit her thumbnail as Eio gathered her spear. “I wonder if any of the other villages heard it.”
“I don’t think any of the other villages are awake right now.” Eio gently ran a clump of moss over the tip of her spear, the sound throbbing in her mind.
“Come on,” Merah insisted. “I said we’d butcher it back home.”
“Thank her, first.”
Eio couldn’t say she wasn’t spooked. Still, she liked the way Merah rolled her eyes, childlike and far too indignant than the situation usually called for.
“Thank you, tapir, for your hide, and for your meat, and for your bones. We will surely feed our grandmother for a long while because of you. You can come to our hearth any time.”
“Perfect,” said Eio, scrambling to her feet. “Now let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”
They wound up laughing all the way home, the hoarse, easy laughter that finds those who think they’re finally in the best years of their lives, and no more howling troubled them that night; but still Eio found it hard to sleep without the fire burning low, weakly flickering to keep the darkness out.
Eio woke late the next day, near noon, to commotion outside. She sat up in her bedroll and found Ahi at the fire, shakily dicing mushrooms on her low table. She had changed little since Eio had first met her over twenty years ago, just bent lower, less steady in her hands and her steps, more prone to wandering both afield and in her mind. A few wiry white hairs spiraled down over her eyes as she worked. Eio wondered what those gray eyes had seen the first time she set foot in Pama, sixty or seventy years ago, fleeing famine or worse. Ahi didn’t look up as she approached.
“You took a hit to the head last night,” she crowed. Eio knelt next to her and planted a kiss in her hair. “Your sister’s outside.”
“Where’s that tapir?”
“Merah decided to let Kova and her girls have it.”
Oh, Ahi—”
“No, no. I can’t eat that much. And she was a big tapir, you both did a good job, but I don’t need it, and the meat’s too tough for me anyway. If you want some you can go ask Kova, I’m sure she’d let you pick a nice cut.”
Eio stood up, sighing. A loud crash came from outside, like one of the little storage huts collapsing, followed by shouting. She leaned her head out of the tanned hides covering the front door. A crowd of Auye was pushing through the broad mud street towards the center of Pama, carrying what looked like long crates, many of them spilled and shattered now. Peering closer she saw a few limp figures being carried with them. She turned back inside.
“What’s going on?”
Ahi snorted. “Go ask your sister,” she said, returning to her mushrooms. “Or Sudha, the big baby, go ask our brave work captain what all the fuss is.”
When Eio found her, still tightening her kit around her waist and pulling her hair back into a loose knot, Merah was trying to talk down a sizable crowd by the unlit bonfire, sweat running across the deep creases in her forehead. She spotted Sudha behind her near the big house he had commandeered some years ago, deliberating or arguing with a man she had never seen before. She slipped through the crowd, nearly stepping on some kids playing underfoot, oblivious to the chaos and fear around them, and had to push past old Engo just as Merah turned away, shaking her head. A pang of panic fluttered in her chest as she reached out for her sister only to grasp empty air.
“Merah!”
She turned, her clenched jaw relaxing.
“Slept well, huh?”
“I’m sorry.” Eio clasped her on the shoulder. There she was. “Ahi said to find you.”
“It’s okay,” she said, and Eio knew this to be false. “Some people came in early this morning, from Talash, I think.”
“That’s far.”
“It’s really far, and they were scared, Eio. Something was after them, hunting them, they said something about being rounded up, and no, I don’t know by who, don’t ask. Sudha’s putting them in the big house for now. Everyone’s just worked up.”
Over Merah’s shoulder she saw one of Engo’s kids hauling another of the long crates, dragging the end in the dust. One of the Talashi women, old and brown, stepped out of the big house and wailed, her trembling arms reaching after the box. Sudha held her back. Eio couldn’t register anything in his eyes; she couldn’t tell whether they could see anything at all.
“They’re called coffins, I think,” said Merah, turning to look. “I’m going to see Sudha. He won’t tell us anything except that the big house is off-limits. First that noise last night and now this.” She glanced back at Eio. “You don’t have to come with me.”
Eio nodded. “I think I do.”
A wave of rank incense assailed the sisters as they pushed through the crowd and past Sudha’s door. The big house was claustrophobic despite its size, weight-bent shelves lining the walls, baskets and dried herbs hanging from the ceiling, big ochre jars and adzes and bundles of parchment scattered around the floor. Sudha glared up at them, his jaw writhing like a cliff before a mudslide. The Talashi visitors paid them no mind. There were four of them, dressed in the high-waisted breeches, alligator boots, and heavy overcoats of the deep swamp. All were bald and bearded except for the old woman, now quietly sobbing. Each of them stared ahead, eyes unseeing, clouded by some storm, as if none of them were really there.
“You can’t be in here,” Sudha hissed between his teeth. His eyes flashed to Eio, momentarily locking her in the pain of his presence. There had been a lot of pain. Her eyes found the far wall.
“We heard,” said Merah. She kept her voice low. “What’s going on? You can’t keep us in the dark forever. Who are they?”
“You need to leave, Merah.”
“We have a right to know.”
A white flash scurried behind Sudha’s eyes, and for a second Eio’s heart stopped. If he and Merah came to blows there’d be real trouble.
“Used to be twelve of us,” one stranger finally spoke in a toad’s growl. He scratched his mossy beard with filthy fingernails, eyes vacant. “Rest sick, or caught.”
“What do you mean, sick?” asked Merah, exasperated now. “Caught by who?”
It was then Eio noticed the fifth stranger.
She was huddled on Sudha’s meager cot, not so much shivering as convulsing, spasming almost constantly. Someone had stripped her down, which seemed a little odd given her distance from the fire, until a stray flame lit the sweat drenching her pale, withered form like stars. Eio had never seen someone so wretched. She suddenly found herself taking quiet steps towards the woman, circling around the fire as Merah and Sudha argued. She just kept lying there, curled around herself, nothing but an empty seashell spiraling into itself; a woman turned cavernous, a calcified chamber, once a home but now so hollow. Eio wanted to see her face.
“Eio, get back—”
She jumped, startled, and stumbled into one of Sudha’s little shelves. A clay dish full of coyote teeth fell and shattered. In a moment longer than her entire life up to that point, the woman on the cot craned her neck up and met Eio’s gaze.
Yellow irises, streaked with mesmerizing crimson rivulets; bloodshot sclera, the vessels burst into a cloud in the left eye; sightless black pupils.
“Dog eyes,” Eio muttered, right before her sister hooked her arms around her chest and—
Beams of sunlight dance rippling across the sand bottom of the shallow sea where worms crawl and spined jellies creep slowly leaving strange undulating tracks behind them in their search for food their destinies simple to eat to propagate to escape to flee the shadows of needle cone giants and swimming scorpions with pincers that rend flesh crush carapace make muck all that lives because nothing yet lives that has bones all is shell and mucus no jaws no teeth no lungs no feet but paddles stalks pincers tentacles gently probing blindly pleading for release deliverance for food all of them food for each other sharing in the bounty of one another a pulsing planet of small monsters each a cell of a compound eye each a thought in a cosmic brain each a ghost that was yet to die—
Eio fell into the dirt at the small crowd’s feet. She could hear their gasps and murmurs. Her head was suddenly leaking. Her hands fumbled in the dust for her brains.
“Get back,” Merah growled. “All of you, get out of here, go home! Don’t come out until Sudha or I say so. Go home!”
That sent them packing. Somebody was laughing somewhere. Probably at me and my spinning leaking head, she thought.
“Shut up, Eio. Stand up, come on.”
She felt her sister trying to haul her to her feet but she just collapsed again. Something was weighing her down. Something was wrong.
“Merah,” she choked. “Merah, what’s happening?”
“You shouldn’t have gotten that close, Sudha should’ve just said, what was he thinking, what were you thinking?”
“Merah, her eyes—”
“I know. She’s sick, Eio, I mean, really fucking sick. We need to go home.”
Oh, Mother Gar: please keep me hale and hearty in all seasons. Keep my lungs clear and fresh, and cleanse me of my stains. Let me swim after you in the wide, clean river.
Eio blinked and they were at Merah’s hut on the edge of Pama. Her sister dumped her limp body on her bedroll and said, “Mother Gar’s busy. From now on you listen to me. Don’t move.” Then she stormed out.
Even if she could have left the bed she wouldn’t have tried. Her head was swimming and her heart was biting its way out of her chest. Something inside her was gnawing. A cold well opened up in her stomach, and she dug her nails into her abdomen. She couldn’t feel anything but her intestines as they roiled. Moonlight cautiously crept into the hut, first as a sliver on the dark hearth, growing longer and brighter as she climbed into the deep night. She recalled a saucer of water held up to her parched lips, a firm hand on her chin, and concerned voices flitting about her pond body on damselfly wings. She sank into the marsh of her sickness and sweat and stayed there, preserved in peat, as eons passed above her.
Through all of her muddled, useless senses, for nearly her entire stay in the bedroll, Eio could smell something burning. Half asleep and trembling, just like Dog Eyes, she would catch portions of shouting outside the hut and hushed whispers inside, though just as frantic. She thought she recognized Merah’s low grumble, even deeper when she was stressed, and little scraps of Ahi’s voice shaking with fear. Others joined the chorus, wholly unfamiliar, sticking to the walls in a thick patina. They were all screaming. From where her corpse lay shivering on the bedroll she saw herself running, the hut turning effortlessly into a spiraling world, a grassland inside of a great tube that stretched into the sun. Then, from right behind her, as if he were still pressing his hot weight down onto her shoulders, right in her ear, Sudha’s voice. “Eio,” he said. “You’re sick.” She understood him perfectly.
The middle of the day broke without warning and her eyes focused on a stranger standing at the foot of the bed. He was tall and broad, somewhat bulkier for the leather bands and splints running down his chest and arms, the padded cloth beneath heavy with sweat. His bearded face, green eyes blazing beneath his dull ceramic helmet, regarded her without much emotion at all. Eio’s eyes crept painfully down to the long knife in his hand, the eggshell of the ceramic blade stark against his brown armor. Another stranger joined him, equipped similarly but for the spear resting on her shoulder, and they exchanged a few words Eio didn’t understand. She tried to speak but her mouth felt like it had never known words. All she could do was wheeze. The burning smell was overwhelming.
Wordlessly the two interlopers grabbed her, one holding her arms, the other her legs, and hoisted her out of Merah’s bed. She groaned as a slimy pain raced up her back, pooling at the base of her skull. Drool congealed around her mouth, slack from fatigue. She might as well have been a cloth sack. She was sure she was going to spill out everywhere.
The sunlight was blinding. It took another eternity for her eyes to adjust, hanging there between the two soldiers. They have to be soldiers, she thought deliriously, no one else around here dresses so stupid.
A wave of sick heat washed over her. She blinked away the singed air and a pyre materialized before her, piled atop the old bonfire in the center of Pama. This fire was angry, raging; the flames were climbing up and up. She choked on the smoke billowing off the dead meat. Gradually the pyre came into focus. Curled beneath the flames were arms, feet, twisted torsos, eyes mercifully shut, all folded up like desiccated spiders. She knew what was happening, who they were logically, but her brain insisted on swimming in the milky sea of disbelief. Ahi, grandmother, I need to find her, maybe Merah is with her right now…
Eio wrenched her eyes from the fire. All the old huts were gone, now only smoldering ruins. Stalking among the embers were more soldiers, poking at the burnt timbers and ashes with the butt ends of spears and the points of long, curved knives. Behind the haze of the punishing heat and walls of smoke larger forms loomed misshapen, jittering with dead movements on the knuckles of frayed wings, their heads scanning for survivors. Eio had heard of carrier birds, raised from the bone middens of the condor clans far to the east by witches from a city behind a towering stone wall, guarded by warriors with ceramic blades, hunting across the continent, gliding on sulfurous thermals. She imagined the fear that had gripped the Talashi, carrying their recovered dead in coffins up the road to Pama, eyes cast skyward.
“What’ve you two got there?”
Her captors stiffened to attention and dropped Eio into the ash. Pain kept her face down and her eyes closed as the fire roared and roared: but still she listened. They weren’t speaking Auyecha. She realized the last time she had ever heard this language was from her father.
“This one was hiding, harrier,” said one.
“It’s afflicted,” said the other.
Ash began filling up her lungs and weak wheeze escaped her. The tip of a hard boot turned her over. Good meat needs to be roasted on all sides, she guessed.
“Is it dead?”
“It just looks dead,” said their leader, the harrier. “These are the ones you really need to watch for. In another three days it’ll be just like that swamp woman, give us a whole load of trouble. We’ll take this one to the coffin camp up north.” Eio heard the rustle and clinking of gear and armor as the harrier dropped into a squat next to her. She craned her neck up; all she could see was a confluence of smoke-smothered sunlight and dancing fire, sparks relaying the messages of the dead between them, and within the confluence nothing short of a demon, her eyes cold, as she stared down at her captive. “Be grateful we found you when we did,” she said. “Soon you’ll be free of all of this.” A gloved hand reached slowly towards Eio’s face and began stroking her cheek. “You’ll be just like an animal. No more pain, no more sorrow, no more of this affliction.” Her tears rolled into the harrier’s hand. “Just free.”
Days passed, and Eio’s life unraveled into a long mauve dream.
Only a few sensations would orient her: the shock of being loaded onto some sort of cart, her hands and feet bound in what must have been cold metal, something else restraining her mouth, bars around her jaw and a leather bit lodged between her teeth; the sudden realization that she could no longer smell the burnt corpses of the Auye, the smoke of the conflagration, and instead noticed only fragrant juniper and the hot dust of the road; a seething white pain in the back of her head where her spine began, radiating out into her mouth, down her sweat-slick legs, between her ribs. Moments of lucidity would unearth an itch deep inside of her, one she couldn’t reach even if her hands had been unbound. The pain would wrench a sob out of her, a pitiful, growling, mewling whine that always triggered the nearest soldier or guard or whoever to hit her until she passed out again.
Three days, they had said, until she turned out like Dog Eyes, the afflicted Talashi woman, a shell of a thing, hollow and frozen. Eio remembered when she and Merah were kids and their father had shown them a treasure from the city, a big orange jewel with the back half of a gecko trapped inside. The blood of a tree, he had explained, eliciting much excitement out of them. It didn’t take long for their father to find his children zealously stabbing at an old pine with our little fishing knives in the hopes the sap would catch some incredible beast. The thought of it made her laugh.
A bump in the road brought her back. The cart lumbered to an uneasy stop. Dim sensations in her body, still pulsing with fever, slowly returned as the hazy outlines of more soldiers carried her limp carcass from the cart and dropped her. Shallow walls surrounded her and a clear cerulean sky, hauntingly empty, black towards its zenith, loomed above. It was a beautiful day, now eclipsed by the shadow of a man carrying a long wooden board. Other voices, further away, hummed mindlessly like gnats. The air was crisp and vibrant. Eio’s head swam, dizzy, but approaching clarity, stumbling blindly towards the truth.
Merah, she thought. Merah, I think I hear you, but you’re far away. You’re so old, can you even hear me? Do I have to speak up? Which one of us is talking?
The whinny of a screech owl, too deep to really be a screech owl, rang like funerary bells in her empty head, and the world snapped terribly into focus.
One of the soldiers, the one holding the coffin lid, turned, alert, but too late. The air whispered a lethal whir. A sound like a hornet buzzed above her and the back of the guard’s head burst open, the arrow carrying his brains lodged firmly in the trunk of a tree nearby. The coffin was showered in blood. It burned where it fell on her, searing her face, her neck, her shoulders. She felt herself growing inside of herself. Another Eio grew. She ripped free of herself. She stood and snapped the chains around her arms. Her muzzle fell away. Her shadow fell across her captors. Their fear as they beheld her surged through her veins. She could have drunk the entire world then.
Someone had replaced her hands with thick paws and wicked scythes gleamed where her fingers had been. The soldiers stumbled backwards, fumbling with the weapons on their belts, but Eio was too quick, too happy. Butchering was a skill; one had to know right where to cut, which bones could be pulled away from which tendons the easiest, the weakest vertebrae to sever. She could really see these people in front of her now, and in that instant she knew they were just meat like her. She reached her claws towards the nearest guard, faster than she believed she could move, and ripped through his belly quietly. His entrails steamed where they hit the ground. A small, surprised gurgle crawled out of his whole body as he collapsed. The others drew spears and knives. There was shouting all around, screaming and gurgling, the whizzing of arrows, the percussive snaps and cracks of some unseen weapon; the blood pounded in her gut. Butterflies swarmed in her stomach.
Another shot, another hornet sting right in front of her, and a third soldier collapsed over a red blossom just above her hip, the arrow buried almost to the feathers. The fourth tried to flee. That got her excited.
People were running all around her, and she chased them. When she caught one she would tear them apart. For all their force and ferocity they went to pieces easily. She felt like she was floating. She thought she was glowing. Someone was calling her name. She turned. They looked familiar. She bounded towards them. She wanted to play.
She took their leg in her jaws and wrenched them into the air. They screamed. Eio laughed and it sounded like screaming, too. Whoever she was playing with flew out of her grasp, landing far off. The leg squirmed happily in her mouth. She dropped it and leapt onto her playmate again and sank her claws deep. Their arms struggled against hers, trying to beat her away, slowly resisting less and less. Eio laughed and laughed. It made so much sense to be sick. The world receded. Her knowledge, her place in time, her worries about the future; they all slid away like waves after their affair with the shore was done.
Then she was back, and Merah was crawling away from her. Eio had never seen her so small before. What remained of her leg was pumping out blood slower and slower. She turned her gaze on her sister, shuddering and convulsing, and in her eyes swam animal fear. She barely noticed her rosy entrails splayed like streamers around her.
“Eio,” she murmured. “Shit.”
Merah sank into the grass. The stench of blood rose around me like smoke. Eio looked down and beheld herself.
She was naked. She was taller. An animal’s hands had taken over her own. They were slick with gore. She stood hunched; her legs were strong and muscled. Her throat refused any speech, and her hair hung down to her knees. The blood slithered blindly across her new skin, soft now where it wasn’t bristling with fur, her chest heaving with each snarling breath. With her clawed hands she began to feel the curve of her hips as they rose into her waist. Her claws found her breasts, fuller now, and squeezed. She found she had stained them when she lifted her claws away.
Turning from her sister’s fresh corpse she found a sea of bodies and limbs scattered around a camp, littered with empty coffins and ruined workbenches, poised on the edge of a cliff. Vast forest loomed beyond. This was the great, winding escarpment that divided the land, north from south, many days' journey from Pama. She had been asleep for so long. Turkey buzzards wheeled lazily above her.
Her head turned at the snap of a twig to her right. Sudha froze in his tracks, a long bow at half draw trained on her, the black lancepoint at the tip of the arrow grinning. Eio could have sworn he had aged decades. A trembling hand betrayed him.
“We looked for you,” he muttered. “Went after you, knew they had taken you. It took us days to find you. Merah never gave up. She knew you were still alive.” He took in Eio’s new shape and a mirthless laugh escaped him. “Looks like it’s just me, now.”
Tears burned behind her eyes but never came. A painful howl crawled out of her throat. Sudha recoiled, his face twisted between grief and madness. Eio realized she probably looked the same.
“There always was something wrong with you. I knew it. Your father did, too. Merah was too stupid to do anything about you, always fawning over you. Now look at her.” Sudha lowered his bow and released the tension on the string to wipe the tears and snot and blood from his face. Eio started towards him and he jerked the bow back up in full draw.
Suddenly, for the very first time, and to her complete bewilderment, she realized the depth of her hatred for Sudha. Her heart froze over.
Eio sprang back and away too late as the muffled bowstring thrummed and hot sharp teeth ripped across her calf. The cliff wasn’t far. By the time Sudha could have prepared another shot she had leapt into the empty air below, and Merah was sprawled cold where she had last stood.