Heiresses of Russ 2012 Read online

You should not risk dehydration. Madini, kneeling gracefully down beside her. Madini is meant to be taking the goats out to pasture, but…it seems it’s later in the day than Mkali knew. She leans against the smooth solidity of Madini’s frame, feeling the coolness of her joints.

  Come. I have water. Mkali feels fingertips against her chin, tilting her face up. What Madini feels—if Madini feels anything at all—it is impossible to say, and Mkali has wondered, when she has time to do so, how one speaks of love to a thing, if it can even be done. But the way in which Madini touches her now is new; that, she is sure, she is not imagining. Madini tilts her chin up and leans in, presses their mouths together, and water flows through their lips, cool and sweet. Mkali drinks, slides her hands up over Madini’s shoulders and drinks, moans softly and drinks until she feels her belly swelling and she’s gasping for breath, her bare arms lightly beaded with sweat and the flies drinking their fill.

  •

  Mkali is about to leave the village in the last of the daylight when they come for her. It’s not entirely unexpected—part of her has been waiting for this, she realizes now, and so there is a sense of relief, because at least now she can face it squarely.

  But more than that, over and on top of and crushing down the relief, there is terror. And this time there’s no mistaking it for love.

  Two men flank her before she can do anything, taking her by the arms and hauling her backward. At some point—she’s not sure when, but it must have happened quickly—a crowd has gathered. She is dragged around to face them, their angry faces, their muttering. Some of them she has known since she was small. Some of them helped to rebuild her house. She sees fires burning in some of their hands; torches, smoking into the thickening night.

  “No,” she says, and they drown out the word. She hears it in snatches, fragments, barely coherent but coherent enough. Why should you have it? What are you doing with it? We’ve heard things. What is it, anyway? Looks like a person but isn’t. Unnatural. Perversion. Cursed thing. How could you? We’ll fix it. We’ll fix you.

  “No!” Louder, a cry, a scream of denial, like the word has enough force behind it to push back what’s happening, but when the wall of night descended, flaming, upon her and her siblings, she wasn’t able to push it back with words, and she doesn’t really expect to be able to do so now. She struggles, pulling so hard in the grip of her captors that she half expects her arms to come free from their sockets; she sees a gleam in the twilight, the soft light of glowing eyes, and, horrified, she begins to understand what they mean to do.

  Mkali? Madini is being pulled forward like her, but placidly trying to keep up with the tugging hands that drag her along. She is looking around, her artificial face blank. If she can be said to have any expression at all, it is one of confusion. What is happening? I do not know what they want from me.

  Of course not. And of course Madini would try to discover what it might be, to please them. She was built to serve, after all.

  “Let her go!” Mkali turns to one man and then the other, to the assembled crowd with their fires and their angry faces, and Mkali is a proud woman but Mkali is not above pleading. “Please…. She’s done nothing wrong, she was just given to me to help…. I didn’t even ask for her!” and there, the words turning back on her like a snake, inches away from outright denial. She wonders if she might now hear three harsh crows of a cock. She meets Madini’s eyes, that soft light, and she has never felt so small and useless.

  “It’s not right,” says an old man—he seems to be the ringleader, though Mkali finds that she does not know him, that his face is strange to her. “We have heard from people who have seen you with…that thing. It’s not right that it was given to you. They put these things in among us, and they only bring trouble.” He turns back to the crowd and lifts a hand. “Give it to the fire!”

  Mkali screams. There are no words this time, but the words behind the scream are not again. She jerks her body, one huge, hysterical spasm, and one arm pulls free and then the other, and she’s charging forward, her eyes blind with tears, and she should be thinking of Kani and Buqisi, she knows, and how she must stay alive for them, for the future she sees for them, but all she can see is Madini, her eyes, her soft face, and the vanishing of it from her life. So much taken. Too much. She reaches the men holding Madini and throws herself at them—but she never touches them. She is in Madini’s arms, Madini having somehow pulled herself free with utter ease—was she even trying, before? She has always been very strong.

  Come, Madini says, her voice lilting terrible music. It is not safe here for you. And they’re running together, flesh clasped around metal, the night closing around them, angry shouts behind and the pounding of chasing feet, back through the village and toward the short road that leads to her house.

  Mkali sees the turning rush coming to head them off, too late to do anything about it. Nevertheless, she turns, they turn together, trying to head away, running headlong into another group of them. Mkali lowers her head and charges through; she sees a flash of fire as she knocks back two people carrying torches, a spin and whirl of lights and darkness, and she trips and is caught around the waist and hauled down. She’s screaming, again without words, looking wildly around for Madini—and the crowd falls silent. There is a crackling sound. An acrid smell. Smoke. Mkali at last sees where they are.

  Torches have fallen against the school, and it is on fire. Night thickens.

  They all stand, watching the roof catch. For the moment, no one can think to be angry. The day is over and the school is empty—but it stands in everyone’s mind as a place for the children, the ones who can be spared to go, reaching up beyond themselves and held aloft by exhausted, desperately hoping men and women. Now it is aflame. Buqisi and Kani’s future, the world they’ll see. Mkali lets out one more wordless cry, and then the night itself seems to strangle her. She slumps, falls silent again.

  Do not worry. Madini steps forward and no one tries to stop her. Her voice is rising like a song over the growing roar of the fire. Her squat, powerful body and graceful limbs are a living shadow against the flames. She opens her mouth, and water jets from her with astonishing force, spraying over the roof, hissing into steam—but some of the flames die back.

  “The well!” Mkali struggles to her feet, turning to the sea of shocked faces. “Go to the well! My well! Bring buckets!” Not my well, she thinks, half a prayer, a prayer to a thing she no longer dares to believe in, but she sends it out into the darkness with a hope that it will be heard nonetheless. Not my well any longer if we live through this night, and not my helper alone, if she agrees. But already, a line of running figures is hurrying away down the road, some carrying pails and pans, others crying direction and encouragement. Madini turns to follow them, but for the briefest of moments she stands against the fire, steaming, her body glistening and deep honey-gold.

  All will be well, Mkali—my darling—All will be well.

  •

  Mkali is a proud woman, but she has never in her life been too proud to work, and now she sets down her bundle of cornmeal, carried from Gulu, and wipes the sweat from her face with the corner of her scarf. One of the village women comes to take it from her with a smile and carries it away, but not before handing her a tin cup of cool water.

  Mkali sits in the shade of one of the houses, drinks, takes her breath and her time. Across the dusty road, Madini’s joints shine in the sunlight as she leans over to patch another spot on the school roof. A man hands her some thatching, smiles at her. A little hesitant, a little unsure, but genuine. Madini nods. Soon the school will look like before, better than before. Madini has said she will also assist in the building of some new desks.

  “Come down and rest,” Mkali calls. Madini turns to her, cocks her smooth head.

  I do not need to rest.

  “Come down here for me, then,” Mkali calls, softer, and she feels that this might be too bold, and she worries…but she pushes it back. All of it, back. Life is far too short and fa
r too fragile, to be anything but bold.

  Madini comes down, crosses the track, sits beside her. Mkali takes the cool, rounded metal of Madini’s hand in hers, and Madini immediately squeezes it. It feels very real. It feels very human. And Mkali thinks, as she watches Buqisi and Kani running with the other children around the side of the schoolhouse, that the air around her has never felt so light.

  •

  And Out of the Strong Came Forth Sweetness

  Lisa Nohealani Morton

  After the Collapse and the Great Reboot, Lila moved into the city and opened a barbershop.

  Great things were happening in the city: spaceports and condominiums and public works projects outlined their soon-to-be-erected monuments to great men and women and superior city living in holographic glows. Angels patrolled the sky, resplendent with metal wings that sparkled in the sun when they banked for a turn. Everyone seemed to be full of exciting plans for the future, but Lila came from a long line of barbers and her humble shop only seemed fitting. She called the shop The Lion’s Mane, because there were lions, once.

  At first she only had a trickle of customers. After all, they had machines for what she did, now—cunning booths that let you try a hundred different cuts and styles on their screens until you settled on just the one for you, then produced it on your head in a flurry of laser-precise snicking. The booths even had presets for a wide selection of celebrities, for when you cared enough to imitate the very best. Only those too wealthy or old-fashioned to submit to the booths’ impersonality, or too poor to live in a neighborhood that had them, bothered with the time and expense of a human barber.

  Soon enough, though, as she cut and styled the neighborhood’s tradesmen and women, her hands began to regain a little of the strength she had lost in her years of hiding and fleeing from one place after another, and she could feel the old magic returning. Word then spread, and her appointment app began to fill up with trims and foils and updos. If any of her customers noticed a certain lassitude filling them as she chattered and clipped, they chalked it up to the relaxing sensation of having their hair washed for them. And at any rate, it all grew back.

  “It’s so much more tiring than the booth,” a middle-aged woman said to her companion, as she wrote a check for a modest amount (plus tip). She patted her hair with limp satisfaction. “But it’s worth every minute.”

  “Come back soon,” Lila said cheerily.

  When closing time came (early, because it was Sunday, and she had obligatory services to attend like everyone else), she swept the day’s clippings into black garbage bags and carried them into the cellar, where they joined the modest pile at the back. She smiled at the sight of them, lifting up onto her toes and bouncing, experimentally. Then she went out to do her errands before services.

  •

  On the way home, she made sure to stop and say hello to Wylie. Wylie was a homeless man who slept on the stoop three doors down from her own. He had been there as long as anyone could remember, and it was rumored that he’d had some kind of run-in with the Angels. Lila could feel the strength in him, both like and unlike her own, and knew him for a sorcerer or a magus of some sort. The Angels didn’t suffer witches; they made the witches suffer instead, and something had brought Wylie to their attention. Whatever they’d done to him, it hadn’t cut away his strength, but it had left him too little mind to do anything with it. Lila tried to make sure he had enough to eat and a warm place to sleep, because of that near-family feeling as much as her own fear of the Angels.

  This morning Wylie was more active than usual, rocking back and forth and muttering to himself. She bent and placed a few coins in his cup.

  He straightened suddenly at the rattle. “Witch-woman!” he shouted, and she flinched, looking around to see who might have heard before remembering that no one took any notice of Wylie.

  “I’m not a witch,” she told him for the third or fourth time. None of her line were, even if the Angels wouldn’t appreciate the differences.

  He glared at her with yellow-hazel eyes. “Flashes in the sky,” he muttered. Then he looked up and seemed to see her for the first time. “Lions around you,” he offered, in an almost conciliatory tone.

  Lila gasped. She dreamed of lions, sometimes, but she’d never told anyone. “Lions? Do they…” Her voice dropped as she realized she was questioning a madman about her own dreams. “Do they…lie down for me?”

  Wylie didn’t answer for a long time. “Lasers,” he said at last, looking sadly at her feet. He looked up at her face again, and his own face contorted with pain. “Laser eyes!” he shrieked, pedaling backwards with his feet until he hit the wall, then scrabbling on the ground with his hands. “Laser eyes! Laser —”

  Lila backed away slowly and hurried down the street. As she rounded the corner, she could still hear Wylie screaming, “Witch-woman! Laser eyes!”

  •

  A woman stood outside when she came up from stowing away the results of her errands in the cellar.

  “I was hoping to get a haircut,” the woman said, her hand stealing up to pat at her shoulder-length red hair. She looked strong and uncertain in a pretty sort of way that left Lila completely tongue-tied. “Are you Lila?”

  Lila came up the last few steps and closed the cellar doors, glancing behind herself nervously. “Yes,” she said, “but we closed at—” Her throat closed at the disappointed look the woman gave her, and she couldn’t continue.

  A hand rested on her arm; she stared at it mutely, and swallowed. The woman smiled. “My name is Rebecca,” she said. “I’d like to cut it short, if you can help me.”

  With an effort, Lila tore her eyes away from the hand on her wrist. It hadn’t budged. She cleared her throat and her gaze locked with amused brown eyes. “Why don’t I make some coffee and we’ll talk about it?” she said.

  •

  Coffee became regular and turned into brunch on Sundays. Lila started jumping at shadows, found herself distracted at key moments by mental images of the two of them necking on a bench in the park, and generally couldn’t get thoughts of Rebecca out of her head. Rebecca drove her mad with little touches—a hand brushing the hair out of Lila’s face, a head resting momentarily on her shoulder—but never quite crossed the line, and Lila didn’t know how to cross it herself. In the meantime she cut hair and grew strong. She never did cut Rebecca’s hair, though, no matter how many times Rebecca asked.

  “Not now,” she said, glancing up at the skies. A glint of metal answered her look. “Your hair is so beautiful like this, why do you want to cut it?”

  Daring greatly, she reached out and stroked it, letting the ends run through her fingertips.

  She closed her eyes when Rebecca said, yet again, “I just want to know when you’re going to work your magic on me.”

  Never, she thought, and felt her lips smile, falsely.

  “Sometime soon,” she said.

  •

  “You haven’t been here that long, have you? In the city.” Rebecca eyed her.

  “What gave me away?” Lila kept her tone light, but questions about her past always made her tense. It wasn’t that far from “where did you…?” to “what did you…?” and “how are you able to…?” And not long after that usually came the pitchforks. She didn’t understand what got them so upset. It all grew back, after all, unlike what some of her other family members did. But in the end, it always came back to pitchforks.

  Rebecca didn’t give any sign that she noticed Lila’s sudden tension. “Little things, mostly…like the way you flinched when I mentioned the Angels just now.”

  She tried, unsuccessfully, to keep from flinching again. Thou shalt not suffer a witch… She forced a little laugh. “City people don’t find them a little frightening? The wings, the laser eyes, and, well, everything?”

  “Why should we? The Angels protect our city,” Rebecca said, her chin coming up stubbornly.

  “But what if they decide you’re what the city needs protecting against?”
/>   Rebecca frowned. “What do you mean? The Angels defend against intruders.”

  “I’ve heard things,” Lila said, struggling to keep her voice from shaking. “People rounded up, dragged out of their homes in the dead of night, things like that.”

  “We defend the city from all threats,” Rebecca said steadily.

  Lila, for her part, choked on her coffee.

  Rebecca leapt to her feet and came around the kitchen table to pound on Lila’s back as she coughed. Her hand stayed on Lila’s back, warm and heavy, as Lila managed to get enough breath to wheeze out, “We?”

  “I’m one.” Rebecca’s tone was casual, but there was an undercurrent of worry just beneath the surface of the words. Her hand lifted off Lila’s back for a moment, leaving the spot where it had lain cold. After a second it dropped down again, stroking almost defiantly over her shoulders.

  Lila shivered and closed her eyes, desire and fear warring inside her. After a long moment, she felt in control enough of her voice to say, with false cheer, “So you don’t suffer witches, then?”

  “Don’t be silly,” Rebecca laughed. “There’s no such thing as witches. It’s just an old superstition, from back before the Collapse, even. Besides,” her voice dropped, becoming something more intimate, caressing, “you must have cast some sort of spell on me, and I haven’t arrested you yet.” Her fingertips traced up the side of Lila’s neck and into her hair, making Lila shiver again.

  Lila swallowed, hard. “Are you making a pass at me?” she managed to ask at last.

  Rebecca laughed again, a sound that tinkled like the door to Lila’s shop. “Only because you didn’t make one about, oh, three weeks ago,” she said, bending to whisper the last words in Lila’s ear before dipping her head to kiss along Lila’s jawline to the corner of her mouth. She hovered there, nearly but not quite touching her lips to Lila’s, as if waiting for permission.

  Lila turned her head sharply, bringing their mouths together. She heard Rebecca give a small, muffled chuckle before they were too busy kissing for anything else.