The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021
- Автор: Рот Вероника, Адамс Джон Джозеф
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: HMH Books : Mariner
- ISBN: 9780358470076
- Жанр: Малые литературные формы прозы
Электронная книга - «The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021». Краткое содержание книги:
This year’s selection of science fiction and fantasy stories, chosen by series editor John Joseph Adams and bestselling author of the Divergent series Veronica Roth, showcases a crop of authors that are willing to experiment and tantalize readers with new takes on classic themes and by exchanging the ordinary for the avant-garde. Folktales and lore come alive, the dead rise, the depths of space are traversed, and magic threads itself through singular moments of love and loss, illuminating the circulatory nature of life, death, the in-between, and the hereafter.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 captures the all-too-real cataclysm of human nature, claiming its place in the series with compelling prose, lyrical composition, and curiosity’s never-ending pursuit of discovering the unknown.
Seven death wagons waited in a column, driven by priest-drovers and escorted by a cohort of priest-guards. Hook-mouthed, four-eyed, six-legged ghouls stirred restlessly in the traces, heads yearning repeatedly toward the canvas-covered wagon beds that concealed corpses. The seventh wagon was yoked to a quartet of stolid oxen who had heads lowered and shoulders bunched. Three elderly women huddled in the bed of the ox-drawn wagon. Another eight women waited by the wheels in their brown widow’s garb. Those eight were healthy enough to walk, although their heads were bowed and their hands folded with womanly resignation.
It was to one of these women that the sisters ran. They crowded around her as the first wagon jolted forward, headed out on the long walk. What bright, sorrowing faces they had! How concerned they looked, desperate and grieving! As Asvi walked closer, drawn by their tears, she saw how threadbare their clothing was, how their mother’s widow’s dress was a faded, much mended hand-me-down, buttoning up the front, the kind of dress bought at the ragpickers by a bride who can afford nothing better.
“We tried, Mama. We tried,” cried the eldest. “But we couldn’t raise enough. The priests kept raising the fee when they saw how desperate we are. What will we do without you?”
The second wagon moved in the wake of the first. The other women sidled away from the commotion, looking frightened. A woman’s grief was meant to be shared in private, not in so public and audacious a way.
“There, there, my girls.” The woman touched each of her daughters with tenderness. She might have been a good ten years older than Asvi, or maybe she had just lived harder on the edge of want. Struggle and deprivation aged a person, too, as it had aged Asvi’s mother, who at least had died in her own bed with her children beside her. “I know you did your best. The priests say women go ahead to make a comfortable home for those who will come after. I will be waiting when you make your crossing many years out, gods willing.”
The third wagon pulled forward as the young women wept and their mother comforted them. So had Posyon tried to comfort her, when he was the one forced to leave behind those who loved him.
A sensation as powerful as the beating of furious wings flamed in Asvi’s chest. She tugged off the obsidian-and-carnelian-bead bracelet. Without plan, more like leaping off a cliff, she strode up to the little group as, with a grinding of axles, the fourth wagon moved. She slipped in among them with two fingers to her lips, for silence.
“Here.” As the young women gaped, surprised at her intrusion, she grasped the older woman’s arm quite rudely and yanked the bracelet onto her wrist. “You need it more than I do.”
A startled gaze raised to meet her own, brimming with tears. “But mistress, this is yours.”
“I know what I am doing.” All the years of bowing before Meklos’s demands fell from her shoulders like a weight dropping. She felt almost dizzy with the sense that the walls had fallen away at long last. The fifth wagon jerked forward with a sharp command from its drover. “This is what the gods intend for me. You belong with the family who loves and needs you. Go. Hurry, before the priests notice.”
She slung the cloak off her shoulders and slid it over the other woman to conceal her clothing.
“Make ready!” called a guard as the sixth wagon shifted and rolled. He hurried over to them, gaze sharp and lips pursed with disapproval. “You should already have made your preparations. Leave-taking is not allowed at the gate.”
“It was just one last kiss for my sister and the daughters I’m leaving with her.” Asvi spoke so brusquely the poor young man took a step back, surprised at her vehemence. The lie fell easily from her mouth. She’d never had a sister, nor any daughters who had lived past three summers. She nodded at them and walked away without looking back.
As the last wagon began to move, another priest-guard came running up with his spear and net to scold the walking women. “Hurry! We must make Eldaal Temple before dusk, and we’re getting a late start. If you get tired you may sit in the wagon. But there isn’t enough room for all. You’ll have to switch out.”
He did not glance at Asvi nor did he notice anything strange about her presence there. She was just another valueless old woman, exactly like the others.
She walked briskly through the double-walled palisade gate and past its guard towers, its chimes and lanterns that would be lit when night fell. Beyond the barrier lay fields and orchards tended by farmers who lived within the walls after sunset. The sky was blue, striped with high, thin clouds. It was warm but not hot, a pleasant day to walk if you liked walking.
She had grown up walking along the hills, so the steady rise of the road did not trouble her. Avoiding the last wagon with its passengers and their inevitable questions was easy. She did not fear the harnessed ghouls, who had no interest in living flesh and wouldn’t even go after lambs. The wind breathed a slow song across fields of barley and dry-soil rice. In the distance, she spotted the threads of dragons curling around the peaks. A woman began to cry.
Her fear had fallen away when she’d taken off the bracelet and given away the cape. Posyon had gone to the edge of the world. Why not her? She would see the mountains up close, as she’d always yearned to. She’d finally follow the dragons into the clouds.
Midday passed, accompanied only by the tinkling of the chimes hanging from the guards’ hats and the spokes of the wheels. Alerted by the chimes, people working in the fields did not look their way, since it brought ill fortune to stare at the long walk. The corpses were too freshly dead to speak. The guards ignored their charges. The women were too much strangers to one another to speak of their own lives. Perhaps some had even loved the husband or brother or son whose death left them vulnerable. Their silence felt charged with despair.
In the early afternoon the wagons took a short rest in the shade of a row of mulberry trees. One of the guards handed out faring bread. She could not abide bad food caused by carelessness or cheapness.
“This is sour and undercooked,” she said to the priest-commander, showing him how spongy and dense the bread was. “Surely we are not expected to eat inedible food for the entire journey.”
Her bold comment startled the man.
“We cook as we go,” he said in a stern tone, mouth pursed with disdain. “We haven’t the leisure to please our palates. Unless you think you can do better.”
“Of course I can do better.”
He snorted, turning away as he called for the drovers to get the wagons moving. “We must make Eldaal Temple before sunset.”
They walked.
The temple was set away from the road behind a screen of thorn-gast trees. No one lived here. Countryside temples were built as refuges since demons might attack day or night. The corpse wagons and the oxen were sheltered in a shed protected by chimes and the ghouls corralled in a stockade surrounded by ground glass. She ignored the open door that led to a dim barracks where the women sank exhausted onto hard pallets. Instead of resting she took her spice case to the kitchen.
Two guards assigned kitchen duty had started a fire in the hearth. She ignored their surprise when she walked in and began looking through the bags and baskets of provisions.
“Simple fare can be well made,” she instructed them, setting them to work as she had done with her sons when they were boys. Barley flour mixed with nuts and a pinch of alsberry was soon baking for the next day’s faring bread. She chopped up cabbages and onions to cook with oil, garlic, ginger, and star anise. The priest-mage came in to set out lamps lit by the magic slowly bleeding out of the corpses. He lingered, inhaling the scent as she whipped up a savory batter for pancakes fried in oil to go with the cabbage for the evening’s meal.