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.
Everything was eaten, down to the last bite. The two guards, now smiling and genial, cleaned up while she set beans to soak for a hearty morning pottage. The commander came in wearing a frown.
“People need strength,” she said to him, thinking he was about to complain about the beans or the pancakes or the cooling bread.
He said, grimly, “The food tasted well, mistress.”
Then he remembered she was dead, no longer deserving a living woman’s title of respect, and he flushed.
She said, “I’ll cook every night, with your permission. I am sure you priests are powerful enough that you’ll take no harm in eating food cooked by a ghost. By the amount of provisions, I am guessing it will be about seventeen days’ journey.”
“That’s right,” he said, startled again. “It usually takes seventeen days to the bridge into dragon country past which no man can follow.”
Seventeen days. She took it as a challenge instead of fretting. Each night she concocted a different style of meal from the staples. Even the women grew more animated. Several who clearly had never had enough to eat began to gain strength instead of wasting away.
The third night she heard a guard complaining to the commander outside the way temple’s kitchen door. “Your Honor, the ghouls are growing weak. Usually one or two of the women have died by now.”
“They’re not women, boy. They’re ghosts.”
“Yes, Your Honor. Should we forbid one of the ghosts from eating? The eldest, perhaps? She can’t even walk on her own.”
The commander sighed. “I don’t want to risk it.”
“Risk what?”
“I don’t know about you, but this is the best food I’ve had on the long walk in all my years supervising it. Feed one of the corpses to the ghouls.”
“But the dead are meant for—”
“Do as I command. Don’t mention the ghouls again.”
With shaking hands, she finished preparing a stew of tubers sweetened with pears. The priests ate with gusto, and the women gratefully, but although the meal was as tasty as the ones that had come before, this night it tasted of ashes in her mouth. All that night she barely slept thinking she heard the ghouls slurping on decaying flesh and crunching on bones. But at least all the women woke up the next morning and set out with the wagons. She counted them five times, to make sure.
The fields gave way to uninhabited scrubland that turned into pine and spruce forest in which they walked in a rare sort of peace, unable to see the mountains. The women exchanged names and began to speak of commonplace things.
After days in the forest, the landscape opened up again as they emerged past the tree line onto a high plateau of short grass and frail summer flowers. The mountains rose in fierce majesty, gleaming in the crisp air beneath the sharp sun. This close, she could see a rippling halo of shining dragons winding around the peaks like elongated clouds painted in a rainbow of colors. Sometimes the dragons would dive steeply, then pull up, rising laboriously with a blurred object clutched in their gleaming claws.
A new silence fell, weighted as with lead.
The procession reached a fork in the road, one branch turning north and the other turning south. Ahead, the plateau was split by a cleft running in a line north and south without any visible end. The eastern massif rose beyond the crevasse. The six corpse wagons continued north toward a distant temple placed at the fissure’s edge. Its wall bristled with horns, chimes, and corpse-fire lanterns burning with the waxy gleam of magic.
The commander himself, and the two guards who had helped her in the kitchen, accompanied the seventh wagon straight ahead along a rutted path. The oxen plodded toward a line of ghostly trees grown along the crevasse in the manner of trees growing alongside a river, fed by its moisture. As they approached, the uncanny appearance of the trees grew evident: paler than milk, almost translucent, like no trees she had ever seen. The women clustered close behind the wagon as they trudged in its wake. What else could they do? There was nowhere to run. Even Asvi felt a chill like doom whispering off the wraithlike trees. Branches stirred as if tasting their approach.
“What will we do?” whispered a woman whose living name had been Vicara. She was often frightened, and cringed at every unexpected noise. “Will it hurt when they eat us?”
“Hush,” said the one who’d been called Bilad. She never smiled. “Our sacrifice keeps the city safe. We prepare a home for those who come after us.”
They all looked at Asvi.
“Why did you do it?” Bilad asked the question at last.
“I want to see the dragons.”
They sidled away from her, as if she were a dangerous influence, malicious and wild. But there was no escaping the crossing: these twelve old women, even if Asvi and several of the others really weren’t so very old, not like aged Kvivim, whose family, the elder had told them in a frail whisper, could have afforded the tithe for her but didn’t want to pay it for a woman who could barely walk. Maybe a different death would have been preferable, but Kvivim had stubbornly clung to life and Asvi admired her for it.
The respite was over and the end was nigh.
They walked toward where the trees grew thickest, spreading out to either side for some distance along the crevasse until the wood petered out into a few last stragglers.
In front of the central grove stood a massive gate of white wood shaped as a dragon’s gaping mouth. The trees crowded up on either side like brambles too thick to penetrate, forming a barrier that blocked anyone from going into the forest unless they entered through the gate.
The drover halted the wagon. The guards used ropes to drag open the gate, not touching it with their hands. A gleaming silver-white path led straight from the gate’s gulletlike opening into the shadows under the trees.
The priest-commander raised both hands, palms up to entreat the heavens. “So is it said, that in the first days after landfall, a fog rolled down out of the mountains of morning, and in it dwelt a ravage of demons. Again and again they descended, ravenous and insatiable. No sacrifice assuaged them, not even the offer of daughters in a marriage of blood. Only when the dragons came did the demons retreat. Ever after, according to the covenant of the new land, the dragons took their tithe in return for protection. By your sacrifice the world lives.”
Dutiful Bilad went first through the gate’s open maw, assisting old Kvivim. The others followed, but the commander tapped Asvi’s arm with his staff of command to hold her back.
In a low voice he said, “The temple here could use a cook. It’s so isolated, no one will know.” He gave a sly tilt of his head back the way they’d come.
The other women had all crossed by now. They halted on the other side, surprised as the guards set their strength to the ropes and began to haul the open gates shut.
“Asvi?” Bilad called, sounding scared now that she wasn’t with them to steady their hearts with her food.
She thought of Danis’s words. What could the priest do to her now? Once she crossed, he could not follow.
“You do need a cook, but it won’t be me. My father did not raise me to act so dishonorably. I will not let others shoulder the burden on my behalf. But you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you? Your own magistrates cheat people, demanding more than they can pay and keeping the extra money for themselves. You would cheat the tithe by keeping me back to gratify your own belly. It’s a disgrace you feed such poor food to the women you send here. They deserve better on their journey.”
“Why waste food on people who will be dead soon?” he snapped.
“You are not a good man. No wonder the dragons don’t want the curdled taste of the likes of you.”