The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year - Volume Eight (56 page)

She inspects her old seashell. A small glow rises through the red smears when she touches its controls. Something here that isn't dead, and she hooks the buds around her ears and feels a faint, nostalgic fizz. But the stuff she liked back in the day would surely be awful, old and lost as she now is. A different person, really. In fact, that's the whole point…

She feels past the syringe in her coat pocket, finds the data card she took from the house security system and sniffs back more blood as she numbly shoves it in. It's still a surprise, though, to find options and menus hanging against the clear morning sky. Files as well, when you'd have thought Dad would have deleted them. But then, he never liked destroying things – even stuff he never planned to use. And perhaps, the thought trickles down through her leaking brain, he left this for her. After all, and despite his many evasions and protestations, he always had a strong regard for the truth.

She waves a once-practised hand through ancient images until she reaches the very last date. The end of everything. The very last night.

And there it is.

There it always was.

She's looking into the bright dark of their old kitchen through the nightsight eyes of that stupid not-dog. Fast-forward until a window shatters in a hard spray and the door opens and something moves in, and the not-dog stirs, wags its tail, recognises… Not Karl Yann, but a much more familiar shape and scent.

Martha rips the buds from her ears, but she still can't escape the past. She's back at this waystation, but she's young again, and the colours are brilliant, and she's here with Karl Yann, full of Politics and Philosophy and righteous anger at the state of the world. And he's got this handgun that he's merely using as a prop for all his agitprop posturings, when she has a much clearer, simpler, cleverer idea. The final performance act, right? The easiest, most obvious, one of all… Come on, Karl, don't say you haven't
thought
of it…And fuck you if you're not interested. If you're not prepared, I'll just do the damn thing myself…

Martha flouncing out from the waystation. Into the darkness. Hunching alone through the glass and rubble streets. The gun a weight of potentiality in her pocket and the whole world asleep. She feels like she's in the mainstream of the long history of resistance. She's Ulrike Meinhof. She's Gavrilo Princip. She's Harry Potter fighting Voldemort. A pure, simple, righteous deed to show everyone – and her Dad especially – that there are no barriers that will keep the truth of what's really happening away from these prim, grim estates. Not this shockwire. Nor these gates. Not anything. Least of all the glass of their kitchen door which breaks in a satisfying clatter as she feels in for the old-fashioned handle and turns. Not that this isn't a prank as well. Not that there isn't still fun to be had. After all, that fucking thing of a dog isn't really living anyway, it's nothing but dumb
property
, so what harm is being done if she shoots it properly dead? Nothing at all, right? She's doing nothing but good. She's shoving it to the system. She's giving it to the man. The darkness seethes as she enters, and she feels as she always feels, standing right here in her own kitchen, which is like an intruder in her own life.

That roaring again. Now stronger than ever, even though the seashell's buds are off and its batteries have gone. After all, how is she to tell one shape from another in this sudden dark? How could she know when she can barely see anything that the thing that comes stumbling threateningly out at her is Damien and not that zombie dog? It's all happened already, and too quickly, and the moment is long gone. A squeezed trigger and the world shudders and she's screaming and the dog's howling and all the backup lights have flared and Damien's sprawled in a lake of blood and the gun's a deathly weight in her hand – although Martha Chauhan doubts if she could ever understand how she felt as she turned it around so that its black snout was pointing at her own head and she squeezed the trigger again.

* * *

H
er father's with her now. Even without looking, and just as when she lay in her bedroom surrounded by pain and humming equipment, she knows he's here. After all, and despite her many attempts to reject him, he never really went away. And, as always, he's telling her tales – filling the roaring air with endless ideas, suppositions, stories… Talking at least as much about once-upon-a-times and should-have-beens as about how things really are. Using what life and energy he has left to bring back his daughter. And if he could have found a way of sheltering her from what really happened that terrible night, if he could have invented a story that gave her a reason to carry on living, Martha knows he would have done so.

She sniffs, tastes bitter salt, and feels a deep roaring. It's getting impossibly late. Already, the sun seems to be setting, and the beach is growing cold, and the cricket match has finished, and that last gritty samosa she's just eaten was foul, and all the dogs and the kite flyers have gone home. But there's Dad, walking trousers-rolled and hand-in-hand with Damien as the tide floods in. Martha waves cheerily, and they wave back. She thinks she might just join them, down there at the edge of everything where all islands meet.

FADE TO GOLD

Benjanun Sriduangkaew

Benjanun Sriduangkaew (
beekian.wordpress.com
) spends her time on amateur photography and writing love letters to cities. Her fiction can be found in
Clarkesworld
,
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
,
The Dark
and numerous anthologies.

T
hey say the afterlife is a wheel and that is true, but I am between and so for me the way is a line. It unspools interminably into a horizon that shows the soft gold of dawn, always just a little out of reach.

Before the war this was only packed earth and grass and dirt to me; before the war I trod this path from home to capital thinking of the sweetness of rare fruits. Now that my back is to Ayutthaya the ground is sometimes baked salt where nothing grows and sometimes wet mud bubbling with the voices of the dead. Inside my arteries there is blood which throbs and pumps, and my belly growls at emptiness as might a bad-tempered dog. But it is difficult to be sure, after so much soldiering, that one is still alive. It is difficult to be certain this is not all a fever dream.

It can be difficult to remember who you are, having watched Queen Suriyothai die.

These are the common ailments of any soldier, though few will admit them.

A
burnt village, a burnt temple. I see such often, these days, defaced by the Phma who melted off the gold and stole every metal coin. Sometimes in their savagery they kill the monks, even though theirs and ours wear much the same saffron. The Phma have faces no different than any mother's son, four limbs and a head each, but it strains belief that anything human could have slaughtered holy men. Do they not have luang-por like second fathers, who taught them to read and write? Are some of them not orphans taken in by a temple, to shelter beneath the steeple and the bodhi shade?

Slaughter is what might have happened here, or else flight, for I find neither a living voice nor a body thick with flies. Toward the end everyone fled for Ayutthaya until the walls strained at the seams, until every house and hovel splintered at the edges. It should have been comforting, so many people, but when there was so much desperation all I could feel was desperation in turn, a sour and unrelenting fear that turned everything I ate – and even the king's soldiers hadn't much to eat – into rotten meat on the tongue, with an aftertaste of cinders.

I take shelter where I find it, in spite of ghosts that must've seeped into the fissured walls and the desecrated murals. In spite of knowing that Phma soldiers have been here too, that the air bears the stink of their sweat, the reek of their filth. Being a soldier has taught me to forget delicacy.

It has also taught me to put on sleep light as dead petals, to be shaken off and scattered at a blink. So when the mud makes sucking noises I am already awake; when the woman comes into view I have a hand around the carved wood of a hilt.

She must have seen the blade glint, for there is a hiss of breath.

"I thought you might be a thief," she says.

"What could a thief rob from a place already thieved to every final clod of dirt?"

"There is always one last bit of painted glass, one last talisman." She closes the distance, her apparent fear set aside. "One last child to murder."

"Have you lost one then?" There's still room in my breast for softness, still room to be cut by another's hurt.

"It's a season for losing children." The luster of her lips and hair seems brighter than dawn's light warrants. "You can only be passing by. Which way calls you?"

"East, to Prachinburi."

"The same direction then." She gathers her braid in one hand, twisting it. "Might we not share company?"

I have collected myself, spine straight, eyes clear. In the back of my mind phantom flies buzz. There is no escaping the noise. No battlehardened veteran ever tells you it is the flies that haunt you most, over the cannon fire and your fellows' screams, over the throb and burn of your own veins. "You would trust a strange soldier?"

"When she is a woman, why not?"

My alarm must have been immediate, for she laughs.

"Even officers go bare-chested the moment they're free from uniform. You remain as neat behind yours as a captain newly promoted and pledged to His Majesty." Her head moves from side to side. "I'll not pry – too much. I want only safety, for if you've survived the Phma you must be as fit to the business of combat as any man."

I should ask how she has been unscathed so far. I should ask from whence she came, and where she was going other than in the same vague direction as I am. But in the army I've been solitary out of need, and there comes a point where a person must hear another human voice or break upon the cliff-face of loneliness. My secret is already laid bare to her, so where's the harm?

We set out at daybreak, keeping parallel to but avoiding the road, for not all soldiers recently unyoked from duty are vessels of honor, and I've heard news of Phma stragglers along this way, ready to avenge themselves upon any Tai.

She breaks open one of her bamboo tubes as we walk, and hands me half the sweet roasted rice. Her name is Ploy, a widow, and when she hears my name is Thidakesorn she smirks at the florid grandeur of it. "A princess's name," she says.

"My parents had expectations." Years living with an aunt who married upward, wife of a merchant grown wealthy on trade with the Jeen. So successful he's sailed to the Middle Kingdom twice, and his fortune tripled by a wife shrewd with numbers and investment. She would tutor me, it was hoped.

"Instead you took up the sword."

How do I say that I went to the capital to learn to be a lady and fell in love with the queen despite the hopeless stupidity of that; how do I say it was for this love that I fought and that when she fell it shattered me? How do I say that I resent the king's continued life, for she was the braver of the two, the finer being, and that he did not deserve a wife as incandescent as she? So I seal my lips and pronounce none of these wounds. Better they suppurate than my shame be cast into the day.

She may have the secret of my gender, but this is mine alone to nurse.

The day brightens and Ploy acquires a clarity of features. Before I thought her soft and plain; now there is an angle to her eyes and mouth I've failed to notice in the dim. Sharp from nose-tip to chin-tilt. It does not make her beautiful, if such a comment may be leveled from someone as blunt-featured as I, but she would snag the attention and hold it fast. A little like the queen. The dead queen, whom I must not think about, whom I must bury under the blackest soil of memory.

When I shut my eyes I see elephants draped in black and silver, trumpeting for death. I see the edge of a glaive passing through flesh and bone, opening a queen inside out.

N
oon claims the sky with fingers bright and fever-hot. It is a month for rain, but I harbor a childish fancy that the season has upended for Queen Suriyothai's demise.

Between my waking delirium transmuting earth to a sanguine river and us stopping to drink from a pool, we hear the Phma.

Away from the shields bearing the king's crest, away from his banners and helms, it can be difficult to tell Phma deserters from our own men. Loinclothed and bare-chested like any Ayutthaya soldier, bearing much the same type of blade. There is a wild look to them that I can spot even as we take to hiding, and I wonder if the penalty for desertion is as harsh for them as for us. Harsher: victors can afford generosity that losers may not.

When they are gone Ploy murmurs, "I thought you'd challenge them, for are these not your sworn enemies and murderous animals?"

"There were five of them, and one of me."

Her sneer is vicious. "If I needed confirmation you were a woman before, I would've required none now."

"What did you lose to the Phma?"

"A family." Her mouth tightens; she says no more.

I study her more closely for signs of who she is or might have been.
Widow
says little, designates merely a specific sorrow. Strange that we will confess but one loss at a time – I am a widow, I am an orphan; how to say in one concise word
I've lost everything?

Evening approaches, and Ploy looks to me, asking of game and hunt. I mean to scavenge and work for food on the way, and point out that the army taught me to ambush enemy warriors, not edible meat.

"You make an inadequate man." She passes me her satchel. "I'll be back."

I wait beneath a tabaek whose trunk is garbed in a purple sash. There's not much of worth on me, but I smooth out the cloth as best I can and pour out a handful of rice for offerings.