I shake my head. Blood seeps from Vikram’s scratches, black as the paper-thin bougainvilleas scattered around and over him.
“I don’t know what you have done to my sister, but—”
“Done to her?” He draws himself higher, and higher yet, spreading his arms out like a hood. “I protect her. I hear her.” He starts a slow glide toward me, looking all the time at Gautam.
“Don’t you touch her!” Gautam stumbles forward, raising a fist.
The half-man shadow shrinks, becomes a snake. Hisses.
No kills in mating season.
Between rivals.
But Gautam is my brother. I shake my head again, but I am more invisible than even a shadow, and neither one sees me.
The cobra sways. I scream, “No!”
The cobra stops. Turns in a beautiful, silent arc and comes to me, slides over me, wraps himself around my arm, across my shoulder.
Gautam’s hand falls, and he stares at me. “You can talk?”
I stare back. There is too much to say.
“What else have you kept from me, Shruti? Why? I thought we were close.”
I want to run to him, to hold him. I want to explain. “Vikram talks better,” I say.
Gautam’s eyes widen. “Then he did . . . ?”
I nod.
“You should have told me. Why didn’t you tell me? I would have believed you.”
“And Papa?”
“Aaizhavli.” He puts a hand to his face. “Papa.”
“What?”
“Papa has a suitable boy in mind for you.”
I cringe, shake my head. “No,” I say.
He nods. “And I don’t know what I can do for you, after this.”
I keep shaking my head.
The snake slips off my shoulders, shifts to half-man, and wraps his arms around my waist. I twist around, rest my face against his chest, taste his wet-earth scent. He says, “Am I a suitable boy?”
I look up and meet his gaze. Warm. Anxious. He gestures wide with one hand, offering me the dark deep forest.
The elders cannot want a charmer in their land. Will they accept me? Send me back? Kill me? I am no shifter. What will they do to him? But I start to smile. If he will risk their anger, so will I. I say, “Yes.”
“You must be joking,” says Gautam. “Can you take him to meet Mama and Papa? Can you live in a snake hole? Think a little.”
I turn back to Gautam. My best friend in this world; but I will not let him say no for me. I stare him down.
“But, Shruti . . .” Light grows in Gautam’s eyes; he blinks, and it streaks down his face. “If you, well ... I would miss you. Horribly. But would you be happy?”
“Maybe.” I push my Naga’s hands gently away, stand, and go to Gautam. “Best chance.”
He takes a breath. Hugs me suddenly. Tight. “Then—go. And Vikram can bloody well die here, for all I care.”
I hug him back. “No,” I say. “Help him.” I turn and walk out of the false light.
The forest looms immediately around me, its shadows half-felt, half-seen. The ground is uncertain, the sky dark, and the trees darker yet. They taste of death as well as life, their roots drinking sharp blood and slow rot. Thick vines coil and hang from branches, brushing my skin, and some are not vines at all. I see eyes, faintly golden, unblinking, watching me.
“Wait.” It is faint, barely heard. I turn back.
I have to squint to see Gautam. He is faded, like an old photograph. But he is holding out the flute to me, and it is solid to my reaching fingers. He is not.
I want to say good-bye, to tell him that I love him. But he is gone, and the garden, and everything but the flute. I raise it to my lips and play a gentle song of hope and healing. Perhaps he hears it.
Then I reach out for my lover’s hand, and it is warm in mine; and we turn together and go into the forest.
On the day Shruti’s father planned to tell her about her future husband, she went into the garden to play her flute. She never came back.
Shweta Narayan has lived in six countries on three continents. She has an ongoing fascination with shapeshifters and other liminal figures, and with fairy tales and folk tales from all over. She used to have a snake, but he didn’t like being caged so she let him go.
Shweta was the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship recipient at the 2007 Clarion workshop. She writes short fiction, poetry, and in-between thingies, some of which have recently appeared in Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, Cabinet des Fees, and Strange Horizons. She hangs out online at shweta_narayan.livejournal.com.
EXCERPT FROM BLACKOUT/ALL CLEAR
Connie Willis
I fell in love with St. Paul’s and the Blitz when I first went to London over thirty years ago, and I’ve been entranced by them ever since. I wrote several stories about them, but never quite managed to get them out of my system, so I suppose my writing Blackout/All Clear was inevitable.
That era is just so fascinating—the blackout, the gas masks, the kids being sent off to who-knows-where, old men and middle-aged women suddenly finding themselves in uniform and in danger, tube shelters and Ultra and Dunkirk, and, running through it all, the threat of German tanks rolling down Piccadilly! What’s not to like?
And though there were kajillions of novels about World War II, nearly all of them were about the military side of things— hardly any about the shopgirls and maidservants and actors and reporters who were equally essential to winning the war. So I thought I’d write about them.
I didn’t think it would take eight years to do it and that it would be such a long book. Neither did Bantam or my editor Anne Groeli, and I owe them a huge debt of gratitude for sticking with me through a process that ended up taking even longer than the war. Thank you!
And thanks to Robert A. Heinlein, who first introduced me to time travel, and Rumer Godden, who first introduced me to the Blitz! And to the devoted fire watch who saved St. Pauls!
“They’d make a beautiful target, wouldn’t they?”
General Short, commenting on
the battleships lined up
at Pearl Harbor
December 6, 1941
“What do you mean, we’re halfway across the Channel?” Mike shouted, lurching to the stern of the boat. There was no land in sight, nothing but water and darkness on all sides. He groped his way back to the helm and the Commander. “You have to turn back!”
“You said you were a war correspondent, Kansas,” the Commander shouted back at him, his voice muffled by the wind. “Well, here’s your chance to cover the war instead of writing about beach fortifications. The whole bloody British Army’s trapped at Dunkirk, and we’re going to rescue them!”
But you can’t go to Dunkirk, Mike thought, still trying to absorb what had happened. It’s impossible. Dunkirk’s a divergence point. Besides, this wasn’t the way the evacuation had operated. The small craft hadn’t set off on their own. That had been considered far too dangerous. They’d been organized into convoys led by naval destroyers.
“You’ve got to go back to Dover,” he shouted, trying to make himself heard against the sound of the chugging engine and the wet, salt-laden wind. “You’ve got to go back to Dover! The Navy—”
“The Navy?” the Commander snorted. “I wouldn’t trust those paper-pushers to lead me across a mud puddle. When we bring back a boatload of our boys, they’ll see just how seaworthy the Lady Jane is!”