Then something spears through the Adze’s carapace from the inside. They are branches, growing in intervals as though obeying the pulse of a heart at their center. Their bark is black as the knobkerrie, black as Naledi’s corkscrew hair, and they spread across the Adze’s body, sending fractures through its shell.
“Are you there?” Naledi whispers, watching flowers spill from the Adze’s mouth. Her hands are still attached to eyelashes, but her feet wobble with the Adze’s labored breaths. The branches grow, and their shadows spread across Naledi’s skin like fissures. She does not know if the knobkerrie has grown roots as well, but the Adze’s body feels anchored to the ground and steady, as Naledi’s never will.
St. Baboloki is hovering over the water. His swarm weaves through the reeds in three strands, like a braid. Naledi thinks the sun might be setting. The light in the sky is orange and searing, and the Adze’s shattered eye looks like it has been set aflame.
“Baboloki!” Naledi calls, as the flies settle upon her bare arms to examine a patch of dried blood shaped like a butterfly.
“You did it,” hums the swarm. “I’m impressed. I’ve never seen anyone attack the Adze before.”
“It’s just an insect. It’s just — it was an old thing, wasn’t it? It only wanted the flowers.”
The Adze’s limbs reach for something that does not exist. After a moment, Naledi feels it still beneath her feet. She looks up to see vultures gathering atop the newly formed tree. Hyenas chatter and bark in the bush.
“You destroyed a thing which destroyed. Have you done it in my name?” Baboloki says, drawing back from Naledi and forming itself into the shape of a man. It plucks the pith helmet from her head and drops it atop its own.
“I suppose,” says Naledi. She pictures her mother, mashing lentils with a round stone. The image comes unaccompanied by context or emotion. In the memory, Naledi’s mother sings the hymns of Baboloki, but Naledi cannot recall the words. She nods. Her arms weigh like roots burrowing into the earth. “She always said the flowers would come, and then the monsters.”
“It is a lovely sacrifice, I must say. One of my favorites.”
“Take the flowers away now.”
“Of course,” says Baboloki.
“You go away too.”
“Unfortunately, as a saint, I am always very much here, in the same way I am not here.”
The Adze is still now, but exudes heat like a ghost pulling itself from a body. Naledi does not understand Baboloki’s statement.
“My mother said the flowers would come first, and then the monsters. The Adze was only hungry. You are — ”
“A saint, I assure you,” Baboloki says, and Naledi watches his dark skin fracture into insects once more. They drop the pith helmet atop Naledi’s head and prick her arm twice before dispersing into the flowers. Twin bubbles of blood grow in increments with her pulse. The flies devour the flowers in great swarms, but also the still bodies of trampled springbok and people. Thaney’s home on the hill is untouched, but Naledi does not see people emerging from their closed doors. There are only baboons, stealing vegetables from abandoned gardens and screeching into the windless afternoon.
Naledi scrubs her arm with a closed fist to keep the smell of the flowers from lingering. Her blood joins the Adze’s.
After a moment, Naledi adjusts the pith helmet to block the barbarous sun of late afternoon. She breaks a length off the knobkerrie’s tree and swings it into the palm her of left hand. Alongside the Adze, moths appear to sing a funerary ballad. Naledi started as a seed, but now she is a branch marked by ruts and crosshatches.
Naledi follows after Baboloki, like a hunter tracking the herds.
The Children of Yig
John Hornor Jacobs
Grislae bent her back to the sea.
The face of the ocean was dead and still. Mist hung about the longship Reinen and drizzle fell in gauzy streamers. No breath of wind stirred the sails. It was warmer here in the south, and what land they could see, flatter, the barest ink stroke on the horizon.
Oars creaked as Heingistr’s company strained. Hoensa, Rill, Svebder, Uvigg, Snurri — the blooded men who did not row — watched the shore as it slowly passed.
“The shape of the land is familiar,” said Hoensa, squinting his eyes against the gloom. “We raided what farms we could find, five winters past, but the ones near here we spared for future plucking.” He slapped the bulkhead. “Our shields were wet from plunder and we could let these pass.”
Grislae sank her oar into the water and pulled. She had found her rhythm among the men from Heingistrhold. At first her hands had blistered, but only a little, since they were accustomed to plow and rope and the labors of the farm.
At the covered stern of the Reinen, over a small touchwood brazier, huddled Urtha and Wen — wives to Hoensa and Rill. The women would not let their husbands raid without their company. Their cooking. Their guidance. And because Heingistr did not meddle in the affairs of husbands and wives, he allowed this, as his father had before him. Indeed, it spared him from eating what his men might cook.
Urtha scowled at Grislae’s garb when she boarded the Reinen, noting her helm, her boiled leather tunic. Her sword.
“You are Ordbeg the Boy-Lover’s daughter, are you not?” Urtha said, as Grislae hung her shield over the gunwale. The shield had been her father’s, but she’d repainted it.
Svebder and Snurri chuckled. Grislae looked at the women. They called her father “Boy-Lover” in derision, because he would not kill children. Last Imbolc he was coughing blood, and by the Festival of Eostre, he was dead, his incessant retching so odious, the end came as a relief. She didn’t weep. She swore she’d never pick up another hoe or scythe another hayfield. She dug his grave, placed him in it, and built a cairn. It was her last spring sowing. Her father’s sword and shield and wealth she kept, and placed nothing in the grave with him. Then, back aching, she drank as much mead as her belly would hold, sitting in the dim silence of their farmhouse — leagues away from Heingistrhold and any other soul — and drew Ordbeg’s sword from its scabbard and watched the firelight flicker down its length.
To Urtha she said, “I bear his shield, sword, and helm. Not his name.”
“Nor his hair,” Wen said in a fruity voice, looking at Grislae’s pate.
“Nor what hung between his legs,” Urtha said, squinting.
Grislae shrugged and ran a hand over her stubbly head. The incessant itching of lice had driven her to take a knife to her once long locks, as she had not the inclination to waste silver on lye. She’d found she liked the fierce look of her shorn head. And that the young men from the neighboring farms had stopped leaving loaves and flowers by her door, which was just as well. She would never wed.
She crossed her arms in front of her and frowned at the two women. “I have come to raid. Heingistr has not a problem with it. Have either of you?”
Wen only frowned but Urtha, the wide-faced leader of the two, said, “I’d warn you to stay away from our men, but I imagine they’d rather fuck sheep than bed with you.”
Grislae smiled. “That hole in your face would be the perfect arsehole,” she said, as she unslung her sword and stowed her bindle, “if it wasn’t for all your teeth.”
There was a moment of quiet. Wen looked shocked. Urtha scowled at Hoensa, her husband, for support. Hoensa shrugged and looked back toward the shore.