“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 is a cultural crazy quilt: she was born in India and lived in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, and Scotland before moving to California. She’s particularly interested in boundaries and the people who cross them, and her fictional landscape is something of a Great Forest.
She grew up reading folktales and fairy tales from all over — and whatever was on the bookshelf — but didn’t discover her love of short stories until she was given The Green Man anthology in college. She read that in one big gulp and hasn’t stopped since, so she’s particularly thrilled to be included in this anthology.
Shweta’s a graduate of the Clarion 2007 writers’ workshop, for which she received the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship. She has stories forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Shimmer, and GUD Magazine, and poetry in Goblin Fruit. She can be found on the Web at www.shwetanarayan.org.
I love snakes. I love the way they move, the way they feel; if I were going to be drawn away from the world by an animal-person, you can bet it would be a Naga.
“Pishaach” isn’t really like the snake stories I grew up on, though. Traditional Nagas aren’t even shape-shifters. I think they ought to be — they’re drawn half snake half human, and snakes are a symbol of transformation the world over — but that bit came from somewhere else entirely. I’m a mix of cultures, you see, and so are the stories I tell. I grew up reading folktales from all over, and living all over the world, too; and “Pishaach” is inspired by selkie stories as much as anything Indian.
I loved those stories where the man hides a seal-maiden’s skin and she stays with him in human form until she finds it. And then she changes shape and is gone. She turns back into a seal, returns to the ocean, not caring who she leaves behind.
I always wondered how the selkie’s children felt about that. The ones caught between worlds. Which is, of course, where Shruti comes in.
THE SALAMANDER FIRE
Marly Youmans
“Out gathering tufts of wool on some slope below the crags? Picking bits from the laurel?” Startled, Alexander Prince — Xan to his friends — let a handful of ramps scatter onto the metal table.
“Hey, you’re all right,” the farmer said, clapping a hand on his shoulder and letting loose a laugh that had all the bounce and mounting roar of barrels rolling merrily down an incline. A robust fellow of in-between age, Charlie Garland had coarse, rumpled hair and an oddly pretty mouth inherited by the daughters who helped him at the open-air market.
“Sorry.” Xan laughed back at him. “Maybe I was wool gathering: groping for wisps of a dream, listening for echoes. When I woke this morning, I heard the most bewitching music, like glass chimes—”
“You’re a real glassman, for sure.” Garland tweaked the bill from his fingers and filled his palm with silver. “Your kind would’ve cut down a myrtle tree and made a salamander in the olden days.” He held out a sack of ramps and another of lettuce and radishes, far more than Xan had picked out.
“You’re giving it away,” he protested, but the other only laughed and waved him on, saying that it wouldn’t be spring in the Carolina mountains without a fresh mess of ramps. What do you mean by ‘making a salamander’?” Xan asked the farmer. “You don’t mean the kind like a little wet lizard, do you?”
Garland sold more ramps and a bag of spinach before he answered. “You’re right, it’s not a lizard, it’s a creature of fire. In the Talmud, when King Ahaz tried to sacrifice Hezekiah to Moloch, the boy’s mother saved him from the fire by daubing him with blood from a salamander.”
“I’ve never heard of any such thing!”
Garland shrugged. “A glassblower like you ought to know the lore of fire.”
“So how do you know this stuff?” Xan asked.
“Oh, I was a strange kid. When chores were done, I’d lie in the clover and read volumes of my grandfather’s encyclopedia of marvels. Still have it — if you come by after lunch, I’ll have my wife bring S to T.”
“All right, I’ll do that. Look for me.” Xan tossed the bags into his pack and moved off, glancing over his shoulder when he heard the farmer’s laughter and thinking that Garland hadn’t told him what the salamander was, not really.
The rest of the morning was spent in driving to Black Mountain. An elderly glassblower had died, leaving him a marver and a crate of straight shears, diamond shears, tweezers, and paddles. Although accustomed to rolling hot gathers of glass on a sheet of steel, Xan would now have a marver of marble.
The other glassblower’s studio was strangely cool and empty.
“Russ thought the world of you,” his wife, Eva, told him.
It was a funny saying. The world was a blue-green ball too big for any gaffer to cut and tweeze into shape. Tears pressed at his eyes and Xan blotted them away. At the burial, after the others had flung their roses onto the coffin in the grave, making a bed of petals, he knelt and let fall a trillium of glass.
“My first husband was thoughtless, but Russ was tender.”
“You two had a long go of it.”
“Yes, there’s that.”
“He and Harold taught me the mysteries.”
“They were such friends, one from the coves and the other from the city. Never jealous, always glad to see each other’s work.” Eva caressed the marver, snow-white with bolts of darkness. “There’s a phrase, lacrimae rerum, in Virgil. This calls ‘the tears of things’ to mind. See?” Her fingers brushed the side of the slab where three owners of the marver had written their names and birth dates. In other hands, two dates of death were marked.