Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 (47 page)

The divine placed his finger on his page and glanced up. “No, I don’t think I have,” he said vaguely.

The merchant said, “All you called folk pray to meet your god, don’t you?”

“I have often prayed for the goddess to touch
my
heart,” said the Mother’s comptroller. “It is my highest spiritual goal to see Her face-to-face. Indeed, I often think I have felt Her, from time to time.”

Anyone who desires to see the gods face-to-face is a great fool,
thought Ista. Although that was not an impediment, in her experience.

“You don’t have to pray to do that,” said the divine. “You just have to die. It’s not hard.” He rubbed his second chin. “In fact, it’s unavoidable.”

“To be god-touched in
life,
” corrected the comptroller coolly. “
That
is the great blessing we all long for.”

No, it’s not. If you saw the Mother’s face right now, woman, you would drop weeping in the mud of this road and not get up for days
. Ista became aware that the divine was squinting at her in arrested curiosity.

Was
he
one of the god-touched? Ista possessed some practice at spotting them. The reverse also held true, unfortunately. Or perhaps that calf-like stare was just shortsightedness. Discomforted, she frowned back at him.

He blinked apologetically and said to her, “In fact, I travel on business for my order. A dedicat in my charge came by chance across a little stray demon possessed by a ferret. I take it to Taryoon for the archdivine to return to the god with proper ceremony.”

He twisted around to his capacious saddlebags and rummaged therein, trading the book for a small wicker cage. A lithe gray shape turned within it.

“Ah-ha! So that’s what you’ve been hiding in there!” Caria rode closer, wrinkling her nose. “It looks like any other ferret to me.” The creature stood up against the side of the cage and twitched its whiskers at her.

The fat divine turned in his saddle and held up the cage to Ista’s view. The animal, circling, froze in her frown; for just a moment, its beady eyes glittered back with something other than animal intelligence. Ista regarded it dispassionately. The ferret lowered its head and backed away until it could retreat no farther. The divine gave Ista a curious sidelong look.

“Are you sure the poor thing isn’t just sick?” said Caria doubtfully.

“What do you think, lady?” the divine asked Ista.

You know very well it has a real demon.Why do you ask
me? “Why—I think the good archdivine will certainly know what it is and what to do with it.”

The divine smiled faintly at this guarded reply. “Indeed, it is not much of a demon.” He tucked the cage away again. “I wouldn’t name it more than a mere elemental, small and unformed. It hasn’t been long in the world, I’d guess, and so is little likely to tempt men to sorcery.”

It did not tempt Ista, certainly, but she understood his need to be discreet. Acquiring a demon made one a sorcerer much as acquiring a horse made one a rider, but whether skilled or poor was a more open question. Like a horse, a demon could run away with its master. Unlike a horse, there was no dismounting. To a soul’s peril; hence the Temple’s concern.

Caria made to speak again, but the path to the castle split off at that point, and dy Ferrej reined his horse aside. The widow of Palma converted whatever she’d been about to say to a cheery farewell wave, and dy Ferrej escorted Ista firmly off the road.

He glanced back over his shoulder as they started down the bank into the trees. “Vulgar woman. I’ll wager she has not a pious thought in her head! She uses her pilgrimage only to shield her holiday-making from the disapproval of her relatives and get herself a cheap armed escort on the road.”

“I believe you are entirely right, dy Ferrej.” Ista glanced back over her shoulder at the party of pilgrims advancing down the main road. The Widow Caria was now coaxing the divine of the Bastard to sing hymns with her, though the one she was suggesting more resembled a drinking song.

“She had not one man of her own family to support her,” dy Ferrej continued indignantly. “I suppose she can’t help the lack of a husband, but you’d think she could scare up a brother or son or at least a nephew. I’m sorry you had to be exposed to that, Royina.”

A not entirely harmonious but thoroughly good-natured duet rose behind them, fading with distance.

“I’m not,” said Ista. A slow smile curved her lips.
I’m not
.

A
ndy Duncan made his first sale, to
Asimov’s Science Fiction,
in 1997, and quickly made others, to
Starlight, SCI FICTION, Amazing, Science Fiction Age, Dying For It, Realms of Fantasy,
and
Weird Tales,
as well as several more sales to
Asimov’s
. By the beginning of the new century, he was widely recognized as one of the most individual, quirky, and flavorful new voices on the scene today. His story “The Executioner’s Guild” was on both the Final Nebula Ballot and the final ballot for the World Fantasy Award in 2000, and in 2001 he
won
two World Fantasy Awards, for his story “The Pottawatomie Giant,” and for his landmark first collection,
Beluthahatchie and Other Stories
. His most recent book is an anthology coedited with F. Brett Cox,
Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic
. Coming up is a new collection,
Alabama Curiosities
. A graduate of the Clarion West writers’ workshop in Seattle, he was born in Batesberg, South Carolina, and now lives in Northport, Alabama, with his wife, Sydney, where he edits
Overdrive
magazine, “The Voice of the American Trucker.”

About “Zora and the Zombie,” he says:

“My stories ‘Beluthahatchie,’ ‘Lincoln in Frogmore,’ and ‘Daddy Mention and the Monday Skull’ are all homages to the great Zora Neale Hurston, but ‘Zora and the Zombie’ is my first attempt to base a character on Zora herself.

“I long had been fascinated by Zora’s brief account, in her 1937 book
Tell My Horse,
of her encounter with the Zombie Felicia Felix-Mentor, and by the photo of Felix-Mentor that she snapped in that hospital yard. For years, whenever Zora crossed my mind, I would think, ‘One day I’ll write a story about Zora and the Zombie.’ When I finally realized that was the title, I was able to begin.

“My wife, Sydney, loves this story but not the title, which she thinks belongs on a pulp horror story. I think it’s fitting, though, because the story is less about the Zombies of Haiti than about Zombies as they were adopted and adapted by U.S. pop culture in the 1930s and 1940s—by Zora, yes, but also by the contributors to
Weird Tales
and its rival ‘shudder pulps.’ So I like that the title would have fit the contents page of, say,
Terror Tales
. Now that the story has been nominated for a Stoker Award, my first such nomination, I wonder to what extent the title caught the attention of the Horror Writers Association!

“A note for the copy editors in the house: I capitalized Zombie because Zora did, partially out of her respect for this elect group of Haitians and partially, I suspect, to emphasize the alliteration of the word with her name—for in the reader’s mind she’s never Hurston, always Zora.

“I have been stunned to realize, since the story was published, that many of its readers had never heard of Zora before. I hope my story inspires even a few of them to go read her, but if I had known at the outset that I would be making introductions, I likely wouldn’t have dared write the story at all!

“Thanks to everyone at the Sycamore Hill Writers Conference who helped me with this story, especially L. Timmel Duchamp, Karen Joy Fowler, and Kelly Link for their enthusiasm; to Ellen Datlow for publishing it in
SCI FICTION
; to Kelly Link and Gavin Grant for reprinting it in
The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror
; to John Kessel for too many reasons to list; and to Sydney for more reasons still.”

“W
hat is the truth?” the houngan shouted over the drums. The mambo, in response, flung open her white dress. She was naked beneath. The drummers quickened their tempo as the mambo danced among the columns in a frenzy. Her loose clothing could not keep pace with her kicks, swings, and swivels. Her belt, shawl, kerchief, dress floated free. The mambo flung herself writhing onto the ground. The first man in line shuffled forward on his knees to kiss the truth that glistened between the mambo’s thighs.

Zora’s pencil point snapped. Ah, shit. Sweat-damp and jostled on all sides by the crowd, she fumbled for her penknife and burned with futility. Zora had learned just that morning that the Broadway hoofer and self-proclaimed anthropologist Katherine Dunham, on her Rosenwald fellowship to Haiti—the one that rightfully should have been Zora’s—not only witnessed this very truth ceremony a year ago, but for good measure underwent the three-day initiation to become Mama Katherine, bride of the serpent god Damballa—the heifer!

Three nights later, another houngan knelt at another altar with a platter full of chicken. People in the back began to scream. A man with a terrible face flung himself through the crowd, careened against people, spread chaos. His eyes rolled. The tongue between his teeth drooled blood. “He is mounted!” the people cried. “A loa has made him his horse.” The houngan began to turn. The horse crashed into him. The houngan and the horse fell together, limbs entwined. The chicken was mashed into the dirt. The people moaned and sobbed.

Zora sighed. She had read this in Herskovitz, and in Johnson, too. Still, maybe poor fictional Tea Cake, rabid, would act like this. In the pandemonium she silently leafed to the novel section of her notebook. “Somethin’ got after me in mah sleep, Janie,” she had written. “Tried tuh choke me tuh death.”

Another night, another compound, another pencil. The dead man sat up, head nodding forward, jaw slack, eyes bulging. Women and men shrieked. The dead man lay back down and was still. The mambo pulled the blanket back over him, tucked it in. Perhaps tomorrow, Zora thought, I will go to Pont Beudet, or to Ville Bonheur. Perhaps something new is happening there.