Palimpsest

Thus the soldiers of the opposition became as Casimira: i

I know you weep for these things. I weep for them. And more for those brave, gallant souls of Casimira’s tribe who underwent such procedures secretly, without glory or fellowship, in order to be trusted by the opposition, in order to fight well, who took mule-legs for her sake, and bear-feet, and frog’s heads.

_______

Ambuscade Station is a dreary, dank place since there is no zoo to draw the laughing or the moneyed. The shouts of the not-too-distant Troposphere barely penetrate the gloom. The platform is empty, and spiders crawl along the poles, ticking, clicking, and November can almost understand them, they are close to bees in language, but in the end they are beyond her, their paeans to Casimira private and eight-versed.

She stands, and ca

The train arrives like an answer, and the doors slide open. She is surprised. It is a long, silver train, bright, new, gleaming like an arrow shot from the moon.

Would you like to ride upon the Leopard of Little Breezes?she thinks, and leaps before her stomach can answer.

_______

The carriage is lined in silk, red silk, and women in long, glistening masks the color of blood and thick, layered kimonos stand at small tables set with tea services. The tea is red, and there are lumps of black within. A few men and women sit hunched at the tables, and the women look proprietary, caring, possessive of their charges. They glare at her coldly. They offer her nothing.

She walks slowly down the polished floor of the carriage, and as she passes the women with their poised teakettles, they turn their heads as one to regard her with icy disdain. They smell of metal and cherry pits.

“Get out,” one of them hisses. “You can’t have her.”

November runs and steps into the space between carriages, her heart throbbing.

Where are you, Amaya Sei?

The next carriage is vast, covered in rice terraces stacking up to a genuine sky, a genuine sun. All along the terraces folk stand in red hats fringed in gold, lined up perfectly along the water’s edge, staring down at her with wintry, hurt expressions. She begins to walk under their gaze, but it is very far, the carriage is so long.

“I am thirsty!” she calls out.

A little boy with a jangling hat screams down: “There is nothing for you here! The rice of grief is withered because you have set foot here, where no one wanted you!”

“She wants me!” November cries. “Amaya Sei! I will find her!”

“She is ours! We have made all these things for her! You can’t take her away from us!”

And the villagers of the second car let loose long copper ladles from bows of rice roots, and November runs again, she must run, through the pleasant countryside, and even still the ladles strike her and bruise her and the bees within her shriek in terror. A fusillade crashes into the carriage door as she closes it, and November’s belly flinches with every blow.

She passes through the carriage of cabbages, and the plants recoil from her. One opens and there is a thing inside it, a word, in black print that wavers like skin crawling: stranger. It hisses at her, and ink spatters her already-black cheek. She passes through a carriage of pine trees, and men in long black suits scowl and spit upon her. As she passes them, they reach out to clutch at her coat, her breasts, her hair.

“We do not want you,” they slaver.

Amaya Sei,she thinks, is this your kingdom? Amaya Sei, is this your hive?

November passes through a carriage of crusted white rock and hanging reeds. There is a rabbit-man there, a veteran, she thinks, mashing rice in a barrel with a great hammer. She tries to inch past him, but he blocks her way with a withered paw.

“Please, I am trying to reach Amaya Sei.”

“I know, child,” he says mildly.

November is surprised again—veterans do not speak.

“Then don’t stop me. If you want her so much, let me find her. It is the only way you can have her for good.”

“I know that, too.”

“Then I’m confused.” She touches his long, gray ear; he endures her wounded hand. “Were you in the war?”

“What an interesting question. No, you might say, and yes, you might say. You might say I am embroiled in its final skirmishes even now.”

“But you speak.”

“I was not in the war, I said. The mochi needed such care in those years, I could not leave it.”

“Then why have you such ears, such paws?”

The rabbit looks at November with a chagrined, sorrowing expression. “It is what she expected,” he says. “To see a rabbit with a hammer, and rice. I wanted to look right for her. For Amaya Sei. There are still surgeons in the world, and this train has caught a few when they were not looking. As it caught me, on a platform, on a Wednesday morning when the coffee was thick and I was not paying attention. As it caught a war-rabbit, still bound up in its saddle, in the last days of it all, when it bent to snuffle for scraps in the dark. I could not even tell my employers I would not be at my desk. I could not tell my wife or my son that I would be away. I was a candymaker, you know. I like to think the city went sour when I vanished from it, but that is probably not the case.”

“In what sense, candymaker, are you fighting the war even now? I am not a warrior, I have not come to fight you.”

The rabbit leans in close and brushes her nose with his. It is soft, as a rabbit’s ought to be. “Do you not know, even now, what they fought for? There was a time when it was easy to cross the bridges and tu

“And then a child named Casimira was born. She should not have been allowed to stay with her family. She was a Braurion. She ought to have been sent out with a new name to haggle with lettuce merchants or bronze-casters. Instead, she grew up in a house that loved her as we love Amaya Sei, and when she was thirteen, she was so lonely that she went to the barricades and began to tear at them with her fingernails. ‘It is not right,’ she said, ‘that all our doors are closed!’

“They stopped her, of course, but Casimira is a creature of will, and she saw in her heart an open city, a city full of the world, full of new people who would love her and new suns in new skies. And she had a billion creatures at her command. Do you know what a thirteen-year-old girl can do when she is alone and frightened and believes she is right? And she wanted it so much. She wanted the immigrants back, and she opened, at last, with a treaty and a pen, under the eye of the shark-general, a single way. And she has waited for twenty years for someone to take it. All we have done and been done to has been for a lonely girl, and there are some of us who say that is enough of grace—that one of us is no longer lonely. We believed that. And now . . . there is Amaya Sei.”