SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

“Don’t know,” he replied, scooping up a spoonful of stew. “Never seen it, but I suppose it’s still there. They say there’s still water in some of the rivers and such. The ocean must be harder to dry up than those.”

He lapsed into silence again and Amba tried not to think about where the ship might be now. After dinner, she cleaned the dishes, swept the house, and started a new loaf of bread to rise for morning. The sack of grain in the pantry was their last, and the jars of vegetables they had traded for were dwindling. Soon, like many already, they would have to live on nothing but the sparkers.

Amba enjoyed the feel of kneading bread. It reminded her of her childhood, when they had kept a garden and grown grain instead of sparkers. Father hadn’t been so sad then and the house not so lonely. She and Mother always had the cooking and cleaning and sewing done before Father was even aware of the need. He used to ruffle her hair and spend his rare words complimenting her baking or his new shirts. Amba had even caught Mother and Father kissing one day, out by the shed.

She and Father did the work of four people now, and life felt somehow incomplete no matter how hard she tried to fill the holes in her world. Amba pressed her hand to the ache at the hollow below her breastbone, as if she could push her fist inside to sate the emptiness.

The next day, while Father worked in the shed, Amba was sent to gauge the grubs in the second field, to see if they were large enough to herd forward. He couldn’t see that the ship was now halfway up the first field, or that to reach the grubs, she would have to walk right past it.

She could have skirted wide of the ship, and perhaps it would’ve stayed its course up the field and sailed away. She didn’t believe it would, though. If she was the only one who could see it, then it must have come for her. She had been frightened and curious too long; if there was no avoiding this thing, she decided, she may as well meet it head on.

The banister of the deck stood nearly three times her height above the ground, and the ship loomed hugely as she approached it. She strained to hear the splash and roll of waves that gently rocked the hull, or the wind that tousled the men’s hair, but she heard only the silence of the farm and the creak of the windmill.

The figurehead turned out to be a woman, naked to hips that melded into the lower part of the bow. Her right arm was raised high, and in her hand she clutched a metal lightning bolt painted gold. Wooden hair that may once have been red streamed back into the point of the prow, as if blown by a strong wind. On the deck of the ship were half a dozen men. The man at the wheel was tall and broad shouldered, sporting a thick shock of ginger hair, and a reddish beard and mustache trimmed short.

“Lower the sails,” the big man called as she neared. Ropes whined as the sails came down, folding like ladies’ fans onto the crossbeams of the masts. “Drop anchor,” he ordered.

Amba heard the rattle of thick chain and saw a huge anchor tumble from a hole in the hull, though she never heard a splash or saw it hit the ground. The anchor disappeared, leaving only the chain hanging taut above the dirt. The ship rocked to a halt.

Her legs felt as if they had no more bones than a sparker as she closed the last few feet. The big man came to the railing and leaned into it, elbows locked, looking down at her. “What’s your name, child?”

Once he acknowledged her directly it all became too real. Amba’s heart fluttered as fast as a thrummer bird’s wings. She wondered if he was a spirit, or maybe a king or a god, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask. She reminded herself that she wasn’t a child, but nearly a woman grown. With an effort, she kept her voice steady as she answered, “Amba.”

“Not your given name, girl. Your true name. What’s your family name?”

“Storm-bringer.”

Her father’s true name, Stalwart, was one of the newer ones—his mother’s name for six or seven generations back—but the name she and Jass had inherited from their mother was one of the old ones, like Bone-healer or Wheat-singer or Wave-tamer. It had been passed down from a time so distant that no memory of those days remained.

The ginger-haired man nodded, as if this was something he already knew. “Why haven’t you brought the storms then, girl? Your land is in need.”

“It’s just a name,” she said, taken aback. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

He bent his elbows and crossed his forearms on the railing. It seemed to bring him closer to her. “It means everything, girl, especially when the land needs you. Don’t you feel it calling to you, like an emptiness inside you? Like something’s missing?”

There was an emptiness inside her, but it was for her mother, her brother, and the lost days of her childhood.

“It’s time you remember your heritage, Amba. I’ve brought you something that might help.” He reached beneath his shirt and lifted a chain over his head. He dropped a necklace over the railing.

Amba bent to retrieve it but couldn’t find the necklace where she thought it had landed. She began to wonder if it had dropped into the invisible ocean when, finally, she spotted a few links poking out of the earth. She tugged, and the chain came partially free. With a little digging, the rest of the necklace emerged from deep in the soil. There was an ornament at the bottom of the chain, but it was caked with dirt. She was certain it had been shiny gold as it fell through the air. Her fingers rubbed the dirt away to find a lightning bolt, the gold metal dark with age.

She rubbed the lightning bolt clean with a corner of her dress, leaving smudges of dirt and black tarnish on the fabric, and slipped the chain over her head. The bolt was the same design as the one on the wooden figurehead. The storm symbol reminded her of snippets from her fever dreams that she had thought of only occasionally in the six years since her illness—vague memories of great winds and wild storms raging; lightning striking ferociously and thunder that shook the bones of the earth. There had been a storm outside as she lay delirious with fever, the first big storm in years. It was what had caused the nightmares, her father told her.

“Amba.” Her father’s voice pulled her from her reflections. He was walking toward her across the field. She wondered if he had seen her talking to empty air and digging in the dirt for the necklace. Shame flooded her. She was not at her duties, and she had probably given him yet another reason to doubt her sanity. Face burning, she ran to the second field without waiting for him to ask why she hadn’t come to let him know if the grubs were ready to move.

That night, for the first time in six years, the storm dreams returned. She was outside, in the fields, barefoot, and wearing only her nightdress. The Wind Moon was full above her.

“Storm-bringer,” the earth called to her in a voice as dusty as the soil. A breeze rustled the fabric about her legs and carried the scent of death and decay to her nostrils. Through her bare feet she felt the thirst in the soil, and the pain of the earth became her own. The hollow beneath her breastbone burned like hot coals. Empty. So empty. Not empty for her mother, she knew now. That pain was in her heart. This place waited for something else to fill it.

In her dream, she knew what she must do, and she knew how to do it. She turned her face to the sky and breathed in the air, as if pulling it all the way inside her mind, down into her lungs and down further still. She rooted her feet to the ground, feeling the soil between her toes, and drew the energy of the earth up through her legs and into her middle. When the sky energy and the earth energy met in that hollow place, she called on her power.