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

It came.

Amba’s mind soared with the wind and her legs grew deep into the soil. Her hair lifted in a nimbus around her head as she became the conduit that connected earth and sky. The tremendous forces of nature were no longer a mystery to her. She stood, arms upraised, exalted, filled with a terrible power that could command the heavens to her bidding. She pulled moisture from the air into the dark clouds and tugged the impotent heat lightning into a single bolt that she hurled down to the earth. It hit the ground like a great hammer, and the thunder that erupted shook the ground. The wind blew mightily and the rain started. A storm that could drench the whole world.

People came to her then, all her distant neighbors, all the folk of the county, all the people of the land. They begged her to stop but still she brought the rain. Every creek bed, gully and valley flooded; peoples’ homes washed away. Sparkers died by the thousands, drowning beneath her feet or struggling to the surface only to drown in the heavy rain. The lights went out and the fans went off. People were hungry; then they starved; then they died.

Amba woke, screaming.

Liath looked at Amba’s tongue, then felt her cheeks and between her shoulder blades. Father had been unable to console Amba when she woke from her nightmare and had summoned the herb woman when she remained afraid, even in the light of day.

“There’s no fever,” Liath told Amba. She stared at her eyes a long time before adding, “The clouds there are unchanged.” She had tended Amba and her mother when they fell ill, as well as many others that awful season. Some had died and some had lived, but Amba was the only one on whose eyes the fever had bestowed clouds.

“Are you sure you won’t tell me what’s been bothering you?” Liath asked again. Her expression was strong but kindly, the lines in her face as coarse as the black hair shot through with gray. Amba felt tempted to confide in her.

What could she tell Liath? That her name might be more than just a name? That a man on an invisible ship was trying to wake an ancient power inside her? That using that power would bring such storms that it would kill all the sparkers? People that Liath cared for would suffer and die if that happened. Maybe Liath would as well. Amba just shook her head and retreated to the same silence where her father carried all his burdens.

“Get dressed,” Liath said.

Amba pulled her thin work-dress over her shift, leaving the necklace hidden in the folds of her nightdress. She had woken from her nightmare holding the lightning bolt in such a grip that her palm was sticky with blood.

Liath opened the bedroom door. Father waited in the other room. “She’s not ill,” Liath told him, “and I see no sign of fever. Or madness.” The deep worry lines in her father’s face softened slightly. “Perhaps she’s just been working too hard,” she said, patting him on the shoulder maternally, though they were of a similar age. “Perhaps you both have been. Let her rest a few days and see how she does. Send for me if you need me again.”

With that, Liath let herself out the front door to ride the borrowed donkey back to its farm and then walk the rest of the way to town.

Father told Amba, “Go to bed and rest.”

She obediently climbed into bed, and he surprised her by bending suddenly to ruffle her hair before he left for the fields. He had lost most of a day’s work taking care of her, she knew. She lay back, but she feared to sleep, feared to dream. At last, stress claimed its price, though. Her eyes closed. She slept. And the storm dreams came again.

This time she woke before she started screaming.

Amba lay awake, her heart slowing to normal before she got up. The gray light of dawn was just easing into the sky. She tiptoed into the main room of the house, listening, but heard no sound. This was the time of day that she and Father usually arose, but she suspected he had worked late into the night and had not yet woken.

She had to make the ship leave, had to tell the ginger-haired man that she would not do the things he wanted, and she had to do it when her father wouldn’t see her talking to the air. She eased from the house still in her nightdress and still barefoot.

The tilled soil was rough and uneven under her feet. One hand clutched near her throat and she realized that she was gripping the necklace, though she didn’t remember putting it on.

Amba knew what she meant to say, but her mind remained half in her dreams and the place beneath her breastbone felt full and heavy and warm. It was confusing. Like being two people at once, the girl of the storms and the girl of the farm.

The ship was bobbing at anchor in the first field, as she had known it would be. She neared the ship, and the ginger-haired man came to the railing. He smiled. “You have awoken your birthright, Storm-bringer. I can feel it.”

“I can’t do it,” she said. “I know what you want, and I can’t do it to Father. I can’t do it to any of them. We need the sparkers more than we need the rain.” Perhaps he was an old spirit, and didn’t understand the world as it was now. If the sparkers died, people would starve.

“You can’t decide the fate of the world until you have knowledge of the world. Use that power of yours. Feel what’s going on around you, and then make up your mind what you will and won’t do.”

“It won’t matter. I can’t bring the rain if it hurts the people.”

Amba turned to walk back to the house when a jolt shocked through her bare feet. Father must have moved the larger grubs to the first field, and one lay beneath her now. Everything about the creature felt wrong in a way that made her stomach clench as if she might vomit. Almost without thought, she tapped her power.

It swept through her—just as it had in her dream—out the top of her head to the sky and down through her feet into the earth. Her legs were on fire with energy, and her scalp prickled as her hair lifted. Her entire body became a conduit.

Unlike her dream, this time she truly connected to the earth and sky. And suddenly she understood. Everything.

She felt the energy of the sparkers moving through the soil and that of the heat lightning above. She understood the dry earth and the perpetually angry clouds. She understood that people farming more and more of the sparkers kept lightning from reaching the ground—like rubbing two cloths on amber and trying to bring them together—and that was what held off the rain.

The earth was barren, the crops gone and the animals dying. Her people stood on the brink of destruction. The sparkers weren’t saving people, they were killing them.

Even more importantly, she understood her power now. It wasn’t striving to unleash the storms for the sake of violence. It spoke the language of nature and had heard the land screaming out its need. It ached only to bring balance and healing to her world.

Amba distantly heard the bang of a door. She glanced back toward the house and saw her father standing on the porch. She wondered what he thought, seeing her in her nightdress in the middle of the field, her hair flying about her. She wondered if he could see the glow of power she felt burning her skin.

Her heart broke for him. He would never understand if she did this thing, none of them would, but she could see now that their world was dying a slow, dry death. She knew it as surely as she knew that she held the key to their survival, if only she had the courage to begin. With an effort, Amba turned from her father.

She didn’t bother to step clear of the ship. The ship couldn’t be harmed by the storms. It was a part of them as much as she was. Perhaps those men sailed the clouds in the sky as well as the clouds in her eyes.