Sriduangkaew - The Archer Who Shot Down Suns

The Archer Who Shot Down Suns

Benjanun Sriduangkaew

Copyright 2014 Benjanun Sriduangkaew

Smashwords Edition

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons living or dead are purely coincidental. All rights are reserved.

"The Crows Her Dragon's Gate" 2013 Benjanun Sriduangkaew.

"Woman of the Sun, Woman of the Moon" 2012 Benjanun Sriduangkaew.

"Chang'e Dashes from the Moon" 2012 Benjanun Sriduangkaew.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise, without express written permission from the author.

Introduction

Before there was Scale-Bright there were short stories. I used to call them - somewhat literally! - 'the Sun-Moon Cycle', but they since gave rise to my debut novella Scale-Bright (Immersion Press, 2014). They aren't necessary to enjoy the novella, but I've put them together for ease of access in chronological order. All stories take place before Scale-Bright

"The Crows Her Dragon's Gate" (first published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 2013. Ed. Scott H. Andrews). The story of Xihe, the mother of suns, when she was young and the world was new: how she met her husband, lost herself, and found it again.

"Woman of the Sun, Woman of the Moon" (first published in GigaNotoSaurus, 2012. Ed. Ann Leckie). Houyi rose in heaven, bow and arrow in hand: the hunt was her joy, the slaying of demons her delight. But most delightful was a serving girl called Chang'e.

"Chang'e Dashes from the Moon" (first published in Expanded Horizons, 2012. Ed. Dash). Chang'e has been a prisoner on the moon while the world turns and cities rise. For centuries Houyi has looked for a way to free her wife, and now she has found it in a distant grand-niece: a young mortal woman named Julienne.

The Crows Her Dragon's Gate

Before the end there would be love-songs to a passion so fierce that the offspring of my body turned into suns; tales of our courtship a wildfire that scorched the world.

The annals of heavens may not always be trusted. They were texts carefully edited, passed to chosen scholars; it did well to remind the warlordsand once empire dreams had come true, the monarchs calling themselves heaven's sonsthat above them reigned paradise, and above paradise an everlasting emperor.

Much was elided and confused. But in the beginning, it was mostly that I was young.

The Huang He was new, freshly disgorged from a dragon's gullet, brimming with stomach-lizards and fish with scales thick as lamellar. The heat drew me, as it too must have drawn him. And so I found Dijun by the banks with knees drawn up like a boy, gazing into the waters. In his palms flame detonated into monsters that cavorted to the edge of his nails and spilled onto the grass, turning green to black-brown.

I measured and watched him through the frame of my hands. What did I know of him then? That he was an oddity, not unlike me; that he was without a place at court, without sworn brothers earned through blood and fire. A lack that left him wifeless, for all that women gazed upon him as they would on rare silverwork. They would glance at him, and sigh a little, and look away. Untitled and unpositioned, what husband could he make?

I did not think of positions or titles.

He noticed my approach, and his smile intrigued me, for aesthetically it was most pleasing. Being young I mistook this for something else; being young I thought beauty was all there was.

"Would you like to try?" He held out his hand, where many-eyed beasts spun through their deaths and rebirths, purer each time, finer with each cycle.

"How did you know?"

"Your shadow moves on its own even when heaven's light stands still. Like calls to like." Dijun hesitated. "And I find I cannot look away from your radiance."

I inclined my head. Men offered flattery; women accepted with poise. That was the way of things. We examined one another; he in fascination, I for lack of conversation. Portrait-still, portrait-flattened. To escape that tableau I thought of heat. It flared out of me, gusting into two wings that multiplied, quartet then decaplet.

I'd thought he would take to it, my natural kindred. He recoiled. "That is wild. Have you never taught yourself control?"

Until that moment it'd never struck me that this required discipline, anymore than did breathing or laughing, or searching for the true face of the sky. "No, why would I?"

He frowned at me. "Unreined it'll bring disaster. This will burn even immortals." Leaning close he gripped my wrists, his breath on my cheeks. "Let me teach you."

I wanted to tell him: no, I had never burned anything, anyone. That I did not want guidance, for this was part of me, like my tongue and my feet, and why did he want to teach me how to use those? I was no infant; I was no child.

But for a reason I wouldn't be able to name until years afteryears stretching between us like clouds unrolling beneath chariot wheelsI was silent; I was silenced and could not demur. I let him, could not quite pull away, show me how to coax the flame and bring order that it did not need. I let him teach me what I already understood.

Pulse hot in my throat I went away from him rubbing the places where he'd touched, the fingerprints on my arms.

This, too, was easy to mistake for an entirely different emotion.

* * *

Winter was air sizzling against my skin, snow hissing to steam on my hair, a susurrus in my ears: Xihe, Xihe. Had I a mother she'd have warned me, Your vanity is how men will ensnare you, little daughterbut I gestated in the dreams of birds and left them fully grown: a woman's silhouette, no childhood behind and no old age before to give it substance.

I would have liked to be someone's daughter, to call someone my aunt. But all I had was my older self, teeth bared in angry laughter.

Winter was shelter too, for Dijun hated that season. He courted status more desperately than he courted me, and he thought the cold would diminish him. It would not; only why tell him that? This was my place, this was my peace.

In my contemplation I could have missed the girl. Only look another way, sidestep rather than forward, take a different turnany of this and the storm would have sifted over, burying her fortune. How small that chance; how breakable her life. Humans were so prone to death it was a marvel that they survived to fulfill their allotted span, a fraction's fraction of my own.

Furs in the snow like slain carcasses: she was wrapped in layers of them, had curled in upon herself to retain heat. I brushed away the flakes on her cheeks and lifted her up. So light, so small, as though mortals were made of a substance less dense and less real than mine.

A wolf's den. The beast, litter-mother, towered over me even as it slept. It woke and made room.

At my behest it extended a paw, gathering the girl to its belly like a pup. I left and returned with lychees from my garden, fed from seed to fruit with fire. Stripping it of skin and seed I fed to the mortal flesh like meat, flesh like liquor; blood-red and just as hot.

The girl woke like that in my lap around a mouthful of sweetness, of warmth leaping in the jugular and bounding in the stomach. Flush with this heat she'd changed colors. She spluttered laughter through chapped lips. "They told us death would look like a field in summer, not a giant wolf and a woman."

"There's no field," I said sharply, and did not tell her that the afterlife was far harsher than the wolf. "Nor am I of the world below. What insult. What were you doing in the storm?"

Her name was Lin, and she did not believe I was real, my throat and head bare, my robes summer-thin. With her thumbs she brushed my braids; with her fists she crumpled my sleeves; with her mouth she insisted I was a fever dream.