When you started making art, were you interested then in fantasy?

Oh, absolutely. My interest in fantasy came far before my interest in art. I was that kid who’d spend her weekends in the library and check out the max amount allowed each time, reading everything from the Boxcar Children to Anne Rice. I originally wanted to be a writer before I ended up turning toward art. (It’s still a goal of mine, but it’s hard enough mastering one discipline, so I’m focusing on the art first!) Michael Whelan’s covers on the Pern novels and Melanie Rawn’s books were probably the first time I really noticed the cover art and started admiring it as a thing on its own, separate from the book it covered. I didn’t actually start drawing until I was thirteen or so, and that was so I could depict my own roleplaying characters instead of relying off of art scavenged from Elfwood.

We’re here and we’re queer. Do you feel a connection between art and queerness?

Not especially, but I am admittedly probably the mildest, most invisible flavor of queerness that could exist, being a Kinsey 2 bisexual cis woman. The main connection I see is that art—like identity—is extremely personal and self-constructed. Discovering both often requires a good deal of self-interrogation and awareness. I know many folks for whom their queer identity influences their art a great deal more. It’s just not one of the main roots that my art pulls from.

Is destruction a part of your creative process?

Wouldn’t say so, except inasmuch as sometimes I need to take away from a shape in order to make it correct. I tend to think of it much more as building up layers than taking away something.

With the influence of television and movies, fantasy has become a highly visual form. Is your work influenced by other visual media?

Indubitably, but it’s difficult to pinpoint what precisely. Games are probably a big one, since they’re my primary form of solitary relaxation these days (when I can afford to). I’ve been doing a lot of thirty-minute studies from film stills lately, so that’s probably wended its way into my subconscious, too, even though I don’t normally watch a lot of movies or TV.

When working on your thirty-minute film still studies, how do you choose stills?

Mostly by hitting Random on cinematicpaintings.com and stopping on whatever tickles my brain so that it goes, “Yes, that, good.” Unless I’m doing a theme week (I’m currently on a noir week), in which case I Google Image Search “<title that fits the theme> cinematography” until my brain goes, “Yes, that, good.” Then I try to figure out what it is about it that made my brain ping while I do the study.

I’ve noticed I seem to like a lot of silhouettes, misty or dramatic lighting and off-centered compositions (at least two of which worked their way into this issue’s cover).

What artists inspire you now?

Ruan Jia, Zhong Fenghua, and a whole crop of other Chinese concept artists do wonderful things with creamy, subtle color-shifted strokes. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention Dave Palumbo, Rick Berry, and Matt Rhodes as big influences on where I want to go (albeit with different elements that I’d want to pull from each, since they are not much like one another).

If you could do an illustration or cover art for one book or story, what would it be? What would you create?

My own! I’m currently kicking around notes for a post-apocalyptic gender-flipped Arthurian YA saga, but I’ve had reams of stories in my head since I was little. Lately, though, I have been considering doing my own takes on covers for Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness or the Immortals Quartets, or Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time books, as both of those were huge in my life growing up. I’d also love to work on Brandon Sanderson’s books at some point. Lots of life goals!

[Publisher’s Note: Normally, the gallery that follows the artist interview features work solely of the featured cover artist/interview subject. But since this is one of our special issues, we’re featuring work from all of the artists who participated in the issue. Enjoy!]

Retellings appeal to me for the same reason multi-threaded stories appeal; I don’t know what it’s like to have only one perspective on anything. I have lived between cultures all my life, and I’m not entirely part of any one. I’m always super-aware of which part of my world is accessible to the people I’m with; even my accent shifts, mid-sentence, depending on who I’m addressing.

So perspective—who’s telling a story, to whom, and for what purpose—is always a central issue for me, and when I play multiple narratives off one another, either within one story or (by retelling a known tale) between stories, I’m writing how I see the world.

In this story I’m playing fast and loose with real history, and with the mythologized history I grew up with. Perspective is just as central to history as to fiction—who decides what’s real, what matters, and what it means? And which versions of history do we repeat to one another? It’s almost never this one: bit.ly/women-in-love—and I wanted to change that a bit.

What does it mean to you to destroy fantasy? What do you think still needs destroying in fantasy?

To me it means destroying the defaults, the assumptions, the worn-out tropes, that limit our ideas about fantasy. If it’s way less strange and complex and wondrous than reality, then it’s not for me.

The most insidious default I think we need to destroy is gaze. Even when the subject matter is nominally diverse, the implied gaze is still so often white, straight, cis, male, able-bodied, neurotypical, middle-class, and anglophone. It’s a constant, jarring Othering that shows up everywhere—even in stories meant to be for people like me. And even in my own stories! We learn to write to that gaze, to make our characters and events “relatable” (to whom?) even when our settings are “exotic”(to whom?).

I’m still working to unlearn that. If I were writing this story today, I would at least call the first nested setting a “women’s quarters” instead of a “harem.” And I’d leave off italicizing words that were perfectly normal to the person using them.

How does your queer identity and experience inform your storytelling?

I’m bisexual and genderfluid/agender, and ID as queer. But I actually didn’t at the time I wrote this story. I’d been pushed into worrying that I “wasn’t bi enough to count,” and I didn’t know that being nonbinary was even a thing. I thought I just sucked at being a woman. Now that I’m less confused, my identity is more overtly present in my stories.

I recently finished a story with a genderfluid protagonist; it’s currently in the dread land of Submissions. But even before I figured stuff out, I was still being affected by heteronormative and cisnormative microaggressions, still feeling like I didn’t belong, wasn’t safe, needed to work to fit in (pass). I’m pretty sure that sense of alienation has always influenced my writing, overtly queer or not, just as my cultural otherness is in everything, even when I write white characters.

And Madeleine is totally inspired by women I’ve had crushes on.

What was the hardest thing about writing this story?

Making it understandable! Four levels of nesting in a novelette, in an unfamiliar setting, is asking a lot of my readers. To make it worse, I started out entirely unwilling to add dates, because Christian-centric dates would undermine Jahanara’s perspective. But of course, with nothing to anchor readers in which story was happening when, I ended up with a confusing mess.

The wonderful Delia Sherman got me to realize that I could add dates in in two formats, with the Hijri calendar (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_calendar) first to prioritize Jahanara’s point of view, then the Gregorian calendar to give the western reader a bit of help. Delia always gets my stories to work better.

What surprised you in the writing of this story?

Several of the characters. Himangi especially! Her plot relevance is just the reveal that Jahanara loves women, but once we got to her part of the story she just . . . cheerfully took over my brain.

Was there anything you wanted to say in this story that didn’t fit?

If there was, I don’t remember. I wrote this five years ago, and it’s one of six I’ve written in this setting so far, and I have three more thought out and air dreams of a fourth. So what doesn’t go in one story becomes the seed for another.

I’m also never really sure what my stories are saying exactly (and to whom). The characters all have strong opinions, but who do we believe?

What advice do you have for other queer folks wanting to write in genre?

You are enough. Your perspective matters. Your writing matters.

Not every crit/support group will work for you, and that’s not your fault; it happens to every marginalized person, and the more axes you’re marginalized on the more it will happen. The best crit groups or partners believe in us, encourage us, and refuse to accept less than our best.

Nobody’s opinion is objective. If advice seems dead wrong, even from an Important Writer or Editor, it probably is wrong for you. It may be useful, though, to think about why it seems right from their perspective. You will encounter people who ask you why your characters “need” to be [marginalization]. Run away. If they need an explanation for why we need to exist, they’re just going to drain the energy you could be putting into your writing. Which matters.

Is there anything you wish I had asked you but I didn’t?

Something about Jahanara! I have so much to say about her. So I’m going to just tell you some things.

• The historical Jahanara really did nearly die in a fire; the perfumes in her hair were set alight. In my world she actually dies (sorry, princess) and her father in his grief commissions a mechanical replacement.
• The historical Jahanara was a poet, and I deemed that my mechanical one is too. She’d write in Urdu, but I’ve written “the English translation” of a poem of hers (available here: bit.ly/narayan-poem). Amal El-Mohtar’s father translated it into Arabic for me (!) and I wrote it into this alternate-Mughal-style drawing of her: bit.ly/alternate-Mughal-style.
• My Jahanara’s not a reliable narrator. I’m not sure I even believe in reliable narrators. If they’re talking, they want to convince you of something.

I knew even when I was writing the story that she was taking every opportunity to undermine the ambassador’s assumptions/certainty, because she was trying to challenge his homophobia, and that some of what she said wasn’t strictly accurate. I realized much later that her phrasing is rather cisnormative at times, which doesn’t fit my sense of the character. Mechanicals experience gender differently from humans, and Jahanara’s not cis. However, I decided to leave that as it was in this story, because it is how she’d speak to cis humans unless she had a compelling reason not to.

I have a novel outlined about her; it’s not entirely consistent with this story, and I’m putting all differences down to her exercising poetic license.

Red Fort, Akbarabad; 1219 H / 1804 AD

Hidden by the feathers of the Peacock Throne, Jahanara watched the Frenchmen’s heads appear at the top of the steps.

Diwan-i-Khas, the hall of so-called private audience, would loom before them now. Morning light caught on its outer pillars and scalloped arches, setting the whole aglow: marble embers sparking with pearl and silver inlay in creeper patterns wound around gearwork. Light slanted through the hall, danced on silk and dust and metal, and threw the delegates’ shadows in before them unannounced.

No shadow touched the throne itself. Hidden lenses and mirrors turned the sun its way from first prayer to last. Light ran liquid on gold, caught on turquoise, fractured into crushed emerald. The Frenchmen would see etched tailfeathers, fanning out from the corners of the canopy in a latticework screen. They would not see the Padishah Begum watching them from behind it.

Strutting in those European jackets, absurdly long behind and cut away from ruffled linen in front, the men looked rather like a pride of peacocks themselves. A singularly dull one. Republicans favored dark blue and white, claiming that the restraint suggested Classical rationality. Jahanara’s heartspring coiled in amusement; if they could but see their stark, precious Greek marbles painted in the garish colors of old.

The Frenchmen slowed at the outer pillars, glancing nervously up. Good. Jahanara’s father had likened the arches to clouds, once, rising into God’s glorious realm—but visitors mostly felt the weight of marble over their heads. And perhaps no weight would quell European arrogance, but splendor sent their minds into predictable paths. Let them think her a simple Eastern noblewoman hungry for trinkets and admiration. Let them think they could map out the movement of her gears. For now.

One man swept into the hall alone, leaving the rest to gape. The ambassador, surely; a red turban singled him out against his group’s blue and white, and he carried the chimerical style as though he owned it. Silent on stockinged feet, he came three steps into the hall and waited with eyes on the throne.

Well, and it did not do to let firangi feel too welcome; they mistook hospitality for weakness. Jahanara let the whole delegation enter, then let them wait another three hundred ticks of her timing wheel before she flipped the screen lever. Peacock-body counterweights swung into place; peacock tails whirred neatly shut, draped gracefully down each pillar. Her courtiers swept down into the kornish salutation as she came into view.

The Frenchmen merely bowed in their own manner, hands limp at their sides. The court’s breath caught in dismay.

So. They or their Napoleon wished to say they were above Mughal traditions. Or perhaps they misunderstood the gesture; Europeans called it a salaam, and they were not a race known for peace.

And perhaps God had chosen today to be particularly miraculous. Jahanara gestured twice: once for the French to be announced, once for a lamp.

Red Fort, Akbarabad; 1055 H / 1645 AD

“You are lovely as you ever were in flesh, my dearest.”

New-enameled eyelids flickered. A familiar voice, though never heard before. “Father?”

“And fire never shall hurt you again.”

Red Fort, Akbarabad; 1219 H / 1804 AD

The lamp’s worked gold clinked against Jahanara’s right knee, apparently clumsy, and a drop of sesame oil spilled over. Abida’s familiar green shawl flicked out to drink the droplet away. Its gold-thread embroidery flashed once, twice. A message. Shall I take offense?

Jahanara held her hand out, palm down to tell her human ally Wait. Anger would not bring her the opening she needed.

Though neither would weakness. Jahanara let her hand drift over the flame, cut its light into rays with her spread fingers, and listened blank-faced to the herald’s stream of names while fire caressed the polished silver of her palm. Then she smiled.

Her face, like her voice, was expressive by mechanical standards; she had three quite different smiles. This was the small one, the ones humans with their quicksilver expressions and assumptions found inscrutable. “It occurs,” she said in Greek—the compromise had taken months of letters, for of course the ambassador would never admit to knowing Urdu—“that customs vary from land to land. We understand that in yours, one shakes the right hand of another. We should not like to show discourtesy.” Smile unchanging, she held out her hand to him, its sensor strips buzzing with heat.

“I am given to understand that one does not simply approach the Padishah Begum, Light of the Empire, herself.” His tone was smooth, but his eyes showed white.

Jahanara’s hand stayed out, pinging softly as the metal cooled. “And of course,” she said, “you would never wish to offend. But your understanding of the matter is a dozen dozen years old; in this new age of reason, we keep the golden boundary only in the public hall.”

The ambassador bowed again, on the slow side of stately, before approaching. Jahanara kept the smile, raised both enameled eyebrows, and waited to see what he came up with.

Tipu Sultan’s harem, Mysore; 1202 H / 1788 AD

The women of Sultan Fateh Ali Tipu’s harem were no strangers to marvels and entertainments. In the days of his glory, they had kaleidoscopes and trained monkeys and pyrotechnic displays, mechanical musicians whose shadows told stories and minutely painted ivory fans that sang as they were waved about. Only their French visitors were amazed the day a clockwork bird landed in the harem’s main garden with a shiver of beaten silver wings.

That the bird was of royal quality was never in doubt; those to whom her perfection of form and articulation meant nothing would yet see the band of purest gold around her neck, and hands complex and flexibile as any human’s instead of simple claws. And who but the Padishah of Mysore would send wonders and oddities to his harem?

So Tipu’s eldest daughter merely waved her singing fan and asked the bird, “And what is it that you do?”

Red Fort, Akbarabad; 1219 H / 1804 AD

The ambassador touched the very tips of Jahanara’s fingers with his and smiled. He said, “The salutation you speak of, most glorious Majesty, is for men. In my land, a gentleman greets a lady so.” He bowed over her hand and kissed the air.

Clever. And irritating. This land is yours, said the bow, while the kiss whispered, but remember, the world belongs to men. It was surely a boon, now, that her face showed no anger. She murmured, “How quaint are the differences between lands; what is courtesy to you might count as a grievous sin here—” She let the pause hang till he had paled nearly to the color of his linen. An entertaining contrast to his men, who were reddening as the day’s wet heat settled in. “—were we younger, or the circumstances more formal. But come! We must not while away our time in idle comparisons. You journeyed here for a reason, and it was surely not enjoyment of Akbarabad’s afternoons.” The court’s mixing perfumes did more to thicken the air than to mask the stench of smokestacks and river. The Frenchmen would regret those cravats soon.

The ambassador took three steps backward, placed his hand over his heart. The tips of his gloves were scorched. He said, “The splendor of the Mughals might be reason enough, surely; we have long wished for an opportunity to behold your fort and your own shining self.”

“And would our gates have been barred to France’s courtiers, when our throne itself bears French-cut gems? Your artisans have been welcome here for centuries.” And one had been more than welcome for years.

“Yet your favor seemed to shine upon the English alone.”

“But how odd a seeming,” Jahanara said, irritated, “when we have treaties—some older even than myself—with the Shahs of Persia, the daughter states of the Ottoman Empire, the Afghanis, the Sikhs, our various Hindu neighbours and vassals, and several of the southern kingdoms. God’s creation holds more than the squabbles of two little nations in the west.” She caught herself, exchanged a glance with Abida. That had been unwise. Best not give them time or breath to count themselves insulted. She laughed, a ripple of tiny silver bells. “Come, we both know that the world extends beyond Mughal lands as well—and you are here because Tipu Sultan is dead.”

The ambassador’s mouth shut with a click. He glanced around; his delegation’s fixed smiles suggested that they all spoke Greek and not a one had a thought worth hearing. He cleared his throat, said, “We deeply . . . regret Tipu Sultan’s death, Luminence. I know he was no friend to the Mughal empire, but our First Consul held him dear.”

“We were aware of ‘Citizen’ Tipu’s friendship with your Napoleon, and of his own Jacobin notions.”

“Our Republican notions,” he replied with careful emphasis, “do not stop us from wanting friendship with your great land and its eternal Empress.”

“—Now that you have lost your trading posts in Mysore and the rest of the south.”

“Losses make new friendships matter all the more.”

“Then was it a measure of your friendship,” she said, “that Tipu fought your foes, and was cut down on his battlements, with none of you at his back?” She had him sweating. Good. She leaned back. “This European manner of friendship does not interest us.”

Tipu Sultan’s harem, Mysore; 1202 H / 1788 AD

The bird preened, revealing neck segments of shining copper etched with geometric forms. In a voice like a bamboo flute, in the stately Urdu of heralds and court poets, she said, “I tell stories, Shahzadi.”

The princess replied, “Is that all?”

For a moment the bird was silenced. Then she rattled her feathers irritably and hopped up next to the girl on her marble bench, perching with oddly ladylike bronze fingers. “I tell stories, Shahzadi,” she said softly, shifting effortlessly into French, “like none that you have ever been allowed to hear.”

Red Fort, Akbarabad; 1219 H / 1804 AD

Hands spread wide, the French ambassador said, “Our resources have their limits. The Terror back home, and the great General’s trouble in Egypt, left us painfully short. And there were . . . tensions.”

“Tensions.” There: her opening. The flick of tail, catch of spring, before the pounce. Jahanara tilted her head with a soft ratcheting click. “Involving the young Frenchwoman who vanished?”

“You know of her?” His arms, jaw, courtier’s mask all dropped in shock.

So he’d heard about the lady Claudine. And cared, perhaps. Jahanara gave him the small smile again and said, “The tale made its way to our court.”

The ambassador said, “It reached me only because she was an aunt. My father—” He stared down at his hands as though they might hold his fallen mask; a struggle. “We know little, even so. Not even how we gained Tipu Sahib’s anger, when it was his harem the lady disappeared from. If—”

But Jahanara, quarry caught, was looking over the other blue-blooded French peacocks. “One might suspect,” she said, “that France has grown careful indeed of her ladies, to send none to an Empress’s court.”

“That . . . choice was not mine,” said the ambassador, “and so I cannot speak for it. But women can be volatile creatures.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“Women of flesh, I mean. They are not—”

“—truly citizens in your vaunted republic?” She waved her hand gently through the lamp flame. “Trusted with the delicate diplomacy you men perform so well?”

The ambassador bowed deep, and his smile was wry. “Any kind of match for you,” he said.

If only he knew.

Red Fort, Akbarabad; 1076 H / 1665 AD

“Two things alone bring me comfort in my twilight years,” Father said.

A year ago, when he was less fragile, Jahanara might have teased, “Wine and dancing girls?” Now she merely waited.

He was silent for some time, looking at the diamond in his hand. Into the diamond, at the little image of the Taj Mahal caught in its facets. Then he said, “Two things. The memory of your mother—and you, my dear, the best of all our children.”

Mumtaz was little more than a name and a tomb to Jahanara; she had been buried in the Taj Mahal far longer than Jahanara had lived in this emerald-and-silver form. Her mother, who had made her, was no human. But she only shook her father’s shoulders gently. “Come, now,” she chided, “you are unjust to my brother Dara. It’s not his fault he is dead, after all.”

“And would Aurangzeb have defeated you so easily?”

“He hasn’t defeated me yet.” She laughed softly. “But this is maudlin, father; I blame that cursed diamond. Set it down. I’ll carry you to the window and you can see the Taj yourself.”

“You may carry me when I’m dead, child. Under the river, to lie beside your mother under the marble dome. But what then? You have spent too many years imprisoned with a dying man.”

“I’ll have years enough.” Years upon years upon years. Mid-thought, Jahanara’s heartspring twisted, her gears caught with pain. “But not to spend alone,” she said. Pleading. “Grant me this: take back great Akbar’s command to the princesses. Let me marry.”

“Could I deny you anything?” He smiled. “Only promise me this: Don’t marry unless you love him.”

Too soft for his failing human ears to catch, Jahanara whispered, “Her.”

Red Fort, Akbarabad; 1219 H / 1804 AD

Jahanara hid satisfaction behind half-lidded eyes and said, “One might think you a follower of the Buddha, ambassador, and free of desires beyond this so-vague friendship. There are now three requests you have not made: You do not ask why the English lost our favor; you do not ask for your missing aunt’s tale; and you are silent on the matter of trade agreements.”

His face spoke acknowledgement, understanding; said he saw her concession and agreed it matched his own. All that, with muscles smaller than the finest gear. She said, “But though you do not ask, we grant you the first answer and the wisdom it may bring: the English lost our favor by cheating our subjects.”

He said blandly, “Such compassion in so great a queen is a marvel in itself.”

“Ah, but the guillotine encourages compassion; it would be a foolish ruler who failed to take your country’s lesson to heart.”

“And the wisdom of the Eternal Empress of Akbarabad is as fabled as her kindness.” The tone was practiced. “It would be a kindness to my father’s memory, Radiance, to resolve the mystery of his sister’s fate; but I cannot let personal matters distract. We are here, as you said, for a purpose.” He paused while courtiers around him straightened and smiled, then said, “Which is that we would be honored beyond imagining if you would accept the humble gifts of France. Festoons of steam-cut diamond and emerald; lustrous dioptase, a new-found gem, set into worked platinum; some sculptures the First Consul judges to be Pajou’s best—”

Jahanara waved it aside. “Yes, and with them a representative of your trading company?”

“We would not insult you so.” He managed to sound hurt. “We brought these items over the seas not as trade, but for the joy of presenting them, though they be stars that fade before your sun.”

And there was the flattery, matched to its trinkets; rehearsed, expected. He seemed to look two moves ahead. Perhaps Jahanara could set up her own exchange in three. “You may have that joy,” she said, “when we discuss matters of trade. We shall include in that discussion not only nobles, but also those whose profession is trade. In keeping with your own Republican ideals.”

His bow acknowledged a hit.

“As to the matter of your aunt,” she continued, “Tales may be told. But they are woven from souls and stars, and carry a price beyond coin of this world.” She leaned forward, watched his breath catch. “For the merely personal gift of our thought and breath, you may offer us an idea.”

“ . . . Any idea in particular, Majesty?”

“A small one, for so small a tale. A weaver’s loom.”

“Your pardon; I must be very stupid today—”

“In the new automated design of your Maître Charles dit Jaquard of Lyon,” Jahanara continued. No reaction. Was he enough of a nobleman not to understand? “His punch cards, and the programmable weaves and patterns they allow, intrigue us. Bring an artisan, too, who understands the use and making of the machine; we would have speech with them.”

He smiled; impressive control, or else no notion how small a group she had described.

But was it a small enough group? Jahanara said, coolly as though her wires did not hum with tension, “And consider this, excellency: mechanicals find the claims of flesh men about their women to be laughable at best. At worst, such imbalance is uncivilized. So your course will be more easily steered—later—if your delegation does not continue entirely male.”

Tipu Sultan’s harem, Mysore; 1202 H / 1788 AD

Shahzadi Abida knew why the bird had shifted to French: it was a language Tipu’s children spoke, but his wives did not. With a look she summoned the other girls, and they clustered together around this newest marvel while their elders laughed about girls’ games.

“Tell us a tale that is impossible, yet true,” the Shahzadi said, for she had the impossible much in mind at that time.

One of the French guests, a girl the Shahzadi’s age, glanced at her with eyes dark with secrets.

The bird said, “Have you heard how the Maratha king Shivaji escaped from Aurangzeb? For that was surely impossible, and yet he managed.”

“Everybody knows that one,” said Tipu’s second daughter. “Everyone’s known it for a hundred years. He hid in a basket of temple offerings, and his son hid in another. We want a new story.”

“And you shall have one,” the bird replied. “For though his escape is legend, very few people know that Shivaji was helped by a mechanical.”

Moonlight Garden, Akbarabad; 1219 H / 1805 AD

A dozen French ladies came on the next boat, arriving a few months later with the news that their Napoleon had crowned himself Emperor around the beginning of Ramadan. It did not take them long to exhaust Jahanara’s patience. In Greek they simpered at her, asked to touch her hair, and told her how their funereal white would bring out her beauty. In French they complained: first of the heat, then of the rain, and throughout of mosquitos and heathen. So she flouted convention to receive the ambassador and his newest guest alone.

Wind frothed the great river, but at the bottom of the stepped Moonlight garden it merely ran damp fingers through shawls and sashes. Jahanara stalked around the octagonal pool, beheading chrysanthemum, frangipani, indigo. Here water lay still enough to hold the world unwavering; an upside-down Taj Mahal pointing to an underworld of slate-gray clouds. Peeking through them, the new-risen moon gleamed orange as a red coral fish.

The clouds were so heavy. The river so dull. She scattered flowers over the pool with a flick of the wrist, spun away from the ripples, and bit back a sharp comment when Abida smiled at her.

“I’m glad to be free of them too,” Abida said in Urdu. “If even one were like Claudine . . .”

Jahanara shrugged. “Who can understand God’s ways?”

“Or yours. Meeting a French commoner, here?”

Jahanara shook her head. Abida understood more than anyone, surely; but not that the court ladies didn’t matter, and not that this meeting might. She was slipping contentedly into middle age, and Jahanara never changed.

Her other companion gave her mood no notice. She perched half-shadowed among magnolia blossoms, a bird with hands like a human lady’s, motionless as only clockwork can be.

Abida looked up towards the garden’s entrance, her face easing into formal lines, and Jahanara stopped as though unwound. She must get the musical streams checked for shifting stones; their sound grated like saws against her suspension wire.

Abida rose from her bench.

Jahanara had said too much, or not enough, or else rumors had reached the ambassador’s ears—

“They come, Padishah Begum.” A brisk note, one few people would dare, pulled Jahanara’s head up.

The ambassador had abandoned his starched linen in the monsoon’s first week; he wore the Mughal style quite creditably now, though still in France’s colors.

He escorted a woman.

Crickets and the garden’s song of leaf and water settled into Jahanara’s silence. The weaver—she could be the one Jahanara had been hoping for. She was neither young nor pretty as humans counted these things; her hair showed silver, her jaw was long, and her body more square than rounded. She clutched a blue pashmina shawl tightly over the neck of a diaphanous gown, and her shoes exemplified why European ladies must lean on the arms of their men. But the strength in her watchful eyes set Jahanara’s wires buzzing.

The ambassador murmured to her in French; she curtseyed deeply while he bowed, then stood with eyes downcast—watching their every move in the pool’s reflection. Were she mechanical, her heartspring would be wound tight and strong, indeed.

And surely only one woman understood Jaquard’s loom well enough to be here. Jahanara swept forward, stepping as lightly as she could. Bad enough that her skin borrowed the clouds’ leaden tones; she would not add to the effect by moving like a pewter doll.

The ambassador said in Greek, “Most exquisite Radiance, the sight of this garden is a gift to raise the spirits. I bring you the weaver Vaucanson, who you desired speech with; I regret that she knows no Greek—”

Jahanara stopped him with the big smile, showing cut-pearl teeth while her gears stuttered at the name. “Our thanks, excellency,” she replied in French.

To his credit, he did no more than swallow hard and stare while she turned to her newest guest. “But I think,” she continued, voice as cool as ever, “that you are more properly Maîtresse Vaucanson, the master weaver and inventor.”

The woman’s eyes widened. She said, “Not according to the guild, Majesty.”

“Your guild is not here,” said Jahanara. “And I believe some of your work is.” A sliver of copper sun appeared below the clouds, throwing long purple shadows and setting the world alight. For a moment the Taj outshone the moon, and Jahanara nearly laughed with the joy of it; she gestured wide and said, “No matter. The Moonlight garden is at its best, and we shall have no more ceremony tonight. Come sit by the pool; I have promised his excellency the tale of a tale told in Tipu Sultan’s harem.”

Tipu Sultan’s harem, Mysore; 1202 H / 1788 AD

The bird cocked an eye at her gathered audience and said, “Many years ago, in the time of your grandparents’ grandparents, three travelers trudged up the path to Naneghat, a cold and stony mountain pass near Jivdhan fort . . .”

Naneghat Pass, The Deccan; 1077 H / 1666 AD

A falcon might have seen the three, for the evening was clear as a sapphire lens, but the pass was too remote for human watchers.

A man of flesh led the way, and behind him came a boy; they both had brahmins’ plain robes and single pigtails. The third, who walked behind, carried several bags, and wore the tunic and shalwar of the Mughal lands and the winding key of a mechanical. This youth’s skin was supple and undented, but blackened with dirt and tarnish.

At times the boy tired, and at these times he rode upon the mechanical’s back. “Nara,” he said at one of these times, “do you not think it odd that a man’s clothes and hair may change how the world sees him?”

“Would a real brahmin ask that question, little prince?” said Nara in amusement. For the boy and man were in fact Sambhaji and his father, Shivaji, and you know how they escaped. “Mechanicals may change more yet; we replace our parts, save only our heartsprings, many times over the centuries. So one with the seeming of a man in one age may look like a mongoose or a tiger in another if he so chooses. But indeed, clothes are generally enough to fool humans. You pay so much attention to the outer surface.”

Moonlight Garden, Akbarabad; 1219 H / 1805 AD

“Is Nara then a man’s name?”

Jahanara’s gears caught at the weaver’s tone. She stretched out a hand, though she knew it would not be seen. Only the sky held light now, and the gaslamps across the river, and a thin mist drowned all reflection. She said, “It is not a Mughal name, nor yet a name of the Marathas, so who was the bird to say otherwise?”

“But surely you know, Majesty? There’s a Nara in your court. I’ve corresponded with her—or him—for some years now.”

“We beg your pardon, illustrious one,” said the ambassador. “It is the enchantment of your telling that robs us of decorum.”

“But it was I,” Jahanara said, “who laid ceremony aside. Maîtresse Vaucanson, you will have your answer. But not just now; I fear the time for sunset prayer is upon us.”

Red Fort, Akbarabad; 1219 H / 1805 AD

Jahanara sent two messages to the Firangi Quarter that night. One invited the ambassador to attend upon her once the next day’s heat lifted; the other offered Maîtresse Vaucanson a chance to inspect the fort’s silk work at her convenience.

“One might offer a wager,” said the clockwork bird from the filigree shadow of a window, “that her convenience shall be prompt.”

Jahanara said, “You know I don’t gamble, mother.”

“No?” A rattle of wings. “Then whatever are you doing right now?”

Red Fort, Akbarabad; 1219 H / 1805 AD

The weaver’s convenience brought her to the Clockwork Tower around noon; Jahanara surprised her in the entryway. She swept into a curtsey, and her guide into a kornish, and it was hard to tell which of them Jahanara had flustered more.

“I am glad to find you here, Maîtresse,” she said, more gently than she might in the ambassador’s hearing. “I wonder, what is your opinion of the silk that is this tower’s pride?”

The master weaver straightened, holding herself taller than she had the previous day. Her artisan’s sturdy skirt and canvas apron, and her comfort in them, suited her as the pretense of being some mere decorative lady had not. “I have yet to see it, Imperial majesty,” she said. “The marvels in these alcoves . . .” She blushed, though she met Jahanara’s gaze. “I confess I was distracted.”

Jahanara turned to the climbing monkey, the ever-unfolding lotus, the snake and mongoose, though she barely saw them. “This latest batch pleases, does it not?” She glanced sideways at her guest. “I find myself charmed.” She gestured dismissal to the guide, who edged wide-eyed to the door and fled.

Maîtresse Vaucanson turned to Jahanara, puzzled worry clear on her brow. “Majesty,” she said, “I’m lost here without my guide. I don’t wish to impose upon you—”

“And you don’t,” Jahanara said. “I had this tower made, and I wish to show it to you.”

“Ah.” The frown eased into a blank look, polite and wary. She said, “I . . . am honored.”

“By so little of my time—when young ones, like your guide, have learned your language for the chance of speech with you?”

Startlement, bewilderment, sharp interest; face and fingers spoke as clear and quick as her voice. She discarded one question, asked the other. “The girl’s a weaver?”

“An artificer; the use of the new loom likely matters less to her than its working.” Jahanara paused. Her smooth voice and features might be a strength before the court; here they were failing her. She turned away. “You see that the staircase rests on rails at this level; It moves with the upper storeys, whose windows follow the sun in the colder months and hide from it in the summers. You will not believe it now, but we do have colder months.”

Maîtresse Vaucanson murmured awe at the staircase, the window filigree, the gem-inlaid marble of the walls; but her thoughts clearly lay elsewhere. Eventually she said, “Do you follow what all your young artisans do?”

Ah. “Hardly. But I try to be aware of promising ones; masters of craft are the jewels of my court.” Jahanara settled in a window niche and patted the cushion beside her. “You worry. Sit with me and I’ll explain. I promise to breathe no fire.”

“You’ve been nothing but kindness.” But she did not sit.

Jahanara attempted the big smile, barely managed the small one. “But you wonder,” she said. “Perhaps I am fearsome? Your guide did run.”

The other woman’s chin came up. She perched on the edge of the cushion as though unwilling to disturb its weave, and she kept her eyes on a window, but she did sit.

“It’s the taint she probably fears. I rule without a husband, after all. I sit barefaced in council with men.”

“Would she have her life if you didn’t?”

“But others may have their lives, too. A depraved lack of standards in an Empress.” And there were the other rumors, of course, though she had been celibate so long. Jahanara laughed softly. “At least my brother Aurangzeb had a strong moral sense.”

Maîtresse Vaucanson drew breath, hesitated a moment. “The jewels of your court must be precious, indeed,” she said carefully, “if you allow them impertinence.”

“Precious. Indeed.” Jahanara laid a hand against the window, catching geometric patterns, henna-like, across the palm. “For more than simple love of beauty, though I’ve that etched into my heartspring. Winged sentry, cannon, art—this fort entire is a show of strength.”

“It’s all about power, then?”

“In this age of empire, yes. But it’s an age too of diplomacy and innovation, and power wears many faces.” Though none that would let her speak the tension ticking her gears ever-faster. “My master artisans are my generals, Maîtresse. The lens grinder, the rocket engineer, the artificer whose creations warn of soul-hunting fog or poison in the water; these people win wars. And the makers of new weaves and dancing dolls, they—you—win the growing wars of trade.” Better trade wars than killing boys on swords and girls on pyres. Madeleine Vaucanson would agree, surely; she had written passionately on the topic. Jahanara said, “There’s no other safety to be had. The English tried to bleed us, and now Bonaparte wants me fighting them, wants us weakening each other.”

“And I am French.”

“But your ambassador warns me that women of flesh can be volatile creatures.”

Maîtresse Vaucanson winced. “Ah.” She sat silent for a long moment, dappled with filigree shadow, eyes darting in thought. Then she sighed, said, “Men say these things. I’ll not turn coat.”

“Nor would I ask you to; only to consider staying. I believe you could improve on Jaquard’s design. Would you not like the chance to? I ask . . .” Jahanara paused, springs in conflict. “Because my people are in need. We must be masters of the fabric trade, or the English will make us its slaves. But I don’t ask you to hide your inventions from France.” She stood, gestured upward. “Allow me to show you my tower’s greatest marvel while you consider.”

A woven marvel this, large as the wall, in silk of green and bronze and shimmering gold. With color and weave it created the orchestrated gearwork of an orrery, every piece so real that the eye expected movement.

Its winding key bore an engraved name in a spidery script: M. Vaucanson.

Jahanara stroked a satin-weave gear. “And this,” she said softly, “this beauty, which sets my heartspring to trembling, is the other reason I ask you to stay.”

Red Fort, Akbarabad; 1219 H / 1805 AD

The clockwork tower paused in its rotation whenever a top-floor door aligned with the Weaver’s Garden, a small walled space with neither symmetry nor color to draw visitors. Its muted green, bronze, and fenugreek gold formed the image of an orrery’s gears, and nine gemstone planets bobbed like flowers on slender copper stalks.

It replicated the tapestry on the tower wall.

“They orbit,” Jahanara said as she showed her speechless guest around the garden. “We hid the mechanisms under the flower beds, so you must trust that it follows your design as they do.”

Maîtresse Vaucanson visibly gathered her wits. “Nara told me he . . .” Hesitation, decision. “No, I don’t believe that. She said she knew who might like my work, Majesty, but never said it was yourself she had in mind, nor that . . .” She trailed off again, gazing around.

“It seems there is much your friend hasn’t told you,” said Jahanara ruefully. Too much unsaid, too many chasms to cross. “Though in truth, not many know how this garden gained its name. One would have to see both your work and the garden itself, and the tower’s lower levels can distract the attention. Besides, being part of the Crystal Palace, the tower is prohibited to men, and while the garden is on the main level, it receives less attention than . . .” She was filling the silence. How embarrassing. “It offers privacy in the heart of the fort, anyway, with no hint of secrecy to draw attention. Ah, your ambassador arrives to hear the end of a tale he thinks told for him.” She laughed a little, glanced at Maîtresse Vaucason. “In total ignorance of the fact that the garden he meets us in is named for you.”

Naneghat Pass, The Deccan; 1077 H / 1666 AD

The disguised prince Sambhaji said, “Do mechanicals never care, then, how you look?”

“There was a town in Kabul province,” Nara replied, “in the time of Shah Jahan, who died last year—though his time ended before you were born, when he was deposed and imprisoned by his son.”

“Aurangzeb the wicked?”

“Say rather Aurangzeb the clever. You may have outwitted the white serpent to escape, but never forget that he outwitted your father first.”

The boy fell silent. Nara continued, “The mechanicals who lived in that town cared greatly . . .”

Of Devanagar; 1045-9 H / 1636-9 AD

They cared so much that they fashioned themselves, their homes, even their tools, from the most precious metals and stones. No gear or spring within these people, nor even the knives and hammers that fashioned them, might be touched by one who had touched so low a metal as mere bronze. Their streets were cobbled gold, their windows jade filigree, and their roofs tiled with turquoise and cinnamon stone.

They named their town Devanagar, city of the shining gods; and though they forbade any lesser being entry, the brilliance of their gleaming domes and spires birthed rumors. And Devanagar came thus to the ears of Shah Jahan.

There was nothing the Shah-en-shah loved more than beauty, so he sent his eldest son, gentle Dara Shikoh, to bring back a mechanical from the fabled city. Prince Dara returned a year and a day later, dejected. “I found Devanagar,” he told his father. “But I did not set foot on its cobbles. They told me I might wear as many silks and necklaces as I wished, but I was yet made of rotting flesh.”

Saddened, Shah Jahan sent his second son, Shah Shuja, in his brother’s stead. But Shuja too returned in failure. “I saw no more of the town of gold and gemstones than its highest golden spire,” he told his father. “A message dropped on my tent that night. It said that it did not matter how much perfume I wore, I smelled of dung and rancid oil to the people of Devanagar.”

Shah Jahan passed over Aurangzeb, who he did not trust, and sent his youngest son, Murad Baksh, to Devanagar. But the insult to his elder sons had angered him, and he instructed Murad to claim tithes from the arrogant mechanicals. And Murad Baksh returned with worked silver and coins cut from purest rubies and gold as strong as steel. “But they said to me, father,” he said, “that I should not come again; that they will send these tithes only if we leave them be. They said my prayers were an offense to their ears, for I called out to God himself, who is greater than they are.”

“Never mind, my son,” said Shah Jahan, who couldn’t stay angry with makers of beauty. “They are not of the faithful.”

Aurangzeb left that day, with neither order nor permission. He returned with molten lumps of gold embedded with precious gears and ratchets, with broken jade filigree and severed diamond eyes and fingernails. He threw these down at his father’s feet, and said only, “They were Infidel.”

Naneghat Pass, The Deccan; 1077 H / 1666 AD

“So I put to you, young prince,” Nara said, “that mechanicals cannot care too much about appearance if they wish to survive human greed and dogma.”

“But Aurangzeb’s wickedness wasn’t their fault.”

“Life seldom offers a moral. It may hold lessons, nonetheless.”

Chhatrapati Shivaji had been silent for some time on the steep pass; now he paused for breath and said, “Nara is saying that the wicked exist, and cannot be ignored.”

“More than that,” Nara said. “Granted, they couldn’t help Aurangzeb’s zeal or his ambition. But they didn’t have to insult his brothers. Or snub their neighbours. Or make themselves too precious to be soldiers.”

“His ambition?”

Nara smiled grimly. “You don’t think he gave his father all of the riches he looted, do you? Or even half, to be spent on thrones and tombs when he had an army to equip?”

Red Fort, Akbarabad; 1219 H / 1805 AD

“Nara’s political acumen makes one wonder,” said the ambassador, “what lies behind his surface.”

“Or even on it,” Maîtresse Vaucason added. “You said that Nara tarnished black?”

Jahanara smiled and went on.

Ghatghar, The Deccan; 1077 H / 1666 AD

It was raining by the time the three made it over the pass, huge warm drops that turned the road to sticky mud and seeped clammy through cotton. Chhatrapati Shivaji could not know whether his men still held Jivdhan fort, so they kept their guises and stopped at the village of Ghatghar for the night.

The village headman offered hospitality with neither protest nor pleasure, and the Chhatrapati and his son soon joined his silent family on the floor to eat unspiced rice and lentils. Nara crouched over the tiny fire and rubbed ash over hands and arms and face.

The Prince could not help but fidget through this, the plainest meal of his life. Eventually he nudged a son of the house of around his age and whispered loudly, “What’s wrong here?”

“It’s my eldest sister,” the boy whispered back. “She went out to draw water yesterday and never came home. Probably rakshasas got her and roasted her for dinner.”

“That’s all you know,” said his elder brother. “There’s no such thing as rakshasas. Probably Shivaji’s men got her, and that’s worse.”

“Oh you’re so wise,” said the prince. “Shivaji’s men don’t hurt women. Besides, what’s worse than being roasted for dinner?”

The older boy could not answer this. He muttered, “Who knows what those soldiers get up to, though, with himself caged like a songbird up in Akbarabad.”

The prince laughed. “That’s all you know,” he said.

His father’s face grew stern, but it was too late; the children all clamored to know what he meant, and the headman and his wives were giving both apparent brahmins looks of deepening suspicion. So the king drew breath to explain.

Before he could speak, Nara said, “And a strong cage it was, but what does that matter when the key is left inside? Tales of Chhatrapati Shivaji’s courage and cleverness against great odds, and his honor towards defeated foes, has reached even distant Akbarabad. He has won allies against Aurangzeb within the Padishah’s own court.”

“Are you saying he escaped?” said the headman.

Shivaji sighed. “He is saying that, yes,” he replied, “And also that your king sits to eat with you tonight, and will find your daughter if she can be found.” For even if he did not owe a guest’s gratitude, Chhatrapati Shivaji kept his people’s loyalty the only way a king can. Nor did he miss Nara’s message: that the alliance with his mysterious friends in Akbarabad might depend upon his behaviour to his villagers.

Tipu Sultan’s harem, Mysore; 1202 H / 1788 AD

The Shahzadi sneered. “So there was honor among Marathas a hundred years ago. So what?”

Her French friend put an arm around her. “The story also tells us,” she murmured, “that the Marathas had allies in the Mughal court a hundred years ago and more.”

The Shahzadi said, “Men’s games, Claudine. They’re all the same. He rescues the girl, he marries her, or his son does—they always do—and nobody ever asks her what she wants.”

“And if that were so,” said the bird, “Why would the tale be forbidden? Though certainly the Chhatrapati and his mechanical friend found the girl . . .”

Jivdhan Fort, The Deccan; 1077 H / 1666 AD

She was a young woman, plump and pretty as village girls so often are, and the Shahzadi may have liked her, had they lived in the same century, for the would-be rescuers found her by following the trail of destruction.

Shivaji found the terracotta shards of the pot she had cracked an attacker’s head with, and Nara the wounded tree whose branch she had ripped off to beat them about the shoulders as they carried her away. They both found the churned mud where she had flung boiling lentils into her captors’ faces before escaping on one of their donkeys, and nobody could miss the trail of disconsolate bandits being marched up to Jivdhan Fort.

So in they snuck, the brahmin and the ash-skinned mechanical—to find a young woman terrorizing a full sqadron of soldiers with one of their own pneumatic crossbows.

“Well,” Nara said, “At least we’ve no trouble recognizing her.”

Shivaji murmured, “Why am I recruiting men, again?”

“Just brain her,” yelled a bandit with mud and lentils in his beard.

A crossbow bolt whizzed by his ear.

In the sudden silence, a soldier said, “She’s armed, you know. Besides, the Chhatrapati would have our ears, and other parts too, if we hurt a woman.”

A different bandit sneered, “Your Chhatrapati’s in Akbarabad!”

And Shivaji called in the voice they all knew, “Would you care to place a wager on that?”

Jivdhan Fort, The Deccan; 1077 H / 1666 AD

Nara left Shivaji to his men and escorted the village girl home—and returned with her the next day. They both wore the flower garlands of the newly married, and prince Sambhaji’s fingers were sticky with wedding sweets.

The girl thanked Shivaji for what she kindly termed a rescue; Nara said only, “Wish us well?”

“Of course,” said the Chhatrapati. But he looked puzzled.

Nara took him a little distance away. “You wonder what she saw in me, when she did not look twice at you?”

“Put that way, it lacks a certain humility, doesn’t it.”

“But you see,” Nara said, “you’re a man.”

Tipu Sultan’s harem, Mysore; 1202 H / 1788 AD

“Such things don’t happen,” the Shahzadi said. But there was no scorn left in her voice now, only misery.

Her sister made a face. “Thankfully!”

The lady Claudine said nothing at all.

Red Fort, Akbarabad; 1219 H / 1805 AD

The ambassador’s lips were a flat line of outrage. But he did not speak, and he did not rise to leave. Yet.

Maîtresse Vaucanson stared too, and listened with fingers covering her lips, but Jahanara thought—maybe—she saw hope in those wide eyes.

Jivdhan Fort, The Deccan; 1077 H / 1666 AD

“But this is heresy,” sputtered Shivaji.

“In what faith?” Nara said. “In the last ten years, when I had time and more for reading, I learned that no prophet wastes words on women. Yes, Himangi and I prefer women; we particularly prefer each other. And if appearances matter so much that I can stop your mind by having breasts, then Aurangzeb has won.”

“It’s not at all—”

“But it is.” Nara unwrapped her turban and used it to rub the last of the ash from her hands and face; tarnish and soot came away with it to reveal gleaming silver, lush enamel, emeralds. “You will never defeat my little brother, and nor shall I, unless we can work together.”

Red Fort, Akbarabad; 1219 H / 1805 AD

“If you are about to claim Sapphic tendencies in my aunt Claudine,” the ambassador said with brittle formality, “then I beg you to reconsider. Slander does not encourage alliance.” He rose, bowed slightly. “Maîtresse, it is time for us to withdraw.”

“I believe, excellency,” said Madeleine Vaucanson quietly, “that I have questions yet for the Padishah Begum.”

Red Fort, Akbarabad; 1219 H / 1805 AD

Abida was in the tower room when they returned, quietly embroidering a shawl. She glanced up and said in French, “I take it your revelations left him less than pleased.”

Jahanara inclined her head.

“Does he know we live here?”

“He didn’t stay to find out. You and Claudine have my sympathies for owning so unmannerly a nephew.” A smile stole over Jahanara’s face. Her hand found Madeleine’s, tugged her forward. “But allow me, Shahzadi, to introduce to you a very dear friend, whose correspondence I have treasured for some years.”

Red Fort, Akbarabad; 1219 H / 1805 AD

“I’ll be unwelcome at the embassy.”

“If that’s where you want to be, I’ll see that you are welcome,” Jahanara said. “Though . . . I hope you know that you could stay. Here. In any capacity you choose.”

Madeleine laughed softly and murmured, “Is this hesitation I hear? From the Padishah Begum, who commands all this?”

Jahanara echoed the laugh, gestured round at the chaos of the Zenana Mina Bazaar. “Only God commands this,” she said, “and even He must have trouble with it.” The clash of human perfumes and fragrant machine oils and sweat, of vivid silks on jade and copper mannequins and carpets against the red stone wall, of anklets and bangles and hawking cries and haggling, responded not at all to her august presence. And every voice, sweet or shrill or wine-rough, was female. “It was more decorous in my youth; a show for the Padishah and his harem. Now the merchants practically own it.”

“And this is how you like it.” Madeleine glanced sideways at Jahanara, thoughtful, her nose and chin sharp in profile.

“Full of life? Yes.”

Jahanara’s gears skipped and stuttered then as Madeleine’s fingers touched hers, feather-light. “I’ll stay. As weaver, as inventor, as your . . . friend. But aren’t you worried?”

“There will be rumors,” Jahanara said evenly. “But there are always rumors. The Mesdames will find reasons to withdraw. Small loss; I only tolerated them in the hope that you would follow.” Her hand’s sensors buzzed as though from heat. The glittering bazaar seemed distant. “The Europeans have decried oriental decadence before, and Persia and half the Ottoman states call me heretic. So long as they hate one another more than me, I doubt—”

A shriek made them jump together; a monkey ran by, dragging a jute sack trailing sugar. The girl who chased after, to much laughter, was not much bigger than the monkey and scarcely less ragged. Jahanara stopped her with a hand on her thin shoulder; offered a coin. Wide eyes, a quick salutation, a quicker snatch and escape.

“So . . .” Madeleine glanced at Jahanara, smiled. “Nothing to worry about?”

“Oh, I never said that.” Jahanara watched the girl dart away between a woman sewing seams with a pedal-driven machine and a copper naga whose tiny clockwork wares climbed into pots to scrub them. “But suspicions should fall only on me, and are nothing new.”

“Easy enough,” Madeleine said, “to fool men who think men alone have desires. But on the subject of men alone, I must confess I found your tale of Devanagar incomplete. So many sons’ stories. What did Shah Jahan’s mechanical daughter make of it?”

“A distant reflection.” Jahanara led Madeleine through a scalloped gate, out from the fort’s great walls. The world opened up: an expanse of river nearly white under unbounded sky; smells of smoke and sulphur and long-dead fish; stark shadows unblurred by filigree windows. Relative solitude. The Taj Mahal loomed huge and perfect, gleaming as though the sun shone only for Shah Jahan’s buried dreams. “My father . . .” She shook her head. “There’s nothing to tell. Oh, I’d been trading with Devanagar for years. I could show you sheets of sapphire with holes in the shape of gears, books on architecture and artifice and the nature of stars, letters that, in the hands of the learned, might make gold as strong as steel . . .”

“He didn’t appreciate them?”

“I never showed him. He wouldn’t have understood.” Jahanara pointed across the river, to the smokestacks that grayed out the hot blue sky and then to the colorful Firangi Quarter next to them. “Do you know, I hadn’t noticed how close together the British and French flags fly. I must grant the Englishmen an audience tomorrow and let your ambassador wonder.”

But Madeleine had pulled away. “Do you even want to be understood?”

A twist of the heartspring, sudden, painful. “What do you mean?”

“You say you wanted—but all this is yours. You could have sent for me, not just for some weaver, if . . .” The tip of her tongue touched her lip. “Did you want me here at all?”

“More than anything.” Jahanara’s tone was calm as ever. Her eyebrows came together, but with enamel stiffness. “By your own will, Madeleine, not my bidding.”

“I might not have come.”

Jahanara looked away, into the Taj’s shattered reflection. “Then I would have continued alone.”

“Alone.” A laugh like glass, breaking. “Surrounded by beautiful ladies, alone for want of—”

Jahanara stopped her with a finger to her lips. “You.” Her hand clenched, fell, aching to stroke those lips. “You, Madeleine, if not from the first letter then surely by the fifth. If my face were flesh, if it could show more of myself and less of others’ images, you would not doubt me.”

Silence, long and tense, and then Madeleine’s hand brushed against hers agains. She turned to look at river, smoke, sky. “Your face reflects all Akbarabad, Nara. Its colors in your skin make my fingers itch to weave your portrait.”

Relief; enormous, unbalancing. Jahanara murmured, “With red stone in one cheek and smokestacks in the other and a balloon from Fatehpur Sikri in my forehead like a Hindu tilak. But is that all they itch to do?”

And Madeleine’s laugh was soft and low and entirely delightful.

We conducted our conversation by email in August and September 2015.

Are there particular types of fantasy (broadly speaking) that appeal to you in a (broadly speaking) queer way? (An anecdote to perhaps clarify what I’m getting at: I’ve recently realized that what I think of as the queer parts of my imagination are most drawn to fantasy of the fin-de-siècle Decadents and aesthetics, to certain types of body horror, etc., and perhaps one of the reasons I’ve never been much interested in cod-medieval fantasy is that it just never seemed to me interesting as a queer space. Which is not to say it couldn’t be such to somebody else, of course.)

I immediately think here of the fantasy story that made the deepest imprint on me as a child: Michael de Larrabeiti’s The Borribles trilogy. It’s a sort of anarcho-socialist 1970s urban take on Peter Pan that abolishes Neverland and turns Barrie’s fancy of never growing up into a glorious defiance of establishment mores. The idea is that any snot-nosed latchkey kid can just choose to never grow up. They turn Borrible: their ears go pointy; they go off to live in squats in London, surviving by thieving and animal cunning. They’re pint-sized punks with a two-fingered salute for adult propriety, hunted by a special division of the Met, with an enemy based on the Wombles—a beloved British classic of cosy kid’s fic that was on TV when I read the first book.

The trilogy was so unashamedly anti-moral—which is to say, passionately ethical—that the third book was dropped by the publisher in the wake of the Brixton Riots, under Thatcher. The female and West Indian Borribles who’re part of the heroic team could be seen as tokenism these days—there is only one of each—but progress is made by stances that look compromised in retrospect. The point is, this was a formative influence for me, and it’s queer as fuck in a wider sense of the term—where any norm, sexual or otherwise, might be seen as defining itself by exclusion. To be a Borrible is to be sworn to a sodality of the abject. The books are underpinned by this idealism tapping into the part of every kid that’s queer as an excludee from adult power structures and proudly so. They may not have immunised those readers from the systems of thought that normativity, hetero or otherwise, does its damnedest to instill, but they had a profound impact on me, I’m sure.

They set what fantasy is for me—fuck all to do with secondary worlds that as often as not seem to be idealised sanctums of normativity, myths that outright valorise abjection. Fuck Neverland. Fuck Narnia. Fuck the Shire. This was a fantasy of our world, of the fantastic as a ferocious antagonist to the mundane infiltrating every interstice of it. And it was a fantasy holding no truck even with the moral filters of the transgressive. I mean, I never really clicked with that Decadent aesthetics, horror and whatnot. I can see why you’d connect with it as queer, but for me . . . it’s about punk versus goth, man. I had a flirtation with the monstrous in my teenage years where abjection drove me into murderous self-mythologising—put a gun in my hand, and I would have been a high school shooter—but in the base mindset I returned to, the queer will always be wild and wayward and wonderfully so.

So my ideal fantasy is not that of Wildean Decadents. No Dorian Gray for me; I have Rake Jake Scallion, “Fixed” in the Scruffian stories by the magical McGuffin of the Scruffian’s Stamp, which carves your identity on your chest, so you always spring back to that state. Like the Scruffians themselves—waifs likewise Fixed by the Stamp, to serve as indestructible slave labour (and worse) in the machinery of Victorian capitalism—he’s immune to damage or dissipation. But to be a libertine, for me, means simply shrugging off taboos rather than allowing oneself to be defined as monstrous in the breach of them, so he’s more Han Solo than Dorian Gray. Some of those Scruffians go wild in their blithe tinkering with their Stamps, editing themselves into monstrous “Hellions.” But for all the relish of the grotesque and Grand Guignol in those stories, it’s all . . . an unruly mob of gleefully vicious Artful Dodgers playing David and Goliath with the Powers-That-Be. There’s no horror of these often murderous wee tykes, rather a savage relish of deviance as a dimension of vitality.

As should be obvious, the Scruffians are in no small way my take on and tribute to the Borribles. And they’re probably the best encapsulation of the spirit informing most of my short fiction, peppering it with pirates and fairies, a werewolf who adores his boyfriend/handler and hates taking showers. It’s like the difference between Samuel R. Delany’s Hogg and Through The Valley Of The Nest Of Spiders. The former is transgressive, but the latter is post-transgressive, and it’s that which really pushes my buttons in fantasy (or SF in that case). This exercise in American Pastoral as idyllic really as anything Bradbury ever wrote.

When I first read Vellum, it was a revelation for a few reasons—one big one being that I had no idea who you were and knew nothing about you, and I got it as an advance copy, so I started reading it before there was any publicity, which meant I had no expectations. That there was any queer content at all was a pleasant surprise, since even now I don’t really expect it in genre books from major publishers, but the real revelation was that it felt to me like that ineffable thing I think of truly queer content—as a queer fantasy rather than a fantasy story that includes some queer content, if that makes any sense.

To put it perhaps a bit more clearly: It’s one thing, I think, to write about characters and situations that are in some way or another queer. All well and good, definitely welcome. But then there’s a deeper queer perspective, which is far more rare, and something I can’t define with any precision. I can only point to examples. It’s still pretty darn rare in books aimed at a general audience, because the assumption is that the general audience wants stories from a basically straight, or at least normalized and assimilated, point of view, though now and then something like Vellum and Ink or, more recently, and very differently, Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life gets through and finds a good-sized audience. (Or to look farther back: Dhalgren.) Or, in the broader media world, something like Sense8, which I adored partly because its central perspective, regardless of particular characters’ (or their creators’) sexualities, felt deeply queer to me. And . . . well, I was going to go off in all sorts of directions from this, but I’ll stop and just ask: Does any of this make any sense to you?

It does make sense—yes, The Book of All Hours is structurally queer, I’d say, with a thematic that’s very much tackling the construction of identity via new narratives and in conflict with existing ones. As with the Scruffians—it’s not hard to see my tropes—the unkin’s gravings essentialise their identities, and as with the Scruffians that’s a dread binding of self but also a process one can wrest control of, taking ownership of one’s identity. It’s not hard to see the queer condition in that, I think.

So, in Vellum, Thomas becomes the Eternal (Gay) Victim because that’s the metanarrative imposed on that archetype of queerdom. Phreedom and Seamus are locked into narratives shaped by and reifying abjection by gender and class. By volition and/or subjugation, it doesn’t matter; they have archetypes of virgin/whore and criminal (i.e. class rebel) graved into them. The whole metafictional gambit of The Book Of All Hours . . . it’s a narrative of the dread thrall of narrative, in many ways, a narrative at odds with all that constitutes normativity, right down to character and setting, linearity itself.

And there’s a self-created doom for normativity in the unreason of this abjection. Paradoxically, by the very disempowerment of the abject, the abject is invested with the power of the libido which—I stand with Aristotle and Spinoza here—knows fine well what pathological fuckery has taken place and must be rectified. So in Ink we get those Havens in the Hinter as desperate shams of normativity. This is the tyranny of ego, for me: a matrix of mores by which abjection warps our ossature of stances, scaling up from individual ego to a motherfucking Black Iron Prison written into the mass metaphysique; the Empire never ended, as Phil Dick said. But. Stance seeks to fit the situation—like water seeks to find its own level. Freud be damned; the libido, I say, unfucked by abjection, will desire not just instant gratification of “base” appetites but an ossature of stances optimising satiation via subtlety, via skills in the arts of ardour. And the stance fit to deal with the Black Iron Prison is Dionysus, libido queer and indomitable.

Under the Empire’s thrall, that libido has to smash its way into liberty, so what you get in Vellum and Ink is Jack Flash, swaggering wild spirit of anarchy, agent of chaos. Jack is absolutely the Return of the Repressed—so yes, the whole overall story is queer to the core; he’s the sexually queer as strutting front man for a sodality of the abject. But the queerness runs right down into the retelling of The Bacchae, where even the archetype of pathological life-denying ice-cold-blooded logic is actually onside with the program, Joey playing Pentheus in narrative as ritual.

The point is, we know Pentheus is wrong. Even Pentheus knows he’s wrong. There’s a part of every one of us, I believe, exempting psychopathy, that strives for the stable stance of empathic ethics even as we’re driven by ego’s insanity. And the more frantic the attempt to cast out the abject, the more its monstrosity is powered up from loathsome beast to force of nature. Thomas as Pan as Christ, Seamus as Lucifer as Prometheus, Jack as Dionysus. Abjection is torture, exile, and imprisonment rolled into one, wrought upon the alterior in order to render it queer in order to consolidate the normative. But in its very action, it is, I think, evermade fomenting insurrection. That’s my queer perspective: that outside the city walls, among the dogs and fornicators and sorcerers, that’s where the sublime is to be found, Dionysus striding up to the gate, returned to tear down the entire edifice built by a King of Tears. Stance seeks its own stability. To be queer is to know that the system is unstable, I think, to assume the role of a necessary corrective.

Your ideas about abjection seem to me especially good ones for exploring the ways power regulates (or creates) borders and norms. How did this concept develop for you? Have your perceptions of abjection changed over the last decade or so?

The notion is Julia Kristeva’s, so I assume it came via Delany—some reference to the idea or to Kristeva herself sending me off to explore; I don’t remember exactly. In all honesty, my reading on it is still largely second-hand, but it’s such a simple concept that it immediately made sense: things that were once part of us—blood, shit, piss—inhabit a zone between Self and Other, subject and object; there’s an unreason that kicks in, with the difference having to be enforced; and it scales up to social groups, so in the rejection of what was/is at some level part of Us, in the creation of an alterior Them, we get this psychosocial mechanism—abjection—by which the normative defines itself in opposition to the queer.

It blows the whole idea of the queer wide open, because it’s not just about sexuality. Any difference can be recast as deviance from a default norm: the construction of race is no less a queering—of all other skin tones than this artificed norm of “white.” The abjecting label “coloured people” is a dead giveaway, a ludicrous pretence that the marker of difference is some quality possessed only by the Other, as if pink wasn’t a colour: abjection is always already denying the (perceived) qualities of the abject that are still there within the Self. And it steers us away from thinking of prejudice, power, privilege as a numbers game of “minorities”: women are abjected under fratriarchy, the majority of the populace; this is how the artficed norm of masculinity is constructed, misogyny an underpinning of homophobia, I’d posit.

That’s how the idea has been developing for me recently—into the notion of fratriarchy. A family unit ruled by the husband is not patriarchy, I mean; to imagine it such is to buy into the shell game whereby the wife is erased as peer. Whether it’s a familial tyrant treating wives as daughters, daughters as wives, or a Great Leader playing Father of His People but evermade invested with authority by his fraternity of peers—the generals of the regime—the posturing of parental legitimacy is a fucking lie. “Who’s yer daddy?” You wish, dickbro. Wearing a white beard and a grandiose demeanour, wearing this archetype as costume, doesn’t make Jacob, say, any less a pretender who steals the birthrights not just of his brother Esau but of whatever sisters have been erased from the story.

Understand abjection as a mechanism for fucking over the peer-level equality of the paternal and the maternal, both of whom have legitimate authority, and you understand it’s really about which siblings inherit that power—and which do not. The sisters are abjected, and the gender-nonconforming kid bros are abjected, by fratriarchs establishing their privilege in this bogus rhetoric painting them, once the lie is in place, as fathers-in-charge when they are in truth brothers-in-charge. Even where we’re dealing with the exchange of daughters as chattels, this is one generation of brothers cementing the privilege of the next.

I’d root racism in fratriarchy too. Abjection based on disability, on class . . . beyond intersectionality, I think, we need to view the fratriarchal system as a common fight. Fuck “allies.” I’m either fighting fratriarchy for and as a member of the abjected masses on all fronts, or I’m a fucking Fifth Columnist in one way or another. As I’m sure I am, lamentably, as and where I unwittingly recapitulate any mechanics of abjection I’ve not yet woken up to. When it comes to myth as attempt to reconfigure the metaphysique, this has all come more and more to focus for me on the myth of Sodom—because that story contains it all, where the homophobia is bound up in anti-Canaanite xenophobia and capped by what happens to Lot’s daughters. The project of dismantling abjection, dismantling fratriarchy, has become for me the project of rebuilding Sodom—reconfiguring the metaphysique, changing the myth.

A lot of your work draws on mythology—Sumerian, Greek, Christian, etc. What is the appeal of mythology for you?

There’s the obvious potency of the strange first off, the thrill of the incredible where—cf. Delany—fantasy’s sentences claim things that could not happen. I’d go further, actually, and talk of the wondrous and the monstrous as what should or should not happen . . . as in Pegasus and Medusa, say, as in the 1981 Clash of the Titans, as seen in the cinema when I was ten. For a kid, that appeal speaks for itself, no? It still holds.

Add sexual desire to the thrall of Ray Harryhausen for that kid though: that young horse-riding Perseus in his loincloth on the beach, the marriage of the heroic and homoerotic in that image. The Greek myths are queer as fuck, I quickly discovered, and as a kid growing up pre-Internet, they became a focus of yearning. All those stories and statuary, in the imagination they opened out to an entire elsewhen, a lost sexual idyll not just of ephebes so exquisite they couldn’t be allowed to die, but where even the gods were shameless sons of Sodom, never mind the boldest heroes—Achilles, Hercules. The idyllic is evermade elegiac, I think, but in the 1980s of HIV and Section 28, in small town Scotland . . . I can’t do justice to the Sehnsucht that Arcadia was charged with for me before I’d even heard of a Virgilian eclogue.

But more: the stuff of myth is archetypal. I don’t hold with Jung’s notion of innate metaphors, but a language has a base vocabulary—mother, father, sun, earth, cow, fire—and a culture has root metaphors—time is money. An archetype is what you get, I think, by wiring those base symbols (with their primal imports) into relationships of mutual metaphor, where each element connotes the others—sun, gold, youth—in a virtuous circle, a feedback effect of poetic power. And mythology is the craft of reconfiguring how those symbols fit together. Which is no small thing.

Any story, I mean, is ultimately leaving you with a subtly shifted connotative import to whatever symbols it operates not just with but on. A crude example: the word “dog” for you will have different import than it does for me, each of us having unique experiences of specific dogs, each personal history shaping a connotative import as individual as the denotation is consensual. Benji or Cujo, a fictive dog can shade that import for the audience. For sure, one wee movie of a friendly mutt or rabid demon dog may not outweigh decades of actual experience, bad or good, but consider how narratives loaded into reportage and rhetoric have affected words like “immigrant” or “Arab.”

So, narrative is deeply political in its impact on the imports of whatever semes it’s operating with and on, and in cultural terms (i.e. when it comes to individual psychologies and social systems), the archetypal is infrastructural. Myth is going in so deep that for all intents and purposes I’d say it’s metaphysical activism. That’s to say, it’s direct action on the metaphysique—that ossature of stances the religious call soul and the marginally less religious refer to as “the mind.” (Superstitious mumbo jumbos both of them. I’m talking here of signs, symbols, semes, but it’s all stance, far as I’m concerned, disposition of material body.) Where archetypes like those we call “God” or “Dionysus” are wrought into that metaphysique, to kill one or free another in myth is to literally wage war in Heaven, to liberate a political prisoner of the psyche. Myth is the frontline of the Culture Wars.

I could rave also about how myth humanises the archetypal: Gilgamesh as a tragedy of mortality; Inanna’s ambition as utterly human; Dumuzi as a gazelle in flight—a god made animal, with all the vulnerability of the truly vital, i.e. that which is alive because it moves in flesh. But the appeal of myth could be endlessly unpacked really. The deeper I look at it, the more I know I’d find to say.

Let’s talk about that idea of myth as humanization of archetypes and bring in the Culture Wars. We’re doing this interview as the U.S. media, at least, is fixated on Kim Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky who refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, and I’ve found myself more fascinated by her religiosity than anything, because if we assume she’s not just playing it all up for the attention, she believes she’s got some sort of direct line of communication with God—that if God doesn’t necessarily speak through her, she is at least his instrument in the world. The stories and myths she tells herself are ones that make life clear for her, and, in fact, turn her into a hero. She hasn’t just humanized archetypes, she’s rendered them into her own image, which I’d say is the image of her prejudices, but which she would say is the simple truth of God.

So my question then is: What are the perils of the humanization of archetypes? Is there a hubris to it, or at least some of the problems that accompany anthropomorphism? Are there ways that as a writer that you can grapple with such perils?

Actually, I think there’s maybe a different sense of “humanising archetypes” slipping in here with the notion of anthropomorphism. Where I talk about an archetype like “God” or “Dionysus” I’m not sure anthropomorphising is the right term. That’s the Victorian approach to myth, seeing all those pagan deities as personifications of some force of nature—the sun, the storm, the earth, whatever. As if those “primitive” pagans thought in the crude formulaic allegory of second-rate Neoclassical poets.

No, if an archetype is a compound symbol the way I’m describing, the “youth” morpheme that’s bound to “gold” and “sun,” say, is as much tenor as vehicle, as much referent as signifier. Is it really anthorpomorphism if what you’re talking about is always already human in form? You’re not projecting humanity onto a force of nature with e.g. the Drifter archetype, where it wears the name “Dionysus” in The Bacchae. Where other aesthemes (to coin a term) bind with the aestheme of the wandering stranger to render it sublime (i.e. numinous and monstrous, that which both should and should not be), this is the opposite of anthropomorphism really; we’re tapping into the resonances of those core aesthemes to encapsulate and address a mode of human agency. We’re rendering the human as sublime rather than vice versa.

Persona, self, ego, id, shadow, anima/animus, senex . . . Jung’s taxonomy of these modes essentialises dynamics into (sub)structure—like the classical conceit of four elements, it collapses a system of deeper complexity—but it’s a good touchstone here: when I talk of the archetypal, I mean something profoundly human, the symbol encapsulating a disposition of one’s metaphysique. Dionysus is a stance, a mode of engagement.

Where I talk about myth humanising these symbols then, that’s maybe a misleading shorthand. What I mean is that myth can be more than just some ritual drama of generic tropes—the Self-as-Hero and Shadow-as-Monster, say, dancing through some template of the Hero’s Journey. As myth renders the archetypal in specific terms—the Drifter becoming a god called Dionysus, newly arrived in Thebes—the more it fleshes the archetype out as a character with a name, a face, parents, lovers, a birth and maybe even a death, the more it becomes an existential(ist) project. Dionsyus against Pentheus, Gilgamesh mourning Enkidu, Dumuzi fleeing the recruiters . . . here the narratives are setting up the stances against realities of the human condition—tyranny, grief, conscription. The myths are driving for existential truth, not just some essentialist ritual drama formulated precisely to grave the status quo in the metaphysique. This type of humanisation of archetypes is the creative struggle against what Kim Davis is doing.

Davis could certainly be seen as self-mythologising, but she’s a symptom of something other than identification with the archetypal. That enthusiasmos (in the original Greek sense: having the deity within) makes for a poet or prophet, comes with its own risks of outright madness, but is at least creative. One can take the stance, drink the world with relish as Dionysus in the flesh, and absolutely such a praxis has perils: taking the figurative as literal, casting the sublime as the divine; binding oneself into a single mode, where stance must shift to fit the situation, where life sometimes calls for one to be Inanna rather than Dionysus; letting the ego bloat itself on the grandiosity of apophenic rapture. This is the chaos magician’s path I’m talking about, I suppose, and it’s easy to go astray on. A writer is maybe (one of) the best equipped to walk that path though: it’s (maybe? one would think?) easier not to get sucked into self-delusions if one understands the material of myth as story—if one sees the mechanics of symbols, the dynamics of stance.

So, the point is, Davis is no would-be magician fallen into messianic hubris. Where an archetype lies at the root of her constructing this narrative in which she’s a heroic martyr, it’s the pernicious trope constructed around the compounding of father, king, and sky. As Zeus or Pentheus or God, this is the ego to Dionysus’s id/libido, and what makes Davis’s iteration of it so pernicious is precisely the dehumanisation, I’d say. Pentheus can be overthrown. Even Zeus, because of his human backstory of birth and all that goes with it (Uranus, Kronos), can be imagined overthrown (cf. Prometheus knowing how this could happen). That’s myth recognising the reality of ego—the matrix of mores playing tyrant over the psyche—as an authority of dubious legitimacy, constructed existentially, societally. Davis’s God is shorn of all humanity but the most abstract—nameless and faceless in its purest form—to render his authority unimpeachable in its abstraction. He’s designed, above all else, to render the ego’s rule inviolable. This is, I think, pathological.

Ego is a stopgap system, its axiomatic mores the training wheels for children who should be maturing into the skill of ethical judgment—and, okay, a pragmatic fallback for a reality in which some don’t develop that integrity. Practical as it is as such, it has an unfortunate flaw in its mechanics of pride and shame as reward and punishment for conformity: it constructs the system of mores as good in and of itself, a Natural, Social or Divine Order, a fabric of society wherein one can find pride not just in conformity but in conviction, in active proselytising. To strengthen the system’s thrall by acting as its agent—suppressing the interrogation of it, imposing and instilling it as and where you can—is the pinnacle of piety, an active devotion beyond mere obedience.

I don’t doubt for a second that Davis is sincere, but I think it’s got little do with any belief that she’s in communication with God. She’s just huffing faith. It feels good to feel right; it feels right to feel good. Zeal validated by pride validated by zeal, this is fucking sanctimony addiction, a runaway feedback loop by which the ethically inadequate can bootstrap a sense of self-worth. This isn’t even speculation. The pious will literally tell you that faith has a sense of “grace” as reward and that their sense of conviction comes from the rapture of that state. How anyone can not see the vicious circle of hubris and até is beyond me.

And consider that this reward of grace—which is to say pride—comes regardless of the substance of the moral axiom. Result? A system primed for prejudice to be promulgated as ardent article of faith. Any petty personal dysfunction works as pretext. An unreasoned disgust at Teh Buttseks or at “miscegenation,” it makes no difference; if you can pull a fuckheaded Thou Shalt Not out of your ass, every transgressor is an opportunity to glory in that sanctimony high as you zealously advocate your absurd moral axiom. The next protest at your sanctimonious twaddle is your next fix, so I suspect vicious fuckheadery is selected for, actively malicious moral axioms serving as the best spurs for the ethical opposition that is the sanctimony addict’s chance for glory and grace.

There’s nothing of the archetypal in that craven egoism. It’s not a peril of humanizing archetypes but rather of dehumanizing one in particular, abstracting it to utter inhumanity, to invest it with an absolute authority to be inherited by its dictates. Where all other archetypes embody that within the metaphysique which is not ego—not least the id/libido, always already striving for eudaimonia—it’s no surprise to see these all demonised wherever this viral pathology we call God reigns supreme. If there’s a risk of going nuts if you unleash the id and shadow, I think it’s a necessary risk in a necessary struggle.

How did you come to have your books published by Lethe Press, which is an explicitly queer publisher? Do you think that having your work released by publishers that are devoted to queer content affects how that work is perceived? Is it a different experience for you as a writer than when you publish with more general presses?

Steve Berman has been an amazing supporter. I can’t recall if his first contact was to solicit a story for Icarus magazine or to reprint one in Wilde Stories, the annual best-of. But Icarus as a venue certainly allowed me to rip loose—like its being focused on queer substance as core criteria made it wonderfully eclectic in terms of genre approaches. I found it a perfect fit. And where short story collections are a hard sell, Steve jumped at the chance to do Scruffians! Hell, he actively leapt in, over Twitter, to snap up Rhapsody when I was blathering about self-publishing it—non-fic being even less commercial.

In practical terms, the differences in working with Lethe have mainly just been those you get working with any small press versus something like Macmillan or Del Rey, and even there, with the latter . . . I was lucky to be dealing with Peter Lavery and Jim Minz as editors; I haven’t had a publisher, to be honest, where I didn’t feel solid support. I doubt a major publisher would have gone for the collection though, and I’m sure as fuck they wouldn’t have let me have the cover of the deluxe edition Scruffians! with the naked donkey-donged hot guy. Steve sent me a bunch of images from that shoot, and basically I asked for the most in-yer-face one—and no cop-outs such as the title covering the cock. He had the cojones to go for it, bless him.

I wanted a difference in perception there, really, for the book to be blatantly, confrontationally queer. I got to present the work as (literally) balls-out punk. Like: No, as much as I love me some poncy literary fantasy, this is not to be put in a safe wee box of bourgeois propriety, stories to sate the cerebral and sentimental. I’m all about the viscerality, and Lethe let me put that upfront—in full frontal, even. Has it affected the way the work itself was perceived beyond that? I don’t know. I hope folk would have got the ethos anyway, that it’s just the most honest presentation for them to know that it’s coming from, as the hatemail dubbed me, “THE . . . Sodomite Hal Duncan!!” (sic). But we’d have to ask the readers.

In some ways, the donkey-donged hot guy (let’s call him DDHG) serves as a kind of marker for potential audiences—it says, “This is a book for people who want DDHG on the cover of a book,” and even to some extent, “I, as someone who wants DDHG on the cover of a book, am looking for other readers who are enthusiastic about DDHG on the cover of a book,” which is a kind of genre marking, or a way of signaling to a potential audience. Also of pushing away the readers who don’t like DDHGs (such people exist?!)—aside from the fact that it’s a naked man, it’s no different from putting some other icon on a cover, like a spaceship or a smoking pistol or a cowboy hat.

Are there benefits for you, then, as a writer (beyond the benefits or challenges of sales) in addressing particular audiences? Vellum and Ink had wildly varied responses because they were published for a general fantasy audience, whereas I’d assume (and could be utterly wrong) Scruffians! has a fairly self-selected audience, so that audience’s criteria in evaluating it—in, indeed, valuing it at all—would be different, because if they get past the cover, then they’re likely to be at least a bit more sympathetic to your project than a more random reader who picks up a book from a major publisher. For better or worse.

I don’t know. If we’re not talking about the bottom line of how many people read it, the pros and cons of targeting, I’m not sure what difference the composition of the audience makes. I’d see reviews as part of that, really. Aiming at a broader audience, as with Vellum being marketed to a general readership, means more negative reviews, negative word of mouth that it sucks to see. Aiming at a narrower audience more likely to be sympathetic means less of that, but it also means fewer positive reviews, less word of mouth extending in unexpected directions—like with some fan of way more traditional fantasy falling in love with Vellum despite it not at all being what they thought it would be. But this just seems like another angle on maximising the reach of the work—sales but seen through a less mercenary lens, not a matter of how much money you make but simply whether you make the connection with as many people out there as would actually click with the book.

In the follow through of that, maybe there’s an upside and a downside in terms of how the two types of responses impact your ego. The hype and backlash you might get with one way of presenting the book make for a different experience to the comparative sense of rolling tumbleweed you can get, to be honest, if you go from that to publishing via a dedicated LGBT small press. It’s only comparative, of course; I got some great reviews for Scruffians!, Brit Mandelo on Tor.com in particular saying some very nice things. Ultimately though, whether the response is loud or quiet, positive or negative, it’s all a crazy ride of validation and vanity where . . . well, for me it’s been as much to do with my own headspace as anything. Like, you can be headfucked by a massive buzz or the absence of it, gutted or gladdened by haters. Insofar as any sort of response pushes buttons that will fuck with your sense of perspective, it’s healthier, I think, to be as Vonnegut as you can about it all: so it goes.

So as far as post-publication pros and cons go, it’s swings and roundabouts, I’d say. Pre-publication? When I’m writing, I don’t really think of the audience much beyond “whoever reads it.” I mean, I know some writers think in terms of an ideal reader, and for a more commercial writer in a category like SFF there might well be a very real difference in writing under contract for very different audiences. But the ideal image I tend to work with is not of a reader to be satisfied but of the work itself—novel, short story, or collection of short stories. The work wants to be what the work wants to be, and I’m just trying to carve and wire and tweak it to that shape, to the point where it seems right. I just hope to fuck that when it’s done some publisher will see what I see in it and be up for trying to get it to the readers who will too.

Earlier, in passing, you mentioned HIV and Section 28. I didn’t experience Section 28, but we had similar laws, statutes, etc. (It wasn’t until 2003 that the remaining sodomy laws were invalidated in the U.S.) My own sense of queer identity is one very much inflected by, even constructed by, the AIDS era. The way the popular representation of AIDS physicalized our abjection. The activism of ACT UP, just the awareness of which, I think, probably saved my life because here were queers not hiding in shame, but fighting back, asserting both their absolute queerness and their right to life and dignity and love. The very deep conviction I have that we must talk and write openly, accurately, and without shame about sexual practices because it’s literally a matter of life and death. The sense of a whole generation of our people lost. A fatalism I’ve never been able to shake, born of never expecting to live past twenty-five, or, at most, thirty-five. (Every queer I know of my age can talk with real authority about self destruction.)

One of the things your work does well, particularly vividly in Vellum and Ink, is weave history into mythology, mythology into history. The older I get, the more I value the way the stories we tell preserve and transmit our history: individual history, group history. The sense of what it felt like to live in those days, in those places. What it felt like to watch the evening news.

And so, after that long preface, a simple question: Queer history, queer mythology, queer stories—do you see them working together? Is it something you think about consciously as you write, or (and?) is it just inevitably going to find its way into your work because of who you are, what you’ve lived?

Yes. For the second question first, a simple answer: yes to both parts, because the writing is (a mode of) thinking about this stuff. As I’m writing this response, I’m thinking as much in these words appearing on my laptop screen as on any metaconscious level. I’m thinking on the hoof, on the page. If I write about queer myth and history in something like my essay in Bahamut, “A Citizen of New Sodom,” it’s as transparent as can be that it’s a product of who I am, what I’ve lived, but it’s barely less transparent in my long poem “Sodom.” That’s maybe even more explicitly making the connections in its autobiographical aspects, speaking directly of what it was like to grow up in that era.

I agree 100% with everything you say, recognise every iota of that conviction, feel it with every fucking fibre, together with the necessity of witnessing, the need to speak of that loss, that whole generation annihilated. My fatalism—I mean, fuck, remember this was the era of Mutual Assured Destruction, too—only died in an annihilation of personal identity, when my brother’s death basically added such weight of unfathomable futility that . . . the only way I can describe it is like the collapse of a black hole. I survived because I died, that part of me the religious would call a soul, what I’d call stance. Because I still had a body, hollow as it was, because I still walked and talked and breathed and ate, some newborn self sprung into existence out of that abyss, the archetypes I write as Jack and Puck and so on stitching themselves together over time into who I am today, which has no truck with fatalism—but only because I see it as failed nihilism. Like, full nihilism says it doesn’t matter that nothing matters. Ask not, Why bother? Ask, Why the fuck not? But the point is that, for all intents and purposes, I see myself as forged out of that devastation, and though my brother’s death was the ultimate tipping point, Lord Cock Almighty but the AIDS epidemic was the wasteland I died in and somehow walked alive from.

It’s maybe less transparent in the fiction when I am, as with the poem “Sodom” and with other works, like “Sonnets for Kouroi Old and New,” thinking of queer myth, history and story, but it’s no less true where it’s true. This or that tale may be tackling something else entirely, only informed by the import that queer heritage has for me in general, but where it is tackling this subject . . . this is me thinking in figurative terms, processing my stances to make sense of it all.

Essays, poetry, fiction, I’ve used Sodom in all of these precisely because it encapsulates for me the confluence of history, myth and story in general. Back when I was finding my feet as a writer, awed by Joyce’s wordplay, one of the Joycean portmanteaus I coined in my own scribblings was “mythstory,” which I think made it into Errata, and which probably says it all as to how those different threads seem inextricable to me—with an echo of “mystery” in there too, of the rites of ancient times, of the dramas of the medieval era, and of enigma plain and simple. Sodom is a mythstory to me, all of these things, so the essay and poem tackle it, but it’s there too in The Book of All Hours and in my most recent short story, “And a Pinch of Salt.”

At the height of the AIDS epidemic, the thing is, as that entire generation was being annihilated, that’s when I read Delany’s Driftglass, with its epigraph conjuring a survivor’s lament: Mother Sodom is gone . . . Where now shall I go to make a home? It’s become part of the myth for me, this idea of survivors—maybe unmentioned slaves in Lot’s household, maybe merchants out of town on business. A lineage of exiles begun in that destruction, travelling in the tents of the Israelites perhaps, Sodomites born to anyone and everyone, out of place and out of time, always already cuckoos in the nest.

It seems to me to capture this key aspect of queer identity, that we’re born sundered from our heritage. That as we awaken to what we are and turn to look for that heritage, what we find first, as often as not, is the ruin of it. Maybe it’s less so for a generation with the Internet and Gay/Straight Alliances in school—I hope it is—but even the contemporary queer community that might have been a beacon of hope to me as a teenager . . . that was a wasteland of salt and sarcoma, a recapitulation of Sodom’s oblivion.

But that absence in itself becomes the heritage. In the fragmentary testimonies that preserve and transmit the truth of some Renaissance artist’s queerness only in hints and rumours liable to be dismissed as “unproven” by historians, or in the court records of some molly house rentboy’s trial in Georgian England, I see the survivors of Sodom, the obliteration and the exile—and the defiant witnessing, the driven loveborn witnessing. The imperative to rebuild, to gather the scatterling fragments and (re)construct this legacy of a diaspora that’s metatemporal: always beginning now, in the now of any queer kid waking up to who they are, what they are; always ending now, or always attempting to be ended, in the now of any queer fortysomething trying to raise Sodom anew in verse or prose. Of anyone of any age anywhen doing the slightest thing to make some sort of shelter for the dispossessed, whether it’s the shelter of a story to keep a dead soul being washed away by time, or a literal physical haven for a very real cuckoo kicked out of the nest.

I am so with you that this is a matter of life and death, to talk and write openly and accurately and without shame—not just in the specific context of discussing sexual practices in the face of HIV, but for the sake of every potential suicide and self-destruction spurred by the desolation of being born alone in exile. It’s for the sake of accuracy I tackle this figuratively, in fact. I can’t do justice to what needs to be said without the myth. History has its deep import, just like the word “dog,” the personal resonances that are the mass of the iceberg beneath the visible tip. It’s not a cerebral pondering then, not a dispassionate consideration of how I shall write of queer “mythstory” in this work or that. Rather this is the only way I can articulate it, as story, as myth:

There are those who say Sodom was not destroyed for sexual sins, but because its mob pounding Lot’s doors for the strangers to be thrown to them breached the law of hospitality. When he woke on the morning of Sodom’s destruction, the first Sodomite after Sodom looked out from his bedroom window and saw the smoke rising, and he knew only that it was gone. Over breakfast, on the TV news, one pundit claimed this reason, another that. When one spoke of hospitality, the Sodomite looked around him at this home that wasn’t his but where he had been warmly welcomed, thought of other exiles who might find no such couth in their wanderings. He thought of the desolation of such unwelcome, for those other Sodomites, for anyone. And he swore to himself in that moment that he would make a legacy for his lost city, for all citizens of Sodom, lost or living. He swore himself to hospitality, to welcome any stranger, any Other, in whatever house he made a home of in his travels. And so he did, going out into the world in search of other survivors; and though some had disavowed their homeland in shame, sworn themselves to other nations and cities, each sworn Sodomite he found understood his oath, having made the exact same vow themself, as it turned out. So, in a hospice here, a hostelry there, in this pub and that website, over time they built a city and a legend, scattered in every corner of the world. The legend is no doubt idealised, the reality imperfect, compromised, but to this day, the city is renowned as haven for the dispossessed, its halls of lost heritage rebuilt in the interstices; and it is said that Dionysus himself will return one day, to plant the figwood dildo he carved long ago that he might fuck himself over the grave of his lost love Prosymnnus, a fig tree blossoming from the dead wood, in the heart of the park at the heart of the completed city, on the day New Sodom is raised fully and finally from the ruin.

I thought the interweaving of commentary on the video-game terminology was fascinating—it was my first intimation that there was something more going on in this story.

What prompted this device?

I had a sudden fierce urge to write some tie-in fiction—for Star Wars, or a Bioware video game, something like that. But since I’m just about the last the author likely to be chosen/approached for such a project, I quickly realized I’d have to make up my own media property if it were to happen at all: thus, the video game Kaiju maximus®. It nearly broke my mind—in a fun way!—trying to tell a straight-ahead genre story as tie-fiction for a media property that doesn’t exist.

Even playing in my own sandbox, it didn’t strike me as realistic that I’d be assigned to tell the story of, say, the emigrée cosmonaut who flew a billionaire’s privately-built lunar shuttle into orbit and nuked the alien mothership, or the story of the first North American superhero, a Chicano fry-cook, who fought so bravely at the fall of Chicago. Those epic, flashier stories would certainly go to big-name authors, I thought. Still, the editor might give me a chance with some NPCs; so that’s the story I wrote.

If I’m not mistaken, the hero is given a name, but she’s primarily referred to as “the hero.” Why include this distancing mechanism?

Actually, the hero’s name never comes up. And instead of a consciously applied distancing mechanism, I omitted her proper name as an intuitive choice. Trying to analyze it after the fact, however, I’m sure the choice owes something to my hating the way video games and movies of the genre to which Kaiju maximus® belongs tend to restrict the primary woman character to the role of “the girlfriend” or “the wife.” Might metonymy be used to different effect? And, too, I think it encourages the reader to view the hero as the family does, and as the hero experiences herself: identity completely subsumed by her mission and responsibility. None of us, after all, is expected to redeem the planet single-handedly!

In googling you, I couldn’t find a tremendous amount of information—not even a capsule bio. Is this purposeful? And is there anything you want to say about your background and what sort of things you write? Are you working on anything right now?

In the age of the internet, I definitely should be holding self-promotion very high among my priorities as a writer. But being dead broke and painfully shy makes sure that it keeps falling off the list. I’ll get around to a webpage someday.

The five stories I’ve had published so far testify pretty well, I think, both to my background and writerly concerns: black, queer, and since the popular media hardly ever depicts any life I recognize, I’m interested above all in telling the kinds of stories usually dismissed by majority concerns, the sorts of stories that have gathered so much silence and neglect around them, I necessarily struggle to find the right, illuminative language.

The writing’s just not coming at the moment, so I’m a reading a lot and trying to encourage a couple new writers I know and admire to stay the course, and see their projects through.

It hadn’t come down since great-grandparent days, but as its last descent had left no stone on stone—nor man, woman, child alive—anywhere people had once dwelled aboveground on the continent, the hero would go up before it came down again, and kill the kaiju maximus. They would go too: the hero’s weakness, and her strength.

For long cool days, she led them up the old byways toward the spectre of the mountains. Finally they reached the foothills. Here and there leaves of the deep green forest had just begun turning red or gold in the last days of summer. He and the children were all fit, all well, and so most days the hero could get about twenty kiloms out of them. She carried the food, that pack twice the weight of his, which was plenty heavy enough. She brought down game for them if he asked, a turkey, or ducks. They did just as that old sciencer in the last cavestead had counseled: every morning a drop of her blood under the children’s tongues and his, and indeed the heroic factor served to ward them all from sickness. No more fevers, not a cough. The scaled dry patches on the boy’s neck and hands cleared up, and he suffered no more frightening episodes of breathlessness. In little more than a month the baby, looking all the time more and more like poor Sofiya, shot up several centimets, five or six, and put on as many kilos. And him? That ankle he’d twisted back in the spring stopped aching during the first and last hours of a long day’s hike, stopped aching at all. You don’t really know, until it’s gone, how much the pain was wearing on you all along.

Come downhill one bright chill afternoon, he and the baby and boy were resting in the swale, eating apples, when the hero came down from the sky. She gave him the choice of the last hill they’d climb that day. “Which one?” she said. Just north of them two hills overlapped in east-west adjacency. “Where’s the good water?”

He thought about it and said, “That one,” holding out his apple toward where, unseen and unheard, a freshwater spring bubbled up from cloven rock, and ran down down the chosen hill’s farside. Though much higher, the other hill looked easy-hiking. The hill awaiting them was squat, not half so high: but they’d end up climbing its height four or five times, after all the switchbacks, its sides being steep and densely forested, interrupted by brief sheer bluffs. There never really was a chance, was there, the easy hill might have had the water?

“Saw some ducks while I was up flying,” the hero said. (They only ever argued over the children—food for them, water for them, rest.) “But just those spoonies with orange fat.”

“That’s okay.”

“Kids won’t eat that kind, you said.” The hero’s latest eyes caught the light funny, as if prismatic oil were wetting them, not saltwater tears. “They taste too nasty.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “Really.”

“You gotta speak up if you want me to hunt.”

It was nice, he told himself, that she thought to offer. “Tonight I meant to finish up what we brung fresh from the last cavestead. So please don’t worry yourself.” He didn’t need some special solicitude that came out of the blue every once in a while. What he needed was not to be argued against, and never, ever overruled, when the hero wanted to wring a few more kiloms from the day—and so skip some meal, rest stop, or water break—and he said to her, “They can’t; the kids are tired. We need rest.”

I don’t think Sofiya should do that. I don’t think she’s ready.

“You hurting for water? I can take the canteens and fill em.”

“We’re okay. Early tomorrow morning we should hit the trickle, otherside of that west hill there. We got plenty till then.” He smiled up at her (irises glinting jewel-like in the oblique fall of light). “And you know I know my water.”

“Yeah.” She touched his head and ran fingers through his hair which, not easily, he kept washed and combed for her. “You do, don’t you?”

Now, his father: there had been a dowser, the old man able not just to find the water but call it from the ground, however dry. He himself could feel the water pumping or at rest in the earth well enough to say where the nearest creek or pond lay, and to judge at a glance whether this standing pool or that mineral-stained leak was poisonous or potable. And the boy could as well: grandson’s talent biding fair to rival his grandfather’s, for already son could often pinpoint what father could only be vague about.

The hero looked at her weary children half-eating, half-sleeping on their weary father’s lap. “We’ll rest here a bit longer, then head up when the sun touches the top of those trees there.”

Mouth full of apple, he nodded. On rare occasions the hero drank thirstily from a spring, or returned to camp with the haunch of some deer she’d devoured out of his and the children’s sight; and he’d roast it up for their supper and next-day’s eating. But she took neither food nor water more than once a month. All the good that a daily two leets of water, full night’s sleep, and three squares did for you, the hero got from a quiet half hour’s sit-down in the sun. She found a bright spot now and partook.

He unraveled a cocklebur from the boy’s head propped on his thigh. “What say you, buddy? How was your papa’s waterwitching that time?”

Eyes closed, the boy held an apple to his mouth, nibbling at it; he spoke with quiet dreaminess. “We’re gonna get to that water today, Papa—right as the sun’s going down. And the spring’s a good gushy one, not no little trickle like you said.”

Still with a couple nice bites on it, the baby chucked her apple-core to the mangy pup that had crept after them since midmorning. “I wanna’nother one, Papa,” she said. “I’m still hungry.”

“We ain’t got apples to waste, pumpkin.” He handed her the half left of his. “Now, just you get to eat this, okay? It’s yours, all by yourself.”

Dr. Anwar abu Hassan, psychogenomicist: To us who still flounder in the storms of the untamed heart, the awakened mystics have explained just what good, in the cosmic sense, is this folly called erotic love. Lust and passion are early doors, first steps away from pure self-concern; and later doors, further steps, lead even as far as the mystic arrives: to that love surpassing understanding, which may encompass a whole planet, and every living creature on it. And so, when we introduce the heroic factor into the population, and give rise to a superhuman élite, let us not have forgotten the heart. Predilection for the pretty face is a precursor of universal caritas. And in defense of one beloved earthling some hero may well save us all.

At the Ritual Benison before each boss-fight, a hero will temporarily advance +1000 XP for every point of comeliness their spouse possesses. But the hero must ensure that his or her spouse always has food, water and rest enough to maintain this attribute. And superheroes must consider the welfare of their children as well, for the sword and the wings can only . . .

Twilight was setting fire to the clouds as they reached the flat top of the hill. Up there was rocky, windswept and bush-covered; or, no—these were all trees, dwarfish kin to the lower forest, with not one gnarled cousin reaching even shoulder-height. All sense of accomplishment from so many steps taken thus far, from so much ground covered, can be voided by a single majestic vista. The prospect overlooked a broad and forested valley, compassed by distant hills, and marching thence to the very limits of sight: ever-higher mountains, some peaks snowtopped, a few piercing the clouds. Let it not be said that he knew a single moment’s despair—for he was loyal to the hero, and steadfast to her cause: humanity’s salvation—but neither could such a view hearten anyone so footsore. How far must they go? At his feet the children sat down together, stretched out side-by-side, and went to sleep: not a full minute passing between these progressions. The hero didn’t want your chatter, your second guesses, nor to be pestered with ten thousand questions. But he dared ask this one aloud, although quietly, and well softened up:

“I guess we got quite a ways further to go, huh?”

“We’re here. This is it,” the hero said. “I’ll kill it tonight.”

According to the maps a city of millions had nestled in this valley before the age of monsters cut short the Anthropocene. Now, only a howling green wilderness filled the lowlands, and on the sixth day God might have called it quits in the morning, finishing with the beasts: never having put people in the garden at all. For miles and miles—forever—there was nothing to see, save rock, tree and mountain: certainly no kaiju maximus. “Where is it?” he said. “I don’t see anything.”

The hero took his shoulders in hand, turned him bodily about, and let go; she pointed.

Knowing that her finger pointed west, even so he was confounded for a moment, and thought east, where sooty night had fallen already. Never before had he seen such insombration as covered over a deep groin between western mountains. This wasn’t the smoky gloom that minores carried about with them, those mighty shambling towers. Nor yet was it the terrifying local midnight in which the hero had fought and killed a kaiju plenus, fully mature, while that great beast hove up over the world nearly lost in darkness, although it had been sunny midafternoon. No, the insombration that blackened the valley’s western reaches didn’t so much dampen ambient radiance as seem a positive dark in its own right: the opposite, not merely absence, of light. The bright fires of sunset had no power to penetrate those malignant shadows, which gave up not even the faintest conjectural hint of the maximus within.

A chill wind blew on this hilltop. He shuddered. “I can’t get the least little glimpse of it through that. Can you?”

The hero nodded. She shrugged off the pack of food, and unbuckled and dropped her heavy sword as well. “Y’all get yourselves settled up here.” Carapace flipping open, her wings extended. “I’ll be back shortly to get ready for the fight.”

“Is it woke already?” he said. “Or still sleep?”

But with a swiftness just faster than his eyes could track the hero plunged upwards into the lowering dusk and sped away west.

If you’d crouched next to him while he checked on the children, you’d have judged them much too wiry for their age. Where was the baby fat? you’d wonder. The chubby thighs and soft bellies? And though one was six, and the other three-and-a-half, brother and sister were very close in size; for the boy’s dead heroic twin had hogged the womb, and been born with not a fair half but nearly fourth-fifths the share of health, size and strength. Sofiya had been a little frightening, so fiercely had she rejected any helping—any intercessory—hand, although in the end she needed her papa no less than this baby and boy, hadn’t she? And please don’t say these sleepers looked uncared for, like no one worried over them always conniving for their well-being. But he feared you probably would. Who loves these children? you’d cry out, looking all around you, hot-eyed and accusatory. Who feeds them? The heart wrung in his chest taking in their gaunt exhaustion. He took off his coat and draped it over them. With just his grandfather’s woolen sweater against hawk on the hilltop, he set about gathering wood for the fire.

Onions and potatoes sizzling in bacon fat was a smell to wake any hungry youngster, however deeply asleep. The children pressed close to him at either side, staring lustfully into the pan. The baby made to stick tender fingers right into hot popping grease; he caught that hand. “Whoa there, pumpkin.”

“I’m hungry though.”

“We’ll be eating in two shakes.” He chopped up most of the remaining ham for the hash and stirred the pan. Still, supper could use some more stretching. He tapped the baby’s nose and pointed. “You see that bent-over tree, the little’n? Just looky at all that good dandelion growing under it. How about you go pull us two big ole handfuls for the pan? And make sure to shake off all the bugs and dirt. You know how.”

“But I’m hungry, Papa.”

“Soon as I get me some greens, you get your supper.”

After the baby jumped up, he said, “And, buddy, will you gather up everybody’s canteen for me? Just a few steps thataway, over behind the big boulder you see right there, I judge it’s a nice spring of water just bubbling up—”

Sassy, and with voice raised: “I know already, Papa.” The boy shouldered up the baby’s canteen beside his own.

“Well, all right.” The outburst surprised him. It wasn’t a tone the boy would ever dare take with his mother, and so neither should he with his father. But a bit of backtalk was, in this case, good news. Trekking twenty kiloms everyday kept the boy so doped with fatigue, the sun could rise and set without him showing any glimmer of personality or preference, much less temper. So, yes: shout at Papa if you would! “Go on, then. Pour out the old water, and rinse them canteens out good, you hear? Top em all back up full too.”

“I know.” The boy stamped a foot, holding out his arm to receive the last canteen strung up over his shoulder.

“Best not be super long about it either, buddy. Or me and the baby might get so hungry we gobble up your supper too. Whew, don’t this pan just smell wonderful?”

“You better not, Papa!” In their leather sleeves, the winebottles under his elbows and pinched to his sides, the boy hurried round the boulder toward the stream’s source.

While they ate he told the children that this was the night Mama would fight the kaiju. Strategic, this timing; for very little news was so upsetting it could ruin a good hot supper, served up right now. “The big one?” said the baby. “Yes, pumpkin.” “The maximus?” said the boy. “Yes, buddy.” And that seemed to be that, for at least so long as they scraped their forks into the pan.

After supper he found himself taking in anew their grimy little faces, all smeared and content, and he heard his mother’s voice. When you fixing to wash these babies, man? Been three weeks now. It’s cold and windy out here, Mama. I can’t wash them in this weather. Boy, it’s getting into the fall. Ask yourself: is it gon’ get warmer and warmer, or will you be breaking ice to get at the creek soon? They’ll cry, Mama; that’s how cold it is. I don’t want my children hating me. Well, all right—keep doing what you doing, then. I’m just sorry I musta not taught you anything about where sickness come from, or the kind of infections won’t nothing cure. Myself, I’d just build up this fire good, and see the babies get nice and warm afterwards . . . but you grown! Do it your way.

“Y’all,” he said, “it’s been a long time now, right? I think we all might need a bath.”

There was an uproar, and tears to break your heart. Possessing nothing like the necessary fortitude, he pretended to be his own implacable mother, and dug out the little cake of soap, everyone’s change of underthings, and after doubling the fire marched himself and the children round the boulder to the near-freezing gush of mountain spring.

“I can do something,” the boy screamed. “The fire underground, Papa.”

Children spoke wildly at bathtime, and you learned to harden your heart and pay no attention. He put hands on the boy to undress him for soap and water.

“Wait,” said the boy. “I can make the water hot. I can, Papa.”

He let the boy go and sat there on a rock beside the stream. Sucking her thumb, the baby leaned heavily against his side, as she did when upset. “What do you mean, buddy?”

“There’s . . . fire in the ground, Papa. Real deep down,” said the boy. “And there’s steamwater sitting on top of it.” His hands swooped and gestured to map these geologic interrelations. “I can ask that hot water to mix with this cold, so the spring comes up here feeling nice.”

“Can you, buddy? I never heard of such a thing. My own papa couldn’t. . . Well, go on; let’s see.” He watched the boy’s face go demented with effort, with concentration, and his heart sank realizing the son he thought he knew was in fact unknown to him; but it lifted up too, for the boy had genius. The candlelight of his dowsing gift blazed high into roaring flames. And, oh, how had he ever forgotten this?—how the twenty-times-brighter gift of his father at work on some feat used to cast illumination by which he himself could plumb depths, discerning subtleties ordinarily far beyond him? From some superheated pool a full subterranean mile down, the boy caused geothermic steam to vent upwards through intervening strata, and that terrifically hot water to temper the icy flow of the mountain stream warmer, and warmer still, until even bloodwarm—

“There, buddy,” he said. “That’s hot enough.”

White plumes of vapor were emerging from the cracked boulder’s underside with the cascade of water. He quickly got off his own coat and sweater and all the baby’s things and ducked her into the balmy waters. While his son stood there with face set, eyes squinched closed, body all a-tremble, he bathed his daughter.

Soaping her feet a second time, he tore open a fingertip on some errant shard of glass—but, no; for apparently this glass was somehow in his daughter’s foot, or on it. He asked the baby to sit down there in the water and let papa see that foot. It gave him a nasty scare, seeing what he saw. By the campfire’s dim filterings from the boulder’s farside, and by the guttering embers of sunset: the baby’s toenails had all gone black and strange-shaped. Then, gingerly pricking his thumb against the sharp downcurved points of them, he understood that his daughter wasn’t taken ill at all—indeed she was soon to transcend the question of illness altogether. The lusciously heated water delighted the baby and she wanted to linger and splash. But the fires of the boy’s gift were by now dwindling fast, and the spring beginning to cool. “Can’t play in the water, pumpkin.” He soaped her hair and rinsed it squeaky. “Bud’s working real hard to keep it warm for you. We gotta hurry.”

The boy said, “Papa . . .”

“It’s all right, buddy.” He lifted the baby out, towel-swathed. “Let go.”

The spring resumed its arctic flow, the steam dispersing at once. The boy took weary seat upon a rock nearby.

He had the baby dry and in her change of longjohns and fresh socks, all snugly bundled up and booted again, in about a minute flat.

“Well, buddy,” he said. “My dowsing’s nowhere near as good as yours. So we’ll just wait till morning”—what optimism, the apocalypse scheduled for tonight!—“and you can have a bath when you feel strong enough to call up more hot water. Okay?”

“Okay, Papa.”

“Hey, pumpkin—hey there—you come back here! What you running off for all by yourself, like you don’t know better than that? Mmhmm, you just sit down right here beside your brother. Buddy, you hold my baby’s hand, you hear?”

“Okay, Papa.”

Never in your life did you see somebody wash up quicker. Dunking himself, he yodeled once from sheer cruel iciness, and then kind of hopped from foot to foot while scrubbing himself with soap, hooting sadly both times he crouched to splash himself over with frigid rinsewater. It was a pathetic and undignified show—nevertheless hilarious to the children, who shrieked with laughter.

He led them back to the fire. The gusts were cutting northerly across the hilltop, and so he’d built the fire in the windshadow of a depression, and stacked up stones for a further break, but still the flames leaned and shuddered. The children tried to talk to him of such little events of the day past as the three of them would hash over nightly before bed—for instance, that poor little puppydog. “What you thinks gon’ happen to him, Papa?” But hunkered down before the fire, he only shook his head, teeth chattering while he pulled the comb through his hair. So the boy began telling the baby that same old made-up story, about the nice family with three little kids, who lived together in a tent set up beside a stream on a green field, where the kids could play all day in that good, sunny place. As usual, the baby wanted to know Was it warm? How warm was it? And the boy laid out for her again how wonderfully warm it was there, the sun shining everyday.

Sounds nice, he thought, but as always wished to object that people couldn’t just live out in the open like that. If ever people dared to gather in numbers on the planet’s surface, and especially when they began to cultivate, and build, and knock down trees, a perturbation intensified in the leylines. Kaiju felt such human activity as a worsening itch in need of a good hard scratch. The children knew perfectly well that people had to live underground in cavesteads; they’d visited plenty. But they spent most of their lives in the wind and rain and sunlight, campfollowing after the hero with their papa; and so naturally the great outdoors, and tents beside sweetwater streams, seemed to them pleasures anyone might know.

Warmed through and dry, he dressed. There was cutlery and the pan to put up. With no threat of rain, he decided against the tent, but got out the ground pads and bedrolls. After a word to the children—stay put, behave—he went to launder his and the baby’s soiled underthings.

Dr. Anwar abu Hassan, psychogenomicist: While we are contending, still, with the problem of human survivability vis-a-vis the existential alien threat, please, my dear colleagues, heed this warning: The Hero Project will have thought too small, and perforce must fail, if we discard all but the mechanistic solutions. I submit these questions for your consideration.

How does the martyr remain true, although put to the ultimate test? Whence comes the endurance of the last man standing, his unbroken will to survive? And what is that moral fiber investing the woman who runs always to the succor of other lives, never balking at risk to her own? Can a coward fight the kaiju—will a selfish woman, or a waffling, indecisive man? So, yes, then, to near-sonic flight, to static apnea in vacuo, to electrogenerative plaxes; and, yes, as well, to all the various exoskeletal enhancements: But as we engineer the superhuman corpus, again I say, let us not neglect the heart!

And should the spouse freely offer up the greatest sacrifice, then the hero’s biomagicite shall become charged with +100 mana: finally sufficient to induce a Volcanic Hotspot, whereby a perforation in the earth’s crust causes superheated magma to discharge explosively from the aesthenosphere, instantly destroying kaiju minores, and causing pleni and the maximus. . .

Spraying the sky the count of stars must go to billions, and the singular moon shone down as well, just a sliver waxing from new. From unlit lunar lands far from the bright crescent—still burning more than a century on—the wrecked mothership winked and flared with eerie phosphorescence. Yet apart from their fire on the hilltop, not another light could be seen over the whole dark and untenanted earth. Barring this one little camp, there was nothing to proclaim that apes had ever come down from the trees, or women once decked themselves in silk and diamonds, or men in times past waged war upon each other.

Lest the wind blow it away, he tangled up their laundry to dry in the boughs of a tree-canopy all knotty and interlaced as arthritic fingers. By the time he’d rejoined the children fireside and stretched out his hands to ease their cold-ache, the boy and baby’s talk had turned to chocolate.

He protested. “But if we make it tonight, there’s none for later. That’s it, all gone.”

The boy extended a litigious forefinger. “You said we’d have our chocolate when Mama fights the kaiju. You promised, Papa.”

No, he’d said “maybe,” for he never made promises. What on earth could he guarantee? “It’s the last little bit, y’all.” He could feel himself doing the ugly, tiresome thing, whereby you put off some pleasure best enjoyed now, for fear nothing good will come again. “Are you both sure?”

Yes!

So he put on water to boil and shaved the chocolate into their tin cup and, finishing the honey as well, sweetened it all up. Sitting between them with the cup, he parceled sips back and forth, but could as well have left the arbitrage to them. For sister and brother were best of friends tonight—angels of fairness—and this camp saw such smiles as none had in some time. What else do you hope to see? Only that your children be warm and well and glad. While they ran fingers round the inside of the cup, chasing dregs, the hero came down from the air and it was time.

Her wings folded invisibly into her carapace. And two mettes tall and more, she brought herself down kneeling to child’s-reach. “Bless me for the fight,” the hero said, and all the lightness left their camp, as if hawk, suddenly switching quarter, had blown the fire out. She picked up her scabbard from where it lay, pulled forth the sword, and beckoned the boy forward to kiss the flat of the blade.

“Papa,” said the boy.

“I’m here.” He set the baby back safely from the fire and took his son’s hand. “I’ll catch you, buddy. You won’t be hurt.” Last time, a bolt of lightning had struck down abruptly from the cloudless sky: charging the sword, but also felling the boy in passing. For a week he lay shivering and mumbling in some half-awake state, and thereafter for months was ill and weak.

They walked over to the hero at his son’s slow pace. Small folk know that unreckonable caprice flickers always through the heart of the great, and they know as you may not that so-called love—that the benevolent smile—may turn on the instant to wrath and ruination. Therefore the children never approached the hero with steps less wary than those of the old Israelites coming before Yahweh.

The boy looked up into his mother’s face: her stillness and regard, insectile or statuesque. Going to his knees beside his son, he whispered urgingly of the planetary importance of this single fight above all the rest that had ever gone before.

The boy said at last, “I hope you win, Mama,” and touched his puckered mouth to the sword even taller than himself. At once the pommel in the hero’s grip took light, brilliance spilling out between her fingers. The cold gray steel began turning to white-hot fire.

He snatched the boy back into his arms, tumbling over, and kicked desperately against the ground to get distance between them and that incinerative heat. Their coats smoked, hair crisped. “Take it away from us,” he shouted at the hero. “It’s too hot.” She got up holding the incandescent beam, and with each step farther seemed to bear away a furnace going full blast, its doors ajar, and then some vagrant midsummer’s day, and thereafter lesser and lesser warmth, until the cold of the boreal night closed rightfully about them again. At the summit’s edge the hero plunged the sword down into solid rock that sputtered and smoked like grease scorching in a pan much too hot. Leaving the bright blade bobbing in liquid stone, the hero came back and knelt as before. Then she bowed until her forehead rested on the ground, for the baby’s kiss upon her back.

Already the hero had wonderful wings, but to fight the maximus she’d need much better. As a rocky shelf, one thousand tons, falls off some mountainside and onto the unlucky walker below, just so did the kaiju hit, with as much force. And their alien effluents, whether spat, shat, or bloodlet, reduced the flesh of earthly creatures to runny sludge, a fertile dung for the world’s resurgent wilderness, feed for the forests that arose where every city fell. They couldn’t guess what shape, this time, the hero’s metamorphosis would take; she had no idea herself. Their only forewarning was that, whatever changes, they would be always perilous, always a shock.

“Pumpkin,” he said and squatted on his haunches. He reached out his arms and sucking her thumb the baby came to him. But when he urged her from his embrace and toward the hero, saying, “Give Mama a kiss, just like you did before,” the baby seized a fistful of his coat, nor wished to let it go. “Are you scared?” He stroked his daughter’s hair and smiled at her in complicity, allowing a little of his own fear to show. “I know; me too. But I need you to do this one little thing for me. Just for your papa: won’t you give Mama a kiss on her back?” (A kiss compelled held no power—nor did a loveless one.) His appeal shifted something in the child’s heart prior words had not, and her fear-blank eyes began to clarify. He said, “Please?” and the baby nodded. Toward the hero and away from him, he set her walking with gently propulsive hands.

The baby cast back one uncertain glance. At his nod, she bent to kiss the hero’s dorsal carapace. Fretfully his two hands hovered to grab his daughter back. No sooner did the baby’s lips alight than her mother’s torso—indeed limbs and whole self—returned to a more human shape, but not made of flesh and bone, rather become some kind of living marble.

At dead center of the hero’s smooth adamantine back, a thin-lipt mouth pursed open. From this hole erupted a long and rotary tentacle of spiked stone. With full decapitatory powers, this flailing rotor tore the air just centimets overhead where he cringed, pressing the baby and himself down, noses flat to earth. Hysterical from terror the baby fought to get free and run, while he shouted at the hero to go up into the air before she killed them both. When the hero had gone aloft, he let the baby go. Sister fled back to brother fireside where the children clung together like half-drowned co-survivors who had won to shore by grace of God alone, and through shark, shipwreck and storm, had not gone down with all the rest.

The hero could not lift much more than her own weight off the ground ordinarily, but now without effort she stooped from the sky and plucked him up into her arms. They hovered midair.

Her mouth by his ear to be heard above the roaring downdraught of that strange, singular wing: “Do you love me?”

“Yes.”

“Really?” Her lips were stone, and if not soft at all, entirely smooth. “I wonder. Love me enough to do anything? No matter what?”

“Whatever,” he said. Could she even feel his fingertips caress her face? “I’ll do anything.” She was hard to embrace, hard to come close to, being made of stone and so much bigger. “I love you.”

“To fight the maximus I need more than you ever gave me those other times. A whole lot more.”

He said, “How much?” and she said,

“How much can I get?”

Even then the hero waited on him to press his lips to hers.

If you’ve ever sucked and chewed on sugarcane, then you have the right image. Vigor, youth, beauty—something on that order—was wrung out of his body like water from a sodden rag, or sweetness chewed from sugarcane. But the agony made no difference to how readily he opened his mouth to the requited passion of her stony kiss. Suppose that some small sacrifice were asked of you as helpmeet and shieldbearer for the greatest hero who has ever lived, and suppose that in fulfilling your role she might deliver the homeworld. Would you do it? He would. She hardened to some much denser substance than living marble, and the arms about him caused his bones to creak and ache. Becoming a chevaux-de-frise of sharp diamond, her lips began to abrade his, drawing blood as the kiss went on.

As he grew feeble she held him closer, until desire and will notwithstanding, his body just could no longer. The hero held her lips one short millimet from his, begging, “Kiss me, kiss me,” and he tried, oh he did, always whispering back when she asked, “Do you love me?” “Yes, yes.”

Let him go. There was a gravelly clatter, rock-on-rock, as pebbles bounced off much harder stuff. Dimly he became aware that his children were screaming and throwing stones at their mother again. Let him go. I hate you. Had the kiss gone so far already? Not too far yet, he hoped. Someone must see the baby and boy tucked into their blankets tonight. And who but him would see them fed a hearty warming bowl in the morning? Such terror these thoughts inspired, he turned his face from hers. Released, he felt himself fall through the air, and hitting the ground saw rainbow-bright glitter and then darkness.

He woke to the baby and boy saying please don’t be dead. Prostrate on the ground he scrabbled there unable to turn faceup, without the strength even to lift his bloody mouth from the dirt. Get up, Papa, get up. Trying to say anything that might comfort the children, he made only the mewling of a kitten which alone of its litter tossed overboard had washed ashore undrowned. These efforts to speak and rise, strenuous to no effect, wearied him so that finally he lay for a long time in a quietude hardly distinguishable from that of a corpse on its bier. The children as well exhausted themselves, and their howls waned to grizzling; their yanking at his coat, to a small hand each stroking at his hair.

From faraway in the night there came at random either one vast crash or repeated booms, as if contending gods took and threw godlike blows. Once, a tremendous though faint echo of the hero’s anger resounded out of the distance, her voice pitched such that blood would have spurted from their ears, had he and the children heard that blast near at hand.

Time did what it does and by and by he felt himself drift from merest proximity to death, into slightly more distant purlieus. He splayed one withered claw under each shoulder and pushing against the ground—pushing as hard as he could—came somehow up to sit. Just the sweet Lord can say how he got up on his two stick legs and made it over to the fire where he sat again, or fell. They paced him there, a child at either side; patient, silent, good as gold.

“Buddy.”

“Papa?”

“Look in the pack there. Get me out the cut-ointment and a clean rag.”

The boy did so.

It wasn’t too bad dabbing the mud from his lips with the dampened rag, but smearing his lacerated mouth with the astringent ointment, he made noises that couldn’t be helped.

“All right,” he said once he’d caught his breath. “Put it up now, bud. Rag goes with the dirty ones.”

“Okay, Papa.”

Exactly once before had the baby seen the toll of this dire miracle, though she might not remember. Standing beside him, she groped with bemittened hands at his slack seamed cheeks, his thin white hair, as if only by touch could she grasp this onset of morbid age. He smiled at her and said, “Mama will turn me back like I was after she beats the kaiju.” If she does . . . “Don’t you worry, pumpkin.” But not even the voice was his own: higher, breathy, querulous. Her face crumpled, tears welling in her eyes, and none of his friendly words were reassuring to the baby.

The boy came back to sit, and lean, gingerly against him. Had you trotted the globe around and come home again, having despaired that day would ever arrive, so too might you breathe out as the boy did then, as long and slow, a shudder passing also through you. Many times he’d seen his papa go suddenly grey, though never before this stooped and frail, a spotted scalp visible like dirt and stone under a dusting of snow.

To distract the baby’s unhappiness, he said, “Want to hear something wonderful?” Brightness pulsed in the western dark, like the traffic of thunderbolts between stormclouds. “Let me tell you what happens sometimes, pumpkin.”

Between hiccups: “What, Papa?”

“Sometimes, when a hero’s got no son or daughter with the factor—that’s still alive, I mean—then it starts expressing in the other same-sex child. That happens a lot with heroes, actually. Your papa should’ve been on the lookout.” His tone was light, as at storytime, or telling jokes.

“What you mean, Papa?”

“I think, pumpkin,”—He kissed her teary cheek—“you’re gonna wake up just like Mama one day real soon. A hero. How about that?”

The baby reached a hand to his mouth as she’d done when almost newborn, still an infant, and pressed his lips together in a buttoning gesture. She let the hand fall and said, “No,” as decisively as when refusing despised foods. “I don’t want that.”

“Well,” he replied (as always when the sequel would come soon enough, nor be anything the children desired): “We’ll just have to see then, won’t we?”

“No, Papa!” The baby grabbed his coat and gave him a good shake—he so weak, she could do so. “Not see. I want to stay people.”

He tapped the little fist clinched in his coat and raised his brow at her. The baby turned him loose.

“Aww, don’t say that.” He shook his head sadly at her. “I really wish you wouldn’t, pumpkin. Mama is people too.”

“I mean, I mean.” The baby was still at that age when words tend to fail, and anger or tears have to fill the gap; her voice broke. “Like you and buddy.”

“Shh,” he said, “Okay, then,” as if she might not rise to Homo sapiens heroïcus on his mere say so. “All right, all right.” He rubbed circles on her back, she quieted, and the whole world tipped nauseously then. He heard himself shout.

“What’s that?” Terrified, the baby embraced him round the neck. “What is it, Papa?”

The ground beneath them was yawing as if the sea, the planet itself groaning deeply bass and agonized as some old sinner repentant on his deathbed. Abruptly, some twenty kiloms down the valley, a bright volcanic arm—a hand of fire—thrust up from the earth and made a credible grab for the moon, incandescent fingers raking across the sky. Brilliance snatched aside the black of night as though it were a flimsy curtain, the truth behind it high noon. They cried out, throwing up a hand or both as the dark cold valley was relit to midday green. The gushing white blaze spewed comets as a geyser does waterdroplets, these fiery blue offshoots waning yellow-orange-red as they fell to earth, as the sourcefire itself discolored: now dimming to ochre and yet still painful to see, even squinting through their fingers; now dimmer still, ruddy-black as the glowing crumbs of their own little campfire; now going out.

In that awful first glare, though, they glimpsed the kaiju maximus, its shape like some conjuration out of all the earth’s collective nightmare, reminiscent of a creature he’d seen once in a picturebook, some beast of the forgotten world—and called what? He couldn’t remember. Bright-lit, that apparition stuttered in stark chiaroscuro, wallowing in magma: horrific, bigger than could be put into words. The eruption, dwindling, and burnout endured only for a slow five-count, but it seemed as if hours passed. Nor did they look away even once, not one time blink, until the veils of starless insombriate night fell over that vision again. After this sign and wonder, the baby turned to him expectantly, to see whether Papa might interpret, but he could only shake his head.

The end of days—what is even this, to a child’s need for sleep? He looked to the boy and saw that his son’s eyes were closed, mouth softly open. To the baby he said, “Let me go tuck in buddy-man.” She released her hold round his neck and stood by watching while the boy was chivvied to his feet and, eyes closed, mumbling irritably, not really awake, was led over to his bedroll where, coaxed, he laid himself down, at once dead to the world again, while the boots were pulled off him, the covers tucked up around him. Heart rattling so in his chest you had to hope it could last the night through, he clambered to his feet after these exertions and saw that far hills were burning like victims in flight from some holocaust, their hair alight, their heads bewreathed in flames, all ablaze with forest fires. The wind began to taste of ash. He sought his spot by the fire again and the baby climbed into his lap. “Ain’t you sleepy at all yet, pumpkin?”

“No,” the baby said, and then: “Did you love Sofiya?”

“Yes.”

Again the earth moved as it should not, making unwonted sounds, but they were by then inured.

“And did Sofiya love you, Papa?”

“Well,” he began, and was by fortuity saved from a lie and the truth alike. “Oh, looky there!” He pointed into the darkness just over the marge of their campfirelight. “See who came up to join us.” From those respectful shadows doomed spaniel eyes watched them. For even after hope, it seemed, hopeful forms and strategies survived.

The baby said, “Puppy!” and jumped up. “Can we keep it, Papa? Like the family in the tent by the river? They got a dog.”

That ole mangy mutt, there? Of course not, child: it’s no telling what diseases that thing’s got! “All right,” he said, and sent the baby over to the hero’s pack.

“Well, you ain’t pulling, pumpkin,” he said. “How you fixing to get that knot loose if you don’t pull good? Pull, girl. There you go, there you go. See? Now loosen it up, reach in, and should be right there on top: the hambone left from supper, wrapped in one them ole-timey plastic bags.”

We believe that queers specifically need fantasies of the future to sustain us moving forward.

We need utopian dreams of worlds that could be, because, as Jose Muñoz argued, without fantasies we cede the not-yet-here to the imperatives of reproductive futurism.

We argue that we need fantasies not just of the future, but of the past.

We see the ways that so many of us relate to the past—the ways in which we are cut off from our communal and personal histories.

We strive to connect ourselves to and make sense of our histories even as we are denied them, even as they are papered over and re-sold to us as musicals or films where the heroes of Stonewall or the AIDS crisis were exclusively square-jawed white men.

We appreciate the immensity of this task, of reaching across historical divides, and we love those who enable this work.

We submit that alongside the work of reconnecting with and reimagining social narratives, we need fantasies of our own personal histories.

We think back to our childhoods and see children forced to grow up too fast, kids who learned to take care of other people’s feelings and bury their own.

We recollect a range of violence inflicted on us for transgressing gendered and sexual norms, violence inflicted on some of us before we even knew what we were being punished for.

We remember a baseline experience of casual ridicule that we assumed was normal and deserved, punctuated by physical and sexual assaults.

We recall most vividly memories of spending the night with children we called our friends and the violence, humiliation, and pain they inflicted upon us.

We realize that history cannot change for those hurt and confused children, but insist that things can be and must be different for us now.

We demand that the violence we suffered be witnessed and recognized, even as we strive to make sense of and recover from it.

We propose that it is exactly because sleepovers were the site of such intense trauma for so many of us that they can be occasions for productive fantasy.

We see our pasts as ripe for fantasy in the same way as our futures; just as imagining otherwise allows us to consider the steps that might lead to more desirable, just futures, it can also allow us to make sense of our trauma and to recognize our resilience.

We wonder what our childhoods could have looked like, not in the mode of tragic longing, but in that of playful fantasizing.

We invite you, in this spirit, to have sleepovers.

We want to braid and curl and play with each others’ hair; paint our nails and watch awful movies; play games and make popcorn and maybe make out; do tarot readings and talk about our crushes; order pizza and eat sitting around the box on the floor; play mixes for each other; talk and talk for hours until we finally fall asleep and then wake up early to make pancakes the next morning.

We are aware that these desires will be painted as embarrassingly normative, as evidence of our childishness, or as indication of our status of patriarchal dupes reaching for idealized childhood experiences.

We retort that embarrassment can be a fruitful experience, that too many of us were denied the opportunity to be childish earlier, and that further, fuck you.

We insist that we can transform a ritual of childhood anguish into one of affection, nurturance, and love.

We ask that you bring your sleeping bag, your PJs, and your histories.

We believe in the radical possibilities of sleepovers, babe.

The image I was always building to, from the moment I started thinking about the story, was the two young women kissing under the manchineel tree in the rain and remaining unharmed, the steam rising from their skin. Manchineels are real trees, and you really can be poisoned and even killed by standing under them while it rains through the toxic leaves. I discovered it while researching poisons for the story, and from then on it became the heart of it, that everything else circled around. That happens sometimes—a simple thing I find in my research unfolds into a fully-realized scene in an instant in my head. I had wanted to write a poisoner’s tale for awhile, but that tree made it something real and emotional.

I loved the mythology of the unicorn you built here: gross snuffling creatures with such utility—what prompted this narrative choice? Did you ever consider using the more conventional unicorn image?

I always saw unicorns so incredibly clearly. In my mind they look something like the mangalitsa pigs I saw while traveling in Hungary with Theodora Goss a few years ago, huge, bloated, squat creatures with matted gray fur so long it curls like a kid’s ponytail. They’re such extraordinarily ugly animals, and at the same time fascinatingly beautiful. Unicorns are so idealized, I loved the idea of making them simple livestock, not even particularly pretty. Unicorn horns are a vital part of medieval toxicology; I couldn’t possibly leave out the iconic goblet made of horn. But I wanted something completely different than anything I’d seen before, and I couldn’t stop thinking about those pigs. I thought I knew what a pig looked like! In the Western imagination, they’re always pink and cheerful and plump. Mangalitsas look like some primeval god of vengeful grandpa-pigs. The conflict between knowing what a pig looks like and being confronted with something that definitely is a pig, but doesn’t match your experience at all, is a fascinating place to play in. And that’s where I put my unicorns.

How did this story come together? Was there anything surprising about writing this one?

I had written something on Twitter several months previous about poisoning, about how it’s hardly ever used in high fantasy, but was used constantly in the actual medieval world. I ended up teasing out some ideas about how poisoning was and still is considered a kind of women’s work: a cowardly way of killing, something with less honor than a bold, masculine shot to the head or knife to the heart. Of course, it had to be framed that way. It’s all too terrifying otherwise. What difference does the strength of a knight or a king make when the servant girl can end the life of that powerful man without a single blow? If your wife, your slave, your discarded cousin can poison your porridge and very likely get away with it? Thus, poisoning must be discouraged. It must be seen as unacceptable, dishonorable, a thing that reflects poorly on the poisoner (more than other murderers, who could be seen as heroes) and thus, would be avoided by anyone who wanted to profit from their deed. Presto—only awful, nasty, deceitful women would ever poison anyone. No one wants to be like them.

Having teased all this out, I wanted to fictionalize it in some way. This happens to me a lot—I get some bee in my bonnet and the only way I can get it out is to make a story of the thing. I wanted to write something in which all that martial virtue that we so easily invest in high fantasy knights and warriors was instead invested in women and poisoners, a world in which poison was as accepted as physical combat, and had just as many rules and traditions built around it as any war. After all, is a poisoning contest really any less arbitrary than hundreds of men meeting on a specific field on a specific day to stand in a line and hit each other over the heads with long pieces of metal for the sake of a lord they’ve never met, or politics that will very likely not profit them personally? I don’t think it is.

The story’s history was compelling, and I loved the brutal practicality depicted in this world. It felt to me that you captured a real sense of one’s environment shaping attitudes. Putting the story part aside for a moment, what the last setting in story you’ve read that really caught your attention?

I recently read The Girl With All the Gifts, and was totally captivated by the setting of the first third of the novel, a kind of school/experimental facility for child zombies in which nothing I knew about schools or zombies seemed to apply. It was completely riveting and immersive—in some sense much more so than the “real” post-apocalyptic England the rest of the book explores.

What’s next for you?

My newest adult novel has just come out from Tor Books. It’s called Radiance, and it’s a Solar System-spanning decopunk thriller full of space whales and silent movies. I’m working on a superhero project and a new middle grade novel revolving around the Bronte children as well.

War is a dinner party.

My ladies and I have spent the dregs of summer making ready. We have hung garlands of pennyroyal and snowberries in the snug, familiar halls of Laburnum Castle, strained cheese as pure as ice for weeks in the caves and the kitchens, covered any gloomy stone with tapestries or stags’ heads with mistletoe braided through their antlers. We sent away south to the great markets of Mother-of-Millions for new silks and velvets and furs. We have brewed beer as red as October and as black as December, boiled every growing thing down to jams and pickles and jellies, and set aside the best of the young wines and the old brandies. Nor are we proud: I myself scoured the stables and the troughs for all the strange horses to come. When no one could see me, I buried my face in fresh straw just for the heavy gold scent of it. I’ve fought for my husband many times, but each time it is new all over again. The smell of the hay like candied earth, with its bitter ribbons of ergot laced through—that is the smell of my youth, almost gone now, but still knotted to the ends of my hair, the line of my shoulders. When I polish the silver candelabras, I still feel half a child, sitting splay-legged on the floor, playing with my mother’s scorpions, until the happy evening drew down.

I am the picture of honor. I am the Lily of my House. When last the king came to Laburnum, he told his surly queen: You see, my plum? That is a woman. Lady Cassava looks as though she has grown out of the very stones of this hall. She looked at me with interested eyes, and we had much to discuss later when quieter hours came. This is how I serve my husband’s ambitions and mine: with the points of my vermilion sleeves, stitched with thread of white and violet and tiny milkstones with hearts of green ice. With the net of gold and chalcanthite crystals catching up my hair, jewels from our own stingy mountains, so blue they seem to burn. With the great black pots of the kitchens below my feet, sizzling and hissing like a heart about to burst.

It took nine great, burly men to roll the ancient feasting table out of the cellars, its legs as thick as wine barrels and carved with the symbols of their house: the unicorn passant and the wild poppy. They were kings once, Lord Calabar’s people. Kings long ago when the world was full of swords, kings in castles of bone, with wives of gold—so they all say. When he sent his man to the Floregilium to ask for me, the Abbess told me to be grateful—not for his fortune (of which there is a castle, half a river, a village and farms, and several chests of pearls fished out of an ocean I shall never see) but for his blood. My children stand near enough from the throne to see its gleam, but they will never have to polish it.

My children. I was never a prodigy in the marriage bed, but what a workhorse my belly turned out to be! Nine souls I gave to the coffers of House Calabar. Five sons and four daughters, and not a one of them dull or stupid. But the dark is a hungry thing. I lost two boys to plague and a girl to the scrape of a rusted hinge. Six left. My lucky sixpence. While I press lemon oil into the wood of the great table with rags that once were gowns, four of my sweethearts giggle and dart through the forest of legs—men, tables, chairs. The youngest of my black-eyed darlings, Mayapple, hurls herself across the silver-and-beryl checked floor and into my arms, saying:

“Mummy, Mummy, what shall I wear to the war tonight?”

She has been at my garden, though she knows better than to explore alone. I brush wisteria pollen from my daughter’s dark hair while she tells me all her troubles. “I want to wear my blue silk frock with the emeralds round the collar, but Dittany says it’s too plain for battle and I shall look like a frog and shame us.”

“You will wear vermillion and white, just as we all will, my little lionfish, for when the king comes we must all wear the colors of our houses so he can remember all our names. But lucky for you, your white will be ermine and your vermillion will be rubies and you will look nothing at all like a frog.”

Passiflora, almost a woman herself, as righteous and hard as an antler, straightens her skirts as though she has not been playing at tumble and chase all morning. She looks nothing like me—her hair as red as venom, her eyes the pale blue of moonlit mushrooms. But she will be our fortune, for I have seen no better student of the wifely arts in all my hours. “We oughtn’t to wear ermine,” she sniffs. “Only the king and the queen can, and the deans of the Floregilium, but only at midwinter. Though why a weasel’s skin should signify a king is beyond my mind.”

My oldest boy, Narcissus, nobly touches his breast with one hand while he pinches his sister savagely with the other and quotes from the articles of peerage. “‘The House of Calabar may wear a collar of ermine not wider than one and one half inches, in acknowledgement of their honorable descent from Muscanine, the Gardener Queen, who set the world to growing.’”

But Passiflora knows this. This is how she tests her siblings and teaches them, by putting herself in the wrong over and over. No child can help correcting his sister. They fall over themselves to tell her how stupid she is, and she smiles to herself because they do not think there’s a lesson in it.

Dittany, my sullen, sour beauty, frowns, which means she wants something. She was born frowning and will die frowning and through all the years between (may they be long) she will scowl at every person until they bend to her will. A girl who never smiles has such power—what men will do to turn up but one corner of her mouth! She already wears her red war-gown and her circlet of cinnabar poppies. They bring out the color in her grimace.

“Mother,” she glowers, “may I milk the unicorns for the feast?”

My daughter and I fetch knives and buckets and descend the stairs into the underworld beneath our home. Laburnum Castle is a mushroom lying only half above ground. Her lacy, lovely parts reach up toward the sun, but the better part of her dark body stretches out through the seastone caverns below, vast rooms and chambers and vaults with ceilings more lovely than any painted chapel in Mother-of-Millions, shot through with frescoes and motifs of copper and quartz and sapphire and opal. Down here, the real work of war clangs and thuds and corkscrews toward tonight. Smells as rich as brocade hang in the kitchens like banners, knives flash out of the mist and the shadows.

I have chosen the menu of our war as carefully as the stones in my hair. All my art has bent upon it. I chose the wines for their color—nearly black, thick and bitter and sharp. I baked the bread to be as sweet as the pudding. The vital thing, as any wife can tell you, is spice. Each dish must taste vibrant, strong, vicious with flavor. Under my eaves they will dine on curried doves, black pepper and peacock marrow soup, blancmange drunk with clove and fiery sumac, sealmeat and fennel pies swimming in garlic and apricots, roast suckling lion in a sauce of brandy, ginger, and pink chilis, and pomegranate cakes soaked in claret.

I am the perfect hostess. I have poisoned it all.

This is how I serve my husband, my children, my king, my house: with soup and wine and doves drowned in orange spices. With wine so dark and strong any breath of oleander would vanish in it. With the quills of sunless fish and liqueurs of wasps and serpents hung up from my rafters like bunches of lavender in the fall.

It’s many years now since a man of position would consider taking a wife who was not a skilled poisoner. They come to the Floregilium as to an orphanage and ask not after the most beautiful, nor the sweetest voice, nor the most virtuous, nor the mildest, but the most deadly. All promising young ladies journey to Brugmansia, where the sea is warm, to receive their education. I remember it more clearly than words spoken but an hour ago—the hundred towers and hundred bridges and hundred gates of the Floregilium, a school and a city and a test, mother to all maidens.

I passed beneath the Lily Gate when I was but seven—an archway so twisted with flowers no stone peeked through. Daffodils and hyacinths and columbines, foxglove and moonflower, poppy and peony, each one gorgeous and full, each one brilliant and graceful, each one capable of killing a man with root or bulb of leaf or petal. Another child ran on ahead of me. Her hair was longer than mine, and a better shade of black. Hers had blue inside it, flashing like crystals dissolving in a glass of wine. Her laugh was merrier than mine, her eyes a prettier space apart, her height far more promising. Between the two of us, the only advantage I ever had was a richer father. She had a nice enough name, nice enough to hide a pit of debt.

Once my mother left me to explore her own girlish memories, I followed that other child for an hour, guiltily, longingly, sometimes angrily. Finally, I resolved to give it up, to let her be better than I was if she insisted on it. I raised my arm to lean against a brilliant blue wall and rest—and she appeared as though she had been following me, seizing my hand with the strength of my own father, her grey eyes forbidding.

“Don’t,” she said.

Don’t rest? Don’t stop?

“It’s chalcanthite. Rub up against it long enough and it will stop your blood.”

Her name was Yew. She would be the Horn of her House, as I am the Lily of mine. The Floregilium separates girls into Lilies—those who will boil up death in a sealmeat pie, and Horns—those who will send it fleeing with an emerald knife. The Lily can kill in a hundred thousand fascinating ways, root, leaf, flower, pollen, seed. I can brew a tea of lily that will leave a man breathing and laughing, not knowing in the least that he is poisoned, until he dies choking on disappointment at sixty-seven. The Horn of a unicorn can turn a cup of wine so corrupted it boils and slithers into honey. We spend our childhoods in a dance of sourness and sweetness.

Everything in Floregilium is a beautiful murder waiting to unfold. The towers and bridges sparkle ultramarine, fuchsia, silvery, seething green, and should a careless girl trail her fingers along the stones, her skin will blister black. The river teems with venomous, striped fish that take two hours to prepare so that they taste of salt and fresh butter and do not burn out the throat, and three hours to prepare so that they will not strangle the eater until she has gone merrily back to her room and put out her candles. Every meal is an examination, every country walk a trial. No more joyful place exists in all the world. I can still feel the summer rain falling through the hot green flowers of the manchineel tree in the north orchard, that twisted, gnomish thing, soaking up the drops, corrupting the water of heaven, and flinging it onto my arms, hissing, hopping, blistering like love.

It was there, under the sun and moon of the Floregilium, that I read tales of knights and archers, of the days when we fought with swords, with axes and shields, with armor beaten out of steel and grief. Poison was thought cowardice, a woman’s weapon, without honor. I wept. I was seven. It seemed absurd to me, absurd and wasteful and unhappy, for all those thousands to die so that two men could sort out who had the right to shit on what scrap of grass. I shook in the moonlight. I looked out into the Agarica where girls with silvery hair tended fields of mushrooms that wanted harvesting by the half-moon for greatest potency. I imagined peasant boys dying in the frost with nothing in their bellies and no embrace from the lord who sent them to hit some other boy on the head until the lord turned into a king. I felt such loneliness—and such relief, that I lived in a more sensible time, when blood on the frost had been seen for obscenity it was.

I said a prayer every night, as every girl in the Floregilium did, to Muscanine, the Gardener Queen, who took her throne on the back of a larkspur blossom and never looked back. Muscanine had no royal blood at all. She was an apothecary’s daughter. After the Whistling Plague, such things mattered less. Half of every house, stone or mud or marble, died gasping, their throats closing up so only whines and whistles escaped, and when those awful pipes finally ceased, the low and the middling felt no inclination to start dying all over again so that the lordly could put their names on the ruins of the world. Muscanine could read and write. She drew up new articles of war and when the great and the high would not sign it, they began to choke at their suppers, wheeze at their breakfasts, fall like sudden sighs halfway to their beds. The mind sharpens wonderfully when you cannot trust your tea. And after all, why not? What did arms and strength and the best of all blades matter when the wretched maid could clean a house of heirs in a fortnight?

War must civilize itself, wrote Muscanine long ago. So say all sensible souls. There can be no end to conflict between earthly powers, but the use of humble arms to settle disputes of rich men makes rich men frivolous in their exercise of war. Without danger to their own persons, no Lord fears to declare battle over the least slight—and why should he? He risks only a little coin and face while we risk all but benefit nothing in victory. There exists in this sphere no single person who does not admit to this injustice. Therefore, we, the humble arms, will no longer consent to a world built upon, around, and out of an immoral seed.

The rules of war are simple: should Lord Ambition and the Earl of Avarice find themselves in dispute, they shall agree upon a castle or stronghold belonging to neither of them and present themselves there on a mutually agreeable date. They shall break bread together and whoever lives longest wins. The host bends all their wisdom upon vast and varied poisons while the households of Lord Ambition and the Earl bend all their intellect upon healing and the purifying of any wicked substance. And because poisons were once a woman’s work—in the early days no knight could tell a nightshade from a dandelion—it became quickly necessary to wed a murderess of high skill.

Of course, Muscanine’s civilized rules have bent and rusted with age. No Lord of any means would sit at the martial table himself nowadays—he hires a proxy to choke or swallow in his stead. But there is still some justice in the arrangement—no one sells themselves to battle cheaply. A family may lift itself up considerably on such a fortune as Lord Ambition will pay. No longer do two or three men sit down simply to their meal of honor. Many come to watch the feast of war, whole households, the king himself. There is much sport in it. Great numbers of noblemen seat their proxies in order to declare loyalties and tilt the odds in favor of victory, for surely someone, of all those brawny men, can stomach a silly flower or two.

“But think how marvelous it must have looked,” Yew said to me once, lying on my bed surrounded by books like a ribbonmark. “All the banners flying, and the sun on their swords, and the horses with armor so fine even a beast would be proud. Think of the drums and the trumpets and the cries in the dawn.”

“I do think of all that, and it sounds ghastly. At least now, everyone gets a good meal out of the business. It’s no braver or wiser or stranger to gather a thousand friends and meet another thousand in a field and whack on each other with knives all day. And there are still banners. My father’s banners are beautiful. They have a manticore on them, in a ring of oleander. I’ll show you someday.”

But Yew already knew what my father’s banners looked like. She stamped our manticore onto a bezoar for me the day we parted. The clay of the Floregilium mixed with a hundred spices and passed through the gullet of a lion. At least, she said it was a lion.

Soon it will be time to send Dittany and Mayapple. Passiflora will return there when the war is done—she would not miss a chance for practical experience.

Lord Calabar came to the Floregilium when I was a maid of seventeen. Yew’s husband came not long after, from far-off Mithridatium, so that the world could be certain we would never see each other again. They came through the Horn Gate, a passage of unicorn horns braided as elegantly as if they were the strands of a girl’s hair. He was entitled by his blood to any wife he could convince—lesser nobles may only meet the diffident students, the competent but uninspired, the gentle and the kind who might have enough knowledge to fight, but a weak stomach. They always look so startled when they come a-briding. They come from their castles and holdfasts imagining fierce-jawed maidens with eyes that flash like mercury and hair like rivers of blood, girls like the flowers they boiled into noble deaths, tall and bright and fatal. And they find us wearing leather gloves with stiff cuffs at the elbows, boots to the thigh, and masks of hide and copper and glass that turn our faces into those of wyrms and deepwater fish. But how else to survive in a place where the walls are built of venom, the river longs to kill, and any idle perfume might end a schoolgirl’s joke before the punchline? To me those masks are still more lovely than anything a queen might make of rouge and charcoal. I will admit that when I feel afraid, I take mine from beneath my bed and wear it until my heart is whole.

I suppose I always knew someone would come into the vicious garden of my happiness and drag me away from it. What did I learn the uses of mandrake for if not to marry, to fight, to win? I did not want him. He was handsome enough, I suppose. His waist tapered nicely; his shoulders did not slump. His grandfathers had never lost their hair even on their deathbeds. But I was sufficient. I and Floregilium and the manchineel tree and my Yew swimming in the river as though nothing could hurt her, because nothing could. He said I could call him Henry. I showed him my face.

“Mummy, the unicorns are miserable today,” Dittany frowns, and my memory bursts into a rain of green flowers.

I have never liked unicorns. I have met wolves with better dispositions. I have seen paintings of them from nations where they do not thrive—tall, pale, sorrowfully noble creatures holding the wisdom of eternity as a bit in their muzzles. I understand the desire to make them so. I, too, like things to match. If something is useful, it ought to be beautiful. And yet, the world persists.

Unicorns mill around my daughter’s legs, snorting and snuffling at her hands, certain she has brought them the half-rotted meat and flat beer they love best. Unicorns are the size of boars, round of belly and stubby of leg, covered in long, curly grey fur that matts viciously in the damp and smells of wet books. Their long, canny faces are something like horses, yes, but also something like dogs, and their teeth have something of the shark about them. And in the center, that short, gnarled nub of bone, as pure and white as the soul of a saint. Dittany opens her sack and tosses out greying lamb rinds, half-hardened cow’s ears. She pours out leftover porter into their trough. The beasts gurgle and trill with delight, gobbling their treasure, snapping at each other to establish and reinforce their shaggy social order, the unicorn king and his several queens and their kingdom of offal.

“Why do they do it?” Dittany frowns. “Why do they shovel in all that food when they know they could die?”

A unicorn looks up at me with red, rheumy eyes and wheezes. “Why did men go running into battle once upon a time, when they knew they might die? They believe their shield is stronger than the other fellow’s sword. They believe their Horn is stronger than the other fellow’s Lily. They believe that when they put their charmed knives into the pies, they will shiver and turn red and take all the poison into the blade. They believe their toadstones have the might of gods.”

“But nobody is stronger than you, are they, Mum?”

“Nobody, my darling.”

He said I could call him Henry. He courted me with a shaker of powdered sapphires from a city where elephants are as common as cats. A dash of blue like so much salt would make any seething feast wholesome again. Well, unless some clever Lily has used moonseeds, or orellanine, or unicorn milk, or the venom of a certain frog who lives in the library and is called Phillip. Besides, emerald is better than sapphire. But I let him think his jewels could buy life from death’s hand. It is a nice thing to think. Like those beautiful unicorns glowing softly in silver thread.

I watch my daughter pull at the udders of our unicorns, squeezing their sweaty milk into a steel pail, for it would sizzle through wood or even bronze as easily as rain through leaves. She is deft and clever with her hands, my frowning girl, the mares barely complain. When I milk them, they bite and howl. The dun sky opens up into bands like pale ribs, showing a golden heart beating away at dusk. Henry Calabar kisses me when I am seventeen and swears my lips are poison from which he will never recover, and his daughter feeds a unicorn a marrow bone, and his son calls down from the ramparts that the king is coming, he is coming, hurry, hurry, and under all this I see only Yew, stealing into my room on that last night in the country of being young, drawing me a bath in the great copper tub, a bath swirling with emerald dust, with green and shimmer. We climbed in, dunking our heads, covering each other with the strangely milky smell of emeralds, clotting our black hair with glittering sand. Yew took my hand and we ran out together into the night, through the quiet streets of the Floregilium, under the bridges and over the water until we came to the manchineel tree in the north orchards, and she held me tight to her beneath its vicious flowers until the storm came, and when the storm came we kissed for the last time as the rain fell through those green flowers and hissed on our skin, vanishing into emerald steam, we kissed and did not burn.

They call him the Hyacinth King and he loves the name. He got it when he was young and ambitious and his wife won the Third Sons’ War for him before she had their first child. Hyacinth roots can look so much like potatoes. They come into the hall without grandeur, for we are friends, or friendly enough. I have always had a care to be pregnant when the king came calling, for he has let it be known he enjoys my company, and it takes quite a belly to put him off. But not this time, nor any other to come. He kisses the children one by one, and then me. It is too long a kiss but Henry and I tolerate a great deal from people who have not gotten sick of us after a decade or two. The queen, tall and grand, takes my hand and asks after the curried doves, the wine, the mustard pots. Her eyes shine. Two fresh hyacinths pin her cloak to her dress.

“I miss it,” she confesses. “No one wants to fight me anymore. Sometimes I poison the hounds out of boredom. But then I serve them their breakfast in unicorn skulls and they slobber and yap on through another year or nine. Come, tell me what’s in the soup course. I have heard you’ve a new way of boiling crab’s eyes to mimic the Whistling Plague. That’s how you killed Lord Vervain’s lad, isn’t it?”

“You flatter me. That was so long ago, I hardly remember,” I tell her.

She and her husband take their seats above the field of war—our dining hall, sparkling with fire and finery like wet morning grass. They call for bread and wine—the usual kind, safe as yeast. The proxies arrive with trumpets and drums. No different, Yew, I think. My blood prickles at the sound. She is coming. She will come. My castle fills with peasant faces—faces scrubbed and perfumed as they have never been before. Each man standing in for his Lord wears his Lord’s own finery. They come in velvet and silk, in lace and furs, with circlets on their heads and rings on their fingers, with sigils embroidered on their chests and curls set in their hair. And each of them looks as elegant and lordly as anyone born to it. All that has ever stood between a duke and a drudge is a bath. She is coming. She will come. The nobles in the stalls sit high above their mirrors at the table, echoes and twins and stutters. It is a feasting hall that looks more like an operating theater with each passing war.

Henry sits beside his king. We are only the castle agreed upon—we take no part. The Hyacinth King has put up a merchant’s son in his place—the boy looks strong, his chest like the prow of a ship. But it’s only vanity. I can take the thickness from his flesh as fast as that of a thin man. More and more come singing through the gates. The Hyacinth King wishes to take back his ancestral lands in the east, and the lands do not consider themselves to be ancestral. It is not a small war, this time. I have waited for this war. I have wanted it. I have hoped. Perhaps I have whispered to the Hyacinth King when he looked tenderly at me that those foreign lords have no right to his wheat or his wine. Perhaps I have sighed to my husband that if only the country were not so divided we would not have to milk our own unicorns in our one castle. I would not admit to such quiet talk. I have slept only to fight this battle on dreaming grounds, with dreaming knives.

Mithridatium is in the east. She is coming. She will come.

And then she steps through the archway and into my home—my Yew, my emerald dust, my manchineel tree, my burning rain. Her eyes find mine in a moment. We have done this many times. She wears white and pale blue stitched with silver—healing colors, pure colors, colors that could never harm. She is a candle with a blue flame. As she always did, she looks like me drawn by a better hand, a kinder hand. She hardly looks older than my first daughter would have been, had she lived. Perhaps living waist-deep in gentling herbs is better than my bed of wicked roots. Her children beg mutely for her attention with their bright eyes—three boys, and how strange her face looks on boys! She puts her hands on their shoulders. I reach out for Dittany and Mayapple, Passiflora and Narcissus. Yes, these are mine. I have done this with my years, among the rest. Her husband takes her hand with the same gestures as Henry might. He begs for nothing mutely with his bright eyes. They are not bad men. But they are not us.

I may not speak to her. The war has already begun the moment she and I rest our bones in our tall chairs. The moment the dinner bell sounds. Neither of us may rise or touch any further thing—all I can do and have done is complete and I am not allowed more. Afterward, we will not be permitted to talk—what if some soft-hearted Horn gave away her best secrets to a Lily? The game would be spoilt, the next war decided between two women’s unguarded lips. It would not do. So we sit, our posture perfect, with death between us.

The ladies will bring the peacock soup, laced with belladonna and serpent’s milk, and the men (and lady, some poor impoverished lord has sent his own unhappy daughter to be his proxy, and I can hardly look at her for pity) of Mithridatium, of the country of Yew, will stir it with spoons carved from the bones of a white stag, and turn it sweet—perhaps. They will tuck toadstones and bezoars into the meat of the curried doves and cover the blancmange with emerald dust like so much green salt. They will smother the suckling lion in pennyroyal blossoms and betony leaves. They will drink my wine from her cups of unicorn horn. They will sauce the pudding with vervain. And each time a course is served, I will touch her. My spices and her talismans. My stews and her drops of saints’ blood like rain. My wine and her horn. My milk and her emeralds. Half the world will die between us, but we will swim in each other and no one will see.

The first soldier turns violet and shakes himself apart into his plate of doves and twenty years ago Yew kisses emeralds from my mouth under the manchineel tree while the brutal rain hisses away into air.

I spent my childhood and adolescence yearning for a world beyond the one I was born into. Yearning for a world where magic was real—where, if a person knew the right words or the right gestures, they could transform the world, or at least their own place in the world. Fantasy is exactly that: a way into another reality (not just an escape from this one). And in those other realities, the configurations of this world are revealed to be exactly what they are: which is to say, it’s all made up. At least in terms of the social orders we live within.

I yearned for these other worlds where magic empowered people who understood it because I wanted to change my world, or my place in it. I wanted to either be more visible, seen for who I am in my entirety and respected for it, because magic-wielder, right? Or else I wanted to be even more invisible, protected from a world that would attempt to damage or destroy me if others knew I was unlike them. That I was other. That I was queer.

Magic is real, but it doesn’t really look the way it does in fantasy stories. It’s performed by the art of story itself, of convincing people of something that isn’t necessarily true when it’s uttered by the magician, but becomes true when others receive those words and believe in them.

Lately, the world has had a lot of magic changing it. The stories queer people have been telling for years now, in intimate interactions with other individuals and in public displays on the internet or in courtrooms, have transformed the world by making a space for themselves within it that demands the respect we have always deserved but never received. Ten years ago I would have said the entire idea of gay marriage being legalized in the United States was a complete and utter fantasy. Now that fantasy is reality. And we all—queer or otherwise—benefit from this act of social metamorphosis. The world has gotten bigger and better for once, instead of smaller and meaner.

I still wish that magic was real in the way that I wished for it as a young person, but I’m also happy to know that it exists in this more seemingly mundane way. I no longer desire to be invisible in order to protect myself. These days, I feel seen, recognized and respected for who I am in my entirety, and not because I’m a magic-wielder so much as because I—like anyone—am seen as equally human (at least by a majority, at this point).

The stories in this volume stretch the boundaries of our world, and reach into the unknown. That’s the thing that has fascinated me about fantasy stories since I was a child. The storytellers behind these stories have different approaches, and are all in different phases of their careers. But all of them share one thing in common: they are magicians and enchanters of the highest order, and the worlds they create before our very eyes here will make the world we inhabit bigger and better.

Liz Gorinsky, Reprints Editor

One thing I hoped to accomplish by working on Queers Destroy Fantasy! was to make the previously occluded landscape of queerness in fantastical literature a bit more visible.

For those of us who are lucky enough to have queer communities, the notion that we can be reduced to stereotypes, let alone those codified by mainstream heteronormative society, is laughable: we know there is as much variation—in personal histories, gender presentation, relationship styles, intersectional identities, how we fall for each other and get it on with each other—under the QUILTBAG umbrella as there ever was outside of it. Probably more, because the kind of scripts cis and het people can use to simplify these decisions are rarely tenable for us.

But one thing that does seem universal is a history of hunting for glimmers of queerness in culture. This is necessary, because with a few exceptions, like the fine work of GBLT+ publishers, we daren’t hope to see ourselves as the dominant figure in any narrative. So we search the margins for a hint of a gay character in a secondary storyline (even if we know their lover will probably get killed), or read historical epistolary exchanges looking for queer subtext, or wonder if a particular phrasing is a marker of trans or non-binary characters, or read between the lines of author bios wondering if “partner” means what we hope it does. If you grew up when I did, somewhere in the Gen Y-to-Millennial morass, you probably didn’t find much of it. The speculative fiction world might be more welcoming than others, but it’s still rare to see more than one story with queer themes in an anthology or magazine issue (or a year of them).

The best part of reading reprints for QDF, therefore, was discovering that those scattered exceptions can build up to quite a stunning field when considered in aggregate. Before I began, I wouldn’t have predicted that I could start listing queer authors I wanted to contact and hit seventy-five names without much trouble, or that many of them would lead me to others: to friends, or anthologies they’d worked on, or stories they themselves loved.* In the end, I looked at well over a hundred stories by brilliant queer authors, far more than I could ever hope to fit in these pages, emphatically proving that not only are we here, we’ve been around for decades. And I found that one of the most exciting things about assembling sufficient quantities of stories by queers is that that queerness no longer needs to be exceptionalized: These writers are not trying to make a point about Diversity or Identity Politics, they are simply portraying characters who look or live like them and the people they know, but just happen to inhabit a magical universe.

I hope QDF will eventually be one of many places to discover queer fantasy, especially because—due to the aforementioned variation within our community—we couldn’t possibly represent every queer person, or even a small fraction of them, in one volume. And once the world understands the wealth of writers and stories emerging from queer communities, perhaps younger generations of queers won’t have to wonder where they are in the narrative, because they’ll see themselves there every day.

* In this camp, special thanks to QDF’s own Matt Cheney, who directed me to Austin Bunn’s “Ledge.”

Matthew Cheney, Nonfiction Editor

The essay is itself a queer form because, like queerness, the essay is amorphous, rhizomatic, mercurial. It is an attempt, and like any attempt, the essay courts failure, a noble queer art. Leave usefulness, respectability, and the soul-crushing quest for normality to the writers of memos for bankers. The queer and the essay are forms for the rest of us.

Fantasy is queer. It imagines the world otherwise, and otherwise is where queerness dwells. We, the queer, delight in our strange tales.

Of course, queers don’t really “destroy fantasy.” (How can you destroy your breath of life?) But we do destroy certain fantasies. We destroy the fantasy of compulsory heterosexuality. We destroy the oppression of the closet, that monstrous cabinet of enforced incuriosity. We destroy the fantasy that everybody is a cisgendered/missionary-position/lifelong-monogamous/heterosexual-until-otherwise-proven-fabulous person. So yes, we destroy. Those fantasies deserve their ignominious deaths.

(On page 110 of The Queer Art of Failure, Judith Halberstam urges: “ . . . we must be willing to turn away from the comfort zone of polite exchange in order to embrace a truly political negativity, one that promises, this time, to fail, to make a mess, to fuck shit up, to be loud, unruly, impolite, to breed resentment, to bash back, to speak up and out, to disrupt, assassinate, shock, and annihilate.”)

The passion to destroy queerly can be a creative passion, too.

I grew up in rural America when Ronald Reagan was President and AIDS was thought to be a death sentence. My father used the word “queeries” to talk about us, and the contempt and hatred dripped from his mouth, and he didn’t know we (both my mother and myself) had silently invaded his heteronormative world—or maybe he suspected, and that’s why the hatred was so sharp, so desperate, so (ultimately) pathetic. Families breed their own traitors.

I remember watching the news at night and seeing brave ACT UP activists getting arrested, and I especially remember the weird and wonderful people of Queer Nation who screamed out through my family’s TV screen: We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it! They saved my life. They gave me my self.

And here we are now, decades later. We’re here and queer and we can do more than get used to it: we can enjoy it.

Here we are with our stuff that can only be labeled by what it is not: non-fiction. These pieces are not entirely fiction in the way I am not entirely heterosexual, and I love them for it.

My task as an editor was to seek out a few writers of my choice. I chose by thinking about people I wanted to read. I asked around, and the writers gathered here are the ones who answered my call. I gave them no guidelines. I said: Play around. Have fun. Be queer. Be you. I said: Don’t worry about form or style or propriety. Find something that fits you. Go long, go short, go wherever. Fantasize queerly and queerify fantastically.

The results are just a tiny sample of possibilities, a hint of a taste of a dream of a hope of a new world that has been here as long as we have, which is to say forever, because we’re here and we’re queer and we always have been and always will be until the oceans dry up and the air disappears and the sun turns off and our imaginations, filled to overflowing with glorious fantasies and failures, disperse into stardust.