The Killing Moon

  Rabbaneh stopped here, inclining his head to Sunandi. “I’ll leave you in his hands.” She nodded, and he disappeared into the corridors’ shadows.

  Silence fell, remarkably comforting. She felt herself relax, which seemed strange as she thought of the chaos and despair beyond the Hetawa’s walls. Perhaps that, too, was Hananja’s doing.

  “I’m surprised to see you here, little killer,” Sunandi said at last. “Have you been out there? Gujaareh’s streets are anything but peaceful tonight.”

  It was difficult to tell from the angle and with only the Moon’s illumination in the Garden, but she thought he smiled. “We’ll go out soon, the three of us,” he said. “The disruption in the city is terrible, true, but it can’t be helped. Certain matters have kept us in the Hetawa these past few days.”

  “Such as?”

  “Finding the Prince’s co-conspirators. The Superior was dealt with by my brothers several fourdays ago, but there were others who abetted him.” He sighed. “You were right, Speaker. The Hetawa had indeed become riddled with corruption. But we’re working hard to make it clean again.”

  Knowing what that meant, Sunandi cleared her throat uncomfortably. “The Protectorate may want a few of the criminals for public trials. That’s not the Gujaareen way, I know… but some things must change now.”

  “I understand. I will speak with my brothers. We’ll keep a few alive for you.”

  She hesitated. “The Protectors will no doubt try to change you, too. You realize that?”

  His smile returned. “Yes, I know.”

  He might have been speaking of the wash for all the concern in his voice. Shaking her head in consternation, Sunandi took a seat on a nearby boulder. Nijiri stirred from his meditative pose to face her.

  For a moment Sunandi barely recognized him. He hadn’t changed physically, but then it had been barely a month since she’d last seen him. There was nevertheless a new maturity in his features now. The weathering of experience, perhaps—or more likely a lessening of his youth. Gone was the frustrated restlessness that had been omnipresent in him before; gone too was the anger that had always churned beneath his calm facade. Now he was a Gatherer. Now there was only peace. But through the peace she could see sorrow, too.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  He gazed at her for a long moment, then did.

  By the time he finished the tale of Ehiru’s death, she was weeping. He had spoken quietly, without embellishment or artifice—but there was no need for more. Even the simplest words conveyed the agony of Ehiru’s final descent into madness, and the utter loss that the boy now felt. But to her surprise, Nijiri smiled when the tale was done.

  “You grieve for him?” he asked.

  For Ehiru. For Nijiri. For Gujaareh, which would never be the same. For herself. “Yes,” Sunandi replied.

  He got to his feet and crossed the sands to stand before her. “Then share this,” he said, and cupped her cheek with his hand.

  In that moment her body—her mind, her whole being—was suffused with a joy more powerful than anything words could capture. It warmed away the lingering scars of the Reaping and Lin’s death, filled her with hope almost too keen to bear, blazed like a thousand suns in the core of her soul. Tears were not enough; laughter was not enough. Both at once were useless but she wept and laughed anyhow, for it would be criminal to leave such absolute joy unacknowledged, unexpressed.

  When she once again became aware of herself, she found that she had pressed her face against the boy’s chest, clinging to him because he too knew the bliss within her. That made them one. His arms around her shoulders felt like the most natural thing in the world.

  “This is his peace,” Nijiri said into her ear. “Now you understand.”

  She did. At last she understood so much.

  He held her until the tremors stopped, stroking her hair and murmuring soothing nonsense words all the while. When she finally looked up, he stepped away, gracefully shunting aside the inevitable awkwardness that followed a moment of intimacy. When he offered his hand to her again it was as Nijiri, the rude fierce youth who had protected her in the desert, not Nijiri the Gatherer. The former was easier to deal with, so he had become that for her—even though the latter was his new reality.

  She took his hand, and he helped her to her feet.

  “Go to Yanya-iyan, Speaker,” he said. “Tell the fools Kisua has sent to rule us how to do things. Hananja abhors clumsy transitions. Gujaareh will not resist if you treat us with respect.”

  She nodded, still too moved to speak. He led her out of the Garden then, and back to the hall where Hananja’s statue stood watch over Her people.

  Looking up at Her, Sunandi said, “Thank you.”

  “It’s a Gatherer’s duty to bring peace,” Nijiri replied. When she focused on him again, Rabbaneh had joined him, and after a moment a third man with Gatherer’s eyes stepped out of the shadows. Once upon a time she would have shuddered in their presence, but now she only smiled.

  “Do your work well,” she told them. “Your people need you.”

  Nijiri only nodded, though she saw warmth in his eyes. Then he turned to follow as the other two walked away. She watched them cross the Hall to the dais, where the Sharers immediately stopped their work and moved aside. Together the Gatherers knelt and bowed over their hands at Hananja’s feet; a moment later they rose and left the Hall. They would exit the Hetawa by the Gatherers’ Gate, she knew, and not return for many hours. They would leave corpses in their wake. But by their efforts, the soul of Gujaareh would once again find peace.

  Nodding in satisfaction, Sunandi left the Hetawa and went forth to do her part.

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks here are mostly for resources rather than people, but only because the list of people to thank would be another book in itself.

  The list of helpful resources would be, too, but I’ll single out a few for particular note. First is Mythology: An Illustrated Encyclopedia by Richard Cavendish, a coffee-table book that attempted the impossible—a survey of all the world’s myth systems. It had some notable problems of cultural bias and the usual problems of any broad survey, but it was helpful in one way: when I first read it, I began to see the common structure underlying most human cosmogonies. I used this common structure, as I did in the Inheritance Trilogy, to create the gods of Kisua and Gujaareh.

  Also, On Dreams by Sigmund Freud, and The Red Book, by Carl Gustav Jung. The latter I was able to see “in person” at last thanks to a lovely exhibit at the Rubin Museum in New York. Early psychoanalysts got a lot of things wrong in their studies of human nature, but in their partly spiritual, partly intellectual quest to understand their fellow human beings, I got a sense of how a faith can be born. To some degree, Gujaareh’s founder Inunru—er, sans mass murder and megalomania—is inspired by them.

  Also, the Brooklyn Museum’s Egyptian and Nubian collection. The British Museum’s collection is much bigger and more impressive, but I don’t live in London, and that museum was too crowded and anxiously guarded to allow the hours of close study I needed. No quick visit can give you a real sense of the day-to-day life of ancient city-dwellers: how they combed their hair, how they cleaned their teeth, how they traveled from home to work, how they gossiped about that guy down the street who looked at them crosswise and didja hear he worships that god? In Brooklyn nobody cares if you sit in one place and stare at something for hours, as long as you don’t then get up and shoot somebody.

  Oh, and I’ll allow myself one bit of people-thanks: to my first writing group, the BRAWLers, who were the Boston Area Writers’ Group until we decided we needed better branding. You guys tore this book apart and put it back together better, and you loved it and cheered for it before anyone else. (No, Jennifer, they did not have sex.) Thank you.

  extras

  meet the author

  N. K. Jemisin

  N. K. JEMISIN is a career counselor, political blogger, and would-be gourmand living in New York Cit
y. She’s been writing since the age of ten, although her early works will never see the light of day. Find out more about the author at www.nkjemisin.com.

  interview

  So my editor has asked me to interview myself, for the benefit of my readers. Gotta admit, that’s a new one. I kind of like the idea, in principle: now I have the opportunity to ask myself questions I find interesting, while avoiding all those incredibly annoying questions interviewers always seem to ask, like “Where do you get your ideas?” And I can even be rude to myself! Hey, this is kinda cool. So here goes.

  Where did you get your—

  SLAP. See, this is fun already!

  Ow. So, the land of Gujaareh. Why’d you pattern it after ancient Egypt?

  I’ve always been fascinated by ancient empires in general, but particularly those that have remained mysterious to—or been ignored by—“Western” historians and scientists. Egypt’s not really the worst of these, but that was part of the reason I chose it: because there is so much scholarship already, and there are so many archaeological and artistic finds to be explored. That made research easier.

  But beyond that, I was fascinated by Egyptian magic, which seems to have been a seamless blend of the religious and medical disciplines for them. I was surprised to learn a few years back that the “four humors” philosophy of medicine was employed there, because I’d always been taught that this was something that came from the Greeks. (But then, ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, and ancient Rome all did a lot of cross-pollination.) That made me wonder what other surprises there might be in the study of ancient Egyptian lore, so I started exploring further. And around that time, I discovered a new branch of modern science that seemed to dovetail nicely with the Egyptian stuff: psychodynamic theory.

  Oh, so that’s what possessed you to create a magic system based on Freudian dream theory and Egyptian medicine. Because that stuff’s crazy.

  Well, no. (And Freud would say there is no “crazy.”) Modern medicine recognizes the power of the subconscious mind. You’ve heard of the placebo effect—I know you have because you’re me—in which people who are given a sugar pill (or something else that has no medicinal content) often respond to treatment just as well as people receiving actual medicine. Sometimes their recovery is nothing short of miraculous, and they get better because they believe they should be better. The power of the mind to affect the body is something that’s been understood, and exploited, since ancient times. It’s not a far stretch from there to the idea that directed, lucid dreaming might somehow be used to harness the placebo effect. This is something Jung openly contemplated and explored through a religious context, in particular the Hindu mandala… but I digress.

  So that’s the religious connection. Okay, admit it; you’re secretly trying to proselytize for Hinduism!

  No, that’s stupid. I know diddlysquat about Hinduism, beyond what I’ve read in a few books. And anyway, I’m not Hindu.

  No?

  Nope.

  But you mentioned a Hindu influence with the Inheritance Trilogy.

  Yeah, and Zoroastrianism, and Greco-Roman and Norse mythology, and American Indian trickster tales, and the loa of vodoun, and the Christian Holy Trinity. I always find it interesting how people pick one thing out of a list of influences to fixate on. I gave a list because they all matter.

  Dammit.

  That’s not a question.

  Okay, then are you proselytizing for something? Because you keep exploring religion in your writing, and that has to mean something.

  Well, I consider myself an agnostic—not in the sense of doubting the existence of God, but in the sense of doubting the capability of any human religion to encompass the divine. More specifically I think religion alone is not enough to encompass the divine. Religion is a handy guide to living, assuming you’re still living in the society that existed at the time of the religion’s founding. It’s useful for unifying and motivating a population. But to understand ourselves and the universe, we need to explore other schools of thought—the complexity of the human consciousness, the limits of science, and more. I believe we will eventually need to interact with other intelligent entities, and exchange ideas. And we need to be wary of the ways in which letting others do this thinking and learning for us can come back to bite us on the ass. So if there’s any one religious theme in my work, it’s that.

  Lolwut?

  Look, just write it down.

  Okay, but… Ina-Karekh—the Gujaareen “land of dreams.” Is that meant to represent the Christian Heaven? With the shadowlands as Hell?

  Nope. Ina-Karekh is based on Jung’s collective unconscious. And the method used to enter it is rooted in Egyptian belief—the separation of the ka, the life-energy of the soul, from the ba, the physical embodiment of the soul, wherein the ka is contained in various organs and on its own might have trouble traveling into other planes of existence—

  Yeah, whatever, let’s move on to something juicier. The Gatherers are all gay, right? They’re totally gay.

  There is no “gay” in Gujaareh. In Gujaareen society, people love whom they love. But if we used modern American labels on any of them, Nijiri would be gay.

  And the rest?

  They’re harder to categorize. Most Gujaareen are opportunistic: they’ll happily schtupp anyone they’re attracted to, so we’d call them all bi. But that label doesn’t really fit, because being bisexual is about more than whom you sleep with. Anyway, Ehiru was heterosexual before he became a Gatherer—that changes them in more ways than just the spiritual. As it is, all Gatherers are closer to asexual.

  Is everybody in these books African?

  No. It’s not Earth. There’s no Africa.

  You know what I mean. Are they all black?

  Some are. Some are sort of reddish-or yellowy-brown, and some are tan with freckles, and some are white enough that they don’t go outside at noon. I know what you’re getting at, though. Gujaareh is modeled on ancient Egypt. (And Kisua is modeled on ancient Nubia.) Egypt, despite what my middle school geography textbook tried to tell me, is in Africa; ergo, its people are African. But “African” has no one set look, any more than “Asian” or “European” does. Also, Egypt was the crossroads of trade for that side of the planet in its day. Traders from what would become China, the Persian Empire, Greece, the Roman Empire, the Malian Empire, the Vikings, the Nubians—they all passed through Egypt’s ports. Everything we know of ancient Egypt, from modern genetic studies of mummies to their own art, suggests it was a multicultural, multilingual, multiracial society. So that’s what I’ve tried to depict here.

  You could’ve done this story in a medieval European setting.

  That’s not a question, and no, I couldn’t have. For one thing, the magic system is rooted in ancient Egyptian science and medicine, and medicine in medieval Europe was a completely different animal—

  WHY DO YOU HATE MEDIEVAL EUROPE?!?!?!!?!

  Uh, could you calm down? We need to keep our blood pressure in the healthy range.

  Hater.

  ::sigh:: Look, I don’t have a problem with medieval Europe. I have a problem with modern fantasy’s fetishization of medieval Europe; that’s different. So many fantasy writers and fans simplify the social structure of the period, monotonize the cultural interactions, treat conflicts as binaries instead of the complicated dynamic tapestry they actually were. They’re not doing medieval Europe, they’re doing Simplistic British Isles Fantasy Full of Lots of Guys with Swords And Not Much Else. Not all medieval European fantasy does this, of course—but enough does that frankly, they’ve turned me off the setting. I might tackle unsimplified medieval Europe myself someday… but honestly, I doubt it. I loved the challenge of writing the Dreamblood books, but I’ve learned that I prefer creating my own worlds to emulating reality. World-building from scratch is easier.

  If you liked writing the Dreamblood books so much, why are there only two of them?

  There might be more. I have many tales of the Dreaming Moon in my
head. But I have more ideas than I have time to write them in, alas.

  That’s because you’re lazy and disorganized and have no discipline—

  SLAP.

  U R so meen.

  Are you done yet?

  Okay, last question. Is that a gas giant in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

  …

  Don’t hit me again!

  … Yes, the Dreaming Moon is a gas giant. The world of the Dreaming Moon is one of its moons; Waking Moon is another. The Gujaareen are aware of this, as their astronomy is about as developed as that of ancient Egypt, but the habit of referring to the Dreamer as a moon is something that long predates these discoveries, so it stuck. I did actually try to work out the astrophysics, for which I thank the instructors and my fellow attendees at NASA’s Launch Pad astronomy workshop for science fiction/fantasy authors and other creative types, which I was privileged to go to back in 2009. Not much of that made it into the duology—maybe one day it will, if I write a story about the Teachers—but it was fun to play with. Any errors are mine.

  I didn’t ask you all that. You just like hearing yourself talk, don’t you?

  Oh, for—That’s it. I’m done.