I run my fingers around the metal circumference, welding it into his skin. He has stopped moaning, but I know he must be faint with pain. If he appeared born with the collar before, now he appears even more so; what metal has not been folded into his skin is like a ribbon of brightness against his throat.
I grab his hands and help him to his feet; he stumbles, but I pull him behind me as I run into the darkened halls of the underground keep, the halls that lead away from the door I came through.
If I am not careful I will get us lost, or worse, captured. Khadim swallows sobs as he runs behind me, but I feel him picking up his pace as the pain lessens.
I strain my ears to hear past my loudly thumping heart, bypassing doors until I get to the one we need. The armory. I can hear the song of a thousand metal weapons call to me.
“You don’t have to do this, Eula. My men and I can take it from here. I do not want you hurt.” Khadim’s eyes are full of pain, his voice full of sincerity.
“I made my choice the moment I came for you, Khadim. We deserve more.”
I push the door open. The room is filled with lances, spears, bows and arrows, swords, short steel knives, and barrels of oil. The lone window in the room lets in enough light for me to see there are enough weapons to outfit an entire garrison. I gesture Khadim to the spears, and we slide several through the barred window. Next, we each grab a machete, and I maneuver with care to get them through the slats of metal.
I press my palms into the bars and will them to bend the metal. Sweat breaks out on my forehead, but the iron softens and stretches and creates a large enough hole for us to jump and crawl through. I pull myself up into a patch of dirt not covered with steel. I push my hand down to give Khadim assistance, but before he grabs it I hear a familiar scratching sound. He jumps and scrambles onto the field.
“What did you do?” I ask, grabbing a machete while Khadim cradles three spears in one arm.
“I lit the base of the barrel on fire.” A blast of heat behind us almost sends us to our knees.
The ingenio is burning.
We run as far as we can, until we make it to the circle of bohíos. There, Khadim’s men stand with the ladinos who raised me: Prieto, Tía, Nana, Rosalinda, Samuel. These folks who suffered through years of service in Sevilla, and then years at the Río Ozama and then years here at the ingenio, are ready to follow the youngest amongst them. Not all. Some shake their heads, afraid to follow. But my closest kin are here. Khadim and I pass out spears to the handful of men and women who do not have their own machetes. Then in unison we all turn back to the mill. The clouds above us clear, and in the moonlight I can make out the peaks of the hills, and if we keep walking, behind them are the Bahoruco Mountains.
A place to hide, to build, to create a new life.
The admiral is expecting me to come calling for my freedom, but he is not expecting me to lead everyone else to theirs. I slash the humid air with my machete, and it is feather light in my hand, whispering, onward onward onward.
From the open windows of the admiral’s house, I can hear a harpsichord being struck. The occupants have not yet realized they are on fire. We march forward, and I hum along to a brand-new song.
WHEREIN ABIGAIL FIELDS RECALLS HER FIRST DEATH AND, SUBSEQUENTLY, HER BEST LIFE
By Rebecca Roanhorse
NEW MEXICO TERRITORY. 1880S. WINTER.
Abigail Fields was dying. Slowly, terribly, the gunshot wound in her stomach leaking, her lagging heart stretching too long between beats.
The man who had shot her was named Barton Smalls. He was a coward of a white man, and he had abandoned her in the ice-crusted dirt road outside the all-Black settlement of Pueblo Libre to die, no doubt believing that she would expire in the course of time and worry him no more.
Abby hated to admit he might have the right of it.
Breath was getting harder to come by, the space between inhale and exhale as wide as the Rio Grande valley where it cut through the high desert just below town and the far shore could barely be seen. But Abby kept on breathing anyway, hoping that Mo would come. That anyone would come. But Mo, especially, as she’d like it to be her lovely brown face she saw last in this world.
She imagined there weren’t too many folks like her and Mo in heaven. Nothing in the Bible they’d made her read at the old nun house said much about Black girls making it to the right hand of the Lord, at least to hear those old white spinsters at the nunnery tell it. If Abigail was honest with herself, the life she’d led so far was just as likely to land her somewhere a bit hotter anyway. Good, then. Hell suited her just fine. Just fine, indeed.
A distant howl broke her from her reverie, followed by a mob of high-pitched yips. A shiver of fear rolled through her body, but all she could do was blink up at the grey winter sky above her. Catch the snowcapped tops of the distant mountain range out of the corner of her eye. Feel the rough touch of dirt and the wet of melting ice beneath her back. And try to keep breathing.
Snowflakes fell, soft and silent. Too silent.
Silent meant everyone else in town was dead. Jolene at the schoolhouse and Francis and Lucy who ran the post. Mr. Henderson and Rose and Rose’s sisters. Oh, and their little ones, too.
Even Mo? No, not Mo. She’d been out hunting this morning, shooting grouse to fill their table. She was miles away. Should have been, at least. But she was expected back by now, wasn’t she? Oh Lord, not Mo. It would be too much.
Another howl, closer now. Coyotes, out there in the distance. Scavengers, tricksters. Likely coming to this little township that was now only a buffet of fresh death. Perhaps it would be the scavengers and not Smalls’s gunshot that took her life. Just like what had happened to her great-aunt Mary, only Mary had survived a wolf attack and lived to tell the tale. But then, Aunt Mary was a legend, and what was Abby but a sixteen-year-old girl, shot in the belly by a coward of a white man, waiting to die?
Part of her thought maybe she’d drawn Barton Smalls to her. Of all the settlements in all the places west of the Mississippi, she’d never thought to see him again. He had looked right at her when he pulled that trigger, and then looked away, her face unrecognized, unremembered. But she remembered him. There was a penny in her pocket to make sure she always remembered.
“Let me live, Lord,” Abby whispered through cracked and bloody lips. “If you let me live, I will murder Barton Smalls. I will forsake love and match him hate for hate. Save me, and I will become an instrument of your vengeance. I swear it!”
It was a bold prayer, and who was Abby to make it? She was not particularly brave. Not a gunslinger. Just a girl and not quite a woman, at that. But she was determined, and she meant it with all her heart, and sometimes, and in some places, that’s enough.
It went without saying that hate and vengeance were not sentiments she’d learned from the nuns at the convent, so their God did not hear her. But there were other things in the desert, listening. They did not mind hate; they held no fault with vengeance. They found her offering pleasing and struck the deal.