The Necessary Beggar - Softcover

SUSAN PALWICK teaches writing and literature at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is the author of more than a dozen works of critically acclaimed short fiction and poetry. Her first novel, Flying in Place, won the Crawford Award for Best First Fantasy Novel, and her poem, “The Neighbor’s Wife,” earned the Rhysling Award for best short science fiction poem.

SUSAN PALWICK teaches writing and literature at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is the author of more than a dozen works of critically acclaimed short fiction and poetry. Her first novel, Flying in Place, won the Crawford Award for Best First Fantasy Novel, and her poem, "The Neighbor's Wife," earned the Rhysling Award for best short science fiction poem.

1

All of us were dumbfounded when Zamatryna-Harani insisted on the old customs for her wedding. The only thing that surprised us more was the marriage itself. Zamatryna had always been stubborn, but she had been stubborn about fitting in, about claiming this new place as her own. Or so we thought; she had been pondering the old ways for years, as you will learn, but she told no one. She kept silent out of love, and the family suspected nothing.

How could we have suspected? She was only six years old when we were exiled from Lémabantunk, the Glorious City, and sent to this strange dry place. She was still at the stage when little girls keep pet beetles and delight in memorizing epic poems, hobbies they put aside soon enough. If we had been allowed to stay in our home--home, I still call it that; this is not home yet after all these years, and I think it never shall be--Zamatryna-Harani would soon have moved on to geometry and horticulture, disciplines which are of course intimately linked, and the beetles, replaced in her affections by birds or toads or badgers, would have been freed to feast on the flowers she had planted.

But we were not allowed to stay there. My youngest son, DarrotiFrella Timbor, was exiled for killing a Mendicant--a woman, no less--which was a terrible thing, an unheard-of thing. To kill anyone is horrible, but to kill a Mendicant is inconceivable. For Mendicants by definition have nothing, and they are helpless, and they are honoring the Elements. None of us understood how he could have done it, or why. He couldn't answer when we asked him. He told us he didn't know. He told us he had been drunk. And indeed, my poor Darroti was often drunk, but he had never been violent.

The dead woman was Gallicina-Malinafa Odarettari, the daughter of the third cousin of the second wife of the Prime Minister. She was twentyyears old, only one month into her year of service as a Mendicant. It was a terrible death. The most grievous acts may be forgiven if the transgressor repents, and if the victim forgives: but the dead cannot forgive. The souls of the dead live on, as trees or birds or flowers, but they can no longer speak to people to say I forgive or I burn in vengeance. They live in a dimension parallel to the one where people live, but unbridgable by speech.

And so we were sent into a dimension like that too, into exile, knowing that we would never be able to return. There is of course an infinity of dimensions, and the Judges who sent us here did not know what this one would be. They knew only that it was a place where we could live, but where we would find no one who spoke our own language, for that is how the dead must exist also. They knew only that it was a place from which we could not return, as the dead cannot return. It was a hard punishment, but fitting.

They did not know that we would land in a refugee camp, in the middle of a desert, in a state called Nevada, in a country called the United States. I have thought about this often, after everything else that has happened. In Lémabantunk one would never think to question the Judges, or to ask how they know what they know. But now I ask questions I will never be able to answer. If no one has ever spoken to the Judges from these other dimensions, how can they know that none are utterly uninhabitable? For certainly I thought at first that we would never survive in this parched place, and sometimes it seems a miracle that we have. And yet everyone must feel that way, who is torn from a known, loved land and sent into darkness.

I do not know what pained Darroti most: his own guilt, or the fact that he had exiled his family. For of course we do not abandon each other, even or especially in disgrace. That is a Law: a Law of Hearts, not simply one of Judges. It is one of the many ways in which our own world differs from this one. And so when Darroti went into exile, we did too: I--his father Timbor--and his brothers with their families. My oldest son, Macsofo, brought his wife Aliniana and their three children, the boy-twins Rikko and Jamfret and the girl Poliniana. My middle son, Erolorit, brought his wife Harani and their daughter Zamatryna. I was glad then that my wife Frella had died of fever six years before, for as much as I missed her, I do not think she could have borne our fate. She was never a strong woman, either in body or mind. I loved her despite her weakness, and my love for her helped me understand Macsofo's love for Aliniana, whose unending wailing grief was a trial to all of us; but I was relieved that Frella was at peace, as we adults were not. What became of Darroti, on whose behalf we had come here, you will soon hear. It pains me to speak too much of it, even now.

The children fared better, of course, and Zamatryna, the oldest, seemed to do the best of all. If she remembered the bejeweled streets and glittering waterfalls of Lémabantunk, the festivals and flowers, she never gave any sign. Instead, once we had emerged from the bleakness of the camp, she became a little American girl. She insisted that we call her Zama because her real name was too long; she kept pet plastic dolls and memorized insipid television jingles about underarm deodorant and automobiles; she acquired a distressing interest in watching young men in cumbersome body armor symbolically slaughter each other on fields which could have been used for more important things, like growing beets.

She also received the highest grades in her mathematics classes, and loved poetry, and delighted to help her mother and auntie in the garden. One cannot completely deny one's heritage. I suppose there are American girls who do these things too, but we all get our talents from somewhere. Zamatryna got hers from Lémabantunk, from her parents and foreparents who grew in that soil.

And yet, since we were in exile and always would be, I had to hope that she would thrive here. I could not wish upon her the homesickness that I, and my children and their wives, felt daily, hourly, like the throbbing of a cut whose edges will not close. And so I delighted for Zamatryna-Harani when she fit in, when she went to her high-school prom looking like an underwear advertisement, accompanied by a young man who--to the horror of the older relatives--had made a great show of giving her mutilated foliage. I still do not know how she could work in the garden in the morning and accept a gift of dead blossoms in the afternoon, but it showed that she had become an American, and so I knew that I should be happy. I dutifully rejoiced for her when, in college, she was adopted by a group of other young women who wore upon their clothing the letters of a language no one here ever speaks, and who devoted tremendous energy to acquiring similar insignia worn by young men. I was pleased for her when she began to date Jerry-the-football-player, an earnestly polite young man who, even when he wasn't wearing his body armor, looked like a collection of tree trunks lashed together. He was a very important football player; the insignia he gave her were the envy of all her friends. I didn't think that she would go out with him for very long. None of us thought so. We saw no poetry in Jerry, and he trampled plants where he walked--although he tried not to, for Zamatryna's sake--and his acquaintance with mathematics was purely functional, a matter of the ledger books he studied. Aliniana, of all people, became very fond of Jerry, and left off her sniffling long enough to predict sadly that Zamatryna would break his heart. I think Jerry expected this himself. There was no doubt that heworshipped Zamatryna, but he always seemed to be holding his breath around her, as one does around a wild, rare creature one does not want to startle.

Imagine...