Palimpsest

“Please, I am trying to reach Amaya Sei.”

“I know, child,” he says mildly

November is surprised again-veterans do not speak.

“Then don't stop me. If you want her so much, let me find her. It is the only way you can have her for good.”

“I know that, too.”

“Then I'm confused.” She touches his long, gray ear; he endures her wounded hand. “Were you in the war?”

“What an interesting question. No, you might say, and yes, you might say. You might say I am embroiled in its final skirmishes even now.”

“But you speak.”

“I was not in the war, I said. The mochi needed such care in those years, I could not leave it.”

“Then why have you such ears, such paws?”

The rabbit looks at November with a chagrined, sorrowing expression. “It is what she expected,” he says. “To see a rabbit with a hammer, and rice. I wanted to look right for her. For Amaya Sei. There are still surgeons in the world, and this train has caught a few when they were not looking. As it caught me, on a platform, on a Wednesday morning when the coffee was thick and I was not paying attention. As it caught a war-rabbit, still bound up in its saddle, in the last days of it all, when it bent to snuffle for scraps in the dark. I could not even tell my employers I would not be at my desk. I could not tell my wife or my son that I would be away. I was a candymaker, you know. I like to think the city went sour when I vanished from it, but that is probably not the case.”

“In what sense, candymaker, are you fighting the war even now? I am not a warrior, I have not come to fight you.”

The rabbit leans in close and brushes her nose with his. It is soft, as a rabbits ought to be. “Do you not know, even now, what they fought for? There was a time when it was easy to cross the bridges and tunnels into Palimpsest. When you might fall in a river or bleed until you fell through the skin of the earth. When you might dig a hole from China all the way here. But too many came, and the streets were always being renamed, and feral, hungry folk came, with money and polished spears, and they knew words like empire, and in killing them half the city was killed, in the ages before ages. All the ways were closed up. Painted over. Barricaded. And there was peace, for so long, so long.

“And then a child named Casimira was born. She should not have been allowed to stay with her family. She was a Braurion. She ought to have been sent out with a new name to haggle with lettuce merchants or bronze-casters. Instead, she grew up in a house that loved her as we love Amaya Sei, and when she was thirteen, she was so lonely that she went to the barricades and began to tear at them with her fingernails. ‘It is not right,’ she said, ‘that all our doors are closed!’

“They stopped her, of course, but Casimira is a creature of will, and she saw in her heart an open city, a city full of the world, full of new people who would love her and new suns in new skies. And she had a billion creatures at her command. Do you know what a thirteen-year-old girl can do when she is alone and frightened and believes she is right? And she wanted it so much. She wanted the immigrants back, and she opened, at last, with a treaty and a pen, under the eye of the shark-general, a single way. And she has waited for twenty years for someone to take it. All we have done and been done to has been for a lonely girl, and there are some of us who say that is enough of grace-that one of us is no longer lonely. We believed that. And now… there is Amaya Sei.”

“Are we the first? The first in all that time to come so near to it?”

The rabbit smirks, wiping rice paste from his mallet. “Casimira wanted to choose, of course. She wanted to pick her triumphs by hand.”

November swallows that. Half of her is proud; she is worthy, she was chosen. Half of her glowers. “If you want Sei you can have her, rabbit. Casimira may choose all she likes, but she cannot leave Palimpsest, she cannot know us beyond it, how we struggle and suffer. How we choose. I chose. And you cannot have Sei without me,” November says.

“I know.”

“Then let me pass.”

“November Aguilar, help me press the rice for the feast of her. Swing the hammer yourself, and I will let you go. I took ears for her, and paws, and I am delayed in my production, because of love, because of need.”

November nods with great solemnity, and steps into the barrel, lifting the hammer over her head and bringing it down hard onto the gluey white masses. It is so heavy, so heavy she can hardly lift it, but she swings and swings until her flesh burns and tears come and she falls back into the paws of the rabbit of the moon, who cleans her with his tongue and sings her the folksongs of the wild glow-worms that live in the Sea of Tranquillity

There is a blue-haired woman sitting in a wide, empty room lined with grass mats. She wears a long, unlined kimono, and her nakedness shines beneath it. Over her face is a long, red mask.

“Amaya Sei?”

“Yes.” Her voice is dull, almost drunk.

“My name is November.”

“I know. The train told me you were coming.”

“What's wrong with you?”

“Partly I drank a great deal of rice wine so that I would not dream, and it did not work. Partly I am afraid.”

“Of what?”