At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories (17 page)

The sun has moved barely a hand’s breadth in the sky since she first saw the trout; still, this is a long time for a fish to stay in one place. Perhaps the trout must be here as surely as she is. She frowns as she calculates and tosses the hook through the air. It settles just before the trout, light as an insect.

Six months from now, Jingu sits astride her horse before the walls of Silla’s capital, longing to kill. She strokes the feathers of the arrow in her hand and dreams a little dream: the king will open the gates and emerge at the head of his armies, all dressed in armor from beyond China, riding tigers and breathing fire. With Chuai alive beside her, she will ride to meet the Sillans, and her own people with them. She will empty her quiver and then draw her sword, and she will cut and cut and cut. Men’s blood will soak her hair and there will be no gods, nothing but the random terror and delight of a life without certainties. Chuai might die or he might not. And she might die here, today, instead of forty long years from now, years already laid out before her as clear and cold and pitiless as a mountain stream.

It is only a dream, of course. She knows the shape of this victory in all its details. She has seen it since the first of her trances, when the gods broke down the walls between the past and the future. The king of Silla also has diviners, perhaps his own instructions to follow. In any case he has problems of his own: violent Paekche to the east, to the west China’s looming shadow. He opens the gates and sends out not armies but emissaries.

Silla falls to Japan without an arrow fired. The king surrenders and swears fealty, annual shipments of horses and gold. The only weapon hurled in anger is the spear that Jingu drives into the ground before the king’s palace, the symbol of the conquest. Her rage is intact when she returns to Japan and bears her son, the emperor who will become the god of war, Hachiman.

The bent needle and its bait lie on the stream’s surface just above the trout’s head. Jingu can only wait, for she knows she will catch it, bring it to shore, and watch it die gasping in the unbreathable air. This will prove yet again that she is to go to Silla, to conquer a land she does not care about for gods she hates, who have killed her husband and will steal her son and make him one of them.

All moments are this moment. Past and future jumbled together: Jingu cannot say which is which. And because everything—sorrow and anger and love and grief—is equally immediate, she finds herself strangely distanced from her own life. It is as though she listens to a storyteller recite a tale she has heard too many times, the tale of the empress Jingu.

She lives this tale divorced from past and future, separated even from what is and what is not. The fragments of her life are stolen from later empresses: this woman will take Silla without a fight; that woman will manage the land for weary years after her husband’s death. Jingu is no more than the tale of the empress Jingu, forced through the patterns of the storytelling, again and again and again. But she nevertheless feels, and she aches to kill something, anything.

The trout strikes and the hook sets. She hauls it in.

At the Mouth of the River of Bees

It starts with a bee sting. Linna exclaims at the sudden sharp pain; at her voice, her dog Sam lifts his head where he has settled his aging body on the sidewalk in front of the flower stand.

Sucking at the burning place, Linna looks down at the bouquet in her hand, a messy arrangement of anemones and something loose-jointed with tiny white flowers, dill maybe. The flowers are days from anywhere that might have bees. But she sees one, dead or dying on the yellow petal of one of the flowers.

She tips the bouquet to the side. The bee slides from the petal to the ground. Sam leans his dark head over and eats it.

Back in her apartment, she plucks the stinger from her hand with tweezers. It’s clear that she’s not going to die of the sting or even swell up much, though there’s a white spot that weeps clear fluid and still hurts, still burns. She looks out the windows of her apartment: a gray sky, gray pavement and sidewalks and buildings, trees so dark they might as well be black. The only colors are those on signs and cars.

“Let’s go, Sam,” she says to the German shepherd. “Let’s take a road trip. We need a change, don’t we?”

Linna really only intended to cross the Cascades—go to Leavenworth, maybe as far as Ellensburg and then home—but now it’s Montana. She drives as fast as the Subaru will go, the purple highway drawing her east. Late sun floods the car. The honey-colored light flattens the brush and rock of the badlands into abrupt gold and violet shapes as unreal as a hallucination. It’s late May and the air is hot and dry during the day, the nights cold with the memory of winter. She hates the air conditioner so she doesn’t use it, and the air thrumming in the open window smells like hot dust and metal and, distant as a dream, ozone and rain. Her hand still burns. She absently sucks on the sting as she drives.

There are thunderheads ahead, perhaps as far away as North Dakota. Lightning flashes through the gold-and-indigo clouds, a sudden silent flicker of white so bright that it is lilac. Linna eyes the clouds. She wants to drive through the night, wonders whether she will drive through rain, or scurry untouched beneath their pregnant weight.

The distance between Seattle and her present location is measured in time, not miles. It has been two days since she left Seattle, hours since she left Billings. Glendive is still half an hour ahead. Linna thinks she might stop there, get something to eat, let Sam stretch his legs. She’s not sure where she’s going or why. Her mind whispers
east, toward sunrise
, and then
my folks live in Wisconsin; that’s where I’m going
, but she knows neither are the real answer. Still, the road feels good. Sam sleeping in the back seat is good.

A report would say traffic is light, but that is an overstatement. In the past twenty minutes, she has seen exactly two vehicles going her way on the interstate. Ten minutes ago she passed a semi with the word covenant on the side. And just a moment ago, a rangy Montana State Patrol SUV swept past with its lights flashing at a hundred miles an hour to her eighty-five. As the siren Dopplered past, Sam heaved upright and barked once. Linna glances into her mirror: he’s asleep again, loose-boned across the back seat.

Linna comes over a small hill to see emergency lights far ahead: red, blue, a lilac-white bright as lightning. The patrol SUV blocks the freeway. There are six cars stopped in the lanes behind it, patient as cows lined up at the door of the barn. The sun is too low behind her to light the dip in the highway ahead of the cars. The air collected there seems dark.

Sam wakes up and whines when the car slows. Linna stops next to a night-blue Ford, an Explorer. The other drivers and the state trooper are out of their cars, so she turns off the Subaru’s engine. It has run, with occasional stops for gas and food and dog walks and a half-night of sleep snatched at a Day’s Inn outside of Missoula, for two days. The silence is deafening. The wind that parched Linna’s skin and hair is gone. The air is still and warm as dust, and spicy with asphalt and sage.

Linna lifts Sam from the back seat, places him on the scrub grass of the median. He would have been too heavy to carry last year, but his muscles atrophy as his spine fuses, and he’s lost weight. Sam stretches painfully, a little urine dribbling. He can’t help this; the nerves are being pinched. Linna has covered the back seat of the Subaru with a waterproof tarp and a washable blanket. She’s careful when she takes corners, not wanting him to slide.

Whatever else he is (in pain; old; dying), Sam is still a dog. He hobbles to a shrub with tiny flowers pale as ghosts against the leaves, and sniffs it carefully before marking. He can no longer lift his leg so he squats.

The only sunlight that Linna can still see fades on the storm clouds to the east, honey to rust. The rest of the world is already dim with twilight: ragged outlines of naked rock, grass, and brush stained imperfect grays. A pickup pulls up behind her car and, a moment later, the Covenant truck beside it. Another patrol vehicle blocks the westbound lanes, but its light bar seems much too faint, perhaps a reflection of the sky’s dying light. If time is the measure for distance, then dusk can be a strange place.

Linna clips Sam onto his leash and loops it over her wrist. She rubs at her sore hand as she walks to the patrol SUV. The people standing there stare at the road to the east, but there’s nothing to see.

Linna knows suddenly that this is not twilight or shadows. The air over the road truly
is
flowing darkness, like ink dropped in moving water. “What
is
that?” she asks the patrolman, who is tall with very white skin and black hair. Sam pulls to the end of his leash, ears and nose aimed at the darkness.

“The Bee River is currently flooding east- and westbound lanes of Ninety-four, ma’am,” the patrolman says. Linna nods. All the rivers here seem to have strange names: Tongue River, Automatic Creek. “We’ll keep the road closed until it’s safe to pass again, which—”

“The
freeway’s
closed?” A man holds a cell phone. “You can’t do that! They
never
close.”

“They do for floods and blizzards and ice storms,” the patrolman says. “And the Bee River.”

“But I have to get to Bismarck tonight!” The man’s voice shakes; he’s younger than he looks.

“That’s not going to be possible,” the trooper says. “Your options would be Twelve and Twenty, and they’re blocked, too. Ninety’s okay, but you’ll have to backtrack. It’s going to be a day or two before anyone can head east here. Town of Terry’s just a couple of miles back and you might be able to find lodging there. Otherwise, Miles City is about half an hour back.”

Linna watches the seething darkness, finally hears what her engine-numbed ears had not noticed before: the hum, reminding her of summers growing up in Iowa, hives hot in the sun. “Wait,” she says: “It’s all bees. That is a river of
bees
.”

A woman in a green farm coat laughs. “Of course it is. Where you from?”

“Seattle,” Linna says. “How can there be a river of bees?” Someone new arrives and the patrolman turns to him, so the woman in the green coat answers.

“Same way there’s a river of anything else, I suppose. It happens sometimes in June, July. Late May sometimes, like now. The river wells up, floods some roads, runs through some ranch yards.”

“But it’s
not
water,” Linna says. Sam pushes against her knees. His aching spine stiffens up quickly; he wants to move around.

“Nope. Nice dog.” The woman waggles her fingers at Sam, who pushes his head beneath them. “What’s wrong with him? Spinal fusion?”

“Yeah,” Linna says. “Arthritis, other stuff.”

“That’s not good. Not much they can do, is there? We used to raise shepherds. Lot of medical problems.”

“He’s old.” Linna stoops to wrap an arm around his ribcage, to feel his warmth and the steady thumping of his heart.

The woman pats him again. “Well, he’s a sweetie. Me and Jeff are going to turn back to Miles City, try and get a room and call Shelly—that’s our daughter—from there. You?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Don’t wait too long to decide, hon. The rooms fill fast.”

Linna thanks her and watches her return to their pickup. Headlights plunge as it feels its cautious way across the median to the other lanes. Other cars are doing the same, and a straggling row of tail lights heads west.

Some vehicles stay. “Might as well,” says the man with the Covenant truck. He is homely, heavyset; but his eyes are nice as he smiles at Linna and Sam. “Can’t turn the rig around anyhow, and I want to see what a river of bees looks like with the light on it. Something to tell the wife.” Linna smiles back. “Nice pup,” he adds, and scratches Sam’s head. Leaning heavily against Linna’s leg, Sam stands patiently through it, like a tired but polite child.

She walks Sam back to the Subaru and feeds him on the grass, pouring fresh water into a plastic bowl and offering food and a Rimadyl for the pain. He drinks the water thirstily while she plays with his ears. When he’s done, she lifts him carefully onto the back seat, lays her face against his head. He’s dozing when she rolls his window down and returns to the river of bees.

A patrol car has rolled up the outside shoulder to park beside the SUV, and a second officer has joined the first. Lit by their headlights, the young man with the cell phone still pleads. “I don’t have a
choice
, officers.”

“I’m sorry, sir.” The patrolman shakes his head.

The man turns to the other officer, a small woman with dark hair in an unruly braid stretching halfway down her back. “I have a Ford Explorer. This—river—is only twenty, thirty feet wide, right?
Please
.”

The patrolwoman shrugs, says, “Your call, Luke.”

The patrolman sighs. “Fine. Sir, if you insist on trying this—”

“Thank you,” the man says.

“—I have a winch on the patrol vehicle. We’ll attach it to your rear axle, so I can pull you out of trouble if you stall partway. Otherwise unhook it on the other side and I’ll drag it back. Keep all vents and windows closed, parking lights only. Tap your brakes if you need a pull. As slow as the truck will go. And I am serious, sir: the river is dangerous.”