The Wings Upon Her Back, the new novel from Samantha Mills, has been getting a lot of pre-publication buzz, and today we are happy to share with you an excerpt, provided by Tachyon Publications. First, though, here’s the synopsis:
A loyal warrior in a crisis of faith must fight to regain her place and begin her life again while questioning the events of her past…
Zenya was a teenager when she ran away from home to join the mechanically-modified warrior sect. She was determined to earn mechanized wings and protect the people and city she loved. Under the strict tutelage of a mercurial, charismatic leader, Zenya became Winged Zemolai.
But after twenty-six years of service, Zemolai is disillusioned with her role as an enforcer in an increasingly fascist state. After one tragic act of mercy, she is cast out and loses everything she worked for. As Zemolai fights for her life, she begins to understand the true nature of her sect, her leader, and the gods themselves.
*
There is a question which has preoccupied me for many years:
What is Radezhda?
I can already hear your complaints. Why, it is a city, of course! In that case, I ask you: what is a city?
Creator Stasia wrote that a city is a related network of roads. But this cannot be true. Some of our roads extend clear through the mountains, and we do not claim all the land alongside them there, nor the municipalities where they continue on the other side. This is clearly the musing of an engineer—I built it, therefore it is mine.
Is a city a cluster of homes, then? This answer seems satisfactory when considering an isolated community such as ours, but there are many more cities in the world which neatly abut one another. We find ourselves in the same situation as we were with the roads—where to call an end to it? We include the farmers in our cityhood, and they do not even reside within the city walls.
Borders, then! That is the purpose of borders. To mutually decide upon a limit, and inscribe it upon a map. To you, the homes in the foothills; to you, everything west of the river . . . Except those borders did not spring from nothing! This is a warrior’s answer, a fixation on protecting what is already there without asking how it came to be.
A city, according to the workers within it, is a designation of where one’s taxes go and from where one’s benefits derive. Industry and government. Centralized economy. This is, by far, the most practical answer. But much like borders, homes, and roads—it only describes a single moment in time. Tomorrow, entire neighborhoods may be traded, abandoned, absorbed.
When I ask, “What is Radezhda?” I do not mean which is the last property beholden to the Council of Five in this year in particular. I am asking: what unites us? What defines us? What is our purpose?
A city is ever-changing, a timeline of expansions and contractions, technological advances and social evolution—and so I have no choice but to conclude that a city is its history.
Just as generations of family remain linked long after their forebears are dead, a city is united by a sense of community, culture, the acknowledgment that our current existence is the result of ten thousand decisions made before us. For newcomers it is a self-identification—an active choice to join the lineage of a new family.
A city is a place that knows the truth of itself. A city is a story.
And the story of Radezhda is a strange one.
Consider this:
In the beginning, there was a city of stone and sod, a people of humble means, a home in a valley of no consequence. And then the gods came.
What was Radezhda before the gods? It was not even called Radezhda—not until the attempted invasion by Rava State, and the death of the first saint, bless her memory. It was hardly even a city, not in any of the senses defined above. It was a disparate group of families scattered through a quiet valley nestled against the mountains Kelior. They farmed with stone tools. They lived in houses of wood and sod. Only much later, looking back, did we say: ah, that is where the city began.
Imagine this life. Imagine their wonder, when the sky filled with god-light, and those incomprehensible voices spoke for the first time. Five of them, each with their own preoccupation, each with their own set of gifts.
Imagine it.
Little remains from those early days. We have fragments of the Dierka Mountain Scrolls. Hints and whispers from the past—they were afraid, then they were not. They were dazzled by all of the Five, then they began to align themselves according to each god’s teachings.
This we know beyond doubt:
The creator god required their followers to explore and innovate, for without engineers, there could be no progress.
The scholar god required his followers to study and learn, for without scholars, the city would succumb to the mistakes of the past.
The worker god required her followers to labor and maintain, for without workers, there could be no production.
The earth god required his followers to sow and reap, for without farmers, the city would starve.
The mecha god required her followers to protect and judge, for without warriors, the city would fall to the first aggressor.
Wonderful. Concise. But in practice, so much more complicated. We mined the hills and plowed the land and built machines we had never dreamt possible. We were united in worship, in ambition, in a belief that anything was possible as long as we followed the wisdom and guidance of the beings who had chosen us, above all others in the world, as their favored people.
If a city is a story, then ours was beautiful in its simplicity: they came to us, they loved us, they showed us how to live.
We defined ourselves by our gods!
And then our gods went to sleep.
After the gods retreated, blame was laid upon every head. The fighting was immediate, intense. There were documents destroyed, a terrible crime born of terrible grief. We know these things, but our knowledge is a skeleton of the truth.
To preserve their fledgling community, the people of the city not-yet-called-Radezhda divided themselves according to worldview: they lived in separate neighborhoods, they held separate worship. A fragile truce. They were no longer the scattered villagers they had been before the gods’ arrival, but they had not yet built the city we know today.
They were sibling districts finding their way forward after a tumultuous youth, each with its own notion of how to proceed.
Two sects put their focus on service, for the farmers and the workers take solace in the good they do their fellows. Two continued the quest for knowledge, for the scholars and the engineers desire answers to all things. And the warriors . . . the warriors locked in place, and tried to keep everything as it was, a house undisturbed waiting for its master to come home.
But all of them agreed on this: they longed to see the gods again (for comfort; for answers; for instructions) and so they built towers to the heavens.
The towers are not the concern of this paper. Their construction is well-documented and their schematics thorough. It is the frenzied time period beforehand that is shrouded in debate: the circumstances of the gods’ retreat.
Why did they leave us?
The warriors believe we were not pious enough; the engineers believe we were not clever enough; the workers believe we were too lazy. Even the farmers murmur an inscrutable story about a poor planting season so egregious their grandparents’ grandparents hoarded jelly jars until their deaths. These reasons are frustratingly vague, even when they are bafflingly specific. (The scholars consider ourselves neutral parties, mere observers and collectors of facts, but make no mistake: we blame the rest.)
It is amazing to me that this pivotal moment in our history, this defining moment—the retreat of the gods from humanity in favor of perpetual sleep—is in such contention.
It is amazing to me that so many of our ancestors were present at this monumental event, and yet our records are so scarce, our interpretations so varied.
What really happened?
And if a city is its history, what does it mean when we do not understand the past?
You will expect, by now, that I have a theory.
Of course I do. Hundreds of opinions have been written on this topic already. Hundreds more will follow mine. The question haunts us: why did the gods go to sleep? We pray, we beg, we preach it from every saint’s day stage. We argue it in council meetings till the sun sets, and then we table the discussion and promise to gather again next month to shout about it some more. The ritual is dressed up in formalities so we do not feel like children, always squabbling over the same old hurt.
It was you, we are saying. It was your fault. Do things my way, and we can fix this.
But there is another answer, one that sidesteps the question entirely. A truth we would rather not face; a truth we are so loathe to admit that we would rather destroy one another in an eternity of fighting than voice it. What we do not want to admit is this:
There was no defining moment. There was no betrayal. There was no crime so great the gods had little choice but to turn away from us.
It is a simple answer, and deeply unsatisfying. It must have been something we did, we insist, because if it was something we did, then we have the ability to control the outcome in the future. We simply will not do that again!
But the gods lost interest. They retreated. That is all. They left an entire city desperate to pinpoint how it went wrong, and did not bother to offer any consolation. We have spent generations obsessed over who was at fault, how it may be reversed, how we must prove ourselves the next time, but we are arguing over the wrong thing.
The real question is not what did we do to make them leave? But how could they leave us so easily? How could they shower us with gifts, with knowledge, with the burning light of the heavens and the monumental weight of their love, only to take it back again?
Because it is a weight. It is a burden, to be singled out in this way, to be chosen above all others in the world, to be granted a spot at the side of our idols. What would we do to keep the affection of a god? The answer is anything, anything.
And what does it mean for them to witness our devotion—our desperation to please, our prayers and our tears—what does it mean for them to look upon our grief and then shrug and turn away?
I am afraid we can draw only one conclusion, a terrible truth, difficult to bear:
The gods do not love us, and never have.
When I say the gods do not love us, I mean they do not love us in the way we wish. They believe they do; they have said they do; but we operate in a relationship so terribly unbalanced it is more akin to master and pet than parent and child. Now and then we catch their attention. The rest of the time, we are an afterthought.
Here is the truth: they love themselves, and they warm to those who reflect them best. The scholar god values knowledge for the sake of knowledge; the creator god values invention for the sake of invention; and so on, and so on, we know these chants by heart.
They shine their light upon those who share their ideals and turn away from those who don’t. The turning away is not malice (take comfort in this), but neither is the light a sign of love. It is wonderful, to bask in that light. It is addictive. A person may do anything to feel it once again. But it is not love.
It is a smile at a mirror’s reflection.
And when we accept this truth—this truth, that the gods do not love us in the way we wish—then we must face another truth: it is our choice to follow or not, and always has been. It means the threat that hovers over our every action (do not put a step wrong or they will not love us anymore) is, in the end, an illusion. We are struggling to hold on to something we never possessed to begin with.
I ask again: what is Radezhda? What is our purpose? What is the story of this city, if it is not the story of our gods? Who are we, if we need not strive to be like them?
We could follow their teachings anyway, picking and choosing as they suit us, because we value what we are being taught. At least then it is an honest decision, not made under duress. Or we could pick another life entire.
It is terrible, in its way, terrifying, to be responsible for the course of one’s life, with no higher authority to blame. But there is a freedom in it, as well.
The freedom to choose what comes next.
*
Samantha Mills’s The Wings Upon Her Back is due to be published by Tachyon Publications in North America and in the UK, on April 23rd.
Civilian Reader 