Clays Beneath the Skies (Jokka Collection 1)
Clays Beneath the Skies (Jokka Collection 1)
The false diviner whose prophecies turn out to be true… the storyteller who risks everything to explore the taboo of cross-sex love… the traders who dare to explore the furthest reaches of the map and the runaway who learns to heal. Clays Beneath the Skies collects seven stories of the Jokka of Ke Bakil, an alien species with two chances at puberty to change sexes: female, neuter or male… a species crushed between the harshness of their world and the imperatives of biology. Whether it’s creating a new religion or choosing to accept the hand of a strange male in a dance, each Jokkad makes sense of its world in its own way.
Seven voices. Seven choices. A completely alien world. Come explore.
Illustrated volume, includes the Strange Horizon’s Reader’s Choice story “Unspeakable,” and the Tiptree Reading List story “Freedom, Spiced and Drunk.” With special foreword by Hugo Award-winning editor Susan Marie Groppi.
Genre (setting): low fantasy (Jokka)
Tags: aliens, no-humans, neuters, trisexual, asexual, religion, romance, low tech
Rating: PG-13 for implied sexual situations
Excerpt from Clays Beneath the Skies
Before her mind died, my mother told me to speak all my memories into a conch shell before my clan gave me to a male. She showed me her own fragile talisman, let me rub my fingers along its slick white surface and smell its sea-salt fragrance. She said, be sure to examine it for holes other than its mouth, lest the words whispered into it leak away. If they do, the memories will be forever lost when pregnancy takes your mind.
I was female then, and the certainty in her stone-gray eyes had softened my fears of impending senility. No anadi, no female, can escape the mind-death. It may claim you while you carry your first child or wait until your sixth, but it will claim you. So we were taught, and so Nature ordains.
The conch did not restore my mother’s memories after my second brother abandoned her body, wailing to Ke Bakil’s bright sun. I mourned her as if she had died, in lieu of mourning for myself.
* * *
I was born anadi and beautiful, and so my clan anticipated my sale with great joy. Those born anadi usually remained thus. The warm breath that carried praise blew soft across my scaled skin as my family examined me for flaws with each occurrence of the flame in the northern sky. How they adored my long mane of pale glitter and gold! How they loved to spread it over my shoulders and breasts and comment on how well it matched my body, painted by Nature with the iridescence of sukul, the color of a white shell beneath the light of a full moon. Kediil, they said to me, when the gods wove you, they used a warp of moon’s rays and a weft of sun. You are spun light, with the sea in your eyes. When you go to your mate, you will enrich your family with several new anadi, and perhaps even another eperu.
For this, then, are all females born: to increase the family, in their bodies and their mate-prices.
My father noticed the first sign of my impending maturation, and the crease in his brow and his flattened ears marked his unease. “You’ve lost weight,” he observed. “Have you been exerting yourself too much?”
“No, ke riiket,” I said. No, honored Father.
One of my aunts, her mind only partially claimed even after three children, touched my cheek. “Your eyes are different.”
And then puberty came, and with it the change my family had been praying to avert.
I was Turning neuter.
As the days waxed long and the fat sloughed from my hips and breasts, I escaped the camp for the solitude of the plains where I could dance in the scrub alone, unafraid at last of the heat or the fragrance of my sweat. The mind-death would not claim me now, not in pregnancy, not during the effort of my body, not in the grip of the sun and air. I would not be sold for my clan’s wealth; instead, the first among eperu would train me to hunt and harvest, to herd and run and thrive.
I had no more need for conchs or spells. Nature had delivered me from useless talismans into freedom, to the spiced scent of Its grasses at ripest summer.
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