Berols’ Anna opened her mouth and spoke, and her voice billowed through the air: the voice that had once written the Plant House books, the voice that both mastered matter and belonged to it. She had come to fulfill her promise.
Berols’ Anna stopped in front of Vanja where she stood in Nina’s embrace. The brightening light from above had not made her features easier to discern; it merely made them glow more strongly than ever. Her eyes mirrored a different landscape than the one they occupied.
“Will you give yourself to the world?”
Anna’s voice crashed into Vanja’s body like a wave, making her gasp for breath. That’s what Vanja was supposed to do. Vanja said it, that she gave herself, that she surrendered, everything she was. A string of syllables dribbled out of her mouth, flat and nonsensical.
Berols’ Anna watched Vanja in silence, her hair floating around her like a living thing. After a moment, she grunted. “A person creates the word. Gives in to the world, and becomes the word.” It sounded like a sigh. “You have no words. You have been separated.”
Separated from her words. The world was built on a new language, and she would not be part of it, only an observer, a watcher.
Berols’ Anna turned her head and gazed out on the chaos. “When all of this has become, you will remain; the people like you will remain, all of you, as you are, separate. But we will carry you.” She stroked Vanja’s cheek. “We will always carry you, little herald.”
An observer, a watcher, but beloved. Nina would be with her; Anna would be with her.
Vanja watched as Anna drifted toward the commune office, the only building still standing in the middle of the chaos. It looked out of place, no longer with any meaning, surrounded now by the citizens of Anna’s colony. Terrified faces stared out from the windows. Berols’ Anna and her people settled down to wait.
Nina and Vanja stayed where they were. They watched from a distance as Berols’ Anna and her people sang to the last citizens of Amatka, invited them to take part of the new world or perish with the old. It was something like “The Marking Song,” but the words were different; it was a song of making and unmaking, a song not of things that were, but that could be.
Nina folded Vanja into her arms. She still smelled the same. The heat made Vanja drowsy.
She was wrenched from her torpor when Nina stretched and seemed to pull herself together.
“Now,” Nina said, “I’m fetching my children from Essre.”
She walked out onto the southern part of the plaza. Some kind of communication beyond hearing must have taken place, because from everywhere people came drifting into the plaza. They shone, flew, undulated. They filed out of the colony’s ruins, toward the railway in the southwest.
Vanja hung on to Nina’s hand. Her right leg wouldn’t quite carry her weight, and her bare feet had lost their warmth, but she kept walking. She would walk with them for as long as she could, and when she could walk no more, they would carry her. They all followed the railway south. It thrilled and sang beneath their feet.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book took a very long time to write. It truly takes a village; so many people have been helpful in the creation of this story.
Special thanks go out to Robin Steen, Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom, Nene Ormes, the Word Murderers, and my parents, Göran and Kerstin, for their unwavering support throughout the process. I would also like to thank my Swedish editors, Catharina Wrååk and Titti Persson; Agnes Broome for excellent line editing; my agent, Renée Zuckerbrot; and my editor at Vintage, Tim O’Connell. Finally, to Ann and Jeff Vandermeer: thank you for everything.
About the Author
Karin Tidbeck is originally from Stockholm, Sweden. She lives and works in Malmö as a freelance writer, translator, and creative-writing teacher and writes fiction in Swedish and English. She debuted in 2010 with the Swedish short story collection Vem är Arvid Pekon? Her English debut, the 2012 collection Jagannath, was awarded the Crawford Award in 2013 and shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award. Amatka is her first novel.
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Jagannath
Praise for Amatka:
“I recommend that you lay your hands on a copy.”
*“Tidbeck’s haunting world made of words is undeniably disturbing and provocative.”
“A fresh dystopian twist…. Tidbeck’s first novel, translated by the author from her native Swedish, is grim, spare, and fascinating.”
“Karin Tidbeck’s Amatka is a stunning, truly original exploration of the mysteries of reality and what it means to be human. It’s brutally honest and uncompromising in its vision—a brilliant short story writer has been revealed as an even more brilliant novelist. One of my favorite reads of the past few years, an instant classic.”
“Tidbeck reimagines reality and the power of language in her dystopian sci-fi novel…. Tidbeck introduces the mysteries and mechanics of her world slowly while leaving the origins of these pioneers opaque. Her ending takes a turn into much weirder territory, but her tense plotting, as well as the questions she raises about language, control, and human limits make this a very welcome speculative fiction novel.”
“Karin Tidbeck is a brilliant conjurer of worlds, a fabulist armed with an imagination as fiercely strange as any I have ever encountered. Her fiction is built on a foundation of improbabilities and even outright impossibilities, and if you surrender to its increasingly bold claims on reality you will walk away surprised, thrilled, and in all likelihood changed forever.”
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Copyright
A VINTAGE BOOKS ORIGINAL, JUNE 2017
English translation copyright © 2017 by Karin Tidbeck
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Sweden by Mix Förlag, Stockholm, in 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Karin Tidbeck.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.