Asimov's Science Fiction: February 2014 by Penny Publications Page A

from the passing airships bristled the skin. Dry brown vines crunched under his weight as he leaned against the cotton tree's steel grey trunk with little concern of dirtying his suit. From his hillside vantage point, he watched the familiar panorama play out through mountaintop haze.
    Ominous shadows, like a shoal of slow moving whales, dove among the clouds. A f lag emblazoned across each of their massive hulls, the crosses of three saints formed the Union Jack. Impassive and smug, the passing battalion represented little more than bloated saber rattling in the name of the Albion Empire. Their standing mission to raze Accompong Town amounted to a bombing raid on the well fortified city. A vain effort, as the town, and much of the island, was reinforced to withstand hurricane assault, much less the tepid shelling of airships.
    Accompong Town launched artillery shells loaded with witchfire, petroleum refined to a gel that blazed with lava's white-hot fury when ignited. Neither side veered near enough to the other to do any real damage. The same dance repeated every few months as Albion warships violated Jamaican airspace on their way to other islands. Ostensibly securing their foothold in the American colony, the so-called United States, any incursion was strictly for show. Albion had its hands full warring with the Five Civilized Nations of the northwest territories and the Tejas Free Republic of the southwest territories.
    Waiting for the smoke to clear, Desmond pinched a pile of dried chiba leaves and rolled them into his spliff. Lighting his spliff and inhaling deeply, the smoke filled his lungs and came out in a ropey fog from his nostrils. The coarsely serrated alternate facing leaves of the chiba plants were to be admired in their own way. Versatile, it found its chief purpose through its intoxicating smoke.
    The cotton tree scraped his back as he shifted. Maroons considered cotton trees sacred. They believed duppies danced among the branches of those rooted in graveyards, the spirits free to play and flit about at whim. Muddled superstitions to some, Desmond clung to the old ways when they served him. No one would search him out where Old Hinge, that particularly fearsome duppy, hung her skin on branches as a warning before making mischief.
    The booms faded into a sputtering thunderstorm without rain. Distant rumbles no longer shook the ground and what passed for tranquility returned to the island. Desmond stabbed out his spliff against the tree and fixed a broken smile to his face, tucking the unsmoked portion into his pocket. Still in the rush of the heady smoke, his thoughts floated above reality, the world moving at a much slower pace as his languid steps took him back toward the Cobena Park estate. Crickets renewed their evening chirping. A damp heat clung to the air. Chickens dashed about, their fluttering wings objecting to his presence. A tinge of sorrow nagged him as he passed the wood shanties many of his brethren slept in when not in the fields. Young, listless, machete-wielding laborers who knew nothing of their heritage, up before sunrise; by moonrise still working. Even without the crack of the whip, without the smack of the cane, without a Massa to take away his pickney and sell them up the way. Unlike the Maroons, the rest of the Jamaican populace was made up of people who fled the Americas, the descendants of slaves. The Chinese. The Taino. Not to mention Albion's undesirables, her convicts, debtors, and dissidents. A proud tradition of exiles who settled the island but were not permitted to live in the Seven Cities of the Maroon.
    His life wasn't his own.
    Descended from the Ashanti people, the sixteen thousand Maroons formed the ruling class of Jamaica. The nation's immense wealth stemmed from its production of sugar cane and rum. And chiba, though no one discussed the herb in polite company. The Cobena Park estate was known chiefly for two crops: bananas and chiba. This allowed the family to own a