Beneath Ceaseless Skies #156 Read online

  Issue #156 • Sept. 18, 2014

  “Written on the Hides of Foxes,” by Alex Dally MacFarlane

  “The Good Deaths, Part II,” by Angela Ambroz

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  WRITTEN ON THE HIDES OF FOXES

  by Alex Dally MacFarlane

  I’ll pretend I’m going blind if I have to: start fumbling my work, carving sloppy lines onto the dolls, squinting, tripping over nothing. Everything my mother did in her twenty-fifth year. Everything my aunt and uncle did. Now the three of them sit in the best positions by the fire; how honored they are, for giving their sight to feed us. How well-fed, while we labor carving more dolls for the pot.

  They’ll kill me for laziness if I don’t go blind in the next year.

  * * *

  Summer in the taiga: for ten weeks, the sun soaks the trees in gold. I walk among them, head tilted high, but the sun doesn’t sear the sight from my eyes.

  “Shit!” I scream at the sky. “Shit on you!”

  I keep walking.

  In summer my family goes hunting and wandering, filling our bellies with meat and mushrooms and berries, meeting with people from the nearby villages—and, in some years, bringing back a womb full of daughter, a womb full of sons. After five pregnancies and three surviving children, I use the village women’s herbs to keep my womb empty. I want that fun again without the strain of babies. When else in the year can we laugh at winter, lie on moss and crushed flowers and kick our bare legs at it? But I can’t do that this summer. I think of my sons, who coddled each other in my womb and came out soft. What will they do without me? I think of my daughter, my first child, born after the worst winter any of us remembered, who came out all sinew and hair like a fox and tore at my too-small eleven-year-old body like she had claws. The twelve-year-old boy I had fooled with didn’t expect to see me the next summer with a baby wrapped in hides on my back. I laughed at him. My daughter’s tough.

  She’s already turning blind producing the finest dolls in the house. My daughter, blind before me! None of my family’s stories tell of that.

  What’s wrong with my eyes that I still see so clearly?

  I keep walking, because surely after another two months of staring at the sun I’ll be honorably blind, or close enough. I don’t want to pretend, I don’t want to be caught out, killed anyway, doubly dishonored: sighted and a liar. I want to go blind from so many winters of hard work, carving the dolls unceasing. What spirit have I angered to put this misfortune on me?

  It’s spirits on my mind, still, when I trip on something and fall face-first on the snowless dirt.

  “Up you get,” a woman says. “I’ll be needing that.”

  It’s a dead fox on the ground, in its silly bi-colored summer-coat, and it’s an old woman with hair white as a fox’s winter-coat and skin a different brown to mine, standing over me with a long knife in her hand. I imagine its tip puncturing my eyes—but there’s no honor in that.

  She doesn’t look like she’s going to hurt me, so I get up and wait to see what will happen.

  The fox is in a trap, its back leg crushed, the ground stained dark. Around my family’s house, the traps will be filling with foxes and hares and wolverines and sable for the children to collect and cook. In summer we eat well. In winter, the darkness comes down and there is nothing, nothing at all but the trees and our carving knives and the dolls in the pot, barely filling our stomachs.

  The old woman bends down for the fox. It goes over one shoulder, the trap over the other. “Coming?” She turns around without waiting for my reply. “I’ve got hare stew.”

  I follow her through the trees.

  Our walking is done wordless but not in silence. Small pine-branches snap against our shoulders and faces, and fallen ones crunch under our feet. A far-off bird calls out. Insects make all their noises, although we’re far enough from water that they’re tolerable. The day smells of sun and green: life. I drink it in, as if it will fill me like a pot of steeped doll.

  I feel heady by the time we reach her tent, like I’ve been chewing fly-agaric mushroom, not swallowing doll-soup. I blink it away, un-blind still.

  Her tent is barely anything—hides draped over low slanty wood-supports—but sturdy. Un-set traps and a few tools sit on the ground outside. Little enough to be turned into a sled and dragged behind her through the taiga, moving, moving, while my family lives in its house of stacked-up stone.

  The inside of her tent smells of smoke and stew and carcasses. I wince. Our house is beautiful: the hides covering its walls are full of the smell of burning pine. This reeks, and I can barely stand up inside. I squat beside the pot, hungry. I wonder if she wants anything in particular or just company.

  “Name’s Oruguaq,” she says, dropping the dead fox on the floor. It thuds.

  “Kegulan,” I say.

  “Help yourself to stew.”

  There’s a single bowl near the still-glowing wood, made of something’s skull. I hesitate.

  “Eat, woman. You aren’t getting any fatter just smelling it.” She squats on the other side of the pot with new branches for the fire, coaxing it back into life. I pick up the bowl and shift aside the pot’s battered lid so I can scoop out some liquid. There’s plenty of meat floating in it. I don’t feel at all presumptive taking several bits. Anyway, she says, “That bit’s nice and thick with meat. One of its haunches. Grab that one. I won’t have any guest of mine saying the pot’s empty.”

  “Just this bowl will fill me up,” I say.

  “Nonsense.”

  I bring the bowl to my lips.

  Only hare and water went into that pot; it’s rich with the taste of the hare meat, hot and filling. I sigh contentedly. “Have as much as you like,” Oruguaq says. “Plenty of hares at this time of year. Put some fat on you for winter.”

  I’m glad to do just that.

  Once the hare is sitting in my stomach, I start looking around her tent, curious about a woman traveling alone—traveling far, by the look of her. I see her sleeping furs, piled against the hide-walls. She’ll need a lot of them, without the heat of other bodies. I see a bow and some arrows, propped near the entrance-flap.

  And I see a low wooden thing like a big stool with something on it, I can’t tell what, draped in fox hides. Under the table are bones. I catch myself squinting in the dim light to see if any look like human bones. Stories of old women out among the trees who eat errant children are just that—stories. Plenty of people have bones on their floor. She’s only been generous to me.

  Still, I squint at the stew before taking another sip.

  I can’t deny her strangeness.

  “So,” she says, when I’m just holding my bowl, not sipping from it, “you’ve seen my book.”

  “Your what?”

  She gets up—and she’s nothing like a woman her age should be, limber and stocky the way she is, nothing at all like my mother by the fire. I realize I can’t even tell her age; older than me, but how much? Right then I think she’ll draw a massive knife from under those hides, long and wide as a fox, and flay me all in one. Instead she draws something blocky, like a wide flat rock made of hide-layers. “This is the book of the endless lands,” Oruguaq says. “I have lived in these lands for a very long time—since there was light for the first time, putting an end to the endless night. It is made of foxes, which have been here since the beginning.”

  My aunt has all sorts of stories for that feat, but Oruguaq’s mention of foxes makes me think of just one: the fox was a more cunning shaman than the bear, and this meant it got the sunshine it wanted. I can’t tell it l
ike my aunt does, but it’s a good one for sitting around the fire in winter, waiting for the sun to come back. Bring it back, fox! Quicker!

  Oruguaq beckons me to her side. I obey, more curious than afraid, and crouch to look at the cover of the book, which is sturdy enough that I suspect there’s wood under the scraped-thin hide. It’s dark and plain.

  “It is written on hides, only fox-hides,” she says, and lifts the cover at one corner. It bends right back, revealing more hide, tanned and pale and amazingly thin, covered in scrawling patterns that look a bit like the writing I saw a trader use, years ago. “These are the pages. And these...” she touches the patterns with her dark fingers “...are the stories of the endless places.”

  I peer at the writing. It’s a useful way of storing stories, I suppose, if you have a lousy memory and there aren’t any good storytellers around to remember for you.

  “Look.” Oruguaq turns the pages, and there aren’t just words: there are drawings too, of people who look a bit like me and people who look nothing like me, and pieces of fabric and pine and bone and a splash of blood and the scale of some vast fish and things I can’t identify.

  I gape at one piece of fabric, embroidered with a woman who wears a magnificent headdress and robes that shimmer.

  “She lived five hundred years ago,” Oruguaq says, “and this image of her was created four hundred years ago. The story I recorded tells of her feats, defending her land against invaders from the south. Women sewed images of her onto their clothes for luck, whether in battle or childbirth or the dark days of winter.” There’s satisfaction on Oruguaq’s face. “Almost no one living in the endless places has seen a headdress like that or knows a story about its wearer, but I do. I walk all throughout these lands, stopping here, stopping there, meeting people, learning about them, and I record everything I learn in my book.

  “A lot changes in every hundred years, every thousand. You people have long memories—when you tell stories around your winter fires, you remember so much—but eventually everything is lost; forgotten, or drawn so far into something else that it can no longer be told. I don’t want that to be so. As long as I record it here, it won’t be forgotten. I travel all over the endless places, writing in my book, keeping the old and adding the new—and telling people what I know.” The book is massive—it must have thousands of pages—but it’s also something she can hold. It’s playing tricks on me. Looking bigger, looking smaller.

  “Huh,” is all I can think to say. I feel like I’ve taken a side-step into another taiga, another kind of tent, where the stars will be my roof on the flank of a deer and they’ll give their milk to me, if only I know how to ask. I feel unrooted, unsure of what to expect. Anything could happen.

  I wait, because what else is there to do?

  “So who are you?” she asks, and she’s just an old woman again, squatting by the fire with something in her lap. It could be a sleeping baby. The change almost tips me onto my back.

  “Just Kegulan.” I don’t like talking about the dolls. There’s an illness on us—it’s old and complicated, and I don’t like the way people cringe from me if I say it.

  “Kegulan, Kegulan, whose fingers smell of wood.”

  She’s strange again, for a heartbeat. Does it mean she already knows?

  “Why were you staring at the sun when you tripped on my fox?”

  That fox is still lying on the floor, looking up at us with dead dark bead-eyes. I wonder what will go on the pages she’ll make from it. Me and my family and our dolls? There’s no others like us, as far as I’ve managed to find out. Or maybe we’re already in her book, great-great-great-grandparents put on her pages in those pretty signs.

  She’s not someone I’ll see again, I reckon.

  I tell her.

  Her eyes light up like stars in an autumn sky.

  I finish it by telling her about my eyes: how they won’t go blind, even though I’m already twenty-five. “My mother and aunt and uncle are old and unpleasant,” I say, starting to get embarrassed at having to talk about my strange ill family under her amused gaze. “My mother’s almost forty.”

  Oruguaq snorts. “You’re too healthy.”

  “What?”

  “Who was your father?”

  What does that matter? I don’t even know his name, and I’m not sure my mother ever did, either. “Some man my mother found.”

  “Your family sits in that house going blind earlier and earlier each generation—do you know it used to be thirty-five years before anyone went blind? Half of you are born from cousins—or someone closer—not the men your mothers go out to fool with.”

  I feel cold, as if someone’s stuffed my insides with snow. “Is that what it says in your book?”

  “It’s what I remember.” She says it matter-of-fact, like she’s describing the blueness of the sky, and I’m not imagining the mockery that lies behind her words. Then she tells me that seventy years ago, she met someone from our family fleeing the house and the dolls but not the illness. “He kept running,” she finishes with a shrug, uncaring, when I’m suddenly desperate to know if it’s possible to get far enough away from the illness after all. “It was winter. I suspect he died. There’s no nutrition in your dolls; he was weak as a sapling.”

  “I’ve talked to the people from villages,” I say, done with her disparagement. “I know what their lives are like. How they starve in winter because there’s nothing to trap. How some winters an entire tent dies, with everyone found in it the next spring, frozen solid. The ones with lots of their own animals do all right, but then there’s a sickness or they get stolen by other people. Whereas we sit in our house carving our dolls, boiling them, filling our stomachs almost every day. Tell me that’s worse.”

  “Your own mother will kill and eat you,” Oruguaq says, laughing.

  I laugh back at her. “You think no other mother’s done that when winter’s teeth are sharper than usual, and you claim to have wandered the whole taiga? You don’t know anything.”

  “Then why do you care about it?”

  “Because I don’t want to be eaten!” What a stupid question.

  And I’m not a small child, unable to pull its weight. I make as many dolls as the other adults.

  “Live with me.” Oruguaq shows her teeth like a fox. “I would like an assistant. The last one died ten years ago—tough woman called Magga, from a family of reindeer herders that all died one winter.” I shudder in sympathy. “It was just her, sitting with a single reindeer when I found her. She lived to a good age with me: seventy-one. Traveled all over the endless forest—and beyond.”

  I narrow my eyes at her. There’s nothing beyond. And no one lives to seventy-one.

  “And,” she said, “I won’t go killing you because you’ve got good eyes.”

  “What if I do go blind?” I ask, wanting to find the flaw in this offer—other than the fact that I don’t think I could stand Oruguaq’s company for much longer than I already have.

  “There’s plenty more a blind person can do than sit in a chair and be fed by her relatives. I won’t leave you out in the snow for the wolves—or eat you myself. Give me a bit of time and I might even break your ridiculous illness.”

  The way she talks is making me feel like a vole, small in her eyes, even though she’s offering freedom.

  But even if I got freedom from the illness, I wouldn’t go with her. “Why would I want to live with you? It smells of dead foxes in here. I want to sit by a fire and tell my nieces and nephews that their dolls are ugly. I want to eat all the best meals and see nothing.”

  She laughs again. “I’ll be staying here through the winter. I’ll look for you.” Baring her teeth in that unnerving, foxish grin, she adds, “Just try not to get eaten this winter.”

  I’ll go blind. It happened after my mother turned twenty-five. It’ll happen to me.

  But I ask, “Do you have anything for my eyes? To make me blind faster?”

  “I don’t work with medicines except the ones
I need.” She’s still grinning. “Good luck, Kegulan-whose-fingers-smell-of-wood.”

  “Thank you,” I say, feeling as full of confidence as an empty pot is of water—but I know I don’t want to live with someone who makes me feel as vole-small as she does.

  I think I know.

  Well, she’ll be there if I need her.

  I won’t. I’ll go blind.

  I walk home.

  * * *

  Winter creeps across the taiga, covering the trees in lumps of white and driving all the animals away. Our stomachs groan for food. Shut in our house by the cold, we bend over our dolls. We carve.

  There is always a doll in the pot. Each one takes a day and a night to steep and stew into the light brown broth we drink.

  Each doll takes a week to carve.

  We wake in the morning—although it is hard to call it a morning when the sun rises later and later, then not at all, as if embarrassed by our hunger. We wake and the pot is simmering full of light brown liquid and we drink, like desperate foxes around the week’s first kill, and for a short time we feel full.

  We carve all day.

  The dolls must be unique—and breathtakingly beautiful. We must weep when we drop every one in the pot. If the doll is too plain, it’ll be like we’re just boiling water. That’s part of our illness.

  I like to carve mine with great pieces of jewelry on them, because I once saw a trader wearing a disc of silver hung with tiny bells that each chimed their own note, so that whenever she took a step I heard a whole song. My dolls wear jewelry that covers their whole bodies like stitched-up furs. It’s a style I’ve passed on to my daughter, although she prefers to clothe hers in the carved shapes of bone jewelry. My sons like smaller repeating patterns, as if the dolls are dressed in pine cones or orderly stars.

  This is what my mother told me, as a very small girl:

  “Many years ago, in the time of my grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother, someone in our family went out to cut wood. It was a harsh winter, and the pile of firewood was getting small. Everyone was ailing and weak. This man staggered out of the tent, his whole body empty, and cut down the first tree his axe landed on—bad luck for the whole family, because it wasn’t ready to be cut down. It begged him to go to another tree. But the man was so weak, he didn’t care, so he kept on swinging his axe. Then with the last of its strength, the tree told the man that he and his family would spend every day of every winter working with wood, preparing it and eating it, because there would be no other food, and only the most beautifully carved dolls would do. And so it still is today. We can’t hunt in winter. We can’t move somewhere else—we take the illness with us. We can’t do anything about it. So we live in this house and carve dolls and that’s our winters. Work hard. We don’t have time for laziness.”