Beneath Ceaseless Skies #22 Read online

  I laid the knife on the limestone altar. The blade was slick with blood that was not mine; its edge was still sharp.

  In the silence of the sanctuary, I prayed to the gods for the death of the corn-man, and for the salvation of my son.

  * * *

  I drew wards around the house in the blood of the hummingbirds, to keep the corn-man at bay, and walked the streets looking for him, my knife always thrust in the belt of my tunic.

  It was night when I found him again. Night and a stifling heat, the air as heavy as before the answer to a prayer. I followed his trail through the gardens and the fields, until at last I stood in the shadow of ripe corn stalks. Everything was silence around me.

  “Show yourself,” I said, drunk on my prayers to the gods. I held the hilt of the knife in my hand.

  Nothing but the rustle of wind, the gaze of the moon on me. “I know where you are.”

  “What do you think you will do, Metlicue?” His voice echoed all around me, as if the very corn had spoken his will.

  I clutched the knife-hilt. “What needs to be done.”

  “Nothing needs to be done,” he said. I saw him, then, standing amidst the stalks that had bent around him, framed with his true crown of corn tassels, a king that was not ours anymore. Because of me.

  “You are no longer the corn-man,” I said. “No longer do the rains fall at your command. I come to make things right.”

  “There was another way.” His voice was sad.

  I could not afford to dwell on that other way. “No,” I snapped. “Your innocence is lost, beyond recall, and not even a child’s death will make you regain it.”

  He laughed, without joy. “Perhaps.” He moved closer to me. His eyes bored into mine. “You have made your choice, and I mine.”

  I said nothing. Watched him, watched his eyes, which were dark with the knowledge of what he was, of what I had made him. “There is only one way,” I said.

  And then his full weight was on me. I struggled, managed to throw him off. I reached for my knife, but his hands were going for my throat, already tightening. I heaved, pried the hands off, knowing him to have no true strength. His innocence should have been his shield; he had never had any. My throat was burning. I heaved again, felt him fall.

  I stood over him, drew my knife. “It is over,” I said, watching him.

  “Strike if you must.”

  In that instant before my knife parted the sheaves of corn, I saw what it must mean to be the corn-man, the born fool, innocence wrapped around fifty-two bleeding hearts. To ask, day after day, for rain, until all the leaves had parted and only the core was left. The core that I had tainted with darkness. With the fear of death, and with the fear of partings, with what made us all human. With all that he could never understand: love and lust, fear and wrath, a darkness deeper than all he had ever been meant to know.

  No wonder that in that last moment he did not struggle. No wonder, as I opened his chest in the same movement that had opened mine, I saw him smile and his lips part to reveal teeth the color of ripe corn.

  Inside his chest was his heart, and it was made of red corn grains. It pulsed softly between my fingers as I lifted it free, and I heard overhead the first peals of thunder. No matter the source, blood spilled in the name of the gods is still blood, and he had the blood of fifty-two sacrifices inside him.

  It started raining as he died. My whole being was cold, as it had been since the day of the sacrifice. The only warmth was the beating thing between my hands. I remembered the priests lifting my heart high above me.

  He had been fed my heart to bring him to life. He had partaken of my flesh. The heart between my fingers was dying, its beat more and more sluggish.

  I lifted the heart again, to my mouth. Blood ran down my throat, and it had the salty taste of tears.

  I ate it to the end. It tasted not of flesh but of grains and earth, like a harvest of corn. Of darkness, and fears that were not mine, fears that made it pulse all the way from my throat to my stomach.

  Standing amidst corn stalks, I felt tears run down my cheeks, like trails of blood down the altar of sacrifices. I have made things right again, I thought, but I knew this was beyond amends. The corn-man’s darkness was mine to bear for as long as I lived, a price paid to the gods I had sought to cheat.

  I left the body lying in the fields of stalks and went home under the stormy skies.

  As I opened the door of my house, I heard Paletl’s cries. We would have to move, to leave for another city, before they found the corn-man and someone remembered the knife I had bartered for.

  I took my son in my arms, nursed him against me. His flesh was warm against mine; he snuggled close to me, knowing nothing of pain or of sacrifices. I thought I would weep again. Instead, I was startled to feel my heart, my stolen heart, beat so quickly out of fear for him that I thought it would burst through my chest.

  Copyright © 2009 Aliette de Bodard

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  Aliette de Bodard was a finalist for the 2009 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her story “Obsidian Shards” was published in Writers of the Future XXIII and garnered an Honorable Mention in Gardner Dozois’ Year’s Best Science Fiction. In addition, her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Realms of Fantasy, Interzone, and Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, and she is the author of “Beneath the Mask” in Beneath Ceaseless Skies #8. Visit http://www.aliettedebodard.com for more information.

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  THE PRINCE’S SHADOW

  by Emily M.Z. Carlyle

  The king’s sister visited my dreams for five nights before I was introduced to her in person, but it was not until the fifth night that she revealed her intentions to me by introducing the young prince into our shared dream.

  I cannot explain why I trusted her and her purpose for me, save to say that where her presence was all degrees of darkness, solid and dependable as my own soul, the boy came into my dream like sunlight, a blazing promise.

  Some would find such contrast between darkness and light easy to interpret, seeing in the king’s sister a witch—as she was rumored to be—and in the prince an imperiled innocent. I was not so easily fooled. While I was born with eyes as blank and useless as a pair of pebbles, my first act in this world was to squall so loudly and insistently that a peddler found me abandoned beneath a frozen hedge before the feral dogs could get at me.

  From that point on and through all the years that the Sisters cared for me, I was never as helpless as my blindness might suggest. Blindness taught me to use my other senses and trust in portents, balancing the evidence of sound, touch, smell and taste against the ambiguous suggestions I sometimes received in dreams or in waking. The Sisters praised God for granting me self-sufficiency even as they forbade me to speak of my ‘visions’ to strangers. They placed their faith in God, but their earthly pride barred them from believing He might gift one such as me so abundantly as to make me a visionary.

  Needless to say, when the king’s sister arrived in person on a warm morning in the early summer of my twelfth year, demanding to see their blind charge and claiming we had met in a dream, the Sisters were mightily confused. Mother Superior did not dare refuse King Hugh’s sister, much as hosting a suspected witch in her austere quarters must have galled her.

  I felt the tension humming in the close air of her tiny receiving room and smelled Mother Superior’s mood, sharp as jaundice. But it was her guest whose assessing gaze absorbed my attention—it was a physical sensation, as sharp and penetrating as it had been in my dream. I stopped in the middle of the bare stone floor and bobbed a curtsy.

  “Come here,” the king’s sister said.

  I remembered her name: Alys of Malvento. She exhaled in amusement as I made my way to her in short, precise steps, counting the distance in my head as I followed her voice. Her hand was cold and smooth as she lifted my chin and inspected me.

  “What is your name?
” she asked.

  Mother Superior answered for me. “We named the child Daria after the blind virgin from the legend of St. Brigid.” She spoke sternly, as though challenging Alys of Malvento to gainsay her. I could not blame the old woman: we were both Trattorians. Even a woman of God chaffed under the rule of the conqueror king, Hugh of Gillianna, Alys’s half-brother.

  “We are all blind in God’s eyes, wouldn’t you agree, Mother?” Alys said coolly.

  Mother Superior huffed in outrage at the younger woman’s presumption, but said nothing.

  I knew that Alys of Malvento was illegitimate, left to fend for herself by forgoing marriage to become her brother’s housekeeper. They said she was his match in cleverness and strength of will. I stood with my head up and let her inspect me at her leisure.

  “Have they told you who I am, Daria?” she asked presently. She spoke to me as to an adult, never addressing me as ‘child.’ I liked her for it.

  I bobbed another curtsy. “Yes, madam. You are Alys, Countess of Malvento, half-sister to our King Hugh.”

  Dry amusement filled her voice. “King? Are you so news-starved out here in the countryside? He was crowned emperor three Christmases past.”

  Mother Superior’s plain wooden chair creaked behind me as she shifted in it, torn between annoyance and fear. While I had taken a lay sister’s vows, I was not, nor would I ever be, a Sister. The reasons were, as they say, legion. One of them was my boldness, sometimes verging on recklessness.

  Alys’s gaze roamed my face while I spoke, bold as a marauding army, never faltering in my recitation. “Indeed, madam, we are not news-starved in the least. We heard how the Archbishop of Illia crowned King Hugh Emperor of Gillianna, Trattoria and Aelussia, Duke of St. Giobert, and Prince of the Palatine Cities. We also heard how the Archbishop was then excommunicated for his presumptuousness, while our King was forbidden to wear the imperial crown.”

  The armrests of Mother Superior’s chair fair groaned as she squeezed them, too furious and terrified to speak. Her mood shifted to mute astonishment when Alys of Malvento laughed—an unexpectedly girlish sound.

  When she had laughed herself hoarse, I smiled up at her, content that I had not been wrong in my judgment of her.

  Alys startled Mother Superior with a request that we be left alone. It took some persuading, but in the end the Sister had nothing on the king’s sister. Alys then questioned me as to my age and origins, the schooling I’d received from the Sisters, and the chores I performed for them.

  She asked if I wanted to become a Sister.

  I hesitated a little, knowing that I was about to repay the Sisters’ kindness unfairly. Harsh they had been to me, and stern in the manner of all religious, yet I owed them much. Yet I could not answer Alys’s question but truthfully.

  “No, madam,” I said quietly.

  She pressed me. “You have taken some vows?”

  “Yes, madam, the lay sister’s vows. Chastity, modesty, obedience, and loyalty.”

  “Loyalty,” she repeated, dry amusement creeping back into her voice like the touch of a midsummer’s hot breeze. “Loyalty to whom?”

  I lifted my face again, unerringly, as though I could see her. “To my lord and master, madam,” I replied.

  The Sisters served the One God Who Is Three, but while I had been taught to feel awe and respect for His power, I was cut from different cloth. Alys saw that as clearly as the Sisters always did. Yet while they had hoped I would be content to end my days as a lay helper in the monastery, she knew me for what I truly was: a retainer born but masterless, overflowing with passionate devotion yet lacking the vessel to contain it. I possessed a strong sensual streak directed wholly outward, away from my own body as I pursued the myriad bits of knowledge to be gleaned from my four living senses and visionary moments, like the broken shards of a stained-glass window depicting all of Creation.

  Young as I was, I knew I would hold true to my vows without regret. And just as surely, I knew that my senses were wasted on me alone. I was like a duckling, which attaches itself to the first creature it sees when it opens its eyes, duck or no, except that my mind’s eye remained as firmly shuttered as my physical eyes. In my twelve-year-old jadedness, I despaired it would remain so forever.

  Alys of Malvento called for refreshments. Over bread, cheese and watery mead, she told me about her nephew, Prince Lys, King Hugh’s only son and heir. Some people have the gift of making unseen things appear as clear as strong light by the power of their words alone. Alys was not one of those people, yet I recognized the boy from my dream in her description.

  Lys was then eight years old. He had no surviving siblings. His playmates were the sons of Gilliannian nobility, mere tools for their fathers’ politicking, their clumsy attempts to undermine or curry favor with their Trattorian ruler.

  He was a lonely child, in need of a friend. Even more than that—a counselor, someone he could trust without reservation.

  “I am not usually prone to prophetic dreams, Daria,” Alys told me wryly. “But when I have them, I trust them.”

  I nodded in full understanding.

  I shall not relate the details of our leave-taking, the tears some of the younger Sisters shed as they hugged me or the Mother Superior’s barely concealed relief to be rid of us both, nor the carriage-ride down thawing roads to the Gilliannian capital of Illia. At sundown that day, still reeling with the rapid succession of events, I stood in the middle of an unfamiliar chamber in the palace, waiting to meet the prince.

  I stomped my foot on the floor, listening for echoes, but the thick carpet covering the flagstones muffled them. I guessed the walls must be hung with heavy tapestries, for I felt no telltale drafts. The air smelled of furniture dust and old potpourri. I stretched out my arms and spun slowly. My left hand brushed old velvet, an upholstered armchair. Using it as the first marker on my mental map of the palace, I made my way around the room, drawing my feet slowly across the carpet to preserve my dignity from footstools and discarded toys.

  My hands were reading the elaborate carvings on the fireplace when I heard two halting footsteps behind me. I smelled Alys’s unique scent: verdigris, ink, and clean linen. The other scent I guessed must be Prince Lys, but I kept playing my hands over carven stone vines, grapes, and birds as though I’d heard nothing. Presently the boy’s footfall ventured closer, hamstrung between hesitation and curiosity. He finally saw what I was doing and cried out loud, sounding cheated: “But she’s blind! And she’s too old!”

  I turned then, satisfied to hear him gasp and fall back a step, startled at how accurately I pinpointed his location in the room. I smiled reassuringly, remembering that he was but a boy and no crueler than most seeing people behave upon meeting me for the first time.

  “Aye, I am blind,” I said, “but I can read your footsteps and your breath, and tell you’ve been playing in the stables today and had stew for supper.” His hands rustled his clothes self-consciously, no doubt looking for leftover straw. I continued: “And what better friend than one blind enough and tall enough to give you a leg up when next your nurse forbids you to climb trees or engage in other hazardous games?”

  From her post by the door, Alys of Malvento chuckled. The prince approached warily to peer into my face—I felt his breath. “Your eyes have no color at all!” he exclaimed, more softly, with a sort of hushed awe.

  “Color has no meaning for the blind,” I said affably.

  He pondered this. “You can’t read, can you?” he asked without much hope in his voice. “No, of course not. My nurse was going to finish reading me the story of White-As-Snow tonight, but now she says she won’t because I snuck out to the stables in my second-best play clothes.”

  “I don’t like that story,” I said.

  “I don’t like it much either,” he confessed. “White-As-Snow is so…” He cast about for a word. “Too girly,” he said finally, his voice rising on a note of defiance, as though he expected me to defend my sex against such an insult.


  I merely shrugged. “That, and she can’t tell a bad apple from a good one, for all that she has two good eyes in her head.”

  This stirred the prince’s curiosity. I bid him have a bowl of apples brought to us, then gave him my hand and asked him to help me to a seat. By then I knew the layout of the room, but I wanted to see if the prince was worthy of my trust. To my relief, he led me straight to a low divan, avoiding other furniture and kicking a toy cart out of our way.

  Thus began the prince’s apprenticeship in the method the blind apply to learn about the world. Using the apples Alys of Malvento herself brought us, I showed him how to sniff out the rotten core of a shiny fruit, how to feel an apple for soft, darkening places beneath the skin where it hit the ground, how to tap it for hollowness inside. When his nurse came to fetch him off to bed, he picked out the best fruit in the bowl and took it with him, promising that tomorrow he’d give me a tour of the palace, his pride filling the room with a smell like burning candles.

  That night I slept and did not dream, content in the certainty that I had found a vessel capable of containing and, even, increasing my devotion.

  After that first night, the night of the apples, we were almost inseparable. We took our toilet and slept separately, and though Lys begged with all his heart I was forbidden from his lessons, but we ate together, played together, attended Mass and public occasions—whether royal audiences or church holidays—together. Lys even profited from my excellent memory when repeating his daily lessons. I taught him to use his senses, emphasizing—after an unfortunate experiment he conducted early in our acquaintance, walking about with his eyes closed, which resulted in a sharp tumble and a twisted ankle—that by ‘senses’ I meant all of his senses.

  We became something of a palace fixture, a part of the décor pointed out to visitors—here were the tapestries commissioned by the first king of the line which yielded King Hugh’s queen; there were the banners of Hugh’s defeated enemies hung up in the great hall; and here came the heir to Hugh’s empire in his impractical velvet play clothes, leading his blind playmate around, her hand resting on his shoulder, her footsteps oddly unhesitant for one so stricken.