Beneath Ceaseless Skies #29 Read online

  The look in her face was of stone, as though all flesh had fallen away and only form remained. No springs welled from her eyes, for there was only drought there now. There seemed to be drought within him, as well. He reached a hand to her arm, warm and tanned, and she did not pull away, but neither did she look at him. She stared out the cave’s mouth, to the hills that shadowed the distance.

  “The marauders,” he said, and paused. “They remain in your land.”

  “Yes,” but there was no longer heat in her voice, as there had been once when she spoke of them.

  “I would not have them remain,” he said.

  “Nor I,” she said, “but if my breath ceases, it will harm them as much and as little as any other action of mine could do—and it shall harm me no more.”

  “Do not!” he said. “Please. Please do not.”

  “The mountain was not concerned with the trifling matters of men and women.”

  “I was never the mountain. I only knew the mountain, for a time.”

  “For an age,” she said. “There was a time when my people did not come to you—but never did I hear of a time when you were not here.”

  “I am only a mortal creature. I have a lifetime, as you do.”

  She did not reply, though for those few words the strain had been less. To keep it so, he said, “You wondered why no man has come to me for so long a while. It is because I knew the marauders before they came—not these, but earlier ones. Do you remember hearing of earlier bands, stealing your children for slaves and murdering your men?”

  “That time is far distant,” she said.

  “Not so distant for me. A man and a woman came to me—he was master of all your land, for leagues at any turn. I looked to his infant son, and I could but name the truth I saw—I named him Ruler in Desolation. His father was angry, but his mother believed, and she went with great sorrow. And later I heard it was true—the marauders came and stole and destroyed, and the child was suffered to live, but blinded. And so a blind man ruled a desolate people, as I had seen.

  “I did not want to see,” he said. “The names I give do not make truth. They only reveal it. But there were few of your people left when those marauders fell, and no one wished to come because the truth I told held such suffering. Nor did I wish to tell it.”

  Her laughter came low and sharp. “And now I bring sorrow to you again.”

  “You—do not.”

  She shivered, and he pressed her into the cave’s shelter and wrapped the second robe close. Soon she slept, and he sat at her side, watching to see that she breathed.

  * * *

  Still he tended her, slaughtering a goat now and again, bringing fresh water with which to mix her grain. They did not speak of hard things again, and though the grief still lay heavy in her eyes, twice she laughed at some word of his. Her strength returned to her, night by night.

  Finally, in the evening after she had gathered wood with him far across the mountainside, she looked into the fire and said, “If I return to my master’s house, I believe I may still be received there. They will not be glad of my absence, but our people are scattering now, and my hands may be useful still.”

  “Yes,” he said. “There remains work for you.”

  “You know?”

  “Yes.” He rarely dared touch her unless it was needed, but now he laid a hand on hers. “I told you that Caris is no sufficient name for you. The second night—when I feared your death—I thought it could do no harm to see what truth remained of your life. At worst, it would only be brief, and cave-dark.

  “But it was not.”

  Again this frail woman huddled with other darkened faces, creeping among sleeping soldiers to spoil the ground with their blood, washing the wounds of lean-muscled women and of boys grown suddenly to men, weeping as the last stranger disappeared beneath a cascade of earth.

  “I name you Promise of Deliverance,” he said, “for you shall return to your people, and your enemies shall be overthrown.”

  “Do you mock?” she said. “I cannot believe it....”

  “I would not mock you.”

  For some time she stared out across the fire, to the distant plains beyond. “Then I must go,” she said. “You give us hope again. And yet—what of you? Will you come with us?”

  His words were all cold stone. They could not tell how he hungered to go, how he would shield her from all the harm he was able and let her tears wet his shoulder when she could accept no other comfort. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I may not leave the mountain.”

  She pressed a palm over his cool fingers. “I’ll come back. I’ll tell you everything.”

  When she had wrapped her robes around her in sleep, he watched her still face and listened to her shallow breaths. Even when the fire’s embers darkened he could only feel the faint aura of her warmth, he did not stir, though from time to time he glanced out to the late summer stars glittering against the black.

  Perhaps she would come again; he hoped she would. But he didn’t look beyond to find if she had spoken truth. The truth would find him, in time.

  Copyright © 2009 Sarah L. Edwards

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  Sarah L. Edwards writes science fiction and fantasy, reads a lot, knits (anybody need a scarf?), and wonders what to do with this math degree she just got. Her fiction has previously appeared in Writers of the Future XXIV, Aeon Speculative Fiction, and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. She is the author of “The Last Devil” in BCS #4 and “The Tinyman and Caroline” in BCS #17.

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  THE SILVER KHAN

  by Stephen Case

  The palace rose every morning at dawn to hang suspended over the gardens below. The light would grow in the east, and the thermal sails would slowly become taut. Then it would rise, drifting slightly in the morning breeze. They told me this was for the safety of the Silver Khan and his court, but in time I came to believe that he was as much a prisoner in his palace as I seemed to be. No one would tell me what in the gardens was to be feared by daylight.

  “The day is for matters of the court,” my attendant-guard would say. “The boyars meet in their chambers, and the clerks fill their ledgers. The Khan sends and receives messages by the birds in the tower. In the heat of afternoon all sleep, and when evening comes the palace returns to its foundations. That is the time for leisure, when we feast and the musicians play and we wander the gardens.”

  It was true. Everyone in the palace slept in the afternoon when the southern sun beat on the bricks and tiles and made the heat rise off in waves. I never became accustomed to the heat, though I took to wearing the robes of silk as they did.

  (They sleep there still. In my dreams that is how I see them: in their long, thin robes of silk on beds of sequined pillows or under canopies of silver. The palace no longer rises in the heat of the day, and in its thousand rooms no one stirs from slumber.)

  My room looked south, and I often pushed the curtains back from open windows barely touched by breezes. Standing, I could look out over the gardens far below, viewed over the edges of the thermal sails that extended outward from the walls like a fan. The gardens stretched as far as I could see to the south, and I knew—for the Khan once summoned me to his Chamber of Birds—that they stretched as far as one could see in all other directions as well, a mosaic of manicured lawns, ornamental trees, still pools, and colossal statues. If there was ever any movement, anything to hint at danger below, I saw no glimpse of it from above.

  I thought about that quite a bit when I first came to the palace, about what sort of danger would make the Khan raise his entire palace by daylight to hang like a stone bauble in the air. When I first arrived, I thought my task would be to decipher this as well as the functioning of the thermal sails. I understand both now.

  Beyond the gardens to the west lay the Great Sea. They said that if you traveled north or south along the coast of the Sea you could sail for a week and still be in lands t
hat paid homage to the Khan. Beyond the gardens to the east was home, over the mountains. I had planned to travel that direction when I left, but as it turned out my path was determined only by the direction of the wind on the day the palace fell.

  * * *

  When the sun began to set in the west, one could hear the chink-chink of the great chain being wound as the palace settled slowly back toward the ground. By sunset it would once again touch its foundation stones, and throughout the evening that followed the groan of granite settling and cooling would echo up and down the corridors of the palace. Then the gates would be opened and the court would flood out into the gardens.

  The gardens of the Silver Khan surpassed all the legends told of them in the east. It was true that there were brooks running with wine and fountains with mead. It was true that the voices of the Khan’s musicians were matched only by the songs of his trained birds, which were every color imaginable and hung suspended in golden cages throughout the garden paths. These things spoken of in legend were certainly true, but what the legends could not speak of was to actually be there, to step out of the ivy-covered gates of the Khan’s palace and look down into gardens that sparkled like stars because there were silver lanterns hung from the branch of every tree. They did not tell of the sweetness of the air that came over the hills and mingled with the smell of incense and the perfume of the Khan’s hundred wives and daughters.

  As the sun began to set life would come to the palace once again. My attendant-guard would come to my door, and I would slip into the long silver robe that was the only color worn by men in the evening.

  “There will be feasting tonight,” my guard would tell me. He said this every night.

  “There certainly will be.”

  “You slept well?” He always asked this as well.

  “I am afraid not. It is the heat. The lands to the east—”

  “The lands to the east are cooler. This you tell me.”

  He would turn and I would follow through the corridors, now echoing with the soft pad of other slippered feet. There would be courtesans and diplomats I recognized, and they would nod formally or smile in greeting. There were the Khan’s clerics as well, somber and dressed in robes of darker silver. They walked silently, their hands folded.

  The numbers would continue to swell as we walked together through the palace and into the great courtyard. Here the Khan himself waited at silver gates. The gates were covered with ivy, and the ivy must have been moon-glory or some other night flower, because now its blossoms would begin to open shyly. The Khan would stand with his wives and daughters arrayed behind him, and behind them his guardsmen stood at attention.

  The legends also said nothing of the colors: the Khan was resplendent in silver, his robes woven with more hues of the metal than I could have imagined. His guardsmen wore silver as well, but a brilliant, shimmering argent that was almost too bright to look at in the daylight. In the muted light of the garden it cast reflections so luminous that to see a guard walk past was almost to fancy a piece of twilight torn from the sky patrolling the pathways. And then there were the Khan’s wives and the princesses.

  They said that the Khan had no sons, and his daughters were his glory. The men of the palace were required to dress in silver alone so there would be nothing to detract from the brilliance of his daughter’s gowns. He had more daughters than I was ever able to count, and I never saw two fabrics of the same color.

  Had I been watching closely, I would have perhaps seen among them a woman in robes the color of the fading sky over the palace. She surely stood with her sisters each night, though I would not know her until she approached me on the night of which I will speak.

  Had I been more cognizant I would have also studied the fabric of their gowns more closely. In my memory something of the way the silk rustled in the first breezes of evening recalls the snap of sails below my window, but surely that memory is touched by what came later. I could not imagine then that those gowns would be my salvation on the day my friend the artist went mad.

  But I find I am getting ahead of my account.

  The Khan and his wives and daughters and the guards would stand there, before the silver gates gleaming gold with the last rays of the setting sun, and we would wait for the faint rumble of the cornerstones of the palace kissing their granite foundations. Then the Khan would speak.

  “In the name of God, the beneficent, the merciful....”

  His voice would rise, and for half a moment he would sing alone before the clear, bright voices of his wives and daughters joined the chorus. In another instant the courtyard would fill with the high, almost keening sound of the Khan’s palace singing the evening prayers.

  When the prayers concluded the Khan would raise his hands in a benediction and say, “May the evening bring you peace. My gardens are open to you.” His guardsmen would swing the great gates open, and the entire congregation would follow the Khan and his retinue down the pathways and into the gardens.

  Sometimes this appearance was all I would see of the Khan in the evening. His attendants pitched his pavilion wherever in the garden his fancy took him, and if it pleased him he would summon certain delegates or friends with whom to speak. If he summoned me, we would talk of my lands to the east and of the Khan’s dominions to the north and south. He would ask me about the habits of my people. If he were feeling jovial he would offer me the hand of one of his daughters and the opportunity to serve in the palace as ambassador of the east. If he was in a foul mood, he might make references to the massing of his armies. I did not approach him if not summoned.

  If left unsummoned, I would be for the most part left to my own devices. I spent as much time as possible in the company of certain officers of the guard or high-ranking delegates, for I knew I would learn more of the Khan’s realm and its workings from them than I ever could from the Khan. Often I would simply wander by myself, eating and drinking with the crowds and then setting off along the footpaths. There were boats for the rivers and a thousand varieties of night-blooming flowers. You were never far from the sound of a fountain.

  I was fascinated by the statues in the Khan’s gardens. The absence of statuary was conspicuous in the Khan’s palace, though at the time I did not understand why. The statues in the gardens were all of men, clearly warriors, dressed in a strange armor, heavier than that of the Khan’s guardsmen and more angular than those of our soldiers in the east. They stood three or four times my own height and seemed carved of white marble.

  One night in the gardens I met an artist who sketched the statues in secret. He showed me his portfolio, which contained drawings of the face of a certain statue he had sketched night after night for years.

  “He is speaking,” the artist said. “See the movement of the lips and the line of the jaw. I do not know what he says, but he is forming words over the months and years.”

  I asked him how a statue could speak.

  “I do not know,” he said, shaking his head. “Suppose a mountain were to stir, as our geometers say they do indeed. Suppose it formed words in its throat of stone. Would a man beneath it be able to hear or perceive?”

  “The statues live, then?”

  He was looking about us in the moonlight, suddenly hesitant. I handed him back his drawings, and he stuffed them into a satchel at his side.

  “I don’t know whether they live,” he told me. “One does not speak of such things.”

  But we did. I began to seek him out in my nightly wanderings through the gardens. I noticed that the secrecy in which he sketched the statues seemed echoed by the statues themselves. They were scattered, seemingly neglected beneath growing vines or beside unkempt pathways. The more I saw of them, the more it seemed that perhaps they had been created in the time of a predecessor of the Khan’s and that the current Khan took no pleasure in them. They seemed forgotten.

  “Were they carved in the time of the Khan’s father?” I asked the artist one night. We stood beneath one as we spoke, a white figure surv
eying a line of distant trees.

  The artist blinked at me. There was no moon this night, and he squinted up at the statue in the faint light of distant lanterns and then back at his canvas. I couldn’t tell whether he was annoyed with my interest or grudgingly grateful he had someone to speak with about the statues that so clearly fascinated him.

  “Have you carved?” he whispered. I bent closer and he repeated the question.

  “No. I’ve sketched, but nothing of merit.”

  I thought then of the pages of torn parchment concealed behind wooden panels of my wardrobe in the palace. They held drawings of the palace, maps of the land as I could see it from the palace’s height during the day, and diagrams—as best as I could create—of the mechanisms that lowered the interlocking thermal sails from the walls. There was even a rough sketch of what the palace must look like from the valley’s edge: a sliver of stone in a bowl of silk, floating almost at the level of the surrounding hills, tethered to the valley’s floor by its great iron chain. Even so clearly drawn, I would not understand it until it was almost too late.

  I had no time to retrieve them, so those parchments and the drawings they hold must now be as unreachable as the fallen palace itself.

  “I have sculpted stone,” the artist was saying. “I can tell you that these statues, all of them throughout the garden, are so similar in form as to have been carved by the same maker.”

  I nodded slowly, unsure of the significance.

  “And yet there are over three hundred, by my best reckoning.” When I said nothing he continued. “And it would take a man the greater part of his working life to carve even one statue of this size and detail.”

  “So they are not stone? They live?”

  “I know only that they move, albeit slower than any eye can follow. This one,” he motioned above him, “has not stirred for as long as my father or his father can recall. But I have been studying the finely carved lines around his eyes, and the way they grow from year to year tells me that he tires.”