Beneath Ceaseless Skies #213 Read online

  But the snakes begged him not to abandon hope. And so the son of the Bahamut said, “There is one rule upon which all others hinge. You must never eat the flesh of your own kind. You may eat the fruit of the trees and the grain of the field. You may eat the animals: the fish and the birds. All of these things are for your pleasure. You may even eat the apes. But from this day forward you must refrain from eating the flesh of your own kind. If you continue to do so, you will never be more than beasts.”

  The snakes knew they could not do this. Instead, they decided that if they could not act as the son of the Bahamut demanded of them, they could at least look like him, which might soften his heart, and help him to forgive their failures. So they walked upright, and they spoke like him, and they covered their nakedness, and they learned. They did learn a little.

  “But not enough?” Miriam interrupted.

  Keila looked up, her eyes distant. Soon, she shook her head. “Not enough,” she agreed.

  The snakes made masks so that their faces would look like his, and they wore them so long they forgot that beneath them they were still snakes.

  They had fooled themselves, but not the son of the Bahamut, for he saw that despite their fine masks and their pretty speech, they still ate the flesh of their own kind. He said to them, “I have told you what you must do, and you have failed again, as I suspected you would. You are abhorrent to me, and now I am leaving you so that you might practice what I have taught. If I find that you have learned when I return, then I will choose one from among you to be the bride of my father the Bahamut, whose eternal body floats among the pillars of the world in the bottomless sea. If you have not, then I will strip your masks away and leave you as I found you.”

  “Why do you stop?” Miriam asked.

  Keila turned the page, then back again. She did not look up.

  “Read.”

  The snakes were enraged, and they would not allow themselves to be abandoned. They fell upon the son of the Bahamut and tore him into a thousand pieces, which they consumed. And when the blood that had been spilt return to the Bahamut, he was well pleased, for he knew the snakes belonged to him after all.

  Keila shut the book, smoothing the hair from her face as she turned to the window.

  “This Bahamut,” Miriam said. “The one eaten by snakes—he is the same as your god?”

  Keila ran her hand over the book’s thin cover. “You think the snakes were evil to do what they did, but you’re wrong. They were more clever than you think. It was the only way they could keep him. They carried him with them always after that—in their bones, and in their blood. As do their children, and their children’s children.”

  “But he was never seen again? He did not keep his promise?”

  “We still wait, Mistress. He will return.”

  “To do what?”

  “To save us from you, and you from yourselves.”

  Miriam doubted that. Even so, she felt a pang of jealousy for the humans, and not for the first time. But a people must have a history before they have a god, and not a stolen one. She raised her glass to drink, but Keila quickly leaned forward to stop her. “Are you sure, Mistress?”

  “Does your god accept sacrifice, Keila?”

  Keila opened her mouth to answer, but said nothing. Her hand tightened on Miriam’s wrist, and in the end she pressed her lips together. Whether that meant she had no answer, or that she refused to give it, Miriam did not know. Who, after all, can speak for a god?

  “Let this be a sacrifice to him. And let him save me, if he can.”

  Miriam drained her glass, and the life inside her turned and turned, dreaming.

  * * *

  Miriam lay still as her father’s physician moved his stethoscope over the bared flesh of her distended belly, hunting for what she knew could no longer be found. She watched his face, his eyes turned inward, as though in keeping them distant he could better hear what he sought. The stethoscope moved from the rounded crest of her belly down the side, and he paused there, head tilted. Miriam held her breath.

  “Has there been blood?” he inquired.

  “No.”

  Brows furrowed, he moved elsewhere, down low, pressing the smooth instrument painfully deep in what she sensed to be a quiet but building frustration. At last, he let out his breath and pulled the instrument from his ears. He sat very still, watching Miriam’s belly a long while before moving his pale blue eyes to her face.

  Before he could speak, Miriam snatched his hand, squeezing in earnest. “He’ll kill me,” she said.

  The physician’s eyes softened.

  “I’ve lost two already, and he won’t give me another chance. He’ll kill me.”

  “Has there been blood?” he asked again.

  “Yes.”

  Her father’s physician opened his hands, a helpless gesture. “There is nothing that can be done.”

  “Don’t tell him,” Miriam said.

  The physician tried to turn away, but Miriam tightened her grip on his hand. “Three weeks,” Miriam said. “The baby will come in three weeks, as you said.”

  “Stillborn.”

  “But I will have three weeks,” Miriam pressed. “If you tell him now... please.” She moved his hand to her belly, as though urging him to feel what wasn’t there. Holding his hand in place, she took the diaphragm of his stethoscope and slid it under their hands. “Listen again. Please.”

  The physician hesitated. His eyes remained on hers as Miriam moved the diaphragm lower on her belly. She smiled for him, nodded. “All is well,” she whispered. She held his grim expression with her forced smile, and continued to nod, urging him to agree. “All is well...”

  Leaving his hand on her belly, the physician turned his gaze away from her and out the window. At last, he pulled his hand from hers. He would not look at her as he packed his satchel.

  “Rest,” he instructed her. “No birth is easy.”

  When he had gone, Miriam sat at the edge of the bed, her loose white gown hiding her swollen belly and trembling arms. She heard the physician’s voice in the corridor outside her room, and the deeper voice of her father. The voices faded, their footsteps receding. When she was sure her father was gone, and not coming back, she covered her masked face and wept.

  * * *

  Her father’s physician had not been gone long when Keila’s soft knock sounded. Miriam, weakened by her loss of blood, sat up with some difficulty even as her maidservant opened the door and slipped inside. Keila, closing it behind her, stood by the door, hands pressed to her apron.

  “Mistress?”

  “Dead,” Miriam said.

  Saying it wrenched something in her, and she shut her eyes against a slow wave of dull pain. Keila was at her side, arms around her.

  “I don’t care,” Miriam said. “I didn’t want it. I never wanted it.”

  Keila pressed her down into the mattress, then carefully lifted her feet off the floor and to the bed. She smoothed her hair back, and felt her cheek. “Is there pain?”

  “No,” Miriam said. But there had been. There had been terrible pain. She had bit down on a twisted sheet as her insides knotted, as the thing in her lurched and fought to live, flexing in the throes of their shared agony. It had gone on far too long, and she remembered thinking that either it must die soon, or she would. Then the blood came, as though a floodgate had been opened, soaking her thighs, soaking the sheets and towels and spreading across the white tiles of her lavatory floor. She’d slipped in it trying to lift herself into the tub, her bare feet slick and red. Too weak to rise again, she had remained on the floor, sobbing against the tiles as her gut clenched with a final spasm. After that the thing had fallen still, and not moved again.

  Keila sat next to Miriam on the bed, and Miriam twisted to rest her head in the maid’s soft lap. With light fingers, Keila smoothed back Miriam’s hair. And as she did so, she whispered prayers to her god, and Miriam calmed.

  “My people have no god,” Miriam said after a time. �
��There is no one to forgive me.”

  “You have a god,” Keila whispered. “He is the same as mine. He belongs to us all. And we belong to him. You’ll see.”

  “How? When?”

  “He hears our prayers. He listens,” the maid said. “Soon... .”

  Miriam let her maid’s soft touch and gentle supplications lull her to sleep.

  * * *

  Miriam woke to the sound of retching from the lavatory. Swinging her legs out of bed, she raked the hair from her face and listened. It could only be Keila, but the maid had not seemed ill mere hours ago, and the urgency of the sound concerned her.

  “Keila?” she called, crossing the room. Through the crack in the door Miriam could see nothing but a stretch of white tile and one clawed foot of the tub. She pushed on the door. “Keila?”

  The girl knelt at the tub, leaning into it. Her hands clenched the rim, and her fine hair hung in lank strands, concealing her profile. The tiles beneath her were smeared with black muck, as though she had been tramping barefoot through the swamps. The girl raised her head, and Miriam recoiled with a gasp. Black tears streaked her cheeks, running from eyes plugged with sticky black mud. The thick stuff smeared her face and coated her chin. Her mouth fixed in a grimace, showing blackened teeth and tongue. She tried to speak but gagged, then leaned into the tub and retched again, bringing up gobs of dark bile. The sides of the tub were spattered; the drain had clogged with it.

  Miriam rushed to her side but feared to touch her without knowing how to help. Instead she turned the taps, releasing a torrent of water from the spigot. Her instinct was to wash it away, to flush the grisly evidence as though it were shameful. She dragged towels from the rack and knelt beside the suffering girl even as Keila started a helpless keening. Miriam tried to wipe the muck from her face, but the girl pushed her away even as she heaved, bringing up more of the black bile.

  “What did you do?” Miriam cried. “What happened?”

  Keila heaved, unable to catch her breath. Where her nails clutched the rim of the tub, they bled black. The gasping, the panting, Miriam remembered her first child, the stillborn infant she had birthed in this very room, and she knew Keila’s suffering was the same. Miriam looked down—the girl’s knees on the smeared tiles, her thighs slick with blackness.

  “I’m getting help,” Miriam declared.

  But before she could rise, Keila seized her arm. “No!” she cried.

  Miriam could not free herself from the girl’s grasp. Keila grimaced in pain, her mouth a black-painted grin. But also there was a fevered satisfaction—a wild pride at what was taking place.

  “—asked for this—” she said in a sticky voice. “—want this.”

  “Keila...”

  The girl’s mouth worked, as though trying to dislodge something caught in her throat. Her body clenched, and her back arched. She heaved again, emptying herself into the tub. “Bahamut,” she gasped. “Bahamut!”

  Miriam dug her nails into Keila’s hand in an effort to peel off the girl’s grip, but the skin split under the pressure, opening a long, bloodless tear from the back of her hand to just beneath her elbow. With a cry of revulsion, Miriam wrenched free and fled the room.

  She hadn’t yet reached the outer door when she heard her name called from the lavatory, but not in Keila’s voice.

  “Miriam!” it called—deeper than Keila’s, guttural and malformed. There came a soft ripping, and Keila’s voice reemerged, picking up a relentless string of rapid prayers strung tight with heightening panic. And even as Keila’s litany spilled out, that other voice slid over and through them, speaking the same words, becoming inside them. A soft rip and a sharp gasp, and Keila’s crying voice subsided to nothing, and only the man spoke. The prayers were ended.

  He said, “Stay, Miriam.”

  And Miriam stayed.

  She listened to the gentle, sticky sounds of wet clothes being removed and of feet in mud. When the curtain was drawn aside, a naked human male stood at the threshold of the lavatory. Dark streaks of drying mud covered his pale skin, as though he had emerged from the swamp and tried to clean himself with only his hands. Other than his eyes, which were the greenest she had ever seen, Miriam barely noted his face, plain but strangely familiar. He started towards her, but Miriam halted him with an outstretched palm. “Where is Keila?”

  “Keila is here,” the human said.

  Miriam called toward the lavatory for her maid.

  “Not there,” the man said. “Here.”

  “Keila!” Miriam called again.

  Caught up in a surge of fury, she rushed to her wardrobe, flung open a drawer, and withdrew the small paring knife she had kept in reserve for the day of her child’s birth. Advancing three steps, she held the knife pointed at his chest.

  “Do not move,” she commanded him.

  Keeping the knife fixed on him, Miriam moved to the lavatory curtain and drew it aside with her free hand. White tiles smeared with black, heaviest where Keila had knelt at the tub. Streaks of it stained the rim where the girl had clutched it in her suffering. Within, masses of thick black mud. And mixed into the slop, the twisted shape of a pale sheet. Miriam turned from the lavatory to face the human, who watched her, but—obediently—had not moved.

  “What did you do?” Miriam demanded. “Where is she?”

  “Don’t you recognize me, Miriam?”

  Miriam took a step closer, knife raised in a steady threat. “No,” she lied, though she could see it in the shape of his mouth and the line of his nose. She could see it in his eyes.

  The human gave a kind smile. “Why do you wear a mask, Miriam?”

  Lowering the knife, Miriam touched her mask with a trembling hand.

  “It is well made, but doesn’t suit you,” he said. He lifted a hand slowly, as though to prevent startling a timid animal. When Miriam didn’t flinch away, he touched the cheek of her mask with only the tips of his fingers. “The face you hide is more honest than this, and more beautiful.”

  Miriam ran her fingers over the stitching of the mask, remembering Keila’s words to her.

  Be what you are.

  “Be what you are,” the human agreed.

  “And if what I am is a liar and a thief?”

  “We are all of us liars and thieves.”

  Miriam narrowed her eyes. “Why are you here? What do you want?”

  “Your child is dead,” the human said. He moved to place a hand on her swollen belly, but Miriam brought the paring knife up again, this time not so far as his chest. She pressed the point to his gut to keep him at bay.

  “Human gods have no power here. You have no authority over me.”

  The human cocked his head. “Human god? You believe you are the only one who fashions masks?” He grinned for her, and his cruel smile revealed a mouthful of thorns.

  Miriam shied from him, but he took her wrist and twisted until she dropped the knife.

  “What do I seem to you? Human?”

  “No.”

  “Raah?”

  Miriam shook her head.

  “Would you witness what I am beneath this mask? And beneath the next?”

  “No,” Miriam said, closing her eyes. “Please, no.”

  “I come for my son, whom you gave to me,” the Bahamut said.

  Miriam did not realize she was withdrawing from the god until her back met the closed door. By then, he loomed in front of her, one hand on her wrist, the other pressed to her belly, and the infant corpse floating within.

  My son.

  “No,” Miriam said.

  The Bahamut leaned close. “Why deny me now? Is it too great a burden, surrendering to me what you have already given in sacrifice?”

  “Yes,” Miriam whispered, but she hid her face from him as she said it. He released her wrist to brush her cheek, to cup her chin and raise her face to look into his cold green eyes. The hand that pressed her womb went deep, and deeper still.

  Miriam gasped, and the thing inside her fluttered, then
kicked.

  She would have collapsed had the god not tightened his grip on her face to hold her tight against the wall. He lowered his cheek to hers, his mouthful of thorns brushing her ear. Though she could not look down, she felt his hand deep inside her.

  “I take only what is mine,” he said. “And I am not cruel. I will not leave you with nothing.”

  * * *

  Miriam lay on her bed, arms hugging her belly. The weight of the child was gone, but something remained. She was not empty. For a time she wept, but she could not have said if for sadness or relief. She slept without meaning to, and rose when she awoke, drowsy and slow, to take up a candle.

  The lavatory was dark and silent. The tiles chilled her bare feet, and the mud that had come so violently and in such great amounts from Keila had dried in clotted smears on the floor and on the sides of the tub. But inside, the black mess remained, and she raised her candle to better see. She studied it a long while before reaching in to tug free the coiled sheet. It came away from the mud, and though she knew by then what it was, still gave an anguished cry. Keila’s skin, empty of content, lax and twisted, a parody of the girl’s shape, slapped wetly where Miriam dropped it. A shapeless mouth and empty holes where her eyes had been gaped up at Miriam.

  She wrapped the skin—still slick with mud—in a sheet from her own bed and buried it that morning in the garden.

  * * *

  Miriam lay on her back, knees drawn up and spread wide. Around her, the midwives tended to the blood and the agony. When it emerged at last in a gush of brine and the gasps of the midwives, Miriam cried out and was already reaching.

  “Give it to me!” she snarled before the baffled midwives had found anything worth swaddling. “Give me my child.”

  But there was no sharp cry, no newborn wail. Miriam hunted the muddy tangle of sheets between her splayed knees but found only the twisted rag of skin that the Bahamut had left of her child.