Beneath Ceaseless Skies #158 Read online

  Issue #158 • Oct. 16, 2014

  “The Leaves Upon Her Falling Light,” by Gregory Norman Bossert

  “The Rugmaker’s Lovers,” by Brynn MacNab

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  THE LEAVES UPON HER FALLING LIGHT

  by Gregory Norman Bossert

  [The hart] hath more wit and malice to save itself than any other beast or man. The Master of Game, Edward of Langley, 2nd Duke of York

  She give us a penny to bury the wren. Traditional Song

  A little before dawn I make five little cages of white bone tied with ribbon and strewn with marjoram and rue, and with the setting of the moon a bird of my remembrance flies in the window to land on the edge of my hand. She’s a wren, frail and faded as she has come the furthest.

  “Hey, Jenny Jenny,” I sing to her, and feed her crumbs soaked in a little blood and honey and then a plump green spider I have been keeping in the windowframe. The windows of the tower face east and west and the moonlight streams in one and out the other, leaves an orange glow across us like a promise of fire. The fire in the hearth is burnt to coals. The nest with its one small egg has sat by the fire all night. Now I place the nest on the table between the cages, where the stories will better nurture the egg than the little heat left in the hearth. I whisper to the egg, “Tallys, I am called.”

  The wren sits on my shoulder a spell, the bramble of my hair another sort of nest around her. When her gaze brightens and her heart calms, I set her in her cage in front of the nest with its egg and bid her recall.

  * * *

  What the wren says to the egg:

  The boy was fair, like a spot of sunshine in the clearing, though the trees’ grasp was so wide and green that no sun slipped through them. In age and size he was much like the lyme-hound that lead him, though what was a wise nine years and a great size in a hound was young and undergrown for a boy so deep in the forest.

  He had fought without success to keep the lymer from dragging him deeper into the trees for all the morning I had flown after him, and now that the hound had stopped the boy fought to get him started again. The hound was unmoved by his tugging, no matter if the boy tried to lead him on or back. It was clear by the way the boy’s eyes, as wide and blue as the hidden sky, turned from oak to ash to moss-strewn deadfall that he would not know which way to lead the hound if it had been so willing.

  For all his searching, he had not seen me flitting from branch to branch above him, nor any other of the eyes that watched in the wood. And even the hound, who knew a stag was just ahead, huge and unseen in the green shadows, did not see the girl until she stepped out from a low-spread hawthorn into the clearing. It shook its head in silent surprise and backed against the boy. I sang my welcome to her.

  She seemed of an age with him, though where he was pale, sunlight on stone under open skies, she was every dark shade of the forest, green on brown, brambled hair and eyes like oak leaves. She seemed a girl, though she might have been brambles and oak leaves not long before.

  The boy staggered a little as the hound leaned into him and squinted at the girl as if trying to pick her out against the background of forest. His lips pursed as if to frame a question, and stuck like that. The girl stared back, head at an angle, very still.

  “An odd end for a hunt,” the girl finally said, in a voice that fluttered like laughter or song.

  The hound shook its head again at that, ears flapping against the boy’s leg. The boy put hand on the hound’s head, steadying the both of them, and frowned.

  “The hunt is tomorrow,” he said. “This is but the quest, nor the end, not until we find a hart, a stag in his harbouring.”

  The girl said, “There are many sorts of hunts, and many sorts hunted.”

  The boy’s frown deepened. “Maybe for farmers.” He squinted at her again. “Or poachers. But the noble man hunts par force, with hound and horse, and hunts the most noble prey, buck and boar and hart.” His thin voice had strained downward, as if reciting someone older and more bold. “I seek a hart as it is king of the wild, the hunting of which is a king’s pleasure. It hath a bone in its heart that bringeth great comfort.”

  “And you a king?” the girl asked, her voice that much closer to laughter.

  “I am Hugh, son of Edwin King of the Three Kingdoms,” the boy said, and then in his own light voice, “The king is... sick. I am staying with my uncle Gérard, who is Duke of the Arden and Master of Game and Regent in my father’s name.”

  “You can call me Tallys,” the girl said, as if the boy had asked. “I hear the Duke your uncle is wise and careful of the wildwood in your father’s name, Hugh son of Edwin King.”

  The girl walked toward the boy, and a little to the side. The hound lowered its head, its flank so heavy against the boy’s knees that he could only turn his head to track her.

  “I hear the Duke’s son is otherwise,” she said. “I hear he has no respect for the wild things, no proper fear of the deep places.”

  “Respect?” the boy spluttered. “My cousin Edouard has no fear of anything. You should not speak of him.”

  The girl was at his side now and leaned over the wide brown bulk of the hound, who kept its head down, its gaze on the shadows ahead. “I hear he pulls the wings from birds,” she said softly.

  The boy looked down and away. “He shows me the use of sling and snare. He’s been on the hunt, as well. He tells stories, things my Uncle’s lessons leave out.”

  “I like stories,” the girl said. “Do you know the story of how the wren became queen of the birds?” She raised one small brown hand and I flew down to land on her palm. The boy’s eyes went round; the hound huffed and would not look up. “The birds had a contest to see who could fly most high and thus be rightful ruler. There were many birds more fleet or mighty than the wren, but none more bright or bold. She hid under the eagle’s wing and waited.”

  I tucked my head under my own wing, and the girl closed her fingers around me.

  “And the eagle flew up higher than any who had gone before, and when she felt his breath grow thin and his heart falter, she sprang out and up.”

  Her fingers flew open and I leapt up and around her and the boy to land in the branches overhead.

  “And so she flew the highest, and all the birds acknowledged her queen.”

  “She cheated,” the boy protested, squinting up at me. I dropped to a lower branch and caught a harvestman; one of its legs spiraled down to land in the boy’s hair.

  “She won,” the girl said. “How came your father to be king? How will you?” But before the boy could splutter an answer, she said, “Tell me one of your stories of the hunt.”

  “They’re Edouard’s stories,” he said.

  “Choose it, tell it,” she said, “then it will be yours.”

  “I... he told me of the Unmaking, after the hart is slain, how my uncle butchers it cut by cut from the outermost limbs to the center with a special sword, all the meat cut away and handed out to everyone who helped with the hunt according to rank and effort, and they put the head on a pole and then the, uh, awfuls—”

  “Offal,” she said.

  “That, wrapped in the skin, for the dogs. It’s a noble art, the ritual of the Unmaking, that’s what my uncle says. But I’m not sure I want to see...”

  The hound shook its head again as if in agreement, though its eyes were on the darkness that was the stag in the trees.

  “Seeing can be difficult,” the girl said. She slipped around to the boy’s other side, her right hand on his right shoulder. “Dangerous.” She raised her left hand before them: a gl
immering like light on water. I fluttered from my branch to the thicket of her hair, hopped down to her shoulder between them to watch. “But sight is a gift.”

  The boy would have backed away, then, but for the hound on one side and she on the other with her arm about him. The light from her hand flickered on our faces. “What glamour is this?” he said.

  “A glass,” the girl said with her reflection. “A mirror.”

  I could feel the boy tremble. “Mirrors are brass with tin over. My father has a silver one. He has a glass, too, a cup for wine. It is very old and the making of it is lost. I am not allowed to go near it lest I break it. One time I was playing in the hall and knocked the high table and the glass tipped but did not break. Father, he... ah, he was very angry. That was before he got sick,” he finished, quietly.

  “This mirror is glass, and very old as well, though the making of it is not lost, not to me. See the wren reflected? If the wren is a story of the past, then what of her reflection? Here, you can hold it if you like.

  “No, Tallys, no, it will break,” the boy said, and tried to pull from her grip but her arm, her shoulder where I perched, were like the roots of trees that can break stone. He pushed at the arm that held the mirror and his soft white hand slipped along her smooth brown until his fingers brushed the glass and then he froze with a little gasp, and the girl laughed like birds leaping into the sky and the stag under the trees lifted its head antlers like the high branches and the hound howled, once, like a trumpet.

  I hopped from her shoulder to his to see what he saw. What that was is not my tale to tell. But through his velvet and linen and his soft skin and the fragile wing of his collarbone, I felt his heart shudder thrice and fall as still as the woods.

  “Oh,” the girl said, and the mirror cracked under the boy’s fingers, shattered and rained down in shards to lose itself in the leaves. “Oh,” the girl said, and the boy’s heart started again, as light and fast as mine, and his knees failed and I took wing as he slid from her grasp. “Oh,” she said, to the boy heaped on the ground and the hound who looked up for the first time, ears back and teeth bright in the dim light, or was she speaking to me and the stag, to herself? “Is this his story after all?” the girl asked, but if there was an answer I did not wait for it, as I had a long way to fly.

  * * *

  “A long way it was, Jenny Wren,” I say. “That place in the woods is overgrown now, and if any shards of the mirror remain they are buried under years of leaf gone to earth.”

  I lean over the nest that is a weave of my hair and breathe on the egg, the scent of warm bark and soil in the sun.

  “Would it have been better if the making of such things had been lost?” I ask. “Though how can I forget, with such as you to remind me?”

  The wren gives me a look that, tiny though her eye, is regal and a bit judgmental; then she sings her song, startlingly loud.

  “Hush, hush. They will find me soon enough. No need to make their way easy.”

  The wren looks somewhat mollified and sets to preening herself. I go to the east window and look out. The last of the moon behind me awakes a green light from the woods, throws the black shadow of my tower against it. The slivered moonlight beats against my back through the opposite window. I mistake my own shadow in the mist for a blackbird fleeing and almost cry after it. A trill like laughter behind me, and I turn to find the blackbird in the other window, orange-rimmed eye like a promise of the sun’s soon rising.

  He does not come at first to my raised hand.

  “So then, Merle, you bird of my recollection, where did I put those berries?” I ask, and find them in a bag on the mantle, crimson holly and dark ivy and pale mistletoe. The blackbird flies to me then, for that handful of fruit that would be death to most. “But not the likes of us, Merle my dear,” I say, as he downs one last bright berry and carefully cleans his bill on my sleeve.

  “Are you ready, then?” I ask.

  He dips his head, cocks an eye at the nest with its egg, and begins.

  * * *

  What the blackbird says to the egg:

  In the night, in the forest where the river turns south and seaward and the road clings close to its banks to avoid the darkest of the trees, there was a fire. Around that fire was a group of young people bright with the colors and chatter of their kind. And around them wagons and tents and horses and dogs, and so they made a home out of the wild. So they thought, and did not see me though I walked around their feet.

  These young people were not arrayed as the folk who work the woods, the wardens and poachers, pig herders and charcoal burners. Nor wore they velvets or silks of the lordly that hunt here. Somewhere between, then; simple folk made bold by the colors of the powerful on their coats and sleeves, granted some grace through their servitude to the mighty. So they thought, though I walked the edge of their circle unnoticed.

  A newcomer joined that circle, then, a youth with bright eyes and wide delicate cheekbones under cropped brown hair, any colors covered by a cloak of green so deep it was black in the firelight. One of those there made a spot for the newcomer on a log, with a half-mocking, half-cautious, “A seat for my lord.”

  The youth laughed, a light trilling tenor, and said, “No lord, I. You can call me Tallys.”

  Introductions went round the fire. Someone asked, “Are you with the King’s household or the Marchionesses?” Tallys had turned the other way, though, was saying, “Such a beautiful song just now. A blackbird, I think.”

  “That was me, a song we sing when the boats return from sea,” said one. “No, it was my song from High Castle, ‘Sun on Stone’ it’s called.” “In the Duke’s court we call it ‘Boy and Bird’.” “And the girls sing it best.” So they said, laughing, in the space after my song.

  A girl in the grey and teal of the Seaward Marches leaned forward to catch a better glimpse of Tallys’s hard shoulders and trim thighs, and said, “We were asking about the tale of the King’s lost hunt. Perhaps you could tell it?”

  Tallys gave her a slow small smile, and the girl flushed, fell silent and confused. A coachman in the blue and gold of the King took up the tale instead.

  “By mid-afternoon Regent Duke Gérard saw his son Edouard eating cherries and King Hugh, who was of course Prince Hugh then, nowhere to be seen. And when the Duke questioned his son it emerged that he had last seen the Prince some hours before noon, leading a lyme-hound.”

  “Old Beauregard, that was,” a huntsman in the quartered red and blue of the Duchy said. “He died just last year, at the age of fifteen, ancient that is for a hound, and his passing was mourned like a member of the household, with the banners lowered and a proper burial.”

  “Well, the old Duke had some stern words for young Duke Edouard, and all the hunt was roused and sent out into the woods in search of the missing Prince. All the rest of that day we searched, and after dark we went out again with lanterns and torches. Eerie it is, under these trees, when you are on your own and the eyes of the wild things glow orange back at you.”

  “Indeed, I remember that dark night well,” someone said, and “I as well,” said others. I trilled a mocking call at that, these brave woodsmen who hadn’t marked my own orange-rimmed eye at their very feet, and Tallys smiled into the fire and whistled back.

  “We didn’t find him until the next morning, would not have found him at all, perhaps, if his hound had not set up a cry. Asleep, Prince Hugh was, curled up in a small clearing deep in the forest. The hound stood over him, had stood there all night, I wager, keeping watch over him.”

  “Old Beauregard,” the huntsman said again, proudly.

  “When Prince Hugh was awoken, he cried out, ‘It is broken!’ But when the Duke asked him what had broken, the Prince had no recollection of having spoken those words or what they might have meant. He remembered nothing, in fact, since the morning before, though he said he had dreamed of a hart, a great stag with antlers like trees and a wren perched between them, singing a song with human words, though he
could not remember their meaning.”

  The people around the fire gasped and gossiped over that, though most had heard the tale before.

  “Quite a story,” Tallys said. “Fit for the making of a King.”

  “But listen, the story’s not done,” the teller said. Tallys looked somewhat uneasy at that. I whistled my amusement again, and Tallys frowned askance at me.

  “All around where the Prince lay, from the edge of the clearing to no more than the length of an arm—”

  “Or a hound,” the huntsman said.

  “Yes, or a hound, from the Prince, the ground had been torn by the hooves of a hart, a great stag. From its track the greatest seen in those woods or any other said the old Duke, who would know.”

  Everyone dutifully gasped again.

  “They said that ever since then Prince Hugh, that is King Hugh, his sleep is troubled by dreams of the wild wood so vivid and strange that he sometimes stays awake all night lest he suffer them.”

  “Well, he sleeps now and it is those who would wake him that would, I fear, suffer,” said a soft voice outside the circle of firelight.

  The young woman who had spoken came into the circle. She was wrapped in teal, trimmed with grey silk like seafoam. I saw the sea once where the woods run down to meet it and remember the way the waves broke against the shore, older and more stubborn, I thought then, than the oldest trees in the forest. Young though this girl was, she had some of that old stubbornness in her grey eyes.

  “Lady Meriel,” some said, and “Marchioness, your pardon,” said others, all rising to their feet. All but Tallys, that is, who pulled the dark cloak a bit tighter and glanced up, eyes catching the fire.

  “I mean no offense, Lady,” the storyteller said.

  “Oh sit, sit,” Lady Meriel said, and did so herself, on a log, so that all were forced to sit as well or loom over her. “I’ve heard the story before, and from the King himself, when we were children together and our courtship more play than passion. The tale, and these woods, are as much a part of him as his high castle, or as the sea is to me. And the wren is, of course, King of the birds, so it was a fit dream.”