Beneath Ceaseless Skies #109 Read online

  The woman covered the pot of salve, placed it back on a shelf. “‘Propriety’, that was Caleb’s word for it. Tradition. Preserving the old ways, he’d say. As if the old ways needed his help.” She coughed, or maybe it was a laugh, and made a wide gesture at the shelves of pots and jars, the hanging twists of herbs; her lame arm swung like an echo of the motion and nearly hit Mel. “And here I am, bottling wive’s tales and superstitions to preserve these people, whose lives have not changed in a dozen centuries.”

  Mel took a step backwards, wary of that swinging arm and those eyes, and came up against a post.

  “Do you think, then, to bring me news, boy? So the Lord Dellus is dead? The staff lowers the shades, a month later they raise them again. Nothing is changed.”

  “There is no rightful lord, now,” Mel said and slid sideways, heart thudding, but a wreath of plaited branches blocked the way.

  “There was no ‘rightful’ lord before,” the woman said, and dry as she was, spittle flew. “Maybe there never was.”

  “The bees are angry. I think they might leave,” Mel said, in a tiny voice.

  “The bees have been there as long as the estate, boy, and as long again and again, since these hills first rose from the sea. I tell you again, nothing is changed and nothing is changed.”

  And at that third repetition, pinned as Mel was between the post and the branches and the woman’s despair, the fear faded and there was just the meaning.

  “You left,” Mel said.

  “I was cast away,” the woman said, and pulled her shift aside. Above her heart was a hideous scar, the ribs crushed in and the shoulder twisted down. “Caleb ran his sword through me and through poor Davie Wilson, all in the name of propriety. I crawled from the ditch and Davie did not, and the child, the child was taken, and what difference did that make to any of us three.”

  The woman stopped, and stepped back and refastened her shift. Mel could have slipped past then but stood straight instead and asked, “And what of the child?”

  The woman took her lame arm in her sound hand and twisted until there was a crack from the shoulder. Cradling that twisted arm, staring into its palm, she said, “Do you know what they say about a pregnant woman who sees a hare?”

  “The baby will be born with a harelip.”

  “How much worse is it, then, for a woman to see something monstrous at the very moment of conception? What perversion of nature would thence arise?”

  I might as well still be fevered and find as much sense, Mel thought in dismay, and asked, “You saw a hare?”

  “I saw Jacob’s face atop me,” the woman cried. “My own brother! Like the Devil leering over his domain, driving his sting again and again and again. And then Caleb with all his desire for propriety and all his blindness for the truth went and killed my Davie instead, who only wanted to take me away from that hell, and ruined me and himself and left Jacob as lord. Oh, that’s a tale for Caleb’s book, is it not?”

  Mel felt a sudden sharp longing for the shelter of Cook’s flank, the dark corners of the House, the woven words of the dictionary, but took a deep breath of the pungent air instead and asked again, “What of the child?”

  “Of monster is monster born. The child, oh the child, was neither girl nor boy, or both. And stained, all down the neck, with the sin of its birthing.” The woman looked up into Mel’s face and her pale eyes went dark and focused. “You seemed a boy just now. What is this change?” Not waiting for an answer, the woman grabbed Mel’s neckcloth and ripped it away. She made a sort of groan, then, and leaned against the shelves. “I thought for a moment.... But who would suffer such a child to live? Go, boy or girl, go back to the house and raise the shades, and some day you’ll take the name Ralph and keep the bees and it will all go on forever.”

  And as Mel opened the door, the woman said, like a sigh, “I named the child Melisse.”

  “I think it means ‘bee,’” Mel said.

  * * *

  Ralph had built a new casket, out of massive slabs like tabletops. They were tabletops, in fact, from the formal dining room and the desk in the library. Pearse was scandalized and refused to allow the body to be placed within it. Ralph was walking round the downstairs now, whistling, tapping at the doors and toeing the floorboards, and Pearse was upstairs with the body. The rest of the staff was gathered in the kitchen, cracking and crushing nuts for the one-week mourning loaf. Cook glared at Mel, but the wooden spoon was out of reach, and her hands were deep in the dough.

  Mel took some cheese and bread and a pickle from the jar in the pantry and sat on Ralph’s stool by the door to eat. After a while, Cook asked, “Where have you been, child?”

  Mel swallowed, and asked in reply, “Where is my mother?”

  Neff sniggered from the hearth—his hands were too filthy even to shell the nuts—and said, “The dog was your mother.”

  Cook raised a sticky finger and shook it at him. “The lord may be gone, and Mr. Pearse and Ralph might as well be, but I can still thrash you, Neff Spit.”

  “It’s true, though, that dog did love the child,” the downstairs maid said. “Remember the two of them curled on the hearth, and the dog licking and licking?”

  “Kept the child clean, at least, unlike some,” Cook grunted, still scowling at Neff.

  “‘Dog’s tongue to ease a pain, cure a wart or lift a stain,’” the maid quoted primly. “And so it was with Mel and that mark. If the dog were still alive, Mel, she’d have healed that hand of yours.”

  Mel fingered the spot where neck met collarbone, vague memories of warmth and wet and a constant slow rhythm. “It’s better now, thanks.” And when the conversation turned to the hounds left on the estate, and who in town might purchase them, Mel went down the path to the old shed.

  Propriety, n. Strictness of meaning, literalness; conformity with requirement; correctness of morals; right of possession: these senses difficult to reconcile, cf. Property?

  Superstition, n. Unattributable knowledge. From superstare stand over (i.e. in awe or superiority)? Or superstes, that which survives?

  Words mislead, Caleb had said. “There are no answers in here,” Mel muttered. “It’s just a, a....” The word was under “C”: catechism, catalyst, ah, “It’s just a catalogue of questions.”

  Catalogue, n. A list or register, perhaps from º±Ä± away? »­³µ¹½ to choose?

  Choose, Mel thought. Away.

  That night, after Cook drifted to sleep, Mel carefully rolled up the shade, and then the sash, slid out of sheet and robe, and lay naked in the moonlight. Things do change, Mel thought, and ran a hand from thigh to collarbone and back. Meaning can be found, if you go searching, if you are attentive. There are other answers, and other fields.

  The next morning, Mel woke early. Cook was rolled face to the wall, still smelling of nuts and spice and golden crusts. Mel took a deep breath, and snuck out down the hall, into the main wing past the master bedroom, where Pearse snored softly by the sunken, stained bed. And then down the stairs and out through the kitchen, where Neff sprawled and sniffled in the ashes. Ralph had left a half-finished casket on the kitchen path, made of panelling and the parlour floorboards this time, as if determined to take the House back to timber; Mel could see him standing out in the barley field, looking south away to the distant forest.

  The hive was dark, the rising sun blocked by the bluff, but Mel could feel it rumbling in its niche.

  Mistress sweet, Mistress sharp,

  Mistress black, Mistress gold,

  Your lady lives, and here I am.

  But I’m leaving.

  The rumble swelled and stopped, and the bees came out. No explosion of rage, this time, nor a solemn parade like that nighttime visit. The bees spiraled out and settled onto the cliff face until the flint was covered.

  Something glinted in the dim mouth of the hive, a reflection of the waxing western sky surrounded by a deeper black. A leg appeared, big as a finger, and then another, and then a triangular head larger than a fis
t, crowned with golden fur. The hive entrance bulged and stretched and finally tore and the thorax came through, likewise robed in fur, and then the great abdomen banded with black as dark and glossy as the flint and fully as long as Mel’s forearm.

  The queen clung to the hive for a moment, and shook loose her wings. Then she leapt out and up, a long loop to land on Mel’s chest. Mel looked down into the dark faceted eyes. Her wings fluttered, catching the dull light like glass. Her stinger hung like a claw over Mel’s belly; at its tip a clear drop swelled and clung, the size of a grape.

  “You can come with me,” Mel said. “If you dare.”

  The queen climbed up, claws catching cloth and flesh and hair. The stinger brushed the length of Mel’s neck, the venom boiling down to the collarbone. Mel gasped and knew the mark had burned itself back in, swirling red proof of birth and change.

  “That’s that, then,” Mel said, and strode to the edge of the garden, where the bluff had spilled down and could be climbed, and then ran east into the dawn, away and gone, and the queen and all the bees went with her.

  Copyright © 2012 Gregory Norman Bossert

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  Greg Bossert grew up in Cambridge, Mass., and currently lives across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco; his path between these points passed through Lisbon, Vienna, Northfield MN, NYC, Silicon Valley, and Berlin. He started writing in 2009 (on a dare over pizza and beer), attended the 2010 Clarion Writer’s Workshop, and has had several stories in Asimov’s Science Fiction and a Russian reprint in Esli Magazine. When not writing, he works on films, currently at LucasFilm. More information on his writing, films, and music is available at SuddenSound.com and on his blog GregoryNormanBossert.com.

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  THE SCORN OF THE PEREGRINATOR

  by John E. O. Stevens

  Some say that the world is an anvil, and we are put on it to find our shape, to be forged or broken. But the world is not some block of metal, lying inert to be struck. There is no hammer come from the sky to smash us into shape. We are tested by living in the insuppressible radiance of the Furnace, of flourishing in the heat of too much love. To not yield to that dire, unconstrained ardency, to spite it, to struggle with the world and not against it, is how we forge not just our lives but our spirits. And yet, that love make demands that sometimes we must embrace, take in even as we are made into cinders by it.

  My grandmother taught me how to look at the sun through a cairnskill’s feather. You still ended up dazzled before long, but you can see the patterns of light shift, imagine the endless imp-dances across the face of the great orb. Its passionate brilliance is broken up between the barbules and does not strike the center of your eye directly, which is how the sun pierces the heart of your eye and seduces it into depriving you of vision. The cairnskill, so adept at plucking the last vestiges of life from a corpse, knows how to misdirect the sun with its feathers and thus disperse its blazing attention from the theft the raptor commits as it pecks flesh and anima from its victim. But nothing escapes the furious, just glare of the sun forever; someday even the center of the world will burn away in the light of the Furnace’s uncaring ardor. The cairnskill teaches us how to put off that dreadful day, how to look at things properly.

  I had assassinated my first cairnskill just two rises after the start of the withering season. I had taken one of its largest feathers (an unbloodied pinion) and was sitting on the great flat stone that marked the approach to our tiny settlement, staring through my trophy at the Furnace in the early morning, just before the first scorch, wondering when it would beguile my eyes into betrayal. I was so fixated on this pursuit that my ears refused to tell me that someone was walking down the gravelly path from the east towards our settlement. The sun had just taken my vision when my ears picked up the scrape of leathery heel on packed shale.

  All I could see were sparks and a moving shimmer, like someone had rubbed glaze across my eyes. As I rubbed at the foolish things to clear them I heard the apparition stop, and it spoke in a clear, hawkish voice.

  “Child,” it said, “what town is this?”

  I squinted, hoping to squeeze the excess light out of my eyes. Now a bit worried at hearing an unfamiliar voice, I replied quickly. “Who comes? The sun is barely aloft and....”

  “Child, do not speak a challenge to me. Only answer. What town?”

  The shimmer was now humanish, distended by cloak and plume. I swallowed a curse and replied between clenched teeth: “I am not a child, and I say again the sun is....”

  The next noise I knew quite well; a sword drawn through a belt-ring. This time I let the curse pass my lips, a wish of ill-fortune on a wasp nest near the mossing cave, and my sight cleared. And there stood a small man, lost in a vast feathered cloak-and-cowl with a great ash-roc plume curling up from a thick combed headband, pointing a long needle of steel at me, his arm shod in small quills like an ant-hunter. I swear I heard a tinny, whistling call as my eyes took him in, and I wished that I had stayed blind.

  A peregrinator had come to our hamlet.

  * * *

  He prodded me down the path to the village mercilessly. It was difficult, because I had taken my sandals off to feel the warming of my stone perch, and in his indecorous haste he had made me lead him forth without my footwear, or, more importantly, my water bladder, which made me angry. It would certainly dry up in the sun’s first scorching and I would have to find another. Giddy auks are rare and furtive, and they dislike those who try to take their bladders.

  Every time I opened my mouth to protest this treatment, he dug his prod into me and muttered a slippery epithet that turned my words into plaintive birdsong. I wondered what poor dying bird was being robbed of its final warning or dirge. We trotted towards the village entrance, my feet aching as hot stones scorched and bruised them. But I did not fall down, for with the Furnace moving fully into the sky I would suffer more than sore feet. My arms knew this, and kept me balanced, for which I was grateful.

  Down the little slope, around a few bends, and we entered my home ravine. It is not deep but well-shaded with purpling goliath-sage, scrappy diggerroot, and somber fan-palms growing from the upper walls. The houses, rammed by hand and gargoyle-fist, are pushed hard against the sides and partly buried, and the Furnace bakes the main street and the plazas into dusty hardness. Most folk were in their homes preparing for bed, and it was quiet, with door-webs fastened, chip-chips and woeful tanagers settling into doorway nests to keep watch. A dust-whisk or two blew by, cleaning the street or singing the proper lullaby for the day.

  “Call them out,” the peregrinator growled as we came onto the street. I began to keen “Cry for an Unexpected Visitor.” Doors unhitched and snapped back, and as people emerged from their homes I led our guest to the main square, which was actually a circular plaza for the small bastion built into the wall at the center of the ravine, under a buttressed overhang frilled with lacywhips and dotted with skitterdrake holes. Neighbors and family, some with parasols, others wearing tahori wraps, quickly converged on the plaza. We were then a village maybe twenty spider-feet in number and could fill the plaza. But they all kept their distance from the peregrinator, who had brought me inside the cobblestoned center of the area, which the Furnace was rapidly turning into a baking-slab.

  After a moment the crowd settled, and my third-aunt took a few steps towards the feather-shrouded man. She gave him the proper greeting, trying not to rush it but giving me a concerned eye in-between stanzas. She had a lovely embertine Elder Frond bending over her conspicuously bare, shaven head; it sighed in appreciation as she chanted the salutation. A thin smile cut across the peregrinator’s sharp face. He watched her like a raptor and seemed unconcerned that I was sweating heavily and already starting to gulp in the heat. I focused on the cairnskill feather, remembering that day when I was shod in muddy coolness with a dangerous prey awaiting to test me.

  There was a lengthy silence when she finishe
d the greeting. I took a step, but our guest snapped the back of my knee with his needle and it buckled; I fell to a crouch and did not cry out, not wanting a dry half-croak to emerge, and pressed the feather against my forehead, its slight grim chill giving me a breath of respite. With the needle still touching my leg, he looked about him and cawed “People of the Red-shaded Bluff, I bring you good news from the Nine Kings! I have traveled long across the steppes and the Flashing Wastes, flying like the blood-taloned hawk and the rainbow crane, running like the velox and the adzebill. I have eaten the shield-shell and the rifting serpent, crested the Sea of Motes, and paid homage to the Face of the Last Mountain. And now I stand before you, to give you the words of your kings!”

  My twelfth-cousin stood beside my third-aunt and cleared her throat; on her tahori she wore the buckle of a myrmidon, passed from her father and to him from his mother. Besides myself she was the only one who had left the ravine and returned. She had lost an ear in a border dispute on the northern edge of the Waste. Her skills at warring were not great, truth to the sky, but she was harder-skulled and meaner than the oldest shield-shell. I remembered the last time she had cuffed me and smiled through my sweating.

  “The last I had heard there were Six Kings,” she rasped.

  The peregrinator cocked his head in her direction. “And now there are Nine. As they say in the Great Howdla, ‘all with stalwart blood must lead.’ In these times of portents and woe, the greatest of us must bind their strengths together, to bring peace to all.”