Beneath Ceaseless Skies #230 Read online

  “I bid you at least to stay until the Sandbird Festival,” I said. It was a time for me to help those who wished to transform their body, or to simply be seen in the shifting and in-between spaces between the words woman and man.

  He shook his head. “I would want to, one day. But some things I do not yet wish to reveal of myself.”

  I bowed in acceptance of all that this implied, a hint of admission that Tajer, too, had something to reveal at the Festival, a shifter’s heart held tightly by the tenets of his pain; and that he was not yet ready to speak of it. Nihitu, who had become my near-constant companion, stood near enough to hear these words. Later she said, rather shyly, “I am looking forward to the festival, myself.”

  “Oh?” It was traditionally considered undignified for a firstway to shift their gender, but the Great Lion had attended a Sandbird Festival not so long ago, with a few of their closest counselors, so perhaps things were changing. “Do you desire to shift?”

  “Not this time. Perhaps never.” Nihitu shuffled her foot in the ground. “But I am, I think I am ready for neutral grammatical forms.”

  I beamed at them. Of course, the Great Lion would send them to me, like many others who come or are sent to me from across the Burri desert. And I thought how after the festival I would want to visit the Great Lion with gifts of fine weavings and jewels, for it was high time we renewed our friendship.

  Two weeks later, I went to bid my lover farewell by the Tumbleweed Gate, the one that looked to the east. He stood there in traveling clothes, a long tunic of plain weave over a pair of golden sunsilk pants in a cut too closely resembling his unfortunate sleeping pants. I resisted pointing that out. He stood on the faded small carpet of roses I remembered from his arrival, but it did not yet stir with his power.

  Nihitu came at my heels. The peace they had made with the Raker would never be anything but grudging, but they kept silent and unobtrusive for my sake.

  I brought my palms together and bowed formally to him. “I cannot dissuade you from this path, but I would beg you to reconsider.”

  “When I left Katra, I told myself that I would walk, unaided, fearing nothing. I would follow only my own desire, to test the tenets of the land’s building lore and the laws of my own power, and take strength in my will, wherever it will lead me.”

  I nodded.

  “And now I desire I will follow this song. I will cast my gaze upon the Orphan, the star that calls to hold all pain.”

  “If it will hold your pain, it will desire to hold the rest of you as well. You cannot separate these two.”

  “Nobody can hold me against my will,” he said.

  I sighed. “Not Ranra. Certainly not me. But Ladder is mightier. His star is fed on the despair of many, and it far outweighs mine.”

  He crossed the distance between us and took my hand in his without asking. No asking was needed. “Please. Do not talk yourself down. In the library, among your books, I learned the truth of it. If I can speak it?”

  I nodded.

  “We tell of the Starcounter of Keshet, who went north to search for the missing stars. And we speak of the twelve guardians, who stretched their hands towards the shining stars Bird brought us, so we could live, so we could thrive.”

  I squeezed his hands. Oh, youth. Certainly you are the brightest of any who had ever learned from me. Or had refused to learn from me, and learned from themselves instead.

  “But we do not speak of this: where did the Starcounter of Keshet go?”

  “They stayed right here,” I whispered.

  “They stayed right here. Because they, too, caught a star. Did you not, Angzariyad?”

  I swallowed tears. Denying nothing. What was there to say? Ladder alone knew this truth. And now he did as well.

  “Every step I take now will be different because of you. It is because you do not wish to hold me that I have let you hold me.”

  “I have not had enough.” It was brash to admit this, to let my pain speak now, but I was too old to care.

  In a sudden motion he brought my hands to his lips. “My teacher.”

  “You jest,” I said, the pain of it too sharp to contain, and it was not the pain of pleasure.

  He smiled. “As you wish, then. I, too, did not have enough.”

  He handed me a scroll tied with a piece of red leather. “It is a custom of my land, for all I am exiled from it. A bit of poetry. It is slight, but perhaps it would ease the passage of time.”

  I bowed, accepting it. “I thank you. And if you can, write more.”

  “I have no need to write more, because I will return. I will always want to return.”

  He engaged his deepnames and made the carpet float, not as high as my gyring sandbird but high enough, out of the Tumbleweed Gate and into the reddening afternoon sky. I watched its receding shadow, and then just the memory of it, drunk on my yearning and on light. Soon I would return to the palace, to prepare for the Sandbird festival. But not yet. Not yet.

  “Do you think he will come back?” Nihitu said.

  I sighed. Today I cannot make joy my geometry, but I will hold on to hope.

  My hands fidgeted with the knot on leather string of the scroll. “If anyone can journey to that court and reemerge still as themselves, it is the Raker. So yes. He will return.”

  It would be some time before I was proven right.

  * * *

  “The stars we still remember them, but some no longer shine.

  What knowledge do you seek of me, if not to fall like they had fallen?”

  “A new geometry of light to issue forth from hollow bone,

  A fire to circumnavigate and make a beacon of my pain.”

  Copyright © 2017 Rose Lemberg

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Rose Lemberg is a queer immigrant from Eastern Europe. Their work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Interfictions, Uncanny, Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology, and multiple times previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among other venues. Rose co-edits Stone Telling, a magazine of boundary-crossing poetry, with Shweta Narayan. They have edited Here, We Cross, an anthology of queer and genderfluid speculative poetry from Stone Telling (Stone Bird Press), and The Moment of Change, an anthology of feminist speculative poetry (Aqueduct Press). They are currently editing a new fiction anthology, An Alphabet of Embers. You can find Rose at roselemberg.net and @roselemberg, including links to their page on Patreon, where they post about Birdverse, the world in which their BCS stories and others take place.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  RIVERS RUN FREE

  by Charles Payseur

  Where Viora Falls used to leap four thousand feet into Lake Aerik, her every pounding breath a climax, a triumph, there is now a citadel. It is the great accomplishment of the Lutean Empire—Viora dammed, chained, all her rage and love harnessed now to power their wheels, their cogs and dials and machines.

  “They know we’re here,” Sainet says, voice soft as if unused to speaking. I’m not sure he had ever taken solid form before I found him in a cave system and brought him out into the light. Some say his past makes him cold, but that’s not the sense I get from him.

  “We have time,” I say, more hope than fact. The Dowsers are doubtless on their way, but they haven’t learned to fly. And we need to see this. Or I want to see this. To remember this. Whatever happens next.

  “Is it true what they say?” Verdan asks. She’s the youngest, used to be a branch of the Burgora before the Dowsers diverted the river, cut daughter from mother. “Can they really kill us?”

  “As much as they can stop the rain,” Mor says, eir voice like iron. Mor, the most faithful to the old songs. The cycles. Change without death, waters without end.

  “They can do bad enough,” I say, looking down at Aerik, who is nearly dry, alive only by the gentle touch of Viora’s waters, not strong enough even to take solid form. He’s just a trickle, our reminder and our warning—see what
happens when you go against the Luteans. See what happens when river pits itself against human. Everywhere east, where Aerik used to birth a dozen strong rivers that radiated out, bringing life to the valley, there is only the Dust now. See what happens when you resist, when you defy. We’ve seen what we needed to see. We all turn toward that bleak horizon across the Dust, where far beyond the sea might reside, must reside. We move.

  * * *

  A truth about rivers: we have always been able to draw our water together into solid bodies, to walk on two legs. But it is not without risk, and not without cost. We lose much of ourselves in the transformation, and if there’s not enough of us to start with, well...

  * * *

  We ride stolen horses over the choked earth.

  “It’s not working,” Sainet says.

  They’ve had our trail since the citadel, and there’s been nothing since to help us lose them. Sometimes the Dowsers get confused when waters cross, and using the dry riverbed as a road had seemed nearly safe. But nothing is—safe, that is. Not since the Luteans discovered what a resource we are.

  “We have to turn and face them,” Mor says.

  I’m tired of fighting. Tired of losing battle after battle. Friend after friend. I’m tired of running because if I don’t a Dowser will track me down, put me in irons, force me to push a wheel that will only make them stronger and me weaker, weaker, gone. I want to win for once.

  I close my eyes. The Dust is full of ghosts these days, and some of them speak. The riverbed we urge our horses faster over was once the Malbrush. I can feel his confusion when the waters stopped flowing. When the sun slowly ate him away, drew him into the sky until nothing remained. Except his memory. I ask to see through his eyes, and his ghost grants me, reveals the miles he used to run. And I see a way.

  “We keep going,” I shout over the sound of the horses’ hooves pounding the dry earth.

  “We have to—” Mor starts to say, but I cut em off.

  “We’ll make our stand up ahead. There’s an old waterfall.”

  Mor smiles as if reading my mind. If there is a hell like the humans claim then we’re all going to it anyway. But they have to kill us, first.

  * * *

  A truth about rivers: there used to be laws that kept the peace between human and river. Or, if not laws, an understanding. We liked company, and they liked the food and relief we offered. It worked for everyone until it didn’t, until it only worked for them, and they never looked back.

  * * *

  I stand with the horses by the edge of the dry waterfall. Not as tall as Viora, but tall enough for what I intend. I face away from the dead drop just feet behind me. A cliff, I guess people call it now. Like this was all natural. I stand with the horses because the Dowsers will know something’s wrong if they don’t see them. They’re merciless bastards but they know how to track, so it’s me and four horses all standing there, waiting, when they arrive.

  “What took you so long?” I ask as two of the four dismount. They all draw weapons, but shooting from the back of a horse is bad business, all noise and smoke and panic. So two remain seated, probably in case I decide to run for it, and two walk slowly forward, silent. Why are they always silent? Why does that make it worse?

  I tried to convince Mor to take the others and run, just run regardless of how this goes. Chances are that I can handle myself—I have before. I could catch up. But ey just looked at me and I could feel the hollowness of my words. Of course they can’t run. Isn’t this entire trip, our whole mission, about not having to fight alone anymore. About being stronger together. We’re done leaving people behind. So I stand there smiling like an idiot, and the Dowsers draw forward while Mor feels their footsteps though the sand.

  They keep their weapons trained on me, all iron and salt and fire, the tools they use to bind us, to track us. That and some innate talent that Dowsers have for finding water. Sometimes I wonder that if we had a way to find them as easily as they can find us, how we’d use the knowledge. If we’d find them as they slept secure in their beds, if people would find them dead the next morning, drowned without an inch of standing water to be found. I don’t think it would be more than they deserve.

  One of the two approaching me pulls out a pair of iron manacles. I smile. Mor acts. Ey rises. From behind their horses a wall of water jumps to life, splashing from the sands, a sudden torrent that rolls like an avalanche. The riders have no time at all to react. In a second they are swept by the wave, pushed forward. I stand still, which is what dooms the other two, who if they reacted immediately could have run to the side, escaped the wave. But they pivot, eyes on the wave and then on me, and it’s as if they can smell there’s some trick to this, that if they watch me I’ll give away how I plan to survive and they can do likewise.

  I sink into the sand. Do they think to try that before the wave catches them as well? If they do, it doesn’t work. They are swept along. As are our horses. And they all go over the cliff. I don’t watch, don’t want to see the terror in the horses eyes, don’t want to face that we’re all merciless bastards.

  I rise, see Mor kneeling in the sand right at the edge watching them fall, eir body heaving from the effort that must have taken, from the water ey has lost. But it worked. And from the falls we can look out at the Dust and see it spread to the horizon like a gray blanket. Huge. Desolate. Nearly featureless except, far in the distance, a collection of buildings betrays what must have been a town, once. What it is now, we’ll just have to see.

  * * *

  A truth about rivers: all waters are alive to some degree, though not all can stand and talk. It takes volume and movement and force to birth a river, to bring water to full awareness, but the potential is always there. In our oldest stories, it was water that gave soul to humans, falling on their clay bodies and infusing them with some touch of the divine. In our new stories, that was a mistake.

  * * *

  The town is like most things in the Dust—a ghost of what it used to be. Malbrush used to flow down through two dozen farms and near the thriving town center, but now only a handful of the buildings remain, the rest claimed by what looks like fire. A common occurrence where wood used to be the primary building material.

  “This is—” Mor’s words are eaten by a fit of coughing that wracks eir body, but I know what ey mean.

  “A mistake,” I finish for em. Perhaps it is. But losing our horses means we’ll be easier to Dowse, and most places in the Dust hate the Luteans as much as we do. It wasn’t just the rivers to have suffered when the citadel was erected. Viora wasn’t the only one damned by that treachery.

  “I just need—” ey starts to say but can’t finish. Time? Rest? Rain? All rather impossible at the moment. But the town is here and might have rain stores they’d be willing to share. So we limp into town and aren’t surprised to find a woman wearing a star on her chest and resting a Lutean rifle against her shoulder.

  “We’re not looking for trouble,” she says, which is its own sort of hello out here.

  I nod. “We’re not bringing it,” I lie.

  Her eyes narrow as she studies us. Like most people in the Dust, her skin is a pale tan, not the slightly blue tinge of our own. She knows what we are, and must know that the rifle she carries offers her some protection. And she’s careful. I can feel at least five other people hidden in the mostly-deserted town.

  “Traveling on foot?” she asks. I have questions of my own, like where she got the rifle. The Luteans don’t just hand those out, so it means she’s either working for them or took it off the dead. I’m betting it’s the second of those, but can’t be sure.

  “We lost our horses at the falls,” I say.

  “That’s a shame,” she says.

  “Well, we lost a team of Dowsers, too, so it sort of evened out,” I say.

  She nods, then lowers the rifle so it’s pointing at the ground and walks forward.

  “Then you have my thanks.” She extends her hand and I take it, feel her firm gr
ip. Her eyes don’t leave mine and I can tell she’s weighing me. Testing me. I hold her gaze until she smiles and gives a sharp whistle. The five people hiding all step into the street, weapons lowered. We pass the test, I guess.

  “I’m Sheriff Arleth Yates,” she says. “Welcome to Abbotsville.”

  * * *

  A truth about rivers: I do not know the first river the Luteans managed to chain. The notion was so foreign a concept we didn’t even know to fear it. Like an infant whose first experience with water is to be completely submerged, it took us too long to realize the rules of our world had changed, and that we were in great danger.

  * * *

  I sit at the table the sheriff has set for us. The food is more than I would have expected from a place like this.

  “Where are you headed?” Deputy Owens asks. He’s a large man with light eyes that seem always squinting. I catch the sheriff shooting him a warning look, but I shrug. There’s no real harm in telling them. After the falls, after everything, maybe it will help them all to hear it out loud.

  “To the sea,” I say. The word is like a cold draft through the room, and all of us straighten in our seats.

  “Sounds like a long way to go,” the sheriff says, studying my face like she’s reading a map. “I’ve only heard stories, and none that I could really credit. Doesn’t hardly seem possible, all that water in one place.”

  “It’s real,” I say. I can feel Sainet’s eyes on me. Verdan’s. Mor’s.

  “I suppose it makes sense, looking to run away,” the sheriff says. “What with those Lutean bastards. Some things, there’s no real fighting.”

  “We’re not running away,” I say. We’re not. What would that do? The Luteans won’t be content with just the rivers in what’s now the Dust. Their citadel will grow taller, their wheels larger, until the whole world is empty of free waters.

  “Didn’t mean anything by it,” Sheriff Yates says, raising her hands.

  “We’re going to bring it back,” I say.