Beneath Ceaseless Skies #229 Read online

  Issue #229 • July 6, 2017

  “A Portrait of the Desert in Personages of Power. Pt. I,” by Rose Lemberg

  “Ora et Labora,” by Theodore McCombs

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  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  A PORTRAIT OF THE DESERT IN PERSONAGES OF POWER, PT. I

  by Rose Lemberg

  Move the first: The stars we still remember them

  Two thousand years ago, they say, a wise man of Keshet counted the stars that blazed and glittered in the orphaned nighttime sky. Satisfied with his arithmetic, he pressed the numbers into the yielding clay and baked the tablet in an oven, and stored it away from curious eyes.

  Some years later again he counted the burning stars of the firmament—and took out the tablet, and counted again.

  Twelve stars were missing.

  Alarmed, the Starcounter brought his palms together and prayed to Bird. He prayed so ardently that the goddess appeared to him in the likeness of the harptail, and in her long blue tail the twelve missing stars were strung.

  Yet others say that the Starcounter was a woman, and that the goddess appeared to her in the likeness of the long-legged sandbird, the stars barely visible in her tail of wind and melted dust. “Come with me,” she said, “and I will show you a place where they fall.” And so the Starcounter donned pale yellow clothing and pulled on her goatskin traveling boots. She left the mountains of Keshet to follow Bird north, to collect her missing miscounted stars.

  The Starcounter followed the sandbird until her boots frayed and tore, and he followed the harptail until his clothes dried up and tattered in the desert sun and his skin was as ancient as sweat-stained leather. Then the great Bird stopped her flight, and shook her tail. Eleven stars fell to the sands, and where they fell, waterwells appeared. The Starcounter drank from the water and walled off a city there; and she called that city Che Mazri, which means Eleven Wells.

  Having blessed the new city, the goddess soared up to the sky, but the twelfth star was still tangled in the feathers of her tail. Afraid to let go, afraid to fall, the orphaned star gathered darkness into itself, and weighted Bird down with desperate doubt. She cried out in a great voice, and eleven sandbirds arose from the desert and sang to her, and she danced for them in swirls of heavy light, faster and faster above the windblown waves of grit, forgetting herself, forgetting the world, until she shook the twelfth star off.

  Ladder caught it.

  * * *

  An old royal on the tiles

  I ascended to the Tumbleweed Garden in the early morning, before classes began, before my advanced students or anyone else sought to bother me with questions or supplications, charts of magic or new designs. I stood barefoot on the tiles and felt the desert change.

  Was it the air that stirred against my forehead, its dry touch acknowledging each wrinkle with a lover’s fondness? Was it some quality of the light? Or was it perhaps a birth I felt, a yet unseen descent of fiery sandbirds that prophesy the season? My body stirred in response to that thought, each bone calling out to the future, the past, to the times in-between when I’d danced my body’s change at the Sandbird Festival and helped many others to do so. My flesh, though full with memories, did not yet yearn for transition. My spirit, content for the time being with the body’s present form, voiced no objections over posture, over timbre of voice or the shape of my shadow—all feelings with which I have long become so familiar that I would greet their reappearance as I would any wandering friend returned to me from the sands. But that morning, no smile of recognition creased the corners of my mouth.

  I drew my senses to the land. Under my feet it was covered with tiles, for which my University was named. Over the centuries I had asked artists to paint and bake and lay down these tiles—fantastic harptail birds in azure plumage, scorpions, winged carriages driven by flame and wind. Under this divination the ground’s clay rested, content in silence. Slightly to the northeast, below ground, I felt the edges of my star. Woven of delicate longer deepnames, the lacelike edges of it stirred with the breath of sleep.

  They say no person can take more than three deepnames, those magical constructs that give the mind its power. Of all the combinations that a mind can hold, some name the Warlord’s Triangle the mightiest, with its three single-syllable deepnames; others so praise my own configuration, the Royal House, with its two single-syllables and the third balancing two-syllable. But the star underhill, the star I guarded; my friend, that person who comforted me when I struggled: that ineffable flaming sphere was woven entirely of magic, of thousands and thousands of deepnames that shortened and intensified from surface to core, each distinct and yet connected to others in a song of mellow red.

  I felt in the Hillstar no danger. No change.

  Turning to the east, I sought out my star’s twin where she roamed the desert. Encased in the body of the sacred Tumbleweed, that star was guarded in her peregrinations by a band of Loroli chosen—warriors and fire lions who speak the roads of dust into being. Ascertaining, too, that the Tumbleweed Star was not the source of my worry, I thought myself mistaken, told myself that old age had stirred my senses into falsehood.

  I had not turned my gaze to the west, nor to the northwest, finding much comfort in the desert and none in the distant treacherous sea; but later that day I was told of a criminal, and it was from the northwest that he was coming.

  * * *

  A lion, opals in her mane

  When the Tumbleweed Star comes to a place of rest, those who follow her dim all fires and still their fingers from touching weapons and musical instruments. The Loroli fourthway speak out of the desert a weave of magic that covers the encampment in a canopy of dust, with only the star shining forth from its center, too big to contain. When finally all is quiet, and lions and people lie pacified around their great guardian, the Tumbleweed Star begins to speak.

  Across great distances I hear her voice rolling over the sand, traipsing gently above bones of impossible beasts that perhaps had one day populated the desert. The Tumbleweed Star speaks to its twin sibling, the star to which I am tethered. She speaks of secrets I will never understand and do not want to overhear; of time above the clouds, of darknesses, of absences, of Bird. She speaks, too, of their unquiet sibling, the twelfth star, whose presence I feel when I dare look southeast towards the school of assassins.

  When she is done conversing with her twin, the Tumbleweed Star looks into my heart. The feeling is like a great sweep of whispering fire in vestments of dry sand; its passing is quieter and lighter than the conflagration of my star but no less gripping.

  It was almost a year ago the Tumbleweed Star looked through me so, the death of my old guardian still a fresh wound. Soon after, a Loroli warrior arose from the sands and strode into Che Mazri, my city of eleven wells.

  There are in the desert lionesses that are born maned, indistinguishable from male lions in behavior and looks. And there are in the desert such lions that are born maneless and those that look like lionesses but prefer to be known as lions. All those and others like them become known to me, for some seek me out to dance and to change their body’s shape at the Sandbird Festival. But I had never before seen Nihitu.

  She was young—barely twenty—yet within her I perceived a burning fire, a redness better suited to my star than to hers. She was a firstway, warrior and leader, stubborn and taciturn, reserved except at such times when reed pipes and drums called all people to dance. She became my guardian according to the old laws, just as I had years ago sent one of my best warriors to serve as a guardian of the Loroli Great Lion.

  It was Nihitu who brought me the news of
a man who now strode through the desert, blood and adoration in his wake. He brought water forth from the dry sand where no wells had sprung before. He righted houses crumbling into dust and infused their walls with deepnames so they would stand forever; he built such structures that remained cool in the scorching heat and imbued them with designs as dark and potent as congealed blood. And he took lovers—perhaps against their will, though that was unclear—and he cared about no-one and suffered no person to stop him.

  When she spoke of him, Nihitu’s eyes hissed with fire and her hands clenched with rage. And yet his crimes, if crimes they were, happened far west from Loroli territories, and that judgment was not hers to make but mine.

  It sat ill with her. I bade her to remain behind while I journeyed to find the truth of these reports, but she would not agree to let me go alone.

  Yet I was born before her, and before her mother, and before her mother still, and my pride outweighed hers by the weight of centuries. Weary of grandeur and the preciousness of my age, I was all too eager for defiant and misguided deeds; and so I made my plans and waited. When Nihitu slept, her waking body heavy with the magic of the dreaming wilds, I adorned her hair with opals and whispered from them a restful sleep. Not a soul stirred within the walls of my underhill palace as I donned my feather mareghe, tied the stilts to my feet, and was gone.

  * * *

  Move the second: but some no longer shine

  At the northwestern edge of the desert, the springflower city of Niyaz has dipped the edges of her robes into the sea and girdled her waist with gates of pink-striated ivory. And in the desert’s very heart, her rival, the city of Che Mazri, stood dusted in clay’s shadow and clothed in memory of Bird’s star-giving dance. Adorned in stories told by painted tiles, she lounged about carefree, inhaling the bitterness of burned liongrass brought to her braziers by the desert winds. The riches to be found in Che Mazri could be counted thus: sweet water in the wells and the learning in her university; the festival of the sandbird season; the star within her heart, and the wisdom of her royal keeper.

  They say the ruler of Niyaz has feuded long with the old royal of Burri, while sandbird seasons came and went. For the ruler of Niyaz would satiate himself with treasures from the desert and beyond: veils embroidered with lions, bones—always bones—encrusted in emerald and humming in a sing-song voice; exquisite weapons made to marvel at, that could not slice a fig. Traders brought their wares to the rainbow court of Niyaz, and warriors spread the spoils of war before his birdcage throne; and having examined each treasure carefully, the ruler of Niyaz would choose the best and lock it in his coffers. This angered the desert’s Old Royal, for many a fine treasure from the sands would become thus hidden and many a story silenced forever.

  There is a law in the city of Niyaz for women not to carry deepnames. Those who take magic by mistake or daring have their deepnames burned from them, so that women graced with the mind’s power live in constant fear. It came to pass that some Niyazi women, dissatisfied with this, banded together. Having stolen from the ruler’s coffers a considerable treasure in carpets and carved precious stone, they made their way on foot from Niyaz to Che Mazri and were granted shelter there.

  The ensuing war between Niyaz and the desert kingdom of Burri lasted for twenty years.

  After that, the Old Royal would no more accept Niyazi refugees, and the ruler of Niyaz grew even fiercer in his persecution of powerful women.

  It was at that time that Laaguti Birdwing arose in Niyaz. With friends and lovers she had plotted revolution but had been treacherously betrayed, imprisoned, then sprung free—and, with friends, had finally sought to escape the city of her birth.

  The desert being closed, the rebels set their sights upon the undulating wave.

  * * *

  A guardian come from flaming sea

  On stilts of horn and bone I leaped over the dark-enraptured desert. My shadow, cut out by the scissors of the stars into shapes delicate and frivolous, flew before me like a flock of sandbirds toward a far horizon.

  All was quiet. Decades ago, the bones that made my stilts had lain upon this ground, revealed in the open fist of the wind for a much younger me to find in my wanderings across the desert. Thousands of years ago, or perhaps never, these bones had been encased in the flesh of beasts that roamed the sands before the sands were blown to cover them: lions with tails like serpents and manes of smoke, birds with plumage of carved cinnabar, lizards with feet and faces of youths.

  Deeper yet beneath the ground, beneath these slumbering beasts and yet not hidden from my gaze, the magical grid of the land’s deepnames sang to me, its long luminous lines unobstructed by the din of the city. Over the many layers of desert and its histories, beneath the bejeweled scarves of the night, I ran on my stilts like a long-legged sandbird.

  I let my bones grow hollow, birdlike. The feathers and folds of my mareghe thundered around me. I could not feel my age, my pain, my body and its changes; even memories tore off from me as I ran, until my clamoring cry turned night into dawn, and dawn into mid-morning heat far west and north of Che Mazri.

  Hesitantly shifting on my stilts like a great sandbird stilled abruptly from flight, I waited for the sights and sounds of my human body to return to me.

  A deep, resonant voice spoke. “I greet you, vision of Bird.”

  I could not understand emotions yet.

  The sun cradled my head and ran down my limbs, hot and steady, purifying. I drew on the magic of my deepnames and folded my stilts, and stood once more a person on unsteady feet that shook with age and exhaustion.

  I had been misguided to travel without a guardian. In a moment of transition between magical states I could easily be slain. There was a new ruler in Niyaz, and it was a custom of this dynasty to send an assassin to try to slay me, one of Ladder’s own and trained in his school. The criminal I pursued could also be an assassin—

  I smelled the speaker before I saw them. Blood and the desert and the far-off sea—no student of Ladder’s would smell thus. Inhaling deeper, I felt the odor of roses, peppery and foreign, and with it a memory of ash, as if from a great burning that had been quenched by the wave. Here was a story that had traveled far indeed, not from Niyaz but from the west and seas beyond it.

  The one who had spoken made no further speech but waited motionless for me to recover.

  I blinked—first rapidly, birdlike, then with a more human tenderness. My eyes could parse at last beyond the heat and shadow.

  Two figures. One seemed asleep, face down on a small, beautifully woven carpet. They were a person lean and—I felt—young, with olive-brown arms spread forward in supplication or embrace. Their long hair, a wave of dark brown, obscured their face. The runners had said “he,” but it was hard to tell, and knowing my own truths, I did not want to choose before I heard the stranger’s truths from their own mouth.

  The other looked like a woman, but that too would not help me know their truths. This standing person was not overly tall compared to me but solid. They wore a seafaring garment, a dun-colored korob belted under the armpits and again below the breasts and yet again at the waist. Their face was middle-aged, weathered and lined by power’s passage; their olive-brown skin was lighter than mine, and lighter than that of their sleeping companion’s, as if unbaked by the desert sun. I’d have guessed them Niyazi but for a peculiar cast of the eyes.

  No. They could not possibly be of Niyaz, for here was a person who, in a woman’s likeness, felt to me accustomed to command, who drew without hesitation on their considerable might and stood unafraid of that magic being discovered.

  I blinked and looked again. Their form undulated in the wind; the sun trickled through it just so. I would have noticed sooner, but I hadn’t yet fully recovered my senses.

  This person was dead.

  I spoke at last, careful not to offer them guestright. “I greet you, spirit of the past who has not departed with Bird but has come instead into my land, for purposes to me unknown.” I want
ed to speak in Niyazi, for I now remembered the voice had spoken earlier that way, but the language of Niyaz lacked neutral forms, which I would use both for this person and for myself. I spoke in my own language. “I am the desert’s Old Royal, ruler of Che Mazri and the keeper of her star.”

  They nodded to me, curt, equal to equal, and spoke in my language likewise. “I am Ranra Kekeri.”

  I shuddered, for accounts of one so named—ancient indeed, and conflicted between themselves—had long ago been brought to my University on the Tiles by itinerant scholars and merchants. And now I knew the proper grammatical forms to use, for in this the accounts had not been conflicted: that Ranra Kekeri made herself known as a woman.

  I opened my mouth, but before I could ask, Ranra’s companion stirred and turned in their sleep. Among the dark strands of their hair I saw the glimmer of bones that shifted under my gaze into snake-chiseled combs and spiral hair-rings with scales of gold and emerald. With every breath the sleeping stranger drew, a very great power trickled into the sands. So intensely and so intricately was it held, even in sleep, that the earth itself rose to greet the stranger with these gifts of bone and jewels. I could not imagine how one like this could commit crimes.

  “Don’t judge in haste just because the earth offers him no judgment,” the one called Ranra said.

  Anger rose in me, even though I could not yet fully understand it. I shifted pronouns after her, trusting she knew his preference. “You are his guardian, and yet you allow your charge to romp around my land, to disturb and take as he pleases. What kind of a guardian are you?”

  “I am more than his guardian. If I judged him, I would judge myself.”

  “And if you taught him?”

  She laughed bitterly. “Taught him what? My own mistakes, which I do not regret? How to save one’s people after having led them to ruin? How to die and yet not to be borne aloft by Bird’s wings to the final rest? He does not want teaching. Pray he will learn nonetheless.”