Beneath Ceaseless Skies #221 Read online

  Then, when Min’s breathing relaxed and Dellia’s soft sounds returned, Thalie pressed her lips to the delicate arch of Yacob’s ear and spoke. Her voice sparked in him, and it was hard to tell which part of the story came from Thalie and which part of it came from the Hole. It was as if the words from the Hole were reaching out through Thalie and finding Yacob’s heart.

  * * *

  One day, in the back garden of Three-Hill Nest, a new Hole appeared at the base of the musil tree.

  Yacob pressed his ear against it. The sound rose to him easily, effortlessly, as though the Beneath had been waiting for him.

  ...their fear was great and it fuelled their anger; anger can accomplish many great and terrible things.

  How old was this tale? How old any of them? And how long had people lived in the City, forgetting, forgotten, having forgotten everything they’d ever known?

  When the Lawless reached the edge of Sayaman, City of Fountains, their numbers had swelled to 50 000 warriors. They came over the mountains riding beasts that did not feel the cold. We believed Eternal Sayaman could not fall, and we laughed when they demanded we submit.

  Yacob, eyes closed, did not hear the Finders until their hands were upon him, dragging him from the Hole and the musil tree with hooted admonishments. Daddy Immi came and draped his own robe over Yacob’s shoulders as a sign of his minority. The Finders subsided, bowed heads showing the proper respect owed a daddy, and Yacob was led inside. There, the mommies boiled milk for him as if he were still in wet-pants. The Finders raised their net and went for the Fillers.

  Another day, Yacob visited the library after lessons. He pulled maps from the shelves and studied them, but all they showed was the City, its walls, a dark-grey edging which was the sea and a stone-black smudging which was the mountains. When he asked Daddy Emman for a map which showed more, Daddy Emman did not understand. When Yacob asked what Sayaman was, Daddy Emman said he did not know the word.

  “We’ve forgotten,” Thalie told him. Her black eyes had gone deep with meaning. “We don’t want to remember.”

  “What don’t we want to remember?” Yacob said. A late winter storm had shut them inside for the day. Thalie fretted and batted at the windows as if she could not bear the warmth and safety of the nest.

  “Something terrible,” Thalie said, her fingers tap-tapping at the glass as if she was sending someone a message.

  One night, Thalie did not return from the Stat, nor all the next day, neither. Yacob, Dellia, and Min said that Thalie had gone early to dig tavaroot from the common. Mommy Lala praised Thalie’s effort and sent the crib siblings away with extra sweets to share. Yacob, hot with guilt, dumped his portion down the convenience.

  It was a long time before Min and Dellia fell asleep that second night. Yacob lay awake and fretting. When Thalie came in at last her hands were shaking and no amount of coddling could comfort her. She pressed needfully against Yacob until at last Min and Dellia moved to the bottom of the crib. Thalie pulled Yacob to her, held his hands to the bony curve of her hips, and wrapped her legs around him. Yacob moved wonderingly, waiting for her lips to touch his ear, waiting for her to tell him the end of the story. But all Thalie had for him was silence and a warm wetness he had not known would be there.

  * * *

  The sun announced the equinox with a banishing of rain clouds and the City responded with a burst of new growth. On the night of the first new moon, word came at last that the Storians were returning. The gate of the Stat was opened, and the scent of the sea crept through the stone ways and alleys.

  The daddies of Three-Hill Nest led the elder crib-siblings to the west wall, where they clutched their ward candles in hands not-yet-confident. Thalie the adventurer, so unlike, hung back and Yacob had to urge her to hurry. Her first time seeing the Storians, he soothed, it was not so frightening. Green shadows, they were, who took no notice of almost-growns like them. Thalie accepted his hand and he brought it to his face, inhaling the Thalie-scent which had returned when she stopped visiting the Stat.

  His heart filled with her: crib-sister, companion, friend, and lover. He had made plans, Yacob had. His age-coming would arrive when the alva fruit was ripe, Thalie’s soon after. Three-Hill Nest had healthy broods; there was a good chance Yacob and Thalie could parent. They would build a new story to replace the one that haunted Thalie’s sleep.

  Yacob had fooled himself into believing the deep of Thalie’s eyes was love.

  They lit their ward candles and lined the road between the west wall and the Stat. The Storians were coming, their feet heavy with distance. Yacob remembered a word Thalie’s Hole had taught them, a word barely understood, lost in time and history and forgetting. It was a word so close to ‘Storian’ that Yacob put his lips to Thalie’s ear and breathed it like a love token. Thalie startled, flicked an expression at Yacob that was like a discovery, and put her lips to the skin of his neck. And so they were standing when the first of the Storians came around the corner: Thalie’s eyes closed tightly as if she were clinging to something. Yacob, heart-full, imagined the two of them in a nest of their own.

  Thalie pressed something into his hand and the Storians were gone. Then Thalie pulled away, twisting in the Storians’ wake as if reaching forward and back at the same time. And she was gone, her ward-candle dripping wax into Yacob’s palm and lifting a curl of smoke from its extinguished wick. Yacob cried out, flinging himself into the trail of the Storians, but Daddy Bain took him around the waist, Daddy Emmer caught him around the neck, and they held him while the Storians took Thalie in a green-shadowed blur.

  * * *

  When the alva fruit was ripe, Yacob came of age. He took a small nest at the bottom of Three Hill. Daddy Immi visited when the fall equinox came, bringing sweets made especially by Mommy Ahh. Yacob knew they were worried he’d stand ward when the Storians came again and disappear like Thalie and so many others had, but he, Yacob, did not yet have the words the Storians wanted. Instead, he shut the windows and tried to imagine an ending for Thalie’s story. At Bonfire, Yacob stood with Dellia and Min. They chose their lamps and made their wishes and Min talked about the new sibling who would soon be joining the crib.

  Dellia came of age prior to spring equinox. She came to Yacob and took him for her own and although they tried they could not parent. It happened that way more often than not; there were always more empty nests in the City than full. Dellia fell silent in her ways and Yacob watched for Holes in the street as diligently as if he were a Finder, searching for fragments of memory to explain the scarcity of children, the why of having forgotten.

  It was many seasons, however, before a Hole opened and Yacob found it before the Finders. It was right at the door of their nest, as if it were meant for him. Yacob crouched and pressed his ear to the new-cracked stone which had been worn concave by thousands of feet over thousands of years.

  The story rose, never fully forgotten no matter how far Beneath it was buried. It bubbled through deep caverns carved by the sea, leeched upward year after year. It rose to the surface, told itself to any who would listen, turned its listeners into storytellers. Like Thalie. Like the Storians themselves, people who were not lost, as Yacob had been taught, but found.

  Anchored to the past, reaching for the future.

  Yacob closed his eyes, sifting through the voices, listening for the one whose story had been added.

  Thalie’s.

  We promised the future we would remember, but the Storians knew we would forget. We had to. Our shame had lit the sky, sealed the wombs of women and twisted the seed of men. The world was so changed that we bound the horror of it Beneath and whenever a scrap of memory reached up we slapped it down in fear and loathing. But a time is coming, Yacob, a time when the weight of history will burst free, turning all of us into storytellers.

  Soon, Yacob. Soon. The City is older than we can imagine, and the Beneath is full to bursting.

  Dellia pulled Yacob from the Hole. The Finders were coming with their nets and
their fear. Dellia took Yacob inside their nest, closed the door, and wiped the tears from his eyes with feather-light fingers. They listened for the Filler wagon, the scoop of the brown forgetting, and the scrape of new stone being laid.

  “It’s not enough,” Yacob whispered. “The story finds the cracks that run through everything.”

  Yacob arranged words of his own to add to the story of the City. In the fall, the Storians would come up from the sea yet again, their rememberings a green weight clinging to their robes. Through the City they would go, unseeing, as if the great stone edifices were meaningless. One by one they would dip their heads over the Crack and listen to the tumbling and lumbering of what had been forgotten. Then, they would add the new stories they had uncovered, filling the last few spaces of the Beneath.

  At last, they would carry their stories on and out into the wakening world.

  In the City, Holes opened more often and the Finders were too few. Holes lost in corners and unmarked alleys whispered their stories on the wind. Once in a while, the words found ears willing to listen and lips willing to tell.

  And in their small nest at the bottom of Three-Hill, Yacob burrowed into Dellia’s warmth, pressed his mouth against the fine arch of her ear, and began to speak.

  Copyright © 2017 J.S. Veter

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  J.S. Veter is the author of three novels. Her short stories have appeared in New Realm Magazine, Luna Station Quarterly, Thunder on the Battlefield: Sword (Seventh Star Press, 2012), and on CBC Radio’s The Vinyl Cafe with Stuart MacLean. In spite having been encouraged to write ‘normal’ stories, she remains committed to science fiction and fantasy. She has no idea why her mind works in this way. Find her online @jsveter or jessicaveter.com.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  COVER ART

  “Pillars of the Gods,” by Ward Lindhout

  Ward Lindhout is a concept artist currently living and working in Japan. Having studied game design in his home country of Holland, his love for original videogame design drove him to the land of the rising sun. After having worked on titles like The Evil Within and Metal Gear Rising he is now working at Capcom. He is passionate about designing new worlds and their inhabitants, drawing inspiration from traveling to the many beautiful countries the world has to offer. View more of his work on his website at www.artbyward.com.

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  ISSN: 1946-1076

  Published by Firkin Press,

  a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

  Compilation Copyright © 2017 Firkin Press

  This file is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 U.S. license. You may copy the file so long as you retain the attribution to the authors, but you may not sell it and you may not alter it or partition it or transcribe it.