Beneath Ceaseless Skies #144 Read online

  She is the first to draw away. Though her breathing has gone to rags, there’s a wariness to the tightness of her jaw. Perhaps she is aware—cannot escape—the fact this is a bargain where we put our goods on the table and haggle over the price. Kisses for a resurrection. So cheap; my merchant aunts would’ve shown pride.

  Ysoreen gathers herself. “Your need, to fuel the wish. My youth, to replicate the conditions of the original animation. The golem’s first name before the princess, before Areemu. The one you don’t know.” Hunger has ruddied her cheeks. She wants more than kisses; will have more than touches. “The sisters loved her enough to give her a name, to provide a means to restore her.”

  My fingers are already on the casket’s clasps. Ysoreen gives way—though does she notice I open the case with greater zeal than when I parted her lips? Does she recognize I pry and tug at it as I never did with her armor?

  Recalling Areemu’s shape is simple. It’s in the material, in the core, and when I evoke that remnant the pieces slot together, clicking, singing.

  In a moment she is complete, sapphire irises shut, platinum limbs corded with strength. Her loveliness does not move the Hall-Warden, whose gaze is for me alone.

  “You’ll have to tell me,” I say. “I don’t read the manuscript’s language.” Practice alone allows me to control my tone; when you’ve used your voice as an instrument for this long, it is second nature to play it precisely.

  “I’ll read it aloud. You’re familiar with the rite? I will be the princess’ substitute.”

  The spell is no hardship either. Merely words, merely a rearranging of potential cupped within Areemu—this has never been difficult; it is the infusion of autonomy that eludes. I could always have had my daughter back a mannequin: no words but that of a parrot’s, no motion but that of routine. But with the sisters’ original formulae, their original words…

  My puissance envelops Areemu’s frame, shimmering strands, cat’s cradle. Ysoreen takes Areemu’s fingertips—hesitates, before anointing each. It is more grudgingly still that she kisses Areemu’s golden lips and pours Areemu’s true name into that inanimate throat.

  * * *

  They wait for the golem to stir. According to the sisters’ instructions it will take until midday, and so Erhensa asks Ysoreen to share her bed.

  She follows the sorcerer, her pulse like a wound. When she sheds her armor and not much else Erhensa crooks a lopsided smile. “You will wear the rest to bed?”

  “I don’t think of you as a… a courtesan. I’m not—” That pathetic. Or that honest. A transaction with a courtesan or a refugee would have been frank.

  “I do not invite you to think of me so. But don’t speak ill of paid companions, pricey ones in your marble brothels or elsewise. Some do it because they’ve no alternatives or because the laws of Scre confine them to the camps. Some do it for they want to, and that’s their choice as much as mine is to practice power, as yours is to administer the curbing of it.”

  So Ysoreen takes off more until she is down to a shift. Under the sheets she lies on her side, Erhensa at her back, a fistful of sheet between them.

  As the moth-lamps dim Ysoreen shuts her eyes, though she knows she will find no peace. Too many hours lie between her and dawn. Too much want lies between her pride and the ambush of Erhensa’s offer. There’s more than one bed in this house, and she could have refused.

  Once, her hand—intent, accident, between—finds Erhensa’s. It is a contact so brief, brushing her knuckles, brushing the inside of her wrist. Ysoreen thinks that this will do; the lust has been sated and she can move past it, a return to the liberty of ambition, the clarity of a rise through Ormodoni ranks.

  It does not do. It does not suffice.

  In the dark, Erhensa’s chin against her shoulder. “Your flesh is iron. They train you to make a weapon of your body, don’t they?”

  Ysoreen listens for the sounds of winter night. Hoots and howls. She evaluates the virtue of silence. “What of it?”

  “I’m making a decision.”

  “On what?”

  “Later,” the sorcerer whispers, “when Areemu lives again.”

  A terrible epiphany. This islander possesses control, a true ease of being. That is what drew Ysoreen: this thing she does not have.

  They remain in the warmth of furs together long after dawn.

  They hear her steps, first, and the chiming of her joints. When the door parts this is what Ysoreen sees: a wrist that gleams, a tress that glitters. The golem looks at them both, and says wonderingly, “Mother?”

  Erhensa’s voice frays, the first faltering of her faultless poise.

  Ysoreen makes herself absent.

  * * *

  If her daughter’s return made her weep, Erhensa has already wiped away the tears. She has changed to a layered, beaded skirt she says is of her home. “Sumalin,” she says, naming that island far to the west at last, a name that’s never appeared in documents of her past.

  The golem is gone to roam the premises, bright-eyed and eager to move again.

  “My mothers did not call me Erhensa,” the sorcerer says, distant. “They wove other things into my name, the aspects of Sumalin. Sand like turmeric, sea like emeralds. Girls like the sun.”

  “Blinds when looked at, burns when touched?”

  “I didn’t realize you had a sense of humor, Hall-Warden.” Erhensa’s gaze refocuses, here and now. “Will Ormodon not punish you for reassembling a golem, your family not shun you for wanting an immigrant spouse?”

  “I was authorized to take the manuscript, and my family is… unconventional.” All too happy to accept a powerful sorcerer into their own, foreign or not. “I had no intention of throwing everything away to pursue you.”

  “How determined are you on cleaving a path to the top?”

  Ysoreen never mentioned that. Her skin prickles. Erhensa has read more than just her moods. “I mean to join First Command.”

  “A long way from Hall-Warden.” The islander holds out her hand. “We each know where the other stands, don’t we?”

  “When I’m First Command—perhaps Tactician Prime—what will you want of me, as a late wedding gift?” Ysoreen takes the hand; finds it as warm as Sumalin might be. Women like the sun.

  “Passage to Sumalin. A visit or two. As wife to one of the First Command I’ll enjoy certain immunities—but not as the spouse of anyone lesser. You do not know my home, but I will tell you that it does not fear Scre.”

  “Every nation fears Scre. And when I ascend so high, with you my wife, you’ll forfeit your home. You’ll be Scre truly, Sumalin no longer.”

  Erhensa thumbs the warped pearls on her skirt. “I will see the shores of my birth, barred to me otherwise. That will suffice.”

  Ysoreen purses a kiss over Erhensa’s knuckles, their texture to her a rough thrill. “An exchange is all we’ll ever have?”

  “I cannot promise love. Not immediately. Perhaps never, perhaps slowly, perhaps before the season thaws. I believe that I’ll grow fond of you.”

  “Even though this is how it begins?”

  “We begin in honest negotiation. Marriages have been knotted over less, over worse.” A smile, to soften what they have, what they don’t yet have. “At my age it will not be passion like the monsoons, ardor like the waves.”

  “Teach me that,” Ysoreen says against the skin of her island bride-to-be. “Teach me to master myself, and I’ll do anything for you.”

  “Very well. Let us begin.”

  Outside, in the summer of Erhensa’s power, a golem-daughter lifts her voice in song.

  Copyright © 2014 Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Benjanun Sriduangkaew enjoys writing love letters to cities real and speculative. Her work can be found in Clarkesworld, The Dark, Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, and previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies: "The
Crows Her Dragon's Gate" in BCS #118.

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  AT THE EDGE OF THE SEA

  by Raphael Ordoñez

  Old men say that life began in the sea. Blood is salt, like seawater; the heart moves an ocean in miniature. The moon pulls tides in the womb.

  What old women say is this: what is taken from the sea, the sea will take back.

  * * *

  The Isle of Hatera is a patch of sand sprinkled with rocks. My Lord Sallus promised that I would get to know every stone and pebble of it. He was right. It takes less than half an hour to walk its shoreline. I was exiled there for a crime against nature.

  I never knew who built the house on the lone outcrop. It was very old. Sallus had it cleaned and furnished. He also had the cistern repaired and the latrine on the rise to the west. It wasn’t his way to let me be lacking.

  My provisions were brought twice a month and left on a sea stack like a stone pillar north of the island. I had to stand at the foot of the iron pontoon bridge when they came. They wanted to get a good look at me. They sailed from some big island beyond the horizon. I don’t know which.

  The first weeks don’t bear description. There is an art to being alone, and my frivolous life had provided me with few resources. I did everything I could to get my mind off the gray infinity that stretched before me. Strangely enough, carnal fantasies about my wife—my former wife—became my constant companions, until exposure had almost obliterated her face from my memory.

  The only thing that saved me from outright madness was the regularity of my keepers’ coming. One day while I was waiting for them, listening to the surf and the silence, I saw that I would lose my mind if I kept on as I had. What I needed was a project. Various ideas for escape had occurred to me, but something useful would have to wash up first.

  Two peninsulas encircled a little bay on the southern shore, the side that faced the open ocean. There the water was shallow and calm. I decided I would build a spiral jetty.

  * * *

  A few days later, I was sitting at the wooden table in my house when a pair of armed man-servants stepped in. They stood on either side of the door. I seized my bread knife and backed against the wall. A slim figure entered between them. It was my wife.

  “Disarm him,” she said. “Search the room for other weapons.” I threw the knife at her feet in disgust. She colored, then nodded to the guards. They went outside.

  Her eyes went flitting about the room. “Don’t bother,” I said nastily. “You’ll say something half-hearted about how well I keep house. I’ll know that you’re thinking something quite different and push you to tell me the truth. You’ll pretend to spare my feelings for a few minutes, then break down and tell me how disgusting I am, how you’ve always reviled me, how your precious Great Uncle Sallus would never behave as I have, and how I’m the one to blame for all of your problems. You see? No reason to go into it.”

  “If you already know what I’m going to say, I don’t see why I even bothered to come.”

  “Then get out,” I said. And she did just that.

  I stood there in the middle of the room for a long time. It hadn’t gone at all as I’d planned. Except that she’d looked better than in my most titillating fantasy.

  Why had she visited? Was it at Sallus’ behest? I thought not. In the end I decided that she’d come to apologize, to ease her guilt for moving on to some other man, or whatever it was she had done. Suddenly I was glad I hadn’t played along.

  * * *

  There is, woven through this world, an occult skein of luminous threads, a web of relations, with signs that signify themselves. I knew it then but darkly, through the silence of wind and surf. But there is in truth little to tell. They aren’t the kind of thing one talks about.

  In building my jetty I followed them, as the sun draws the scale-tree up out of the earth, pulling its branches and leaves along the channels laid out for them; as the stars steer their courses through the sky; as the fishes swim the paths of the sea. They were like a trellis; I the trained plant, restricted (some might say) while drawn ever upward, granted new freedoms, new visions. All I had seen so far was only a trace or projection of that larger universe. The ocean, the limitless ocean, that has beaten the shore infinite in its devious turnings for five billion years—the ocean is its alpha and omega.

  I may be disbelieved when I tell how I, all unknowing, began to attune myself to these siren song-lines, trace them with the fingers of my soul, and so sidled crab-like into a more congenial frame of somatic organization. But so it is. The world is big with significance. We just stand too close to see it. With each step we put our foot out over the abyss, and the earth rushes in to catch us at the last instant. The true life is a walk in darkness, its destination hoped-for but unseen.

  And so the jetty proceeded apace. I’d begun with a mound at the center, collecting stones from around the island and depositing them in the bay. My involute unwound from there. As I finished each section, I poured gravel into the crevices and formed a level surface along the top. The jetty’s appearance pleased me. Its brown-black rocks and pale sand stood out against the green sea.

  My daily schedule was rigid. Each morning I greeted the dawn and contemplated my work, then went searching for suitable stones. Heavy labor I saved for the afternoon, when I otherwise grew restless and weary.

  Weeks turned into months. The equinox came and went, and the cool of the year arrived. The days were short and the nights were chilly. The tides varied from neap to spring and back to neap again. The winter solstice went by, and the spring equinox as well. The beams of the sun grew stronger. The days waxed longer and longer.

  My beard fell down to my chest. My tattered shirt became a rag. I went with back bare, my skin toasted a shimmering bronze, my limbs supple and strong. I was the golden god of the desert island, the master of my own solitude. But I went with seared vision and brains slightly cooked; for one cannot look long upon the sun.

  One night I rose from my cot and went to the window. Strange clicks and whirrs mingled with the sigh of the surf. The gibbous moon made a chessboard of the island. Dark forms flitted about where the white breakers rolled in. I feared nothing on Hatera, so I went to investigate.

  They were crawling around at the edge of the sea, hundreds of them, their high carapaces like domes of burnished bronze, their sword-tails scoring the sand behind them. They seemed excited. Their clicks sounded like speech.

  At first they didn’t mind my presence. I succeeded in getting close to one and flipped it over with my foot. Its pale spider-legs writhed frantically as it whipped its tail against the sand, trying to right itself. Its head was distinct from its soft, jointed plastron, eyeless but with facelike features. It rolled over at last and scuttled into the surf, hissing with agitation. After that, the creatures avoided me.

  The next night was much the same. I began to recollect certain old fables about a preadamitic race of ensouled decapods that did battle with the giant eurypterids and ammonites of the whirlpools in the southern straits. Do you see? I thought of the sea-folk only after their first appearance. And yet my labors were their ineluctable summons, as I had known (without knowing) that they would be.

  Then, on the third night—the night of the full moon—the females came.

  I knew they were females as soon as I saw them. They were larger than the males and had ornate, sculpted hulls. The acrid perfume they released in the surf stirred strange feelings in me. Some of them were attracted to my jetty. They crawled all over it while the males hissed disconsolately from the shore.

  From a distance I watched them pair. A male would cling to his mate’s carapace while she dug a hole in the sand. Then she would drag him over it, pause, fill the hole, and go to repeat the process elsewhere.

  This went on until dawn paled the sky. Then they vanished into the sea.

  * * *

  My wife paid her second visit at midsummer, nearly a year after the first. This time she was alon
e. I was working down at the bay. She came and stood on the shore, waiting for me to notice her. She wore a dress of black brocade edged with black lace. Her auburn hair streamed in the wind.

  I was still putting the finishing touches to my jetty, but it was essentially complete. The space enclosed by its turns had begun to shelter a sea-garden. Green anemones spread their carnivorous blossoms. Trilobites skittered over the stones. Sea lilies waved in the currents.

  My wife surveyed it from where she stood. “What is it?” she asked as I waded onto the beach.

  “A jetty.”

  She began walking along it, following the paved path around and around until she reached the center. There she stopped and regarded me. “I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Let’s go to the house.” I waited for her to wind her way back, then led her up the path.

  “You look like the Old Man of the Sea,” she said as we went along.

  “It was you who put me here.”

  “I know.”

  I looked at her, but I couldn’t read her expression.

  We got to the house. “Welcome to my abode,” I said. “Take the chair. I’ll sit on the cot.” I sat cross-legged on the wood-frame rope bed while she settled herself at the table.

  The color had risen into her cheeks. She avoided my eyes. An ugly look appeared on her face. “I’m sorry for what I did,” she said.

  I was so gratified by this that I found it hard not to gloat, unseemly though it was. “You’re sorry. That’s wonderful. Now that you’ve unburdened yourself, you can go back to court with a clean conscience, and I can finish my days here, content with the knowledge that you’re sorry.”

  “I can’t go back there,” she whispered, covering her face with her hands.

  “Just tell me one thing,” I went on, brimming over with glee. “What was it that made you turn me over to him? I mean, you didn’t want a child any more than I did. In fact, if I recall correctly, it was your idea to practice—”