Beneath Ceaseless Skies #118 Read online

  I heard that he laid down the rules and ceremony of nuptials for mortals new-made, in the fashion of our own wedding: the veil, the sacred husbandly lifting, the loosening of hair. Man and wife.

  But those days softened from desperate to bearable through the liberty I had purchased with wrath. My wanderings were not half so blithe as they had been in my maiden days, but it was good all the same to step free, even under this sky. The flood abated by degrees. At the foot of Kunlun muddy mounds, once huts, began to emerge. A lonely pagoda finial; the head of a statue. I went to the empty place where my house had once stood. I could not transmute it to what it had been; to do so required having one’s name registered to that plot on heaven’s census, and mine was appended to Dijun’s now.

  Then came a night when I could not find the crane. This had never happened; it—she—had learned the routine so well, like breathing, like flight. My husband to my relief was absent, which gave me free reign to question the servants. But this time, however I threatened, none of them would answer in words, holding in their collective silence as though it could shield them from my anger. One pointed, paper sleeve charred by my hand, toward the obsidian maze.

  On black pavement I found the crane, limp and still. Every bone in her wings had been broken. Dijun was slight, never a warrior, but I’d felt how unhesitating his grip could be, and bird bones were so fragile.

  I did not waste tears. From each branch and bramble in my orchard I stripped orchids and okra, lilies and lychees, sunflowers and starfruits. Hands trembling I fed the crane. Her bones did not mend; her ligaments did not knit. When she had swallowed every fragrant and hot thing, she shuddered: a spasm of gullet and shattered pinions. From her beaks ten black pearls fell into my hand.

  She laid her long neck across my knee, for mercy. I gave her that. Once she had gone cold, I flung her up into the sky one last time. Her body, if not spirit, would remember the way.

  The pearls I spilled into a silk pouch, which I tied shut and slipped into my robe. I had seen Nuwa make life from craft and memory, children without mating. I knew what I had to do.

  * * *

  Under blackness crane-corpse lit, I entered His Majesty’s palace. It had many gates, many walls, tiered one over another and bisected by a stair that did not end.

  Guards in stone and lamellar barred my way. I melted the metal on their glaives, burned black marks into their armor. A storm of twenty wings and thirty taloned feet passed through them, and they gave way.

  My wish had been for: impervious, aloof, untouchable. My reality, when I reached the throne room, was one of breathlessness and trembling knees. Kneel and I would have snapped; kneel and I would have fallen, to such depths that no godhood or fire could have saved me. I remained therefore standing. The crows hid my terror, scarlet beaks and dark eyes holding close to me as a shield. My own court. Arrogance, then, would serve me.

  The few immortals in attendance pinned me with their scrutiny. Behind him the emperor’s throne hissed, scales rustling, claws unsheathing. His Majesty quieted both throne and gods with a motion. “Xihe, we have long missed your grace and company, though we did not expect the size and unusual nature of your entourage.”

  To ground myself I ought to have murmured ritual greetings, every respectful phrase. All that tumbled out of me was, “Majesty, I have an answer to the question of bringing back daylight.”

  A sharp intake of breath, by whose cadence and pitch I recognized as my husband’s.

  “Might we see a demonstration?”

  “Outside, Your Majesty. I would not wish to ruin the roof.”

  Gravely he led; royal body, royal head: the limbs of the court must perforce follow. My husband among them; my beautiful husband with his traps at the ready, his snares snapping after my heels. I did not look at him, would not look at him. My voice would not be taken; my courage would not be shaken. The crows moved with me and there I took refuge.

  In the courtyard I whispered to one of the crows perching on my shoulder. He leaped into the night, strong as summer morning, and blazed. The emperor shielded his eyes with his sleeve. Courtiers drew back from the stab of midday heat. Dijun had gone utter white.

  The emperor gave a contemplative nod. “How did you come by them?”

  “They are the sons of my flesh and my husband’s blood.” I did not tell them I had given birth through my eyes. Feathers slick, leaving me like tears. Cartilage passing through my lashes to harden on the other side; blood-brooks on my cheeks. I smiled slowly. “My children, Your Majesty, every last one of them.”

  Dijun’s proximity rippled against my skin. He would claim us all, wife and progeny, and we would return to his mansion, where in his hexagonal rooms my path would wind around itself until the only way was back. There he would part my thighs and with a kiss murmur, More sons, most precious of wives. “I will want an engineer to help me build a chariot. In this my sons and I will ride, bringing day to mortals and heavens alike. We will glide high and in this way avoid all earthly frights. No flood will ever again cause winter unending or night everlasting.”

  Dijun fell back. He could not object; could not admit he’d been told none of this, that this plan was none of his, that he did not know his wife. The shame would fall on us both but on him hardest for being unable to master me, inkstaining indelibly what he thought the pellucid waters of his honor. I had strangled his words in the crib of his throat. I had given back the silence he’d forced into me with his mouth.

  This was my moment of becoming, and I savored it, every bite, more potent than the best of my orchard.

  Taming mounts was no difficulty. Carps newly reborn were docile, and drawn to my power they would acquiesce to anything. With them pulling the chariot I brought Lin and Jia to an inland town where survivors—not Nuwa’s clay offspring—had gathered to try again and heal. Fuxi and Dijun had laid down the customs of marriage, man to wife, but this small corner I claimed for myself; wife and wife would live without reproach. I visited them often.

  My sons grew in bounds, greedy in their eating, until they stood as tall as I. Soon I had to fly with only one of them at a time, for together their joy would crisp and cook the earth to ashes. After the first three dawns they began to speak, a jabbering chorus of Mother! Their first utterance, their first reality. On the easternmost shore, beyond gods and humans, I nursed a tree to grand heights, mulberries like embers on its boughs and leaves that would cut to pieces anyone other than us. Each sunset I watched my crow-children sleep on the branches.

  My sons’ laughter was music, and they knew no sorrow.

  * * *

  It was long after the end, and out of ten sons only one remained to me, the last, the youngest; here approached the part of my story which is known best.

  Even then it was such a quiet, submerged part. Mortals learned the legend of how ten sun-crows rose and terrorized the earth with their fatal light, how heroic Houyi—heaven’s best marksman, Dijun’s champion—shot them down. Xihe went barely mentioned: the suns’ mother, nothing more, for the function of giving them birth must be fulfilled by some vessel.

  I’d told my sons of what Dijun had done to me, to the one who preceded them as my child of the heart, but they were sons, not daughters: a gulf no motherhood could cross. They wanted only to be a family. In the end I could not impose my hate upon them, for I wished their existences unmarred; I wanted them steeped in bliss. They were only mortal. Few realized that they were not divine, inheriting neither Dijun’s agelessness nor mine. They would pass, and some other way would have to be devised to light the world.

  Dijun told them: I sometimes long for a fancy to see the sky subsumed by your wings. The brilliance of you all together, for heaven and earth to behold.

  My sons had been uncomplicated creatures. Born to be loved. If their father expected a little gesture to earn his, why then, they would gladly give it.

  The feathers of my youngest were growing rime, aging before their time. Absorbing the work of his brothers was more than
he was made for, and in time he would fade. It was terrible for a mother to mourn her children—but when my offspring was mortal and I was not, what was to be done? Life was change.

  He fell asleep, my last son. In the sky a dead crane drifted.

  A footfall; a radiance. “Xihe.”

  “You ever visit uninvited, husband,” I said without looking at him. “It seems you do not understand the meaning of unwelcome.”

  “You were a delight once.”

  “These days I’m rather delighted with myself.” I turned my attention to scrubbing one of my dragons’ necks. “Heavenly etiquette is all that stands between you and the event of your eyes being pulped between my dragon’s teeth. I’d personally gouge them out with my thumbs. Since our wedding night I’ve longed to do this.”

  His robes rustled as he backed out of the dragon’s reach. “You would not. And could not.”

  I looked down at my arms, at muscles hardened over centuries. “How precious that you think so.”

  “In celestial census we remain spouses, Xihe. What would befall you if you attempted to murder your own husband?” He drew closer. “And witness what has transpired after you left me. Your sons dead. You cannot govern yourself, much less them. One child is all you have left to live for.”

  I could not keep from laughing. “That’s what you think?” I stepped into the chariot and tugged the reins. The paired dragons arched and reared. “I live for myself, Dijun. For that I have been made; for that I have been born—for myself, not for you, not even for my sons.”

  Life was change, and not even the mother of suns would forever stay the same. The limitless skies opened for me. Into them I soared, flames pouring out of me in a roar, a dragon’s gate carved into the night.

  Mine alone to leap.

  Copyright © 2013 Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Benjanun Sriduangkaew splits her time between Hong Kong and Jakarta, and has a fondness for airports. She can be found blogging at A Bee Writes.

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  BLOOD, STONE, WATER

  by A.J. Fitzwater

  Tau bit deeper with her paddle, and green water hushed beneath the oka hull. Nhia sat in the bow, as serene as when they had pushed off from Ia that sunrise to a farewell ululation. Her fingertips trailed in the smooth ocean, eyes unfocused on the fins that kept time beneath the oka or searching further forward to their destination five sunrises hence.

  Tau fell into a paddling cadence, and Nhia’s sweet harmony twined thoughtlessly around her bark-rough voice. Nhia’s easy joy sang at odds with the impending rise of the Stone Moon.

  Death awaited them at the end of their journey.

  Tau risked glances at Nhia’s bared breasts. Like many Stone Maidens, Nhia gathered sun to her as she did eyes. Tau reasoned her hands would fit Nhia’s small and pert breasts, though her gourd remained empty when it came to touching a Stone Maiden. She had to be content with looking. Nhia was unashamedly content to let her look, needing little prompting to show off her kiho-nut brown skin, unusual light grey eyes, and virility; she was the only one in a generation born on Ia under a Stone Moon.

  Tau resented her own breasts. Her chest ached, and not from exertion. Kah, she sighed to herself, twitching her keenly muscled upper arms in an effort to find a more comfortable position for her heavy breasts; the stiff, new kiho fabric wrap, a gathering gift from chieftess Lau’Ia’Maa, rubbed them tender. At least I will get through the gathering before I am indisposed for this rotation of the great keel.

  The Ia-mother’s figure floated in Tau’s mind; her heavy breasts, striped by sun, time and nurturing, and her tattooed lips forming the parting words which had sent Tau off with a grin and roll of the eyes. “Everyone is encouraged to ride their own wave, but you can’t ignore the plethora of enough potential seed mates awaiting you at the gathering, Tau’hene.”

  With her gaze straying from the naumu-like water to the figure in the bow, Tau smiled and offered a little kia and curse to virility as she tried to pretend the heat between her thighs had only to do with the sun. She fell into daydream, imagining the child begat from her seed mingled with Nhia’s.

  The conceit couldn’t last. If Nhia was allowed to survive the Stone Moon gathering, her rare seed would be in demand. A maiden would never grant a keel-woman, a common carver and moon-gazer, the opportunity to procreate with her, Tau decided with a long kah of regret.

  Both women scented the change in the sea before they saw the shoals of the reeflet. Tau chanted off the fifth verse of the Travellers From Ia cadence and discovered they had missed a sand bar. She added a lilt to the verse as a way to notate the shifting geography.

  Nhia balanced easily and eagerly, an image of Ia On The Mountain, one foot braced against the bow head. “I am starving. I have been looking forward to this all morning.”

  Tau grunted as she aimed for the narrow opening in the oblong reef. The Water Moon tide had just turned, and the oka shot between the gap in the subsurface rocks. The reeflet was empty of the usual fisher folk spearing peuru worms and gathering mollusks, in respect for the passing Stone Maidens.

  “You prepare that fermented wiro-fruit juice, I will be right back.”

  Tau had to look away as Nhia stripped off her wrap and slipped over the edge of the oka, a shining eel.

  She returned with two peuru still twisting on the end of her spear and a handful of link-shells. Oblivious to the way Tau’s eyes drank in her ocean-dusted skin and dark ropes of hair that clung to her throat, Nhia carefully manipulated the oozing orange innards out of the peuru with her thigh knife onto a bark shell, expertly avoiding the poison-tipped spines. With a flick of her knife tip, she threw the now-limp worm casings back into the water to be returned to the circle of coral life. The hopeful wind-dancing witi birds knew better than to make a dive for the dangerous husks.

  Unable to wait, the women licked the sweet gizzard off their fingers, humming in pleasure.

  “Lau’maa believes peuru paste is good for baby making,” Nhia said as they watched their meal turn a deep sun red as it steeped in the wiro juice. Still dangling over the edge of the oka, she kicked her feet in the water. “Maybe I will be lucky this time.”

  Tau prodded Nhia with a glance as sharp as the tip of her spear. “This is only your second Stone Moon of fertility. You were too young the last time.”

  “Other islands would disagree.” Nhia’s kicking turned the oka in a circle around the rock anchor Tau had thrown in.

  “Ia is not other islands, nor any other mother,” Tau growled, cracking a link-shell with the handle of her hip knife and slurping at its waiting treasure.

  “Do you remember the last Stone Moon?” Nhia asked, discarding an empty link-shell into the water.

  “Of course,” Tau replied. “I may have been young and a little preoccupied with lesser things, but one never forgets their first Stone moonrise.”

  Nhia uttered a non-committal grunt and swung back into the oka, enfolding herself in her brightly painted wrap. She then pointed at the freshest carvings along the inner bulwarks of their vessel. “Lesser things? Do you count your sisters and cousins and cadences lesser than moon-gazing now?”

  Tau’s face tightened beneath its already fine crust of salt. She scooped up a finger-full of peuru paste, indicating its readiness. “That is not what I meant.”

  Nhia laughed and punched her lightly in the bicep. “I fathom, you tide-washed fool. You have always been an easy tease.”

  “I wish you would refrain.”

  “We all wish for many things, but some are not destined to come to us in any good time.”

  Startled by the wistfulness of Nhia’s tone, Tau’s glance was not quick enough to catch her out. Nhia’s interest had been captured by a darting school of coral fish.

  They passed the rest of the afternoon in polite but taut snatches of conversation before putting in for the night at an uninhabited islet. They made camp above the ti
de lines near the smattering of kiho trees, Tau coal-roasting the moon fish Nhia had deftly speared from the shallows.

  After sucking the husk of a spicy wiro-fruit dry, the quiet tension washed away with the tide as they laughed and pointed out stray pips and scales around each others mouths.

  “Why did you volunteer to be my keel-woman?” Nhia asked, running her sinuous tongue around her lips to capture the leftovers before stretching her long neck to stare up at the rising Blood Moon as it kissed shoulders with the setting Water Moon.

  Tau had to look away. Choosing an empty hardwood slate and a sharp, shaved naumu stone, she judged the angles of the celestials and made quick, deft cuts. “One does not volunteer to be a keel-woman at a gathering. It is an honor to be chosen.”

  “Do not take me for some storm-tossed flotsam,” Nhia growled, more teasing than angry. “A chieftess’s daughter comes with privileges.”

  “We are all daughters of the chieftess—”

  Nhia’s inelegant snort cut off Tau’s protest. “You in more ways than one. I fathom you try very hard not to be, but you are her favorite.”

  Tau frowned at her slate; the simple pictographic of the moons, she had cut accurate and neat. Koro would be pleased. “You seem to fathom more about me than I do. I am neither the oldest nor the youngest, nor the most intelligent, hard-working, nor fecund.”

  “Why speak so ill of yourself?” Nhia scolded, sounding much like Lau’maa in that moment, and Tau bit her lips to hide her own smile. “Gazer Koro would disagree. At least the intelligent and hard-working part.”

  Nhia made a crude gesture, and they giggled in unison at the thought of the elderly gazer working on the fecundity part. When Nhia gasped out, complete with funny faces and more hand gestures, that she’d seen Koro sneaking into old kiho-weaver Maka’s wari, they fell about in further fits.