Beneath Ceaseless Skies #144 Read online

  “No, it wasn’t. You’re the one who suggested it.”

  “Well, you practically forced me to. Remember? It was the night of the fête. You said—”

  “Enough! Enough!” she shrieked. “Do you always have to have everything worked out? That’s why I did it! Gods! How I despise you sometimes. I didn’t want to say that, but I can’t help it. I despise you!”

  That silenced me. I suppose I had achieved my goal. For a long time we sat there without saying anything. I listened to the surf and thought about my project. “Do you like my jetty?”

  “It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.”

  “Does Sallus know you’re here?”

  “Of course not. My people wait in the boat. They won’t bear tales.”

  “Why did you come? To apologize?”

  “I—I want to get you out of here. I’m working toward it. I just wanted to tell you that.”

  “And if you aren’t successful? Because we both know you won’t be.”

  “Then I’ll come share your exile with you.”

  “They’ll never let us be together.”

  “We’ll escape. We can live in secret in Panormic Styrrhena or the Golden Horn or the Deserits. Someplace my uncle won’t find us.”

  I nodded. “When?”

  “Give me a few months.”

  We spoke then of unimportant matters. She kissed me—I could tell she was a little reluctant—and went out. I watched her pick her way to her ship. I didn’t expect to see her again.

  * * *

  The fall equinox went by. I finished the jetty and began to extend the path into a design that encompassed the entire island. As I worked I felt that I was tracing something foreordained. At each stage I merely did what seemed most fitting. My house’s knoll was the pole of dynamic symmetry.

  I made a discovery in the dead of winter. The day was too cold and stormy to go out. I was just sitting there, listening to the wind, when I noticed that one of the flagstones had come loose. Out of boredom I began idly to work at it.

  I succeeded in flipping it over. There was a hole in a corner of the depression. I used this to get a purchase on the neighboring stone, and pried that off as well. The hole I’d uncovered was large enough to admit a man. I spent a few minutes preparing a torch, then dropped down into it.

  The chamber had once been a natural cave, but human hands had shaped it into a cubical space. An altar ran along one side. Carved above it was the image of an architeuthic ocean goddess with vacuous, lidless eyes; hundred-handed, a corporeal icon of divine energy.

  The other walls were adorned with painted bas-relief. They told the story of the rise from primordial chaos, when demiurgic spirits of flame kindled the spark of life in the vents of the deep sea, and of the advent of man and a race of marine arthropods.

  Several panels recounted the whelming of a human kingdom by an inbreaking ocean. The survivors gathered on a mountain peak that rose above the waves and there made a sacrifice to the goddess. A spring welled up from the earth. Some drank of it and joined the sea-folk. Others made their way ashore. The arithmetic spiral was a motif throughout, in the coils of the mantled goddess.

  When the weather improved I began to investigate Hatera with a new end in view. I crossed over to the sea stack and searched for a cave like my own. I found nothing but a shelf where the surf slapped noisily underneath. After that the outcrop became a kind of asymptotic attractor for the whorls of my design.

  The sea-folk returned later that spring. The females emerged under the full moon. I awaited them on the spiral jetty. They swarmed up it, surrounding me, feeling me with their bifurcated forelegs.

  I continued to visit the sea stack every spring tide. I knew now that a cave was submerged beneath the shelf. Each month it was a little more exposed. Finally, at the new moon nearest midsummer, I was able to enter.

  The sides were carpeted with dripping seaweed. I went up a flight of slippery steps into a small chamber. A stream spurted from a crack. The water, I found, was fresh. That one taste filled me with a sudden singing desire to devoutly consummate my union with the authoress of my soul’s longings, the belemnitic mother of life. I filled a jug and bore it back to my house.

  To this day I wonder whether the spring would have been there had I not sought it.

  * * *

  My wife paid her third visit a month later. It took her a long time to come to the point. I made one or two little attempts at intimacy while she talked, hating myself all the while, knowing how deftly she would turn me aside. It was just another way of spilling myself in the sand, but I couldn’t help myself.

  Giving up at last, I said: “How’s it coming?”

  “How is what coming?”

  “What we talked about last time.” She didn’t say anything. “Have you made any headway with Sallus? Or are we going to try to escape together?”

  “Escape where?” she laughed bitterly. “No, I haven’t made any headway. How could I? It was stupid of us to think we could get around him. He’s had all sorts of people banished now, you know. They call him the Reformer.”

  “So...you don’t want to escape?”

  “Like I said, where to? What would we do? You don’t have any useful skills. I can embroider a little, but not enough to make a living.”

  “That wouldn’t matter to me, so long as we were together.”

  “That’s very well for you to say. What do you have to lose? But I—” She froze.

  “That’s how we stand, then,” I said. I turned to the window.

  “Darling,” she began, putting her hand on my shoulder. I shrugged it off. Inwardly, though, I was dancing with joy. I knew I had her.

  “Spend the night with me,” I said. She didn’t answer. The silence was taut. I could feel her eyeing my sun-hardened skin, my unkempt hair and beard. I hated her for it, oh, how I hated her! “Just for company,” I forced myself to say. “For old times’ sake. You can go in the morning. Then you needn’t bother with me again. You take the cot. I’ll make do with the table.”

  “I’ll have to go get my things,” she said at last.

  “Are your people with you?”

  “No, I hired a boat in Ket. I can’t trust my servants anymore.”

  “You sailed over alone?”

  “Of course not. The fisherman is anchored beyond the islet. I rowed myself ashore.”

  “Will he wait for you?”

  “If he wants to get paid. I’ll be back in a moment.”

  While she was out, I prepared our meager repast. I got myself water from the cistern; her water I poured from the jug. Then I laid out the board of fare: purple dulse, hard oblongs of fungous fruit-bread, two boiled cheboth eggs.

  I was just replacing the flagstone over the storage cellar beneath the house when my wife returned. We sat down to eat. She pretended to put on a brave face but made it clear all the same that she wasn’t used to such viands. She wrinkled her nose when she tasted the water. “Is this from your cistern?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Is it quite clean?”

  “Oh, yes. It’s just a bit musty from sitting in my jug.”

  “It makes me feel strange. You’re sure it’s safe to drink?”

  “Quite safe. I’ve never gotten sick.” She emptied her cup, then, oddly enough, asked for more. She drank that down as well.

  Her sleep that night was troubled. It took her a long time to get up in the morning. “I don’t feel right,” she said as she swung her feet down.

  It was true that her skin had grown a little pale. Also, her eyes looked unnaturally large and protuberant. When she stood, her gown swung loosely from her shoulders. Its hem touched the floor. “What’s wrong with me?” she grunted. She stumbled to the jug and drank straight from its mouth.

  “Maybe you should stay for a day or two, until you feel better,” I said. She nodded and went back to bed.

  I went out and dragged the dinghy ashore. The boat was beyond the sea stack.
The fisherman was nowhere in sight. I hoped he would give up waiting and return to Ket.

  My wife was asleep when I got back. Her face had new wrinkles. Her skin was so thin that I could see all her veins through it.

  She slept through the rest of the day. By evening her hair had begun to fall out. At sunset she opened her eyes wide with horror. “What’s happening to me?” she rasped. She got up. Her gown dragged on the floor now, but it was stretched tight over her back, which had begun to broaden. “Help me,” she said.

  I gently stripped off the gown. She hardly looked human now. Her abdomen was shrunken, her bones deformed. Her vertebrae had begun to thicken and shoot out strange growths that moved beneath the skin.

  Suddenly her shriveled legs gave way and she went scuttling about the room, hissing bewilderedly. I coaxed her back into the cot. She fell at once into a deep sleep.

  In the morning she looked more like a larva than a woman. Her eyes were dark spots on her pallid face. I went out for a long walk.

  When I returned the cot was empty. A hardening, fluid-filled sac was hanging in the corner, cemented to the ceiling by dried mucus. There was movement inside it. Her face was a grotesque mask at the bottom. A bulging, jointed dome was taking shape on the back.

  When I saw that, I drank a draft from the jug myself.

  * * *

  The tree of life springs from one stem. The segmented worm gave rise to the joint-shelled tribes, but also to fish, and hence to man. Do you doubt this? Man is segmented. It’s true. His skull and his spine are but a great sea-worm that carries its brine with it, in blood. Do you still doubt? Set side by side the embryo of a man and a shellfish, and tell me which is which.

  And so, as I followed my wife’s transmutation, no violence was done to my form. I was only stepping from one branch to another of the same family. I slept the great sleep in my sac on the ceiling, and emerged on a morning of pale sun and placid water.

  I went out. A dark form sat at the edge of the sea. She waited while I approached. She was much larger than me now. It was impossible to tell if she knew me. Her eyes conveyed nothing. Had her mind even survived the change?

  But how tenderly, oh, how tenderly did she rear up a little and touch her foreleg to my carapace! Our shells knocked together, and it sent a quiver of excitement through my soft insides. I began to hiss and wave my tail. She turned, inviting me, and I clung to her carapace.

  And there, on the beach, we made love after the fashion of the sea-folk. When we were done we climbed out on my jetty and surveyed the view. The great goddess hoved upon the unbroken waters, her mantled miter an arrow to the sun’s lidless eye, her pliant, muscled arms snaking sublimely through the deep, with pointed fingers and paddled hands playing the organ stops of oceanic profundity. The vision faded, or rather, resolved itself into the enigmatical reserve of blank infinity.

  The green sea beckoned. We plunged into it and swam side by side, upside down, steering with our tails as rudders.

  Now we dwell in swaying gardens and calcareous houses on the abyssal plain, watchful for dread things of the deep, of which no man may know or speak.

  Copyright © 2014 Raphael Ordoñez

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  Raphael Ordoñez is a mildly autistic writer and circuit-riding college professor living in the Texas hinterlands, eighty miles from the nearest bookstore. His fiction has appeared multiple times previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, including "Misbegotten" in BCS #113. He blogs sporadically about fantasy, writing, art, and life at raphordo.blogspot.com.

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  COVER ART

  “After the Giants War,” by David Demaret

  David Demaret is an art director/artist from Paris, France. He is a senior graphic artist working in the videogame industry for 20 years, and he does freelance and contract work for illustrations and concept art. View his work online at themoonchild.free.fr.

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  ISSN: 1946-1076

  Published by Firkin Press,

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  Compilation Copyright © 2014 Firkin Press

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