Beneath Ceaseless Skies #20 Read online

  Urvara kissed Mama on the forehead, then placed one hand on each side of her mother’s head. The final gift shouldn’t be taken alone, but Jor remained on the floor, clutching his empty turtle shell, unaware that he was neglecting his role. Urvara couldn’t ask him to do this, he wouldn’t understand.

  “Goodbye, Mama.”

  “Goodbye, Urvara, child of my breath.”

  Urvara pressed her hands together, squashing them into Mama’s head until her palms met in the middle.

  All that was left of her mother was a distorted ring of flesh, wrapped around Urvara’s hands. She shaped Mama’s flesh into a ball and placed it onto the birthing table. The flesh was dry. Urvara sprinkled it with water from Mama’s turtle shell bowl until it was as moist as babyflesh again.

  No matter what Mama might have wanted, Urvara couldn’t take it all. She took half the flesh to Jor and massaged it over his chest, his arms, his legs. Half for him and half for her. This was the closest she could come to balance in her world. These insignificant things were all she could control. She added the other lump of flesh to her own frame. Even with Mama’s final gift, they both still looked like children.

  She took Mama’s bowl back to the dresser and set it next to Papa’s. She should have destroyed his bowl when he gave the last of his flesh, but they hadn’t had the new bowls then. Urvara poured the last of the water from Mama’s bowl into her own new turtle shell. She crouched down next to Jor. “Can I use your shell?”

  She held out her hand, hoping that Jor would give her the shell, but instead he clutched it against his chest and gave her a wary look. The water from Papa’s bowl was supposed to go into Jor’s shell. She had to empty both parents’ shells so she could break them.

  “What does it matter to you, about the shells?” Rhea asked. Her voice wasn’t spiteful but curious, as though Urvara was a puzzle to be solved.

  “I can believe in the gods without believing in the priestess and her temple. She might tell you that it is all one and the same, but she was just a woman once.”

  “You believe in the stories?”

  “I believe that there must be a balance between our people and the shells. I believe that each shell can only be used once. Jor was born from a used-up shell. Look at him and tell me that he is the same as my brother was.”

  “Perhaps with time—”

  “He will never be the same, no matter how much time passes.”

  Still, there was no harm in letting Jor keep his turtle shell. Urvara poured the last of the water from Papa’s bowl into her own shell, now filled almost to the top. Then she took her father’s empty shell to the sharp corner of the dresser, reinforced with stone to bear the force that ritual required, and brought it down hard against the corner, once, twice, three times. On the fourth blow, the shell finally cracked, splitting into two pieces along a jagged line.

  She took up Mama’s bowl, thick and sturdy. It was heavier than Papa’s bowl, and the ridges would make it harder to strike a solid blow against the corner of the dresser. She ran her fingers up and down the rows of spiky bumps along the back of the shell. A shell is just a shell. She clutched the bowl in her hands. The last trace of her mother. She and Jor were supposed to destroy it together, to bring balance into the world. He should hold one side and she the other, so that together they could dash the shell to pieces against the corner of the dresser. Instead, he sat on the floor, poking the new flesh on his chest with his finger.

  The ritual was almost done, but she couldn’t finish. She traced the rim of the bowl with her fingertips. There was no one to help her now. Mama was gone, and Jor didn’t understand.

  She felt a hand on her shoulder, and turned to see Rhea. Neither of them spoke. They stood that way for a long time. Jor crawled up into Mama’s bed, looked around for a moment, then fell asleep. Urvara wanted to be done with death, but she couldn’t bring herself to break the shell.

  Rhea took the other side of Mama’s shell. Urvara wanted to be angry, but she found herself grateful, grateful for anyone who would help, even someone from the temple, because it meant she didn’t have to do everything alone.

  They lifted the shell as high as Urvara could reach, then smashed it down against the corner of the dresser. It only took a single blow, and Mama’s shell splintered into shards.

  * * *

  Every year, on the last day of autumn, the people went to the riverbank and gathered shells to make their children. But one year there were not enough shells. Fewer shells meant fewer children, and the priestess refused to let her brother’s people dwindle away and die. She told everyone to go home and return the next day. She told them she would beg the gods for more shells.

  The people left, and when they returned there were enough shells for all who needed them, and it was good. Now the priestess always speaks to the gods on the last day of autumn, and the people collect their shells on the first day of winter.

  * * *

  Urvara was surprised to see Rhea standing on the doorstep on the third day of winter. She had smoothed away the zigzag indentations in her flesh that had marked her as a servant of the priestess. In her left hand, she held a turtle shell, a large deeply-ridged shell like Mama’s had been. It was crusted with dried mud from the riverbank. Rhea had visited four times since she’d watched Mama give her final gift. She said that she would have come more often were she not needed to do the work of the priestess, away at the temple. It irritated Urvara that Rhea refused to give up her service, and yet she was always so kind to Jor when she came to visit.

  “Can I come in?” Rhea asked softly, interrupting Urvara’s thoughts. Her voice had the sad warble of breath that bubbled up through a constricted throat.

  “Of course.” It was an amazing gesture of pity for Rhea to bring her shell here. The traditional day of choice was the first day of winter, and it must have taken her two whole days to force herself to come here, to choose Jor instead of a more desirable mate. Rhea was good with Jor, always telling him stories and giving him little gifts—stones smoothed by the river or gnarled sticks shaped like abstract animals. Trivial things.

  “You were right about the priestess,” Rhea said. “I should have left, before... “

  “I’m grateful you’re here,” Urvara said. “Autumn is ended, and now that you’ve done your duty you don’t have to go back.”

  “But I can’t undo what I’ve done.” Rhea held up her turtle shell. “This is what the turtle shells should look like when the turtles are done with them. They should be this big, with spikes and ridges. It took me two days of searching to find it, that’s why I’m here on the third day of winter and not the first. I didn’t want to be part of the higher order. I wanted to stand guard over the turtles as my father did—as your father did. What she does at the end of autumn, it’s wrong, Urvara.”

  Rhea was talking so fast that Urvara had trouble taking it all in. She didn’t understand what the priestess had done, why the shells were smaller. She remembered the autumn day when they had encountered Rhea by the river, a basket in her hand. “Is it something to do with the day we met by the river?”

  “No. Well, yes, but that was not the worst. There were no guards by the river that day because no one was allowed to see what I was doing. I was collecting clay. River clay to sculpt a new arm for the priestess.”

  “But only the gods... River clay isn’t pure enough—”

  “I know. I spent most of my autumn separating out the clay and making it clean. That was the work of the higher order, and it was strange, but we all thought it was good. There were eight of us, and we thought the priestess was wise, and that it was okay for her to live so long, even using the river clay. But.”

  Rhea paused for a long time, hugging the turtle shell to her chest. “On the last day of autumn, the priestess ordered us to go down to the river. She told us to... I didn’t want to, but the others convinced me. There are fewer shells every year, and if we hadn’t done it then some people wouldn’t be able to have children.”
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br />   “You killed turtles,” Urvara said.

  Jor looked up. He made swimming motions with his hands, then stopped and turned the shell upside down. Urvara couldn’t help but think that he understood, even if he never said a word.

  “I killed one,” Rhea said. “It wasn’t even old. It wasn’t even an adult. The others kept going, but I couldn’t. I ran away, downstream, just ran and ran until nightfall. When dawn came, I knew that all the village would be out collecting shells and choosing mates, and everyone would be happy because they didn’t know.”

  “But you still found a shell, you still came back.”

  “I wasn’t going to. I was going to run away forever. But then I found this shell, a shell from a fully grown turtle. It reminded me of your mother’s shell, of your family. I could abandon the village, but I couldn’t abandon you.” Rhea stood in the center of the room with her shell, staring expectantly at Urvara.

  “Jor,” Urvara called softly. He’d need his turtle shell for the union ritual, and... well he couldn’t speak the words, he hadn’t learned to talk yet, but Rhea knew that, and she still had come. Urvara could speak for him. She ran through the ritual in her head. It was good, that Jor would have someone to take care of him. Jor needed that.

  “He can watch from there,” Rhea said.

  With the markings of the temple smoothed away, Urvara could see the face of her childhood friend in the woman who stood before her. She smiled at the future they might have had together, but she couldn’t be so selfish. “Jor needs you. I can take care of myself. You can’t choose me over him, it’d be just like the priestess all over again.”

  “It doesn’t have to be you or him. We can take care of Jor together, and we can spread the word about the priestess and the turtles, and bring balance into the world.”

  Urvara shook her head. “Only the gods can bring balance to the world. But stay with me, and at least we can have balance in our hearts.”

  * * *

  The people lost their faith in the priestess and abandoned her alone in her mountain temple. They stopped killing turtles, and only took shells they found empty on the riverbank. But the damage had been done, and every year there were fewer turtles. With no one serving at the temple, the rain forgot its promise, and washed away the people.

  At the end of time, the last turtle was dying. The gods returned and carried that last turtle up the steps of the temple. Inside sat a priestess, her flesh so old and crackled that she could not move. She was the last of the people, the sister of the priest who’d tamed the rain. Like the turtle, she was dying. The gods lifted the turtle high above her head, then smashed it down with a strength that only gods possess. The priestess and the turtle, shell and all, were reduced to dust. There were no more turtles. There were no more people.

  And with the world once more completely in balance, the gods left.

  Copyright © 2009 Caroline M. Yoachim

  Comment on this Story in the BCS Forums

  Caroline M. Yoachim is a writer and photographer living in Austin, Texas. She is a graduate of the 2006 Clarion West Writers Workshop, and her fiction has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Talebones, and Shimmer. Her website is http://carolineyoachim.com.

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  THE BONE HOUSE

  by James Lecky

  We live in the Bone House, Father and I, in the shade of the ironwood trees, beside a river that is never still, never silent.

  Somewhere, far to the south, a war is being fought, a war that began many years before I was conceived and has been fought with growing ferocity ever since. At night I sit on the banks of the river and look to where the great fires burn, lighting up the horizon as if to challenge the stars themselves, and imagine that I can hear the clash of armies, steel upon steel.

  In the morning there are bodies in the water—men, women, children, horses, oxen—and it is these that sustain our lonely life here. The river is wide and deep, a quarter of a mile from one bank to the other. Sometimes it roars like an animal in pain as it rushes towards the sea. At other times, when the tide is low and the stinking mud of the shore is exposed, the water swirls and gurgles and sings a discordant tune.

  On such musical mornings I walk two miles to where the riverbank dips. I take my hook, wade out as far as I am able, and use the big, sharp blade to grab at the flotsam.

  By noon, when the water is rising again, I take stock of what the river has given us, laying out bodies on the bank, collecting rings and trinkets, scraps of paper, anything that is useful, and stripping away their clothing to expose fish-belly white flesh. Then I return some of the bodies to the river to continue their journey north.

  Some. But not all.

  I like to carve. I like to sculpt. But the ironwood trees in the forest shatter even the finest blades. Father says that the war has changed them, that the magic of the battlemages has infected the land, and I have no cause to doubt him—he has been my educator and my window on the world.

  Bone is easier to shape.

  Our home is decorated with an abundance of carvings—fairy folk made from fingerbones, a blossoming tree formed from the thighbone of a soldier, a dragon carved from the spine of a horse—even Father’s drinking cup was fashioned from the shattered skull of a southron knight.

  “You have made this poor place a bone house, Mikulas,” Father told me once, and there was a touch of wonder in his gravelly voice.

  But he has never seen the pride of my collection.

  Hidden in the deep, dark of the ironwood trees, a mile or more from the Bone House is a statue—chipped away flake by flake from a fused mass of human and animal bone.

  It is a statue of my mother, her features copied as best I can, taking as my guide the tiny portrait carved into the jade cameo I wear around my neck.

  She was beautiful, and so my statue is beautiful too.

  I am an ugly thing of flesh and stone. My eyes, like glittering points of quartz, peer out from beneath the ridges, dark as coal, that protrude from my cheeks and forehead. I am my father’s son, poisoned by the same rituals that have turned his flesh to rock and that have already begun to do the same to me. It is my inheritance, the thing that, save for some miracle, I will carry to my grave. A condition as inescapable as breathing.

  “You were cursed before you ever left the womb,” Father once said, and little harsh, sandy tears had fallen from his eyes. “I never realized the harm that I was doing to my flesh, to her flesh. And for what? A pointless war that can never be won.”

  “Everything must end eventually,” I said.

  “Ah, my beautiful Mikulas, you are wise beyond your years, but not as wise as you wish. The war will continue forever because of fools like me.”

  I was little more than a babe in arms when we fled the southern cities and came to the ironwood forest, but I remember the flames and the screams and the vast armies that trudged night and day across the plains. I remember how my father pored over ancient books by the light of a guttering candle, searching for spells and rituals that would bring peace to the world but only finding the Terrible Words of Destruction.

  He was a fool, of course he was, allowing himself to believe that what he was doing was right and just, allowing the Earl of the South to manipulate him, just as the other Earls manipulated their own court mages to the same ends. We need more weapons, they said, more rituals, more soldiers, enough to strike one final, shattering blow that will finish the war. But one shattering blow was met with another shattering blow and the killing continued.

  The price my father paid for his naïve compliance was terrible—his flesh poisoned, his son deformed, and his beloved wife dead.

  It was her passing that finally opened his eyes. The sorcerous poison worked quickly on her, carried in his kisses, in the very stuff of him, destroying her from the inside out.

  She was in her tomb by my second birthday. She was soft and pale, a fragile creature even before the trauma of my birth, or so Father tells me. He does not blame m
e for her death, nor do I blame myself; I know that she died—as have so many—on the altar of the Earls’ ambition.

  But in that mass of bone—blended together by fire, enchantment and a quart of my own thick blood—she lives again. And so I chip, I pare, I shape.

  At times, when Father sleeps and even the great fires of battle have dimmed somewhat, I come to her and sit for hours, staring at the half-formed lines of her face, her body. Even in the near total darkness her beauty lights up the night.

  * * *

  It was in the summer that Isoria came into my solitary life.

  That morning the river was in full voice and I found myself singing in counterpoint to the tumbling melody, adding my rumbling bass tones to the high soprano of the water. The fighting had been fierce in the preceding months, as if the Earls had acknowledged that magic offered no solution and were attempting to end their war through simple brute force.

  As ever, it was the innocents who suffered most—for every figure in blue or red or green livery that floated through the water, a dozen more wore rough homespun cloth. If I had chosen to do so I could have walked from one bank to the other on the backs of the dead.

  I had long since grown indifferent to the sight of corpses, no matter how horrific their mutilation. Their humanity had been taken from them at the moment of death—stolen by sword, spear and arrow—and I had no tears to shed for them.

  By mid-morning twenty silent, bloated forms lay on the bank, together with the waterlogged carcass of a black dog and the shapeless bulk of a headless warhorse. One of the dead men, a scribe judging by his dress, clutched a small leather-bound book, the pages sodden but still readable. I took it as a present for Father, then began my morning’s work.

  I had just begun to strip the livery from a dead soldier when I heard a soft moan from the water behind me, so feeble that at first I took it for a discordant note in the river’s music.

  I heard it again and turned to look. It was a woman, dressed in torn and filthy livery. The coat and breeches were purple—the colors of the Earl of the South.