Beneath Ceaseless Skies #112

by Christian K. Martinez

  She ignored my certainly incredulous gaze.

  “Do you know what day it is?”

  I gave the date, and added the listing of minor saints commemorated for good measure.

  “Yes. Today is also the first day of spring.” Mauro held up a hand. “I know the calendar says not yet, but I should hope you’ve been my apprentice long enough to feel it for yourself.” She bent down, folding her robe around her. “Touch the ground.”

  I did so.

  “Close your eyes.”

  I knew this bit well enough. As an apprentice I had spent the last seven years learning all Mauro knew of herbology, botany, and the more obscure horticultural arts that had no name.

  “What do you feel?”

  I bit back “dirt and grass” and forced myself to stillness.

  “I feel stirring, Sister,” I finally whispered. “I feel grubs burrowing and worms inching their way back upward.”

  She snorted, unimpressed.

  “The trees on this side of the ridge seem to be stretching, waking from sleep.”

  “The winter leaches the strength from them. I come out here, every spring, to wake them. Then I spend the summer urging them to delve deeper so they will be strong again by the summer’s end. You will too, now. You know what’s beneath the dirt under your feet?”

  “Stone.”

  “Correct. They don’t want to eat stone. They want soil. I have to convince them stone is better.” She knelt and pushed the sleeves of her habit to her elbows, as she did when we went to work in the garden. “Touch the tree here.” Her fingers indicated the base of the trunk where it began to spread like fingers grasping the earth. “Listen.”

  There was nothing at first, just the early breezes rustling a few tattered leaves. Then the blood rushing in my ears, my breath in and out. These sounds faded with concentration. Beyond them there was a very faint groaning, as of wood straining in a wind, but nothing more.

  “They still sleep,” Mauro whispered. “Now, do as I taught you with the bean stalks in the garden.”

  “Sister, you told me to sing to make them grow.”

  “Yes, but the songs were not important. It was what was beneath the song.”

  “Wouldn’t Mother Superior have something to say if she knew we were casting spells in the garden?”

  She snorted again. “These are not spells. They are persuasion. Nothing nature wouldn’t do in her own time. She simply wants for a bit of encouragement. Besides”—she pushed up her sleeves again— “Mother Superior never complains when she’s served the potatoes in the refectory. Now, tell the tree what to do.”

  I tried, quieting myself until I was a hunched bit of silence beside the trunk, until I was a scrap of dust and water that had brushed up against it like a fallen leaf. Then I began to whisper, not with words but with images. I thought of warm sunlight, buds opening, and showers falling softly. There was a barely perceptible shudder as the tree stirred.

  “Excellent,” Mauro muttered. “Now the roots.”

  I moved my attention downward, toward the stone that I knew lay somewhere beneath my knees. The roots were deep, extending far deeper and spreading wider than the trunk and branches above me, a net cast into a murky lake, slowly drifting with the seasons against the stir of rock and soil.

  I felt where the roots brushed against stone, where they had begun, over decades, to slowly crack rock and reach inward. I felt the taste of stone as it felt to the tree: tangy, metallic, something harsher than the moist soil around it. I was not sure how to tell a tree it needed stone over soil, but I did my best, focusing on the rock, trying to will the roots to bend that way, to stretch their net tighter around the stone.

  “Good. That’s very good.” Mauro stood. “This must be done every morning, at dawn as the dew is settling. The trees will pay more attention then. We will be at it all summer, and eventually we may get one of Sister Technica’s mechanics out here to give your idea a try.”

  We visited each of the other trees that morning, and it was nearly time for the midday meal before we were walking the path together back toward the walls of the abbey.

  Mauro had said it was the first day of spring, but it is clear to me now that this day—the day I accepted her charge as easily and unthinkingly as I would have a task in the garden or orchard—was the first day of much more besides; the beginning of changes that would sweep over the abbey like a wind through the branches of those trees still bare above me.

  And like the trees, when it had passed I would remain—yet be transformed as surely as the seasons draw all things from death to life and back again.

  * * *

  In the chapel that afternoon there was a contingent of knights from the Court-in-Exile. They stood in the balcony, out of view of we novices in the choir, but occasionally we could see the flash of light on armor or hear the thud of boots as they stirred.

  We saw them better at dinner. Their blue and silver cloaks needed mending and their armor wanted polish. Their eyes, however, were bright, and they kept the required silence with a reverent if somewhat self-conscious air. They ate apart from us of course, though their captain and his guard sat at the high table with the Mother Superior, Sister Mauro, and some of the other senior sisters. They spoke together up there, though it was low and none of the words reached us.

  The Mistress of Novices spoke to us about the knights before we retired for the night.

  “They have lately returned from a campaign in the far north,” she began, wiping her eyeglasses absently. “You are not to speak with them unless you are first spoken to, and of course they will be lodging outside the abbey’s walls. During the day they will be allowed within the grounds for prayers and meals, and we will be tending their wounds, mending their garments, and doing what we can to replenish their supplies. Sister Technica, I imagine, will keep many of you busy in the smithy.”

  There were of course whispers after she had left, and sighs. Some of the novices had been sent to the abbey against their will, and they saw this as the opportunity to find love, or something like it, and a way out of a life of prayer and seclusion. I rolled myself into my cot and tried to ignore their words and low laughter. I had seen something of the wars these knights had walked out of, and it was clear to me the abbey’s walls were safer than anything the mountains could offer.

  * * *

  I should have paid more attention to my dreams in the weeks that followed. I dreamed of the trees, but I imagined this was simply because my duties brought me to their feet each morning. I would go from tree to tree, urging them to take the strength of stone into themselves as Sister Mauro had instructed. By the time the sun had risen high enough to begin burning the morning mist away, I would be walking back to the cloister muttering my prayers.

  In my dreams, though, I was among the trees at night. Sometimes I could see the lowest branches swaying wildly, and I would remember Sister Mauro’s instructions. I would wonder what touched the upper branches to make them shudder so violently, for in my dreams I felt no wind.

  Sometimes I would look up, and once I saw that a mountain had fallen from the sky to hang suspended in their branches. Another time the moon, pale as a skull, bowed the trees with its weight.

  * * *

  The knights had been camped outside the walls of the abbey long enough that the novices’ whispered longings in the cloister had turned into sighs of bitterness, when I found one of the knights sprawled in the grass asleep on my morning walk to the trees.

  An empty flask lay on the ground beside him. He was at the base of one of the trees near the edge of the grove. I ignored him, and when I had finished I saw that he was sitting up and watching me.

  “Good morning,” he muttered, rubbing his eyes. His face was deeply lined, but it was impossible to tell his age. His features were blurred either by sleep or wine.

  I nodded curtly.

  “What were you doing?”

  “Praying.”

  “For the trees?” His hand groped at the
grass beside him until it found the flask, which he lifted and studied morosely.

  I nodded again and started back toward the abbey’s walls.

  “You’re a nun?” He rose to his feet unsteadily. He was tall, but also so thin as to be almost comical. Whenever the knights came into the abbey they wore their cloaks and armor, and he had his on now too, but even wearing it, he seemed insubstantial. The blue of his cloak was reflected off the silver surfaces of his armor—boots, breastplate, those little plates that fasted onto the shins and wrists that I could never remember the names of. The wrist-pieces ended in tiny plates that covered the top of each finger like the segmented skin of the lizards Sister Boadica kept in her terraria.

  “Did you sleep in all that?”

  He looked down at himself, confused, and then nodded grimly. “The captain is going to kill me.” He fell into step beside me and asked his question again.

  I shook my head. “I’m a novice. This is my twelfth year. In another eight perhaps I will take orders.”

  “Gods, twenty years of training?” He laughed. It was a good laugh, but since I wasn’t sure it was meant to be shared, I let it wander off on its own. “We get about a twentieth of that. Though I expect the attrition rate’s not quite as high here.”

  After a moment he seemed to notice the flask that was still in his hand. His lip curled into something like a sneer, and he hurled it out over the lip of the ridge and into the tall grass beyond.

  I was embarrassed to have come across him at all and irritated at the courtesy his status as a guest demanded.

  “Do you need help back to the abbey?”

  He stared at me. “Help?”

  “You seem a bit unsteady on your legs, Sir Knight.” If there was an edge of sarcasm in my voice, I could confess it to the Mistresses of Novices that evening.

  “No, that’s just....” He brushed at his face wearily. “The stones in your castle seemed so solemn. I needed some fresh air. The wine happened to come along for the ride, and I expect I’ve assumed upon your mistress’s hospitality. I should apologize.”

  I waited, walking in silence.

  “We’re not supposed to be on this side of the walls at all. We’re assigned to duties in the camp itself, but the front side of your abbey looks out toward the mountains, and after a couple weeks it starts to feel like the mountains are looking back at you.” He blinked up at the trees as if seeing them for the first time. “Gods, those are tall ones. I saw them last night but thought it was a trick of shadows.”

  “They’re stone oaks.”

  “There are khans down south who could fit their whole palace under one of those. How old are they?”

  I admitted I didn’t know.

  For some reason that made him grin. “I don’t know much at all about this place,” he said.

  “It’s a convent. We work and we pray, and when others of the Court-in-Exile—or anyone for that matter—show up, we give what aid and hospitality we can.”

  “Anyone?”

  I shrugged. The path down from the ridge was flanked by fields of barley and wheat, and some of the laborers were moving among the rows.

  “What’s your name?”

  “We have no names, Sir Knight. We are given the name of a departed sister when we take our culminating vows.”

  “How do you know when someone is talking to you then?” He continued to match my pace. If any of the other novices saw me approaching through the fields with him, I would never hear the end of it.

  “I am the apprentice to Sister Mauro. That usually suffices.”

  I walked through the open gate before he could ask more questions.

  * * *

  If anyone had witnessed our exchange that morning, no one said anything. There were no taunts from fellow novices nor questions from the senior sisters. I found an absurd pleasure in the fact that I had not told the knight my name, and I told myself I did not wonder or care what his had been.

  Each morning I worked to make the trees pull the stone up through their roots and lace it into their heartwood. I did not see it happening, but I could feel it, and on the stillest mornings I could hear it, a slow groaning like the rafters settling in the Great Hall.

  Spring slid into summer, and the knights remained camped outside the walls with vague explanations involving the abbey’s safety. Occasionally I would see the one I had met below the trees. He seemed to enjoy wandering the grounds at sunrise, despite what he had said about his orders, and sometimes he would stand at the edge of the grove and wait while I went from tree to tree.

  “I didn’t think your kind prayed to trees,” he said one morning.

  “I was not praying to the trees.” I had gotten better at keeping the impatience out of my voice. “I was praying for the trees.”

  He laughed at that. “Are they sick?”

  “No.”

  Sometimes he would be gone when I was finished, but more often he would wait and follow me back to the walls.

  “You can’t trust the reports about the war,” he offered on another morning, squinting back at the line of trees.

  He could have been handsome, had his face been less lined. It was a face that augmented his thinness, as though everything about him was oriented vertically and only begrudgingly made an exception for the circumstance of eyes and a mouth, and only then by carving lines into the corners of those eyes.

  “The campaigns in the south are done for the season, which is good. There’s peace with the khans, though it came at quite a cost. Our captain—that’s Sir Auden—might tell you otherwise, but it’s good we reached a peace when we did. I don’t know how much longer we’d have lasted fighting on both frontiers.”

  “But the Court-in-Exile holds no territory.”

  He waved that aside. “The north is where the real war is. Armies disappear into those valleys like stones in the sea. I’ve seen columns five companies strong march into passes and never come out the other side.” He grimaced. “I can’t see it ending any time soon, but I can’t see stopping it either.”

  “So why are you here?”

  He grinned, and I glanced away.

  “You know,” he said after a moment, “you’ve never even asked my name.”

  I had not, and I didn’t then. He had stopped asking for mine.

  “When Auden was to march back south, he promised us a respite if we would accompany him as honor guard. When we refused, he ordered.” He sighed. “But I don’t know the answer to your question. He should either let us go home or let us go back to the fight. I know he wanted to seek the Mother Superior’s guidance, but I don’t see why he needs an entire season to do it.”

  He was lying to me. I would like to believe that had I been listening closer I would have heard it.

  * * *

  Perhaps three weeks before Endsummer Eve, Sister Mauro joined me at my rounds. We walked together in the predawn gloaming to the ridge where the stone oaks grew. The trees always seemed taller in darkness, as though they could stretch their limbs into the dusky spaces between dark and dawn. Now they were retreating, diminishing in the growing light.

  “The shadows don’t hold them back as much,” Mauro whispered, as if hearing my thoughts. “We don’t need them larger, though that may help. We need them stronger.” She motioned me to wait and knelt before the first. “Besides, the moon will be nearly full on Endsummer.”

  It seemed she meant this morning to check the progress I had made. She asked questions about specific trees, about certain moods and dispositions toward soils. I answered her as best I could.

  “You are hurt that I doubt your competence, perhaps?” she asked as she rose from the base of the last tree. When I shook my head, she smiled. “I do not. But the trees can be rather stubborn in own their way, and perhaps it was irresponsible of me to put such a task into the hands of one so young.”

  I tried to hide my disappointment. “Have I done poorly?”

  “Oh, no. You have done remarkably well. I am impressed.” Her gaze w
andered a moment and then fastened on the huge trunks nearest at hand. “We are but weeks from Endsummer Eve. Have you yet thought of a method for testing their strength?”

  “Sister,” I began carefully, “perhaps if I knew more about the weight they would—”

  “Three hundred weight. That is what you need to know.” Her gaze softened. “And you are making good progress. But the days are getting shorter, and the trees will want to sleep once more. From now until Endsummer you must come three times daily, once at dusk, once when the bell calls for prayers, and again at your normal time in the morning. They must not sleep yet.”

  She put her arms into her cowl, and we began walking back toward the abbey. “The trees along the east side seem to be coming along slower. You must concentrate on them. There is a vein of good granite there, if the trees at that end would reach deeper.”

  “Yes, Sister.”

  “Other than that though, if you come thrice daily, I feel you will have faithfully discharged your duty.”

  “Thank you, Sister.”

  We walked through the fields as the day’s color began to return to them. When we were nearly in the shadow of the abbey’s walls she faced me again.

  “Have you been alone in your visits to the trees?” She paused, weighing me with her eyes as she had gauged the strength of the trees. “I do not question your modesty, daughter, but I speak of the knights. Have you seen any of them on your visits to the trees?”

  I nodded slowly. “There has been one. I do not know his name.”

  Mauro looked back to where the oaks loomed at the edge of the fields. “They are looking for something here,” she muttered, “but they do not know what it is or how it would appear if they were to find it.”

  For an instant I had the notion that some of the novices’ wilder imaginings were true and the knights were here searching for a specific person—the daughter of some lost duke or landgrave, perhaps, whom they would seek out and return to her inheritance.