Beneath Ceaseless Skies #228

by Jonathan Edelstein

  I try one of the words he suggests and nothing comes of my Gathering, but the next one flows smoothly into the story and its image appears through the lamplight. Muqan claps his hands; one more passage of Amram’s story has been reclaimed.

  “Will we find the mafteach in this story?” he asks.

  “I don’t know.” I look down at the parchment, now just letters reflected in flame. “If we can find more of it, maybe it will tell us. Kallanthe’s story told me—I knew it would be the key to the Masri characters the moment I started reading. But it will be much harder to know that in an Ivri tale.”

  “Why?”

  I rise and make three steps to the shelves where I keep my manuscripts and take down an ancient Masri document. “Look at the Masri words,” I say. “Each letter is a picture, an idea—they carry some memory of the story they belong to. The Tianxia characters are like that too. But the Ivri letters are like the Attiki writing or the alphabet of al-Shams—they are only lines. They don’t remember who wrote them or the story that was written.”

  “Only lines,” Muqan repeats. “Only patterns.”

  “Yes. Patterns.” For some reason, I feel that there is an enormous difference between the two, but neither I nor Muqan—nor Tamar, who has crept in to listen—can put our finger on it.

  “If the Tianxia characters remember,” Muqan says, “then is the mafteach there? Zhao xiansheng told me that some Ivrim live in Tianxia—that their ancestors came in Skandar’s time. Maybe a scholar copied their stories. Maybe they’re in the Emperor’s library waiting for someone to read them...”

  I hear myself draw breath. How could I have never seen what a child of twelve has just imagined? “I can ask Scholar Zhou if he’s heard of such a thing,” I say, and Tamar adds, “we can ask the caravan-masters.”

  “Why don’t you go there?” Muqan presses. “If there are Ivrim in Tianxia, you can live among them as you do here. Zhao xiansheng says that there are Ivrim in Bharat too.”

  “Because all roads meet here,” I say. “Because the caravan-masters from the west come here, but not to Bharat or Tianxia.” But there is more than that, and for a moment I cannot say what it is. Images flash before me, a Gathering in my mind: festival banners, the smell of the spice-markets, the taste of apricots that have fallen on my husband’s grave, the homely anonymity of a city where Ivrim are just one of a hundred foreign peoples and where a child like Muqan might come to me in the market.

  I start to shape the words, but Tamar says them before me. “Because Marakanda is the garden in a garden.”

  * * *

  These stories are the ones I hear in the ancient houses of Marakanda and in the ruins on the Karadarya’s other shore.

  They are old, older than Skandar. There are many tales of what they are and of the peoples who built them, and some are surely true. But I will never know which.

  Sometimes I stand among ruined walls or forgotten cellars where subsidence has made the ground precarious and recite the stories. Sometimes a faint hint of a Gathering comes to me as I speak the name of a hero or god; no doubt those mighty names have come down to my generation in the way they were first spoken. But the rest of the tales haven’t; the language has changed, the words have been reshaped, and without writing, the storytellers could not preserve them.

  Sometimes I imagine those storytellers, watching in despair as their ancestors’ stories slipped away. I wonder if that would be better or worse than losing them all at once, as my ancestors did.

  * * *

  At Midsummer’s Day, Tamar and Muqan take their place in the storytelling for the first time. The next day, I catch Tamar kissing Muqan under the apricot tree, and the day after that, the army of Fars invests the city wall.

  In the weeks that follow, I spend my nights on the wall. The debates in the astana rage on, and the members of the Seventeen and Nine who favor Fars argue endlessly with those who would fight to the death, but day by day, arrows and catapult stones render the argument moot. Everyone who can defend is needed, men and women alike; these are the days when I learn war, and I learn willingly, because from the wall I can see all in Marakanda that is sweet to me.

  My days I spend in the market. People want stories now more than ever; they are an escape from the siege, and the one thing the besiegers can’t keep out. My customers—young men seeking stories of bravery, women who want to distract their children, even one of the Nine in search of a tale of a city that survived another siege - bring me scraps of parchment and even cloth or wood on which to Sow, and they leave with treasure.

  I am at the market when Zhao xiansheng comes to me.

  “I may have learned something,” he says.

  “From the library in Tianxia?”

  “No,” he says with a trace of a smile, and I remember that the siege has kept out any news from Tianxia just as it has interrupted Scholar Zhao’s journey to the Yedigurs. “Closer. Here.”

  “In Marakanda?” Now Muqan and Tamar are listening too.

  “The world meets in Marakanda,” he says, quoting Rostam, “and Ivrim have lived here a long time. In the archives at the astana, there is a record of some who came from Nahrain in the hundred and fortieth year after Skandar. There are records of the houses they bought. One of them still stands.”

  I look at the parchment he is holding and see the name of the street and the recital of metes and bounds. I know that house. It is one of the ancient ones to which I go sometimes hoping that stories will remember themselves.

  “I’ve been there,” I say. “There’s nothing in that house anymore.”

  “Maybe there is a cellar.”

  After that, Muqan won’t let me keep the stall open. At the house an hour later, he leads the search, moving aside rubble and scraps of furniture that have lain untouched for generations. And Zhao xiansheng is right: there is a steel-shod trap door in the floor.

  I try to lift it and it doesn’t move; Zhao can’t budge it either, and I wonder if it has been so warped by generations of weather that it will never come free. But I hear a cry from Tamar, who has pulled up a floorboard and found a hidden catch. Muqan adds his weight to hers, and they push the door up slowly from underneath. And when at last we are able to see what lies beneath, Tamar’s candle reveals a store of records.

  Another surprise awaits me when we bring them up into the light. The first one I touch—I touch it as I might a butterfly, lest it crumble in my hand—is written in an archaic form of the Ivri alphabet. I can tell what the letters stand for, but they are different from those I know. And the next document is written in letters older still, some of which look utterly unfamiliar.

  I lay them out side by side, hoping that comparing one to the other will reveal their secrets. And they do, but Muqan divines them before me. “See how this letter looks like this one,” he says, and then a light comes into his eyes: “And this one—the older one—looks like the Masri character, the bird.”

  He cannot read, but he knows the patterns.

  I kneel and stare at both documents, scarcely noticing Scholar Zhou kneeling beside me, and I realize Muqan is right. The Masri character evolved into the oldest of the Ivri letters, and the old alphabet slowly became the new. I can see the outlines of other Masri characters in the ancient document, and I wonder how I could have missed them before.

  “The Masri letters remember,” Tamar breathes.

  “What is that, dear one?” I ask. I am still abstracted.

  “The Masri characters keep some memory of their stories. If we remind these letters of their ancestors when we Gather them, will they remember too? Will they tell us which story is the mafteach?”

  I say nothing, but the ancient writings swim before my eyes again, and as I accompany my children and Zhao xiansheng back to the settled city, I burn with desire to fill their empty places and learn.

  That evening, and many evenings to come, we lay the parchments under the apricot tree. Their poetic styles are as archaic as their letters, but many of them are by the sa
me author and we learn their patterns. Slowly, the three of us working together, we piece together the gaps. One is a full copy of the Book of Amram, the next a story of Vered the Judge, but the third...

  It is a poem—I can tell from the way the characters are arranged on the parchment—and its first line is about a teacher telling stories to the little ones. Muqan stares at it with eyes bright—something in the pattern has excited him—and when I Gather the Ivri letters and remind them of the Masri characters they once were, the letters seem to remember.

  The story takes shape in the twilight and the teacher’s form appears, with the white robes and long beard of nine hundred years ago. He starts singing to the children sitting cross-legged in front of him, and as the words take shape, I hear the name of a hero from one of the lost stories. I know only the name—it alone survived—but now I hear his story, letter for letter and sound for sound.

  Behind me, I hear Tamar writing furiously. The teacher is speaking faster than she can write, but that doesn’t matter; I can Gather the poem again. I can Gather it until all the stories are told, and we can Sow them on so many sheets of rice-paper that they will never be lost again. In Marakanda, we can rescue them from the fire, if there is only time.

  * * *

  This is the story my grandmother told me.

  It begins with a city: that is the first thing to appear with the telling. It had a name—so my grandmother was told by her grandmother—but no one remembers it now, though the light suggests the land of al-Shams and the Great Green Sea is at the edge of vision. It hardly matters, because the same scene is being enacted in every city in the west.

  The buildings of the city are blurred, but the people in the plaza, when they appear, are sharp and clear. There are thousands of them, men, women and children, dressed in mourning. In the center of the square is a ring of soldiers, their faces implacable behind iron helmets, and in the middle of them is a pyre.

  There are books stacked atop the wood, and there are black-robed priests holding tapers, and as one, they thrust the tapers into the pile. The people give a wordless cry as the flames go up, and a moment later, the words cry out, and their cry is just as wordless.

  Letters can be seen in the flames, Ivri letters, flashing for an instant before they turn to ash. The stories vanish with them. The people look into the flames, trying to fix the books in memory, but their eyes are too tear-blinded and the words flicker out too fast.

  There are those who knew the stories by heart and who might have preserved them, but they were given to the fire too.

  * * *

  At midnight three days later, the second watch of the militia arrives and I go down from the wall to join my sleeping children. It is still dark when I wake to the sound of screaming.

  I run outside, locate a foothold on the garden wall, and raise myself until I can see above it. I see little; the sound is coming from some distance away. But there is shouting and the clash of arms, and the glow of flame is on the horizon.

  Soon there are people running down the street shouting that the city is taken. They are fleeing to the river-gate where the boats are moored; there, the Karadarya is wide enough that they might escape under the bows of the soldiers on the other shore.

  More people run toward the gate—merchants, laborers and craftsmen all together, holding frightened children’s hands—and the noise of battle draws closer. And, in a palanquin, Wei taitai passes, dressed in a servant’s clothing and with flecks of ash in her hair.

  “Wei xiansheng...” I say—he is not with her.

  “He is coming. But you have to leave. The Farsi army is in the city.”

  “How? There was no breach in the wall.”

  “A member of the Nine, they say—one of the emperor’s faction. He told them about the sewers, and...”

  I don’t need her to say more. There was a Gatherer among the invaders, no doubt, and the traitor’s story has given them the exact route into the city. As long as he had seen it, his story would give them the map even if he didn’t precisely remember it himself.

  “They are in the city, Taharah. You must leave.”

  “Why? Will the emperor of Fars be worse than the Seventeen and the Nine? We have lived under many invaders.”

  “They are burning, Taharah. They are killing. Maybe they will rebuild the city—maybe they will build it greater than before—but they will destroy it first.”

  The wind carries flame-heat, and when I look to the north, the fires are marching as fast as soldiers. And Tamar is at the garden gate with a sack of scrolls over her shoulder and a trail of spare clothing behind. “We have to go.”

  There is a sound of clashing swords—very close—and Tamar runs inside. I cast my eyes over the shadow of the grape arbor and the graves beneath, and I follow her into the house.

  The things that make a home are strewn across the floor, and I see that Tamar has dug the purse of coins out from under the hearth. Muqan has a sheaf of parchment and rice-paper under his arm. There are far too many documents to carry, and maybe that is part of the reason he is near tears, but I know that the sounds and the smell of fire carry memories of the attack on his caravan. That is one story he knows word for word and sound for sound, but I know he would rather forget.

  “The back door,” I say. “Hurry.”

  The door opens onto an alley between two walls. The wind is hot now and the screams are close. We turn left—a left, a right, a left and two blocks will take us to the river.

  We are nearly at the corner when the wind gusts. The records fly from under Muqan’s arm—the Masri parchments, the rice-paper on which we have Sown the lost Ivri stories, and, carried on the breeze, the mafteach. He cries out, as wordlessly as the Ivrim in the long-ago city square, and runs up the alley after them.

  “No!” I call. “They aren’t worth your life!” But he follows the papers, ducking to pick up each one; Tamar runs after him, and I run after her.

  The mafteach swirls in the wind beside the back door. In a single movement, Muqan snatches another of the fallen stories from the street and reaches upward to catch the mafteach. His hand touches the it, and that is when a Farsi arrow catches him in the chest. He falls, and a spark in the wind ignites the mafteach; the air carries it away as fine, ancient ash.

  I kneel beside Muqan, heedless of the danger. He raises his hand, not to take mine but to offer me the stories he had rescued. I take them, wondering why I am not crying, and I lay my other hand on his forehead. An instant later he is dead.

  Ish—the man. Aish—the fire.

  Another arrow hisses overhead, through a place where I would have been if I were standing. I remember where I am; I urge Tamar into running and follow her myself a moment after. A right, a left and two blocks to the river gate: the boats are there, taking us to exile with the flames mirrored in the waters.

  * * *

  This is the story I will tell at midsummer next year and the year after, and that my daughter will tell when I am dead. I will tell it in Tianxia or in Bharat, in Fars or in Nahrain, wherever I sell stories in the market and wherever my search may take me.

  I will not tell them of Skandar or his chariot, nor will I tell of the Nine or the Seventeen or the battles or the visits of great philosophers. But I will tell them that there was a city called Marakanda built on the ghosts of other cities; that there was a city of tiles and gardens on the golden Karadarya, and that for a while it was the meeting-place of the world. I will show them that city, because I know it word for word, brick for brick, person for person: Wei taitai, the scholar Zhao, Tamar, and Muqan.

  In markets and ruins and dusty libraries, other scraps of Ivri await me. I will look for them and fill their missing spaces one by one, and someday I will find the mafteach again. When I do, I will have rice-paper, enough to Sow every story so they will never be lost.

  But this story I know already, and I know it by heart.

  Copyright © 2017 Jonathan Edelstein

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  Jonathan Edelstein is forty-five years old, married with cat, and living in New York City. In addition to BCS, his work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, Intergalactic Medicine Show, and the Lacuna Journal, and he blogs occasionally at www.haibane.info/author/jonnaomi/. He counts Ursula Le Guin and Bernard Cornwell among his inspirations, and when he isn’t writing, he practices law and hopes someday to get it right.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  A LATE QUINTESSENCE

  by Justin Howe

  From the Records of Dierponte Hast, former Agent-Censor of the Magisters Subtle, the 7th day of the Month of Mists, year of His Reign 572

  Last night as I walked home from my retirement party at Malgo’s Behight along the cryptomeria-shrouded lane that meanders uphill away from the ferry landing, I heard a child speaking an impossibility: the closing lines to Bernhard Velasco Horn’s last play The Ashen Quintessence. The child was a thin reedy thing, more bones than flesh. A knowing-eyed chit, like one of those waifs you encounter on certain humid festival nights in the village square, reading cards and performing some puppet mummery while wearing a sailor’s jacket over her aged and dingy farm-girl drab.

  “Destruction perfects that which is good—”

  She broke off her recitation at the sight of me and made no reply when I called to her, nor did she stay to receive the coin I sought to gift her in exchange for answering the questions I hoped to ask, but too quick she slipped into a nearby alley that runs there off the lane beside the wig-maker’s place. I will say her words gave me a fright that sublimated the fumes straight from my lungs and sobered me quick.

  For years now Horn’s words have been silent. Unheard since the summer he died and the Magisters Subtle burnt all his works. But Horn was never easy prey, and now as night stretches out beyond my walls towards the gray dawn, I sit in my manse’s closed study, vigilant and alone amid my slumbering parkland neighborhood, remembering those words the Lady Mermingosa said to me the day of Horn’s death. I remember her words and check the powder in my pistol, for I fear this night I may require it.