Bone Swans: Stories

by C. S. E. Cooney

  It was as if she suddenly had no face at all, was nothing above the neck but a nest of downy fledglings, soft and warm and restless with too many heartbeats. She had seen him coax mice and lizards and wrens to these hands, had seen him conjure the dead to his thread so gently that the carpets wove themselves for love of him. Now, beneath his hands, Kantu’s swollen tissues shrank, cuts closed, bruises vanished. With a click, her nose moved back into place, unhappily returning her sense of smell.

  The stink of her body, the dried sweat, the dried blood, the gutter where she had lain, the trash she had fallen into, all rushed into her nostrils and left her feeling dizzy and shabby with rekindled memory.

  When he was done, Manuway placed a thumb to the bridge of her nose and stroked down to the tip of it.

  “All better,” he said.

  Kantu tried to swallow, found she could not. “Did you make my nose any smaller?”

  “Some of us,” he told her, “like it as it is.”

  “For myself,” said the Rokka Mama in her rollingest voice, which could incite in the timid and downtrodden such acts of bravery that poets wept to write of them, “I think it is a very fine nose, a splendid organ, a queen amongst olfactory instruments. You could travel the length and breadth of Bellisaar and never stumble by accident over such magnificence.”

  “Unless you fall face-first into a cactus,” Kantu parried. She grinned wryly at Manuway. “Thanks, friend. I owe you one.”

  “You saved my life, Kantu.”

  “My nose is larger than life.”

  He almost laughed then. She saw his broad, oddly bony shoulders move. “Very well. No debt.”

  Fearful to twitch or breathe lest his hands fall away from her flesh, Kantu continued to smile witlessly up at him, until a disturbance near the door caught her eye.

  “Crizion!”

  But Kantu had not slid off the table before the Rokka Mama seized her, dragging her back bodily and placing herself between Kantu and the door.

  “Don’t, Kantu!”

  “What—?”

  “She’s not alone.”

  Then Crizion spoke. “To Tesserree, High Princess of Sanis Al, Thirteenth Wife and Favorite of Fa Izif ban Azur, God-King of the Red Crescent, I give you good and loving greetings.”

  The Rokka Mama’s grip had not lightened, but Kantu stopped fighting it. Crizion’s forehead bore a blue gem, a costlier twin to the button Mikiel had plucked from the Childless Man, though it glowed with the same eldritch light. It seemed to be embedded in her bone, for the flesh around it was raised and red, and spidery veins ran from the gem down her face and neck. Her chestnut hair was loose, but instead of lying silk-straight as it usually did, it rose around her head, licking the air like flame. When she spoke, blue fire filled her mouth.

  “That’s his voice,” Kantu whispered, remembering.

  Dreamily, drowsily, almost imperceptibly, Crizion’s head turned, her attention shifting from the Rokka Mama to Kantu. Her familiar face, her lovely, dainty, friendly face, her tiny nose, keen Audiencia cheekbones, shy mouth, eyes gone whimsical and nearsighted from too much scroll-diving, her I-can-outstubborn-even-you-my-dearest-friend chin, her face—Crizion’s face—was almost unrecognizable.

  Crizion was not in possession of herself.

  Kantu did not mean to move, but her head shook. And kept shaking, side to side. Tears spurted from her eyes, though nothing else in all that long, long night had made her cry.

  It’s like staring into the sun, she thought, only to find it staring back.

  “To Kantu jhan Izif ban Azur,” Crizion continued in a voice calm and deep as a cathedral bell, “Handprint of the Thundergod, Storm Bird, Rain Bringer, Savior and Sacrifice of Sanis Al, I extend to you my heartmost greetings. And this message: Return the life you stole from your people. The Fa your father begs you.”

  “No!” shouted the Rokka Mama. “My daughter is not for you!”

  “Return,” said Crizion, “or I will raze Rok Moris to the ground. Woman, man, child, all within these city walls shall perish, crushed by freezing darkness. Their dust shall be swept from the Fallgate, and night shall lay forever across this barren acreage, that no one living will rebuild upon it, and no green thing grow within it for all eternity.”

  Kantu did stand now, though she had to cling both to Manuway and the Rokka Mama to keep her feet. Manuway’s grip was no less furious, no less tender than her mother’s, and Kantu knew this meant far more than she had time to understand. The Rokka Mama was wild-eyed, her knuckles white. Her large, lined brow was sheened with sweat. She looked capable of any atrocity.

  “Momi.” Kantu touched a frizzled tendril of her hair, and the Rokka Mama shuddered again, like an earthquake of the bones. “We can’t run any more, momi. We must go to him.”

  * * *

  Kantu had one strong memory of her father. The rest she had built patchwork, like Mikiel’s wings, out of things the Rokka Mama had told her.

  The memory was this. She was nearly five and the joy of the Shiprock. She was let to run loose wherever her dimpled limbs could carry her, and it was general knowledge that, like a cat, she followed the sun, to play in its rays or nap in its warmth at whim. When her father was at the Shiprock, she followed him, for the sun rose in his ankle and set in his eyebrow. Momi said so. Everyone said so.

  Momi was father’s thirteenth wife and his favorite. The Fa kept her bed-night sacred, shared with no other wife, and Tesserree was at his side most every day, his best friend and confidante. One night a week the Fa took a rest from his conjugal duties, and this night, too, he spent at Tesserree’s side. Often Kantu joined them on the Fa’s enormous bed, as they read to each other, or talked softly over palace matters.

  The other Modest Women did not grudge Tesserree the Fa’s partiality. Rather, they came to her for counsel, to mediate domestic squabbles before they escalated into feuds, or for comfort when they missed their families and homelands. Tesserree was Mother to all the Shiprock, it seemed, but never less than Kantu’s own momi.

  One evening, perhaps for the first time, Kantu found herself alone with the Fa her father. It was sunset, and they were standing on the roof of the Shiprock, overlooking all of Sanis Al. They saw the golden domes of her father’s palace, the graceful arches and promenades and flowering towers of the city, the painted rooftops, the warm white stucco, the rainbow mosaics tiling every sidewalk and street. Best of all, running through the city and out into the distance, were the Mighty Rivers Anisaaht and Kannerak, Serpents in the Thundergod’s Claws, which brought fertility and abundance to the Red Crescent.

  “Do you like what you see, pili?”

  Kantu smiled up at him. Momi was taller than the Fa, but he was as large as the sky. His face was painted gold like the sun, and his eyes were deep and black as night.

  “It is yours. It belongs to you, as your godright. And you belong to it. Do you know why?”

  Kantu nodded, bringing her right hand to her left breast. Beneath her thin cotton shift, a red handprint burned across her skin, where the god had touched her in momi’s womb. The Fa had a mark very like it on his face, beneath all the gilding.

  “You are my daughter,” he said, “my beloved daughter. That mark sets you apart. Had you been born my son…” Here his voice frayed into sadness, and he looked away from her, across the scarlet sands.

  “But you are better than a son,” he said. “For if you were my son, you would be mortal, destined to bear the heavy mantle of mortality on your shoulders, the weight of living and loving and knowing that all good will sift from your fingers like sand. Had you been a boy, at the hour of your birth, I, the Fa, would have died, and passed like breath between your lips and lived again in you. She who had been your wife would become your mother, and you would have no father but yourself. From that hour to the birth of your heir, you would rule as Fa. Alone.”

  “But I am not a boy!” exclaimed Kantu. This she knew, and she was proud of it.

  “No,” he said, smiling a lit
tle, at last. “You are my beloved daughter. You are our hope, and you shall be our god. Do you understand?”

  Again Kantu nodded, although she did not.

  “In another month, on your birthday…”

  Kantu held up five fingers, like the handprint on her chest.

  “Yes, my love, when you turn five years old, we shall stand here, on the roof of the Shiprock, which is the tallest point of Sanis Al, and you shall fly.”

  The Shiprock jutted from the sands, like a stone ship with stone wings, as if it had been abandoned by colossal seafarers in the days when Sanis Al was a kingdom of merpeople and Bellisaar still an ocean. The volcanic breccia and igneous rock that composed the formation had been hollowed out and reinforced over the centuries by the mason-artisans of Sanis Al, and now the stone was home to the Fa’s hundred wives, their servants, and the Army of Childless Men who guarded them. Kantu loved the Shiprock, loved her desert, loved her father, and she took his slender brown hand and kissed it.

  For one warm and splendid moment, his hand rested on her head. Then he squatted down, which he had never done before, to be eye to eye with her.

  “Kantu,” he said, “what I am about to say is most important. On the day of your birthday, you must come to this great height willing to fly. You must say to yourself, and to me, and to all the people who will be waiting below: This is my choice. This is my will. My life for yours. My blood for rain. Repeat that.”

  Kantu did. She said it until he knew she had memorized it.

  “And so,” sighed the Fa, “your sacrifice saves us all.”

  Not long after that, momi came up and joined them. She kissed the Fa and smiled at him, kissed and smiled at Kantu, chatted lightly about the lustrous wheel of sunset, about the first shimmering constellations and the stories told of them, about nothing much at all.

  But Kantu saw, hidden in the folds of her robes, how momi’s fists were clenched like stones.

  * * *

  Every Bird Person who could still walk ascended with Kantu and the Rokka Mama to the surface of Rok Moris. Crizion went before them, the blue nimbus that crowned her lighting the way.

  With the effortlessness of a shadow, Mikiel slipped in next to Kantu, saying in her deceptively mild way, “So the Fa’s some kind of demonic ventriloquist, is he? Tough luck on Crizion.”

  But Kantu, whose fear and weariness had rubbed her nerves to screaming sensitivity, caught the shark’s glint in Mikiel’s eye as she gazed at Crizion’s unprotected back. It reflected the razored steel in her hand.

  “No, Mikiel,” Kantu said quietly. “It won’t hurt him, but it will kill her.”

  “She might thank me.”

  Mikiel’s pitiless whisper did not carry, but Crizion turned her head. She turned it, and kept turning it, until one degree further would snap her cervical vertebrae for certain, and Crizion said nothing, but something screamed beneath the blue-eaten fires of her eyes.

  The knife clattered to the ground.

  The Bird People marched with Kantu and the Rokka Mama, once again driven from their sanctuary. The walking wounded bore nothing but their anguish. Others carried carpet rolls upon their backs. The carpets whispered to one another, rippling like wind things, like water things. Some Bird People carried those who could not walk but who would not be left behind. Only a few remained in the tunnels, with heartsick volunteers to tend them.

  When the Rokka Mama had tried to convince everyone to stay, that the coming exchange was nothing to them, Manuway stopped her.

  “We have followed you for twenty years, Rokka Mama,” he said. “Do not forget—this city is ours, and you were born of it, long before you became wife to a god.”

  And mother of one, Kantu thought. Then—not yet.

  Men awaited them on the mounds of Paupers’ Grave. Hundreds of men, Childless Men, dressed in their vests of white bone, their red tunics that bared shoulder and knee, their sandals that laced up the legs. These were the sons of the Fa, and the sons of the Fa before him, all those who had been born without the red handprint marking him heir to the god-right. These sons had been given to drink a potion at their comings-of-age which rendered them impotent, they might never bear rogue wizard offspring in the fullness of manhood. They were at that time sent from their mothers to be trained at the barracks of the Shiprock.

  They were lithe and lethal. Their faces were unlined, pure, painted silver as the Fa’s was painted gold. They wore their hair unbound, beaded with glass and bone.

  Kantu realized they were all blood to her. Brothers, uncles, great-uncles. Hers.

  They stared back with avid interest. Some of them hated her, she could see. They blamed her for the slow death of the Red Crescent, the desiccation of Anisaaht and Kannerak, the stupefying toll of people and livestock brought down by twenty years of drought and starvation. Others watched her like the Bird People watched the Rokka Mama. As if she were all their hope. A gift from the Flying Thundergod to succor and aid them in their darkest hour.

  Kantu took a deep breath, but she could not smell the Bellisaar Wasteland, the sweet, smoky green of creosquite, or the good, dry, desert sands that carried the musk of night hunters upon their particles. She could smell only her father’s magic and his longing, the blackness of his despair coloring the air all shades of night, calling her to his side.

  “I’m here.” Her voice, already rough from wear, broke.

  The ranks of Childless Men parted, and the Fa her father stepped forth.

  Fa Izif ban Azur was not even as tall as she remembered him. Kantu matched him height for height, and even among the Bird People she was small. His nose was like hers, a great curved hook, but with his piercing eyes and the gilded planes and hollows of his face, the prominence gave him an aspect at once regal and forbidding, like a golden eagle. He was dressed in similar garments to his sons and brothers and uncles, only without armor. A long scar ran across his throat.

  And Kantu remembered what had made that scar. And she remembered that though she had thought to check Mikiel for a knife, she had forgotten the Rokka Mama.

  “Momi—no!”

  She was too late. Tesserree had broken free of Manuway’s grip and was rushing on the Fa, silent but savage, her teeth bared. A deadly crescent of sharpened bronze glinted in her fist. Kantu knew the instrument, knew every image etched upon its bitter edge, and the ancient lettering laying out the strictures of sacrifice.

  The Fa stood very still, watching his wife run to him.

  Three Childless Men caught and held the Rokka Mama yards before she came within striking distance. Though each soldier was as sinewy as a mountain lion, not one of them handled the Rokka Mama with brutal or callous indifference. It was as if they believed they held a fanged butterfly, or a hummingbird that spat poison. Whether this was because they thought Tesserree herself dangerous, or because the Fa still loved her, Kantu could not say.

  “Tess.” Fa Izif ban Azur stepped close to the Rokka Mama, close enough to pull the kerchief from her hair. Dark masses fell around her face and shoulders in tired clouds, webbed in gray.

  “Every night,” he said, “I dream of you.”

  At his gentleness, the Rokka Mama collapsed. Only the grips of the Childless Men kept her more or less upright.

  “I killed you,” she said. “I killed you, Iz—you cannot be here!”

  One of the soldiers handed the Fa the bronze dagger she had wielded. He stroked the edge with his thumb, his golden face absorbed.

  “With this blade, you cut my throat on the eve of Kantu’s fifth birthday.” His voice was dark and slow, like gore welling from a wound. “And the blood ran out of me, and into the soil of Sanis Al. For a while it was enough. Even without the rain, my blood sustained the land. But without a son who bears the god’s handprint, I cannot die. And as my blood returned to me, and as my wounds healed, my land grew brown and withered. Years have passed, and I have allowed them to pass, but I cannot allow it any longer. Tess. Without you, my heart is a wasteland. Without Kantu, so is
Sanis Al.”

  “I will lay waste the world,” said the Rokka Mama, “for Kantu.”

  “Our thoughts have always been twins,” said the Fa, “running in joyous parallel. But in this, we run cross-purpose, ramming together like two boulders. It is my lifelong sorrow. But I spoke you true through my handmaiden.” He gestured to Crizion, still haloed in blue. “Rok Moris falls tonight if Kantu fails to fly.”

  Kantu stepped between her parents, vaguely aware of Mikiel and Manuway tugging at her, of voices calling her name in protest. Her friends. These were her friends, who loved her, who had grown with her, fought beside her, laughed at her jokes, tended her scrapes, who had flown with her. Her friends, who, with Viceroy Eriphet now driven to the sands and the Fa eager to return to Sanis Al, might at last be free.

  Tiredness seeped from her marrow. Kantu’s sight whitened for a moment, and her body flashed on the visceral memory of falling.

  She had always loved riding the carpets, ever since Manuway’s older brother, now dead, taught her the way of it. The tumble, the soar, the zip, the whirl, the joy and jubilation. Especially when she was flying for flight’s sake, not to escape the Gate Police or hound the Audiencia.

  But not until that night, when she had thrown herself from the sky, toppling the guard with his net to save the lives of her friends, had Kantu felt completely happy. And whole. And, somehow, right. As if falling were her purpose. Always had been.

  How awful it had been to wake up battered but alive, unfulfilled and alone.

  In that moment of remembrance, Kantu understood the Fa her father. Not even Tesserree as once she had been, young and in love with her god-king husband, could fathom his secret heart and mind, but suddenly Kantu could. She bore the red handprint on her breast. And she knew beyond any last lingering doubt what she must do.

  “Do I have to—” She stopped, swallowed. “Do I have to return with you? Must the ceremony take place at Sanis Al, on the Shiprock? Or can we do it here?”

  “It must be from a height,” said Fa Izif ban Azur, understanding her instantly. “And you must be in the desert. Here, daughter, we stand at the edge of a cliff, and this is still Bellisaar.”