Beneath Ceaseless Skies #186

by Bruce McAllister

  The creature was moaning horribly as it changed—as it became what it had once been and what it both did and did not want to be.

  Stappo, seeing a man now, not a monster, rushed the figure again, clamping his jaws on its left arm. The figure did not bellow this time. It screamed as any man would and collapsed to the floor, where Stappo held him tight.

  Bonifacio was staring at me. I looked down at the light of my body and could not see it. The light was too bright.

  He dropped to his knees, bowing his head in supplication. What was he doing?

  “In nomine matris misericordiae,” he was muttering, hands in prayer as he forced himself to look at me.

  “Emissarius sanctus, protega nos,” he was saying, his eyes burning with the light.

  “We must go!” I shouted.

  He did not answer. He was still on his knees, looking at me.

  “Grab a dozen of the vials! Please!” I shouted.

  This he did, getting up shakily, making himself look at the vials, and gathering them one by one. Then he stood there, like a statue, eyes on mine, until I grabbed him by the arm. He jerked as I touched him—as if my glow might burn him—but then he moved at last even as Stappo let go of the man on the floor and joined us.

  The light from my body was dimmer now. I could see it fading. We needed to be elsewhere before other creatures arrived.

  There were indeed others. My skin was itching insanely.

  * * *

  When we reached the church, we found the body of the big guard, poor Frazetti, naked on the floor. His head had been crushed with a rock or staff, but there were no talon or teeth marks on him.

  “This was not done by the Drinkers,” I said. “This was done by a man.”

  I remembered the eyes of the third guard.

  At the main door of the church—the night as black as ink beyond it—a figure moved from the shadows to block us.

  It was not a Drinker but indeed the third guard; and Stappo, growling, stepped between the man and me.

  “You have sold your soul cheaply,” I heard myself say. It was true. A man could indeed sell his soul, and always too cheaply. Father Tamillo had said it often: “There are many ways to sell your soul to the Devil, ragazzi miei. Some men do it without knowing they do, so you boys must be on guard every day. Once you have reached Heaven, of course, you may rest; but not before that day. And it had better be Heaven rather than its opposite you reach!”

  What had the Drinkers promised the man?

  Though exhausted by events, Bonifacio had not lost his wits. “You were damned before tonight, Signore,” he was saying to the man. “I saw it in your eyes.”

  “You saw power,” the man answered, full of contempt. “The power that will take both of you tonight, as it has taken the Holy City, not to mention two stupid men who imagined they could guard a pope.”

  “Stappo,” I said, and Stappo obeyed, leaping at the man. A knife had appeared in the guard’s hand, glinting in the candlelight, but the man knew how this would go: a large village dog—part “bull,” part Maremma—would have him by the throat before he could use the knife, and killing a dog while he himself bled to death on the cold floor made no sense.

  The man, spinning around so that Stappo’s jaws caught robe, not flesh, tried his best to flee. Hurrying down the steps, he fell to one knee under Stappo’s weight. No man should have to run while carrying a large dog.

  ‘“Stappo!” I yelled, and Stappo let go, hitting the steps in a leggy heap, and with a mouthful of white lint. His pride needed at least this souvenir.

  “What a masterful job!” Bonifacio exclaimed, and it was to Stappo that he said it, not me, and with no fear in his voice. A friendship had been born.

  “We are not safe on this island, Bonifacio,” I said, watching the guard disappear into the night.

  “No, we are not. They believe, the Drinkers, that they can stop it here and now by killing two boys, or changing them into what they themselves are. They will keep trying. I do not wish to leave this place, Emissary. I do not wish to leave my friend, the seer, or the solitude. But I must. Otherwise, I will indeed die—or worse. You, Emissary, may be able to postpone death by the miracle you are, but I am only a child-pope, and one who sleepwalks. Take me with you....”

  “Of course, Bonifacio. That is why I am here, I know now....”

  Was La Compassione whispering this to me? I could not tell, but it was the truth.

  * * *

  “Is there a boat standing by for you at all times in the harbor?” I asked as we hurried to the harbor.

  “I believe so.”

  “Are there guards at the wharf whom you trust?”

  “I trust no one now.”

  “Then we must find another boat.”

  * * *

  And we did. Between the fading light of my skin and a moon that hadn’t been there before, we found our way out of the forest to the little harbor, the beach, and a boat— the only one in sight.

  It was small but of the kind every fisherman wants: sturdy, so that it will not tip over when men stand up in it; a short mast and boom to match it; and just enough room fore and aft for the nets and lines and folded sail.

  There was no one on the beach or the nearby wharf, and I found this strange. There are always fishermen who cannot sleep and so pace a beach or wharf, waiting waiting to sail before dawn. There is always someone who has imbibed too much and cannot fall asleep until first light. But no one paced or staggered here. No voices muttered in the night.

  For a moment—and for no reason other than the loneliness a night wind can make one feel—I missed my mother. I missed my village. I worried about her and everyone else, whether it made sense to or not. I wanted to be with them. These were not, however, feelings I could afford. To stand transfixed by love, by longing and memories, when the world was waiting—this I could not allow myself to do.

  The boat had been pulled onto the steep shore—but, oddly enough, not so far up the beach that Bonifacio and I could not wrestle it back into the water. The tide had come in, and that certainly helped; but it still made no sense: no fisherman would ever leave a boat like this, so close to the day’s high tide mark. The sea might, with a surge, carry it away.

  “Someone is watching over us,” I said quietly.

  “Yes. I believe it, too.”

  We did not speak for a moment. Stappo regarded us both, waiting. Bonifacio knew nothing of sailing, and even I, who should know something, knew little. My uncles were fishermen, but what fisherman invites to his boat, for teaching purposes, a boy with a rash made worse by even a splash of seawater?

  I stared at the boat and at the dark sea. I felt the wind on my cheek and realized that my rash had stopped itching. Since leaving the village, it had itched every hour of every day. Now it was silent, an ordinary skin.

  I knew then that we would not need a sail this night. Whatever was watching over us would use the winds and tides to take us through night to the mainland... and to the long journey it wanted us to make.

  Bonifacio was thinking the same, I could tell. He was smiling, ready to laugh, trusting the world and his God. The events of his room had not defeated him. His fears would not either. This he vowed, I knew, and I was proud of him, my new friend.

  Copyright © 2015 Bruce McAllister

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Bruce McAllister’s science fiction and fantasy stories have appeared over the years in the field’s major magazines and many “year’s best” volumes (like Best American Short Stories 2007, Stephen King ed.). His short story “Kin” was a finalist for the Hugo Award; his novelette “Dream Baby” was a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula awards; his novelette “The Crying Child” was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award. He is the author of three novels: Humanity Prime, a chronicle of humanity on a water planet in the far future; Dream Baby, an ESP-in-war tale; and 2013’s The Village Sang to the Sea: A Memoir of Magic. His short stories have been collected in the c
areer-spanning The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories. He lives in Orange County, California, with his wife, choreographer Amelie Hunter, and works as a writer, writing coach, and book and screenplay consultant.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  THE GUARDIAN’S HEAD

  by Tamara Vardomskaya

  My maid flung open the shutters at dawn and said, “Smell of ice.”

  I shivered with the chill, although raised in the Patrie as I was, where ice stayed on mountaintops and chilled drinks, I had never smelled that scent before. I would have considered it just another edge to the smells of sea and salt and rain in the coastal city of Nevarim. I tried to find words simple enough for my maid’s limited Langue to handle. “That means early winter, no?”

  “Inundation first.” Somehow she had learned inundation before the simpler term flood. “Inundation come this year, very early. See the fortress wall at in-tide? Inundation coming week.”

  “You cannot be serious!” I blurted before her blank look made me understand that she did not understand. I forcibly calmed myself. I am assistant to a master sculptor, working on the empress’s commission at her specific request. To these people, I am a model of the cultured ladies of the Patrie. I will not be a terrified eighteen-year-old girl.

  Even though this was exactly what I was. For the great equestrian sculpture of the Guardian of Nevarim that Master Merlinnet was commissioned to make would be twice the size of anything even he, much less I, had ever dared attempt before. And it had to be completed, cast out of orichalcum from his clay model, before the autumn floods would swell the Nevarim river, spreading across the swampy delta, cold salt water covering churches and palaces and horses and children... and, if we failed, us.

  I tried not to think about this as I rushed my maid through dressing me and dashed from my small room in the Palace to the workroom the empress had assigned to Master Merlinnet. Although the sun was just rising, he was already there, a small man in the shadow of the great rearing horse statue that would bear the Guardian.

  I had helped him make the horse in the summer, during the nights of never-ending sunlight. We sketched from the aristocratic stallions that the empress’s riders would spur up onto their hind legs for a breathless moment, and Master Merlinnet and I would sketch as much as we could in those few seconds, so fast that sometimes our charcoal sticks would snap from our haste and blacken our hands and paper. I still remember their names: Brilliant and Caprice. The horses, not the riders. I can’t even remember the riders’ faces, or that of the empress, even after I had made a portrait of her. After I did portraits, I no longer remembered the faces, as if all I saw of the people’s souls I let the clay absorb.

  The face that my master turned to me, though, had the eyes of a drowning man. “Lumarine, his head isn’t working.”

  An absurd statement that he counted on me to decipher. I took in the giant clay torso, general’s epaulettes and stiff collar framing the absence of a head. The lumps of clay scattered around the workroom floor, men’s faces half-mashed with the impact of my master’s frustrated throws. Lifeless, powerless, without any promise of magic.

  This clay was made from northern coastal mud, infused with salts and crushed seashells. A different material than the clay I had learned on, back in the Patrie, back when my first master had offered me the job of artist’s model in exchange for food and lessons in drawing and sculpture. And, I at age fifteen had been too naive to realize, in exchange for lessons in the art of love as well. Until a year later he found the sculpted head I had made of him, modeling how he would look lying on the pillow, and he flew into a rage. He was angry despite the quality of the sculpture, I thought then, already knowing enough to know that I had done it well, that the face was a likeness and the intent had been passionate, and if I were to cast it in orichalcum, it would live, and love. He was angry, I understood later, because of the quality.

  I fled to apprentice myself to his rival Merlinnet, who needed my hands and not the rest of my body, and I had not taken a lover since, caressing clay and not flesh. Together Merlinnet and I had travelled to the Low Country two summers ago, commissioned to create three Guardians, bronze orichalcum men and women to keep the sea floods away from the dike-encircled wheat farms there. I had sculpted their faces, farmers’ faces, apple cheeks and potato noses and jolly smiles that dismissed the sea with a cheerful politeness. And their fame reached the ears of the Empress of Nevarim.

  The opportunity to travel to this northern empire had seemed an adventure. New faces to see, new clay to shape, the chance to help with a work greater than any of Merlinnet’s previous commissions. And again, I was too naive to see that it also had the greatest cost if we failed. The fierce gray-green sea here would not heed a jolly smile.

  I sat down on the floor, ignoring that my dress from the Patrie would get stained with dust and clay residue. “Master,” I said, “let us walk for a spell to rest our minds from this.”

  He froze in seeming incomprehension.

  At last, he said, “I do not think you understand the stakes. All the servants, the soldiers, are saying the floods are coming early this year, as soon as next week. It will take a week to cast the entire sculpture, once it’s ready. So if we do not have the Guardian’s head tonight... You know the fortress wall where the tide-marks are? Prisoners condemned to die in a bad autumn are just left in the lower cells, for the sea to take. You and I would call it barbaric. They call it a savings on axe-sharpening.” His aging voice cracked in nervous, helpless laughter.

  “They wouldn’t... do that to us.” Even I shuddered. “You are a noted artist of the Patrie. Our king would protest.”

  “Like Hestland protested when the first emperor killed Lady Hambleton? Like anyone protested at regicide?” he whispered, glancing around to make sure no one heard, regardless of whether or not they understood the Langue.

  I shuddered. The first emperor, the present empress’s grandfather-in-law, was the one whose desire for a port had forced this city up from the swamps sixty years ago. He had kept a Hestlandic mistress, Lady Hambleton. On some pretext I knew not, he had her beheaded—and her head preserved in formaldehyde so that men centuries hence would know her beauty.

  The present empress was eager to show us foreigners that she ruled a land as advanced in industry and culture as our own, she with her powdered wigs and her gowns opulent to the point of vulgarity, stitched to fashion brought by word of mouth from our courts; she with her Langue she thought was perfect but which bore the broad vowels and gutturals of her native tongue. She fought to give women, and women’s accomplishments, attention and power unheard of even in the Patrie: she had founded the Institute for Well-Born Maidens that taught science and mathematics as much as needlework and the harpsichord; her court ladies were chosen for wit in multiple languages ancient and modern more than for etiquette and millinery; and when she heard that Master Merlinnet had a girl apprentice, she specifically insisted that for his commission, he bring me along. So that I, too, could play a role in showing the world that women at the Nevarim court were the equal of men in talent.

  But she herself had secured her throne with a coup, and rumors whispered of how she may have obscenely rewarded the soldier who had brained her own husband with a golden snuffbox.

  We needed to make a Guardian for these people playing at being cultured, else they appease the sea in the old way, by human sacrifice.

  “But,” I said, “perhaps all you need is a breath of fresh air.”

  I neglected to mention that the breath of fresh air would smell of ice. And inundation.

  I won him over. We went strolling along the canals, in the shadow of the elegant buildings, blending in with the people running errands. As if we were ordinary imperial subjects. As if our heads were not at risk at all.

  We went again to the top of the cathedral, Nevarim’s highest point. The empress herself, puffing, had brought us up there on our arrival in the spring, showing us the city that was her pride all sprea
d before us. The churches. The palaces. The alleyways and schools and factories. The poor villages and huts beyond the city walls. She and her scientists had shown us the paths of the floods, the marks of new brickworks where the buildings had been damaged by the rising seawater in prior bad years.

  Now the autumn sun lit the villages beyond the wall scattered like a child’s abandoned toys. I saw the wind sway young pines as they danced, tossing their verdant crowns. Someone in student grays embraced a girl between the pines and the wall, her skirt billowing in echo of their branches. Three children chased each other; I imagined I could hear their laughter.

  Landscapes are the farthest thing from portraits in clay, yet one inspired me to a vision of the other, and I saw the Guardian’s face in the sky above the sea: handsome, haughty, fiercely protective and coldly commanding, a face even the sea had to obey. I knew what he must look like.

  “I can make his head,” I said, turning to Master Merlinnet, pulling my scarf over my windblown hair.

  He must have not heard me in the high winds. “What?”

  “I can make the head!” I shouted. “I know how!”

  He stepped forward so that his eyes were even with mine; he was a short man, and I am a tall woman. “Lumarine,” he said, “you are but a girl of eighteen.”

  “Young enough to take a chance,” I replied.

  “Young enough to be a fool!”

  “You know portraits are my strength,” I said firmly, trying not to think of my first successful portrait and its consequences. “I did the faces of the Low Country Guardians. You know I’ve only grown better since. I can do his head.”

  His head, not the head. The Guardian’s image had become real to me in that moment, everything from the curve of his brow to the lobe of his left ear. I itched to shape it.