Beneath Ceaseless Skies #116

by Scott Andrews

  “I secured for you an imperial lineage so that when the time comes, you can challenge the Daimyo, and then Tokugawa—”

  “I don’t want to hear this.”

  “You cannot unhear it.”

  My mother’s voice stopped me. I could not catch my breath. The rocks of my world, my parents, had suddenly become two islands spreading rapidly apart, leaving me with one foot on each.

  “Walk carefully, my son. Think before you go running after your father for affirmation. You are the seed of his two most powerful rivals. All your life I have hidden you in your enemy’s shadow. One day you must undo all that he has done, you must return to Edo—”

  My face throbbed. Without a plan, I sprang up and fled the house. Across the northern sky, colors bloomed like chrysanthemums. I felt as if I were caught in one of my mother’s stories, where beautiful women unstitched their skin and stepped out as monsters. No one stopped me. No one stops a spark in a comet’s trail.

  * * *

  I found my father in Sensei’s house. Both of them looked up when I burst in. Between them, Sensei has the feral girl sitting on a table. She turned toward me, but her face shows only fear. Her eyes are milky jade. Sensei stood next to her holding a dropper full of clear fluid. One shining drop fell to the floor.

  I turned to my father. The slash in his cheek has been neatly sewn, more of Sensei’s work. For no reason at all, my hands became fists. My shoulders would not relax. My mother’s words had burned a hole through me, and anything could fall out.

  “What are you doing to her eyes?” I jerked my chin toward the girl.

  Sensei wiped his hands on a cloth and glanced at my father. He carefully returned the dropper to a small glass jar.

  My father cleared his throat, and she sank back like a dog that fears its master. “She’s as uncivilized as they come, but with time and training...” My father pulled me closer. “Amber eyes are a mark of witch blood among the hill tribes. We have never before taken one alive. In these backwards hills, men follow the amber-eyed women. This one would have grown into a hell-cat to devil our borders.” He spat on Ito-sensei’s floor against ill luck. “The captives tell stories about their magic, but every tale is more unlikely than the last. Can you imagine this one using her moonblood to transform into a wolf? They spread these filthy lies almost as much as they spread their legs.”

  “Bakemono.” The word falls from my lips, and all my mother’s stories come back, dancing figures catching fire, stolen moments, burning paper leaping out of the flames.

  The girl turned in my direction while my father and Sensei laughed. She leaned toward me suddenly, as if she’d just become aware I was in the room. Something clicked into place. “The drops have made her blind.”

  “That happens when we remove the pigment. The source of her power.” Ito-sensei’s words are lost in the roaring of my ears. Like waves on Edo’s shore, my mother would say. I will never know. I have never seen the sea.

  ”How many girls have you blinded getting the color just right?”

  “Apologize to Ito-Sensei.” My father...no, my head spun...the man I always thought was my father...ordered me.

  Sensei made a placating gesture. The girl followed me with her whole head. I went still. Silently, I stepped behind my teacher. Her head moved with me. An odd shiver tightened my scalp. She was tracking me by scent.

  My father grabbed my wrist. “Stop that.”

  “Does she have her moonblood?” I’m not even sure what that means, only that it means the moment when the girl’s wolf-colored hair cascades into velvet pelt. I can’t stop thinking about the way she moves, so quick and lithe. She could cross the room in one leap.

  “Her moonblood!” My father laughed. “So eager! Soon, I think, if I’m any judge of women. With any luck it will come near your birthday.”

  My birthday. I closed my eyes. If my mother’s story was true, I don’t know my own birthday. The room was too warm, the floor unsteady.

  “Katsu, I want to give you a very special gift.” My father slid his arm around me. “This one is for you.”

  My eyes snapped open. “What?”

  My father snorted. “Surely you know what goes on between a man and a woman?”

  “She will be your yujo,” said my teacher.

  My woman of pleasure.

  My face went numb and tingly. I could not look at the girl, or my father, or my teacher. I desperately hoped she didn’t understand. Surely Takami had not taught her that.

  “You are my son,” said my father. “Imagine the power they will attribute to you for mounting their she-wolf.”

  The world turned upside down, and I turned, almost falling, and caught myself on the hearth. My stomach reversed its course.

  Sensei made a tut-tutting noise. “Gently, Tadashi. He’s still a boy.”

  My father yanked me up. “No warrior can lead with a weak stomach.”

  I wiped my mouth and looked past my father and my teacher to the girl who is to be my yujo. Her gaze is as steady as the foothills of the great mountains that mark the Empire’s edge. She knows her homeland, as I had never known mine.

  I realized in that moment that even my name is a lie. Katsuro, victory. But I was not born with the Empire.

  * * *

  When the riders came, cloaked in the dust and ceaseless wind blowing out of the hills, it was Takami who first saw them, or actually saw how the girl went still. Before we heard a sound, before anyone sensed them, she knew. Then I felt the drum of hooves vibrating through the floor.

  One of the girls pointed to the western window.

  Our teacher shot one glance toward the feral girl, and then he was shouting instructions. There were rules for every emergency. We had practiced. We knew where to go.

  Everyone watched the western window, except the girl, who stared straight ahead as if she had gone deaf as well as blind, and Takami, who sat nearly as tense as she, and whose eyes kept slipping away to the eastern window.

  Sensei was calling us up by row, hustling us through the door. Something hit the thatched roof. The girl’s nostrils flared. I caught the scent of fire.

  The pounding of hooves intensified, and now we heard war whoops and wild ululations. Gunshots marked my father’s answer. His men were mounting the defense. Students queued up at the door, jostling to exit. Gusts from the open door carried the scent of smoke, and the feral girl’s stillness looked more and more like the stillness of a drawn bowstring. Sensei hustled past on his uneven legs, pushing students out and shouting directions.

  A whoosh came from outside, and the smell of smoke intensified. Sensei darted out.

  Takami bolted toward the window, but I caught his wrist. He’d seen something. He swore at me and dragged me when I wouldn’t let go. The feral girl sprinted past us toward the window. She fumbled with the latch. Her head swung toward the rafters, and it was then I heard the crackling.

  Takami jerked free, and we sprinted to the window.

  The girl turned, her mouth full of words we didn’t understand. She dropped to her knees and caught our legs. We fell over her, sprawling. Above our heads, the window shattered. An arrow buried itself in the opposite wall. Through the window came a hand, followed by a well-muscled arm.

  The girl threw back her head and let out a piercing ululation. An unshaven face and a blood-smeared torso rose into view.

  I was up and moving toward the window, faster than Takami, faster than thought. The knife my father had given me found its way into my hand. The girl shouted something urgent.

  The door flew open, Sensei yelling for us to get out. The attacker dropped out of sight.

  Sensei’s clothes were dark with sweat and his voice was almost gone. He shouted, but all I heard was the thunder of hooves and my father’s bellowing commands. “Move, now!” Sensei shouted. “The roof is on fire.”

  My arm shot around the girl, again, with no thought, and I pulled her tight against my chest, heaving us both toward the door and safety. She kicked and twis
ted. Takami caught her legs, but in a low voice he whispered, “Let her go! They came for her!”

  “You traitor!” My grip relaxed from pure shock. The girl bit my hand and kicked Takami hard. She pushed off his chest and overbalanced me. We fell hard. She scrambled up and toward the window. I caught her ankle. Now Sensei was running to his desk, searching inside. Takami rolled on the floor.

  More gunshots, and my father’s booming commands.

  The girl and I grappled on the floor, my hand locked on her ankle as she kicked my chest. I lunged and caught her legs. She arched back and twisted, but I pulled myself up her body and pinned her with my whole weight. Her eyes, in the wild tangle of her hair, met mine. An image came from my mother’s stories, the fox caught in a trap, her fate and the hunter’s hanging in the balance.

  Her scent was very strong, a warm musk, but overlaying it, a contrasting fresh sharpness, like the wind that sometimes blew in with the rain from the steppe.

  “Hold her!” Sensei hurried toward us with a bottle and a small cloth.

  A piece of burning thatch fell from the rafters.

  Takami’s leg shot out, and Sensei fell on his bad leg. The bottle smashed under his chest. A strange odor filled the room. Our teacher lay in a pool of liquid, fumbling at his shirt. The liquid vaporized even as it spread. He went still.

  The girl’s chest rose and fell beneath me. The warmth of her, the musk and camphor scent of her, which suddenly I recognized as sagebrush after the rain; the strong beat of her heart where my hands gripped her wrists.

  Takami shouted something, but all I could hear in that moment was her breath and my heartbeat. Perhaps it was her scent at work on my mind. Perhaps it was something on the wind blowing in from the steppe.

  One of her braids had come undone, and the storm of her hair swirled around us. I saw her then as she had come to us, with clinking beads the only cover for her bare skin. Then and now. Her storm smell. I wanted to let go of her wrists, to touch her face so close to mine. I wanted to know all of her.

  A strand of wild hair blew across her ruined eyes.

  Pain. I gripped her wrists, and she drew a breath at my force. The pain had come so suddenly, I had hurt her by accident.

  My father once had told me there is pain at the moment the soul recognizes beauty, wabi-sabi. We feel the spirit’s longing to hold on to that which is impermanent.

  Her beauty was like the wings of the butterfly beating itself against the walls of a jar. She would never be that girl again.

  A stillness settled in my stomach. Softly, so softly, I leaned down and brushed my cheek against hers.

  Then—

  I let go.

  She bolted for the window, leapt without a sound, without a glance. She was gone.

  Takami ran to the window. His voice came to me as if underwater. “They have her now.”

  I slid to the floor. My hand hit something, a bundle of cloth and feathers. It was a doll, such as any child might have. I held it on my open palm.

  Takami grabbed me by the shirt and hauled me outside. I sat in the grass with battle sounds all around while Takami dragged our teacher to safety. There was no room in my head for more. We found our classmates, sitting neatly on a small hill while half the town burned.

  Takami nudged me, and we glanced back toward the hills, where a small band of riders streaked away from the battle, riding low and fast and already disappearing into the grey winter grass. “She’s all they wanted.”

  The tide of the fighting had turned, the tribesmen falling back away toward the hills, my father’s formation giving chase.

  I held the doll in my open hand. A stray breeze brought a hint of musk and sagebrush. I thought of my mother, how she fed her treasures to the fire.

  Takami’s two-colored eyes met mine, and something passed between us. I knew we would never speak of what had happened. We would never see her again.

  I offered him the doll, but he closed my hand around it.

  My heart caught on something sharp and jagged, a pure, private ache. We sat there a long quiet moment, his hand around mine.

  My father had taught me to observe the ways of nature, the things that change, and the way each change shifts the balance of every other thing it touches.

  My mother had taught me the power of a story and the art of concealing an inner world, and how nothing is set before the ending.

  This was not the ending.

  I had become the thing that changes.

  Copyright © 2013 A.B. Treadwell

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  A.B. Treadwell is a nomadic wordsmith who has hailed from Moore, Oklahoma, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Fairmont, West Virginia, and that’s just in the last two years. Her stories have been published in Flash Fiction Online, Bards and Sages Quarterly, and the Triangulation anthologies. She is also on staff at the Alpha Teen Writing Workshop. Her website is www.abtreadwell.com.

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  COVER ART

  “Marching Off,” by Maciej Wojtala

  Maciej Wojtala is a Polish concept artist who works in the video games industry. For the last seven years, he has been working at People Can Fly, the studio responsible for Bulletstorm and Gears of War : Judgment. He creates environment concept art, prop designs, illustrations, and graphic design elements. View more of his artwork at www.wojtala.com.

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  ISSN: 1946-1076

  Published by Firkin Press,

  a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

  Copyright © 2013 Firkin Press

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