Beneath Ceaseless Skies #141

by Rahul Kanakia

  “Come on, Papa!” I say. “I know how to do it now! We can go and destroy their general!”

  “My God,” he says. “What the hell are you doing? Those men were screaming for mercy.”

  “Hurry, we need to move quickly,” I rush across the road. I grab up a gun, just because it seems right to hold one. Papa was wrong. Soon enough, I’ll fulfill both Mama’s vision and Papa’s. I’ll rule over men, and I’ll end the war. Everything will be unified in me!

  Papa just barely scrambles into the jeep before I push the accelerator and speed us off towards their headquarters. All the way there, he remonstrates with me and tells me that men are supposed to be free and that I cannot treat them like that and that I am no better than they are. I know that he just doesn’t understand, but there is no time to explain it to him right now.

  Before nightfall, I’ve destroyed the village that the enemy had occupied. It takes an hour, since there are so many soldiers to invade and so many soldiers to kill. Mostly, they do not realize that I am there. But at one point a grenade explodes, and knocks me around, opening up a hole in my hip. I bind it up as best I’m able, but I know that I’ll have to be more careful in the future.

  Eventually, Papa falls silent, and just watches me. I keep waiting for him to smile and tell me that I am doing well, but he says nothing.

  Once the headquarters is destroyed, I want to keep going. I am not tired. I am well capable of fighting my way from unit to unit, until I eventually reach Hitler himself. Once I kill Hitler, all the soldiers will be leaderless and can then be captured using the same kind of songs that Hitler used.

  But then Papa stumbles and I realize that he is tired. I catch him and try to make him lean on me, but he shakes me off. Once in the jeep, I drive us back towards the cave.

  I say, “The enemy won’t soon forget today.”

  “You... you’re... you’re taking away their freedom. This is against all the rules of war....”

  I tell him that these Krauts have no freedom. They are just soldiers; they can obey one queen or they can obey another queen. They can die for one master or they can die for another master. I know now that for human beings, the identity of the queen is not as straightforward as for ants. The queen is not always a large female. Many times, the queen is a man. Sometimes I think that Papa is a queen, too. But the point is that it’s no tragedy if soldiers die, because they have no power to do or create any of the beautiful things that are so prized by Papa and me. The only tragedy is when queens die.

  I know that Papa realizes this instinctively, or he wouldn’t be so worried all the time about “the generals” and how they’re wasting our soldiers. Wasting your own soldiers is wrong, just like wasting food is wrong. But wasting enemy soldiers is not wrong.

  The Krauts are evil because they needlessly and recklessly kill queens, and our boys are good because they rescue queens.

  He tries to tell me that I am wrong wrong wrong about how humankind works. He tries to tell me that all human beings have dignity and deserve to be free. It sound so much like the bleatings of the lowly ant workers that I am tempted to laugh.

  I am driving fast, now, and Papa’s shouted words are carried away by the wind. I laugh. He reaches out and tries to grab hold of the wheel. The jeep swerves and skids in the mud. I hurriedly sing a few chords of song and his hand falls limp. After I regain control of the jeep, it is a few moments before I realize that Papa is slumped over. I tell the ants inside him to go back to work everywhere except his throat and the muscles of his arms and legs. The silence is not bad. I finally have a moment to enjoy my triumph. The cool blue air of the forest fills my entire body.

  Once we reach the cave, I restore full function to his body. He climbs out. I stay up in the jeep. He looks at me for a long while. And then he turns away. When I drive off, I’m scared to be alone, but I’m also almost glad to leave him. Today, his presence was a burden.

  * * *

  I rampage freely. I shadow our boys as they move forward, and stories begin to circulate about mass defections and rebellions amongst the Krauts: entire companies that fell to infighting and wiped themselves out. I learn that my hands can easily break a man’s back or neck. As the fighting grows more desperate, I often find myself in close combat with the enemy. I acquire more holes in my body, and sometimes I feel like I am held together more by gauze and glue than by skin and chitin.

  The soldiers call out for me to lie with them, but I ignore them. I am aging too rapidly. I do not have much longer to live, and I know that the generals are too incompetent to finish this war on their own. I must concentrate on destroying the enemy before I die.

  For a time, I feel like I have failed my mother. I haven’t learned the songs that humans need to hear: although my ants can control their bodies, I’ve made no progress with their minds.

  I will never become mankind’s queen.

  But then I remember my sisters. Once I protect them from the scourge of Hitler, they will have all the time in the world to learn the right songs. And... well... perhaps it’s not too much to hope that some of those songs will be about me.

  It is April and I am resting in my room at the inn. I need more rest now than I once did: I am already carrying more than a few strands of gray hair.

  There is a furious banging on my door. When I open it, Papa flows into the room.

  “Had a devil of a time finding you...” he says.

  But his voice is overshadowed by the chorus of ants, “We brought him to you, my queen! The traitors said to kill him, but we knew you’d want him!”

  Papa staggers back and forth across my room and rages at me in his usual pedantic way, but the chorus of ants helps me to piece together what happened.

  Mama had a difficult winter: sensing herself growing old, she insisted on taking foraging parties out into the snow so that there’d be enough food for Papa and the newly hatched princesses. But food for the ant soldiers ran low. They started to look enviously at the supplies heaped up in the cave. Eventually, when Mama was gone, they broke free from her song and gorged themselves on the supplies. When Mama returned, she tried to ensnare them with her song, but the revelry and anger and hunger proved too strong, and they rebelled openly. They swarmed her and the princesses and bit them relentlessly. Papa was out, puttering through the woods, but, before she died, Mama managed to drag herself out and warn him. Inside him, a loyalist faction asserted control and expelled the rebels from his body. The loyalists held him together while searched the battlefields of Europe for signs of me.

  Finally, I’m able to understand his ramblings. “She’s dead. Our girls are dead. I still don’t quite understand what hit them. It was some sort of disease, I think. I knew that we were creating something unholy... but... god... why did you have to be the one to survive?”

  He throws a map case onto my table.

  “Read it,” he says.

  The case is full of papers. They’re muddy and disheveled and even the very first page is full of errors—the pages were clearly composed in the dark. While I sit down to read, Papa roots through my room until he finds a bottle of wine that had been delivered by one of my admirers.

  In Papa’s book, a wounded soldier is rescued by a young prince and nursed to health in an isolated mountain village. The prince brings the soldier right into his home: the country is ruled by an impoverished line of kings who live in a decrepit manor. There, the cultured and widely traveled soldier befriends the King and starts to tutor the prince and his brothers.

  Meanwhile, the war rages down in the valley. The soldier’s army is annihilated just outside the borders of the kingdom. In order to preserve the neutrality of his country, the King orders that, from now on, all escaped soldiers should be detained. A former comrade escapes from the roundups and knocks on the soldier’s door, but, after much soul-searching, the soldier decides that he cannot break the neutrality of his new home: he turns his comrade over to the authorities.

  The prince loves his tutor, but he also love
s guns and loud cars and crisp black uniforms. The tutor tries to teach the prince about freedom and respect, but the prince insists on assembling the villagers into a brigade of conscript soldiers whom he drills mercilessly, even as their crops rot. When the tutor protests, the prince just says that he wants his country to be prepared to fight. The tutor, though, knows that this is absurd. This tiny country could never stand up to any major power in a fight.

  Finally, after many arguments, the prince summons the tutor and says that the tutor has convinced him. He takes the tutor out for a drive. Even though it is a day for scheduled military drills, the fields are filled with workers. But then the tutor sees the brigade assembled up front. He is confused. If the workers are undertaking a drill, then who is working the fields? He jumps out of the car and runs to the nearest worker. It’s the tutor’s comrade. He’s been hobbled and put to work as slave labor.

  The tutor is horrified. On the drive back, while the prince is gunning the mountainous turns at high speeds, the tutor argues with the prince and finally grabs the wheel of the car. The vehicle goes spinning over the edge of the cliff, with the prince inside of it. The tutor, who’s managed to jump free of the car, starts to walk back to the manor. He hopes he can do a better job with the prince’s younger brothers... but he can’t stop remembering the wide-eyed look on the prince’s face: while the car spun out of control, the prince had lifted his hands and surrendered the wheel to the tutor... up to the very last moment, he’d trusted his tutor with his life.

  “But I’m not neutral,” I say. “I am winning the war. I am beating the Krauts.”

  He nods sadly. “You’ve become worse than them.”

  “I’m not like this prince,” I say. “I never trusted you.”

  Then there’s another knock on the door. It slips open. A little girl stands in the doorway and says, “Papa, you were gone so long....”

  He rushes forward and picks her up. I move towards them, but he turns around to shield her from me. “Let’s put you back to bed, Bernadette,” he says.

  “Who is that?” she says.

  “She’s no one,” Papa murmurs.

  I come close and the ants inside of him say, “Oh yes! The queen is here! She’ll reward us for our loyalty!”

  I sing to them, “This girl is your queen now. Obey her. Take care of her. Guide her.”

  Papa’s hair is still dark. He’s so young. He will outlive me, and this girl, and her daughters, and on and on and on. He’ll be able to fill thirty generations of us with lies about me. I want to snap his neck.

  But I don’t. He still has a function: this little princess will need him.

  I silently forgive him for his cruel caricature. This softhearted little boy isn’t responsible for his actions. I’d thought he was a queen, but he turned out to be just another soldier.

  Copyright © 2014 Rahul Kanakia

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Rahul Kanakia is a science fiction writer who has sold stories to Clarkesworld, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Apex, Nature, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. He currently lives in Baltimore, where he is enrolled in the Master of the Fine Arts program in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University. He graduated from Stanford in 2008 with a B.A. in Economics and he used to work as an international development consultant. If you want to know more about him, visit his blog at www.blotter-paper.com or follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/rahkan.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  PILGRIMS

  by Ann Chatham

  I found the dead man a few hours before sunset, rolled roughly out of the narrow path I had been following. If it hadn’t been for the drag marks and the dark stain in the dirt, I might not have seen him at all; the shadows were lengthening and whoever had left him there had set him in a low spot and tossed a broken branch over him. I didn’t want to stop; I’d been hoping to catch at least a squirrel for my dinner, and though I was out of arrows, I’d still a sling and a pocket full of stones. But the living have a duty to the dead, or so I’d been taught.

  The man had been rich once; he was tall and had a plumpness to him that wasn’t just the bloat of death. Whoever had left him there had taken everything but his undertunic and braes, and likely they would have taken those too for the fine linen if his death hadn’t left them so shredded and stained. I had seen a battlefield before, and so I was not sick, but something sat cramped at the back of my throat all the while that I blunted my knife and my finger-ends scraping rocks and soil enough to cover him.

  I’d no coin left me for the burial gift, but I wrapped his linens as shroud-like as I could and pulled off the last of my rings to rest on his swollen tongue. When the body was covered, I sang the rites and blessed the space of ground with my own blood—a little more than I had intended, on account of the dulled knifeblade. The people in Kemnwater had called me a saint once, and sac religious though it was, my own not-yet-relics were the most I had to sanctify the ground. At least I knew what to sing over a proper burial.

  I slept cold and hungry, and my ringless fingers felt nearly as light and strange as my head had when my braids had fallen twisted at my feet like a pair of coiled snakes, severed from my head and theirs. There’d been too much change of late, and a supper of winter-cold water and the last of my dried fish didn’t help that.

  I was two more days walking before I met another soul, and fortunate indeed that it wasn’t brigands, since even the scrub trees had given out, leaving nothing but the scattered boulders to give any kind of cover or shelter. I’d been remembering the stories the Northerners told about outlaws and about the walking dead, especially after finding the dead man, but the horseman who caught up to me along the path was dressed like a knight, in good furs and fine wool.

  He drew rein some paces away from me and bowed from his horse, as gallant as a young courtier, though neither of us were young and there was none but me to admire his fine airs. When he spoke, it was with a practiced voice and words that would have sounded well in some troubadour's tale: “I bid you greetings, fair madam; I am a knight in sore need, for I travel under a geas that I must do a great service for the first living soul whom I meet. Please grant that I may be of use to you in this land of God’s forgetting.”

  I stared at him, feeling the dirt of travel and the coarse fabric of the borrowed peasant’s wools against my skin at wrist and neck. Briefly, I thought of asking what hell he’d sprung from, but it came to me that I didn’t really care to know. He was either a madman, cursed, or some revenant of a knight out of a tale, and whatever the case there was little I could do if he changed the face he showed me. “Have you any food, or wine?” I asked.

  He had. It was fast-day fare, suitable for travel, but it tasted as fine as the First Food must have done in the beginning of the world. When we had eaten, he tried to put me up on his horse behind him, but I said that I walked for a penance, and so he walked beside me, leading the beast.

  “There are kinder roads that lead to the graves of the saints, fair lady,” he said to me, after the third time I had stumbled over the rough ground.

  “There are,” I agreed.

  There was a little silence when I said nothing further, and he glanced back at the empty way behind us. “May I ask what shrine you seek, lady, that I may escort you there over better roads?”

  I felt my brow draw down and my teeth begin to clench, but it was the village priest’s voice I was hearing, and the elders from the abbey, who thought a woman good for little but bearing and weaving and gathering the cut sheaves at harvest. If this man thought to protect me, at least he had said no word about women being unsuited to the service of the Lord. And truth be told, I was even more poorly provided for the barren lands than I had thought, and had been wondering for some days if I would reach my destination at all. I did not so much mind the thought of dying out here, but it would have been a waste.

  “I am not seeking the shrine of any saint who died in the God’s wars,” I told him, mindi
ng my feet so that I would not have to look up. “I seek the root of the Tree that the Lord cut down to end His war, that I may build a shrine at its heart, and burn an offering there.” He did not need to know about my village or my daughter.

  The knight stopped, between one step and the next, and I walked a little further before turning back to see him standing with his foot still raised. I waited, and after a moment he finished his step, and the horse bumped his shoulder with an impatient nose.

  “If that be the case, fair lady,” my protector said at last, “then your way lies farther to the north.”

  We changed the direction of our steps.

  I began to feel that I had not paid enough attention to romances and mummers’ tales, for my companion did not act in ways of ordinary men. I thought perhaps I remembered hearing it was unwise to question mages and the creatures that lived by the rules of magic, lest you break some unspoken part of the compact between the two of you and turn their help to hindrance. Surely there were stories enough of the lives of the early Saints that told of strange rewards for stranger customs, though I was not about to compare myself to those great heroes of the war-torn days. Whatever the case, I didn’t quite like to question my companion about why he was here and helping me, and he seemed content to travel as silently as his horse.

  Watching him sidelong through the chin-length brush of my cropped hair, I began to feel as if he should look familiar to me; something about the look of his jawbones or the shadows beneath his eyes. His skin was dark enough that he probably had some southern blood, though his hair didn’t have the inky curls of the men of the Empire or the Churchlands. I thought of the faces I’d seen in the great halls at Caerleon and Newmarket on feast days and the church Knights who had stayed at the Abbey three winters ago, but I could not place him in that multitude.