Beneath Ceaseless Skies #213

by Greg Kurzawa

  Issue #213 • Nov. 24, 2016

  “Masks of the Mud God,” by Greg Kurzawa

  “The Marvelous Inventions of Mr. Tock,” by Daniel Baker

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  MASKS OF THE MUD GOD

  by Greg Kurzawa

  Miriam fashioned the inner lining of her mask from a single piece of cured and softened pigskin. Pressing the soaked leather over a plaster gauze mold of her face, she cut it to shape with a pair of shears, and with a naked razor carved holes for the mouth, nose, and eyes.

  She baked it only long enough to fix its shape without sacrificing flexibility, then conditioned the inside with neatsfoot oil, so it would remain kind to her skin, and supple. She mixed her own plaster with clay, sand, and water, which she smeared over the mask’s exterior. She sculpted cheekbones, nose, and chin not from memory but from imagination and desire. With a sliver of wood and meticulous care, she pressed detailed texture into the lips and drew the finest lines around the mouth to suggest kind and frequent smiles. When the plaster dried, she brushed it with the softest hues of pink and red paint. It was a pure face, a face with only a few innocent secrets, if any at all. It was the face of a woman with freedom, contentment, and children who brought her joy—all the things Miriam lacked.

  Holding the mask in place with one hand, Miriam presented herself to the full-length mirror in her private suite of rooms on the third floor of her father’s manor. Turning slightly to reveal the full weight of her pregnancy, she cradled her swollen belly. There in the mirror was the woman she wished to be. As if in reaction to the image, or to Miriam’s pride, the life in her belly kicked and turned. Behind the mask, Miriam smiled.

  She almost looked human.

  * * *

  Miriam’s sisters mocked her when she appeared masked in her father’s opulent dining room. Brazen Sarai, Miram’s mother and half-sister—and the worst of them—groaned. Abigail revealed a toothsome smile, pleased to be provided an object of easy ridicule in the comfort of their own home. Only meek Ruth, after one look at Miriam, lowered her own eyes, as if to make herself invisible by shutting the rest of them out.

  “Don’t you look divine,” Sarai chortled.

  Ignoring their leers, Miriam remained standing—head bowed—behind her chair, both hands on its high, straight back. Her father was already seated at the end of the long table, and it would not do to be seated before his invitation. Elbows resting on the table, thick fingers laced as though in prayer, Miriam’s father considered her with dark, hooded eyes. Momentarily, he uttered a soft grunt, silencing the cackling of his daughter-wives.

  “And who is this,” he said to Miriam, “who comes disguised to my table?”

  Miriam spoke softly. “It is Miriam, Father.”

  “Ah,” he said, brows lifting in bored revelation. “My own child Miriam. Please, Miriam, do sit.”

  Murmuring her gratitude with downcast eyes, Miriam slipped into her chair. She’d thought the mask would protect her from her family’s ridicule, a barrier between them and her. But now, under the quiet smirks of the sisters and the disapproving scrutiny of her father, she felt crushed, and fixed her eyes on her plate. The first dish of the evening had yet to be served, and all the dainty vine- and rose-painted dishes remained empty.

  “Have you nothing to say?” her father asked. And when she didn’t answer, “Miriam?”

  “No, Father.”

  “Who encouraged this... charade?”

  “No one.”

  “Your friends? Your tutors?”

  “No, Father.”

  Further questioning was interrupted when the door to the kitchen opened and the servants filed in with platters of fruit and thinly sliced meat, thick wedges of melon, and loaves of bread still warm from the oven. The family remained silent while the servants poured pale red wine into crystal glasses. When the course had been laid, the servants—all of them human—quit the room without a word spoken. Unless essential to their duties, their tongues had been removed.

  “What compelled you to... this?” her father asked.

  Miriam risked a glance at him—but quickly averted her eyes. His previous disappointment had given way to open disgust. But this was the question to which Miriam knew the answer, the why of it. This was the question she had prepared for. Even so, she had to force her mouth open, force her leaden tongue to unstick.

  “We should be different,” she said.

  From the corner of her eye, she saw the shape of her father lean forward. “What?” he said.

  Miriam realized she’d barely spoken above a whisper. Determined to persevere, she looked up, but not at her father, nor at any of the sisters, which would have felt too much like begging their protection. And she knew better than to expect that. She looked past Sarai, who sat directly across from her, and set her eyes on the dark wood paneling of the dining room.

  “We should be different,” she repeated in a voice she hoped was a little stronger now.

  “Different from who?” her father asked, a dangerous edge to his voice.

  “From all of this,” Miriam said. Her hand moved in her lap but dared not rise to perform the sweeping gesture that would include her father and the sisters. “From the way we are.”

  “‘From all of this,’“ her father repeated. “And what is ‘all of this—’“ he brandished his own arm to encompass the entirety of the room, the house, the sisters, “—to warrant your displeasure? What are we, that you despise us? That you wish to set yourself apart?”

  Sweat crept beneath the lace of Miriam’s high, tight collar. Her skin itched behind the mask. She gathered herself for her response, perhaps even to look him in the eye, when his hand struck the table, rattling the candlesticks and bouncing the laden platters. His own fragile wineglass toppled, a red stain bleeding across the pristine tablecloth. One of the sisters—Miriam didn’t know which—gave a startled yelp.

  The door to the kitchen opened tentatively, but Miriam’s father snarled at the emerging servant. “Out! Leave it.” He righted his wineglass himself, tossing a napkin over the spill. “Now,” he said, his wrath clenched behind sharp teeth. “Miriam. Speak.”

  “We should be more like them,” Miriam said quickly.

  “More like them,” her father echoed. “Humans?”

  “Like humans. Yes.”

  “You mean weak,” he said. “Subjugated. Or do you mean on the verge of extinction? How should we, who have conquered, be more—”

  “They don’t eat their children,” Miriam said. She hadn’t meant to say it with such vehemence, but the clarity of her statement silenced her father. At last Miriam raised her eyes. Only Ruth, also pregnant, did not visibly loathe her. But there was no help to be found in Ruth. Barely more than a child herself, Ruth kept her eyes averted as though ashamed.

  Before her father could react, Miriam continued. “They don’t eat their old ones, or their sick. They care for their wounded. They write books, and they make things. What books have you written? What have you made?”

  Miriam’s father was both nodding and shaking his head at once. How tedious were his foolish daughter’s arguments, and how ready he was to dismiss everything she said before she had finished speaking. So near to being disregarded, Miriam blurted her final judgement hastily, before he could silence her.

  She said, “They’re better than us.”

  Miriam’s father leveled a dark-nailed finger at her. His voice tightened with the effort of control. “Let me tell you, Miriam,” he said. “Civilization depends on what we are. The order of our lives—our prosperity—demands we be as we are. Here we have our place,
carved by these hands—” he showed them to her, twisted like claws.

  “We stole their language,” Miriam said. “We stole their names. We live in homes they—”

  “The things I’ve done—that I’ve endured—so that we may prosper—so that we may eat—are more than you know. But you. You sit at my table, eat my food—” He scooped a sopping handful of chopped fruit and cast it negligently at her. Miriam flinched when the bits struck her mask and the front of her dress, but she dared not move to brush them away.

  “There you sit in your fine dress, bought and paid for by my strength.” He pushed himself to his feet and leaned forward, palms flat on the table. “If I were a weaker man you would have nothing. You would be nothing. It is by my strength that you exist. And you dare tell me I should be something other than what I am?”

  Miriam bent her head, too terrified to move.

  “Take it off,” her father said.

  Miriam’s impulse was to obey at once, to rip the mask away and cast it into the fire, anywhere to get it far away from her. She would beg for mercy. The sisters would jeer and mock. She would be humbled, but she would be forgiven. Instead, she tightened her hands in her lap, and said, “No.”

  Miriam half-rose from her chair as her father came around the table, sure that he would kill her—that he would break her neck with his own hands—that he would open her throat with his teeth and her belly with his nails, ripping his own child from her womb. Such things were not beyond him. But he seized the back of her neck in a rock-hard grasp and shoved her back down. Digging a handful of meat from the full platter, he dropped it on her plate, and with his fingers around her neck, forced her mask into it, though she turned to gasp for air.

  “Eat,” he snarled in her ear. “Live. But never forget whose hand it is that feeds you, or what it is you eat.”

  * * *

  Alone in her suite, Miriam sat at the edge of her bed, facing the window. She suspected her father would soon regret the mercy he had afforded her, and would come to kill her. The child in her womb was not irreplaceable, and he had other daughters—less willful daughters—to increase his brood. The view from her high window was of the tiled rooftops of the city. Though unable to see the wide, polluted flow of the river dividing the northern boroughs from the southern, she could see the high towers of the nearest bridge, called Solitude. The lights of the towers along the wide span had been lit, though it was not yet full dark, and it was these she studied.

  If her father did not come himself, he would send the sisters. If not now, then later, while she slept. She dared not lock her door—locked doors only enraged her father, and it would do nothing to stop them in the end. They would strangle her, devour her and the child, then never speak of her again. It would be as though she never existed.

  Believing these things, the timid knock at the door startled her. “Come,” she said, without rising.

  Keila, her very own petite, white-skinned human maidservant, entered bearing a small platter of cold meat and vegetables. Miriam sighed and turned back to the lights of Solitude. She would no more touch her father’s food. “I’m not hungry,” she lied.

  “You must eat, Mistress,” Keila said. Closing the door behind her, the diminutive handmaid set out the plate on Miriam’s escritoire. After neatly arranging silverware and napkin, she poured a tumbler of fresh water from a porcelain pitcher. She surveyed the arrangement, and finding it acceptable, pulled out the fragile chair in invitation.

  “Mistress,” she said, when Miriam still did not come.

  “The fifth of the great bridges spanning the Bittern is called Solitude,” Miriam recited from memory. “Joining Lowechapel borough on the south bank, to Mudside—a predominantly human slum—on the north, it was built in the year 582 with carved granite blocks shipped in by barge from the quarries to the west, and with marble.” She turned her head to look at Keila, as though expecting to be challenged.

  Keila only nodded.

  “Although all the great bridges are marvels,” Miriam continued. “It is Solitude which gives my people most pride. Because it is the longest, and the most beautiful.”

  “All true, Mistress.”

  “Truths disguising the worst of lies. Who built Solitude, Keila?”

  “I do not remember the name of—”

  “Who built any of the bridges? All of them. Who built this manor my father takes such pride in?”

  “Mistress, I don’t—”

  “Human or Raah?”

  “Raah, of course.”

  Miriam speared her with a glance. “Of course,” she said bitterly. It was no wonder the girl had been permitted to keep her tongue.

  “You must eat, Mistress,” Keila said. “Think of the child.”

  Miriam scoffed. “The child! As though my people need another monster.”

  The maid’s face softened, and she left her place by the vacant chair to sit beside Miriam on the bed, very close. She took Miriam’s hand in her own and squeezed kindly. “You are not responsible for the actions of your people. And you are not to blame for what you are. Does the wolf pity the lamb?”

  “No,” Miriam answered. She rubbed her thumb along the back of the girl’s hand, feeling the unblemished texture of it. “The wolf has no pity.”

  The girl leaned closer, her voice dropping. “Does the snake—”

  “Stop,” Miriam said. She squeezed the girl’s hand hard, and took satisfaction at causing her to catch her breath. “I won’t have you preach to me. How can you do... this—” she looked around the room “—while your people suffer?”

  “You’re hurting me,” Keila breathed.

  Miriam released her instantly, and Keila withdrew her hand. “I know my duty, Mistress,” she said, somewhat cowed. “I know what I am, and I know that nothing stays the same... not forever.” She put her palm to Miriam’s cheek and brought her face back around. She lifted both hands to the mask, her small fingers prying beneath the edges where they snugged against Miriam’s temples.

  “Don’t,” Miriam said, pulling away.

  But Keila persisted, and Miriam allowed her to pull the mask away. The skin of her face tingled at the touch of air, and she breathed deeply, watching as her maid laid the mask aside.

  “There,” Keila said with quiet satisfaction. She smiled as she brushed her fingers over Miriam’s bare cheek. “Be what you are.” The girl’s fingers moved caress the iridescent scales along the line of Miriam’s jaw. “For a little while longer... be what you are.”

  Miriam took her maid’s hand and held it still. “I’ll not have his child,” she said.

  “You don’t have to.” It was barely a whisper.

  “You’ll help me? You said that you would, that you knew how.”

  Keila closed her eyes. “I do.”

  “Keila,” Miriam pressed. “You’ll help?”

  “I will.”

  * * *

  Keila fulfilled her promise the very next night.

  Miriam lowered herself into the straight-backed chair by the windows to watch her maidservant turn down the bed. The interminable weight of her pregnancy exhausted her. The creature folded inside her womb pressed and shifted, testing the bounds of its confinement. It seemed discontented to her, frustrated with its own slow growth and the insufficiency of its ever-tightening space. It would come soon, her father’s physician had said, a matter of weeks.

  Bed prepared, Keila moved to the escritoire, where she produced from her apron pocket a diminutive amber bottle, stoppered with a wax cork. This she set beside the glass, which she filled from the pitcher. Miriam stopped watching, concentrated instead on her swollen stomach, where the unborn child rolled and flexed as it moved from one dream to the identical next.

  Keila crossed the room to Miriam’s chair and stood before her, glass in hand. Miriam accepted it but did not yet drink, regarding it instead as though she could not remember what was to be done with it.

  “I brought our book, Mistress,” Keila said. Withdrawing a tidy bu
t well-worn volume from the pocket of her apron, she sat on the bed, book in her lap. “Shall I read for you?”

  Miriam demanded the book with an outstretched hand, a human book—the only kind she’d ever seen. She let it fall open on her lap, its broken spine dictating the place, displaying a mass of words, no less incomprehensible for their orderliness. She turned pages, pretending to scan the words for something of interest. Human text, human stories. All of it incomprehensible. She had never learned to read it—had never tried, and did not know if she could. She flipped pages until at last finding what looked like the beginning of a new tale.

  “This one,” she said, and relinquished the book to her maid.

  Swimming alone among the pillars of the world in the bottomless sea, the Bahamut created for himself a son. To this son, he gave the hands and feet from his own body, the eyes and ears from his own head, but his flesh was taken from the mud clinging to the roots of the world. He spit in his son’s eyes, and blew in his face, and said to him, “All the world will be yours if you go up and bring me a bride.”

  So the son of the Bahamut left the waters of the bottomless sea to do his father’s bidding. But upon dry land he met only with wild beasts, and found none that was a suitable bride for his father. Despairing not, he resolved to raise the serpents above other beasts.

  And so he hid himself in a pool of water until a large viper came to drink. Afterward, the viper vomited out its guts and died, and out of the guts came a tiny snake, which grew large very fast. And in three days it was full grown, and it went among the other snakes and said to them, “My father the Bahamut seeks a bride from among you serpents. This honor is more than you deserve, and you are ill-suited for it, but I will prepare you. Such a task will not be easy, but if you do as I say there can be a little hope.”

  The snakes were very hard to teach. They were cruel to one another, and they ate the flesh of their own kind, even though the world was full of birds and mice and apes to eat. But the son of Bahamut showed them how to walk upright, and how to speak. He taught them many things, and gave them many rules, but they failed at all of them. Until at last the son of Bahamut despaired of their ever becoming more than what they already were.