Beneath Ceaseless Skies #47
Page 6
* * *
By the fourth week of our affair, my fear had evaporated, leaving giddy disbelief. None of his other lovers had lasted this long.
“Paper might be better,” I said, burying my eyes in the crook of my elbow as his writing brush traced intricate wet shapes along the inside of my thigh.
“This poem is only for you to see,” he said.
“Do you do this for all your women?”
“Only you,” he said. Too smoothly.
Feeling sudden self-loathing for my moment of forgetfulness, I sat up. “I am your experiment. You want to see if I will despair and die.”
“Yes,” he said evenly, without pausing in his writing. The text was something about masonry and lotus blossoms. His wrist was in the way.
“You think my having seen your true form will protect me against illusions.”
“Perceptive,” he said, finishing the symbol for longing.
“Or is it because I am a man, beneath, raised with the expectations of a man, accustomed to being unimportant?”
“That is also an excellent observation.”
“But which, if either, is true? Or is it both? And of all the people you have met over hundreds of years...” I couldn’t say the rest; it was too plaintive, too self-effacing, too male.
He stopped then, and looked up at me, and for a long moment I thought he was prepared to answer all of my questions, both spoken and unspoken.
Instead, he simply interlaced his fingers with mine, drawing my hand closer to him so that he could write on the inside of my wrist. “For centuries,” he said, “your Empire has been a lake so still your people could look into it to count the stars.”
I waited for more. He released my hand, and I turned over my wrist to look at the two characters written there. Throw stones.
I stared at the black ink on my blue-veined skin. “You’re not here to unravel my life,” I said. “You’re here to unravel the Empire.”
“Incisive,” he said.
* * *
Though he may not have intended to unravel my life, the divine chaos he channeled had a way of leaking into everything that touched him, whether he willed it or not.
I became more and more reckless, less attentive to customers. Six weeks into our affair, such a shocking discrepancy occurred in my nightly figures that I was formally accused of stealing and dismissed from service. This catastrophic event ought to have sent me into a panic, but I reacted with almost goblinlike calm, meeting Tuo the next night and telling him what had happened once we were hidden away on The Mirror.
“Perhaps it is time, then, that you apply for testing at the Temple,” he suggested as he began to undress me.
“I’ve only half the fee saved.”
“I can provide the other half.”
I stopped his hands. He gazed back at me with an amiable, attentive expression, and I kissed the coolness of his palm. “I understand the reason for your generosity,” I said, “but I do want to know why—if you have those sorts of resources—you didn’t send me to the Temple before now.”
His eyes drifted upward, the way they often did when he sat at a table with the handle of his writing brush playing over his lips.
“Am I to assume that your more personal experiment is not finished?” I said. “If you need more time, perhaps I could stay here on your boat until it is complete.” Something about the idea made warmth seep into my bones despite the breeze off the lake.
“I have the answer I sought,” he said. “You told it to me at the start, though I did not understand at first. I think I came to understand after our first night together.”
“Then why am I still here?”
His narrow shoulders lifted briefly. “What other company can I keep?”
It had not occurred to me until that moment just how much his studies must have separated him from his people. I looked at his odd, hollowed face, and felt a heaviness in my chest and throat as I touched it with my fingertips. He appeared to need shaving, so scrupulous was he in his attention to detail.
“I want to see you,” I said.
I expected resistance, but he said nothing, shrinking and melting into his natural form.
I drew him against me, an ugly wet creature not meant to be long out of water. When I pulled back after a moment, he gazed up at me with blank round eyes. I leaned forward and pressed my lips to the slick skin of his forehead; it tasted of salt and fish and something acrid I could not identify. The immediacy and honesty of it hit me like a gust of dry wind blowing fog from water.
I spoke slowly, carefully. “While I appreciate that you have enjoyed our time together, and while I have enjoyed it myself—if you have the money to send me to the Temple, then it is in both our interests that you do so.”
Tuo looked at me for a long time. I would like to say that I did not search his alien eyes for some sign of anguish. I would like to say that I searched and found it. I would like to say that he was right about me, that I was unique, that I was the one person he could touch without destroying.
* * *
The examination was held at night, and even the High Seeress could not see through Tuo’s profound magic. I was treated just like the others, be they laborer’s daughter or cousin to the Empress. The Temple primaries peered into our minds, induced horrifying visions of disasters we would cause, interviewed us via direct mental communication while holding us underwater. Of the twenty who applied, ten were sent back to the city. I placed seventh of those who passed.
I waited for a rush of triumph that did not come. There was only a cot in a tiny room, a drab black robe just like the others, and a nightly grind of lectures and testing and casual verbal abuse. The Mistress of Astrology despised me for my ineptitude; the Mistress of Shrouds despised me for my talent. My mother had long since been promoted and transferred to Snowfeather Temple in Huo-Ru. I evaded friendly overtures from my fellow students, and the overtures were eventually withdrawn.
I tried to remind myself that I was living a grand and dangerous adventure, but the nights slipped by like the beads of an abacus, each like the other, counting time.
Just before dawn each morning, before my illusion was dispelled, I locked the door to my west-facing room. I slept each day until afternoon, and then I would rise, the only man on the mountain. No one thought to disturb me. Behind a locked door I practiced my runes, or meditated, or read about the ancient tapestry of history whose loose thread I now held between my fingertips.
When rusty sunlight began to slant through my window and cast its shape onto the stony floor I would pull my chair over to the sill and gaze out, waiting for the last rays to fade so that I would be free to roam the halls of the Temple. But my eyes always went to the water, gazing at its spangled surface, meditating on its depths.
Sometimes, in these quiet moments, it would occur to me that I had forgotten to eat the night before, and I would reach for my writing brush and paint two symbols on the inside of my wrist, to remind myself not to repeat this mistake.
I owed him a debt, though he would never see it in those terms. And so I would watch the nights slip by, smooth as glass, until I rose to a height worth throwing from. I would live long enough to matter, even if it no longer mattered to me.
Copyright © 2010 Mishell Baker
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Mishell Baker is a graduate of the 2009 Clarion Workshop and now serves as Communications Director for the Clarion Foundation. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the obligatory cats, and a new baby (who attended Clarion in utero). She is currently at work on a novel set in the early history of the world that is featured in “Throwing Stones.”
http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/
COVER ART
“Spring Sunset,” by Andreas Rocha
Andreas Rocha lives in Lisbon, Portugal, with his wife. He studied architecture, but after college his main occupation veered from architecture towards digital painting, something he had done during college as a
hobby. He has been working freelance for three years now, doing conceptual and finished illustrations, matte paintings, and 3D architectural visualizations. See more of his work, including a movie version of “Spring Sunset,” at www.andreasrocha.com.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
ISSN: 1946-1046
Published by Firkin Press,
a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization
Copyright © 2010 Firkin Press
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