Beneath Ceaseless Skies #177
Page 3
“I want to end the war,” Mattar says.
“Everyone wants to end the war,” the Aghan’s daughter says. “I was conceived and born so that it could end.”
Mattar turns hard eyes on her. The day this girl was born, the priestesses came to tell her. They explained the rites and rituals; the ways the Hasha knew to craft a weapon from a child. “You were made to kill my son.”
“I was cut from my mother at the dusk of the day the winter and the spring were in perfect balance. I was suckled with the blood of the great stag and the great wolf, and taught to walk the ghost roads. Death is easy among the Hasha, Grandmother. We do not put so much effort into such a simple thing. I was born to bring peace, not death; killing your son is merely the mechanism of my fate.” She speaks it as plain fact and seems to wait for Mattar to object, perhaps to spit at her and curse her.
“You will not kill him in time,” Mattar says. “The armies of Korond are marching, and your lines cannot hold. He is not with them. He is safe in his palace, safe with his sons who whisper pleas for peace to him, unheard. You may kill him months or years from now, and perhaps then the war will end. But first he will break your clans and burn this city, and claim the nations of the Hasha Alliance for his empire. I believe there is another way.”
“What way?” the woman asks. The Hasha do not trust as the people of this city do, but she listens. Perhaps it is the shadow of the tortoise. Perhaps it is the knowledge that Mattar is right.
“A prayer,” Mattar says. “A perfect prayer to catch the ear of the gods.” The word is wrong; they are speaking in the Hasha tongue, and the Hasha do not have gods the way the Korondi do, nor even the way the people of this city do. They have one god, who fills many vessels. But she thinks the Aghan’s daughter understands. “A prayer to ask for peace.”
“You would not be the first to pray for such things,” the Aghan’s daughter says. “Anyone with breath in their lungs has prayed for them.”
“I have crafted it,” Mattar says. “I have selected each word so that it cannot be misconstrued or doubted. But I lack one. I lack the word that will tell a being who does not die why this war cannot continue.”
“Do you believe words have so much power?” the Aghan’s daughter asks. “That a single word could bend the fate of fifty nations?”
“No,” Mattar says bitterly. If words alone had power, prayers and poets and her own begging would have turned her son’s heart from its course. “Words do not have power. Kings and gods have power. Words are the key with which we unlock their whims.”
The Aghan’s daughter laughs, a scraped-hollow sound. “Do you see that boy?” she asks.
The boy is throwing rocks in a pond. The splinterman crouches beside him, enjoying the game. He’s hardly more than a boy himself, hardly old enough to cultivate a scraggly beard. The bone shards make odd patterns beneath his skin, and the wound that killed him is beginning to open at his side.
“I see him,” Mattar says, fixing her attention on the living child. The dead are beyond her help. “He is a handsome child.”
“He is my son. I found him in the mountains, when your son’s soldiers were slaughtering his kin. After the avalanche. After the vulture fell. I fled with him through the gray spaces and the ghost roads, and fed him mare’s milk and mare’s blood. He is the last of the Enokoans, the last of those who knew the language of birds, but I cannot teach him his mother-tongue. I know only one word, and it has never been spoken.”
Mattar looks more closely at her. Her shoulders bend beneath the weight of unseen things, and her eyes watch shadows more than light.
“What word?” she asks, but the woman does not speak it yet.
“We will never surrender to your son,” the Aghan’s daughter says. “He is the king who killed a god, the man who slaughtered a nation. They believe he will do the same to the rest of us. To the stag and the wolf, to the tortoise and the eagle. They believe he will dredge the great sea itself to slay the storm-wrack gods. Before Enokoa, we might have made a truce, but we cannot while he still lives. Because they blame him.”
“And you do not?” Mattar asks. “I was on the mountain, horse-daughter. I know what my son’s soldiers did.”
“I know you did not cast a spell to kill the vulture,” the Aghan’s daughter says. “I saw the spears of the splintermen strike it. I saw it shriek and dive and rise. I knew that it would die. You conquered the southern kingdoms with the power a few old bones could give you. What would you do with the flesh and blood and organ meat of a fresh-dead god?”
“You killed it,” Mattar says softly. Guilt slides from her like snowmelt, but the feeling is false. She spoke the prayer. She felt the gods’ understanding. Perhaps the vulture still would have died if she had stayed silent, perhaps this girl would still have killed it, but she thinks not. The gods use humans as their instruments, after all.
“I rode the ghost-roads to the mountain-top where it paused to rest. I took one of the splintermen’s spears from where it had fallen, and I drove it through the vulture’s skull,” the woman says tonelessly. “On the mountain peak where I could hardly breathe, where no one could ever climb to claim it. And because I slew the vulture-god, we have held this long. Because of what I did, my people will never lay down their spears. We are victorious, or we are destroyed. And I do not believe we can win this war.”
“But we can end it,” Mattar tells her. “You and I. I need only a single word, and I think that you are the one who knows it.”
For a long time, the Aghan’s daughter says nothing. The tortoise shifts, a sound like the movement of a mountain.
Then she nods, once, and speaks again. “When the vulture died, it thrashed, and its wings made such a great wind that the whole sky howled with it, and the rocks shaped the wind into a word.”
“What was it?” Mattar asks.
The Aghan’s daughter leans close and whispers in her ear.
* * *
Mattar rises from the rock with the heat pressing against her with all the stubbornness of a child. The Aghan’s daughter walks her to the poolside and speaks in gestures to the singer, who takes the splinterman’s hand. She joins it to Mattar’s and hums softly until Mattar’s skin prickles.
“He can take you home,” the Aghan’s daughter tells her.
“Thank you,” Mattar says. “I promise you, the gods will listen. This war will end without need of further death.”
The Aghan’s daughter shakes her head. “Grandmother, I was born to end this war. And I was born to kill your son. I have given you the word you need. So our soothsayers are wrong, or you are. Or we are all of us right, and I fear that you will not like the answer to your prayers.”
Mattar looks away. She looks at the last Enokoan child. “Guard your sons,” she says to the women. “But keep them from your prayers.”
She tells the splinterman they must go home. The curse still sticks to the soles of his feet and carries them to the outskirts of the city where her son and grandsons have their thrones. But when she takes another step, she is alone. The splinterman has walked on to the ghost roads, the sunset of the seventh day marking his end.
She walks alone to the temple, the word droning in her mind. It is a word that has no translation—not in the hundred tongues she’s heard, not in the hundred-thousand that Anaharesh could name. It is the sound of a spear driving through bone. It is the sound of last breaths, of mud, of rocks crashing and of the scrape of a crippled foot across a dirt path. It is not war but this war, distilled into a dying scream.
In the temple, she kneels. She has carved every word of her prayer in the flagstone at the feet of the hooded god, Imrin-ka, the last god who still listens when she prays. The last clear patch of stone lies at the center, waiting to be filled.
I was born to kill your son, the Aghan’s daughter said. Mattar is mighty in her faith; she does not doubt. She believes her gods of stone can stand against the will of the behemoths the northern nations worship. But she can see no reas
on why they would.
A different prayer, perhaps, could shape the gods’ answer to her will. A prayer that would spill over every stone in the temple, precluding loss and sorrow, anticipating every misfortune, with the unflinching vocabulary the gods demand. And perhaps she could find the words for it, if she were Anaharesh, or if she had a hundred years to wait.
When she was young, and newly with child, she knelt in this place. She carved a prayer, as was her right as first wife to the king, at the feet of Imrin-ka. Make my son strong, she wrote, in the tongue of her mother, the Kilin-kasa, a language she spoke but did not truly understand. She did not know there were as many words for strength as bones in the hand, and the word she chose was drenched in blood.
She presses her fingertips against that word. Strong. It was not her fault, she has told herself many times before this day. She did not understand then that she was Three-Times-Woken. Woken to life with her first breath, woken to sentience with the accretion of thought, and at last woken to the gods. She prayed as any mother would, and to her grief, the gods answered.
Or perhaps he would be as he is without her prayer. Perhaps the vulture would have died on the mountain if she were silent. And perhaps the word she carves now in the small smooth space is nothing more than grooves in sandstone, inert and unremarked.
She kneels, fingers laced, and folds herself to the ground. She whispers the words, again and again, and the stone listens.
In the palace on the hill, a prince slips a bead of poison into a king’s cup, and prays for peace.
Copyright © 2015 Kate Marshall
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Kate Marshall lives in Seattle with her husband and a slightly demonic cat. She’s written everything from coffee orders to ad copy to supernatural noir video games, and her own work has appeared in a number of venues, including Strange Horizons, Pseudopod, and Crossed Genres. You can find more of her work at katemarshallwrites.com.
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COVER ART
“Migration,” by Julie Dillon
Julie Dillon is a freelance science fiction and fantasy artist from Northern California. She received her BFA in Fine Arts from Sacramento State University in 2005, with continued education at the Academy of Arts University in San Francisco and Watts Atelier. Her clients include Simon & Schuster, Penguin Books, Wizards of the Coast, and Paizo Publishing. She won the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist. View more of her work online at www.juliedillonart.com.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
ISSN: 1946-1076
Published by Firkin Press,
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Compilation Copyright © 2015 Firkin Press
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