Carrion birds followed above our marching columns, taking places on distant trees as we arrayed ourselves upon the field beneath banners of suns, swords, and serpents. Upon the hills the spider-things stirred, drawn by the prospect of rich scavenging. We positioned ourselves in squares and long lines, pikes and halberds held high, under skies that were clear and seeping from pink dawn to blue day.
There was a hill, where Ravallic stood watching with my eyes. Fifty-seven men waited, brave men, heroic men, wearing helmets of mottled silver and brass, men with dreams of glory and drumbeats in place of their hearts. Here I stood, history’s prime actor and shaper, yet also another of its victims. I held high my sword, and at the sound of a trumpet the men ran forward, eager to be the edge of the blade that makes the cut. Never had I seen such deeds done, and I trembled within my skin, but whether from fear or ecstasy I can not say. The army acted in Ravallic’s name, and the two of us were one and the same.
“For Ravallic!” the soldiers cried.
How might I describe such a battle, where all the participants are intoxicated, not on liquids or noxious smoke, but on ideas and dreams? Where butchery is embraced as an art, and barbarity serves as a final release from the worm inside each of us that thinks?
The day wore on, Ravallic’s hates and desires raging at my whim. Never once had a role gripped me so strongly, or the skin pressed so close. It held with a certainty as fixed and impassive as the stucco walls of this taxo den. Ah, the delight it gave. I believed I had come to inhabit myself, that now finally I was born. For such is an important thing, nay, I would say, almost the most vital: to awaken to ourselves and our own potential. Such is our purpose, always to be welcome, even if but late in life and only amidst the lies of legends. Yet there is a price to be paid for this. No longer can we flee the consequences of our actions. We pay the price of who we are and we go on paying for as long as we breathe.
By dusk, the dead lay about the field; the legendary Fifty-Seven immortalized with inert, rictus grins. The carrion birds rejoiced to one another with harsh cries, while an orchestra of destroyed horses kicked out their last with ruptured bellies and shattered limbs. Smoke blanketed the ground, and here and there mounds of the slain rose out of the fog like deformed islands. The soldier remained at my side, his bloodstained courtier’s hands clasped around the smooth handle of his saber.
“We won,” he said. “The invader is gone.”
How he could see victory in this slaughter was beyond me. All I saw before us was the reality implicit in a mad king’s dream, a dream I now must claim the responsibility of.
The soldier took a step, and slipped in the mud to kneel upon one knee. He removed his helmet, and looked up at me, showing lupine teeth in a smile. His red-rimmed eyes simmered with a merciless intent.
“I would have us die here together,” he said. “So that Ravallic’s dream might never end.”
He tried to regain his feet, but the trampled mud would not allow him purchase. He slid and drove his saber into the ground to keep from falling.
The King’s flesh freed me to act, and I woke to myself. With a quick motion I plunged Ravallic’s sword into the juncture of the soldier’s neck and the collar of his cuirass. The effort and the weapon’s weight carried me down, so I fell atop the man. Ravallic’s face, reflected in the soldier’s dying eyes, the man’s dreams splashing into the mud while yet his heart kept beating.
I fled the field leaving the weapon in its place, crawling like a newborn birther within an abattoir. How this skin clung to me then, heavy as a chain, and stouter than any jailer’s cell. The volium had died upon me, melding to my flesh, so I might forever be the King. I wandered onward, each step bearing down upon me like a weight. Already the scavengers rode down from the hills atop their slender spider-things.
* * *
“I returned here,” the King says, “for the kingdom had endured its fill of Ravallic’s dreams. And if I must give up my own ability to eschew certainty, at least I could remain here and pursue possibilities in the comfort of my dreams.”
His tale finished, the King pulls another pellet of taxo from the basket. He taps it down into his pipe and asks for a brand from the fire. The flame crackles as the King draws deep off the taper, illuminating his waxen features once more.
The mask is nearly immobile, rigid yet perfect in its semblance. The eksya of Ravallic, free of the chain of our endless shifting; a legend, a dream, a nightmare, to all of us who practice the serpent-arts.
His eyelids close, and I leave him there to sleep, going down the stairs and past the constellations of glowing pipes. The preena bird stretches its wings at my passing. Beyond the door, the dust of the world greets me. There are crowds on the Street of Seven Horns: men and women who reside as comfortably inside themselves as a hand resides within a glove. Night deepens around us, and I make my way to my room, unsure who I will be tomorrow. Already my skin weeps from a score of wounds.
The volium awaits.
Copyright © 2009 Justin Howe
Justin Howe's short fiction has appeared in Abyss & Apex, Spacesuits & Six Guns, and the anthologies Cinema Spec: Tales of Hollywood and Fantasy and Fast Ships, Black Sails. He also blogs for Tor.com.
http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/
COVER ART
“Endless Skies,” by Rick Sardinha
Rick Sardinha is a professional illustrator/fine artist living and working on the outskirts of Providence, Rhode Island. His passion is to create in traditional oil media, however, he is just as comfortable in front of a computer and often uses multiple disciplines in the image creation process. More of his work can be seen at http://www.battleduck.com.
This file is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 U.S. license. You may copy and share the file so long as you retain the attribution to the authors, but you may not sell it and you may not alter it or partition it or transcribe it.
Table of Contents
“The Mathematics of Faith,” by Jonathan Wood
“Of Shifting Skin and Certainty,” by Justin Howe
Beneath Ceaseless Skies #26 Page 5
