Beneath Ceaseless Skies #109

by Gregory Norman Bossert

  That fear was gone, though, those eyes closed behind heavy new-hung black curtains. And Mel had thought that there might be something left in the library to explain those long evenings in the chair, the confusion of household, the strange desire of the bees. Still, it was hard to turn the knob and go in where that chair might still sit on the frayed patterned rug. Mel stood and scratched and shivered a little from the strangeness of the last day, and only then heard the voice behind the door.

  For a second, the lord’s death and the telling and the bees’ visit all threatened to swirl into dream, but the voice was sharper than Dellus’s murmur and raised in a tone that the lord would never have approved. It was Cook, and she was saying, “...held up to ridicule. Or worse. Goodness knows what the town folk might do.” And Pearse’s reedy voice added, “More importantly, it is our responsibility now to maintain the honor of the House. I’ll not have that... impropriety brought out of the corner and into the light.”

  Ralph replied, his words calm as always and no doubt mumbled around his pipe. All Mel could catch was “not stir the wasp’s nest,” which seemed odd, as Ralph was always quick and fierce with wasps; “lest they cross the bees,” he would say as he took up his stick.

  “We are agreed then,” Pearse said. “We shall speak no more of it.” Cook rumbled agreement and there was a creak of chairs and a shuffling of feet. Mel crept backward to the quiet of the hallway runner and was around the corner and halfway down the stairs before the door opened.

  * * *

  Mel lay awake that night, as Cook snored and grumbled in her bed. If the anticipation of the bees’ return had not been enough, there was also an ache across chest and belly, a shifting as terrifying and wondrous as the previous night’s visit. ‘A new queen,’ Ralph had said, and ‘The dream means change.’ What had the bees brought with those bitter drops? The shades were down—they would not be raised for weeks yet—but Mel had reached through to slide the sash up, and the warm breeze slipped in bearing the smell of spring clover and a slice of moonlight.

  The breeze made a gentle, persistent suggestion of sleep, despite the promise of the bees. ‘Attentive’, Mel thought again, and lifted the edge of the shade.

  In flew a bee.

  Not the silent creeping parade of the night before, but a solitary buzzing bee, fat with fur, that flew a few lazy circles and landed on the blanket over Mel’s chest.

  “Hello, bee,” Mel whispered.

  The bee waggled its body in return, not a wave, but a sort of zigzagged line diagonally across the blanket. It stopped, looped right to its starting point and retraced the staggering walk.

  “You’re drunk,” Mel said. Lord Dellus had paced like that almost every night, stumbling circuits around the library until he collapsed into a chair, and finally into his deathbed.

  The bee looped left and drew its drunken line again. And again, and again, alternating left and right, tracing a rough circle with a jagged line across the middle.

  “An Egg,” Mel guessed. The bee continued its dance. “A Gourd? The Moon?”

  Cook grunted, and rolled over. Mel was quiet, then, and watched the bee walk until the sliver of moonlight crept into its path. It stopped when it hit that light, and flew up and around Mel’s head and out under the sash.

  Mel pressed a palm against the pain and hoped for another visitor, but the only thing that came in the window was the air and the light and the distant trill of a nightingale and eventually sleep. And then it was the sun and wakefulness, and Mel sat up and said, “A Compass.”

  * * *

  The bee’s jagged path had pointed toward the barley fields, a bit west of south, and that was the path Mel took once the morning chores were done. There was nothing of note in the fields beyond a lack of laborers. They were in mourning over Lord Dellus, Pearse said, but Ralph shook his head and said, “The House has no hold on them.”

  Past the fields was the west road. Mel came out onto it not far from the crossing with the town road, but that led north and away from the bee’s path. Straight ahead was pasture, spattered with cows and their droppings, and beyond that a stream and the end of the estate and then rolling hills and copses like sleepy green sheep. There were no other Houses. Mel walked until the sun passed noon and lost itself behind the leaves of old untended forest.

  Amongst those trees were standing stones that at first seemed as wild as the trees, but the shifting light revealed an arm, a swell of breast, a swirl of patterned robe like honeycomb, an eye as grey as Pearse’s above moss-softened lips. These monuments marked three sides of a square, broken and overgrown. The fourth side was cut by an outcropping of chalk and flint in which was set a statue of a woman covered head to toe by a veil, carved with patterns of leaf and limb and long zigzag lines.

  “Despoina,” a low rough voice said. Mel started and turned. A man stood a few paces away, sad deep-set eyes over a beard as wild as the woods, arms and legs bared by roughly-repaired clothes.

  “The name means ‘mistress of the house’. It is more properly considered a title. The goddess’s true name and nature was a mystery, passed mother to daughter by those who kept this place.” His voice was as worn and splintered as the stone, but the tone was measured and clear, the words careful. “Whence come you, girl?”

  “From the Dellus estate,” Mel said, and after a moment of consideration, added, “Sir.”

  “And whither bound?”

  “I’m following a bee,” Mel said.

  The man considered this in turn, for such a time and with such a frown that Mel began to grow alarmed.

  Finally, he turned to walk away, but said over his shoulder, “I have eggs, if you hunger.”

  He doesn’t seem dangerous, Mel thought, and he talks like my book, like he knows things. “Thank you, sir, I do, in fact.”

  They walked for a few minutes along the outcropping, which grew to a bluff, and came to a small camp around a shallow cave in the rock: a lean-to, a bed of bracken, a stack of books gone green under the shelter of the cave. Mel sat on a stump and the man produced tin cups of a sort of tea, small spoons of bone, and the promised eggs, which were small and blue and cooked warm but still runny.

  They ate and drank in silence, two eggs apiece, after which Mel carefully crushed the shells. “That they may not be used as boats by witches,” the man said gravely, with a nod, and did the same to his. He refilled Mel’s cup—the tea seemed brewed from bark and small blossoms—and stared into his own, and said, “Lord Dellus, then, how fares he?”

  “Dead,” Mel said and then regretted the brusqueness as the man looked up with wide eyes and spilled half his tea.

  “Dead, you say! Dead. I had not heard.”

  “It’s been just three days, sir.” And with an unwonted wildness that might have been the tea or the woods or the fluttering in Mel’s torso, added, “Three days and I don’t know who knows, there’s no one left in charge at the estate except Pearse the butler, and no one has been told, except the bees and they spurned the telling.”

  The man barked a laugh, as strange and bitter as the tea. “Did they now? The ancients believed honey brought truth as prophecy. Despoina, the unnamable mistress whose house you found yonder, was fed by the bees who crept under her veil and thus she learned the mysteries. If the bees objected, it was only because the telling was false: their lord was not dead.”

  “But I saw the body, sir.” That had been this morning, when the body had been moved from bedroom to the downstairs parlour in the casket Ralph had built, oak, with the lacquer still wet and hardware borrowed from a scattering of splinters in the crypt. “Weren’t no objections from aught when I took ‘em,” Ralph had said, though Pearse flushed and fumed. The body in the open casket had been pale and bloated with a sour peaty smell; not much changed from life, Mel had thought, and stared into the blank eyes. There had been no revelation there, after all.

  “Oh, I believe the man is dead. Jacob was his name. But he was not Lord Dellus, not rightfully. He had a sister, Deborah
, and a brother Caleb, and he was the youngest of those three.”

  Mel thought of conversations cut short, dark spaces on the wall where portraits once hung, and Lord Dellus pacing circles with an ever-emptying glass. “And they are alive?”

  “The brother is. A sad wretch, bemused by time and circumstance.”

  “But he’s the rightful lord, then! Would he come back, do you think?”

  “They would not have him back.”

  Mel took a deep breath, ribs shifting, grinding. “I think Pearse and Ralph are going to fight, and Cook will fly into one of her moods, and where will I....” Where will I find answers? Mel thought.

  “Ralph, from raeth wulf, ‘wolf’s council’,” the man said blankly. He fished a twig from his tea, flicked it away, looked up under bristling brows. “Have you no parents? A mother, at least, who could sew or cook and thus support you in town?”

  “I can cook, sir, and sew. And sharpen a plow and fix a fence. But I wouldn’t fit with the town folk. I don’t even fit at the House. I’m just... in between. Is ‘limbo’ the right word?”

  The man nodded, but then frowned and said, “No, girl, it’s a wrong word, a hellish word.”

  “Do you think—” Mel paused, feeling foolish and a growing fear. “Your pardon, sir, but you know things. Do you think the bees want me to follow the path through the woods to somewhere else?”

  The man laughed again, his face cleft by old bitter lines like tree-splintered stone. “There is no path through, girl, try and try and try as I have. No meanings to be found, just more mystery, and every way leads back here. The House won’t let me lose myself.”

  “The House is lost, sir! Oh please, if you know where the brother is, or the sister—”

  “Dead!” The man was on his feet, and not so much shouting as growling. “She is dead, the whore, she and her fop of a lover, both run through the heart and left to rot. And the brother, he rots too, though he yet lives; rots alive and spurns all news like your bees, and looks for understanding instead amongst old tales and older stones.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t mean....”

  “Away!” he roared, and threw himself down on his bed of bracken. “Away, child,” he said, quietly, an arm across his face, “away and hence away. You’ve crawled under the wrong veil. I have no need of your honey.”

  Mel was halfway back to the statues when his voice called out, “Girl!” Mel almost didn’t stop. “There is a manuscript in the House, in the library, the pages loose in a black box with silver fittings. A dictionary. Do you know it? Is it yet there?”

  “It is still in the House,” Mel said, not quite a lie.

  “So.” And after a minute, he added, “Words mislead, girl. Be wary of following them.”

  “What else, then?” Mel asked. The man said nothing more, but in the shifting mote-speckled leaf light there was a flicker, and a buzzing.

  * * *

  Mel had lost the bee’s path amongst the trees, and regardless the man was too frightening and his story too astonishing. Maybe there were answers yet in the limbo of the House, its book and bees, still some comfort to be had in its corners.

  It was late afternoon before Mel got back, which would have earned a few blows from Pearse’s cane under other circumstances, but the butler was in the downstairs parlour with Ralph, voices not quite raised but certainly sharp. Cook gave Mel a half-hearted swipe with a wooden spoon, and said, “The coffin’s cracked, and Lord Dellus half tumbled out of it.”

  “Not the lord,” Mel wanted to say, but did not.

  “It was those handles and such as Ralph took from the crypt,” the downstairs maid said. “‘Silver once buried is to the darkness married’ is what they say. Bad luck, sure as sunset.”

  “Ralph should-a used more nails, is all,” Neff said, and sniggered. “Lot of weight for a little box.”

  Cook went after Neff with the spoon, and Mel slipped out the door and down the garden path. Time for the book, Caleb’s book, Mel thought, but first to tell the bees.

  The sun was low in the west, the hive gilded like a mosaic set into the flint. Mel stopped at the black-clad stake. The words came easily, as if glimpsed in flat thick light and the dim disquiet of the house, overheard in the rumble of the hive and the echoes of the man in the forest:

  Mistress sweet, Mistress sharp,

  the lord lives in the forest dim,

  Broken, sad, and grim.

  Mistress black, Mistress gold,

  let me bide and let me stay.

  O stay, O stay, please let me stay.

  A bee flew out from the hive and hovered. Black eyes glittered in the sunlight. Mel raised a hand, and the bee settled gently, crawled in a small circle, and carefully drove its stinger into Mel’s palm.

  The pain was unbelievable. The stings from two days ago had been mild, and the welts were already faded, but this was like a handful of molten lead, searing down to the fingertips and up past the wrist. Mel hissed, a sharp sound liked a startled cat, and fought the urge to crush the bee in a clenched fist. But the bee pulled forward on its own—the stinger ripping from its sternum, poison sacks still pumping like tiny hearts—and collapsed.

  Mel stood and watched the bee quiver and grow still, the welt rise and turn an angry rose, everything swirling sky to ground and the sun squeezed to an angry spot or was that the sting and then Ralph was there clucking concern and spreading cool chalky mud on the wound and then they were in the kitchen and Cook was angry but not it seemed at Mel or not exactly and then Mel was in bed though there was still a hint of sunset coming under the shade. Cook was saying “the child has taken a fever from the sting, damn Pearse for the telling” and Mel wanted to say “no no no it’s not my hand its in my chest between my legs in my thoughts there was a sister a brother I asked for the wrong thing the dream means change” but all that came out was silence and sleep.

  Later like a dream the bee danced again, pointing north this time past Cook and House and toward the village, and though the bee glowed on a blanket that was so so far down and away, Mel knew what it wanted.

  * * *

  The next morning Mel felt as clear and light as the breeze through the open kitchen door. Cook said, “Back to bed, child, last thing I need is another body to look after.” Neff sniggered at that. But Mel sat in the corner and had a slab of bread with honey, and when Cook went upstairs to speak with Pearse—the butler had moved Lord-not-the-lord Dellus’s body back to the bedroom while Ralph repaired the casket, and sat guard with it—Mel left the House and headed north.

  The town was half a mile past the front wall of the estate, no more than a fifteen-minute walk on the old road, though rarely did anyone from the estate spend those minutes so. And it was no more than another five minutes to the far end, but within that duration were four shops and an inn and a tavern and a market and a dozen hundred people; Mel stood in the square at the crossroads and looked around in dismay as the town buzzed to all sides.

  Inspiration came with a sip of water from the well, and the women come to fill their buckets and gossip.

  “Please, ma’ams, is there a Deborah who lives in the town?”

  There were three, it turned out. One was no older than Mel, or so the women said, and one was married to the innkeep and from a town four days to the south: who knew what customs they kept down there, the women agreed, but her blouse was far too liberal in its lines for a respectable wife in this town. As to the third Deborah, one of the women made a sign with crossed fingers and another spat thrice into the dirt. “Don’t let your path cross her shadow,” one said, “lest you catch her madness,” and it was only by asking how to avoid such an accident that Mel was able to get the location of this Deborah’s house from them.

  The house was at the north end of town, and if the inhabitant was mad then her madness was not evident from the exterior. The house seemed neatly kept, with a swept path and pale roses by the door. Mel knocked, and swallowed a sigh when the door opened; the woman seemed too old to be s
ister to either Lord Dellus.

  But the hand that held the door half-open was not so withered, though the other hung lame, and the brows that rose in inquiry were still black and smooth. It was not age but pain, Mel thought, that had graved such deep lines on the woman’s face.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am, but might I ask you a question?”

  The woman started to close the door. Mel put a hand into the opening, regardless of the oozing welt, and said, “Lord Dellus is dead.”

  The woman blinked and bit her lip, then grabbed Mel’s hand—a stab of pain—and pried it free. “Past time, then, and past any of my caring,” she said.

  “He wasn’t really lord,” Mel said. “His brother lives.” And then, heart throbbing like a fresh sting, added, “And so does his sister.”

  The woman stopped, still holding Mel’s hand, and stared. The pressure of her thumb on the welt brought a whirling faintness like the fever of the previous night, but Mel sucked air into aching ribs and belly and stood firm. The woman finally looked down, shifted her grip on Mel’s hand, and said in a low distracted voice, “I have something will soothe that.”

  Mel followed the woman into the house. If it was as neat inside as out, in its way, it nonetheless had something of the forest in it; the posts and beams were unfinished, and promised the swirl of robes, the hint of an eye if examined too long. The floor was flint, a mossy green. And everywhere there were plants, in drying bundled and twisted wreathes. The smell was like that of the madman’s tea, and a bit like the drops the bees had brought; it did not at all help Mel’s swirling, buzzing brain.

  The salve the woman rubbed onto the welt did help, however. The throbbing faded, and the swelling, and the scent of mint and meadows cleared Mel’s head.

  “This should have been better tended, boy, lest it fester,” the woman said. “In my day the gardener knew better.”

  “Ralph is still gardener, ma’am,” Mel said.

  “The gardener has always been named Ralph. Just as a son of the Pearse line has always been butler, and Cook’s bread the same as her grandmother’s grandmother’s. The staff do not just keep the house, and the estate, they keep the manner of things.” The woman leaned toward Mel and hissed these last lines, lame arm flailing; her breath was sharp, alkaline, like the chalk and flint hills where the grass had died away. If the man in the forest had been tangled and splintered, this woman was dry and twisted, but their eyes held the same pale anguish. As had those of Lord-not-the-lord Dellus that last time Mel had looked him in the eyes, for all that he had been dead.