Beneath Ceaseless Skies #220

by Sara Saab

  “Yes, Captain.” Harvei looks at her in a brand new way. This is Panette’s reward. She soaks it in like sunlight.

  Then she pushes the little Ruumari in Harvei’s direction and goes back to the head of the troop.

  * * *

  Three years after they first arrive in Vannat, Panette encounters Harvei on the grand steps leading down to Corner Avenue. Panette’s in a hurry, rushing to the track to watch Udu race. The young bay stallion is her favorite. He’s so responsive when she gallops him; stops as soon as he’s sure of the tug on his reins.

  She and Harvei almost collide. (Vannat? A taste for whimsy?) Harvei’s arms are heaped with fabrics. Bolts go tumbling and unfurling down the steps: tangerine, white, olive. Panette scoops up three rolls of silk from the roadside before she sees who is carrying them.

  Harvei’s smiling, and then Panette’s smiling too. She wants to orient this moment inside the years she’s lived in Vannat, three years the whole time wondering, feelings a bit ripe, a bit bruised. But she can only think in the register of the jubilation that springs awake in her chest.

  “Aln.”

  Panette has never heard her given name in Harvei’s voice before.

  “What—where are you going with all that?” Panette asks.

  Harvei’s smile widens. “The tailor.”

  “I’m going that way,” Panette lies. “Shall I walk with you?”

  Udu wins the race comfortably; Panette’s on the other side of the city when he crosses the line. The tailor is across Vannat’s huge central square. They walk in silence for a time, then it rekindles: the easy company, the mild one-upmanship.

  “Surprised you thought you could carry all this alone,” Panette says as Harvei struggles.

  “Strong shoulders from carrying your second quiver for a decade,” Harvei says. “And your shield. And your mud boots.”

  “No, no. I travel light,” Panette counters, smirking at the clear sky. “You insisted on having a whole armory to hand.”

  Panette stops with Harvei at the door to the tailor’s. She can’t bring herself to ask for more of Harvei’s time. Too proud. Too ashamed. So she doesn’t, and Harvei doesn’t volunteer it.

  Panette strides across the road and raises an arm in goodbye. Cutting her eyes away is like smashing a latch.

  The next time they see each other is the day the suddenwall appears.

  * * *

  Harvei spends the night after the rescue in Panette’s home. The hardness about her barely softens. The only familiar cues are the involuntary tells of her body.

  They set a mat down in the spare room, and Panette gets a single impassioned reaction—when Harvei won’t let Panette make a bed for her.

  “Everything I learned in the war caravan counts for nothing,” Harvei says, “unless you give those sheets to me. Captain.”

  The next morning Panette heads down to the spare room with a glass of orange blossom. Waking up, she remembered the way Harvei would tease her about how she sat a horse. She’d exaggerate a lean to the left—you sit off-balance, Captain—until her horse whinnied nervously and other soldiers began to stare.

  Panette has her line ready when she rounds the hall towards Harvei’s room—since you envied my horsemanship during the war, shall we ride today? She stops short.

  Even if she wanted to go further, she can’t.

  A suddenwall is in the way.

  * * *

  This time, there is no doubt. There are no associates of Harvei’s to share the enclosure Vannat has built for her. The amnesty-city is pushing her out.

  * * *

  Given enough time and fodder, even yellow shoots grow into trees.

  After a long lull, in the wake of the Extinction, rumors of Ruumari speakers turn into rumors of Ruumari agitators.

  On the face of it, Camillon has been rehabilitated. Pacifist approaches prevail: a Minister for the Ruumari, ambassadors, receptions to celebrate cultural exchange. Theories appear about how the Ruumari language is acquired, rekindling speculation about whether it’s teachable. Scholars read treatises aloud to captive audiences gathered for horse races and concertos. There’s such a glut of new studies that crowds learn to arrive later and later for public events.

  The assimilation isn’t enough. Attacks by Ruumari fighters are sporadic but on the increase. Nothing as dramatic as the day the godkeep came down—nothing will ever sear into Panette’s memory that way—but there are Camillonese victims. A Ruumari swordsman breaks into the stalls at Panette’s childhood stables, kills jockeys, kills horses.

  Like all veterans of the Extinction, Panette pays attention to the disturbing news from Camillon and the frontiers. Although not too much attention. Vannat is always passing judgment, and all of them worry. No one is sure what raises the city’s ire.

  * * *

  Aln Panette sounds the alarm throughout the neighborhood—a suddenwall, a suddenwall here. Her door stays open for a stream of volunteers.

  The suddenwall in Panette’s house is thicker than yesterday’s. Vannat has redoubled efforts, as she knew it would.

  They excavate until dark, until Panette is blinking ochre dust from her bloodshot eyes, and though she can hear Harvei’s voice on the other side, they still do not break through.

  Panette’s hands don’t falter, but she mouths no no no no without pause. A string of words like a defensive stream of arrows, because otherwise she will have to accept what this means.

  If Harvei stays? If Harvei stays, a suddenwall will spring up too close and crush her, or entomb her in an unbreachable thickness of miracle stone. These deaths happen. They are not as rare as they should be. Camillon’s veterans have become dependent on a city that lightens burdens, antidote city to every sediment that’s ever settled inside a heart. To bear its rejection is almost inconceivable.

  After midnight Harvei scrambles out from behind the suddenwall. She’s ashen wherever she’s not covered in dust. She’s barely standing.

  “I was asleep,” she tells Panette. “The head of my mat began to lift. I rolled away. Woke. Saw this.” Tips her face at the suddenwall.

  “Why is this happening?” Panette whispers as she wipes Harvei’s face with a cool cloth in the latrine. It reminds her of dressing injuries in the war caravan, even Harvei’s own once or twice. All of the rescuers have gone home to tell cautionary tales of the woman Vannat has condemned.

  Harvei’s face is set, chiseled. When Panette scoops dust from the corners of Harvei’s eyes, from the hollows of her cheeks, there’s not a hint of emotion, not even this close up. Panette half-imagines clay, not flesh, beneath the track of cloth. The only thing to indicate life is the wild black hair that’s come free at Harvei’s temples.

  “I eliminate suspected Ruumari speakers,” Harvei says. “For money. That’s how I survive.”

  Panette stops, the cloth midway between them.

  “Ammar and Lei are my clients,” she adds. “They work for interested parties in Camillon.”

  Panette puts the cloth down.

  “All ages,” Harvei says finally. “Even children. A lot of children.”

  There’s something terrible shackled behind the control of her features, the untouchable focus of her eyes. It never undams. There’s only the cutting wound to Panette’s heart, incision overlaid on old incisions.

  * * *

  Panette never moves away from Vannat. When on occasion she takes the stallions out beyond the city’s walls, the sky’s oppressive, the ground too red-rich with the minerals left behind by the Extinction’s shallow-buried dead. She forces herself to ride Vannat’s circumference every so often. A reminder, she supposes, of how tattered her heart would be without the balm of the amnesty-city.

  Harvei survives Vannat’s extrusion, leaving on a packhorse not unlike Panette’s first mount of the war effort. Panette sees her off.

  Nights, Panette dreams of Harvei being crushed. The suddenwalls in these dreams are not stone but walls of sound, walls of syllables that scald Harvei’s ski
n as they close in on her.

  Waking up from these dreams, Panette recalls more and more from her years with Harvei. In the war caravan. During the Extinction. These memories she sifts, on her back with her eyes closed, fists knotted in her blanket. She’s searching for the most untarnished of them to keep. Does Vannat know these too? Do the memories count in her favor or incriminate her?

  Panette only wonders briefly, and only privately, by first light.

  When she hears about a new suddenwall, she tilts her chin to shake the thought away.

  for Jess

  Copyright © 2017 Sara Saab

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Sara Saab loves warm croissants, crowded cities, and the sound boxing pads make when you punch them dead-center. She was born in Beirut, Lebanon but now lives in North London. Sara’s a 2015 graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop at UC San Diego. You can find her on Twitter as @fortnightlysara and at fortnightlysara.com.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  GHOSTS OF AMARANA

  by Kurt Hunt

  When the city of Amarana fell, broken from the cliffside like a docked tail, its cobbled streets fell first. For a heartbeat they retained their shapes, their curves, their intersections. I have memorized every single one—that ghost of the city, the amputated walkways and avenues backlit by the fading orange blooms of our bombs.

  By my side, someone whose face I can no longer see whispered, “It’s beautiful.”

  I tried to agree, but I couldn’t speak.

  The ghost city tilted as it fell, barely enough to see through the black spots burned into my retinas, then the streets divorced and the illusion was broken. There was no ghost. There was no city. Only a storm of cobbles, and they landed like hailstones.

  Buildings followed. Homes. Shops. The cluster of government offices that had inspired us to kill the city in the first place. All filled with screams—I still hear them, especially the children—as everything plunged to the valley floor and shattered. Only in the ensuing silence did the city’s outer wall—stubbornly rooted into the rock face, protecting only smoke and emptiness—collapse.

  * * *

  Here, there are no walls. Time has dissolved. I simply persist, each day an echo, huddled with prisoners and grimmer things in this massive stone bowl beneath the Judicial Plaza. It is the most famous—and the cruelest—of the oubliettes of the Fifth Sovereign. A prison without walls; confinement without bounds.

  Somewhere high—even higher than the spires of the plaza—comes the sounds of thunder, a great clearing of the throat. A whisper leaps up—a single ember, and everywhere it touches: conflagration. Prisoners scatter in orbit around me, hopelessly purposeful. Their instinct is to huddle, to hide, but where? Cruel, cornerless world. Some even cling to the bars above, faces turned up and gasping at the slash of rain like monstrous white koi biting at the surface for food. The rain falls, inevitable.

  It speaks to me of cyclicities. At the grated bottom of the bowl, where corpses collect and melt to the river below in fat rotting chunks, I lie back and watch the other figures—the ones that are not prisoners here. The rain passes through them as if they were fog, and they sing a melancholy song about a different rain, about pale dirt made black, about lying in the glurbling mud while drops fall into open mouths, open eyes.

  I would sing, too, but I have no songs.

  I watch the new prisoner too. The one that does not belong. Crawling, not like the others, but with purpose. Energetic. Inquisitive.

  He has come for me. But I don’t know who he is.

  * * *

  Amarana is a wreckage, but still its citizens press cold against me in the oubliette. Another darkness behind me. Like the mother who died birthing me—with each push I stole more of her breath, and still more until, crowning, I ended her and emerged, bloody fists held before my open eyes.

  My world now is the imprisoned and the dead, but I can’t tell the difference until they reach into me. Ghost fingers are needles—they dimple my flesh and then puncture, and once inside me they inject sensation and memory.

  This was how I had learned first-hand the fear of the people of Amarana when the city fell. The weightlessness, the shock, the wretched impotence. This was how I had lost myself beneath the terrible weight of their accusation.

  I cannot bear them, but I cannot flee.

  This is why I scream when the mysterious man touches my face, and I thrash away until I realize his fingers are blunt and rough like walnut shells, not needle-like at all. The fingers of a living man.

  He squints in a familiar way and opens his mouth. But instead of words he emits only a buzzing shriek, ear-splitting, a hundred thousand hives rising up in frenzy.

  I shrink down, hands protectively over my head, and the man touches my shaved scalp with a manner so gentle I finally recognize him. Kaeler. My brother, Kaeler.

  “Bzzz bzz?” he asks.

  Are these words?

  “Bzz ZZZZzzz.”

  I cannot recall. I shake my head.

  He looks from side to side and points down. Down to the grated barrier and the river below. “Bzz?”

  While I am staring at the black rush of the river, filled with vertigo terror, the air shifts—becomes heavier—and needles hit me.

  There is a ghost in me.

  “Your brother will help you escape,” says the ghost.

  I crouch and whimper.

  “Listen to him,” the ghost says.

  Kaeler opens his mouth to disturb the air, and those disturbances magically transform into words. “—can escape. Zin implanted—”

  I lose his words in a panic, overwhelmed by the relentless sound of Amarana’s detonation. It echoes still. More ghosts crawl into me—worms in an apple—and shush me and soothe me and instruct me.

  “You must go with him,” they say.

  I protest. I have carved a path through life like a reaper in the field.

  “Yes,” they say.

  There can be no resurrection. Nothing for the stalks beneath my feet but decay.

  “Yes,” they say. “But you cannot allow it to happen again. For you: one more swing of the scythe.”

  Redemption?

  “Perhaps.”

  One more swing of the scythe.

  I take Kaeler’s hand. We look at each other like wolves.

  * * *

  Too many voices in my head; too many visions. But I swear Kaeler opens a small hatch in his bottom jaw, and from it he withdraws a narrow jeweler’s blade, and, with a quick glance up, cuts off the top of his left middle finger.

  Blood is a friend of mine. It defined my old life—though I cannot remember exactly how—and my time in the oubliette.

  But what comes from Kaeler’s finger isn’t blood. It is too thin, too black, and where it hits the grates the metal smokes and fizzes and finally cracks to pieces.

  An implant. My old specialty.

  “Do you remember,” the ghosts inquire, “the men who bore the bombs like fetuses into Amarana?”

  Four men, and a woman. A young woman. Each placed strategically. There had been months of research and—

  “Quickly, now.” Kaeler grabs me. A dribble of black from his finger burns into me. “Be present, Lash.”

  “Look at him,” say the ghosts. “Look at him.”

  I look at the grate first. Kaeler had burned a hole almost two feet wide—more than enough for my starving body.

  “Into the river,” he says.

  The river is black and angry. It is thirty feet below us, and just looking at it, past the ropes of prisoner-rot swaying from the bars, overwhelms me. I evacuate my bowels and shriek something in a language I don’t know. Kaeler—it was Kaeler next to me when Amarana fell, Kaeler who saw the beauty, and

  “I have come far, brother,” says Kaeler. “We need you, and there is no time for hesitation.”

  “Jump,” says a ghost.

  “Fall.”

  “Jump!”

  So m
any voices.

  “Let the river take you.”

  “We will fall together.”

  “Into the river.”

  “Into the air!”

  —and one of them is Kaeler’s—

  “Trust us.”

  “NOW!”

  —but I don’t know which.

  “Jump!”

  “Stay together!”

  I close my eyes. Hands are on me, rough ones and needle ones.

  “Don’t worry.”

  “The fall will be over soon enough.”

  Someone laughs.

  “God be with us.”

  I open my eyes. The oubliette is above me, above us, quickly receding. From here it looks like a fishing net—massive, the size of a small town—hauling in its grisly catch of murderers and dissidents. Tangled in it are people like me, staring, already too far away to tell if they are confused or scared or excited.

  There is a brief sensation, like a shockwave, and I go black.

  * * *

  Water, people say, evokes a feeling of peace. Sunsets over lakes. Ocean waves talking their way up beaches.

  But water is false. Like a man, it has two faces. Its surface—merely the reflection of the people and things around it—is a pleasant story, a harmonious extension of its surroundings. But within: it is unforgiving, violent, cutting, crushing, bottomless, blinding...

  “Open your eyes,” says a voice.

  I am floating.

  “Surface,” says a voice.

  I am submerged.

  “Wake up!”

  Maybe water has three faces. Calm surface; chaos in the transition; and beneath is oblivion. Serenity.

  Escape.

  The ghosts scream in my head. Bubbles erupt from my mouth.

  “help”

  Strong arms wrap around me, and pull me back to the air and to life. Kaeler’s face is huge and black and wet.

  “Lash,” he whispers. “Lash, are you still here?”

  “I’m...” I don’t know what to say. Days have passed without food, with only rain for water, and my body... “I’m here.”