Beneath Ceaseless Skies #178

by Raphael Ordoñez

  The singing reached a crescendo and ceased. The light fell through the door now. Something was in the children’s bedroom.

  “I’m going to go see it,” said Mena.

  “Perhaps you’d better not,” said Helen. But she made no move to stop her.

  Mena went and soon returned. “Look,” she said. “It gave me this.” She held up a diaphanous infolded shell with a delicate design in gold leaf. Its shape was curiously simple—simpler than a perfect sphere—but it had no edges.

  The creature began to sing again.

  “I’m going now,” said Helen. She went as Mena had, and came back a moment later. “It was so beautiful,” she said. “I’ve never seen scales so snowy soft and golden white.” She opened her hands to reveal a lump of rich resin fit for the thurible. “It gave me this.”

  For the third time the creature sang.

  Brontes drew himself up. “This is madness,” he said, “but I suppose I should go see what it has for me.”

  He stalked past them into the chamber. There was a moment of silence, then a horrific scream cut short, and a fearful inhuman shriek. A succession of strange, unidentifiable noises followed. Then a rustling shudder, and finally a low crackle.

  They crept cautiously to the doorway and peered inside. Of Brontes there was no sign. A pile of what might have been soft, pearly scales lay heaped in the middle of the floor. It was being consumed by a smokeless white fire.

  Phoenix sat cross-legged on top of the wardrobe, watching them serenely. His bare skin was clean and white, as though newly made. Beauty both ancient and new sat in his face. He held up one hand as if to bless them. But Mena looked closely, and saw that his little finger was missing one joint.

  Copyright © 2015 Raphael Ordoñez

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Raphael Ordoñez is a mildly autistic writer and circuit-riding college professor living in the Texas hinterlands, eighty miles from the nearest bookstore. His stories have appeared multiple times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and his novel Dragonfly, featuring the same main character as his BCS story “Day of the Dragonfly,” is available from Hythloday House. He blogs sporadically about fantasy, writing, art, and life at raphordo.blogspot.com.

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  THE INSURRECTIONIST AND THE EMPRESS WHO REIGNS OVER TIME

  by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  They captured the insurrectionist Yin Sanhi during the Feast of Twelve Luminous Cranes.

  They found her in Onsakit the Red Capital, which she had helped conquer, where an army led by mathematicians and blade-artists had disemboweled a dynasty five centuries old. It was a baking day, the sun in apex; royal bodies cast to the sand were quick to cook.

  In a palace shaped like bromeliads Yin Sanhi sat sipping a liquor of fermented cactus essence and sand persimmon. The chamber was papered by scrolls of proverbs on statecraft. The mathematicians and artists meant to send her dancers in pale silk and musicians with wrists like flutes, but she had declined, choosing instead silence and solitude. On another day she might have chosen the company of Lenenha, her military arm, or Zheng Husin, her thinker. For now she wanted quiet, wanted only herself as she watched the sky bleed like ink in water. Blots across the clouds, like cranes.

  Until that day, Yin Sanhi had a knack of being absent when harm would find her, of being sideways when an arrow or shell meant for her flew, being elsewhere when a blade inscribed with the intent of beheading her fell. For thirty years her fortune had held; for thirty years she had found the weakest pillars of any state, the frailest link in the chain of any government, and struck. She looked, and found, the common discontent that could be ignited into civil war.

  None knew better than she the ways of dismantling empires.

  When soldiers serving Empress Narasorn of Kaiyakesi came, she was not surprised. Luck such as hers could not last, and though she was a peerless strategist, she was not infallible. Like any elevated leader or general, she knew that each victory merely postponed defeat. Probability is a game which no tactician may, ultimately, win. The most treacherous of all terrain.

  She looked up at the soldiers, expecting death. She considered a game of persuasion. Her words, her voice, were her most potent instruments.

  They put chains on her throat and ears, and thread on her lips. A special needle was used, of a pearlescent alloy hammered to the thinness of a hair. It entered the fat of her lips and exited through the skin around her mouth. When her eyes showed only whites they pricked until she woke again, so she would be conscious through the sealing of her mouth. They held her down while her breast filled with the weight and shape of screams.

  When they had bound her mouth so, and locked her voice in the cage of her lungs, they brought her to Kaiyakesi.

  * * *

  The palace of Empress Narasorn was built on an islet as flat as a windowpane, above a lake so immense and deep that great sharks and whales have mistaken it for ocean and made their home there. At all times, regardless of light, a perfect reflection shines beneath. It may waver under the passage of wind or water-striders, but it always keeps a certain solidity. In most respects it is a perfect double of the palace.

  It was into this mirror image that Yin Sanhi was taken and, for twelve months and twelve days, kept. An incision was made in her throat and a tube slipped into it: the surgery was delicate, so as to cause little pain—physical suffering was not the purpose of her incarceration.

  The best liquor was brought for her, distilled in summer nights where the sky washed chartreuse off its skins and turned it pale gold. The finest elephant meat was boiled in broth, the whitest rice beaten into a pulp, for the sustenance of Yin Sanhi. The room in which she was held was a double of the empress’ own suite, furnished with instruments to amuse, windows that looked out to upside-down fish and diverse sights. She was given ink and pigment, paper and canvas. Had she written down a request for the company of temple singers with the voices of birds and the eyes of wild animals caught in a trap, doubtless those would have been sent for, with instructions to entertain her in whatever fashion she preferred as long as it did not involve conversation. But she did not ask for that.

  The flesh of her mouth did not mortify and the stitches did not snap or cut; nevertheless they fettered with the surety of iron. Sanhi’s voice was her weapon; it was the primary tool with which she bound revolutions to her across three nations and five city-states, where she toppled monarchs and magistrates, upended priest-lords and icons-made-flesh. Words and the memory of her voice built up within her stomach, her ribcage, between her teeth. She exhaled them through her nose and eyes and ears, where they calcified into amber echoes: trapped sentences and fragments of speeches which, once, had roused cobblers to arms and turned soldiers from their oaths. Sanhi collected each echo and stored them in a redwood box, where the words rattled half-articulate, calling for justice and liberty, for the destruction of kingly yoke or theocratic fetters. For a new order, a better world.

  Her keepers were commanded to never communicate with her in any way other than to accept her requests for paint, manuscripts, or bees to keep as pets.

  * * *

  Twelve months and twelve days passed.

  * * *

  They did not prepare Sanhi for the audience. She was not cleaned and perfumed or clothed in the penitent’s robe; her hair was not shorn and her face was not tattooed with the purple scales that would brand her as dynastic property. No iron wasps heated to red incandescence were pressed into her flesh to scar her with the royal alphabet. The empress came to her rather than the more conventional way around.

  Empress Narasorn is not beautiful, and the faith that ruled both her nation and her palace forbids court poets to tell lies. Her bearing-mother had been broad in the shoulder and thick in the neck; her giving-mother had been widely built. She inherited these aspects, and they should have made her breathtaking. But something in her features betrayed this excellent heritage—a sharpness of bone, an angle
of jaw—and she was merely plain. Nor did she adorn herself; she dressed as a footsoldier might in times of war and scarcity. A blade was strapped to her thigh, passed down from her bearing-mother, and an arrowhead gleamed around her neck, a keepsake from her giving-mother. Her hair was austere, cropped, dyed iron-gray.

  Sanhi regarded the empress without kneeling, no restraints upon her save the sutures on her lips. She was not a soldier, had never been, but thirty years an insurrectionist—eight civil wars—had taught her enough, should it become necessary to defend herself. But she did not move, yet, though there were many objects at hand she could turn into a weapon: the shards of unmelting ice, the fangs of a blue lion—those and more draped the wall as trophies, and were mere steps from her.

  Instead she unlocked the redwood box, upon whose lid were carved the symbols of Kaiyakesi faith, and arranged the fossils of her voice in a zodiac pattern.

  “I did not capture you,” the empress said, in a voice like snapping banners, “in order to have you perform a charlatan’s duty and tell fortune.”

  Yin Sanhi moved pieces of whispering amber into an outline of a turtle, the animal of wise questions.

  Empress Narasorn smiled. “I captured you for your voice, Yin Sanhi.”

  To this Sanhi made no answer or gesture. The fragments of her speeches had much quieted during her imprisonment; an exceptional listener might still have heard the poetry of her cadence. Narasorn listened well, but did not appreciate verse of any sort.

  The empress had long, blunt fingers callused with the vigor of statecraft. She laid their tips now along the insurrectionist’s lips.

  Her nails pierced, and blood sprang like pearls. The stitches fell away gleaming, each having hardened into shells, to click and roll at the women’s feet.

  Sanhi sipped at the air. Her tongue, cat-rough, scraped the empress’ fingers.

  Narasorn poured tea.

  For the first time in a year, Sanhi tasted the lake’s saltiness, and drank tea through her mouth instead of the feeding tube. When she had had her fill, when the distillation of golden hand-fruits and shark fins had restored some of her voice, Yin Sanhi lifted her head. “Most would’ve kept me silenced for longer than twelve months and twelve days.”

  “Most would have killed you and silenced you forever.”

  “So they would have; why have you not?”

  “I brought you here for a specific purpose.” Narasorn canted her head. “Perhaps you are in want of an explanation. But first, proper food, for I’ll have you strong and whole or you are of no use to me.”

  The empress exited, and the insurrectionist required no instruction to follow her out. Locks loosened where Narasorn walked; doors Sanhi had never seen fell open. A prayer room where jars of ash rattled and candles guttered in still air, a scriptorium smelling of saffron where orange and black books kept the balance of razor wheels. Finally they came to a dining hall fit for two hundred, where tables were arranged not for banquets or grand weddings but as though for the dining of soldiers. Harsh function. Nothing else.

  At the smallest table, food had been laid out. Cuts of bleeding meat and duck tongue lightly cooked, heavily spiced. Broiled stomachs, which the empress opened with a knife from her belt; they spilled glutinous rice and maidenhair nuts sodden with blood, a red treasury.

  Yin Sanhi looked at this fare and said, “I am not an animal.”

  “No,” Narasorn agreed, “but this will nurture your arteries and return flesh to your bones. I’ve tried to have food sent to you that was good for the body’s elements, but broth and drinks can only go so far.”

  The insurrectionist sat and ate. Her jaw remained strong and her teeth sharp, owing perhaps to the rumor that she descended from a line of tiger-demons. The empress watched her closely. But the insurrectionist was only a woman made skeletal on a year of deprivation, and her table manner was immaculate.

  When each bowl was dry of the last drop of blood, each celadon tray cleaned of the last grain of rice, Yin Sanhi pressed a thumb to the feeding tube in the side of her neck and exhaled. Her fingers trembled, minutely, but that did not escape Narasorn’s notice.

  “It pleases me,” the empress said, wielding her words like needles under nails, “that an enforced silence did not break you.”

  “My constitution isn’t so delicate as that. No red iron was pressed into my breast, no black steel slipped between my ribs. I was fed well and received nearly anything I asked for. What is a year of silence?”

  “Nothing at all. Do you know the properties of my palace’s image?”

  Sanhi gazed through a round window. Sharks showed her their bellies. “It is upside down.”

  “It is more than that, but it’s best to let you discover that for yourself.” The empress’ smile, which had been constant as the horizon, widened. “First let us depart from this place.”

  * * *

  Twelve months are not so long for anyone. Even for a dog it is merely a fifteenth of its span. But an insurrectionist measures her time by the wax and wane of strife, the success and failure of revolts. To Yin Sanhi a year’s absence severed her from the thread of the blade-artists and mathematicians, the coil of Onsakit’s upturning and its consequences; to her this was a long illness, a grave wound. In a time of discord anything could have happened in a month, let alone twelve. She does not know what goes on there, and this lack of knowing trembles in her like a thorn.

  The empress leads Sanhi up steps of scales and teeth, through doors of water and glass. The empress leads Sanhi as she walks up a wall, then along a ceiling of black nacre and iron wasps.

  They are in the palace above: this Sanhi can tell at once, from the absence of seaweed and fish smells, from the presence of sunlight that has not been sieved through lotus leaves and lake water. It is hot and gold and bright, and the touch of it startles her—searing on the tongue, pricking on the flesh, like the needle that once sewed her lips shut.

  From behind her the empress says, “I know that in thirty years since you began your work you’ve committed three great deeds, at three different sites: Citadel-that-Burns Honghu, Bussaba-Morrakot where facets flourish, and finally Onsakit the Red Capital.”

  The insurrectionist licks her lips; they still taste of thread, a faint iron tang. “You have made a study of me. I’m flattered.”

  “My bearing-mother trained me to make a science of familiarity: to observe, to catalogue, to memorize intimately... and I, much as she was, am uniquely favored for such a discipline. That I will demonstrate to you, in time.”

  “You are open with your secrets.”

  “Revealing them is as much an art as keeping them.” The empress throws open the shutters.

  A shudder knifes through Sanhi as the day blinds her. She does not mean to shame herself, but the strength of it drops her to her knees, where she bows to the summer blaze and gasps into the charring heat. But she turns her face to it, crawls forward onto the veranda, to let the sun brand her, seep into her tendons.

  “I understand,” the empress says, “that you were born on a noon much warmer than this, grew up on the edge of a desert. This must be nothing to you.”

  Sanhi gazes down into the lake that kept her prisoner; it scintillates, much as Bussaba-Morrakot does, or once did. The garden where jeweled fruits bud, where glass flowers converse, the one she helped shatter, that was Bussaba-Morrakot. “In the place of my birth it is taught that fire is the element of the spirit, even if the flesh may not always endure it.”

  “An uncompromising philosophy, but one to which I’m not unsympathetic. When you’re strong enough I will give you currency, rations, clothing and any other supplies you require. You’re free to go where you would.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Your sentence has served its purpose.”

  Yin Sanhi stands, swallowing mouthfuls of air. Perhaps Narasorn means to make a point; perhaps Narasorn believes a year’s incarceration is enough to permanently remove her from the board, her irrelevancy fatal.
Her foot is half in a trap. But she says, “I’m strong enough.”

  * * *

  When the empress finds the insurrectionist again, a month has fleeted past. Yin Sanhi is standing on the roof of the Rosette, the bromeliad palace where she once led an army to empty its halls of royal bodies. Narasorn rides one of Kaiyakesi’s beasts, bootblack iron and a belly full of thunder-wasps. The insurrectionist does not flinch when it lands for all its terror, its brute reality.

  She is holding two ash-jars sealed and marked with small pictographs: each a woman stylized in harsh brushstrokes. Strings of folded cranes drape her right arm, and chains of miniature blades her left. “First of Blades Lenenha, and the Algebraist of Composites Zheng Husin,” Sanhi says. Sleeplessness has bruised her eyes and grief has hunched her shoulders. “Forty-five and forty-seven years deceased, so I’ve been told.”

  “It is the property of my lake retreat,” the empress says as she dismounts. “My court theoreticians will have the precise numbers; I’ve never found the difference to be exact. But while twelve months passed there for you, fifty years and three months have gone by in the world without. In burning Honghu, in glittering Bussaba-Morrakot, and here, in Onsakit the Red. I meant to tell you as much, but you wouldn’t have believed me without seeing it for yourself. So I let you go.”

  “At the time of my capture you were said to be forty. You do not look a hundred to me.”

  “That is one of my secrets.”

  “What is your purpose?” Yin Sanhi’s throat flexes around the feeding tube. She has not covered it with choker or scarf, nor done much to hide the indentations on her lips. “Perhaps you believe that by making me irrelevant you’ve given me a death worse than strangling or drowning, a torture worse than nails and whips?”

  “I wanted to foster hatred within you,” the empress says, with little feeling. “It would be fierce and total, with a strong hard neck and a jaw that knows no closing. This hate would pump through the chamber of your heart in place of blood, and it would inform each sip of water poured down your feeding tube. It would overtake all else, and it would be for me, for Kaiyakesi.”