Beneath Ceaseless Skies #170

by Cat Rambo

  “What are you doing?” Ria exclaimed.

  Primaflora licked the sap from her lips, feeling its strength infuse her. “We don’t have many chances or much time. They’ve kept us starved in order to keep us weak; docile. Will squeamishness keep you from accepting the last gift this tree has to give us?”

  They all could feel the form trapped beneath the bark. No ordinary tree, but a rooted dryad, who’d taken this immobile form for good and thus been unable to resist when the boat’s crew came with axes and chains. The sap oozing from the holes cut in the log was that dryad’s coagulating blood.

  Falling Water Song, Columbine, and Ria followed her example, but none of the rest. That was fine. It trimmed down the number she felt responsible for. If they couldn’t take her suggestions in order to strengthen their chances, then she owed them no effort in return.

  Footsteps along the stairway. She straightened. They all did.

  The driver. He unlocked the chain secured to the bole’s larger end from the fence and led them on foot.

  More stairs. She was glad that this driver seemed in less than prime shape. He climbed slowly, breathing hard, as she did. The time aboard the Swan, chained and unable to move, had not served her well.

  A final landing, then archways and a courtyard. Were they there at last?

  * * *

  The gates over the entrance to the Duke’s Menagerie bore words in curling letters, carved of stone so cleverly that they looked like vines that had simply grown in such a pattern.

  “They say ‘The wildest heart may be tamed by love’,” Petya informed her.

  When they had first arrived three days ago, Petya had attached herself to Primaflora as though they had grown in the same grove. Primaflora wasn’t sure what drew Petya to her, but she didn’t want to pursue these thoughts. Petya had been there in the Duke’s Menagerie three years and was an experiment on the Duke’s part to discover what happened when a dryad’s rooting was thwarted. A Keeper watched Petya wherever she went, and whenever she looked as though she had been in a place longer than a single turn of the gold and glass hourglass the Keeper bore, she was rousted with gentle but ruthless efficiency.

  Petya’s hair looked like broomstraws, and strands of it drifted away whenever she moved too quickly. The sparrows looking for nesting material followed her, taking her bounty to weave into their nests, creating soft brown cups dotted with dry flowerets. Her eyes glittered with a feverish cast, and often what she said made no sense.

  But she had been here three years. She was Primaflora’s best chance to find out what was going on and how she might flee back to her homeland.

  Such an escape was a thin straw at best, she learned. Petya was full of horrific stories of those who had essayed such an attempt and been taken in it. Usually the Duke gave the truant over to the College of Mages.

  “They take them to pieces, you know, there,” Petya confided. “They want to look inside us, but the only way they can do that is to cut us open.” She passed a hand down her chest as though envisioning the knife stroke that would do so.

  Primaflora shuddered.

  “You don’t need to worry,” Petya said. “They want you to root.”

  This was evident. They had supplied her with plenty of space to do so, and if she chose to sit and rest a while, no Keeper watched, ready to roust her if she showed any signs of the slumber that presaged rooting.

  “Why?” she asked Petya.

  Petya giggled, an unexpected and chilling sound. “The Duke has his own forests,” she said. “Will you grow there?”

  “I do not seem to have much choice,” Primaflora admitted.

  Petya’s stare was sky-wide, edged with delirium. “No,” she said, “no choice at all.”

  The sky overhead was blue as Petya’s eyes, but bars of iron lay across it, a grating intended to keep those of the Duke’s creatures that might manage to fly from escaping. There were few of those; most had been treated in the same wise as the dragon that curled in the front hall, the stumps of its wings scabbed over with the hot tar that had been used to dress the amputations. It made Primaflora shudder every time she saw it, and she felt pity for the dragon, although she shouldn’t have. Dragons and dryads held a natural antipathy against each other; a dragon loves nothing more than a good blaze, and a dryad fears such a thing to the same degree.

  The menagerie, despite the best efforts of the Keepers, stank. It smelled of the heavy musk from the ancient lion kept in the tiniest of pens, and stale seawater from the tanks of dolphin poets, who were kept there despite their (and the Keepers’) pleas that they be housed in the netted tanks down by the shipyards. The Duke liked his dolphin singers nearby, ready to sing to him in the evenings, and accordingly there were always at least three of them kept in the menagerie, or so Primaflora’s other new friend, Rebekah, told her.

  Rebekah was an Oracular pig, and she had the same sadness about her that so many prophetic animals had. When the dryads had first been shunted into the general courtyard, Rebekah had shown them where the food and water and necessaries were. She’d asked about Primaflora’s impressions of the city and said she’d been there at the menagerie twenty years now. They’d tried to breed her, many times, she’d confided, but it had never taken.

  She was chatty, like Petya, and ready to fill up whatever silences Petya left empty. She knew all the long-running feuds and alliances and experiments between, and on, the inmates. She showed Primaflora a small copse of dryad trees where Petya was not allowed to go.

  The sight of them made Primaflora feel faint with desire. She’d just been beginning to think about rooting when she’d been taken. The rigors of the journey, the dangers it pressed upon her body, had all brought it closer, made her yearn after it, thirst for its restful oblivion to drown in.

  She wrenched her gaze from it and said to Rebekah, “Petya is the only other unrooted dryad here?”

  When Rebekah dipped her snout in a nod, a pang struck Primaflora. No one to talk to, to advise her, no one who would understand its pull. The dryads who had arrived with her were worthless; they wailed and whined and lamented. Primaflora had never thought herself particularly impatient, but these dryads drove her mad.

  Rebekah watched her with sad, long-lashed eyes. Primaflora would not ask. You never asked an Oracular animal what they saw in store for you. But she would have liked to know. She tried to put that in her gaze, but Rebekah ignored any sign of it.

  “Most of us are allowed to wander loose within these walls,” Rebekah told her. “If you cause trouble, you’ll lose that privilege.” They looked at the other dryads, who had found the fishpond in the center of the courtyard and were clustered around the shallow basin, drinking as though they had been transported here over the desert rather than a river.

  “Primaflora,” Rebekah said, “we’ll be good friends once you let yourself trust me.”

  Primaflora stared at her, trying to make sense of the words. What did Rebekah see in store for her?

  * * *

  Life in the menagerie was dull. The denizens entertained the Duke when he wanted, with conversation or singing or even just standing in place, stock still, for appraisal. Sometimes he brought a few favored courtiers with him, but none cared about the plants and dryads of the collection. They might call for the riddling deer and a few ladies for the old satyr that had belonged to the Duke’s great-aunt, but mostly they wanted the dolphin bards or cages of singing birds.

  The new dryads were catalogued, each asked name and whatever particulars of their home groves they could describe.

  Primaflora lied. It made her laugh to think she was written in their books as the daughter of Cornfragrance, daughter of Neverthistle, or that they thought she’d last flowered in the fall and not put out blossoms in her hair, as all of them had, on the trip. Such a petty revenge, but it was all she had right now.

  The Duke looked them all over. He said to the Keeper, “Is there enough room for this many new dryads?”

  The man had said, sott
o voce, “We will clean out some of the dead wood when the occasion arises, my lord.” Horrified, Primaflora and the others had vowed to stave off rooting as long as they could.

  But they couldn’t keep from it forever. The menagerie constantly changed. That was why they were here, fresh flowers to be rotated into the landscape, updating it so it would continue to amuse and delight.

  She wasn’t even sure how long they had been here. It was still winter, still cold outside, and the winds that penetrated this sheltered wing of the castle held an edge of ice.

  “I wish that spring would come,” she said to Rebekah.

  Rebekah said, “In a few days, the Gladiatorial games will decide whether spring comes now or in six weeks.”

  There was no end to the oddness of human customs. “They play a game to determine the weather?”

  “They fight,” Rebekah said. “A fighting game. I’ve never seen it, but I’ve heard of it. Sometimes beasts fight in the games too. The Duke is always there.”

  She stared at Primaflora.

  “It’s how you get away,” she said, but then would say nothing more.

  * * *

  Petya was worse that day than she had been since Primaflora and the others had arrived. A Keeper had set their youngest child, who was being trained in the trade, on her, and the child had a little willow switch with nettles wrapped around the tip.

  Petya kept trying to rest. The child, out of misplaced kindness or else diabolical instinct, would let her sit just long enough to relax before the prod would land, usually on exposed flesh. The dryads wore only the shifts the Keepers pressed upon them, and even then sought any excuse to discard them.

  Petya burned with need, Primaflora could tell. It was cold and crisp weather, which should have held it off, but there was also a sense of magical flux, the swirl of untouchable, unknowable energies hanging in the air. She watched the child as it chivied Petya away from the patch of sand near the fishpond. Petya rose, took a few steps this way, then another; indecisive. The child stood waiting, face unreadable.

  Petya saw Primaflora and Rebekah. She started walking towards them.

  “Remember how much you like being in the open air,” Rebekah said. Her tone was resigned. She nosed the icy cobblestones underfoot.

  “What?” Primaflora said.

  “When it comes back to this—don’t worry. You managed it. Just remember the third day.”

  Petya was there. Her eyes were glazed, the pupils pinpoints in the bright sunlight.

  “Did you hear the thunder last night?” she asked.

  “Those were fireworks,” Primaflora said. “Didn’t you see them?”

  Petya shook her head, let the unkempt mass of her hair fall forward. Withered flowers studded the ragged strands, buds gone to dust without ever unfurling. She said, “I thought it was thunder and that soon it would rain.”

  Primaflora could think of no reply.

  Petya swayed on her feet. The child watched her with incurious eyes, placid as the cloud passing in front of the sun, bellied like a fat chicken, features lost in downy white fluff.

  Rebekah said, “Stay by the bars on the third day. You’ll need some sort of stick to reach out and snag them, and something to muffle the fall, keep them from jingling.”

  Petya was speaking even as Primaflora started to say “What?” again. No, she was singing, a lullaby, a sleep song of the sort you sang to a tree at night. It was a very private song, not what Primaflora should be listening to, and it made her blush. Petya swayed back and forth, the song barely audible, its notes just a whisper unwinding from her mouth into the air, even as her long brown toes flexed over the ground, bent and unbent twice before uncurling further, starting to dig in...

  Petya shrieked. The child hit her twice again, on the face this time. The clump of leaves left reddened welts on the birch-white skin.

  Rebekah said, “The third day. Say it with me. Will you remember?”

  But Primaflora had no time for whatever Rebekah was hinting at. Petya’s torment needed to stop, if only for a little while. She grabbed the stick, snapped it over her knee. The child gaped.

  “Rest, dear friend,” Primaflora said to Petya. Petya’s toes flexed in the dirt and she stooped so her fingers could follow. A spot of color in the broom-straw pallor of her hair: a single flower still capable of blooming. The air smelled like mint and carnations and day-old rushes.

  Primaflora held her hands in her own, thin and reedy as rolled paper. “I will buy you what time I can. Sleep. Sleep.”

  The child shrieked something. A shout answered in the distance.

  At this distance, she could feel waves of heat and cold washing through Petya, deep shudders of earth magic helping her send roots down. Already her skin was thickening. Her eyes were closed and the air was full of the smell of her blossoming.

  * * *

  Primaflora could not see how much further Petya got in her rooting before being pulled away, although she scratched and bit and kicked and fought as best she could.

  The cell they locked her in was made of stone, and the floors and walls had been scrubbed with salt water, so its touch stung her skin. She sat on the cot and stared at the wall.

  She set her hair to growing, thinking she would use it to pad the cot. But the first night, two guards appeared and cut away what she had grown, leaving her with only a finger’s worth of stubble.

  After that it became an act of defiance, growing out her hair. Every morning she lay amid the mass of it she had strained to produce over the course of the night, feeling herself drawn thinner, tighter, counting the sweet hay smell surrounding her a victory.

  She was not sure that it wasn’t a victory for the Duke as well. She thought that her hair was being sold to the College of Mages, as were the other things Rebekah had told her of: mermaid scales and the long quills from gryphon and hippogriff wings, stony basilisk eggs and certain droppings. And the dryad logs from the trees that would be chopped down when the new dryads rooted there.

  A cheeseparing lord, Rebekah had called him.

  Had Primaflora bought enough time? Had Petya succeeded in rooting?

  She cast her mind back over the day. She froze on a single moment.

  “You managed it,” Rebekah had said.

  Surely Rebekah had been anticipating this moment of worry.

  Primaflora had to find the stick Rebekah had spoken of. At first she despaired of it, but in poking at the cot on the second day, she realized she could detach a leg from its frame. The absence was painfully obvious, but what could be done about that?

  She rehearsed it a thousand times in her head that third night.

  On the third morning she gathered the mass of hair, rolled it over and over in her hands till it was a thick ball. She set it near the foot of the bars and knelt beside it, stick tucked to lie along her arm. There, she waited.

  It wouldn’t work unless something else happened to draw the guard’s attention. What? What had Rebekah seen?

  She had to trust Rebekah. It was all she had.

  The pair of guards walked past without a second look. An explosion outside shook the corridor, and she reached out with the stick before she even thought about it, rolling the clump of hair out at the same moment using her long toes.

  Only her ears heard the muted jingle of the keys falling from the guard’s belt. The guards shouted something and ran ahead.

  She shifted her grip on the cot leg and snagged the keys on the second try, pulling them in. She replaced the leg and put the keys underneath her pillow, lying down as she heard returning footsteps.

  “It could have been back in the other cells, to be sure, but where were we along here when we heard that noise?” one guard grumbled to the other.

  They stared at her and the other prisoners as they passed along the hallway. It would have been easy enough for one of the other prisoners to say something about what she’d taken from the corridor floor. Relief weakened her knees as the guards passed farther and no one said anythin
g.

  “They’re not anywhere along here,” the other guard said. “No one had time enough to grab ‘em. You’re safe enough.”

  “You and me both’ll be out on our asses if we let any of these beasts escape.”

  The other guard stared through the bars at her. She met his eyes, defiant as she had been in every other encounter, but kept her expression blank as snow. This time she had something to lose, and she dared not signal that, dared not hint at the joy it had loosed in her, lest it be taken away as quickly and arbitrarily as fate had bestowed it on her.

  What was Rebekah doing right now? Surely she must have sensed this too, must be waiting to leave with Primaflora. They would escape, and with Rebekah’s knowledge of Tabat, its customs and complications, they’d be able to stay one step ahead of any hunters, anyone who might come seeking escapees from the Duke’s Menagerie.

  Another bang and crash from somewhere down the hall.

  The guard snarled, “What are you looking at?” and slammed his forearm against the bars at face level. He laughed when she flinched back.

  When they were gone, she fumbled the keys loose. It was hard to open her door from the inside, easier to open all the rest from the outside. The other prisoners were both beast and human. Very democratic of the Duke’s jailers, she thought, or perhaps it was another means of cutting costs?

  Rebekah met her beside the side door. Primaflora rested her palm on Rebekah’s broad back, feeling its solidity. But there was no time.

  “They’ll catch you if you go down there,” Rebekah said, snout motioning at the head of the stairs. “You’ve got to hide, and escape after all the hullabaloo is over.” She trotted briskly to the other dryad trees. “This one is hollow.”

  “How long...” Primaflora said. Surely she would have sensed this tree’s demise before? The smell of rotting wood reached her nose.

  “She did it so you could escape.” Ria stood there. “She willed herself to death and then we removed what was left of her.”

  Kneeling to look through the indicated crevice, Primaflora could tell it was true. A hollowed space that might have once been shaped around a dryad’s form had been hollowed out further, enough to admit another dryad.