Beneath Ceaseless Skies #170

by Cat Rambo

  Primaflora watched her where she sat mending the leather wrapping of the huge axe she carried. As though sensing her gaze, Aisha looked up. The great eye blinked at Primaflora, its expression unreadable as Aisha rose and approached her.

  “New girl,” she said, pointing at Primaflora. “What will you do, new girl? Hide like most of them? Run? Or fight?”

  “Fight?” Primaflora stammered. “You mean fight the humans? But how? They have soldiers and magicians.” How could any beast hope to withstand the humans? No, the only strategy was to escape their notice and work in secret to free the others.

  She said as much, and Aisha scowled. “We can fight,” she grunted. “We use the mountains, hide, jump out to attack, hide again.”

  “They come into the mountains?” Primaflora asked with a twinge of despair. She had thought herself safe here, at least a little safer than she had been when imprisoned in the Duke’s estate.

  “No place far enough,” the cyclops said. “In the North they hunted me because they wanted to make an example of me. So we will make them come here to hunt, by making them think it worth it.”

  “How?”

  “How else? We will show them that we are here and a danger to them. We will raid the lowland farms until they come to hunt us thinking we will flee before them and then perhaps lead them to our lairs. But they think as though we were animals, and we are more than that. We are something as cunning as they are.”

  Sunlight gleamed on her axe.

  * * *

  Wails alerted everyone in the camp to the new escapee. The centaur woman bore a bundle, refused to relinquish it. From where Primaflora stood, she saw a tiny, translucent hoof. She hurried forward, coaxed the woman into giving her the bundle.

  The child was dead.

  “What happened?” she asked. Tears engraved the centaur woman’s face. Dryads never knew their children. Though Primaflora felt a certain tenderness for the offspring she would produce in her eventual final flowering, she knew it was nothing like the tie between a centaur and its young.

  “We were hiding,” the mother said. “They were going to take us back and I couldn’t bear it for him. They were so close, I thought we were doomed.”

  Primaflora could see horror in the eyes around her. She took the blanket surrounding the body and pulled a flap up over the face. The legs dangled limply and felt fragile as a bird’s as she shifted the bundle, swaddled it, shut it away from everyone’s eyes.

  The mother stared into space, eyes glazed and white and mad. “I put my hand over his mouth. His lips moved against my palm as I smothered him. He stared into my eyes all the while. He understood what I was doing and why. I believe that. I must believe that.” She buckled, went to her knees, something Primaflora had never seen a healthy centaur do, hung her head so her tangled hair fell in a dusty curtain, partitioning off her grief.

  Footsteps shook the ground as Aisha lumbered up. She was an ungainly creature, and privately Primaflora thought again that all cyclops looked as though they had been shaped of clay and left half-finished.

  “You are free,” Aisha told the woman. “And you prevented your child from falling into captivity, into a life of torment and servitude.”

  The centaur woman did not seem to hear the words. She stared off into the distance. Tears striped her dusty cheeks.

  Aisha stood there. Primaflora had observed before that Aisha led through strength, rather than diplomacy, as well as the natural inclination of beasts, who had been born into servitude for the most part, to obey anyone who seemed authoritative.

  Something about Aisha rankled Primaflora, but she thought it might simply be that the cyclops’s manner reminded her of a human’s attitude, so sure and self-confident. She’d been that way once herself, she thought, before she’d experienced being ripped from her native forest. It had scarred something inside her.

  The scar, though, was what allowed her to still resist the urge to root. She stinted herself on water, knowing it would only encourage the urge, and her supple skin thickened and coarsened, looking like the bark of a withered tree. She didn’t care. When the urge pressed her too close, she thought of burning trees, of logs being thrown into the great magical furnaces. The thought of the flames helped her resist.

  There were no others of her people here, so she could not ask them what would happen if she went too long. Would she become, like Petra, half mad? It was something that had never been spoken of. Taboo.

  The mother refused to rise that night, or when they broke camp.

  “I will wait here,” she muttered to the ground when they tried to pull her up. “Sooner or later the beast catchers will come.”

  The worst of it, Primaflora realized, was that she was right.

  * * *

  Three days later, Primaflora was one of the six the cyclops chose to accompany her on a raid. The others were Swiftwind, two of the goblins, a selkie named Idalya who had lost the ability to transform, and a fox woman from the Western lands. Primaflora had never met one of the latter before. There were so many varieties of beast in the world! Were they all lesser than humans? It made no sense to Primaflora that the humans said their gods had given them dominion over all. She had never thought much philosophically, but there was plenty of free time in the camp, and she could not help but use some of it for thinking.

  She had not thought she would go on the raid, until Aisha asked. The cyclops had clearly expected a “no.” Something about that forced Primaflora in the opposite direction.

  She thought, “How complicated is it to kill?”

  The humans had found it easy enough.

  * * *

  She refused sword or musket but carried a long, leaf-bladed knife, so sharp it could have severed one of the long shadows. The leather vest she wore was reinforced with leather scales and weighed her down till she could scarcely bear it. She wanted to remove it, but when she started to undo the laces, Aisha had shook her head in refusal.

  Farms lay along the river, dark earth smelling of preparation for planting. The heady scent rose to Primaflora’s nostrils, spread through her body, made her feet twitch. Spring was nearing, it was her season. Thoughts tugged at her: she could lay down her weapons and armor, she could spread her arms, plunge her long toes into the soft loam, and become the tree she was meant to be. Here surely she would be safe. Children would play beneath her, and there would be little animals: squirrels and birds and butterflies and bees.

  A wave of dizziness swept through her, and she staggered where she walked.

  “You all right?” the goblin behind her said.

  She shook her head to clear it. “I’m fine.” She needed to focus on what was at hand, not worry about rooting. If she did it here, the humans would find her, would know that it was a dryad tree, and chop it down in order to claim the bounty.

  They walked in single-file along the path towards the farmhouse. The first goblin bore things that Primaflora didn’t like to think about: the means for making flame. They would set a few buildings alight and slip away before the alarm was set.

  But that was not how it happened.

  The humans rushed outside into the fire-lit darkness, shouting. She saw Aisha’s axe fall and rise again, gleaming scarlet in the light.

  Her stomach churned, but wasn’t this the justice she’d wanted? Let them fall, as the trees had fallen!

  But she was sick at heart by the time they returned to camp. Three bloody scalps rode at Aisha’s hip.

  “Battle trophies,” she said. She laughed at Primaflora’s expression. “Do you not understand what this is? We are at war.”

  “I cannot do this,” Primaflora said.

  “Then there is no place in this camp for you. You complained before of boredom, surely here is excitement enough.”

  “I will root soon anyhow.”

  Aisha studied her, the great eye bloodshot from torch smoke. Blood still smeared the broad cheeks. “Then I will find some other solution,” she finally said, and turned away.

/>   * * *

  Primaflora didn’t mind spending her morning fetching water from the river. The motion of walking kept her from thinking about rooting.

  The two blocked her way along the path, just out of earshot of the camp: Aisha and an unprepossessing man. She presumed him beast, although he looked human enough to set her nerves ajangle.

  “This is Murga,” Aisha said. Her tone held a layer of indecipherable meaning.

  Primaflora nodded at him, but he did not speak, studying her.

  “Murga runs our cover in Tabat,” Aisha supplied.

  “The circus?” Primaflora asked, curiosity piqued. She’d been told of the beasts’ base within the very city itself, hiding in plain sight amid the welter of entertainment lured to Tabat by the promise of work at political gatherings and festivities. Was this what Aisha meant to do, send her there? It did not answer the question of rooting.

  “The Circus of the Autumn Moon,” the man said. His voice was low, as though not to startle Primaflora.

  This warmed her to him a trifle. “It is a pretty name,” she said.

  “All circuses bear names from calendars or holidays. It gives them a reason to put on a grand anniversary show each year.”

  Another odd human conceit. She wanted dearly to ask what sort of beast he was, but manners forbid. She noted his unpointed ears, the omnivore’s jaw, the unremarkable eyes.

  As though sensing the purpose of her scrutiny, he smiled. “Aisha tells me you are afraid you will root soon, and become useless to the cause.”

  Not for the first time, Primaflora cursed confiding in the cyclops. “It is something any dryad would worry about in my position,” she replied, letting chill creep into her tone.

  Without asking permission, he reached forward and took her arm, running his thumb along the skin to test its texture. Primaflora pulled away.

  As though he hadn’t noticed her reaction, he spoke. “You’re right to be worried. You’re very close. Summer will make it even worse.”

  Humiliation burned in her. Fueling it was the truth. If she rooted, she would lose all ability to move, would only be able to wait, helpless, for the axes to come and fetch her to the lifeless piles near the great furnace. “I can withstand it for now.”

  “What if I told you there was a way you might remain able to think and act in our cause?”

  She glanced at Aisha. The cyclops woman nodded as though in confirmation. “He can work magic,” she said. “He can help you.’

  “But to do so, you would need to travel back into Tabat with me,” Murga added. “All my devices and magical workings are there.”

  Two centaurs passed on the same errand Primaflora had been on. One glanced at the buckets in Primaflora’s hands and sniffed, long tail flicking in irritation. Malingerers were not encouraged in the camp.

  But Primaflora paid her little mind, looking at Murga.

  “You could do this?” she said.

  “Beyond any question. I’m taking a wagon of beasts back to the city tomorrow. You’ll be just another one, entering Tabat to serve in the circus.”

  Doubt crept in like a trickle of water to threaten the coal urging her on. What was he, that he could speak of magic like this? Only a human mage would deal in devices.

  “Not all humans wish to see beasts enslaved,” he said, confirming all her doubts. He was one of the axe-wielders, the chain-forgers, the furnace-builders!

  The cyclops gripped her arm when she would have fled. “We trust him,” she said. “Phillip trusts him. He would not be here if Murga had not found him and healed him of what the humans had done to steal his mind.”

  She wanted to believe that the humans could be like this. But she remembered the faces on the docks and streets of Tabat, watching the dryads pass as incuriously as though they had been furniture loaded on a cart. The jokes of the sailors. The Duke’s eyes, possessive of his things.

  Her toes curled and uncurled painfully, dry and withered.

  What choice did she have? Every day took her closer to helplessness.

  She nodded. “Tell me how.”

  * * *

  While they were still in the drylands far away from the city, Murga let them travel unencumbered and unfettered. When relieved from pulling the wagon, the centaurs ran races alongside the road and the youngest of the three dog-folk chased them, whining because she could not keep up.

  Winter still held the landscape in its grip. Primaflora could barely sense the life in the snow-covered trees they passed, so deep was their cold-induced slumber. She hardly felt it herself, the cold, but the two elderly fauns suffered from it, choosing to sit in the wagon wrapped in blankets while Primaflora rode on the top towards the back, watching the road behind them.

  They moved southward at the pace set by the centaurs drawing the wagon—an iron-barred box with coin-sized holes drilled in the flooring, through which bits of ice and stones, kicked and bounced up by the wagon’s wheels, would come with stinging frequency. The cold sky was at least clear, stretching overhead in blue indifference to the world below.

  The door at the back of the wagon was lashed open at first, but as they got closer and the first traffic appeared on the road, three boys taking a pair of goats to market, Primaflora slipped down and inside the wagon, closing the door as the boys approached. They circled the wagon, gawking till Primaflora felt as though her skin was no longer there, as though their stares had stripped it away.

  “Here’s a nought apiece, so you can come see us,” Murga said, tossing each a wooden round. Still wide-eyed, the boys nodded and waved as the wagon trundled on at a speed faster than the goats could manage.

  As the miles passed, the road grew busier: a traveling Priest and her servant, farmer wagons, a band of pilgrims. This kind of travel was very different from the steamboat, Primaflora thought, particularly since travelers tended to accrete, collecting to exchange greetings and news, then continuing along together at the same pace. Murga’s brightly painted wagon was a natural gathering point. The beasts sat silent as the humans stared in at them. Primaflora had found a seat near the wagon’s front in the shadows overhung by the driver’s box, and she tried to doze, hoping to while away the interminable hours in that fashion. But sleep eluded her, jostled away by the bump and sway of the wagon wheels rumbling over the icy, rutted road.

  Finally, as the sun slanted so the trees’ long shadows clawed at the road, Murga made camp.

  “We’ll be there by tomorrow evening if we rise early and make good time,” he told them, but did not join them at the fire.

  Primaflora sat and combed out her long hair. Before she had left, Ava had pressed the comb on her, carved from a bit of tortoiseshell. “Remember me,” she had said.

  Dryads had little need of belongings, but the gesture had touched her. “When some of us root, we take an object with us, to live at the tree’s heart,” she said. “I will cherish this so.”

  * * *

  The city smelled of shit and iron, as it had before. Every once in a while, doubt assailed her, made her wonder if she was doing the right thing. What could she hope to accomplish here? But Murga had said he could help her.

  The Circus was no stranger than anywhere else here. A girl brought her water where she waited inside Murga’s tent for his return.

  He came alone late at night, long after the crowds she’d heard outside no longer trampled there, after the calliope’s wheedle had given its last dying gasp, when all was quiet except for the patter of icy rain on the canvas.

  “What will you do?” she asked him.

  His eyes glittered. “You will no longer need to root. Instead you’ll be able to exact revenge on the humans.”

  She bit back a repetition of the question. Clearly he wouldn’t answer.

  He led her through the deserted circus. Here and there she saw other beasts, working. A man sweeping up paused to watch them pass, his face bland and incurious. A purple-dyed mouse sat on his shoulder and squeaked as they went by.

  She hadn’t
expected Murga to lead her into such a vast space. This huge tent must be where the performers entertained the crowds. Everything smelled of sawdust and humans.

  “Stand there,” he said.

  She wavered. There was time enough to give all of this up, to go somewhere and root. Give up and go back to the whole.

  She thought of axes and furnaces, and moved where he directed. Taking a deep breath, she tried to unclench her fists, but they stayed wound tight despite herself for several moments before they finally gave way and opened. She took a deep breath of the tent’s stale air.

  He chanted as he drew a chalk circle around her, furrowing the sawdust away from the rough ground. She stood still, waiting.

  He set three red candles in a triangle and lit them. They smelled of blood and brine.

  He spoke, and the words resonated through her, spread through her like dye in water, coloring her some strange new color. She felt her toes flex. It was too late, she would root right here! Energy rushed through her; her arms extended, became branches. She stretched up and up toward the top of the canvas, leaves brushing it.

  When the first axe blow came, she would have screamed, but a tree did not have lips with which to scream.

  * * *

  When she awoke, everything was different.

  She looked down in horror and screamed.

  “What have you done?” she wailed. “Oh, what have you done?”

  Her body was made of rough-hewn wood, so green it still dripped crimson sap on the sawdust around her new, blocky feet. Marks covered the wood, tiny glyphs so fine she could barely see them, but she knew what they were: the names of dryads, scratched on the surface, the names of all of the fallen, all of the dead.

  Her fists were massive blocks. She would have smashed something, had anything been in reach from where she knelt, joints like blazing knots of pain, but Murga stood well away, a little smile on his lips.