Beneath Ceaseless Skies #145

by Seth Dickinson

  Issue #145 • Apr. 17, 2014

  “Our Fire, Given Freely,” by Seth Dickinson

  “Women in Sandstone,” by Alex Dally MacFarlane

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  OUR FIRE, GIVEN FREELY

  by Seth Dickinson

  Rider Bray runs the steppe one stride ahead of her name, racing the wind cross waves of grass glazed in the light of a high cold sun. Heading home, war and longed-for glory at her back, to answer the summons of her warlord queen.

  She wants to stay at war. Wants to fight and win, against the enemy _övalye and their black-masked retinues, against her own name and heritage and the weakness it implies. But she answers her queen, the mighty Hau Nidane, the Setless Sun.

  Rider breathes the steppe air cold with coming storm and lets her small sedition flow out with it. Runs on.

  Her retinue chases her like the chevron autumn geese cut from the sky and among the drum of their footstep she hears, against her will, the ghost of ancient hooves. Down fifteen years of memory her mother tells her: the horses ruled this steppe, this Black Atora, and we ruled the horses, we the Horse People, we of the enamel and the glass.

  Then the Walkers came, and killed the herds—

  Did they hunt the horses with tribute fire? little ill-remembered Bray asks.

  Their secret strength, whispers umi Bray. Unknown to us, to the Horse People: the tribute fire, the given flame.

  Oh, umi Bray—if you could see!

  Now that tribute sings in Bray’s veins, burns in the sweat upon her brow, alloys her bone and breath. Six years she has been sworn and still this power dizzies her.

  Each morning the men and women of her retinue grant her tribute, whispering the words of the ancient Walker rite: our fire, given freely. Each night the tribute bonds break and she diminishes as they fall one by one to sleep. The fire makes her strong, feeds body and soul, grants her might for battle and speed for the steppe.

  She has been made _övalye, first of all the Horse People, by the grace and wisdom of the mighty Hau Nidane. And now she has been called home.

  She runs on.

  * * *

  The palace of Hau Nidane rises from the steppe ahead, white walls like the bones of the world. Rider Bray shouts to her retinue, voice a mighty drum: “Raise your kites!”

  Snail-dye banners dip in answer, codes acknowledged, greetings sent. But no other Nidani _övalye runs out with his retinue to offer escort and guard. Perhaps it is a Walker slight. Perhaps the war has left no _övalye here as guard.

  Rider Bray passes through the great stone gates, surrendering her spears and knives, divesting herself of her retinue, and goes down the path of paper lanterns into the henge court of Hau Nidane.

  She feels like a stain upon the Walker court, her skin mud against their humus-dark, her jaw narrow and fragile, her teeth gapped and stained. But she has learned to carry herself proud, even under the contempt of the Walker guard, the mathematicians and engineers and concubines that ring the court.

  The people who bore her were stains, perhaps. But she is _övalye. She reached up and was lifted.

  “My Queen,” she says, and bows her head to the chernozemic earth.

  Hau Nidane stands at the pole of the white circled henge, her shoulders broad as the sky, her legs set like the trunks of windbreaking trees. She wears no crown and needs no throne to rest upon. Her open arms circle the span of all that Rider Bray is and will ever be. “My _övalye,” she says. “My sworn and chosen. Welcome.”

  “You sent for me.”

  Hau Nidane, the Setless Sun, grants her the favor of a smile. “If I ask for word of our war,” she says, “will you be true?”

  “I will.”

  The Queen lifts a hand: continue.

  “We cannot match the King of Emmer Wheat,” Rider Bray says, her brow pressed into the grass, the dark Atora earth, on which she has spilled so much blood. “He gathers tribute from too many. His _övalye are too strong. We have been driven back, nearly to the quarries at Uma Nonya.”

  The queen nods. “So it is. You must wonder, then, why I have called you away.”

  “I wonder only how I can serve best.”

  The Queen beckons for her to rise. “Some say you cannot understand the tribute. That the knowledge of it is not in your blood.”

  Rider Bray lifts herself and lifts her chin. “I have ears. I hear what is said.”

  “It is not your ears they question.”

  Even secondhand, the slight pricks at her temper. “I know the ways of tribute as well as any _övalye,” she says, eyes averted to hide her curled lip, her ill-hidden disquiet: why am I here? “Each day we pledge our fire to you, O queen, by way of your runners and deputies. You in turn choose your _övalye. And as you never sleep, your bond to your _övalye never breaks; and so we are made mighty.”

  Hau Nidane considers her _övalye with dark eyes. Sövalye know the rule of eyes: you will see fire only in the eyes of those who burn less bright. Ordinary eyes mean an ordinary woman, or a woman more powerful than Rider Bray. Hau Nidani is not ordinary.

  “You carry your name well,” she says. “I chose it to remind you of what you had to prove. And you have proven.”

  “You choose well in all things,” Bray says.

  “Is that so?” The Queen’s great shoulders cord. “My people starve, Rider Bray. I take their fire and spend it on a war I cannot win, and without that fire, without the strength to heal pox and hoe the earth, they sicken and starve. They say that among the Horse People there are mothers who have given so much they cannot quicken. Does that not trouble you? Do you not doubt me?”

  “Never,” Rider Bray says, and smiles within at the truth of it. “You are Queen of the Nidani. Some day your kingdom will mend this shattered steppe and you with all your gathered tribute will be immortal.”

  The wind moves among the standing stones and stirs the short strands of Hau Nidane’s hair.

  “A traveling sage came to me,” the Queen says. “A man named Marantic Lind. He claims he can teach a band of common tribute to fight with the strength and fire of a great _övalye. He tells me that he can raise an army which will win my war against the King of Emmer Wheat.”

  An army. A mob, a herd, an ignoble thing. To hear that bitter word in the mouth of the Queen—

  Rider Bray fixes her face and waits.

  “Go to him,” Hau Nidane commands. “Learn the truth of his methods.”

  “Surely I could do more good—” Bray begins. But the Queen raises a hand to silence her.

  “Go to this Marantic Lind,” Hau Nidane repeats. “You are the only Horse Person ever made _övalye. You understand the common tribute. I trust you to be fair in your report.”

  Her eyes say all the rest. A Queen cannot speak worry, cannot say fear. Nowhere in the method of Marantic Lind has the Queen made any mention of royal tribute.

  I will earn no glory here, Rider Bray wants to shout. I will still be Rider. I will still be a woman with a name that spreads its legs across a horse.

  “My Queen,” she says, and lowers her brow to the dark Atora earth.

  * * *

  “We run for the quarries at Uma Nonya,” she tells the chief of her retinue, the albino Suro Bulayo. He is a Walker and her first friend.

  “To join the fight again?”

  “To serve our Queen.” She gestures impatiently to the gathered retinue, the Horse People who run with her because she shares their blood, the Walkers who run with her because they are deformed or weak or pale of color and no other _övalye will have them. “We go at dawn. Eat and shit while you hav
e the chance. Bulayo—my spears.”

  Bray takes their tribute under the sunrise, the fire rich like cream, and blesses each of them with a touch and an oath, for speed and strength in their run. She is trained _övalye. She can do more with their gathered power than they could achieve in concert with all their farflung kin.

  This sage Marantic Lind cannot change that truth.

  Uma Nonya spills out beneath them at the end of their trail, split by the bent blade of its river, the near bank perilously close to flooding down into the quarries in a broth of sand and sweating flesh.

  Bray looks down across the village with eyes made eagle-sharp by tribute fire. Sees an emaciated, pot-belled child working the dry teats of a dying cow. He is a Walker boy with a Walker jaw but naked and filthy as her little brothers. The sod-roofed hut behind him has begun to slump.

  The King of Emmer Wheat’s _övalye have never troubled Uma Nonya. No blood has spilled in its white quarries, its clear cold river. But still the war is here.

  She turns her eyes to the quarries. Walkers work the walls with ball and chisel and flame, and in the dusted pit beneath them gangs of Horse People labor with cable and lever to drag loose blocks. Everywhere she looks she sees starvation. Tribute fire can sustain a man through drought, but though the rains are late this year, the fire goes to the Queen and the war.

  “You’re frowning,” Suro Bulayo says.

  “As usual.”

  He chuckles.

  At a ramp in the northernmost pit, where a work crew struggles at the ropes of a pale granite block, some peculiarity draws her eye. Rider Bray considers the crew for a moment and points. “Marantic Lind. There.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Because he’s a madman,” she says. “And that gang is full of Walkers and Horse People, side by side. No chains. No guards.”

  “Like us,” Suro Bulayo says. “Maybe they’re friends.”

  “They might have been, before they began to starve. But now?” Bray signs to her retinue, a laconic wave: be ready to move. “I know what Walkers do to Horse People when things go wrong. Someone holds them together. Marantic Lind.”

  * * *

  The granite rides a wooden sledge along the ramp. The men and women of the gang labor downslope against it, hauling at a rope roll, the corded reed lines looped taut around a stanchion upslope so that the gang’s descending labor powers the block’s ascent.

  Strange, this: the gang has no caller, no officer to keep time as they labor at the cedar handles. Rider Bray paces the length of the line, breathing their sweat and body stink, her fingers snapping to each perfect synchronized grunt as they step into the ropes like a mother bent to her last labor.

  She sees in their eyes the spark of tribute fire, each and every man and woman. They have not passed their tribute to the Queen today.

  And they are not starved. Far from fed, surely, but she can smell blood from some of the women. Fat enough for fecundity. Fire enough to cycle.

  Among the gang she finds a man, Walker skin and Walker jaw, eyes cast to the earth, narrow shoulders trembling with effort. She knows him by his small bloody hands, hands unaccustomed to work.

  “Marantic Lind,” she says. “The Queen sent me.”

  “We have stone to pull,” he says. Walker jaw but a foreign accent, touched by the lilt of some other sweep of steppe.

  “You’re too weak for this work.”

  He looks up and his eyes glimmer with a little measure of tribute fire. “I am weak,” he says. “We are strong.”

  She walks past him. Goes to the head of the gang, finds a pair of handles on the rope, sets her boots against the clay-caked ramp, and begins to pull. The rope creaks with her strength, and in her chest and calves she feels the fire swell to answer her.

  The beat of labor breaks, and the gang falls apart into confusion. Her pull offsets the rhythm and they begin to slack off the rope, confused, drawn along.

  She heaves at the rope, and the stone in its sledge carries on as if they still spent all their strength on it.

  “Give me your tribute,” she calls. “I am _övalye. Give me your fire.”

  The gathered Walkers and Horse People with their calloused quarry hands look to Marantic Lind. He nods. “Go on,” he says. “Give her your strength.”

  One by one they approach with sullen eyes to touch her and whisper: our fire, given freely.

  She works the rope and pretends not to hear the lie.

  * * *

  In a cedar cabin between the quarry and the river she wastes the last of the day’s light listening to Marantic Lind.

  “We do so many stupid things,” he says, squatted across the fire, steeping the dry leaves of a weak tea. “Quarry by rivers. Till our farmland dry. Waste the fire that could make our people strong.” He sips the tea, grins a curious little grin like a sparrow’s cocked head. “Don’t you think?”

  “You have better ways?”

  “I have a way to make sixty common Nidani tributes as mighty as any _övalye,” he says.

  She lifts her hands to show him the memory of the pull handles. The stone she alone drew up out of the quarry.

  “Yes—yes, a powerful demonstration.” He nods like a little bird too, bouncing on his haunches. He has a face not much given to stillness and a tongue uneasy with silence. “One trained _övalye can do so much.”

  She finds the mockery in his implication - one trained Horse Person _övalye can labor so well—and stamps on her fury with long weary practice. Maybe he doesn’t mean it.

  “But how many _övalye does Hau Nidane command?” Marantic Lind presses. “How many years of training do they each demand from our kingdom? How much gathered tribute?”

  She leans forward on her hands, the symbolism conscious: a cat before a bird. “I could kill your gang of sixty in a minute,” she says. “I could snap their bones with my bare hands and run them down as they fled. I could do the same against six hundred. I am invested with the might of so many, Marantic Lind. No number of men lit by one solitary fire can match me.”

  “Bray,” Suro Bulayo calls from the door. “People coming.”

  Marantic Lind steeples his hands beneath his chin. “I call it the Flock,” he says. “Let me show you.”

  They wait outside, the sixty men and women who worked the quarry, Horse People clumped among the Walkers like clots in cream. Marantic Lind opens his arms to them. “Rider Bray,” he says. “I beg you. Give them back their fire.”

  She measures him with a sidelong glance. “I wonder,” she says. “What do you get from all this? What is your cause, Marantic Lind?”

  “Victory for our Queen Hau Nidane,” he says, his level eyes unblinking. “The unification of the Black Atora under her rule. May it be eternal.”

  She considers him a moment more and then reaches within herself to cut their tribute free. Sparks kindle in a hundred eyes before her. “Done,” she says. “Show me, then.”

  “Begin,” Marantic Lind says.

  The crowd mills with silent intent, pawing at each other, whispering the familiar susurrus: our fire, our fire, our fire. Each groping for the hand of another, for the shoulders of a companion turned away, a communion of grime and common calloused flesh.

  Tribute to tribute.

  “We pool our fire,” Marantic Lind whispers in her ear. “Every one to every other. It takes discipline, trust, experience—but little training. We have learned to make it work.”

  She nods, her curiosity piqued even as her training rebels. “Who leads? Who plays _övalye?”

  “A flock has no leader. Only the bird who flies front.”

  “I see men, not birds.” She swings to face him, her impatience buried. “A sage should know the uses of the fire, Marantic Lind: to nourish the body, to prolong life, to heal, to quicken, and—in a trained _övalye—to grant speed and might. Sixty weaklings paying tribute to each other are still weaklings.”

  “We are the best gang in the quarry,” he says, chin raised. “These were the
worst, when I found them. They were all half-dead. Now they labor well.”

  This man, she thinks, has never learned his place—and there, in spite of herself, she feels admiration.

  “So you feed extra fire to the starving and ill. Take from the strong to coddle the weak. A good and clever trick.” She gives him just the hint of a nod, to prick a drop of hope, as the _övalye who trained her used to do, before the crushing reminder—your name is Rider! Remember who you are!

  “You keep your band strong against starvation,” she says. “And deprive the Queen of rightful tribute. Deprive me of strength I need to end this war.”

  Marantic Lind raises his hands but she speaks over him.

  “You promised my Queen an army. All you have devised is a clever sort of treason.”

  “Wait. Wait.” He pushes at the air with his soft hands. “Give us a chance. One chance to show you what we can do.”

  “There is more stone in that quarry,” she says.

  “In battle!” he pleads. “Let us fight!”

  She almost turns away. She almost laughs.

  She remembers a Horse Girl, eyes fixed on the cabled calves of a passing _övalye, telling her mother: I will be her.

  You can never be her, little Bray.

  “The King of Emmer Wheat sweeps the fields north of you with his raiders,” she says. “If your Flock can run, then I will take you out as skirmishers. Is that what you want?”

  Marantic Lind nods. The watching Flock whispers to itself.

  “Understand,” she says. “We will meet his _övalye and we will cast spears. Some of us will die. I think your Flock will rout. I think the Harvester foe will run you down and murder you. Is that what you want?”

  She says this to Marantic Lind, as if he were _övalye of this ragged Flock. He is not, of course; but his Flock still hears.

  One of the men among them, a Walker with a broken nose, speaks. “We are dying here,” he says, arm on the shoulder of the man beside him. “I have lost my sons and my husband has lost his wives. We want a chance at a better kind of death.”

  “We will need spears, and a chance to learn their use—” Marantic Lind begins.