Beneath Ceaseless Skies #145

by Seth Dickinson

  “Sövalye!” the face cries, in the tongue of the Horse People. “Save us!”

  She has no time for weakness and need. She turns away to find the enemy.

  Afterwards she does not remember what happens down among the mob; only that two of the Harvester _övalye die before the others withdraw, their shattered retinues torn limb from limb, cast into the river or from the quarry walls.

  When the mob begins to ebb, when she begins to be something more than howling rage again, she finds herself wandering among the shattered burning hovels of the Horse People slum, her spears cast, her hands bloody to the wrist, her nose and mouth full of the stink of the place as if her years as _övalye had only ever been a dream.

  Dead Horse People lie in the streets and smolder in their burning homes. For an instant she has the relief of rage, at the King of Emmer Wheat and his Harvesters. But the Harvester _övalye brought no torches with them. They had no plans to burn.

  Some piece of the mob did this. Some part of the panicked mass turned on its own. She remembers the face before her, so like her own. The cry: “Save us!”

  She saw this happen and she did nothing. She had no time for Horse People weakness. Horse People need.

  She cuts herself free of the Flock. A Walker man with a bloodied chisel stumbles drunkenly past. “We’ve won!” he calls. “It was good! Look at this! It is good!”

  Rider Bray stares at him, and perhaps he sees some question in her eyes, for he stops and says: “The good ones are the ones you win!”

  * * *

  “Thirty of the original Flock survived,” Marantic Lind says exultantly. “Thirty who remember your training—thirty skilled in Flock tribute, and bloodied in battle now. Thirty missions we can establish, if the Queen agrees—”

  He sits on the bank of the river and rambles on about the possibilities, the village Flocks who will cure their crops of blight and their children of pox, the bands of citizen-fighters that will sweep the steppe in the name of Queen Hau Nidane. “The transfer of power,” he says, “from the disinterested few to the self-interested many—”

  Rider Bray wades in the rocky shallows and scrubs her bloody skin. “You’re very convincing,” she says. “Maybe you could’ve fooled someone else. Someone who had never craved what you crave.”

  He blinks too rapidly. “But I’m right,” he says. “We can put Flocks in every village. We can win the war for the Nidani, we can—”

  “—change the world,” she says for him. She kneels to splash her face. “I see what you see. I see your Flocks conquering the steppe. I see what happens afterward, when you have taught the people of the world this new way.”

  He tilts his head birdlike, and just for a moment she thinks he is going to lie. But the affectation passes. The sparrow smile does not come.

  “You see what I see, and you know what I know,” he says, as if by speaking it he can make it true. “No one should endure this kind of suffering. No one should be made to sacrifice like this.” He gestures to the horizon, to the quarries and the stillbirths, the dry fields waiting for rain. “Something has to change.”

  She scoops water to splash her hair. “How many Horse People will there be in your new Flocks?” she asks.

  “What?”

  She waits. Hau Nidane would wait, patient, for an answer. So will she.

  He gestures convulsively. “It worked here. Walkers and Horse People together. Comrades—friends.”

  “It worked for a band of sixty starving laborers.” She considers the smoke that clouds the dusk. Remembers the burned Horse People hovels, the orgy of violence that swept even her away. Rise. “The Flock needs numbers, Marantic Lind. You know that. Your power depends on consensus, on mass. It does not welcome division.”

  He steeples his hands beneath his chin. “You may be right,” he says.

  She looks up sharply, startled not by the sentiment but by his poise.

  He meets her gaze and perhaps he shrugs. “Something has to change,” he says. “Somehow. If there is a price—well.”

  “The Queen Hau Nidane made me _övalye.” She sets her booted feet among the small river stones. “In her wisdom and compassion, she chose me from among the Horse People, against the will of all her advisors.”

  “Do you call what you’ve seen compassion?” He speaks softly, as if she were a fellow scholar. “The things these people suffer for your queen?”

  That she has no answer for.

  “What now, then?” Marantic Lind asks.

  “The Queen has summoned me to audience, to discuss the victory at Uma Nonya.” She lifts her chin to match the distant horizon. “To advise her regarding the possibilities of raising more Flocks.”

  “Well.” Marantic Lind spreads his hands. “I trust you to tell her the truth, with so much riding on your words.”

  She smiles and savors the certainty she feels. “So do I,” she says. “So do I.”

  Perhaps history will give her a new name.

  “And?” Marantic Lind leans forward, his lips pursed. “And?”

  Something booms in the vast distance. Rider Bray looks to the horizon with eyes of tribute fire. Sees, in the orange dusk, the first shadow of the long rain.

  Copyright © 2014 Seth Dickinson

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  Seth Dickinson is a graduate of the University of Chicago, a lapsed PhD candidate at NYU, and an instructor at the Alpha Workshop for Young Writers. His work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Analog, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, as well as winning the 2011 Dell Award. He can be found at sethdickinson.com.

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  WOMEN IN SANDSTONE

  by Alex Dally MacFarlane

  “Your mouth is hanging open like a bell,” the South-East Wind said. “I wonder, if the wind blows between your teeth, will you clang or chime?”

  The general tore her gaze from the temple’s walls. The tall wine-dark plume on her silver helmet bobbed and swayed in the North Wind | I blow through it and it is like the grass near a battlefield: heavy with the smells of burning and blood and bones | and then it tilted as she removed the helmet, revealing her hair—long and black with white running through it like embroidery, fastened in four thick braids—and the extent of her dark, scarred face. “I wish to honor your great temple,” she said.

  | I blow through the bells, I blow through them all, all thousands upon thousands, I bring them all to song and it is loud and perfect |

  The general barely flinched at the sound of the North Wind blowing across the temple’s bells, though she looked up again, wary. The South-East Wind smiled.

  “Has your military training included work with sandstone?”

  “No,” the general said.

  “Follow me,” the South-East Wind said, and beckoned the general through the temple’s old doors to the bare, bell-less interior.

  * * *

  | I blow down from the mountains, where stones are stacked in figures for me to scream between: thick limbs full of holes, hundreds together—or one figure apart, tucked in a gully, its holes as numerous as the bones of the empty desert, as graceful as those rib-arcs, as sturdy as a pelvis. I blow the winged women of the Air people into the snowstorms where they test their strength. I blow out the fires of foolish foragers, their fur matted with mud. I blow into the faces of the Saqnaga foxes, their ears thronged with beads. I blow between the glass spires of the desert city In-barash and devour the meals left on its high roofs. I blow from temple to temple. I blow— |

  * * *

  Berenike removed her breastplate with its gold embossing: a woman, heroically nude, stabbing a lion that reared on its hind legs. It clanged as she set it against the wall—with her helmet, her greaves, her javelin, her small bag.

  The South-East Wind took her to a subterranean room, where river water rushed through thin channels and clothes were set out, and let her turn the channels murky with sweat and dust—then brought her back to the main
chamber, where, in her damp clean tunic, she ate the temple’s food: eggs and dates, small sweet lemons, and fish from the river that ran here between the barren hills and the great desert. The day’s light reached them through apertures in the lower walls of the temple, orange with approaching sunset.

  “Are you not curious about the names of your visitors?” Berenike asked.

  “I know yours, General Berenike—who led the left flank at the battle of Norete, who carried a shield embossed with a map of the world’s mountains, who vies for control of the land left leaderless when your conquering ruler died. I know, also, that your horse starved two weeks ago in the hills to the south of this temple, and that you survived this far by eating it.”

  Berenike filled her bowl. “What do you not know?”

  “Why you are not afraid of the men crossing the hills after you.”

  “Ah.” Eggshell fell away under her fingers. She ate the egg in two big bites, then chose a skewer of fish. “How far are they?”

  “A week’s walk,” the South-East Wind said. “Their horses are dying. Their water is running lower than yours was—they might yet become bones for winds to blow through.”

  “I won’t count on that, not yet. Metron is among them, no doubt. And Derdos.”

  “Yes.” The South-East Wind had not blown through those hills since becoming the guardian of the temple for this period, but the South Wind blew there / where the bones drift into gullies like the snow that falls in other lands and I can call through them in a hundred voices, like lizards, like foxes, like men, like horses, like all the animals that have ventured into this barren place and found nothing but the bones of other animals, long emptied of their marrow, the only sustenance in a land where rain never falls and mist never drifts and the bone-shrub must blow from carcass to carcass / and the South-East Wind knew much of what the winds saw.

  Knew, too, that the men following Berenike would later die between temples; their flesh food for the foxes, their bones instruments for the wind. Berenike would call that the future. The winds saw such things all at once.

  “I do not want to bring war to you,” Berenike said. “I would dedicate to your temple and be on my way before those men arrive, if that is possible.”

  “The deaths of mortals hardly affect us.”

  That brought a smile to the general’s chapped lips. “Still.”

  “We will begin tomorrow.”

  * * *

  Berenike slept by her amour and javelin, cushioned by the temple’s blankets, with a knife not far from her hand. Her dreams were full of winds.

  * * *

  “This is what you will dedicate,” the South-East Wind said.

  Berenike crouched to examine the thigh-high pinnacle of sandstone, brought from the desert by the South-East Wind. “I will carve this?”

  “Yes. Then forge the bell. Then place the figure on the temple’s walls. It does not matter how crude or beautiful your work is, only that it is personal: a true gift to the temple. You may practice on smaller pieces of sandstone if you wish, to gain familiarity with the material, but it is not necessary.”

  “No,” Berenike murmured—but she did not ask for the tools until an hour had passed.

  Berenike carved a figure simple in form, its whole body a smooth shape like a stele, legless; a suggestion of arms only just discernable at its side. The South-East Wind had seen and blown among hundreds of these.

  But Berenike lingered on the figure’s chest. First she carved small breasts, shaped as though bound for fighting. Then she used the edge of a broken stator to groove jewelry from neck to navel. Her sure hand spoke of memory, not invention. Ovals and circles appeared to hang on thin lines. Jewels? Metal? Between the breasts hung a large disc, detailed with birds. Smaller discs at the ends of the thin lines depicted a woman’s profile, her hair bound in braids but more complicated than Berenike’s.

  The South-East Wind stepped closer, curious.

  “My mother’s jewelry,” Berenike said, in a hard voice. “Or so I am told.”

  In the head, Berenike hollowed out a mouth—a space for the bell—gouging, into the roof of the mouth, a hook.

  Eyeless, noseless, earless it remained—but Berenike carved four long braids down its back. Around its head she carved a band. The South-East Wind supposed that usually the headband would be patterned with embroidery or metal discs, but Berenike filled it with her letters in four lines.

  “That will wear away,” the South-East Wind finally said. “We winds are not gentle.”

  “If I write of myself on a hundred surfaces, only one will survive the winds, or the rain, or the masons of the future. Only one. Perhaps two. Three.” Berenike stood, finished. “I must write of myself on five hundred surfaces. Then I will be remembered.”

  It was Berenike that the South-East Wind now looked at, amused.

  “Do I make the bell now?” Berenike asked.

  “Yes.”

  “With what?”

  “Those that can, give some metal of theirs: an heirloom, a weapon, coins.” The South-East Wind glanced at Berenike’s amour.

  “I have coins,” Berenike said. “How many for a bell to fit the mouth of my figure?”

  “Ten, perhaps. It will depend on their size.”

  Berenike nodded and walked to the amour and her small bag. From it she took a clinking pouch.

  “Silver stators,” she said, holding them in her palms for the South-East Wind to see. “From my own issue.”

  The woman’s head on the obverse of these coins wore a helmet—the same plumed helmet resting against the wall—with thick curls of hair over her forehead. Her long braids hung at the back of her neck. On the reverse, the coins depicted a seated god and two words: King and Berenike.

  “You should not judge me by these,” Berenike said. “They are clumsily made, but they are mine.”

  “They are fitting,” the South-East Wind said.

  “One day I will wear the diadem and sit on a throne.”

  “Is that so?” The South-East Wind knew how quickly mortals’ aspirations turned to bones in the desert—like the man whose hair Berenike’s coin mimicked, with those short curls above his eyes that Berenike, whose hair was straight, did not possess.

  “It will be so. Where do I make the bell?”

  “Follow me.”

  The forge sat at the other side of a courtyard, away from the main temple building. Under the awning of dried palm leaves, the South-East Wind directed Berenike in heating the charcoal and melting the coins, in choosing the mould for her bell, in pouring the glowing-orange silver. Berenike stood in silence as the bell set. When it was ready, she attached it to the hook in the figure’s mouth with a slim length of cloth.

  The South-East wind led Berenike up stairs inside the temple’s wall, up, up, to the highest door. Berenike’s detailed work deserved that honor.

  Together they stepped out—but Berenike stopped, staring, at the ankle-high, knee-high, life-size figures surrounding her, carved and blown smooth by the wind, and the bells, gleaming and dull, chiming, tinkling, ringing, banging in over a thousand mouths as the little winds of the temple played through them. The figures clustered on the sloping pinnacle of the temple. They stood scattered around the high walls; they covered the lower walls, all the way to the ground, far below. They filled Berenike’s eyes.

  Her figure, held in her arms, began to chime, its bell high, strong.

  “Follow me,” the South-East Wind said, and Berenike did, on a well-worn way between the figures like a sheep-trail on a mountainside.

  The North Wind gusted suddenly past, bringing all the bells to song. Berenike flinched—it was so much louder among the bells than at the temple’s door, so loud that no other sound could be heard—but did not try to put her hands to her ears. A general of many battles knew cacophony.

  “Here,” the South-East Wind said, in a quiet lull.

  They stood by a narrow rectangle hollowed into the wall: a perfect fit for Berenike’s figure. Be
renike knelt. The South-East Wind had told her to make mortar. It took some effort to push the figure into place—but then it stood, fixed by the mortar, unshaken by the North Wind’s final gusts, its bell chiming, chiming. Berenike touched the fingers of one hand to her lips and bowed her head: not a gesture of honor her mother would have recognized, but the one her hands knew from childhood lessons.

  The North Wind blew elsewhere. Little winds of the temple returned, playing in turn ~ see how it is so full of strength, see, see ~ with the new bell.

  Berenike roamed across the wall, admiring the figures, then continuing, looking, looking—and the South-East Wind knew what she would find. Knew the life-size figure with the bell of gold. Knew, from the North Wind | I blow across the face of a man who goes tirelessly into the desert | blowing long ago, of his journey.

  The South-East Wind sat in front of Berenike’s figure.

  | I blow across temples with walls of blue and white, such images for a wind to savor, such variety, nestled in oases where the water flicks at their supporting struts like a fish’s tongue |

  From the South-East Wind’s mouth came the south-east wind rushing, a high whistling and the bell rang longer, longer.

  * * *

  As they descended the stairs in the temple’s wall, Berenike asked of the lands beyond the temple: the endless desert and the temples within it.

  “It is not endless,” the South-East Wind said.

  “Where I have lived, we say that it is where the world ends.”

  The South-East Wind smiled. “There is the rest of the world beyond it. First you will find mountains, rising from the desert, and in their heights live the snowchangers, who still sing the arias of the long-dead Air women.”

  “I have never heard of them,” Berenike said, with quiet wonder in her voice.

  “And they have never heard of you.” So it would surely remain. The South-East Wind gestured Berenike to the table, where the general gratefully received another meal. The sun’s light was orange again, thick with the end of the day.

  “It is strange,” Berenike said, while squeezing a lemon over her fish and eggs, “to think of the many places where even my name will not be known.”