Beneath Ceaseless Skies #68

by Valentine, Genevieve

  I sat up slowly, propping my arms for support. Panadrome and Boss were crowded close; between their heads I could see glimpses of the others setting up the tent. Elena was standing a few steps off, watching all of us with a drawn face.

  I asked, “What did he take?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Boss.

  (It was true, but it’s never stopped me wondering what was so worth stealing that he did all that just to rob us of it.

  His courage must have failed him; something about the bones must have woken him in dread, just before he broke into the workshop and tried to make a run for it.)

  “He’s dead,” Elena said, before I could ask.

  “The rigging pole got him,” said Panadrome, watching Boss.

  “I heard someone,” I told him. “Before everything caved in, I heard someone moving.”

  In the rigging, on the trapeze.

  I looked over, but Elena was already gone.

  “Leave it,” Boss said.

  When she used that tone, you gave way, and so I closed my mouth and kept it closed.

  I slept off my headache in Peter’s bunk, dreaming that Boss went into the woods and dug a grave.

  * * *

  When I came out of the trailer it was nearly sundown and Alto and Altissimo were already dressed, smoking a single cigarette in their shabby-looking jackets, their makeup running a little in the heat.

  Mina and Nayah must have been inside warming up, because I heard the squeak of the trapeze and the solid clap of hands clasping hands.

  From inside Boss’s trailer, I saw the shadows moving that meant she and Panadrome were almost ready.

  It was all as it should be, it was all as it had been before, but something had changed, I could tell, while I was sleeping.

  It took me until I was standing before the tent to see it—a new banner, the letters traced with care, the paint still gleaming wet in the heavy capital letters. On one end Boss had painted the griffin that was tattooed onto her arms. It stood at the ready, like a talisman.

  I read the banner slowly, twice. It seemed strange that it was new; it seemed at once that it had always been hanging there, and yet that it had sprung into being from the wreckage of the tent that had fallen, giving everything a real name at last.

  The Mechanical Circus Tresaulti, it read, and underneath, Finest Spectacle Any Where.

  “It’s certainly shorter than the other one,” Elena said behind me. “We’ll see if it does any good.”

  But she must have known already what had changed; she clenched her hands before she turned away, as if she had just been called to a fight she’d wanted for a long time.

  I was still watching Elena’s back when Boss stepped up beside me.

  “It’s time,” she said. “Long past time.”

  I thought about Peter, about the little crowds that had grumbled at the price of barter and the soldiers who had given us dirty looks and kept us from even slowing down as we passed their city walls.

  A little sideshow could come and go, neither a thrill nor a threat. A circus, I could tell, would be a different thing—a circus was something real, something united.

  My hands were shaking. I pressed them to my sides.

  “Some people won’t like it,” I said.

  Boss said, “Then they can be afraid of it.”

  (Strange, how sometimes I could guess her reasons, and sometimes nothing at all.)

  But she was smiling, and it happened rarely enough that I was happy to smile back, and think about the future as an even road we would all drive along together, and make out all right.

  Then I lifted the canvas aside for her, and together Boss and I went inside to the circus.

  Copyright © 2011 Genevieve Valentine

  Read Comments on this Story in the BCS Forums

  Genevieve Valentine’s World-Fantasy-Award-nominated short fiction has appeared in The Way of the Wizard, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and more. Her story “Bread and Circuses” appeared in BCS #55 and as BCS Audio Fiction Podcast 049. Her first novel, Mechanique: a Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, set in the same world as both “Bread and Circuses” and “The Finest Spectacle Anywhere,” was released by Prime Books in April 2011. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog at www.genevievevalentine.com.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  BUZZARD’S FINAL BOW

  by Jason S. Ridler

  Down a cold dark hallway covered in wild skins, furs, and the harsh sculptures of the north, Buzzard walked flanked by two vigils with barely enough fuzz on their face to prove their manhood and not a battle scar between them. Still, the winds were thrashing against the palace walls instead of his naked bones, as Razor would have preferred it. He smiled and walked on, waiting for the inevitable.

  Behind them was the cage he’d been dragging since his lost days if glory. From within it, Razor, the old red tiger, growled low and constant. Massive paws hung between the bars, flexing grey claws. Buzzard halted, and the guards gripped their weapons.

  “Humble gents,” Buzzard said, enjoying the nostalgic weight of chains on his wrist. “I’d suggest you don’t force me to part from my companion. Razor won’t let me out of her sight for long.” Truth was, she lived off his misery as much as off rats and hens. And her appetite for both was bottomless.

  A sword hilt jabbed his back.

  Buzzard hardened his stance. “This is for your safety, good sirs, not mine. I’m not moving unless—”

  An open—palm slap warmed his face. “You don’t give orders, buffoon!” said a vigil. “We do.”

  A captain emerged from a massive ornate door made of twisted wood and black amber. He had the hard strides of a campaigner. His face winced at the stench of Buzzard, but a flicker of his eye held recognition of the familiar, though Buzzard had never seen him before. His guts clenched.

  “Lady Astra will see you,” said the captain.

  Buzzard bowed, stiff. “Of course, good sir. And I’ll be glad to perform for her with my companion.”

  The captain shook his head. “The beast stays.”

  “I wish that were so,” said Buzzard. “I won’t go forward without her.” Though it did bring a smile to his heart to consider Razor slashing the guards to gruel then gumming the remains up off the floor, since the metal teeth he’d made for her were in her water bucket.

  “This is my arena, not yours,” said the captain. Buzzard inhaled the pain caused by the word “arena” and swallowed hard. “I will not allow a wild beast to our Lady’s chamber. No matter how good you might be at... besting her.”

  Buzzard gave him his largest morning smile, the kind that children laughed at, hating the man and his knowing stare enough to taste bile bite the back of his tongue.

  The captain nodded forward. “Come.”

  “No.”

  The vigils drew swords and the captain’s face tightened. “You don’t have a choice.”

  If that were true, they’d all be dead. Including Buzzard. And then Razor would stop having the satisfaction of making him suffer. But freedom was a seductive dream he’d laid to rest long ago, and to resurrect it would cripple what spirit was left alive in his heart.

  “Or....” Buzzard said, “you can simply keep the door open so Razor knows where I am. My ripe odor, as you noticed, carries itself far and wide, and her sense of smell is as keen as her claws. So, an open door...” Buzzard closed his hands and pulled the chains wide for a throat strike. “Or take your chances right now with me.”

  The captain smiled, but not unkindly. “I’d like that... but you are to be unspoiled. Vigil Meris, keep the doors open and three men on the cage.”

  They shoved Buzzard through the door. “Keep me in your nose, Lady Razor.” She inhaled once, long and strong, then snorted.

  Smoke and jasmine awoke childhood memories that Buzzard quickly strangled. Bigger hides hung off these walls, and above them a row of crimson skulls. The captain’s ragged voice sang out. “Lady Astra
, Lord and Protector of his highness Prince Konrad, Future King of Baltikum.”

  Lady Astra strode in from an antechamber, nothing short of hideous. Pale and jaundiced as fresh goat milk with a dribble of piss, but eyes like iron ringlets. She walked with the confidence and strength of a southern beast in the wild, and her dark hair was richer than the normal fey blondes and weak browns of the north. Roughly his own age, Buzzard thought. Soured by power like he was from poverty.

  “You may leave us, Captain Landris.” Her voice was soft as a piglet’s belly. “I require privacy.”

  The captain bristled. “Your Grace, this is no alley rat, he is—”

  “No threat to me,” she said, thick hands folded. “Tend to the beast he brought with him.” Her accent was not the broken harshness of the captain but braided with a southern sting.

  “Aye,” said the captain, whose heavy steps thudded into the distance.

  Lady Astra sat in her throne of oak. “You are the traveling tiger man who has been entertaining the seedlings outside the arenas, along the northern arm of the Royal Empire? Buzzard the Beast—Man.”

  He bowed. “At your service, Your Grace.”

  “You are actually Bazzar Kiln, the champion beast hunter and gladiator, born into the Tarish slave camps of the southern empire and chosen for arena combat when only ten.”

  Buzzard held his bow as sweat cut down the filth on his back. The dull echo of long dead crowds roared in the pit of his heart. He quelled them with a bitter anger that made his chains rattle. He couldn’t let the warmth of this keep, the freedom from the elements, nor the caress of memories, seduce himself into forgetting.

  “And earned his freedom before his twentieth birthday against a scarlet tiger from the Mountain of Desert Wind in the East. Carrying the supposedly dead beast’s carcass past Freedom Gate after the Royal Court games, thirty years ago. Vanishing into the air like some market conjuror, when I was but a young maiden at the arena.” Her voice burned smooth like desert wind. “Is that you, Bazzar Kiln?”

  He emerged from his bow, lip twitching. “Bazzar died outside the Coliseum. I am Buzzard.”

  She puffed up. “Save me the sad poetry of your drifter existence, I have no ear for it. Though I believe I will need both the gladiator and the buffoon from you.”

  “I am no gladiator.”

  “I can see that,” she said, the disgust like venom from her lips. “Freedom has not treated you well.”

  “I have no complaints.”

  “Do not patronize me, gladiator. I know misery when I see it. The misery of what was once powerful and gone to rot.” She hissed out her breath. “What is it you want?” Her stare hardened and he could not lower his head. “Another stab at glory? The roar of the crowd at Cressus? The pleasures of a saffron house? You must pine for greater days than a peasant death on the streets of this fringe kingdom of ice!”

  He held still and counted heartbeats to ignore the affirmation in his mind and what remained of his soul. She was touched with mage blood, he thought, likely some bastard child from a lower royal house, stuck in the backwater kingdom to keep her petty schemes far from the Royal heart of the empire.

  He focused on the bitterness of his last days on the blood—stained sand and the pervasive smell of death from young life snuffed out.

  Lady Astra’s lids fluttered, then opened. Red orbs cindered into azure blue. “Goddess,” she said in a fit. “You want... nothing. Nothing but what you’re doing.”

  He swallowed bile and gave her the same smile he’d shown the Captain. “Only the laughter of children.”

  “Do not insult me!” Spit flared from her bottom lip. “You bled the sands for the glory of battle and the adulation of the masses and the flavor of death.” She wiped the froth away, anger settling into determination. “Fine. Desire is but one key to my needs.”

  “And what do you need that I can offer?”

  One word escaped her graveyard smile. “Entertainment.”

  He wondered if Razor could smell the fear on him, and if she was enjoying it.

  Lady Astra spoke of Prince Konrad, a sickly boy, weak in bone and will, and the future king of Baltikum. “Given his frailty, he is not allowed to leave the confines of his room, which looks upon his late mother’s garden. An indulgent mess that I will have cleared for your performance.

  “As it is sacred ground, I cannot have it sullied by an actual bloodsport. So you and your beast will put on a show so real, so savage that it will scare him into being a man capable of ruling. I can see the birth of that spark.” Her blue eyes flickered red once. “When your mock battle triggers his soul, you will be free to go.”

  “And if I fail?”

  She exhaled slowly. “Then he will have an accident. One that your... pet will be sure to take advantage of. If he cannot be strong, then he shall meet his mother below the roots.”

  “And that would not sully the sacred ground?”

  She smirked. “I suggest you prepare for your performance.”

  “No,” Buzzard said.

  She glared.

  He made a silent prayer to his deaf gods. “I will die before I hurt a child.”

  “You will do as I command, gladiator,” Lady Astra said, standing. “Or your companion’s hide will become the latest addition to my collection. I’ll hang it next to yours.”

  At the command of a royal house, void of choice, Buzzard let his powerlessness wash over him with a sad relief. Until he realized Lady Astra’s malice might make that of Razor seem as light as dust.

  All roads from the arenas were damned.

  * * *

  Frost laced Buzzard’s breath as he dragged Razor’s cage through the dark limestone labyrinth of the Keep, vigils flanking him on all sides, until they came upon a great stone door, smooth as the summer sky and flecked with metals so that torchlight made it shimmer like stars.

  Three guards pulled the great latch. “Inside,” said the captain. “Our Lady has ordered you to examine the grounds.”

  “You’re not going in?”

  “It is the late Queen’s garden. Sacred. We are not permitted. Even the gardeners are high born.”

  “And I guess my presence there is even more of a stab in the eye of the dead royal. Your new queen has a mean streak that could make a starved wolverine proud.”

  “Watch that degenerate talk!” said Vigil Meris. “Get in there, slave, or we’ll—”

  Faster than hate, Buzzard snatched the dagger from the vigil’s belt and brought it to his neck.

  Another sharp edge braced his own throat. “I am no slave,” Buzzard said. “Nor have I been, for longer than you’ve been staining the world with your turds. I’ve killed more than you will see living, to get my freedom. Call me that again and the Lady can have my head, for I will gladly take yours.”

  “Lower your blades,” the captain ordered, voice calm and clear. “Our Lady needs him more than a loud—mouthed vigil too stupid to keep his blade out of reach from a trained killer.”

  They all retracted their weapons. Buzzard dropped the knife.

  The captain held his head back. “They’re too young to remember your glory days. If they did, they’d see fit to ask you questions instead of trying to slit your throat.”

  “Their loss, obviously,” Buzzard said glumly, picking dirt from his nose.

  The captain held his belt, hands away from his sword hilt. “I saw you take on the Talinide Bear when I was a child visiting cousins in the south. Such courage was inspiring enough to take a meek northern stick and see if he could face the challenge of a martial life.”

  Buzzard tried to smile but shook his head. What little good he’d done in the arena was an ember next to the fire of his crime. “Please, just tell me where I am to go.”

  “Inside,” said the captain, gripping Buzzard’s shoulder. “We will leave the door open so your... companion stays quiet.”

  Buzzard nodded, then covered his eyes and walked inside. Sweet, warm air cleared his nose. Winter... had not t
ouched this garden.

  Here, the air tasted of spring. Rich greens and reds filled the garden and the chirps and chitters of bug and bird were ripe as fruit. Above, the ice—blue sky taunted him with iron clouds that ran over the Keep and on to eternity. The courtyard was as wide as a hundred cells, surrounded by wild trees and flowers that were in turn surrounded by grey walls. A patch of colorful heaven amidst the Keep’s somber cadence, he thought, but heaven in chains was still a prison.

  A single balcony with a high rail faced him from a few stories up. The prince’s room.

  Buzzard sat down. He was damned, he thought. Death waited for him on either choice. And what of Razor? He cracked his knuckles. They hurt.

  Something moved in the long grass a few feet deep under a thornberry bush. He ignored the urge to pounce and kept running his hand across the weak grass blades. Maybe it was a test. Maybe that useless vigil wanted a second crack. Then, another rustle.

  Buzzard waited three heartbeats then sprang like Razor in her prime, grabbing the body in his leap and twisting the manacle’s chain around his prey’s neck, crushing the squeal that was about to break the silence. They landed silently on soft grass and not even the song birds in the tree stirred.

  “You think you could surprise someone who’s bested a pack of jaguars?”

  Small white hands gripped his massive scarred forearm. Buzzard let go and dashed away.

  It was a boy, pine—needle thin, coughing so hard into the long grass that it seemed his tiny neck would snap.

  “Forgiveness,” Buzzard said, hands on the ground. “I thought you were—”

  The boy sucked in air, then fell back, gripping his neck.

  “Shit!” Buzzard whispered, then leaned over him, tore the boy’s hands away, and flipped him over. “When I hit you, breathe out hard.” He slapped the boy’s frail back and his thin body hit the grass like a fallen log. But from his mouth shot a gory nut, dyed black.

  The boy sucked in air until the words formed. “Why... why did you save me?”