BeneathCeaselessSkies_Issue011

by Unknown

  It was locked.

  Of course; her father must have had a key. She should’ve known. Stupid girl! No key meant no stealing. No stealing, no land...no land, no vote. No citizenship. No possibility of change.

  The berry-seller tugged at his wild hair, distracted by some internal struggle. “I could...show you another entrance.”

  Her trust wavered, her ribs straining against breath. Judging was going to continue any minute now, and then—yes, here were the dizzies again. Another judging, another touch of the God, another blow from above.

  Halla wanted in that temple, and she wanted it now. “What’s your name, old man?”

  He looked up, down, around the alley. “Don’t have one no more, my pet.”

  “We all have a name.”

  “No one left to call me. What’s the use?” Berry juice flecked the hair on his chin.

  “I’ll call you Gooseberry,” said Halla. “Show me the door.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The temple was white and gold—marble on the floors and flaking filigree in the carvings on the columns. It stirred long-forgotten memories. Halla’s father had been of the holy rich class—not a priest nor a landowner, but one of the men who liaised between the temple and the landowners’ committee, equal in status to both. One of the three classes with citizenship. The holy rich spent a lot of time in both worlds, and Halla had gone with him. She had been in this part of the temple long ago. Back when she still had a family.

  But now she was with a rambling old man who was going to get her in trouble. Every time she crept away from him he looked at her with mournful fatherly eyes, so she stopped. Stupid, this pull on her—she was used to getting along on her own. She didn’t need a familiar face, especially one that wouldn’t say his name. She tried again, her voice low. “Did you know my father? My mother?”

  Gooseberry grabbed her sleeve. His eyes were intense and his smell rank. “She was the kind and beautiful wife of a holy rich man. But she murdered her husband and she had to be executed. The God decreed it, and so his people must be his hands here on earth.”

  The cruel memory shocked her, made her fingers clench. “If I wanted a sermon, I wouldn’t be stealing from the temple right now.”

  “Everyone thinks the executioners are random,” he said, letting her sleeve fall. He mumbled, and he didn’t accent the right words. Halla had to lean in closer than she wanted to pick sense out of his rambling. “The God does not give a task to one finger over another, for we are all equally parts of his hand.”

  “I know,” Halla said. Six years living with her doctrine-obsessed father, seven spent whitewashing walls for the batty old nun who ran the lighthouse. Gooseberry could not teach her anything new. “It’s not murder, it’s divine will. The God might give the execution to any of his people to perform. Ah, the room.” She risked a peek. It was full: golden bowls, charred bamboo screens, iron shears. “You can go now.” She whisked the stolen plate out of his hands.

  He followed her in. “But this God favors some fingers over others.” He put his sticky hand to his forehead, and Halla realized his third and fourth finger were missing to the second knuckle. “That’s not right,” he said. “It must be his hand. The Mouth, you see, the Mouth is choosing which fingers....”

  Halla wanted to shake him. “Do you mean the Mouth himself chooses who has to perform a God-Death?” Heresy? Or merely temple secrets? It fit, somehow...but how would this old man know?

  “Of course. Didn’t you get it? You used to be smart.” Three purple fingerprints spotted his forehead. “The God gives the power, but the Mouth manipulates it. The landowners who give money to the temple, you don’t think they get chosen, do you? The fingers, they’re giving sweet lotions to the God’s hand....”

  “Old man,” said Halla. “If you say one more thing about fingers, I’m going to hit you with some.”

  She touched the prism of a gold lamp. The room reminded her of happier times, being here as a child. She and her da had played games here. Funny games, where he had made her try to talk to the old Mouth with her mind. The room had gone dizzy and vague, her nerves aflame...but she had been sure the God was pleased with her. She’d even thought her father was pleased, which filled those memories with warmth, pride at her abilities. He was a hard man, distant...but then there’d been these golden moments, the two of them together in the temple. Before her mother had destroyed him.

  Strange to think today of all these childhood memories she hadn’t thought of in years.

  Gooseberry scowled. “What makes you fit to judge me? You aren’t temple or rich.”

  “I will be. A landowner, that is, and then I’ll be a citizen. I’ll make changes to this city.”

  “That’s why you’re stealing gold lamps, then?” he jeered. “Only reason you want to be rich is to sit on the committee? Tell me another one.”

  Halla put down the lamp and picked up a tablet. “I don’t have to tell you anything. Why don’t you leave before they find us by your stink?”

  He looked sadly at her. One grey eye rolled around. “Good-bye, my pet,” he said, and left the room.

  Halla breathed relief and went back to studying the tablet. An overseas collector might like it. But Gooseberry’s face swam before her, the wild white hair, the vacant grey eyes. “Good-bye, my pet,” he had said, just like someone used to say when she was a girl. Not her father, but someone very like....

  Voices rose in the hall. Someone was coming.

  Halla hurried behind the bamboo screen, shoving the stupid stolen plate under her shift. The pin on the emerald brooch loosened and pierced her, but she managed not to swear. Judging usually took a full hour—how much time had she wasted arguing with Gooseberry? She peeped between two slats while refastening the brooch, this time to the inside of her worn boot. It was a thin man, a nun and three children, all in blue. Halla tried to breathe quietly.

  “Are the priestling’s robes prepared for tomorrow?” said the man’s smooth voice.

  “Yes, Mouth of the God.” The honorific was slurred with long use, closer to mowthgod.

  “Go check on the sacrifice.”

  “Yes, Mouth of the God.” The nun touched her lips in salute and left.

  Not just any man, then. Beside the Mouth stood his two child assistants and the priestling. The priestling’s head lolled and he drooled. If Gooseberry was right that the Mouth had the ability to manipulate the God’s will, then this simpleton would be disastrous as the next Mouth. Why had the God chosen him?

  “Look around,” said the Mouth. His sharp eyes scanned the room. “Find a knife you like for tomorrow.”

  The priestling obeyed, head bobbing. He was young, too. Perhaps nine. Halla was just old enough to remember the current Mouth’s investiture a decade ago. But the current Mouth had been the age she was now when he took on his duties. A young man, not a boy.

  The priestling swayed towards the screen and Halla froze. His hands wandered, picking up random objects that were not knives at all. He hefted the same lamp Halla had held, gaze captured by its prisms. “I like this.”

  The Mouth nodded at a dagger, hands hidden in his sleeves. “How about this one?”

  “Okay,” said the priestling. He dropped the lamp. Prisms clattered as it tumbled over chests and rugs, landed at the foot of the screen. The screen wobbled.

  “Come, then,” said the Mouth, and he headed for the door, the three blue-robed children following.

  Halla exhaled...then heard her name, echoing down the marble hallway. “Halla! Halla!”

  It was Gooseberry.

  The Mouth froze in the doorway, his blue robe outlining his thin frame. Through the screen Halla saw Gooseberry nearing the room. “I promised I’d help you, Halla.” Tears streamed down his lined face. “Don’t send me away.”

  He was crazy. Absolutely crazy. And it was about to cost her half the fingers off her left hand.

  Now the Mouth nodded at the room, at her screen, and the boy and girl assistants climbed back, c
lambering over trunks, skidding over bowls. The boy twitched the screen forward, revealing Halla.

  “Submit, child,” the Mouth said softly.

  Halla bolted past him and out the door, slamming Gooseberry aside. She pounded down the white hallway, plate banging her ribs, brooch scraping her ankle. It was incriminating to run, she knew it, but there was her stupid old uncle back there, too, and she thought she could make the back door if she just ran fast enough.

  There was pounding behind her, catching up, and her thoughts caught up at the same time.

  Gooseberry was her uncle.

  She swerved, but the hallway opened in two directions and hesitation cost her. The guard grabbed Halla, twisting one arm behind her. She tried to go for her dagger, but his arm crushed the plate into the ribs she’d bruised earlier, making her double up, retching air. He dragged her back to the Mouth, who stood with the child assistants and Gooseberry. She kicked backwards into the guard’s knees.

  The Mouth smiled, his eyes sharp on her skin.

  And then Gooseberry lunged at the Mouth, knocking him to the floor. One of the Mouth’s hands almost came out of his robes in surprise. But it didn’t, not even to catch himself.

  Gooseberry was on top of the Mouth, but the boy threw himself on Gooseberry, kicking and clawing. The Mouth lay calmly on the floor as the boy punched Gooseberry off of him and into submission. The Mouth stood and the girl straightened his blue robes with deft movements of her right hand. Her sleeves were in disarray, and for the first time Halla realized that the girl, like the immortal assistant she represented, had only one hand.

  “Theft from one, and attempted deicide from the other,” said the Mouth. His narrow face was emotionless. “The God will lay his finger of justice on you.”

  With a final kick at Gooseberry’s unmoving body, the boy stood, panting. The boy’s mouth was a dark hole, tongueless.

  Halla swallowed at the sight of Gooseberry—her uncle—on the floor. “Let him go with a whipping. He didn’t do anything to you.”

  The Mouth turned his still face on hers. “The God has chosen me to interpret his justice for him. You have no part in that.” His voice smooth, like wind. “Besides, what would the daughter of a murderer know of divine morality?”

  “I know more of justice than you.” She spat at his feet.

  The boy bent and wiped her spit from the Mouth’s robes with his fingers. “You’re just like your father,” the Mouth continued. His words rolled out, implacable. “You think you know more than anyone else. No concern for whose plans you’re disrupting.”

  He left a pause, as if she might answer him. But she did not.

  “Take the old man to the afternoon judging,” he said. “Put her in the dungeon.”

  “She’s got something in her shift.”

  “Get it off her, then.”

  “It’s nothing of yours!” Halla went for her only weapon, but the guard pulled her hand tighter, kicked her knee out so she bent to the floor.

  The Mouth nodded, and the one-handed girl crossed to Halla. With deft motions she slid the plate from Halla’s shift, maneuvering it with fingers and stump.

  “Maybe so,” said the Mouth. “But it isn’t yours, little thief.”

  Halla watched the pink lump of wrist in sick fascination. The God’s punishments were absolute.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The cell was cold and moldy, and there was nothing to do but pick at the blister on her foot and think. She couldn’t figure out how her uncle had gone from the swank and lively Uncle Ollan she had known—so different from his quiet little sister—to Gooseberry. Distantly she could feel two people being judged in the square, one after the other. Without knowing, she labeled Gooseberry as the one who caved instantly. She wondered what his sentence was—she didn’t care. She hated him for not taking her in after her parents’ death—she hated him for today. She hated him for saying, in the middle of all of it, that he was there to protect her.

  At last there were clanks outside her cell door. Another door creaked, there were thumps, and the door creaked closed.

  “Rest up till midnight,” one of the guards said. Their feet moved away and then there was cold silence again.

  “I’m going to die,” Gooseberry said. His voice seemed far away.

  “Your own damn fault.” She swallowed other words—”my uncle, my family”—swallowed them into silence.

  In the dungeon, time slowed. She almost forgot he was there.

  “I killed your mother.” The words drifted around the stone wall between them. They seemed to echo in her past long before she realized what they meant.

  “I don’t understand.” Wasn’t his only crime that of abandoning her to the charity of the lighthouse?

  “The God chose me. He put the God-Death in my mind and I was the executioner.”

  His words were lucid but the meaning was not. He seemed to have forgotten everything he’d said about the priests supplanting the will of the God. His tone was singsong, lilting.

  Anger, as the meaning sunk in. “You killed her?”

  “The God convicted her. It was justice for killing her husband, and I was no one while I carried it out. The priests say no one is complicit then. I was the God’s hands, his eyes.”

  “You killed her. Your own sister.”

  “The God metes justice.”

  “Your own sister! Do you know how I lived with no parents? The temple dumped me on a rock with a batshit old nun. I lost my citizenship, I became nobody. I slaved for her seven years before I ran away. I cried for my old life. For you.”

  Silence and blackness.

  “I thought someone must’ve killed you, too, or you would’ve taken me to live with you. Mum and Da were holy rich. I should have been raised in that class, in my rightful place as a citizen. Or with you—not that I’d want that, now that I know what you are. Not abandoned in a lighthouse.” With a nun who beat her for feeling the God’s touch, if it was the God’s touch, if all of this wasn’t some horrid perversion of the Mouth’s. Beatings twice a day until she’d learned to control what she felt, to hide it. “I shouldn’t have been tossed to the bottom. Left all alone.”

  Crying from the other cell.

  Halla shut her ears with her fists. “You deserve their death.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Halla was awakened by the scrape of iron on stone. She strained her ears, but apart from that there was utter silence; no shouts, no curses, no prayers from Gooseberry as they took him to the ring on the hill.

  She was tense after that, still and fraught in her cell. After a long time, iron scraped on stone again. A key. A small hand pushed the door inward. Golden light from an oil lamp spilled in. “You can go,” a high voice said.

  A boy of nine or so, in blue.

  The simpleton priestling.

  Halla stuck her foot in the path of the door, pushed him aside, and slid out into the hallway.

  He looked up with big unfocused eyes. His head wavered, but he was not drooling. She studied the black corridor, but he seemed to be alone.

  “What are you doing here?” she said quietly.

  “The God sent me. Also, I want breakfast.”

  Halla sucked in her breath. “Can you lead me out?”

  He put one hand to his head, waved it at the hallway. Short spastic movements. “Come.” He scuttled sideways, turning his head to look at her, lamp swinging, his feet feeling out the stone floor.

  Halla crept behind him. “Does the God often send you to people?”

  “Usually he sends me things. Rabbits and pretty dove birds to —” His hands mimed cracking. He smiled in the lamplight, a brilliantly sweet smile of yellow-brown teeth. “I think someday he’ll send me a pretty person, like you. The Mouth says I have to listen to the God.”

  Slowly the words registered. “The God talks to you?”

  “Almost every day, I feel what the God wants,” he said. “That’s why I’m gonna be his next Mouth. Sometimes he hurts. I get dizzy and fall down.
But the God is just.”

  Halla grabbed the small boy’s shoulder. “Does it feel like a crackling in your head? Like ants on your bones?”

  He slid away. “Does the God tell you what you want, too?”

  Halla shook her head.

  They turned up a narrow staircase and the boy rocked his head in tune with his steps. “We play games. Little games, like I try to read the Mouth’s thoughts. Or sometimes the God makes me feel ferocious angry. Then the Mouth brings me something so I can kill it. A rabbit, maybe. As soon as I kill the rabbit the God leaves me. Sometimes the God makes me happy. Then the Mouth comes. As soon as it’s over I feel like nothing again. I feel like me.”

  Little games.... An icy thought shivered up her spine. Had this boy always been a simpleton? What had he been like before the Mouth turned his attention—and the God’s attention—to him? And nobody to watch out for him.... “Don’t you have a family?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Father, mother. Uncle.”

  “The Mouth is my father now. He has a plan to never leave me. I’m scared to be the Mouth, but Father says he’ll never leave me. Not even after today; he will never ever go. Did you bring me breakfast?”

  “No,” said Halla. The story that the God chose each new Mouth must be a lie—or at least, it had become a lie, even if it was once the truth. The Mouth had handpicked this boy. Raised him. She suddenly remembered the current Mouth sitting in the room once when she met with her father and the old Mouth. He was even skinnier then, lurching and narrow with sharp eyes, and he’d watched her as the men talked. They hadn’t tried the games that day, but Halla had had a long dizzy fit anyway, that ended with her father rocking her. The skinny young man had watched her the whole time.

  Halla wanted to ask more questions, but the boy stopped at the top of the stairs. There was a dark alcove, and ahead, a massive door. The lamp swung gold circles of light in the alcove, picked out a thin gleam.

  “My dagger,” she said. “Wait.” She put a hand on the handle of the oil lamp, next to his.