Beneath Ceaseless Skies #97

by Tina Connolly

  * * *

  It took me two months to pad to the southern part of the island, and when I got there I found that the old woman was accurate in her depiction of the town. The fields hung heavy with fear. Acrid smoke rose from the birch woods. Even the white trunks of the birches were stained black with it.

  I crept into the great house. Those villagers who were left were gathered in the hall, and a small crowd they made. Many of them were so young. Across the way Ingy was speaking with passion to a group of young men, stirring them to fight once more in a hopeless battle. The voices around me rose in different murmurs, and I heard one boy say that the village was cursed and it should be abandoned to the giant, and another, in quieter tones—that Ingy should be left in the forest as an offering. I hissed at that, but when the boy looked down he saw only a cat.

  I sidled towards Ingy. She was grown-up now but otherwise just as I remembered, just as I always wanted to be. Silly kitten dreams, wanting fingers and golden hair. Why pine after that when claws and teeth are so much more useful?

  Next to her stood gentle Osvif, also full-grown. He was not as tall as some of the doggish young men, not as wide. But when he spoke those around him quieted to listen. He put a comforting hand on the princess’ shoulder, telling everyone that they should withdraw from the attack and burnings, that the giant would fade away if they did so. They couldn’t ever find the giant, he said, for he knew how to stay hidden. They were only making him madder. They should stop seeking revenge. Ingy leaned into him.

  I felt more alone than I had since I found my pack. These were not my people. They had grown, the village had changed, and I was still a cursed cat. They were doing human things like falling in love and fighting wars and I was catching mice and getting forcibly bathed by old hags.

  I bit Ingy’s ankle.

  Gently. But I bit it, and darted. She looked down and followed the green eyes she saw, coming over to examine.

  I do believe that if she had acknowledged me for who I was, I wouldn’t have done what I did next. I would’ve swallowed my loneliness, and bid her follow Osvif’s advice.

  But Ingibjorg the chieftain’s daughter said, “What a darling little cat.”

  I didn’t owe her anything. It was she who had gotten my mother killed. “I can find your giant,” I said.

  “You can talk,” she said. “I used to imagine that my cat could talk. Or did I?”

  I rumbled dislike. “I’m sure I don’t know what you imagined, my lady,” I said. “Leave a fish head at the door if you change your mind.”

  “Nothing to change,” she said. “We’ll go right now, and I’ll take my mother’s kitchen knife. If you dare find the giant for me, I’ll dare face it.”

  I put one ear back at that, because I knew what the giant was like, even if she’d forgotten or didn’t care. If she could forget such an important incident anyway, I didn’t care what happened to her.

  We slipped out of the great house. “One of your ears is back, Kisa,” she said. “That means you’re conflicted about something.”

  “Oh, so you do remember me,” I said crossly. I couldn’t get the ear to go up, so I put the other one down as well.

  “I know there was a horrible day where we met the giant,” she said softly. “And then you disappeared. I cried for weeks.”

  “Truly?” I said. “Then why are you blithely trotting after me now?”

  “Because,” said Ingy. “If I hadn’t disturbed the giant’s home in the first place, he would never have come after the town. All this is my fault, and now you’re here to help me face it.” She sounded quite cheerful. The massacre must have made her crazy.

  “Turn here,” I said. I led her through low-hanging branches, which she ducked. After all these years I could still feel the twists and turns into the giant’s heart. The woods grew darker, the stench of soot and bone harsher. “Have your knife ready.”

  “I do.” Her footsteps were tense behind me. The silence got thicker, each paw padded slower. Guilt almost made me turn and lead her out of the forest, but no, she wanted to face the giant and I wanted her to face it. Still my steps slowed, till I was no longer leading her.

  I hissed as she trod on my tail.

  “Sorry,” she said quietly. Then, “Kisa? Do you ever think you’ll get your curse lifted?”

  My ears were belled out, quivering. “I don’t think I’ll ever try again.”

  “But—” she said, and then the giant towered in front of her. He was bigger than I’d remembered. Had he grown? I was bigger and stronger than five years ago, and yet the sight and stench of him widened my eyes and froze me to the ground. There was a smoke-stained birch concealing me from him; I couldn’t seem to move around it.

  Ingy rushed at him with her kitchen knife. She hacked at his shins, his fingers as he tried to deflect. He bellowed as she aimed for arteries—for a second I thought she might have a chance. But the giant wrested the knife from her weak wrist, tumbled her, pinned her to the ground. With one stroke he swung the knife and chopped through her ankles like they were carrots. Ingy screamed. Fell silent, unconscious.

  Then she was laying there, her feet all separated from her body, the shell of her completely unlike the vibrant Ingy I had known.

  The giant put her pink feet in his pouch. He hoisted her to his shoulder so I saw the stumps of leg—oddly quite bloodless. He swung around and set off, Ingy’s hair whipping around and her pink smooth face blank, vanishing behind black peeling trunks.

  For one horrid instant all my cowardice rushed back upon me and I thought of running away. Running to the west, finding my cat pack again. I needed no part of human affairs.

  But in the dark woods I heard Osvif, tearing madly and randomly about, calling for Ingy. My last shameful thought vanished like hot breath into frozen air. I raced forward, along the giant’s footfalls, quick and calm as only a cat can do. When I reached the clearing of his cabin I halted, for I know how keen the giant’s smell is. But Ingy was there and so in one bound I jumped in the nastiest, smelliest thing nearby to hide—the giant’s midden.

  I crawled in the nasty tunnel underneath the house wall, peeked up into the house. The smell inside was interesting and acrid; burnt bones and hair and the strong musk of giant. There was a cooking pot at one end and a chest of gold coins at another. The giant sat brooding in the middle of the room. And there—Ingy, dumped on a heap of moss and peat ash, her feet thrown down next to her.

  I waited and waited, probably a short time in reality, but it seemed endless. At last the restless giant picked up his water buckets, heading for the river. He peered out of the cabin, drew his head back to smell the air for human, for fear. But either because he wasn’t looking for cat or because his own stench hid mine, he didn’t sense me.

  The instant his tread lumbered off, I sprung from my hiding place. I lugged each of Ingy’s feet over by biting their toes, lined them up with her ankles. “You could help me, you know,” I said, but I might as well have been talking to rock. With the back of my paw I dug the last of the moss from my ear; the packet fell on a bruise and the purple faded. Oh no you don’t, I thought, and I hurried before the moss wasted its power on scrapes. I nudged the moss with my nose to her ankles, tore and laid it around them, nudged the feet to the legs by pressing my back against them.

  Then I hopped onto her chest and, yowling, kneaded her neck. Her eyelids fluttered. “Wake up, Ingy,” I said. But my kneading did no good. “Wake up!” I said again. There were strange drops of water falling on her neck.

  But I couldn’t wake her. I couldn’t move her. I was just a cat. I swallowed my rivers of pride and guilt. I left Ingy there and flew back to the forest to where clumsy human Osvif was still searching. I did not want to talk to him, but he, unlike Ingy, recognized me—or admitted to recognizing me—instantly.

  “Why, I know you,” he said. “I’d know that mackerel coat anywhere.” He dropped to one knee, lowered himself to me. “Have you seen Ingy?”

  And so I lashed my
tail and turned and walked a few paces, looked back. When I was sure he was following me, I set off at top speed to the giant’s house, leading him through trails that only I could find.

  His face paled when he saw her.

  I took pity on that and spoke. “Careful of the ankles. Keep the moss on them; keep her off her feet.” I did not really know, but I guessed, based on what I knew of the moss and the apothecaries’ sayings.

  He nodded, worried but calm. A careful, solid man. A strong-souled human.

  My ears stayed upright and steady. “And Osvif,” I said. “Take the gold.”

  Osvif looked at me sharply. Then he took a mere three handfuls from the chest, filling his pouch. He swung the unconscious Ingy to his shoulder, just as the giant had done, and hurried out of there, back through the forest.

  He walked into the great house with poor half-dead Ingy on his shoulder, and in a louder voice than any I’d ever heard him use, he bought the men off of their anger with gold. He rallied them to his strange cause of non-aggression, and because of the giant’s gold, they followed.

  I followed him back to the village slow and unstopping—a test of endurance for an energy-spent cat. I often thought of laying down and sleeping forever, but Osvif chivvied me again and again until we made it home. She will reward you, he repeated, but I spat when he said it. Much I cared for that. Not with Ingy hanging from his shoulder like a dead deer.

  Her body was cold and shaking by the time he laid her in the sleeping loft of the great house. I padded up the stairs after them, one red paw print after another. I was bone-tired, my tail dragging, my pads bleeding, but I saw one last thing I could give the girl who had everything. I jumped onto her pallet and curled around her shivering feet, feet with blue toes and bits of moss still sticking around her ankles like fetters.

  I kept her feet warm until she fell asleep, and in the morning I was human.

  * * *

  A good deed that had never been done before. I don’t know what moment tipped that balance. It worked, anyway, for I am human, and isn’t that what I always wanted?

  But now that I am human I am never satisfied. Ingy and Osvif are married, and he is the chieftain now, though he bids everyone call him Osvif. Ingy can walk, though now that she has her own princess on the way, she stays off those delicate ankles and keeps to the bench near the hearth. They gifted me one of the abandoned turf houses and a servant girl to help me adjust to buttons and mending and cooked food.

  Sometimes I go up to the great house and sit with her. But sitting is not the same as running through the forest. Needlework is not the same as a wild chase after a giant.

  And I am no more her equal than I ever was.

  I feel strangely hollow these days. Lost between worlds; I can’t curl up with my pack of cats, nor can I feel at ease with these large-souled humans. Osvif and Ingy overflow with generosity to me. But I seem to have used up my humanity in my quest to become one.

  Ridiculous longings! The dreams of a kitten. I knew where my soul was, once. It fit right between the ears, in a little fuzzy body.

  Once I had a right-sized soul, the soul of a cat.

  Copyright © 2012 Tina Connolly

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Tina Connolly lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and young son, in a house that came with a dragon in the basement and blackberry vines in the attic. Her stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Fantasy, multiple times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and the anthology Unplugged: Year’s Best Online SF 2008. Her debut fantasy novel Ironskin is forthcoming from Tor in October 2012, with a sequel in 2013. She is a frequent reader for Podcastle and is narrating a 2012 flash podcasting venture called Toasted Cake. In the summer she works as a face painter, which means a glitter-filled house is an occupational hazard. Her website is tinaconnolly.com.

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  DEATH AND THE THUNDERBIRD, PT. I

  by Michael J. DeLuca

  I.

  Carelessly tossed, the sheathed knife cleared the chaos of platters on the table and skidded towards Bienor across the surface of the map. He stretched a shaking hand to stop it falling to his hooves, willing away the alcoholic shivers and the nervous urge to rear. The hilt was elk-horn, scrimshawed in the likeness of a sheaf of rods. “The fasces,” he acknowledged, scowling. A symbol of unity: a joke in the worst kind of taste.

  Nessus’s teeth flashed around the cigar clamped between them. The sight of that ossuary grin inspired no less terror despite the wear of a decade’s devouring since Bienor had last been privy to it. The high desert gale, contorting through the gap in the tent’s stretched skin, caused the map to quake like living flesh, weighted down though it was with the leavings of a carnivore’s feast. In the blankness West—those scant regions Eurytus’s domination hadn’t reached—Nessus had scrawled the terms of the offer in a bloody hand, signed with his symbol. Treason. The centaurs of his retainer shifted nervously, scraping hooves into the hard-packed earth.

  Bienor wanted nothing so much as to turn tail and run, past the hard young colts who’d dragged him here, out into the wind and dark. But they’d catch him. They’d done it once already. He was slower than he used to be.

  The cigar swirled ash over Nessus’s chestnut coat; a slave brushed frantically at the embers. “Eurytus and I campaigned for moons among the peaks,” he said. “Every savage who’d ever escaped him must have fled there—we won more spoil than even he could have aspired to, enough to overflow the Achilles’s every coach and cattle car. I had to arrange for a second train.

  “In the morning he returns with the first to New Ilium, where I’ve ensured he be met with celebration appropriate for a homecoming his people hoped never to see: orgies, feasts, fireworks, a week of discounted fees at the Circus. While his ego is thus occupied, you’ll meet the second train—the Echidna—at the switch house east of Prometheus Gulch. You’ll divert it north, here, along this abandoned spur.”

  His grease-stained fingertip slid over hill and butte until it reached a name whose red Greek lettering was stricken out in black: Epimethea.

  “I’ll be waiting at the end of the line. And when it’s over, you’ll never need rustle minotaurs or smuggle redeye again. Or did that old shotgun still of yours in the fens by Satyr’s Spike finally go up in smoke?”

  “You caught me square,” said Bienor with a grimace, “no need to flay it. You’re offering me this windfall... why? Not because I deserve it. Why not use one of your retainers?” He aimed the fasces knife, still sheathed, at the muscled young bay spoiling at Nessus’s elbow. “What have I got that he doesn’t?”

  The end of the cigar flared gold. “Besides experience and a rifle taken from the corpse of Pyretus himself? Deniability. This is Eurytus. That bastard’s got eyes in his asshole.”

  He could buy that, as far as it went. Not far enough. “What makes you think I want your money? Gryneus and I didn’t turn outlaw out of objection to our portion of the spoil.” Not entirely true—but with Nessus you gave as good as you got.

  “Gryneus is dead. You’re not the young colt you were. You’ve lived by your own terms, I respect that. But you deserve better than the gristle left once we loyal centaurs have carved up the meat.” Nessus unstoppered a crystal decanter, poured three fingers of liquor the polished bronze of the River Acheron at dusk. He thumbed the glass forward, sloshing its contents aromatically across the map.

  That buttery scent, burnt sugar aged in oak, the faintest, iron-metallic hint of ashes—this was no backcountry moonshine, as suitable for soaking rust off shoeing nails as drinking oneself blind. It was Labyrinth Bourbon—from Eurytus’s own cellars.

  Drink had been a fine vice when Bienor was younger. Now it was killing him—killing his aim, his self-control, eating money he should have been spending on bribes, bullets... maybe once in a long while a roll in the hay. A bellyful of bourbon wouldn’t get him out of this alive.

  He breathed the scent, told himself that
was enough. “It’s not that I mind acquiring the means to ease my dotage. Forgive me, Nessus, but throwing in with you is no way to live that long.”

  “Refusing me will kill you even swifter.”

  Maybe he’d need a drink to make it through this after all.

  At least they were getting to the marrow. He was an asset Nessus didn’t mind expending, with a weakness that made him easy to control. He swallowed, dry. “Not if you were hoping to loot the Pyretus rifle off my corpse.” He’d been just sober enough to hide it when he heard them coming. Likely that had saved his life.

  Nessus laughed, too quickly. “You’ve survived too long in the outlands, my friend—it’s made you paranoid in your old age.”

  “Don’t kid me. Redeye rots the liver, not the brain. Even a blood pact wouldn’t stop you cheating on a deal. You want my help, give me an excuse to trust you.”

  “Trust... yes of course, I’d forgotten; you consider yourself a centaur of principle. A rare thing these days, almost mythical. But if what’s required is a show of faith, I believe I can oblige.” With a heavy arm, Nessus swept the jumbled plates and heaped bones clattering from the table. He performed an unsubtle prestidigitation, producing a wallet sewn from ill-cured leather, then leaned intimately close across the map. “I stole this wallet from the corpse of a savage sorcerer Eurytus slaughtered among the high peaks.”

  Bienor glanced down at the knife in his hands. He couldn’t remember when he’d been this close. The big bay stiffened, reaching for the revolver at his withers.

  Nessus paid no attention. Opening the wallet with a creak, he tipped across the map a stream of things shriveled and tawny like buttons of flesh. “These are the mythic flower-hearts of human prophecy. The visions they grant allowed the Anemoi to pass the siege of Acoma unscathed. After the uprising at Epimethea, the rebel leaders Hippodamia and Scylla divined by these flowers the means to escape execution. No centaur since Chiron has attained the power of prophecy. Until now. Do you understand me?”