Beneath Ceaseless Skies #97

by Tina Connolly

  “Prophecy.” Bienor tried to moisten his cracked lips with his tongue, tasting grit, imagining whiskey. Eurytus had disavowed the gods of the centaurs—they all had, long before they had come to the New World. They had given up Fate to worship power.

  Nessus’s eyes were huge, unblinking, black. “I have eaten of these flowers, and they’ve shown me the path to Eurytus’s defeat.”

  The words came to Bienor unbidden, almost a prayer: the death of Eurytus. Gryneus had lived by those words, drank to them, fucked to them. Gryneus was dead at Eurytus’s hand. Bienor’s own hands shook. “Why should I believe you?”

  Grinning, Nessus spat the stub of cigar from his lips. He brushed the heap of flowers into cupped hands and raised them. “The death of Eurytus,” he intoned, a prayer to a lost god in whom Bienor knew Nessus had never believed.

  The flower-hearts spilled down his gullet and over his lips, catching in his beard and the gray curls that frosted his chest. The human slave made to brush them away; Nessus backhanded her into the dirt. He lunged across the table, ripped the sheath from the fasces knife and gripped Bienor’s fists around the blade. The bodyguards shouted, drawing their guns. Bienor barely found the presence of mind to recoil; the force of Nessus’s grasp prevented even that. His black eyes swelled with the flowers’ effect, irises contracting to nothing, pupils edging out the white. Was it only the the beaten slave’s reflection, or did Bienor imagine human figures moving in their depths?

  “Yes,” hissed Nessus, his voice suddenly distorted, sibilances stretched. The flowers’ bitter scent mingled on his breath with aromas subtler and more profane. “They’re real. Don’t believe me? Still don’t trust my word, my symbol? Try them yourself, and see.”

  His death-grasp weakened. His hands fell away. His eyelids slammed like furnace-mouths, and the earth itself trembled as he toppled against the cushions.

  Bienor’s age stared back at him from within the bloodied steel, accusing: the canyoned, bald pate, the crags framing his lips, the iron-filings stubble. His blood dripped across the parched skin of the map and was absorbed. He seized the untouched glass of Labyrinth Bourbon in tremoring hands. “The death of Eurytus,” he whispered, and drowned doubt in a torrent of molten gold blended with ashes.

  Beside Nessus’s symbol on the map, he smeared his own: the half-moon of Artemis, divided by an arrow-shaft. There on the page, it evoked the idealistic delusions of his youth.

  The bodyguards converged. He wrenched the map from the table, enclosing the knife and decanter of bourbon in its folds, and clutched them to his chest as the bodyguards hauled him out into the writhing desert wind.

  II.

  Five Legs returned from the hunt to find his adopted tribe’s campsite trampled and burning. He could find no signs of life or death—no bodies—only heaps of smoldering skins stinking like funeral pyres, smashed weapons and tools, shattered pottery ground into dirt, and hoofprints, everywhere, hoofprints. Like his own.

  He searched the camp twice and started again before he recognized the hot clench in his belly as hunger. His tribe’s tradition was to fast on the hunt in honor of the prey, then feast in celebration. Days, he’d been gone, on the far side of the valley; his equine endurance and stride let him range farther than the other hunters—that, and his need for their approval.

  He slung the two dead does from his back next to a scattered firepit and made effort to assemble cinders for a cooking fire. But his limbs dragged to a halt, and he sank to the trampled earth beside his kill like a foal on its first legs. With a knife of flint, he sawed a haunch from one of the deer, skinned it carelessly, and ate, salting the raw meat with his grief while the sacred mountain and the evening sky looked on, serene.

  A shriek came from behind him. He turned, deer’s blood slick on his lips, relief welling in his throat to choke off breath. Something hobbled towards him on a splintered spear. A tattered cloak, feather-trimmed, broke its outline against the jagged flame-lit dusk such that the figure flickered in and out of tangibility: a rangy juniper, it seemed, then a bundle of rags and sticks awaiting fire, a carrion-bird, and then an old, old woman—tiny, angular, and masked.

  The elder. How had she survived? If the centaurs had judged her too weak for toil, they should have killed her, if only to prevent her passing word to the next tribe of what they’d done.

  Five Legs threw away the haunch of venison, suddenly appalled at its slick, ropy texture and faint warmth. He tried to wipe blood from his lips, realized his hands were covered in it. Centaurs ate their meat raw, like beasts. What was he?

  “Look at you,” the elder whispered. The immense wooden mask, with its hooked beak and gaping eyes, was jubilant and cruel, the eyes of the old woman lifeless behind it. “You claimed to have renounced their ways. You feigned desire to learn the wisdoms we could teach. Was this what you wanted, all that time? You brought them here.”

  Denying it would have felt like a lie.

  Her withered hand, clawlike, reached for his left haunch—the place where Thin Crow had painted the medicine wheel. “You never deserved this. I knew.” Her blackened talons dug through tar-and-milkweed paint into the scars beneath. He cringed but couldn’t pull away.

  Her people loved their elder, spoke of her with more than reverence. Grandmother, Thin Crow had called her, though if she’d ever possessed a family of her own they had outraced her to the grave. To Five Legs, she had always been a mask without a face. Did she know what he’d been—what lay beneath the paint?

  Had Eurytus come seeking his wayward son, and finding him gone, taken his tribe instead?

  He choked out the only answer he could muster. “I’ll go after them. Our tribe—please, elder, tell me, you must have seen—”

  “Go after them for what? To ply the whip? To sever their feet and make them drag stones across the desert for your pleasure?” The elder’s voice was brittle. The mask leered its derision.

  They had done such things, and worse. His people, centaurs. “To help them,” he whispered.

  Her claws dug deeper, drawing blood. “My tribe was taken to a train—one of those hungering machines that have devoured the trees, even the land itself from end to end. You could never overcome such a thing—even if you weren’t a traitor but a hero of our race and this new vow not as much a lie as everything you’ve ever said.”

  Five Legs struggled to recall Thin Crow’s gentle hands on his hide, Thin Crow’s calm voice, whispering. The medicine wheel—it had been his meditation, an image that should come to mind as easily as breathing: a consummately human symbol, signifying elemental harmony, eternal return. For a time, it had allowed him to believe himself one of them. Human.

  Thin Crow, now chained and crammed into a cattle car along with every other member of his tribe but one; with Nine Fawn, Standing Hare, all the human beings Five Legs had learned to think of as his own. As his possessions.

  “Go ahead, elder,” he said. “Scrape the wheel from my hide, as I deserve.”

  She obliged him without mercy, the mask laughing, her nails seeming to lengthen and sharpen into talons, tearing free hair and skin along with the tar.

  When the last of the medicine wheel was ripped away, leaving the symbol it concealed as red and raw as on the day it had been seared into his flesh, Five Legs glimpsed recognition in the eyes beneath the mask. The spiral brand—Eurytus’s mark—she knew it.

  The home fires had spread to the grasslands, fanned by wind. Smoke circled the camp in a widening gyre as dusk fled before night.

  The elder lightly traced the spiral’s shape with fingernails upon his skin. She turned up the palm of the hand she’d used to flay him, exposing a deep scar limned in red: the sacred mountain, whose shape in the north was outlined by the last rays. It was her own symbol: the mark of a sorcerer, carved not in ownership but sacrifice, no doubt by her own hand. In seven years, he’d never seen it.

  “Lend me your power, your vision,” he said. “I knew their ways once. We can free them.”

 
; The elder’s hands retreated within the feathered cloak. She propped the sole of one foot against her knee, defying the mask’s massive bulk, balancing her weight against the spear: a pose unassailable, distant, a stork on the hunt amidst the stream.

  When she spoke, the elder’s words were nearly lost amid the rush of fire. “I will share one portent, traitor. Unless you’re prepared to embrace what you are—to abandon the compassion and the will to peace that my people gifted you against my wish—you’ll fail. And if by exploiting that inborn viciousness, you free my people but find yourself incapable of covering up that centaurness with paint and lies a second time, you’ll die. If not by another’s hand, then by mine.”

  III.

  Bienor reached Prometheus Gulch before dawn. It had been a long, unsteady gallop in the dark along the trail out of the hills, the crystal decanter a pendulum of fire swinging open in one fist, the unearthed Pyretus rifle in the other, frost-edged buttes like ancient human faces lurching up against the starlight.

  He dozed away the night’s last hours dead on his hooves at the station house bar, knees locked, his cheek in the stains, the rifle in his arms. By sunrise, the bourbon had driven a bent shoeing-nail through his skull. He staggered out into the street and picked a string of dog-ends from the gutter, practicing holding each one still enough to light the next, burning his fingers often as not. Liquor would have worked better, but he barely had coin enough for what he needed as it was. And the golden half-inch left in Nessus’s crystal decanter, buried like stolen bullion deep in his possibles bag, he was saving for later. Liquor was killing him, but he wasn’t such a fool to think he could live without it.

  There was too much traffic in the street for so early a morning in this dusty shithole of a town—but then, the train was coming. He studied everyone who passed: ranchers, prospectors, slaves and slave-drivers, centaur, satyr, human, beast, people of class and of the road.

  The two deserters came out of the low country south, headed straight for the bar. One was bragging to the other, loud, showing off a pair of repeating pistols he claimed he’d lifted off the madam of a cat-house in Niobe’s Hole, brandishing their tarnish-silvered gleam as though he were performing for a sold-out Circus crowd. Stupid, even in the outlands. But Bienor wasn’t looking for genius. At least they’d had the sense to ditch their army issue.

  Battered floorboards ringing under his hooves, he stepped to the bar, brushing gently against the quiet one’s flank. He liked what he felt: well-muscled. This one could move fast when he had to.

  “Got a problem, old horse?” said the loud one with the pistols.

  Bienor let that slide, gave them the easiest smile he could muster. “No problem. Sounds like you foals might have some profits chafing your hides. Thought you might fancy a roll with the Fates.” He opened a tremoring hand on a set of dice: Gryneus’, hand-carved from a dead hoplite’s hip, and hand-skewed.

  In a dozen throws against the peeling pillars of the station house porch, he took them for half what they’d stolen—army scrip mostly, a few cat house tokens, chips of shaved silver stamped with a medusa’s head. Enough.

  Deimos—that was the loud one, a stringy, slope-shouldered chestnut scared of everything and faking fearlessness. Phaeton was dapple-grey, long-limbed and graceful, slow to form an opinion, slower to speak it. They didn’t love Eurytus, though they envied him. They’d abandoned his host on the Asphodel Mesa near the start of this recent campaign. Since then, they’d wandered, living on what they could hustle.

  There were dozens like them in the outlands, more every year: disillusioned and dangerous, resentful of their lot, at a loss for how to change it. Bienor understood all this too well. He and Gryneus had been the first.

  He bought back into their good graces with cheap wine and the lost ideals of his own youth, dressed in kid leather and lambswool like he still thought they were anything but bullshit. “In the Old World,” he told them, “the humans ruled, and we were the downtrodden. We lived as philosophers, healers, adherents to the cult of Artemis and of the moon. We hunted the red deer and the wild boar; ran with muses among the glades, drinking nectar and ambrosia, answering to no one but the gods. The humans, jealous of our freedom, desiring control, persecuted and pursued us into exile. Here in the New World, Eurytus has transformed us into what we hated.” And Nessus, Bienor did not add.

  By the time they broke into the second wine-jar, he’d whispered his dead lover’s name, and they were with him. Slumped against grimed windows in a low-slung backless chair, Bienor sucked smoke and watched them drink, wondering how much more like Nessus this job would make him. He and Gryneus had been as young as these two, would have jumped just as quick at a promise of change—if there’d been one—and been just as unprepared for the consequences. He remembered that first night of their rebellion; the steer they’d poached and spitted in the wilderness, coyotes’ eyes glinting jealously from distant buttes. The things they’d said; oaths, promises.

  But he didn’t want to think about Gryneus. So he drank a little wine. And then a little more.

  These two idiots might survive what was coming. If they did, if Nessus could do as he promised, they’d have a chance to live like centaurs of the Old World. Of course, they’d be rolling the dice. Or rather, he’d be rolling for them.

  * * *

  The Achilles roared past sometime after noon, waking Bienor from numb contemplation of the bottom of a jar. Glue-eyed and corpse-mouthed, he dug his hat from under Phaeton’s unconscious bulk and joined the crowd outside the station, seeking in vain for a glimpse of Eurytus through the glare in the Hypnos car’s windows for a glimpse of Eurytus. He counted fifty cars, each as wide as ten centaurs, long as twenty, drawn by an iron demigod hunched snorting over a bellyful of fire, sorcery, and steam.

  As the train slowed for the curve at the outskirts, a bag-man flung himself aboard from the tin roof of the water tower. A leather-faced wrangler leaned out the sliding door and jabbed him with a prod; the bag-man teetered and fell through the gap between cars. The wheels cut him in two.

  The crowd dispersed, disappointed and murmuring. He hoped they hadn’t come here just for this. The clatter of the last car faded; the crackling spider-legs of sorcery settled back into the rails.

  Only then did the sun-scattered figure appear coming down out of the hills.

  Bienor splashed his face from the trough, tipped his hat to shade his eyes, and the blur resolved into a blond palomino, bare-chested, moving with a posture of determined exhaustion. Another deserter?

  The palomino gazed along the tracks in both directions, then laid himself belly-out in the dust and held an ear against the rail. A cold slackness in his face, as he rose; he hadn’t liked what he’d heard.

  Bienor intercepted him wandering the sharp shadows between the slave kennels, unarmed, unshod, without a hat, whispering at iron doors unanswered, straining at the bolts with bare hands. He was younger than the other two, barely a colt. Only a hint of growth darkened his jaw, though his matted mane spilled wild down his back and over his chest. By the burrs and thorns lodged in his coat, he’d been sleeping hard. On his left haunch gleamed a spiral scar, its lines doubled, blurred, as though applied by a sober drunkard.

  Or with the desire to inflict the utmost possible pain.

  At Bienor’s approach, the palomino fled for the end of the row, skittish as a deer. Fading bourbon hangover and fresh wine warmth struck precarious balance at the base of Bienor’s skull. He didn’t trust himself, didn’t trust this. Somewhere in those hills, Nessus lay wrapped in his prophetic coma, the sumptuous cloak of a savage king. What had the poison flowers shown him, and what had he already known? Had he arranged for this colt to be here, a deserter young as this one, wearing Eurytus’s own mark, when Bienor was just drunk enough to believe it?

  Buzzards spiraled over the bag-man’s remains. Thin clouds poured out of the hills, spreading across the flatland sky like a flash flood; catastrophic, brief, then gone. The colt slowed, looking bac
k. His face, painfully young, transitioned from fear to resignation. Then he charged.

  The colt was tired, distraught maybe, but not stupid. He faked a body blow, went for the rifle. Bienor stepped aside with a twist and shoved him back into the narrow shadows of the kennels. Pressing close, he trapped the colt against the hot, pale wall. Drinking made some things easier: easier to take a hit without feeling it, easier to act without having to think.

  “Where have they taken them?” the colt demanded, his Greek faintly accented, making him sound almost human. He tried to rear.

  Bienor didn’t give him room. “Shipped south, some of them, field hands for New Tyre. Or north and east—strip mines that way, foundries. Or east to the city, downriver from there.”

  Despair stole over the colt’s sun-browned face. Bienor frowned. You didn’t let yourself feel sympathy for slaves. You didn’t think about them—not if you expected to keep yourself alive. There were two or three swallows of bourbon left in the bottle; he could share them, wallow with this stranger awhile like he had with Deimos and Phaeton. But this colt was no deserter.

  Drinking made lots of things easier. Like the truth. He tried to put it gentle. “Nobody uses these cells anymore. No work for chattel slaves in these parts, supply’s all dried up. These days, they come by train out of the west.”

  The colt took it in stride. “When?”

  Bienor stepped in to look at him close. The crescents beneath the colt’s eyes hardened, but he didn’t flinch away. He had a fighter’s instincts. And he was no more afraid than he should be.

  “You want to free slaves?” Bienor said. “Get yourself in order. Otherwise you’re no use to anyone. Get a bath, a shave, a coat, a set of shoes, a tavern berth. Keep your mouth shut, but let yourself be seen.”

  The colt looked at him blankly.

  “Wait here. Understand? Just wait.”

  Bienor went and thudded his hoof against the battered boards of the station platform until a ticket-seller came to the window. He traded what remained of his swindled riches for a ticket, one way, to the Tethys Stockyards, on the Acheron downriver from New Ilium. He ducked into the bar, kicked Phaeton gently into a passable semblance of sobriety, poured a few instructions in his ear. When he came out, the colt stood in the street watching a slave woman empty slop into a hog run across the way. The woman watched him back, her eyes bitter—begging for trouble.