Bellico returned, and as the Baremescre quieted they again bent their gazes upon Imre. He knew what came next.
Cantiléna stepped forward with a steadfast expression and a song that throbbed coolly. She slid her tortoise-shell hymn from its sling and flexed her vesti.
No, Imre said firmly in his mind. But his body was rising from its crouch. His roaring wind grew. No, he said as Cantiléna slid into her singing stance, impeccable—no openings, no tension, a master of space and balance. Imre’s body crept forward with supernatural patience. Every flexion controlled. Every extension fluid. His song built in spirals until the air was a roaring cyclone. No, Imre pleaded, squinting against the gale though he knew it was no true wind.
Cantiléna remained unnerved as she brought her throbbing wind densely in about her limbs, wrapped it so tight it gave off barely a hint. And when she and he were close, close enough that he caught the scent of her breath, close enough that he thought fear had overcome her nerve, Cantiléna took a deep breath and slammed her song down into the earth. The cool steady throb shuddered far underground, becoming a rumble that grew and swelled until a gush of energy rebounded upward through her slender frame. The multiplied force blasted through her, producing a shock that jarred Imre to the core. But Cantiléna rippled her body lithely and shot forward, riding the awesome wave in an explosion of power.
Her throb smote the air; Imre blinked; and he was airborne. The vault that was the evening sky tilted round, becoming first a field of grass and then a rapidly scattering crowd of Baremescre scalps. Imre’s body, displaying a litheness of its own, wrenched itself about so that when he crashed to earth with a thud it was in a controlled crouch and on sure feet. Imre’s chest tingled in a slash from shoulder to hip, while Cantiléna stood some two dozen yards away, panting visibly. The hymn strike had been tremendous. Imre thought of the fists of his body swatting away Bellico and Ariosa’s hymns with no ill effect to speak of, but this—an assault like this could fold a man in two and make dust of his bones.
But Imre was no man. Not anymore. Already his body was moving, shocked but uninjured, undeterred, dashing across the open ground. Cantiléna drew herself up. Her parents had fought methodically, patiently for heavens knew how long, but this woman, so recently a cause for Imre’s shame, had sought to end him with a single blow. He found a pride in that, and hated himself for it.
His body attacked in full stride, though Cantiléna took his assault square, struggling gamely for space to counter even as Imre’s hands bulged and snapped from shape to shape and picked her defense apart. Double-weighted fists knocked aside her blade. A sawtoothed arm raked her flank. Spiked palms gripped her flesh arm and yanked her off balance. And only then, when she was teetering askance, did the now familiar claw rake down for her blind spot, merciless. She flung her vesti upward. The talons plunged through the back of her hand to the thunderclap of stone on stone, to her guttural cry as her knees buckled beneath the blow. No! Imre screamed, his mind afire. But without pause or stay his body, his cold weapon, wrenched its claw free, making an exploded ruin of Cantiléna’s stone hand. Her song screamed. Imre’s surged. And after an eternal moment, their eyes meeting through the coppery clouded remains of her natural-born shield, the ebon stone claw thrust forward for her unprotected face.
It was too much. Whatever man he’d been, whatever thing he’d become, whatever his Bapa, or Naldo, or the Baremescre believed, this was too much. He was no longer hoping, no longer pleading, but with all his might, all his being, commanding.
“STOP!” a cry boomed, snuffing the song winds like a breath to a candle flame.
And the cry was his, cruel and graveled and stonily implacable, but his. All motion stopped. The violent winds of his song had vanished. Imre opened his eyes to find Cantiléna staring back at him, black claw inches from her face, mouth set stubbornly but cheeks aflush, and not with fright. It was a look only a Baremescre could wield so close to the edge of death. It was a look to melt a man to pudding. Imre felt not a thing.
“Back away,” he said aloud. His body didn’t move. Back away, he tried mentally, but the stone was unwilling. At ease. “Withdraw.” After a time, Cantiléna very gingerly dislodged her hymn from Imre’s battle-shaped arm and stood to her feet, the ripple of her linens whispering clearly among the chirrup and buzz of the evening insect chorus. She took three steps backward and, cradling her broken vesti, bowed to her knees. Imre’s body at last lowered its arms.
Bellico was there at once next to his kneeling daughter. He dripped blood and sweat and held a somewhat misshapen hymn, but he otherwise appeared as fierce as ever. Imre imagined against his will how the tomb servants would go about their work separating Ariosa’s bone from the flesh, and he regretted it.
“We need a solution,” Bellico said aloud as the Baremescre returned their rough circle. Their songs were probing him, most tentatively reaching, others lashing. It wasn’t until Glissando spoke that the reason became clear.
“He cannot be cut, thus they cannot kiss,” he said. “They cannot kiss, thus they cannot marry. It is the law.” The sentiment was echoed in murmurs and nods throughout the assembly.
Imre tore his gaze from Cantiléna and nearly choked on his rage. Even now they were hung on their labyrinthine customs. Did they want him to kill her? Make a minced platter of her face? Didn’t they see what he was now? The fools! Didn’t they see?
Bellico stepped further into the circle to stand between Cantiléna and Imre. “Thalamos pugna is a ceremony of cutting,” he said. “Without cuts there can be no ceremony.” Cantiléna remained kneeling and said nothing. Bellico looked to Imre. “You will need to allow this.”
Imre self-consciously made to rub his brow, but his hand moved less than an inch and drifted off to his side. He cursed to himself and instead ordered it still. This failed. So he chose to ignore the offending hand. “I cannot,” he said at last. The stone had gone into his heart. Stars only knew if he even had blood anymore.
Bellico returned to Eroico, and the pair spoke in low tones. And all the while Cantiléna knelt with her song throbbing, weak but even, and whether that meant cold anger or detachment or pain, Imre didn’t know. He felt like an old blind man suddenly given sight. What did he know of colors?
This time when Bellico came to the circle Imre knew from the grimness on his face that the decision would not likely favor him. “My family,” the Maestro said, “we each of us owe our existence to the laws of the Voce, spoken into the foundations of our island and thus into our very bones.” He looked down to his daughter. “Thus, despite the many kisses between Imre the Balgas and our clan, we cannot allow this bond through thalamos pugna.” The gathering was silent, though Imre detected only consent and approval. Damn them, he decided. Damn them all.
“However,” Bellico said, and the word hung heavy. “However, I myself have felt the strength of Imre the Balgas and deem myself no match.”
“I, too, deem myself no match for this man,” Cantiléna said in a voice surprisingly strong.
“As do I,” Eroico said.
“And I!” This from the man with the three-pronged hymn.
More followed, and more, until the voices became a murmur, though many were not content; Imre knew them by the aggressive licks of their songs.
“For this reason,” Bellico said, voice rising, “and because he is an incarnation of Silici Voce, born here in the land of our mothers and fathers, from the bones of this isle, in the sight of the peers of the clan Baremescre, we invite Imre the Balgas to lend us his power, to keep us strong if ever we are weak. We ask you,” Bellico said, bending his gaze upon Imre, “to serve us as the vesti ferre of the Voce, as Vindector of the Dettatura Genis Baremescre.
“And as a sacrifice of trust,” he said, kneeling next to his daughter with Eroico joining, “we concede you the right to the hymn and hand of Cantiléna, Third Blade of her clan, should she have you.”
Cantiléna’s song flared like a blossom.
“Let those in fav
or so attest,” Bellico said to the Baremescre peerage. And many knelt, one by one, then in growing numbers clapping fist to breast. It was an easy majority.
Imre paid little heed. In his mind one phrase rolled round over and over and over. Born here... from the bones of this isle. He had been born in a century rain under a cedar tree on a mountain above the Bath Oasis. His bones were Adala bones. His city was a thousand leagues away in enemy hands. But what, if anything, of that man remained?
Imre looked over his hands at the cool black stone that was his flesh, a killer’s hands, Baremescre hands. He would have damned his own soul for the freedom to weep as he knelt upon the ground before Cantiléna, as he ordered his fist against his chest. The fist was slow to move. But it moved. And when it did, the clap was deafening.
* * *
Coda
Imre the Balgas, Vindector of the Dettatura Genis Baremescre, had two homes. One was of flawless travertine stonework and leonine pillars with slaves to stock his kitchens and beat his rugs and till his gardens and refill his baths with the scorched oil he needed in the stead of soap and water. He had never set foot inside. No one had ever asked why—too polite he guessed. They were all so damned polite.
The Baremescre were even now politely leaving him alone as he sat cross-legged on the floor of his second home, Naldo’s old quarters. He was situated one pace from the hearth, the fire’s heat a distant sensation but comfortable nonetheless. A pile of wooden splinters rested at his side.
Turn slight left, he told his left hand, and it rotated the puppet head a few degrees. Now scrape there and there, and the right hand, holding the wood knife, set to work on the puppet’s eye. The hands moved with halting brutality, etching a crude, childish visage that would have given Tayuya apoplexy. Still, it was progress. And he of course had plenty of time to improve.
While his hands worked, Imre spread his awareness to the songs of the Silici isles. He heard every mount and hill and rock, the scrape of every mole, the slither of the worms, the stones of the islands themselves stretching into the bowels of the earth, and on the surface, all the bestial rhythms of the living Silici, mingled with those from the bones of the dead. Ariosa’s fainted flutter played among them. Imre shrank quickly from her. Instead he focused on his surveying project.
He’d realized in the early days that the Silici power flowed from the deep stone roots of their islands—sown there by the Voce, the Baremescre would say. Like a fool he’d tried walking the seabed to find where Silici Tarraneh’s stone stretched to its limit. What he’d found were the boundaries of his own power. Just a single step too far and his stone body had seized into a lifeless hunk of rock. He’d spent days trapped below the gloomy currents, unmoving and undying, until the Baremescre sent parties to fish him from the abyss like lagan. Those dark, songless days had been a hell, and he understood at last why the Silici never left the reach of their island mother. “We do not sail where we cannot sing,” was what Ariosa had told him. Now Imre simply listened, and day by day he added detail to his mental map.
He was exploring the seventh stratum below Silici Tarraneh—the scrape, nick, and sway of his carving work adding to the lulling comfort of the fire—when his body told that a Silici was coming down the lane. Told and acted. It snapped itself to attention, forcing Imre from his thoughts, and before he knew his right from his left, he was on his feet, the fire to his back, the wood knife tossed aside. And his puppet, his ugly little mystery, was broken to splinters in a fist now sprouting stony spikes.
Imre understood his body’s nature as he understood the temper of a familiar ship or mule, and knew he should accept the nature of the thing simply for what it was. But there were splinters in his hand. His work, damn it all! He would have flung the wooden remains aside and roared with a shout to bring the walls down around him, but his body held fast, mouth shut, stance solid. Only his eyes were his. With an effort he pulled them away from the corpse of his puppet to regard the visitor standing in Naldo’s doorway.
The girl paused in the face of Imre’s aggression, but only for a moment. The Baremescre had by now grown accustomed to him. “Hail, Vindector,” she said with a deep bow and a clap, her vesti the color of rust and elaborately horned, her song pounding dully like stamped feet. “I have word from the Maestra.”
Through the open door Imre saw that it was just a few hours past dawn. But on what day? How long had he labored this time? The breeze brought scent of a recent rainstorm he’d not noticed. And the birdsong, his cunning ears told him, claimed the days were getting shorter. Summer was ending. A month at least, he realized with an inward sigh. A month for a handful of splinters. Imre painstakingly nodded for the girl to continue.
“The traders bring rumor of another peregrin armada nearing our shores. It carries an army of musketmen larger than the one you destroyed on the beach near Falcis. The Maestra is requesting your presence at war council.”
As the girl spoke, Imre’s body became convinced she meant no harm and relaxed. “Tell me your name,” he said in a gravel-and-iron voice.
“I am Acciacciatura.”
Daughter of Maestra Cadenza, Imre thought, daughter of Estinto, son of Gaudioso, son of Brillantea, daughter of Lontana, daughter of Libera, daughter of Eroico.
“So you are one of Eroico’s,” he said aloud. “I knew him well. His sister Cantiléna was—she was very beautiful.” And stubborn. And loyal beyond reason. She would have loved a daughter like you.
The girl stared at him uncertainly. “I apologize, Vindector. I know of no one with that name.”
Imre waved away her confusion. “A project of mine,” he said, “remembering the dead.”
Before Imre agreed to follow the girl, he dropped the splinters onto the pile near the fire. Half an eye this time. Not enough to be a face, not enough to be anything at all. Yet it was the best he’d done in all these years. And that, Imre thought as he left Naldo’s room, preparing for a new war, was worth a little happiness.
Copyright © 2009 Michael Anthony Ashley
Michael Anthony Ashley is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop. He focuses on short fiction, his latest project being the “Story A Day” challenge at fabula-magna.blogspot.com. He writes, teaches, and practices martial arts with his wife in Atlanta, GA.
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COVER ART
“Endless Skies,” by Rick Sardinha
Rick Sardinha is a professional illustrator/fine artist living and working on the outskirts of Providence, Rhode Island. His passion is to create in traditional oil media, however, he is just as comfortable in front of a computer and often uses multiple disciplines in the image creation process. More of his work can be seen at http://www.battleduck.com.
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