Beneath Ceaseless Skies #172

by E. Catherine Tobler

  Gemma and Sombra guided us through the train as it prepared to leave the city; it was a circus train, they told us, though “circus” meant little to us. They were performers—this we understood—and had completed a series of shows meant to entertain those gold-rushing men. I saw the glitter of money in their eyes and a transformation as the light sister became the dark sister, and knew we had found our path into the mountains.

  This path was not easily had. There were gold-seeking men upon the train, having asked for passage to Dawson City. They were possibly as eager as Jackson to reach the depths of the mountains on these narrow rails, crowding every car with bodies and equipment, wedging themselves against performers and animals alike. The animals.

  I cannot say how many train cars there were, for unless my memory fails, this number changed over the course of the journey. The train itself changed based on what Jackson and its people required of it. Of her. I felt a kindred spirit inside this metal body, a thing I have felt in no other place. I might compare her to what I felt in my partner, that spirit beneath the flesh being opposite of the flesh itself—but this train had no flesh that I could see. (If I had known then of the severed hand within her engine, I would have understood that indeed she possessed such flesh yet another doubled spirit, she of metal and woman.) She was a creature bound to travel the tracks of the world, but sometimes she skimmed through sky and cloud.

  Some of the train cars held animals that we did not know and each car appeared to change its shape based upon their occupants. The cars looked entirely normal on the outside but inside, each and every beast or person was properly housed according to their needs. The animals did not need cages when they had small landscapes to roam.

  Among the beasts, we discovered lions, sirens, and one pale bear that Gemma and Sombra said would soon be in its proper place. The sirens drew us because of their bird natures, their train car spackled with glittering fish scales from their many meals. We saw in these striking women our mothers and wondered if they were why Jackson had such a hunger for the thunderbirds. Did he seek to mate one spirit to another? We did not ask, only burned sweet grass in the small compartment we had been given and clasped our hands as we asked for a safe journey, for guidance, for the ability to know what would need doing in the moments to come.

  Those nights, I heard thunder through the hills, felt the rattle of windows as wind tried to invade. I dreamed of our mothers bursting from the snow-laden mountains, cracking the world apart until it was buried in white. Unable to sleep with such thoughts, I watched the dark world pass beyond the train windows beyond my own reflection.

  Eventually, the train slowed, stopped. I left our cabin to understand what had happened.

  I found Jackson easily enough. I expected him to be concerned—surely a train stopped upon tracks was bad luck—but his face split with a grin. Come, he said, watch them work.

  It was one of the most magnificent things I have witnessed. Jackson guided me to the cab and sure-footed his way up the ladder that led through a roof hatch. I grasped the ladder to follow, but this is when I saw the woman’s hand. Severed at the wrist, partly bundled in cloth, it spilled threaded fatelines into the world, its palm crossed with gold. I felt its eternal heartbeat, the rumble of the train even though we stood still, and climbed my way up and out through the hatch.

  Gemma and Sombra, Jackson told me, had a way with metal, in the finding of it but also in its manipulation. Beyond the train, the tracks lay heavy with ice and snow, and though the women could not move these directly they reached with their essences to the buried rails. They warmed the metal, which sheared the ice; as stars fall from the night sky, bright shards of ice plummeted down the dark valley over which we stood on the elevated track.

  The whole hour through, the women worked tirelessly, digging their spirits into the ice to reach the metal, to make it simmer with a warm, unearthly light. In its own way, this avalanche of ice sounded like thunder, and I looked to the sky above, wondering if our mothers could feel our approach.

  Gugán, roused by my absence, soon joined me, and we sat upon the cold engine cab roof with Jackson, watching the ice’s destruction. Gemma and Sombra were illuminated by the glowing tracks, water sputtering into the air as more ice broke violently free. Jackson asked nothing of us; he knew as I did that all had been agreed to in the tavern. He would take us into the hills; we would call our mothers down. What the thunderbirds did then was out of our hands. He knew this but dared it anyhow and some part of me loved him for it.

  Morning saw the train in motion again, deeper into the hills that rose on either side of us. The snow-draped heights reminded me how far we were from the water, from our home. I watched them with unease, but it was Gugán’s hand upon the back of my neck that grounded and calmed me. This was what we had come for, he reminded me. This is what we longed to do. Free our mothers and then— We could see nothing beyond that moment, could not even see that moment, truth be told. It was cloaked in the clouds Raven had used that day to steal our mothers away.

  Being of Raven was not controlling Raven, I told Gugán. It was folly to think any could control such a creature. I could see that this weighed on him even now. That moment of loss, always floating in the depths of his eyes. This was the path that tethered him, and even had I known (I knew—do not listen to this untruth), I would not have stopped what came.

  * * *

  I came to see many forms within the cloaked mountains as we passed northward; the tail of our kin the whale, the rough-cut edge of a wing lifted in flight, the pointed nose of a leaping salmon. It was the wing that drew my eyes time and again until we were far out of its arching height. The train wove her way through tunnels of rock, breaking once more into sunlight falling through bruised clouds. It was those clouds that gave us concern, that made us feel Raven closing in to protect what he believed was his. They were not snow clouds but the clouds of storm and rage. In this way, they were also of the thunderbird.

  Snow and ice on the tracks stopped the train again midday. Before Gemma and Sombra could begin their work, the gold-rush men expressed their frustration by daring to exit the train—they swarmed out of the cars, walked the length of the train, and leaped down to the ice-coated metal. They began to chip at it with picks and boots. The sisters stared at them but made no move forward. They only looked at Jackson, who stood silent upon the engine roof.

  But he also made no move toward the men, and I watched him turn a slow circle, studying the mountains. The peaks traced a jagged line against the clouded sky, a line like none I had seen before. Only the clouds were familiar, possessing the rounded bounty they’d had that day in my youth, when they had dipped to the river and carried our mothers away. In my heart, a notion was given breath, was given space to stretch and explore, and I reached for the hand that should have been at my side, only to find that it was not.

  Gugán had gone already, feeling that breath a moment before I had. My hand curled into the fist of a man who wants to strike a thing. I didn’t look to the sisters or Jackson. I fled the engine, threading my way through the train to the strange cars that changed their shape based on need. Here, I found my other half, kneeling before the great pale bear. I felt certain the beast would lift a paw and spill Gugán’s spirit to floor, but instead it leaned its massive head against his own in acquiescence.

  Another breath filled me. Gemma and Sombra had said this bear would soon be in its proper place. Not necessarily its home, but proper. I watched Gugán settle onto the bear’s broad back and offer me a hand to do the same. The bear heaved beneath us, the train car split wide, and we were gone, running along tracks that should have been iced but were not.

  As the metal rails cleaved the mountain in a sure and sweeping curve, the bear leaped with similar certainty. He knew where he was going, muscle and bone bunching beneath our grasping thighs. Our hands curled knuckle-deep into the oily fur, and we moved as one creature with him, up and up the rock-strewn mountain. Here, the trees were sparse and the gr
ound more rock than dirt; there was little shadow to cloak what we sought: the peak of the mountain, so far from the river, the ocean, the lake.

  In tintypes, lightning appears to have split the mountain’s crest in two, leaving a gaping mouth of ragged stone. But a closer look reveals the yawning V of a beak. This mouth possessed no blue tongue—this mouth was not Raven but thunderbird, and we rushed headlong toward her, caring not what would happen, only knowing it must.

  We plunged into the stony mouth of darkness. This darkness rushed absolute, and we had only the cascading wind to tell us we still moved. The pale bear was invisible within this darkness, until I realized that pieces of the beast were coming loose in the dark. Strands of oily white hair pulled free from its hide, bursting into flame the deeper we ran into the mouth. These flames hovered and provided no light to see by, only a strange illumination that seemed to stretch into feathers, into beaks, into talons.

  Beaks snapped at my arms. Talons raked my spine. A cooling rush of blood signaled the unraveling of the ink that marked me, upward into the dark. Pain clawed my throat as every inked thread that spoke of my double-spirited nature was ripped from my skin. The blood in the wake of the stolen ink turned to momentary fire, a burning river that flowed upward against the wind.

  I saw too how my love came apart, how the flesh that confined him was peeled away, to reveal bones and heart, to expose his clove and salt soul, his khaa yahaayí as he became the ghost that would never leave me. I watched Raven pluck my love’s heart and swallow it whole. The warm breath that once flowed from him became the wind around me; his breath channeled my blood, which became the water, which broke the stone.

  When you have known darkness and are thrown into light, you are blinded. I was blind and still knew everything. The mountain shattered up the length of my arms, an eruption of snow and trees and stones spewing into the clouded sky. I was thrown upward as our mothers shook the stone from their trapped wings, to push free as if being born. They clawed the sky in jubilation, jagged streams of lightning illuminating the air. Everything crackled with energy and when the thunder rolled beneath their wings, I gloried in that sound even as I spiraled uncontrolled far through the air, landing flat against the train’s roof.

  Raven came as black fury through the bruised clouds, but he could not pin our mothers, could not claim what had been released with the blood and breath of our doubled spirits. Our mothers circled Raven, beat him down with beaks and wings, until he tumbled loose and flew up and up and away, screaming with his blue tongue aflame.

  And then, the strange silence. The absence of mothers and lovers and every inky line that had ever burrowed into my skin. When our mothers returned, they crouched above me, studying me with eyes familiar yet unknown. They balanced on the edge of the metal train and screamed fire when Jackson meant to come closer. With shrieks, they dared me to split my own skin, to give way to that which I had not.

  My Eagle spirit emerged from its slumber within my body, parting my skin like water to take the sky as her own, and I thought to see muscle unfurling in her—my—wake. This was the second spirit within me, the woman I had never fully unleashed, even with Gugán—oh, my lost Gugán.

  Now that I had given myself over to her, Eagle cried her freedom as our mothers had, wings trailing fire, which ignited lighting, which caused me to pull the cool clouds closer. I wove a gown from them and floated safely to the ground where I crumpled and shook as newly born. The resuming rumble of train and thunder alike were both far distant, and I was in an unknown space dark and dappled like forest.

  There, you found me, wiped the soot from my skin as though you smoothed feathers down. How, you wondered, had I come to be naked in the dark forest when I was a creature of the bright water. You brought me back to the water, for surely a story was to be shared, my skin bare of ink but still showing pale traceries of what once had been. The breath of Eagle expanded my lungs, made me steady beneath your regard.

  Your inked fingers contain the shapes of all possible things and your black eyes hold a glimmer of more beneath their surface. Was it my Gugán I saw in them, moving as sun within the shadows, or only the hope of him? Either way, why you want a story is plain. You have not split your own skin. You wish to understand and carry the words—my voice, his tongue. You wish to carry our ghost, our khaa yakghwahéiyagu, into the future.

  All things have a beginning, we would say. Split the skin. Give way.

  Copyright © 2015 E. Catherine Tobler

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  E. Catherine Tobler is a Sturgeon Award finalist and the senior editor at Shimmer Magazine. Her short stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and multiple times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, including three other stories set in this traveling circus world, most recently “We, As One, Trailing Embers“ in BCS #147 and podcast BCS 127. Her first novel, Rings of Anubis, is now available. Follow her on Twitter @ECthetwit or her website, www.ecatherine.com.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  SWALLOWING SILVER

  by Erin Cashier

  John Halpern knew it should be a heavy weight on his conscience, to wake up and know that he was going to kill a thing that used to be a man. Whether it was or wasn’t was a topic of much internal contemplation for him as he walked up the long path to his brother-in-law’s house to ask for help. The fact that his brother-in-law was himself a devil-man did not escape him.

  Eldred’s people lived in a valley higher up than his own, a homestead of about sixteen families, surrounded by unkempt hills. They “weren’t here for the farming” was a nice way of putting it.

  The wind swung around, and Halpern knew the children would scent him soon. Sure enough, as he rounded the final bend, they scampered towards him, on feet and hands, backs hunched over.

  They wouldn’t scamper like that if their momma was still around to mind them.

  “Uncle Hal! Uncle Hal!” Junior hugged him first, with smaller Marna just a step behind. He squatted down and they thumped him, leaving dusty handprints all over the front of his workshirt.

  “Whoa there.” Halpern held them both for a moment.

  “Did you bring us anything from town?” Junior asked, his head still against Halpern’s side, squinting up with hope. Another year or two, hell, maybe a month, and it’d be handshakes and nods, like real men. Depending.

  “Of course I did.”

  A few deep sniffs. “I smell candy!” Marna announced. With the slow sincerity of youth she added, “I like candy.”

  “Don’t I know it.” Halpern rocked up to stand, knees popping, looking down at them. Junior still held a bit of his mother in the curve of his nose and the line of his jaw, but Marna was her spitting image. Each time he visited it caught him unawares. He rustled her hair with one hand and produced wax-paper wrapped taffy with the other. Junior opened it and took the largest chunk, till he caught Halpern watching, and he broke off an extra piece for Marna with a sigh.

  “Your daddy around?” Halpern asked, when they both had candy wedged inside their mouths like chaw.

  “Home.” Junior pointed back behind them. “Slaughtered a bull last night, been butchering it all day long.”

  “Thanks.” He tugged on an imaginary hat and left them to their chewing.

  Time to ask the devil for a favor.

  * * *

  As he rounded the bend, he thought he saw Sarah walking ahead of him—a flash of blue fabric flapping in the wind. Then the blue was only curtains, and he was missing her again.

  Eldred smelled him, same as the children had, and came out to stand on his porch. His apron was covered in dried blood, and he produced a pipe from behind it as Halpern neared.

  “Been awhile since you visited last. They miss you.”

  “You should bring them into town.”

  “You know I’m busy.” Eldred hit his pipe upside-down against the banister.

  “With what?”

  Eldred frowned and hit his pipe again. A plug
of tobacco ash landed near Halpern’s feet. “What do you want, John?”

  “I need a favor.” Halpern put his boot on the first stair. “May I?”

  Eldred didn’t answer, but he did step away.

  Halpern followed him inside into the darkness. The cabin was pressed up against the hillside, the roof slats overhead plugged with clots of dirt. The stink of raw meat made it smell like a dog’s mouth.

  Halpern sat down on a chair near the open window for the air and watched Eldred move among the objects of the house like he hadn’t put them there himself. He lumbered, wide-shouldered, wide-hipped, but it would have been a fool who called him fat. There was a chance he’d wrestled that bull he was slaughtering to the ground himself. Depending on the moon, Halpern wouldn’t put it past him. Devil-men’s strength knew no bounds.

  Eldred disappeared in back, to return without his apron but carrying a tobacco pouch. He opened it and sent his pipe to dig inside.

  “I need a favor,” Halpern repeated.

  “I’m not much inclined.”

  “Hear me out. And get Merrill to listen, too.”

  “Merrill don’t listen—”

  “To anyone but you. I know how you run up here.”

  There was a crunch outside, of dry grass breaking, and both men looked to the open window. Halpern could see Junior’s rust-colored hair below as he gave a hiss of defeat.

  Eldred made a thoughtful noise. “Boy, go get your uncle.”

  Junior looked up, and Halpern watched a moment of smart-assery cross his face. Halpern was really his uncle, on his mother’s side, and the boy was tempted to say as much. But Eldred clicked his tongue like he was speeding a horse and Junior minded.

  Asking Eldred for favors was bad enough—but sometimes it took a devil to fight a devil. Halpern leaned out the window and watched Junior run. At least this time he was on two-feet, as God intended.