The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine, Year Eight

by Catherynne M. Valente

  But, I remind myself, there is much I can do for this man. Draw some of the imbalance out, release some of the tensions that spread like waves and affect all in his vicinity.

  “Please allow me to examine your mind more closely, lord. I will gladly help you.”

  “Me?” He half-rises, then falls back on the settee. His laughter is a shrill thing, like the call of the hunting marshbird. “Me? Are you blind? Why in Bird’s guano-encrusted cloaka would I need a healer? I do not need a healer. It is for her.”

  He claps. Almost immediately the grand doors of the chamber open again. Two burly servants lead another, a thin short person of about fifteen—perhaps sixteen. The young person wears a boy’s long woolen pants under a girl’s overdress, an especially frilly one. The servants hold the young person by the arms.

  The youngster screams and screams. Their deepnames become activated—two names, one short and one very weak, long. The young person flails, struggles with all their might against the guards, and one by one the candlebulbs begin to snap out, and a large piece of crystal falls down and shatters. The young person screams in words now, over and over. “I do not want to be remade! I do not want to be remade! I do not want to be remade!”

  Mezará Brentann yells “Shut up! SHUT UP!”

  The old man half-springs, half-falls from his seat and grapples with the youngster, helped by the guard who has not been injured by the falling crystal. Brentann’s two short deepnames wrestle with the young person’s deepnames, and triumph. The young person is sprawled on the floor, with Brentann grasping their arms and the guard is affixing some type of restraint.

  Rasping, Brentann says, “And this, my dear, is your patient.”

  All this time, I have not moved. Fear has possessed me, paralyzing, choking. I have survived worse. Catastrophes. Deaths. I have looked the world’s destruction in the eye and found the strength to make a healing. But this I cannot face. In my mind I am a child again, cowering in the corner of the kitchen again, and my father’s looming shadow, huge, relentless, coming closer.

  I shield myself with the memory of my lord’s words, spoken to me all those years ago. Wherever you walk, you never walk alone. Your past, your future, I am by your side. I will always protect you. Whatever it takes, Parét. Whatever it takes.

  His voice reaches me from above, from below, from in-between spaces where I’ve scattered myself. His voice pushes me back into myself.

  I take a deep breath, and another, until I am steady again. If I want to walk out of here right now I will, and Brentann will have to deal with the resulting flood, the marsh, the wildfire, the scourge of mosquitoes, or whatever shape my lord’s rage will take this time.

  I speak. “Does my patient have a name?”

  “This is my granddaughter, Dedéi.”

  The young person starts to scream again. “I do not want to be a girl! I do not want to be a girl! I do not want to be a girl!” Their deepnames are not engaged. Defeated. It is much darker in the room, and glass is thick on the floor.

  “You see how she is,” gasps Brentann from where he holds her. “Healer after healer could do nothing. My son swore she’d grow out of it, move past these things with the nametaking, but it only gets worse. Her second deepname was a five-syllable! A good-for-nothing five-syllable, not-even-to-light-a-candlebulb five-syllable! My only granddaughter—”

  Dedéi suddenly speaks, fast and flat. “It’s a two- and five-syllable configuration. Called the Odd Angle, one of the world’s rarest and more impossible to take. Surpassed in rarity only by the two- and four-, the so-called Square Wheel, but it is too unstable. The Odd Angle is stable. Maruta Gostano, Postulating the Improbable in Magical Geometry, imported from Laina and translated into Katran in. . .”

  “Shut. Up.” Brentann’s hands lock around Dedéi’s arms, and push.

  “Can you please stop,” I ask him, “and let her go?” The Katran pronoun slides easily from my tongue, but if I were on the Coast, I would be using zha, an unmarked pronoun used by young people who are yet undecided on gender. My native tongue does not easily allow for such variation.

  “Are you out of your mind? Perform the healing while I hold her. You’ll never have a better chance.”

  “I do not heal without consent,” I say, slowly, patiently, as if to a child.

  “What are you talking about? She cannot give consent. She is insane. Warped. Look! She cannot walk from her bedroom to breakfast without breaking something. Try to say something to her, and she will forever repeat the same Bird-pecked thing, or rattle endlessly from books. She cannot speak like you and me. She cannot write, she cannot even hold a pencil. One minute of your time, and you can remake her—”

  The child starts to sob again. “I do not want, I do not want. . .”

  I shake my head. “Dedéi’s desires are clear. I do not heal without consent. Just as I would not heal you without your consent, I would not heal her.”

  “There is nothing wrong with me,” he snarls.

  “There is nothing wrong with her, either.” It is not true, of course. I have seen people like Dedéi before, in my practice. If I could take a look, I would see nothing wrong with the shape of her mind. A different shape than usual, of course, but whole within itself. No, whatever is wrong with Dedéi Brentann has nothing to do with her mind, and everything with the world.

  What’s wrong with her is you.

  “Get out of here.”

  “I want to help,” I say, “but not without consent. I’d like to talk to her. . .”

  Lord Brentann half-rises, still grasping the child, and his deepnames rear up, ugly and short, over his head. His face is a grimace of hate. “GET OUT!”

  I flee.

  ~ ~ ~

  The younger Brentann is all apologies. He tries to explain about his daughter, how they kept the secret all these years. How he brought healers, how he pleaded with his father. I wave him off. He begs me to take the carriage, but I cannot face—I cannot be in this house, or anything associated with this house, for another moment. I mutter about Little Hold being close, about liking to walk. Brentann makes no further move to stop or convince me. He sees me out through the front door.

  The streets of upper Katríu are too wide, too clean, too full of finely tended shrubbery and flowers. The houses are too far apart from each other, huge palaces of marble and limestone shrouded in glittering deepname veils. I draw on two of my own deepnames, the four- and the five-syllable, and pull concealment over me like a cloak.

  A good-for-nothing five-syllable, not even to light a candlebulb—

  They teach this at the Mainland Katra University. A five-syllable deepname is a disgrace, a joke. If one cannot take something shorter and stronger, one is better off without power. Five-syllables are for country bumpkins without any training—stupid commoners who do not know better, who will struggle all their lives with a deepname that does nothing.

  Over the years, I have gotten more use out of my five-syllable than out of my other names. If only my Primrose had had a five-syllable when—

  I feel anger stirring. I do not remember being angry in years. Not even when she died. Not—

  I run where my feet take me. They take me down the hills to middle Katríu, where the streets narrow almost enough for comfort, where the houses stand closer together, almost touching, not yet touching. The smell of the river is close, damp and potent, with a bitter undertaste. In my pain, I have run away from upper Katríu, away from Little Hold. From my lord.

  lost your wife to some drunk

  Brentann was goading me. He wanted to throw me off-balance, and here I am, running around the city without aim or purpose. In a space of one hour or less, Mezará Brentann has made lewd allusions to my lord’s preferences in pleasure, ridiculed his power, forced me to remember Primrose’s death, and made a person suffer in my presence in such a way that her consent, and thus a healing, would be impossible to obtain.

  My steps slow down, and yet I walk. I chase all thoughts away, fill my h
ead with the seaweed smell of the river. I remember the water, licking pieces of capsized boats and iron hooks torn out of piers in that great flooding, long since polished to smoothness. Beneath the surface of the wave, the bodies of last night’s suicides are nibbled away by tiny translucent fish. As a child I stood on that bridge, on nights like this, having barely escaped my father’s moods, too frightened for the leap, too frozen for any action at all. I remember returning later to these damp stones of the bridge’s railing, moss-covered and slippery under my hands—later, when I was thrown out of the university. I was admitted by chance to begin with, on a scholarship for especially talented commoners—but then I did not take more power, as expected, could not master disciplines for which the rich children had prepared all their lives. My funding was stripped from me, and I. . .

  I lean over the bridge, contemplating the leap as I had in the past. Was this Brentann’s intention? He is my lord’s enemy. Would he avenge himself upon my lord in such a fashion, make me feel again what I have silenced myself from hearing, knowing full well that I find it nearly impossible to heal myself, to fix—

  But if he knows me this well, he should know that I’ve always been too much of a coward to take the leap.

  No, this isn’t about my fear. This is about his. He, Brentann, was afraid that I would heal him against his will. He knew—had to know, despite his arrogance and his superior maneuvering of me, that there is much within himself that needs fixing.

  I do not want to be remade!

  He had told Dedéi, who was what?—sixteen?—that I would force a healing, and that brought her to panic. The first, dark room offered a subdued kind of comfort. The room in which he received me was made to sparkle so as to overwhelm, likely adding a layer to Dedéi’s distress, as it did to mine. I suspect the visit had been orchestrated by the younger Brentann, a desperate ploy to better both father and daughter. Outsmarted by the old man, of course. . .

  lost your wife to—

  It wasn’t a drunk, Lord Mezará Brentann, and you know it. It was a person, a man, much like you in fact, only younger—a man with visions, with painful voices and tremors, a man who both hated and feared himself. A poor man who wanted, unlike you, so much to be healed. So much. He did not want to lash out anymore. He came to the healing room, he begged Primrose to help. I was away, helping my lord with the aftermath of the second Katra-Araigen war. She did not want to turn the patient away. She thought she could handle it.

  I do not want to write down what I know. I invented the discipline, my lord says, and I have an obligation to document it. I taught Primrose, and I taught our son. Such disasters my choices have caused.

  I never want to teach anyone else. But my lord tells me to write, and I do, even though it is painful. For mind-healing, one has to have long names. Inconsequential and feeble long names, four- and five-syllables, which are for most people almost impossible to acquire. A theoretical exercise—for who would want names so humble they can do practically nothing? But mind-healing requires a gossamer touch.

  I remember my hands on the man’s head. The river has flooded. My lord hovers over my shoulder. His breath is heavy on my neck. His rage encompasses worlds, his vision has gone red with the need to kill. I do not look at my lord. Do not speak. I focus on my wife’s killer. That man did not want—he did not want to kill—

  It is not his fault. It is not anyone’s fault. He lets me touch his head, hold it, as I go in, extend my deepnames to finish his healing that Primrose started.

  I push the memories away. My veil of deepnames discarded, I cry openly now, and my tears are swallowed by the damp stones of the bridge railing. Always the coward, too scared to die, too scared to let other people be carried away into Bird’s domain. How many more hurts will I let overlay this pain before I turn towards myself with healing? How many more times will I need to heal this wound, align myself to where the pain would be easier to carry, only to feel myself regress, unwilling to maintain the newfound peace? I resist my own medicine. I do not want the pain gone. It’s my fault—my fault that Primrose was alone, my fault that I had taught her.

  A rattle of wheels alerts me to an approaching carriage. It is a small one, beautifully formed of blue basine hardwood and stretched leather, its green so dark as to appear almost black in this lack of light. A single deepname lantern swings from the bow, illuminating the driver’s head in a soft glow. Like my lord, Merudar is Coastal, with darker olive skin and long brown hair braided in a five-way fashion that identifies them as ichidi. There are many ways to identify oneself as ichidi, if one chooses to do so at all, and Coastal courtesies are different from Katra. Nonetheless, I bow to Merudar.

  They don’t laugh it off this time. Their voice is serious. “He begs you to come home.”

  He begs?

  “He is worried—but if you cannot come, he says, just convey a word.”

  I sigh and wipe my damp hands on the sides of my pants, then climb into the carriage. I do not want to think. I do not want to remember my losses, my various failures, all the empty spaces of me.

  The carriage takes me back north, towards Little Hold. The name is a misnomer—like other houses in upper Katríu, it is a pile of carved marble built to impress, to stake out a territory for one of the two Coastal nobles allowed to participate in Katran governance. Our real home is never here. It is on the Coast, which at this time of year is bathed in smells of quince and persimmon. The Kekeri estates are famous for their vineyards; my lord has spent many years teaching me about the pleasures of wine, but still I remain indifferent, content to drink what he chooses and to praise it, even if it is vinegar. How much of a home has the Coast been to me? As a young boy, I wanted little—a humble job, a place to sleep, and not to be bullied. Later I learned to want what he wanted. He wanted a big Coastal family with lovers and wives and their lovers, and children, and friends who would visit from all the lands where he had once walked, and a large dining hall to feed this throng. How often has the dining hall stood empty, since those early days; how often have I poured for him alone, in brittle silence?

  He waits for me in near-darkness, in the drawing room by the side entrance. It is made comfortable with softly glowing candlebulbs, and real fire, burning logs in a tiled fireplace. Age has added heft to his frame. His configuration is fully engaged, and lights run up and down its complex, steely length. His hair, more silver now than black, is braided in the five-way fashion. He does not go by ichidi pronouns or other ichidi language, but tonight, I can see, he will keep no secrets from me.

  “Parét,” he says, with that old tenderness he keeps for me, only for me, between the darkness and the flickering flames. He has not turned away. Of course, he has not turned away. My mind has been tormenting me.

  I start crying as his power and his arms reach out to embrace me.

  ~ ~ ~

  Come morning, he refuses to leave for the Governance session; instead he lingers in bed, tracing the paths his power carved on my skin the previous night. I want to stay like this with him, floating forever. So many times I’ve refused myself healing, turned my power away from my own ailing mind, denied myself even his feelings—but now, in his domain I don’t need to think of anything. My lover holds me in the net of fire that he constructs out of his need and mine, a bondage as powerful as the earth’s naming grid, as strong as the invisible lines that tie the stars together and string them up across the firmament.

  I rarely wish for pain in the body, and he does not press, but last night I begged him for it. He does not wish me any harm. He takes the injuries away, later—short deepnames to erase fresh wounds. I am unhurt. Only the memory remains to comfort me.

  He asks me to talk, he waits for me to find the words, but they do not come. He sighs at last and tells the hired Katran servants to take the day off, and asks the Coastal retainers to serve and to share. A sitting space is cleared in the bedroom, and we eat an enormous formal breakfast of Coastal cold dishes—redgrain flatbread rolled with vegetables and smoked fis
h then sliced thinly into rounds; quail eggs with a filling of minced meat and figs; pickled grape leaves stuffed with millet and pine-nuts; sweet crepes with quince jam from the Kekeri estates. About a dozen people sit around on cushions family-style, war-style, but unlike in the early days of the second Katra-Araigen war, there is very little joking. I long to tell my lord more than I managed to squeeze out of myself last night, but time in which to be alone with him has slipped away from me.

  It is almost noon when he is ready to depart. He insists I come with him to the session, and I gather from his hints that he is badly pressured by his peers; whatever’s wrong, Mezará Brentann is at the heart of it. There is more to what happened last night than the scheming of his enemies, but I am not ready to—not sure how to—share the story. Whatever else is going on, I’ll have to find a way to speak to Dedéi, whose life is crushed between the wheels of powers grown too large and self-absorbed to see her as a person, to see her as anything but a flawed possession which must be remade. But my lord needs me now, and so I do not argue.

  It is a short ride uphill from Little Hold to the Governance building, an imposing round structure of gold-veined gray marble in which the oligarchs make decisions on Katran affairs. He leaves me in the Kekeri seating box, a high and half-concealed room with a balcony that overlooks the argument hall, from which I can observe the proceedings. Each of the sixteen oligarch families has such a box, and the Kekeri one is familiar to me from many a visit I’ve paid here over the years since my lord took the oligarchy seat at the customary age of forty. I came here with Primrose in the past, and I came here with the children; but for the last two years I have been alone in this room.

  I see my lord below, where the other oligarchs greet him. At least two others wear pale green. Of course, he abandoned the color as soon as the others adopted it. Today he wears a Burri-style flowing dress of bleached linen minutely embroidered with sandbirds, and I am amused into pondering what it would take for Katran men to adopt this fashion. I am feeling light-headed, somewhat elated, and troubled by these sensations. He has taken good care of me, but am I truly myself when I feel this way, or is it only my body’s reaction to the push and pull between us?