Beneath Ceaseless Skies #190

by Mike Allen

  She kept struggling as the wrappings tightened. Something forcibly caught her chin and lifted it, like her father whenever she had tried to avoid and ignore him. The fabric over her eyes parted to grant her a view of Longsleeves’ cowl as it lifted, opening into raw, roiling hunger.

  The folds of cloth hadn’t covered her mouth. They were avoiding her mouth, the place where Uethorn’s men had wounded her and Olderra had healed her.

  She demanded, “Who are you?”

  The wrappings tightened, as smothering serpents.

  “Why are you doing this?” Merav gasped.

  And the creature answered.

  Tableaux came to life in Merav’s mind, flat and faded like aged paintings, and yet they moved. The same nightmare that Merav had lived since Uethorn’s men took her to the cottage played out again, with a different cast.

  A girl bound and slung over the back of a horse, armsmen laughing as they bore her into the forest, to the same cottage. The merciless bite of an axe; her arms chopped away, leaving agony behind.

  Heads dangling from antlers.

  A ceiling like a tunnel. A second girl brought to the forest, the thrill of killing the killers, puncturing them with poisonous fangs and crushing them with the snake-like arms the forest gave her to replace the ones the armsmen had hewn off.

  Those same arms, transformed to white sleeves, squeezed her now. Merav fought back not with claws and teeth but with will. “Tell me your name,” she wheezed.

  The creature stilled, as if startled. The tableau of violence subsided.

  Merav heard a word. Maelina.

  She knew that name. A great-great aunt, she would have been; vanished long ago. Merav’s father had spoken of her murder as the worst of the long-simmering grievances with House Uethorn.

  More memories poured from Longsleeves. The other girl enmeshed in the tragedy, the one Maelina had helped save, given fish scales for skin, a long mouth filled with needle teeth, water seeping from her hair. A Uethorn woman, dragged to the Dium Forest cottage to be slaughtered, flayed alive by men from Merav and Maelina’s own house. She and Maelina had hated one another even before their reunion inside Olderra’s tree. They did not recognize, as Merav did now, that they were the victims of a ritual.

  They had fought. Hundeil had tried and failed to intervene. Maelina, victorious, was banished...

  Maelina and her enemy, Merav and Kaediya; their misfortunes followed a baffling but undeniable pattern. Had it gone on even before them? How far into the past did these ritual murders go?

  Longsleeves—Maelina—trembled even as she tightened her grip. Merav could no longer speak. She hoped her thoughts spoke for her, that her words could break through the monster’s mindless bloodlust. You and I are bound by family and bloodshed. The pressure built in her lungs, her brain. She tried to share her own memories, scenes of Hundeil waking her in the cabin, of Kaediya bleeding into the mud. Look what I’m showing you. Our fates are bound to this horror.To this atrocity inflicted on us by the me of our Houses! We must defy it!

  Her head went light as the blood stopped flowing to her brain. Then she collapsed to the forest floor.

  Longsleeves had released her.

  Wind breathed against them as the entire forest seemed to sigh, in sadness, in relief.

  “I am sorry,” Olderra said.

  Merav craned her aching neck to stare at the witch, who stood among the withered trees. Longsleeves slumped to a kneeling position. Its shoulders hitched in silent sobs.

  Eying Olderra warily, Merav croaked, “What curse will you bring on us now?”

  “You are within your rights to despise me,” the witch said. “The rules of the Ones I serve are complex and exacting, inscrutable to mortals, and more than one has found them as intolerable as you do. But I am not responsible for the pact between your houses that has been a source of screams and spilled blood for four cold centuries.”

  Merav’s voice, still little more than a whisper. “Pact?”

  “The sacrifice of daughters, made to curry favor with things more ancient than this forest. Made inside that cabin, long ago.The greedy men who first swore themselves to this arrangement did not want the blood of their own daughters on their hands. But to kill a daughter from the other house, that was acceptable, that absolved them of what little guilt they might have entertained. They tailor the manner of death to harm what each girl values most. In your case, your words.”

  Merav found herself bereft of them.

  “They might believe this approach curries more favor, but in truth it’s a sadistic flourish to no purpose. All that matters to the creatures they propitiate is the bloodletting. They care not how it happens, or who is killed. Those ancient things despise the Ones I serve and savor any act that defiles the forest.”

  For all the hate Merav harbored for her father, its seething core still revolved around the notion that he had chosen to teach her, shelter her, prepare her for her life amid the merchants and nobles despite her defiant tantrums because he loved her, stupidly, imperfectly, brutally, but nonetheless as sincerely as his malformed soul could manage. As her grip on that notion loosened, that faith drained from her heart, her anger pouring in to fill the hollow that remained.

  “Why,” Merav rasped, “didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “I couldn’t. I tried,” the witch said, eyes lowered. “The pact made by your bloodlines in that cabin defies the forest law. It bound my tongue. Even the half-truth I managed to utter brought pain with each syllable.” She anticipated the question at the tip of Merav’s tongue. “When you spared each other, just now—” she nodded at Longsleeves, who still trembled— “that freed me to speak.”

  “How do I know you speak truth?” But even as Merav asked, she sensed the answer she had for so long sought: the filament of blood magic stitched through her, connected to the quivering figure beside her, to the scattered leaves of Kaediya’s corpse, to Maelina’s twice-dead rival, back into the darkness of memory and time; dead women hanging from its string like the ghostly heads that hung from Hundeil’s antlers.

  Hundeil. He loomed at the edge of the copse, watching Longsleeves, his muzzle still bloody from Merav’s claws.

  “This must end,” Merav said. “How do we stop it?”

  Longsleeves raised her head.

  “It can be done,” Olderra said. “But it cannot be done in Dium Forest. Once you leave, you cannot come back. And I will no longer know what can or will happen to you, or how long the body gifted to you by the forest will last.”

  “I am willing to go beyond your knowledge, Olderra. Tell me what it will take to end this.”

  Though at one time she could never have imagined it possible, when Olderra finished speaking, Merav offeredthe witch her thanks.

  * * *

  Don’t do this, he said.

  There’s nothing for it, honored one. A shame, father, that your honor was never real.

  * * *

  That night, in the great hall of Lohmar, two daughters thought lost by some, and disposed of for good by others, reappeared, one with sleeves as long as dragon’s tails, one with claws and the visage of a fox. Lohmar was only the first manse they would visit that night, but it was fitting they called first at their birthhome.

  The guards were unable to raise any alarms as white cloth tightened around their throats.

  The sun would rise to find the Manse Lohmar and Manse Uethorn eerily silent. All the men of both houses, every husband, brother and son, beheaded in the night. Daughters, mothers and wives submerged in unnatural sleep would awaken to bewilderment and weeping, never to know why they’d been spared.

  For a moment, once the most urgent deed of all was done, once her father’s head hung from her belt, Merav’s heart shrilled with grief. But given what he’d hidden from her all her life, the plans he’d made for her fate, her sorrow died just as fast, a candle flame snuffed out.

  She and Longsleeves left Calcharra, moving south ahead of the dawn. Tales of their exploits woul
d live on centuries hence, in nightmares, in fantasies of vengeance, in fever dreams.

  Copyright © 2016 Mike Allen

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Mike Allen edits the acclaimed anthology series Clockwork Phoenix and the long-running magazine Mythic Delirium. His books include post-apocalyptic dark fantasy novel The Black Fire Concerto, career-spanning poetry collection Hungry Constellations, and short fiction collections Unseaming and The Spider Tapestries. His poetry has won the Rhysling Award three times, and his fiction has been nominated for the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award. He lives in Roanoke, Va., with his wife Anita, a goofy dog, and two cats with varying degrees of psychosis. Follow his exploits as a writer at descentintolight.com, as an editor at mythicdelirium.com, and all at once on Twitter at @mythicdelirium.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  THE MAMA MMIRI

  by Walter Dinjos

  The mama mmiri is the mother of the Ofia River, and she loves her food in pairs. Every month the villagers toss goats and fowl into her water so that in return she will allow them to fish and row and wash in it. She swallows the twins among the sacrifices and spits the rest out on the bank as she did papa.

  This was why the evening Baba Tunde lowered my twin brother, Ugo, into a caisson to fetch his fallen cap for him, I ran home with blobs of tears rolling down my cheeks and sweat soaking my dada. And as mama saw me, she abandoned the pounded yam in the mortar, tightened the knot of her wrapper around her chest, and we dashed back to the river with our feet naked.

  We found Baba Tunde canoeing away from the uncompleted structures jutting out of the river and toward us with a plump body sprawling behind him in the boat. This made mama throw herself on the muddy ground and lift her face and hands skyward, screaming “why?” to the gods.

  I, on the other hand, was too numb to cry anymore. But I felt a gloom building up inside me. If you have ever felt like dropping from an iroko tree, a half of you hoping someone would catch you and assure you everything would be alright and the other half praying for a lethal landing, then you have a hint of my grief.

  You see, Baba Tunde was a devious man, a predator always on the prowl, especially around the riverbank at night and, although he worked for the oyibo from England, he was lousy with English words. Often, when he wasn’t spewing out what seemed like insults in Yoruba at one villager or another, he chewed pidgin English with a deep grimace, as though the words tasted like onugbu leaves in his mouth.

  I suspected the deficiency in his vocabulary was a facade—a part of his deviousness—because on each of the few occasions he spoke English a corpse was always involved. Phrases like ‘barotraumas of the ears’ and ‘lungs and dysbaric osteonecrosis’ tumbled out of his mouth and he called them sicknesses and blamed them for the corpses.

  This time, as he hauled Ugo to the clay bank, he said, “Sinus cavities.”

  Mama crawled to the corpse and fell on top of it, hugging it, shaking it, and wailing.

  “You!” I jabbed a hesitant finger at him in most children’s way of saying ‘I realize mama said I ought to respect my elders, but I’m most certain you are that exception she failed to mention.’ I swear I could feel intense heat emanating from my rancorous gaze. “You think we don’t know?”

  Baba Tunde glared at me. Until that evening, nobody had ever challenged the truth in his strange words, although, with five sets of twins already dead, the villagers had begun conspiring.

  “We know the truth,” I yelled. The oyibo gun buckled to his waist and the brown beads around his wrist, which suggested he was into juju, were the only things holding me from crashing myself into him. I, however, doubted those weapons could frighten the aggrieved villagers away from their plots to drive him and the oyibo out. “You sacrificed him.”

  Baba Tunde didn’t respond. He simply began to mutter in Yoruba and hurried back into his boat with his head down, as if to hide the three skin-deep tribal lines that marked each of his cheeks. I stood there, bleary-eyed, and, with bitterness, watched him paddle back toward the structures and caissons.

  Everybody knew the truth, that the depths of the caissons were altars on which Baba Tunde and the oyibo appeased the mama mmiri with monthly sacrifices to ensure successful construction of their bridge. We knew this because, on his deathbed, papa mumbled that they trapped him in a caisson, and some glowing spirits tormented him with gushing water and visions of his death.

  Papa didn’t have a twin; one whose death would have made the sacrifice whole. That was why the river had spat him out.

  Ugo, on the other hand, had me, and Baba Tunde knew that.

  * * *

  There is this saying about identical twins, that they are two bodies sharing a soul; one could hardly survive without the other. Appropriate to the saying was the vacuum I felt within me. It seemed that without being cut open I had been hollowed out, I had been drained of my very essence—like a grasscutter gutted alive, you know, or perhaps like an unripe coconut drained of its juice with a syringe.

  It had been a fortnight since Ugo’s burial, and the vacuum grew ever larger. I jumped out of bed most nights with screams that made mama down two cupfuls of Mazi Ike’s supposedly heart-mellowing concoction every day, and I couldn’t continue huddling under the avocado tree beside Ugo’s grave every other night weeping. I longed for someone with whom I could engage in our papaya-pipe-gun battles in the surrounding forests.

  I missed our pranks.

  I remember the day mama had warned that plucking a mango from the tree in the backyard would incur twelve lashes. So Ugo and I decided to eat the fruits without detaching them and leave the seeds dangling from their pedicels, just like bats do, except that, unlike bats, we did the eating all too neatly. And when mama returned from the market and questioned us, we simply explained that we hadn’t actually done any plucking. It had been fun, but only because Ugo had shared in the experience.

  The dirt road was moonlit and desolate, papers and dead leaves scampering here and there in the Harmattan wind as if to announce the impending appearance of a ghost. This reminded me of the whispered rumors that the spirits of those sacrificed to the mama mmiri roamed the river and its banks at night and that souls that ventured there during dark hours rarely returned.

  But that was, of course, the reason I had stolen out of the secret meeting at the village hall and bounded downhill toward the river. Seeing as Ugo was taken by the water spirit, I couldn’t help but entertain the prospect of seeing him again and fight the dread that his spirit might harm me.

  Besides, if the dead had the heart to hurt the living, the ones rumored to have been glimpsed wandering the village especially at night would have killed those who had seen them, instead of vanishing on discovery. And Ngozi, our neighbors’ daughter, who had unsuspectingly resided in the next village with Mazi Okonkwo’s dead son for a year, wouldn’t have survived.

  Still, as I fearfully ventured into the bamboo bush preceding the river, I focused my senses and readied my limbs for the improbable appearance of a ghost, or rather because something about bamboos made my skin flutter; that occasional rustle of dry leaves and the chill within the shadows—shadows where Baba Tunde or the oyibo could be lurking.

  There was another saying, this time from the oyibo. ‘Speak of the devil...’ I had never really understood the need for the utterance of such a stunted phrase. Well, until, I sighted Baba Tunde strolling, not in the bamboos but between them and the bank, toward a path in the northern end of the bush.

  My heart responded with a lurch that forced me down on my knees, and there I waited, until he disappeared into the path. All the while I tried to calm my nerves with mama’s advice that if Baba Tunde or the oyibo ever tried to grab me I should kick them in the loins and run home with my slippers in my hands.

  I scooted down the bank and buried myself neck-deep in the water and waited and prayed for a good hour that Ugo come and join me. My skin was already feeling like that of agege bread dipp
ed in hot tea, yet no spirit appeared. It was all a rumor, I realized, although I did consider taking a boat past the crab-like dredgers moored to the bank and to the pillars and from there pick my way scaffold by scaffold, over the protruding lacing of rods, to the caissons just to make sure.

  I had barely dismissed the thought when the water lit up with a clean blue glow, as though its bed resided a million feet deep in the earth. I staggered back, the chill of the night and of the water making my skin and lips tremble. Deep inside, I felt my vacuum contract and expand as if deciding whether to let itself be filled by the glow or not.

  Unfortunately, instead of my brother’s spirit, or even a beautiful maiden with a fish tail in place of human legs as rumored across the village, a translucent woman sprang out of the river and hung in the air with agility that should have left her drooped shoulders falling apart and her wrinkled black skin sagging into the water. The now-billowing wind didn’t shake her, and for someone who had risen from the river, she wasn’t dripping. She was the ugliest creature I had ever set my eyes upon—yes, I doubted a fish tail or tentacles would have made her any uglier.

  My bones were quaking even as I swam backward, slowly so I didn’t alarm her, all the while gaping at her fallen rumpled breasts.

  “Let me spare you the trouble of asking, my dear.” Her voice was a high-pitched tone that suited neither her age nor her fatness. “The stories are true, although somewhat embellished.”

  “The stories?” I quit swimming, the muscles in my face twitching curiously.

  “Yes. You are not going to escape the river tonight.” Her baggy lips spread in a smile that made the heavily crinkled skin around her mouth shift in a most perturbing way, much like the skin of a moving old snail. You could even have made a bag as big as a cement sack from the swinging meat around her stomach.

  “Please,” I said. “I just want to see my brother. I need to know what really happened.” The words came out as tentative puffs of cold air.