Beneath Ceaseless Skies #159

by Gemma Files

  Resting with my head on a patch of dust I waited days to discover my fate. The Sanjiib merchants ventured back, tip-toeing around me and spitting if I stirred. They had picked up a passenger, a tall man swathed head to foot in a ragged black robe. At length his sandaled feet approached, his toes a bleached blond in their coating of dust. His skin above those streaks was black, and as he moved, the hem of a robe flashed scarlet.

  “Red Desert,” I croaked. He would be a tribesman, though I’d never seen one of their kind so attired.

  The fellow nodded. I drifted off. What did it matter if he were the Demon King of Kadaban! There was not a soul on earth who could help me; none to give succor to my limitless life. I fell back into dark, hungry thoughts—and was awakened by a thump and the hawing of camels.

  The tribesman had let fall a waterskin and retreated to join the departing Sanjiib. As they passed me, the bridles of their mounts jingling, the tribesman gestured at me from his precarious saddle. In the long light of evening his finger was thin, pointing spearlike towards the setting sun. I sat up through sheer incredulity. The rags of cloth that fringed his hand were red.

  “Watch for the red,” the girl had told me. (Has she been of the Red Desert too?) Her nonsense suddenly cohered, sweet at the mineral taste of water. Watch for the red. Learn of the goddess.

  Suddenly, I knew where I was going.

  When the water had restored me I limped on my way—to where the sun sets and the desert turns red. You have heard tales of the Red Desert, but what civilized man in full grasp of his senses has gone there?

  It wasn’t easy. Nothing is. Not living. Not dying. Not knowing who to trust. I suppose it helped that, as I struck out, I had long since become uncivilized.

  The space between the towns stretched. The walking took longer. I could not die. I could find little food or shelter, either. In that part of the world only rich men have oases. Their gardens and keeps were far too strong for a worn thing like me to break into, and so I rolled, at times, like mere refuse, down windy streets and between the sand-eaten towns. I stole fruit from the stands of pauper merchants and drank with the street-pack dogs in the muck. Then even the towns were gone. There were only rude outposts and caravanserai.

  The priests were still there, in the desert. The men who would lead me to the goddess.

  I’d been aware of them for a long while now the way you become aware of new flowers after a rain. Since the nameless town of the Sanjiib merchants, I had caught, more and more, the flashes of red. They appeared in the shadows at temple doors. They sat in the alcoves set aside for street preachers. Red priests. They seemed to recognize me. Their scarlet-framed fingers pointed on.

  The Red Desert is more than a name. The gods have done battle in that place. At its edges the sands take a rosy hue like a blood plume dispersing in crystalline water. Like any battlefield, the deeper you go, the redder and redder the land becomes.

  When I passed the final priest the sands were ochre, the sun melting in the West like living fire. The priest (and who could tell if this was a new man or the very first that I had seen?) was waiting by his lean-to with his long, sharp shadow, and the night that fell upon us was cool as the day had been hot. The Red Desert, I remember thinking, was as feverish as a flush on a young woman’s skin.

  “On,” the red priest bid me, pointing. I had fallen, half-dead at his feet.

  “How much farther?” I gasped, coughing. Not enough moisture remained for my sweat.

  “You must go on, to the temple,” he answered. Then both he and his lean-to were gone.

  Was I hallucinating the man? Hallucination and reality mingled. Morning came and faded and returned. I lay on the sands like a fish on slow coals.

  I could not die, though.

  I could not die.

  I got up.

  I resumed my journey.

  On, one foot before the other. On to the dark cliffs in the West. No more priests. No sound but the wind. The sands ever darkening like a stain.

  I hallucinated the smell of water. That palaces appeared, and Helené waited for me. In my mind I killed Indri a hundred times and made love to my goddess upon his bones. I ruled them. I hurt them. I woke, still walking. The slave—the other slave—had told me to follow.

  Then, like a slap to my blistered skin, I beheld the sharp dawn above the cliffs. A cool breeze that tasted of green things came to me and I stood in their blessed, sheltering shadow. The cliffs—yes, even they were red. And carved into them was the temple.

  I call this place the Valley of Sleepers but at that moment, I awoke. The morning hovered, still and cooling, and water waited in a deep glassy pool. The shadow of the cliffs hung above it. Its long basin was carved in the fluid style favored by kings.

  All around the pool were sleeping men, sheltered by the fanning leaves of plants.

  The men lay entangled like the carvings on a door. Red priests and Sanjiib and pale-faced Northerners. Old men and young curled next to each other—young cheeks cradled golden on knobby, torn knees. Long robes in bright colors, poor trousers with patches, scuffed slippers, the heavy felt shoes of cameleers—all of them shifted together in slumber, overlain by green filigree traces of mold. In the heat and the damp of this hidden valley their clothing was peeling and sloughing away from their skin like mango rind, yet the men themselves remained perfectly preserved with skin young, old, and middling, untouched by decay. The gossamer treble of their snoring came faintly and shimmered the water of the pool.

  I charged like a stallion into that water until its wetness stung my skin. Until I submerged myself utterly I had no idea of how blistered I had become. Screaming and thrashing I drank of the water and vomited half of it up again. Hours passed before the pain of my sunburned skin subsided and I relaxed to float as drunk as a lily pad. The sun moved and the sleepers snored.

  I knew, of course: my journey was not done.

  Insects and frogs chirred their small songs as I raised myself gingerly out of the pool. As I stood, letting the waters subside, I noticed, for the first time, my reflection. Alien eyes peered out at me from a thin unshaven tangle of a face. I touched it and the old man in the water did the same, then shed his ruined breeches and padded naked to the shore. Cool and fragrant night had fallen and torches burned in the temple doors. As I approached, the outdoor sounds gave way to the distinct chant of human voices.

  The temple was made of basalt stone. Night already reigned within. Sinuous columns supported the ceiling, and unlighted passages trailed off. Torches and candles burned in the dark like stars in a miniature galaxy. Men guarded them: Red Priests who ignored me and murmured their prayers to the flickering flames. Slowly their chanting wound around me. Again I entered a kind of dream. Filled with calm lucidity I let myself stumble towards a shrine. An eight limbed figure towered before me—Pilara, vast as the cliffs of her home.

  I paused before her, breathing the dark and the distant tang of ambergris. The goddess’s carven hands contained offerings: votives or flowers, or small, cunning bowls. Dark liquid gleamed in many of these. The incense barely covered its smell. I shifted and the floor shifted with me, objects clattering together with a soft, hollow sound. The face of the goddess regarded me: a flat, onyx surface without mouth, nose, or eyes. The flat surface merely gave back my reflection: a draggle-man wandering a field of bones.

  At present the air around the statue shifted. The shadows, dark already, deepened still more.

  “What do you want?” asked the mouthless goddess. Her voice was a sigh like a childish breeze.

  My skin tightened, my belly curling inward around its months of wander and want. Though I had drunk the water of her pool and soothed some part of my tortured throat, I swallowed and my answer came out rasping as if I had chewed and swallowed a fan leaf.

  “I want to strangle my friend,” I said.

  “Ah.” A candle fluttered. “You realize: you have no hands?”

  “You—can’t you restore them to me?”

  “For
a price.” She sounded hesitant.

  “What price have I not already paid?” I asked, thinking of the desert. “I am starving. It was you who bade me come. Now that I am here you must satisfy me.”

  “With revenge?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you not tire of such feasts? My courtyard offers water and shade.”

  “Your courtyard?” I trembled like a candle—the flames all leaping and juttering now. The shadows, seething, reminded me of Indri and the Power that would pulse above his noble head. They reminded me of the shadows that had melded on the walls of the pink-red cave of Helené’s room.

  As the thoughts took hold the goddess laughed. All at once, the effigy vanished.

  My knees crumpled as Helené stepped from the plinth. She wore white robes, as fresh as springtime. Her hair fell in coils of coppery gold, and no veil obscured her glorious face.

  “I see you do not wish to rest,” Helené said. My dusty mouth fell open, groaning. “You poor man.” She held my chin and tilted my face with a cool, soft hand. There I was: kneeling on the bones of her supplicants while her perfume dispersed the stink of the grave.

  “Year after year they come,” she said. “Year after year they name their price. Then they leave and curse my name—but they have done it to themselves. It is a lonely life, my love. Once more I ask: will you not stay and sleep?”

  “I cannot sleep.” Tears filled my mouth. “Helené! Please—help me!”

  “I am not her.” Her thumb stroked my lip. “I am but the face of desire. The Whore. Pilara. The burning flame. I can grant your fondest wish, but you will burn inside me.”

  I nodded. Yes. I wanted to—did I not burn already in my heart? Had I not crossed the endless desert? My blunted wrists pawed the edge of her robe.

  “There is water,” she said. “Water that soothes. Forgetful shade and peaceful dreams.”

  “I have no other dream but you.”

  She smiled. “Oh. You only think that.

  With infinite care she drew me up, the tears in her eyes, to my shivering feet.

  “I will give you your hands.” She smiled at me. “I will give you the power to vanquish him. You will have your girl and your city again. But you will give me everything.”

  I nodded, suddenly unsure. Why should the goddess weep for me?

  She took my stumps between her hands.

  After that, I knew.

  I knew.

  * * *

  Have you seen a candle melted in a pan until it loses mass and form? Such a thing the goddess did to me—as greedy as a wick for nourishing oil.

  The flames she burned me with were white. They devoured, like mouths, my bright, blank screams. She seemed to pull the fire from my heart, as if the spark had always been there, waiting for her.

  I screamed and my lips melted into flaps.

  I screamed and my stumps lengthened into hands. They were the only normal features she left me. I had knelt merely human. I rose as the Burned Man.

  * * *

  Sometime later I awoke—vengeful in my wrath and pain. The temple had vanished and the sands blew red, but the heat of the desert no longer daunted me. Helené had, as promised, taken everything and given me power and a pair of hands. I spread my beautiful fingers before me and noted the webs of shadow between them. I rose then, turning my magic to wings and returned, at once, to the house of my friend.

  * * *

  Now I must tell the rest of it: how I found Indri and how I destroyed him. You know there is no palace here. That my tower is all that remains. There are forces in this world, my boy, that even the strongest man cannot overcome. Many of these forces are hers—though they cannot work without us to prey on.

  So: to Indri in his palace. Indri who paled at my return. I came to him as a fearsome cloud—a ragged thing battering down from the sky. A woman sat near the arm of his throne, but at first I did not know her.

  I twisted my friend between my hands and left him boneless on the floor. Only then did I turn to the startled woman who held a small child in her arms.

  We were the only people in the hall. My new Power made a barrier that Indri’s men could not cross. The woman let the child slip to the floor and, for a moment, I thought she would scream in terror.

  But Helené of Vervain laughed instead. She laughed with the sound of a brassy bell.

  For the first time in years I felt uncertain (years, yes, for she had had no babe, before). I had crossed the Red Desert on my belly and bared myself to the goddess’s flame, yet this was the strangest thing of all: my paramour, beside Indri’s body, laughing.

  “The goddess is good,” she told the sky. Her child howled and, with her foot, she shoved him towards me. “Oh, I had thought you perished, betrayer—yet you lived, and suffered, and now free me from these chains.”

  The bewildered child sobbed between us, cowering from her laughter as from my face. I was equally bewildered. Was this really Helené? Helené whom I had bedded? Who’d said she loved me?

  “How have I betrayed you?” I asked. “It was Indri who discovered us.”

  “But you discovered me.” She backed away from the child. “You came to the temple and took me from my goddess. I had been sold and dishonored—yet you sold me again. You! A fellow slave!”

  Fire had been the substance of my days, but her words sent a cold trickle down my spine. “Helené!” I held out my hands to her; watched her flinch in disgust at my reaching fingers.

  “I swore I would destroy you,” she said. “I swore I would destroy you and Indri Pasha. I thank the goddess for answering my prayers and aiding in my slow revenge.”

  She laughed again at my confusion—but already that confusion was dissipating. I remembered the stinking alley where they’d dumped me and the maid who had bathed me and pointed me on. On and on; all fingers towards the goddess, seeing red—what I wanted to see—all the way.

  Helene nodded. “I begged Indri to spare you—to curse you when he would have cut you down. I knew you would crawl to Her temple for mercy, but there are crimes Pilara cannot forgive. You men who worship Her as Mother neglect to consider her other aspects.”

  As I stared at her, rage and sorrow fuming in my heart, her whole form seemed to blur at the edges like a thing viewed through water. I wiped at my eyes, and her child kept howling, and I had gone so long hoping, and now all hope was gone...

  “The boy,” I said.

  Helené smirked. She made no move to pick him up.

  “The boy!” I insisted—yet my rage brought laughter and you who have suffered love must know what I did.

  The child’s screams hovered over my vengeance and continued when his mother’s screams had died. They lasted until I picked him up, gently, with the only part of me still unburned and, with the dust of the palace settling around us, carried him down the hill to Pilara’s Temple in the city.

  The End of the Burned Man’s Story

  * * *

  The Burned Man’s voice had faded to a whisper, and his grip had loosened as the first hour drew near. I sat stricken in the dust at his feet and watched his tears drop –tiny stains on the ground. I wanted to ask: Whose child was it? And: What happened to the temple? for he had not told. Yet a terrible silence hung over us, and we seemed like the last two souls in the world.

  “The curse never fades,” the Burned Man whispered. “All I loved is gone, and still I am here. I would spare you the same with fair Dulcina and the dangerous men who guard her bower. Do not return to woo with her. She is as lovely as a goddess but her touch will burn.”

  As he spoke he stepped back and a bell rang once—whether in my own world or in his. I had but a moment to note the flicker—the shadow just peeping from under his robe. Then the tower and the square vanished, leaving me in an empty lot behind the market. I thought I heard a child cry, but it might have been my own voice—the wheeze in my throat.

  I alone in Div Kamia have seen the Burned Man’s shadow. I alone am certain that he is a man. A cursed ma
n. He has seen the goddess and lived and yet, even so, his torment endures.

  I thought on all that the Burned Man had said. I thought of his face, once a young face like mine. I thought of Dulcina on her grand balcony, and of her deadly father, and of my treacherous heart.

  Hugging my lute to my aching chest, I sat there a long time before I made my decision.

  Copyright © 2014 Hannah Strom-Martin

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Hannah Strom-Martin’s fiction has appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and the anthology Amazons: Sexy Tales of Strong Women. Together with Erin Underwood, she is the co-editor of The Pop Fic Review and the anthology Futuredaze: A Collection of YA Science Fiction. She lives in California with her husband and the obligatory herd of cats-with-fantasy-names.

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  COVER ART

  “Golden Age,” by Juan Carlos Barquet

  Juan Carlos Barquet is an artist from Mexico City. He has done illustrations for books, album covers and tabletop games for clients such as Fantasy Flight Games; concept art and matte paintings for short films supervised by DreamWorks Animation and ILM, and exhibitions at Art Takes Times Square (New York, 2013), Parallax Art Fair (London, 2012), Euskal Exhibition Center (Bilbao, 2012) and more. View more of his work at jcbarquet.com.

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  ISSN: 1946-1076

  Published by Firkin Press,

  a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

  Compilation Copyright © 2014 Firkin Press

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