Beneath Ceaseless Skies #161

by Margaret Ronald

  I ignore him, and open the door. The scent of rhododendron and rotting hay fills the night air.

  “Kev,” says Zelhorn again.

  I waver on the threshold. I think of all that Zelhorn has done for me, and the truths he has taught me. I think of my parents in the colony who still need my help, even though they do not want it and no longer trust me.

  I close the door. I remove the mask and hurl it at the wall. The bird nose crumples in ruin and the glass eyepieces shatter.

  “Do you know what I think about the doctors?” I say. “It’s a farce. A carefully choreographed tribal dance. No town wants to seem like it is giving up on its own. So it hires medicine men for a show with elaborate rituals that signify nothing. Everyone dies anyway, but they die with a clear conscience, thinking that they tried.”

  Zelhorn sighs. He does not sound angry, even though those masks must have been expensive. “You may be right. But the towns are desperate to try anything, and becoming doctors gives the Beta a chance to fit in. We need such a chance. Maybe then, the humans will stop hating us.”

  “The humans detest us because of who we are, no matter what we try to become,” I say. “They fear our birdlike appendages, our lizard tongues, the ghastly nooks above our foreheads, our pale faces. Those are things we cannot change.”

  “Kev my boy, on this sphere, everything is subject to generation and corruption. We were born under the sky and stars, just like the humans. Change will come, in God’s own time.”

  I care not for whether there is a God. I think only of the unchanging stars, from which we did not come, and to which we can never return. “Under the sky and stars,” I reply, “there is no hope and there are no gods. Not at least for the Beta.”

  Zelhorn crosses himself. “Spare me your heresies,” he mutters, “and please go back to bed.”

  * * *

  The night before I left to become Zelhorn’s apprentice, Mother told me that she had touched the stars.

  It was late, but I couldn’t sleep. I was practicing my reading with one of the texts that Father had copied. Mother approached quietly with a candle above her forehead and her knitting still in hand. She touched her tongue to mine before I could withdraw. The Beta need their traditions as much as they need the new learning, she was saying.

  I tried to resist her; I wanted to shut her out of my mind. But I could not. Such is the strength of the bond between mother and child. “Talk to me,” I insisted. “Use words. Why must we always be different?”

  Because we are different. I know so. I have touched the stars. I have heard their song. Someday I hope you will understand.

  I just stared at her twisting tongue, her shaking hands, and the candle clenched above her forehead. She was alien to me.

  Never forget, she pleaded, that we were once of the sky.

  Yet how could I remember, when long ago we had forgotten what it meant?

  Mother’s tongue retreated, her face a mask of calm. “Good night, Kev,” she said. “I love you always.”

  I said nothing as she left.

  When I was sure my parents were asleep, I slipped outside. I needed to be alone with the relics. I needed to touch them, to know the truth.

  So I sat all that night in the cool darkness of the reliquary. In the dark, the relics did look otherworldly, like ancient dragons. As it grew later, their serpentine faces dripped with the blue light of the predawn. Perhaps in my excitement I even imagined a faint, tingling hum coursing through the cool flagstones.

  But then the sun rose, as it always does. Light cascaded off the tall spire and glittered among the drab metal parts. The dragons breathed no fire. The relics were just old broken metal and no more.

  I got up. My joints were stiff and numb. I reached out and patted a relic shaped like a trident. Nothing happened of course. Mother had been wrong. There was no way to touch the stars. “Goodbye,” I said aloud, perhaps to the relic. “I doubt we will meet again.”

  Then I went home.

  * * *

  Scores of Beta flock from the colony to the Bureau—a sorry lot of rolling tongues and babbling voices.

  “Adjust your mask like this,” says Zelhorn, helping a small female Beta with the strap.

  “Burn the straw just so,” says Thrita, lighting a match.

  The Beta listen attentively. They are learning how to be plague doctors.

  I can stand it no more. I groan and sink to the floor, holding my tongue rigid in the air. “And then die like everyone else,” I say.

  Silence. Everyone turns to me.

  I get up and dust myself off. “Bubonic plague has no victors,” I explain. “Especially not its doctors. It spreads silently in the foul air. Few of you will survive, if any.”

  Zelhorn and Thrita stare at me but say nothing to contradict me.

  I ascend the winding stair. No one stops me.

  But no one heeds me either. In three days, we give away seventeen costumes.

  And the plague is still coming.

  * * *

  It took some time before I finally had the courage to tell my parents the truth about the stars.

  I showed them the Almagest.

  “What’s that?” asked Mother, eyeing the figures and diagrams suspiciously.

  “It’s about the celestial spheres,” I replied.

  Neither of my parents’ expressions gave any hint of recognition.

  “It’s the structure of the heavens,” I explained. “We live on the terrestrial sphere. That’s the only sphere subject to generation and corruption—which means birth and death, being created and destroyed. Above our sphere is that of the moon. Then there’s a sphere for each of the planets, and one for the sun. Last is the sphere of the fixed stars. All of the spheres rotate, driven endlessly by the Prime Mover. The Christians call him God.”

  “There’s no birth and death among the stars?” Mother asked.

  “No,” I replied. “There can’t be. The stars aren’t made of matter—what we call the four elements. They are ethereal, made of quintessence.”

  “Then how did we come from the stars?” she asked.

  “The stars are not made of matter,” I repeated. “Imperfect terrestrial beings can’t exist in that sphere.”

  “So the Beta never sailed the stars?” asked Mother, her voice quavering a little.

  “Of course not,” I said.

  Father started tending the fire with a poker even though it didn’t need tending. The years had been unkind to him. Gutenberg’s movable type had replaced relief printing. There was no more demand for woodcuts. Sometimes he sat alone in the shadows, caressing old woodcuts with his tongue as if feeling out the shape of the letters somehow helped him understand. “If we never came from the stars,” Father asked, “what are the relics?”

  “Every Christian village has a relic, be it a fragment of the True Cross or a lock of Mary’s hair. They want tangible proof. It helps them keep the faith. Our relics are much the same.”

  “I don’t think it’s the same,” said Father. “But I suppose you won’t believe anything unless it’s written in a book.”

  Perhaps Father was right. I looked down at the Almagest again. Perhaps it was just like a relic to me. Yet unlike the Beta relics, I knew it told the truth.

  * * *

  Someone is knocking at the Bureau door. I am upstairs, stacking crates of ripe apples and tins of salted pork. We are not expecting any visitors this evening. “A minute,” I say as I descend the winding stair.

  It is a Beta from the colony. He sells food. I think his name is Mika.

  “Sorry Mika, we don’t need anything today,” I tell him.

  But something is wrong. Mika just stands there. Then I notice that he is shaking.

  “What is it Mika?” I ask.

  He tries to answer, but he coughs, and blood dribbles from his mouth. He holds out his fingers. The tips are black and flaky. They smell of death.

  Then I know that the plague has reached the colony.

  I dra
w back behind the door and finger the handle. “I’m sorry Mika,” I say, almost in a whisper. “But the colony will need us more than ever when the plague is over. We must be here to render aid to the living.”

  Zelhorn and Thrita stand beside me now, nodding sagely. I feel a twinge of anger. It is Zelhorn who brought the plague. Zelhorn and his schemes; Zelhorn with his bird doctors. But then I sag, and all the anger sails away. The time for recriminations has passed. I know that the plague would have come anyway.

  Mika does not move.

  I shut the door anyway. I think I can hear Mika clawing at it with his blackened fingers.

  I hold my head in my hands.

  * * *

  “You must teach me to read,” said Father. “Perhaps I can work in the printing press.” Outside, gossamer dew glistened from new spring leaves.

  In the shed, I found my alphabet primer, the one with the dragons and unicorns. Paint peeled from it in chunks of scarlet and amber.

  “Are there truly dragons?” Father asked when he saw it.

  “Far to the east,” I replied. “Marco Polo says so. But not here.” I paused. “But I wish there were.” Somehow I could not imagine that the Beta would suffer so in a world of dragons.

  “Me too.” A shadow momentarily fell across Father’s face. Then he laughed. “But what am I saying? I have my family and my faith, and that is all I really need.”

  Father hugged me awkwardly, and I wished that family and faith was all I really needed too.

  * * *

  “We are leaving, Lawyn and I,” Thrita tells me. His things are all packed. The bedroom we shared looks bare.

  The rain had come at the end of summer, washing away the withered grass, drowning the plague and its miasma, banishing life and death together. Lawyn is one of the survivors who came to the Bureau after the plague. The plague made her an orphan. Thrita spends a lot of time with her now, even though she is half his age. I see them walking in the small herb garden, holding hands, touching tongues, laughing at private jokes.

  “Where will you go?” I ask. I have forgotten there is a world beyond the Bureau.

  “The others talk of founding a new colony further east, near Ruscombe. Lawyn and I are going with them.”

  “I guess you will need to discover some new relics.”

  Thrita laughs. I have never heard him laugh before. It is a throaty, scratchy sort of sound. “You know I don’t believe in all that. I’ll leave it to the others to carry on with the worship and the stories.”

  Then how can you go with them? I say with my eyes. How can you go if you don’t believe?

  Thrita is serious again. He puts a thin hand on my shoulder. He is worried about me. I can see it in his eyes. “Kev,” he says, “come with us. There is nothing left for you here.”

  “I must wait for my parents,” I lie. By now I am sure they are not coming. I too am an orphan.

  I hear Zelhorn muttering from the other room. “A mixture of mercury, horse manure, pearl, white alum, sulfur, clay, hair, and a couple of eggs,” he says. “What will I get?” Then he pauses, and I hear him clap his hands. “A good silver! But one can never be quite sure.”

  He has been going mad for some time. “If I go,” I ask, inclining my head toward Zelhorn’s door, “who will take care of him?”

  Thrita looks at me sadly. “He is beyond help.”

  I know Thrita speaks the truth.

  “We need to live our lives,” he adds.

  I am sure he is thinking about Lawyn. She is his life now.

  “Kev,” he says, “you need to live too.”

  I think instead about the Almagest. Ptolemy and Aristotle are hard masters and bitter lovers. But they are right. The stars do not move. “My life is here,” I tell Thrita. But what do I have left to live for?

  I watch them and the others depart, a drone of voices against an autumn-washed sky. There are strains of music—a flute, and a mandolin. Some Beta bear parcels wrapped in fine cloth. I think they are relics—meaningless relics of a past that never was.

  * * *

  Father never found a job at the printing press. I regularly sent my parents money from my earnings at the Bureau. But it never seemed to go very far.

  Then I found the bottles under Mother’s bed, jumbled among the woodcuts of her parents.

  Father just stood there, rolling his tongue from side to side helplessly.

  “How come you never told me?” I accused.

  “I didn’t want to upset you.”

  “But it’s my money!”

  “It’s also your fault.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You killed her hope, Kev. She lived for the stars.”

  “So she turned to human poison.” The irony was potent.

  Father made a resigned motion with his hands. “We live among humans.”

  Mother entered. She stood at a distance. I clenched my hands.

  “Father’s wrong,” she said. “I never lost hope.” Then she smiled. “The stars still sing. I hear them all the time.”

  She came close and put her hand against my cheek. I could smell the whiskey on her breath.

  “They tell of broken promises. They call to me from beyond a wall of glass. Don’t they call to you too?”

  I unclenched my hand, and reached upward to lay it on hers. “I’m sorry, Mother.”

  She took my hand. “You are learned. Tell me, what does Beta mean?”

  I didn’t understand. “It’s our name.”

  “No my child. The word. Where does it come from?”

  “It is the second letter of the Greek alphabet.”

  Mother gave me drugged smile. “See? We don’t even have our own name anymore.”

  I said nothing.

  * * *

  I find Zelhorn in bed and unfinished alchemy on his table. His beard and beads are askew. He is perspiring, and his face is contorted in pain.

  “Water,” he gasps.

  I give him water to drink. He sucks it out with his tongue, now nothing more than a yellowish-gray lump.

  He grabs my arm. His grip is strong, but his fingers shake. “It’s time to go home,” he says, and he points toward the sky.

  When he dies, I close his eyes.

  I don’t know whether it was the plague that took Zelhorn. As a precaution, I decide burn his body anyway; it is the only sure way to stop the spread of the miasma.

  I wrap his body in a musty sheet and take it outside. I cannot find kindling, but I need something that will burn.

  I gather several books from my shelves and arrange a funeral pyre. I place Ptolemy’s Almagest on top. Then I light it. I sigh just once as the flames take hold. I think I will not be able to watch, but somehow I stand transfixed as flesh and paper alike singe, blacken, and blow to ashes beneath the autumn sky.

  Thrita was right. I also need to live.

  I do not weep for Zelhorn, or for my parents, who I am certain are dead. Instead I turn my mind to the immediate issue of survival. Supplies are running low. Perhaps I can scavenge something from the colony. In any event, I cannot stay at the Bureau now that Thrita is gone and Zelhorn is dead. Now my books are gone too. The emptiness will drive me mad. So I take a large sack and set off for the colony, for what used to be my home.

  * * *

  “We need a plan,” I told Father.

  Mother had been getting worse. Her eyes always shone with the fire of drink.

  When Father didn’t reply, I continued, “Zelhorn is an alchemist. He must have some remedy that will help her.”

  Father’s tongue shook, and he pounded his fist on the wax stained table scored by years of making woodcuts. “I will not have that Beta in my home! I should never have let you study with him. His teachings have brought nothing but grief.”

  “But his medicine might heal Mother.”

  “Unless alchemy can set the course of the stars and mold the shape of the heavens, it will be of no help to her.”

  “There is still a chance.”
/>
  Father turned to me. “Not this time, Kev.” I saw the despair and rage in his eyes. “You cannot undo what you have told us. So go! You do not belong here.”

  I was stung by his words. “I will go,” I said quietly.

  I did not return. I never saw my parents again.

  * * *

  The colony burns. Even as I approach, I can see the smoke beyond the line of trees. The humans have scoured the countryside, sacking and burning in their rage. With a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, I see that the colony did not escape their wrath.

  I enter by the rotted gate. I lurch upon the charred cobblestones as the stench of putrefied flesh threatens to overtake me. Smoke rises like dark curtains, and steam erupts from fetid pools. A once gaudy sign reading “Provisions” flaps unhinged in the breathless wind. I crawl upon the hot ground, collecting what few supplies are left.

  I find my parents’ home. It is warped and tilted, blackened and broken. I try to locate the bodies of my parents—or what is left of them. But I cannot. My insides revolt and I vomit on the pavement.

  Then I cry out to whatever deity will have me.

  My nausea passes. I make my way to what is left of the reliquary. Its unicorn-like spire has toppled and crushed the roof, and thatch and straw burn red-orange amid the ruined cobblestones. Then I see a piece of metal shaped like a trident, burning a sorcerous green.

  I find a sliver of driftwood and push the metal from the fire. It must be one of the relics. Remarkably, it is still as pale as ever, burned but not consumed. It is covered with strange markings that I have never seen before. I cannot read them.

  I put out my hand to touch the relic, but I hesitate, held back momentarily by the old superstitions. Banishing such thoughts, I feel the relic gingerly with my hand. It is the same as before. Nothing happens.

  Then without thinking, I insert my tongue into the groove of one of the markings and let it run the length of the crevice.

  Everything changes.

  There are a thousand voices pounding inside my head. Or is it more—tens of thousands, even millions? Each one is different, yet all are the same. It seems like they are chattering across a great distance. Frightened, I try to lift my tongue, but I cannot. I feel like I am being drawn upward through a great fissure—as if the sublunar sphere has cracked and I am ascending to the moon or beyond. I try to concentrate, or to breathe, but there is no way to focus.