Beneath Ceaseless Skies #124

by Gemma Files

  They stared at each other a long moment, during which Rusk could feel the bo’sun—along with every other man on deck, aside from Parry’s creation—cast eyes his way as well, waiting to see what might come of this confrontation. And though the wizard knew enough to school his face, Rusk nevertheless took due note of how his fingers flexed all unconscious, blue and green St. Elmo’s fire dancing between and similar-hued sparks set dancing ‘cross their knuckles as a clear demonstration of just how much they longed to form fists.

  “Oh, Jerusha,” Rusk said, almost sadly, his own hand moving to caress his sword’s hilt. “What is’t you’ve done now, ye mad bitch?”

  “Freed myself at last from you, I venture, albeit at Mister Dolomance here’s expense. Yes, I teased him up, bent him to my will, re-made him, as you see... slaved myself one of the sea’s fiercest monsters, and without even a collar. For the which he now hates me, true—but then, I require only his obedience, not his affections. He will do my bidding from now on, neat as any devil but without the contract, thus posing no threat to my immortal soul beyond the immediate; guard my body in all matters, most particularly from those who lie, and cheat, and do not keep their promises.”

  “By which you mean myself, I suppose.”

  “Do you? Well. If the shoe fits.”

  Such a wild tone, lurking at these last words’ very back, knit from equal parts despair and triumph; the bo’sun took a half-step back at their sound alone, though Rusk made himself stand fast. Telling Parry, as he did—

  “So you’re angry wi’ me yet, as I knew already. But this is my ship, whose Articles you swore to on your honor, as a Navy man. Does none of that mean naught t’you, anymore? What’s your intent?”

  “Can you not guess? Then I will be plain: Since you have had your way with me, sir—and on several different occasions, no less—now it is both turn-about and catch-who-can, as the old phrases go. And thus, while the play involved may not perhaps be entirely fair, by some standards, yet it is just enough, to my mind.”

  “Mutiny, then. Ye seek the Captaincy, in my place.”

  “If the crew agree.”

  “And ye think they will, between us—pick you over me, ye bedwarmer, who never went over-side or fought hand-to-hand in your life? Ye sly jest of a jumped-up Cornish marsh-witch’s get, wi’ your fake-vicar’s airs and graces?”

  “They’ve little enough choice, considering. As little choice, almost, as you gave me.”

  At this last blatant ingratitude, however, Rusk drew himself up full height, unsheathing, while Parry reached for his hex-bag just as fast, whipping it free, aiming it like a pistol. “And who was it popped your lock, Hell-priest,” Rusk heard himself declaim, “when you would’ve died like a sick bloody dog, iron-yoked still, had I not? For which reason alone ye’ll do well t’keep a civil tongue in your head, damn your eyes!”

  “I have been civil with you throughout, the more fool me! Would to God I had been less so, seeing all the good it did!”

  A man of pride, Tante Ankolee had called Parry, once—and wasn’t it so, Rusk only realized now; wasn’t it, though, by Hell and blast. Pride poison-rich as any stingray’s sac, the sort that’d make a man always more willing to break than bend, no matter what might be gained from doing the latter. Which meant, well though he suddenly understood the full range of his own mistakes, that there’d been no way for him to’ve ever had his will with Jerusalem Parry and walked away after with both ‘em content, let alone happy....

  I did have ye, though, sure enough, Rusk thought, meeting Parry’s silver eyes, almost sure the man could hear him. Made ye like it too, in our congress’s fullest bloom. And by the very way you behave, ‘sir’—no matter all your most fervent protests t’the contrary—I’d say I have ye still.

  Once more, he watched Parry nod, slightly. Thinking, in return: Perhaps. But where magic is concerned, things go both ways, or so that cousin of yours tutored me. So here is my curse, pirate, my gratitude made flesh for all you gave, and took....

  (What you put in me, I put in you; what we share I turn against us both, accounting my own pain of no moment, so long as you suffer. By the bond between us I bind you fast and draw you down. Draw out your life’s root, and sever it.)

  So, you admit it: Ye’d have nothing at all, not even t’curse me with, were it not for me.

  Rusk felt the spell’s price flare behind his eye, a split coal screwed deep in the empty socket, and knew exactly what it was costing Parry to work it, in that very moment—a sick joke, overall, spurring him to laugh yet one more time, full in the man’s self-sorry face. Scoffing, as he did—

  “An apology, then, for givin’ ye what you weren’t canny enough t’know ye wanted? Because I took liberties? Well, be that as it may: in this case, as in all others, I scorn t’defend my actions, except with steel!”

  Here he lunged forward, sword’s point aimed straight towards the pale shadow of Parry’s neck-scar, where it peeked from his cravat’s high twist. Only to meet something else halfway, come barreling into him sidelong like a leaping whale: “Dolomance”, Parry’s curst creation, its teeth suddenly all ablaze with sorcerous fire, snapping-to like a trap about his wrist and biting the bone of it through entirely, in one fell chunk.

  The pain was so severe Rusk swooned, coming to again in his own vomit, his nauseate agony set to the cracking, snuffling sound of a shark-were at its repast. Spasming, he jack-knifed left and came nose-to-snout with the thing, its bloodstained mouth still unnaturally aflame, and managed, groaning: “Wh-what, wh—why—?”

  Standing above, too damnable calm by far, Parry paused to order first one cuff, then the other. “The process,” he said, at last, “Is called cauterization.”

  Rusk spit bile. “Because ye... want me t’live crippled, is... that it?”

  “Because I want you alive, yes, for now. ‘Til I say otherwise.”

  “And just how long will that be, I wonder?”

  “A fair question. How long can you hold your breath?”

  * * *

  “No ship can have two captains,” the Bitch’s former master used to claim, before Rusk overtook him. “‘Tis not natural, and the sea bears no unnaturalness.” Which was good advice, certainly, or always had been, before....

  That man never had the ill-luck to meet with such as Jerusalem Parry, though, let alone make the supreme error of lying down with him, in both the phrase’s prime senses. And Rusk thought he might well’ve given thanks for avoiding that opportunity, had he only found himself still far enough above-waves to venture a verdict on the matter.

  “Others might maroon you,” Parry had told him as the crew’s four strongest members bound Rusk’s pain-stiff carcass, all apologetic, to the Bitch of Hell’s anchor-chain. “But I am not over-merciful by nature, as you have no doubt noted, and have no interest in giving second chances. This ship is mine, from now on; your death will christen it with blood, as is only lore-ful.”

  Oh, aye, Rusk thought, far too wearied by dolor to summon much of a struggle. Still, it would all be over soon enough, if not immediately....

  (and there was that vaunted lack of mercy showing through, in the very proclaimed method of his demise—for keel-hauling was one of the illest deaths imaginable, a terror seldom more than threatened, combining as it did all the varied and central terrors of drowning, great bodily suffering and utter humiliation)

  Soon enough, yes. Or so he had believed.

  “I should thank you, I suppose,” Parry said, while they hauled him up, “for this change my durance seems to’ve wrought in me, since truly—even at my lowest, in that gaol-ship’s brig—I never looked to be so powerful as I am now. Then again, my mother’s marsh was salten, so perhaps I was always destined to find my power’s depth at sea.”

  Rusk touched a too-dry tongue to bleeding lips, and eked out: “Hmm, might... be. So... will ye?”

  “Give thanks, to you?” Parry cast that cold metal stare his way, one last time, lips pursing in a way Rusk would once have fo
und intolerable for very different reasons. Then, at last: “I think not.”

  But this, too, was very little surprise.

  “Stay... ever as y’are, my Jerusha,” Rusk croaked while the weeping sailors heaved to, swinging him over the side. “I’ll... miss ye.”

  “I cannot say the same, sir,” was Parry’s reply.

  Then Rusk closed his eye, and let the water take him. Only to learn that for some unlucky few—himself very much included, it turned out—death was not always as he’d been previously given to believe, prior to shedding his mortal coil.

  Now that he was no longer encumbered by the flesh, Rusk could easily see everything he’d never been privy to: lines of power leaking from Parry to Mister Dolomance and back again, a double set of chains; from his own ruined wreck of a body to the Bitch’s hull, in the brief instant Parry stooped to pluck Rusk’s still-witched eyeball out and slip it in his bag, like spoils of war, before directing “his” crew to shove their former Captain’s corpse off-deck through the scuppers same as so much other rubbish. Or the curse he’d never known he was capable of placing on sweet Master Jerusha bleeding out from that same bespelled item, tainting every other hex-ingredient and entering Parry’s heart through the breast-pocket, where it soon commenced to circulate through his system like any other humor.

  Seem you the same sort’a Rusk as me after all, no matter the size o’that piece ‘tween ya legs, or what-all it pull ya fiercest towards, Tante Ankolee might have said, had he ever thought to ask her. Born of bad angels on one side an’ bad men on th’other, a ten-mile-long chain o’ witches, pirates, and pirate-witches—an’ just like that Master Parry o’yours know all too well, t’him an’ your cost both, ‘tis never no fit measure ta look only at what a man already done ta foresee what him yet may do, under th’exact right circumstance. Why is’t ya think y’have such a hunger for him, anyhow, but that ya finally recognize y’own kind?

  (Which maybe explains it th’other way, too, Rusk’s traitor thoughts would have chimed in, if so. Why he felt the same pull as regards to me, and just as strong, though Christ knows he’d do anything not t’admit it.)

  Anything and everything, yes. As current circumstances only went to prove.

  When the Bitch returned to Porte Macoute, Rusk’s ghost stood watching from her deck when Parry tried to come ashore, only to start bleeding out at every pore the second his boot-soles touched land. Saw Mister Dolomance drag him into the surf and swim back at double-time, inhumanly swift, that same passage rubbing Parry raw ‘cross the chest and inner arms against the shark-were’s sandpaper skin, even with two separate layers of clothing between.

  Later, with Parry cocooned in healing power just like that first night they’d shared together, Rusk stretched himself invisibly alongside and passed a gelid ghost-hand down his beloved murderer’s side, touching each of the wizard’s organs in turn and saving that one he liked best for last. Stroked him once more from the inside out in an entirely different way, sowing gooseflesh over his blood-smeared new-grown hide, and whispered, in Parry’s fever-bright ear:

  Shield yourself from me all ye please, in whichever ways ye choose, yet I am here always, nonetheless. The Bitch is my command as much as yours, forever, Master Parry. A sad truth, and one which must drag it down eventually, bringing you along with it....

  How it comes I know not, but know this: I will be there that day, that hour, at the very striking of your doom; we will meet again beneath the water, where I will hold you tight, as your own flesh casts you free. I will never let you go.

  * * *

  And so it did come to pass, eventually, but not for years yet. The which is another tale completely, told by one who would never know—or care to know—what you now do: how two equal-obdurate men may always be the death of each other, fast or slow, especially when magic is involved.

  Said Solomon Rusk to Jerusalem Parry, licking this last truth—with a wintry ghost-tongue—directly onto the drum: shouldn’t’ve killed me on me own ship, my Jerusha, ye really wished t’be rid of me. And while Parry moaned and tossed in sorcerous sleep, all unknowing of why he felt so cold, the Bitch of Hell sailed on, secure in its two captains’ care.

  Copyright © 2013 Gemma Files

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Former film critic and teacher turned award-winning horror author Gemma Files is best-known for her Hexslinger novel series (A Book of Tongues, A Rope of Thorns, and A Tree of Bones). She has also published two collections of short fiction and two chapbooks of poetry, and she is currently hard at work on her fourth novel. The adventures of Jerusalem Parry and Solomon Rusk from “Two Captains” continue in “Trap-Weed” (Clockwork Phoenix 4) and “The Salt Wedding” (Kaleidotrope, early 2015).

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  ELSE THIS, NOTHING EVER GROWS

  by Sylvia Linsteadt

  I. Long-Nose

  I only wanted him for his clean, warm blood, you know. And for the brightness of him. He was a normal man with smooth arms and legs, who ate gentle, ripe things like apricots and loaves of bread; like almonds and deer meat. Mine is the realm of decay, of rot and decomposition, the underbelly of every one of your wild poppies and love stories. I only wanted to hang on to something that still flourished, touch it before the rot set in. I wanted to know what that was like.

  So did my mother. We liked having captive things, fresh and blood-beating creatures—men and women who worshipped their Christ faithfully and shone positively blue with all their yearning, all that repentance and prudence. We kept perfect chickadees who sang in cages and great broad grizzlies, like he was for all that time; golden-eyed, so strong they held off decay with their shoulders, the whole black weight of it.

  We came here because you brought us along with your dreams for gold. You brought your monsters, your devils, goblins, imps, gods. The figures you prayed to and cursed, blamed for your bad luck, for your or lust or your rage. Northern Europeans brought my kind, but our only purview is decay, not evil, like they think. Not deceit and trickery, only rot—the way worms take over a body and turn it back to earth; the purple fungi, the weathered world, all the places it releases itself back to the ground, crumbling and falling and getting consumed.

  You brought us with you in your dreams and quiet longings, between your intolerant God and his merciful Son. You call us evil, but ours is only the profit of equilibrium, of right balance, the necessity of worms. You’ve carved the rivers to carcasses with your hoses, for that shining stuff, dense as stars. You’ve ripped the others here, the ones before you, who have no need for Gods and Devils, because theirs is a living land, flicker and cougar and oak the true deities. You’ve torn up their bodies for sport or a sack of gold-dust, their lands for your own breakfast table.

  So do not call me evil for taking only one of you, a cursed boy. My mother did it to him anyway, the grizzly body, the curse, so I could have him. Do not hate me for wanting a little bit of what you want.

  * * *

  II. Girl

  When the bear came, we were so poor that the towhees had stopped fearing us and would land casually on our shoulders, as if we were trees. We were saving up our energy, our hunger, slowly, as trees do. Not moving much. Trying to eat up the sun. We lived, my father and three sisters and I, in a hut, one room, in the foothills of those mountains that turn a savage blue and white at dusk, the Sierra Nevadas, where the gold flowed from. The Sierras threw down a blue shade when the grizzly bear came, granite dust and snow in his fur. Scars made bare patches on his shoulders. From the bullfights, he told me, those goring horns.

  It was later on he told me that; later when I lived in his home of gold-hung tree roots and wildflowers in pewter vases, which he must have picked at night when his hands were human, for me to smell and to smile at. I liked sweet things then, silly things, because they were new to me. I ate bowls of sugarcubes he brought to me in sacks shipped from the Caribbean. He caught the most tender brush rabbits and quail for me in his me
rciful claws, killing them instantly. I didn’t suck their marrow, like I used to, in that other life of the miner’s shack and the endless dust, because I didn’t need to. I wasn’t starving. I wanted to be wasteful and to toss those bones still heavy with food into the fire, knowing there was more, always more.

  Years of hunger will do this to you. I hoarded things in my stomach, my pockets, the brim of my sunhat: cheeses and pretty ribbons, Indian paintbrush flowers and gold flakes and wishbones, the bulbs of wild onions, and nails, because my father always made us collect them off the ground, rusty and misshapen. Nails were a luxury. I never could shake the habit, that smell of rust, like blood, on my fingers.

  * * *

  III. Long-Nose

  I didn’t get him in the end. You know this. It is always a girl, young and pure, who does. She was a miner’s daughter, clean in heart somehow beneath the dirt of deceit and greed she grew up in.

  They call us trolls, the Norwegians who dragged us along in their mildewed wagons, in the immaculate folds of their linens aired daily by their wives. Then they forgot us. The Irish forgot their banshees, the Portuguese their mouras encantadas, the Chinese their Ba Gu Jing. We all dwell in the forgotten places now, the barren, the desolate and windswept. We live in the abandoned barn, the site of an old village, perhaps the one we were first brought to, rolled up in their stockings and bedskirts, beside the canning jars and their single precious silk. We are bedded down in the roadside plants you call weeds—the dandelions, wild onions, nettles. All nourishing; you’ve just forgotten.

  We trolls, we’ve taken the Southeast Farallon. We like it for its winds, for the mildewed lighthouse keeper’s attics, the ghosts of children killed by typhus and sailors killed by waves. For the paint of sea bird guano and sea lion afterbirth. We live in the granite caves, in tunnels carved deep into that ridge that was once mountainous, now surrounded by sea. The lighthouse keepers don’t notice us, because they don’t believe we are here. And the island is so torn with violent winds and strange bird-cries, with a frightening melancholy, that we are not out of place.