by Jeff Wheeler
“Art. So, the gardeners made the ghosts? For the sake of art?”
“No, not exactly.” He was distracted by the sound of her increasingly labored breath. “But they helped. The garden itself made the ghosts. The garden is the artist.”
She stopped suddenly, bent double with a grunt of pain; he stopped with her, grimacing in sympathy. When she looked up at him, her eyes were hot, golden, fierce as a hawk’s. “Talk,” she commanded.
“It’s all under our feet,” he said helplessly. “The woods, the water, the tombs . . . those are only surface trappings. The most important parts of the garden are all underground. Beneath everything you see here, there is one great machine—an engine of the First Empire, built before the Fall.” He shifted uneasily from one foot to the other, looking down at her. “The gardeners thought that it was built for our benefit. Designed to make the Severans better emperors. They thought if we could learn history from those who’d lived it, we would be less likely to repeat their mistakes.”
She straightened and began to walk again, slowly. “You don’t sound . . . as if you agree with them, old man.”
“They were men of faith. They thought the builders of the garden were men like them, driven by high ideals and lofty visions.” He shook his head. “I was a man of power, and I thought that power of such magnitude doesn’t need to hang a halo on its motives. If I could have built a thing like this—a machine that would record and preserve a human soul—I would have. Just because I could. And for the sake of vanity. Who better to live forever than me?”
She laughed unevenly, stumbling a few more steps onward. “It’s funny to hear you use a word like ‘soul,’ Tiberius. You sound . . . like a priest.”
“Stop a while,” he begged. “Let me find you a place to sit and rest.”
“No.” She turned and staggered off the trail. Holding her stomach with one hand and leaning against a gravestone with another, she bent low in the bushes to be sick.
“We can’t talk about this any more now. For heaven’s sake, girl!”
She spat repeatedly into the weeds, ignoring him for several seconds, and then straightened again. “Tell me how it went wrong,” she croaked. She was moving more slowly now, but seemed somehow calm—as if she had passed through a crisis. “What happened to the gardeners?”
“My nephew.” He still winced at the memory. “Decimus didn’t like the tomb they built for me: he said the man who had murdered his mother and siblings deserved a wooden box, if that. So he had my mausoleum demolished, and executed them for ‘sentimentalizing.’ ”
“The machine.” She breathed the words, suddenly struck by understanding. For the first time in several minutes, she looked him in the eyes. “It needed them, didn’t it? Without the gardeners to care for it, it began breaking down.”
“Yes.”
“It made . . . bad recordings.”
“Not bad. Just . . . incomplete. When a living person comes into the garden, the machine still tries to do its work—but now it can only capture part of the whole. Sometimes it’s just the dimensions of the body, the vibrations of the voice, a fleeting gesture. Other times it forms a more complete picture, including all that a person was thinking and feeling at that moment. So we have Quintus Valerius on a summer day, when he walked by the wall: a single man, frozen in a single moment, knowing only what he knew then.”
“Summer,” she gasped. “Summer, by the wall. That’s why I only saw him . . . a few times.”
“Yes. The garden will not place him out of his proper context; he remembers coming here in a certain season, on a cloudless day. He will only appear if the light, the wind, and the clouds are right . . .”
Cleona cried out, clutching her abdomen in agony. When she looked up at him, her eyes were glazed with confusion; shadows stood out sharply against her skin. “Tiberius?” She looked down at herself, bending to gather her skirts with both hands. “I think . . . I think that I . . .”
Cleona raised the hem of her dress; a slow dark trickle of blood was running down her brown thigh. She looked up at him in mute supplication—as if to ask that he take this back, unmake it somehow.
“I’m sorry.” His voice broke. “So sorry, child.”
Her eyes rolled up toward the darkening sky, lashes closing over white sclera. When she fell, he couldn’t catch her.
* * *
The highest point in the garden could almost be called a mountain. For those hardy enough to climb to the summit, the towering bluffs offered a complete view of the imperial city—from the white walls of the palace to the dingy roof of the meanest bayside tenement. Tiberius could not bring himself to make the climb often, but when he smelled the salt on the wind and saw the broken clouds above, he knew that it was time to go.
There had once been a trail up the mountainside, an exhausting switchback snaking back and forth all the way to the top. Time, rain, and erosion had destroyed the easy way, however; now he could only climb directly up the mountain, scuttling up slopes of broken tallus and clinging to steep rock faces like an old gray spider.
She was waiting for him when he reached the end of the climb, sitting cross-legged on a boulder. “I wondered if you would come!” she cried, shouting down the wind.
He straightened up slowly. “I knew you would be here today. I didn’t want to leave you alone.”
She turned away and looked out at the sky; clouds raced across the horizon, beams of bright light slashing down amid the falling rain. “Tell me how long I’ve been dead.”
He went down on one knee beside her, his robe whipping in the wind.
“Go on, tell me. I want to know. Tell me how long I’ve been dead—and who did that.”
She jabbed an angry finger at the lands below, but there was no need to point. The city was in ruins; vast swaths of it had been reduced to pools of glass, with the half-melted skeletons of many high towers still standing, twisted and naked, like trees drowned in a flood. Elsewhere there had been heavy bombardment, and sweeping fires that eradicated everything but a few low broken walls. Whole districts had been replaced by impact craters, and whatever was left standing was windowless and gaunt with long neglect. The streets were white with human bones. Nova Roma was dead—and she had died by violence.
Cleona trembled, her gray cloak whipping in the wind. “How long?”
“It happened fifty years ago. The last survivors were forced to abandon it when biological weapons were used against them—this whole planet will remain uninhabitable, until someone finds a cure.” He looked down at the devastation. “If anyone ever does.”
“What do you mean, ‘if’?”
He held out his trembling hand, and somehow this one gesture seemed a general indictment: of the city, of the empire, of the species that had destroyed them both. “We are in decline, Cleona. War is devouring us, and with it will come darkness and ignorance—just as it did before. Those who create a virus today that will target and eradicate all human life may die before they can teach the next generation how to cure it.”
She made a halfhearted nod, unwilling to argue. “And how long has it been since . . . me?”
He stood silently for a time, trying to read her face. “Over six hundred years. Give or take a few. I’m afraid I never really understood the new calendar.”
She looked at him and smiled. Years had creased and folded her skin, but the eyes had not changed; they were still bright, beautiful, heartbreaking golden brown. “Shame on you, Tiberius.” She shook her head.
“Why?”
“You’re lying. And what’s worse, I caught you at it—your naive little niece!”
He smiled back feebly. “You’re not so little anymore, old woman.”
“Apparently I’m not anything anymore.” The wind caught the lip of her cowl, blowing it back from her face; coarse white dreadlocks spilled around her shoulders. She turned again to look down on the ruined city, its streets and squares slowly succumbing to an invading army of trees. “Was this my doing, somehow? Is that
it?”
He shook his head, unable to speak.
She studied his expression carefully, and then nodded to herself. “It was.”
“Don’t blame yourself. There was nothing you could do.”
“Stop. You, of all people, cannot forgive me for this.” She shook violently. “I’ve killed the empire, the one thing you loved . . . how can you help but despise me?”
“Everything dies.” He offered the words gently. “It is the way of things.”
“Succession.” She spat the word bitterly, ignoring him. “That’s what started this war.” She wrapped her arms around herself, shrinking against the wind. “All those years, old man, you tried to tell me: get rid of a few more cousins, good or bad—you’ll be glad you did! And this is the final proof.” She put out a trembling hand toward the city. “You were right, and I was wrong.”
“No. Just the reverse, Cleona.”
She squinted at him, surprised.
“You tried to prevent this. The heir that you conceived was poisoned in the womb—they murdered her before she was even born. Don’t be ashamed that you refused to play that game; you should be proud that you stood above it. It was an ugly, stupid way to live.” He pointed to the broken ruins below. “And this is the way it always ends.”
“My, my.” She cocked her head, deeply amused. “You’ve certainly changed your tune, old man. You were always a great proponent of the game.”
“I practically invented it. That wreck below is as much my doing as anyone’s. I wanted to build a great empire, one that would last forever—but I laid the foundation in blood.” He turned away from her. “It’s a shame I didn’t ask the gardeners for help. They could have told me that nothing stands long, rooted in bad soil.”
She reached out a weathered hand. “Tiberius . . . There’s nothing we can do to change things now.”
“Yes. I know.” He swallowed, staring dry-eyed at the destruction below. “No one knows it better than I.”
She remained silent for some time, sitting beside him on the bluff. When she finally turned to him again, she wore an almost girlish smile. “Do you ever wonder how things might have been, if we had both lived at the same time?”
Tiberius looked away, hiding his face from her. “No, Cleona.”
She frowned. “Really? Never?”
“No. I think it was a blessing that we met when we did.”
She drew back, mingled hurt and bemusement in her eyes. “Why do you say that?”
“I was a different man when I was alive. I would have hurt you.” He turned away. “And I’ve done enough harm to the things I love.”
She reached tenderly for his cheek, but her fingertips met no resistance; they passed through him like a dream. She was fading, the wind and rain wiping her away. Grinning at her own predicament, she quickly kissed her withered palm and blew it toward him. “Something to remember me by.” Her voice was so faint it was almost inaudible.
“No need.” He smiled. “We’ll meet again.”
* * *
The Severan Funeral Garden is the planet’s largest public park, bordered on all sides by the imperial city of Nova Roma. It is a fine playground for a young empress, with a million places to hide. On certain spring mornings, when the sun and wind are right, a child still creeps through the weeds there, stalking an old man. He goes to the same place year after year, to tell her his name—because although the two of them have met before, he knows she will not remember the occasion.
About Arinn Dembo
Arinn Dembo is a writer and game developer currently living and working in the Greater Seattle area. Her short stories, poetry, and novellas have appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror, Weird Tales, Lamp Light Magazine, and several collections. Most recently, she contributed three stories to two anthologies, which were both nominated for the 2015 World Fantasy Award, in different categories: Gods, Memes and Monsters by Stoneskin Press, and She Walks in Shadows by Innsmouth Free Press.
As a narrative designer in the computer gaming industry, she has provided world-building and background fiction to a number of popular PC titles. She is the English-language screenwriter for the Japanese animated series World Trigger, based on the manga series written and illustrated by Daisuke Ashihara, and her military SF novel The Deacon’s Tale and her short-story collection, Monsoon and Other Stories, are both available from Kthonia Press.
The author holds a degree in anthropology and a second in classical archaeology. The inspiration for this story comes from her academic work in Roman studies and is dedicated with love to her younger daughter, Freya.
THE BEESINGER'S DAUGHTER
By Jeff Wheeler | 21,600 words
IT WAS A story Rista never grew tired of hearing, yet she shivered with fear each time her father told it. The hearth crackled and cast an orange glow across the small cabin space, lighting her siblings’ faces as they stared at the storyteller, transfixed. The mood had to be right before Rista could convince her father to share the stories of his adventures from the past. As the oldest, she felt it was her duty to incite the tellings.
Her father was a good storyteller, with a baritone voice that was just a little too soft, forcing her to lean forward to catch every word. His gray thatch of hair showed his age, which always made Rista secretly sad, but his hazel eyes twinkled as he leaned forward, a little smile making his lips crooked.
“We had traveled four days to reach Battle Mountain,” he confided, “after crossing the Arvadin. Four days of serpents. Four days of kobold raids at night.”
“Not Twig!” little Camille said indignantly. “He couldn’t hurt anyone!”
At the mention of his name, a little kobold no taller than a strutting rooster peeked his head around Father’s back. He was small, even for a kobold, and he blinked at Camille and skittered into her lap, then around her back, and finally rested his lizard-like snout on her shoulder, making her giggle in hysterics.
Rista wanted to swat him down for ruining the story. “Shhh!” she scolded. “Let Father tell the story! Twig, get down!”
The kobold blinked at her, his little shoulder wilting at the rebuke, and then he curled up in Camille’s lap while she stroked his knobby horns. Little Twig had joined Father’s adventure all those years ago and had not grown an ounce bigger in all those years. He was the runtiest little excuse of a monster. The only reason he had survived so long was because he was cowardly in the extreme, jittery as a squirrel, and clever enough not to fight anything bigger than her little brother, Adam.
“As I was saying,” Father went on patiently, his eyes twinkling, “we reached Battle Mountain. It’s a desolate land, full of jagged rocks and scrub. Not a single tree. The peak comes out of the middle of the flatlands. It’s huge.”
“Are there any bees then?” piped in Brand, the second oldest, who would be leaving with Father in the morning to move the hives.
“Sshhh!” Rista hissed impatiently.
“There are bees in that forsaken land,” her father said, giving Rista a subtle hand gesture to try to calm her down. She hated such interruptions. “Carpenter bees. The big black fat ones. Practically the size of hummingbirds.”
A chorus of shivers went through the siblings, including Rista. She was the Beesinger’s daughter, and had grown up loving bees of all sorts—except the nasty black carpenter bees. She wasn’t afraid of bumblebees, yellow jackets, honeybees, wasps, or hornets. But the giant bees had terrified her as a child, and now that she was seventeen, she wondered if she would ever conquer her fear of them in order to become a true Beesinger herself.
“When we reached Battle Mountain, the fortress of the Ziggurat dominated the base of the rocks. I’ve never seen something so big, yes—even bigger than King Malcolm’s palace! The kobolds had been working on it for centuries, driven by their slave master. Now, how could we get in without being seen?” He tapped his chin thoughtfully.
“Twig could get in,” Camille said proudly,
and the little kobold lifted his head from her lap with a toothy grin and a little purring noise.
“But that was before I found Twig,” her father said, wagging his finger. “The Ziggurat was built above caves in the mountain. So we searched the base behind it, looking for another way in. That was before the king’s army arrived. Well, I found a little cave—a small one that Twig could fit through, but so could I.” He patted his own belly. “I was thinner back then. I crawled on my stomach to see how far it went. It was so dirty and dusty, I could hardly breathe or see, and it was full of cobwebs.” He used his arms and hands to gesture the words as he spoke. “I used my cudgel to clear some away and then scoot in a little farther.” He paused, eyes twinkling again, and Rista felt the shivers already starting to go up her back.
“I had a piece of magic, given to me from the Enclave. It’s that small clear stone full of borrowed light. I’ve shown it to some of you before. It was so dark I couldn’t see well, so I reached into my pocket, opened the pouch that hides the light, and pulled it out.” He mimicked the action, withdrew the small oval stone, and then opened his palm. The clear stone began to glow dimly. The light had been much brighter when Rista was young. The magic in it was fading. “That’s when I saw the spiders,” he added softly and with a wicked grin. “Black widows—everywhere. I’d crawled into the middle of their nest.”
Rista hated spiders, especially black widows. She saw the faces of her siblings twist with disgust and fear. Twig suddenly leaped from Camille’s lap and skittered around the hearth with his usual disruptive antics.
“Twig!” Rista complained while her siblings giggled. The tiny kobold scrabbled up the Beesinger’s arm, up his shoulder, then down his front before nestling on Father’s lap. He stared at the light from the crystal as it began to fade, his red-orange glassy eyes shimmering with the light. His long snout of teeth grinned at it. Rista loved the little monster—even though she sometimes called the kobold a little runt in front of her siblings and friends. Twig could be very exasperating on occasion.
