Beneath Ceaseless Skies #113

by Tori Truslow

  Issue #113 • Jan. 24, 2013

  “Boat in Shadows, Crossing,” by Tori Truslow

  “Misbegotten,” by Raphael Ordoñez

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  BOAT IN SHADOWS, CROSSING

  by Tori Truslow

  Come, let me whisper you a tale of the city where I was born, the Town Where Salt-Plums Grow. A summer tale: dark and succulent, with a bite of chill—the kind we love to tell on warm thick nights.

  Picture that place, between the soul-swallowing land and the heart-stealing sea, where once a merchant prince carved himself fine pleasure-gardens out of the swamp. Picture dusk shivering the water; hear the night-bells blooming! Picture a broad waterway sinking into moth-thick twilight. On the bank red grasses murmur, and the sky is ruffled in patterns like lace or lizard-skin.

  Hear the city shuffling its canal-streets, shifting its bridges. Just days until summer’s heart, the Carnival of Crossing. Time, soon, to shed old lives for new. Clots of wilted blossom hang over house-barges, dripping down, making way for festival fruit. Nestled there, under the trees’ shadows, is a carved red barge with fat yellow lanterns. Inside, a party of youths, all intent on astonishing each other with weird wild happenings.

  One, in pretty robes and rueful laughter, told the rest how a sun-tree ghost followed him through the gardens all day, lithe and coldly shining, asking if he’d come live with her.

  “I told her I already have a wife,” he said. “And besides, I prefer my lovers warm.”

  The servant who sat with them laughed at that. A new boy, handsome and dark; good enough fun to invite to the gathering. “What a narrow view of love you’ve got, Cail,” he said. “Why, only yesterday I saw the happy fruits of a love between living and dead.”

  The first’s man’s brother shook his head. “Don’t encourage him, Bue.”

  “Ah, Jerrin, let the lad have a turn,” said Cail. “And let him fill our cups as he does.”

  Bue poured their cups full to the brim, and served himself too, as none had forbidden him. Then, long fingers fidgeting with air, as if pulling words from the wine-scented lamplight, he spoke:

  * * *

  I always knew I’d get into the city, knew I’d not spend my life making fish traps in a swamp—though it was fixing a trap that got me here.

  It’s old living, in the mangroves; quiet living when the men lay down their whiskey-songs. I’d sit up by night between our old walls, looking out to the shine of the city, listening for its bells, its beat. I thought of slipping off more than once, I can tell you; creeping upstream and finding all the dangers, all the temptations the drunks dribble about. But my thoughts were always interrupted by the house, the walls. Pa said those planks weren’t special, just bits of old market-boats. But late at night they smelled of salt; muttered in tide-voices like souls chewed up by the sea. Their sighing kept me fixed, and their rhythm steered my weaving.

  One midnight I was mending a split trap, and thinking: I wish I had a way to make them better than the rest, get my Pa more fish. Mutter-stutter went the walls, and I stuck my fingers through the thing’s wicker mouth, grabbed hold of the death inside it—snagged like threads on the splinters—and wove it back into the sides. You follow me? Want, chase, take, I told it; swallow us a great fat catch. I made it fins and tail of palm, stones for eyes to see. And Pa took it next day and hung it in the water.

  Now we’ll see, I thought. But when Pa went to fetch it that evening, it wasn’t full of a great fat catch. Can you guess what was inside? I must have been dreaming of city girls when I fixed it up, because—well!

  Picture it: the trap tied to one house-pole by a long cord, and I’d patched it up with the hunger of dead things. Would you have stayed in one place? Ha! Maybe it swam as far as it could, death woven through it like veins, gaping its mouth in hope of swallowing some life. Maybe a plump fish came by, shining and quick! Maybe they liked the look of each other, maybe they danced, spun and tumbled in the current and turned the water milky.

  So when Pa pulled it up he saw its middle swollen full. But no fish inside, just a clutch of wicker beads rolling about—a bellyful of eggs! Pa didn’t know what to make of that, so he left them in a bucket and went to pull up the rest of the traps. Well, Ma found the bucket, only by then they’d hatched: little basket-shoal with kicking tails and sucking mouths. That’s what sent my folks off boasting about my talent, and that’s what got me here.

  So I should thank that fish-trap, really, though I won’t say I’m not jealous it got all the fun that night.

  * * *

  So the servant finishes his tale. He tells it light, not as if it means anything much.

  But I’ll tell you a little more. Listen: down in the mangroves, just a few days before this story-telling night, a certain fisher pulled up wicker eggs that turned into wicker fish. He showed his wife the trap that bore them, shiny stones tied onto it like eyes. She shook her head and turned to their daughter.

  “It’s because you made it too lifelike,” she scolded, “and now something’s possessed it.”

  “Oh, no,” the daughter said. “I made it more deathlike. So it’d suck fish to the same fate.”

  And her parents thought, and conferred, and spoke to their cousins and their neighbors, who all agreed: a girl with such a talent could marry well.

  One said he’d heard of a wealthy ice merchant from across the seas with an unmarried son, who needed someone with haunt-tricks to help their business—he had bought a ghostwood barge to use as a roving shop but couldn’t get it to go. Now, Bue’s parents cared for their daughter but not for ghosty fish-traps—and to be joined to a merchant family was a fine thought. So they asked her, as they sat down to supper, what she thought.

  “But Ma, Pa, who’ll tend the traps?” Under her calm face, dismay tumbled with delight. The city, the city! But as a merchant’s wife?

  “I can do that,” her mother said. “Just think! No more blistering your fingers with work, but sitting in a high chair and commanding a house! And there’d be money to send home.”

  “So send me as a servant,” Bue said, ladling soup into their bowls. “I’ll earn you some coin, and I’d rather work with my hands than worry about accounts.”

  “I’ve heard nothing good about rich boys and servant girls,” said her father.

  Bue’s smile was not a delicate thing but a big rash grin when she said, “why should I be a girl?”

  And her parents were not hard people. “Ah, is that how it is?” said Bue’s mother, who had seen her nodding at shrines to the double-god Kam. “It’s a week till Crossing, isn’t it?”

  “Go as our son, then,” said her father. “If you find yourself happy, well enough. If you change your mind, come home for the Carnival, and we’ll send you back as our daughter.”

  Have I confused you? Oh, to be telling this tale in my own tongue! They say a bad workman blames her tools, and maybe so, but your language throws up strange borders. Understand: to her parents, Bue was a daughter, but to herself? Neither “he’ nor “she’ is exactly right, and nor is any third word. But these are the words you understand, so I’ll do what I can with them.

  Bue packed up her things: a pillow, spare shirt and trousers, her knife. She took the baby basket-fish, all tied on a string. The egg-bearing trap, she set quietly into the canal. Its spawn must have had a father—perhaps they’d wish to be reunited. In the dark water it beat its tail; went swift through the sluggish current.

  Then she sat and fixed traps. The weaving hurt her fingers; the walls were silent, the night slow.

  Morning came from the city, beckoning
, and she was ready. She kissed her parents, set out with their neighbor. Out, over the ever-widening web of canals. Past the spiry silver and gold temples of the stars and moon, out to the north of the city, where ancient pleasure-gardens draped themselves over the banks. Where the bronze trees rang and the flame trees reached up to the sky; where rich squares of land were joined by sly pivoting bridges. Where the tall houses were dark shining wood with trailing silk curtains; where barges carried not goods but learning. Where the women wore organza gowns and grew their hair long, and only men kept theirs short. A glistering, jeweled web of a new world.

  Its waters and trees, bridges and boards all swelling with more ghosts than Bue could fathom.

  * * *

  But let’s return to that night of skittish lamp-lit tales and see Bue savor the merchant-sons’ laughter, play for their admiration. “How we laugh at boys like you, in the mangroves!” he said. “Pale and flimsy with riches, they say, but not me—I think you’re very fine. Your father too, Cail, a wise man! I knew, from the moment I met him.” He went on:

  * * *

  Wise to buy a boat built from old wicked wood, when all the modern merchants go scrabbling after craft made with demons’ trickery; wound-up ghosts in engines they were never meant to haunt. What speed is worth owing a debt to them? No, give me natural haunting any day—but a ghosty boat with pretty carved fins won’t go if it doesn’t want to, and there’s my entrance: bundled off by my proud parents to earn some gold. Bad luck, the village must’ve thought me, weaving death in the night while they worked and slept. Bad luck and good riddance, said their eyes when I went. But I think ghosts are like dice: you can be lucky or unlucky with them, and I got lucky.

  So I told this ice-seller—your good father, I mean—I can do anything you like with haunt-stuff, no problem. Boastful? If you like, but I believed it that morning, when the world and I stared at each other like new things. “Good,” said he, and showed me his boat. It was splendid, I said—didn’t ask where he’d got it from, or whether its eyeless grinning face unnerved him. “You’ll be well treated, boy, if you get this boat swimming by tomorrow—otherwise it’s back to whatever you were before.”

  Well, I bided my time till dark, waited up for that deep kind of night that gets ghosts restless. We’re heading toward that time now, and I’m sure the boat can hear us, so shush me if I crow too loud for beating it—it might swallow us all. Think it wouldn’t? Listen to the games it played last night.

  Under the brooding black I put my hands to its deck, which looked so smooth in day. It stuck me full of splinters. Too late, the thought squirmed in my brain: this is nothing like the fishes’ ragged little deaths. Maybe my luck’s run out.

  The canal ran colder, the dark got me sharper, and I felt the thing twitch. Not the surface; something under, full of size and pain and yells turned to knotty wood. Who’d cross that? Only a night-mad fool clinging to the city he’s only just won. Time to show what I’m made of, I thought, and spoke with a man’s swagger: “I’m your commander now, you’ll obey me.”

  The planks went warm, and wet, with a hollow gurgling noise that rose into a whisper. I hope you never get to hear that sound. It turned in my guts like a key; said I’d woken it.

  “Good,” said I. “You’ve work to do.”

  Then I saw that the sound came from mouths and mouths and mouths that had opened like wounds in the screens and railings, all toothed with thorns, and all with a voice like a twisted crowd jammed in a bottle with just one throat between them.

  “I’ll swallow you up,” it said, “and suck the spirit from your bloody bones.”

  “Ha!” said I; “I’ll jump overboard first, and I swim fast.”

  And with a ring of mouths that drew close to me along the floor, it said: “I’ll eat you right where you cower.”

  And, trailing mouths across the ceiling, it said: “I’ll catch you if you swim, too.”

  “Oh, so you can catch anything?” I scoffed, and—

  “Anything!” it grated with all its splintery mouths. Oh, I had it then.

  “Well I say I can release a fish you can’t catch.” How it laughed! Didn’t it wake you in your big house-boat? It laughed like it knew I’d end up squeezed among the untold deaths in its gut, and asked if I was so ready to bet my life on that.

  “I am, and a bet it is,” said I.

  And so we made a deal: if it could catch my fish, it could eat me and whatever else it liked. If not, it would do as I bade. And it seemed to still be laughing, but the sky was lightening, though night’s hours hardly felt spent, and I saw that what I had taken for mouths were in fact just cracks in the red paint.

  The merchant came. Time to test my luck! I tossed one little basket-fish over the side. In the water it turned lively and, feeling the furious thing behind it, shot away. The boat went after it with such a jerk that it broke its mooring, but it stopped at the busy street corner, not knowing which way the canny thing had gone.

  “Now, boat,” I whispered into its wood, proud as anything, “remember our bargain. Chase again if you catch its taste, or else go where I steer.” The merchant clapped his hands; I took my place by the monster’s tail, and away we went!

  * * *

  “You were so sure your creature would be fast enough?” said Jerrin.

  “Child of fish and ghost,” said Bue. “What could be quicker?” He told them how easily the boat responded to him, tail-rudder beating in the water; how the people who lived on that canal came to the windows of their stilt-borne houses and waved, shouting “he’s done it at last!” He told how they wove this way and that, calling out their wares: frozen treats, chilled teas from across the seas. The dawn blazed, the water was calm, and the things the boat had said were easy to forget under the dancing shadows of the flame trees.

  “Ah, enough,” said Jerrin, though the other boys looked glad of a chance to think of daylight. “We don’t want to hear about father’s work. Let me have my turn now.”

  “You’d do well to listen,” scolded Cail. Jerrin frowned and poured another cup of their father’s wine down his throat.

  “I’ve more mysteries,” promised Bue, who had tasted what it is to have an audience. “Listen: this is the best bit.”

  * * *

  Round another corner, we came to a wide water-square, where market boats mingled and the shoppers went needling between them in their canoes. They all turned to stare at us, knocking their boats’ noses into each other, as we moored ourselves at the square’s edge. We did good trade, selling sweets in icy syrup to curious customers; serving tea right at this table. If they saw the boat’s great big grin just under the water, they stayed quiet.

  Just as we got set to go, I spied something in the water, and the boat sensed it too: flick of a palm-leaf tail. And we were off, so fast that the pots of tea leapt from the table and were on me like freezing rain and I was on the floor. The merchant didn’t topple like me but he yelled louder, shouting at me to stop it, but what could I do? I tried, pounding on the floor like a fool and saying no, no, not now! But I knew we’d go till the boat lost the fish—or caught it.

  Well, it lost the trail in the end, and we found ourselves in a dark street with tall teak houses all leaning together over the water: rich-looking, but with something secret and starved and half-mad about them. Their jutting fronts stood on skinny stilts with slimy ribbons wound around, little ghost shrines hanging like birdcages on chains from under box-windows.

  We glided under a red glass bridge that hummed when shadowy folk walked on it, and beyond it the water was even darker and quieter, like dusk. It spooked us both; I think even the boat wanted to be out of there. But the way was too narrow to turn, so on we went to the end—and were stopped by a song. It fell from a high window in a high house with walls carved to look like rotted leaves; so thin I could see light shining through them.

  And what a window! It had some haunt-charm on it: a frame carved with birds that beat their wings and dipped their wooden beaks i
n wooden flowers. And what a song! Its telling was nothing so strange, a maiden who comes to Salt-Plums chasing her sweetheart and gets snared by a demon, but the singing of it—

  * * *

  “That song!” cried Jerrin, wild-eyed. Bue reached for the slack thread of the story, but Jerrin blocked him again. “Do you remember it?”

  A word about the ice merchant’s sons. You know how brothers are in stories. Everyone knew that Cail, born when his father had first arrived in the city and could afford to eat only plain rice, raised in uncertain years, was clever and dutiful. Everyone knew Jerrin, born in his father’s fine house-boat, raised without hunger or care, was lazy and stuffed with dreams. He loved indulgence, in smoking or gambling or falling in frequent hopeless love.

  Even more, he loved words, long strings and bolts of them, more wonderful to him than things. There were words enough to be found in the city, perhaps too many, budding in its orchards and dancing on its spires. He could hardly look at the sun sequinning the canal without verses threatening to burst him open. But how dappled the city’s song; how knotted its meter! He wrote calm water but knew the water might hide market-trash and murders and magic. He wrote angel-faced beauties but knew lovely faces might mask all manner of bodies. He wrote in a bold black hand but knew city ink had stories of its own.

  Still he sat, with heat-fogged head, fighting the ghosts that flowed in his pen, late into the night. And once, this led to a strange adventure—listen to him tell it to the boys on the boat, now:

  * * *

  It was a year ago, on one of those nights when everything bloats, when I heard that song myself. I was sitting at a window in the house-boat, trying to pen something calm, something still, but outside I could see the fruit on the trees swelling enormous in time with the tide. Too hot to write, or to think, I went to walk in the garden, under the glower of houses with their windows lit late.

  The air, flat; pressed down by the sweltering belly of a long summer. I plucked a peach and bit; it burned my tongue with salt. A pair of lovers lay like stifled dead things in the old stone pavilion, and a barge, a barge stole past on the water, with shutters thrown wide against the heat, glittering voices and light out onto the deep rippling street. It was a learning-boat, and inside a scholar was reciting ancient verses, in perfect shape; sweet and spare.