Beneath Ceaseless Skies #121

by Alex Dally MacFarlane

  Laughter around the fire, flame-bright.

  Knowe doesn’t know why she’s so upset. It’s not as though it’s the first time her father—or anyone in her family—has said her singing’s bad. But I was out there alone, I wasn’t making anyone listen. She winces at a small bone in her mouth, removes it. Though it’s so slender, more like hair than any of the dark, heavy bones she found in the mound last summer, it makes her think of Tolnait. Singing with Tolnait is easy. It’s not even about the sound. And what’s wrong with bad singing? It’s about the words, about the stories not lost.

  Knowe glares at her half-eaten sillock.

  Conversation lingers on the Mainland boat. It’s boring—she sees her brother dozing on the floor, her cousins already curled together under blankets. Knowe is too hurt to sleep. For a while she sits by the fire, half-listening, then she gets up and goes round the back as if she’s only relieving herself and she doesn’t stop walking, up, up to the high, ghosted plain.

  Clouds hang low, patchy, part-darkening the moon and flinging rain at Knowe’s face. She squints against it. There’s almost nothing to be seen, but her feet know the way: up the stony path, along years-worn sheep paths through the heather and grass to the mounds, to the open entrance. She bends and enters.

  There’s a song in the tunnel, in words like the ones in Uuir’s song.

  There’s not just one voice in the singing.

  Knowe keeps going, right to the end of the tunnel where she stops, gaping at ghosts: seven of them, sitting in a circle, Tolnait with her strung bone-thing in her lap, accompanying the loud voices. They glow so bright together that it’s like white, cloud-filtered daylight in the chamber.

  At the end of the song, they go silent and look at her. Tolnait smiles, says, “Come in!” and there are other smiles too, bright as the year’s first flowers.

  “Are you Knowe?” another ghost asks. “It’s wonderful to meet you!”

  “Tolnait told us about you,” says a ghost far older than the others, her translucent face wrinkled and her fingers like twisted heather-roots.

  They’re all women: friendly, welcoming women. Knowe sits.

  People still like to say the mounds hold warriors. Well, maybe they do. Three of the women wear fine knives: shaped sturdy for use, not decoration, judging by the translucent sheaths. The women’s arms don’t look soft. Their glowing hair is braided and bound back from their faces: practical. Like Tolnait, they wear blanket-garments, although they do not all have metal discs over their chests.

  What did they fight? What—

  Questions crowd at Knowe’s mouth like a family around a fire.

  One woman is naked, except for a small vertebrae tied on chord around her neck. Was she buried that way? Or—there are too many unpleasant ways to die without clothes. But the woman is cheerful, smiling broad as a summer horizon, one arm slung around the shoulders of a far smaller ghost, a shyly smiling short-haired girl wrapped in what looks like a seal skin.

  “Will you sing with us?” the naked ghost asks.

  Sing in a circle?

  “I’ve never really—”

  “Doesn’t matter!” says Tolnait. “But you need our names first. This is Manath,” she says, indicating the naked ghost, “and her daughter Aniel. This is Tolorg—” the old ghost, who smiles with bare gums “—one of my sisters. And these three are Bridei and Dresnait and Gur, sisters, who lived a hundred years before me. They’re buried in the mound closest to this one.”

  Knowe gasps, knowing that.

  How many people will see the sisters’ knives, if they still remain, and say the bones are men’s?

  “And, yes,” Tolnait says to the other ghosts, “this is Knowe, the singing woman I told you about. In summer she’ll be digging up our bones—those of us who are buried here.”

  Knowe’s heart goes suddenly fast with fear, but none of them look angry. None of them look like her work is causing hurt.

  “Will you share our songs with other living people?” Bridei asks.

  “Yes. If that’s all right? If—”

  “Songs are for sharing,” Tolorg says.

  “We keep our songs here,” Gur says, “but to have them kept by the living too—that’s how it should be.”

  Knowe smiles, thinks: When I dig you up, I’ll fight for the truth of you to be known.

  “So will you sing with us?” Manath asks.

  “We’ll teach you the songs,” Tolnait says.

  “And then you can teach us yours!” Gur says.

  “I don’t— I barely know any songs. My family doesn’t really sing. They didn’t teach me any.” She feels awkward, embarrassed: she should know songs, but these pieces of family and island history are lost to her. “I would like to know yours, because—because they’re far closer to lost than the ones I don’t know.” There’s Bess and plenty of other people who know songs, though Knowe’s never talked to them about that. Never thought to. Singing is something people who can sing do—Knowe has the mounds. Well, I’ll just have to have both.

  Bess will want to hear the songs, won’t she? No matter how poor the voice sharing them?

  It hurts to imagine Bess’s laughter.

  “We’ll teach you,” Tolnait says, and there are nods and agreement around the whole circle. “Let’s start with the one I sang last time you were here. Uuir’s song.”

  “Oh!” Gur exclaims, then says something to Tolnait in their language. Tolnait nods, smiling, and says something that sounds a bit like Yes.

  Tolnait and Tolorg guide Knowe through the repeating part of the song: letting her mimic the tune and the words until she’s got it right, not caring that it takes her a while. And then they’re all singing, Tolnait and Tolorg and Gur singing all of the words, Knowe and the others joining them in the repeating part. The song goes on a long time—there must be more parts that Tolnait didn’t sing the first time—and gets so loud that it crashes against the chamber’s walls like a tide.

  The silence afterwards is a surprise.

  Then they teach Knowe the next song.

  They guide her through words and words, tell her their meaning: here a song about weaving with cursed nettles, here a song to draw a man’s attention, here a song for midwives, here a song that Bridei and Dresnait and Gur used in battle to keep their courage high. Manath shares a song from the open sea, in a completely different language—selkie language—and Aniel’s voice floats high above theirs, like a seal contemplating fish.

  They sing til morning sends grey light along the tunnel. Knowe wants to slow the sun’s rise—there are so many songs, so many more yet un-sung.

  Knowe forces herself to leave, knowing her family will already be wondering where she spent the night. I’ll offer to mind the sheep, she thinks as she crawls along the tunnel to the day. Then I can just sleep behind the gorse. Tolnait tells her to come back soon. The others agree. “I will. I will!”

  * * *

  She goes whenever she can, learning old songs, old stories: a path across hundreds of years, clear and bright.

  * * *

  It takes Knowe almost the whole summer to get up the courage to share the songs with Bess.

  She has to approach Bess among other people, talk of singing where someone might hear and laugh, or go alone when Bess sits with her sheep and be turned away—she can’t. She retreats to her days’ work and the mounds, where her digging adds to what the songs give her, adds to her knowledge of her ancestors.

  She tries. She can’t get her legs to take her closer than a fishing boat’s length. Words slide away as inevitably as the tide.

  Then, on a rare day when she’s up on the slope above the crofts with the sheep, she sees Bess not far away, minding her family’s flock and singing something too distant to understand.

  Hours pass.

  Knowe hikes over to her. “Can I sit? I thought we could—it’d be nice to share our lunch, instead of eating separately.”

  “Of course!” Bess says, smiling.

  They sp
read out bannocks and cheese and torsk caught the day before. They eat, talking of island news: good fishing, a healthy baby, rumors of important people on Mainland causing trouble among themselves. Eventually they go silent, and Knowe thinks she should get back to where she can see her sheep better—no. “There’s something, um. I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s about singing.” The words come out like a difficult lambing, but Bess is smiling. “Yes. It’s, um.” Sing. Just sing!

  Knowe thinks of Tolnait, always welcoming, and Tolorg and Manath and Aniel and Gur—

  Knowe starts with the repeating part of Uuir’s song—and it’s wonder on Bess’s face, not laughter. Knowe sings more. Starts telling Bess about the ghosts, when Bess asks what the unfamiliar words mean, and Bess doesn’t mock or call her mad. Her face is bright with joy. “Oh, these are wonderful. Can you sing them all? Can you—do you think I could come with you, when you next go singing with them? I would love to sing with you and Tolnait and the other women. Ghosts. Selkies.”

  “Yes,” Knowe manages. “That would be fun.” Bess actually wants—

  “I wonder if we could translate them, with the ghosts’ help,” Bess says, gazing at the cloud-heavy horizon. “Then we could sing them for people here.”

  “That. Yes.” It gets Knowe thinking about the three word-etched stones and whether the ghosts would tell her what those say. She’s been too busy singing and digging new bones—with no marked stones—to ask. “Yes.”

  “So sing another for me!”

  “Yes, uh—”

  She chooses a song.

  The words spill from Knowe’s mouth like a hundred dug-up bones.

  Copyright © 2013 Alex Dally MacFarlane

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  Alex Dally MacFarlane lives in London, where she is pursuing an MA in Ancient History. When not researching ancient gender and narratives, she writes stories, found in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Shimmer, The Other Half of the Sky, and previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Poetry can be found in Stone Telling, Goblin Fruit, The Moment of Change, and Here, We Cross. She is the editor of Aliens: Recent Encounters (2013) and The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (forthcoming in late 2014). Visit her online at www.alexdallymacfarlane.com.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  OUR DEAD SELVES LIE LIKE FOOTSTEPS IN OUR WAKE

  by Jeff Isacksen

  I close my eyes and listen to the gentle beating of her heart, the rhythm of her life. I can almost feel the warmth of her blood. Intensely intimate—more even than the earlier tangle of limbs and lips—the fabric of her physicality is laid bare in her heartbeat. Like I’m part of her, I press so close that I am among the tiny, fleshy machines that move her parts and breathe her air and do all the other miraculous, incredible, completely mundane things that came together to be Adalia.

  “I can see yours, you know,” she says.

  I shift in her arms. “My what?”

  “Your heartbeat.” She knows my thoughts, as always. Spending so long together, sharing every aspect of every moment, we have become one person. I know her feelings by the subtlest shift of her eyelids. She reads my mind from nothing but a far-off look.

  I don’t question her, because I know it’s true. Adalia sees things no one else can. We are all in touch with the invisible strands of the world, but her innate understanding goes deeper than even our most talented instructors. A heartbeat—something that I would struggle and study to harness—she sees clearly as a splash of color on canvas.

  In sheer ability, I would never match her, but I have a gift too. Where she sees, I understand. The formulas and symbology that our predecessors spent generations building and rebuilding are full of holes that only the best of us can fill. Three years ago, I drew a new symbol and argued for its place in the books. They said it was impossible, that no one of my age could show such ability.

  They had said the same of Adalia. In both, they were wrong.

  “How do you do it?” I ask her.

  “I just do.” She takes a flask of powder from the nightstand and pours it out across the polished wood. With her fingers, she draws. “Do you love me, Mikale?”

  “Yes.” I reach out to touch her dark curls. This is our last moment as we are now. Our time at the University is over. It’s frightening, because I can’t remember my life without her. “More than love. I am you.”

  We have our share of privileges. We were born with the talent for magick. More importantly, we were born thusly to Lords recognized by the city. Common mages are a destabilizing element, they say, and must be normalized—a symbological process that often kills and leaves the lucky few irreparably damaged.

  But our peers are more privileged still. I was born a cripple, and she a girl. Which of these is worse, we debate to no resolution. They say my foot is twisted, but what they mean is that it is hardly a foot. They say she has grace and empathy, but what they mean is that they would rather see a woman as a Lord’s servant than as a Councilor.

  Her fingers dance in swoops and waves, cutting runes into the powder. It’s odd to see. Hands usually draw with inks or chalk. Powder and silver-tipped slippers are for simple gestures in duels, when there is no time to stoop and paint. With my warped foot, dueling is an impossibility, but I have seen her practice countless times.

  She finishes with a stroke I recognize. My symbol—our newest tool in altering the threads of the world. I sit up.

  “This is both of us.” Adalia laces her fingers with mine. Tomorrow, she is to leave the city as a mage-guard to a long expedition. The Council must be hoping that she never returns. She will, but it will be a year or longer. “My sight. My talent. Your symbol. Your wisdom. I always want you with me.”

  Most spells alter threads. They can turn air into bursts of fiery energy or freeze water in a glass. Others destroy threads or create them. The formula on Adalia’s nightstand binds things—ties threads together.

  I move our laced hands over the runes. The energy of them is thick in the air. Her symbols are beautifully precise. “You are me, Adalia, so I’m always with you,” I say. It has to be true, because a year without her is a year without myself.

  She spreads her fingers, and the runes flash with yellow light. The air crackles. I feel something like a tug in my chest, and I gasp and breathe, and then everything is still.

  I can hear her now. Faintly, in the back of my mind, her heart beats, warm and steady. And mine beats for her, I know, when I see her smile back at me.

  * * *

  In my sleep, the world is theoreticals. I dream of unproven equations, long-shot theories, and frightening, exciting discoveries. Between night and morning, I discover a thousand new slants on old symbols, then I fight to stay asleep. When I wake, all these things dissipate like smoke, leaving only the faintest haze behind my eyes when I finally open them.

  When dreams fade, I can hear her. Her heart beats against my mind like rain against a roof. Sometimes, it is steady even drops. This morning, it’s a thunderstorm—pounding, echoing. She returned years ago, but shame kept me from writing or seeking her out—shame for what I am without her. She has never come to me, either. And because we are each other, I know that she is ashamed of who she returned as.

  I grope for my cane, and my hand touches glass instead of wood. A bottle clatters. I tell everyone, myself included, that gin fights the pain in my damned, twisted foot. But it fights away doubts, too. After all, what genius discovers a new symbol as a student, then accomplishes steadily less for a decade? And it fights the cold of the Tower and the drafty halls of the Researcher’s Wing.

  And it fights the thoughts of her, but it can never win. Even when she’s far away, serving as a mage-guard or advising Lords in magick dealings, she is always there. Her heartbeat hammers through the alcohol, through the pages of books in which I bury myself. What use are discoveries without her to share in them?

  As her heart steadies, I find my cane. The c
old of morning makes the first movements of my foot an agony. I swallow the remnant gin from the bottle on my nightstand and hobble towards the door.

  The research hall is massive, with vaulted ceilings and walls lined with chalkboards, dozens of polished writing desks and bookshelves. Symmetrical corridors lead in all directions, where rooms identical to mine house my peers. A roaring fireplace struggles to keep the vast room warm, but I feel chills as soon as I step inside. Drawing my robes tighter to my body, I move to my desk and its chaos of notes and drawings and books with marked pages.

  “Lord Mikale,” a familiar voice says. I feel a hand on my chair.

  I don’t want to turn. I want to bow my head over the infinite writings of our library. Inside every hundredth book or so, a secret waits. Past geniuses with unpopular notions of magick inked their discoveries onto fragile pages and left them for us—for me—to raise like a torch. I want to be writing, solving, learning, and unlearning.

  But I’m obligated to glance up. Lord Erich meets my eyes. He’s a beautiful man, tall and slim. His wavy hair is bound with a ribbon, and thin spectacles rest on his straight nose. His research is unremarkable, and his skill as a duelist is almost as shameful as my own. But with a Councilor’s daughter carrying his child, Erich has earned himself a powerful father-in-law and a position with Steam and City Works.

  “Lord Erich.” I’m suddenly aware that I haven’t eaten. The gin burns holes in my stomach.

  “I wish I had the mind to follow your patterns.” Erich nods to my desk and smiles sardonically. “I’m joking. One can’t expect a genius to operate like your average researcher.”

  “Is there such a thing? I thought only geniuses worked here.” I run my tongue over my dry lips. All I want is water and silence. “Average mages can help the Jacks solve petty crimes, and run papers for advisers.”