Beneath Ceaseless Skies #203

by Mishell Baker

  “Children of Ru!” she panted. “You must go now! They have set the precinct afire!”

  “Are you going to release me, too?” one of them called up.

  “No,” said the jailor, assuming it was me. “The building is stone; you’ll be safe. I’ll lower you down some food and water quickly. But the goblins need to get back to the water before the fire surrounds us.”

  “You’re going to leave me here?” another of them said in a whining, panicked tone that I hoped sounded nothing like me.

  “You’re to be executed,” the jailor said. “I can’t let you go; I’m sorry.”

  The three goblins looked at one another, and some wordless communication must have passed between them, because two of them immediately shifted their forms and began to climb the walls. The third remained seated, leaning back against the wall, watching me. I stared back at him, looked into my own eyes from across the cell.

  “Aren’t you going to go?” we said at the same time, in the exact same tone.

  I stared at him, and he stared at me.

  We both whispered, “Tuo.”

  “Come on!” the jailor called down. “We don’t have much time!”

  I’m staying, said Tuo’s voice in my mind. Say it.

  “I’m staying,” he and I said at once.

  “Begging your pardon, Child of Ru,” said the jailor, “but you will die if you stay down there.”

  “Please go,” I begged Tuo, even as he begged me the same. “I’ll be safe down here. Go!”

  “Stop it!” said the jailor, clearly beginning to panic. “Child of Ru, if I let you die, the mob will draw and quarter me! You have to come out. Please! The precinct is burning!” She began to weep, sinking to her knees by the grate. “Ah, Ru, what do I do? What do I do?”

  Tell her to lower the chain.

  “Lower the chain,” we said. “It seems we must leave together or not at all.”

  “There’s no time for this,” sobbed the jailor, rising to her feet. “I’m sorry; Ru forgive me.” With that, she fled.

  Bewildered and weeping myself now, I moved to Tuo to give him my hands and help him to his feet. He stood, exactly my height; my own eyes stared into mine. He did not let go of my hands, and when he saw my tears, his own eyes filled. For a moment I was shocked, until I realized he was only adjusting his disguise.

  This was not the time nor place to say the things I most wanted to say.

  “Don’t die down here, Tuo,” I whispered instead, still holding his hands. “It was a brilliant plan. But it’s over. I’ll be fine. You have to go.”

  She left so that I would leave you. When she sees I am not giving in, she will return.

  “You can’t be sure of that.”

  Of course I can.

  “Please, Tuo, go.”

  You say this as you grip my hands more tightly.

  I let them go and turned away, pacing toward the center of the cell and staring upward. He followed me and did the same. The dim light reflected off of the tears on his cheeks. My cheeks.

  “Why are you doing this?” I whispered to him. “Have you not caused enough chaos?”

  I would preserve your life a while longer.

  “Why? Your kind aren’t capable of love. I’ve never been anything but a tool to you.”

  Such disdain for tools! Small wonder that everything you build falls apart.

  I struck him a brisk blow to the cheekbone. He neither avoided nor deflected it, but the relaxed, economical way he caught his balance afterward suggested that he had been expecting it. I resisted the urge to press my knuckles to my mouth, letting my hand fall to my side.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, not looking at him.

  Regret is wasteful.

  Above, the door opened. I heard the jailor’s footfalls and then the grinding sound of the heavy grate being moved aside.

  * * *

  The extent of the fire suggested that it had been set on purpose, by a crazed mob running through with torches. Even on the driest of days, a fire could not have spread through the precinct so quickly. The air was thick with smoke, and Tuo swooned the moment he exited the building. I tried to catch him, but he shifted form as he lost consciousness, slipping through my arms and the rough robe the jailor had given him and landing in a glossy black heap at my feet.

  The jailor and I locked eyes. The game was over.

  “I don’t know who you are,” she said, “or why the High Seeress wants you dead, but a Child of Ru has risked his life for you. I will row you out of here myself.”

  * * *

  Once we were clear of the worst of the smoke, Tuo regained consciousness and sat up, as serene and unruffled as if I had not just been cradling his limp form in my arms. He shifted seemingly effortlessly into the form I had known ten years ago, the gaunt poet with tangled hair, and took the discarded robe I had laid across my lap, reaching up to pull it on over his head. I looked away from the flawlessly human flex and stretch of muscles under his pale skin.

  At Tuo’s quiet request, the jailor rowed us through Starlight Gate and to a dock outside the city wall, near the Children’s Causeway. Tuo helped me up the slippery stairs, and the jailor gave the both of us a deep bow before rowing away.

  Tuo walked to the end of the dock and paused there, gazing out over the water. I started to follow him, then stopped myself.

  “Now that I’ve done what you needed,” I called to him, “I suppose I’m allowed to die?”

  He did not look at me. He spoke aloud in his flawless Jiun-Shi accent, but his voice was barely audible. “You are human. You will die whether I allow it or not.”

  “And it will make no difference to you.”

  He turned and devoured the distance between us, seizing my jaw in his hand and looming over me in a way that would have looked, from a distance, like a show of anger. But his eyes were as tranquil as the lake.

  “Stop,” he said, and brushed my lips with his, not quite a kiss. His grip on my jaw was punishingly tight, and I told myself that this was why I did not pull away. “You have so little time,” he said, hovering over my mouth. “Why do you spend it this way? Why do you all spend it this way? You throw yourself, again and again, onto a knife I have never concealed.”

  “I’ve tasted passion,” I said, “ and I’ve come to feel I deserve it.”

  “The woman at the Temple.” There was no heat in the statement; it was merely a clarification of fact.

  “Yes. I’ll confess it was satisfying. There is too much of the Betrayer in me.”

  He released me and stepped back, smiling a little. “The god of truth was false to Ru, but Ru is true to him.”

  “What? What blasphemy is this?”

  He arched a brow at me until I heard the absurdity of my own accusation.

  “You imply that Ru is still loyal to the Betrayer,” I said. “But why would a goddess of change be constant?”

  “There is nothing constant about loyalty,” said Tuo. “If your shadow stayed constant, you would lose it by living.”

  “Who are you lecture on loyalty, when you’ve left a string of broken women behind you?”

  “I did not break them. They broke themselves against me. Just as you are doing now.”

  I looked into his eyes, trying to reframe his history in light of what he was telling me. Each of his women had left him, either by suicide or abandonment, unable to bear the sight of his blank loveless eyes. It was his lack of mourning that had made him seem disloyal, the way he had moved so swiftly each time to a new lover. Each time except one. A current ran through me at the realization.

  “Why was I different?” I asked him. “Why, when I left, did you not find another lover?”

  He looked at me for such a long moment that I realized with a shock that I had actually confused him. At last he spoke, with the air of a man giving up on a particularly difficult riddle.

  “When did you leave me?” he asked.

  I must have looked at him, baffled, for twice as long. But then I
understood how very differently the same tale had played out for him and for me. I was at the same time humiliated and chastened, angry and weak-kneed with futile tenderness. I gave a shaky laugh.

  “I deserve a lover who doesn’t casually misplace me for a decade,” I said.

  “I placed you quite deliberately.”

  “It amounts to the same,” I said. “Your loyalty is—moving, but it isn’t enough.”

  “Farewell then,” he said, and turned to gaze back out over the water.

  I let out an animal cry of frustration and pushed him into the lake. He made no effort to stop me and disappeared beneath its surface with a great splash. I watched the water rock itself back to sleep where he had fallen and waited to see if he would resurface, but he did not.

  “Tuo,” I said to the water. “Come back.” But I knew he would not, for he had not done the leaving. “You know I won’t go back to her,” I said. “You know it’s you that I love.”

  I couldn’t tell if he heard me. It didn’t matter. It was I who needed to hear it, as a woman needs to hear that her business is bankrupt, her house burned, her child stillborn. A woman or a man needs to hear these things, so that she can begin to assess the damage, shoulder the weight, and move forward.

  I slipped off my robe, took a deep breath, and dived at a shallow angle into the lake. I hit bottom almost immediately. The waters there were not deep, but the cold was shocking. A chaos of bubbles burst from my startled mouth. I felt myself lose buoyancy as my lungs emptied, and I settled face first onto the soft lake bottom. For a moment all was dark and icy-still as I fought to keep my nose and mouth sealed against the mud.

  Then I felt hands gently turning me over. I resisted the urge to open my eyes. A slippery palm, cold as the water around it, pressed against my mouth, fingers sealing my nostrils shut. I twitched and kicked, panicking as my body began to plead for air.

  Do you want to live? It was Tuo’s voice, echoing in my mind as though he had just spoken.

  I don’t want to live alone.

  Would you rather die with company?

  My white-hot need for breath made the question intensely immediate and relevant. It also clarified my answer.

  No, I said. No. Let me go.

  What will you do?

  I tried not to panic; it only made me need air more urgently. I don’t know. I will find a place to start again. I have years left.

  So few.

  Enough. Let me go.

  No. I felt him draw me against his small, cold body, twining his limbs around me, holding me down. I thrashed with terror at first, but even as I did so I understood that he did not mean to kill me, only to make me fight for life, value it. A profound, childlike trust melted through me, and I relaxed in his arms.

  There, he said, and though I was fading from consciousness, I could almost swear that I felt him tremble.

  Without warning his magic rearranged my skin and my bones and my flesh, shattering me and putting me back together. He was still there in my mind, but without words: watching, questioning, studying.

  Only when he released me and I drew in a deep instinctive breath did I realize what he had done. I gasped the muddy lake water with as much relief as I would have drawn the night air. He had lent me his shape - I breathed as a child of Ru.

  If you wish to travel, he said, this is the fastest way. He slipped his webbed fingers between mine, and I opened my eyes. The first thing I saw was his own eyes, white as winter suns and nearly blinding. Around him, what had once been suffocating blackness was now a soft gray world, low-ceilinged and infinitely broad, a world I saw as much through my skin as my eyes.

  Tuo tugged me southward toward the wall, toward the Starlight Canal, which led through the city to the Weeping River. I could feel the immensity of the world’s water at once, as though every distant shore reached out at once through that liquid web to beckon me.

  I watched the movement of Tuo’s strangely jointed legs and tail, and I mimicked him until I found my own rhythm. Then, as I sensed we were of one mind about our destination, I let go his hand. The two of us glided side by side through the water, heading for the sea.

  Copyright © 2016 Mishell Baker

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Mishell Baker is a 2009 graduate of the Clarion Fantasy & Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop, represented by Russell Galen. Her debut novel Borderline, first in the Arcadia Project urban fantasy series, was published by Simon & Schuster’s Saga Press in March 2016. She can be found on Twitter at @mishellbaker and maintains a blog and website at mishellbaker.com.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  THE NIGHT BAZAAR FOR WOMEN BECOMING REPTILES

  byRachael K. Jones

  In the desert, all the footprints lead into Oasis, and none lead out again. They come for water, and once they find it, no one returns to the endless sand. The city is a prison with bars of thirst and heat.

  Outside the gates the reptiles roam: asps and cobras, great lazing skinks, tortoises who lie down to doze in the heat. Where they go as they pad and swish and claw their way through the sand, no one knows, save the women who look over the walls and feel the deep itching pressure in their bones, the weight of skin in need of sloughing.

  * * *

  Though Hester has sold asp eggs at the night bazaar for five years, she has never become a reptile herself, no matter what she tries.

  She takes eggs wherever she finds them. She has eaten those of skinks and geckos. She has tasted sun-warmed iguana eggs. She has traced water-snake paths through Oasis and dug for their nests. She has braved the king cobra’s sway and dart, and devoured its offspring too. Once, she found an alligator egg, and poked a hole in the top and sucked out the insides. But no matter what she tries, Hester has never broken free and escaped the city like the other women do.

  She even tried the asp eggs once, the ones that were her livelihood. It was the day after Marick the mango seller asked to take her as his sunside lover. Hester left home and dug asp eggs from the clay by the river. The sun spilled long red tongues across the sand, over the footprints always entering the city, never leaving, and Hester’s skin itched all over, and her flesh grew hot and heavy, and she longed for cool sand sliding against her bare belly.

  One, two, three eggs into her mouth, one sharp bite, and the clear, viscous glair ran down her throat. The shells were tougher than she expected. They tasted tart, like spoiled goat’s milk. She waited for the change, but the sun crawled higher and nothing happened.

  She has never told anyone about the day with the asp eggs. Not her mother the batik dyer, who spatters linen in hot running wax and crafts her famous purple cloth. Not Marick her sunside lover, who sells indigo cactus flowers and mango slices on a wooden tray. Not Shayna the butcher, her moonside lover, whose honey-gold verses roll from her tongue, smooth and rounded as sand-polished pebbles. Hester hasn’t told them, because they are why she longs to leave.

  * * *

  The night bazaar meets on a different street each week. Each morning before, at sunrise, Hester finds three blue chalk symbols sketched on the doorjamb behind the perfumed jasmine bush. Sometimes she sees a falcon, a crane beneath a full moon, and a viper climbing a triple-columned temple portico. This means We assemble where the Street of Upholsterers intersects the Street of Priests, when the Crane rises. Or it might be a hand holding an eye, a wavy river, and a kneeling woman, which would mean Meet where Oasis runs to mud, and beware the police. Hester memorizes the message and wipes off the chalk with her sleeve.

  They meet in secret, because the night bazaar was outlawed when the emperor stepped down from her throne and became a snapping turtle. No one knew if she chose to change, or if a traitor had slipped her the eggs unawares. These days, vendors caught selling such goods moonside are made to drink poison sunside. Even possessing the eggs earns a speedy execution. But in Oasis, women at their wits’ end have always eaten the eggs, and fled.

  Hester packs the asp eggs in damp re
d clay and binds them, in sets of three. Any more would be a waste, and any less, insufficient to cause the change. At the meeting point, booths have already popped up in the dark. Hester drapes her bamboo frame in purple and gold batik, fringed with the shiny onyx hair of some young customer who bought eggs long ago.

  She lays out packets in three reed baskets and lights a lamp that burns tallow made from women’s fat. At moonrise, Hester’s chin lifts, and over vendors hawking their wares, she sings:

  Eggs of the asp

  collected riverside

  in the new moon dark

  Come, buy, and eat!

  Opal-white eggs

  cool as desert’s night

  against your belly

  Come, buy, and eat!

  The customers arrive, ghosts cut from darkness by moonlight’s blade. They are no two alike. They are old and young. They are blind and deaf and whole of body. They have hats and sandals, sunburns and calluses. They come singing and weeping and completely silent. The vendors sing to them all, a cacophony and a tapestry. Hester’s bones buzz from the dissonance, her skin as a quivering lizard bolting from rock to rock.

  On slow nights, Hester bargains for rare eggs, which she devours on the spot. They never work. A waste of good coin, the merchants say, clucking their tongues, but they take payment anyway. Traders should not eat their wares. Most vendors prosper from the illegal trade, but Hester barely makes ends meet because she spends so much on eggs. Shayna, her moonside lover, often teases her about her bad business sense.

  Marick never asks what she does moonside. By this, Hester has come to fear him. He does not ask because he already knows.

  * * *

  Hester has to wait for sundown to pack for the next bazaar, since Marick won’t leave for work before then. People often compliment her attentive sunside lover—how he won’t leave her side until sunset requires it. When they are alone, he keeps his distance. He has not once touched her, not as a lover does. Perhaps he mistakes her distance for demure shyness, the way she lies still in bed, how she curls into herself during the midday nap.