Beneath Ceaseless Skies #110

by Doyle, Noreen

  “So I heard you say! ‘Jon must fail at last!’ And don’t think I haven’t heard you, Pendergast, muttering and fretting all this time!”

  “I don’t doubt that you have! But still, you can’t have it,” Pendergast said. “It is impossible.”

  “Look for yourself.”

  “Don’t you understand? It’s impossible because I fabri—”

  Jon spoke over Pendergast, unhearing. “It doesn’t matter why it’s impossible, because it is more than possible: it is, in very hard fact.”

  “How far you’ve carried this delusion, Fox! But I’ll play along. What have you had a stonemason cut and at what cost? If it’s good enough and fits somewhere, I’ll have Klein put it down in the ledger as an expense.”

  Pendergast looked at the block. He stared at it. He gazed at it. He inspected it. He measured it. And, quite to Jon’s surprise, with a laugh he authenticated it: two thousand four hundred years old, from the front face of the pylon of the Pink Chapel. “By God and the Devil, Fox! You are as clever as they say, and maybe more by half. Hoozeyn! Where’s Hoozeyn?”

  Iánheh had already fetched the foreman, who expediently took charge of the donkey cart. This became the centerpiece of a slow procession toward the Pink Chapel.

  “You owe me for this, Pendergast,” Jon said, bluntly. Pendergast had received his defeat so well that it might be mistaken for a triumph; Jon felt thoroughly robbed.

  “I do owe you, I do! And we’re Harbridgemen. The ink on our diplomas is thicker than blood.” Pendergast waved to Klein, who joined the little procession, note-book in hand. “Enter ‘Jon Fox’ onto the roster of members. But we can’t say it’s for extra-ordinary efforts, though, you understand, or else we’ll have all manner of transgressions and attendant attempted compensations.”

  Jon said, “No, no, we can’t have such behavior as that, of course,” emphasizing the now-inclusive pronoun. Although occupied watching Klein’s pencil jot notes that would be later typewritten into formalities, Jon began to present ideas about the Pink Chapel that had been fermenting in his brain ever since his exclusion from the Research Club, if not before: if it might not be a mortuary temple, which would bring forward the question of the location of the associated tomb, and where there was one tomb, there ought to be others—

  Pendergast spoke over him. “We can feed you from the R. C. accounts, I think, but nothing will be official until next year. Iftah lee!”

  The barrel of a rifle lowered, pike-wise, across Jon’s path, in the hands of one of Baker’s Guns, and thus he and Iánheh were shorn from the procession, which disappeared beneath the arc of a brailed tarpaulin.

  As it closed down again, Pendergast called, “The main office must approve your ‘rehabilitation’! Don’t despair! You’ll get in, Fox. I give my word as a fellow Harbridgeman that you will receive formal notice of the arrangement before noon.”

  Jon waited out the rest of the morning seated in the shade of a fig tree, but Iánheh was obliged to return the unburdened donkey cart. Klein came to him not long before noon. He handed to Jon a small envelope, unsealed, of good, stiff, ivory-colored paper and walked away, shaking his head.

  “So,” Jon wondered to himself, “Klein doesn’t approve? No matter. He’s not boss, anyway, and never can be.”

  His fingers slipped the envelope open. Inside he could see the back of a card equaling the envelope in quality. Because a man ought to stand when receiving such a privilege—even a belated and well earned one—Jon brought himself to his feet, then brushed off his dusty trousers with his hands and wiped his dusty hands on the sleeves of his jacket. Several repetitions of this procedure soon had him feeling presentable. He savored the prospective moment of his triumph and relief before pulling the card from its envelope.

  “That so small a thing can disarm Baker’s Guns and part the tarpaulins—”

  Which it did, by naming Jon Fox as one of the Invited Guests permitted to enter the Pink Chapel on the morning of its formal unveiling, to be held with great ceremony in three weeks’ time.

  * * *

  The unveiling came off on schedule. The ceremony was held at ten o’clock in the morning (according to the clock of the Baker & Son travel office), with a brass band that played a succession of marches, a chorus of children from the missionary school, representatives from the khedeeval palace, the Pretish consul, and a number of other dignitaries, including some very important Emerishmen who arrived aboard a Baker’s steamer. The fringed parasols and bright dresses of their wives made a garden of the new pavement between the pylon and the steep riverbank. Jon even wore his best suit to the occasion.

  “Are you going to call the djinee out?” Iánheh asked.

  Jon Fox was startled to find her at his elbow, dressed not in her best but in her usual, with qafiyeh and ukhl a little dusty. She had become a tourist’s novelty again.

  Jon replied, “He was not among the Invited Guests.”

  “An unfortunate oversight I’m sure, sáyeed. It has happened even to me.”

  The ceremonies dragged on, a disquisition by Pendergast, a speech by a senior Baker & Son man from the Ilyonton office, a homily and benediction by Reverend Hopewell from the mission. Finally, the actual unveiling.

  The scaffolding supporting the tarpaulin had been taken down to its barest elements and cleverly arranged by Hoozeyn: so that, when the dusty and stained cloth fell away from all four sides, the scaffolding also neatly collapsed, the whole then being dragged away by ropes pulled by unseen hands. This happened as the choir reached the stirring climax of “Arise Ye Faithful, God Is Risen.” And there was the Pink Chapel, glowing rosy in the sun like a confection.

  Applause, now. The National Opera Company’s stage-hands could have pulled it off no better.

  The R. C. had admirably adhered to the terms of the Baker & Son contract, and he who approved it deserved little of the credit that his signature later gave him. True, there were tinted concrete restorations among the rosy-pink granite, most especially on the great pylon front, but these were scarcely discernable to the untrained tourist eye.

  There, on the southern half of the pylon, King Ósorathó presented his son (nominally Crown Prince Senuóphis, but surely the Divine Son), before God. Although the size matched, the prince’s face was not the djinee’s block. It had a different aspect and the “tears” were missing.

  Jon thought desperately, “Maybe the djinee’s prince is somewhere inside the temple, or on another side!” But Pendergast had distinctly, emphatically, indicated that “His crowning glory” belonged to the pylon front. Had Pendergast had Hoozeyn smooth away the tears, lest, as obvious “blemishes,” they violate the terms of Baker & Son’s contract? The more Jon looked, the more he was convinced that the prince’s face was not the djinee’s block—and had never been.

  After Baker & Son’s chief man made a final declaration, the band struck up a march and the court inside was opened for the assembled to tour. Pendergast conducted the highest-ranking guests through, and Farrington and Klein took their share of the others. Jon kept himself separate and, with Iánheh, sought the djinee’s block on the exterior.

  Iánheh cried, “It isn’t here, sáyeed! Lá, it isn’t here!” Beyond this point she forgot all her Emerish, and even her Provench, and her tongue retreated back into Harábese, and, quickly, into the kópee language.

  Jon tried to calm her; the Guns were looking. “Hush now or you’ll ruin us both—and look!” Jon guided Iánheh to the block, because she was now so overwrought that she could not from any distance see it for herself.

  He (and she) could reach it, for the eye was just below the King’s feet. And the eye was not upside-down—or, perhaps better put, it was still upside-down, like the entire figure it belonged to: one of the defeated, unnamed foes thrown supine and trampled royally.

  “Pendergast’s game is transparent now—his worry, pure fabrication,” Jon said mournfully. “He sent me to the haystack in search of a needle that never left the sewing-box. The pri
nce’s face has been in the inventory all along, I’ll bet. This” (he put his hand to the block, and Iánheh followed suit) “was just one last chance find. It might have been another fragment of a beard! Pendergast made a fool out of me, bad enough... but how much worse to fall from god—even of the lower case—to wretched invert!”

  Jon gently called to the djinee.

  The djinee replied, but in his own Old Ópetian. With a little trouble, Iánheh, calmer now, translated what he said. It was much the same as he had told Jon before, but now the meaning was different: he had been a prince and a mage, his father’s first and favorite, and there had been a war, a violent plot against his king, his father; he, the prince, had conceived it and lost. Other mages had consigned his living force—qá, Iánheh said—and those of his fellow conspirators to these blocks. The others’ were all gone, having been forgotten, but he (and the qá did not give his name, because he had forgotten it) had been awakened by pleas and strokes to find himself in a house foundation. And now, restored back to his place, he would feel the weight of his father’s wrath while his favored brother was as a gift unto God.

  “And now,” Jon thought, “the empty images of king and heir will be honored by Baker’s tourists in their thousands while the djinee—this qá! once a living man like me, or like Pendergast, or Taggett—is just some poor nameless devil who, everybody will say, should have known better than to defy his pious father....”

  “Fox!” called Pendergast from within the chapel. “The Reverend craves your learnéd opinion about the presentation of the severed hands! Literal or figurative?”

  “Don’t feel too sorry for this qá, sáyeed,” Iánheh said to Jon, who hesitated to respond to Pendergast’s summons.

  He rebuked her callousness. “How is it possible for anyone to feel too sorry for that!”

  He tried to get her into the Pink Chapel anyway, so that she might hear what he had to say about the presentation of the severed hands. Not being one of the Invited Guests, Iánheh was permitted no farther than the pylon gate. One of Baker’s Guns made it clear that she must not be on the grounds at all. It was against the stamps, seals, and signs, and the Guns were finished being lenient with Jon Fox and his nut-brown maid.

  Jon contemplated going no farther, but it would change nothing, except perhaps for the worst. So he went in to argue severed hands, literal, as one of the Guns took Iánheh away.

  * * *

  The esteemed Invited Guests later praised their tour of the Pink Chapel under the direction of their knowledgeable Research Club guides. A newspaper article would later quote one Mrs. Thurkettle, who described it as spending part of a morning in the era of the ancients. “There was not one trace, but ourselves and our shadows, of the modern day, at least until a steamer went by on the river, blowing its whistle.” This pleasant illusion (which any member of the Research Club would have disputed, noting, for example, the complete absence of painted surfaces, ritual furnishings, and roof) did nothing to ease the shock of their return to the outside world less than an hour later: when guests and guides emerged through the pylon gate, the world, or at least the site of the Pink Chapel, had taken on a new character.

  The last event of note anyone could remember of the pre-tour world was that one of Baker’s Guns had escorted a kópeet girl back to the Corniche, per the power of the stamps, seals, and signs. Now, however, all of Baker’s Guns were cowed by a great mob: old women and young ones, men of all ages, toddling children, babes in arms, all Ópetian. Some considerable proportion of them was, to put it mildly, not in good heath. These were aided and abetted by the sound ones. It was as if a hospital ward and charity society had been delivered to the Pink Chapel.

  This mob centered its attention on a particular detail of the left-hand face of the pylon. Those who could reach brushed their fingers across the legs, torso, and arms of one of the scene’s supine figures, and its face, especially its eye, which was already well worn with strokes and kisses, proof of its antiquity.

  Pendergast pushed through, furious.

  “Fox! Fox! This is your doing, isn’t it! Whip that dragowoman of yours to get rid of them!” (Never minding that Iánheh was nowhere to be seen.) “A rabble like this is against the contract! Explicitly! This place is for Special First Class tourists! It’s a holy place! It says so in the contract! The stamps! The seals! The signs! It’s the law!”

  “Talk to the bashaw-ruzool,” Jon said gravely, with a smile that Pendergast was not allowed to see.

  Pendergast did talk to the bashaw-ruzool. As did Taggett of Baker & Son.

  It did not do them any good.

  To this day, several days each week, supplicants come to the Pink Chapel, at the peak hours when Baker’s Special First Class tourists stroll through. The supplicants bring onions and tobacco and fish, and show off their children’s ruined eyes and the crushed limbs of men, and the ulcers and sores and cancers that have afflicted women. The colors are quite vivid against the rosy pink granite, and their prayers—not that the tourists can understand them—are quite graphic. There is no translator for the supplicants’ benefit, because now one can hear Harábese spoken, softly but without worry, by the djinee, or the qá, or the god. (Who, it should be noted, does not seem to suffer much, for all that a king is standing on his stomach.) Most importantly, the magic seems to work as well as it ever did. Which is not to say perfectly, but not even sysdaimons or men (or even women) succeed in what they try to do all the time. Nevertheless, people continue to come. And they will continue to do so for a long, long time.

  The bashaw-ruzool explained the truth of the matter to Pendergast, and also to Taggett. There are some things that cannot be governed. That is the law.

  Copyright © 2012 Noreen Doyle

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  A longtime resident of Maine, Noreen Doyle has recently moved to Arizona to work for the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research and the University of Arizona Egyptian Expedition. She earned graduate degrees in nautical archaeology and Egyptology and is the author of many articles on archaeological and historical subjects. Her fiction has appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Century, Weird Tales, and several anthologies, including Fantasy: The Best of the Year. As an anthologist, she edited Otherworldly Maine and co-edited The First Heroes: New Tales of the Bronze Age.

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  THE GIANTS OF GALTARES

  by Sue Burke

  With a smile that grew more false every year, Sardamira would begin, “Yes, I’ve met two giants. One was good, and one was evil.”

  Someone would say, “Giants are always evil!”

  “Well, they’re always ugly and frightening,” she would answer, “and when they’re evil, they’re unspeakably evil. I met them both on my way to the royal court when I was only thirteen. This is how it happened.”

  * * *

  She had never left home before, but as a young noblewoman, she needed a broader education so she could marry well. Thus her parents sent her off in early summer with her daft old Aunt Clementina, who was a nun, along with a maid and a serving boy. Three days on horseback through the countryside made the rigors and boredom of travel painfully clear, as well as the fact that no one really enjoyed listening to her complaints, so what good were they? Besides, the ideal lady bore suffering with dignity.

  Late on the fourth morning, as they left a forest and entered some fields along a river, Sardamira felt thrilled to see brightly colored tents up ahead and a young woman coming toward them on a side road. She was about eighteen years old and very pretty, and she wore an ostentatious black velvet dress, but it was rumpled and dusty. She seemed to have no servants accompanying her to keep her proper.

  They met where the roads converged and had barely exchanged greetings when a giant loomed around one of the tents, uglier than Sardamira had imagined possible, with huge eyes and a gaping mouth in an over-long face.

  “Oh my God! Flee!” she said.

  She turned her horse, then sto
pped. Aunt Clementina was prodding her tired old nag, but it just stood there blocking the road. The maid, paralyzed with fear, had let go of the reins of the packhorse. It was trotting away toward a sunny pasture, and the serving boy had dropped his parcels to chase it.

  Sardamira looked back at the tents, hiding her fear with all dutiful might, and expected to see the giant waving a huge mace, since everyone knew that was their favorite weapon. Instead a very young knight was running toward them. He was as handsome as the giant was ugly.

  “Wait!” he shouted. “Don’t be afraid. He’s my father. He won’t hurt you.”

  “Your father?” the other girl said.

  “Well, my stepfather, but he’s good and gentle, not like other giants. Please, don’t flee. Where are you going?”

  He smiled, which made him look even more handsome. He was husky and wore a new yellow surcoat and a gorget around his neck that sparkled with gilt decorations.

  Aunt Clementina giggled. While Sardamira wondered what to do, the other girl answered him in a tone of voice that seemed more like a challenge.

  “My lady has sent me to see an amazing battle. They say a lone knight is going to attack the giant at the Rock of Galtares, and she wants me to bring back news of it.” She pointed at the giant near the tent. “Would that be him?”

  “Oh, no, he’s a different giant, a good one and a good man. He raised me well.”

  The giant was helping a servant unpack a horse, and neither seemed afraid. Everyone said a giant was bigger and stronger than two bears, and this one was that big. He wore fine clothes, but he had a white beard and moved like a frail old man, using a cane the size of a tent pole.

  The idea of such an amazing battle made Sardamira forget proper comportment. “Really?” she said to the other girl. “There’s a knight addled enough to fight a giant? I must see that, too. I’ll go with you to Galtares.”

  “Wait,” the knight said. “We’re going too. Come with us.”