Beneath Ceaseless Skies #183

by Richard Parks

  “Yuki, no!”

  Kenji had already drawn his own prayer beads and was in the first phrase of a chant when suddenly Michi was between us and Yuki.

  Kenji looked frantic. “Michi-san, look out! She’s a demon!”

  I grunted. “Save your warning, Kenji. He knows what she is.”

  Yuki stopped, and her anger and frustration were obvious. “Anata, move aside.”

  Anata?

  I’d had my suspicions, but now everything was that much clearer.

  Michi held out his arms as if to shield us. “You must not harm these men!”

  “Why not?” she asked. “I am hungry.”

  I spoke up quickly. “Shall I tell her, Michi-san? It’s because, if you kill us, this time Lord Yoshi will send everyone he can spare, far more than you can kill or elude, and your husband will not be able to protect you,” I said. “Or do you want to risk the little one’s life as well?”

  That got her attention. Michi’s, too.

  “Yuki is the ‘woman from another village’ you were married to. When she left you, she took up residence in her old haunts. Am I right?”

  “She did not leave me,” Michi said. “She left the village. She tried—”

  “—to live as a human, for your sake,” I said. “Yes, Michi-san, I have seen that before. It never seems to work. Not for foxes and not for snow-demons.”

  Kenji scowled. “Michi-san and this... creature?”

  Yuki looked faintly amused at Kenji’s outburst, but Michi cut in. “I crossed the pass alone the first day I came here,” Michi said softly. “She could have killed me when we met. Perhaps it would have been better for us both if she had.”

  Yuki wasn’t amused now. There were tears in her eyes. They turned to ice crystals and fell softly, just two more flakes of snow. “I cannot help it. I am hungry,” she said. “Soon your daughter will be hungry.”

  “Come home,” Michi said.

  She looked away. “I cannot. You know I cannot.”

  “That is a problem, since she cannot stay here, either,” I said. “My guess is that, unless she’s living as a human, human food cannot sustain her. She can suckle the child for now, wherever she keeps it hidden, but she can’t feed herself without taking life. That’s why you’ve been coming up here, isn’t it? She’s taking life from you because there’s no one else, but since she doesn’t wish to slay you, it’s never enough, never all of your life. That’s why she’s still hungry while you can barely stand.”

  Michi didn’t say anything, but I knew it was true. If anything, the exhaustion I had seen in the young man when we first met was worse. He was functioning on will alone.

  “Sooner or later she’s going to kill you. Then what do you think will happen to her and the child?”

  “There’s another way. I’ll find it,” Michi said.

  “Believe what you will. For now, if she gives up the doll, perhaps we can at least buy you both and the village some time.”

  Michi frowned. “Doll?”

  I turned to Yuki. “When you left the village, you took a doll from Aoi Temple, didn’t you?”

  Michi scowled. “Why do you accuse her?”

  “Because, as far as I can determine, the doll disappeared at the same time she did,” I said, “and while I recognize that this is not proof and that coincidences exist, true coincidences are very rare. Or did it never occur to you to ask her?”

  Michi looked as if he’d been struck between the eyes with a mallet. He finally looked at the snow-demon. “Yuki?”

  She sighed. “Human children need such things, so I brought one for our child. It was the newest one, perhaps, but I don’t understand all the fuss; the temple had plenty of others.”

  Michi smiled a weak smile. “I will bring you food when I am stronger,” he said. “Please be patient. I will bring another doll for our child. A better doll. But I think we had best return that one to the temple.”

  She scowled. “Very well, and for your sake I will wait a little longer. But do not break faith with me or I will do what I must. I have your word?”

  “You have everything that I am,” Michi said.

  The snow-demon apparently considered this oath enough and turned and floated back into the forest like a swirl of snowflakes and disappeared. We rushed forward to support Michi, who was in imminent danger of falling face-first into the snow.

  “You never saw where she keeps the child hidden, did you? Otherwise I assume you would have known she had the doll,” I said.

  Michi admitted that this was so. “She’s afraid I’ll try to take our daughter back to the village if I know where she is. I mentioned the doll was missing and that it was a problem, but Yuki never said anything. I shouldn’t be surprised; she doesn’t always think the way you or I do. I’ve learned that.”

  “No doubt. I gather those prayer beads were a gift from you?” Kenji asked.

  “They help remind her... of her human side. Yuki does have one, you know. I’ve seen it.”

  “That may be so, but sooner or later you’re going to have to bring your daughter back among true human beings. Or see her turn into her mother,” Kenji said. “You know this to be true.”

  Michi didn’t even blink. “I also know that, without the child, Yuki may forget everything of what being human meant, prayer beads or no. One day I will bring them both home.”

  “One day she’s going to kill you,” I said.

  “No,” he said serenely. “She won’t. I will not lose them. Either of them.”

  “You’re a fool,” Kenji said. “but sometimes fortune favors the fool. I will pray for you.”

  Michi sighed. “I’m not such a fool that I won’t take whatever help I can get.”

  * * *

  We told Lord Yoshi that a trickster badger-dog had taken the doll and hidden it in the mountains, but with Michi’s help, we had managed to find it. I’m not sure he believed us, but the doll was back in its rightful place, and that was all he cared about. Lord Yoshi informed the headman of the village, who through his daughter sent word to Akitomo.

  While we waited to hear the outcome, Kenji and I made a doll. Naturally, it was the first doll I’d ever attempted, though I’d done a little carving from time to time. Kenji, with help and scraps of cloth from the headman’s wife, made the clothes. I wouldn’t call either of our contributions a work of art, but together they made a very passable doll.

  For his service Michi was granted a temporary absence from his duties, which, while we worked on the doll, he spent mostly eating and sleeping. He said he could wait two days but no longer before he had to return to the mountain.

  Just enough time to be certain we would be able to leave. If there had been any way back except through the pass, I’d have taken it, but having Michi escort us through was the next best thing.

  Word came. Akitomo and the boy’s mother were together praying for their son, and that was all. The Emishi were dispersing back to their farms and villages. The new doll was completed and we presented it to Michi, who, if not fully recovered, was at least rested.

  The time came to go. We took our leave of Lord Yoshi and the headman and his family. Michi went with us up to the pass. We saw Yuki among the trees, but she kept her distance until Michi left us on the far side of the pass. As we made our way down the mountain, the snow crunching under our feet, we saw them meet again under the trees.

  I turned back to the path ahead. “Idiot.”

  Kenji grinned. “Funny thing, Lord Yamada. The way you said that, it almost sounded like a compliment. So. I assume you learned that the snow-demon was Michi’s lover the same way I did?”

  “I already suspected, but yes. When she used the familiar form of ‘you’ to address him. Anata. Only someone on intimate terms with a man would do that.”

  “That’s the common usage, but don’t you think we were making a great deal out of a simple pronoun? I might do the same referring to you.”

  I smiled a grim smile. “Not the way she said it. She m
ay as well have called him ‘beloved.’ Unless there’s something you’re not telling me?”

  Kenji ignored that. He looked thoughtful. “Do you really think she’ll kill him?”

  I thought about it, but not for long. “Yes. I really do. I’ll go so far as to say she might not mean to do so, but she will.”

  “Then don’t we have a duty to stay and try to reason with him?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I might be wrong.”

  “Lord Yamada—”

  I cut Kenji off. “Michi is a grown man. He’s made his choice and understands the consequences. He’s going to try and be happy. Just because I failed doesn’t mean he will.”

  Kenji just sighed. “You’re a romantic, Lord Yamada.”

  I saved my breath for walking rather than argue the point. I had already resolved to stop and make offerings at the first temple or shrine that we passed, and to offer prayers on Michi’s behalf that he might succeed. That I might actually be wrong. It wouldn’t be much more trouble to add a prayer that, for my own sake, Kenji might be wrong, too.

  Copyright © 2013 Richard Parks.

  Originally published in Yamada Monogatari: Demon Hunter. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Richard Parks lives in Mississippi with his wife and a varying number of cats. His fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Realms of Fantasy, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales, nine times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and in numerous anthologies including Year’s Best Fantasy and Fantasy: The Best of the Year. His Lord Yamada short story collection, Yamada Monogatari: Demon Hunter, was released by Prime Books in 2013, followed by the novels Yamada Monogatari: To Break the Demon Gate in November 2014 and Yamada Monogatari: The War God’s Son in December 2015.

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  GEOMETRIES OF BELONGING

  by Rose Lemberg

  I like to be alone in the healing room. It is a small place, and the low ceiling-boards smell slightly of damp. The candlebulb, a floating magical light I have created, is weak and does not jar the senses. Small square windows of tourmaline glass are the only hint at means, installed here only because I need privacy. The tenants in surrounding rooms keep quiet at my request. It is a fair price for them, to be this close to a holy place. I feel their emotions sometimes, when I work—a subdued kind of awe that spreads through the people like warmth, brown-yellow and tinted at the edges with soft orange.

  But holiness is often just unholiness purified; silence sighs from the gaps of any great power, from the spaces in-between the deepnames as they nestle in the mind of a named strong. What a body learns from wounds, it cannot easily unlearn. Crude tears of the flesh and breaks of bone can be erased with magic if one acts quickly, but subtle damage is so difficult to repair.

  A person knocks. It is an old woman made frail by hard work, her fingers swollen. Even though I have not yet extended my deepnames, I can feel how her joints ache with the damp and the early autumn cold. Laundry. The river, its water unheated by the passage of magic. The kind of work that women do in my neighborhoods, where named strong are a rarity.

  I make her tea with birch syrup, warm enough to hold without dropping. I ask after her name, her grandchildren’s health, and finally, her permission.

  She gives it, even though she does not quite remember why she made it here.

  I extend my deepnames. Three, four, and five syllables—long and feeble, inconsequential. It is a marvel that I was able to take more than one, let alone as many as three. In Mainland Katra University they teach that a three-named strong has nothing to fear, but that is other people—professors, builders—those with short deepnames, real power. When I was younger, fear was all I knew of life. The fear of beatings, ridicule, of helplessness, of cold, of hunger. The fear of never earning attention, the fear of losing it. That fear has lasted and lasted. Two decades after my lord took me in, that fear is still with me—an old friend, an acknowledgment of my emptiness.

  Slowly, patiently I align my names along the old woman’s naming grid, the foundation of every mind upon which magic may alight. She has no magic, but that does not matter in my work. The strands of her naming grid have warped themselves out of place.

  My work is all resonance. Slowly, I make my deepnames vibrate. Slowly, the grid realigns itself. She will remember more now, pay attention to her surroundings, speak with clarity. But in a year, I gauge, maybe two, the warping will reassert itself and she will start slipping. Her mind is too used to this pattern; comfortable like an old, torn blanket.

  The work done, I thank her and bow. This gesture is perhaps what I cherish the most about healings. She remembers to thank me in turn, and the empty porcelain teacup is gripped with newfound firmness between her fingers. I tell her to come back when she needs it. Maybe she will. Maybe she will forget. In every mind-healing, its undoing is already embedded.

  My work contains within it not only its undoing but also my inaction. When patients leave, they imagine I busy myself writing a learned treatise or inventing new methods of healing—but mostly I sit, on the black walnut bench near the window that looks out into a small courtyard, its glass too opaque to see anything. I sit, too often too inert to pour myself a cup of tea, or even to want such a cup; and I don’t go anywhere. I think those thoughts, but the writing of them happens only at home, and only when my lord sits by me and writes and orders me to write. He has always honored me so, before I was anyone, before I had this room and even my full deepname configuration, before my insignificance could even be disputed.

  Beneath the surface of the land, as we have learned so many years ago, embedded in the earth, there is a naming grid. Inert, it shines too softly for most minds to discern. It is unto this grid that the first people spoke their magic. They created deepnames for the land, watched them alight upon the land’s naming grid like fireflies; and it is those ancient deepnames that we see, those of us with enough power to do so, when we go out beyond cities, where the land is quiet, and draw on our senses and attend. The mind, too, is much like the land, a land that lies within each of us—so I have postulated, these many years ago, shortly after I was expelled from Mainland Katra University. Each mind contains a naming grid, each of a slightly different nature, as no two people are exactly alike. And it is these grids—in strong and simple people both—that take to ailment, and it is with these grids of the mind that I work when I heal.

  I take no payment from the poor. I was raised in a neighborhood close this one. I take no payment, and no pride. It is hard to understand.

  The Governance is in session in the autumn, and so we are in the capital. Each morning, my lord leaves. I do not want to move, but I cannot abide to loiter in the rooms where others may pass in his absence; I cannot abide the art he has so carefully chosen to please the eye—his eye—to remind him of moments and lovers and acts of great magic he has committed elsewhere. I cannot abide the absences between the gaps of his very great power. He tells me to go back to sleep, but I grow restless as his presence cools off the sheets. He becomes impatient with me, tells me to come with him to the Oligarchy Governance. But there he is busy and brusque and would rather not be disturbed, and the high nobles beset me. Somebody always ails. They offer me money, startlingly large sums of it to work in absolute secret, in side rooms tiled with marble and mortared in gold. They whisper to me, voices mixing hope with condescension; and when I am done, they call me ragi behind my back, confident that I will never report them to my lord.

  And so each morning I walk instead in the opposite direction. I cross the bridge above Katríu River that separates the rich neighborhoods from my old haunts, the tenement buildings unsupported by deepnames or other infrastructure, their paint long since peeled and replaced by graffiti. Mists float below the bridge, mists made up of vapor as delicate and quiet as my magic, powerless to shift anything much, useless if not for this w
ork.

  Every morning I am in the healing room, waiting for patients. I sift through my thoughts, finding nothing in them that is worth writing down. My insignificance is vapor covering the river, infinitesimally small droplets of water that disappear with the heat. And at the end of the day I will be again beside my lord’s heat, which is more than I ever wanted, and certainly more than I ever deserved.

  It is growing late. I can feel the approaching sunset in the slight darkening of the glass—a change of mood, a subtle shift in the dampness that permeates the walls. If I wanted, my lord would imbue the structure with deepnames, reinforce it to maintain an even, pleasing temperature in all seasons, allow no moisture or dryness beyond the amount established as the strong builders’ standard. Even now he frowns sometimes, coming here, and I feel his fingers itch with the desire to act. I asked him to leave it like this, and he does, but it makes him unhappy. He wants everything that is his to be beautiful.

  I don’t know how he doesn’t put me aside after all these years. Perhaps the beauty he craves is in what we’ve been through together—a complex perfection created by memory, by story, rather than by my many inadequacies.

  As always, in the evenings I crave to return, to be by his side once again, and as always I dread that moment, the possibility that he will look at me and see me as I see myself, as everyone saw me before him. I fear that he will turn away from me, indifferent and cold, his gaze already moving on to other matters.

  I have nothing to take with me. When the knock comes, I have already put on my coat and waved off the single candlebulb light.

  “Come in,” I call from the darkness, relaxing once again into this new direction. A patient comes; I heal. Reacting is restful.

  A person edges in. I cannot fully see them in the gloom, but I can feel their hands shake. Their voice, when it comes, is tentative and young. “Mister... Healer Parét?”