Beneath Ceaseless Skies #232

by Scott Andrews

  “You’re very calm about this.” Back in the carriage—temple trip aborted—I wrap the head in a bag. Sopping the blood up is a logistical problem and I don’t want any of it on the upholstery.

  Yut blinks, undisturbed by the arterial reek. “When I was very young I ventured outside our walls, thinking to dive for wild pearls. The ones we cultivate are white, the wild ones blue, and I fancied the latter terribly.” She holds up her hands. There are silver lines there, old lacerations. “My family had me schooled after for self-defense. Besides, I used to be sickly, and learning the shadow steadied my health.”

  “You don’t have bulwarks. What defends your wall, shadows like yours?” The seas are less infested than the land, but they have their share. The world itself is made of monsters, everywhere. Ocean or prairie, barren waste or bounteous earth. Walls alone keep us safe. Walls and soldiers, in whatever form they take.

  “Not precisely.” Her mouth pulls into that half-smile, the one I saw when she first arrived, and her tone mimics mine. Noncommittal. “It’s something of a state secret.”

  Once more I’ve misjudged my lord’s bride. Over and over I’ve allowed her surface to distract me. Whether what is underneath is a danger to Samonten remains to be seen.

  When I bring it up, my lord knows that Yut is not defenseless. Yes, the island families train their scions in conjuring. No, Yut is not dangerous to her; Samonten trusts my judgment but she has never thought Yut an artless ingénue, for what interest would she have in such a creature? Yes, I can shadow Yut if I wish, am I not already doing that in any case? I escort them to plays and flower-viewing, to markets and museums. No further incident occurs. Poisoned items in the kitchen become no more or less frequent. The chef is as harried as ever.

  When Yut gives me gifts from her trousseau, I have them checked by our chemist, then priests. But they are clean, just jewelry. Strings of pearls threaded loosely, filigreed in steel. Earrings, also pearled. Each bead is perfectly round and deeply blue. Out of courtesy I put them on and they look as though they were grown for me, matched to my celadon coloring. It delights Yut inordinately to see me decorated. When I ask whether she fetched those pearls herself from the deep, she laughs. “Perhaps.”

  On we continue this way, me quietly cautious, the two of them perfectly harmonious. Perhaps I have been paranoid. One month pupates into three, the way months tend to in their promiscuity. My time to range beyond the wall comes.

  I thought Yut would be glad to see me gone, a respite from my vigilance. Instead she fusses over my departure and sends along one of her owls to see me off. The shadow bird is surprisingly soft, weightless on my shoulder and affectionate, nudging my chin with its burred head. It dissipates before we reach the gate, the limit of Yut’s sending.

  There are a dozen of us, bulwarks drawn from households and magistrates’ courts, at the same stage of life as I am. We know each other in passing. We know our duty much better. On foot we leave. No beast of burden is fleeter or more enduring than we are, and most would spook at the sight and smell of the parasites. The alloyed gate lifts quickly, drops behind us just as quick. No one wants it to stand open longer than necessary. Twice a month our scouting party ventures forth to check whether parasites have come to nest in proximity to our gates and, if we can, dispatch them early.

  The land spreads green and sunlit: a room without a roof. Some primal part of me always wants to roll in the brilliant grass and get dirt under my nails, to have flowers bleed onto my scalp and stain it gold. The sky is very clear, as if it weren’t an interplay of light and water and air but an immeasurable pane of glass. Even the quality of the air is different from within the walls, pure and varnished by the distant sea. As a child I wanted to run out here, not on a patrol-path but a course of my own forging. Children’s fantasies are so simple.

  We do a circuit around the city, pacing ourselves at first, conserving stamina. None of us speaks, saving our breath for reconnaissance. Our path widens little by little. Parasite nests can be easy to miss, even for us. They begin life so small. Become so hard to defeat.

  Half a day’s run from the wall, we locate the corpse of a full-grown parasite.

  Like any of them, it used to be one of us, the size of a house. A nielloware head and a short, sturdy neck; in parasitic corruption the skin has grown brittle with minerals, drawn up from the earth perhaps, and from the eye sockets loll a string of tongues. The shoulders are cantilevered with blades.

  The court bulwark beside me recoils, his brushstroke-skin blanching gray; he knew this one in life. The rest of us set to work, hacking the forearms and thighs apart, puncturing every knot of flesh and fat, every writhing tumor until we find the parasite. It has a hound’s shape, blind and bloated from months inside the bulwark, muscles in frayed atrophy.

  We build a vast, hot fire and feed it the host, the parasite, the young it spawned within the bulwark’s belly. A revolting syncretism, a ghastly consummation. Some of the young scramble to escape, tiny tumors with legs. I gather them up to throw them back into the flames.

  I watch the grass brown and wilt. Hosted parasites eat humans but not non-mature bulwarks. Young parasites in search of a host infest mature bulwarks but not us. We are an exact balance between, and this our perfect task, to hunt and butcher and burn. I hear that, for a time after infestation, the bulwark remains aware. Conscious of what’s happening to them, cognizant of who they used to be. It doesn’t last. They become a vehicle, a puppet. There is no cure, no reversal.

  Inevitably the parasites come, drawn by the scent of their own dead, their footfalls like earthquakes. Some of them move too fast, scampering on all four or six. Others crawl too slow, on shuffling disobedient feet. By unspoken agreement we stay to make a count. They move in packs, or not. There is no exact order to their behavior save in their habits of consumption and infestation.

  Three this time, loping toward us on hands and feet, talons and tails converted to another set of limbs. One I recognize as a former commander, our city’s best in her generation. Limbs like spears, a gaze that knows no fear. Not then and not now. This is how we all end if we fall in combat, and more of us fall in combat than not. Until then, we keep our lords and our city safe as long as we can. Our ultimate future, our inexorable destiny.

  There is no room for sentiment or even personal honor. It would be brave to stand our ground and fight and then fall, but our first duty is to report. We turn back to the safety of the walls.

  * * *

  On Yut’s insistence, Samonten holds a small feast to celebrate my return. Patently ridiculous; I join the scouting contingent every few months, the matter as routine as the chef ordering grocery.

  It also appears that Yut has had a long, persuasive talk with the chef. Instead of tea, I’m served a full course. Steamed dumplings, noodles, deep-fried radish cakes—all full of poison lethal to humans. It’s experimental. The dumplings taste saccharine; the ginger and spring onions make an eccentric admixture of salty and corrosive sourness. But it’s an effort.

  “I’m so glad you are back,” Yut tells me as she brings the dessert, evidently having received a lesson in balancing trays and plates too. “I worried far more than is sensible.”

  At her seat, Samonten drinks plain, cool water. For the feast—a private affair, just the three of us—she and Yut eat nothing, to make sure what’s cooked for them is not contaminated by what has been prepared for me. My lord gives me a look and the slightest nod: Do as you wish. A weight settles in my stomach, inevitability rather than dread, and I wonder what I will choose.

  I skip patrolling. In my room I run a bath and spend a frivolous amount of time soaking, even more time choosing the soap. Which too strong, which too sweet, which might offend. I stall, even though the act of grooming already forecasts my decision. My body does not produce much odor, but old habits—from when I was chiefly fluid humors and soft viscera—make me self-conscious, and so I put on a scent. Oodh, chamomile. A loose robe and her pearls at my ear, around my wrist. T
here are bulwarks who relish in drawing human lovers to us like filings to lodestone, but I’ve never been one of those. Nor do I understand attraction readily. What tips me, slowly, toward saying yes to Yut? Is it her seeming naivety, is it her looks, is it simply the familiarity fostered over months?

  I’m still ruminating, no closer to the answer, when she knocks.

  Her feet are bare and, though she’s not wearing her wedding garb—that’d have been an insult to Samonten—she is in an opalescent dress, pinned at shoulders and cinched at waist, the Tarangkaya symbol placed exactly over her heart: this is who she is, this is who she belongs to, the same as I. She enters on tiptoes, clinking red coins.

  “The lord has given you permission,” I say, a matter of course.

  “Yes. We’ve been discussing it. I feel very foolish. At home this would’ve been unthinkable. There everyone’s monogamous.”

  Samonten has never asked exclusive commitment of her partners, though not all house-lords are so generous. A house-lord may have multiple spouses, but each is meant to be faithful to the lord alone. “Are you here because I’m a bulwark and you have been curious all your life?”

  Yut knits her fingers together. “No. Yes. A little. But it’s mostly that you have been so kind. The way you smile. And I wanted to work it out—or not—before you leave for another scouting shift. Where I am from, we used to reconnoiter by ship. A lot of our scouts didn’t come back.”

  Her voice catches. Despite myself I take her hand, lacing my fingers into hers. Small and, like all humans, fragile. A softness to her that I’ve left behind long ago.

  She touches the pearl at my ear. “You were right. I did dive for these personally. Underwater, even monsters can look beautiful. Some of them take on the guise of anemones, coral reefs. In the air they are birds—most of our scouts fly now, and I think that’s what drew me to Samonten. She brought needlebirds to the Coral Garden.” Her hand moves down to the plumage-patterns on my clavicles. “If you’d been there with her, I might have courted you too.”

  “Bulwarks can’t marry.” I unravel the threads that hold her dress together, wondering even now. Moonlight and shadow make her contours infinite, her body a labyrinth where there is no end to the hollows, the shrouded corners. Forever there is something hidden, forever there is something that would not reveal. She kisses my wrist, her mouth very hot, and it tugs—desire doesn’t arise in me as quickly as in most, but here, now. I bend to her breast, scraping lightly with my teeth; one of her hands in my robe, seeking between my thighs. Humans like to ask whether we still possess nerve-ends, whether we retain the wherewithal for carnal pleasure. Yut doesn’t ask, seems to know, from previous experience or else intuition. However far we drift from humanity we’ll always be animal.

  Orgasm is abrupt, nearly unbearable. She strokes the blue-green pinions down my flanks as my heart and breathing slacken, slipping down from their seizure peak. When she kisses me, she tastes of a memory—I try to locate it: mango or jackfruit? Alarm goes through me like a knife. I pull upright at once. She tries to hold me down, saying, “No—it’s not what you think. Let me show you.”

  In an instant I can end her. I push her off me. “You have a moment.”

  She passes her hand over her belly, and then I see. A body of secrets after all. Her skin goes from flesh to translucent quartz, and her breasts are the palest brass. Her pupils have brightened to pewter, narrow as a cat’s. “When I was a child and came home wounded, close to death, my family chose this for me. Learning the shadow wasn’t enough, wouldn’t save me in time.”

  From her neck up, and from below her hips, she looks much the same as before. I have never seen anything like this. Bulwarks are marked from the start; no part of the infant could be mistaken for human. “Bulwarks can’t be made,” I say slowly, “not after conception.” The process begins within the womb, through drugs and rituals and injections.

  “In my country, they can.” Her smile is pinched. “There it is, our awful secret. We turn perfectly normal children from the poorest families, as needed. Most are made into—not like you, but into flying beasts. Mindless and tame, for our soldiers to ride into combat. When my condition was discovered, my family resisted handing me over. They were exiled, and me with them. Our entire line. Outside the walls we lost children to parasites, and one by one we made each other into this half-thing so we could survive. A family of bulwarks, from root to stem.”

  I look her up, down. Her entire retinue. Yut has stayed looking mostly human, and her conjuring has hidden the rest, made her as chameleon to her environment as the parasites. “You can’t stay here.”

  “I don’t mean to. What I wanted... I wanted to meet with other bulwarks, to let them know there is a way other than being used by their own people. Their own people, who think them less than human. Even ones as honored as you are bound to this relentless vocation. Once you reach maturity you will lose all this—your household, your lovers, your own lord. Duty is all you will be. You’ll fight, die, become a host and your successors will slay you, as you have the ones before.”

  My robe is crumpled under us, damp with sweat. Mine scentless, hers fragrant. I stand; she doesn’t try to draw me back onto the bed. “Samonten will have to know. A house-lord may not have as lawful spouse a bulwark.”

  “Because bulwarks are tools,” Yut says softly. “Infertile yes, but what are second and third spouses for. If you consider it closely there is no reason at all bulwarks cannot wed.”

  “It would be unnatural. You might preach your ideal, but how would you make existence—roving as a bulwark-band? Build your own walls?” I shake my head. “Go. My first fealty is to my lord, whose heart you’ve broken and whose dignity you’ve trampled on like a savage. But I’ll give you a head start, if you can navigate the labyrinth.”

  Yut starts to reach for me but lets her hand fall, recognizing perhaps that there is no point. She can no more sway me than she can sway the sun. Still she tries: “We can make something of our own. Together we can survive—there is no deadweight among us, everyone protects each other equally. I will go to other cities, and seek, and speak. One day we’ll build something better.” Yut puts her clothes to order, breathes out the shadows that give her the seeming of a fully human person. Eyes black once more, skin fair again. “I will wait by the western gate. As long as I can.”

  For what. In case I change my mind.

  * * *

  I imagine telling Samonten what has transpired, and consider the optimal result. Should I go to her with Yut’s head in hand? I know my lord, but this situation has no precedent. Nothing will restore Samonten’s honor and consequently Tarangkaya’s, not in the short term. Perhaps we can spread the rumor that Yut was a foreign spy—not far from the truth—and by containing her... Only no. It has been too long, three entire months. My lord would look a fool, and I a failure.

  In the labyrinth, I find nothing save the needlebirds, not even a corpse. Yut is gone.

  * * *

  I love Samonten fully and deeply. This is not merely duty—it is shared childhood, shared lifetime, the understanding that she deals with me fairly and considers me as good as a sister. But I will outlive her. Have I ever loved Tarangkaya itself? Do I love the city?

  Weighed on a scale, what species of love is truer and greater? Does one supersede for having been there the longer? What can Yut begin to offer—an empty, inchoate promise?

  There is a small possibility that, if I go to her, my lord will shut her eyes and say only, Do as you wish. She will forgive, and she’ll arrange her own fiction. Perhaps if I am gone it will be easier, a tale of an ungrateful bulwark and a ghastly wife united in treachery. Or perhaps Yut owes us blood.

  I’ve dressed myself, and armed myself. Nothing at all will stay or impede me, not conjured shadows or sentiment. I may not know this creature Yut fully, but I know that she is not tried. In combat I can best her, nascent bulwark that she is. The shadows are not as fast as I am, not by half. I’m a weapon. Yut is a child’s im
itation.

  Pre-dawn as I leave the estate. The sky still gray as I reach the western gate.

  She has put on a foreign mask with owl feathers, loitering there like some far-traveled entertainer, but I recognize her posture, her body. I have come wearing her pearls. To keep her pacified, to symbolize. One or another. She glances at me and stiffens but does not run. Does she see the pearls first, or the weapons? Does she expect me to, overnight, have come to accept her strange vision?

  Love, I hear, is blinding. A brilliance like looking up at the sun in zenith. That is a common belief.

  I go to her side. We exchange no words; she does not plead, though she holds my hand. Simply we wait in quiet for the gate to open, as it does every three days.

  She turns to me. Beneath her mask, perhaps she’s smiling. I look at the widening gap between within and without, the gate gaping just enough for departing travelers to pass under. Then it’ll drop shut. It will be fast. The moment of decision.

  “Yut,” I begin, and my hand strays. I think it touches the pearls at my ear first, then the weapons, or perhaps the other way around. That sequence functions in lieu of my tongue, and it says everything.

  The gate lifts a little more. Beyond its alloy mouth, a glimpse of the rolling green land reveals itself, slowly turning white with frost and cyclamens. It is a room without a roof; it is a body without limit, transcendent and immaculate. The shoulders stained gold, the arms immense as eternity.

  Copyright © 2017 Benjanun Sriduangkaew

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  Benjanun Sriduangkaew writes love letters to strange cities, beautiful bugs, and the future. Her work has appeared on Tor.com, in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, and year’s best collections. She has been shortlisted for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her debut novella Scale-Bright has been nominated for the British SF Association Award. Her epic fantasy novella Winterglass is forthcoming from Apex Publications.