Beneath Ceaseless Skies #70

by Beaulieu, Bradley P.

  “Two more cases.”

  “By the gods, Kaliil! Sulamin would kill you over one. For three they’ll kill us all!”

  Kaliil slams his fist onto his desk. “Can they smell it, Muulthasa? Will they stop chasing us if we rid ourselves of it?”

  The ehrekh’s bellow plays across the desert behind us. So loud is the noise, it can be no more than a mile away now.

  “We had better hope so,” I tell him as I head for the cabin door. “Bring them on deck.”

  I return to the foredeck, where the woman watches the horizon intently. Her veil whips in the hot wind, revealing only her painted lashes, her bright green eyes. She is so familiar. If only I could see her face unobstructed....

  “Best you get belowdecks,” I say.

  She casts her gaze downward and heads for the hatch.

  Before she can take two steps, the ehrekh’s call echoes, close. It is different this time, higher-pitched.

  “Hard to starboard, Rafaf! Now!”

  Rafaf pulls the ship hard over. Ahead, an explosion of sand bursts into the warming desert sky. An ehrekh howls. The force of his breath shoves us to one side, and the ship groans as it lists far to starboard. Our scout falls screaming from the vulture’s nest and flies wide of the tilted ship. His screams stop with an abrupt thud.

  Rafaf is forced to compensate for the lean by pulling larboard. The ehrekh lunges and catches the stern railing, which shatters free in a six-foot section as the ship continues on.

  The men bring their crossbows to bear and let fly, but the beast waves its hand, sending up a hissing wall of red sand to foul the quarrels’ paths. By the time the sand plummets back to the dunes, the ehrekh has vanished.

  Kaliil grapples his way along the gunwale, wary of the concealing sands below our skis, and hands me an ornate inlaid box. The scent of aged bonewood and pepper cannot hide the overpowering smell. It burns, like strong rum, but there is a sweetness to it and an underscent of rosemary or angelica.

  “One?” I stare at him, incredulous. “You brought only one?”

  “Throw it to the sand when it comes. If it follows the box, then it must be after the fyndrenna. If not....”

  No sooner do the words escape his mouth than the ship bucks, sending me through the air. Kaliil falls and slips backward along the deck. The ship is tilted strangely, and a moment later I see why: the second ehrekh has grabbed onto the stern deck. One of its black hands reaches high and hooks a fistful of rigging to pull itself higher. The other, gods save us, is lodged through the hull.

  The rear of the ship drops and scrapes against the sand. Kaliil loses his hold and slips further along the slick deck toward the ehrekh. It bares its yellow teeth and releases a pleased, chill-inducing growl.

  Unable to think of anything else, I throw the case of fyndrenna at the ehrekh. It roars as the case bursts and the golden spice within sprays it in the face. The beast snatches Kaliil’s leg. Rafaf abandons the wheel in favor of a crossbow and releases a quarrel deep into the ehrekh’s shoulder. It mewls and throws Kaliil high into the air behind it. He flies silently, limbs flailing. His black turban flutters free of his head, and his golden coin glints as it spins away and lands in the ruddy sand.

  The ehrekh pulls itself higher along the tilted deck. I attempt to swing the loaded ballista around, but the pivot was not designed to point astern.

  A voice calls from behind me. “Run, Muulthasa!”

  I yank at the ballista again and again, trying to bring it to bear. I pray the gods will allow me to turn it on the beast, but they have apparently cast a deaf ear to my plight. I spin when the hollow sounds of its footsteps become too loud, too terrible to bear unseen.

  The thing towers above me, and I know I am about to die. It grabs my leg and pulls me away from the weapon. I slide down and lose my hold. My head cracks against the deck, and for a while I can hear only high-pitched sounds.

  A blur of motion shoots in from my right. Blood sprays my face and neck, so hot it burns. The ehrekh rears back and releases a howl so loud I clamp my hands over my ears.

  Hands grab me about the shoulders and yank me to my feet. I stumble over the edge of the tilted ship and run, blind from the acrid blood.

  We are running to our last ship, Night Wind, and though I am too addled to understand everything around me, I realize we have escaped.

  That some of us have escaped.

  The Night Wind takes us into her arms and carries us away, but we are mindful of what has been lost. Kaliil is dead, and the men—even the rahib—turn to me to see them through. They tell me the ehrekh took a bolt from the other ballista, that it lay motionless as we fled the remaining ehrekh’s rage. If the gods allow any fortune to shine on us this day, the first ehrekh still lies on the deck of our ship, its lifeblood spilled.

  As I sit in the solitude of the captain’s cabin, I despair. Sytaatha had the right of it. Even if the ehrekh lay dead, the other will hound us until we are dead to the last man. I kneel and pray long into the night for Alenha’s future, wishing I had been able to be part of it...

  ...and wake without knowing I had fallen sleep.

  Sunlight streams through the open shutters, but the wind is up, sending the sands to blowing in great swaths. The moment I close the shutters, a thought enters my consciousness, one I had been chasing for days.

  Six years ago was the night I left my wife, the night my guard unit and I were ordered to spirit Queen Rossanal and her handmaid away from the city. I remember much of it like it happened yesterday. I saw the Queen clearly only a handful of times during our two-week flight from her cousin, who was then Lord Sulamin. She was veiled every time, but her eyes were distinct—her left eye off ever so slightly from the other, their color the deepest green I have ever seen.

  It is that gaze I had forgotten.

  I order Rafaf to bring Azadeh to me. She treads carefully into the cabin a few minutes later with her son held protectively before her. When she sees the seriousness in my face, her head droops, and she stares at Rafaf until he removes his hold of her.

  “They’re after you, aren’t they?” I ask when we’re alone.

  She, Queen Rossanal, the woman I swore my life to protect, stares at me with those serious green eyes, and nods. The hold on her child tightens, and I wonder if she fears I will simply take her out to the deck and throw her to the sands.

  I pace, unable to place the last of the pieces. “Why?” I ask. “Why would the King send them now? And what would make you brave the return to Harrahd?”

  The Queen doesn’t answer, but she holds her son closer, and it’s as if she has pointed to where the puzzle pieces aught to go. Her son. He is five at least, the right age for her to have been pregnant when she fled Harrahd. Could it be? Could this boy....

  “He is the rightful King?” I ask.

  The ehrekh’s lonely call plays over the desert.

  The Queen’s eyes pool with tears. “Would you serve your King as you served your Queen?” Her voice has lost its royal luster; perhaps the desert has burned it from her.

  I kick the captain’s chair, sending it crashing into the far side of the cabin. “You abandoned us! In foreign lands, without warning, without money, and with no hope of survival! King Sulamin’s men found our trail within weeks. He began plucking our lives like feathers from a dead pheasant. I am one of only three remaining of the nineteen who rescued you.”

  She brushes one hand deliberately through her son’s golden-brown hair. “I had another to worry about.”

  “But you were the Queen! You could have received help from the Kyman in Ilinnon or the King of Jabatti. You could have—”

  The Queen holds up one slender hand, a tear slipping down her cheek. “I was little more than a child myself,” she says. “I didn’t know if one of you might be loyal to Sulamin. I couldn’t trust you as a whole, and I didn’t know which one of you to trust, so I trusted no one.”

  “You stole my wife and child from me.”

  “I know. If we get back t
o Harrahd, I would see you reunited.”

  And now it seems her fears were justified, for my fingers ache to throw her from the ship. How can she expect me, for my men, to help her back to Harrahd after all she’s done? And to act as though she could simply repair my life with a wave of her royal hand....

  “Get back to your cabin,” I say.

  “My brother has prepared the way—”

  “Now!”

  Her eyes blaze. She seems ready to oppose me—as she might have once—but the fire in her eyes dims, and she lowers her head. How strange to see the Queen I once served so cowed.

  “You loved your kingdom once,” she says quietly.

  “It paid well.”

  “No, I saw it in the way you protected me. You made sure I was safe every step of the way. You barely slept, our first five days from Harrahd.”

  “That wasn’t loyalty. That was fear.”

  She bows her head, still unwilling to meet my eyes. “Then think of your family. You must have heard how dearly Harrahd suffered when my cousin stole the reins from my husband. How it still suffers.”

  I open my mouth to spit back a reply....

  But how can I? How can I turn my back on my Alenha? For she is Harrahd to these desert-dry eyes. Anything I do for the Queen I do for Alenha as well, and our child.

  * * *

  (Concluded in BCS #71)

  Copyright © 2011 Bradley P. Beaulieu

  Read Comments on this Story in the BCS Forums

  Bradley P. Beaulieu is the author of The Winds of Khalakovo, the first of three planned books in The Lays of Anuskaya series. In addition to being an L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Award winner, Brad’s stories have appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Writers of the Future XX, and several anthologies from DAW Books. His story “In the Eyes of the Empress’s Cat” was voted a Notable Story of 2006 in the Million Writers Award. Brad lives in Racine, Wisconsin with his wife and two children. For more, visit www.quillings.com.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  THE NINE-TAILED CAT

  by Michael J. DeLuca

  I arrive at the door of my house in the dark with lamp and spade, jungle mud caked past my ankles, thickets of scratches streaking my limbs. I set the lamp on the step, sling the sack of stinking goat’s meat off my shoulder, and reach for the knob.

  And there’s that cat in the moonlight—the one I’ve been hunting since dawn. It clings by its black claws high in the pinabete tree, lashing its five spotted tails against the shadows. That same ruby bracelet hangs around its neck. Nine rubies. I shouldn’t have to count; I have another just like it.

  Nine rubies rich as kisses, yet the shine on each one’s surface is paler than milk. I’ve never seen reflected moonlight sparkle so, except atop the mountain on crusted snow closer to sky than to earth.

  Such beautiful jewels. How fine they would look beside the others on my Maya’s wrist. But I won’t fall for that trick twice.

  I heft the shovel in my hand. The glint of it doesn’t compare. If I sharpened it, maybe. If I flattened it out with a mallet and ran the edge against a stone until it sparked like death-day firecrackers, then it just might outgleam the cat’s ruby torque.

  I should have sharpened it before I left. Why didn’t I? The eyes, so round and pitying. It bewitched me. I assumed it would fall for my traps.

  The spade just clangs against the tree-trunk, blind and dull, and the cat departs from the moonbeam, flicking its tails.

  The last time I don’t think it had so many.

  I leave the lamp, the meat and the shovel. I let the door slap closed and go in looking for the other bracelet.

  It isn’t on the dresser. Maya’s rings are there, her pearl necklace. I touch them, still awed by their presence here in my house, even months after we wed. It isn’t by the basin, though her brushes and combs are there, and the bottle of cacao cream whose scent once made me so desperate and still makes me shiver.

  I creep to the bed, where Maya sleeps. Her right arm lies dark on the coverlet, bare. I peel back the blanket and the sheet, wrinkled in curves around her shape like rope lava wrapping the mountainside, still supple, still cooling.

  I fall down beside her, gazing stricken on the curve of her neck and her hip. At last I touch her skin; I gently draw her left wrist out from under the pillow. And there I find it: the bauble that won me her hand and all the rest of her, when my ring and my love and all my charms could not. Nine rubies, like berries of blood on a golden vine.

  I took that bauble from a four-tailed cat I met at my traps on the jungle slopes, one morning when the light beneath the forest canopy was green and the sky was white. It let me stroke its spotted coat. It purred like a storm. It did not speak, though by the look in its eyes I feared it might.

  I thought it a god-king’s pet, escaped. I thought it glad to be rid of the heavy jewels, of divinity’s weight. The four tails I ignored, because I was mad with love and lust for a woman I could not have, because it was convenient to do so.

  I gave the bracelet to Maya on her birthday, when her father, out of cruel consolation, asked me to a feast at her family’s house. A feast where I could consume all but what I wanted most. My gift, though it was never mine to give, changed their minds about me sure enough.

  Maybe I can give it back. The cat has another already. But I have to do something. Even if it means I have to give her back as well. I can’t live like this.

  The bracelet has no clasp. It never had. It slipped from the cat’s head so easily. I grasp it tight; I pull. My fingers press cruel marks into her wrist. The gold digs a ring of red around her hand. It will not come free.

  She wakes. She watches me burning, holding her hand. In another time, before she was mine, she would have taken me without a word, without thought for her father, her master. We would have slept and in the morning woke afraid, wondered if it was a dream, and done it again to be sure.

  She pulls her hand free and rolls away, tucking it again beneath her cheek.

  “What’s the matter?” she mumbles at the wall.

  I rise. “Nothing.”

  The goat’s meat that failed to draw the five-times-damned cat to my traps is gone from the stoop. Blood stains the stone in the lamplight. Frogs scream at the darkness. Tree shadows tilt and shamble across the maize. The cat is gone—but not far.

  The lamp swings in my hand and the world spins as I search among the roots. I find the spade where it fell, take it up and flee into the house.

  Our people lost the craft of making metal; this spade is all I possess. It came to me from the conquerors before they fled. I have used it digging the trenches through the jungle. I have used it cutting furrows for the maize. I have used it digging traps. It has made me what I am, as much as that thing on Maya’s wrist. Now it must serve to protect all that.

  I take my shovel out to the mill-house and pound it flat. I sink the cog into the shaft that sets the millstone spinning and press the edge of the shovel-blade hard against it.

  The metal rings my treachery.

  There’s my Maya, standing limp and languid in the black silk nightgown the door-frame’s shadow drapes her with to hide her from the lamplight’s shame. To hide the red bracelet from mine.

  “What are you doing?” she asks.

  “Nothing, my love. Go back to bed.”

  If it had been the old Maya, the real Maya, my lover from before the bracelet stole her soul and fed it like morsels of meat to the cat, she would have said... what? Something I could never expect. Something clever, playfully cruel. She would have stepped forward into the light, and that would be all of this instinctive vengeance of mine. Cat and jewels forgotten, I’d have left the shovel there on the stone and the lantern burning and followed her to bed.

  But she isn’t that anymore, whatever she is—maybe no more than a body and voice. She turns, and the lines of her fade, and the last I catch is the glint of rubies.

  It’s a long time be
fore the rusty shovel-blade begins to gleam. When it does, I let the mill-wheel cease, and I go in and kiss my sleeping shadow of a wife good night. Then I come back for the lamp and the blade.

  Now I have an ax, and not a spade. I have a weapon. I have hope and desperation.

  I creep from the doorstep across the pinabete tree’s roots into the jungle. It waits for me there: the cat, with its friendly eyes, its tails. It purrs like a lover and a coming storm. It arches its back and begs me to stroke it.

  I raise my blade instead.

  Maybe if I can cut off the cat’s new tail and sew it up in a bracelet round her other wrist, she’ll go back to the way she was. Maybe I delude myself. At least the cat will be dead.

  I let my ax swing. It falls between the cat’s huge, pale, liquid eyes. I turn my own away. When I look back, blood gleams in the lamplight. Brain clings sticky and gray to the blade. But the cat is gone.

  When the conquerors came, they carried a weapon for use on their own kind—a scourge. After we became their servants, they turned it on us. They left, and now it is ours. One stroke and the will is broken. They call it the nine-tailed cat.

  I wipe the ax on a tree and go home.

  At my doorstep, all is serene. The maize barely rustles. Even the frogs don’t speak. Have I won?

  It will be such relief to sleep.

  In the bedroom, I throw myself down beside her. I kiss between her shoulder-blades. I kiss her head.

  My lips are cut by shards of bone.

  Something has shattered my Maya’s lovely head. It has stolen all her lovely blood and brains. And the bracelet is gone.

  I smash the bottle of cacao cream. It splits like a skull. I sit awhile on the floor, drowning in her reek.

  My life, my lust, my only soul. I would have killed for her. Her father shouldn’t have sold me her love. He should have let me take it.