Beneath Ceaseless Skies #229

by Rose Lemberg

  But plum wine, not blood, caroused now in my veins—and so I explained nothing.

  I said, “If you are so wary of him, then be his guide tomorrow. Show him the things that do not arouse your ire. Walk with him through the classes held on my painted tiles, and in the tumbleweed garden. Let him see the library, and join any classes or study circles, if he wants. Let my students Urwaru or Marvushi e Garazd help you in this task.”

  I waved Nihitu off without waiting for a reply, as one waves off a common retainer. She was not my retainer. I should have talked to her, should have bared my heart and listened to her concern, but her earlier words and brash demeanor had scraped me.

  She did not argue with my order, but simply nodded and withdrew. I listened to her steps recede, relieved for the weight of her presence to be removed, relieved to be at last in silence. But it wasn’t long before I descended the narrow ladders to the chambers far below ground and sought the companionship of my star.

  * * *

  Of all these tales but slivers left to us

  He opened the trapdoor and made of his soul a ladder and dipped it into the abyss beneath his court. This done, he descended to converse with the Orphan, to pit his will against its will.

  And thus it came to pass that the Orphan, the star that refused at first to fall or choose a guardian, had chosen—a man as ruthless and vast as itself, with despair and darkness to rival its own.

  In the sandstone court above the open trapdoor, all was quiet. And yet a careful stranger, if such could be found, would observe a peculiar tenderness in the weave of the ladder and hear a sigh that reverberated upwards from the abyss.

  * * *

  A vision of quince and the fall

  So comforted I was by the subtle heat of my star that I did not notice when Ranra floated into the star-greeting chamber. So still she was, so motionless. Her clothing blended in the darkness to a kind of mild shadow. Only the absence of heat where she stood had alerted me to her presence.

  “Ranra,” I said. A greeting. It disconcerted me that she had come so deep into my underground palace uninvited, so close to the surface of my star; and yet I was glad—even relieved—to see her. I yearned for her discourse, but she was silent at first, looking past me where the tendrils of Hillstar reached out in faint curiosity towards her floating form then withdrew with a slight shudder as she stretched a hesitant hand towards it.

  “You and I have been guardians,” I said. For that reason alone I felt at ease with her, for so much is revealed to us starkeepers that is concealed even from the most powerful named strong. I was curious to exchange starlore with her, but even more I simply yearned for company of one who was like me—and not a bristling youth like Nihitu or even the Raker, whose enormous desires had scalded more than I cared to admit. In their company I had been seized by restlessness. Ranra, with her becalmed eyes and translucency of color, seemed to offer the ease I now sought.

  “You are a guardian and I the same,” she said, not shifting much. Again she extended a hand. From my star a clay-red tendril of light, made up of delicate five-syllable deepnames, reached out towards her and yet again recoiled before touch. “I would exchange starlore with you, as guardians do.”

  I inclined my head. “What knowledge do you seek of me?”

  “Your star and you are intertwined.”

  I nodded. For all I had been eager to be seen, this was a revelation uncomfortably close—yet I should have expected no different of one who in turn had guarded a star. “Your star and you were different?”

  She spoke, not in reaction to my words. “When you breathe, your dormant deepnames extend towards the one you guard, and are reassured by the touch of ten thousand deepnames; when you glide over the desert in a sandbird’s plumage—” for indeed, I had first met her as just such a shape—”the tendrils of your star follow, unfold, experience through your body and your mind that which should not be accessible to stars.”

  I asked again. “Your star and yourself did not share such a bond?”

  And yet again she continued but not to answer me. “And when your star’s fiery twin reaches out across the waves of sandhills, touches your heart with the insistence of an old friend, the domains of the desert you have traversed and ruled become revealed to it as well.”

  To her. For all that my stars were twins, they differed. My star had no dream of being embodied in flesh, conceiving itself only as a burnished globe of light made out of tens of thousands of deepnames. The Tumbleweed Star, for all she too was made of deepnames condensed into a ball inside the sacred tumbleweed, sometimes envisioned herself in a person’s body: a middle-aged Loroli woman with laughing yellow eyes. But I did not suggest this language to Ranra.

  Unmoved, I repeated my question for the third time. “Your star and you did not share such a bond?”

  “My star is gone, Old Royal. My star, the restless sleeper, was quenched by the tide.”

  I clasped my hands behind my back and kept silent, waiting her out, for I would have from her the knowledge equal to what she had gleaned from me.

  She sighed. “We were tethered to it, but it did not know us. It slept. Oh, how it slept, as restless as a traveler tormented by a swarm that comes in dreams; and it paid no less attention to us than it would to such vermin.”

  “And your guardian, the first one, they did not speak to it? They did not teach you this lore?”

  “The star was asleep as it fell,” Ranra said. “It was asleep still when Semperí carried it out of the desert to the shores of the evening sea, asleep and scalding their arms with blue fire. We learned what we could. So hard we learned, so desperately we sought to converse with it. And yet it slept.”

  “I remember Semperí,” I said. One of the last guardians to depart with a star, the star that clung almost as long as the Orphan, that had breathed the noxious fumes of the Orphan’s breath, that had slumbered through it all in angry buzzing. I was not quite the same as that First Royal, and yet I remembered them all, each one of the other guardians who caught the stars—and I remember pressing their names onto the clay that I carried, before that too became too heavy for my grip and I let it go and stretched up my arms instead for the Hillstar.

  Ranra regarded me for a while, then said, “There is a lore I sought. A new geometry of light beyond the restrictions of the magical tenets we all learn. A law that multiplies and is vibrant and hangs between each of us in a glittering web.”

  I did not follow her meaning precisely, and yet her words stirred the small hairs on the nape of my neck. “Did you find it?”

  “I?” She laughed bitterly. “I? Let me tell you what I found—a heaving mountain and my people dying. Everything, dying. The mountain, my people, the star, myself. Folding and folding forever, falling through the ground into the maelstrom below.”

  Her speech, so calm and unwavering before, acquired a frantic sheen. “Erigra caught me as I fell—and if they hadn’t, if Erigra hadn’t, then my people would have perished—and almost all of them perished—this instead of glory, instead of the new geometry I sought. I had to act—because of what Erigra had done, I could not die. I had to save what I could. I broke my mind, the mind which bore the Royal House, like yours, the mind that had envisioned the new lore—I broke my mind, so it is forever now afflicted with the Warlord’s Triangle.”

  Ranra had spoken so quickly, with such vehemence, that I would have been lost if I hadn’t known parts of the story already. Ranra’s lover, Erigra Lilún, whose books about quince had reached even the desert—poetry, and pruning instructions for the tree which would never grow in this soil but which was now cultivated from the northern Lysinar to Niyaz—that was the person who had carried Ranra away from the erupting mountain. They kept watch just enough for her to recover and act.

  “I do not know this new geometry,” I said.

  She shook her head and floated closer. Her hand, reaching now to me, touched the sleeve of my kaftan. “I alarmed you. Forgive me.”

  “It is all ri
ght,” I said, but it wasn’t, for my star now changed color, became brick-dark, its tendrils withdrawn. I felt dizzy, as if the air, too, receded from the room. Yet I persevered. “Can I help you?”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “Oh, yes. You can teach him starlore.”

  “I want nothing better,” I said, with a sincerity that surprised even me. With all my heart I wanted to teach him, to show him the desert in all its power and secrets, deepnames blended into the grains of sand, the lines of the earth-grid buried so deep that even the questing wind could not reach them; the perfect translucency of the air just before dawn; the immense heat-quivering sky. “It is my desire to teach him.”

  “Good,” she said. “Good. Teach him starlore. Teach him expansion.” She turned from me and floated away, through the walls of my star-room, out of sight.

  I had yearned for Ranra’s discourse and I wanted to teach her ward, but now my hands and forearms puckered with pinpricks, as if some heavy noxious residue clung to my skin.

  * * *

  Move the fourth: If not to fall like they had fallen

  I have made a habit of going out, each fifth-day and eleventh-day morning, to make the rounds of my classes. With the help of my retainers, I don the light-colored spidersilk dress embroidered with Loroli pinwheels, and over it a glass-beaded vest of green rough silk, and sandals with gold and orange stripes. It had not lately been my custom to adorn myself, but this morning I was seized by whimsy. I summoned my deepnames, the Royal House of one, one, and two syllables; but instead of great feats of magic, I touched with my power each and every glass bead on my vest, imbuing them with memory of their past, of sandgrains before the Maiva’at glass singers translated them into their shapes. The grains of sand inside the glass beads bloomed into tiny flowers, gray roses and quince blossoms and that flower the Raker had shown me, perhaps unawares: alyta, a three-petal pale bloom that grows in a small, sea-hugging country called the Coast.

  I had sent Nihitu to shepherd the Raker, and so my advanced student Urwaru would accompany me instead. Urwaru’s hair was braided to the left and slung over the shoulder in the fashion of Laaguti and other Niyazi women rebels, for she had been such a rebel before she came to me, shortly after I decided to again admit Niyazi students. Urwaru was a consummate writer with a careful and precise hand but taciturn of demeanor, and so we spoke little as we walked.

  Under the clear-scented morning sky, the courtyards brimmed with students of all ages who received tutelage from my best named strong, and—once every starweek—from myself. I visited the children first, those who had not yet taken deepnames but who sought instruction; under the supervision of older students, they ran on the painted tiles, shrieking and laughing at each other. A few stood separately with serious expressions, puffing up their cheeks as if ready to burst. I encouraged each of them equally, for there was no knowing which ones would take deepnames and of what power.

  In the next courtyard just north of the tumbleweed gardens, a group of teenage mages sat on tiles painted with scorpions and bees. These youths were named strong, all with a single longer deepname and without much power; but they did their breathing exercises eagerly under the direction of my advanced student Marvushi e Garazd. And it was in Marvushi’s class that I found my guest, sitting cross-legged on the tiles, his lip curving up just slightly as he saw me. Nihitu stood behind him, arms crossed at her chest, a blank expression on her face.

  Marvushi of the Surun’ people was the second of my best students. Four years ago they came here with their husband Garazd, a serious and silent man who eagerly joined my guard. Marvushi was neither serious, nor silent, nor a man, and they delighted both in starlore and in teaching children. That last was a constant source of disapproval from Urwaru, who stood now with her arms crossed and lips pursed. “Forgive me, teacher, but your guest seems too advanced to be planted among babes.”

  The Raker smiled in response to Urwaru’s words. “I enjoyed the lesson.”

  I said, “I’m sure you’re used to something else at Mainland Katra University.”

  “Yes? The buildings clogged with age-old deepnames and even more ancient grids? The Katran professors who hated me for my power, all the more offensive to them because of my Coastal provenance?” He shook his head, as if to shake that memory. There was more to this tale. But I was patient.

  A long moment passed before he looked at me again.

  “They do not teach this, anyway.”

  “This?”

  “Breath.” And then, in a quieter voice, “The might of language lies in breath.”

  “Exhale one syllable,” I said. Just in case I was mistaken.

  He smiled. “A mighty gust of air—

  these deepnames hold the magic of the land.”

  We grinned at each other as Nihitu frowned, and Urwaru likewise. Marvushi, I noticed, hid a smile.

  I said, “Some books have reached you, I see.”

  “I studied Burrashti to read them.” The Raker’s face acquired a subtle glow, quite different from what I’d seen before—neither ravenous nor withdrawn. I, too, felt a soft kind of feeling unfold in my chest. “I have many more books to show you, that you have never seen.”

  “I have no doubt.” And edges of that hunger creased again a corner of his mouth.

  He crossed his arms. I became painfully aware of him, there in the unfolding warmth of mid-morning, his olive-brown skin baked by the sun in his travels, the small dark hairs on his bare arms; his fingers, long and powerful and poised just so. My gaze would have traveled yet further if not for Nihitu, who coughed indignantly into her fist.

  I cleared my throat as well, still smiling. “Come to the honeycomb library, then. After sunset.”

  “If your guardian consents,” he spoke. His voice was playful, with no underlying edge, but Nihitu bristled.

  “This guardian has been told it’s none of their concern.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes,” I said, more harshly than I had intended. “Your presence will not be needed.”

  “I’ll come then,” he said. “To ask you a question.”

  I nodded to him and left with my other guards, ignoring Nihitu. As if she did not exist.

  I continued my rounds, in anticipation of the evening and the questions he might ask. It was not Nihitu’s fault that my old keeper was gone, nor that she had been sent here, but I did not want to think about her stubbornness or her sternness.

  I completed the rounds and returned to the palace and the many meetings in which to discuss the affairs of Burri. On the edge of my senses I felt the Tumbleweed Star, reaching across the desert and trying to touch my mind. But for once I pushed the awareness of the Tumbleweed Star away from me and paid her summons no heed, thinking instead how he’d worn one of the dresses I’d sent him, a light brown gown embroidered with sandbirds, and how his hair touched his arms.

  Plum wine for blood.

  I was too old to succumb to anything easily. I would be guarded with him when he came. But now, alone, I had no wish to be sober.

  * * *

  The heat and splendor of that pain

  He came to the honeycomb library at dusk, long after the hour I had named. In semi-darkness, his form glimmered with the subtle heat of star-born iron that had tumbled into the desert, almost-cooled, never-cooled. His deepnames glistened from his head like incursions of mica, hovering on the edge of my perception, edging me to guess how many deepnames there were, what configuration, a question that for all my learning and age I hadn’t yet seemed to be able to deeply consider. As the Raker drew closer, the heat of him intensified, the feeling of iron and heft—and a desire rose in me to reach out and feel the texture of that surface, to learn what distances he had traversed to come to me. I kept my control and stood still, intent on my body’s reactions, my mind, weighing in myself what could now pass.

  He spoke, and his voice reverberated along my ribcage, heavy and languid. There was no pain in it, only intent. “Have you considered my offer?”<
br />
  The Raker lifted his right hand, not touching. His fingers flexed as if he was gripping my neck, and his lips curved in that familiar disdainful smile, his pleasure.

  I savored this and my body’s yearning response, its need. But I was in no hurry. “I see that you did not accept my previous answer,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Your answer was a lesson. I enjoyed it.” He held my gaze and spoke slowly, as if to make sure I followed. “Now I ask again, and I wait for an answer which is not a lesson. Whatever it may be.”

  “I thought you would ask me of starlore.”

  To that, he only shrugged.

  I turned away from him slightly, giving myself the space to think. Silence stretched between us, barely stirring the softness of air.

  I considered how long it had been since I had entertained such a proposition. Remembering Nihitu’s recoil, I considered also how very few people dared to imagine the Old Royal fit for any propositions, my power too vast and my body too shriveled, its pain and decay imperfectly held by my power, and by my star. But he saw me, and that in itself sent a delicious shiver down my spine.

  And now, having finished contemplating myself, I turned to contemplate him. His suggestion that I lean into his fingers, his grip, offer myself while he, perhaps, continued to conceal.

  I let my upper lip curl up to mirror his. “I will not lie; it has been long since I entertained such an offer. It tempts me. As I am sure your offers had tempted many others before you stood at my gate and asked for entrance.”

  “None like you,” he said.

  Yes. None like me.

  And yet you have not answered my question. Have you ever said no? But now I needed to know something else instead. “Before I decide, then, answer my question.”

  He lowered his gripping hand, and the smile faded. I felt his heat withdraw. I spoke quickly to dispel the shadow of dangers past. “No, not that question. Another.”

  “Ah.”

  The smirk did not return. But neither did his presence grow colder. Just hovering there. Wary.

  Oh, youth.