Beneath Ceaseless Skies #229

by Rose Lemberg

  “What would you take me for, then?” he snapped, as if his residual anger had been pulled to a tautness then released. “An assassin?”

  I let that go. I would let it all go. “I thought you would want to study starlore. Why else seek me out? Everybody knows...” Though now I thought about Nihitu’s early reports. The Raker had righted houses crumbling to dust, infused their walls with deepnames—I should have remembered this, but I had not.

  “After our conversation, I thought you would want to learn more about Ladder.”

  He shrugged. “I wanted to stop thinking about it.”

  “And Strong Building is soothing.”

  “Exactly.”

  And it was soothing, too, to sit like this, leaning against his bare shoulder. We had both made false judgments and hurt each other. But now there was warmth, and silence, and the shining soft light of his floating candlebulbs.

  When I felt stronger, he helped me to my chambers and delivered me to the hands of my startled wardens. I felt no assassins lurking in the corridors, but in truth, I was too tired and shaken to perceive much. He refused an offer of a guard when he bade me good night. I hoped that he would be careful.

  After he left, I summoned my councilors to warn them that a becalming power worked upon the palace, the handiwork of one or more of Ladder’s students. It made people sluggish, inattentive. My power was such that it did not affect me, but it had served to isolate me for an assassin’s blow. They argued that I should never have left my chambers—but I am prone to wanderings and do not consent to be constrained by fear; and in truth, the servants and wardens at my door would not have been strong enough to protect me from one of Ladder’s assassins. This required personages of power, like Nihitu, who was still missing, or the Raker, who should have been asleep by then. In the end I accepted a guard of twelve, warriors and mages directed by my best students Urwaru and Marvushi e Garazd. The rest I ordered to search for Nihitu, or to find at least the reason for her disappearance.

  I let the servants change my clothing and allowed a cup of buttered cardamom tea to be served, then sank at once into a dreamless sleep.

  * * *

  (Concluded in Pt. II, in BCS #230)

  Copyright © 2017 Rose Lemberg

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Rose Lemberg is a queer immigrant from Eastern Europe. Their work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Interfictions, Uncanny, Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology, and multiple times previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among other venues. Rose co-edits Stone Telling, a magazine of boundary-crossing poetry, with Shweta Narayan. They have edited Here, We Cross, an anthology of queer and genderfluid speculative poetry from Stone Telling (Stone Bird Press), and The Moment of Change, an anthology of feminist speculative poetry (Aqueduct Press). They are currently editing a new fiction anthology, An Alphabet of Embers. You can find Rose at roselemberg.net and @roselemberg, including links to their page on Patreon, where they post about Birdverse, the world in which their BCS stories and others take place.

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  ORA ET LABORA

  by Theodore McCombs

  Matins: the apse is dark. The monks in the choir stalls hunch over their parchment, noses hovering over scratching nibs. The novices in the back have the worst light, but the air is so still the thick standing candles offer poor illumination for everyone: just beads of flame on the wicks. Obb stares so fiercely into his calculations they deform into cross-hatches, into the coarse-cloth weave of his cassock:

  He tears at a nail with his teeth. His fingerpads are bitter with ink. Beneath his work, the dark is rippling with bugs; they sleep in the oak joints and chew his legs throughout night offices. His skin is scarred with bites to his knees. His eyes are gummy with sleep. Divine offices are the hardest your first year, the novices tell him, just get through the first year, and your body changes what it wants. He’ll wake for Matins at midnight like the night flowers in the cloister garden. Obb isn’t a night flower but a sack of coarse-cloth, left in a windowless cellar, chewed by vermin. Is there any idea so terrifying as being eaten in the dark?

  * * *

  Obb rises an hour before Prime. His shadow, in the sickly dormitory lamp, trawls over the other novices slumped headfirst into their straw pillows. He pads barefoot down the flickering galleries to the rear of the abbey, then crosses the meadow in the gray half-light: a cold, muddy shape in the mousy grass. The valley is covered in cottony morning mists caught in pine boughs. Faraway, a bleat of goats in pasture. Obb picks his way through the nunswood to a creek, where he washes like a bird. The pain of the freezing water relieves his itching legs, briefly.

  He pulls off his cassock and cringes at his own reek of stale sweat on wool. It’s summer, even in the mountains, and his feet have started to sour and crack inside his leather shoes. He sits in the bunch grass and peels dead skin off his soles, in milky sheets like cheesecloth. He splashes cold water on his face and scrubs, until he’s shivering. The other novices are fouled with pimples and weird odors; they rush red-faced through the halls hiding erections under their books. Obb drags a wet rock over his pits until they smell like a wet rock.

  He hasn’t been punished for leaving the abbey to wash, not yet; the nunswood is the most obvious way to escape, so he’s surprised no one stops him. They must know. A few brothers and sisters are already awake at that hour: he sees lamplight through the grates in their cell doors as he crosses each cloister. But the forest is too vast to cross on foot, and the goatherds will deliver you right back to the abbot like a muddy stray kid.

  He prays sometimes, by the creek: not a number-prayer, but a word-prayer, to God the Mother: Please, let me go home. But what is home anymore? Is it his parents, whose faces his own bitterness will no longer let him see clearly? His older sister, who seemed to know before anyone he’d have to be oblated? Is it having hours alone, not punctuated every third by divine offices—Prime, Terce, Sext, Nones, Vespers, Compline, Matins, Lauds—and the labor of infinite litanies?

  He has been three months at the abbey of St. Riemann, but his life before is already blurring. He remembers his eyes sore from crying, as the abbey’s snowed towers and spires first turned into view. He remembers his terror at the brothers—wrapped in dark coarse-cloth, circling him in the dusky chapter house, their skirts whisking over flagstones—

  In nomine Patrie, et Matrie, et Filie Oblatum

  Two figures stood apart: the monk WroDski, his upper face a strip of shadow under his cowl, the lower half only a deep weathered grimace; and Sister Casorata, the matron of the boys’ dormitory, in a white, roseate wimple. When he approached them to beg their help and offered his name, WroDski stopped him short with a gesture.

  “We call you Oblate,” Sister Casorata explained, “until it is time for you to name yourself to us.”

  (Oblate, from ‘oblation,’ from oblatio, a word from a language thousands of years dead; meaning ‘offering,’ meaning he’d been ‘offered,’ and received.)

  “Your family has renounced you and donated you to the Church. The name they gave you is a lie,” said WroDski. “You never were their son or their brother. You are Disordered, a child of the Jack of Lies. Rejoice in your deliverance, and submit with gladness to God’s sacred labor.”

  It wasn’t true, Obb repeated in his head, as Sister Casorata led him to the dormitory. His family loved him and remembered him; they’d never wanted to oblate him, they were forced; in a few days they would come for him.

  The abbey blots out the horizon. Cassock in hand, he lets the mountain air dry him as he makes his way back up the slope under a noise of bells.

  St. Riemann’s is a massive limestone complex shagged with ivy and brown lichen, with eleven cloisters and seven square towers hoarding owls. There are two hundred eighty-one doors and four hundred ninety-nine stained windows; the abbot has counted. Along the church’s nave, under every window, there are walnut reliquaries carved as women�
��s busts, with intricate tresses and heavy expressions of pity. Inside are the skulls of martyrs of the sack of St. Riemann’s, three hundred years ago, when the forest lay thick with sisters strung from branches.

  * * *

  If the brothers showed any patience in Obb’s first three months, they want improvement in his second. Brother WroDski scrutinizes Obb’s litanies and leaves mark-ups on his bunk, rashed in red circles. Obb is no good at these calculations: Why is he, and not some other sad fourteen-year-old, here? Every Disordered child must be oblated to the Church, but what does that mean? He has ideas, but he doesn’t like them: because Disorder does not refer to any external and visible imperfection, it must point to some internal defect that was still, somehow, visible. Like a dome built wrong.

  Children in the city, his peers, his schoolmates, regarded the Disordered like sorcerers, with their books of mysterious diagrams. The ship captains who hired priests to offer navigation prayers returned to port; those who didn’t, might or might not. Merchants at the Bourse had nuns pray over trades to set wheat prices and reaped miracle profits. Every civic guild tithed clergy to consecrate its construction plans; decades ago, an unblessed dome in the College of Sciences had collapsed and crushed dozens of only sons. Stories like these had convinced Obb’s sister that the monasteries and convents secreted in the mountains were schools of magic where oblates learned spells to summon elemental spirits of spectacular power and beauty.

  He cries himself to sleep, every night; it’s impossible otherwise. Mosquitoes bite his face and ankles. Strange throttled cries and rustlings come from the end of the dormitory. The nights are swollen with rain that won’t fall. The panic and hopelessness hits him hardest after dark, until he wants to thrash in his pallet. Instead he cries, silently, lying on his back so that his nose plugs up. He can’t stand the idea of the others hearing him sniveling. He wakes with a sore throat and cracked lips.

  It’s wearing him down: this cycle of sleeping and hoping to wake to a different life, then finding all of it the same.

  His parents will not come for him, he admits. It’s a painful logic to yield to—oblation is mandatory, but why wouldn’t they fight for him, their only son, no small thing, but that’s what he’s become here: a small thing, in the mouth of something giant and old. He looks down and sees tears blotting his litanies, sees multiplications that abandon the laws of nature: fifth and seventh powers of nonsense, odd numbers hatching out of even products like moths wriggling out of cocoons.

  He pushes aside his litanies and writes to the bishop:

  I revere our Most Holy Church but I don’t belong here I will never belong here. This isn’t how my life is supposed to be please please I can’t stay like this I can’t spend my life here

  For weeks after, he is vivid with anticipation of an answer. Between religious instruction classes he dawdles in the arcades over the courtyard, watching the mail carriages. He hears sister novices singing in the north chapel during Lauds: walled-up voices slipping under doors, passing through glass like light. Will he be punished? Obb isn’t so naïve to think the abbot would simply let his letter post without reading it. Will the brothers now see Obb’s bitterness written across his face? Or did they all write such letters as oblates, begging and bleating for their lives back?

  * * *

  Only the Disordered may manipulate the disordered numbers—Obb pictures this work like harvesting sprigs off a poisonous plant. But Obb’s infinite litanies aren’t truly disordered, or truly infinite for that matter, only novice approximations: calculate out x – x3/3! + x5/5! – x7/7! +... for x = 1.1110, x = 1.1111, x = 1.1112, and so on and on, and on, and on. If x were a true disordered number, like the square root of two, x = 1.414213562..., the decimal would trail an infinite, never-repeating streak of digits and the calculation of x3/3! alone would occupy the remainder of Obb’s life and the universe’s life, and the life of all universes to come. So, he approximates to four decimal places; and even that, for x11/11!, makes his eyes cross and takes hour after hour. Novices spent years compiling tables of these approximations, or copying out and verifying old rotting books of tables that smelled of vinegar.

  Four months in, Obb still doesn’t understand how this labor is supposed to glorify God. He knows that priests will use his calculations for engineering, navigation, and other important things. But it’s still dull, even crazy-making. He still hasn’t figured out how not to go deranged from boredom.

  He tries taking each litany slowly, drawing each multiplication out with loving precision. The office ends with Obb stupefied, having accomplished half of nothing.

  He tries rushing through the calculations, the top of his quill capering crazily. The office ends with Obb exhausted, his hand cramping, the bites on his legs crackling like fire.

  There’s something unsettling about approximating numbers with infinite decimal places to just four: a poor trade for the truth, Obb thinks. He remembers days before his oblation when he’d had another name and felt perfectly safe in happiness. His family was well-off and loving. He had a bright future. Then he lost all of it, out of nowhere; his entire life, and everything he’d understood life to be, collapsed without omens or dreams or warning into this; yet Disorder, the necessity of his oblation one day, must have always been there and he’d just failed to see it—his understanding only, and dangerously, approximate.

  One afternoon he is watching the carriages when Brother WroDski confronts him with a sheaf of Obb’s calculations: unacceptable, says WroDski; but the clatter of hooves on cobblestones muddles his words. Below, the stench of straw rotted in horse piss fugs the air; Obb is wondering where the horses have come from and where they’re going, whether any reach his white city on a blue bay, where the sunwarmed walls smell of salt...

  WroDski grabs Obb by the shoulders and Obb reels back into his own head.

  “Pay attention, Oblate. Error has grave consequences. Your calculations here give our priests in the city precise angles and logarithms, and if your litanies are even one thousandth of a percent off, their next multiplication is a tenth of a percent off, and so on until the roof falls in. Is that what you’d like? Is that worth your time? Do you want a dome to fall on your family?”

  “That’s fine,” Obb says, wrenching himself out of WroDski’s hands. He is ashamed to be so furious. “I’m fine with that. I never was their son, isn’t that what you said? They let you take me here.”

  WroDski’s response is swift and wordless. He hauls Obb downstairs by the wrist, asks the mail driver for his switch, and whips the backs of Obb’s hands exactly six times, in front of everyone and their horses. The pain is sharp, white-hot, and over; leaving behind a warm, gluey throb as blood buds over his skin. “He hit me,” he shouts at Sister Casorata, later, blind with tears, while she rubs stinging mash into his hands. “You said”—voice jumping, accusing—”you said to tell you if they touch me a way I don’t like,” and Casorata snaps at him, “That’s not what I meant,” and says, “I know it’s hard to believe, but he’s trying to spare you worse,” then she tells him a stupid parable about pulling out pernicious weeds before they grow deeper roots. Obb’s insolence isn’t a weed, though; it’s the last thing he has.

  It’s a bland, dumb parable, but it makes him think of what WroDski has said about errors exposing: how if you make an error in the tenth decimal place but multiply this calculation by a hundred feet of wall, say, then by a hundred tons of roof work, and keep pressing this product in turn through more and more calculations, that flaw in that tenth decimal place rises to the eighth decimal place, then to the sixth, the fifth, the first, a whole number; like a monster from the dark canyons of the ocean rising and breaching. Obb lacks the doctrinal understanding to be certain, but he suspects his litanies are approximations of a true, perfect form; where the litany x – x3/3! + x5/5! – x7/7! + x9/9! – x11/11! +..., when extended to its infinite length, becomes something else and strange, a function that twists like a snake. But the litanies he calculates during divi
ne offices can only ever be approximations—even if he extended one to a hundred thousand places, and worked out x99,999/99,999! + x100,001/100,001!, et cetera, this wouldn’t cure but only bury the imperfection, dormant, deep below the surface, powerful and secret.

  * * *

  Obb suspects too that the brothers and sisters of the abbey are approximate people. In religious instruction, at Vespers, at Lauds, he watches them gesture and bow and turn around at a noise following them; they are reedy or stout, dark or sallow, but in all of their faces, their lips curl a decimal place off. They have almost-expressions, almost-voices. He thinks of the bright orange fish his father once showed him in a book of plates, with blots on their tails that serve as decoy faces for predators.

  * * *

  Lauds: hungry, cold, and dreaming, Obb processes to the dormitory for second sleep, and he catches in the dark a train of girls, in moon-white habits, filing out from the north chapel. One of them, a head taller than her companions, is muzzled. A rumor from last week: the sister novice who swallowed a carpenter’s nail from her pallet frame. And, the month before: she knocked the new sister oblate across the head for her eyeglasses, crushed them underfoot, ate the shards right there. In the amber light of the candelabras, she glows like a house on fire.

  That’s Agatha, whispers another novice. Obb thinks of his letter to the bishop and feels he understands her. How long here before he has that much despair and courage?

  From a window, he studies her during free hour, the novice Agatha, watched by a heavyset nun in the cloister garden. She sits under the sinewy quince tree, whose screen of twisting boughs cuts her figure up into small blooms of white habit, like the rosebushes around her. She’s spread over her lap a sheet of parchment ruled in even, parallel lines; she is dropping handfuls of dress pins on to the paper. She counts something, records the number in a notebook, then sweeps the pins into her hand and repeats: again, again. The falling pins shimmer like a trickle of water, and Obb sinks into a mysterious, painful longing to sit at her feet and listen to her arrange this unaccountable scene into a theorem.