Beneath Ceaseless Skies #226

by Richard Parks

  The knights come, and you fight them. Sometimes they have witches in tow who have blessed them with burning sage and owl blood. Sometimes pages who carry their swords. Sometimes whole armies come for you, and you enjoy this the most, because you can kill as many soldiers as you please, just not the knight. It always ends the same way. A knife through your neck. A pike through your chest. Your head on the ground beside you, dead eyes full of stars and blood. Once a boy killed you with a six-inch nail he’d pried out of a wall in his bedroom before running away from home to come and rescue a princess. You are a master swordsmen, and you know twelve of the thirteen ancient forms, Palm Grasping Moon, Ocean Turning Time, Dragon Eating Itself, and a boy killed you with a crooked nail.

  The same humiliation over and over. Sometimes the knights are alone, and they have great swords, like your own, and you duel atop the black stone bridge above two hundred empty feet and a silver loop of river that rings your castle like a wedding band. These are the moments you are closest to being yourself. Perry, repost. Perry, repost. The art of the sword. The complicated music of steel and iron. It can go for hours. Bursts of blue and red sparks off your swords like spells, like dreams of other places, other times. Eventually, the knights tire, begin to slow, and magically, the next form goes out of your head, the next step disappears under you. You trip over nothing. You slow down for no reason, and the knight lands a lucky blow and chops off your arm, and it goes flying through the air, sword and all, like a strange, dark bird.

  You are not allowed to hurt the maidens. You give them food, but you do not force them to eat. You lock them in the west tower, and, even after all these years, you are still ashamed each time. Sometimes they pound on the door until their fists are bloody. Sometimes they are so silent you think they may have died, and it is a relief. Like a deep muscle pain, you love every one of them.

  “Someday, you will learn to love me,” you say, you always say, just before you lock the door. It is your destiny to repeat these words over and over. You are used to something else controlling your body, at times, and at least, during those moments, you can pretend that you are not responsible.

  * * *

  The knights always kill you, and you always wake up the next morning. Always they break down the door to the west tower, following the singing, the crying, the screaming. Some have enough sense to take the heavy iron key off your body; others hack down the door with their swords, axes, maces. Sometimes they take the gold in the south tower. Sometimes not. The gold is also cursed and will turn to dust in three hundred days and reappear in your castle. You like it when they take the gold. You hope it will bring them great misfortune and unhappiness. You hope they use it to pay for their weddings.

  Sometimes you wake up on the road where you died, arrows still sticking out of your back like new, throbbing hearts. Sometimes, if the knights have burned your body or thrown it into the silver river to dissolve, you wake back up in your lace iron coffin in the north tower. Sometimes you lie there for days before you have the mental strength to reach up and push the coffin open. It is cool in there, and so silent.

  Time shudders around you. Years. Winters, summers. Seasons of firefly comets. Years as fleeting and meaningless as shooting stars.

  * * *

  Sometimes there are no maidens in your castle; sometimes two or three at a time. Sometimes you are compelled to ride a skeletal wyvern, even less alive than you, that lives at the top of the north tower. Sometimes you wonder what sin this creature committed. It was here in this castle long before you came, and it will be here long after you are gone. You caress the white calcite scales and they click against your black armor. Under your palm, it feels like an incredibly fragile creature, hollow, and it sighs into your hand, leans into you. It has huge black eyes, like a dog’s. Perhaps no sin at all. Sometimes, birth alone is a great enough sin to be punished for.

  You ride the white wyvern for days, clinging to its neck like child riding a mare for the first time. You ride through storms that chill you all the way down your skeleton and burn it to frozen glass. Perhaps that is not your skeleton you are feeling, so brittle and cold. Perhaps that is your soul. The wyvern dodges cracks of lightning like cracks in the world while you pray and pray to any god who might still be alive.

  I’m sorry, you pray. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.

  You always pray in the lightning storms, and you always feel foolish afterwards. You ride over the dark forests surrounding your castle. The forests are filled with bear and wolf and snake. You ride over the ivory deserts, the five-inch sea, over huge cities alive with alchemy and astronomy and the noble sciences, and you ride over miles and miles of gray ruins and rotting stone rising out of poison marshes like half buried bodies. Sometimes you wonder if this ruin, a soft stone courtyard lined with tufts of white grass or a tiny village encased in clear ice, might once have been your home. Did you live here? Did your mother live there? Your daughter? Whomever you might have once had in your life, they are long gone now.

  You take maidens from their beds. From the fields, grain, corn, oranges, silver apple, fat grapes. Sometimes they fight you. Shears and farming scythes and bits of broken glass or tiny mirrors, which, later, you must pick out of your eye with the slivers of iron you use as toothpicks. More than once, you have saved maidens from drowning, from rape. You caught one in mid-fall off a cliff, and still she did not love you. She was terrified of you. Your black armor like gargoyle skin. Like demon’s skin. Once, you stopped one from killing her father in his sleep. You pried the knife from her hand, and let it fall to the soft wood floor, and for just the smallest moment, you felt like someone’s hero.

  “He deserved it,” she said. Her voice was even harder and more filled with hate than yours. Her eyes wild, and full of old pain. She smelled like dried flowers and pepper. “If any man deserved it, he deserved it. This was justice. Why did you stop me?”

  “When it is time,” you said, in the voice that you hate, that constant wraith whisper, that dying breath voice. “Nothing can stop me. Certainly not justice.”

  You have slain many fathers to kidnap maidens. You have slain dragons to kidnap maidens. You have slain trolls. Your sword is elder iron, that much you remember; it was your father’s sword, and it cuts through stone bodies like so much hot air. Through golden scales. Through the water mail of putrid merfolk, the ashy skin of lower demons, the heavy plate of other cursed knights. You still enjoy combat. The craft of swordplay was always the medium of your art. The perfect strike like the perfect wild beating of your heart. And who knows? Perhaps one of these curses, floating over these twisted bodies like great pendulum blades, will be greater than the one hanging over you. Perhaps, one day, you will meet with some curse that is greater than yours, and some demon will murder you.

  This hope, like your sometimes belief in God, makes you feel so foolish. Like a child, all you have are your fantasies.

  * * *

  Often you read. The library is huge and takes up most of the south tower, and an inhuman peddler occasionally comes to the castle and trades you new books in exchange for allowing him to fill his vials in the silver river. You read, in a children’s book, that when a curse is broken, a brand new firefly comet is born. You read in a much newer scientific tome from the university city of Zaren that the firefly comets are some type of invisible energy burning and becoming visible in the upper layer of the ether. Both explanations make you more than a little sad.

  * * *

  A new maiden today. You have ridden the wyvern for ten days over open sea as blue and cold as infinity. The stars are sometimes calm, and sometimes scatter as firefly comets swirling and chasing each other across the sky. Who is chasing whom? What will they do when they catch, or are caught? The air is cold and full of salt. You feel like you’re rusting. You whisper to the wyvern. You tell it stories you have read. It is your only true companion. A crescent of islands across the ocean reveal themselves like a shattered moon. You can feel your curse pulling you tow
ard one of the smallest islands at the outer tip of the formation.

  The wingbeats of the wyvern as it lands scatters her tiny campfire in a hail of coals and ash. You haven’t smelled anything but salt and sea for days, and the scents of the sand and the dense tropic green and the sweet flower oils off the maiden’s dark skin make you shudder with pleasure despite yourself.

  Her irises are almost as black and deep as her pupils, and her eyes are wide open, and they reflect the scattered campfire in flickering red light. She is alone on a broad stretch of white beach near heavy jungle. You move toward her. Tiny shells and glass coral crack and turn to dust beneath your feet. You don’t even feel the coals you step on, still bright and orange against the night. She falls to her knees and clasps her hands together as if in prayer, eyes wide with fear and surprise. This is where she begs. Often they beg.

  “Please,” she says. Soft waves crash on a near shore. You feel the response already forming in your throat like destiny. When it is time, nothing can stop you. Not even yourself.

  “Please,” she says. “Take me with you!”

  The words twist and halt in your throat. You feel upside down. Standing over her like this, it is almost as if she is praying to you. You reach out your hand, heavy and cool, and place it over her clasped fingers.

  For ten days atop the wyvern’s back, through calm skies and one light, tropical storm through which you pray nonstop, silently like a young boy, the maiden hardly ever stops laughing. She smells a little sweet, like firewood ash.

  * * *

  She has copper hair and the dark, sandy skin of the isles you took her from. Eyes like new moons. She is very beautiful. They are all very beautiful. Sometimes you fall in love with their eyelashes, like little wings. Sometimes the constellations of their freckles, the bend of an ankle. Once you fell in love with the life-line on maiden’s palm. It seemed, to you, heartbreakingly short. You always hate this part. This love forced through your body like a potion replacing your blood . This time, you fall in love with everything.

  She has suffered. Her father, her brothers, her mother wrapped around her like chains. She was set to marry a wild man with shockingly white skin from the continent north of the islands. She hated this man, the way his breath always smelled like meat, the way he would not let her touch his bow or knives, the way he would not hold her hand but drag her places by her thin wrist. Many have suffered, you think. Suffering does not make one special.

  But she is special. That first night, when you land together on the roof of the north tower and the dark forests extend all about you like another kind of sea, she hops off the wyvern as easy as dismounting a horse. Her skin is burned from the high sun and chapped from the hard wind, but she spins on her heel and hugs the wyvern around its huge neck. It turns to look at you, with a slightly tilted head, a confusion in its eyes.

  “What’s her name?” the maiden asks.

  “That creature has no name.”

  “Can I name her?”

  You say nothing. The night howls with silence. You do not know if the heavy, sick love you feel is you or your curse.

  “I will name you Comet,” she says to it. “Because you are so free. Not even the earth can hold you.”

  * * *

  She asks to hold your sword, as if she does not know she is your captive. You wonder if you will have to explain it to her.

  “You may not,” you say. And she looks so disappointed that you let her into the armory and she picks another sword, much too big for her figure, and swings it clumsily like a club. Laughing as its weight pulls her whole body behind it.

  She does not cower from you, like most, or even scheme ways to murder you or escape you, like the smarter ones do, the tougher ones you sometimes have to lock in the dungeons. After a few weeks in which her arms grow toned and strong from swinging her new sword daily, she can lift the sword easily, and she asks you to teach her swordplay. The idea of this makes you happier than you have been in years. To have a student. To discuss the sword. And this happiness makes you feel pathetic.

  However, you are desperate, and always in love, and you show her the first form, The Eternal River. She is eager and intelligent. She absorbs it like a plant absorbing water. The second form, the third, the fourth, the fifth.

  You spar with her once she has understood the fifth form, and the curse that is always wrapped around your body like armor, like skin, feels very far away.

  You pause. She sips water from a ladle. Silk moths flutter near the torches and cast dancing shadows. She’s sweating. You are in love with her sweat. She’s breathing hard and you are not. She wipes a strand of copper hair from her brow.

  “Why am I here?” she asks. It has been months. She will not look at you now. She is frightened, as if she expects you to throw her away.

  You tell her how this works. You show her that the armor does not come off. You lead her to the back of the armory and show her your coffin. She runs her hand, freshly calloused from the sword, over the inside surface of the coffin, and you shiver as if she has touched your bare skin.

  “But you’re so powerful,” she says, still breathing a little hard. The sweat dries on her skin, and goose flesh rises on her arms. You have never felt any need as great as the need to protect her.

  “I am a prisoner,” you say, in the only voice you can remember ever having now, “as much as you are.”

  “Whose prisoner are you?” she asks.

  “My own.”

  She looks up at you. Torchlight dashes across her face like blush. “I want to be here,” she says.

  And you try, you try so hard, not to believe her.

  * * *

  Sometimes you take her flying on Comet, and she screams into the clouds, into the lightning, screams laughter. You are both soaked afterwards. You have not prayed in months, and it feels like being set free. She finds ways to make food better. She uses black fire powder as seasoning and puts ground fire chips directly into the stew. You had forgotten food. Sometimes the two of you watch the firefly comets together, sitting in opposite corners of the huge window in the east tower. The light plays in your armor, she says, like the midsummer light on the seas of her home. The air is clear and thin here, and the stars are brighter than she’s ever seen.

  A year passes. Two. Time flickers like a fire. She now sleeps in the room beside yours in the east tower. You have taught her how to read, but sometimes you still read to her as she falls asleep. Sometimes you tell her stories of the countries you have seen. The creatures you have slain. Wraiths. Bogmen. Lychen. Harpies. Men. She is wide-eyed at these tales, and hungry. There is a clean joy and desire in her. A purity which you did not think existed. She feels what she feels, and nothing else. You feel like both her father and her lover and her great devil. Is the curse purposely giving you more time with her? So that it will hurt even more when she is taken from you.

  You show her the seventh form, Sparrow’s Fall, spinning and leaping in the practice hall while she watches from the edge holding her own sword loose at her side. When you land in the final stance, low with the sword high above you ready to flow into any other step of any other form, she tells you that she thinks she is in love with you.

  Slowly, you lower the sword. Sunlight peeks through the slight windows high above as white and brittle as ice.

  “I am always in love with you,” you respond. Your voice echoes in the hall and inside your own helmet. “With all of you.”

  “I’m not joking,” she says, stepping toward you. You step back. She smiles, and it is like iron. “I love this castle. I love Comet. I love the storms and the lightning. I love the sword, god be damned I love the sword, and the firefly comets and the stars. I love hunting with you in the forest. I love that there are no laws here. I love falling asleep under quilts so heavy they make it hard to breath. I love the library. I love when you read to me—”

  “Stop.” You feel dizzy. You know not to trust yourself, or that rotten apple in your chest that you call a heart. Trul
y, it is a bundle of betrayal. It is a bundle of smooth poison.

  “Most of all,” she says. She has backed you against the wall. You want to believe in her like you want to believe in God. The high blush on her cheek, her heavy breathing, the wild shine in her eyes. Is she afraid? What is she afraid of? You want to hold her, to be held by her, to die in her arms, and at the same time, you want to strike her with your sword. “I love—”

  “When your knight comes,” you say, “he will destroy me, and he will take you from this hell and into a beautiful future from which you will forget this place completely. You will have children and a warm touch and a life. And I will be here for a long time after that. For a very long time.”

  “I don’t want children.” A beam of light falls across her face, sharp and bright, and she turns her eyes briefly away and down. Her hair glows as if it has been freshly forged. Her dark skin gleams. You are in love with this motion of hers. With every motion. “And I will never forget you.”

  “When your knight kills me,” you say.

  “Stop calling him ‘my knight.’”

  “When the knight kills me, you will.”

  She’s silent. The family of white day owls that live in the rafters flutter like impossible butterflies. You can see her mind turning like a planet crossing the sky beneath her skin. What is she planning? To trick you? Or to trick fate? She smiles into the hard sun. Her teeth white as wolf’s and just a little crooked.

  “Not if you kill him first.”

  * * *

  You, slay a knight? Impossible. Even your elder sword, capable of piecing a golden dragon’s scales, has shattered on a simple knight’s shield. It regrows with the rest of you. The curse never allows you to kill the knights. It lets you be just strong enough, lets you remember just enough swordplay, just enough of your own body, to push the knights, push them to their furthest edges but never enough to break them. You pray to encounter demons or bandits or sword masters just so that you will have something you can fight with your whole body, just so that you can move without being held back. You are probably the best swordsman alive and the worst at once. There is no one left alive who knows the thirteenth form, and only you know the twelve.