Beneath Ceaseless Skies #83

by Arkenberg, Megan

  “What’s your name, child?” I said, trying to keep my voice level.

  “Isadore the Blue.” Now that she knew that her power was in the blood, she was using it to worm toward me, throwing my people back layer by layer. The settlers of Glory-Arn turned away, covering their mouths with their scarves.

  “And what have you been doing, Isadore?” I was nervous too—Glory had picked up a superstition in Ellake about blood being the conduit for spirit—but I ground my boots into the dirt and refused to hide behind my people, because I was their King Courage. I willed myself to believe that I would defeat this child in spiritual battle. She had the black craft of chaos, I had the Secret Atlas. My victory was foretold. “Why is your hand bloody?”

  She kept advancing, without answering me. Her eyes were solemn and fully awake—almost as if she had seen something terrible behind me but couldn’t tell me what. I could hear her breathing heavily, like a dog, through her swollen open mouth. Finally I said “Stop!” and one guardsman drew his sword. He swept it toward her neck but I stayed his hand; the blade tapped her skin where her jugular pulsed like a dying fish.

  “The forest is full of blood,” she said.

  As she spoke my eyes began to ache, and the settlers bundled themselves in their shawls as if assaulted by a stiff wind. My guard chased her away and, after she grabbed her sister’s hand and the two of them started running fleet between the trees, the men lifted their crossbows and shot at the little imps. The younger girl was grazed across the hip, but both climbed like squirrels into trees and were gone.

  * * *

  Glory-Arn survived for a year. Then one afternoon two courier boys completed the three-day trek to the settlement and found all the settlers dead. Not even a single crying child remained. And they were not just dead, as I understood it, but bodily destroyed. I didn’t want to hear the details. Apparently a hideous yellow-eyed monster—half-man, half-lizard, and coated in black and green swamp sludge—was still eating one of the victims. Only one courier boy escaped. He told the woodcutters who rescued him that the monster had flown howling through the trees.

  The letter from Turner was tinged with a panic I was not accustomed to reading from my military leaders. With generic enemies he would have sounded angry, calculating, but now he sounded overwhelmed. He went on for pages about all the ways he was trying to maintain control—over the situation, over himself—but control was running off the paper like wet ink:

  “We have captured several Doe-in-the-Dark tribesmen. Under duress they told us that the monsters are called Garrow-Low and live in the great swamp at the center of the forest. These Garrow-Low are possessed of black magic from that swamp. The tribesmen say these beings only attack those that bother them, but the savagery at Glory-Arn was clearly unprovoked. I do not know if the Doe-in-the-Dark are in league with the monsters. Can’t be sure. They say they run from Garrow-Low, but why did they not warn us about monsters in the swamp?”

  I dreaded evenings, when couriers brought letters from the colonies. Letters from the Span and the Blue Belt and Halzi and Ellake—I could not read them until opening the sloppily-addressed envelope from the forest, still rank with the smell of wet earth.

  Each letter was worse than the last—”Three woodcutters were slaughtered by Garrow-Low yesterday, in broad daylight,” “We are temporarily moving women and children out of the forest,” “We set traps but only caught worthless, cowardly Doe-in-the-Darks. The Enemy moves in secret ways. The men have suggested burning the forest to the ground. I have dreamed of this myself, as I hate this forest. But when we launched torches at the swamp, we discovered to our horror that Garrow-Low consume fire!”

  I imagined Turner’s scribe huddled over a dying candle as darkness licked their cabin, and when I closed my eyes I saw those enormous pines moving in deep concert with each other like they were all part of one world-swallowing creature’s shaggy coat. It was The Boar, of course, the very same that had haunted me since I took its life as a child. Silent now save for the roaring wind. Running within it was the strange Doe-in-the-Dark girl that had told me the forest was full of blood. Isadore the Blue. If she was afraid of The Boar she did not show it; I chased after her legs and she moved nimble and spry through the Boar’s—the forest’s—denseness. In every dream I was terrified that the trees might shift as the entity turned over and reveal The Boar’s hideous, swampy mouth.

  “Keep the settlers safe,” I had my own scribe write back, and because I had to show them courage, “I will leave tomorrow.”

  * * *

  By the time I reached the forest, our soldiers had scored a minor victory: they’d found a group of slow, elderly Garrow-Low and succeeded in killing them and dragging the bodies out of the forest. Swanson, a highly intelligent man who kept a catalog of all the animals and vegetation we’d plucked from the forest, poked at the cadavers and concluded that the source of their magic lay in their unnaturally long, stretchy limbs. I went to see the specimens, because I thought I should know the face of the Enemy—my father would have been in there prodding and cutting himself—and immediately wished I hadn’t. Cleaned of swamp sludge they looked like the gray ice mummies that had been found in caves along the Blue Belt.

  “They’re all muscle,” said Swanson. “In their prime they must be fantastically strong.” He twirled his obsidian scalpel. “At least now we know what to cut off.”

  The Treaty of Cooperation was my idea. I knew the soldiers resented it, because it is a show of weakness to rely on others—especially those whose lives are not foretold in the Secret Atlas—but I did not think we could win the war alone. We did not know the forest or the Garrow-Low half as well as the Does-in-the-Dark did, and if their tribe had managed to avoid annihilation, I wanted to know their secret. Turner said that Does-in-the-Dark had no pride or honor and would betray us in an alliance, but then another unit of our soldiers was swallowed by a pit of black quicksand, a Garrow-Low trap, and their polished bones spat up for other men to find. Turner conceded the issue. My advisors praised my wisdom.

  The Does-in-the-Dark refused to leave the forest to meet with us, so we generously agreed to meet them in a little grove that they promised would be safe from Garrow-Low. I would like to say that we strode through the trees with our banners aloft, but we did not; we crept.

  It was a night meeting. The Does-in-the-Dark had lit a fire and a whole throng of them were gathered around it—some sitting on the leaf-strewn ground, some hanging from the trees. I made the mistake of looking up. Standing in that grove was like standing at the bottom of a very deep well—I could see stars but I couldn’t feel the escape they promised—except tribesmen came out of these walls. All of their faces, even the chief’s, were marked by the same hand.

  This chief’s name was Call the Green. He sat opposite me with the fire between us, and was one of a very few of his people who could look at us without twitching. His fingers were stubbier than those in the handprint, but who else could have marked them? I looked for Isadore the Blue, and to my surprise she was standing behind the chief. Her pose was that of a guardsman—I’d seen it in my own men. She had grown by a whole head since I last saw her, but she was still miniature compared to my guard. The stare she threw my way was colder now.

  “I can see that you are a decent man,” I said, although I had no idea. The placidity of Call the Green’s expression left me uncertain that he could even understand me. “I hope that we can find common ground against a common enemy.”

  “We have lived with them for ages. Garrow-Low do not hunt us if we stay out of their way,” said Call the Green.

  I shook my head. “You deceive yourself. The Garrow-Low are the most brutal race we have ever encountered. They are barbaric, they do not know decency. They’ve killed our children without a thought. I’m sure they’ve done the same to yours. It’s time to put a stop to their evil, because they will destroy you in the end. You must take a stand now. With us.”

  “You do not understand. The Garrow-Low do not hunt
us if we stay out of their way. But your people do.”

  I was so surprised that I was silent, but Turner made a dismissive grunt. Call the Green frowned at him deeply. “My friends were killed by your hand. You or one of these others....” He nodded at the guardsmen standing around me, who narrowed their eyes and ground their teeth. “Garrow-Low do not string their prey up in trees and leave them there.”

  I thought again of the dead wolf hanging outside the palace. Call the Green’s face was like rock now, and I wondered if that was what old unvanquished grief looked like: an impassable boulder. Isadore the Blue was, for once, looking away from me. The others didn’t defend themselves, so I had to try my best. Try my best is all I’ve ever done, I’m afraid. “I am sorry,” I said to Call the Green, though my father would have said it was beneath me, “But this is no time to dwell on mistakes. We face a much greater evil now. Innocents are being killed. The Garrow-Low are beyond all—”

  “We will not hurt you, King Courage.” He was only imitating the sound of my name, not its meaning. Judging by what he said after this, I did not think he understood the word: “We will not help you either. Same with the Garrow-Low. We have no stake in your war. If you control the forest...,” he held his hand up as if to signify the sky instead, “or if Garrow-Low control the forest, it is the same for us.”

  He hadn’t seemed like a shameful man, but Glory said I gave people too much credit. I didn’t understand what was wrong with this man and his handprinted people that they could put us and the Garrow-Low in the same sentence, give us the same weight. Some things—like waving bloody hands at a king—can be excused, attributed to pure primitivity. But being unable to distinguish between good and bad? Living in the chaos of the forest must have damaged these people’s moral compass. Damaged it, or prevented them from developing one at all.

  Turner spat in their fire. “You’re dishonorable cowards,” he said, glaring at the colorful faces that surrounded us. “You’d rather sit in your trees and hide. Wait the war out instead of fighting in it. Well, God judges. Men judge too.”

  “Yes,” said Call the Green, staring at Turner.

  Isadore the Blue led us out of the grove. My guard ignored her and stomped ahead into the maze of trees—all the trunks were black in the dark—where they waited for me, because I was waiting for her. She was still a girl. I wanted so much to rescue her from this depraved life where the Secret Atlas was no different from viscous swamp magic. “You must tell him to change his mind,” I said, “or you must leave. Just you. If the Garrow-Low don’t kill you....”

  “You will?” she said, and then her voice sank to a growl. “I hope you kill each other off.” She jutted her chin at three guardsmen who were mumbling to each other and hissed at them: “Ay. Take one step back, you’ll be bones in a Garrow-Low pond.” The three lifted their heels in a hurry. Isadore the Blue gave me a stare harder than her little body should have been capable of and then loped back to her people.

  * * *

  Crossgold, the great explorer, had a winter homecoming. He had become very ill at last, and when Glory and I went to him his skin was yellowed and loose and reeking of the animal oils he’d used in Halzi to keep himself young. Glory sat at Crossgold’s left side and did not speak, because she knew I was angry with the man and wanted me to have the first word. But it was Crossgold, as always, who spoke first.

  “Pardon me for missing your daughter’s wedding,” he wheezed. “I hear it was joyous.” Maybe; it was as joyous as weddings could be under the war’s rain cloud. Faith had certainly been radiant, standing under the globe-shaped chandelier that signified the promise of an ordered world. But even then I could feel the threat of violence coursing beneath, like a snake under a blanket. All my thoughts were with that forest. Always, with the pine trees. By the time Crossgold’s caravan arrived, fighting had resumed again. I was always glad to have it in the open, to have people in the city be quiet and understand the smallness of their lives compared to this War of Our Time, as the poets were calling it.

  “You said nothing about monsters in the swamp,” I said. “Did you know they were there? Did you know how strong and ruthless they are, when you told me to move settlers in?”

  “It was foretold,” Crossgold said, closing his eyes. I hissed. Glory and I did not speak anymore of anything being foretold—the Atlas had not been added to for years, except where diamonds marked battlefields—we spoke solely the language of loss and slippage. “Not all is bad. Timber is still extracted, sometimes.”

  “Five soldiers were ambushed last week. Only their heads were untouched. We are being mocked. We are being killed.” It was a pity, Turner wrote, as it always is, because they had been crawling along the edge of the swamp for weeks, taking out the enemy where they could, and were finally on their way home. They’d been boys when the Garrow-Low destroyed Glory-Arn. “That is where you sent us. That is your beautiful forest.”

  “Nothing is easy, King Courage,” Crossgold whispered. “Sometimes you have to stick the boar over and over. I thought you understood this. Your father did.”

  “And yet you lacked the wisdom to see that I am not my father. I cannot see us through this. I will lead us into ruin, I will lose us everything!”

  Crossgold groaned and ceased to respond. He was pretending to have died; Glory saw through it and did not make the appropriate gestures. Instead she said to me, “The Atlas can never be undone. No enemy, no death, can ever erase what our people have accomplished.”

  “Yes,” I said, bitterly. It was the War of Yes—”yes, burn it,” “yes, seize them,” “yes, attack.” Yes, yes, yes, and it never seemed to be enough. Just recently I’d said Yes to our soldiers destroying a Garrow-Low nest filled with squealing young. Glory said, “fewer left to fight,” and I said Yes to that too. I felt as if I was hurtling through the air toward some dark point I couldn’t see and I couldn’t stop myself, not even to fall.

  That night Crossgold truly did die, and I received another letter from the front. A Doe-in-the-Dark under interrogation had let slip the name of the soldiers’ killer, and it was no Garrow-Low. It was Isadore the Blue. Their coward-chief’s guardswoman, as Turner wrote, but first she had been my darling. When Turner and his men stormed the Doe-in-the-Dark hamlets she disappeared into the topmost tree branches, because she had no honor as Turner said, but he swore—to me, to the soldiers’ families—that he’d find her. I didn’t doubt him.

  When I read this terrible news I tried to drop the letter, but it clung to my fingers like a spiderweb. The ache in my eyes was back, hammer-pounding with every blow this child must have thrown, and now my neck was pulp as well. Glory asked, “Are you all right?” from the divan—I could barely hear her over the trumpets of mourning and the clamor in my own head—and I had to answer, “No. I am not.”

  * * *

  I spent years hoping she would never be found. I imagined her crossing the Span, swimming across the waters of Ellake, finding her way to a land we somehow had not touched. A land that was Unforetold, if such a place was possible. My children did say I was losing my mind.

  After Turner died of liver poisoning without having found her I thought maybe she had escaped. I should have known she would not leave her people, just as I would never leave mine. Three months after our settlers turned the forest into timber, Turner’s replacement, Porter, wrote to inform me that she had been found. At last.

  When they brought her to the capital courthouse I could still see the handprint on her face under the grime and dried blood earned in the prison carriage. All her limbs were still attached, at least, and she could still stand, although not without rocking back and forth as if on the deck of a ship. I looked at her when she was brought onto the courtroom floor, and she returned my gaze. I expected to see hatred in her eyes because I didn’t know how she could have killed those men without it, but there was only fatigue. Her eyes did not have their old penetrative glare; I was afraid her will was gone. I wondered if she didn’t recognize me anymore. I
barely recognized myself.

  They had refurnished the courthouse when the war ended. The inquisitor’s new seat was carved from the resinous pinewood of what we now called Gloria Forest. I didn’t know the inquisitor, although my son Valor assured me that he was very shrewd and had peered down at many a murderer and traitor. Valor didn’t understand why I had dragged myself out of bed to attend the trial. “She’s just a mad Doe-in-the-Dark,” he said. “I must learn how to handle these rebels, but you shouldn’t trouble yourself with it anymore.” How Glory would have praised him, if she had been with us.

  Valor wanted the Does-in-the-Dark relocated—to where, he never said—but I had made them a permanent preserve in the grove where Call the Green had rebuked me. I’d visited this preserve—to pay penance, I suppose—and seen them pacing, picking at their sores and sharpening their daggers, as great trees fell around them.

  The inquisitor began, “Isadore the Blue—”

  “Princess Courage!” someone shouted in the gallery. It was a Doe-in-the-Dark who had snuck into court by dressing nicely and covering his handprint with a hood. “Princess Courage, we believe in you! Fight forever!” I recognized the adoration on his face as the same love the settlers at Glory-Arn had shown me when they clasped their hands, gazed up at me, and hoped....

  The Doe-in-the-Dark was seized and removed. My son shook his head in disbelief, muttering, “They are so disrespectful of you, father,” although I did not feel disrespected. Several nobles I couldn’t identify laughed on beaded cushions. Isadore the Blue didn’t respond. She continued to rock, toes to heels. What was she dwelling on? The trees she could no longer climb?

  The inquisitor began again, “Isadore the Blue, we accuse you of conspiring with the Enemy to murder five of our soldiers. What do you say?”

  At first she didn’t say anything, but the guards tapped her with spears and after a sharp inhale she said, “Yes, I killed them.” She certainly sounded like she had been put through the wheel of order—she sounded crushed up, ground up. “But not for Garrow-Low.”