Beneath Ceaseless Skies #129

by Austin, Alec

  But it was several hours before we could ask the gentleman—if that term still applied to such a one as Odilon Barca. His soldiers escorted us into a chamber with no windows, no convenient heavy ornaments for bashing the guards, no draperies or cords for catching them up—in fact, it was as though he had read all the same adventures as I had in my youth and was determined not to be caught out by them. An extremely sturdy and hatchet-faced woman brought us a single quite durable pitcher of plain water at regular intervals, and a cursory examination made it plain that if we broke it, all we would have was greater thirst for waiting in the stuffy chamber. There was nothing to read; no sets with which to play at turnip or sneeze, to say nothing of more mature and complicated games, and I felt the loss of my expedition notes most keenly.

  I also began to wish that there were more members of the party whose stories I had not heard a dozen times or more.

  “You, Gaspar,” I said. “Are you from these parts?”

  His humble visage took on a terrified aspect. “My lady, I swear to you, I know nothing of—”

  “Peace, Gaspar. I am not questioning your loyalty. I merely wish to know whether there are any advantages to be gained from a boyhood spent in these jungles—if indeed you spent such a boyhood. If you are from the plains of Ariminia, it will avail us naught, and I will have to turn my questions to Roldao’s men in turn.”

  He relaxed visibly, and so did his master. They had been together many years, and while Plinio was often a fool and half the naturalist I believe myself to be, it warmed my heart to see his loyalty to his man. “Yes, my lady. I am from these parts. But they are not what they appear to be on the maps Lord Barca has given His Imperial Majesty. I was able to assist Lord Plinio to his discovery because I knew that our lands have a shifting and unusual character, very much like the lands to the northwest that have not fallen under—um, His Imperial Majesty’s grace.”

  My lip twitched. “Why did you say nothing of this?” But before he could answer, our host finally deigned to make his appearance.

  Odilon Barca dressed himself in what appeared at first glance to be the same livery as his soldiers, but a trained eye could see with a second look that the fabric was infinitely more costly, the stitching finer, and his epaulets and cuffs were embroidered in subtle and delicate ways. His posture, his gaze, every move that he made proclaimed that he was the lord of all he surveyed—proclaimed it more surely, my treacherous mind intimated, than the king had ever done.

  “So you have found my humble abode,” he said. “Well done, Jovita. I should have known that it would be you or Roldao, although young Calixta here was a dark horse.”

  “I beg your pardon,” said Plinio stiffly, “but I am the leader of this expedition. It was I who uncovered—” But he stopped, and I knew why. None of us had truly uncovered anything, and Plinio could not hold his head high and meet Odilon Barca’s gaze while claiming that he knew all.

  Barca turned to him. “Oh, dear dear, Plinio Invicta, you, the leader, you? How could this come to pass? You haven’t been cribbing off your servants’ notes all this time, have you?”

  “I have long been your friend, Odilon. I thought you were mine. And now I find that instead of the rightful Barca estates, you are—”

  “Making my own way in the world. I know, it’s a tad ostentatious. A little grand. But with the riches of my personal—well, ‘kingdom’ is a bit much, isn’t it? I can hardly call myself a king yet.” Odilon Barca grinned. “With what I have, I don’t have to. Come, give me your parole and I’ll show you. It’s splendid.”

  He had noticed. Roldao and I grimaced at each other. We had both relied on the fact that we had never given our words of honor to anyone that we would not try to escape, and I knew I could rely on Roldao in a pinch, even if Plinio was a soggy muffin. But giving my parole to a fellow noble—I cast a despairing glance at Jovita.

  “Oh, come, Calixta,” she said. “You know very well that honor is always second to curiosity with me, and I will give my best mottled jacana specimen if it’s not the same with you. You have my parole, Odilon. Show me what it is that you’re crowing about.”

  Roldao and I gave our parole grudgingly, and Odilon Barca led us out of our captivity, lackeys and all—I nearly stumbled over my own feet. Lackeys and all. I looked at Lygia to see if she had noticed what I had. Of course she had, clever girl. In his attention to his fellow nobles, Barca had done what all of our kind do: treated our lackeys as though they were extensions of their masters. He would no more think to ask Lygia for her parole than he would my left shoe. Which meant that half our party, at least, was free to make its escape at will.

  This meant that we only had to figure out how they could set about doing it, and what they could do once they had.

  Turning the back of my mind loose to work on that problem, I shifted the main thrust of my attention back to Barca, for we had finally departed his mansion and were about, I hoped, to see something interesting. He was not taking us out the way we had come in but instead through a pleasant back garden, green and lush and filled with the sorts of flowers that our ancestors back in the mother country would have found barbaric and appalling, with complicated, garishly colored sexual apparatus sprawling all over the plant. None of the tidy little alpine blossoms of home for our colonial lands, and as I had not grown up with those demure blooms I would never properly appreciate them.

  Barca’s garden staff were diligent but not inspired—frankly, I would have expected better of them, knowing his naturalist interests—and it was not until we entered a wooded glade that I began to see what he intended to show us.

  “Jovita, look,” I whispered.

  “The lady Calixta sees it,” said Barca with a smile, though I had not intended my voice to carry to him. My specialty is avian, not floral, as with all of us on the expedition, so it had taken me longer than it should have to notice that we were surrounded by plants not from one climate but from all, and by flowers not from one season but from all. As far as Odilon Barca’s garden was concerned, we were in every location on the continent, on every day of the year from spring through fall. Only the depths of winter in their barrenness were not represented.

  I ran my fingers over a velvety late autumn bloom. “What have you done here? It must cost a fortune in labor to keep the plants transported in and out from the—” I stopped. The rare Meldaxean jacaranda, a night-blooming plant, was flowering just before Roldao’s fingertips. He reached out to it in wonder, gaping like a child. The crimped, nearly black bud unfurled itself, deep blue sweeping out into the petals as they were freed from each other, and spread to unaccustomed light.

  “By the jaguar,” said Jovita. “This cannot be you, Barca.”

  “Would that I could gainsay you,” said Barca, sweeping her a bow, “but alas, you are correct. This is the land’s own power, not mine. I have situated my home here to take full advantage of its joys and its... more unique properties. And from here, there will only be more for me. You have noted our proximity to the capital, I hope.”

  I eyed him dubiously. The Meldaxean jacaranda is that most deplored type of flora in the king’s vocabulary: decorative. What else might bloom here, that Barca could keep servants busy harvesting? What poisons or toxins? Or—

  Roldao spoke before I could even make the thoughts coalesce in my mind. “Is it only the plants that behave so, here?”

  “No, of course not,” said Barca. “There are animals. There are even, sometimes, people. People of a sort. Have you caught a chill, Plinio? Do you wish to go in?”

  For Invicta had started to shake uncontrollably. The rest of us tried not to stare at him with too much contempt. “Our, ah, leader has had a very long day,” I said. “Perhaps some rest for us all, before we speak to you more?”

  Barca looked at me sharply, but I could meet his gaze secure in the knowledge that I had given my parole and did not intend to break it. “Come along, Plinio,” I said, bracing his shoulders and steering him back towards Barca’s mansion.
“Pull yourself together, before you shame us all.”

  “You don’t understand,” Plinio muttered as Gaspar took over the burden of supporting his master. “There are footnotes in Barca’s book—written in jest, I thought—about sowing dragon’s teeth and harvesting armies of myrmidons.” Another tremor shook him, making his teeth rattle against each other.

  I schooled my features to blankness as we reentered the mansion and cast a discrete glance at the servants and soldiers that we passed. While the servants and officers had their own faces, there was an unnerving similarity between many of Barca’s foot soldiers. Before, I had thought them to be recruited from a single tribe and their blank expressions the product of rigorous military discipline. Now their uniformity took on a darker cast, and as a servant led us upstairs to a suite of tastefully appointed guest rooms equipped with water and light snacks, I caught Roldao and Jovita exchanging worried glances.

  Once Barca’s servants had withdrawn, and Gaspar had delivered a stricken Plinio to his sickbed, I gathered the remaining members of the expedition in the atrium of our suite, where, mindful of eavesdroppers, we conferred in hushed voices.

  “So, Jovita,” I inquired. “Do you still feel honor must defer to curiosity?”

  “As yet we know nothing,” Jovita murmured. “We only suspect, and our suspicions are so outrageous that I can hardly credit them.”

  Roldao frowned, his mustaches drooping even more than usual. “We know many things, Jovita, even if Plinio’s tale of dragon’s teeth is still conjecture. We know that Barca has harnessed the power of the shifting lands, and set himself up as a petty despot. We know he has an army of no small size, and that he is poised to strike at the heart of the colonies and His Imperial Majesty’s court.”

  “We have also given our word not to take up arms against Barca, inform the king of his plans, or try to escape,” Jovita countered.

  “We have,” I said meaningfully, glancing at Lygia and those of Roldao and Jovita’s servants who were present, and leaving the corollary unspoken.

  * * *

  With Jovita and Roldao trying to find out more about the suspiciously similar-looking soldiers—and any other part of the estate or his plans that they could manage to get Barca to talk about—I turned my attention to the lackeys. “Parole is generally for nobles,” I said, as if making conversation.

  Jovita’s maid scowled at me. “Aye, that it is, milady.”

  “No one would blame a maid who left her lady’s side under such conditions.”

  “Any of us most certainly would blame a maid who acted so shabbily,” she said, glaring at Lygia as though the suggestion had come from Lygia herself. “We may not have the thought of honor you have, but—”

  “If leaving her lady’s side meant getting her lady out of a very pretty mess indeed, I expect such a maid would be rewarded handsomely.”

  “I expect such a lackey would run the devil’s own risk,” said the thinnest and dourest of Roldao’s lackeys. “There would be the matter of getting past the guards, who would know very well that the lackey was not their own man, and there would be the risk of encountering wild beasts without the entire party’s tinder and steel to protect them, and even once they’d gotten free, who’d be to say what help would come? No, milady, a lackey would have to know there was a mighty fine reason for leaving his master’s side once his master was captured and had given parole. Most times he’d be a fool to do it.”

  I leaned forward. “What if it could get the master free and contribute to science and earn a reward from the king?”

  “Kings don’t reward the likes of us,” said Lygia softly. My own Lygia. Well, I wouldn’t keep her around if I didn’t trust her judgment.

  “What if it did all that—mind you, that the masters of such lackeys would have to be trusted to pass on the king’s rewards—and got the king to go back where he came from and leave the colonies alone?”

  The room was so quiet you could have heard the buds of that jacaranda detach from each other as they unfurled.

  “How would a lackey breaking her master’s parole do all that, my lady?” said Lygia, feigning idle curiosity and tracing a pattern with the condensation from the water pitcher they’d left us.

  I had them. They would do it. Keeping Plinio from ruining the whole thing would be an undertaking, but the lackeys would be as sound a bunch of conspirators as a noble had ever wished for.

  The first part of Roldao’s lackey’s objection was, of course, the easiest. Barca’s servants were all too ready to believe that being imprisoned for even the shortest length of time would test the loyalties of lesser beings than themselves—especially when Roldao and I staged fits of rage where they would be sure to be overheard. Any lackeys worth their salt would flee being cooped up in a strange jungle manor with masters who talked to them as we did and appreciated them so little—so when Lygia muttered to the porter, “Bugger this for a lark, I have family three villages back,” he grinned and mouthed, “Good speed, then,” and let the group of them pass.

  One of the housemaids even let them take a few select bags, once she saw that they only wanted some basic supplies to help them survive in the jungle. Of course if they’d wanted to take anything fancy that their masters might have wanted, or anything with writing on it that might have been a message, the housemaid would have had to alert her master immediately. But some disaffected servants taking rope and a tent and some tins of meat to eat? What could be more natural than that? They slipped into the green night without any further disruption.

  Our part was more elaborate—at least, from the point of view of Barca’s household. Jovita and Roldao came back to report that they had seen the patch of dragon’s teeth ready to harvest, and it was not as large as they’d feared but should still serve our promises to our lackeys well enough if all went well. Barca had found a natural patch of dragon’s teeth and had husbanded them into as close and fertile a planting as the soil would bear. The harvest was a platoon of nearly-grown soldiers, their coats folded about them like glossy green and gray leaves. He would hand them their arms when their maturity was complete, but if his bragging was even close to the truth, they would come off the vine knowing how to shoot a musket, how to fence, how to fight bare-handed—even how to fire a cannon. And his intentions were no more peaceful than we had imagined.

  “Do not trouble yourselves over this detail,” I told them, “for I have turned it to our advantage.”

  Jovita tossed her greying hair. “Oh, very well then! Several dozen platoons already harvested and working away for Barca, with another at the ready, but Calixta has turned it to our advantage! I find myself more calm by the minute.”

  “Listen to what she has to say,” said Roldao. “Calixta is not given to flights of girlish fancy.”

  I bowed slightly. “Thank you, Roldao. Our duty at dinner is to convince Barca that we are part of a larger expedition headed by the Duke of Apocrita, and that this expedition is likely to come looking for us. Meanwhile our lackeys will be laying a trail that will lead him to the lair of the larger parent of the lovely creatures who visited us that evening upon the trail and played such merry games with our ironware.”

  Jovita raised an eyebrow. “Do our lackeys even know where to find such a lair? And what could motivate them to risk themselves laying such a trail?”

  “First, their affection for us is strong, and they have been made aware that we are bound by our honor not to save ourselves,” I said. “Second, we have assured them that there will be a reward and we will share it with them.”

  “Oh we will, will we?” said Jovita dryly.

  “For shame,” murmured Roldao.

  “Of course I will,” she snapped. “Do go on.”

  “Third, in addition to his gratitude and the gratitude of science, the king will be so moved by the spoils of this victory we will win for him here that he might find himself moved all the way back to the motherland.”

  Roldao’s lips moved but no sound came out.


  “You’ve gone mad,” said Jovita.

  “Think it through,” I said. “His exile here was none of his choosing, nor any of ours, and while his support for the sciences has benefited us, he also has the time and energy to tax us and our families, and to apply more royal attention to other aspects of colonial administration than we might otherwise prefer.”

  “If you call statuary ‘administration,’” said Roldao.

  “Just so,” I said. “How many of us have lost a friend, a cousin, even a parent or lover, to the king’s basilisk? We would all be better off if he had a few more troops and could stop being king-in-exile and could go back to being king in fact.”

  “The people in the homelands don’t want him any more,” said Jovita.

  “Well, no more do I,” I said. “That’s why I think we should let the shadow creature eat Barca, give the king Barca’s vine-born army, and dance a tarantella while we wave his ship goodbye.”

  As the servants had, my companions took a moment to stare at me, for I expect they had never imagined they would hear such a plan from the lips of one who carefully refrained from putting herself forward at court. But as the servants had, they came around to my way of thinking.

  Barca himself was a very different bird to lure, but we had our chance at dinner.

  “This fish is lovely, Odilon,” said Jovita. “Did you catch it here on your estates? I scarcely know what I’m eating if so.”

  “All the game and fish are fresh from the estates,” said Barca.

  “It’s a shame that—” I made a show of stopping myself.

  “No, do go on, my dear Calixta,” he said.

  “I was only thinking that the Duke of Apocrita would have enjoyed this greatly, if only he had made it this far in the expedition,” I said.

  “Foolish girl, hush,” snapped Jovita.

  Barca raised an eyebrow. “The Duke of Apocrita was among your number originally?”

  Plinio waved his wine glass. “The king forced me to take him on my expedition. You know how it is with favorites.”