A short time later she was climbing the serried stone pillars to the temple ruins. From their rounded heads she could see clear to the Edge of Beyond. She passed under a colonnade of fat, banded pillars.
Darden was lolling in a shady portico.
“What have we here?” he said, grinning sardonically at her appearance. “Half a week without me to look after you, and see what happens.”
Orana tried to smile. “I thought you were dead.”
“No! The other fools are probably done for. I left them at the wreck. I found where you must have landed. And knowing how contrary you are it was easy to take up your trail.” His eyes flashed, and she shifted uneasily. “You took good care of your seeds and my sword, I hope.”
“They’re at the village. You met the children?”
“I taught one little fool a lesson. The rest were too stupid to get me something to eat, so I came up here to wait for you.”
“Are you hungry?” Orana asked softly. “I’ll get you something, Darden.”
“Do that. Bring those items.”
She returned an hour later with a repast prepared from the children’s stores.
“Is it edible?” he asked, sneering. He took up a fruiting body and bit into it, frowning. Parts of it were curiously lumpy and stringy. “The ova, love.”
She handed him the compact. He opened it, then snapped it shut. “I must be seeing things,” he said, taking another bite. “It looks empty to me.”
“It is empty.”
The scar on the side of his face turned white. “Where are they?”
“I used them up.”
“All of them? Out here?”
“The children needed my help,” she said.
He smiled, but his eyes danced with malice. “And my sword?” he asked. “Did you bring that, too?”
“Here,” she said, handing it to him.
Quite calmly, he shook it straight. “You’ve been using it,” he said. “Interesting.” He got to his feet, standing over her. “You shouldn’t have wasted them. You realize that.”
She took three steps backward, but her eyes met his without fear. Her antennae were pulsing. “I brought your food up here instead of bringing you down to the village,” she said, “because I didn’t want the children to see.”
“See what?” he asked, looking slightly confused, as though he were forgetting something. He winced and put his hands to his head.
“I had a flash of insight yesterday,” she said. “All these years I’ve been preserving the ova because they meant I was something special. They meant I was still worthy of your protection. It’s fitting that I devote the last one to you. You may not have noticed, but you just swallowed it. Let it unfurl now, and prove that even your mind, Darden, can give birth to beauty.”
A hard lump was forming on Darden’s brow. Orana began singing. Darden stumbled into the center of the court and fell to his knees. Tendrils snaked out of his mouth and nostrils and the ducts beside his eyes. Roots descended from his breeches to feel over the paving stones. Tentacles exploded from his skull.
Orana turned her back on him and descended to the village.
There the children gathered around her, touching her, calling her name. Some of the littler ones confused it with “Mama,” and she did not correct them.
At the summit of the island an anemone had grown up to overshadow the temple. Seraphim went back and forth among its tendrils, and it waved like a sea-flower of glass and gold.
Copyright © 2016 Raphael Ordoñez
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Raphael Ordoñez is a mildly autistic writer and circuit-riding college professor living in the Texas hinterlands, eighty miles from the nearest bookstore. His stories have appeared multiple times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and his novels, the first two in a planned tetralogy, are available from Hythloday House. He blogs sporadically about fantasy, writing, art, and life at raphordo.blogspot.com.
Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies
A DEEPER GREEN
by Samantha Murray
Summers in the colony were bright and brief, like a taste of the light golden sap of the maka-tree, burning the lips with its searing sweetness. Children splashed gaily in the green, green Odaay river, their mothers staying to chat with each other as they warmed their skin outside.
Inside her uncle’s mind, Juvianna could not feel the sun.
There, it was dank and fetid, with a pervasive smell that reminded her of a wet swim-tunic sitting too long in a pile in the corner of her hut. The dim shapes of memories and emotions writhed and coalesced at her periphery, like vegetation moving in slow water. She brushed through them, drawn by the instinct that was her gift. There. A tight hard new memory, which smelt like rot. She felt a shudder in her chest as she touched the memory with her mind, feeling the heat within it, and plucked it away.
It flailed where she had ripped it loose, but it was already dying and disintegrating, dripping away, gel-like, till it was gone.
That was the easy part.
Juvianna moved again lightly through the flotsam of emotions. The memory she had pulled out had not formed in isolation. There, a root stemming from her uncle’s need to look good in the eyes of the elders of the colony; there, a tendril of envy over his neighbor’s hut, and there, her uncle’s rage, inflamed and pulsing and curling in on itself. Juvianna soothed and smoothed, paring and pruning back those emotions, plunging deeper into the murk of her uncle’s fear and spite.
Even when she was done, it took a while to come back. It took longer now than when she had started more than a year ago; it was easier to get in, easier to see the way and shape what she found, but harder, harder each time get back and see the world again. The streets, caked with red-brown mud; the laughter the sun brought to the colony for a short time every year; children darting and dripping from their swim. Sights and sounds of these wafted in through her aunt’s window, but they only dimly intruded at the very edges of Juvianna’s awareness, even though her eyes were open.
A pressure at her right hand, squeezing. Juvianna blinked. She felt a trickle of sweat run down between her shoulder blades, she heard the high-pitched squeal of children outside and could smell ravberries and roasted quintbeast drying in the sun.
“Ju,” a voice said softly at her side.
It was Davvi of course. The sight of him prickled her because she knew he didn’t want to be there. And as always, when she returned she felt exposed and naked, and like she needed to plunge herself in the Odaay river to feel clean again.
“Leave me alone,” she muttered.
Davvi released her hand and winced slightly. He hesitated, and she thought he was going to speak, but then he left without a look.
He’d be back. Often she thought she had pushed against him so hard that he would find a way out of this duty he detested, and be gone for good. But he was always there, the next time.
Juvianna’s aunt looked into the room and entered hesitantly. “How is he?” she asked.
Juvianna looked at her uncle, slumped in his carved wooden chair. He would sleep for a while, she knew. She also knew that when he woke he wouldn’t be quite the same man.
He’d be calmer, more peaceful, purged of the resentment that had layered and layered over itself creating twisted spirals of spite. He’d be a little vague and absentminded for a while too, but that was only temporary.
“He’ll be fine,” she said.
Her aunt still looked worried. “I didn’t know he had it in him. He had a bit of a temper when he was younger you know, but... oh and Rinaald, he’s always been the most bothersome of neighbors but he’s harmless he is, and you should see his poor face.” Juvianna had not been there when her uncle had bashed Rinaald with the chair leg, but she had a vivid picture from his mind of Rinaald’s nose and the left side of his face, red and pulpy like overripe varmelon. “Oh, and what will I say to Silveena in the marketplace? I can’t show my face!”
“Hush,” Juvianna said
gently. “It’s diaforra now,” she reminded her.
Diaforra—it didn’t exist anymore. The perpetrator had been wiped of the event and its precursors, and was no longer to blame. Diaforra, it was a ghost word, belonging to no-one, nothing.
“Yes,” her aunt murmured, straightening. She moved forward as if to touch Juvianna’s cheek but let her hand drop. No one touched Juvianna. Davvi was the only one who dared, but he was also the one who dared disapprove of her, and the only one who dared to get cross with her and treat her like a child.
Juvianna had to shield her eyes from the glare of the sun as she left the hut and stepped back into the street. She could feel the heat of the path under her bare feet, the hardness of the cracking mud. It felt like she had spent hours inside the hut, but the red sun had barely moved across the sky.
Her aunt had not thanked her. It was not the done thing to thank her, not that the word seemed to spring to many lips. It was her maka, her duty. Juvianna had been declared attitra of the colony two years ago, after her father’s accident. Her father had been attitra before her, and her grandfather before that. The colony was small, too small—it was devastating to lose a member, both for the breeding pool and for the essential functions that each carried out. Losing one diminished them all. Before this the punishment for violence against another colonist had been death. Since the gift of attitra there was an alternative.
“Excuse me, Juvianna,” said a middle-aged man on the path, stepping out of her way.
“It’s ok,” said Juvianna shortly. Everyone was so polite to her that they didn’t seem to notice if she wasn’t all that polite back. Davvi always noticed, but then he would. Then he’d be disapproving. They can’t help it, Ju, he’d say, with his irritating habit of shortening her name. Of course he’d take their side, he was one of them after all.
When she was closer to the river someone called her name. She recognized Staal, the mair’s youngest son. He dropped his eyes before her as most people did, but then he raised them halfway up with something in them that made her feel clammy and hemmed in.
“You’re requested at Council. Hour next,” Staal said.
“Council, why?”
“Is it for you to question, Attitra?” he said with an odd little smirk at his lips. “The mair wants you to be there.” Juvianna could not argue the mair’s wishes.
“All right,” she said ungraciously, and turned on her heel.
After trekking in the heat following the Odaay further upstream Juvianna reached her destination: a rocky outcrop that overhung the river, shaded by the broad leaves of the maka-trees. She let out her breath in a puff of annoyance when she saw Davvi there already. He stood, body poised, and Juvianna saw the arc of the stone he had just thrown against the bright blue of the sky, before it sent up a splash and disappeared into the green. He looked fit, hunt-ready, she hardly ever noticed his limp these days.
“What are you doing here?” Juvianna said.
He turned at her approach. “This is my favorite place,” he snapped.
“Mine too,” she said shortly. Both of them already knew this. Davvi reached down for another stone.
It was too hot to argue. At least Davvi wasn’t afraid of her, and at least he wasn’t polite; even her own family were killingly polite. Juvianna sat down on the ledge, dangling her legs over the side and watched the sparkle of the river a meter below her feet. She picked up a stone, smooth and cool to her fingertips, and tossed it out towards the water. It didn’t even go half as far as the one Davvi had thrown.
Davvi’s maka was as her minder. She knew he would rather be hunting with most of the other young men his age, but his leg made it hard for him to keep up. Juvianna resented that she was the first attitra to have a minder. It’s because I’m a girl, she often grumbled to herself. But she knew that wasn’t true, or not completely. It was because of how her father had died.
“I’m called to Council, hour next,” she threw her words to the side, a peace-offering.
Davvi looked at her. The peevishness left his face and was replaced by a faintly worried look. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” Juvianna admitted. “I guess I’ll find out.” In the colony gossip ran like wildfire through tall grass. Juvianna was always officially summoned to Council if her gift was needed, but she usually had a pretty good idea who had done what and why she was required. And it was so soon after her last call. In summer, the colonists were usually more relaxed. It was the long, cold winters, when the colony moved to the underground caves, that patience chipped and shattered like thin ice, and little things stewed and brewed large in the darkness, like the shadows cast on the walls of the caves.
* * *
Staal was there to usher her into the Council. She hoped he would leave once she was inside, but he made his way to the back of the room.
It was dim inside as the Council hut had no windows, and Juvianna stood in the entry, waiting for her eyes to adjust after the bright sunshine outside.
“For our next order of business we welcome our attitra Juvianna,” she recognized the precise, moderated tones of the mair. As the shadows began to make sense she saw him sitting there, a short man, but bulky. He looked directly at her with eyes that didn’t waver.
“My maka for the good of all,” Juvianna said the traditional words. She recognized all six council members, but it was the mair she addressed.
“Your call, this morning?” queried Javv, the Council member she liked the most.
“It is done.”
“Rinaald will need some weeks to recover.” Luperrt, a wiry, graying Council member said.
Juvianna nodded. She was not surprised.
“His skills in making the traps will be sorely missed in that time.”
“Yes.” She knew that. Where were they going with this?
“We still have Bennart to work on the food storage preparation which is useful,” Luperrt added. Juvianna was not expecting this. To mention her uncle in connection with Rinaald’s injuries skirted on the edge of the forbidden. It was diaforra. “But we are still left lacking. Losing one, even for a time, diminishes us all. Do you understand?”
Juvianna nodded again. Of course she understood; it was in part why her calling was so important to the colony.
“What if we could save not just one, but both?” It was the mair speaking now, in his soft, even voice that could somehow cut right through a crowd.
Now Juvianna did not understand. She could do nothing for Rinaald’s face; she was not a healer, that was not her maka.
“Your maka benefits us all,” the mair continued. It was more acknowledgment than she usually received. “But perhaps you could do more.”
“More?” The word tumbled from Juvianna’s lips in her surprise.
Then they told her how her maka was to grow, and what they wanted her to do.
* * *
Davvi was not happy. Juvianna could read it in the tension in his stride, the small crease lodged between his brows.
“This does not feel right,” he said finally, as they neared Hensson’s hut, way down close to the shore of the Odaay.
Juvianna kept walking. “Oh really?” she said, glaring at him.
“No, it doesn’t. Ju—” He grabbed her arm and stopped her. “There are a lot of people who are not too happy about this.”
She had been at the public audience. She had heard the rumble of concern, of dissent, passing through the crowd, like low-key thunder grumbling on the horizon, when the mair had spoken of Juvianna using her gift as a preventative measure rather than just a reactive one. But the mair, by pure force of personality coming through his cool and persuasive words, had led the colony back around, gentled their protests before they could build into a storm. He had spoken to their need to feel safe. At the back of their minds, they all knew winter would return. How the darkness would worm its way into the minds of people they knew as their neighbors and friends when they were too long without a glimpse of the sun.
“They listened
to the mair,” she said. “If I could save someone... Losing one—”
“—diminishes us all. Yes, yes we all know that, Ju. These people haven’t done anything. Going hunting in their minds...”
“They haven’t done anything—yet,” countered Juvianna. “If you could have felt what it was like in my uncle’s mind, what I find in any of their minds... it is better with it gone, believe me.”
“You are not a god, Juvianna.”
Against her will, she felt herself start to shake. “I never said I was a god. I never asked to do this—they asked this of me... it is my maka, this is my call. You can’t deny your maka, you know that. It is banishment, or death. This is who I am.” And then, because she felt like her stomach was rolling and dragging her like the currents of the Odaay, the heat left her voice and she knew she was truly asking, “What do you want me to do?”
Davvi softened then. “I don’t know,” he said quietly.
Juvianna looked at him a long moment. “We all have our maka, even if we find it disagreeable,” she shot at him. Davvi of all people should understand that.
She stalked into Hensson’s hut, not particularly expecting him to follow. He did though.
Hensson was a middle-aged man, timid, yet with a history of being aggressive and antagonistic under the effects of varmelon wine, or any other summer-brewed intoxicant. He had never in the past crossed the line that would have had Juvianna called to him, but the Council considered him at risk, and not an asset to the colony. His maka was as fisherman, not that he was particularly good at it.
He reacted to Juvianna with politeness that had a tremble underneath it, and his nervousness did not seem allayed by the presence of Davvi.
Juvianna spoke the new words, “I offer you banishment or release of the darkness.” Usually she said death or release, but as he had not committed a crime, death was not on the table here. It did not matter—banishment and death were essentially the same thing. Where would he go, how would he survive if cast out? There were stories of another colony, far, far to the west. But stories wouldn’t save him when winter hit.
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