Beneath Ceaseless Skies #169, Page 2

  “I know where we’re going.”

  The sour-ashy smell doesn’t go away. It gets thicker, as if the forest is burning up ahead. I look through the trees, study shadows to see what is there—a single hunter, a whole pack of men, or something else entirely? Among the shadows between the trees, a flash glints that might be light reflecting off a spear point, or might be the glee-filled eyes of some demon. I pull a stone from my pouch that I can throw.

  “What are you looking for, Marha?” Elu’s voice has gone low; she already knows.

  “Stick close,” I say. “Be ready to run.”

  She grips her staff two-handed. It’s a tool with many uses.

  Dusk has fallen, and that’s when I see the first one, a shadow breaking off from the trees, hooting a signal across the way to a figure up ahead. I veer; Elu is right with me, I don’t have to worry. We move fast without running, because I expect at any moment I’ll need to turn and fight.

  I can’t see how many there are. Dozens, I assume. They might be merely men—bad enough. But demons also have arms and legs, wear coats of fur and carry spears. Until I see their eyes I won’t know for certain.

  The light is failing, the world is gray. Up ahead the trees break, revealing a hill of rocks—a natural outcrop, not a cairn, though I’m not sure until we reach it and see the tumbled edges and cracked breaks between stones.

  “Up!” I call to Elu, because the outcrop is defensible. With a running start, she scrambles up the side. I turn, spear out, to defend her.

  I still don’t know how many there are, but a javelin flies from the trees and strikes granite by my head.

  “Mahra!” Elu calls, reaching for me. I retrieve the fallen javelin first and take Elu’s hand.

  We are on the rocks, and there are three of them, wild men in rough furs, taunting us—I don’t understand their language, which means they must come from some far-off land even more wild than this. Another world, maybe. In the lowering dark, with their hulking furs, they stop being men and start being large stoats or small bears, or both together. Creatures of fur that speak words. I look for glints of red in their eyes.

  They will be up the rocks in moments unless I stop them. But as Elu said, patience and accuracy will always win out, so I pause, take a deep breath, and throw the rock I’ve been holding.

  My target howls and falls back. Next, I thrust my spear down at another one of them; the sharpened point catches fur, digs in. He grunts but doesn’t fall. I pull back, slash forward—and throw the borrowed javelin in my other hand while he is distracted. It strikes him. He falls but isn’t dead. What will it take to kill them? I have to kill them, if we’re going to get off this rock and escape.

  I turn to check on Elu—she’s gasping for breath, but she is safe behind me on the pinnacle of the outcrop. She looks over my shoulder; the third has bided his time.

  A hand grabs my ankle, another stabs at me—a stone sharpened to a blade. I can’t yank away fast enough but manage to hold back a scream as the edge slices through my naked calf.

  Elu skids along the rock beside me and jabs with her staff, cracking my attacker in the face with its oaken head. Bone crunches. I know that sound from killing rabbits.

  The fallen figure is nothing more than a furry lump on the ground.

  I set my jaw, resettle my spear in my hands. I am not angry, I am calm. I have my task: to stop them, so we can move on. The first two come again. Blood pouring from my leg has made the rock slippery so I have to brace carefully. I kick, stab, slash—they fall back again, and I scramble up the rock to a higher purchase. Elu hands me two good solid stones she has found, broken pieces from the cracks in the outcrop. I throw, throw again. I’m good with stones. Our attackers lie there, senseless.

  My leg throbs. Nothing left of it but flowing red, it feels like.

  “Oh Mahra, Mahra!” Elu cries. She’s cut a strip of leather from one of her pouches and moves to bind the wound.

  “We don’t have time, we have to run before they come at us again.”

  “You can’t run!”

  “I will, you’ll help.” I let her wrap the strip of leather around my leg because that seems prudent. The pressure of the bandage at least cuts down the throbbing pain.

  Gripping each other’s arms for balance and reassurance we climb to the other side of the outcrop, slide down, and run. I stumble at first—the pain jabbing up my leg surprises me. But then I ignore it, and we run more sure. If I am confident, Elu won’t stop.

  Eventually, we leave that sour-ashen smell behind. I decide it wasn’t the smell of old campfires at all but the smell of hungry demons.

  * * *

  We have to camp yet again. We will never reach Behru. Elu fusses over my wound. The skin hangs loose from the muscle. In the morning light we both look at it, ugly and scabbed over with clotted blood. Horrified, I might faint at its mangled shape, so I look at the trees in the glade we’ve sheltered in. I think Elu might scream, but she finds water, washes the wound, and then binds it all back together with strips of leather.

  “We should move in case they come back,” I say.

  “I’ve put charms every half a foot around this place, they won’t find us. Heal. I command it.”

  I start to say I don’t trust our charms anymore. But my leg is on fire, and what else are we going to do? I trust Elu.

  She chatters brightly to distract me. It’s like the day we started out. “You were magnificent. I’ll make a song of how you fought.”

  “If I’d been faster my leg wouldn’t be hurt.”

  “You know what? We’ll tell folk we fought off wolves. A pack of wolves, and you drove them all off with nothing but your spear and your battle cries.”

  I have to smile. She commands it. “Demons. They were terrible demons.”

  “Demon wolves,” she adds. “Worst kind.”

  They might as well have been. It makes a good story.

  * * *

  My leg hurts, but in two days we walk on. I’m too restless not to, but I have to limp along using my spear as a crutch.

  The clouds break the next day, bringing sun. My skin stings with the heat, and it feels marvelous to push back my hood and rub the itch out of my hair. Elu smiles, squinting into the sky. It’s like she’s found the gods again.

  Near dusk, we find stones. It isn’t Behru—Behru is a whole complex, tombs surrounded by rings of stones and altars, with a village nearby to oversee it. This is three simple stones in a clearing surrounded by oak groves. They are our height, small enough around to hug, in a straight line. Grass has grown up around their bases, but there are no lichens growing on them. They might have been here a decade, or a hundred years. Not longer than that.

  “It’s a summer line,” Elu says, looking at the sky, sighting along her staff. “It aligns to the solstice.”

  Even in autumn, when the sun has moved low, she can see this.

  “Abandoned?” I ask.

  “Nothing is ever really abandoned,” she says. “Something lives here, no doubt.” Her brow furrows; she presses her palm to the stone as if she feels a heartbeat. “They buried a bad harvest here, and plague. This is a tomb for ill fortune.”

  I want to run, then. “We should go. We must be close to Behru.”

  Turning to march away, I trip. My injured leg gives way, my foot catching on a tuft of clover, a dry stick, something, and I fall. I never fall. I’m not like Elu, looking up when I should be watching the earth. I know before I hit the ground that we are captured. My foot is stuck to the ground, my wound screams in pain, my hands are bound, I cannot see by what. My spear has fallen. It’s the bog for us, then.

  Elu stands over me now, putting herself between me and... something. She is looking right at a thing that I cannot see and shouting curses, holding the stone she has been carving out straight-armed, like a shield, as if it will protect us.

  A long moment passes, and I only hear her heavy breathing, and mine. Hand shaking, she reaches for me. I can raise my hand now, and I d
o so. When she grabs hold the weight comes off me, I can move again, though the throbbing pain keeps me on the ground. I retrieve my spear; even seated on the ground I hold it defensively. Elu stands over me with her staff, waiting.

  A woman is sitting on the ground with her back against the center stone.

  I know she is a goddess because she is too beautiful to look at. I turn away, my eyes watering, and sneak glances. She is a hunter, a shaggy gray hound at her side. Her spear tip gleams bronze—a rare and holy thing. She is like me but better. My better self, what I aspire to be but will never reach in all my striving, in all the silent vows I’ve made to bring Elu safe to Behru. She is Canna the Hunter.

  “Oh my dears,” the goddess says. “I have been watching you.”

  “You have been harrying us!” Elu says, much more sharply than she should. She bows her head in a late apology.

  “Elu, no,” I murmur, putting a hand on her thigh, the only part of her I can reach. Canna is not her goddess, she wouldn’t understand. Her gods live in the sky and the stones. Mine walk upon the earth, among living things. Elu can be angry, but I can only weep.

  Canna looks at Elu, back at me. Her face is young; her eyes are like a grandmother’s, full of scolding wisdom.

  “Do you know it was me?” Canna says. “The world is full of gods and spirits.”

  What can we say? The words of Elu’s song pass through my mind.

  “Command me,” I say, struggling to get on my knees. I cannot speak for Elu, who stands at my side as if she will protect me.

  “Answer me a riddle,” the goddess says. “Are you running to, or away?”

  That is not the real question: Are you brave, or are you a coward? Are you ambitious or merely discontent? I do not want to answer; I cannot trust my own honesty.

  “We are not running at all,” Elu says. “We travel carefully.”

  Canna laughs, and I don’t know if that’s good or bad. She looks at me. “And your answer?”

  “Yes,” I breathe. “I think the answer is, yes.”

  The goddess’s smile is kind.

  “Do we pass your test?” Elu asks, because we both know that is what gods do, they test you and punish you. “Or is this some lesson of how we ought to be satisfied with our places and not go questing for better?”

  “Oh, dear, no. I wouldn’t try to teach such a lesson. You simply crossed into my territory. I deserve to have a look at you.” She scratches the hound’s ears, and its tail thumps the ground. “You answered my question so nicely, though—do you have a question for me?”

  This is an even worse test. Elu looks at me—Canna is my goddess, I should be the one to ask. But my mind is blank, and I can’t think of a question, only wishes and reassurances. I look back at Elu and nod.

  She says, “Are we doing the right thing?”

  “Well,” Canna says. “We won’t know that until it’s all done, will we? Come, Di, let’s be off. It’s almost dark. You girls should find a camp somewhere. There are spirits about.”

  She stands—she is clothed in leather that blazes white, leggings and tunic and hood, all of it from the purest doe that ever lived. Her smile is brighter. The dog walks at her side, as tall as her hip. They move off, vanishing behind one of the standing stones.

  The world is suddenly dark and silent.

  “Mahra?” Elu asks finally. I can’t answer because I’m weeping. She touches my shoulder with a fist—still holding her spiral-carved stone.

  I get to my feet—easily, feeling no more pain. When I unpeel the bandages, there’s a thick scar there, well healed.

  We move off. A full moon lights our way, and we are able to travel far from the standing stones before we stop and put talismans around our camp.

  * * *

  We first see the tomb a half a day’s walk away—gleaming, it rises from its hill like a full moon. The village at the base of the hill is large—smoke from dozens of fires visible, part of a forest recently cleared, and all surrounded by the stubble of harvested fields. This time, we can’t avoid the well-worn path that leads to the heart of the village. People watch us; I am careful to keep my spear lowered.

  There isn’t just the one tomb but a whole circle of altars, stone rings, barrows. The people here have started a new tomb. It’s why we’ve come, Elu and I know the stories. The work is still for now—the autumn harvest has taken away most of the workers. But great stones lie on beds of logs and rope, ready to move, and a circling trench has been freshly dug.

  All around the site, marker stakes made of stripped oak saplings stand driven into the ground around a new chamber of stone—the stakes, weathered and mossy, track the passage of the sun across their world. It takes years to get the map needed to build a tomb like this, aligned to the light of winter or summer. Elu studies the work, putting a light hand on each stake and sighting down its shadow to see what it marks. That brings the flustered gray-bearded chief astronomer rushing toward us, the woolen sleeves of his tunic flapping as he waves his arms.

  We offer reassurances and are asked for our story. We tell them of days of travel, storms and cold, the forts and cairns we saw and the ghosts that haunted them. The bandits we avoided, the demons we didn’t, and the otherworldly songs we’d heard chanted in the night. Eyes in the dark, talismans left behind, our own strength of stubbornness, if not will. We met a goddess, we told them, and she did not smite us, though I couldn’t say why.

  All in all, it’s a pretty good story.

  “Mahra has the favor of Canna herself,” Elu tells them, sounding outrageous, but I can’t say she is lying. Because she says it and not me it’s not bragging and people believe her. They ask to see the scar on my leg. They are impressed; we are admired.

  But Behru does not need us. They won’t take us in, and the refusal feels like punishment for being brave.

  Then the flustered old astronomer says, “A tomb is being built at Nowa, only a few hours’ walk away. The chief astronomer there needs a young apprentice to carry on the building after her death.” He smiles.

  The gold in Elu’s hair does not glint as brightly as her smile at this news.

  * * *

  The solstice sun has illuminated the standing stones at Nowa many times since then.

  Now Elu is old, with apprentices of her own, and she has used her life to build a circle of stones and a tomb that will not be finished when she dies. “The Earth was not built by one soul in one life,” she says. “It takes a dozen gods and all their children too.”

  I have children, and they have children, and Nowa has become ours. I still hunt, and my grandchildren tell the story of how I speared a charging boar and saved a chieftain. Sometimes in the evenings, after food and fire and song, Elu and I sit together over a smoldering piece of turf and tell a different set of stories, Remember whens? and Oh, we were so young. And yes, some cold dark nights when there is no moon and an interminable rain falls, we still ask, “Did we do the right thing?”

  It should be a question with a firm answer, here at the end of our lives, but I think sometimes of all that could have happened, all that could have gone wrong, and I feel a terrible chill at all we would have lost. Not lost—all we never would have had. And I think the gods must have wanted us to be here.

  Ambition drove us, but here at the end, when I know how it all turns out, I know our true purpose: to bury good fortune in our tombs, under our stones.

  Copyright © 2015 Carrie Vaughn

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Carrie Vaughn is the bestselling author of the Kitty Norville series, the most recent of which is Kitty in the Underworld. Her superhero novel Dreams of the Golden Age was released in January 2014. She has also written young adult novels, Voices of Dragons and Steel, and the fantasy novels Discord’s Apple and After the Golden Age. Her short fiction has appeared in various magazines and anthologies, from Lightspeed to Tor.com and George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards series. She lives in Colorado with a fluffy attack dog. Learn more at carr
ievaughn.com.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  THE SIXTH DAY

  by Sylvia Anna Hiven

  I’m the corn girl. That’s because I make our corn field grow.

  If I take my shoes off and curl my toes deep into the dirt when I walk around the field—although that tears up my feet something bad—I can raise the corn a quarter inch a day, so long as I make sure to touch all stalks I pass. You’d think that’s an amazing talent, especially in a place where the other fields around our farm lie dead. But ain’t nobody noticing a lick of what I do—not when my sister can travel into the ahead and tell us how to keep the stretch away.

  Cassie. She ain’t no corn girl. Pa, old Jeremiah, the Howell sisters across the corn field—they all just care about what Cassie has to say when she comes back from the ahead side. What will end up slipping away, what knickknacks will vanish: Pa’s wagon wheels or Jeremiah’s clod-hoppers or the wooden cross under the knotted oak where Ma’s buried. Cassie used to be able to tell us what farms the stretch would take, too, but there are just the lot of us and our farm left now. So now all that vanishes are things here and there: socks and the scythes in the barn and tiles off the Howells’ roof.

  Except one day, Cassie ain’t telling me what will vanish. She tells me something’s coming.

  “A man and a boy,” she says as she steps out of the mirror. “They got cows. Cows, Jo, can you believe that?”

  The mirror shimmers behind her. I catch a glimpse of what all lies ahead of our farm six days from now. I hope to catch sight of cows down the dirt road but I ain’t got Cassie’s magic and all I see’s the corn field and the outline of Jeremiah’s little shack behind it. Then the mirror goes flat and there’s just the reflection of me and Cassie: round and curly-haired and freckled Cassie because she gets away from the stretch sometimes, and tall and lanky with sore feet and hair straight as a horse’s mane Jo, because I never go nowhere.

  “How you know they’re cows?” I ask. “You ain’t never even seen one.”