The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine Year Eight, Page 8

  As I sprang from the bench, he bent over and picked up a small object near my foot.

  “A Tavalland thaler penny,” he held it up to me with a teasing smile, brushing off the stone dust to make it shine. “Are you counting them? Do you want it?”

  It must have fallen out when I took out my pocket-handkerchief. Normally, I would want it. Even after I became a fashionable professional woman I had a trick to pretend to drop my gloves just so I could pick up a penny lying in the street. A penny meant candy at the soda shop. A penny meant costume thread. A penny meant a ribbon or pair of shoelaces that would make my shoes look newer. A penny meant one less penny I had to work for.

  But an accountant counted pennies, not an artist. And right now, an accountant, a woman who failed at the arts but was left counting the artists’ pennies, was the farthest from how I felt sitting by those dancers.

  “Keep it,” I said. It was only one-fourth of a Hestland penny. “Consider it payment for services rendered.”

  And then Izida and Nahemiah came in.

  The greetings and formalities, during which both Izida’s and Nahemiah’s eyes kept drifting to the sculpture. Then Nahemiah spoke.

  “I will take you as a guest to my palace in Tavalland. For two nights, and a full day. You will return on my aeroplane the day after tomorrow.”

  1500 thalers, I thought. I went to stand beside Izida, just the accountant again.

  “You expect to buy me with a three-day holiday?” Estorges asked, arms crossed.

  “I expect to overwrite your yellow-press bar-gossip prejudices about me. I want you to learn for yourself who I am. And why I want that piece.”

  Guests would beg and wait for years for an invitation to her palace six months hence, not that very day. I would have been more surprised if she had groveled on the floor and kissed his foot. Or rather, the foot of the Three Dancers.

  “Nouet,” Izida said, for the first time using his first name that I had not dared to use, “I think you will appreciate the art that I’ve worked so hard to collect.” I and not my father, she left unsaid.

  And that was something that I, Bethenica the penny-counter, could not offer him at all.

  “Will you?” Nahemiah was gentler than I had ever heard her. “My aeroplane is waiting on the aerodrome just outside the city. We will take a first-class cab.”

  Nouet Estorges said slowly, “Give me two hours.”

  “To pack?”

  “To speak to my solicitor.”

  ~ ~ ~

  On the grounds of Palace Froll there are seven glittering fountains, each in the style of a different era, costing from 250 to 1300 thalers sterling to carve out of marble and rig the pipes. There is a tunnel system, dug at the expense of 300 thalers per foot, excavated and reinforced with marble; lining the tunnel are fifty statues of ancient gods, carved on commission at a cost of 300ts. each; it cost an additional 50ts. per statue in labor to lower them via block and tackle and set them up. The pride of the stables was Wings On Water, the championship racing stallion bought for 7300ts. plus transport, commanding 200ts. as a stud fee, a beautiful horse dancing on springy legs with his mane rippling in the wind, not knowing how much he had cost.

  But my favorite place is the pear orchard that had been on that hill long before Nahemiah’s father had bought the property. They were low-grade green pears of the half-feral unnamed variety that grew everywhere along the coast, but that was the only place on the grounds that I did not know the price of, that never had a price, that never cost anything but only gave.

  So I hid there while Izida guided Estorges around the grand rooms with the mosaic floors and the fan-vaulted ceilings she had designed herself, around the galleries and the tunnels. Up into the bell tower built just because Nahemiah had seen a Caltavan bell tower when she was a little girl and had fallen in love with it, and so Izida had done one for her. Izida did. Not me.

  After an afternoon and an evening and a breakfast where he kept sighing in awe at Izida’s handiwork, at Nahemiah’s taste, I fled to the pear orchard. I had no place on that tour. I was not an artist. I was just the woman who counted the artists’ money and kept them from bankrupting themselves, and as a courtesy, got to talk to them for a while.

  I was a village girl who had climbed pear trees (mindful of the thorns) where no one could find me and make me gut and scale fish, and had sat in them, crunching on the sour woody fruit, and dreamed of running away with the theater and becoming an actress, with a mink coat and my name in lights and dazzlingly handsome men and women I had seen on silver screens pouring me champagne, and me never having to think, for an entire night, how much any of this cost. That was what wealth was, really—to be able to buy something without ever worrying, because you have people to do that for you.

  I never got that. I only grew old enough to know that my dress had cost 20ts. out of my own wages and I could not afford to tear it on the thorns climbing the pear trees. So I sat under the tree on a spread towel, leafing through the broken-spined Arts Today handed down from Nahemiah, returning again and again to the Three Dancers of Gizari.

  “Is this where you escape to?” he asked, and I dropped the magazine face down, wrinkling the page against the grass.

  He was dressed in tennis costume; Izida, or Nahemiah herself, must have challenged him to a tennis match. His forehead beaded perspiration, as marble or allatir cannot.

  “It’s private,” I said noncommittally.

  “It also seems to be the only place on these entire grounds that is not proudly stamped as Nahemiah-Froll-owned, Izida-Charteret-made.”

  “It’s within her property line. Her father paid for it.”

  “All she has, she has relied on others to get for her,” he said, leaning towards me, “and she rations it out to those who are already rich and fortunate, just like the Count of Schellerbide. Except she favors women more. Yes, everyone in the art world knows that she takes women to her bed, not men. Have you ever slept there?”

  “No,” I said honestly. “Never. I do not sleep with people who pay me.” Izida never paid me.

  “Because it puts a whore-price on your body? Yet you skulk here like an abandoned lover.”

  I realized that he was holding my hand, and I pulled it out of his grasp, even though half of me was very reluctant. Nahemiah rationed things out to me, who was neither rich nor fortunate, but no force could make me admit that aspect of me to him. “Because there are other things that women desire than being wedded and bedded,” I said tartly. “And you of all men should have understood that if to craft that allatir you needed your models’ moment of delight. Nahemiah wants to make the world see women’s joy, as do you. Why don’t you see that?”

  “The world—of people I did not intend this statue for. We lock a piece of our soul in our art, and we gift it to kindred souls, not to the largest pile of thalers or ducats. You deserve that sculpture more than she does, or that silver-spoon-gobbling Izida or her stubborn old man, for you can feel the difference when it raises you to a wealth where money doesn’t matter.”

  I found tears in my eyes. He knew my station, and he valued me despite it, or for it. But he mistook my expression.

  “Think again on your delight at the foot of the sculpture, Bethenica,” he breathed. “Here, it makes you more beautiful than any stone art.”

  And he kissed me.

  And I responded.

  And then we did more, in the tall grass.

  ~ ~ ~

  The Three Dancers of Gizari was rejected from the Public Opera for indecency because they were naked and yet emanated not just joy but sufficiency. They had enough. They did not fear their lack. They wanted to give, not count or be counted.

  And if his seduction had in it something hard and cold as marble, flat as a projection screen, I did not notice it until later. Because after all, it was not him that I truly wanted but the work of his hands.

  ~ ~ ~

  “The aeroplane has radioed a flight path for a 10:20 departure to take you bac
k to Halispell,” Nahemiah said, setting down her breakfast spoon.

  Nouet had been silent all through the simple elegant breakfast of exquisite coffee and flaky biscuits (5ts. it would be, in some prestigious cafe and worth it, too), served at the small table of teacup-delicate porcelain in the southern corner of the Great Hall. Nahemiah and Izida chatted about upcoming exhibitions, about Tammen’s work, about everything but the blank dais at the other end of the Great Hall braced for the weight of the Three Dancers of Gizari.

  I was silent too. I had forgotten to add the fresh cream and sugar to my coffee, as I sipped without tasting it.

  “Very well,” said Nouet. “I thank you very much for your hospitality. Your art collection took great skill and great taste, and,” his voice went just a bit dry, “a lot of money.”

  He rose from the table. But even he stopped when Nahemiah spoke, just as she assumed he would.

  “So am I outbidding the Count of Schellerbide?”

  Tick, went the great clock (214.23ts., plus 12ts. a visit for the only man in Tavalland skilled enough to tune it once a month). Indeed, it was so quiet that I could hear the ten-foot grand piano, custom-made at 2286.45ts., softly echo in resonance with it.

  “I chose to alter the deal with the Count of Schellerbide, for the appropriate price,” Nouet said, so casually that the clock counted a few more ticks before victory registered on Nahemiah’s face. Only Izida was biting her lips as she leaned forward; she still knew her father better than anyone, and she felt something was wrong. But Nouet ignored this and said smoothly, “I have the papers ready for Bethenica to review.”

  Out of his briefcase resting by his chair leg, he drew a leather portfolio and handed it to me.

  It contained a contract, opened to the back where his signature already filled in one of the blanks. The ink was dry, I noticed subconsciously, having seen enough wet-ink signatures. There was the name of the solicitor. In wet ink was today’s date, and the name, with a blank beneath it for the signature. Bethenica Morning. No space for Nahemiah Froll.

  He had palmed me a pen as well. “Sign it,” he mouthed, his eyes meeting mine the same way they had in the pear orchard.

  I flipped angrily to the first page. “Do you think me such a fool as to not read contracts I sign?” I was about to snap, and then I bit it back.

  Because this was not a bill of sale.

  It was a bill of lease. The sculpture known as the Three Dancers of Gizari, allatir stone, emanation: contentment, dynamic-captures from all angles included on p. 4, was the property of Nouet Estorges under contract to the Public Opera, transferring possession, but not ownership. The possessor could display the work wherever she wished, but had no right to resell it without the permission of Nouet Estorges.

  The possessor was Bethenica Morning. The leasing fee was one Tavalland penny. One Tavalland penny—and my body, unmentioned by the solicitor who had drawn this up in the missing two hours from two days ago. But I had no doubt that yesterday’s seduction was part of the contract, part of the offset price.

  The empathy it takes to carve allatir—how well he saw through us. He’d lied to everyone, including me, in the aim of humiliating Nahemiah—yet he also offered me my heart’s desire. With my signature, the Three Dancers of Gizari would be mine. Not Nahemiah’s, not ever again. Once again I was the stage manager, the little god behind the footlights, the only one, other than the author, who actually has the script.

  “But,” I whispered, “the Count of Schellerbide. . .” Nahemiah, my Chief, was waiting for me to handle the cues as I always did, before passing it to her and letting her have the credit. Izida was waiting for me to ensure that she got her art. I had always been but the executor of her desires.

  “I lied,” he replied casually. “Do you really think the old man could appreciate this? I just knew what rival would shatter Nahemiah and Izida the most. Until I saw an even better one.

  “Come with me to Halispell, Bethenica. You need the Dancers, not her. Not this.”

  I had 1211.37ts. to my name, with interest at 4.5%, standing between thirty thalers a week and two women, and the offer of carved-stone contentment beyond wealth.

  He had not put in my place of residence as Palace Froll, Tavalland. He knew that the moment I signed this, it would not be true. If he had guessed my price.

  My pen hovered over the signature blank and dripped one single black drop.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Tamara Vardomskaya is a Canadian writer and a graduate of the 2014 Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Besides Beneath Ceaseless Skies, her fiction has also appeared on Tor.com. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D in theoretical linguistics at the University of Chicago.

  GEOMETRIES OF BELONGING

  Rose Lemberg

  OFTTIMES I LIKE to be alone in the healing room. It is a small place, and the low ceiling-boards smell slightly of damp. The candlebulb, a floating magical light I have created, is weak and does not jar the senses. Small square windows of tourmaline glass are the only hint at means, installed here only because I need privacy. The tenants in surrounding rooms keep quiet at my request. It is a fair price for them, to be this close to a holy place. I feel their emotions sometimes, when I work—a subdued kind of awe that spreads through the people like warmth, brown-yellow and tinted at the edges with soft orange.

  But holiness is often just unholiness purified; silence sighs from the gaps of any great power, from the spaces in-between the deepnames as they nestle in the mind of a named strong. What a body learns from wounds, it cannot easily unlearn. Crude tears of the flesh and breaks of bone can be erased with magic if one acts quickly, but subtle damage is so difficult to repair.

  A person knocks. It is an old woman made frail by hard work, her fingers swollen. Even though I have not yet extended my deepnames, I can feel how her joints ache with the damp and the early autumn cold. Laundry. The river, its water unheated by the passage of magic. The kind of work that women do in my neighborhoods, where named strong are a rarity.

  I make her tea with birch syrup, warm enough to hold without dropping. I ask after her name, her grandchildren’s health, and finally, her permission.

  She gives it, even though she does not quite remember why she made it here.

  I extend my deepnames. Three, four, and five syllables—long and feeble, inconsequential. It is a marvel that I was able to take more than one, let alone as many as three. In Mainland Katra University they teach that a three-named strong has nothing to fear, but that is other people—professors, builders—those with short deepnames, real power. When I was younger, fear was all I knew of life. The fear of beatings, ridicule, of helplessness, of cold, of hunger. The fear of never earning attention, the fear of losing it. That fear has lasted and lasted. Two decades after my lord took me in, that fear is still with me—an old friend, an acknowledgment of my emptiness.

  Slowly, patiently I align my names along the old woman’s naming grid, the foundation of every mind upon which magic may alight. She has no magic, but that does not matter in my work. The strands of her naming grid have warped themselves out of place.

  My work is all resonance. Slowly, I make my deepnames vibrate. Slowly, the grid realigns itself. She will remember more now, pay attention to her surroundings, speak with clarity. But in a year, I gauge, maybe two, the warping will reassert itself and she will start slipping. Her mind is too used to this pattern; comfortable like an old, torn blanket.

  The work done, I thank her and bow. This gesture is perhaps what I cherish the most about healings. She remembers to thank me in turn, and the empty porcelain teacup is gripped with newfound firmness between her fingers. I tell her to come back when she needs it. Maybe she will. Maybe she will forget. In every mind-healing, its undoing is already embedded.

  My work contains within it not only its undoing but also my inaction. When patients leave, they imagine I busy myself writing a learned treatise or inventing new methods of healing—but mostly I sit, on the black walnut bench near the window that look
s out into a small courtyard, its glass too opaque to see anything. I sit, too often too inert to pour myself a cup of tea, or even to want such a cup; and I don’t go anywhere. I think those thoughts, but the writing of them happens only at home, and only when my lord sits by me and writes and orders me to write. He has always honored me so, before I was anyone, before I had this room and even my full deepname configuration, before my insignificance could even be disputed.

  Beneath the surface of the land, as we have learned so many years ago, embedded in the earth, there is a naming grid. Inert, it shines too softly for most minds to discern. It is unto this grid that the first people spoke their magic. They created deepnames for the land, watched them alight upon the land’s naming grid like fireflies; and it is those ancient deepnames that we see, those of us with enough power to do so, when we go out beyond cities, where the land is quiet, and draw on our senses and attend. The mind, too, is much like the land, a land that lies within each of us—so I have postulated, these many years ago, shortly after I was expelled from Mainland Katra University. Each mind contains a naming grid, each of a slightly different nature, as no two people are exactly alike. And it is these grids—in strong and simple people both—that take to ailment, and it is with these grids of the mind that I work when I heal.

  I take no payment from the poor. I was raised in a neighborhood close this one. I take no payment, and no pride. It is hard to understand.

  The Governance is in session in the autumn, and so we are in the capital. Each morning, my lord leaves. I do not want to move, but I cannot abide to loiter in the rooms where others may pass in his absence; I cannot abide the art he has so carefully chosen to please the eye—his eye—to remind him of moments and lovers and acts of great magic he has committed elsewhere. I cannot abide the absences between the gaps of his very great power. He tells me to go back to sleep, but I grow restless as his presence cools off the sheets. He becomes impatient with me, tells me to come with him to the Oligarchy Governance. But there he is busy and brusque and would rather not be disturbed, and the high nobles beset me. Somebody always ails. They offer me money, startlingly large sums of it to work in absolute secret, in side rooms tiled with marble and mortared in gold. They whisper to me, voices mixing hope with condescension; and when I am done, they call me ragi behind my back, confident that I will never report them to my lord.