The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine Year Eight, Page 36

  In the flickering light of the glow stones the figures seemed to twitch as if alive, shadow faces accusing Frere-Jones of unknown misdeeds. Frere-Jones touched Haoquin’s face—felt his sharp cheekbones and mischievous smirk—causing the basin’s red sands to rise up, the individual grains climbing the statues until her family glowed a faint speckled red over the darker sands below.

  The red grains burned her fingers where she touched Haoquin, connecting her to what remained of her lifemate. She felt his bones in the family graveyard on the edge of the forest. Felt the insects and microbes which had fed on his remains and absorbed his grains before dying and fertilizing the ground and the trees and the other plants throughout the land, where the grains had then been eaten by deer and cows and rabbits. If Frere-Jones closed her eyes she could almost feel Haoquin’s grains pulsing throughout the land. Could almost imagine him returning to her and hugging her tired body.

  Except he couldn’t. He was gone. Only the echo of him lived on in the microscopic grains which had occupied his body and were now dispersed again to her land.

  And her son was even farther beyond the grains’ reach, forced to forsake both the grains and her land when he turned day-fellow.

  Frere-Jones sat down hard on the tile floor and cried, cradling her empty wine mug.

  She was lying on the floor, passed out from the wine, when a banging woke her.

  “Frere-Jones, you must help us!” a woman’s voice called. She recognized the voice—Jun, from the day-fellow family which left that morning.

  Frere-Jones’s hands shook, curling like claws. The grains in her body screamed against the day-fellows for staying on her land.

  No, she ordered, commanding the grains to stand down. It’s too soon. There are a few more days before they wear out this land’s welcome.

  The grains rattled irritably in her body like pebbles in an empty water gourd. While they should obey her, to be safe Frere-Jones stepped across the den and lifted several ceramic tiles from the floor. She pulled Haoquin’s handmade laser pistol from the hiding spot and slid it behind her back, held by her belt. She was now ready to shoot herself in the head if need be.

  Satisfied that she was ready, Frere-Jones opened the door. Jun and Takeshi stood there supporting Alexnya, who leaned on them as if drunk but stared with eyes far too awake and aware. Alexnya shook and spasmed, her muscles clenching as she moaned a low, painful hiss, unable to fully scream.

  Frere-Jones looked behind the family. She reached out to the grains in the land’s animals and plants and soils. She didn’t feel any other anchors on her land. If any of them found the day-fellows here. . . .

  “Bring her inside,” she told Jun. “Takeshi, hide your wagon and horses in the barn.”

  “Not until later,” Takeshi said, wanting to stay with his daughter.

  Jun snapped at him. “Don’t be a fool, Tak. We can’t be seen. Not after everyone knows our caravan left.”

  Frere-Jones took Alexnya in her arms, the grains powering up her strength so the teenage girl seemed to weigh no more than a baby. Takeshi hurried back to the wagon, where the family’s two youngest kids stared in fright from the open door.

  Frere-Jones carried Alexnya to Colton’s old room and placed her on the bed. Alexnya continued to spasm, her muscles clenching and shivering under her drained-pale skin.

  “Please,” Alexnya whimpered. “Please. . .”

  As Jun held her daughter’s hand, Frere-Jones leaned closer to the girl. The grains jumped madly in Frere-Jones’s blood, erupting her fangs like razors ready to rip into these day-fellows’ throats. Frere-Jones breathed deep to calm herself and gagged on Alexnya’s sweaty scent. It carried the faintest glimmer of grains inside Alexnya’s body.

  “She’s infected,” Frere-Jones said in shock. “With grains. My grains.”

  Jun nodded, an angry look on her face as if Frere-Jones had personally caused this abomination. “The further we travelled from your land, the more pain she experienced. She didn’t stop screaming until we left the caravan and began making our way back here.”

  Frere-Jones growled softly. “This is unheard of,” she said. “Grains shouldn’t infect day-fellows.”

  “Day-fellow lore says it happens on rare occasions. Our lore also says each land’s anchor has medicine to cure an infection.”

  Frere-Jones understood. She ran to the kitchen and grabbed her emergency bag. Inside was a glass vial half-full of powder glowing a faint red.

  She hadn’t used the powder since Colton became a day-fellow. The powder’s nearly dim glow meant it had weakened severely over the years. Chakatie had taken most of her remaining medicine after Colton left, worried about Frere-Jones killing herself with an overdose. Now all that was left was a half-vial of nearly worthless medicine.

  But she had nothing else to give. She held the vial over her altar—letting it sync again with the coding from her land’s grains—then mixed the powder in a mug of water and hurried back to Alexnya.

  “Drink this,” she said, holding the mug to Alexnya’s lips. The girl gasped and turned her head as if being near the liquid hurt her.

  “Why is it hurting her?” Jun asked, blocking Alexnya’s mouth with her hand so Frere-Jones couldn’t try again. “I thought the medicine helped.”

  “It does, but the grains always resist at first,” Frere-Jones said. “When I gave it to my own son years ago he. . . went through some initial pain. We usually only give small doses to new anchors at puberty to calm the explosive growth of the grains in their bodies. But if we give Alexnya a full dose for the next few days, it should kill the grains.”

  Jun frowned. “How much pain?”

  “I. . . don’t know. But if we don’t do something soon there will be too many grains in her body to remove.”

  Frere-Jones didn’t need to tell Jun what would happen if Alexnya became anchored to this land. The anchors from the lands surrounding Frere-Jones’s wouldn’t take kindly to a day-fellow girl becoming one of them.

  “We shouldn’t have come here,” Jun said, standing up. “Maybe if we take Alexnya away from here before the grains establish themselves. . .”

  “Taking her from the land will definitely kill her—the grains have already anchored. We need to remove them from her body. There’s no other way.”

  “I’ll drink it,” Alexnya whispered in a weak voice. She glared at Frere-Jones in fury. Frere-Jones prayed the grains weren’t already sharing the land’s stored memories with this day-fellow girl. Showing Alexnya what Frere-Jones had done. Revealing secrets known by no one else except her son and Chakatie.

  Despite her hesitation, Jun nodded agreement. She held her daughter’s spasming body as Frere-Jones poured the liquid through the girl’s lips. Alexnya swallowed half the medicine before screaming. Splashes and dribbles on her leather shirt and pants glowed bright red as she thrashed in the bed for a moment before passing out.

  Frere-Jones and Jun tucked Alexnya under the covers and stepped into the den. Takeshi stood by the fireplace holding their youngest son and daughter.

  “Will she make it?” Jun asked.

  “I don’t know,” Frere-Jones said. “She’ll need another dose before the medicine wears off or she’ll be as bad as ever. And that was all I had in the house.”

  Frere-Jones glanced at the altar, where the red sands squirmed in a frenzied rush, climbing over the figurines as if outraged they couldn’t eat stone. She noticed Jun staring at her back and realized the woman had seen the laser pistol she carried.

  Frere-Jones handed the pistol to Jun. “Use this if needed,” she said. “Make sure none of you touch the grains in the altar—if you do, every anchor for a hundred leagues will know there’s a day-fellow family here.”

  Jun nodded as Frere-Jones pulled on her leather running duster. “When will you be back?”

  “I don’t know,” Frere-Jones said. “I have to find more medicine. I’ll. . . think of something.”

  With that Frere-Jones ordered the grains to power up
her legs and, for the first time in years, she ran across her land. She ran faster than any horse, faster than any deer, until even the fairies which flew after her could barely keep up.

  ~ ~ ~

  At the land’s boundary Frere-Jones paused.

  She stood by Sandy Creek, the cold waters bubbling under the overhanging oaks and willows. Fairies flew red tracers over the creek, flying as far across as they dared without crossing into the bordering land. On the other bank a handful of blue fairies hovered in the air, staring back at Frere-Jones and the red fairies.

  Usually boundaries between lands were more subtle, the grains that were tied to one anchor mixing a bit with the next land’s grains in the normal back and forth of life. But with Sandy Creek as a natural land divide—combined with Frere-Jones’s isolation from the other anchors—the boundary between her and Chakatie’s lands had grown abrupt, stark.

  One of Chakatie’s blue fairies stared intensely at her. Chakatie knew she was coming. Frere-Jones wished there was a caravan nearby to trade for the medicine. Day-fellow pharmacists were very discreet.

  Still, of all the nearby anchors Chakatie was the only one who might still give her medicine. Chakatie was also technically family, even if her son Haoquin was now dead. And she had a large extended family. Meaning a number of kids. Meaning stocks of medicine on hand to ensure the grains didn’t overwhelm and kill those kids when they transitioned to becoming anchors.

  Still, no matter how much Frere-Jones had once loved Chakatie she wouldn’t go in unprepared. She was, after all, her land’s anchor. She stripped off her clothes and stepped into the cold creek, rubbing mud and water over her skin and hair to remove the day-fellow scent. She activated the grains inside her, increasing her muscle size and bone density. Finally, for good measure, she grabbed a red fairy buzzing next to her and smashed it between her now-giant hands. She smeared the fairy’s glowing red grains in two lines down both sides of her face and body.

  Battle lines. As befitted an anchor going into another’s land in the heart of the night.

  Satisfied, she walked naked onto Chakatie’s anchordom.

  ~ ~ ~

  Frere-Jones hated memories. She hated how the grains spoke to her in brief snatches of memories copied from Haoquin and her parents and grandparents and on back to the land’s very first anchor.

  But despite this distaste at memories, they still swarmed her. As Frere-Jones crossed the dark forest of trees and brambles on Chakatie’s land, she wondered why the grains were showing her these memories. The grains never revealed memories randomly.

  In particular, why show her Haoquin’s memories, which the grains had so rarely shared up to now? Memories from the day she met him. Memories from their selecting ceremony.

  Frere-Jones tried to stop them, but the memories slipped into her as if they’d always existed within her.

  Frere-Jones’s parents had died when the grains determined it was time for their child to take over. Like most anchors they’d gone happily. First they drank medicine to dull the grains’ power to rebuild their bodies. Then they slit each other’s throat in the land’s graveyard, holding hands as they bled out and their grain-copied memories flowed into the land they’d protected.

  At first Frere-Jones had accepted her role in protecting the land. She safeguarded the land from those who might harm it and carefully managed the ecosystem’s plants and animals so the land was in continual balance.

  But a few years after becoming anchor a small day-fellow caravan defiled her land by cutting down trees. Frere-Jones eagerly allowed the grains to seize control of her body. She called other anchors to her side and led an attack on the caravan. Memories of the pains her land had suffered before the grains had arrived flowed through her—images of clear-cut forests and poisoned soil and all the other evils of the ancient world. In her mind she became a noble warrior preventing humans from creating ecological hell just as her family had done for a hundred generations.

  Only after the caravan was wiped out did she learn that a day-fellow child, gifted with a new hatchet and told to gather dead branches for a fire, had instead cut down a single pine sapling.

  Outraged at what she’d done, Frere-Jones attacked the other anchors who’d helped savage the caravan. The anchors fought back, slashing at her with claw and fang until a respected older anchor, Chakatie, arrived, her three-yard-tall body powered to a mass of muscle and bone and claw.

  Chakatie’s land neighbored Frere-Jones’s land, but Chakatie hadn’t aided in the attack on the caravan. Now this powerful woman had stepped among the fighting anchors, a mere glance all that was needed to stop the other anchors from attacking each other. A few even powered down their bodies.

  Chakatie had paused before the remains of the caravan and breathed deeply. As the other anchors watched nervously, Chakatie leaned over and tapped the tiny child-size hatchet and examined the cut sapling. She sniffed each day-fellow body.

  With a roar, Chakatie told everyone but this land’s anchor to leave. The others fled.

  Once everyone was gone Chakatie bent over the dead bodies and cried.

  After Chakatie finished, she stood and wiped her tears. Frere-Jones forced herself to stand still, willing to take whatever punishment Chakatie might give for this evil deed. But the older woman didn’t attack. Instead, she stepped forward until her hot breath licked Frere-Jones’s face and her fangs clicked beside her ear like knives stripping flesh from bone.

  “The grains speak only in memories,” Chakatie said. “But memories only speak to the grains’ programmed goals. A good anchor never lets memory overwhelm what is right and what is wrong.”

  With that Chakatie walked away, leaving Frere-Jones to bury the caravan’s dead.

  Ashamed, Frere-Jones had locked herself in her home and refused to listen to the grains’ excuses. The grains tried to please her with swirls of memories from her parents and others. Memories of people apologizing and explaining and rationalizing what she’d done.

  But she no longer cared. She was this land’s anchor and she’d decide what was right. Not the grains.

  A few years later the grains gave her an ultimatum: marry another anchor to help manage this land, or the other anchors would kill Frere-Jones and select a new anchor to take her place.

  The selecting ceremony took place on the summer solstice. Hundreds of her fellow anchors came to her home, setting up feasting tents along the dirt road and in fallow fields. Frere-Jones walked from tent to tent, meeting young anchors who spoke eagerly of duty and helping protect her land. She listened politely. Nodded to words like “ecological balance” and “heritage.” Then she walked to the next tent to hear more of the same.

  Frere-Jones grew more and more depressed as she went from tent to tent. If she didn’t choose a mate before the end of the day all the celebrating anchors would rip her to pieces and chose a new anchor to protect her land. She wondered if day-fellows felt this fear around anchors. The fear of knowing people who were so warm and friendly one moment might be your death in the next.

  Frere-Jones was preparing for her death when she spotted a ragged tent beside her barn. The tent was almost an afterthought, a few poles stuck in the ground holding up several old and torn cotton blankets.

  Frere-Jones stepped inside to see Chakatie sitting beside a young man.

  “Join us in a drink?” Chakatie asked, holding a jug of what smelled like moonshine. Chakatie’s body when powered down was tiny, barely reaching Frere-Jones’s shoulder.

  “Do I look like I need a drink?” Frere-Jones asked.

  “Any young woman about to be slaughtered for defying the grains needs a drink,” Chakatie said.

  Frere-Jones sat down hard on the ground and drank a big swallow of moonshine. “Maybe I deserve to be killed,” she thought, remembering what she’d done to that day-fellow caravan.

  “Maybe,” the young man sitting next to Chakatie said. “Or maybe you deserve a chance to change things.”

  Chakatie introduced the man
as her son Haoquin. He leaned over and shook Frere-Jones’s hand.

  “How can I change anything?” Frere-Jones asked. “The grains will force me to do what they want or they’ll order the other anchors to kill me.”

  Instead of answering, Haoquin leaned over so he could see outside the tiny tent. He was a skinny man and wore a giant wool coat even in summer, as if easily chilled. Or that’s what Frere-Jones thought until he opened the coat and pulled out a small laser pistol.

  Frere-Jones froze at the sight of the forbidden technology, but Chakatie merely laughed. Haoquin aimed the pistol at a nearby tent—the Jeroboam family tent, among the loudest and most rambunctious groups at the selection ceremony. Haoquin pulled the trigger, and a slight buzzing like angry bees filled the tent. He shoved the pistol back in his coat as the roof of the Jeroboam tent burst into flames.

  Drunken anchors, including Jeroboam himself, fled from the tent, tearing holes in the fabric walls in their panic. Other anchors howled with laughter while Jeroboam and his lifemate and kids demanded to know who had insulted their family and land with this prank.

  Haoquin grinned as he patted his coat covering the hidden pistol. “A little something I made,” he said. “I’m hoping it’ll come in handy when I eventually spit at the grains’ memories.”

  Frere-Jones felt a flash of memory—her parents warning her as a kid to behave. To be a good girl. She shook off the grains’ warning as she stared into Haoquin’s mischievous eyes.

  Maybe Haoquin was right. Maybe there was a way to change things.

  ~ ~ ~

  Frere-Jones leaned against a large oak tree, her powered body shaking as red and blue fairies buzzed around her. The grains had never shared such a deep stretch of Haoquin’s memories with her. The memories had been so intense and long they’d merged with her own memories of that day into something more. Almost as if Haoquin was alive once again inside her.

  Frere-Jones wiped at her glowing eyes with the back of her clawed right hand. Why had the grains shared such a memory with her? What were they saying?