The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine Year Eight, Page 6

  So is her bundle of asp eggs.

  ~ ~ ~

  The moment Hester notices, she ransacks their home, searching for the missing eggs. She strips the bed and shakes out the linen sheets. She dumps the reed baskets piled by the door. She plunges both hands elbow deep into the refuse heap outside the window. Worms ooze around her knuckles.

  Never in all this time has she left evidence of the night bazaar. Never so much as a glance toward the doorjamb and its tiny chalk symbols. Her bones quiver inside the bag of her skin. The sky is streaked angry red, and moonrise bears down with vicious weight. Marick could return at any time with the other policemen, with the poison.

  Her fingers dig into her palms so hard they draw blood. It is against every rule for him to police her by day: against law, against custom, against decency. But poison makes no such distinctions, and if he found the eggs, she would have no defense. She could beg Shayna to hide her, but how would she explain it without exposing her sunside life?

  Hester wraps her head in batik and hurries to the western wall, where the reptiles emerge in a thin, long line across the sands. Above them, bodies swing to and fro over the gates, dry and mummified by weather and time. It was always a major affair when they hung out a new one. Marick took Hester to watch once. He held her hand, and neither smiled.

  If she could be that kind of creature. If she could cross the desert. If she could break free of the spidersilk bonds Oasis imposed, the thin invisible obligations tying woman to man to woman to child, a web which caught and snared.

  Hester finds herself at home again, standing before the darkened door. Behind the jasmine bush, she finds the chalk symbols: a pot, an oboe, and an egg.

  We gather in the alley on the Street of Midwives where the Emperor was born.

  She considers going into the house, lying down in the dark, and waiting for Marick, but her feet are already drawing her back toward the night bazaar.

  ~ ~ ~

  Hester’s money buys her half a dozen crocodile eggs, two cobra eggs, and a large speckled monitor lizard egg still warm to the touch. She swallows them down and will not let her stomach vomit them up, no matter how much her guts twist. Her head buzzes like when she drinks too much palm wine. Her hands tingle as if the poison courses inside her veins already. She hurries from booth to booth, begging for more eggs, but her colleagues only cluck their tongues and offer her rose petal tea, or silken shawls, or cool hands to the forehead.

  “I am not sick,” Hester insists. “I need to buy more eggs.” But they will not sell them to her.

  At last she hunches behind her booth, shivering in the chill, waiting, hoping yet for transformation. She has no asp eggs to sell, so the customers pass her by, until at last one does not.

  Despite his broad-brimmed veiled hat, Hester recognizes Marick, when he sets the missing eggs on the booth’s counter. He smells like incense and cinnamon. “Do not try to run now. Not this time.”

  Fear twists her gut hard, and all the raw eggs roil in her stomach. She gags and vomits into the sand behind the booth. The slimy white glair pools with her bile, studded with chunks of undigested shell. Her last hope of transformation, absorbed into the sand. The desert will take even this before it will take her. As her hope dribbles away, so does the fear. Hester laughs a short, sharp hyena bark.

  “Everyone pretends to be something different at the night bazaar, Marick. What are you supposed to be?”

  He hesitates, then twitches the veil up. Rose-colored moonlight bathes his face, a rare lunar eclipse. He looks small and fragile as a pressed flower, not at all like the man she has feared for five years.

  He leans forward, voice low and secret. “I need to know how the eggs work. Is there a spell?”

  Hester snorts. “You want our secrets before you betray me. You think you can ask, and I will tell you, as if this is not my bazaar and you are not a customer. As though the price is not my life.”

  Marick shakes his head hard. “No, no, you’ve got it all wrong, Hester. Have the police found the night bazaar since we became lovers? Do you think that is a coincidence? Whatever I am, I am no traitor.”

  It has the ring of truth to it, though she does not want to trust him. “What do you want from me? You take me for a lover and do not touch me. You follow me here and do not arrest me. You say you’ve been protecting me. What do you want?”

  He casts his eyes toward the gutter, which is littered with tiny reptile prints. When he speaks, his voice is not a mango-seller’s cries or a policeman’s growl but trembling and weak, a flute cracked and leaking air. “I am done, trying to live in this body. It doesn’t fit. Not with dayside lovers, or nightside lovers. Touches do not reach me. I wear my own flesh like a cloak, and I am alone inside. It isn’t mine. Maybe I was supposed to be a reptile? A woman? Half a mother to complete some child? I do not know. I only know that if I don’t shed this body, I will suffocate in it. Do you understand?”

  He sounds just as sure as every woman who has come before. “You just eat them, Marick. There is no spell. The eggs don’t work for men, though.”

  He shrugs, and the corner of his mouth lifts. “I will try, anyway. I don’t know any other way.” Marick unwraps the eggs and rubs off the clay. He cracks them one by one, sucks out their insides, chews and swallows the shells. Around his ankles, women skitter and slither westward on scaled claw and belly.

  Hester waits for his disappointment, but instead he collapses before her booth. An asp springs from his breastbone, a fine golden-eyed creature damp from heart’s-blood, and it joins the reptile exodus in the gutter. As she watches him go, a hollow place inside her rips open, as though the last of her hope has also left her and slithered into the desert.

  Mechanically she drags his unwanted body behind the booth. It has been many years since this chore unsettled her, since a customer’s discarded eyes fixed upon her face, but Marick was her dayside lover, the only one she had. For the first time since she joined the bazaar, a body becomes a corpse.

  ~ ~ ~

  When Shayna sees Marick, she steadies her head between her hands. “Oh, Hester, what have you done? The law might turn a blind eye to the night bazaar as long as we’re discreet, but it won’t ignore a dead policeman.”

  “He isn’t dead. He became an asp, Shayna!”

  The two women slump together behind the booth while Hester confesses everything. “What did he do? Why did it work for him?”

  Shayna jerks her chin toward the sky. “Eclipses are strange. Moonside and sunside join hands and pass. Perhaps the desert calls to its own.”

  Hester curls up tight and tries not to retch. No eggs for her, because she is already empty inside. She does not say, Why won’t it work for me?

  Shayna holds her at arm’s length. “You think I don’t know. You think I don’t pay attention.” She undoes Marick’s earring, holds the matching golden pot to Hester’s ear. “Tell me, lover, what makes you so afraid? Afraid enough to piss away your profit on all those eggs? Scared enough to leave me too?”

  “You are so happy here,” Hester manages through hitching breath.

  Shayna’s eyebrows pinch together like when she is considering the best way to slice open a ribcage. “Maybe the eggs do not work for you because you do not need them. You’re practically an asp already. You spend enough time among their nests.”

  Somehow, the thought comforts her. “And you, Shayna? What are you?”

  Shayna’s smile is all teeth. “I am a butcher, of course.”

  They drag Marick’s shell into an alley. In the night bazaar’s bustle, no one notices. Hester grabs the booth’s batik fabric and drapes it over the ground. Shayna is a good butcher, well-practiced and quick, skilled at separating muscle from skin and meat from bone. The waxed batik absorbs the blood in brown-bordered swirls.

  Shayna cuts, and Hester sorts the pieces. Hester lays Marick’s heart in the pile for the vulture breeders. It is soft and round like a ripe mango on a plate, plum-red as an amethyst, tattered where the asp rip
ped through the flesh.

  As the heart drips onto the batik, Hester sees maybe there is another path to freedom, one she never considered before Marick transformed. How she could leave behind the mass of bodies—the heralds, the upholsterers, the weavers, the potmakers, the herbalists, the papyrus-rollers, the inksetters—all the close, warm mammalian musks, the raised voices, the songs and tambourines. How she could slip beneath the gates, slither into the desert, the sand burning her belly into hard scales; her tongue flickering, testing the air. Some irresistible pull inside knows exactly where lies the ocean she has never seen, beating on a far shore. Her flesh feels heavy and cumbersome, and she thinks she could shake it loose, leave it behind to mummify in the heat and sand.

  If this other path will work for her.

  Hester saves Marick’s heart carefully, wrapped tight in stained batik until the blood no longer soaks through. They sell the meat and bones to the vendors, but the skin they burn at Shayna’s bower on the Street of Butchers. Its wetness makes the fire smoke and sputter.

  “I can hide you for tonight, but you’ll have to leave tomorrow,” Shayna says as they wash up at home. “We can slow down their investigation, but they will find you. There were witnesses. Someone will talk eventually.”

  “Yes, of course. I understand.” Hester inhales Shayna’s familiar licorice smell, and longing prickles down her back. If this path works for her, there will be no more sunside or moonside, no lovers to fear and tend to and worry over. There will be no night bazaar, because in the desert, everyone is a reptile. Asps are asps by day or night.

  ~ ~ ~

  Hester waits until Shayna sleeps before she draws her last gift in chalk on the doorjamb: two stones, a dead woman’s eye, and an asp. Find me at the wall where criminals are made to drink poison, and come alone. Then she kisses her sleeping lover and their moonside baby, and she leaves.

  At this hour, the night bazaar must be packing up. A few snakes and lizards skitter through the gutters. Hester follows them to the gouge in the sand where they have dug a hole beneath the wall. They slither and wriggle and just slip through. Overhead, ropes creak as the mummified corpses swing.

  Before she can lose her courage, Hester unwraps Marick’s heart, sliced into strips like a mango, her final hope on a wooden tray.

  Hearts are eggs, she realized when Shayna slit open Marick’s body and piled his organs on the stained batik. Hester wonders what will hatch from hers.

  Hester eats it, piece by piece. If this fails, the police will find her. Her body will swing overhead with the rest, always within sight of the desert but never able to go there.

  The heart slides into her belly, easier than glair, and settles in the empty space which once held fear. The quivering in her bones becomes a violent shudder. A change is coming, churning her like a sandstorm. She slips and twists inside her own flesh, full to the brim, a straining wineskin, a sated leech, an egg about to burst.

  It does not hurt much, the hatching, the shedding. No worse than picking off a scab. When it is over, she slides free onto her segmented belly, the sand warm, the wind drying her damp newborn back. Her tongue tests the air, and tastes water far to the west, beyond the husk of her old body, through the gouge beneath the wall.

  Over the wall the bodies swing and creak on their ropes, but they are only shells, and the poison rests between her teeth now, a gift for those she chooses to kiss. Oasis shrinks toy-like under her unblinking reptilian gaze. It is a nest, a golden pot with an amethyst lid, trapping asps until the music plays, but it cannot hold her anymore. All over the city, people pitch and turn inside themselves, sliding against the smooth walls of their prison, but only a few buck against the shell and break it.

  But the desert is a city too, vaster than Oasis, and the reptiles are its people. Hester tastes them on the wind. Blood and incense, jasmine and mango, they call to her, all the ones who went before, the peasants and merchants, the old women and the young, the Emperor and Marick all, now fully themselves, unchanging day or night. Their prints erase the footsteps trailing into Oasis. Their bodies are arrows which point to the sea. They are waiting for her. It is almost time to go.

  Hester waits beside her cooling body until sunrise breaks upon the city. Oasis turns over in its old familiar rhythm. Moonside lovers kiss and part. Footsteps hurry from house to house, and chalk symbols are found and read and quickly erased. And then, for the first time sunside, Hester sees her: Shayna the moonside butcher, come to unseam her body.

  Hester knows Shayna will sell the parts piece by piece, a last providence for her Oasis family. A family can live for a month on the price a human body would fetch. Her hair will go to the weavers, her bones to feed the lemon tree groves, her fat to fuel the lamps, everything given back to the city that bore her.

  Except her heart.

  Shayna saves it in the same scrap of bloodstained batik that once held Marick’s. Hester hopes it will be enough.

  But now, the part of her that cannot be bought or sold slips beneath the wall, tastes the distant water, and goes to find it.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Rachael K. Jones grew up in various cities across Europe and North America, picked up (and mostly forgot) six languages, an addiction to running, and a couple degrees. Now she writes speculative fiction in Athens, Georgia, where she lives with her husband. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in many venues, including Shimmer, Lightspeed, Flash Fiction Online, Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, Crossed Genres, Diabolical Plots, and Daily Science Fiction. She is an editor, a SFWA member, and a secret android. Follow her on Twitter @RachaelKJones.

  THE THREE DANCERS OF GIZARI

  Tamara Vardomskaya

  “AND FOR THE main ballroom,” Nahemiah Froll said, tossing the latest issue of Arts Today in our direction as she paced heavily over the mosaic floor, “I want that piece that Estorges made for Hestland’s Public Opera. The Three Dancers of Gizari.”

  I tried to forget that I knew to the penny how much that thousand-year-old mosaic she was stomping on had cost (1,023,048.18 thalers sterling, not counting shipping it across the sea and all the wrangling with the insurer), something Nahemiah had not cared to know when she ordered it for her architect and curator, Izida Charteret, to fit into her palace.

  Izida now stood near me, half-lit by a rose window of her own design. We both knew exactly what Nahemiah was talking about, as she expected us to. But this time, for this sculpture out of all the paintings and sculptures and transfigurations and works of magic described in Arts Today, I did not trust myself to reply. Let Izida, the artist, the aristocrat, comment.

  “The one that the Public Opera then rejected as obscene? If you want to branch out into modern artists at last, Chief, why not Tammen? He’s all the rage right now. If. . .” she paused, “what you desire is fine female nudes that emanate sensuality.”

  I had never understood how Izida, older and university-educated, could so blindly fail to anticipate the effect of her words. Or perhaps my time in the theater looking at faces gave me the advantage there. Or perhaps it was that unlike her I had been born and raised an underling, always watching the subtle signs of my lady’s displeasure—such as knowing that using “my lady” instead of “Chief” to her would be grounds for dismissal. Especially when the veins in Nahemiah’s forehead just below her ornate cloche hat (40ts.; the imitations on the street went for 3.50) bulged as they did now.

  “You look at Tammen’s paintings, sculptures, transformations,” Nahemiah said in that ice-cold tone that masked white-hot rage, “and you see men doing things and women—looking bored. Nude, clothed, all his women have no expression on their faces at all, and any sensuality of theirs hasn’t a hen’s tooth of true emotion behind it. And men hail him as a genius! You know why the men at the Public Opera rejected Estorges? Because he dared show women looking happy, unabashedly, unashamedly happy!”

  She opened Arts Today with a sudden movement; the spine had clearly been broken at the spread with the dynamic-captures of the “obscen
e” sculpture. That was striking: all of the newspapers from her chains that Nahemiah read every day, she sent back in pristine condition, only their content copied to her formidable brain. But then, Arts Today was not yet in her chain, even as she bought a profiled work after nearly every issue.

  “I got you to show these men what women can do”—she pointed at Izida, though not at me—”and I will now get these men to see and feel women being happy.”

  I sighed and silently began making notes. Costs of journey to Halispell (32ts. by ship, then between 0.25 and 0.5 ducats by train), ship schedules, Nahemiah’s contacts, or rather, mine. My Chief wanted the Three Dancers of Gizari. All through the years of building and rebuilding the elaborate palace we now stood in, Izida, and later I, had done what the Chief wished.

  The flare of Izida’s nostrils now showed a skeptical distaste. I had seen it many times in front of a design that she wasn’t pleased with, whether drawn by another’s hand or her own. It had always made me yearn to do all I could to change her expression, that nose and cheekbone doing more than any of Nahemiah’s shouts.

  But, looking at the spread in Arts Today, I instead found myself gripped by the energy in the women’s expressions, indeed by their unabashed joy. Joy that I had never seen in Izida or Nahemiah, for all the beauty one had wrought and the other had bought. Joy that I would never feel from any allatir sculpture adorning Nahemiah’s collection, acquired by me but not meant for me.

  As always, it would be Nahemiah’s thalers sterling that I would count out on green-edged checks and assignation notes to pay for the sculpture, and it would be Nahemiah’s palace home, amid mosaics and paintings and tapestries, that it would stand in.

  But it was I, Bethenica Morning, Nahemiah’s financial manager, who truly wanted it.

  ~ ~ ~