BeneathCeaselessSkies Issue005 Read online

  Issue #5 • Dec. 4, 2008

  “The God-Death of Halla,” by Tina Connolly

  “Precious Meat,” by Catherine S Perdue

  PODCAST STORY

  “Kingspeaker,” by Marie Brennan

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  The God-Death of Halla

  Tina Connolly

  Halla got halfway out the window, stolen brooch in hand, and then the dizzies hit.

  She swore as the world rocked around her. She kicked off the sandstone wall by instinct and thumped to the ground. The gold plate stuffed down her shift knocked her ribs and all her breath whooshed out. She gasped like a fish in the humid air.

  Voices.

  Halla stumbled over the cut stone and clover of the landowner’s garden. Her breath rushed back with loud wheezes and she flung herself into the ubiquitous bamboo groves dividing one house from the next. A bamboo leaf sucked into her mouth and she spat.

  Once her family had been guests at this very house. Her father, one of the elite liaisons between the landowners and the holy, had been deeply honored...and feared. Halla had sat on that very bit of stone in a starched white shift, praying that she wouldn’t disgrace herself. But that was ten years ago and several classes above. That memory wouldn’t save her fingers if she were caught this morning.

  The landowner was a heavy woman, whose flesh swung through the gaps in her chiton as she thudded around the side of the house. Two maids trailed her. “I heard someone!” she panted. “Search the house!”

  Halla breathed relief as she crept through the narrow gaps in the bamboo stands, one hand pressing her laboring ribs. The dizziness was gone now. It was only short sharp bursts these days; nothing like the attacks of her childhood. The big ones came at predictable times. Stupid of her for staying in the house that long. The open brooch pricked her palm and she drew it up, watching its emeralds glitter in the green-tinted light. It was an unexpected haul, worth the pain in her side. If she added it and the plate to her small cache it might...might it be enough to buy a bit of land?

  Halla squinched her eyes shut against that hope. She tucked the brooch under her shift and twisted her way out the other side of the grove.

  The heart of the city was even more crowded today—market and temple, sellers and enforcers. The temple reared in the air as she turned corners, a golden glamour of stone, an island in a sea of blue-robed holy. She wended through priests, temple assistants, nuns, novices: all preparing for the next day’s celebration. And there, as she had known—a crowd gathered in the judging square at the temple’s front, where the Mouth of the God stood on the dais.

  Morning judging had begun.

  Sick fascination drew Halla in. She kept low, slipped behind a group of sturdy landowners. Ragged laborers argued in furtive voices, one gesturing with missing fingers. The stolen plate was rigid against her chest and she rolled her shoulders forward as she watched, trying to make her shift hang loose.

  As always, the Mouth was flanked by his two young novices, a boy and a girl. His hidden hands, folded in his blue robe, signified that he carried out only the directives of the God. The girl and the boy stood in for the God’s two immortal assistants: mute Habek and one-handed Iva.

  “Fellow possibilities of the God,” said the Mouth. He was dark and thin with sharp eyes. His smooth voice slid to every corner of the crowded judging square. “He is glad you have come to be with those who have erred, as they submit to divine will. Your eyes will be his eyes as he sees his will accomplished. We are all the eyes of the God.”

  “May he see through us,” answered the crowd.

  A palanquin stood at one corner of the judging square. More priests crowded around it, and a young boy in blue—the priestling, the chosen one—sat inside it. Tomorrow on the new decade he would be invested as the new Mouth. Then he would be the one to hear the directives of the God, to relay the justice of the divine.

  “Through you, he will hear the accused submit to his fair judgment,” said the Mouth. “We are all the ears of the God.”

  “May he listen through us.”

  Two nuns lit smoky torches. The laborer being judged was chained to a pole in the depression at the foot of the dais. Guards fanned out around him and a short priest stepped forward, a moving bundle of net and feathers in his hands.

  Halla spread her feet apart, bracing herself. She swallowed.

  The Mouth made no gesture, spoke no words, just looked at the prisoner. The prisoner’s head swung up as the compulsion of the God surged through the Mouth and touched him. The short sharp dizziness hit Halla at the same instant. She kept her feet braced and rode it out. She did not know why she was attuned to the moods of the God, but so it always had been. Yet another reason she should have her rightful place back, among the holy rich.

  “Morsel of the God,” said the Mouth. “A landowner has accused you of robbing him with a knife. Tell us what you have done.”

  The man’s head swung wildly, his fingers grasping towards the straining netted bundle. The touch of the God on an unholy man was not pretty. Halla could sense it, crackling the air from the Mouth to the man. It was a compulsion that filled him with blood lust, blanketed his mind with one urge: kill the dove. “Nothing, I did nothing.”

  The short priest held the dove just out of reach as the man frothed. The torment would not cease till he succumbed to the God’s compulsion and killed the bird—and the priests would not let him have the bird until he confessed. No one could resist the will of the God for long.

  Then the Mouth would proclaim the sentence. The God generally decreed temple service for landowners, whipping or mutilation for laborers. But if the crime or the victim was great enough—death.

  If the God decreed death, the priests would take the prisoner this night to the ring on the hill and chain him there. At dawn, the God would lay that same bloody compulsion on one of his subjects to carry out the execution. Perhaps someone who stood right there in the unruly crowd, gloating over the man’s agonies. Someone hard at work right now, or fighting or stealing or praying. The God chose at random. It was part of the service to him, and it had to be carried out. The condemned man would be executed.

  Just like her mother.

  Halla realized her crossed arms were digging the rim of the plate into her sore ribs, and she forced herself to let her arms fall.

  “You must speak the truth of the story,” said the Mouth.

  “I wasn’t there. It wasn’t me.” The prisoner shook, but he wasn’t crying. Sometimes they cried.

  “We are all the fingers of the God,” intoned the Mouth.

  “May he work through us,” answered the crowd. A ragged laborer woman next to Halla spat. Another was weeping.

  The man was red and white now, neck corded, trying to reach the dove to kill it. This was the moment when they broke, when they babbled, when they said anything.

  Halla lowered her head and turned away. She slid through the crowd to the back of the temple. There the shops and houses pressed up against it in profusion, there you could slip away unseen. Her heart still beat high with the tension of the judging square. Unreleased tension—the uncompleted death of the bird rang her bones like a prickling line of ants. The prisoner was holding out against the God longer than most.

  Halla wove around blue-robed nuns, a landowner in gold embroidery, a dirty berry-seller with a wooden hand cart, until with a snap the prickles vanished and her bones went silent. The bird must be dead, and the touch of the God, vanished. She wondered, not for the first time, how it felt to have the God leave you. To know his touch, painful as it was, and then to see it go, to be human and plain once more. Her
prickly visions were surely a millionth of what it would be to know the God himself. She crept into an alley shadow, away from the clash of crowds.

  There she stood in darkness and tried to maneuver the plate down her shift. When she finally slid it free, she looked up to see the dirty berry-seller, leaning on his cart and looking straight at her.

  Her first reaction was a shock of recognition, which she immediately dismissed. Her life had changed for the worse a couple times; instead of consorting with the landowners and holy, she knew the laborers and thieves. Yet even they had beds and roofs. She had not yet stooped to familiarity with vagrants. The man was old, his hair a white tangle. His face was so wrinkled and his grey eyes so wandering that she could not tell if his expression was lust or disgust. Plain old idiocy, likely.

  She stashed the plate behind a pile of fish netting in the alley, hoping he wasn’t alert enough to steal it. Still, it was nothing compared to the brooch, or to what she might find within the temple. “Here you go, old man,” said Halla, and flipped him a cent. “Just stop staring at me.” The coin landed in a paper twist of yellow gooseberries. Halla stared a moment, then flipped her thumb and strode past. “You didn’t see nothing.”

  She hurried on to the hidden door that led into the rear of the temple, attempting to match her rhythm to the crunch of people. Her palms were wet. The image of the prisoner, red-faced and shaking, was strong. But today was the day to slip into the temple—all the extra pomp would be out for the decade celebration tomorrow. The tithing room, the indoor altar, the worship hall—all those places would be guarded. But there was a little room at the back where ceremonial props were stored. Ten years ago she had been there with her father, just before the last investiture. They had met the Mouth in that room. Six-year-old Halla had played with a stained golden bowl while they talked in hard voices.

  Her father had taken her into the temple through a door at the rear . She neared the bamboo stand that concealed it, looking for the opening. Ten years was a long time.

  It occurred to her that she had been hearing one particular noise since she left the alley—the rolling of a cart. She turned around. The old berry-man was shuffling behind her. Following. Looking up, around, anywhere but at her. But following.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Halla demanded.

  “You forgot your pretty plate.” It was tucked under his arm. He was eating berries from two paper twists: blackberry, gooseberry, blackberry again.

  She glared. “My business if I did.”

  “You’ll never get rich that way. I’ll hold it for you while you go in the temple.”

  Her hand flicked to the dagger at her belt. “Give me my plate and leave, if you want to help me.”

  “Don’t go in there,” he said. “Dangerous. They’ll chop your fingers off, chop chop.”

  She took a step closer to him. He was stupid, harmless—yet her spine was on edge. “Do I know you?”

  He moved bamboo stalks, tottered right to the door. “Go back to robbing the landowners, my pet. It’s safer.”

  Halla slammed her open hand into his shoulder and he staggered, fell back. “Move.” She reached for the door’s handle.

  It was locked.

  Of course; her father must have had a key. She should’ve known. Stupid girl! No key meant no stealing. No stealing, no land...no land, no vote. No citizenship. No possibility of change.

  The berry-seller tugged at his wild hair, distracted by some internal struggle. “I could...show you another entrance.”

  Her trust wavered, her ribs straining against breath. Judging was going to continue any minute now, and then—yes, here were the dizzies again. Another judging, another touch of the God, another blow from above.

  Halla wanted in that temple, and she wanted it now. “What’s your name, old man?”

  He looked up, down, around the alley. “Don’t have one no more, my pet.”

  “We all have a name.”

  “No one left to call me. What’s the use?” Berry juice flecked the hair on his chin.

  “I’ll call you Gooseberry,” said Halla. “Show me the door.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The temple was white and gold—marble on the floors and flaking filigree in the carvings on the columns. It stirred long-forgotten memories. Halla’s father had been of the holy rich class—not a priest nor a landowner, but one of the men who liaised between the temple and the landowners’ committee, equal in status to both. One of the three classes with citizenship. The holy rich spent a lot of time in both worlds, and Halla had gone with him. She had been in this part of the temple long ago. Back when she still had a family.

  But now she was with a rambling old man who was going to get her in trouble. Every time she crept away from him he looked at her with mournful fatherly eyes, so she stopped. Stupid, this pull on her—she was used to getting along on her own. She didn’t need a familiar face, especially one that wouldn’t say his name. She tried again, her voice low. “Did you know my father? My mother?”

  Gooseberry grabbed her sleeve. His eyes were intense and his smell rank. “She was the kind and beautiful wife of a holy rich man. But she murdered her husband and she had to be executed. The God decreed it, and so his people must be his hands here on earth.”

  The cruel memory shocked her, made her fingers clench. “If I wanted a sermon, I wouldn’t be stealing from the temple right now.”

  “Everyone thinks the executioners are random,” he said, letting her sleeve fall. He mumbled, and he didn’t accent the right words. Halla had to lean in closer than she wanted to pick sense out of his rambling. “The God does not give a task to one finger over another, for we are all equally parts of his hand.”

  “I know,” Halla said. Six years living with her doctrine-obsessed father, seven spent whitewashing walls for the batty old nun who ran the lighthouse. Gooseberry could not teach her anything new. “It’s not murder, it’s divine will. The God might give the execution to any of his people to perform. Ah, the room.” She risked a peek. It was full: golden bowls, charred bamboo screens, iron shears. “You can go now.” She whisked the stolen plate out of his hands.

  He followed her in. “But this God favors some fingers over others.” He put his sticky hand to his forehead, and Halla realized his third and fourth finger were missing to the second knuckle. “That’s not right,” he said. “It must be his hand. The Mouth, you see, the Mouth is choosing which fingers....”

  Halla wanted to shake him. “Do you mean the Mouth himself chooses who has to perform a God-Death?” Heresy? Or merely temple secrets? It fit, somehow...but how would this old man know?

  “Of course. Didn’t you get it? You used to be smart.” Three purple fingerprints spotted his forehead. “The God gives the power, but the Mouth manipulates it. The landowners who give money to the temple, you don’t think they get chosen, do you? The fingers, they’re giving sweet lotions to the God’s hand....”

  “Old man,” said Halla. “If you say one more thing about fingers, I’m going to hit you with some.”

  She touched the prism of a gold lamp. The room reminded her of happier times, being here as a child. She and her da had played games here. Funny games, where he had made her try to talk to the old Mouth with her mind. The room had gone dizzy and vague, her nerves aflame...but she had been sure the God was pleased with her. She’d even thought her father was pleased, which filled those memories with warmth, pride at her abilities. He was a hard man, distant...but then there’d been these golden moments, the two of them together in the temple. Before her mother had destroyed him.

  Strange to think today of all these childhood memories she hadn’t thought of in years.

  Gooseberry scowled. “What makes you fit to judge me? You aren’t temple or rich.”

  “I will be. A landowner, that is, and then I’ll be a citizen. I’ll make changes to this city.”

  “That’s why you’re stealing gold lamps, then?” he jeered. “Only reason you want to be rich is to sit on th
e committee? Tell me another one.”

  Halla put down the lamp and picked up a tablet. “I don’t have to tell you anything. Why don’t you leave before they find us by your stink?”

  He looked sadly at her. One grey eye rolled around. “Good-bye, my pet,” he said, and left the room.

  Halla breathed relief and went back to studying the tablet. An overseas collector might like it. But Gooseberry’s face swam before her, the wild white hair, the vacant grey eyes. “Good-bye, my pet,” he had said, just like someone used to say when she was a girl. Not her father, but someone very like....

  Voices rose in the hall. Someone was coming.

  Halla hurried behind the bamboo screen, shoving the stupid stolen plate under her shift. The pin on the emerald brooch loosened and pierced her, but she managed not to swear. Judging usually took a full hour—how much time had she wasted arguing with Gooseberry? She peeped between two slats while refastening the brooch, this time to the inside of her worn boot. It was a thin man, a nun and three children, all in blue. Halla tried to breathe quietly.

  “Are the priestling’s robes prepared for tomorrow?” said the man’s smooth voice.

  “Yes, Mouth of the God.” The honorific was slurred with long use, closer to mowthgod.

  “Go check on the sacrifice.”

  “Yes, Mouth of the God.” The nun touched her lips in salute and left.

  Not just any man, then. Beside the Mouth stood his two child assistants and the priestling. The priestling’s head lolled and he drooled. If Gooseberry was right that the Mouth had the ability to manipulate the God’s will, then this simpleton would be disastrous as the next Mouth. Why had the God chosen him?

  “Look around,” said the Mouth. His sharp eyes scanned the room. “Find a knife you like for tomorrow.”

  The priestling obeyed, head bobbing. He was young, too. Perhaps nine. Halla was just old enough to remember the current Mouth’s investiture a decade ago. But the current Mouth had been the age she was now when he took on his duties. A young man, not a boy.