BeneathCeaselessSkies Issue009 Read online

  And he looked at Nona, who was so good at seeing what was really there. So good that she couldn’t understand how what wasn’t there could have power. “Nona,” he said, getting to his feet.

  “I don’t understand,” Nona said. “You don’t think—Keia girl, I come up here each spring to help with the molting. In return I get these.” She held up the dragon’s-eyes, red and gold gleaming through her fingers as if lit by their own fire. “There’s only a few places they come for the molting, and there’s only a few people who know how to help.”

  “But there’s more to it. There has to be.” Keia flung her arms out toward the dragons, as if to draw them all close to her. “Why else would they come here, why else would dragon’s-eyes be royal?”

  Nona shrugged. “If there was a reason, I never knew it, and neither did my old master.”

  Keia’s face crumpled. “That’s it? That’s all there is—just some cheap trade?”

  Like razormen are just glorified thugs. Skald took a step forward. “Nona, Keia, I think maybe—”

  “It’s a long and proud tradition.” Nona reached out to her daughter, hands still brimming with horn and scale.

  Keia knocked her hand away, scattering dragon’s-eyes across the grass. “No! No, you’re wrong—I’ll prove it, the dragons know me, they recognize me—”

  She turned and darted toward the bright dragons, heedless of the knifegrass. “Look, I’m here, I’ve come! It’s me, Keia Dragonsdaughter—”

  “Keia, no! Not that way!”

  Skald was already on his feet, running after her—but he was too slow, or too old, or maybe, maybe, had too much of a sense of self-preservation to follow her with all his speed.

  The newly-molted dragon reared up away from her. Keia didn’t see, or saw it as something else, a greeting maybe. It lashed out—Skald caught a glimpse of claws, this time white and clean—and Keia fell.

  Nona’s scream caught as if snagged on those claws. Skald clutched her as she ran past. “No, no, stop. Let me do this.” He shoved Nona back and walked forward, arms outstretched.

  The dragon blinked once, sluggish as its unmolted fellows, and withdrew its claws. It nudged Keia’s limp body with the tip of one claw. The slim jaws parted as if to utter a malediction, but all that emerged was a confused, warbling hiss.

  The dragons had a language, the man strapped to the table had told him. They had a language, a long time ago. But every time they killed a human, they lost another few words, and so eventually they forgot how to speak. They’re just animals now. It’s the truth, the truth, I swear it.

  Skald hadn’t believed him then, in spite of what he’d said. But he knew it to be true now. He crouched by Keia’s body, as he had when pulling her from the knifegrass. Her eyes were open, still wide with conviction, and he closed them.

  The dragon hissed again, almost but not quite forming words. I know you, he thought, and raised his eyes to meet the dragon’s gaze. I know how it works. You do something awful, maybe because you’re angry or you’re scared or someone told you it was the only way. And then you regret it, but not enough to keep from doing it the next time.

  He got to his feet, Keia’s body in his arms. So you keep doing it, and regretting it, and the rust builds up and the blades thin under it, and one day you forget you ever could speak. Skald’s reflection in the dragon’s eye blurred, and he didn’t think it was the dragon’s doing.

  He turned, crossed the grass, and laid Keia at its edge, then turned his back while Nona knelt beside her daughter. Her chest hitched twice, and she turned away, toward the dragons. “Get out!” she screamed. “Go, go, get out!”

  The dragons flinched, a ripple spreading out from her. One by one, they turned and flew or crawled out of the basin, trailing shreds of skin and scale, straining wings that were too new to fly. The last few, graying and thick-plated, waited in futile hope, then dragged themselves away through knifegrass. In the shadow of departing dragons, Nona stroked her daughter’s brow and cried, and Skald turned away, not wanting to hear.

  After some time, because Nona was a pragmatic person even in grief, she began gathering stones for a cairn. Skald helped without speaking, then as the cairn grew, took a seat beside it. Wail and Moan were easy to unstrap; Reap and Sow less so, and the lack of Mercy’s pressure against his back was like an ache. Cutting the toes from his boots took longer, but in time the two Surprises joined Keia, and he stood, an old unarmed man with nothing.

  Nona returned to his side. “I thought I was doing it all the right way,” she said without preamble. “I thought she’d learn from the Sisters, and I could teach her what I knew, and it would be right....” She covered her face. “What do we do, Skald? What do we do, when all our work comes to this?”

  Skald set the letter from Wullfort on top of the blades and laid a last stone over it all. “The same thing the dragons do,” he said. “Shed our skins. Shed our skins, and move on.”

  Copyright © 2009 by Margaret Ronald

  Of Thinking Being and Beast

  Michael J. DeLuca

  The last bout of the afternoon ended in an instant. Recovering from a dive, the thunderbird tangled itself in its tether, and the human sorcerer simply took a handful of rattlesnakes and hurled them at its eyes.

  Boreas the satyr, beastmaster of the Circus of King Minos’ Masque, saw the noble bird personally to its hearse. He touched the bare skin below its eye, plucked one enormous feather from its wing. Misty-eyed, he tacked up the feather next to a lucky centaur shoe on the crossbeam of the Lethe Square gate. Then he knuckled the blur from his vision and made his way back through the menagerie.

  Overhead, the ten thousand seats of the Circus of King Minos’ Masque emptied slowly, its human patrons tossing chestnuts and popcorn aside and scattering into the streets of New Ilium. Piss-colored wine dripped from the cheap seats, sparkling in the desert light that angled in from the arena.

  Only the gods knew what the human masses did in the City of Centaurs after the Circus closed its gates. Boreas didn’t want to guess. He never left the Circus, not if he could help it. As far as he could tell, the only thing keeping the human population of New Ilium alive from hour to hour was the prospect that, a little later on, they might get to watch some beautiful monstrosity rip one of their centaur masters apart.

  Boreas’ cloven hooves, aching from a long day’s work, dragged to a stop at the edge of the minotaur pit. His body was sticky all over, bits of hay and animal filth clinging to his sweat. He thought about finding a pig trough and submerging his head. But his day wasn’t over.

  Eurytus, lord of the Labyrinth Ranch, ruler of the City of Centaurs, owner and proprietor of the Circus of King Minos’ Masque, sorcerer, murderer, pathological liar—Boreas’ boss—had reserved the arena for the evening. A private bout. Any minute now, the second champion would arrive. He had until then to pull himself together.

  Hitching up his overalls, Boreas climbed onto the crossbar of the fence and let his legs dangle. He found his corncob briar in a pocket, packed it with bearberry leaf. He squinted into the sun. Three hours, he guessed. Three hours before nightfall.

  The bull-headed, tattooed monster in the pit glanced up at his sigh, no sign of recognition in its milky gaze. The minotaur, sculpted and scribed for the purpose of violence, had endured the Tartarean ruckus of the Circus with the patience of Orpheus. Amazing, thought Boreas. He’d been at this job half his life; every bout still left him a wreck. Eurytus said Boreas cared too much about his charges. He couldn’t deny it. He loved what he did, even on a day like today.

  He puffed at his pipe, let it dangle from his mouth trailing smoke into the sunbeams.

  Every detail of this monster’s life, from the forest of sorcerous tattoos on its hide to its fine diet and impeccably groomed auburn curls, served only to prepare it to die on its master’s behalf. Boreas wondered if it understood that. Eurytus understood, at least. The nameplate on the fence was blank. Boreas would have liked the name “Ariadne”, were the minotau
r’s male gender not so readily apparent. Maybe he’d call it that anyway.

  Somewhere in the menagerie’s bowels, a gate growled open, massive timber pivots creaking in protest of the winch. The river gate. Something large and unnatural bellowed, hurled its bulk against a support. The Circus shook.

  Boreas tumbled from his perch. The briar pipe flew out of his lips and into Ariadne’s pen. The comforting must of hay and weeks-old shit gave way to the sinister stench of a monster in rut, the pack of coyotes locked in the menagerie’s first cellar started up their horde-of-rabid-children din, and suddenly every living thing in the menagerie was screaming.

  Everything except the minotaur.

  Against the shimmering blindness of the open gate, beyond which the River Acheron lay flooded with reflected sunlight, a black silhouette loomed. Boreas skidded to a halt.

  It couldn’t be a bull. Some kind of prehistoric buffalo. A uroch. It was as wide across as a locomotive. A human slave dangled impaled upon one of its horns. A dozen other slaves dragged behind it on tether-ropes, bruised and battered, nearing panic.

  The bull sidestepped sharply. A centaur stallion stumbled out of the glare, slammed hard against a pillar and recovered with a snarl. Nessus. Keg-chested, twenty-one hands at the shoulder, one fist wrapped around the butt of a colossal revolver holstered at his withers, the other scraping sorcerous symbols in the dirt with the end of a prod. It was clear that the inclination towards the gun was winning. Nessus had outdone himself. Created an aberration beyond his control. “Boreas,” he growled. “Where have you been?”

  If it occurred to the bull to turn around, it could escape onto the docks. Boreas studied the branding scars that covered its skin from hock to horn and wondered how many of the Circus’ patrons it would trample to death if it did.

  He had to beat Nessus to the draw.

  Boreas ran up to the titanic bull, snatched his trusty ‘A’ harmonica from the hindquarter pocket of his overalls, and commenced an impudent hornpipe right in front of its nose. It pawed the ground and bellowed. Hot breath, sick with the reek of decay, pushed Boreas’ curls back from the knobs of his horns. Inside the bull’s mouth were things like wolf’s teeth wrought of iron, caked in gore.

  Boreas kicked up his hooves and took off down the corridor, blowing at the mouth-harp like his life depended on it, leaping over fallen slaves, hoofing loose chickens out of his path. The bull thundered after him, gnashing and snorting.

  He risked a glance back. The slaves were still hanging onto the ropes. “Let go, you idiots,” he gasped. “Circle around—get the Big Pit ready!”

  The dead slave came dislodged from the monster’s horn and was pulverized beneath its hooves. Blood and bits of brain splattered Boreas’ face. He stumbled over something tawny and squealing, barely rolled out of the way as one of the bull’s hooves descended, rupturing the piglet’s spine. He turned a corner, did a tight lap around the hogs’ wallow to slow the thing down. Ariadne’s pen flashed by on the right; he gave it as wide a berth as he could. A brief crossfire of flying feces from the apes—he swore a massive sacrifice to any god who cared to listen if the bull could just manage not to smash open the cages—and the black orifice of the Big Pit yawned ahead. The slaves had raised the grate. Boreas measured the inch-thick, steel-tipped prods in their hands against the titanic thing behind him. The prods would snap like toothpicks.

  At the lip of the Pit he skidded to a stop. He took in the hard-packed dirt four fathoms down, the array of feed sacks secured by netting and guy ropes among the beams, the bull bearing down three strides behind him, and Nessus, who stood safely on the far side of the room, arms folded, a sickly yellow bruise forming across his shoulder. “If the beast breaks its neck in the fall,” Nessus said, “I’ll kill every one of you.”

  Boreas blew a last desperate arpeggio and dove aside. The slaves closed in, prods trembling in their fingers.

  “Get back!” he screamed.

  The bull pounded to a halt, horns swinging.

  Boreas gathered himself off the floor, traded the mouth-harp for a skinning knife from yet another pocket, and sawed through one of the guy ropes. A half-ton sack of chicken feed swung down and slammed into the bull’s ribs.

  The monster tottered. One tree-trunk foreleg lost its purchase, then the whole massive bulk fell, thudding into the floor of the pit like a blow from Hephaestus’ hammer. A fine trickle of cornmeal descended after it from a rupture in the sack.

  Boreas and Nessus limped to opposite edges of the pit.

  The bull shook its head and snorted, then set about attacking the growing heap of meal as though bearing it some personal grudge.

  Boreas sank to his haunches. He fumbled in his pockets for his pipe and found it missing. Slaves fussed over him, fighting to be the one allowed to clean his face of gore. He waved them off. “Get back, you buzzards. Go mop up Ilus. And close the river gate.” Couldn’t be too careful these days, what with the rumor of rebels.

  Nessus’ disapproving expression did not fade. Cradling his bruised arm, he stalked around the outside of the pit and disappeared into the corridor. A few overcurious goats bleated amiable greetings. He returned with one slung like a sack across his uninjured shoulder—a heavily lactating, cream-and-charcoal-spotted nanny goat.

  “Listen, Nessus,” Boreas was grumbling, still patting his pockets. “I’m beastmaster here. Just because you’re... doesn’t mean you can just.... You brought that abomination in here, and it killed one of my.... Petunia! How did you get out here? You ought to be looking after Zephyrus. Nessus, what are you doing? That’s Petunia. She’s a milking goat. Wait! Don’t—”

  Nessus upended her into the Pit.

  Petunia brayed, trembling, her velvet ears flattened against her head. She tried to get up. One of her hind legs folded beneath her, the slick white of bone protruding from the flesh. Then the bull’s enormous, scarred bulk blocked Petunia from view. There was the sound of bones being crunched between iron jaws.

  “Petunia!” moaned Boreas.

  “Stop bawling.” Nessus extricated his foreleg from Boreas’ embrace. “He hasn’t eaten since this morning. I want him ravenous, not starved. You’d rather I sacrificed another slave? Next time I suggest you show up to do your job.”

  Boreas clenched his teeth. His vision blurred. “This is your fault, Nessus.”

  “Don’t worry. I won’t hold it against you. In fact, I’ll let you make amends.” Nessus closed a fist around the strap of Boreas’ overalls and hauled him to a standing position. He flicked a speck of skull from Boreas’ bib. “You’re going to help me win this bout.”

  Boreas found a scrap of hankie, wiped the last of the dead slave from his face. “You can’t be serious. You feed my favorite goat to your man-eating buffalo, and then you expect me to help you? Against Eurytus? This was supposed to be my night off!”

  Nessus lifted him up off the ground. “Buffalo?” he asked. “You are referring to the Bull of Heaven. Impressive, isn’t he? I made him myself.”

  Boreas craned his neck, realized he was dangling above the Pit. The Bull of Heaven roared like a steam engine as the last of Petunia disappeared down its gullet.

  Boreas swallowed. He tried not to look.

  One corner of Nessus’ broad mouth curled up. Coward, said his sneer. “Perhaps you were unaware of the significance of my wager with Eurytus. You’ve heard of the slave uprising at Epimethea.”

  The mine. Boreas had heard. Arguments about it had trickled down from the stands all afternoon. By most accounts the revolt had been brief and bloody. Eurytus himself had been present. Some even claimed he’d instigated the fight—that he’d baited the slaves to attack him.

  “Eurytus captured the ringleader alive. That’s his stake in the wager: Hippodamia, the mastermind of the rebellion. But the only way I could convince him was to offer a prisoner of equal value: the savage prophet, Scylla.”

  Boreas nodded slowly. The rivalry between Nessus and Eurytus was as old as the centaurs’ rule. N
essus would love for a slave rebellion to succeed: he’d waited decades for the opportunity to seize control.

  “What you’re going to do for me is this. Find out which of the beasts quartered here is his champion. Make sure it doesn’t survive.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The nameboard on Petunia’s stall was hand-carved and hand-painted, bordered with purple flowers on whimsical vines. Boreas rested his forehead against it and tried to think. He missed her already.

  He’d made the rounds of the cages and stalls, making sure the damage the Bull of Heaven had inflicted was repaired, herding escapees back into confinement, doping a few of the rowdier apes, trying to calm everyone down. Everyone except the minotaur. The minotaur he’d found puttering about its pen, as quiet as before. He’d found his pipe, too: clutched in one of its fists.

  For the moment, he’d switched from smoke to liquor as the means to calm his nerves: an eight year-old, rust-colored bottle of bourbon bearing the spiral stamp of the Labyrinth Cellars––one he’d been saving for rather a different occasion.

  Boreas’ son, Zephyrus, thrust his head from between the slats of the next stall and bleated. He had Petunia’s eyes, glazed with that faraway look, the pupils squashed flat as though they’d been stepped on. Boreas patted the kid on the head and burst into tears.

  Petunia wasn’t the first goat he’d loved. He told himself she wouldn’t be the last.

  He’d sent a lot of beautiful, noble, gentle creatures to their deaths over the years, and mourned their passing. But never once had he interfered in a bout, or tried to give a favorite some advantage. He liked to tell himself he was only giving his charges up to fate.