Beneath Ceaseless Skies #75 Read online

  His tears are as surprising as seeing water well up from dry stone.

  “I lacked faith,” he confesses, then crumples into me.

  I hold him tight, finding the first roots of forgiveness. Because I finally understand the nature of his faith.

  The true Blacksmiths carry an innate magic, I realize. It’s not granted by a goddess; their healing is just a trick of birth, like a sixth finger. And I do not have it.

  There is no Goddess, no Anvil the world was forged upon; all this religion is just a meditative technique to unlock their skills. Might as well say birds flew thanks to faith, and if we all leapt off cliffs we’d learn to fly.

  In that way, I begin to forgive Father. And myself.

  I would have, too, if he hadn’t stabbed himself.

  * * *

  Father’s unconscious expression is robbed of mirth; he’s hollowed, forsaken. As though he knows I’m now judging him.

  My laughter has subsided, leaving behind a grim residue of a question:

  Does Father deserve to die?

  His belly rises like fresh bread; his gouged intestines are swelling, squeezing his lungs into his throat. He chokes. I listen, uncertain how to feel.

  Hadn’t he dragged me to Elamera pass, then dragged me here? Hadn’t he grabbed my knife? Death would be a just reward for all his manipulative stubbornness.

  You need to come to terms with what I’ve done to you, whether that leads to forgiveness or hatred....

  Give him his due. He thought hatred might be a fine conclusion.

  His death would be restitution for squeezing me into a life I was unsuited for, for dragging me across the land to watch a bunch of idiots tear each other apart.

  I pick up the knife; it feels like murder in my hand. And when I glance fearfully at his body, I don’t see a tyrant—I see someone who’d tried to fill my life with little kindnesses.

  I’d spent my whole life quivering under the shadow of his disapproval—yet had he ever actually disapproved? You haven’t even tried yet was the worst thing he’d ever said to me.

  In his own way, he’d had as much faith in me as he’d in Aelana. With less proof.

  She will not listen to half-meant pleas....

  I press my hands to his belly. “Aelana, heal your servant!”

  My hands are as cold as the rock he lies on.

  I slump against the stone, light-headed with a relief that is surprising, thorough, complete—as if my whole body had let loose a breath I had been holding all my life.

  Here’s the proof I’m not meant to be a Blacksmith.

  Once Father is dead, the path ahead of me will be... dense. Entangled. But that path will be mine to choose. Father spent his life telling me how I was a true Blacksmith—and here’s the rebuttal! You’re not fit for this calling. You killed the last man who told you otherwise.

  Did I want to be a Blacksmith? No one ever asked. Blame Father for that. But grant Father the knowledge of how he has warped my life: Either way, he said, your pathway will be clear.

  Maybe I’m not a Blacksmith. That doesn’t mean I can’t save him.

  Make your choice, Father told me. And I see all that he is and is not; kind, insufferable, distant, caring, and above all loving. He has committed himself to Aelana—but whatever room he has left was all reserved for me.

  I lay my hands on Father’s wounds, as gently as playing a piano.

  “Let him live?” I whisper.

  A voice rings inside my head: How could I refuse a friend?

  And I think: am I her friend? before realizing yes, of course we are— She’s been waiting for so long, all those silences that were my own doubts echoing back at me, and now that they’re gone we can finally clasp hands....

  My world goes white. I feel Her love flowing through me, unblocked by fear or rage, flooding through my arms, turning my father’s belly into a glowing ember. I push down and his stomach is molten, the reluctant give of hot steel; I fold and refold his belly-mass, my hands hard as hammers, until I form healthy intestines, twitching muscles, wet veins. Sweat drips and sizzles on my father’s baby-new skin just before I zip a finger down the gash in the robe; it sews itself back up, neat as the smooth seam of a forge-weld.

  As my Father draws a deep breath, I feel sick. The soldiers.

  I could have saved them. But I thought them idiots—fools who killed other fools. Their deaths were sad... and fitting.

  Judge, Aelana says. Then tell Me what You need. Her voice is pure love. I weep.

  Then Father hugs me tight, crying tears of joy, thanking Aelana for his girl, his beautiful girl, his beautiful beautiful girl.

  * * *

  It doesn’t matter whether Father lived. Don’t think I’m wrong just because he did.

  For today is the day I bring my son to the Anvil. Laelius shuffles reluctantly behind me, and I know exactly what he’s thinking. Anything I say will just feed his doubt.

  So I express bold confidence. And I don’t let him see how damp my palms are as I carry his knife. Despite Father’s elegant lie, stabbing yourself is a horror.

  I am about to stab myself for my son. When my father cut himself open, he placed both our lives in my hands. I will give that same gift to Laelius—even though I now know that sometimes when we go to the Anvil, we find a dead body and an inconsolable acolyte.... Or, worse yet, two suicides.

  Yet my Laelius is so bright. He keeps asking the right questions. “If Aelana would give you anything you wanted,” he asks, “Couldn’t She stop all war? Why does She allow such suffering?”

  I give him Father’s placid, all-knowing smile. I can’t tell him that every Blacksmith has begged Aelana for peace. We think of orphaned children, of needy mothers....

  But then we remember the hate-filled faces of soldiers—boys sent out to fight by their elders, fed lies by their mothers, shamed by their brothers into killing.

  Isn’t it fitting that such anger rebounds upon them all?

  I could have stopped all this, Father had wept. I lacked faith.

  Aelana would grant us any wish. We could reforge the arid rocks of Elamera Pass into an oasis, hammer barren fields into wheat, reshape death itself. But as we would start, the memory of those pathetic soldiers would catch in our throat like a fish bone—and as every good Blacksmith knows, even a speck of doubt blocks a miracle.

  So we perform tiny miracles. Parlor tricks. All the while knowing the state of the world is not her failure, but ours.

  “Can’t you ask Aelana to talk to me, mother?” Laelius asks. I have, of course. So then I wonder whether Aelana is real, or just a way of touching my own talent. Part of me wants to believe I am gifted with strange and mystic powers.

  So no, Laelius; your mother does not know. Just as my father did not know. I will take the knife from your hands, and I will gut myself, and I will never let you know I am terrified that I will die because you do not have the spark.

  Your knife is heavy in my hands. Yet I will not let go. You will test me, and I will test you.

  Together, I hope we can find the strength we both need.

  Copyright © 2011 Ferrett Steinmetz

  Read Comments on this Story in the BCS Forums

  After twenty years of wandering desolate as a writer, Ferrett Steinmetz attended Clarion in 2008 and was rejuvenated. In the two years since then, he’s sold stories to Asimov’s (twice!), GUD, Shimmer, and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, among others, and otherwise has a marvelous collection of extremely kind rejection letters. He lives in Cleveland with his wife, a well-worn copy of Rock Band, and a friendly ghost. Visit him online at theferrett.livejournal.com.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  BONE DIAMOND

  by Michael John Grist

  I discover the first bone diamond in a hunk of crocodile clavicle, lodged between the foramen and articular process. I had meant to simply facet the bone tip’s lamellar weave, that it might, once polished, dove-tail into a brooch that some high lady in the court might w
ear to the arena flooding.

  Rather, I find a diamond, at least thirty carats in size. It is the most extraordinary bright yellow, like amethyst but glowing hot within. Allory would have loved it.

  I take it to my lathe and polish it on corundum, brute it with emery, and at last heat it over a sulfur jet as though it were a citrine. Its yellows melt, whirl, and blaze as though afire inside.

  I sit atop my cankerous clay rooftop and hold it up beside the sphere of the moon. Of the two, my bone diamond shines the purest, the brightest, as though the sun risen at night over the slums of Memphis.

  I do not know then that it will be the end of everything I know.

  * * *

  “Five hundred seinu,” says the Pharaoh’s own man, Ktolemy. He stands bold as saltpeter in my small cutting shop, his gleaming golden torc catching the bright of the mid-day sun. “It is a piddling thing, you see, polisher. You say twenty carats? I wager it is fifteen at best.”

  “Twenty, weighed and measured,” I reply him. “And absolutely unique. You’ll find none other like it in the world.”

  He turns the small golden jewel over in his hands. I faceted it to the euhedral cut and set it within a mount of partridge skull basted with liquid silver. It burns like a mote of fire in his hands.

  “Then six hundred,” he allows grudgingly. “And not a seinu more, unique or no. Perhaps the Pharaoh himself will sport it, at the games.”

  “I would be honored,” I gush, appropriately.

  Ktolemy laughs. “Of course you would, polisher. Six hundred, and you are lucky I do not grind off your nose on your own lathe for the presumption.”

  He leaves, and I think little more of it. How did a diamond come to be in an crocodile’s shoulder? It is not for the likes of me to know.

  * * *

  I attend the games with the masses, gathered to watch the Pharaoh re-interpret the black pestilence that took my Allory and decimated the city. The arena’s aquifer is opened, and we watch as the wood-packed sand is slowly swamped with brackish Nile water.

  Men in brown leather rags jostle and cheer around me, stinking of gut-rot and sour lyrrhd. Before the pestilence it used to be that artisans were lifted above the commoners, given boxes from which to watch the entertainments. Allory and I always hoped to become jewelers together, that we might share a box.

  Everything changes.

  While the arena floods with black water we watch ten legless slaves crawl about the slopping wooden floor. They have the sickly look of pestilence painted on their faces, have probably been tutored to scrabble and rage as though infected. They were perhaps de-limbed as much as a week ago; several of them have learned to walk astride their hands, their torsos upside down in the air above them. There is something repugnant in the way they scrap and claw at each other, like dying animals clawing for sustenance, but then I suppose that is the purpose of it.

  At the end, as the water level rises above their height, only one of them will survive, he who fought the other nine off and climbed the single pole at the center of the arena. The pole has been carved in the shape of a single stalk of safram, the weed that brought the pestilence’s cure. The winner is a Numidian, black as tourmaline and wiry, covered in the raking pink weals of fingernail gouges. He perches on his stumpy legs atop the safram pole and waves to the crowd.

  The men around me boo that he is alive at all. I doubt though that there is much for him to look forward to- perhaps he will find employ as a rug-weaver’s mate and live out his days twining threads and feeling the lash of his master’s cane.

  I shudder at the thought.

  “Polisher,” comes a voice, and I turn to see it is Ktolemy. The savages either side of him cower away, averting their eyes. I too shade my own. “The Pharoah would see you.”

  I bow my head, stand, and follow him meekly.

  * * *

  In the Pharaoh’s presence I must keep my eyes down to his feet at all times. I see there several of the women of his harem, languid, copper-skinned, bedecked in gold; his living treasury.

  His voice is soft, sibilant. Though I may not look I know he speaks from behind a heavy golden mask. I wonder how hot such a thing must be, to wear in this summer heat.

  “From where did you dig this diamond?” he asks.

  It occurs to me then that I have done a very foolish thing.

  Prospecting for diamonds is illegal without the Pharaoh’s grace. I have never prospected for diamonds before, have only ever bought from the Koran markets where the Pharaoh’s grace has already been granted. Now I have sold him one for which no grace was even asked.

  I realize I am seconds away from the fate of the men in the arena. There is no more hope that I might keep its origin a guarded secret.

  “Great lord of the sun, I unearthed this diamond from within the clavicle of a river-crocodile, and being but a foolish and ignorant polisher, failed to seek your grace due to ineptitude.”

  “A river-crocodile,” comes the musing reply. “Within the bone itself?”

  I am sweating copiously. Am I to be forgiven my thoughtless mistake? Am I to fight tooth and nail for my place above the flood water, my legs de-limbed?

  “Great lord of the sun, yes, as though formed in bone mineral, like the nacre of oysters or the chitin of mollusks.”

  The jewel appears before me, held in the Pharaoh’s hand ruby-ringed hand. I hastily avert my eyes to the side. It is forbidden to look at any point but the feet of the Sun King.

  “This jewel, could there be more of them?”

  I wonder if my answer will define my chance at existence. If there are no more, then I will certainly be beheaded for my transgression. I have no choice, and must take the risk.

  “Certainly, great lord of the sun,” I answer, hardly stopping to think. A bead of sweat drips down my nose and I barely catch the drop in my hand before it touches the ground of the Sun King’s box. “They can be found in the bones of certain creatures, at certain times.”

  “And you know these times, and these creatures?”

  I feel as though I am already sinking legless beneath the waves.

  “Yes, great lord, I have some knowledge of such things.”

  The hand with the jewel retracts. “Then bring me more.”

  “Yes, great lord.”

  “And do so with my grace granted.”

  I nod. Ktolemy jerks me in the ribs, and I back out, bowing, terrified.

  * * *

  I buy the bones of three crocodiles from the Kell docks, where they hang bleaching in the sun, destined to be ground into tincts by medicians or garnished and polished by jeweler’s of bone such as myself, or perhaps studied by didacts in the lecture halls of Sankore.

  “Three?” asks the swarthy man, pushing to one side the hanging skins of ostrich that surround him in his dank and musky stand. I have never placed such an order before. I cannot imagine any would.

  “And all that you get in subsequence,” I add. “On commission to the Sun King himself.”

  The man’s eyes widen in alarm, and he makes the sign of the sun across his forehead. Whether he believes I come with the Pharaoh’s remit or not is unimportant- simply to claim it is a matter of life and death.

  “Of course,” he says. “Three tomorrow, and three the next.” I see his beady eyes glow with the profits to be made. He will be thigh deep in entrails all night, and is already spending his seinu in his head.

  I hand them over, one hundred for the rushed payment and delivery. Plenty remains of the six hundred Ktolemy paid for the sun jewel.

  The crocodiles are delivered by cart at my back, a small of team of wastrel boys tugging them along the dusty streets. Back in my workshop, door shuttered against the world, I lay them beside the remnants of the original and take out my bone shears and vise.

  I begin with the clavicles, left articular process, shearing them at epicondyles, splitting them in the vise. I chop the fragments to bits in my search, but find no jewels, nothing but the spongy honeycomb of labyrinth and
collagen. My concern begins to mount, and I move to the right articular process clavicles, but again find nothing of note. I proceed then down their spines, smashing each vertebrae to dust, then to the ribs, then to cracking the long epiphysis of the fore and hind legs, caving in the sutured plates of the skull.

  All for nothing. No jewels spill out. I begin to think it is an impossibility, perhaps the whole affair was an imagination. How did I ever think I found a jewel in a bone?

  Then I see the five hundred seinu on my workbench, left by Ktolemy, along with the promissory writ requesting I supply the Pharaoh with more, and my knees turn to columns of sand. I have promised a thing I cannot deliver, a thing I have no more control over than the flood waters of spring.

  I am covered in bone dust and detritus, spongy osseus matter that is still moist from a recent kill.

  I will surely drown in the arena with the other criminals. The only compensation is that Allory is not alive to see it.

  * * *

  I return to the boneman at first light. There are the three new skeletons, still red and raw with drying tangles of nerve and artery, on a cart by his side. Will they be as empty as the last three? The boneman watches as I pull down the first from the pile, my shears and vise in my hands; his eyes are weary and his leathers stiff with blood.

  I crack the first crocodile’s left clavicle there in the dawn-lit street, find it empty. I crack the right, likewise. The boneman watches as I work my way down the beast’s spine, powdering vertebrae, breaking ribs, cracking the trabecular bones along their long spiny eminences, but find nothing. There are no diamonds, and I feel despair riding up my throat like bile.

  I turn to the boneman and pin my hopes on a wild thought that had come to me as I lay abed that night, unable to sleep, dreaming of all the ways the Sun King might kill me. “The first I bought,” I ask, “from where did it hail?”

  He looks at me glass-eyed, as though hypnotized by my swift work with the shears, demolishing the skeleton he’d so carefully exhumed. “What?”

  “The first,” I persist. “I bought it here a week hence. Did it hail from the Nile, as these other three? From the same hunter, trapping the same region, the same bank?”