Issue #121 • May 16, 2013

“Singing Like a Hundred Dug-up Bones,” by Alex Dally MacFarlane

“Our Dead Selves Lie Like Footsteps in Our Wake,” by Jeff Isacksen

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SINGING LIKE A HUNDRED DUG-UP BONES

by Alex Dally MacFarlane

        Out by the mounds, the ground thaws slowly. Frost-got grass and heather crunch under Knowe’s boots. There’ll be no digging for at least another month, probably closer to two. Knowe walks alone, wrapped in winter wools and hides, but the day is mild enough that she goes un-hooded, letting the wind grasp at her long hair.

        Her mound-hair: peat-dark and thick, blowing over her face that’s pale as dried-out bones after the long, dark winter.

        Now the sun gleams low above the distant sea. The sky is pale blue. Birds let themselves be blown about in it. Knowe can’t name them. Sea crows? Or is it still too soon for them? She’s no good with living things, that’re still covered in their flesh.

        Smiling into the sunlight, she walks to the mound she opened in last summer’s long, light nights. The mound’s entrance is protected from snow and rain by a slab of stone she found among the heather—easy for her to tilt back, to lay flat. Then, slumping her shoulders and lowering her head, Knowe walks along the tunnel to the chamber at the mound’s heart.

        The chamber’s stone walls and curved ceiling are so well-built and so old, fixed in the dirt by the centuries, that Knowe doesn’t fear their collapse. She sits on the bare dirt in the centre, looking at the first of the side chambers where, in the summer, she started clearing the layered dirt and finding bones and metal and three worked, word-etched stones. When winter’s darkness crouched around her, she stopped her work, but she knows there’s still more in that first chamber, more again in the three un-opened chambers: people with close-kept histories, locked up in metal and stone, in the state of their bones—stories for Knowe to spell out in slow, small pieces. Her ancestors’ stories.

        There’s peace in the mound, with only the knowledge of this history for company.

        Alone in that near-dark place Knowe sits a while, enjoying the silence after the winter in her family’s small, crowded house. She hums, then sings: lines snatched from a singer, Bess, a handsome woman with knife-grey strands in her long hair. Some nights Bess is with her sheep, singing to the wind. Some nights she’s with other people. Knowe listens, occasionally.

        “On the rigs two three,” she sings, remembering the opening of one song. Her fingers tap on the age-soaked dirt of the mound’s floor. “‘tween the gloup and the sea. Lint grew there...” Then her memory turns to fog. A line about the girl and her mother? No matter, because she remembers a later bit, similar to the opening: “And it’s all because of the rigs two three, where the lint grew so bonny between the gloup and the sea!” None of the other words come to her tongue. So she sings what she knows, over and over, enjoying the way the words fill the small mound-space.

        There’s another voice.

        Knowe falters, looking for the woman who has crawled into the mound with her. The voice—higher than Knowe’s, clearer—drops away. There’s no one but her and the dirt and the bone-filled side chambers. “Who’s there?” Nothing.

        Then, “Why did you stop singing?” that high voice says, not more than a pace in front of Knowe.

        Coldness crawls right over her.

        A woman appears out of the air, like fog coming together, and sits on the dirt.

        Knowe gasps, goes still, too shocked to scream or talk or move.

        In the dim chamber, the woman glows: paler than any fresh corpse, translucent around the edges. Long white hair falls around her shoulders and arms and brushes on the ground. Colorless fabric wraps around her body like a blanket. There are a few worked metal discs attached to it. Iron? Bronze? Gold? Their fog-white hue keeps their secret.

        Was that what they buried her in, countless centuries ago?

        There’s a small strung bone-thing in her lap; white too. She plucks at it. The sound is like the wind screaming across a chimney top: raw and aching and wincingly loud.

        “Your voice is like that,” the woman says.

        Knowe’s heard worse, but it stings. It’s the first thing this woman—this ghost—has to say to her? “Well, that’s why I’m singing here. Not troubling anyone.” Fear on her tongue. “Except you. What—”

        The woman’s eyes are wide. “What do you mean?”

        “What?”

        Knowe’s heart is writhing like a sheep that knows its slaughter. Get out, get out! “I have to—” she gasps, getting on her hands and knees.

        “It was nice meeting you.” The woman moves further back into the chamber.

        “And you,” Knowe gets past her fear-locked teeth—then she’s out along the tunnel, out of the mound and into the crisp afternoon, where the setting sun stretches its shadows long like strips of sinew.

        “Come back and sing with me!” the ghost calls at her back.

        Oh.

        As Knowe hikes fast over the plain and down the heather-thick slope to the farms spread out along the low lands, she almost laughs thinking: of course a ghost is the first person to want her singing.

* * *

        Knowe’s way home takes her past sheep, past crofts—with not even a token seed in them yet to begin the year’s luck—to her family’s house. The wind’s back up, lashing the island. Night’s wandering in. Getting inside is a relief: into the warmth of her family’s house, where food is cooking, where the light of the peat fire pushes out some of the night’s gloom. Where voices greet her, her family’s voices, familiar and alive: “How’s the view up there?” and “Did you have a good walk, dear?” and “You look chilled. Sit here.” Sillocks are cooking on the brandiron. The bannocks are ready—one is passed to her, already buttered. She nibbles it while the sillocks are brought down, smelling like they were fished out of the sea more recently than last harvest-time, and she takes one, splits it open with her thumb, starts eating the white, soft flesh. It’s reassuringly real to sit with the fire’s heat against her legs, eating, talking. It’s as if she imagined the ghost woman—but she didn’t. Every bit of her knows it.

        All through the evening she tries to get accustomed to the idea of ghosts being more than a rarely heard tale.

* * *

        As a girl, years ago, she sat on the mounds while the sheep grazed on patches of grass. She dozed on the mounds, dreaming vaguely of their contents, and asked around what people knew of them. “Trows’ homes,” her grandmother said—and her father snorted, muttered, “They were chased off the island a hundred years ago. Nothing in the mounds but soil.”

        She kept asking, getting only trow-tales and fanciful rumors of gold and silver hordes—and her nickname, Knowe, which chased out the name her parents gave her at birth—until the night a chunk of cliff fell away, taking half a mound with it. Standing on the tide-bared rocks below, Knowe saw an exposed chamber. Saw bones lying among the rocks and mud at her feet.

        Tales of hordes and the grandly clad skeletons of long-dead warriors grew at the island’s hearths.

        When Knowe finally opened a mound, what she found was smaller, harder to tell a story from. Bones, yes, and a scrap of fabric, and bits of metal that might have been weapons or decorative. The only writing she found was on those three stones in letters none could read. The only words: mute.

* * *

        All the next day, the thought builds in Knowe: the ghost woman can tell her own stories. The history in Knowe’s carefully sorted boxes needs piecing together, and there’s no way of doing that without putting something of herself into the glue, into the scrawled notes that theorize purposes, meanings, lost lives. The ghost woman’s words will be unfiltered by soil and time and modern thoughts.

        Knowe goes back.

        Outside the mound she hesitates. She thinks: ghosts are often sad, adrift—not malevolent. Not normally.

        She pushes aside her fear and goes in.

        The ghost woman is waiting, still white and translucent, undeniably dead, plucking at the edges of her blanket-garment. “Hello,” she says. “Will you sit with me?” Then she smiles, hesitant and shy, like a living woman.

        “I will.”

        Shaking, but only a little, Knowe sits just inside the chamber.

        “I’m Tolnait,” the ghost says. “Who are you?”

        “Knowe.”

        “That’s a good name. Knowe.” With a name like Tolnait—a name Knowe has never once heard—what would she have called the burial mound? Knowe thinks of the stones, etched in intelligible words. “I saw you last year,” Tolnait says, still a bit shy. “Digging in here.”

        “Yes.” Fear fills her. “Is that— Is it all right? Digging you up?”

        Tolnait shrugs. “I don’t mind. I don’t think any of us do. What the birds left of our flesh and hair are in the dirt, now. We’re not just bones.” There are many ghosts. Knowe wants to ask—oh, as many questions as there are bones in the side chambers. That name, that strange blanket-garment, that especially large metal disc at her chest. Everything. “Will you sing again?” Tolnait asks.

        “I— what?”

        “I liked what you were singing last time. I don’t know it. Can you teach it to me?”

        It’s the first time anyone’s asked Knowe to sing. She wishes she knew the words. “I don’t know it. Just bits.”

        “That’s a shame. It was fun.” Tolnait plays with the edge of her blanket-garment again. It makes Knowe shiver, how Tolnait is so normal—and so unforgettably not. “Do you want me to teach you some of the songs I know?”

        “I, um. Actually. I.” Knowe stops and wills the words to come out right. “I was wondering if you could tell me who you are. Not just your name, but how you got here, how—anything, really.”

        “Oh, I died stupidly,” Tolnait says. “Fell in the sea. Washed up on the shore like wrack, all rock-battered. Made all my sisters cry so long that the tide came in higher than ever before.” Her translucent fingers still. “They made it in here eventually, the ones that weren’t married away to other islands or taken, un-married, on seafarers’ boats.” Her voice has turned dark: angry. Knowe imagines knowing a sibling’s theft—knowing the rape and distant death that follows—and not being able to lift a hand about it. “Then there was a bad winter, all ice and no reprieve, and everyone that didn’t freeze under their fleeces got on a fishing boat and set off for Mainland. I stop seeing people once they’re off the island. Then it was hundreds and hundreds of years til their descendants came back.”

        Hundreds of years. That’s how we don’t know their stories.

        Knowe tries to imagine all those years, stretched out like long-lines across the open sea: snapping, sinking, taking stories like fish to the sea floor.

        “Can you tell me the bits of that song you do know?” Tolnait asks. “Your people so rarely linger around the mounds. I get to hear your words—” which explained how she spoke them “—but I never get to hear your songs.”

        “Oh. All right.”

        Knowe sings them, feeling awkward with someone listening, but Tolnait is child-rapt, smiling, and after a few repetitions asks Knowe if she knows the full story even if she’s forgotten the song’s words.

        That she remembers. “It’s about a girl, a poor girl, who’s out on the shore and finds fine lint growing between the gloup and the sea, on ground that isn’t anybody’s, though it’s marked with the lines of old rigs. Your people’s, maybe,” Knowe adds, feeling a swell of wonder at that connection. “The girl gathers the lint and makes a fine dress, so fine that one day she’s out wandering the shore in it and a wealthy man sees her and thinks her fine, and it leads to her marrying the man’s son and having a better life. Hopefully.”

        “When I was a girl,” Tolnait says, “a pretty girl I knew went out walking along the shore, waiting for her father and brothers to come back from the fishing. A giant fish all covered in barnacles and ugly markings suddenly appeared and snatched her away, to be its meal or bride. My mother saw it and jumped right into the sea after it, dived down, killed the fish and rescued the girl.”

        Knowe feels her mouth fall open like a hooked trout’s.

        No bone could tell her this. No eroded lump of metal, whether a decoration or a weapon, could hint at the story of a woman diving into the sea to fight a fish.

        “My mother did lots of things like that,” Tolnait says.

        “Tell me,” Knowe says. “Will you? Will you tell me all of them?”

        “All right.”

        Tales blow over Knowe like the wind—and in the midst of telling her memories, Tolnait starts to sing. The words are like her name, nothing Knowe has ever heard, but the strength of it comes through. The determination of whoever’s story is behind the singing.

        After, Knowe sits in silence, as if the song is echoing and she’s still listening to it.

        “We all sung that as girls,” Tolnait says. “It’s about a girl called Uuir who fell in the sea and got swept right out to another land, where the foxes are white and the people fish through holes in the ice. The people took her in and she grew up there, happy with her new family but always wondering what happened to her first family, always afraid they would be so devastated by her disappearance, and so she used to sit on the edge of the ice and sing—”

        —and Tolnait sings, several times, the words that repeat like a warp through the song—and Knowe tries, under her breath, to sing along, though she’s sure she’s getting it wrong—

        “—telling her family not to worry about her. Eventually there was a winter so cold that the whole sea froze and Uuir was able to walk right across to this island to see her family again, bringing her daughters and one of her new sisters, all of them wearing the fur of those white foxes and carrying recently caught fish, and her first family said, ‘Oh, we knew you were alive, we could hear you singing!’ and they all ate fish together until the sun started to rise again, which meant it was time for Uuir and her daughters and her sister to go back across the ice to their home.”

        “That’s wonderful,” Knowe breathes.

        “I loved it.” Then Tolnait adds, “But it turns out if you fall in the sea, you just drown.”

        “Oh, I—”

        “I still love it, though. And while Uuir got swept out to sea, I got to stay here. I got to meet so many interesting people who were buried before and after me. I got to know my daughter, too, who was only a baby when I died. And now you!”

        Knowe can’t find words for how she feels to be hearing these stories: knowing bits of these long-dead women’s lives. Knowing Tolnait.

        “Do you have children?” Tolnait asks.

        “No. I’m not married. I don’t really like people enough to marry one of them.” Living people, anyway. So far she likes Tolnait more than anyone she’s met.

        “My family was too important for me to remain unmarried.” That doesn’t surprise Knowe, who has already guessed that Tolnait’s people didn’t give everyone the honor of a mound burial—but she hears the darkness in Tolnait’s voice and she aches for her. She knows she’s lucky to be in a family that doesn’t need to marry its daughters away. “Fortunately he died out at sea so there’s no chance of him showing up here,” Tolnait adds, brighter.

        “Are there men in the mounds?”

        “Some. Not many stay here, though, like I do now.”

        And then she goes into the next story like a boat pushing away from the shore, sweeping Knowe into the love of two selkie women and the magic they used to make a daughter with their blood and finger-bones and slick, shining pelts.

* * *

        A boat from Mainland pulls in, surprising everyone. It’s too early for boats. Some important person has died, is the guess. Died or got married or had dealings with another important person that need telling before the right season for boats comes around. Most people walk down to the harbor to hear what’s happened, but Knowe doesn’t care for crowds, doesn’t particularly care for the news of important Mainland people. To keep herself busy, she walks the croft walls, knowing some bits are due a repair before the sowing season starts.

        Sure enough, near the house is a section that needs rebuilding. It’s not a bad day for the work: patchy-skied, with the wind gentle and the sporadic rain no more than drizzle, landing on Knowe like ground oats. The dried stems of last year’s nettles sway around her. She picks up stones from where the wind’s blown them and judges the best way to reassemble the wall.

        Tolnait’s song creeps into her head.

        With a bit of making up sounds—a lot, to be true—she can sing the repeated part: Uuir’s song for her first family. At first she’s quiet, just working and singing under her breath like many people do, but there’s a thrill going through her. She’s singing words unheard by living people for hundreds of years. She’s singing—and she’s not sure how she’ll pass on Uuir’s story without people thinking her mad or getting full of fear, but she’ll find a way. She’ll make sure Uuir is remembered among the living as well as the dead.

        The words come out of her louder.

        Crunching stone: someone’s nearby.

        Her father walks past, howling at her like the wind. Even after she stops singing, the howl continues. Then he’s gone, chuckling, off on some bit of business, and there’s no one else around.

        Knowe finishes the work in silence.

* * *

        That night, she stares at her sillock, poking the scales and only remembering to eat when her mother asks what’s wrong.

        “Nothing,” she says, forcing a smile.

        The Mainland boat brought news of an important man’s death. One of his sons would take his position: a succession of names, as far as the islanders were concerned. “And they needed to come out now to tell us,” her father says, shaking his head. “As if we can’t bear a few months not knowing he’s died.”

        Laughter around the fire, flame-bright.

        Knowe doesn’t know why she’s so upset. It’s not as though it’s the first time her father—or anyone in her family—has said her singing’s bad. But I was out there alone, I wasn’t making anyone listen. She winces at a small bone in her mouth, removes it. Though it’s so slender, more like hair than any of the dark, heavy bones she found in the mound last summer, it makes her think of Tolnait. Singing with Tolnait is easy. It’s not even about the sound. And what’s wrong with bad singing? It’s about the words, about the stories not lost.

        Knowe glares at her half-eaten sillock.

        Conversation lingers on the Mainland boat. It’s boring—she sees her brother dozing on the floor, her cousins already curled together under blankets. Knowe is too hurt to sleep. For a while she sits by the fire, half-listening, then she gets up and goes round the back as if she’s only relieving herself and she doesn’t stop walking, up, up to the high, ghosted plain.

        Clouds hang low, patchy, part-darkening the moon and flinging rain at Knowe’s face. She squints against it. There’s almost nothing to be seen, but her feet know the way: up the stony path, along years-worn sheep paths through the heather and grass to the mounds, to the open entrance. She bends and enters.

        There’s a song in the tunnel, in words like the ones in Uuir’s song.

        There’s not just one voice in the singing.

        Knowe keeps going, right to the end of the tunnel where she stops, gaping at ghosts: seven of them, sitting in a circle, Tolnait with her strung bone-thing in her lap, accompanying the loud voices. They glow so bright together that it’s like white, cloud-filtered daylight in the chamber.

        At the end of the song, they go silent and look at her. Tolnait smiles, says, “Come in!” and there are other smiles too, bright as the year’s first flowers.

        “Are you Knowe?” another ghost asks. “It’s wonderful to meet you!”

        “Tolnait told us about you,” says a ghost far older than the others, her translucent face wrinkled and her fingers like twisted heather-roots.

        They’re all women: friendly, welcoming women. Knowe sits.

        People still like to say the mounds hold warriors. Well, maybe they do. Three of the women wear fine knives: shaped sturdy for use, not decoration, judging by the translucent sheaths. The women’s arms don’t look soft. Their glowing hair is braided and bound back from their faces: practical. Like Tolnait, they wear blanket-garments, although they do not all have metal discs over their chests.

        What did they fight? What—

        Questions crowd at Knowe’s mouth like a family around a fire.

        One woman is naked, except for a small vertebrae tied on chord around her neck. Was she buried that way? Or—there are too many unpleasant ways to die without clothes. But the woman is cheerful, smiling broad as a summer horizon, one arm slung around the shoulders of a far smaller ghost, a shyly smiling short-haired girl wrapped in what looks like a seal skin.

        “Will you sing with us?” the naked ghost asks.

        Sing in a circle?

        “I’ve never really—”

        “Doesn’t matter!” says Tolnait. “But you need our names first. This is Manath,” she says, indicating the naked ghost, “and her daughter Aniel. This is Tolorg—” the old ghost, who smiles with bare gums “—one of my sisters. And these three are Bridei and Dresnait and Gur, sisters, who lived a hundred years before me. They’re buried in the mound closest to this one.”

        Knowe gasps, knowing that.

        How many people will see the sisters’ knives, if they still remain, and say the bones are men’s?

        “And, yes,” Tolnait says to the other ghosts, “this is Knowe, the singing woman I told you about. In summer she’ll be digging up our bones—those of us who are buried here.”

        Knowe’s heart goes suddenly fast with fear, but none of them look angry. None of them look like her work is causing hurt.

        “Will you share our songs with other living people?” Bridei asks.

        “Yes. If that’s all right? If—”

        “Songs are for sharing,” Tolorg says.

        “We keep our songs here,” Gur says, “but to have them kept by the living too—that’s how it should be.”

        Knowe smiles, thinks: When I dig you up, I’ll fight for the truth of you to be known.

        “So will you sing with us?” Manath asks.

        “We’ll teach you the songs,” Tolnait says.

        “And then you can teach us yours!” Gur says.

        “I don’t— I barely know any songs. My family doesn’t really sing. They didn’t teach me any.” She feels awkward, embarrassed: she should know songs, but these pieces of family and island history are lost to her. “I would like to know yours, because—because they’re far closer to lost than the ones I don’t know.” There’s Bess and plenty of other people who know songs, though Knowe’s never talked to them about that. Never thought to. Singing is something people who can sing do—Knowe has the mounds. Well, I’ll just have to have both.

        Bess will want to hear the songs, won’t she? No matter how poor the voice sharing them?

        It hurts to imagine Bess’s laughter.

        “We’ll teach you,” Tolnait says, and there are nods and agreement around the whole circle. “Let’s start with the one I sang last time you were here. Uuir’s song.”

        “Oh!” Gur exclaims, then says something to Tolnait in their language. Tolnait nods, smiling, and says something that sounds a bit like Yes.

        Tolnait and Tolorg guide Knowe through the repeating part of the song: letting her mimic the tune and the words until she’s got it right, not caring that it takes her a while. And then they’re all singing, Tolnait and Tolorg and Gur singing all of the words, Knowe and the others joining them in the repeating part. The song goes on a long time—there must be more parts that Tolnait didn’t sing the first time—and gets so loud that it crashes against the chamber’s walls like a tide.

        The silence afterwards is a surprise.

        Then they teach Knowe the next song.

        They guide her through words and words, tell her their meaning: here a song about weaving with cursed nettles, here a song to draw a man’s attention, here a song for midwives, here a song that Bridei and Dresnait and Gur used in battle to keep their courage high. Manath shares a song from the open sea, in a completely different language—selkie language—and Aniel’s voice floats high above theirs, like a seal contemplating fish.

        They sing til morning sends grey light along the tunnel. Knowe wants to slow the sun’s rise—there are so many songs, so many more yet un-sung.

        Knowe forces herself to leave, knowing her family will already be wondering where she spent the night. I’ll offer to mind the sheep, she thinks as she crawls along the tunnel to the day. Then I can just sleep behind the gorse. Tolnait tells her to come back soon. The others agree. “I will. I will!”

* * *

        She goes whenever she can, learning old songs, old stories: a path across hundreds of years, clear and bright.

* * *

        It takes Knowe almost the whole summer to get up the courage to share the songs with Bess.

        She has to approach Bess among other people, talk of singing where someone might hear and laugh, or go alone when Bess sits with her sheep and be turned away—she can’t. She retreats to her days’ work and the mounds, where her digging adds to what the songs give her, adds to her knowledge of her ancestors.

        She tries. She can’t get her legs to take her closer than a fishing boat’s length. Words slide away as inevitably as the tide.

        Then, on a rare day when she’s up on the slope above the crofts with the sheep, she sees Bess not far away, minding her family’s flock and singing something too distant to understand.

        Hours pass.

        Knowe hikes over to her. “Can I sit? I thought we could—it’d be nice to share our lunch, instead of eating separately.”

        “Of course!” Bess says, smiling.

        They spread out bannocks and cheese and torsk caught the day before. They eat, talking of island news: good fishing, a healthy baby, rumors of important people on Mainland causing trouble among themselves. Eventually they go silent, and Knowe thinks she should get back to where she can see her sheep better—no. “There’s something, um. I wanted to talk to you.”

        “Oh?”

        “It’s about singing.” The words come out like a difficult lambing, but Bess is smiling. “Yes. It’s, um.” Sing. Just sing!

        Knowe thinks of Tolnait, always welcoming, and Tolorg and Manath and Aniel and Gur—

        Knowe starts with the repeating part of Uuir’s song—and it’s wonder on Bess’s face, not laughter. Knowe sings more. Starts telling Bess about the ghosts, when Bess asks what the unfamiliar words mean, and Bess doesn’t mock or call her mad. Her face is bright with joy. “Oh, these are wonderful. Can you sing them all? Can you—do you think I could come with you, when you next go singing with them? I would love to sing with you and Tolnait and the other women. Ghosts. Selkies.”

        “Yes,” Knowe manages. “That would be fun.” Bess actually wants—

        “I wonder if we could translate them, with the ghosts’ help,” Bess says, gazing at the cloud-heavy horizon. “Then we could sing them for people here.”

        “That. Yes.” It gets Knowe thinking about the three word-etched stones and whether the ghosts would tell her what those say. She’s been too busy singing and digging new bones—with no marked stones—to ask. “Yes.”

        “So sing another for me!”

        “Yes, uh—”

        She chooses a song.

        The words spill from Knowe’s mouth like a hundred dug-up bones.

Copyright © 2013 Alex Dally MacFarlane

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Alex Dally MacFarlane lives in London, where she is pursuing an MA in Ancient History. When not researching ancient gender and narratives, she writes stories, found in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Shimmer, The Other Half of the Sky, and previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Poetry can be found in Stone Telling, Goblin Fruit, The Moment of Change, and Here, We Cross. She is the editor of Aliens: Recent Encounters (2013) and The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (forthcoming in late 2014). Visit her online at www.alexdallymacfarlane.com.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

OUR DEAD SELVES LIE LIKE FOOTSTEPS IN OUR WAKE

by Jeff Isacksen

        I close my eyes and listen to the gentle beating of her heart, the rhythm of her life. I can almost feel the warmth of her blood. Intensely intimate—more even than the earlier tangle of limbs and lips—the fabric of her physicality is laid bare in her heartbeat. Like I’m part of her, I press so close that I am among the tiny, fleshy machines that move her parts and breathe her air and do all the other miraculous, incredible, completely mundane things that came together to be Adalia.

        “I can see yours, you know,” she says.

        I shift in her arms. “My what?”

        “Your heartbeat.” She knows my thoughts, as always. Spending so long together, sharing every aspect of every moment, we have become one person. I know her feelings by the subtlest shift of her eyelids. She reads my mind from nothing but a far-off look.

        I don’t question her, because I know it’s true. Adalia sees things no one else can. We are all in touch with the invisible strands of the world, but her innate understanding goes deeper than even our most talented instructors. A heartbeat—something that I would struggle and study to harness—she sees clearly as a splash of color on canvas.

        In sheer ability, I would never match her, but I have a gift too. Where she sees, I understand. The formulas and symbology that our predecessors spent generations building and rebuilding are full of holes that only the best of us can fill. Three years ago, I drew a new symbol and argued for its place in the books. They said it was impossible, that no one of my age could show such ability.

        They had said the same of Adalia. In both, they were wrong.

        “How do you do it?” I ask her.

        “I just do.” She takes a flask of powder from the nightstand and pours it out across the polished wood. With her fingers, she draws. “Do you love me, Mikale?”

        “Yes.” I reach out to touch her dark curls. This is our last moment as we are now. Our time at the University is over. It’s frightening, because I can’t remember my life without her. “More than love. I am you.”

        We have our share of privileges. We were born with the talent for magick. More importantly, we were born thusly to Lords recognized by the city. Common mages are a destabilizing element, they say, and must be normalized—a symbological process that often kills and leaves the lucky few irreparably damaged.

        But our peers are more privileged still. I was born a cripple, and she a girl. Which of these is worse, we debate to no resolution. They say my foot is twisted, but what they mean is that it is hardly a foot. They say she has grace and empathy, but what they mean is that they would rather see a woman as a Lord’s servant than as a Councilor.

        Her fingers dance in swoops and waves, cutting runes into the powder. It’s odd to see. Hands usually draw with inks or chalk. Powder and silver-tipped slippers are for simple gestures in duels, when there is no time to stoop and paint. With my warped foot, dueling is an impossibility, but I have seen her practice countless times.

        She finishes with a stroke I recognize. My symbol—our newest tool in altering the threads of the world. I sit up.

        “This is both of us.” Adalia laces her fingers with mine. Tomorrow, she is to leave the city as a mage-guard to a long expedition. The Council must be hoping that she never returns. She will, but it will be a year or longer. “My sight. My talent. Your symbol. Your wisdom. I always want you with me.”

        Most spells alter threads. They can turn air into bursts of fiery energy or freeze water in a glass. Others destroy threads or create them. The formula on Adalia’s nightstand binds things—ties threads together.

        I move our laced hands over the runes. The energy of them is thick in the air. Her symbols are beautifully precise. “You are me, Adalia, so I’m always with you,” I say. It has to be true, because a year without her is a year without myself.

        She spreads her fingers, and the runes flash with yellow light. The air crackles. I feel something like a tug in my chest, and I gasp and breathe, and then everything is still.

        I can hear her now. Faintly, in the back of my mind, her heart beats, warm and steady. And mine beats for her, I know, when I see her smile back at me.

* * *

        In my sleep, the world is theoreticals. I dream of unproven equations, long-shot theories, and frightening, exciting discoveries. Between night and morning, I discover a thousand new slants on old symbols, then I fight to stay asleep. When I wake, all these things dissipate like smoke, leaving only the faintest haze behind my eyes when I finally open them.

        When dreams fade, I can hear her. Her heart beats against my mind like rain against a roof. Sometimes, it is steady even drops. This morning, it’s a thunderstorm—pounding, echoing. She returned years ago, but shame kept me from writing or seeking her out—shame for what I am without her. She has never come to me, either. And because we are each other, I know that she is ashamed of who she returned as.

        I grope for my cane, and my hand touches glass instead of wood. A bottle clatters. I tell everyone, myself included, that gin fights the pain in my damned, twisted foot. But it fights away doubts, too. After all, what genius discovers a new symbol as a student, then accomplishes steadily less for a decade? And it fights the cold of the Tower and the drafty halls of the Researcher’s Wing.

        And it fights the thoughts of her, but it can never win. Even when she’s far away, serving as a mage-guard or advising Lords in magick dealings, she is always there. Her heartbeat hammers through the alcohol, through the pages of books in which I bury myself. What use are discoveries without her to share in them?

        As her heart steadies, I find my cane. The cold of morning makes the first movements of my foot an agony. I swallow the remnant gin from the bottle on my nightstand and hobble towards the door.

        The research hall is massive, with vaulted ceilings and walls lined with chalkboards, dozens of polished writing desks and bookshelves. Symmetrical corridors lead in all directions, where rooms identical to mine house my peers. A roaring fireplace struggles to keep the vast room warm, but I feel chills as soon as I step inside. Drawing my robes tighter to my body, I move to my desk and its chaos of notes and drawings and books with marked pages.

        “Lord Mikale,” a familiar voice says. I feel a hand on my chair.

        I don’t want to turn. I want to bow my head over the infinite writings of our library. Inside every hundredth book or so, a secret waits. Past geniuses with unpopular notions of magick inked their discoveries onto fragile pages and left them for us—for me—to raise like a torch. I want to be writing, solving, learning, and unlearning.

        But I’m obligated to glance up. Lord Erich meets my eyes. He’s a beautiful man, tall and slim. His wavy hair is bound with a ribbon, and thin spectacles rest on his straight nose. His research is unremarkable, and his skill as a duelist is almost as shameful as my own. But with a Councilor’s daughter carrying his child, Erich has earned himself a powerful father-in-law and a position with Steam and City Works.

        “Lord Erich.” I’m suddenly aware that I haven’t eaten. The gin burns holes in my stomach.

        “I wish I had the mind to follow your patterns.” Erich nods to my desk and smiles sardonically. “I’m joking. One can’t expect a genius to operate like your average researcher.”

        “Is there such a thing? I thought only geniuses worked here.” I run my tongue over my dry lips. All I want is water and silence. “Average mages can help the Jacks solve petty crimes, and run papers for advisers.”

        “When everyone is above average, that becomes the average, my friend.” He touches the green-striped brooch pinned to his robes, the mark of the City Works branch. “But enough small talk. I’m here officially, Mikale.”

        “Shouldn’t you be with the engineers? This place is for self-directed researchers. If we have something for City Works, we’ll send a page.”

        “Listen.” He lowers his voice and sits on a stack of books. “Everyone knows you’re one of the best, but there are whispers, Mikale.”

        I clench the edge of my desk. Politics seep into everything—another poison that kills knowledge for knowledge’s sake. “Aren’t there always?”

        “This is serious. Some people—I’m not a liberty to say whom—feel you are unfocused. It’s no secret that you’ve been drinking more, and your research of late hasn’t impressed the Council.”

        I feel myself sinking. For the Council to speak poorly of my research threatens everything that I have. I know I’m squandering my talents, but there is nothing for me beyond the Tower. “Research takes time....”

        “That doesn’t change what’s being said. There are people who want to see you removed, Mikale. They say you’re wasting resources and embarrassing the University and your fellow researchers.”

        I have nothing to say. I just push the papers around my desk, trying to remember the last revelation I’d shared with the Council. There was something I’d worked on, something important from the night before, but between the alcohol and my sleeplessness, I can’t remember. I glance at my chalkboard, but it bears a hand-shaped streak of white. Did I erase my writing in a fit, or did someone maliciously wipe it away?

        “I know you’re better than this.” Erich stands and straightens his robes. “I want you to work for me. City Works needs more dedicated researchers, and the Council agrees that you could use direction.”

        We are expecting great things from you, a Councilor had said when he welcomed me into the Researcher’s Wing. I cover my face with my hands. Adalia’s heart taps out its even rhythm, deep in my skull.

        Erich puts a hand on my shoulder. “In the past, City Works has relied too heavily on engineers and not enough on mages. There are opportunities for untouched research with us. I promise you won’t be bored. And it’s a respected branch.”

        The main doors fly open, banging back against the stone walls. Everyone, even the most absorbed reader, flinches and turns. A page stands in the doorway, his eyes downcast. “My apologies, Lords, but Instructor Henning is dead. Please convene this way.”

        Researchers flood after the boy. I struggle to keep up as well as I can manage. Erich makes a show of friendship and keeps stride with me, though I can tell he wants desperately to bolt ahead.

        In the main hall, where the countless wings of the Tower connect, gaping mages surround the Instructor’s body. Covered in burns, he lies on the floor with his arms outstretched. Powder sits in a pile at his feet. Half a rune has been slashed into the white dust.

        Erich fights his way to the front. “Who did this?”

        I know before they say it. Logic tells me that Henning was an incredible duelist and only the best could have beaten him so soundly. But more than that, I know because I remember her heart pounding. I know because I am her.

        “Lady Adalia,” someone says, and I mouth along.

* * *

        I get used to the brooch. At first, it feels like a chain. Years later, it’s an extension of my robes, weightless but always there. Lord Erich lied about the boredom of it, as most of City Works’ problems are trivial. I rarely spend an entire day in my study. But the solutions I produce are tangible, and tangibility begets recognition.

        The Councilors and Lords know me now. I receive invitations and offers that I never would have as a researcher. Magick within City Works has the potential to change the city, and everyone wants to be on the cutting edge.

        City Works has even convinced the Tower to lend books to my study, so today I find myself in the main hall where Henning died. The Tower looks alien to me. When I was a researcher, I rarely left the Wing, and I haven’t been back since Erich hired me. Some of the tapestries are different now, I think. I press my cane into the carpeted walkway and start towards the library.

        But then I feel her—her heartbeat, close. “Mikale?”

        At the base of a stairwell, she watches me. Her dark curls are shorter and lighter in patches. She’s thicker now, more womanly. The cloth at her chest is still broochless, unaffiliated. Everyone will hire her and use her power, but no one will claim her.

        Researchers strive to be unaffiliated. In that, I have failed. But those who seek to become Councilors fight for affiliation. In that, she has failed.

        “Adalia.” A part of me wants to fall into her arms, but she is hardly Adalia now. All of her tragic beauty has bled out, leaving her hard and angry. Without me to share in it, her soft side has atrophied. And I feel betrayed because she isn’t me or herself.

        “So it’s true. You’re with Steam and City now.” She sighs. “I didn’t want to believe it. You have a researcher’s heart.”

        “No one becomes a Councilor for research,” I say without thinking.

        “You never wanted that.”

        I frown. My dream of research alone died years ago. But within City Works, I’ve gained respect and contacts. I’ve climbed steadily upwards. Becoming a Councilor is a natural goal. “Things change.”

        “I see that.” Her words are sharp.

        “Like how you used to not be a killer,” I snap back.

        “Legitimate and legal duels.” Her heart beats faster, incensed. “If any of those deaths were questionable, I would be in the dungeon. They’d love to be rid of me.”

        Her face twists, scowling. Once, she had been determined but warm and alive. Her eyes look like clockwork now, like she’s been hollowed out.

        “What happened to you?” I ask, as though I don’t know.

        “Me?” Her words echo in the empty hall. “What happened to you, Mikale? I loved you, but now you’re just—”

        “You killed Lord Berecht in front of his children!” I slam my cane down against the floor. “You’re beyond ambitious, Adalia. You—”

        “He asked why he should bother hiring me as an adviser when he could pay an alley whore for the only thing I was worth!” Adalia’s heart bangs like gunpowder. “I challenged him. He accepted, then and there. If he would kill in front of his sons, he can die in front of his sons!”

        I pull away. Her words are venom. She’s panting through her teeth, angry, near mad. But I know that it is honesty, not insanity.

        “I’ve learned two things,” she continues, her arms lashing as she gestures. “One: no one is going to give me anything, even if I earn it. And two: they are too damned proud to decline a duel from me. If they stand between me and a place on the Council, I will do what I have to.”

        “You’ll kill the whole Council, then?”

        “If I have to! At least I remember my dream.”

        Once, I’d believed she could be the first woman on the Council of Mages. Now, I see that they’ll break her long before that. They’ve broken her already. My Adalia is in pieces, like a crystal glass tossed carelessly aside.

        She strides forward and pushes a finger into my green-striped brooch. The metal backing pricks my chest. “You have no right to talk about what I’ve become. You let your research rot and then sold yourself to City Works because that was the easy way out.”

        My heart catches. I’m in pieces, too. Her eyes fall—a hint of regret on her hard face. “I never learned how to be me without you,” I admit to her and myself.

        Adalia covers her mouth with her hand. Her eyes begin to shine with tears, but she blinks them away. “...I’m sorry, Mikale. You—we were so much, and it seems like it’s all gone.” Her shoulders fall. Without her fury, she hangs limp, barely upright. “I hate seeing you like this. I just want to scream until you’re you again.”

        I look away, shamed. “It wouldn’t help.”

        “At least you can still do great things at City Works.” She touches my arm, but I move it. “It’s not ideal, but you can learn and discover and—”

        “I’m sabotaging my research.” The tears are mine this time. I can hear the pain in her heart. I’ve stabbed her through the chest. “One of the Councilors wants the support of the Engineers’ Guild, so he’s asked me to see that certain projects fail. And I’m doing it.”

        Her frown dimples deep into her right cheek. That’s how I know when she is truly hurt. Not upset, afraid, offended or angry, but truly, deeply hurt. I can hear it in her heartbeat, too. I wonder what she hears in mine.

        Before she can speak, I turn my back and walk as quickly as I can. The Tower doors open onto rain-slick streets. Cold drops fall like tiny swords. I savor the stinging pain and drag myself, empty-handed, back to Steam and City Works.

* * *

        The smooth tiled stone underfoot is so clean and shining that I can almost see myself in it. I’m glad that I can’t. The sound of my cane against the University halls should be nostalgic, but my foot is worse now. The rhythm is wrong. The wood of my cane is different, and the sound isn’t light and hollow but dense, hard. I try to use it to block out the beating of her heart.

        Blue-black curtains wave over massive windows that overlook the city. In the moonlight, spires rise like mountains from the CityCenter, encircled by the ugly grays and rotting buildings of the Outer District. The air is silent and still.

        But from the cracked door of an empty lecture hall, I can almost hear myself arguing my discoveries. Using brilliant logic and hard-earned knowledge, I twist everything that the University and the Council think we know about magick. Every word on every page is a weapon against stagnation. Every thread I bend in a new way is a shield against old bearded men who believe their knowledge is the only knowledge, when in truth they know nothing.

        And on a padded bench beneath a painting of a generations-old headmaster, I almost see Adalia, hair bound with golden pins, tears shining in her dark eyes. She cries to me about the unrelenting humiliation that her instructors try to break her with. They cut her down, insult her, and when it is time to duel, they set her against a fierce young man who has injured five others before her.

        She burns him because his defense is poor. Because he underestimates her. Because she underestimates herself and hurts him badly. And with her chin high and ice in her eyes, she walks from the dueling hall without a faltering step. She hasn’t the luxury of weakness. She cannot worry for him or ask after him, because it is better to be feared than mocked.

        Afterwards, she cries to me alone, in the abandoned hallway beneath the judging eyes of a long-dead headmaster. And when footsteps echo from the next corner, she becomes silent, eyes dry and lips steady.

        Here, now, I hear footsteps and raise my head. When I see her, I nearly lose my grip and fall. If not for the shortness of her curls, I would think myself mad, seeing ghosts of our murdered youth.

        The silver tips of her slippers click on the floor as she walks to me, arms wrapping around herself. “I knew that you’d be here,” she says, knowing me better than I know myself.

        “I didn’t.” Out the window, gas lamps light the main streets in a golden glow. “I’m not sure how I got here. I just walked....”

        “It’s a horrible place.” She raises her chin to meet the painting’s eyes. “I hate it, but I wish I could be here forever. I miss us.”

        “We’re still here,” I say, but I don’t believe it.

        Adalia lays her hand on the lecture hall door. It creaks open. “Tell me something incredible, Mikale. Like you used to.”

        She leads me inside. The gas lamps flash. The rows of tables and empty chairs and the long chalkboard at the front of the room are all just as I remember them. Symbological equations cover the board, some half-erased, others underlined, all of them elementary.

        “The one at the top,” I say, pointing. Slowly, I help myself towards the chalkboard. “You know it. One of our most basic concepts of alteration....”

        Faintly, she smiles, and she sits atop a table at the front of the room. “I know it.”

        “It’s garbage.” I seize a piece of chalk like a knife and slash through the runes. “It functions, but we don’t know why. Decades ago, a man named Instructor Jeralt penned a different series of runes that can do the same things but better, faster, and more importantly, we understand them.”

        She leans back on her palms. “I didn’t know that.”

        “That’s because they never teach it—because it unhinges some of the very basic concepts of magick that the University and the Council hold dear. We’ve based everything on this other cruder drawing for generations.” Wiping a space on the board with my palm, I touch the chalk to it. My hands are shaking from how hard I grip. My fingers feel clumsy, drawing in chalk again, but I scratch out Jeralt’s equation from memory. “We’ve made so much out of nothing. Just imagine what we could do if anyone was willing start over and learn it all again.”

        “Understanding isn’t everything, genius,” she replies with a grin. She stands up and takes the chalk from me. Her hands are clumsy, too. Her feet, I’m sure, still draw with dangerous precision. Her linework tightens as she writes. “No one, not even you, can explain why I can do this.”

        She finishes her last rune, and the symbols glow. Fire leaps from the lanterns, crawling like snakes along the floor. The flames wind up the legs of the middlemost table, converging and burning brighter. But, impossibly, they consume nothing. The wood remains polished and clean.

        Adalia waves her hands like a puppeteer. She can feel the threads, I know it. The fire burns higher in places, like fingers straining for the ceiling, while others fall closer to the table. It’s all there—the CityCenter, the Tower, the University, and even the Outer District and the Basin, where part of the city collapsed ages ago.

        I gape. Her heart patters, delighted. The fire even feels hot, but the table refuses to burn. “...how did you do that?”

        “I just did,” she says with a laugh. She parts her hands. The fires vanish, leaving the smell of smoke in the air. “I just see it and make it do whatever I want.”

        I glance at her with a wry smile. “All that power, yet you never fixed my foot.”

        “If I could, I would. You of all people should know the limitations of magickal medicine.” She touches my chin and smiles.

        I grin faintly and put my hand on her wrist. “If we adopted Jeralt’s equation, it might be possible one day.”

        “I’ll leave that to you,” she whispers, and her lips brush against mine. They’re warm and familiar, soft still and beautifully pink. My eyes close.

        But I stop and turn my head. Her lips fall against my cheek. I glance down. “We’re not who we were.”

        Adalia shrinks, withers away from me. She flees from my words, head down as she skulks to the door. “Hasn’t this proven that we are?”

        “No.” I follow her back out into the echoing halls. “This just proves that we were something else once.... We can’t just erase everything and be children again.”

        She bites her lip to stop the shaking. “Why not?” Pressing her fingers against her head, she spins to face me. She’s quiet—a pained silence—then she swings her arms wildly. “If I could, I’d tear open time and push you through it! Then you could be you again, here again. And you’d take me with you, and we—”

        “No, I wouldn’t,” I say. She stares at me, betrayed, her frown dimpling deep into her cheek. But I mean my words, even though they hurt her—me. “You never learned to be you without me, and if we did it all again, we’d end up right here.”

        “I’d still go back if I could. Wouldn’t you?”

        “Yes!” I shout, and I hate myself for it. I know it’s weak and wrong and selfish and that all roads from there lead to here, but I still would. “But it’s a ridiculous to talk about impossibilities. This is beyond theoretical.”

        Adalia collapses into the cushions of the padded bench. She drops her head against the wall, dark eyes on the ceiling. Deep shadows cover the stonework, barely visible by the light from the connecting atrium. “I’m tired, Mikale. But I don’t want to sleep, because tomorrow I’ll be me again. I miss being us.”

        I sit down beside her, careful of my foot, and rest my cane across my lap. Adalia’s weight leans against my shoulder. I can faintly smell her hair. Was it so long ago that we sat like this, sharing her tears over her horrible victory? The memories are so clear—of speaking, spitting resentful, hateful words about rigid old men who so willingly crushed down everything that we believed in. I struggled, then, to understand how men calling themselves mages could knowingly stunt the growth of knowledge.

        And I look down at my hands and see ink stains on my fingertips from symbology I’ve written that would never work. Impossible, I’d said to Erich’s face when I presented him with a dozen broken equations—false solutions to a problem that I could have solved on the second pass.
   “We can’t be who we used to be,” I say, brushing her hair from her face. Her curls are like dark velvet, soft and comfortably familiar. “But maybe we don’t have to be who we are. What would Adalia have wanted for you?”

        Her eyes are ringed with exhaustion. “She wanted to prove it could be done.” Adalia wets her lips. “But I think she would have been happy to know she was making a path for other women. Like your scholars and their writings. She would have left behind something good for when this damned city was ready.”

        I kiss her softly, sweetly, and then I stand. “It’s late. You need sleep.” With my hand in hers, I help her to her feet. “Wake up as someone else, if you can.”

        Our fingers slip apart. I want to strain after hers, to brush fingertips again even if for one second. But I make my hand fall and turn from the ghosts of our past—our corpses that we left to rot in our footsteps.

        Tonight, we have died again and left ourselves another decade of haunting memories. The years are now nothing but failed theoretical could-have-beens, like doors slammed shut and barred forever.

* * *

        I don’t sleep, but the rhythms of her heart tell me that, in time, she does. In my cramped quarters, I struggle through pages of complicated equations. My failed symbology wastes a pile of parchment, covered in flawed inks. Finally, I return to my chalkboard, a better tool for uncertain work, a tool I haven’t touched in years.

        The sun is rising when I’m sure the runes are right. I draw the final symbol—my symbol—and lay my hand over the dusty board. The runes flash. The thread tugs at my chest like it will rip me open, and I cry out through my teeth. It pulls and aches, but then it—no, they unwind, like two halves of a severed whole. I feel amputated, empty, bleeding, but I make myself stand. I make myself walk, leaving yet another part of me to die on that hard wooden floor.

        At Steam and City Works, Erich looks surprised to see me this early.

        “When I said impossible....” I limp past him, towards my bare desk. “I meant for someone who wasn’t a genius. I’ll make it work.”

        With those words, I anchor myself to my small study and my drafty, leaking quarters. The favors I’ve curried from powerful men will vanish. I will live and die at Steam and City Works. So I spread my books and my pages across my desk and hang my chalkboard on the wall.

        Silence fills my head where Adalia used to be. I wonder what’s she’s doing and where in the city she is now. For the first time, I don’t know. I can only hope that, after so long stumbling over what we left behind, leashed to the past by a heart thread, she will finally find herself, whoever that may be.

        With chalk in my clumsy fingers, I draw Jeralt’s equation. From it, all of my research shall grow.

Copyright © 2013 Jeff Isacksen

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In addition to writing, Jeff Isacksen works as a personal trainer, plays too many video games, and practices Krav Maga incessantly. His first reader is always his infinitely supportive wife and fellow writer, Lauren Liebowitz, without whom he never would have put his ideas to the page.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

COVER ART

“Marching Off,” by Maciej Wojtala

Maciej Wojtala is a Polish concept artist who works in the video games industry. For the last seven years, he has been working at People Can Fly, the studio responsible for Bulletstorm and Gears of War : Judgment. He creates environment concept art, prop designs, illustrations, and graphic design elements. View more of his artwork at www.wojtala.com.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1076

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Copyright © 2013 Firkin Press

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