Issue #145 • Apr. 17, 2014

“Our Fire, Given Freely,” by Seth Dickinson

“Women in Sandstone,” by Alex Dally MacFarlane

For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

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OUR FIRE, GIVEN FREELY

by Seth Dickinson

        Rider Bray runs the steppe one stride ahead of her name, racing the wind cross waves of grass glazed in the light of a high cold sun. Heading home, war and longed-for glory at her back, to answer the summons of her warlord queen.

        She wants to stay at war. Wants to fight and win, against the enemy _övalye and their black-masked retinues, against her own name and heritage and the weakness it implies. But she answers her queen, the mighty Hau Nidane, the Setless Sun.

        Rider breathes the steppe air cold with coming storm and lets her small sedition flow out with it. Runs on.

        Her retinue chases her like the chevron autumn geese cut from the sky and among the drum of their footstep she hears, against her will, the ghost of ancient hooves. Down fifteen years of memory her mother tells her: the horses ruled this steppe, this Black Atora, and we ruled the horses, we the Horse People, we of the enamel and the glass.

        Then the Walkers came, and killed the herds—

        Did they hunt the horses with tribute fire? little ill-remembered Bray asks.

        Their secret strength, whispers umi Bray. Unknown to us, to the Horse People: the tribute fire, the given flame.

        Oh, umi Bray—if you could see!

        Now that tribute sings in Bray’s veins, burns in the sweat upon her brow, alloys her bone and breath. Six years she has been sworn and still this power dizzies her.

        Each morning the men and women of her retinue grant her tribute, whispering the words of the ancient Walker rite: our fire, given freely. Each night the tribute bonds break and she diminishes as they fall one by one to sleep. The fire makes her strong, feeds body and soul, grants her might for battle and speed for the steppe.

        She has been made _övalye, first of all the Horse People, by the grace and wisdom of the mighty Hau Nidane. And now she has been called home.

        She runs on.

* * *

        The palace of Hau Nidane rises from the steppe ahead, white walls like the bones of the world. Rider Bray shouts to her retinue, voice a mighty drum: “Raise your kites!”

        Snail-dye banners dip in answer, codes acknowledged, greetings sent. But no other Nidani _övalye runs out with his retinue to offer escort and guard. Perhaps it is a Walker slight. Perhaps the war has left no _övalye here as guard.

        Rider Bray passes through the great stone gates, surrendering her spears and knives, divesting herself of her retinue, and goes down the path of paper lanterns into the henge court of Hau Nidane.

        She feels like a stain upon the Walker court, her skin mud against their humus-dark, her jaw narrow and fragile, her teeth gapped and stained. But she has learned to carry herself proud, even under the contempt of the Walker guard, the mathematicians and engineers and concubines that ring the court.

        The people who bore her were stains, perhaps. But she is _övalye. She reached up and was lifted.

        “My Queen,” she says, and bows her head to the chernozemic earth.

        Hau Nidane stands at the pole of the white circled henge, her shoulders broad as the sky, her legs set like the trunks of windbreaking trees. She wears no crown and needs no throne to rest upon. Her open arms circle the span of all that Rider Bray is and will ever be. “My _övalye,” she says. “My sworn and chosen. Welcome.”

        “You sent for me.”

        Hau Nidane, the Setless Sun, grants her the favor of a smile. “If I ask for word of our war,” she says, “will you be true?”

        “I will.”

        The Queen lifts a hand: continue.

        “We cannot match the King of Emmer Wheat,” Rider Bray says, her brow pressed into the grass, the dark Atora earth, on which she has spilled so much blood. “He gathers tribute from too many. His _övalye are too strong. We have been driven back, nearly to the quarries at Uma Nonya.”

        The queen nods. “So it is. You must wonder, then, why I have called you away.”

        “I wonder only how I can serve best.”

        The Queen beckons for her to rise. “Some say you cannot understand the tribute. That the knowledge of it is not in your blood.”

        Rider Bray lifts herself and lifts her chin. “I have ears. I hear what is said.”

        “It is not your ears they question.”

        Even secondhand, the slight pricks at her temper. “I know the ways of tribute as well as any _övalye,” she says, eyes averted to hide her curled lip, her ill-hidden disquiet: why am I here? “Each day we pledge our fire to you, O queen, by way of your runners and deputies. You in turn choose your _övalye. And as you never sleep, your bond to your _övalye never breaks; and so we are made mighty.”

        Hau Nidane considers her _övalye with dark eyes. Sövalye know the rule of eyes: you will see fire only in the eyes of those who burn less bright. Ordinary eyes mean an ordinary woman, or a woman more powerful than Rider Bray. Hau Nidani is not ordinary.

        “You carry your name well,” she says. “I chose it to remind you of what you had to prove. And you have proven.”

        “You choose well in all things,” Bray says.

        “Is that so?” The Queen’s great shoulders cord. “My people starve, Rider Bray. I take their fire and spend it on a war I cannot win, and without that fire, without the strength to heal pox and hoe the earth, they sicken and starve. They say that among the Horse People there are mothers who have given so much they cannot quicken. Does that not trouble you? Do you not doubt me?”

        “Never,” Rider Bray says, and smiles within at the truth of it. “You are Queen of the Nidani. Some day your kingdom will mend this shattered steppe and you with all your gathered tribute will be immortal.”

        The wind moves among the standing stones and stirs the short strands of Hau Nidane’s hair.

        “A traveling sage came to me,” the Queen says. “A man named Marantic Lind. He claims he can teach a band of common tribute to fight with the strength and fire of a great _övalye. He tells me that he can raise an army which will win my war against the King of Emmer Wheat.”

        An army. A mob, a herd, an ignoble thing. To hear that bitter word in the mouth of the Queen—

        Rider Bray fixes her face and waits.

        “Go to him,” Hau Nidane commands. “Learn the truth of his methods.”

        “Surely I could do more good—” Bray begins. But the Queen raises a hand to silence her.

        “Go to this Marantic Lind,” Hau Nidane repeats. “You are the only Horse Person ever made _övalye. You understand the common tribute. I trust you to be fair in your report.”

        Her eyes say all the rest. A Queen cannot speak worry, cannot say fear. Nowhere in the method of Marantic Lind has the Queen made any mention of royal tribute.

        I will earn no glory here, Rider Bray wants to shout. I will still be Rider. I will still be a woman with a name that spreads its legs across a horse.

        “My Queen,” she says, and lowers her brow to the dark Atora earth.

* * *

        “We run for the quarries at Uma Nonya,” she tells the chief of her retinue, the albino Suro Bulayo. He is a Walker and her first friend.

        “To join the fight again?”

        “To serve our Queen.” She gestures impatiently to the gathered retinue, the Horse People who run with her because she shares their blood, the Walkers who run with her because they are deformed or weak or pale of color and no other _övalye will have them. “We go at dawn. Eat and shit while you have the chance. Bulayo—my spears.”

        Bray takes their tribute under the sunrise, the fire rich like cream, and blesses each of them with a touch and an oath, for speed and strength in their run. She is trained _övalye. She can do more with their gathered power than they could achieve in concert with all their farflung kin.

        This sage Marantic Lind cannot change that truth.

        Uma Nonya spills out beneath them at the end of their trail, split by the bent blade of its river, the near bank perilously close to flooding down into the quarries in a broth of sand and sweating flesh.

        Bray looks down across the village with eyes made eagle-sharp by tribute fire. Sees an emaciated, pot-belled child working the dry teats of a dying cow. He is a Walker boy with a Walker jaw but naked and filthy as her little brothers. The sod-roofed hut behind him has begun to slump.

        The King of Emmer Wheat’s _övalye have never troubled Uma Nonya. No blood has spilled in its white quarries, its clear cold river. But still the war is here.

        She turns her eyes to the quarries. Walkers work the walls with ball and chisel and flame, and in the dusted pit beneath them gangs of Horse People labor with cable and lever to drag loose blocks. Everywhere she looks she sees starvation. Tribute fire can sustain a man through drought, but though the rains are late this year, the fire goes to the Queen and the war.

        “You’re frowning,” Suro Bulayo says.

        “As usual.”

        He chuckles.

        At a ramp in the northernmost pit, where a work crew struggles at the ropes of a pale granite block, some peculiarity draws her eye. Rider Bray considers the crew for a moment and points. “Marantic Lind. There.”

        “How can you tell?”

        “Because he’s a madman,” she says. “And that gang is full of Walkers and Horse People, side by side. No chains. No guards.”

        “Like us,” Suro Bulayo says. “Maybe they’re friends.”

        “They might have been, before they began to starve. But now?” Bray signs to her retinue, a laconic wave: be ready to move. “I know what Walkers do to Horse People when things go wrong. Someone holds them together. Marantic Lind.”

* * *

        The granite rides a wooden sledge along the ramp. The men and women of the gang labor downslope against it, hauling at a rope roll, the corded reed lines looped taut around a stanchion upslope so that the gang’s descending labor powers the block’s ascent.

        Strange, this: the gang has no caller, no officer to keep time as they labor at the cedar handles. Rider Bray paces the length of the line, breathing their sweat and body stink, her fingers snapping to each perfect synchronized grunt as they step into the ropes like a mother bent to her last labor.

        She sees in their eyes the spark of tribute fire, each and every man and woman. They have not passed their tribute to the Queen today.

        And they are not starved. Far from fed, surely, but she can smell blood from some of the women. Fat enough for fecundity. Fire enough to cycle.

        Among the gang she finds a man, Walker skin and Walker jaw, eyes cast to the earth, narrow shoulders trembling with effort. She knows him by his small bloody hands, hands unaccustomed to work.

        “Marantic Lind,” she says. “The Queen sent me.”

        “We have stone to pull,” he says. Walker jaw but a foreign accent, touched by the lilt of some other sweep of steppe.

        “You’re too weak for this work.”

        He looks up and his eyes glimmer with a little measure of tribute fire. “I am weak,” he says. “We are strong.”

        She walks past him. Goes to the head of the gang, finds a pair of handles on the rope, sets her boots against the clay-caked ramp, and begins to pull. The rope creaks with her strength, and in her chest and calves she feels the fire swell to answer her.

        The beat of labor breaks, and the gang falls apart into confusion. Her pull offsets the rhythm and they begin to slack off the rope, confused, drawn along.

        She heaves at the rope, and the stone in its sledge carries on as if they still spent all their strength on it.

        “Give me your tribute,” she calls. “I am _övalye. Give me your fire.”

        The gathered Walkers and Horse People with their calloused quarry hands look to Marantic Lind. He nods. “Go on,” he says. “Give her your strength.”

        One by one they approach with sullen eyes to touch her and whisper: our fire, given freely.

        She works the rope and pretends not to hear the lie.

* * *

        In a cedar cabin between the quarry and the river she wastes the last of the day’s light listening to Marantic Lind.

        “We do so many stupid things,” he says, squatted across the fire, steeping the dry leaves of a weak tea. “Quarry by rivers. Till our farmland dry. Waste the fire that could make our people strong.” He sips the tea, grins a curious little grin like a sparrow’s cocked head. “Don’t you think?”

        “You have better ways?”

        “I have a way to make sixty common Nidani tributes as mighty as any _övalye,” he says.

        She lifts her hands to show him the memory of the pull handles. The stone she alone drew up out of the quarry.

        “Yes—yes, a powerful demonstration.” He nods like a little bird too, bouncing on his haunches. He has a face not much given to stillness and a tongue uneasy with silence. “One trained _övalye can do so much.”

        She finds the mockery in his implication - one trained Horse Person _övalye can labor so well—and stamps on her fury with long weary practice. Maybe he doesn’t mean it.

        “But how many _övalye does Hau Nidane command?” Marantic Lind presses. “How many years of training do they each demand from our kingdom? How much gathered tribute?”

        She leans forward on her hands, the symbolism conscious: a cat before a bird. “I could kill your gang of sixty in a minute,” she says. “I could snap their bones with my bare hands and run them down as they fled. I could do the same against six hundred. I am invested with the might of so many, Marantic Lind. No number of men lit by one solitary fire can match me.”

        “Bray,” Suro Bulayo calls from the door. “People coming.”

        Marantic Lind steeples his hands beneath his chin. “I call it the Flock,” he says. “Let me show you.”

        They wait outside, the sixty men and women who worked the quarry, Horse People clumped among the Walkers like clots in cream. Marantic Lind opens his arms to them. “Rider Bray,” he says. “I beg you. Give them back their fire.”

        She measures him with a sidelong glance. “I wonder,” she says. “What do you get from all this? What is your cause, Marantic Lind?”

        “Victory for our Queen Hau Nidane,” he says, his level eyes unblinking. “The unification of the Black Atora under her rule. May it be eternal.”

        She considers him a moment more and then reaches within herself to cut their tribute free. Sparks kindle in a hundred eyes before her. “Done,” she says. “Show me, then.”

        “Begin,” Marantic Lind says.

        The crowd mills with silent intent, pawing at each other, whispering the familiar susurrus: our fire, our fire, our fire. Each groping for the hand of another, for the shoulders of a companion turned away, a communion of grime and common calloused flesh.

        Tribute to tribute.

        “We pool our fire,” Marantic Lind whispers in her ear. “Every one to every other. It takes discipline, trust, experience—but little training. We have learned to make it work.”

        She nods, her curiosity piqued even as her training rebels. “Who leads? Who plays _övalye?”

        “A flock has no leader. Only the bird who flies front.”

        “I see men, not birds.” She swings to face him, her impatience buried. “A sage should know the uses of the fire, Marantic Lind: to nourish the body, to prolong life, to heal, to quicken, and—in a trained _övalye—to grant speed and might. Sixty weaklings paying tribute to each other are still weaklings.”

        “We are the best gang in the quarry,” he says, chin raised. “These were the worst, when I found them. They were all half-dead. Now they labor well.”

        This man, she thinks, has never learned his place—and there, in spite of herself, she feels admiration.

        “So you feed extra fire to the starving and ill. Take from the strong to coddle the weak. A good and clever trick.” She gives him just the hint of a nod, to prick a drop of hope, as the _övalye who trained her used to do, before the crushing reminder—your name is Rider! Remember who you are!

        “You keep your band strong against starvation,” she says. “And deprive the Queen of rightful tribute. Deprive me of strength I need to end this war.”

        Marantic Lind raises his hands but she speaks over him.

        “You promised my Queen an army. All you have devised is a clever sort of treason.”

        “Wait. Wait.” He pushes at the air with his soft hands. “Give us a chance. One chance to show you what we can do.”

        “There is more stone in that quarry,” she says.

        “In battle!” he pleads. “Let us fight!”

        She almost turns away. She almost laughs.

        She remembers a Horse Girl, eyes fixed on the cabled calves of a passing _övalye, telling her mother: I will be her.

        You can never be her, little Bray.

        “The King of Emmer Wheat sweeps the fields north of you with his raiders,” she says. “If your Flock can run, then I will take you out as skirmishers. Is that what you want?”

        Marantic Lind nods. The watching Flock whispers to itself.

        “Understand,” she says. “We will meet his _övalye and we will cast spears. Some of us will die. I think your Flock will rout. I think the Harvester foe will run you down and murder you. Is that what you want?”

        She says this to Marantic Lind, as if he were _övalye of this ragged Flock. He is not, of course; but his Flock still hears.

        One of the men among them, a Walker with a broken nose, speaks. “We are dying here,” he says, arm on the shoulder of the man beside him. “I have lost my sons and my husband has lost his wives. We want a chance at a better kind of death.”

        “We will need spears, and a chance to learn their use—” Marantic Lind begins.

        She signs to Suro Bulayo. “We have spears to spare,” she says. “Eat and say farewell to your families. We leave tonight.”

        Of all of them, Marantic Lind looks the most afraid.

* * *

        “Are you a coward?” she asks him.

        They run the blind steppe beneath the infinite stars, north across the grass, through the windbreaker trees and the fields waiting for water to wake the Black Atora’s earth.

        “My strengths are hard to see,” Marantic Lind says. He shrugs and grins his sparrow grin. “I was an orphan and a slave. I was carried far from here, to a land of salt and scholars, and told I would never find my way back. But look: here I am!”

        He keeps pace with her, and the Flock keeps pace with him, formless but persistent. Not as fast as her retinue, but faster than she expected. Their shared fire, bolstering the weak.

        The sliver of moon gives little light and as they run north Rider Bray chews over the possibility of ambush. “Suro Bulayo!” she calls. “We should throw out a screen—”

        “No need.” Marantic Lind points to the horizon. “A little starlight multiplied by many eyes, and your night becomes our day. We see clearly.”

        A chill takes Rider Bray. “Clever,” she says.

        For a moment she glimpses the web of power that binds them all together, these rough and ragged bonds.

        “Isn’t it?” Marantic Lind looks giddy. “Isn’t it, though? And only the beginning, only a little trick. Hau Nidane could rule the Black Atora, and with the world’s tribute she could be immortal.”

        “It is one thing to see in the dark,” she says. “Another to stand against the mighty. Consider your people, Marantic Lind. They have husbands, wives, children. They may fight so close to home, but they will never go out to war in the name of Hau Nidane.”

        “The Nidani are a desperate people,” he says. For a moment he does not look at all like a child or a bird. “Beset by starvation and pestilence and war. Given cause, they will fight.”

        “The common tribute cannot fight a war,” she says. “We have our _övalye and our Queen for a reason, Marantic Lind.”

        “So that we can spend our fire to feed them, while we starve? So that we can send our strength to the Queen, while we labor at the stone?”

        “Consider your position,” she says softly. “Speak with care.”

        A cry goes up from the eastern edge of the Flock. “Runners! Runners to the east!”

        Rider Bray follows their gestures and sees the glint of moonlight pinned on naked speartips, four minutes distant at a steady pace. The distant runners fly no signal kites. “Harvesters,” she says.

        Marantic Lind shouts to his Flock, but already they have begun to unravel. A woman breaks from the eastern file, spear across her shoulders, jaw set, running toward the distant Harvester. “Neida!” someone shouts. “Neida, wait!”

        But this woman Neida will not wait. A man named Wick scrambles after her and he draws a whole thread of companions out after him until the whole eastern side of the Flock—Walkers, mostly—has joined their ragged indecisive charge.

        “Will you command?” Bray asks Marantic Lind. She knows this pattern, knows how it will play out: eager to charge, eager to break.

        He touches his temples, eyes briefly shut. “I have learned many things,” he says. “Not this, though. Not this.”

        “I can save your Flock,” she says. “At your word I set myself between you and the enemy, and I screen your retreat. At your word.”

        In the distance the Harvester formation opens like a hand and their _övalye steps forth, spear and shield, eyes bright in Bray’s sight. He carries tribute fire, surely, but no great measure. The King of Emmer Wheat leaves him to gather from his own retinue, rather than giving him fire through a sleepless royal bond.

        “At your word, Marantic Lind,” she repeats.

        For just one instant his eyes beg for servitude, for command. Then he sets his jaw and turns.

        “Charge!” he cries. “Forward! Charge!”

        And the Flock charges, spilling itself across the steppe, a stumbling cataract of men and women waving spears.

        “Bray,” Suro Bulayo says tightly. “Do we help?”

        Rider Bray hefts a spear. Considers Marantic Lind, caught up in the tide, roaring his narrow lungs out as if arguing against his own heart.

        It will take one bloody moment to break them.

        Or one simple intercession to show Marantic Lind his foolishness.

        “We wait,” she says.

        The other _övalye closes at a bemused trot, and she sees the mantis mask of Ro Kahae, young among the Harvester sworn. He lifts his spear and throws from a great distance. In the stretched sight of battle-ready _övalye Rider Bray watches the shaft arc like dark lightning to take the woman Neida in her stomach. She screams.

        The man Wick stops to kneel by her and cry out, and the charge breaks around him. The _övalye Ro Kahae draws from his bundle of spears and kills two men with one cast. Someone throws back at him and he catches the shaft and snaps it as kindling across his knee.

        At the spectacle of his might the Flock’s charge slows and spreads. Spears fall short or go wide. Bray loses sight of Marantic Lind in the piling confusion.

        “Bray,” Suro Bulayo says. “They have no chance.”

        Ro Kahae laughs and draws his blade.

        Rider Bray draws breath and speaks as a booming drum. “The flanks!” she shouts. “The left and the right! Go! Go past him! Go for his tribute!”

        She leaps forward like a wind across the grass not to join battle with Ro Kahae but to push at the Flock, to add current to their faltering rush. “Kill his tribute!” she roars, bounding down their line. “Take the flanks! You—and you—rally your companions! Hold him!”

        Ro Kahae sees her and raises his spear but a mingled bunch of Horse and Walker step forward to cast spears and he must whirl away as all around the Flock streams past like the horns of a bull.

        She imagines Ro Kahae’s confusion, beset by this desperate fire-eyed mass, this rabid herd. Sövalye fight _övalye; this is the way of battle on the Black Atora. Retinues do not fight.

        She hears Marantic Lind: “Stand by the man beside you! He can only kill one of you at a time!”

        The screams of the wounded drown his shout, but then, somehow, it comes from another throat, and another, spreading man to woman, Walker to Horse: “Kill his tribute! Stand by the man beside you!”

        The Flock speaks. Ro Kahae hesitates, blade in hand, shield raised against the pressing mass. He roars challenge and his roar is thunder but the Flock’s chant matches him.

        Behind Ro Kahae the Flock falls upon his retinue, his spear-carriers and scouts. They have no fire in them for they have given it all to Ro Kahae and so they are no match for the men and women set upon them. When the first man among his retinue dies Ro Kahae feels it.

        “Rider!” Ro Kahae roars, name and epithet. “Rider!”

        He could kill them all if he stood and fought. But he has never met this kind of war, Rider Bray knows. He knows no way but the Black Atora way, the clash of _övalye.

        He draws away. The Flock screams derision at him.

        “Run!” Rider Bray roars. “Run, coward! Run!”

        He gets halfway to the horizon before the last of his retinue dies behind him, and with his fire so diminished he is only a man again.

        The Flock runs him down.

        “We won,” Marantic Lind pants. A wounded man shrieks in the grass behind him. “We won. Was it—I couldn’t see, I couldn’t understand what happened—was it you? Did you beat him?”

        “I cast no spears,” Rider Bray says. She signs to her retinue: see to the wounded. “You won.”

        She is _övalye. She must respect the argument of spears.

* * *

        Some of the wounded cannot be moved, so the Flock makes camp on the steppe, huddled in the lee of a line of windbreaker trees. “No campfires,” Rider Bray commands. “No light.” She sends a runner back towards Uma Nonya to report, carrying a measure of her fire.

        Suro Bulayo and the rest of her retinue bind wounds and guide the Flock in the prevention of sepsis, the setting of bones. “We could use your fire,” Marantic Lind says, flush with his victory, trailing her steps. “You should join them—”

        “And if another Harvester _övalye comes?”

        He sets a finger to his lips in thought. “Every minute I spend with you,” he says, “I discover new holes in my scholarship.”

        Someone screams at a bone set or a surgery begun. Marantic Lind closes his eyes for one guilty moment.

        She sits herself against a cedar trunk. “There are no wounded in sövalye war,” she says. “Just victor and vanquished.”

        He will not meet her eyes. “Maybe it’s best to let the people earn their victories,” he says. “Maybe we’d rather take our own wounds.”

        “Sit.”

        He folds himself against the trunk. “You saw how they fought,” he says, as if in petition. “You saw what they did against a true _övalye. Imagine a Flock in every village, a horde sweeping the steppe, across every splintered kingdom! Imagine an end to war and hunger and hurt.”

        He was a slave, she remembers, and feels as if a small unwise door inside her has come ajar. “It was a good battle,” she says. “Dishonorable and dirty. But good.”

        “I’ve never fought before.”

        “Let me tell you, then: the good ones are the ones you win.”

        He chuckles weakly.

        “It’s all right to be shaken.” She takes his shoulder. “Your Flock has power. They fight like idiots—but they can be taught.”

        He makes a mindless washing gesture, scrubbing his palms against his thighs. “How did you convince your Queen?” he asks.

        “To make me _övalye?”

        “Yes. Given that you’re—” He touches his jaw. “Narrow.”

        “I told her that we deserved to fight for ourselves,” she says.

        “And she listened?”

        “She’s a good Queen.” It feels good to say that. It feels good to speak the truth of who and what she is.

        But it feels good as well to remember Ro Kahae’s smug Walker face, run down and broken by the mingled mass—

        Of course Ro Kahae wore a mask. Of course she never saw his face.

        “A good Queen.” Marantic Lind considers the sores he has opened on his hands. “If such a thing exists. If one sleepless sovereign can justly rule so many.”

        Angry shouts from among the wounded: Walkers and Horse People shouting over a burial rite. “Whispers only!” Rider Bray shouts at them. “Unless you’re ready for another fight!”

        Marantic Lind leans forward with sudden intent. “You used to rule this steppe. Now you labor in our quarries, and all the animals you worshiped and lived with are dead by our hands. How can you serve a Walker queen? How can you accept your place?”

        It takes Rider Bray a moment to realize that you means Horse People and not _övalye. “I earned this,” she says, her gaze a challenge he will not meet. “I raised myself up with my own strength. I earned my place.”

        “Yes.” Marantic Lind looks across the huddled squabbling Flock. “You earned it. That’s good, isn’t it? That feels right.”

        What is your cause, Marantic Lind?

        She spits into the grassy humus and when he starts she laughs at him. “You’re a radical, Marantic Lind,” she says. “A dangerous, subversive radical.”

        He grins a sly grin.

        She gets to her feet. “When we return to Uma Nonya,” she says, “we begin to drill.”

        “The sky is so huge here,” he says. His grin has passed and suddenly he seems to have put aside some great part of his life. “I’d forgotten.”

* * *

        They learn to cast spears, to burn tribute fire on the run and in the push of battle, to answer simple commands and treat basic wounds. They will never be good soldiers; they will never match even one good _övalye.

        But Rider Bray watches their progress with a kind of rebellious exultance, watches the shoulder-to-shoulder exertions of the Walkers and the Horse People with dizzy dreamlike want.

        Suro Bulayo tells her: “The Flock is spreading. They go home and teach their husbands and wives and friends to tribute each other.”

        “I know,” Rider Bray says.

        “It is treason,” he chides.

        “I know,” she says, and wants to laugh, for even he in all his patient wisdom does not see Marantic Lind’s ultimate design, the purpose that leaves her sweating awake at night, as sleepless as her Queen.

        I trust you to be fair in your report—

        What is your cause, Marantic Lind?

        She should tell the Queen. She must tell the Queen.

        She does not tell the Queen.

        A Walker woman in the riverside slum gives birth to a son and the Flock gathers when he sickens to pool their fire and make him well again.

        The moon fattens and thins like the calf of a running god but still the wet season rains do not come. The Black Atora lies dry and barren.

        Rider Bray runs fireless with Marantic Lind to help him build his strength and hears his wild fantasies of lands beyond the place where steppe meets sky and the world ends, lands of crashing salt water and towering stone.

        And a _övalye and his retinue come in from ranging patrol to gather new weapons. “We heard you defeated Ro Kahae the Mantis,” he says.

        Bray puffs her chest to boast as etiquette demands, but the _övalye spits. “We heard how it was done,” he says. “A true _övalye carries herself in battle. Rider.”

        The next day a file of the Flock comes home from a close patrol in frantic fear. Rider Bray listens to their report: six Harvester _övalye and their retinue less than an hour away, their kites red. Challenge to battle.

        “They come to take Uma Nonya,” she says. “They will each bear royal bond. Tribute portioned out by the King of Emmer Wheat.”

        “So we cannot starve them of fire by taking their retinue,” Marantic Lind says into the hush. “What do we do, then?”

        She looks to him and hefts a spear. Holds his gaze for a moment, to say: you know as well as I what you intend to do.

        “Bring everyone who knows how to Flock,” she says. “Meet them on the far side of the river, so we have depth for retreat. And kill them.”

* * *

        “Six,” Marantic Lind says. “Six of them, with royal bond.” He paces the road at the foot of the bridge.

        The Flock mills at Rider Bray’s back: the fifty-odd original survivors and great clumps of neophytes, masons and carpenters, laborers and merchants, Horse People packed into nervous stripes among them. They have made their tribute to each other, though it is incomplete; some of the Walkers will not touch the Horse People.

        “Surely, in your travels, you have heard of victory against greater odds,” she says.

        Suro Bulayo chuckles softly.

        Marantic Lind steps close to confide. “We have five hundred at most,” he hisses. “And you, with your retinue and royal bond. Perhaps if we were to tribute the entire Flock to you—”

        “And what,” she whispers, “would that mean for you, Marantic Lind? What would it mean for your future, if you turned back now?”

        His eyes flicker. “Surely I mistake your meaning,” he says.

        “Surely not,” she says, and turns her back on him, to go among the Flock. His eyes follow her, wide with wonder, as she reaches for the closest man, finds his shoulder; utters, without hesitation, the old words: “Our fire—”

        Hands reach for her. On the horizon, six red kites soar.

* * *

        The Flock offers six false _övalye as bait, six men and women full of power that they have never been trained to use. The Harvester _övalye descend on them with a powerful fury and not one of the false survives.

        But it is enough to draw the Harvesters in among the mass of the Flock, arrayed along the riverbank. Everywhere around the enemy presses the chanting horde, hundreds in their filth and emaciated fury roaring the commands of Rider Bray, the mantras of Marantic Lind. Limbs swift with shared fire.

        Too weak. Too few.

        The Harvester champions shatter the Flock, rout the untrained masses back across the river bridges, in among the hovels of the Horse People that squat in the floodplain. Here Rider Bray arrays her trained cadre and her own retinue, to rally the retreating mass, to strike at the glory-hungry _övalye as they fill the winding streets with blood. Here the Flock shows its worth, sluicing its fire from fighter to fighter, throwing its weight behind a single champion and then splintering among a dozen avatars, giving the _övalye no clear target, no single threat to square against.

        But it is the voice of Marantic Lind that wins the day. “Rise!” he roars, echo carried down the bloody streets, from a hundred throats, from the riven quarry walls. “Rise and bring the mighty low! Trample them as they have trampled you!”

        Uma Nonya, damp quarry of the white Nidani stone, can offer no champions to stop the King of Emmer Wheat; and so, like a wounded hive, it issues forth a mob. They come out of their huddled homes and their desperate prayer circles, calling back the tribute they had given just that morning to the distant Queen, and they paw at each other and say, as the rumors told them to, our fire, our fire, given freely—

        Rider Bray, twined for the first time in the web of the Flock, feels the rising flood. Hundreds of new tributes tied into the net, animalistic, desperate, smeared in dust and blood and shit. Desperate to save their homes and themselves. To kill what they hate and fear.

        The discipline that Marantic Lind taught his Flock vanishes.

        “Rise!” Marantic Lind roars, his voice in a thousand mouths. “You have waited all your lives! Rise and kill _övalye!”

        And in the place of discipline the bloodlust and fury of a thousand minds passes through the web of tribute until Rider Bray knows in its entirety this summed thousandfold hate and feels that same summation in a thousand other minds and with that infinity of rage pressing upon her she roars her lungs empty with the need to kill.

        Somewhere in the blur of violence she sees fire and a face before her, pleading. She cannot understand mercy, and the face, narrow-jawed and mud-skinned, is too much like her own.

        “Sövalye!” the face cries, in the tongue of the Horse People. “Save us!”

        She has no time for weakness and need. She turns away to find the enemy.

        Afterwards she does not remember what happens down among the mob; only that two of the Harvester _övalye die before the others withdraw, their shattered retinues torn limb from limb, cast into the river or from the quarry walls.

        When the mob begins to ebb, when she begins to be something more than howling rage again, she finds herself wandering among the shattered burning hovels of the Horse People slum, her spears cast, her hands bloody to the wrist, her nose and mouth full of the stink of the place as if her years as _övalye had only ever been a dream.

        Dead Horse People lie in the streets and smolder in their burning homes. For an instant she has the relief of rage, at the King of Emmer Wheat and his Harvesters. But the Harvester _övalye brought no torches with them. They had no plans to burn.

        Some piece of the mob did this. Some part of the panicked mass turned on its own. She remembers the face before her, so like her own. The cry: “Save us!”

        She saw this happen and she did nothing. She had no time for Horse People weakness. Horse People need.

        She cuts herself free of the Flock. A Walker man with a bloodied chisel stumbles drunkenly past. “We’ve won!” he calls. “It was good! Look at this! It is good!”

        Rider Bray stares at him, and perhaps he sees some question in her eyes, for he stops and says: “The good ones are the ones you win!”

* * *

        “Thirty of the original Flock survived,” Marantic Lind says exultantly. “Thirty who remember your training—thirty skilled in Flock tribute, and bloodied in battle now. Thirty missions we can establish, if the Queen agrees—”

        He sits on the bank of the river and rambles on about the possibilities, the village Flocks who will cure their crops of blight and their children of pox, the bands of citizen-fighters that will sweep the steppe in the name of Queen Hau Nidane. “The transfer of power,” he says, “from the disinterested few to the self-interested many—”

        Rider Bray wades in the rocky shallows and scrubs her bloody skin. “You’re very convincing,” she says. “Maybe you could’ve fooled someone else. Someone who had never craved what you crave.”

        He blinks too rapidly. “But I’m right,” he says. “We can put Flocks in every village. We can win the war for the Nidani, we can—”

        “—change the world,” she says for him. She kneels to splash her face. “I see what you see. I see your Flocks conquering the steppe. I see what happens afterward, when you have taught the people of the world this new way.”

        He tilts his head birdlike, and just for a moment she thinks he is going to lie. But the affectation passes. The sparrow smile does not come.

        “You see what I see, and you know what I know,” he says, as if by speaking it he can make it true. “No one should endure this kind of suffering. No one should be made to sacrifice like this.” He gestures to the horizon, to the quarries and the stillbirths, the dry fields waiting for rain. “Something has to change.”

        She scoops water to splash her hair. “How many Horse People will there be in your new Flocks?” she asks.

        “What?”

        She waits. Hau Nidane would wait, patient, for an answer. So will she.

        He gestures convulsively. “It worked here. Walkers and Horse People together. Comrades—friends.”

        “It worked for a band of sixty starving laborers.” She considers the smoke that clouds the dusk. Remembers the burned Horse People hovels, the orgy of violence that swept even her away. Rise. “The Flock needs numbers, Marantic Lind. You know that. Your power depends on consensus, on mass. It does not welcome division.”

        He steeples his hands beneath his chin. “You may be right,” he says.

        She looks up sharply, startled not by the sentiment but by his poise.

        He meets her gaze and perhaps he shrugs. “Something has to change,” he says. “Somehow. If there is a price—well.”

        “The Queen Hau Nidane made me _övalye.” She sets her booted feet among the small river stones. “In her wisdom and compassion, she chose me from among the Horse People, against the will of all her advisors.”

        “Do you call what you’ve seen compassion?” He speaks softly, as if she were a fellow scholar. “The things these people suffer for your queen?”

        That she has no answer for.

        “What now, then?” Marantic Lind asks.

        “The Queen has summoned me to audience, to discuss the victory at Uma Nonya.” She lifts her chin to match the distant horizon. “To advise her regarding the possibilities of raising more Flocks.”

        “Well.” Marantic Lind spreads his hands. “I trust you to tell her the truth, with so much riding on your words.”

        She smiles and savors the certainty she feels. “So do I,” she says. “So do I.”

        Perhaps history will give her a new name.

        “And?” Marantic Lind leans forward, his lips pursed. “And?”

        Something booms in the vast distance. Rider Bray looks to the horizon with eyes of tribute fire. Sees, in the orange dusk, the first shadow of the long rain.

Copyright © 2014 Seth Dickinson

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Seth Dickinson is a graduate of the University of Chicago, a lapsed PhD candidate at NYU, and an instructor at the Alpha Workshop for Young Writers. His work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Analog, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, as well as winning the 2011 Dell Award. He can be found at sethdickinson.com.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

WOMEN IN SANDSTONE

by Alex Dally MacFarlane

        “Your mouth is hanging open like a bell,” the South-East Wind said. “I wonder, if the wind blows between your teeth, will you clang or chime?”

        The general tore her gaze from the temple’s walls. The tall wine-dark plume on her silver helmet bobbed and swayed in the North Wind | I blow through it and it is like the grass near a battlefield: heavy with the smells of burning and blood and bones | and then it tilted as she removed the helmet, revealing her hair—long and black with white running through it like embroidery, fastened in four thick braids—and the extent of her dark, scarred face. “I wish to honor your great temple,” she said.

        | I blow through the bells, I blow through them all, all thousands upon thousands, I bring them all to song and it is loud and perfect |

        The general barely flinched at the sound of the North Wind blowing across the temple’s bells, though she looked up again, wary. The South-East Wind smiled.

        “Has your military training included work with sandstone?”

        “No,” the general said.

        “Follow me,” the South-East Wind said, and beckoned the general through the temple’s old doors to the bare, bell-less interior.

* * *

        | I blow down from the mountains, where stones are stacked in figures for me to scream between: thick limbs full of holes, hundreds together—or one figure apart, tucked in a gully, its holes as numerous as the bones of the empty desert, as graceful as those rib-arcs, as sturdy as a pelvis. I blow the winged women of the Air people into the snowstorms where they test their strength. I blow out the fires of foolish foragers, their fur matted with mud. I blow into the faces of the Saqnaga foxes, their ears thronged with beads. I blow between the glass spires of the desert city In-barash and devour the meals left on its high roofs. I blow from temple to temple. I blow— |

* * *

        Berenike removed her breastplate with its gold embossing: a woman, heroically nude, stabbing a lion that reared on its hind legs. It clanged as she set it against the wall—with her helmet, her greaves, her javelin, her small bag.

        The South-East Wind took her to a subterranean room, where river water rushed through thin channels and clothes were set out, and let her turn the channels murky with sweat and dust—then brought her back to the main chamber, where, in her damp clean tunic, she ate the temple’s food: eggs and dates, small sweet lemons, and fish from the river that ran here between the barren hills and the great desert. The day’s light reached them through apertures in the lower walls of the temple, orange with approaching sunset.

        “Are you not curious about the names of your visitors?” Berenike asked.

        “I know yours, General Berenike—who led the left flank at the battle of Norete, who carried a shield embossed with a map of the world’s mountains, who vies for control of the land left leaderless when your conquering ruler died. I know, also, that your horse starved two weeks ago in the hills to the south of this temple, and that you survived this far by eating it.”

        Berenike filled her bowl. “What do you not know?”

        “Why you are not afraid of the men crossing the hills after you.”

        “Ah.”  Eggshell fell away under her fingers. She ate the egg in two big bites, then chose a skewer of fish. “How far are they?”

        “A week’s walk,” the South-East Wind said. “Their horses are dying. Their water is running lower than yours was—they might yet become bones for winds to blow through.”

        “I won’t count on that, not yet. Metron is among them, no doubt. And Derdos.”

        “Yes.”  The South-East Wind had not blown through those hills since becoming the guardian of the temple for this period, but the South Wind blew there / where the bones drift into gullies like the snow that falls in other lands and I can call through them in a hundred voices, like lizards, like foxes, like men, like horses, like all the animals that have ventured into this barren place and found nothing but the bones of other animals, long emptied of their marrow, the only sustenance in a land where rain never falls and mist never drifts and the bone-shrub must blow from carcass to carcass / and the South-East Wind knew much of what the winds saw.

        Knew, too, that the men following Berenike would later die between temples; their flesh food for the foxes, their bones instruments for the wind. Berenike would call that the future. The winds saw such things all at once.

        “I do not want to bring war to you,” Berenike said. “I would dedicate to your temple and be on my way before those men arrive, if that is possible.”

        “The deaths of mortals hardly affect us.”

        That brought a smile to the general’s chapped lips. “Still.”

        “We will begin tomorrow.”

* * *

        Berenike slept by her amour and javelin, cushioned by the temple’s blankets, with a knife not far from her hand. Her dreams were full of winds.

* * *

        “This is what you will dedicate,” the South-East Wind said.

        Berenike crouched to examine the thigh-high pinnacle of sandstone, brought from the desert by the South-East Wind. “I will carve this?”

        “Yes. Then forge the bell. Then place the figure on the temple’s walls. It does not matter how crude or beautiful your work is, only that it is personal: a true gift to the temple. You may practice on smaller pieces of sandstone if you wish, to gain familiarity with the material, but it is not necessary.”

        “No,” Berenike murmured—but she did not ask for the tools until an hour had passed.

        Berenike carved a figure simple in form, its whole body a smooth shape like a stele, legless; a suggestion of arms only just discernable at its side. The South-East Wind had seen and blown among hundreds of these.

        But Berenike lingered on the figure’s chest. First she carved small breasts, shaped as though bound for fighting. Then she used the edge of a broken stator to groove jewelry from neck to navel. Her sure hand spoke of memory, not invention. Ovals and circles appeared to hang on thin lines. Jewels?  Metal?  Between the breasts hung a large disc, detailed with birds. Smaller discs at the ends of the thin lines depicted a woman’s profile, her hair bound in braids but more complicated than Berenike’s.

        The South-East Wind stepped closer, curious.

        “My mother’s jewelry,” Berenike said, in a hard voice. “Or so I am told.”

        In the head, Berenike hollowed out a mouth—a space for the bell—gouging, into the roof of the mouth, a hook.

        Eyeless, noseless, earless it remained—but Berenike carved four long braids down its back. Around its head she carved a band. The South-East Wind supposed that usually the headband would be patterned with embroidery or metal discs, but Berenike filled it with her letters in four lines.

        “That will wear away,” the South-East Wind finally said. “We winds are not gentle.”

        “If I write of myself on a hundred surfaces, only one will survive the winds, or the rain, or the masons of the future. Only one. Perhaps two. Three.”  Berenike stood, finished. “I must write of myself on five hundred surfaces. Then I will be remembered.”

        It was Berenike that the South-East Wind now looked at, amused.

        “Do I make the bell now?” Berenike asked.

        “Yes.”

        “With what?”

        “Those that can, give some metal of theirs: an heirloom, a weapon, coins.”  The South-East Wind glanced at Berenike’s amour.

        “I have coins,” Berenike said. “How many for a bell to fit the mouth of my figure?”

        “Ten, perhaps. It will depend on their size.”

        Berenike nodded and walked to the amour and her small bag. From it she took a clinking pouch.

        “Silver stators,” she said, holding them in her palms for the South-East Wind to see. “From my own issue.”

        The woman’s head on the obverse of these coins wore a helmet—the same plumed helmet resting against the wall—with thick curls of hair over her forehead. Her long braids hung at the back of her neck. On the reverse, the coins depicted a seated god and two words: King and Berenike.

        “You should not judge me by these,” Berenike said. “They are clumsily made, but they are mine.”

        “They are fitting,” the South-East Wind said.

        “One day I will wear the diadem and sit on a throne.”

        “Is that so?”  The South-East Wind knew how quickly mortals’ aspirations turned to bones in the desert—like the man whose hair Berenike’s coin mimicked, with those short curls above his eyes that Berenike, whose hair was straight, did not possess.

        “It will be so. Where do I make the bell?”

        “Follow me.”

        The forge sat at the other side of a courtyard, away from the main temple building. Under the awning of dried palm leaves, the South-East Wind directed Berenike in heating the charcoal and melting the coins, in choosing the mould for her bell, in pouring the glowing-orange silver. Berenike stood in silence as the bell set. When it was ready, she attached it to the hook in the figure’s mouth with a slim length of cloth.

        The South-East wind led Berenike up stairs inside the temple’s wall, up, up, to the highest door. Berenike’s detailed work deserved that honor.

        Together they stepped out—but Berenike stopped, staring, at the ankle-high, knee-high, life-size figures surrounding her, carved and blown smooth by the wind, and the bells, gleaming and dull, chiming, tinkling, ringing, banging in over a thousand mouths as the little winds of the temple played through them. The figures clustered on the sloping pinnacle of the temple. They stood scattered around the high walls; they covered the lower walls, all the way to the ground, far below. They filled Berenike’s eyes.

        Her figure, held in her arms, began to chime, its bell high, strong.

        “Follow me,” the South-East Wind said, and Berenike did, on a well-worn way between the figures like a sheep-trail on a mountainside.

        The North Wind gusted suddenly past, bringing all the bells to song. Berenike flinched—it was so much louder among the bells than at the temple’s door, so loud that no other sound could be heard—but did not try to put her hands to her ears. A general of many battles knew cacophony.

        “Here,” the South-East Wind said, in a quiet lull.

        They stood by a narrow rectangle hollowed into the wall: a perfect fit for Berenike’s figure. Berenike knelt. The South-East Wind had told her to make mortar. It took some effort to push the figure into place—but then it stood, fixed by the mortar, unshaken by the North Wind’s final gusts, its bell chiming, chiming. Berenike touched the fingers of one hand to her lips and bowed her head: not a gesture of honor her mother would have recognized, but the one her hands knew from childhood lessons.

        The North Wind blew elsewhere. Little winds of the temple returned, playing in turn ~ see how it is so full of strength, see, see ~ with the new bell.

        Berenike roamed across the wall, admiring the figures, then continuing, looking, looking—and the South-East Wind knew what she would find. Knew the life-size figure with the bell of gold. Knew, from the North Wind | I blow across the face of a man who goes tirelessly into the desert | blowing long ago, of his journey.

        The South-East Wind sat in front of Berenike’s figure.

        | I blow across temples with walls of blue and white, such images for a wind to savor, such variety, nestled in oases where the water flicks at their supporting struts like a fish’s tongue |

        From the South-East Wind’s mouth came the south-east wind \ rushing, a high whistling \ and the bell rang longer, longer.

* * *

        As they descended the stairs in the temple’s wall, Berenike asked of the lands beyond the temple: the endless desert and the temples within it.

        “It is not endless,” the South-East Wind said.

        “Where I have lived, we say that it is where the world ends.”

        The South-East Wind smiled. “There is the rest of the world beyond it. First you will find mountains, rising from the desert, and in their heights live the snowchangers, who still sing the arias of the long-dead Air women.”

        “I have never heard of them,” Berenike said, with quiet wonder in her voice.

        “And they have never heard of you.”  So it would surely remain. The South-East Wind gestured Berenike to the table, where the general gratefully received another meal. The sun’s light was orange again, thick with the end of the day.

        “It is strange,” Berenike said, while squeezing a lemon over her fish and eggs, “to think of the many places where even my name will not be known.”

        “Tell me, truly, why are you here?” the South-East Wind asked.

        “My fortune has wavered, has it not?”  Berenike smiled: a tight gesture, like the final stretching of a bowstring before its release. “I come to offer supplication and sacrifices to the gods of this land, to see if they will favor me as the gods I know clearly do not.”

        “We winds are not like the gods of your land, prone to assisting mortals.”

        “You are only one wind,” Berenike said. “I hear there are at least fifty.”  Fish bones piled under her steady fingers. She spoke as if of the price of grain or the location of high ground; as if of an army’s organization.

        The South-East Wind saw a great number of things: | I blow between the glass spires of the city In-barash and shatter them, I blow heavy and sharp, I scratch the bell-mouthed figures | from the scarred cheek of Berenike’s wind-worn figure after a storm thirty years beyond this moment to | I blow with a storm wind, tangled like braids | desert weather and / they stumble from the barren hills, their lips dry with the dust of a thousand bones, their hair thick with it, their tongues still alive, their voices still capable of demanding, at the bell-loud door, the location of the general who trod before them / visitors : the foxes offer one of their beadless young in return for shelter between the bell-figures : and ~ poor bell-less thing, how does it sing? ~ a future visitor \ over her chest she wears an ornament of silver and carnelian, tipped in bells, each ringing in me with a different note \ but not everything. Not Berenike’s destination.

        What a wind saw was as unpredictable as its path.

        “How far is it to the next temple?” Berenike asked.

        “Four days’ walk. Directly north. I advise you to walk at night—”

        “By the stars.”  More eggshells joined the fish bones. “May I replenish my water skins here?”

        “Yes.”

        “Then I will set off tonight. I thank you for your hospitality.”

        “I thank you for honoring this temple.”

        Wearing her breastplate and greaves once more, carrying her javelin and several skins of water, the general Berenike walked from the temple when the moon filled the bell-mouthed figures with silver shadows.

        \ she crouches in front of the sandstone figure, her short hair catching the south-east wind, and examines its chest with the intensity of a person reading even though there are no words there, just the jewelry-lines so like the jewelry on her own chest \

        The South-East Wind watched Berenike, frowning with un-sated curiosity.

* * *

        ~ The North Wind blows through the bells and it is loud, loud, loud, too loud for us to endure, too loud to remain, too strong. The North Wind abates and—oh, it is our quieter ringing that is heard then, it is the play of the smaller winds, it is—

        Words?  Not on the figure’s bell, no, that is smooth silver, so full of strength, but on the body, the beautiful body—they are never beautiful, they are never secretly a woman—women, two women—three: a palimpsest of women, mother under daughter, granddaughter like a scarf around them both. Words run around her—their—head like a game for a twisting wind.

        I play, I play, I play.

        Who is this Berenike? 

        Victorious general of the battle of Norete, besieger of Tel Garat, founder of Berenikia. Daughter of Kesty, of the women who live across the sea of grass, and of Ariston, a Makad, who met in paid service fighting for the conqueror Kandros, who both fell in the battle at the river of milk.

        Who is this Mirtun who places her name at the figure’s base? ~

* * *

        The winds raced around Berenike. The moon-silver desert stretched out, marked with dry, thin-stemmed plants and the stone-filled gullies of flash floods and, always on the horizon, never closer, the darting forms of foxes. They stopped moving just long enough to look over their shoulders at Berenike : in my West Wind body I tie bells the size of fleas to the offered fox’s ears so that it is as close to its beaded cousins as a temple upbringing can manage : before running on, chasing rats or frogs or each other. Their huge heavy ears flapped in the winds. Their yips punctuated the winds’ susurrus on the sands.

        : it is true that the Saqnaga foxes hide their beading underground, where even the winds cannot reach, so that none know how they create the beads and tie them to the short hairs of their ears :

        Berenike considered whether she could get one with her javelin.

        Deciding against the attempt, for now, she ate two of the dried fish that the South-East Wind had given her and sipped at one of her water skins. The South-East Wind had described the small watery night-flowers of the artiq plant, saying that they had saved several travelers in the desert—and adding that they were so rare that many missed them.

        It would not be a comfortable march, but Berenike had experienced far worse. At just five years old, in the baggage train of Kandros’s army, she had survived the desert of Šammuramat. At seventeen, after her second battle, the disaster of Kuš, she had fled into the high mountains where people with partridge bodies were rumored to live and had drunk the blood of an ibex to stay alive. At twenty-three, at twenty-eight, at thirty, at thirty-five—the decades since Kandros’s disappearance had been a chaos of victories and defeats, riches and privation, joy and fear. Some of the older soldiers told of unending victories with Kandros, of enemies falling like wheat under the scythe. Berenike listened, never speaking her doubts: that these were just stories.

        A single memory of Kandros: in the desert of Šammuramat, how Berenike had rushed forward to the single stream they had found and scooped water in a greave, her mother’s, the only item left to her when the soldiers divided her battle-slain parents’ spoils. She had sipped carefully from the narrower end. “See that little girl,” Kandros, standing nearby, had said. “She is the future of our army.”

        Berenike’s soldiers liked that story.

        They had followed her to fortune in the past five years, to success in battle and to the stability of Berenikia, to further conquest. Then Lysikos had claimed those lands, claimed their city—her city.

        Berenike kept walking, though her body wanted rest and more food than a pair of dried fish; though the sun started to rise, sending the foxes underground. Eventually she found a gully with an overhang of rock and slept there, sweating in the shade. At dusk, she returned to her feet.

        There were no foxes.

        : there are nights when they never emerge from their dens, when no winds know what they do :

        Smaller winds spun in the sand, waist-high.

        ( it’s very sweet that you think that )

        : am I to believe winds that are born and die in a moment? :

        ( can’t you hear them? )

        ( singing, singing! )

        ( oh, you don’t know that foxes can talk? )

        ( truly? )

        A fierce gust scattered the spinning sands. Berenike shivered: certain, for a moment, that someone was shouting all around her.

        : I admit that I imagine, sometimes, the foxes gathered in their dens, beading one another’s ears and sharing tales old and new :

        No foxes emerged for the entirety of the night, nor the next, nor during the hot day following that, in which Berenike walked under the sun knowing that she drew close to her destination.

        : I wonder how the bell-eared fox fared in those first months when it returned to the desert, its time at the temple done :

        Berenike smelled the oasis before she saw it. The wind blew sweetly around her, suddenly green and fresh, and Berenike quickened her pace—and then, over a rocky rise, saw the tops of date palms, and the circling of a pair of water birds, and the tall temple, covered in blue and white images unidentifiable at this distance.

        : I wonder what tales it told to its bead-eared cousins :

        The sweet wind stilled as she walked among the foliage towards the temple.

        A wind did not live in this temple. It was inhabited by human guardians: a pair of women, who Berenike found wrestling at the edge of the oasis. Their muscular arms and backs gleamed with sweat. Their grunts accompanied the oasis-winds among the palm leaves, the high cries of birds, the whine of insects. Berenike watched approvingly.

        “Oh!” one suddenly exclaimed. “A visitor!”  They broke apart, grinning. “Welcome to the Icranah temple.”

        “Welcome!” said the other.

        “I am glad to be here,” Berenike said. “I come to honor your temple.”

        “Then we, too, are glad that you are here. I am Iric.”

        “I’m Hatah. Do you want to wash first?  You must be sweaty and dusty. We’ve got some water here for drinking as well.”

        Berenike gladly drank from the clay vessel, which was shaped like a smaller version of the temple, then stripped off her clothes and joined the women in the oasis. The feeling of fresh water against her skin brought a sigh of pleasure to her lips. Iric and Hatah combed each other’s dark hair, then swam to the water lilies growing across the lagoon to draw up the long thin stems: a small harvest, a fraction of the plants coating that part of the oasis with green and soft pink. Berenike watched hungrily.

        Cleaned and clothed, the three women carried water together to the temple, to be boiled for cooking and drinking.

        The temple stood tall and sturdy on the shore, like a vast and beautifully decorated post: blue and white rising out of the greens and browns of the oasis foliage. Steps angled around the temple’s exterior. Berenike craned her neck, seeing the images more clearly now: an array of unidentifiable creatures, part human, part constructed, part animal, part wind, all flying in swirls and gusts that were—Berenike squinted—each made of countless tiny creatures.

        “Do you paint the walls?” she asked as they climbed the many steps to the door.

        “Yes,” Iric said. “We renew them often. It is our greatest offering to the winds.”

        They led Berenike inside, where sunlight filtered through small square gaps in the brick walls, arranged in the shapes of animals. Hatah set a pot of water to boiling, then hurried outside. Iric cleaned the water lily stems in another pot of boiling water. A short while later, Hatah returned with six eggs and a trio of apricots.

        Berenike’s mouth started to water.

        As they shared the meal, Iric asked about Berenike’s journey. Berenike recounted only parts of it. The two women only saw—or heard, or felt, or experienced—the blowing of the wind they had each been married to: Iric to the West Wind, who was fond of the desert foxes, she said while smiling with a fondness of her own, and Hatah to the North-West Wind, who blew from a sea far to the north-west, where the ghosts of whales swam in the bitter black water. Berenike found it refreshing, after the South-East Wind at the temple of the bells, to talk with people who did not know everything.

        “We were each married to a wind as children,” Iric explained as Berenike chewed on the sweet lily stems. “Our lives are spent guarding this temple—or another of the temples of the great desert. If guardians do not enjoy one another’s company, they obviously cannot live together.”

        “We’ve managed thirty years,” Hatah said, coiling a length of Iric’ dark hair around her finger.

        “Yes.”  Iric pretended to bite Hatah’s finger. Hatah leaned forward and kissed her on the lips.

        “Marriage to a wind does not prevent you from enjoying human pleasures, then,” Berenike said.

        Hatah laughed.

        “The winds do not care how we spend our time,” Iric said, “as long as the temple remains beautiful and all other honors are given to them.”

        “Besides,” Hatah said, “some of us need to have children.”

        “My sister has four,” Iric said. “One each from different visitors to her temple.”

        “How long have these temples been here?”

        “Oh, the oases shift,” Iric said, “some going dry, some opening like lilies, so that each temple has only been in its current location for hundreds of years, but there have been temples in this desert for thousands of years. There have been offerings for longer—for as long as there have been people here. That is a very long time.”

        “And before there were people?”

        “There were no winds,” Iric said. “How could there be?”

        Berenike knew this story; it had drifted across the hills and towns and harbors until it reached her, a girl learning a warrior’s skills, and when years later her city was taken by Lysikos she had followed it, like one of a pair of snakes leading her across the desert.

        “What do you mean by that?” she asked.

        “Without people, the winds cannot be as they are,” was all that Iric said, smiling over the last of the water lily stems. “Now, it will be sunset soon. You should prepare an offering.”

        “Yes. What must I do?”

        “The West Wind is blowing here at the moment and prefers food: a fruit, a poem. You must pick the first and compose the second.”

        Iric and Hatah showed Berenike where to find fruit. Then, on learning that she could write, they gave her a metal stylus and paper made of dried palm leaf and left her on the steps of the temple.

        Berenike wrote a poem of war: women riding into battle, with winds in their long braids.

        “You must give your offering to the wind on the temple’s roof,” Hatah said.

        “It is dangerous to linger there,” Iric said. “Place your food, then leave.”

        “I will.”

        She climbed the steps. She trod on the flat, un-patterned roof: five paces, ten, a bow to place her offering.

        The wind tugged at her skin. It hurt; like a hundred fingernails trying to pry her skin free.

        Breathing sharply, she turned and hurried to the stairs, to the temple’s cool, quiet, still interior. There, the three women passed the night with wrestling and caresses, shouting often with joy. There, they slept through the next day.

        In the cooling evening, she left, with water lily stems and more dried fish and boiled eggs still in their shells and a live—for now—chicken. With no sign of her pursuers at her rear, she walked north, to the next temple.

* * *

        \ the woman speaks names into the winds: Kesty and Mirtun, the sandstone figure’s, and her own \

* * *

        Berenike made an offering at the next temple: her blood in a bowl of rodent-bone, poured into the sand-thick front of a desert storm, which laughed and flashed bright with lightning and scattered her blood in fine drops across the desert for a day’s march in every direction.

        Afterwards, the storm-scarred man at the temple drew water and blind white fish from the well. Provisions for her journey. He told her, as the fish dried, that almost forty years ago a man had gone into the desert from here and never returned. Berenike nodded, pleased.

        Then, finally, Berenike began the walk of almost two weeks to the central temple, where the winds were born.

* * *

        \ she says: “The day I stepped onto the sea of grass, Grandmother Kesty, I was recognized as your descendent, as having a face and a fierceness of gaze so like yours. I heard your stories. How you rode away for glory and silver. How, before that, you taught the youngest girls to draw a bow and ride a horse in full gallop and sing louder than the wind, so that they could fight to defend themselves from any who would claim them. How you taught them to button their coats with the finely carved bones of their enemies. How you taught them to know the winds like siblings. I came for that knowledge, glimpsed first in my mother’s tales, then in my aunt’s. My aunt. Ah. I would wish to have been taken in by no other woman!  She didn’t expect me: daughter of an older half-sister she had not known, whose life after leaving the sea of grass is its own epic. Derent who rode to the sun!  My aunt called me beloved niece and finished the teaching my mother had begun, and I loved her. I would wish that her maps were smaller, that she took less pleasure in founding cities, that I did not have to learn how to oppose her. I came to the sea of grass for its winds and found so much more: a family among the women who live across the sea of grass, a lover, a home. But my aunt is a wind, unceasing.” \

* * *

        There were no people in the central temple. There were no winds, only the still, hot air. The temple’s walls were bare stone, its floors un-patterned, its rooms empty of offerings. Berenike walked among them, frowning.

        “We do not often get people here.”

        Berenike spun, already poised to hurl her javelin.

        A person stood just an arm’s length from her. A wind.

        “Which one are you?” Berenike said, lowering her arm.

        “Why are you here?”

        “Why do you think?”

        “This is an empty temple,” the wind said. “Abandoned. It belongs to no wind.”

        “I know the story.”

        The wind’s expression did not change. “Surely a general fighting and conquering in the name of Kandros knows how often stories are true.”

        Berenike couldn’t stop a small smile. “The men and women fighting for me tell this story: soon after her marriage to Kandros, the queen Roshanak received an envoy from the women who live across a sea of grass. My mother’s people. The envoy said that some young warriors had heard of a great army gathered on the western edge of the steppe, and they wished to try themselves in friendly combat against its soldiers, and perhaps join it, for a share of its wealth and glory.

        “Roshanak and Kandros arranged athletic games outside the grand city of Roshanak’s birth. The young warriors arrived, arrayed in embroidered jackets and trousers, jangling with the silver of their jewelry, and won prizes in sports from archery to wrestling to sprinting. Their request to join the army was granted—but women who fought were rare, so it was not always easy for the warriors. Many returned home.

        “My mother, however, found a man among the soldiers whose true aim and agility and singing impressed her, and she decided to have a child with him, certain that his traits would combine well with her own. Then the triumphs and trophies of the campaign distracted her from thoughts of home. Then she died in a battle, as did my father. What a marvelous story!  My soldiers boast that both of my parents were fierce and strong. I am not certain that any of them think it is true.”

        “And because this tale is true—”

        “Here is another story. In the desert of Šammuramat, far to the east of this desert, the army of Kandros ran out of food and water. Thousands died. Then we found a stream, a pathetic thing, that killed yet more soldiers and camp followers who drank too much, too quickly. Among them, I stood, only five years old, drinking slowly from a greave that had belonged to my mother. Kandros was drinking nearby and, seeing me, said that I was the future of his army, because I was five and already carried a greave. That story is true.

        “So is this one: eventually I left the water and walked towards some of the camp children I knew, to sit with them, but suddenly a wind kicked sand at me. It turned into a person, taller than me, very slender, so that I assumed I was looking at a woman or an older girl, although I now suspect that none of the winds are women or men, even when shaped as people.”

        The wind smiled, briefly.

        “That wind said, in the only language I knew then, ‘I am the edge of a storm raging in the mountains far from here. I am a person who once lived here. I am telling you to leave this water now, before the flash food comes and sweeps your people away. I am not bothered by the deaths of soldiers, but people like you do not need to share their deaths.’  Then that wind blew away.

        “Kandros, who had been standing nearby, called me to him and asked what I had seen, for he had seen it too. I told him. Why would I want more soldiers to die?  Kandros thanked me and called me blessed, for a god had come to me, and he advised me not to tell anyone of it. I realized why, a few years later, when he disappeared into the far north-west after his soldiers would follow him no further: here. I realized what the storm wind had said: a person, who once lived here.

        “And this is from a song I heard in the women’s quarters, where I continued my mother’s warrior training with many other girls under the tutelage of Roshanak: in the great desert, of which Šammuramat’s desert is only a tributary, there are hundreds of winds, there are dozens of temples, and there is a temple in its heart where the winds are born.”

        Berenike smiled again, and added, “There are as many untrue tales of Kandros as there are stars across this sky, but that does not prevent some of us from keeping hold of true ones.”

        “You would not be who you are now,” the wind said.

        Fear crept under her breastplate like a knife—but she thought of the South-East Wind, of the storm wind in Šammuramat’s desert, of the wind standing in front of her now. They were people. “What should I fear?”

        “A wind is not a person.”

        “Will I remember my goals, my life, myself?”

        “You will be much more than those things.”

        “Stop giving me these useless answers,” Berenike said, firm, though the fear remained. If she lost sight of her plans and never returned south, if she slipped from the memories of soldiers and storytellers—she was no Kandros, to be remembered despite her disappearance. She knew that. Before long, her soldiers would join another general’s army, and eventually the spoils won in new wars would erase her name. The storytellers would turn to fresher exploits.

        “Every wind is different,” the wind finally said.

        Better the risk than sure obscurity.

        “I will do this,” she said.

        The wind laughed, arms spread in a wide gesture encompassing the ruined temple. “There is no rival general or beast here to be slain.”

        Berenike ignored the wind, returning to her exploration of the temple: its featureless rooms, its smooth floors. No wind blew past her. Above her head, the sun shone bright through the great holes in the roof. Broken steps went nowhere, scattered across the floor like forgotten votives. Berenike eyed the walls. Smooth. Too smooth.

        Outside, the temple’s walls were equally useless, but Berenike walked twice around the perimeter, looking for details.

        There—in shadow, a wall not plain but carved in pristine snake-curls and fox-points. Berenike hoisted herself up it with ease.

        What remained of the roof was flat, a plain like the desert beyond it.

        Winds blew around her, buffeted her, drove her gasping to her knees, winds hard and sharp and slicing and pulling—it was agony; it was torture.

        It stole her screams.

        It blinded her.

        It tore her skin from her body, it strung out her innards, it ground her bones to dust.

        It tried to rend apart her thoughts.

        I am Berenike, daughter of Kesty

        Unrelenting.

        founder of

        It split her self open, it scattered her.

        A woman who knows the name of the sea of grass, leader of men who love fighting on foot, and I will win this war

        It could not dissipate the pieces that were Berenike.

        The wind blew harder.

* * *

        \ she says: “Grandmother Kesty, I don’t know what you would think of her. Would you be proud?  Afraid?  Both?  I am.” \  

* * *

        • I am •

        The wind blew across the desert, unsure, uncertain, like a new horse, trying to see • seeing a city that can’t be real, seeing a caravan of men with golden machines for hands, seeing rivers and lush forest, seeing the desert south and east of the ruined temple, full of tall rocky pinnacles that hide caves behind their small mouths • trying to focus on the pinnacles, trying to blow between them, inside them, looking for evidence of the man who had gone missing in the desert almost forty years ago, of the great conqueror who had failed to achieve what she had just done.

        What were those other deserts?  They looked as real. Future deserts?  Past deserts?

        Trying to blow in a single direction, trying to plan a route, trying to think, to hold a thought, to be • I am blowing strong, strong, strong •

        Being a wind was • strong, strong • easy.

        • no •

        The wind concentrated on the desert, the pinnacles. • I am Berenike, daughter of Kesty and Ariston, victorious general, founder of Berenikia, a wind •  The wind blew into the pinnacles • why are they full of grain-sacks • which were empty and not empty • what are these swarming men with dog-heads, what are these shining buildings with caves in their bases, what are these bones •

        A person’s bones, poorly arranged, bitten and broken by fox-sharp jaws.

        Fabric flapped in the wind • I know this fine weave, this golden thread • hanging on the ribs like sails. Disturbed sand revealed a knife, a leather pouch, a pair of coins among the messy bones of one hand.

        How could bones be carried?  How could the shape of the person • Kandros • be held?  How could it be presented, how could it be believed to be him?

        • I need to just pick them up like a wind carries sand or a person carries several javelins •

        The wind turned.

        The wind twisted in thoughts of bones, of the poor condition of this body • my wind-body • and how • how will I appear to them • how • how can a wind lead an army with a bag of broken bones • how to • where am I, how do I • become a person again, how to be what the winds tore apart • how • how to be • I am Berenike • the other winds said nothing, though they blew nearby • I am Berenike, I am Berenike, I am •

        Berenike spun out into her human body, gasping, gasping so hard that her breath disturbed the sand at her feet.

        Still her body, unchanged. Still wearing her greaves and breastplate and tunic, still battle-scarred and strong.

        The bones fell around her like rain.

        “I am Berenike.”  Her voice, too, was unchanged.

        “It is not good to hold onto your former self so tightly,” said the wind from the last temple, suddenly standing in front of her. They were not far from the cave where Berenike had found the bones of Kandros; its sunset-long shadow stretched to her feet. “You are more than Berenike.”

        “I am Berenike, a wind.”

        Her whole body shook, exhausted as if from a days-long march. How long had she been blowing?

        “She is new,” said another wind, unfamiliar to Berenike, “and the manner of her birth is not typical.”  Looking directly at her, the wind said, “The East Wind forgets that we were born over ten thousand years ago. You are not us. You are not a storm, born from a baby abandoned on a hillside or plain, raised in the high places of the sky, swooping down when conditions are right. You are not a sand spinny, as short-lived as a mouse.”

        “How long will I live?” Berenike asked, unable to comprehend the number ten thousand, unable to imagine—

        A few centuries, she had thought. A life of legend.

        “It is difficult to say,” the wind replied.

        “One of your kind blew out in a mere decade,” the East Wind said. “Another is still blowing, two thousand years later.”

        “And did that one hold onto their former self?” Berenike asked, shocked again. A decade!  If she had stayed in the south with her soldiers, she might have survived another decade. Two thousand years!

        The East Wind looked away, at nothing in particular.

        “There is no pattern,” the other wind said.

        “Then my strength will keep me alive for centuries.”

        The East Wind frowned, but the other wind smiled, saying, “Know that you will change. Know that you are Berenike, but you are more than her, too.”

        “I’ll save that thought until after I’ve defeated my enemies.”

        And now it was the opposite of her need to wear her human body; now the wind tugged at her, ecstatically sharp, and • I will be remembered for this • the wind blew on with the bones of Kandros.

* * *

        | I blow far from the desert. I blow in a land where an army marches along the coastal plains. I blow between the high, tiled walls of the city of Berenikia, where every dawn a singer on a high tower ululates in joy. I blow, stirring the short hair of Berenike’s niece, preparing herself to meet the legendary general for the first time. I blow, knowing that there is another wind here—and there, there, blowing at the head of an army, bearing the bones of Kandros like a banner, laying the opposing forces low with fear, turning into General Berenike the person and celebrating victory after victory with thousands of soldiers. |

* * *

        The South-East Wind knew when Berenike became a wind, knew—felt it, gusting past the temple, sending the bells into song—when the wind blew south. The bones here of the men who had followed her to the desert and to its temples made fine songs as the North Wind chased the new wind, blowing further south than ever before, curious | I blow between the high, tiled walls of the city of Berenikia, where every dawn the wind called Berenike still blows along the shore, still is depicted on the city’s coins, still sits at the head of the city’s council, hundreds of years after the city’s foundation | but though the South-East Wind now knew something of Berenike’s centuries of life, other parts of those years remained yet to be seen when the South-East Wind once again blew among the bells of the temple instead of guarding them in a human form.

        \ Mirtun speaks to all of the winds, at their temples or out on the sands where bead-eared foxes run and an old vixen with a single, wind-worn bell on its left ear watches over the kits, and what Mirtun asks for is not transformation but knowledge: how to make offerings to the winds blowing across the sea of grass, how to work with them—knowing that their ways will be different to the winds of the temple desert but hoping that the knowledge will aid her in the defense of her home \

* * *

        \ before she leaves, Mirtun re-carves the jewelry on the sandstone figure’s chest with careful attention to every original detail, adding tulip-swirls only where the winds have erased the old styles—and she leaves her name at the figure’s base like an offering \

Copyright © 2014 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, and The Other Half of the Sky. 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.

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COVER ART

“After the Giants War,” by David Demaret

David Demaret is an art director/artist from Paris, France. He is a senior graphic artist working in the videogame industry for 20 years, and he does freelance and contract work for illustrations and concept art. View his work online at themoonchild.free.fr.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1076

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

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