Issue #174 • May 28, 2015

“Two to Leave,” by Yoon Ha Lee

“The Warriors, The Mothers, The Drowned,” by Kay Chronister

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TWO TO LEAVE

by Yoon Ha Lee

         Four rivers border the parched lands, or one, depending on how you reckon it. Philosophers have written treatises on the subject, some of which I’d even read. What concerned me now, however, was the question of how to pay the ferryman.

         I had not entered the parched lands entirely unprepared. I had an excellent pair of boots—good boots are underrated everywhere—and I was almost glad the ferryman would not accept them in exchange for passage. I had the Apiarist’s Gun, made to fit my hand. And as for nourishment, that took care of itself, even here.

         I should not have trespassed in the first place, but the Raven-Cloaked General had offered me her eyes. It is a common misconception that my people collect such jewels, although in this case I could not blame her. She might even have paid me literally, if I had demanded it. But I had boasted that I would collect my payment only after completing the mission. I was hoping to ingratiate myself to the General and earn a place as a military advisor, a rest after generations of wandering, even if such service was likely to result in yet more travel. Still, it was worth a try.

         An old friend had once told me that I lacked the attention span for grand strategy, although I had some gift for tactics. I could not deny it. The Keep of Silent Bells lay ruined behind me, as the Raven-Cloaked General had desired. Neither she nor I had had any doubt I would succeed. No: the hard part was the escape.

         I heard the approaching thunder-march of the Keep’s reinforcements. They brought with them their own pall of rain deferred. Even outside the parched lands the Drought Guard had made a name for themselves. I could not help but feel a certain kinship for them. The thirst of my people is of a different order, yet there are few of us, and it is difficult not to hope for even the glancing illusion of camaraderie.

         The Drought Guard had sent twelve-and-twelve of their own after me, which might have held numerological significance if I still cared about such things. Their armor was plate-of-desiccation, chased with incongruously bright silver.

         It was possible that they didn’t realize what I was. I wasn’t going to count on it, however. Neither assignment nor thirst drove me at the moment, but better to face the Guards here, hoping to slay them quickly, than to allow them to pin me against the river before I was prepared to deal with the ferryman.

         Upon approaching, the Guards raised their spears. The rain-flash of their salute pleased me. “Tell me your names,” I called out, “so that I may mourn you properly.”

         My old friend had also explained to me that this was more likely to be taken as an insult as not; but I wanted to know, and I had little patience for obscure courtesies. I prevailed the time it mattered to me. I knew my friend’s name when death came for him, and to this day I carried a funerary tablet of jade the color of lilacs, which I had had carved with his name on one side and mine on the other.

         More often my friend won. I kept score even now. In this case, the Guards disdained to answer my question. Their leader, with their eyes the color of buried ice, said, “I know who you are.” Their voice was calmly weary, and I was certain they were looking at my gold-muzzled gun, which had come to my hand the way it did when it was eager. “If we fight here, we’ll draw the ferryman’s attention. Come with us, or face the ferryman; it’s up to you.”

         “If I come with you,” I said, curious, “how is that better?”

         “As much as the Drowned Queen hates rebuilding fortresses,” the Guard leader said, “she hates it even more that the ferryman and his rivers limit her borders.”

         Plausible, but none of my affair. “Sorry,” I said.

         The Guard leader lifted a hand. The first rank knelt. The second remained standing. Both ranks prepared to fire.

         My gun hummed in my hand. It was unbeautiful sound, much-loved. I pulled the trigger.

* * *

         There are many misconceptions about my people besides the one about the collection of eyes. (Pickled, one presumes, although I’m no expert on such endeavors.) That we are universally excellent at seduction, an exercise better left to fox spirits; that we only hunt at night, as though the nights that matter are defined by sun-arc rather than heart-dark; that if you catch us at a crossroads, we are bound not to harm you for a year and a day. None of these is true.

         What is true is that thirst drove each of us to have our hearts forged into weapons.

* * *

         The Apiarist’s Gun made no noise of its own, although the Guards’ rifles did. A silent weapon has its applications, yet I longed sometimes—call it sentimentality—for battlefield percussion.

         Bees swarmed from the gun’s muzzle. They intercepted and clung to the rifles’ bullets, which fell dead to the ground and kicked up dust, a lot of it. One of the Guards, more sensitive than his fellows, coughed wrackingly.

         The rest of the bees headed straight for the Guards’ eyes. The ranks’ discipline in not dropping their weapons was commendable. Their hands would have been small barrier anyway. Each bee had only one sting; but there were very many bees.

         When the bees had finished their work, I holstered the gun with an effort. The surfeit of death so soon after the slaughter at the keep made me sluggish. The only consolation was that the ferryman was unlikely to care about twelve-and-twelve more deaths added to the tally.

         That brought my original problem back to me. While it is true that the ferryman does not leave his boat, I should have expected that the river was an extension of his will, just as the gun was an extension of mine. It was surging toward me now.

         I was no connoisseur of rivers, my main concern being whether I could pass them or not. But the waters sheened dark-bright like a million rippling coins, melodies of light playing across the ripples. I was moved in spite of myself.

         The ferryman and his boat arrived shortly after that. I didn’t run. We both knew I had nowhere to run to, after hunting in his territory. Not all of my people are territorial; I’m just as happy to play mercenary in one nation as another. But the weapon that is my heart also happens to be portable. The ferryman’s weapon—the river—is less convenient.

         Just as the river’s waters could not harm me, so that I had been able to cross into the parched lands without paying the ferryman’s toll, my gun had no virtue against him. The gun lay quiescent, in recognition of this.

         I knelt in a rustle. The gun being my best defense, I rarely bothered with armor unless I was passing for an ordinary mercenary. (I’m passable, although not exceptional, with a sword.)

         The ferryman held his oar in a way that made me think getting hit by it would hurt, even if it could do me no lasting damage. He was tall, with dusky skin and deliciously broad shoulders. Some of my people are more handsome than others, by my idiosyncrasies of taste anyway; and it had been a long time. But he had no reason to think well of me.

         “Do you mean to cross?” he asked.

         “I’m in no hurry to leave,” I said, which was true. I’d done as the Raven-Cloaked General had asked, and her payment was of little moment.

         “You must be one of the younger ones,” he said musingly.

         “I suppose that’s possible. I don’t keep track.”

         The ferryman winced, and I was almost sorry I had lied to him. “There aren’t many of us anymore,” he said. “Someone has to keep the histories. Still: I hadn’t heard of bees. Why bees?”

         “You’d have to ask the thirstsmith,” I said. “I told them that I wanted a gun. Everything else was up to them.”

         The Apiarist’s Gum hummed in satisfaction. Quiet, I thought at it.

         “When was the last time you shared the cup?” the ferryman asked me.

         I was disappointed, hearing this. A fight might not be forthcoming after all. My friend had always remarked that I had simple tastes. There are worse afflictions. Still, resting here a little space might be congenial.

         “The last time was when I was in the service of the Peacock General,” I said. We don’t share our names casually, and I had never known hers. Her weapon had been the military gift in its purest form. Not unsurprisingly, she had been more cerebral than most of us. But after conquering several empires, she had tired of the game and fallen into the dust sleep that claims us when we deny the thirst too long. I’d heard of her fate two mortal generations later, from a traveling scholar.

         The ferryman was nodding, his mouth crimped. “Yes,” he said. “I remember her. Come into the boat, then, and let me offer you that small hospitality.”

         I could not see through the waters, and I wondered how deep they ran as I stepped into the boat. Carefully, we both sat.

         The ferryman had produced a cup of stained stone. With a small knife he slashed his palm over it. I did likewise. We each touched our lips to the rim of the cup: a recognition of the thirst we shared.

         “My turn,” I said, wondering how much he wanted to talk. “Why a river?”

         “There’s a saying where I come from,” he said. “‘Where the heart’s rivers run.’”

         I waited, but that was all.

         He eased the oar back in the water. “It’s words, nothing more.”

         I heard the tension in his voice and did not press further.

* * *

         In the old life I was a scholar-aspirant at the Winged Library. When I was very, very young, I thought the most hideous thing that could happen to me was the loss of the knowledge I guarded. It was, needless to say, a very great library, unrivaled among the named lands.

         As it turned out, the conquerors who came during my youth were not barbarians. They did their utmost to save the books. The same could not be said of my old people.

         I survived the conquest. After that I went to the Forge Beneath the World and gave myself into the hands of the thirstsmith who dwells there.

         Forging your heart into a weapon changes you only if you desire to be something more than a weapon in the first place. By then any such desire had departed me.

* * *

         Neither of us needed sleep, which was just as well. The way the boat rode high and low in the water bothered me. The ferryman smiled when he saw it, not unkindly.

         For a long time I sat in his boat, a silent presence, as he rowed from shore to shore in response to calls that I could not decipher. Gradually it occurred to me that the river’s dull roar had words in it, even if their language was not for me to understand.

         We might have spent a year and a day together, or longer than that. After the time of silence, I began speaking little by little. But mostly I listened.

         Only the very desperate crossed into the parched lands, people for whom the world without was so cruel that the rule of the Drowned Queen seemed preferable. I witnessed my share of suicides at the river’s shore. The ritual method involved a knife not dissimilar to the one the ferryman and I had used. I observed merely that bleeding to death is never as fast as everyone seems to think it ought to be, and if I had been more fastidious the mess would have bothered me. As it was, ravens waited for their feast. I thought to myself that the scavengers of the world were often underestimated.

         From time to time the ferryman shared with me his observations. He told me of the Drowned Queen, who had survived an assassination attempt in body but not, entirely, in mind. So great was her aversion to water that she locked it away in her lens-lit palace and let it out only in stingy trickles while her people struggled to bring life to the parched lands. By then I could guess that the ferryman’s own bargain with the thirstsmith had something to do with containing the Queen’s desire for expansion.

         As I grew to know him better, I sensed that the ferryman brooded from time to time on his self-inflicted duty. But it was not until the first time I witnessed the fate of a passenger who had not brought the toll that I learned how deep his discontent was.

         It is perhaps relevant that most of the Drowned Queen’s subjects, by now, were born in the parched lands. The woman who came to us asking for passage, however, had only one eye, and she came from within the Drowned Queen’s realm. A disc of thin gold was stamped with the oar-sign over the socket of the other, affixed by polished rivets: toll paid.

         The woman waited with slow dignity as the boat pulled up. The ferryman’s oar slowed. “You must have been misinformed,” he said, with the politeness I had grown to treasure. “One to enter, two to leave.”

         The saying was known even as far away as the Burning City. The ferryman’s toll of eyes.

         By now I had discovered that the ferryman neither pickled eyes nor (my second guess) threw them to the fishes that might lurk in the river. But he had tools beyond the knife and the oar, and those tools were what he used to collect his toll.

         Most people were considerate enough to bring their own coins to cover the gaping sockets. Even pennies worn thin would do. For the very poorest who insisted on crossing, the ferryman would cut a circle of their own skin. In my old life I would have considered writing a treatise blaming him for all the superstitions about our people.

         “I have a daughter,” the woman said, already boring me with her desperation. There was always a daughter, a lover, a cousin. “She is dying in the Underbridge, and there is no one else to care for her. I must cross. One eye, two, what does it matter to you?”

         “The rule is the rule,” the ferryman said.

         I tried to figure out what bothered me about his face, and it came to me: if I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn that he felt sorry for her. But why—?

         Eventually she tried to leap into the boat. The waters had swollen forward to catch her, and she gurgled as they dragged her under.

         “I don’t understand you,” I said after nothing remained but the ripples in the water.

         “Would you have saved her?”

         “Of course not. Her life doesn’t mean anything to me one way or another. I could have shot her, if that would have been more to your liking. I didn’t because—” I was not accustomed to hesitating like this. But it was important to find the right words. “I didn’t think you wanted me to.”

         I had not realized how vast the river was, how far away the shore was. In fact, I wasn’t sure I could see the shore at all.

         “I didn’t,” the ferryman said. “I sometimes wonder how much difference it makes, whether they leap or we push. At times it seems like all the difference in the world.”

         “Why does the rule matter to you, if you like it so little?”

         “Because when I stop enforcing it,” the ferryman said, “it no longer binds the Drowned Queen.”

         “She kills people with her stinginess, but so do we with our thirst. She can’t be so much more terrible than we are.” Mostly I was reflecting that the smith had given me a much less complicated weapon.

         The ferryman lifted the oar out of the water and sighed. “Tell me about the world outside,” he said. “Tell me if any of this has made a difference, or if outside, too, there is nothing but tyranny.”

         “How long have you been here?”

         “The number wouldn’t mean anything to you.”

         I conceded that this was likely true. “All right,” I said.

         I didn’t tell him of the people I had killed. Killing was nothing new to him. Nor did I speak of politics, which rarely interested me. Instead, I told him of small memories from my travels. Blocks of bean curd hung to dry from tiled roofs. A tiny shrine I had stayed at during a storm, where I had unexpectedly discovered a clay tablet from my old homeland housed with devotional verses scratched into bamboo strips and painted onto porcelain. The sweetness of thyme honey.

         And at the end I took out the funerary tablet I always carried, and I ran my fingers over the smooth jade. “We traveled together for six years,” I said. “I would have massacred armies for him, and instead pneumonia got him. I have no cures for pneumonia.”

         “You’re not angry?”

         “At pneumonia?”

         The ferryman laughed at my expression. He held out his hand for the tablet, and I reluctantly surrendered it to him. “Beautiful work. Yours?”

         “I paid someone to do it for me. I’m no stonecarver.”

         He handed the tablet back to me, and I returned it to its accustomed place in its pouch.

         We spoke of other things then: the flowers that bloomed along the bank in the spring, and the snails that sometimes kept the ferryman company, and the clear sweet smell of wind over water. But I sensed that his dissatisfaction would only grow.

* * *

         I did not drowse, exactly, but the ferryman was occupied witnessing the latest suicides when the ravens came for me. I knew them immediately for what they were. They perched on either side of the boat and said, raucously, “439th Raven Detachment, reporting.”

         “Tell your general she owes me nothing,” I said to the ravens. There were two of them, one with a red band around its leg, one with a blue band. To aid those of us who couldn’t tell the birds apart, presumably.

         “Our general believes in payments delivered,” the red raven said. “Or do you intend to linger here forever? She was starting to wonder, and even her patience is not infinite.”

         I had, in fact, been considering it. But there was no telling when the ferryman would tire of my company, even if I had yet to tire of his. In a low voice, I said, “I would if it were an option. I am not one to stay where I am not wanted, though.”

         “One to enter, two to leave,” the blue raven said. “No one ever asks about returning after that.”

         “People usually run out of eyes about then.” Even so, I had a thought—”Tell me, how highly does your general regard your vision?”

         Never let it be said that ravens are not without conceit. “What other bird would serve her as well?” the red raven said.

         Good to know. “Then I don’t want her eyes,” I said. “I want you. If you are amenable to being loaned out.”

         The ravens were laughing at me. “Don’t you think she foresaw this?” they said.

         “Visitors?” the ferryman said, arching his eyebrows at the ravens.

         “After a fashion,” I said, although he must have overheard everything. I hadn’t told the ferryman about the Raven-Cloaked General, but I couldn’t imagine that he didn’t know, considering what I’d done to the keep. “I want to leave you now.”

         It wasn’t precisely what I meant, but I could not come up with a better way to say it.

         “So soon,” the ferryman said, and I knew then that I had hurt him.

         We both knew this couldn’t last. The nature of our hunting need not be profligate, depending on our weapons, but sooner or later we would quarrel over (as one of our philosophers said, ironically) oasis rights. The ferryman might have indulged my hunting in his territory despite the terrible insult I had offered in doing so, but I didn’t know how much longer he would do so.

         I unclipped the holster, gun and all, and held it out to the ferryman in both hands. He stared at me, eyes widening.

         “Take it,” I said, voice shaking. “Take it, take the ravens, and go. It seems this is the only lasting happiness I can offer you. If I know you might return some day, I think I can bear it.”

* * *

         Among my people, the exchanging of hearts is very literal, and true reciprocity is rare. The old stories are full of fools who disarm themselves only to find their regard unreturned.

* * *

         The ferryman knew how to handle a gun. I had wondered about that. Nevertheless, he returned the gun to me.

         I stared at him, cold inside. But I accepted the gun.

         “An exchange,” he said. “The river for the gun. Guard the river for me and I’ll come back to you, if you will but wait. I’ll tell you my name then.”

         “Yes,” I breathed. “Yes.”

         “Shoot me,” the ferryman said. “Two to leave. I want the bees to be the last thing I see, to remind me of you.”

         “I’ll be waiting,” I said, and fired.

* * *

for Sonya Taaffe

Copyright © 2015 Yoon Ha Lee

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Yoon Ha Lee’s short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Clarkesworld Magazine, and multiple times previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, including “The Bonedrake’s Penance” in BCS Science-Fantasy Month 2014. His short fiction collection Conservation of Shadows was released by Prime Books in 2013. He lives in Louisiana with his family and an extremely lazy cat, and has not yet been eaten by gators. Visit him online at www.yoonhalee.com.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

THE WARRIORS, THE MOTHERS, THE DROWNED

by Kay Chronister

         The coyote follows Ana and her baby from inside a shroud of dust, swallowing the distance between them down into his empty belly. Over her shoulder, she can see how his indolent lope matches the frantic, foam-lipped canter of her tired old mule stride-for-stride. He would catch them even if she hadn’t drawn back on the reins and told the mule to slow his pace. That’s what she says to herself, trying to slow the thud of her heart in her throat as the mule comes to a halt. “This won’t be more than a moment, mi querida,” she tells little Sylvie, who is oblivious and half-asleep in a makeshift sling. “We’ll just see what he wants.”

         Already she knows what he’s after; how could she not? But she wearies of pretending not to know, of his tracks in figure-eights all around their old aluminum-roofed shack, of his shadow stretching out long on the sand, of his hot breath at her back now as she dismounts to face him. Only an animal, she’s been saying to herself; she can’t yet force herself to call him by that other name. In all the stories her mother told, no scabbed, hideous creature stole the living into the land of the dead. The nagual were wise and noble and only came once the deceased were wind-whispers laid into graves.

         “You should not be still running with the little girl,” says the coyote.

         “Why do you chase after us?”

         “She belongs in the land of the dead,” says the coyote.

         “She is not dead yet.” Ana can hardly even speak that word, dead.

         “But here is the river,” says the coyote.

         And there now is the river. Ana has lived all twenty one years of her life in half-starved flatland and never seen such lush endlessness, ink-colored and wreathed in spiny grasses. She might think it beautiful if she did not know: across the river there is no return.

         She should climb back up on the poor tired mule and dig her heels into his sides and kill herself outrunning death, but instead she says, “Take us to the other side.”

         The coyote cocks his head. “You will be in the land of the dead. Do you realize that?”

         “All right. So we will cross the land of the dead. And we will come out the other side. If we can do that, you have to let her live.”

         The coyote smiles open-mouthed. Here is a game he knows how to win. He trots ahead, dragging a tail of thorn and goldenrod, then waits at the riverside for them to climb astride his back. He is a towering creature—his head comes to her chest—but somehow they both mount comfortably, Ana and her baby, swinging bare legs over his hoary sides. When he swims across the river and Ana is submerged up to her chest she feels coldness but not wet. After months in the desert, shivering is unfamiliar and magnificent.

* * *

         Sylvie’s sickness was only a cough at first, a small scuttling sound that whistled when she slept at night. From the dust, said one of the other women at the labor camp. There was too much dust. So Ana fashioned a little mask from twine and cloth to protect Sylvie’s lungs.

         While summer wore on and Ana got sunburnt and hollow-eyed and strong, Sylvie got weak. Her breathing grew shallow and red tendrils of snot cobwebbed in her throat. When she cried, Ana couldn’t always make her stop. For hours she would pace the dirt floor with her face buried in Sylvie’s curls, promising someone—was it Sylvie? Maybe it was herself—”We will not always live here, mi querida. One day we will go north. We will be safe and happy, and the grass will sparkle green.”

         And all through those long ember-colored nights, the creature skulked past their shack on tawny, bone-thin legs. How did she never guess what he wanted?

* * *

         Ana thought the land of the dead would be empty, but it is full to bursting. With gods’ turquoise bones, with small grimacing golems fashioned from maize and bone-thin fellow travelers wandering across the desert on their hands and knees, with temples so black and shimmering that she can’t quite make herself look at them. The coyote plods along ceaselessly, nose to the ground and tail flung high. Up through the ash-colored landscape they go, snaking around heaps of coal and green-eyed idols. At last they reach a hilltop. The coyote lets them off his back and they look out, standing side-by-side on the precipice.

         “First there are mountains,” says the coyote.

         They are towers of red stone, close to one another as twins in a womb. They shudder and palpitate, and beneath her feet Ana can feel their joined heartbeat. Kissing the crown of Sylvie’s head, she sets out down the narrow canyon path which divides the peaks. The coyote trots at her side, silent save for the soft scrape of his tail on the sand.

         “They are not only mountains,” says the coyote.

         She bristles at the sneer in his words. “What are they, then?”

         “They are the remains of some ancient storm that sent boulders hurtling down over the gods, and beneath the land of the dead their roots still wrap around the wrists of gladiators.”

         He says those words like they are memorized; probably he has said them before, to someone else, perhaps someone whose baby also coughed and convulsed for three long summer months. To Ana they sound suspiciously like poetry, and she will not heed them. She climbs over the outcropping of rock, steadying herself with one hand and cupping Sylvie’s scrawny tailbone with the other. Closer now, she sees how the mountains bow toward each other in slight, almost imperceptible flinches of movement. Where she steps might not be where her foot lands.

         “I can’t cross this,” she tells the coyote.

         “Then you will live here, among the ashes and the golems. No further than most of the dead have ever gotten,” says the coyote.

         “But I am not dying.”

         “Then your living spirit will be meat for something ravenous,” says the coyote.

         She wishes he would say what he means: he is hungry, and intent on devouring her. He has been licking his chops outside their shack for months, and Ana wonders now if it was not only Sylvie that he was after. Eyeing the mountains distrustfully, she crouches down low and shelters Sylvie’s head in the crook of her arm. Slowly, she crawls forward. When the rocks shift once more, her hand is crushed between two boulders. Ana fears a lash of pain, but she only feels the solid weight of stone all around her. Prying her hand out of the crevice, she finds her fingers crumpled and covered in blood. Still she feels no pain. She can be hurt and unhurt here, torn and yet still standing like a barren stalk of corn after the harvest.

         She stiffens. Says, “It doesn’t hurt a bit.”

         The coyote looks on disapprovingly as she wades deeper into the mountains. He seems displeased that she has not conceded defeat, but she can tell already that he is patient. Earlier, he said that he has a thorn in his paw but cannot pry it out, for his teeth are made of briars and he lodges a new complaint in his foot whenever he tries to remove the old one. That is to say, he told her slyly, he is well-practiced in shoving the same boulders up the same old hill. Ana doesn’t guess he’ll congratulate her when she reaches the other side of the mountains.

         He doesn’t. He lowers himself down to a crouch and they mount again, Ana wrapping bruise-mottled arms around Sylvie, tangling her fingers in the coyote’s wild thatch of fur.

         “Many others did this before you, better than you,” says the coyote. “And they never made it out alive.”

         “Lead us further down,” says Ana, and he obeys.

* * *

         Sylvie’s father was Ana’s husband for a year and a half, from the morning of the Catholic service in the ramshackle camp chapel to the night when he snuck out of bed and fled a pile of gambling debts. Ana had never seen so much money in her life as the amount that the lenders wanted from him. No one ever had any cash at the labor camp, so they made promises on tattered scraps of paper instead. Ana couldn’t read English, and she had to take their word for it when they banged on the shack door and showed her the stack of promissory notes that Arturo had written.

         “Fifty four dollars,” said the towering man who crowded out the others. There were four in all, big white men with knotted shoulders. They were untouched by dust and their shoes had no holes. Not farmers, then. They wouldn’t be under the camp’s authority; she couldn’t ask the foreman to deal with them. They could strike her dead, if they wanted.

         “I don’t have the money,” she said, though they must have known already she couldn’t pay. No one worked for wages in the labor camp; they worked for food rations and, twice a year, new dresses, and, after five years, documentation papers. Glancing across the grizzled landscape of their sunburnt faces, she said, “I’m sorry,” and tried to shut the door.

         The man stopped the rust-eaten aluminum frame with the toe of his boot and shoved closer. “We need the money. Your husband, where is he?”

         “Gone,” she said. “I don’t know. I think he’ll be back, come morning.” A lie: he’d been gone a month and probably would never come back. If he’d been gone this long, he’d found work somewhere else—on the railroads maybe, or digging canals and holes for telegraph posts in some city. She never made any effort to resent the abandonment. He’d kissed her forehead with something like reverence as he’d gone.

         The man shoved past her. The scents of clay and machine oil clung to him. A thorn was stuck in his mud-crusted shirt, and she felt the strangest impulse to brush it from his shoulder before it sank into his skin. He crossed the room in three steps to reach Sylvie’s cradle and produced a shining pistol from a holster at his side.

         She’d never come so close to a gun. She heard herself whimper the word no, and then she said shakily, “Don’t you touch her.”

         “We will come back tomorrow morning for our money. And if we don’t get it,” said the man, pressing the pistol to Sylvie’s forehead, “she will get a hole in her little head.”

         When the men shut the door, she was already adding up how many miles she could put between herself and the camp before dawn. Maybe she should not have left the camp, maybe she was stupid to flee the only place where Arturo would ever think to find her, should he come back, but she found that she cared only for Sylvie. So she stole a mule and abandoned everything besides her dying baby, cutting through a hole in the barbed wire fence to reach the open desert without detection. Before her, the landscape stretched out endlessly. She had not left the camp in close to a year, but she knew secondhand that the road to the city never forked. She thought only endurance was asked of her.

         Over her shoulder, she remembers, she could see nothing of the fields or shanties. The dust silhouetted only what she expected: a single figure, four-legged and ridge-backed, lean and ravenous.

* * *

         When the boulders become a crush of stones underfoot and the heartbeats of the mountains fade deeper into the earth, Ana and Sylvie and the coyote emerge onto a plain which is bare and crowded. Ana has known no desert so full of lifeless, twisted things: dead cactus, burnt and black; dead rams buried up to their heads with their curled antlers sticking savagely out of the ground like ivory flowers; dead crow’s skins, stuffed and mounted upon posts. The crows are the corpses of great explorers, the coyote says, brave intrepid men named Cortez and de Gama whose bodies the gods used to line the road to the valley.

         Ana tries to imagine a valley in the land of the dead. “With grass?” she says. “With trees and water?”

         “Grass and water do not make a valley,” says the coyote.

         Further down the hillside, the land flattens out. The coyote stops to gnaw at the thorn in his paw, and they slide down from his back onto the hard-packed earth. Ana’s breath catches to see how the valley resembles the labor camp after harvest-time, when the fields are lush carpets of withered grapevines and rotten peppers. She can almost see the women moving along the rows, uprooting the last survivors. She is fearful of what secrets the desert might hold, for nothing that looks so ordinary can possibly be safe, but being timid does no good in the land of the dead. Where there were corpses fashioned from maize, she had to see herself broken and crumpled; here, among the bodies that beckon ahead, perhaps she must point her own way.

         “There is sometimes rain in this valley,” says the coyote.

         “Rain?” She can hardly remember the meaning of the word in the midst of whisper-thin gray dust and featureless sky. She is suspicious: “What sort of rain?”

         The coyote trots ahead, panting. His tongue is the color of cactus, and spiny all over. When tiny knives begin to fall, they glance off him. Ana is not so fortunate. She doesn’t feel the little blades when they strike her, but blood runs down her arms in hot rivulets.

         She hitches her dress up to cover Sylvie, even knowing that neither of them feel any pain. For herself, she is not much concerned. No matter if the gods bury knives in her chest; as long as she has hands and knees, she will crawl out of their pit. The wind drives the knives sideways, blinding and deafening her, but she does not stop. Bereft of the landscape ahead and the coyote’s taunts in her ears, left with only the scent of the dust, she never stops, never slows, never lets her direction change. The valley must end sometime, and then they will ascend back into mountains. She might still be confined in her sightlessness, but at least there she will feel the roughness of the rock beneath her hands and know she has made progress.

         She cannot describe what she feels when she comes down hard on her knees in a well of mud. All that surrounds her is unsharp, soft and wet and wonderful. She wrestles Sylvie out from underneath the cover of her dress and presses mud into their foreheads and cheeks and lips. When she tears the knives from her eyes and ears with mud-covered hands, her sight comes groggily back to her; her ears open. With her new sight she glimpses miracles: Sylvie’s fingers splayed in the pit of mud, her dark eyes full of laughter, her lap full of dirt. Across from them the coyote sips delicately at the well, a creature perfectly accustomed to living off a land of death.

         The valley lies at their backs now, Ana sees. They have crossed. She is so stricken by her relief that she forgets herself and whispers, “Is it real?”

         “Because it doesn’t hurt you, it can’t be real?” says the coyote.

         “Not here,” Ana says.

         “No,” says the coyote. “Not here.” He licks the mud from his lips and beckons for them to climb astride his back. Ana mounts gracelessly, buries her fists in his coat, and yanks with such force that clumps of fur come out in her hands. The coyote says nothing, but he is still licking his lips hungrily. She can feel his ribs beneath her thighs.

* * *

         The natives of the dead land, the coyote says, have abandoned the rhythms of birthing and feeding and getting deathly sick. Only the imported dead feign life, and they do so clumsily.

         “Not even you?” Ana says to the coyote. “Were you not mothered and brought up?”

         “I am unliving and undying,” says the coyote out of swollen lips. He is attacking a beehive that has fallen from some dead land tree, and so the hive is attacking him, covering his canyon-colored snout with white wings and tiny, sprawling black legs. When he tears the mass of honeycombs open, the bees collapse dead in a heap at his feet. “Feed the child,” says the coyote, nudging the hive towards her.

         Ana obliges, though her daughter does not seem to be much hungrier than the natives of the land of the dead. She hasn’t tried to nurse since they arrived. While Sylvie licks honey from her fingertips, she persists: “Tell me the truth. Not even the gods can be unborn.”

         “We are all unborn here,” says the coyote. “All forged. All made. I asked to be made a nagual because I, like you, was alive when I followed someone else into death. Five hundred or five thousand years ago, I cannot remember. Either way, I have been unchanged ever since. Time is not the same here, you’ll find. I’ve been starving for a few eternities and getting no thinner.”

         “You look,” Ana says, “very thin to me.” And she reaches out, her fingers covered in honey, to nourish one sickly creature as she nourished the other. The coyote regards her suspiciously as he lowers his mouth to her hand. His cactus tongue raises welts on her skin, but she does not feel them.

         “Don’t imagine,” says the coyote, “that you can ever flee death.”

         “I would never try.”

         He aims a caustic look at her and then at Sylvie, who has lost interest in the honey and is blithely tearing the wings off the dead bees. “Everything is an exchange here, you’ll see. I had to kill a nagual to become one. You or her. It’ll come to you or her.”

         “It already has,” Ana says. She wrestles the wingless bees from Sylvie’s fists and sets out across the desert. Moving in insubstantial increments towards another river, another dead cactus-studded land. If she didn’t have a daughter, she might have a pistol and a will to live instead.

* * *

         In labor with Sylvie, Ana swallowed a sour-tasting draught of morphine and sobbed inconsolably over an old superstition that had been buried many years ago beneath a Spanish baptismal font.

         “I won’t belong with you anymore,” she said over and over again, clutching at the tails of her husband’s shirt. “Please, don’t let the child come.”

         He was an unsturdy and beautiful man, Arturo, and he didn’t know how to comfort her. “Stop thinking on those other worlds,” he said, speaking under his breath so the midwife across the room wouldn’t hear him. “It’s just heaven and hell and purgatory.”

         “Heaven for the warriors, the mothers, and the drowned ones,” she managed, though her tongue felt thick from the morphine, and the pain of labor was deafening. “Purgatory for the rest. Didn’t they preach it that way, once?” It was true, they had. The camp chapel was prone to sacrilege, inducing velvet-clad Catholicism to shake hands with those ancient dust-streaked truths which everyone with even a speck of Aztec heritage knew.

         “I’d drown before I’d leave you,” said Arturo, and she knew even then that he was lying but she let him say it, let him tangle his fingers in her sweat-soaked hair and prop her head up on the adobe wall that served as the headboard for their frameless mattress. “And they dabbed a bit of holy water on my forehead, didn’t they?”

         “You know that’s not what it means,” she sobbed. “Please–”

         She bit down on an iron crucifix while the midwife drew Sylvie from her womb, pushing her screams to the back of her throat and watching Arturo through a rose-colored morphine haze. How heavenly he looked. How impossible. She hoped her child was nothing like him, that Sylvie would instead be branded with the inexorable mark of that savage, ancient heaven where mothers and warriors and the drowned feast upon their enemies.

* * *

         The land of the dead does not frighten Ana now that she has learned all its rules. Small gods with stars for faces sometimes try to make good on their reputations as tricksters, but they come away disappointed by her invulnerability to cuts and bruises. Other trespassers attack–longtime wanderers who have lost their guides and resent that she should persist when they have lost all hope—but the coyote kills them and buries their bodies in the sand. “When they rise, they will be aspen trees and their branches will anchor the wind,” he says.

         There are many meanings of the word dead, Ana has realized. Many intermediate stages between being and not being alive. She finds she can no longer name the stage where she subsists, nor the one where Sylvie has landed.

         The second river in the land of the dead is nothing like the first. The shore is not exposed to the wilds of the desert but hidden in a cave where stalactites protrude from the slick rock and armored starfish writhe in pools. Poised elegantly at the lips of the water, enormous cats with golden skin look out over the horizon. They are the guardians, the coyote says, of the threshold to the other world.

         “We’ve crossed the land of the dead, then,” says Ana.

         “Not yet,” says the coyote.

         “Not yet,” she concedes. Then, kissing Sylvie’s head, “But if we cross, we’ll both be safe? She won’t die?”

         “You won’t die,” says the coyote.

         “It’s not me that I care about.”

         “She belongs here,” says the coyote. “You are marked for another world, and you have known it since before you arrived.”

         Ana knows he does not mean the world of labor camps and documentation papers. The warriors, the mothers, and the drowned ones, she mouths through heat-cracked lips. Beneath her, the coyote feels swollen with hunger.

         “I can’t leave her,” she says, looking across the vast shining expanse of the river.

         “Then make her suitable for the other world,” says the coyote.

         She slides off his back, holding Sylvie close to her chest. Atop a creature forged from deathlessness, the thought of drowning her daughter is too awful, too tempting. “Don’t say that. I want her to live. I want her to live with me. I don’t want to spend fifty years in another world while she’s in the land of the dead—I don’t care which land of the dead.”

         “You have no other choice,” says the coyote.

         How terrible that would be, if she believed him. Is there anything she would not do for Sylvie now? Any boundary she would not cross, any impossibility she would not make possible?

         “I want to become a nagual,” she says. “Like you.” At her back, the river beats against the shore. The other side is close, but she wants nothing of it if her daughter is not beside her.

         “That, you cannot do,” says the coyote. Beneath his peeling skin and rust-colored fur, she sees, he is only a spindly frame of bone.

         “You told me how.” She tears a stalactite from the sand and approaches him. Her hands shake but she is calm with Sylvie tucked up against her heart in a makeshift sling. “You said that everything here is an exchange.”

* * *

         Loping across the land of the dead with Sylvie on her back, past the aspen trees, the crow’s skins, the golems, Ana counts up the dead and includes herself among them. There are candles lit in skulls beside the road at night now and sparse stalks of sugarcane sticking out of the barren earth. Sometimes she wonders if the sheer force of Sylvie’s life might resurrect the dead land. Certainly, it is not the force of her own deathlessness.

         She has not yet found the boundary between surviving in the land of the dead and becoming one of its inhabitants. With her ridged spine and fangs, she might well have lost her citizenship to the other world already. But she is not the most savage creature here. The monsters would frighten her if she did not see the potential in them. She teaches her daughter how to put on their costumes, to wrap herself in their pelts and imitate the cries they make when hunting. Their power will be Sylvie’s inheritance when she no longer has a monster for a mother. Because Ana knows she has not really secured deathlessness for herself. Someday there will be another desperate woman with a gun to the head and a mule that won’t go on running, another blood-covered hand and knife-pierced eye and, at the riverside, another killing blow.

         They are scavengers of death, the nagual. It would be foolish for them to think they will not be picked off by some equally formidable predator.

Copyright © 2015 Kay Chronister

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Kay Chronister’s fiction won the 2015 Dell Magazine Award and is forthcoming in Ticonderoga Publications’ Hear Me Roar, an anthology of feminist speculative fiction. Originally from Seattle, she currently lives in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in a household of twenty-one children and six dogs.

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COVER ART

“Twisted Mountain Valley,” by Christopher Balaskas

Christopher Balaskas is an instructor at Infinity Visual and Performing Arts and a freelance traditional / digital conceptual artist. He was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, and is currently based in Jamestown, New York. View more of his work at deviantArt and artstation.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1076

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Compilation Copyright © 2015 Firkin Press

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