Issue #208 • Sept. 15, 2016

“Teeth, Tapestries,” by Alex Dally MacFarlane

“Abere and the Poisoner,” by Jonathan Edelstein

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TEETH, TAPESTRIES

by Alex Dally MacFarlane

Teeth

         A wind came up strong off the scale-grey sea. Salt stung Gort’s cheeks.

         “Got me here just in time,” she said.

         The man who’d boated her across the firth strode up-slope, silent. Gort followed. This island: not a rock bare-but-for-birds, not a name she’d ever heard in her years of midwifing. Ahead was a whole village, almost empty, roofs sagging, doors open like sockets in a skull. Not a single story about it.

         At a house still standing whole, the man stopped, slammed open the door. Gort walked in after him and saw a woman sitting by a peat fire with a belly like a boulder.

         “Teeth in the wind!” the man shouted. Slammed a fist into the wall. “Too many!”

         Gort stood just inside the one-roomed house, thinking of the sea between her and any other island, thinking of the storm. Thinking of her oath-wife on Hoy. Thinking of the woman right here who needed her skills.

         The woman gestured her to the fire, offered her a stool. The man paced.

         “I’m Beill,” the woman said quietly.

         “Gort. And him? Didn’t ever give me a name.”

         “Ruis.”

         Wind tore across the chimney-top.

         “Glad I got here before that storm did,” Gort said.

         “It’ll take days to build,” Ruis said. “Not a storm.”

         “There’s food,” Beill said, and started putting it into bowls: fish stew, simple. Hot and good. Gort murmured her thanks. Ruis took a bowl and ate it and didn’t mention teeth all that night, though the wind never died.

* * *

Tapestries

         Gort went out for air: salt-stinging and strong, the storm still hanging a long way off the shore. Clouds sat on the heather-hills at the back of the village, beyond an old church. She set off among the ruined houses, looking for a distraction, for a way not to think about the storm, about teeth. What story was that? Shivering, shaking it out of her, she walked on. She poked her head through doorways. Bare earth and stone, damp, cold. Sometimes birds had used a house for nesting in. Sometimes there were one or two things left by the long-gone islanders: a broken cup, a broken comb, a little stone block that might have been a carving of a woman.

         A house had something flapping in its doorway. Colours. But—Gort saw when she got closer—faded and dirty, their pattern indistinguishable. A tapestry. Gort lifted it aside.

         More tapestries covered the floor of the one room.

         Nothing else remained: no furniture, no pot in the hearth, nothing broken and discarded but the tapestries, damp, mossy by the door and the chimney. Other tapestries preserved their designs. Gort carefully stepped on only the ruined ones and crouched, saw a strong woman holding her seal-skin, sea-greys swirling under a plain grey sky, saw a smudge of what might have been hair or gold or the rare sun, saw dark eyes in staring faces.

* * *

Teeth

         Beill lay on the blankets, screaming. Gort crouched between her legs and told her when to push. Blood on her hands. Not too much.

         “Babies all born with teeth! Fox-sharp!” Ruis shouted. The wind tore over the chimney. Not the storm. Not yet. “Knives in their mouths!”

         Beill tried to reach for one of Gort’s hands, cried, “Please! Please!”

         “What’s that house?” Gort asked Ruis, thinking of distractions. “With the tapestries?”

         He threw a scythe at her head.

         It missed. Clattered on the floor, loud as Gort’s heartbeat, loud as Beill’s scream. He shouted louder: “She tore them all to pieces and tipped them all in the sea! The sand is bones! Ground by her teeth, her teeth, too many teeth!”

         Too many teeth.

         He didn’t throw anything else. Gort got her hands still, got her voice steady, told Beill, “Push.” Gripped Beill’s knees tight in what she hoped felt like comfort. Watched Ruis.

         Too many teeth, too many teeth!

         Stey will tear off your flesh!

         It had been over ten years since Gort last heard that, chanted by children. Scare-song. Shiver at night: Stey who stripped a whole island of its flesh, Stey who wore it all and danced and finally tore off her own skin, Stey who was ripped to shreds, Stey who still stalked the islands. Teeth in the wind!

         This island.

         Ruis paced and shouted and Gort told Beill to push again, again, until there was a baby boy in the blankets: crying loud, open-mouthed enough for Gort to see the smooth gums. Beill was saying nothing: breathing in gasps, in pain. Alive. Watching her husband. Gort listened to his steps, his words, knew where he stood even when he was behind her. Cleaned the baby. Knew how she’d get to her longer knife.

         “Here,” Gort said to Beill. Gave her the baby, wrapped in lint-cloth. “He’s small enough you’re not hurt from the birth, but not too small.”

         “Look!” Beill said, holding him up in weary arms. “It’s a boy, a healthy boy. Look.”

         He cried, showed his gums.

         Ruis didn’t stop pacing.

* * *

Tapestries

         Stey who tore off her skin and turned into a fox, a creature all teeth, a creature no one knew until she tore them right open.

* * *

Teeth

         The storm screamed outside: on the island at last, three days after Beill’s labour. Three days of shouting, of fear, of things thrown. Of Gort thinking whether she dared going up against a man as big as Ruis with her knife. Thinking of Beill, thinking of the best ways to help her.

         “Teeth!” Ruis shouted, over and over, like the wind banging against the door.

         Thinking of Stey.

         Too many stories.

         “Too many teeth!”

         Too many stories and none of them sure: all teeth and tearing skin, all fear. All teller, not tale. Not Stey’s story.

         “Tell me,” Gort whispered to Beill—the two women sitting by the fire, watching Ruis – “who was Stey? What did she really do?”

         “Teeth!” Ruis shouted.

         “Anger,” Beill whispered.

         “Teeth!”

         Gort flinched as Ruis banged open the door and went out into the storm.

         Gone.

         “She was so angry.”

         Ruis’ shouts receded. Though she wanted to hear more of Beill’s words, Gort said, “We need to leave this house. Now.”

         Beill said nothing. Bound the baby more securely to her chest – he’d latched well, a small relief in these three days—then draped blankets over her shoulders and over him. Took two small stone figures from the notch in the wall. Joined Gort, who held her working bag with her longer knife ready to be pulled out.

         They stopped just outside the door, smacked by the rain, the wind, near-blinded in it. Nothing of Ruis’ shouts reached them. But he stood there, down the path, shouting, his back to them, blocking the way to the few other houses still lived in.

         “We can’t get past,” Beill said.

         “No. This way.”

         When Beill realised Gort’s direction, she cried out, pulled back.

         “This way!” Gort shouted through the loud rain, the wind. Ruis was already lost in the storm. “He won’t dare look here!”

* * *

Tapestries

         When Gort pushed aside the soaked, stinking tapestry, lightning flashed and Beill ran inside with eyes wide like a hooked fish’s mouth. The baby cried, muffled under the layers of blankets. Dry, Gort hoped.

         “You were going to tell me something,” Gort said. “About anger.”

         “Here!” Beill laughed nervously, paced the filthy tapestries, then huddled in the corner furthest from the door and the rain-pattered ashy fireplace. There were only rain-noises. Gort saw in dark outlines: the shape of Beill in the corner, like the figurine she’d found on a lighter-skied day. The door, limned in vague light. Until the lightning flashed, lighting the room, lending brightness to the tapestries under her feet. She saw women’s faces: mussel-ovals but light, cut through with lines. Women at her feet, staring up, as if unwillingly put there. “Anger,” Beill said. “The stories were all about her anger. All wrong. Anger without a cause. Anger for fun!” Beill laughed again: harsh, sharp. “Who’s ever angry for fun?”

         “Why was she angry?”

         Beill shouted over the thunder, the rain beating the house: “No one ever told me!”

         The tapestry at the door was torn away. For a heartbeat, loud as the thunder, Gort thought it was Ruis.

         Only the storm.

         The women didn’t speak. Gort was still shivering but didn’t dare look outside for Ruis, so she went to Beill’s side and huddled with her. Lightning flashed again. It cracked open the air like a skull, like anger. Lit up the faces on the floor. Gort shut her eyes, but the faces stayed there.

         “Do you know stories?” Beill asked, after the thunder. Her teeth chattered in her words. “Good ones.”

         But Gort was thinking of other stories, heard over the years, that talked about Stey. That gave her a face. Pale-faced, like a bone. Long hair in wrack-knots, shaved off, fur, braided, tangled with teeth, soaked in blood. Scars on her cheeks. Teeth wedged in her ears. Teeth-marks cut into her forehead. Too many teeth. Lightning. The faces were all Stey’s, all wrong, all caught—

         “Let’s get out of here,” Gort said. Stumbled to her feet, looked out the door into walls of rain. No Ruis. She could barely see a boat’s length. “Come on. I think we can do it.”

         They ran into crofts, away from Beill’s house, just in case. Nettles stung their ankles. Rain sliced their faces. Too many teeth. In the next lightning flash, Beill’s face was pale, un-marked, running only with rain. They reached the shore, where the village’s paltry boats were dragged high, clear of the foam and fist-heavy waves, and Beill led them to a still-standing house. Salt stung their eyes. It took rhythmic knocking, Gort remembering a fishing-round as Beill huddled beside her on shaking legs shielding the baby, before someone inside recognised a person amidst the storm’s sounds. Surprised cries. They were hustled in, stripped of their soaked clothes and given blankets, food, places by the peat-warmth of the fire. The children gaped, until their father started up a story: a good one, of ambitious sailors and mounds of fish.

         “Is—-” The mother, Onna, glanced from Gort to Beill, who was staring pale-faced into the fire without words. “Where is—”

         “In the storm,” Gort said.

         No one else knocked. The storm battered the house, and the father, Tinne, lightened the air inside with his words, more dawn light than lightning, laughter-light. The children enjoyed the tales.

         Gort thought of the tapestries, the women’s angry trapped faces.

* * *

Teeth

         Dawn light crept under the door. The storm was done. Beill’s baby cried: a healthy cry, hungry, not sick. A lot of luck, that. Beill still looked pale, so Onna put a pot over the fire and Gort helped and they managed a stew of dried fish and nettle, neeps, garlic, with stale soaked bannocks.

         Tinne went up to Beill’s house and came back with a story: of the house empty, of no sign of Ruis in the streets, in the crofts, in the empty houses—even, he said with a lowered voice, even in that house, where the tapestries were soaked and dark, as if with blood.

         Beill didn’t say a thing, only spooned more stew into her mouth and held the baby close. It was hard, raising a baby alone, but there was worse.

         “Do you want to stay here?” Tinne asked Beill, looking from her to Onna.

         Onna nodded, added, “You’d be very welcome to stay in our house.”

         Beill stared at her stew, then looked up at Gort. “What work is there where you’re from?”

         “It’s been a long while since I’ve been from one place,” Gort said, “but if I can be taken back to South Atsay, I know people there. I can get from there to the other islands.” How she wanted her oath-wife’s farm-calloused hand. Soon. “There’s good work to be had. Wool-work, fish-work, farm-work.” 

         “Then I want to come with you. I don’t want to live here anymore, I want— I want better.”

         Gort smiled.

         “I can take you both,” Tinne said. “Soon. See how the weather goes after this storm.” The way he and Onna looked at each other, they’d be following Beill before long. They and the other last villagers.

* * *

Tapestries

         Gort slipped away, in slanting sunlight. The first sun in two weeks. It wouldn’t last long.

         It slanted just right to light the floor of the tapestry house.

         The faces were stained all kinds of dark, still wet from the storm. Filth-dark, grime, accumulated over years, not the fresh soaking of blood. Gort knew that colour well. Yet it didn’t slip from her mind. The women on the tapestries with their filth-cut faces glared up at her, hair tangled and stained, clothes dark, eyes narrowed, staring. It was as if they each had only her look, her cutting look. Sharp as teeth. Had the tapestries always been like this? Had the woman who made them—Stey, it could only be Stey—had Stey made the women, each with her look? Or had time done it?

         Who had they been? Who had Stey been?

* * *

Teeth

         No one would tell her Stey’s story. No one knew it, they said. Only bits of it remained: the tapestries, the walls, the fear, the pain. Unwanted. Untold.

* * *

Tapestries

         Forgotten.

Copyright © 2016 Alex Dally MacFarlane

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

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.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ABERE AND THE POISONER

by Jonathan Edelstein

         There was an assassin named Folau, who sought to slay a magician’s words, and he hunted.

         There was a swamp-woman named Abere, who some called demon and others witch, and she waited.

* * *

         —You’re a young one. Younger than most who come here—too young for revenge. Was it suicide? Love? Both, maybe?

         —Yes, young one, you’re right. They do go together sometimes. But you came for love first—I believe that. You won’t find it here, you know.

         —There is a flower in the swamp you can make a potion from, they were right when they told you that. But it won’t give you back a love who has gone to another, only the imitation. Some people your age might think that’s enough... ah, I see you don’t. A wise one, you are.

         —No, not a wise one? A poet? That will do. Poets know tragedy. And a poet would have heard the story of the rattan bride.

         —You haven’t? A pity. Maybe the swamp-witch will tell it to you.

         —No, no, no, not me. You’ll know the swamp-witch when you see her—you can be sure of that.

             —My name? I have one, but I don’t use it any more. You can call me the Eaten One. You can take that name too, soon enough.

         —Oh yes. The marsh-reeds that surround you are no ordinary ones. You can’t cut them. You’re no shaman, so you can’t turn into a fish or bird and escape them. And even that wouldn’t help you—I could turn into a fish, and yet here I am.

         —Surely they told you that those flowers only grew where the swamp-witch lurked... yes, they did. You should have believed them. She doesn’t hunt everyone, but a young one like you...

         —You’re scared. Don’t be. It’s not such a bad thing, being eaten.

         —You don’t believe me? Let me tell you a story.

* * *

         —There was an assassin named Folau, and he lived on Tovata.

         —What’s that you ask—what is there to kill for on Tovata? Where are you from?

         —Ah, Nanao. The people of Nanao are wise and rich and proud, and Tovata is poor—yes, that’s true. Nanao is a great island and a powerful god; Tovata is a small god, a humble island at the edge of the sea. But that doesn’t mean that the people on Tovata have no reason to kill. There are disputes over land and fishing grounds. One war-leader might be at odds with another, or with a chief or shaman. A follower might think it’s past time to be a leader. When the outriggers come to trade for hardwood, there are arguments over the price, or maybe one of the sailors is caught in bed with the chief’s daughter. Or it can be something even less—the bure where one man lives might be bigger than another’s, or his wife might have a cowrie necklace that his neighbor’s wife lacks. There’s plenty of work for a man who can wield a dagger and mix poison, don’t ever doubt that.

         But Folau. Yes, Folau. One night, a war-leader named Hui’ehu came to visit him—came in secret, as people always do when they visit an assassin. Folau’s bure was deep, deep in the forest, and Hui’ehu came alone at night, even though war-leaders never walk alone. He rustled the thatching on all four sides of the bure and he said the words: “I am at the window, I am at the door, let me enter for I have gifts.”

         He came around to the door-flap and stood watching. It didn’t open, but all at once, there Folau was, standing in front with empty hands.

         “You should not come in,” Folau said. “I am brewing poison; I am immune to it and you are not. But I will take your gift and hear your words.”

         Hui’ehu clapped once and gave the assassin a patterned cloth bag that was filled with kava. “Enele the shaman is my enemy,” he said.

         Folau stood waiting.

         “He has spoken to the men who follow me. He has told them that Tovata doesn’t favor me, that my war-parties have not returned with sufficient offerings. He has spoken to Tigulu, who wants my men to follow him.”

         “And people have listened?”

         “Some of my men no longer give me of their crops and catch. If I get nothing from them, I will have nothing to give them.”

         —What was that, poet? Yes, he who takes must also give. Folau and Hui’ehu lived on Tovata, not Nanao, and the measure of a leader there is what he can give away. A bride-price, a bone spear, a stone knife... he gives what he takes, but he must give.

         You may not know that, but Folau did, because he lived on Tovata and knew its people. “You want me to kill Enele?” he said.

         “No,” said Hui’ehu. “I want you to kill his words.”

         “Ah, yes.” It would not be enough merely to kill the shaman. In fact, a dagger in the back or poison in the night might simply make Hui’ehu seem a coward or afraid. The shaman would have to be discredited...

         —Yes, poet, you see what he had to do. They have those stories on Nanao too, do they? Shamans perform rituals. They call on the divine. And if a shaman’s call fails catastrophically, it isn’t only his body that dies.

         There was a harvest ceremony in a month, and with the night still black and moonless, Folau went to the place where it would be held. He had to take a boat, because the sacred place was on an islet just off the shore, one that was joined to Tovata only at low tide. There was a stone wall by the landing—it had been a fortress once—with the great ancestors’ skulls on top of it and the standing stones inside.

         Folau stood by the largest of the stones, the one shaped like the dog that Tovata had been before he took stone and became an island. The carved dog looked inward to the other dog’s face, the one that had not been carved, the one that had gazed down from the cliffs since immemorial times. There was an altar just in front of the carved figure, and that was where Enele would be, with the people around him.

         He would drink kava, and kava could be poisoned, but he would taste the poison before it killed him. The people would know it was murder and not the god. There were smokes that could kill, bitter roots that could be burned, but those, too, would be known. Maybe a sliver of black swamp-oak that would go unnoticed against Enele’s skin, but there was no secret place to shoot it from, even with a blowgun...

         No, this wasn’t a killing that could be accomplished by boiling garland-berries or smearing a sliver of bone with snake-venom. There was another poison, one with no smell and no taste that induced delirium and death, but Folau couldn’t make it with anything to be found on Tovata. He would need dreamer’s orchid, and for that, he would have to go to Isatabu.

* * *

         —Yes, poet, dreamer’s orchid. The same flower you were going to use for your potion. Are you surprised? Even now, are you surprised?

         —You know Isatabu as the Apothecary? So she was. A great healer, worshiped in life, so much so that she took stone rather than dying and became home and hearth to many hundreds. The plants that grow from her soil are famous medicines. But she has more than one face, and so do her creations.

         —You’re not a doctor, are you, man from Nanao? If you were, you’d know. Every drug, every potion, can be a poison. A little can heal, more can kill—but even a poet should know this. Your drug would have wrung the imitation of love out of your lost one. Wouldn’t that have been poison, of a kind?

         —Yes, you are a poisoner, just as Folau was. Two kinds come as seekers to Isatabu: healers and poisoners. Only the poisoners come to where the swamp-witch is. The man who made the rattan bride—he, too, came here.

         —Oh, yes, you haven’t heard that story. I said the swamp-witch would tell you. But she will be a while yet in coming. We have time enough for that story as well—maybe it would amuse you if I told you while you wait.

* * *

         —Many years ago there was a shaman on Nanao—yes, poet, your country. He was even a poet like you. He loved a woman and lost her, and though he looked for solace in sad verses, they didn’t console him.

         He sought for spells to bring his love to life again. He journeyed to many islands and consulted with wizards and gods. But even magicians cannot enter the country of the dead, and even gods cannot bring souls back from that country. Souls... they are something beyond magic.

         But on an atoll far from here, the shaman made an offering to an oracle-fish, and when it leaped from the lagoon, its scales formed the shape of dreamer’s-orchid. “You cannot bring your bride back,” it said, “but perhaps you can make her again.”

         So he sailed to Isatabu where the dreamer’s-orchid was, and when he camped in the swamp, his fingers began to form strips of rattan into a woman’s shape. And as his hands fashioned the bride, his mind fashioned a spell, and when both were done, the orchid had brought the bride to life...

         —A happy ending, poet? Yes, if it had ended there, but it didn’t. Because the shaman’s new bride didn’t truly love him. She was a thing that was made, but she had a soul, and it wasn’t the mate of his. The spell made her act the part of a lover, and she kissed him tenderly and coupled with him among the reeds, but as she did she was screaming inside. And he never knew it; he loved her, and he thought she loved him.

         Until the day... but no, poet, I think I’ll let the swamp-witch tell you that.

         —What will she do? She will love you, and she will eat you.

         —No, you can’t cut through the reeds. There’s more of Folau’s story to tell.

* * *

         —It is five days across the sea-roads from Tovata to Isatabu, and Folau made the journey alone, because no one will travel with an assassin. It is dangerous to cross the open sea alone in a small boat, especially in the early summer storms, but Folau had done it before.

         He came to a village at the mouth of a stream, set against the forested hills that made the form of the sleeping Apothecary. He sat at their cookfire and ate fish and taro and vine-leaves, and he begged a place in a storage-hut for the night. He paid well for it—assassins are generous with those they don’t plan to kill—and they made him free of their stories.

         They told him about their war-leaders and chiefs, about the exploits of the ancestors and the follies of the young. He told them stories of Tovata in return, and then he asked about their plants. He named flowers and berries, leaves and roots, the tools of his trade, and they told him where to find them. And then he named the dreamer’s orchid.

         “Deep in the swamp, that,” said a fisherman. He was old, white-haired, gnarled as a mangrove. “Have a care, or you’ll meet Abere there.”

         “Who is she?” asked Folau, though he had heard.

         “A witch,” the fisherman said.

         “No, a demon”—that was a woman whose jewelry said she knew a few spells.

         “There is a thing I have,” said Folau, “that is stronger than witches and demons.”

         At dawn, he took his boat and paddled into the swamp, into the channels that wound between reeds and mangroves. He listened to the birdsong in the trees that rose above the mangrove-islands and watched the dragonflies that hunted within them. A crocodile paced him for a while and then took another turning. They understood each other.

         The swamp grew thicker as he went further in. The smell of decay was stronger, and the mangroves shut out more of the light. The channels wound and crossed each other so many times that Folau was no longer sure of where he was going; maybe he would have to become a bird to find his way out again. But he could smell the dreamer’s orchid, and the channels all seemed to be leading toward it.

         The orchid’s presence grew powerful, and the water, sky and mangroves faded into each other. And then, all at once, Abere was there...

         —No, poet, I don’t know her true form, any more than you will. But I can tell you what Folau saw. She was timeless. Her face was midnight, unblemished by age. Her eyes, golden as the stars. Her hair fell in braids to the channel and spread across the waters all around. She wore ornaments of woven hardwood, and her sulu was made not of cloth but of the living forest. There were two girls with her—servants—but Folau hardly saw them.

         “Are you a hunter?” she asked. “Have you come for dreams?”

         Folau said nothing.

         “Come now, hunter. Surely you don’t believe all the stories you hear. Tell me, it will do you no harm.”

         He fought to be silent, but of itself, his mouth shaped the words. “Yes, I have come for dreamer’s orchid. And the dreams that come with it.”

         “Dreams such as this?” Abere asked, and Folau saw that she lay, unclothed, on a hummock of land.

         The stories tore at Folau, pulled him back. But the dreamer’s orchid was strong, and the world he was in was no longer quite real, and Abere had the beauty of a witch, or a demon. He lay with her, and they were one.

         When he woke, the mimia reeds surrounded him—yes, poet, as they do you.

         “Abere!” he said. “Where are you?”

         “I am here,” came her voice, from everywhere and nowhere. “And shortly you will not be.”

         “No witch will trap me,” he said, “nor demon either.” He drew his iron dagger—a treasure, poet; Tovata isn’t Nanao, and it hasn’t the secret of ironworking—and cut the reeds. But as fast as he cut, there were more in front of him.

         “I have other weapons,” he said. He took parrotbane from his pouch and scattered it into the water to poison the reeds. But they grew back as quickly as they withered, and his other poisons fared no better.

         “Are you done now?” asked Abere. “Have I your permission to eat you?”

         “I have taken many poisons,” said Folau. “They have made me immune. But they are in my body, and if you eat me, you will sicken and die.”

         “From poison?” Abere’s voice had an edge of hysteria, but it was the hysteria of laughter, not of fear. “I am poison. I am all the things on this swamp, this island—the poisons with them.”

         “Then you are the Apothecary? No, I don’t think so. Her name was Isatabu, not Abere. You are no god, just a witch gone mad from dreamer’s orchid.”

         “You’re right, hunter. I’m not Isatabu. I am the Apothecary’s other face—the Poisoner. I am stone and I am flesh and I am rattan. And I am god enough for you.” And she stood before Folau in the reeds, with obsidian skin and iron claws.

         Folau had only one weapon left. It was a glass mask made from the sand of Bunglon the Chameleon—yes, poet, shaped in the kilns of Nanao—and with it, the assassin could become any creature in the world.

         He put it on and turned into a bird, but the reeds closed above him. He became a fish and dove into the current, but Abere gave commands and the mangroves tightened around him and choked him. He became an insect, but the waters boiled around him and drew him into their depths.

         Last of all, he became a thing too small to see—no, poet, I don’t know what it was called, and neither did he, but he became one. And then, only then, was Abere thwarted.

         “Where are you?” she asked. “I can feel your presence, but where?”

         “I am in a drop of water, Abere. Can you tell which one? Search them one by one, and maybe you’ll find me.”

         “And will you stay in a drop of water forever? As soon as you become a man again, or even a butterfly, I will find you.”

         “How long do you care to wait?”

         “How long do you? How long until a minnow swallows you?”

         “Maybe the minnow will carry me away. Will you know which one it is?”

         There was silence, minutes of silence, and it seemed that nothing in the swamp moved at all.

         “Then we are at an impasse, assassin. That doesn’t often happen between man and god. But there are precedents, and maybe we can strike a bargain to end it.”

         “What are your terms?” asked Folau.

         “I will love you again—truly, and not the imitation of a dreamer’s orchid. You will have more from me than the one who made me. And then I will eat you, as I ate him.”

         “That hardly seems a bargain.”

         “I haven’t finished.”

         “Being eaten seems rather final.”

         “It needn’t be, not here,” said Abere. “Make an offering of your body, poisoner, and I will give you your soul.”

         She explained what that would mean, although she didn’t really have to; Folau, after all, had heard the stories. And there he became the Eaten One, as you soon will.

* * *

         —Yes, poet, of course I was Folau. Surely a poet would have understood that long ago. But now you know. It isn’t so bad to be eaten.

         —And yes, of course she was the rattan bride. I was going to let her tell you, but of course she was. She was made of the Apothecary’s plants and born of a spell, and when she ate the shaman, she won more than her freedom. She is god and demon and witch, the Apothecary’s other face.

         —Maybe she took that face when she took her freedom, or maybe it was always hers. She was made here, remember. And if she leaves you your soul, it will be more than she left her maker.

         —But he was innocent? Yes, poet, she knows that now. But she didn’t know then, any more than he knew that he’d enslaved her, and Isatabu had told her how to find healing...

         —My soul? It goes anywhere. I can inhabit the fish, the trees, the dragonflies... the reeds that surround you now.

         —Don’t be so surprised, poet. Abere left me my soul, after all, and it is the soul of an assassin. You’re not the first one I’ve trapped for her. Poisoners all.

         —You would have taken your lost love from her intended and made her into a rattan bride. Is this so much, beside that?

         —Hardly. She will eat your body, but you will survive. She will spare your soul if you ask, as she did mine. She is ruler here, and in this part of the world, a ruler is measured by what she gives away.

         —Think about it, poet. Tomorrow, the birdsong will be yours to compose. Or if you prefer, you may inhabit the mangroves and feel the water and earth on their roots. You may know poison, know how it is life and death... think what poetry you can make from that.

         —Who would hear your verses? As many as you want. You can be a ghost if you like, as I was when I denounced Enele from Tovata’s stone... yes, I slew his words, even if I couldn’t slay him. Or you can haunt an outrigger and tell your stories to the sailors.

         —Oh, yes, your soul can leave. A soul can be eaten, but who can hold one? Not a shaman, not even a god. The rattan bride’s maker found that out, didn’t he? But you will come back, as I did. A place where you feel such pleasure, such pain...

         —You’ll find out in a few moments. It isn’t so bad to be eaten.

         —Think of the poetry, man from Nanao. This will be real love, not the kind that comes from dreamer’s orchid. Think of the verses you will sing when it happens. She is a god, and though she was born of terror and sorrow, she was made of poetry and magic. She’ll remember those verses forever.

* * *

         There was a man from Nanao, who was poet and poisoner, and he waited.

         There was a swamp-woman named Abere, who some called demon and others god, and she hunted.

Copyright © 2016 Jonathan Edelstein

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Jonathan Edelstein likes to tell lies about dead people. Eventually most of them will be gathered in the not-quite-a-novel-but-not-quite-not-a-novel-either Certain Americans. Notes on the historical sources of the stories (as well as other ephemera) may be found at www.tmwaldroon.com/blog. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia.

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COVER ART

“Tortoise Caravan,” by Marek Hlavaty

Marek Hlavaty is passionate illustrator who has been working as a freelance 2D artist since 2002, including illustrations, in-game and animation backgrounds, covers, and visualizations. Most of his artwork is in the game-developing and publishing industries. He believes that good painting should pull your mind into another world. View more of his work online at DeviantArt or on his website at www.prasart.com.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1076

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Compilation Copyright © 2016 Firkin Press

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