Issue #275 • Apr. 11, 2019

“Boiled Bones and Black Eggs,” by Nghi Vo

“The Red Honey Witch,” by Jessica Paddock

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BOILED BONES AND BLACK EGGS

by Nghi Vo

         The sign that sits over the lintel of the Drunken Rooster reads “we have served tea to all the world,” and it is only a slight exaggeration. The inn sits just south of Tsang and just north of Wu. The Sai River, which starts in Pa’i and doesn’t end until it has reached the land of the Engs, flows right by the front door. It is a borderland, on the margin of every country’s map. It is a place where the dead get of hand if they aren’t placated, honored, and fed.

         I own the Drunken Rooster now, but before me came Shang Hua, my aunt by marriage. My father owed her a debt for some very fast talking and two bottles of fermented millet, difficult to come by in that part of the world. When it came to pass that I could see over the edge of the table and somewhat handle a knife without hurting myself, I traveled a full month overland to live with my aunt.

         She let me cry myself out that first night before lifting me up on a sturdy stool and showing me how to cut pork against the grain, with a cap of fat and skin left on top to caramelize in her enormous pot. She lined the pot with onions, letting them cook in a fragrant broth of sugar and fish sauce, and then she directed me to tip in the pork and to splash it over with water.

         “Now what?” I asked, scrubbing at my eyes with the back of my hand. I was still heartbroken at being so far from home, but I was hungry, too.

         She shrugged her round shoulders, the short embroidered cape she wore making them even rounder. She didn’t look like the women I had grown up with. Her face reddened fast in the steam, and the kitchen was always filled with steam. Her eyes were small and often narrowed with distrust. She hadn’t once told me to stand up straight or directed me to practice my handwriting, though, so I was cautiously hopeful that perhaps things would not be so bad.

         “Now it’s just waiting, niece,” Hua said. “Then after we wait, there will be something good to eat.”

         It was quiet at the Drunken Rooster that night, one of those evenings where the world seemed to pause for breath. I could hear the murmur of the Sai in its banks, and the wind whistled a little, coming down from the mountain to say hello.

         In an hour, a little more, Hua whipped the lid off the pot, and the most delicious smell spilled out. Caramelized pork and onions, brown and salty, sweet and glistening with fat. Eaten hot over pure white rice, I thought it was food fit for a princess, but before I reached for the blue bowl that I had brought with me all the way from Chu-hsien, I hesitated.

         “What about Uncle?” I asked timidly.

         He was my father’s youngest brother. The only thing that I knew about him was that he had run off with a wild woman four years ago who had come through town carrying a pan big enough to fry a small child.

         In response, my aunt scooped out a generous portion of rice, dressed it with some pork and onions, and stuck a pair of chopsticks straight up and down in the bowl.

         “He died two days ago,” she said calmly, setting it on the table.

         I didn’t know what to make of that, wondering if I should be sad for the death of a man who I had never met, but then there was a scraping at the rear of the inn, a noise that echoed through the darkness. I hunched my shoulders in fear, but my aunt only nodded.

         “Ah,” she said, “that should be him now.”

* * *

         When the dead come to the back door, their bellies empty and their eyes gazing jealously on the lives that used to be theirs, the food you give them must be the very best. In Tsang, especially in the capitol, they don’t consider it a meal unless it’s spicy enough to make your tongue go numb. In Wu, the food is plainer, and Hua said they made it into a virtue, relishing the purest white rice dusted over with a sprinkle of black salt. The people from Pa’i, seafarers, firebreathers, and storytellers come to rest on their shoal of small islands, like their food fatty and plentiful, sweet with plenty of rice wine.

         We couldn’t serve all of them as well as they would have liked, but we did our best. After all, my aunt would say, most people won’t say no to something that starts with a chopped leek and a dead chicken. Living right on the Sai gave us an advantage, both in terms of the food that we could get from the traders and the custom that came in the door. A fair day might see a Pa’i mercenary in for a breakfast of rice porridge, a prosperous Tsang merchant and his family for a lunch of lacquered duck, and a pair of nuns in saffron for a large shared dinner of last winter’s salted pork cooked in apples.

         “I didn’t think that nuns ate meat,” I said, fortunately not so loudly they could hear me. My aunt grabbed me by the arm and dragged me back to the kitchen where she glared at me, her eyes small with anger.

         “Don’t ever let me hear you talking about what people order,” she said, so sternly that it made tears well up in my eyes. “If they ask, and we have it, all I ever want you to say is ‘please enjoy the food, understand?”

         I nodded, and then she sighed at the tears that were running down my face. I was a sensitive child, and she had never had to deal with children at all before my father sent me west.

         “Those ladies aren’t nuns,” she said gently, “but it’s not polite to point it out, right?”

         I understood ‘not polite’ at least, and I learned to set down the platters of slivered duck and bowls of rice or millet with a cheerful ‘please enjoy the food!’, just as Hua directed. After a few months, I stopped batting an eye, taking after my aunt’s philosophy that everyone needed to eat, no matter how good, bad or strange.

         Good, bad, or strange described our clientele at the Drunken Rooster very handily. The year I turned seventeen was especially busy because Tsang was warring again. There were plenty of people on all sides of the conflict who had no interest in being ground up, whether it was under the hand of the Boar Emperor or the various warlords who had decided they wanted their try at being the Great King Under Heaven.

         We fed the people coming through, and we fed their dead as well. There was a small graveyard behind the inn that grew larger that year. The ferry workers brought accidental deaths to us, people who drowned in the river or fell from the barges to be dragged under the steep hulls. Once in a while, some old pilgrim would slip on their sandals and keep walking, leaving their barefoot body behind.

         The locals paid my aunt a twice-yearly fee to make sure that she kept the dead fed and happy. The dead like to eat as they did in life, and so we were always very busy. Between the fee and the living customers that came through, we made a nice living.

         My aunt handled the dead and the living alike with a shrug and the understanding that people should be fed what they liked, if we could do it. Early that summer, there was a slender little miss who had committed love suicide with her man. She refused to move on until we could find lotus nuts for her, and that took almost four weeks. It wasn’t so bad, even if she sat next to the stove and asked me what I was making every few minutes, and when she moved on, she gave me a cool little kiss on my cheek that made my aunt giggle for what I imagine must have been the first time in her life.

         The evening that Lord Ning appeared, there was a storm waiting to fall on us from the north. The air prickled with uneasy heat, and the only guests were a group of monks who ate their rice and vinegar pickles in the courtyard, even though my aunt said they might as well come in since custom was so bad.

         I was scrubbing out the giant pot with sand when there was a sound like a thunder clap, so close that my ears popped. I thought that lightning had finally hit the dead tree on the bank, and I rushed out to make sure that no one was hurt.

         In life Lord Ning was a big man, and when he appeared at the inn’s wooden gates, mounted on an enormous chestnut mare, he looked even larger. He was dressed in a suit of armor made from linked and laminated leather plates, all painted a glittering green that must have cost a fortune. He had a sword with him that he named the Lightning of Wei Lu Xin, and he rode straight into the courtyard, scattering the monks like saffron rice.

         “I was told I could get a meal here, woman,” he said, peering down at my aunt from behind his bristling mustache. She had a bag of greens in one hand and a chicken clucking madly in the other. Her face was stone, and she scowled.

         “Of course you can, sir,” she began, but then he spurred his horse forward, its thick hooves lashing out dangerously, missing my aunt by a handspan. Hua fell back with a curse, glaring up at the warlord who was glaring down at her.

         “It is lord when a Tsang woman speaks to me,” he said, his voice full of cannon fire and gravel. “You will lay out your best food at once for me, for I am Lord Ning of the Eight Valleys, martyr of the Battle of West Ridge, and favored son of the Great Emperor of the Heavens. I conquered the Red Court of Shao Fan, and I will have my due.”

         “Of course, my lord. At once, my lord,” my aunt said, her voice flat.

         Lord Ning peered after her as if he was uncertain about her tone, but he still dismounted, throwing the reins of his horse to one of the monks who were just beginning to recover from the start. It turned out to be a bad idea, as that teenage monk lit out for Wu that very night, riding Lord Ning’s mare. The old abbot said he had never had much of a head for the monkhood, but a life as a southern pirate, as I heard later, suited him quite well.

         As for Lord Ning, he never noticed the loss of his horse because once he took his seat at the head of our largest table, he settled in and seemed to have no intention of leaving.

         My aunt went about her business; just another day, after all. She roasted the chicken she had had tucked under her arm and dressed it with soy sauce and stuffed with ginger and bright red sausage. She prepared a thin water spinach broth and set out a small bowl of white rice next to it.

         She brought it to the table and laid it out in front of Lord Ning. It was an excellent supper, and I had helped her with the roasting. I knew that it was good, and at first, from the way Lord Ning started to wolf it down, tearing the chicken with both hands, I thought we would soon be rid of him.

         But when the dinner was nearly scraps, the broth drained, and the rice bowl empty except for a few stray grains at the bottom, he glared around and bellowed for my aunt again.

         “This food is not fit for a man who has straddled the earth like a giant,” he thundered. Honestly, that lost its effect after the fourth or fifth time he did it. I covered my ears against it, but my aunt stalked into the dining room, glaring at him.

         “I am sorry that the food is not to your taste,” my aunt said, her courtesy stiff and rusty. “But it is all we have tonight.”

         And of course you can certainly try to do better elsewhere, was the unspoken ending.

         “Fine, fine,” Lord Ning said, waving his broad hand “Tomorrow you will do better.”

         The next day, we prepared braised fish drenched in wilted green onions and fresh red radish pickles, a particular favorite of mine. I cooked the whole thing while my stomach was growling, but all the dead are selfish, and I couldn’t take one bite before bringing it to the table.

         The dead lord smacked his lips heartily at the sight of the meal, but again, he ate it down to the last bite, leaving that contemptuously on the plate.

         “Country bumpkins, when will you serve me what is my due? I am Ning who killed Lord Hsieng at the fords of the Sai River!”

         One armored fist sent the plate shattering to the floor, and I backed away, teeth gritted.

         It went on like this with no sign of stopping, and this was no wispy girl sitting next to the stove. He hovered like a storm cloud in the dining room, and when the living saw him glowering in the corner, they backed out of the inn quickly. Some of them could be convinced to eat in the courtyard, but most hurried on.

         “We’re running short on cooking oil,” I told my aunt, and she snorted.

         “We’re running short on everything. It all goes into the belly of that cross-eyed frog-eater.”

         We had actually tried frogs, delicately skinned and then fricasseed. He ate all but half of one, and it was the same story all over again.

         “What are we going to do?” I asked, sitting on an overturned wooden bucket by the back door. “We’re going to go broke at this rate.”

         “And be two women living in a ghost-haunted county, on top of it.”

         The dead lord’s lowering presence put off the dead as well as the living, especially since our dead were most of the humble variety. Farmers, fishers, pilgrims, none of them wanted to eat next to Lord Ning, and they cleared out too. It might be as much as a year before an exorcist came around our way again, and a year of Lord Ning’s boasts was too terrible to consider.

         My aunt cooked when she was frustrated or angry (when she was happy and content, as well, but that hadn’t happened since Lord Ning showed up). She bound up her hair with a black cloth and worked herself to exhaustion over ox shanks, duck livers, stuffed fish, and even vegetarian holy dishes. She boiled bones to extract the rich stock from the marrow, and she used it the next day to infuse the meat. She was a frenzy of activity until one night, I found her flat on her back in the courtyard, staring up at the starlit sky. In the inn, Lord Ning was bellowing to an empty house about his killing of the three sons of Minister Shen.

         “I have been going about this all wrong,” my aunt said presently. “This whole time, I thought I could get rid of him by giving him what he wants.”

         “That’s good advice for ghosts, you always said.”

         “But not good advice for bad customers. That ass-faced whale-purge doesn’t want to move on. He wants to sit and talk about his conquests, while having us run to bring him plates of goat and duck.”

         “It’s not like we can get the local magistrate after him, though,” I said. “The magistrate hasn’t been by once since Lord Ning took up residence.”

         “No, I think I know what to do,” my aunt said, sitting up. “I need you to watch the inn for a little while.”

         A little while turned out to be close to a month. She took up the walking stick by the door, put on her embroidered cape, and left me with dwindling supplies and an insatiable dead man to feed.

         I was mostly equal to the challenge, what there was of it. At this point, it was achingly clear that my aunt was right. A monk might have said something about the man being a glutton for wealth, fame, and power in life, or perhaps that earthly desires held him to this world, but I’d been waiting tables since I was ten. He was a man who wanted everything he could get for the least amount he had to spend.

         I kept the dishes simple, dodged the scraps he threw at me in retaliation, tried to entice real customers dead and living to come in, and gritted my teeth through his stories, which were by this point beginning to repeat themselves. I heard about the three sons of Minister Shen, Lord Hseing, Lady Autumn, and the rest so often that I thought I could imagine them, Lady Autumn’s whirling steel fans, Lord Hsieng’s stern face, the three identical boys who Lord Ning let slip had been no older than I was.

         I slept with my pillow over my head, and by the end of the month, I thought that I might be living in my own personal hell.

         My aunt was simply back in the kitchen early one morning, taking stock of the pantry as if she had never left.

         “You’ve let things get a low,” she said, “but it could be worse.”

         “Where have you been?” I demanded. “Did you find anything that will help with...”

         She spared me a quick glance, but there was a sly glint in her smile.

         “Come on, we have work to do,” she said. “Take some coins from the jar, and have Lu bring by a goat, a fat one, not one of those bags of bones. On your way back, pick up a big bundle of water spinach, and some sweet potato candy as well.”

         She was never one for explaining things, so with a sigh, I fell in beside her. She pulled out cup after cup of rice, not the plain white that we mostly used, but her special store of gleaming black rice, brought from Pa’i. I held down the goat while she cut its throat, and then together we butchered it neatly, hanging the meat up to drain until we could get it into the cookpot. I walked out to the tall linden trees, and after some digging pulled up two full jars of preserved duck eggs. They were only six months old, not as good as they would be at a year or two, but when I cleared off the ash and the clay and peeled off the shells, the whites had turned to translucent black jelly and the yolk to a gray salty paste. My aunt nodded with approval.

         “Good, they’ll do well enough. Now wash up the water spinach, and get out the good dishes.”

         I wondered if my aunt planned to stuff Lord Ning so full of food that we could simply roll him out to the river and sink him. It was an idea I had entertained in the long month she was gone.

         Lord Ning watched with hungry hollow eyes as we set the plates on the long wooden table. Our best china was still only glazed earthenware, but the food that I and my aunt had made gleamed like jewels in the lamplight. At the center of the table was the roast goat, of course, braised and sitting in a salty broth. Arrayed around it were dishes of fried vegetables, cold pickles, fried fish, and braised chicken resting on a bed of shredded orange carrots and white cabbage.

         It was like the meals we would cook for the new year, and the table fairly groaned under the weight. My aunt fussed with the placement of the fish, and then as Lord Ning watched, she placed a bowl of the black rice] by every seat at the table.

         “Stupid woman, what are you doing? I am Lord Ning, who—”

         “I know who you are,” my aunt said briskly. She began to ladle delicate broth into each of the smaller bowls by each plate. “Our guests tonight know who you are as well.”

         “Guests? What is the meaning of—”

         Four knocks sounded at the door. It would have been tremendously unlucky for any living person to announce themselves in that fashion, but for the dead, it was just right.

         “Come in and be welcome,” my aunt called, and the door swung open.

         The three sons of Minister Han were tall and thin, but their bodies had swollen up from the lake where they had been thrown. They came in on a tide of boisterous shouting and laughter, carrying their leather helmets under their arms and handing me their swords with the usual jokes. They were identical in life, but death had marked them differently, one with a deep dry cut over his throat, one with a hole clean through his heart, and the third with a missing arm.

         They came in and sat to the left of Lord Ning, praising my aunt’s cooking all the while, flirting with her and saying they hadn’t seen better since they left the capitol.

         My aunt laughed at their outrageous compliments, mock-scolding them affectionately, but it looked like she was waiting for something. Lord Ning scowled at the three newcomers, one finger tapping hard on the table, but just when it looked as if he had summoned up the liver to say something, the door knocked again, four times.

         At my aunt’s call, the door opened and Lord Hsieng, short and round as a cauldron, clad in his famous red lacquered armor, strode in. People always said that he was a big man, but that wasn’t quite right. He would have come up to my nose if we were standing face to face, but he entered the room like a boom of lighting, and no one would ever have found him small.

         He greeted my aunt with a fond bow of his head, and he took his place at Lord Ning’s right, laughing with the sons of Minister Shen. They had known each other once upon a time, and of course he had embarrassing stories about all three.

         By this point, Lord Ning looked downright green. He must have thought he was being discreet when he rose, but Lord Hsieng took him by the arm, keeping him where he was.

         “There’s still more coming, warlord,” Lord Hsieng said with a deadly joviality. “This is your feast. This is your honor.”

         If a corpse could pale, Lord Ning did. If he had been alive, sweat would have popped from his brow like drops of grease from the skin of a roasting pig. He sat still, however, and four knocks came again.

         Lady Autumn was as tall as Lord Hsieng was short, and her face was as brown as cinnamon bark, death taking none of its color. She moved as if she had no feet at all, floating as smoothly over our floor as she had over the stage, and she declined to surrender her war fans. She gave me and my aunt a regal nod and seated herself at the other end of the table from Lord Ning. She did not joke or laugh.

         The silence was thick enough to mire a water buffalo. Still we waited, and I knew that somehow, there were yet more coming. My aunt looked calm, but there was a rustling energy about her.

         This time, there was no knock on the door, only a humble scrabbling, and when my aunt called for them to enter, they came in one at a time.

         These dead were nameless. They had not always been, I knew that. Somewhere, there was a parent, a spouse, a child or a friend mourning the loss of someone who could never be replaced. However, the mass graves that littered the frontier afforded no fame or recognition, and there were far more of these soldiers than there were minister’s sons or courtesans turned general.

         They filed in, their grave-muddied feet leaving no trace on the floor, and they were a tide of angry mutters, tired whispers and low growls. They filled the room until I hopped up on the tall barrel of spiced brine to get out of their way. There was no space left at the table, but the soldiers thronged close, close enough to make even a man as big as Lord Ning shrink into himself.

         I had served the dead for almost ten years at that point. They didn’t frighten me anymore, but now, their anger did. The fact that it was not focused on me was the only thing that kept me breathing. There was death in the air, and it didn’t matter at all that some of those deaths were years old or had happened over the mountains or across the sea.

         “Well, what are you waiting for?” my aunt said as if it were a normal night. “Eat, eat.”

         Her words broke the storm, and there was a rush, towards the table I thought at first. The food we had spent all day preparing was torn apart and devoured greedily. It disappeared down to the bones, down to the broth. Then they started on Lord Ning.

         They tore into him as if he were steamed dough, harsh fingers digging at the plates of his armor. The three brothers circled him while Lord Hsieng tore at his belly, the armor offering no more protection than the crust of good bread. Lady Autumn’s fan lashed out, sending a scatter of fingers to the waiting horde. I am sure he cried out, but it was lost under the sound of smacking lips and groans of satisfaction.

         Somehow, he freed himself from the crowd, shoving his way across the inn. For one terrible crystal clear moment, I saw him, the fat and flesh and muscle ripped from his bulk, the armor hanging in tatters, and most of his mustache pulled off.

         He bludgeoned and barreled his way to the door, opened it, and then he was gone, the hungry people he had slain in his life swarming after him.

         The air in the inn lightened immensely. I felt as if I could truly take a breath for the first time in months. The dining room was empty, but soon it would be full again, with living and dead who only wanted a bit of something to eat before they passed through.

         My aunt made a brief noise of satisfaction, a tick of her tongue behind her teeth, and started to gather up the dishes.

         “Well, come on,” she said lightly. “There’s dishes to do.”

Copyright © 2019 Nghi Vo

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Nghi Vo lives on the shores of Lake Michigan, and her fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Uncanny Magazine, PodCastle, and Lightspeed. Her short story “Neither Witch nor Fairy” appears on the 2014 Tiptree Award Honor List. She believes in the ritual of lipstick, the power of stories, and the right to change your mind.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

THE RED HONEY WITCH

by Jessica Paddock

         When Arati was born, bees hovered above her crib. The humming swarm yielded only to her mother and those with the gentlest of touches. As she grew, they followed her, buzzing around her head and nestling within her clothes. They made a hive in her wall, widening a thin crack in the mud between the room she shared with her parents and the tiny garden they kept. The bees tickled her cheek with their wings when she cried, and sometimes she thought she heard them whispering; not in words but in meaning, like the language of dreams. They stung the people who upset her—the milk-delivery boy who made fun of her doll, the gun-wielding lowlander men who demanded coins from their village, the old woman who said Arati was a curse on her family. A child of the bees, the village people knew, was always volatile. They were never sure what would upset her, so they stayed away.

         Eventually, as Arati grew to understand the fear of the people around her, she began to hate her bees. She swatted them away and closed her ears to their whispering, but they persisted until she set fire to the hive in the bedroom wall. Then, at last, they left. She still heard them sometimes, just on the edge of her hearing, like the distant call of a bird at night.

         When she was twelve, she had a fight with her mother. In the heat of the moment, she wished to herself a wish that many children shared, that her mother was no more, and the bees came to this call. From miles around they came, from the forest and the field and further up the mountain. They came, and they stung. For a week after, her mother ailed. For a week after, she withered, the stings puffing on her skin as if drawing the life from her. Then she died.

         Arati’s father, deep in his grief, sent her to live with the witch.

         Arati traveled up the mountain, through the thick forest and goat-thin paths. Goodwitch Vidya lived in a simple bamboo hut and cared for the bees on the cliffside. She was wrinkled and hunched and moved at the pace of the rising sun, but her withered brown hands touched the bees unscathed, harvesting healing red honey and combs from the plated cliffside hives as easily as another would pick fruit from a tree. She told fortunes in the movements of the swarms. Every week, people came to her for healing or comfort or advice, and she would give it all, accepting with grace whatever paltry gifts they could afford to give her.

         “Bees know their witch better than anyone,” she told Arati that first week, showing her a jar of glossy crimson honey. “They feel us, understand us. They read our lives in the lines of our hands. They aren’t just insects—they are part of this land. Just as we are.”

         Arati hated it all. Hated the kind witch, whose eyes knew every part of a bee’s life, from egg to flight to death. Hated hauling wood from the forest, hated thatching the leaking roof. Hated the people who begged the witch for help, hated especially the ones from her village, who turned their eyes from her as if she were diseased. Hated her father, who never came.

         But most of all she hated the bees, who buzzed about her head and asked to be let in.

         Arati could not understand them like the witch did. They scared her, the way they pulsed and flowed through the air like a storm. She could not forgive them for killing her mother any more than she could forgive herself.

         During harvests, Goodwitch Vidya would scale down the cliff on a rope and cut chunks from the hives, the bees swarming around her in a constant humming haze, soothed by her voice. Not once did they sting her. When Arati joined the harvest, she had to clutch a pouch that trickled sweet smoke and move slowly, her arms and legs covered in cloth, and still she sometimes left with painful stings.

         “They die after they sting someone, don’t they?” Arati said one day as they sat in front of their hut and crushed honey from combs. “Why would they do something so stupid?”

         “Each bee is one of many. They give themselves out of love—for each other, for their queen and their hive, and for me. Is it that strange for them to die for the ones they love?”

         Arati remembered her mother ailing. Dying. For what—for love? A bee settled on one of her honey-slick fingers, and she heard that whisper again, a familiar humming from so long ago: we know you.

         She shook the bee off, dropping the honeycomb, and Goodwitch Vidya sighed.

         They lived in that uneasy peace, an orphan and an old woman and a cliffside of bees, until the lowlanders came. The lowlanders had taken money from Arati’s village for as long as she could remember, armed with hard black guns they swung over their shoulders; always men and always tall, as if the thick air of the lowlands had filled them taut like waterskins. But they never came here. Goodwitch Vidya saw their arrival in the hive the day before, and so she got up early and set tea over the fire. The bees hummed around her anxiously and occasionally landed on her shoulder, as if trying to give her comfort.

         The men arrived when the sun was high. They came demanding not money but healing honey, red from the crimson flowers found only here. To Arati’s surprise, Vidya refused. To her even greater surprise, the lowlanders left.

         “They cannot gather the honey themselves,” the witch told her. “And they know better than to harm a witch.”

         Arati was not so sure. They came back again and again, week after week, and each time they left with a growing darkness in their eyes. She heard their anger rumbling in her sleep, their patience waning with the moon. It was an almost familiar anger. Arati could feel it growing within her too; anger at her village for fearing her, anger at the bees for wanting her to join their hive one moment and dying to hurt her another, anger at the witch for saying that the two of them were anything alike. She did not want to be here, not with the incessant buzzing and the aches from scaling cliffs and hauling firewood, and especially not with Goodwitch Vidya, who would not give up her precious honey to the people with guns. Who would get them both killed when that darkness boiled over.

         “Honey is the lifeblood of this place,” Vidya told her one day as they squeezed out thick honey. “Each person, each village—all are a part of a hive, and it’s our duty to help them. You, me, and the women before us, generations back, from the moment our people arrived in this land. Understand?”

         Arati was not sure she did.

         That night a woman came to them crying, clutching a feverish child. By moonlight Vidya spread crimson honey onto the child’s sores, her soothing hums harmonizing with the bees that circled the garden, her eyes soft and infinite as she worked unresting through the night. Arati did not know how to comfort the woman. She felt useless, and all she could think of was her mother, who had wheezed in a bed like this child, her last ragged gasps a gift from her own cursed daughter.

         Goodwitch Vidya looked up at her, just once, and in that moment Arati felt the great weight of generations press onto her back, the duty of witches long gone. A duty she did not want. A duty she was expected to uphold. She made tea with numb hands, let the woman cry onto her shoulder, and all the while the bees hummed from the cracks in the walls.

         Arati made a choice. When the lowlanders came again, she followed them. Far from the witch and far from the bees, she approached them and made a deal.

         “Take me away from here,” she told them, “and the honey is yours.”

         They argued, but she had the stubbornness of youth. One batch of honey and they would bring her down to the lowlands and let her go, where she could form a new life away from this all.

         She feared the bees might know her plan when she returned, their whispers of we know you swimming through her head, but life went on as normal. She waited days for the lowlanders to appear, each sunset a stinger boring into her skin.

         The boy recovered, the woman left, and the lowlanders came once again. This time they arrived with great baskets strapped to their backs. The bees fled, leaving the witch and Arati in the hut.

         “I’m sorry,” Goodwitch Vidya said, “but—”

         They shoved past her and looked to Arati, hands on their weapons. Goodwitch Vidya looked to her too, but her face was worn and tired, as if the weight of this betrayal had compounded every day they had spent together, heaping upon her the ages of the witches who came before.

         “Rethink this, Arati,” she said. “These men are not your—”

         They struck her, and she fell with a cry. The lowlanders shoved Arati from the hut, assuring her in their gruff voices that she would be free of this place soon. She tried not to cry as she led them to the hives, feeling the burning of Vidya’s gaze until they were out of sight.

         The bees roiled on the cliffside. For just a moment Arati thought she saw them like Vidya did, saw the future and the past in their shifting shapes, like glimpsing for an instant a rabbit in the clouds. Then it was gone, and they were just bees. Just insects that had ruined her life.

         She brought the lowlanders to the top of the cliff, where she lit her sweet smokepouch and wrapped her limbs and mouth in cloth. The lowlanders feared the darting bees, so alone Arati pulled the rope from the ground and fastened it to a tree, letting it unfurl down the cliffside.

         She strapped a basket to her back and scaled down. Immediately, the bees swarmed around her, buzzing furiously, their whispers of we know you echoing in her head, and for a moment she thought they would kill her. She thought they would look inside her and take her life for what they found, atonement they should have exacted long ago. But it seemed more of a dog’s growl than a bite, and they let her work. She carefully cut into a hive with a knife, exposing the insides like a wound, like the skin of a bamboo stripped back to reveal white flesh. Her hands shook. The bees buzzed so loud she could not hear her own beating heart. She forced herself to think of a place away from here, a place with no bees, no kind witches, no reminders of what she had done.

         She smelled burning. Not her own sweet smoke but something bitter. She looked up.

         The lowlander leader held a burning rag over the cliffside. The bees were too focused on her to give his proximity a thought. “Sorry, little girl,” he said, “but there’s a war going on. A single batch won’t do it. And if we can’t have that honey, no one can.”

         He let the rag fall. It struck one of the hives, which erupted into flames. Arati ducked her head and shrieked. A part of herself was burning too, a jagged pain ripping through her stomach and into her ribs, as if something were tearing her apart. The bees panicked. They swarmed from the burning hive, some of them smoldering like embers for a moment before falling far to the earth. What had once been a distant whisper roared wordlessly in her head.

         Another hive burst into flames. A chunk of burning hive fell past her, trailing tiny corpses. Trembling, Arati scrambled up her rope, but it jerked once, just once, and then tumbled free. She plummeted down the cliff, her head swarming, bees massing in her wake as if she were a hand waved through dust. It took forever to fall—her entire life.

         When she hit the ground, she wondered for an instant if this was what her mother had felt—a torturous week climaxing in a moment of agony and fear.

         She lay in the crimson flowers at the base of the cliff, a broken girl watching the hives burn above her; watching the frantic swarms who could not place their attackers, their tiny minds understanding only the flames. A single bee landed on her nose. Then another, brushing her cheek, tickling her through her tears as if she were a child. She heard it again, that dreaded whisper, we know you. And she feared, because she knew it to be true. Because here and now, as she lay too weak to keep them out, the bees knew inside of her. Every horrible thought and horrible deed: setting fire to the hive in the wall, the deal with the lowlanders, her mother dead, every cruel thing she’d done in her life laid out like honeycombs in a familiar hive.

         But instead of a final sting to end her life, she felt a strange sense of peace. They knew every part of her, every flaw and every mistake, but still the bees called to her and asked to be let in. They knew her goodness too, the parts she could not see for herself. As the cliff burned above her and tears crystallized on her cheeks, she understood what it meant to be part of something. To be part of the hive.

         She let them in. They filled her, desperate and mourning, and with them she rose. Her body flowed with crimson nectar, and her bones slotted together like honeycomb. Their wings hummed inside her skin as they flew higher and higher, more and more bees joining the swarm. As she stepped onto the clifftop, the lowlander leader raised his gun and pulled the trigger, but it only clicked, clogged with pollen and bees. He froze, and the others fled. The bees, understanding at last who had hurt them, pursued, a horrendous swarm that stretched and flowed as if it were all one creature, entombing the screaming men. The leader swung his weapon desperately at the swarm, but Arati only stepped aside and watched his momentum carry him off the cliff, his screams ending a moment later in an almost silent crunch. The bees swarmed around her too, but she knew they would never sting her again. She was part of the hive.

         By the time Goodwitch Vidya struggled to the cliff, half the hives were mere burn marks on the stone. Arati hung from the rope near another, extracting a queen from her smoldering prison.

         “Well,” Goodwitch Vidya said, “do you understand now why bees die for their hives?”

         Arati held the queen in her hand, watching bees fuss over her wings and legs. “Perhaps.”

         When Goodwitch Vidya died, bees swarmed over her grave for months, mourning. Arati thought that perhaps people would stop coming to the hut, but they did not. They left flowers and jars of spice at Vidya’s grave, then stepped into the witch hut for healing or comfort or advice. Arati gave it. Bees bumbled from teacup to chair to the garden outside, their humming a comfort to her and the people who had been hurting enough to brave the walk, who sought the lifeblood of this place—not just the honey, but the witch who provided it.

         Arati waited for the day she knew would come, when a child would be brought to her with the hive in their heart.

Copyright © 2019 Jessica Paddock

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Jessica Paddock is studying writing at Central Washington University, where she has worked as an editor for and been published in the campus literary magazine, Manastash. She looks for monsters in closets.

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COVER ART

“Abandoned Fortress of Alphander” by Vicky J. Bawangun

Vicky J. Bawangun is a self-taught freelance illustrator and concept artist residing in Indonesia. He started his journey in digital art professionally in 2012. He works mostly on indie games projects and book covers, creating fantasy and sci-fi environments, illustrations, and concepts. He gets a lot of inspiration from playing video games, watching movies, and even listening to music. You can see more of his artwork at his gallery on deviantArt.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1076

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Compilation Copyright © 2019 Firkin Press

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