Issue #286 • Sept. 12, 2019

“The Silent Flowers of the Magician’s Garden,” by Eleanna Castroianni

“Witch’s Road,” by Christian K. Martinez

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THE SILENT FLOWERS OF THE MAGICIAN’S GARDEN

by Eleanna Castroianni

         All flowers sing but his.

         When he came back to live among us he was already an old man, old even for a magician. My mother sent me to wash his feet with cardamom and tangerine water, to spread seed-butter and dogrose jam on his bread—the tasks of women. “He pays well and we need the money. I don’t have the time, so River must go,” she said when Father questioned her decision. Lips flat and a fire on her cheeks, she kept stirring the leek and tomato soup, her grip on the ladle tight.

         On my tiptoes I walked into his birth-house: a mausoleum of other, better times. I was greeted by a cabinet full of fangs and rows of dogteeth hanging from the ceiling. A refined collection of cicada lacey wings, and on its side a pair of priceless embalmed lilies the color of misty mornings. Fragments of living pottery—glazed epigraphs and poems of the old Empire—carefully arranged on the wall, each piece whispering a tale more wondrous than the previous one. Everything was artfully stacked on top of everything, hundreds of trinkets pouring out of resin-smelling fir coffers. On most of them I recognized the royal seal: an eagle pierced by the thorns of a white rose, three drops of blood falling on the petals.

         And outside, in his garden, his flowers did not sing.

* * *

         Tulips, anemones, chrysanthemums, orchids, marigolds and forget-me-nots: he knew every secret name, every ancient way. This is the first thing magicians learn, I was told. They train their ears to listen to the songs and teach their hearts to sing them. When the flowers tell a song of worry and disease, magicians are the first to know.

         For weeks, I watched him. How he listened and how he healed. How people’s faces beamed when he helped them and how they thanked him afterwards. He was old and not in need of money, yet he was on his feet all day, answering calls for help and mending what was broken.

         My father noticed. “Don’t get any ideas,” he said, scratching the long, faded scar on his cheek. “You must go to war first. To prove you’re a man worthy of your bread. That’s what all men do.” He passed me the light iron sword he had forged for my practice and waited. Every morning I had to display my knowledge. Every morning I had to practice until he was satisfied. “I want my son to serve like a man. Then return,” he used to say. “I’m not losing you over there. Be the best you can be, like your father. Kill so that you won’t be killed.”

         The way he immediately noticed that day as I was watching the Magician’s healing work with all-devouring eyes: it warned me that I was not to perish like my brothers had; his eyes, his words were all a swarm of wasps latching onto my neck, forcing me to return every tiny leaf of my attention to his world of steel roses and chainmail ivies. My shoulders dropped, bones suddenly too heavy to carry my weight. I took the practice sword and began to swing it perfunctorily. It was not long before his dissatisfied rap came down my arm—I had just earned myself a fresh, rosy, glistening scar. I swung the blade more intentionally this time and watched my father’s eyes shine with reserved pride.

         Something hardened in my world, the way it did every time my father told me I had to become a man and that being a man meant being brave. As something acquired another layer of earth crust, fossilizing more completely inside me, something else emerged from its cocoon like a late summer moth, soft and fragile, dancing around flames.

* * *

         Despite the kindness of his eyes, the Magician rarely smiled. Mechanical birds fluttered between his clawed rheumatic fingers, the details on the ironwork so fine that I wondered what beautiful things he must have made for royals when his hands were still young. I think the joy on my face brought a smile on his lips—a timid, fleeting one.

         “Have you ever been to war, sir?” I asked him. I was pitting hawthorns to make a pie for him, my hands dyed blood red. My mother would appreciate my careful work, but my father would certainly cringe at the softness of the task.

         “Many times,” the Magician said. “It is not nice.”

         I squeezed the hawthorns tighter and, like all children, kept testing the waters of our conversation by dipping another toe. “My father thinks this is how men are made. At war. He says that I’m not brave unless I fight.”

         The Magician munched on a dried fig, eyes off into the distance. Without meeting my gaze, he said, “This is a rather limited view on what bravery consists of. Pray, tell me, is he also fine with you dying over there as well? With your body returning in a wooden coffin? With your flowers withering before they even bloom?”

         “No,” I rushed to say. “That’s why he tells me I must be the best fighter there is. So I can return a veteran, like himself.”

         His closely knit lips reminded me of my mother’s silent anger. “Maybe putting an end to wars could help with that,” he muttered.

         “He’s too afraid to lose me.” I worried I was doing my father injustice. All he wanted was to protect me, after all. “He lost every last of his brothers in the war. My two elder brothers—his sons—too.”

         The Magician didn’t say anything, and I understood this was no excuse to him.

         “I’d rather help people’s flowers, like you do,” I finally said, timidly. It was the first time I uttered it, even to myself.

         “I’d rather you do that too.” Perhaps he even offered me a smile just then, hidden inside his beard. “This is a brave thing to do, you know. Not many people choose it.”

         “Why don’t your flowers sing?” I asked. For a moment, it seemed like my question caught him by surprise. Then the kindness returned to his eyes, sitting on every wrinkle around them. I think he used to smile a lot in the past.

         “I left this house—my birth-house—when I was very young. A little older than you, I think. So maybe they forgot how to sing.”

         This was no real answer, but I didn’t ask for more. He, the King’s former magician, made all these wonders for us, yet his flowers stood silent in his garden, muted against the harmonies of our own.

* * *

         The day we are born we are given a plot of land. This land is not our property—it is our life. Without seeds and flowers we wither and die. Many have tried to invade this country of singing flowers, but we have always pushed them back, adding fresh blood to this soil, more blood on top of that shed by our ancestors. “These flowers grow on blood,” my father used to say, smiling his small, cynical smile.

         Right before my little brother Tin fell ill, I heard a sharp note coming from his single sunflower—an arresting, suffocating sound. A day later he couldn’t leave his bed; a child no older than six winters, roasting in fever. The healer—rows of beads around her neck, clacking against each other—shook her head. There was nothing she could do.

         “I walked past your cottage this morning,” the Magician told me when I visited a couple of days later. “Your brother’s flower is singing a song of illness. Can you hear it?”

         I almost dropped the jug of infused water. Breathing deeply, I calmed myself and tried to be brave. “I can hear it, sir. The healer said there was nothing she could do.”

         “Oh.” He scratched his elbow absentmindedly, eyes looking over the window and into his garden full of silent flowers. Long hair and a chalk-white beard, the Magician was a relic claimed by time. Sitting in the silence of his home, mute flowers staring at me, I was nervous. “I could help,” he said after a long pause. “Ask your parents and let me know.”

         I shivered, tears building inside me. What I couldn’t bear to ask, he had suggested himself. I had seen him at work before and knew he could save my brother. My feet caught fire as I ran back home to tell my parents that there was hope for Tin.

         My father sighed and turned to look at mother. She was shaking, in her plain homespun dress, her lush dark hair that both her surviving children still bore held in a tight bun.

         “Copper,” my mother pleaded, “you know he can heal him. Let’s bring him over.” She was crying.

         “We’ll be indebted to him. I know you don’t want that.” He met my eyes abruptly, as if he only noticed me there. He had the look grown-ups have when they know children should not be listening.

         “We might be, yes. But we will have Tin. You know he will die without his flowers, don’t you? I can’t bear to lose another child, I can’t.”

         He didn’t move closer, did not comfort her; my father was not this kind of warm person. But he knew her heart better than any of us did. “I see,” he said simply. He looked at me once more, then went to fetch more firewood.

         A long silence installed itself between mother and myself. There was much I didn’t understand, not because I didn’t want to but because I didn’t yet have the words to voice things that were beyond me. “Mother, you don’t like the Magician?” I asked. The question was a reasonable one, even from a mere boy like myself.

         Through her tears she gave me a single look. “His flowers give me the chills,” she said and went to her room, where Tin was sleeping feverishly. She didn’t return to the kitchen that night.

* * *

         Tin lived.

         The Magician visited one quiet winter evening. He shuffled the soil in which my brother’s sunflower grew and whispered words between its leaves with eyes closed. My father thanked him as the Magician inspected the plots of the rest of us. His eyes passed over my brothers’ dead plots—now their graves. He didn’t speak, although his face darkened. He paused, however, to listen to the songs in mine and gave me an amused look. “Many new songs your flowers have learned, eh?” he said, and his approval spread warmth inside me. Then his eyes shifted behind me, where my mother stood at the doorway holding a lantern full of fireflies.

         The Magician bowed politely. They stood, my mother and he, looking each other in the eye. She did not say a single word; her presence was a cold ice shard between us. “Well,” the Magician said at last, “I’d better go now,” and he helped himself out of our garden and into the deepening night.

         Since that evening my mother swallowed her dislike of the Magician and encouraged me to visit him more often. I began to talk to her about my visits there more openly—but only to her. I watched her raising her eyebrows at the Magician’s words that perhaps wars should end, that staying here to help people’s flowers was a kind of bravery. I believed she had misunderstood him, and now that I shared with her the views and deeds of the man who had saved Tin so kindly, she was warming up to him.

         I think she changed a little because of this. A new song was added to her flowers and, sometimes, hers and mine sang in unison. She gave me more and more tasks, both for the Magician and for our household, until I noticed that she did all she could to keep me away from my father’s odd, obsessive preparation for war. This is how I gathered all my strength one day and asked her, “Mother, do I really have to go to war?”

         I’m not sure what I expected. She had just returned from church, where she took my dead brothers’ seeds every month to cleanse them with blue smoke and keep them alive, as we do with the seeds of the dead. Tears rolled on her face, but she did not embrace me. In a moment’s weakness I had asked her to protect me, but she didn’t even know how to protect herself.

         “I wish you didn’t,” was all she said.

* * *

         “Don’t go back there,” my father ordered me. That day I had brought back a tiny, speckled fawn made of strawberry-colored glass—the Magician’s gift—and was hoping to show my brother how it could move around and chase birds and dogs. “The debt is repaid,” he continued, unyielding, “and we can live without his money. It’s time for you to grow up too. Find a profession and get apprenticed somewhere so you can have a job when you return from service.”

         My mouth hang loose, lip trembling, words dissipating from my tongue. All of my father’s subtle disapproval of the womanly tasks I had to offer the Magician had warned me that this day would come. My mother used to dislike him too, but I knew she secretly respected him by then.

         When I turned to her for help, her eyes were fixed on the floor. “Mother,” I pleaded.

         “There’s not much time left, River.” Her words hurt me more than anything. “We must find a master to teach you his art. You’re almost fourteen—your conscription notice will arrive soon.”

         “I want to be a magician,” I said, surprising even myself, “I want to be apprenticed to the Magician.”

         Who could argue with this? The Magician would teach me the principles of his art while I waited for conscription, then I would go to war, and when I returned—if I returned—I could finish my apprenticeship and become a magician myself. Was it too much to ask? It certainly was not.

         The look in their eyes told me that I should have kept silent. It was Mother who spoke, not my father. “You don’t understand some things about him, not yet. You don’t want to become like him.”

         Coming from her lips, her words were betrayal. She knew what he was like! She was the only one who knew! And yet she wouldn’t let me become his apprentice. Yes, she couldn’t prevent me from going to war, but why deny me such a thing? I was all alone.

         “I know what I want!” I shouted as loudly as I could, struggling to be heard. “Look what he made for us!” I stretched my arms to show her the fawn, as if that trinket meant anything. “And he saved Tin and our lives are so much better now! I...I want to be that person who helps others. I don’t want to fight Father’s stupid war.”

         I was holding back my tears, desperately trying to show that I was a grown up.

         “Forget magics,” Father’s resolute order came. “They’re not for us.”

         That day I was younger than I wanted to be. In childish temper, I smashed the fawn on the floor and ran out the door.

         It shattered into thousands of pink stars.

* * *

         The faltering light in the Magician’s eyes flickered once, then stood still. Nothing else betrayed what he thought about my wish to become like him.

         After what happened, I had gone straight to him. He had hinted before that he would like to share some of his knowledge with me and had even started showing me thin threads of his craft. I dropped on my knees, begging him to take me as an apprentice.

         “How much do you know about magicians?” he asked in a low voice.

         “They’re very learned. They serve the King. All this I knew before you arrived. But what you do to flowers—this is what I want to do. With all my heart.”

         “Seedling,” he coughed, “this is my gift to you and it might be the last. Want to know why my flowers don’t sing?”

         I nodded, hungry for knowledge kept from me.

         He took his time before telling me his story. First he emptied his pipe, then loaded it with fresh leaf. Blue rings of smoke swirled like mist between us.

         “They sang when I was born,” he whispered, “when my mother planted the first narcissus for me. They sang as I grew and learned the mysteries of the world, how to shape matter and manifest rain and mist. They sang when I was given the highest praise in this land, when I stood by the King’s shoulder. When he took me to that first war, where I conjured beastly contraptions for him, arms that dealt death by the hundreds, poisons that took the lives of so many—all that time, my flowers sang. When my King entertained murderers who wore gold on their wrists, when they spoke of how the people of this or the other land were cattle to be slaughtered, and I never said a word, and I always nodded and did my duty which I was honored to have, all that time, my flowers still sang. They sang, because I believed, so they, too, believed.”

         Slowly, I saw the tapestry he was weaving for me—but my heart couldn’t quite grasp the landscape that unfolded with it. Something in me refused to match the kind old man with his wild stories of horror. Not knowing what else to do, very politely, I asked, “So when did your flowers stop singing?”

         “Ah, seedling.” There was pity in his voice and even a drop of secret joy. “They never stopped singing. They sing a song you can’t hear yet.”

         I didn’t understand. I stayed silent, looking into his eyes, waiting for the latter part of the story that never came.

         “Leave now,” he said firmly, though not unkindly. “Think of what I told you. Think carefully. If you want to come back, I’ll take you as an apprentice.”

         I left his house that day, thinking I would return later.

* * *

         I never did. The Magician was not who I thought he was. The Magician couldn’t do for me what I had hoped he would. What I learned that day was more, much more than I had asked for.

         For a long time after I left his house that day, when he bade me to leave and think, I walked by the river, not wanting to go home. I slashed reeds with a long stick, hopped over rocks, terrorized frogs and small birds nesting in the woody grass. All the while I was thinking about my parents and about the Magician and his words, and still nothing would come to me. I couldn’t make a decision. My head was cloudy, my insides tied uncomfortably into knots. Something too big, too quick, had burrowed inside me, and I didn’t know what to do with this strange animal suddenly gnawing at me from the inside out.

         And then, among the cat tails, I dropped to my knees. It didn’t come to me lightly but thrashed against my face like a violent gust of wind. It shook my heart loose from my ribcage, that feeling that made me bite my fist, that blinded my eyes with tears I couldn’t stop. And then, I knew, because I could finally hear it. The song was blaring everywhere, ringing off the rocks, pounding inside the bones of my chest at my heart itself.

         And then, I knew.

         The Magician’s flowers were mourning. This was the only song left for them to sing. A song for my brothers, for my father’s brothers. A song for my mother’s dead children. A song for all we’d had, that now was lost.

Copyright © 2019 Eleanna Castroianni

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Eleanna Castroianni is a writer, poet and oral storyteller from Greece. A cultural geographer by training, Eleanna tells stories from the margins of history and the far futures of the Anthropocene. Their written work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Podcastle, Strange Horizons, The Stinging Fly, previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and elsewhere. They live in Athens, Greece, with a growing number of string instruments.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

WITCH’S ROAD

by Christian K. Martinez

         The forest gave Catalina the road, as she stepped under its boughs; for it was not a sleeping forest. It had its coat of thorns for the wood-cutter folk, the high path for wagons, lush trails made right for foragers. It had creeks for beasts and travelers; the occasional outcropping for when it rained. It had monsters for those that needed eating.

         And it had the road for girls like her.

         No doubt.

         She was running from something, in her fine red dress embroidered with flowers. She carried it in her chin cut like a cliff’s edge thrust out to crack the sea. In her hands forced so loose; refusing to clench. She carried it in her hard eyes that would not look back. She carried it all the way up the hill and into the trees, despite the weakness in her left leg that left her limping and leaning heavily on the cane her brother had carved her.

         A cane she dropped before she crossed the treeline, because it would not serve her here, even if it smoothed her gait. And keeping it would not serve him, either. She didn’t let herself pause.

         One foot before the other.

         To find the Witch, one must stride the edge of nowhere. Falter and be left there alone in the forest.

         Walk the road, and earn a favor. Ask a gift. Be careful what you ask for. The Witch will give it.

         There were things taught to children by the forest.

         For Catalina the road was a kind and dangerous thing, painted skulls set in tree knots and nestled atop roots; a few hanging low, hooked on vines or bent down branches, shaking slightly in the lazy wind. Every now and then she saw a butterfly perched beside them or a bee resting somberly in the socket of an eye. Moss and stone stuck up here and there like scales, peppering the trail ahead.

         She didn’t waver, even as the day grew dark and the sun forgot where to find her. Even as she tripped, and her knee twisted and buckled, and pain like fire gnawed at muscle to force her down. A wolf of pain chewing at her leg, up and down, like to snap the bone, and she answered it with sneers, but she made no sound.

         There was no rule against sound. You could scream or cry, sing or laugh, on the road. But she didn’t wish to, so she crushed from her throat everything but the sound of breath and the occasional grunt.

         So Catalina pushed herself up and off of tree after tree, even when she felt her dress tear. And as hours, or minutes, or some other measure of time, passed, her eyes stung, her heart pounded, her mouth went dry; but she did not pause.

         By the end, the forest was a dark thing, welcoming and shadowed. The only light was in the skulls, blue and yellow and red and green, painted and glittered and glistening with unreflections of a light she couldn’t see. Until, of course, she could.

         She fell into the Witch’s home with a half-cursed gasp and too much blinking against the light that hung down from... Catalina wasn’t sure. Only that she caught herself on a table, if you could call a great log cut in half a table.

         All around her was wood, as though they were inside a cavern made of a tree, a great chamber, rising up and up until it simply ended in a wreath of half-hinted leaves and branches, sunlight falling through like a mist, foaming down the walls.

         Those walls were hung with shallow pots and flowers, some living, some dried and hung from strings; with animal hides stretched on racks; with three great beehives that gave an audible buzz built straight into the wood and spilling honey in long strips down into what looked like birdbaths.

         There were several large tables, some filled, some not; a cot laid out in the corner beside a deep-set fireplace with a single large pot hanging above it. And everything smelled of honey and woodsmoke and ash.

         “Well,” she breathed out, forcing herself to stand, bracing herself on the edge of the table. And her eyes caught on the stack of paintings in the corner, strange things laid on flat wood, of women and men atop crawling bursting writhing masses of color and texture and—

         Something else, she couldn’t name. And then of course, the Witch herself. In a green and sleeveless dress that ran to the floor and almost into it, burly arms, and long black hair tied into a high tail.

         The Witch hadn’t reacted as Catalina stumbled in, which Catalina was grateful for. She kept grinding something in a large stone bowl, hands and arms dyed orange, with streaks of red and yellow. She was humming a strange sound that had bone in it somewhere, or teeth, and bees all around them seemed to swell with it, carrying petals and other small things to her or away.

         “Indeed,” the Witch answered her, with a half smile, glancing over her shoulder now, and Catalina froze.

         “Either it’s exactly like you expected,” the Witch continued “or nothing at all. And either way it’s comforting, and rather unnerving at once. No? You really can take a moment to get comfortable, dear.”

         The Witch’s words were honeysuckle mild, but Catalina twitched anyways; as if they were barbed. Something in her stomach twisted, knotlike with embarrassment, and she felt hot beneath the sheen of sweat that’d started to cool on her. She hadn’t come so far to be teased, or mocked. She didn’t need to rest!

         “I—” she started to say, and then swallowed hard, words crumbling to gravel as the Witch laughed.

         It was a bright sound in the smooth light, and the Witch turned. Catalina wished she hadn’t. Her eyes didn’t have a color. They weren’t white or pale, or even mirrors, there was no milk to them. They were...

         She wasn’t sure. Made of sight? Made of seeing. And in them she saw her own road, in reverse. All of the skulls, a cane set down, back down over the hill, down to the village, out to the cemetery and—

         The bees laughed with their witch, a flurrying spiral above her head, spinning the shadows of the room like a top, and Catalina flinched. The hand not holding herself up, carefully flat against her thigh. She didn’t look away, even as the Witch spoke, and those eyes showed her herself, and other things.

         “Catalina de la Rosa. There has been a Witch in the forest since before Death held court on the Blue Hill; since the time bees had warlords, before they elected their very first queens. Since there have been axes to threaten trees. And I am she,” the Witch said, and her voice was moss; the soft thing scarabs think will eat the world.

         “Some have come with fire, and some have come with fear, and some with grief, and many with all three. And all of them have been brave. I have not mocked any of them. You are known by your road, and I know you. You seek, you walk, you earn the gift.”

         Catalina swallowed again, seeing the time she’d taught herself to swim in the quiet river that ran past the village, head ducking under the water over and over again. “I, I’m sorry. It’s been a long day, with, well...” She left it there, then bit her lip. “I don’t want to talk about it. The cemetery, any of it... Is that alright?”

         The Witch broke their gaze, and Catalina could see she was smiling as she turned back to the stone. “All you have to do, is ask, or leave. And then all you must do is listen, and watch. To follow the road, as it were,” she said.

         Catalina nodded, gathering her thoughts and shifting till she leaned back against the table, reaching down to hike the skirt of her dress up enough to reach her knee. There she started to massage, easing the tension as much as she could, trying to press back the wolf of it.

         The two of them were quiet for a while, as Catalina... she didn’t quite need to deliberate. She knew what she’d heard, what she wanted, all of it.

         “After this, if I do this, I cannot go home. I must wander, or find someplace new, except for days like today. And... you can’t tell me how it will change me. But it will, all the stories say so. And it might be terrible, but I’ll get what I’ve asked for. I don’t think I believe that you try to trick people with what they ask. If you did, well, the road would be easier,” Catalina reasoned, thoughtfully, working it through aloud as the Witch ground and hummed at bees.

         There was a louder hum of something like agreement, from the Witch.

         “And so you have a question, for me,” the Witch said in her moss of a voice.

         Catalina didn’t hesitate, and the words came out a little sharp and fast for it. “Would you paint my death away? Into the wood? I don’t know... they don’t tell you what will happen. Only that there’s a cost, that you change. I don’t know if that’s for you, or part of the magia, but...” Her face flushed again, and the words tripped over themselves without touching her lips.

         “‘...but will you make me everlasting?’“ the Witch finished, for her, her body still.

         Catalina wasn’t sure if the Witch meant it to be as ominous as it actually came out. So she nodded. Her mouth was still dry.

         “Please. Do I— do I need to tell you why?” Her voice did not tremble. She was absolutely sure. Though she wasn’t sure if she could explain. Her father wouldn’t have understood, or her mother. Her brother certainly wouldn’t. She felt almost bad about that.

         But there were always letters.

         “We will both know why, if the painting takes. And if it does not, the forest always has a need for monsters. And your reasons will not matter. Do you understand? If you stray, if you doubt, if you cannot hold the way—” The Witch let the words lie there, picking up a rag and rubbing her hands down; washing them in a basin that Catalina wasn’t entirely sure had been there before she needed it. The pigment retreated from her skin with an apparent reluctance.

         “I understand. They didn’t tell me, but I... that makes sense. You must walk on the edge of nothing. And if you falter—” Catalina nodded and shrugged at the same time, her heart hammering against her ribs, dancing with a fever-hope of need.

         She would not die. Or she would. But it’d be decided here. And it would be decided. No failings of the heart or trailing-off coughs. No accident would steal her from those around her. She pushed herself off from the table, fists tight against the pain in her leg.

         “I understand.”

         “Good. Find somewhere comfortable to sit, or stand, to lie, wherever you like. And—you need to wash up?” The Witch nodded firmly, tossing the rag down and looking at her with an expression that was mostly... Catalina wasn’t sure exactly. There was something in the eyes that she didn’t understand. The way they wrinkled at the edge.

         Mostly she was just glad she the Witch wasn’t making her wait. Anybody else would’ve questioned her, back home. But here there was no need for the Witch to make certain of her choices. If she wasn’t sure, she wouldn’t be her anymore. The forest would have made a different place for her.

         Catalina shook her head. “No. I earned this dirt. I’m proud of it.” She said that part almost fliply but uncompromising. There were tears in the dress, and she had splinters in her palms, and her good leg had a shallow cut in it. But she hadn’t stopped. And she had not laid down.

         It suited her fine.

         The Witch laughed again, just as eerily as the first time and just as accompanied by the bees. She vaguely gestured at Catalina, a handwave urging her to move as the Witch glided smoothly through her own chaotic space, seemingly unperturbed by the length of her dress. She pulled an easel from what looked like a pile of small foliage, setting it out with a practiced snap.

         As Catalina started to move along the table, looking around for where she might settle, the Witch pulled out a single large wooden canvas, a flat and pale-brown thing from behind the finished paintings. Paintings of strangers that Catalina had only heard of vaguely before; the others who wanted their deaths painted into the wood. Finally, she found her way to the Witch’s bed and settled there, smoothing her dress a little before giving up on it and leaning back to watch the Witch finish preparing.

         “Anasael, come now, it’s time to paint—” the Witch called, setting the canvas to the easel.

         Catalina tensed, a hiss echoing somewhere in the room at the call. Every bee in the great room fell silent, finding purchase or roost somewhere and going still. After long moments a snake emerged from beneath the Witch’s bed, passing just beside Catalina’s feet. She was careful not to move, not to breathe or flinch, as it traveled on by.

         A long and wily snake. With each scale a different color, and each color a different hue, and each hue in a different shade. A snake as long as the room itself, slithering up and wrapping around its mistress, climbing up and then draping from tables and the back of the easel she’d set up, leaving behind a half shadowed trail of color on the every surface as it moved.

         “My palette,” the Witch at least partially explained, as the snake turned its head to regard her, tasted the air, then turned its head and settled it seemingly in the air, its eyes closed. A lazy, quiet, half-hiss arose from it as it relaxed, and the Witch kept talking. “He helps give life to the paints, his family has grown quite proficient at the task over the years. A few of his cousins even moved down south, to expand the trade.”

         The Witch spoke idly as she turned in a circle inside Anasael’s broad coils, assessing where each spectrum of color was. She held her hands above them, fingers waving as if playing an instrument, tapping the air around colors she might need. “I will paint you, that is how the magia works. At its heart, it’s simple. You will hold my gaze. You must not look away. And you must not fear. You understand? I will show you faces, the faces of what comes of this gift you ask. If you can wear them as your own, you will be free of death. If you cannot—”

         A shrug punctuated her words as she trailed off, and Catalina took a deep breath. She thought for a moment there should be something more portentous about what they were doing. Clouds obscuring the light, a dark looming presence, some sort of ritual or ceremony as the Witch began to eye her sitting there. A thickening in the air.

         Or even an explanation of what exactly the Witch meant by showing her a ‘face’.

         But it seemed it was more like the road; simply a strangeness laying there like it’d always been. The Witch didn’t much seem to care about how Catalina sat either, or held herself, or other things that Catalina was rather sure mattered to most painters. Even so, she sat as still as she could and tried to clear her mind. Or focus it, like she had for the road, on the long walk from home.

         As she braced herself, the Witch deftly stroked a brush over one of Anasael’s many scales, putting color to bristle after long moments spent examining them. She lifted it with a nod, before lifting her gaze as well and meeting Catalina’s eyes with her own the color of things happening.

         The Witch didn’t ask if she was ready; there were no last-minute soulful gazes, no final questions. The moment the brush touched wood, Catalina could not speak, and she could not move except to breathe. Staring deeper and deeper into the Witch’s eyes, she felt sounds seem to fall away; the low hum of the bees, the ambience of bristles across the cedar plank the Witch had taken up. Until all she could hear was heartbeat and sibilance, a strange and undulating noise that fogged away sensation.

         The scratch or drag of the brush was silent, as were any other noises the Witch might be making, present and tucked away from Catalina’s ears. But she knew the brush moved. In the peripheral of her eyes so trapped by the Witch’s, she could see it, and when it touched wood, she could feel it. Something dragging through her and under her and into her, blurring her off to the edges of her skin. Till she felt herself like a puddle being swept over with a broom.

         The first face did not frighten her, and it lasted only a moment on the Witch’s features. And Catalina was glad of it being the first, so she could understand. Nothing overtly changed, exactly. The Witch did not become a wolf with a goat’s horns; her skin did not petal away, opening to the bone. It simply became like her eyes, with the wrinkle of flesh and the crest of bone, with the curve of her face, all holding more. A map and a memory in it.

         In the first face, she watched her brother fade and go, just as they’d seen with their mother, and their father. And the blacksmith’s daughter, whose smile made her giddy, too. And the boy she’d danced with last fall, turn frail as sticks and break from life.

         Catalina witnessed half a hundred people she might meet, might love, know her then wither away from her. Falling, falling, as she danced, as she walked. Ever forward, up the hill but never over, down the road, and never off it. She met the Witch’s eyes and knew this. And knew how it would hurt. How she still hurt.

         But it was only pain. Whether a wolf, a storm, or a whole countryside of it, it was still only pain.

         She saw her brother’s face, at the cemetery. The craggy broken open-ness of it. It wasn’t even the tears, it was the way he looked torn, as if some strange facet of him had gone flat inside, and empty. Her stomach hurt from that look, turned in on itself, and from that she might have flinched if she hadn’t made herself.

         That face lasted only instants, Catalina swore, but her body ached again, her leg throbbing. She was covered in a sheen of sweat. And the Witch’s hands were covered in flecks of at least seven or eight colors of paint.

         Still she gazed ahead, didn’t fold away or pull from the Witch’s eyes. She sagged into the stillness there, and the sibilance in the air and her heart pulsed in a steady time, tapping each other out.

         She wasn’t sure she understood the second face at first. It showed itself in just the same way: the meaning of the Witch’s face transforming, more than anything else. But it took longer to translate into anything.

         The sight of herself walking, unrested and unweary. The seasons changing around her in blinks, in less than blinks. Years passed in the space of a full drawn breath. In this face Catalina saw herself skipping stones into a lake whenever she passed.

         Until an island of them rose, each of her stones piled on top of the others.

         She saw herself bear a child, and a whole city of her descendants in a thousand years, all with echoes of her face. She saw herself deepening into the world, until every twitch of her hand sent ripples. Even if she hid her name, and hid herself, she saw the unease dawn in others at a woman who knew a hundred trades and spoke more languages than they knew names for and moved with a dozen lifetimes of practice at it. In the face, the whole scope of her twisted.

         Catalina watched as she became unrecognizably herself, every habit worn into the color of her hair, into features as strong as her chin and her gait and her hands that would not clench, would not claw. She saw every flaw flower into virtue, and every virtue break jagged and harsh into flaws.

         And she saw her eyes become things without color, despite their soft brown sweep. There was too much in them. Too much weight; a pressure, a knowledge, that crushed out the pigment, crushed out the air around them. Until her gaze was a thing that made and broke people that held it.

         Cracked open hearts, on plain faces. Ordinary faces. She would still leave those in her wake. Pressure, presence, could break a thing as easily as emptiness.

         It was an awful, accruing, weight. What was the point? If she wouldn’t escape it. The longer she stared at the face, the more she saw the breaking and breaking. It rolled on, over and again.

         Her body went tense as she tried to see past the face on the Witch’s face. Past everything held in the Witch’s eyes.

         Was there something beneath the Witch’s gaze too? Did her eyes have another color? Did it matter the Witch anymore?

         The Witch’s expression, beneath the face, did not change. Catalina could see that much. It was a smooth thing, despite the wrinkles of her face. Not precisely uncaring; it wasn’t cold. There was a furrow to her brow, ever slightly; her mouth was set but not flat or loose. If she spoke, or hummed, or sighed, it didn’t show. And Catalina could not hear.

         She continued to paint, stripping over Catalina’s image in lines and strokes that still left her feeling swept through. But she could not see deeper; she wasn’t sure if it was magia or exhaustion or something else.

         There wasn’t a lot she understood. Except that someone, something, expected her to be afraid of something terrible. Instead of angry at it, or willing to accept it. So!? She’d be less human as time went by. She’d be no less a person. Just more dangerous. Everything that lived grew.

         At least she wouldn’t leave things half done! If she died, that was it, she was done in the world. Which might be for some people, for most people. But she couldn’t imagine it. There were always too many things to do.

         Normal, ordinary, impossible things. Skirts to darn, and sheep to care for, gardens to plant, books to puzzle out, to borrow or trade for. There would be nieces and nephews, grand nieces and nephews to baby. Children. Lovers’ legacies. There would be so much to see, so many ways to learn.

         The third face bled out of the second, and embers blew into a whole flame of rage as she realized what it showed. She did not quite register the bemused tilt of the Witch’s head, as her own expression went all into sharp and jagged angles.

         Whatever Catalina set her hand to, as permanent as she was, would not be permanent in turn. That was it. And there was nothing she could do to change it. All things would turn, and she would walk through it. No wars would end forever, no pains would always be eased; there would be more pains, later; what she saved would not be saved forever.

         Her brother would not bury her. But he might his first spouse, or child, his grandchild. His children would still break open around his death, or he around theirs. Her eternity would not spare him facing death at all.

         But she’d never thought it would.

         “Just—” Catalina’s mouth moved, but her gaze didn’t waver, even as it teared up, even as her head wanted to snap back to laugh or spit or defy. It felt like talking through cotton stuffed in her mouth. She couldn’t hear herself, or how the words came out.

         Only that they bubbled up all hot and liquid and twisting in her, demanding their way out. She wasn’t afraid! She wasn’t afraid of what would come. Of messing up. There were always consequences. It coiled in her, until it was boiling out of her mouth in words.

         “What’s scary about that!?” she demanded. “Things will change. I will too. Things will end. I just don’t want to. So what if I can’t protect people from every pain? Just because someone will get sick again doesn’t mean you don’t take care of them now. I just don’t want them to get broken open because I die. I couldn’t do anything about that, I’ll be dead. And—and damn that! Over the hill with that, but I won’t follow! I know what I’m asking for!” Her voice cut at her own lips, and the words hung there for a moment.

         She couldn’t hear the hiss in the air, and she felt her heartbeat more in her throat, in her body, than in pressure beating at her ears. It was hard to see past the weight of helplessness, the stroke of the brush through her body, over and over and tremors of it, once it stopped.

         And then the Witch coughed.  “Asked for, Catalina de la Rosa. The gift you asked for.”

         That’s when Catalina realized the Witch had set the brush down. That both the Witch and Anasael were regarding her without terrible intent; without weight and age and purpose. Just looking. She was sticky with sweat, her limbs trembling slightly, her dress clinging to her awkwardly. And she wasn’t held by anything at all; the Witch was stretching her arms out, popping her shoulder with an audible sound and a grimace.

         The painting was done.

         She didn’t feel anything different till she stood, pain snapping into her leg, bear-trap swift and just as cutting. And... immortality was not any distance from the pain. If anything it felt sharper, clearer. But the fear of it was gone. She tensed against tensing, ready to push back on the bone-deep instinct. Which she’d felt before when tired. But it didn’t come. She felt aware. Cool as the bees began to buzz around them, their wings twirling the air into lazy currents.

         And she realized she was smiling, soft and wondering, as she lurched across the room, smearing paint over her dress as she pulled the Witch into a hug and thanked her. The Witch actually squeaked in reply, half stepping-back to brace herself, even as Anasael hissed in amusement and retreated back beneath the bed.

         Catalina didn’t stay to watch the paint dry. She washed herself quickly; borrowed a dress in green that looked like it’d been made for her and waiting. And she hugged the Witch a second time, and told her goodbye. There was no rush in getting to know each other, not really. And, she wanted to not see the Witch’s face, for a little while.

         She was fairly certain the Witch understood. The Witch handed her a few letters, for the other painted people in case she met them. Apparently, it was easy to recognize them. Catalina did not think about what her eyes looked like; if they remained the same for now.

         The Witch even let her write a quick letter of her own to her brother, so he would not be afeared for her. She couldn’t return home, not for a long while yet, but she was certain he could meet up with her here and there. The bees or one of Anasael’s cousins would deliver it, for which she promised to bring some new flowers or a few tasty mice their way when she visited again.

         Then Catalina left by the same door she’d entered. Just outside it, she found her cane waiting, leaned up against the wood as if she’d set it there herself.

         With that, she put foot to the road, and she walked.

Copyright © 2019 Christian K. Martinez

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Christian K. Martinez's short fiction has been published in Jabberwocky, Every Day Fiction, and multiple times previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Originally from California, Christian has traveled back and forth across the country, wandering off to New York just in time to meet the blizzards, and finally settling in Oregon with their wife and cat.

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COVER ART

“To Feel the Edge of Heaven” by Noah Bradley

Noah Bradley is a creator. He is working on The Sin of Man, a primal fantasy world of his own design. He made Art Camp, which has helped to teach thousands of students around the world to make better art. And he makes Reference.Pictures with his wife, which provides affordable, high-quality reference images for creators. See more of his work and these many projects at noahbradley.com.

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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