Issue #304 • May 21, 2020

“Clever Jack, Heavy with Stories,” by R.K. Duncan

“The Honey of the World and the Queen of Crows,” by Dimitra Nikolaidou

For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

CLEVER JACK, HEAVY WITH STORIES

by R.K. Duncan

         Jack was only a cook’s boy, but Rowland, Lord Robert’s own son, had been his friend since both were little children. They ran wild together through all the mischief and scrapes that a clever boy and a boy no one dared punish could manage, all before either one thought of degree or station.

         When he and Rowland had nine summers each, and Lord Robert thought to have tutors for his son and see him learn knighthood, he had Jack and Rowland brought to him, and he looked at the way they stood so close together, and he bent to look Jack straight in the eye and said: “I think it will be easier to teach you manners, Boy, that to keep my son from your side.”

         So Jack got an education, that he might serve as a secretary or a groom of the chamber for Rowland, and some practice at riding and arms, though he never grew as strong and bold as Rowland did. He also listened to his mother’s stories and the tales told by her friend Agnes, who people called a witch, and in them got learning that Rowland never did.

         The two stayed fast friends, closer with one another than either was with any of the other boys that lived and played in the castle yards. Nothing kept them apart for a free moment, not until their fourteenth year, when Rowland was married to a pretty dark-haired woman, Mary-Anne, who rode up from the borders on grey-spotted horse and wore a fine blue gown at the wedding.

         Mary-Anne was all of twenty-four, and she made no secret that she didn’t like being married to a child. She would shame Rowland into spending more time at study or on the practice grounds, to do what a grown man would and not play with Jack and the other boys.

         Today, with the weather so fine, she had relented and even brought her needlework onto the green outside the castle walls to watch them as they sported with a ball and sticks on the lawn around the grey stone chapel. Rowland was the leader, and he was bright and strong and fairer than all the rest together as they tumbled and ran behind him.

         As they ran, Rowland hit the ball with his stick, so high it flew over the chapel and out of sight. He turned to chase it, and Jack could not help give the warning his mother had given him before.

         “Wait, Rowland, not that way! It’s terrible bad luck to go widdershins around a church.”

         Rowland nodded. He was used to Jack’s little spells and omens. He said he didn’t believe them, but he would always humor Jack and do as he asked. He would have turned back, but Mary-Anne laughed then. She had a way of laughing loud so that Jack and Rowland knew she was laughing just at them.

         “Are you still a child, Husband. Do you leave a candle burning against goblins and boggarts under the bed, too?”

         Rowland shook his and clenched his mouth in a crimson face. Jack knew what Rowland would do, with Mary-Anne goading him. It was her fault really, but Rowland was still a fool to do it for her.

         He ran once widdershins around the chapel, and Jack could only watch. Mary-Anne nodded him on, and Rowland ran again. A third time he went round the grey stone walls, to show he was a man.

         They watched and waited, all of them, but Rowland never came back to the lawn beside the church. The whistling wind the village people called the Elf-King’s Horn blew in the trees outside the castle wall. All the boys, and Jack, and Mary-Anne were silent for a moment, waiting for Rowland to appear.

         Jack was the first to move, and Mary-Anne came after. They ran rightwise around the chapel and back to the place where they had started from, and they saw no sign nor heard no sound of Rowland or his footfalls on the grass. The boys who had been playing scattered, calling after Rowland, for his joke had gone too far and frightened them. Jack stayed and looked at Mary-Anne.

         “He’s gone now,” Jack told her, “taken by the king of the elves or some other dark thing, because you shamed him into foolishness.”

         He watched her chew over his words like a tough cut of beef. She looked to the castle, where Lord Robert was, and away south to her father’s country.

         “Will he come back?” she asked.

         “Not likely,” said Jack. “You have to win your lost ones back from fairies in the tales, not wait for them.”

         She swallowed and looked him full in the face and nodded, and then she ran widdershins round the stone chapel with never a look behind. No horn blew for her, but she was gone on the third turn as well, and Jack walked round it once again and saw that she was gone too, wherever Rowland was, or to some stranger place that bad luck and cold wind off the hills had opened a door to.

         Jack wanted to run after, to bring back Rowland from wherever he was gone, but Jack was cleverer than he was brave, and he knew many stories of the other country, where fairies chased white deer with packs of red-eared dogs. Jack would make sure he was ready before he went to fairyland, and maybe he would come home with Rowland at his side.

         First Jack went to his mother in the kitchens, and he told her what had passed and what he must do, and she would have told him not to go, but she knew that he loved Rowland close as kin and had no others in the world but her and Rowland. She gave Jack salt and bread and a good iron knife, sharp and heavy at his side.

         “Eat and drink nothing in the other country, Jack,” she said, “and wear your good boots with iron hobnails when you go.”

         Jack heard, and he kissed her on each cheek, and he did not cry until he left the kitchen.

         Then Jack went out of the castle, down the winding lane of the village to the last house before the hills, where the old witch Agnes lived. She was his mother’s friend and the heal-all for all the village and the servants in the castle, and it was her tales of the other country that Jack would use for his guide.

         Jack asked her to write three tales of fairyland onto his heart, so he would remember them though all the snares and tricks and magic of the other country and know how he could win his Rowland back.

         The witch did not try to dissuade Jack, but she was grim. “You’ll die more likely than save him, Boy, or be caught there, which is much the same.”

         “I know, but I won’t leave him.”

         The witch had Jack take off his shirt and bare his chest. She bound Jack’s arms to the spindly chair so that he wouldn’t flinch. She took a knife with a bone handle and a copper blade, and she muttered stories to herself as the knife slid through his skin. It hurt like itching under a scab, sweat in a fresh cut, a sad ending when he expected a happy one.

         When she was finished, there was no blood, and his skin was whole, but there were shadows that almost looked like letters, bleeding through from somewhere deeper in his flesh.

         The old witch said that he had been a clever boy to ask for such a thing to guide him in the other country. She had not heard of such a trick in any of her tales. She gave him a leather bottle of sweet water from well behind her cottage, safe to drink in any land he traveled to.

         Jack ran back to the castle. No one was in the yard, no one looking yet for Rowland, or if they were they had abandoned superstitions repetition of the path around the chapel. Likely Lord Robert had heard of his son’s vanishing and put it down to some excess of play among the boys. He did not listen to fireside stories or bow his head when the Elf-King’s Horn blew on the heath above his castle.

         Jack started round the grey stone chapel, walking widdershins as slow and tentative as tightrope walker in a carnival. He found a rhythm he could make himself maintain, and he felt for something: a winding up of tension, a prickle on his neck, a holy trembling in the bright air of the summer afternoon.

         There was no sign but a dryness in his throat and a shimmer that made him dart his eyes after each mote in the sunshine. In fear and dullness he walked around the chapel, once, twice, three times widdershins, and felt no breath of wonder to transport him.

         He stumbled as he rounded the last turn. He caught himself and found he had crossed over. The castle walls and towers were all gone, and the stone chapel was a lonely boulder with a great cleft leading into darkness. The forest all around was twisted, tall and thick as the curled hair of a sleeping giant, full of shadows deeper than should have been under the summer sun. The grass was bright as emeralds, richer hued than fine Holland cloth. It was trampled by the hooves of many horses, and their trail led away into the west.

         Jack followed the trampled road across the lawn and under the twisted trees, and he walked in dream. He seemed to move by fits and starts, so that he went long minutes without moving and then leapt forward a furlong at a stride. His feet pulled left and right as currents in the ground urged him to turn from the straight way and search the shadows for his Rowland. He stamped each step down heavy and felt his hobnails pin him to the path as to a lodestone. He blessed his mother’s gifts for the first time, and not the last.

         After an uncountable time of dream-walking under the trees, Jack came out onto a green lawn of grass so firm and thick it showed no dint of hooves, and he could not reckon his path forward. A choice of three roads lay before him, one broad and smooth running over the turf, and one winding beneath willow ash and alder through a country of green hills, and one narrow as a blade, beset on all sides by thorns and briars.

         And in a shiver of light, a lady stood there at the parting of the ways, and she was beautiful. Jack found he could not tell more than that. Whether her hair was dark or fair, her skin pale or black, her figure broad or thin, her eyes bright or darkly lidded, he knew not; only that she was beautiful, and she laughed a smiling laugh at him, so that he felt awkward, a child grubby from play and long walking, at the feet of a great and noble lady.

         “Will you kiss me in friendship at our merry meeting, Jack?” she asked him in a voice like sparkling wine and honey.

         Almost Jack bent forward and kissed her as she asked, for friendship and the wonder of her beauty, but the shadows on his breast ached, and he remembered the tale written on his heart and gave a clever answer.

         “I will not, Lady. I have to find my friend who was taken by the blower of the Elf-King’s horn, and if I stayed to serve you seven years, I would never bring him home safe to our own country.”

         The lady laughed again and smiled and said: “You are a clever boy to reckon the cost of my kiss so well, but do you know the road to elf-king’s hall? I will tell you the right path for a kiss, and there is other payment to be had for your service in my kingdom once you win free.”

         The tale carved on his heart was like a bed of coals, and the warmth that rippled out from it made Jack’s tongue loose and clever.

         “No, my lady, no matter the reward, I have not seven years to spare, and I may need a lying tongue to come safe through all that waits for me.”

         He knew the way well enough now, for he sought neither hell nor heaven, by the broad road or the thorny one, but it was hard to set his feet on the path. The dream of the other country filled his head like the fragrance of too many flowers or the scent of grass in a field the scythemen had just crossed. He should bend forward and kiss the fair lady who waited on him, and tarry with her on the green grass soft as down.

         The tale in his heart tugged him away. He would not be True Thomas, stolen seven years. He had no need for prophecy; only for Rowland.

         He took the winding path beneath the fairy trees, to follow Rowland to fair elf-land, and when the lady called after him to offer a kiss for good luck on his road, he did not turn again.

         Under the trees, the sound of water grew louder, and a little stream sprang from the turf and ran beside the path, twisting in and out of shadow and chuckling as it ran over little falls on its path through the green hills.

         After a little walking, at a place where the stream was farther from the road, lost in the shadows of the willow trees, Jack heard a voice over the noise of water, and it was Mary-Anne, speaking gently to someone.

         Jack balked a moment at the thought of leaving the road. Paths were hard to find in fairyland once they were lost. He had heard more than enough tales to know. He thought of leaving Mary-Anne behind and going on to save his friend and come home a hero, even with the spectre of Rowland’s noble wife gone into wind and shadow, but that would be a poor tale for a winter night, and Jack knew more than Mary-Anne about the other country. He did not think she would come home without him.

         Jack stepped from the path, and he let a trail of salt fall behind him, and he blessed his mother’s gifts for a second time, and not the last.

         Under the shadow of the trees he saw Mary-Anne, and she was gentling a white horse, tall and proud and beautiful. Mary-Anne was a fine rider, better even than Rowland, and if she could mount the white horse, she would think to master it and ride as swift as it could go to follow Rowland, and perhaps she had heard enough stories to guess that a fairy horse would know the way to whatever she desired. It was a fine plan, but Mary-Anne did not know the tales of this country as Jack did.

         Mary-Anne had not noticed the stagnant bow in the stream only a few paces back, where the horse still dipped a trailing hoof. She had not seen its hungry look or marked the stain of red around its lips. She had not felt the fairy vines already twining round her ankles where the ground beneath was soft, or seen how fast and deep the water ran just a few paces farther down the stream. Lost in the white horse’s eyes, she did not notice Jack come near.

         Jack saw Mary-Anne bend her knees and test the firmness of the ground under her feet. She meant to mount. He dashed the last few paces and drew the iron knife from his belt and knelt on the soft ground to cut the vines that twined round Mary-Anne’s ankles.

         The vines slithered at him like blind worms chasing food, but all withdrew when his blade parted the first cord. The iron cut the fairy vines easy as cutting a taught thread. Jack blessed his mother’s gifts a third time, and not the last.

         Still Mary-Anne was caught in her trance, and she lifted a leg to mount. Jack caught her round the waist and pulled her back before she could climb to the water horse’s, the kelpie’s back and be taken down to drown.

         The white horse reared up and neighed like screaming, and spittle and blood flew from its lips. Mary-Anne screamed half a scream before it choked off, and Jack held his iron knife out, shaking.

         The horse leapt forward, and the water followed it, carving a new bank to keep the kelpie’s hooves wet. Jack stumbled back and dropped his knife, but Mary-Anne caught it up and struck the white horse across the nose. It reared up again and screamed, but it did not come farther after them. It stayed on the bankside, with one hoof in the stagnant water, and watched them go.

         The woods twisted thick and blind between the river and the road, and Mary-Anne looked wild, searching for the way to go, but Jack could see the trail of salt he had let fall before and he followed it, leading Mary-Anne by the left hand.

         “What was that, that horse?” she asked, when the color of her cheeks calmed and her eyes no longer darted quick as dragonflies in her face.

         “The old witch called it ‘kelpie’ in her tales. It would have drowned you if you sat on its back, and eaten you down to the bones and entrails.”

         She looked along the road and into the woods around. “Do you know where Rowland is gone in this strange country?”

         “I know the road to find him.”

         “Lead on, then. Doesn’t time move wrong from here to home? I don’t want to wake a hundred years after we came here.”

         Jack led her back to the winding road and on toward the elf king’s hall.

         It was harder, traveling with Mary-Anne. She could only half-see the path that Jack thought a clear road. Without stories on her heart, she was more mazed by fairy dreams, and there were no nails in her soft slippers; her feet were always straying from the path.

         They moved by fits and starts for a while, with Jack always having to correct her, until she thought of tying them together and bound their wrists with the cloth she had been sewing while she watched the boys play in the morning. Bound by his left hand to her right, Jack could lead her on without a stop.

         Being tied to Mary-Anne pulled Jack out of himself and his armor of stories and more firmly into the other country. He heard voices call from the woods: sweet, uncanny voices like the sparkling-wine lady from the meadow. The birds that sang in the trees were strange; too tuneful and too much in harmony with one another, like minstrels and not wild things. Silver bells rang in the distance, like the fall of frozen rain. Jack felt Mary-Anne’s fear in the trembling of her arm through the linen that tied them together, and she must have felt his, but they also held each other steady. They trembled, but they did not fall or stop.

         “What are the bells?” asked Mary-Anne

         “Fairies hang them on their harnesses when they ride out hunting.”

         “Why do they make you shiver?”

         “They would hunt us if they found us in their country without leave.”

         The road wound on under the twisted trees and out over rolling hills, and later they came to a river running with blood up to Jack’s knee.

         Mary-Anne, in her fine linen, shrank back from the bank. “What’s this, Jack?”

         “Stories say that all the blood shed on earth runs through the streams of fairyland.”

         “So this is the blood from Lord Robert’s wars, and my father’s, away south of the borders?”

         “Maybe, or from some other battles far away.”

         She looked at the river and sucked her teeth. “Jack, why did you come here after Rowland, when you knew how terrible this country is?”

         What answer did he have for that, except the foolish truth? “To save him. I love him. What else could I do?”

         “You could have stayed and lived your life, grown to a man instead of dying in this uncanny place.”

         “Why did you come then, if you think we’ll die? I know you don’t love Rowland like I do, don’t pretend.”

         Mary-Anne laughed without smiling. “How long do you think Lord Robert would have kept me, with my husband gone and you to blame me for his going? How warm do you think my welcome would be in my father’s castle, with two husbands dead and mourned and never a child to show?”

         Jack had no answer for that. He took her hand and held it, instead of only the cloth that bound them together. They walked on, until they had forded bloody rivers three and stained themselves red up to the knee.

         Beyond the rivers, the hills grew to tall moorland and mountain, and dark pines covered the slopes. It almost looked like the prospect of home, but where the castle would be there was a great grey hill, rearing bare and tall out from the rest, and as they came closer, Jack saw that the mountain was carved, and he saw the square indentations of battlements and walls at the edges of the empty space, and he knew them. The carven mountain could have been a mold to cast Lord Robert’s castle.

         The yard in front of the castle was there too, under a roof of grey stone, and fairies on horseback rode about it and trampled the dust into a cloud. They came close, and Jack saw that the stone roof was hung with silver lamps like stars, and the dust kicked up by the horses caught the light and glittered like diamonds and pearls in the air. Against the emptiness that would have been the castle’s wall, there were tiered seats, and fairies sat and watched the melee.

         At the center of the highest tier sat one under a canopy who could only be the king of the elves. His skin was dark as the grey stone of the hills, and his hair was bright silver, long and loose down to his shoulders. His crown was twisted antlers, and his raiment was green and hung all over with the flowers of purple heather.

         “Who is the lord?” asked Mary-Anne.

         Jack felt for the shape of stories in his memory to answer. It was difficult. This place did not want him to remember that anything but here and now was real and true, but the stories written on his heart kept him tied to home and made all he knew of the place more than mist and fancy.

         “The grey king. He must be the one who took Rowland. He rules a great country here, and he takes mortal champions, and maybe he is a lord of the dead and people come to his country when they die.”

         “How do you know so much about this place? Are you really a changeling or a brownie Lord Robert caught to be Rowland’s servant?”

         “I listen to the stories, and I remember them.”

         Jack heard a shout he knew, and there was Rowland in the melee among the fairy knights. Rowland wore armor of bright silver, and his sword was silver, and a heather bloom was purple on his shield. He turned and twisted and matched blows with riders bearing strange devices and stranger faces. One rider had an owl’s head helm, and great owl’s wings spread from its back. Another struck at Rowland with a living branch that burst with flowers wherever Rowland cut it. Some had ram’s horns, or spreading antlers, or hair like weed and sea-wrack, and every one was beautiful with a beauty as sharp and cold as a blade of fine steel.

         Rowland overmatched them all. Among the jewels of dust, he was the jewel of all the knights, and none could stand against him. It was joy to watch and a lightness and a tightening in Jack’s heart to see his Rowland triumph, but Jack was troubled, even while he looked at Rowland. Elves in tales were strong and cunning and full of spells and tricks. Why would they let a boy, even so strong and beautiful, overthrow them with a few blows of the sword?

         He got no answers from the fighting and saw no sign of magic or inhuman strength, only listened to the music of blunted swords on silver mail and oaken shields until Rowland had unhorsed the last elf-knight. All the watching fairies rose and cheered, and the grey king clapped his hands with a sound like great stones falling from a height. He smiled, and flecks of gold sparked in his grey eyes. Mary-Anne stared at him, and Jack could feel the force of her attention in the limpness of her limbs while she looked.

         “The victory to Rowland,” the grey king cried, “the newest ornament of my court. Now all who can enter my hall are welcome at the feast.”

         The king clapped his hands again, and all the fairies were gone with a blast of wind and distant horn-call, and doors of shadow barred the main gate of the hollow hill.

         Jack plumbed his heart for stories to know what trick or riddle might open the doors, but Mary-Anne tugged him from thought. “Don’t get too caught in stories, Clever Boy.”

         She took him by the way he should have thought of, to the butcher’s door that went to the larder and the kitchens and was never shut.

         The hall was lit by red torches, brighter than the star-lights in the ceiling high above. A fairy no taller than a little child, with hare’s feet and fingers like twisted twigs, met them in the doorway and led them to a place far down one of the three long tables.

         They could see Rowland easily, sitting at the king’s right hand on the dais. Jack watched the way that Rowland hung on the king’s words and kept his eyes on the king’s face and not the plate before him, and he thought that Rowland was bewitched. Jack had never known Rowland to look at anyone that way, be it his father or Mary-Anne, or Jack himself.

         Mary-Anne kept her eyes on the dais as well, but Jack could not tell if she was watching Rowland or the king.

         The grey king rang a silver bell, and a host of servants like the one who had led them to the table poured into the hall, bearing platters and loading the tables until they groaned. There was game and fowl, beef dripping fat, swine roasted whole with mouths stuffed with apples and garlanded with rosemary. There were fish long as Jack’s arm and longer, and every scale was gilded. There were summer berries and autumn apples, oranges and lemons all out of place and season, and stranger fruits Jack could not name. There was white bread and barley cakes and sweet loaves dripping honey. There were subtleties of sugar spun like jewels and spider’s webs; pale wine and wine as dark as blood.

         Jack’s mouth watered, and he thought that he had not eaten since the morning before Rowland was taken, and he could not count the hours he had traveled the other country. Mary-Anne reached for a platter, but Jack remembered his mother’s warning, and he pulled Mary-Anne’s hand away. “We can’t eat fairy food, or drink their wine, or we’ll be bound here forever.”

         Jack took the bread his mother had given him, and the witch’s bottle, and they shared bread and water between them, and he blessed his mother’s gifts, for the last time, and the old witch too, since he had only the tales she had written on his heart and his own wits left to win his Rowland back.

         With mortal food in their bellies, the scent of the fairy feast faded to nothing, and Jack felt no hunger looking at the laden tables. They watched the fairies eating and the king talking with Rowland and the others at the high table: gossamer-gowned, flower-haired ladies, lords of stone like to the king, and clever-eyed courtiers with fox tails slipping from under their doublets.

         The fairies ate, but the tables never grew empty, and there was never a shortage of bones for the red-eared dogs lying by the hearth to fight over. Time passed, in the unmeasurable way of the other country, and then the feast was ending, and the grey king stood and spoke.

         “Now our feast is passed, and we must ride once more to the war east of the world, and my new champion shall go first of all on the white horse and bring us victory against the bright sun that rises ever again.”

         Jack felt the warmth of knowing in his breast. The mortal who would fight for the grey king under the hills against the sun was one of the tales written there, but Rowland should have had a choice and walked open-eyed into the contest, not gone bewitched and stolen, and the white horse was for a sacrifice, not for a champion in war. The grey king was sending Rowland to die against a foe that would rise up whole each time it was struck down.

         It was as if two of the tales Agnes had written for him were braided together here, but the second tale, of the stolen knight riding with the fairy host on white horse, had a way to win Rowland free, and that was what they needed.

         Jack turned to Mary-Anne. She must be the one to save Rowland. The true love was meant to pull the rider from the white horse, not the bosom friend.

         “We have a chance to save Rowland, and win him free, but you will have to do it.”

         “Tell me what to do.”

         She looked grim, still resigned to death in the other country, maybe, or maybe she did not think of going home with Rowland at her side as a cause for joy.

         “When the company rides out, you must pull him from the white horse and hold him tight. The king will change Rowland’s shape in your arms, but you must not let him go.”

         Mary-Anne set her face sternly and looked resolved, but Jack marked how her eyes lingered on the grey king as they went out, and he did not know what to think of it, but they looked the way his own eyes felt watching Rowland on the practice grounds when he trained for his knighthood.

         The high table and the hall were emptying. Jack and Mary-Anne ran through the crowd, through the hollow castle and out to where the stable yawned as a dark tunnel in the grey hill. Jack clasped Mary-Anne’s hand, and she held it tight.

         A rumble rolled out of the dark, and there was Rowland first of all on the white horse, and all the fairy host behind. Jack let Mary-Anne’s hand go, and she ran to Rowland’s stirrup, and she pulled him down. The fairy riders wheeled and turned their steeds with a sound like thunder and stones breaking, and they drew round Mary-Anne and Rowland in a ring, and Jack was hemmed in with them.

         Rowland changed in Mary-Anne’s arms into lion, muscles rippling under a golden coat, his roar resounding from the hills, and still she held him tight. Rowland changed in Mary-Anne’s arms to great serpent, hissing like a boiling kettle, and the spittle that dripped from its fangs hissed on the ground, and still she held him tight. Rowland changed in Mary-Anne’s arms to a crying babe, and Jack could see, by its black hair and the line of its mouth so like to Rowland’s, it was the child the two of them would have one day. Mary-Anne let go and sprang away.

         Jack leapt for Rowland and barely caught the babe as it struck the ground. He gathered it up and wrapped it in his arms before it cried, before the fairies moved. Maybe the story would still finish right if he kept hold. Maybe the spell was not yet broken. Damn Mary-Anne for letting go. If all was lost and Rowland bound, then Jack would make them take him. He would not let go of Rowland until he was slain or changed to some unfeeling thing by fairy magic.

         Rowland changed in Jack’s arms to a boiling cauldron, and Jack felt his hands burn and blister, and he held on. Rowland changed in Jack’s arms to a sword, bright steel stained with blood and the hilt in Jack’s hands, and he kept hold, and tried to keep from retching or from weeping all unmanly. Rowland changed in Jack’s arms to a fairy maid, pulling him close for kiss of her red, red lips, and Jack felt his flesh crawl and fear make him tremble away, but still he kept hold.

         Then Rowland was there, naked, flushed red and soaked in sweat as if he had lain long with fever, but he was himself again, and Jack knew he had won. He unlaced his shirt with clumsy fingers to give Rowland a covering.

         The grey king stood down from his horse and looked over them with his hands on his hips, just like Lord Robert when he had caught them at some mischief.

         “Well this is a pretty puzzle, young man with stories in your heart and iron in your boots. By the old rules you’ve won your love and should be free to take him home with you.”

         Jack looked at Rowland, and Rowland looked back. His love? Rowland smiled a little back at him.

         “But,” said the grey king, “the challenge was also failed, and so I am still due one mortal to stay and ornament my court. That must be the ruling then. Two of you may go back safe to your own country, but one must stay here under hill with me.”

         Jack nodded slowly. That was right, and who could it be to stay but him? What tale was there of a bold young man coming back from fairyland with his common friend and not his lady love?

         He was just rising to bid Rowland a last goodbye when Mary-Anne stood between him and the king.

         “Take me, of course,” she said.

         Was she run mad, thought Jack, or caught by some fairy spell that he had shaken off?

         “You can’t find the way back alone,” said Jack. “You know that, don’t you? I don’t know a tale to tell you what it will be like to stay with him.”

         “I know what I’ll get going back with Rowland, and so do you. I’ll take a chance on this instead.”

         She looked at the king again, with hungry dreaming eyes, and Jack could see how she would think him fair, lordly and ageless, nothing like Rowland’s bright laughter and his land nothing like the trap of her marriage to boy too young for her.

         The grey king said “this will do,” and he set Mary-Anne before him on his tall grey horse and put Jack and Rowland on the road back to their own country.

         The road was short returning, and they came back to the lawn beside the grey stone chapel before the sun set on the day Rowland had been taken. They had not spoken, not beyond hesitation and a little fear, on their road home, but their hands never parted, and they stopped often to hug tightly.

Copyright © 2020 R.K. Duncan

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R.K. Duncan is a queer polyamorous wizard and author of fantasy, horror, and occasional sci-fi. He writes from a a few rooms of a venerable West Philadelphia row home, where he dreams of travel and the demise of capitalism. In the shocking absence of any cats, he lavishes spare attention on cast iron cookware and his long-suffering and supportive partner. Before settling on writing, he studied linguistics and philosophy at Haverford college. He attended Viable Paradise 23 in 2019. His occasional musings and links to other work can be found at rkduncan-author.com.

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THE HONEY OF THE WORLD AND THE QUEEN OF CROWS

by Dimitra Nikolaidou

         The clock on the bar’s wall has four hands, and none of them is moving. The wall opposite it is covered in a smoked mirror reflecting the honey-gold bottles, the low-hanging chandelier, the red carnations on the tables. Things it does not reflect: the long-haired barman, the nun in the white habit smoking on a bar stool, and me.

         I collapse on a chair and struggle to get a grip.

         I look at my feet: they are here. The last thing I remember is the mortar shells hitting the trench, Yiorgos’s face broken in a thousand pieces of light and blood, the pain in my thighs and my boots cast away, full of flesh, my own flesh.

         I look at my boots now and they are where they should be, on my feet, polished to the nines.

         I am dead, we are both dead, Yiorgos and I, and this is the waiting room of Hell, and the worst is, I am here alone and he is nowhere to be seen.

         I bury my face in my hands, open and close my mouth, and no sound comes out.

         “Shall I buy you a drink?”

         I lift my eyes and the nun stands above me, one hand already on the chair, the other holding her cigarette. Without waiting for an answer she sits down, lifts her hand leaving a trail of smoke, and signals the barman to get us two drinks.

         “Magdalene,” she introduces herself, and thankfully my fingers are too numb for I wouldn’t know if I should shake her hand or kiss it.

         “I’m Leandros,” I say, standing still. “I am dead,” I add, and the realization reaches my toenails.

         “For the time being, yes.” She blows some smoke through perfectly painted lips and looks at me.

         The barman brings over two glasses. Whiskey for her, honeyed raqi for me. My glass looks ancient, made of brass and engraved with bees, but I care not; I just down it. It burns, and I start coughing. When my eyes clear, I see her behind the red carnations drinking slowly, her blue eyes pinned on me, waiting.

         “Where am I?” I say, half my throat still burning.

         “On the border,” she says, and I needn’t ask what border.

         “Yiorgos?” I ask, and my voice dies upon the question. I wonder if they found our bodies side by side, and if there was anything left to take back to our parents.

         She looks at me a bit more, now misty-eyed. She turns to the barman. He swallows a sigh and then nods yes before turning back to his glasses.

         “Would you like to see him again?”

         My heart begins to pound in my chest. My turn to nod. My mouth is full of thorns. She leans towards me, and the adrenaline inside me overflows.

         “What would you give up for that?”

         “What is your price?”

         “Do you see the clock on the wall?”

         Of course I do. It’s huge, its heavy frame carved with crow feathers and bees, and I dare not look at it too long for fear the hands will start moving again.

         “The barman is an old friend. If I ask him, he will let me turn the hands backwards. Only for a little bit. I can do a minute, but it will be enough for you to roll behind the sacks of sand and save yourself.” She pauses. “It will even be enough to grab Yiorgos, persuade him to leave, and start running.”

         “Start running? Why not stay and fight?”

         “Because no man from your platoon survives today. The only way to save yourself is to abandon the trench.”

         I laugh, and the sound startles me. “You want me to be a deserter? With the enemy at the gates, coming for my home?”

         She nods. “If you don’t, you will both end up dead anyway.”

         She is right, of course. This particular battle is unwinnable, and the colonels, knowing that, have grouped all the undesirables together and sent us over the top. I should be on my knees, kissing the nun’s hands, even if she is the Devil herself offering me deals. But I think of all the other faces in the trenches, touch the bee-engraved glass, and answer not.

         “And what do you want in return?” I ask.

         “What I already told you. Get away, and live.”

         “Why?” The question flies out of my mouth before I catch it, and hovers between us like a sick black bird.

         I wish I hadn’t spoken.

         She looks at me and orders two more drinks.

         “Why not?” she asks and the question is a breath between her lips.

         Because we have been at war for five whole years, and I have forgotten how to live. Because if I get away from the trenches, I will always be branded a deserter. Because Yiorgos is engaged to a girl back in Capital, and when the war is over we will part, and I am not sure I don’t prefer us dying like heroes side by side. We will be buried with medals on our gravestones and be free from the things that await people like us.

         I lower my eyes. How is it possible to be offered your life back and still refuse it?

         “I know,” I hear her say. “Once war-touched, you can’t turn your back on him, can you? But since we have all the time in the world, let me tell you a story.”

* * *

         When I was young, I fell in love with two things: a handsome prince and a nunnery. The nunnery was built by a very clever bishop, who knew women well. When the time came to fill it up with nuns, he went from castle to castle and took the younger daughters aside. Do you want a place to be, where you will serve neither father nor husband? Do you want not to die in childbirth? Do you want to spend your days as you yourselves wish, full of art and music, no one telling you what to do?

         No man sang promises as sweet in any ballad. My handsome prince was waging war at the borders; fighting against those bearing the flag with the blackbird and the wreath of red carnations. He had to, because they were worshipping the Queen of the Crows instead of our own God, the proper God. From battle to battle and from carnage to march, it had been a whole long year since his last loving letter. So one day I persuaded my father to give me half my dowry, climbed my coach, and took the way to the nunnery, where I put on my white habit.

         I had never been happier. The bishop left us alone and made sure no one ever bothered us. We had our own Garden of Eden, enclosed within the forest leaves. We played music, illustrated holy books, made our own wine and then drank all of it under the stars. Some had brought their lovers as maids, some fell in love there, and others imagined the angels to be their lovers. From time to time deserters from the war found their way to the nunnery, and we made sure they had a very, very good time before sending them on their way.

         Why are you looking at me like that? Because they didn’t teach you that in church? Much help that has been to you.

         One time, we got caught. An archbishop came without warning and caught us sleeping, with the sun at mid-sky. Three soldiers were still half-naked in the garden, trying to sober up before taking the way home. The archbishop threatened to burn us all. I happened to be Mother Superior at that time—my dowry was large, you see—and so he announced loudly I would end up at the river with boulders sewn in my stomach. What a pity he met with an accident, while returning to the capital. They still haven’t found his bones, even today.

         You’re looking at me again. As if you would’ve done any different.

         Two years after that, my prince came to my door. I saw Death crown his head from afar like a black halo, like the one you have. I didn’t want him. I wanted him. He smelled of the outside world, all smoke and soil. I told him to stay the night. It was dangerous out there—hadn’t he heard of the poor Archbishop who got lost on his way back, and who no one ever found?

         He stayed three nights, and not once did we step out of my room. I would have kept him inside me if I could have, buried him between my legs. When he finally left, we wrote to each other every day. We hid the letters inside books, inside empty wine bottles, under the messengers’ saddles. Three months later he came back, and then came back again, and again. He begged me to return with him—he would repay my dowry to the bishop. I begged him to abandon the war—it had gone on and on for thirty years, starting before we were ever born, and it wouldn’t finish even by our grandchildren’s time.

         He answered that he was doing it for me. If the devotees of the Queen of Crows reached the nunnery, he said, they would leave none of us alive. They would have their way with us, and then they would sacrifice us all in her sacred crossroads, where at night her blackbirds roam, where they would make beehives out of our skulls.

         Won’t you listen to that nonsense.

         On the last night that I saw him alive and well, we picked a fight worse than usual, and he left angry. He told me he would marry a foreign lady, to give him children, and I told him I would forget him before the wedding bells faded. We were lying, both of us. I had some very angry talks with God in those days. Not that I ever believed in God, but the two of us would occasionally have a glass of wine together late at night, when all was quiet. I must have angered Him with my nagging because several months after, they carried my prince to my threshold, dying.

         Just like you are dying now.

         I remember the sight: the cart, the attendants carrying the flag at half-staff. His father the King was heading the march, and he stood before me, his head bare, without a crown or a helm. He knelt before me and told me his son had been wounded, and he was dying. The only thing he had asked for, before the long fever carried him to sleep, was to leave his last breath in our nunnery, and to be buried in our garden.

         I asked how he was wounded. They fell over themselves trying to tell me. He was, they said, the first to reach the enemy’s palace, draped as it was with the banner of the Queen of Crows. And once inside, he had drawn his sword and fought the foreign king hand-to-hand. The steps, they told me breathlessly, were painted scarlet with their blood. And in the end he had killed the enemy King, broken his wooden crown adorned with crow feathers, but not before receiving the wound that had now carried him to my door white like a prayer sheet long forgotten in the sun.

         I asked them to bring him inside the temple and place him before the Holy of Holies. They left the foreign King’s sword lying beside him. You know, if you spread the right balm on the blade that hurt you, the wound is immediately healed.

         How is it my business if in your time it doesn’t happen like that anymore? In my time it did. It’s not my fault you have forgotten half of what we taught you.

         Drink up.

         So, I spread the balm on the blade, yet nothing happened. His breath remained as shallow as a puddle in the summer. I looked at the wound again; what could I do better than the doctors?

         And so I started praying. I apologized to God. I swore to leave my nunnery, to go to another and live on bread and water, to sleep among the ashes. The prince didn’t recover even a hint of color. I told God that if he didn’t want me at all, such as I was, I would abandon nunneries completely. I would get married, have children, keep my mouth shut, perish in childbirth. I would do whatever it was he wanted us women to do, and I would die as he commanded, praising his name.

         My prince didn’t open his eyes even then. He breathed heavily, like you do now, and the candlelight on his skin was more alive than he was.

         I thought of taking the sword, covered as it was in useless balm, and finishing him off. I thought of falling on the sword myself. I thought of all the foolish things people consider when they want to avoid what they really need to do.

         And on the third night I put on my cape, took the foreign King’s sword, picked a few things from the garden, and left the nunnery.

         It wasn’t an easy journey. The ghost of the Archbishop I had murdered began following me halfway through the trip. You see, he couldn’t cross the nunnery’s walls, but now he had caught me outside, alone. His head was broken in a strange angle, and his hands were cold as ice as they tugged at my skirts. Thankfully he was scared of the holy symbols even in death, and my habit was enough to keep him at bay. I stopped hearing his curses long before I reached the crossroads.

         And when I was there alone, I placed the red carnations in a circle, I called upon the Queen of Crows, and I waited.

         She wasn’t what I expected our enemies’ Goddess to be. They depicted her as a Queen crowned in ebony feathers; as a warrior witch, a demon. I saw an old woman clad in a cape of feathers painted black, rough five-jointed fingers, two mongrels at her feet. Only her eyes were blacker than the void between the stars as she looked down at me.

         I fell on my knees and began weeping.

         She touched her unnatural hand upon my head and didn’t speak a single word. And when I stopped wailing like a baby, she named her price.

         I accepted it, kissed her hand, and she offered me a handful of bees and told me what to do, word for word.

         I took my horse and rode back into the night. The Archbishop cowered when faced with the angry buzzing of the bees flying like a wreath around my head. And when I reached the nunnery, the King saw them and turned white as death but didn’t ask where I had been. He let me get inside the temple, and I closed the door behind me.

         I let the bees fly over my prince’s head, and they spread around the church, as if they were gathering in their wings the light from our candles. And then suddenly they flew like an arrow and burrowed into his mouth, his ears, his nose. I knelt and waited, drowning my breath.

         Soon the buzzing was coming from inside him, louder than any mass that had ever sounded within these walls. I wanted to pray, but I didn’t know who I should address, and so I prayed to the two of us, the sainted promises we had exchanged before he left for the war.

         And after hours had gone by, honey overflowed from his lips.

         I reached a trembling finger, gathered a bit and brought it to my lips. They went numb; I became dazed. I saw myself, taking off the habit for the first time in the garden, smiling at him, inviting him. I saw his hand, older by a few years, unfolding my secret letters out of a green-glass bottle. I saw his mother’s coffin lowered into the ground through his eyes, blurred as they were with tears.

         And I lowered myself and kissed his mouth long, until there was no drop of honey left on his lips. So I would see what I needed to see.

         I saw him entering the enemy city. I saw him order his men, our men, to go forward. And I saw what they did to the men and women of this foreign place, these men fighting in our name. I saw it all, and the honey turned bitter on my lips; became poison. I saw him falter among his soldiers, as they slaughtered the guilty and the innocent alike, him ordering them to stop and them not obeying. And then I saw the disgust he had held back for years on end finally spread on his face, his black halo that the years had darkened become a noose around his neck. I saw him drop his sword and turn his horse around.

         A deserter.

         And I saw his father the King ordering him to stop, and when he did not obey, I saw his father draw his sword and bury it between his son’s ribs.

         The rest of the memories I saw through half-closed lids, honey burning on my lips. I saw the King weep all the way to my nunnery. I saw my walls come into full view beyond the forest. I saw my face leaning over his, white, drawn. And then nothing.

         I sat dazed by his side, holding his hand, making a choice, just like you now. And then I got up, stumbling, and walked out of the temple.

         The King was waiting for me outside, his sword hanging from his belt. We stared at each other long enough that my knees were trembling under my habit, but I knew I wouldn’t take a step away from the door. I saw him weigh everything in, the love of his son, my blood, the shame, the entire world, and I heard the scales break in two. He took the belt off, looked at me one last time, left his sword on the ground as if it carried the weight of the world, and then he turned his back on me and left without a word.

         And when the dark closed behind him I picked the sword up, entered the temple, and locked the door, and I spread the balm on my beloved’s wound and an equal amount across the King’s blade, the right blade this time, and kept praying to the Queen of the Crows.

         Of course it worked. I told you. It was another time.

         And when my beloved opened his eyes, and the fever went away, I took him by the hand and we slipped through the cellars, beyond the nunnery, into the valley, away from all our vows, away from the Gods, and away from everything we were supposed to be, until we found the crossroads again.

* * *

         “And when happened then?” the dead soldier asks.

         I leave the glass I was cleaning on the bar. For as long as my Magdalene was telling our story, he was staring at her slack-mouthed, and so the last drinks I had carried to their table were left untouched in front of them. Not that I myself had done any work while she spoke. No matter how many times I have heard this story, I always stay to listen to it once more. Even if I have to sing loudly in my head when I hear her speak about the half-naked soldiers she constantly entertained in her nunnery. Or about the bees that entered my eyes and harvested my memories. I still hear them buzzing in my dreams.

         The part about my father, who stabbed his sword through my chest, does not bother me anymore. I have forgiven him after all this time. I would have liked to be there at the end, with him, to tell him that I’m happy now and that I love him, but for years on end Magdalene and I travelled other paths, so far away that neither bird nor letter could reach him, and when we returned they had already turned him into a statue in the city square, motionless and illuminated by gas lamps.

         From time to time, I take my cigarettes and a bottle and I sit on his pedestal, hoping that he sees me from someplace else and knows that I understand him now.

         Nowadays, of course, the square is not a nice place to visit. We are at war again, and the city is always grey, and in any case we are very busy at the bar with all these lads who, when the mortar shells explode on their head, remember at the last moment that they should have done everything differently and they end up here, at the crossroads. Magdalene tells me not to mumble because it took me a decade to change my own mind, and when I did it I didn’t even have the brains to get away without drawing all kinds of attention to myself, but she’s not the one making drinks non-stop when the clients swarm in.

         For the time being of course, we only have this young one here, so I pull up a chair and sit with them. I pick up Magdalene’s cigarettes; I can’t be bothered to look for my own. She gives me the look, but I smile at her and she softens immediately, takes my hand under the table.

         “So, what happened afterwards?” the soldier asks again.

         “Afterwards, as promised, we had a long life together and then we paid our price to the Queen of the Crows,” my sweetheart says, taking the drink I made for her. The fifth one today, but who’s counting.

         “And what price was that?” asks the young man.

         “To guard a crossroads as she did once, and offer our help when some supplicant calls upon us,” she says, looking at him. “Only, we decided not to ask anything of them in return. We have everything we need. If you want your life, it’s our gift.”

         I see him trying to wrap his mind around that. I push his drink towards him. He doesn’t take it yet. The time for a decision fast approaches. Somewhere far away, mortar shells still fly, the carnations flower at the crossroads, and the bees harvest the memories of the dead. And yet in here, the three of us around the table have stolen and are sharing a cigarette’s worth of time.

Copyright © 2020 Dimitra Nikolaidou

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Dimitra Nikolaidou is a Greek author. Having discovered the 36-hour day, she also researches RPGs and speculative fiction at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, acts as head editor at Archetypo Publications, and is the co-founder of Tales of the Wyrd, which organizes creative writing workshops and seminars. Her fiction has appeared in Metaphorosis, See the Elephant, Starship Sofa, and Gallery of Curiosities as well as in several published and upcoming anthologies (After the Happily Ever After, Retellings of the Inland Seas, and more). Her non-fiction work has been published in Cracked.com, Atlas Obscura, and Future Skies as well as in several Greek magazines and history anthologies. Rumors of her radicalizing fairies in her spare time have been greatly exaggerated.

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COVER ART

“Sea Shore,” by Anton Ninov

Anton Ninov is a freelance illustrator located in Bulgaria. He has been creating digital artwork since 2015. His work focuses on fantastical environments and scenery with playful colours and strange shapes. He draws his inspiration from his favourite video games, books, and the stunning nature of his location. View more of his artwork at ArtStation.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1076

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Compilation Copyright © 2020 Firkin Press

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