Issue #305 • Jun. 4, 2020

“The Widow,” by Emma Törzs

“Breath Of The Sahara,” by Inegbenoise O. Osagie

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THE WIDOW

by Emma Törzs

         Being the confession of Perrine Mauroy, as dictated to Pierre-Martin de la Martinière, in the final hour of his life and the first hour of her own. À Paris, chez l’Auteur, ruë de Gévre a l’Espèrance, l’année de notre seigneur, 1668.

         The truth is, Monsieur de la Martinière, I was hoping to see the skulls. Tiny ones burned nearly to charcoal and piled in La Voisin’s back garden, proof of all the poor babes they say she yanks daily from the swollen bellies of desperate women. Proof, too, of the magic she makes with the bones, turning ugly old women into glowing nymphs or making slow fingers fly with sudden skill across a loom.

         I’d heard of the skulls and I wanted evidence, because like all good country girls I thought constantly of witchcraft: would I ever see it, would I know it when I saw it, and most importantly, would I myself be tempted to damnation? As a child I often dreamed of hungry pursuit, joyful and mad; dreamed my own mouth grinning wide as I sank my teeth into something warm and soft and full of blood, and I always looked with yearning into the darkness of the forest. So damnation worried at my mind, for even as an innocent, I think I sensed a sort of beast in me, clawed and starving.

         But the day I went to La Voisin—crossing Paris in the carriage you’d loaned me, my purse sagging with the weight of your coin—I believed myself innocent still. I kept peeking through the heavy black curtains on the carriage window to watch people fling themselves from the horse’s hooves, shouting and swearing as they flattened their bodies against the walls of buildings so as not to be crushed beneath the wooden wheels; running from the danger of someone else’s money, as I myself had done many times before. But here was I now, not running, raised above them all. I was above the streets, and told myself I was above those women who went to La Voisin seeking love potions or a brew to kill an unborn child. I convinced myself I was seeking her for nobler reasons, for your reasons: the salvation of French medicine, and through it, the salvation of humanity.

         Even later, watching Antoine writhe in agony as his fingers melted together and hardened, his screams shrinking to bleats and his hair coming in coarse and white... even then, I felt innocent.

         But it is not to protest my innocence that I now leave this confession. Some of what I will relate, Monsieur, you will already know, for you were there. But it is not for you I speak. It is for those who will ask questions after you and I have gone. It is because I am, for the first time in my sorry life, proud.

* * *

         And so:

         The gossips were spilling with tales of the madman kept at the Hôtel de Montmor, and sure enough, it was there I found my husband. The Montmor home was huge and solid stone, grander than any I’d dared approach in my twenty-eight years, and I feared they’d take one look at the state of me and send me off. Days of searching the streets of Paris had left me stained with heavy mud all mixed with shit and piss, my best blue dress stained brown now nearly to my waist—yet soon as I said my husband’s name to the man at the gate, the heavy wooden door was thrown open and I was passed from butler to servant to Monsieur Montmor himself.

         He was in a warm room larger than any house I’d lived in, with many other fine-dressed gentlemen and one lady. They all turned their great curly-wigged heads towards me as I entered and pressed their noble perfumed handkerchiefs to their noble noses to protect them from my stink. My knees were weak with fear and my hands shaking, but nonetheless I managed a curtsy, and in answer I heard the lady laugh, high and clear, a pure expression of delight at the spectacle I made. The memory of my shame is enough to make my jaws snap.

         The Monsieur Montmor stood before me in his beautiful pink stockings and heeled shoes, the leather shining as if he’d never trod upon the streets I’d just quit, and as for the rest of him, I do not know. I had not the courage to lift my head any higher than his knees. He said to his servant, “The wife of Mauroy, you say? A sad-looking creature! What is her given name?”

         “Perrine, monsieur. Perrine Mauroy.”

         “Show her to his chambers,” Montmor said, and then to me, “Well, Madame Perrine, you shall soon see what an improvement we have made upon your wretched husband!”

         Then he turned, his interest already transferred back to his salon, and I was once again led through a series of chilly hallways and up a flight of stone steps, and finally left at the door of a room hot with the hearth of a well-kept fire. There I found my husband lounging on a down bed, looking pale but quite contented. He was attended by a well-dressed man with close grey hair—his own—and large intelligent eyes, which he turned towards me just as my husband did the same.

         “Perrine!” cried Antoine and leaped from his bed, his arms outstretched. I couldn’t help but flinch from him, for it was the full of the moon and my husband was as famous for his insanity as I was for the bruises his fists left upon my face—but to my shock he tenderly took me in his arms, saying, “Oh, you will not believe what has occurred!”

         By this time I was exhausted. We lived in a village on the outskirts of the city and I’d been walking for days, terrified that Antoine had succumbed finally to one of his fits and set himself afire or drank himself to death. For as brutal a husband he was, he was better than no husband at all, especially for the woman I was then. You will no doubt remember my nature, Monsieur de la Martinière, for you took full advantage of it. I was pitiable and weak.

         So I asked no questions of my own; only sat by the fire and tried to grasp the tale Antoine recounted. He was often interrupted in his story by the grey-haired man, who was one Monsieur Denis. The monsieur was a doctor—a doctor who, I was to understand, had of late opened my husband’s veins and bled him freely, several cupfuls at least. Then this doctor had replaced all of Antoine’s lost human blood with the blood of a living calf.

         “Calf’s blood?” I repeated. “In Antoine’s veins?”

         “For its mildness,” said Monsieur Denis. “To counteract the heat in your husband’s own blood.”

         Upon hearing this, I crossed myself. How funny now, to think of that gesture!

         “I pissed pure black, Perrine, for days,” said Antoine, with some satisfaction, “and bled greatly from the nose, and had energy for nothing but prayer. Now, however, I feel quite sound!”

         “Do you not find him much improved?” Monsieur Denis beamed, and I admitted I did. I could not pretend to understand the science behind the experiment, and I shuddered at the thought of cow’s blood pulsing in my husband’s body, but here was Antoine suddenly without a hint of violence or of madness, his words and glance and air all perfectly calm.

         “The count of Montmor found him wandering the streets quite naked and screaming, and—knowing I was seeking a madman for my experiments—brought him to me directly,” Denis said. “And what success! A blow against English science indeed. He is still under my observation, and will be for the next few days—I mean to bleed him again tonight, a porringer or two—so you will stay here with him.”

         I did, gladly, scarce believing our luck to stay in such a noble home. For his part Antoine took the attention as his due: the warmth, the plentiful food, the mattress and blankets, the wine. He’d had a taste of such a life before, but it was all new to me, and I savored every moment, dreading the return to our village and to our natural circumstances. A one-room house, filthy, cold, and miserable. We were lucky if we ate meat once in a week—here we had it every day.

         “It will be different now, Perrine,” I told myself. “Antoine is cured, he will find work and be occupied, he will drink less, he will quit his beatings. Perhaps you could be happy.” Fool I was, I even managed to convince myself he might apply again to the Marquise de Sévigné and resume his old position at her house, and perhaps this warm new life of mine would be not an irregularity but the beginning of a new and glorious standard. How I dreamed!

         I hear you are yourself of low birth, Monsieur de la Martinière, and so may understand what it’s like to experience, for the first time, not even luxury but safety. You might understand how just the taste of it fills you up as if for the first time and you can never again be content with the same old hungry fear. So mayhap, Monsieur, you have been right all along, though not quite in the way you suppose. Doctor Denis did indeed create a monster, but it was not Antoine Mauroy—and perhaps you, even more than Denis, are to blame.

         Or, as the case may be, to thank, from the depths of what was once my soul.

* * *

         Always, as a girl, I felt close to animals. I longed for kinship with the predators but reluctantly felt more likeness to those we ate: the sweet-eyed cows, the lambs with their soft coats and shaking legs, the skinny goats that butted their heads against the posts of their pens as if they thought they had a chance of winning freedom. I was not soft-hearted like my cousin Marie, who wept when a dog she liked particularly was eaten during a hard winter, for it wasn’t affection I felt, only affinity.

         Once, as a child, I was in the city with my mother and young brothers, and I overhead a nobleman remark loudly to his lady companion that children such as ourselves ought to be kept at pasture, behind fences, with other livestock; and she laughingly agreed. When I grew older, I used to walk to Paris for executions, and instead of watching heads roll or necks break, I watched the nobility. I stared at them staring, the way they pulled their lips back from their teeth as the guillotine fell and how their eyes showed whites when they became excited, and I thought to myself that really we are all animals, are we not? What is the difference, save that some of us are kept in mud and squalor and some of us run free?

         You may remember, Monsieur de la Martinière, that when you first approached me, I was in the icy road before my house, trying to catch a cat. I wanted to bring it in to kill a rat that had been plaguing my sleep. Right before you called out to me, I was thinking how well-arranged it is that some animals are born to chase other animals, and how perfectly suited is a cat’s mind for the fun of batting at small scurrying things, and how suited are their sharp delicate teeth for tearing into the bellies of mice.

         I was thus distracted and did not see your carriage until you spoke my name aloud from its window. You said it once, and then again, very slowly. “Are you Madame Perrine Mauroy?”

         Finally I nodded yes, and you cried “Magnificent!” as you swung down from the carriage with great agility and enthusiasm. Perhaps you did not notice that I stepped in fright away from you, for I was much unnerved by your vigor and fine clothes. I did not understand what such a man could want with a creature such as I – but of course, it was not quite me you sought.

         “I come about your husband,” you said. “May we retire inside? It’s cold as Siberia out here.”

         I relate our ensuing conversation here in full so there can be no mistaking what you asked me. No mistaking what you put in motion.

         In the house, I noticed you stare at the sooty fireplace until I put on our last log and kindled the embers for you. Then you sat down smiling on my husband’s wooden chair and crossed your well-shod feet at the ankles as if you’d never been more comfortable. I offered you hot wine and watched you look around our home at the meager furniture, the bed that was little more than rope and a moth-eaten blanket, the frozen-over chamber pot.

         “Well,” you said, as if comforting me, “I have seen worse. In Arabia I slept the night in a bed so crawling with beetles that every movement produced a crunch like breaking bones. A poorer sleep I think I’ve never had.”

         I managed to summon my manners. “I am sorry to hear it, Monsieur...?”

         “De la Martinière.” You were peering at my face with open curiosity, and I turned away, ashamed. I could imagine what you saw. One of my cheeks was pulsing hot and swollen from where Antoine had knocked me to the ground the night before, and my lip was split. The neighbors had heard my cries and sent their two sons to tie him to the bed for me, but he’d gotten loose in the early hours and was now God-knew-where.

         “I see your husband is not so cured, after all,” you said, and I felt a bristle of anger at the satisfaction in your tone.

         “For a time he was,” I said. “But quickly the madness returned.”

         “It must be hard, Perrine, to live with such a man.” This you said in very kind tones.

         “It is, monsieur.”

         “I am told he was not always like this,” you said. “Was he not once the valet to the Marquise de Sévigné?”

         “He was, monsieur. But that was before I knew him.”

         “How then did you two come to marry?” Though you were all interest and compassion, I could tell you knew the answer already. Nevertheless, I did not feel I had a choice, and I admitted it had been arranged by our families.

         “I was told he was only ill,” I said. “I did not realize the extent of his madness until after the wedding.”

         “I have heard tell he went mad for love,” you said, still with that air of gentle understanding. “Though not love for you. He pinned his hopes of fortune on the dream of marrying a certain noblewoman, did he not? And when she married another, he took to the streets screaming and began setting fires to the homes of nobility, threatening murder upon every head he came across.”

         “Yes, monsieur,” I said. I was speaking as calmly as I could.

         “Perhaps he is so cruel to you because you are a daily reminder of what he will never have.”

         Do your lips recall shaping these words? Such craft and meanness, disguised with pity.

         “Perhaps,” I said. In truth I believed Antoine had been cruel long before he was mad. There were, after all, many gentle madmen.

         You nodded in apparent sympathy. “You must often dream of what your life might be like married to another.”

         It was true that once I had. I’d wasted untold time imagining a different husband, a different life with someone who would take care of me. But with the years my reveries had changed. Now, when he hit me, I imagined I could take care of myself. With every blow I envisioned myself strong: thick-armed, sharp-toothed, with claws that could crush the words from Antoine’s throat, feet that could stomp his ribs until they punctured his chest, and legs that could run me away from him forever.

         But I said, “Sometimes, monsieur. We all have our little fantasies, do we not?”

         Your smile struck me. You agreed that we did. And then you asked, finally, “Would you like to know now why I am here?”

         You did not wait for me to answer but reached into your waistcoat and took out a velvet bag that clanked when you dropped it on the table.

         Grandly, you said: “You look upon 1800 écus. All yours, Perrine, if you agree to aid me in my quest. I come on a mission of salvation—to save French medicine from descending into violence and cannibalism, and to save the immortal souls of countless men like your husband, men who might accept the blood of animals into their bodies and unwittingly become half-beast themselves and taint themselves for heaven, forever.”

         You had not yet taken your hand from the bag of coins, and it was there my eyes were fixed. I heard you say something of mummies and the application of their flesh for maladies, and then you asked if I had taken mummy flesh myself, perhaps powdered for an earache or poultice for vertigo.

         I nodded that I had, if only to hurry your speech.

         “Perhaps you, like I, have pictured the ancient sources of this most excellent curative—pictured the wizened, blackened forms taken with much ceremony from their tombs, their immense power unwrapped and portioned off with care. Can you see it, Perrine? As could I—until at fourteen I traveled with the pirates to Egypt and found myself in a rank, fetid room, surrounded by criminals, watching as a man extracted the brain and organs of a freshly slaughtered body, then filled the ghastly cavity with a viscous black liquid that oozed and stank like sin itself. This sludge-filled corpse was then left to dry for several days, then once desiccated it was wrapped in bandages, and then—? Shipped off to the Continent, where it was to fetch a pretty price as Mummy Flesh and be ingested by hundreds of ailing, hopeful people, perhaps you yourself amongst them. Does this not make you recoil?”

         It did. My stomach churned, but I refocused on the glimmer of the 1800 écus and was calmed.

         “So you see,” you continued, “I alone understand the darkness that lies beneath these ‘experiments’ with transfusion. First comes transfusion with animal blood, making beasts of men. Then, it will inevitably follow, transfusion with human blood. And if the populace believes the placidity of a cow can calm madness, imagine what the blood of a priest could do, or a virgin? Like the demand for mummies, the demand for blood will be insatiable. Every day men will kill men for the red gold that flows in all of us. Imagine blood sold at market alongside cuts of beef, or the Rue du Massacre renamed not for its animal slaughterhouse but for the striking-down of men that will be as commonplace as slicing lamb. We will all be unholy cannibals and God will weep in heaven. You understand, Perrine, that sometimes great sacrifices must be made to—”

         You kept talking, Monsieur de la Martinière, but I admit it was truly an unnecessary effort. I listened, and understood your complaints, but the weight of that velvet bag in my hand had already half-convinced me. And when finally you came around to explanation of your plan, you seemed to think I might balk or skitter at the thought of killing Antoine; but I did not. Truth be told, your proposal of his death felt like yet another heavy jangling purse of wealth cast upon my table.

         So I did as you asked, and took your coach to the witch La Voisin, and purchased the poison with your coin, and waited.

* * *

         At first, Antoine’s sickness was indistinguishable from his madness. He shat everywhere, screamed curses, and lunged for me if I came too close, and I feared the powder I sifted daily in his morning wine would not work after all. But within a scant few days he had grown wan and weak, and when he passed his fist at my face, it landed with scarcely a sound, his hand like cold dough, his lips already blueing. I admit it was intoxicating to see him so incapable, and day by day my confidence grew. When he began to thrash and moan, foaming at the mouth, scarcely able to bring himself up out of bed, I did as you told me, Monsieur de la Martinière, and I went for Doctor Denis.

         He came, as you knew he would, and as soon as he arrived at the house, I saw his uncertainty. The lamb you had provided was tied up to a fencepost in front of the house, nosing at a patch of dirty snow, and Denis hesitated when he saw it, glancing at me, his clever eyes taking in my bruise-swollen face, my filthy dress, my matted hair; the poor and cringing whole of me. I could not afford a lamb, and he knew it.

         “Just inside, Doctor,” I said urgently, not letting him think too hard. “Please, hurry, I fear he’s getting worse!”

         Denis looked again at the lamb, but I was close and pressing, guiding him forward, a fervent shepherd, and he moved reluctantly before me, through the doorway.

         In the house, Antoine was wailing and shaking, his mouth foamy with vomit, and when he saw the newcomer he let out a howl and thrashed in his bindings. The neighbors had again helped me secure him to the bed by his limbs, and so he could not move much, save for his head, which he whipped around as if possessed. Instantly Denis forgot the lamb in favor of the patient, hurrying to the bedside to examine him.

         “Pulse slow,” Denis murmured to himself. “Skin cold and clammy to the touch, burning head.”

         “You must begin the procedure immediately,” I said, just as you’d told me to. “We have no hours left to spend. There is the lamb, and here on the table is anything you need. Begin at once!”

         Denis looked distractedly behind him at the table, then again with more attention. He stood from Antoine’s side and bent over the instruments you’d laid out not three hours earlier, then put his head up sharply. “Madame, these are surgical tools. Tubes, bloodletting bowls—even a catlin knife. Where did you come by these?”

         “They are on a loan,” I said, “but never mind. They do no good if you will not put them to use!”

         “Madame,” said Denis, in very firm tones, “your husband is too hot by half, his passions too excited. I can see he has been drinking, taking tobacco. No Madame, I am sorry, but I cannot perform the surgery.”

         He was moving towards the door now, and I, terrified it might all be for nothing, threw myself upon his feet and pressed my face into the silk of his stockings, my bruised cheek against his hard shin. “Please,” I begged him, “please, have mercy on me. Look what he has done to me, look how he has beaten me.” I turned my face to him and tilted towards the window’s light so he could see the full, fat swell of mottled purples and reds that painted me from brow to chin. I saw him soften, slightly. “After you first transfused him he was docile, Doctor, as sweet a husband as a woman could hope for, kind and hardworking like I’ve never seen him. So how could you, my only hope, now render me hopeless?”

         Antoine let out a garbled, piteous shout, and I began to weep.

         You knew your enemy well, Monsieur de la Martinière. Denis could not deny us.

         Soon enough, my husband’s veins were once again exposed, his thick blood welling and dripping into the letting bowls beneath his arms, and the lamb was struggling and baaing in its restraints as Denis sliced it open. I sat at Antoine’s head, smoothing his sweating brow and giving him sips of wine.

         Wine into which I had mixed not only the rest of the poison but half the other powder, too. The powder I had paid for with your unwitting gold, Monsieur de la Martinière, which La Voisin had delighted in extracting from you for my benefit.

         “If any trial should arise, he means to frame you,” La Voisin had said, quite casually, as she skimmed the letter I had carried for you, then handed it back to me. I was in her sitting room, perched on the edge of a velvet chair as she reclined on a sofa. She was dressed as a midwife, capped and cloaked, but even beneath her dress her bosom was formidable, and below her hood her eyes were bright. There were no baby skulls in sight, but there was a heavy smell about the rooms, herbaceous and bitter and bubbling, and I kept hearing a high mewling cry wafting from somewhere in the bowels of the house. A sullen-faced girl who looked very like La Voisin kept stomping in and out as we spoke, and once she went to the door and paid a man for a bucketful of live toads. Anything I touched, my fingers came away streaked: with dust, with soot, with slime.

         “He asks me to put your name on all our correspondence, so it can be easily traced,” La Voisin said, and waved the letter I could not read. “Already you are a very sorry-looking thing. If your plans go awry, he will make you sorrier. How do you like that?”

         I did not know what I was expected to say, so I told the truth. “I like it not at all.”

         “Well, there is no reason not to get something for yourself, in the bargain,” La Voisin said, reaching for the well of ink and quill that rested on a low side table. “I will write back and charge him double, and with the rest of the coin you may choose something of your own. A brew to keep a man’s attention, perhaps? Or a charm of fortune, to bring money in?”

         I could not believe my ears, nor my luck. I said, “Why?”

         “Why not?” she returned. “I will take any chance to trick a man.” Her laughter was deep and unfeigned. “And of course it is to me the extra coin will come. Two pleasures in one deed. Now, what will you have?”

         It was remarkable, Monsieur de la Martinière, how quickly I knew my answer. It was if I had been preparing for that moment, though no one in my life had ever put before me such an offer; nor even any offer at all. I knew exactly what spell I wanted. La Voisin claimed her witchcraft was more than capable of a feat such as the one I asked, but I could not quite believe it possible that a potion could effect such a blood-borne transformation as the one I sought. However, circumstances had provided me both the perfect subject and perfect situation on which to test the magic.

         Antoine drank down both my potion and your poison just as the lamb’s blood began flowing through the metal tube Denis had inserted into his arm. The effects were subtle but nearly instantaneous—if you were looking for them. The whites of his eyes, already yellowed, grew yellower still, and his pupils began to thin and flatten. The hair on his unshaven jaw began fading from brown to grey, and the coarse curl of it grew tighter, as did the hair on his head, the roots of which were going white. One of his hands was gripped in both of mine so I could feel his fingers slowly start to fuse, and harden, and when I looked I saw his nails were turning black and spreading, taking over the flesh.

         Denis was slow to see, focused as he was on the transfusion of the blood, and in truth did not notice until Antoine’s low mutterings began to take on a peculiar, throaty whine, too high to be natural. Then Denis paused, and looked closer at the arm into which the lamb’s blood ran. It was sprouting white wool.

         “What in the name of Heaven...?” Denis said, and squinted, confused.

         At that moment, Antoine began to seize. His body turned rigid and his eyes rolled back in his head, and his arms shook with such force that the tube was knocked away, and blood from both man and lamb spilled onto the floor, where it pooled in a glistening mirror at our feet. Denis leaped into action, attending to I know not what, for I was focused on Antoine’s face, his nose that had started to flatten, his nostrils dark and round and heaving as he struggled for breath.

         I was staring into his strange slitted eyes as he took his last air and died.

         As you had predicted, Denis wanted to take his corpse right then for an examination, to prove immediately that transfusion had not been the case of death, but I screamed so horribly that finally he relented, exhausted, and he left with a promise of coming to collect the body the next morning. I buried Antoine in all haste with the coin you’d given me for just this purpose, and by the time the last shovelful of dirt had been dropped on his quick-dug grave, roughly eight hours since he’d taken the lamb’s blood, his body resembled no human man. La Voisin’s magic had kept working even after the poison had halted his life.

         When it was over I went back inside my house, cleaned the blood from the floor as best I could, hid your medical instruments in a sack of flour, and went to sleep.

         The next day you came to collect the instruments, but you seemed unbothered when I told you that Denis had taken them with him, to examine for flaws. You were too jubilant to mind the loss of a knife or two.

         “Well done, Madame!” This uttered with your usual grandiosity. “It is already all the talk, how transfusion has claimed its first victim, and I have it from a friend that when Denis heard you’d buried Antoine, he let out a shout of rage to rival that of Alala herself. It will not be long ‘til he is tried for murder, and through him, transfusion itself, and this dark Satanic chapter in medicine will be forever behind us. Into the light go we, Perrine!”

         You were so certain your plan had worked, and your enthusiasm was convincing. I fingered the twist of powder in my skirt pocket and considered that perhaps this all would not come to using it. Perhaps I could build my life reputably, as a widow, and find some freedom there; perhaps I would not after all resort to the measures I had set up for myself.

         But maybe, even if all you’d set in motion had run smooth as a greased wheel, I would still have made this choice. All my life I had been dreaming of the forest, and the open star-clouded sky, and how fast I’d move beneath it. Not running in fear, away, but towards.

* * *

         And so, Monsieur de la Martinière, here we are.

         All night long I have been on foot, evading the men sent by the chief of police, men who wish to lock me in the Grand Châtelet forever for the crime you paid me to commit. They would put me behind stinking walls and never let me see the sky again. I have paused only once, in an ill-reputed tavern, to sit by the fire and warm the vial of blood I purchased from a hunter of pelts fresh this morning. It was thick and red and proud, the blood of a predator, and in the alley I coaxed it into my own veins with the knife and tubes you gave me.

         You can no doubt tell from my appearance, and from the easiness with which I gripped your throat and slashed your face with my claws, that I have been taking La Voisin’s powder; though far more slowly than did my husband, who swallowed it all in a draught. I wanted to retain my power of human speech so that I could come here and relate all I have recently told. You may hear by the slurring of my words that my teeth grow sharper and speaking becomes more and more difficult. I can feel my throat changing, my voice lowering to what might be called a growl. Finish writing, then, and read it back to me.

         Now sign your name, and mine. Do not weep, Monsieur. Are you not certain of a welcome from your God, for all you’ve done in His name? Yes, put that down, too, for I want it known that even now I think of God, and I wonder what will happen to my own soul when I die. If wolves do not go to Heaven, neither can they enter Hell, so perhaps I will run in an eternal forest.

         As for you, your servants will find you here tomorrow ripped open like a butchered cow, all your precious blood released—but, take comfort, still pure. Perhaps a maid will claim she saw a wolf leap from your window. Perhaps a butler will swear he heard a howl pierce the night. Perhaps this confession will be read and disbelieved; or perhaps it will be judged credible, and spark a panic in the city. I do not care. I am not for the city any longer. It is the full of the moon, and the sky calls to me.

Copyright © 2020 Emma Törzs

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Emma Törzs is a writer, teacher, and chronic waitress based in Minneapolis. Her short fiction has been published in journals such as Uncanny, Lightspeed, Ploughshares, and the Missouri Review and honored with a 2020 NEA fellowship, a 2019 World Fantasy Award, and a 2015 O. Henry Prize. She’s grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts, the Loft Literary Center, the Jerome Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the MRAC, the MSAB, and Norwescon for financial support over the years. She is a graduate of the University of Montana's MFA program and an enthusiastic member of the Clarion West class of 2017.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

BREATH OF THE SAHARA

by Inegbenoise O. Osagie

         Today was Sabbath, but my brother had to take the mare on some excuse that he needed to run to the mines before heading for the temple. This was enough reason for me to miss worship with no compunction. The temple was at the heart of our large village; after a horseless walk in the biting cold, I’d be too weary to mumble a prayer. But missing worship by myself, staying alone in my cabin, my ears would ring until I’d find myself rambling round the room trying to shut one side of my heart to the other.

         Even if all the villagers congregated at the temple, there was one person who would guiltlessly remain tethered to her bed—Esohe Okhah. If one needed a tangible rationale to miss the temple, other than the weightless indisposition to stand for a lifetime in a vast rotunda, Esohe could coin out a hundred. Her family’s cabin was only a few walks away. Whiling away the time with her would make the hours whirl out faster.

         Outside, the villagers all headed north, families striding together or trotting on horses, some with eyes yet bordered by sleep vestiges. It was still early dawn, the kind with the cleanest air, before the poised harmattan dusts would begin swirling. I meandered between horses, half-hoping no good-natured faithful would offer to transport me. I dodged faces, focused on the flanks of horses.

         Close to the Okhahs’, I saw Nata, Esohe’s father, riding his old mule. I quickly dropped my eyes. If I looked straight up, I was sure to find his eyes piercing me—the girl who was luring his daughter away from the divine tenets. (If I too had a father, he would have thought same of Esohe.) Yet, I was relieved knowing I wouldn’t be encountering him at the house and enduring the monologue of how errant today’s youngsters had become.

         Esohe was a morning sleeper who had seen the first white clouds fewer times than a cock had crouched to pee. I whistled at her window, loud enough to eclipse the shrill of the larks and penetrate the cedary window. Footsteps loomed from the other side of the cabin. She emerged, holding a chewing stick and cup, dressed in her cottony cloak.

         “I thought you said you’d be going to the temple,” she said.

         “Mudia had to take the horse.”

         Seeing Esohe dressed on a Sabbath morning was rare. But I did not want to make a fuss of it, especially since she was already acting like it was a habit.

         “You’re going to worship?”

         “It’s been a long time,” she said.

         “We’ll ride together then.”

         “You can ride her alone.” She gestured at her mare in the shack, whose neck was stretched up toward the teasing leaves of a crooked coconut tree. “I’ll go on foot.”

         “Foot?”

         “You’ll be faster riding alone.” She laced and unlaced her fingers. “It’s already late.”

         She started to say something but stopped. She was fumbling for words; it was not hard to see.

         “You dressed up to deceive your father,” I said. “You have no intentions of going to the temple.”

         The contrived cheer from her face waned out. She knew I could perceive that something was off. We’d done things together for eons.

         “I’ll tell you the truth,” she said. “I’ve made plans to visit the sanctum today. Now is the best time, it’s first Sabbath, the sanctum will be empty.”

         Visit. That was our codeword, but we visited only at nights.

         Before she said it, I had sensed it. Lately, she had been rambling about the sanctum of the Order of Zephyrs; would poke it in the face of an unrelated discussion. I had been waiting for her to build the courage to voice it, only I never expected she’d schedule a visit to the sanctum on a Sabbath. But thinking about it now, no other day than today could be better.

         “What if we have the same intentions?” I leaned against the hardwood wall of the cabin.

         “I’m going to the sanctum to seek more knowledge of the pantheons. You’re least interested in that.” She began walking toward her horse’s shack. “We could ride together. You’ll dismount at the temple.” She untethered the mare.

         I was tempted to burst out, shout at her, hit her on the head and remind her of how she’d be useless without me. Esohe was a deft thief, but without me, she wouldn’t last a heartbeat before being seized by one of the sentries. “I know the inner sanctum of the Zepyrs is adorned with gold. If you dare to steal alone, I guarantee you’ll be seated in the prisons by dusk.”

         “I have no intentions of looting!” She was frowning at me. “I never knew the sanctum has gold.”

         I decided to return home. I rose without sparing her a look.

         After I’d walked a short distance, her voice sprang forth behind me. “Alright, Obehi, please come back, we go together.”

         I was still chafed that she could think of venturing without me, and I made sure she saw it on my face.

         “You’ve thought about this?” I asked. “What’s your plan? How do we get past the lock?”

         She reached into her boot and slipped out a roped key. “I’m a thief.” She smiled. “We enter, grab, and dash out.”

         The Order of Zephyrs were our link to the gods. They were the closest to the gods. Stealing from them might have divine consequences.

         Esohe must have sensed my thoughts, because she said, “The Order do not care a tad about gold.”

         She was the most avid and informed pantheon scholar I knew of; spent most of the night fixed on her papers. If she affirmed that the Order couldn’t care less about gold, robbing them was a reasonable risk. A handful of such pure nuggets could make a person rich enough to say no to an extra penny for the next ten years.

* * *

         The streets were almost empty, with a few youngsters loitering and some senile faithfuls slowly riding their old horses to the temple. I imagined some of these faithfuls grimacing at us. Esohe didn’t have the best reputation in the village. “Money thief,” some persons have named her, and of course, some of the reputation must be rubbing off on me, but having a marred reputation was better than being a penniless saint hounded by the tax collectors.

         I’d known Esohe since before we could walk, from those evenings when children convened in circles at the moonlit square to listen to folktales. She was a story lover, especially those stories related to the pantheons, the Order of Zephyrs, or pilgrimages to the Sahara, but she was also a known irritating pedant; even as a child, she intruded in the storytelling to uncourteously correct any factual flaw in the tale. She had grown to be a savant in matters of the pantheons—which might have made her overfamiliar enough with the gods to breed a little impiety—and would have been a great story weaver, but no parent would allow their child sit near a notoriety like her.

         We slowed to a walk when riding past the temple to avoid causing a distraction (doing that would be giving the guards a reason to stop us and ask questions), and we heard the faint mumblings of the faithful villagers. The early sun spilled over the dome of the enormous temple, whose spire glistened softly.

         We trotted into the third quarter of the village, so empty and quiet it hummed; clean streets and green air, perfect alleys between uniformly separated buildings: the relics store, cabins inhabited by the households of the sanctum keepers, temple marshals, holy faithfuls who had never missed a prayer in their lifetime. We trotted past the village court, hedged by towering squirrel-nested trees rustling in the gentle breeze. The air became serener as we approached the sanctum, its dome gleaming like varnished porcelain. As we rode nearer, my chest tightened, and I willfully shoved away the fear, but I kept my ears open for the slightest uncharacteristic noise. Esohe, as always, continued riding resolutely, and I comforted myself with some of her boldness.

         We stopped, tethered the mare to a nearby palm tree, and scanned around us. When certain no eyes were on us, we circled the sanctum to arrive at its entrance. Esohe fetched the key from her boot and slotted it into the lock, pushed the door open to an unending line of downward-sloping stairs. Any attempt to peer to its end and I might topple over. We climbed down side by side, the air growing damper and dimmer with every step, my legs growing wearier. Faint echoes of our steps began to reverberate from the round walls.

         Hung on the walls were stingy lanterns that shed their light on a small sphere, barely illuminating the etched glyphs on the wall. After the stairs was an underlit narrow passageway, with sidewalls lined with alcoves that contained reliquaries. Stealing relics would be unwise, as an attempt to sell them could raise suspicion, and they weren’t even gold. The gold adornments, I supposed, were in the innermost sanctum. I remained expectant as we journeyed the passageway. We might be a hundred feet below the surface.

         “Where is the gold?” Esohe asked when we were out of the passageway into a less sweaty space. In the encompassing quiet, I heard faint steps shuffling from behind. I froze. The steps didn’t continue, but it wasn’t a trick of the ears. I waited for a voice, closed my eyes, tried to breathe, waited for the next steps. The quiet lingered and the steps didn’t come. I turned to look.

         It was no keeper, no sentry, not anyone I would have guessed in a thousand trials. Standing there was a Zephyr, shrunk like the hind legs of a sickly calf, floury skin clothed with silk, tiny bristly hair on its head. Today was the first Sabbath of the month; all the Zephyrs were supposed to be in the temple. I was engulfed with a different kind of fear. I bowed slightly and was not sure why; reverence or shame.

         With tilted head, the Zephyr looked at us giants, its petite eyes barely reaching our waists. Around the creature’s narrow neck, wrists, and ankles were rings of gold that managed to glitter in the dim. Esohe remained still, staring.

         When trouble comes, don’t give it a chair. The Zephyr probably had not gotten a good look at us; now was the time to dart out. I reached to touch Esohe’s stiff hands. She, too, was staring, entranced, with head tilted as the Zephyr’s.

         “Let’s leave,” I said.

         She remained stiff, not seeming ready to flee. I started to walk past but halted at her voice.

         “We came hoping to see the sacred relics,” she said to the Zephyr. “And to pray,” she added as an afterthought.

         Esohe might be daring enough, but I wasn’t getting hanged with her. “I’m leaving, and you should too.” I strode off, while she remained there.

         I paced back through the passageway, gathered my frock at my waist to hurry up the stairs, and when outside, I continued straight ahead, occasionally looking behind, hoping to see Esohe. The worship would be over soon and the villagers would start pouring out of the temple. I continued walking until hooves and footsteps became audible and I was amid a handful of villagers before I turned and headed for my cabin, still hoping to bump into Esohe.

         Esohe was a sage friend, I had never thought her otherwise, and though I had never deemed her wisdom infallible, I had also never thought it so lowly. Wisdom was also knowing which way to run when pursued by danger. I prayed she had recovered from her hesitation early enough to have hurried out before the keepers returned.

         I didn’t leave the cabin for the remainder of the day, didn’t even head to the drying lake to refill the pails. I lounged on the chair at my porch and studied the face of every passerby, if they bore news of any abominable trespass, the kind so treacherous like a young thief caught in the sanctum on a Sabbath. The haunting ill-defined face of the Zephyr couldn’t leave my mind. The Zephyr was supposed to have been in the temple. Zephyrs were wind lovers, even if the wind shrank them; breathed through their skin so that it became loosened enough that it turned floury. They only came to the surface and gratified their wind lust on first Sabbaths, at the temple. I stayed out on the porch till the orange sun became haloed by its lush shadows, hoping to see Esohe riding toward the cabin.

         Before it became too dark to see, Mudia, my brother, trotted home in coal-stained clothes, holding by the tail a dangling rabbit he had found shackled in its cage. Far behind him was Esohe astride her mare, slowly riding.

         Mudia, after tethering our horse at the yard, headed for the kitchen, howling that he was unbearably hungry and needed to grill the rabbit immediately.

         Esohe had the same mien she bore after every other visit.

         After she came inside the cabin, I said, “You could have landed us in trouble. Perhaps you have already.” I tried not to yell at her. “Where have you been?”

         “The only thing I landed us in is this.” She upturned her goatskin bag, and gold and silvery utensils, bowls, spoons, cups, fell on the floor with a clatter. “I dug more after you left. I never knew of such gold, we should have raided there long ago.”

         I quickly shoved them back into the bag, looking behind to check if Mudia had come into the room. “Where did you find these? How?”

         “I located the dining room. It happens our Zephyrs don’t eat with mere earthenware.”

         “The Zephyr will report you to the keepers.”

         She waved a hand. “Oh, fear not.” She cocked her head. “Aren’t you happy?”

         “I’m worried.”

         “Don’t worry. This is all on me.”

         “Yes, of course. I’m worried about you.”

         She chuckled. “That’s charming, but there’s nothing to worry about. The Zephyr won’t talk, nobody will notice, there’s still a lot in there.”

         “This has to be buried and never unearthed until it’s clear you’re in no danger.”

         She shrugged.

         I reminded myself of the day’s events, her folly, what could have happened, what could still happen. “It’s best we no more visit together,” I said. “I’ve never been this close to death.”

         “Aren’t you curious of what information I got from the Zephyr? We had a long talk.”

         “I’m not.”

         Esohe remained with us for dinner. I couldn’t eat much of the bushmeat. Mudia had rushed the grilling and the meat was too sinewy for my teeth. He and Esohe munched most of it, chewing noisily, and for a moment the usual friction between them seemed to have dissolved (my brother had never liked Esohe and was strongly against our friendship). I gulped the most of the palm wine. After the meal, Mudia staggered to the bed and quickly started snoring.

         Esohe requested I accompany her home.

         We walked alongside, while Esohe held her mare’s rope, leading her. It was already dark and Esohe had begun to ramble some things that made me conclude she was near drunk or sleepy or both. In this possibly drunken state, she was so intent on telling me of what information she learnt from the Zephyr, while my mind drifted to the loot at my cabin, imagining if it was possible for Mudia to awake and stagger to the high shelf where I had placed the bag. Merely seeing the bag could implicate him. Esohe had asked I keep it for the night; she could encounter her ever-suspicious father at home, who might try all means to see what was in the goatskin.

         “Where did you find the sanctum’s dining room?” I asked.

         “I’ll draw you a map tomorrow.”

         After a while, I said, “At least you got gold.”

         “I have no use of gold.”

         “Yes, just the money in it.”

         The streets were thick with flickering fireflies and a bit auburn from the few lambent torches tilted from the walls of stone cottages. Occasionally, we ambled past circles of children playing games that made them lace their ankles against each other’s.

         “Give my share to Mudia.”

         I stopped walking. “You said?”

         “My share, give it to Mudia,” she said, “even if he doesn’t like me.”

         “You— Did you hear yourself? I mean you did all of the work.”

         “I don’t need it. I was honest when I said I never knew the sanctum had gold. If you’d been listening to me, you’d know I have bigger worries than gold.”

         Her words prickled and unsettled me. “What are you saying?”

         For a while, she said nothing, her face solemn. She started to talk but stopped, and for a moment I feared it had something to do with the loot.

         “I am like those of the Order.”

         If she had said this at another moment, I would have indulged her with a feigned laugh. But now, even though she was muttering gibberish, laughing might only worsen things. So I said, “Is that what the Zephyr told you? That you too are a Zephyr?”

         “I went to the sanctum hoping to find a panacea that retarded the shrinking or assuaged the wind lust. I’ve known I’m a Zephyr for some years back. But only recently have I noticed my flesh and bones shrink under the gentle yet irresistible air. The Zephyr at the sanctum said I’ve reached the growth peak. I can now only shrink, and I will only last few weeks if I don’t vacate the surface and come dwell in the deep sanctum with them.”

         The Zephyrs came from the Sahara, sent by the gods to be an intermediary with us humans. I still expected her to burst into a laugh at her facetious joke of being a Zephyr. “You were birthed here. You have lived amongst us your whole life.”

         “Yes, I’m not from the Sahara. Not all possibilities are contained in the parchments. The Zephyrs come from lands far beyond the Sahara, where they are deemed abnormal and cast away. They find us in search of safe harbor.”

         There was no glimmer of cheer on her face.

         “But you don’t have the gifts of the Zephyrs,” I said. “You can’t foresee the rain, the storm, a good planting season.”

         “Obehi, I know the wind. I feel her, her movements. That’s all required to foretell a good planting season.”

         We were almost at her cabin. “I don’t know what—”

         “You can’t voice this to anyone. Not even Mudia.”

         I nodded, still trying to put my head together, still half-expecting her to break into a chortle at how she caught me. “But you were born here.”

         She nodded and exhaled loudly. I stopped walking and watched her stride to her cabin, leading her mare, and then I saw her silhouette, atrophied, shriveled, clearly noticeable despite her cloak.

* * *

         That last image of her stayed with me the whole night. I rushed to her cabin the next morning. Nata, her father, was gratingly whetting his carpenter’s knife at the porch and, on seeing me, did not bother to keep straightened brows to hide his resentment.

         “I’ve come to return this.” I showed Esohe’s goatskin. I had buried the gold at my garden before dawn.

         When I entered Esohe’s room, she was still in her smock, pooled on her bed like liquid. Her breasts were almost flattened, no stomach bulge, brown skin already turning clayey. Everyone now would conclude her ill.

         “Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “I’m neither cold nor sick.” She grinned. “In a different circumstance, you’d be reverencing me. I don’t need the pity.”

         “If you really are a Zephyr,” I said, “you have to show yourself to the keepers. You need to move to the sanctum.”

         “I can’t. Nobody can know of my shrinking. What I need to do now is leave the house before my father sees me.” She rose and pulled on a tunic that was now twice her size.

         “Your father may know what to do.”

         “My father is the most devoted faithful. If he knows his daughter is of the Order, he’ll be disoriented. He will panic beyond reason, and in the end he’ll feel obligated to reveal me.”

         I sat on the edge of the bed. “What do you intend to do?”

         She stared at me for a while. “I do not know.”

         “I know of a place that may help, before you decide.”

         “Where?”

         “There is a forgotten dried-up well beyond the grazing field. It’s not nearly as deep or enclosed as the sanctum, but it can shut out some of the surface wind.”

         “A well?”

         “It’s a suggestion, that I hope makes you rethink and decide on the sanctum.”

         The gentle morning harmattan air had already started streaming through the wide-open windows, every draft a pernicious acid dissolving Esohe’s skin, seeping through all her pores to wear out her bones, the flesh of her insides. She was already unbelievably thin. I imagined each outer layer flaying off.

         I marched to the windows and shut them. “You’re going to the sanctum! I’m telling your father!”

         She pushed the windows open. “Please let me relish the air.”

         “You’re shredding yourself apart.”

         She sat on the bed beside me and leaned against a bedpost. “The sanctum is not a lasting solution. I’ll still fade out, albeit slower, until my last grain becomes one with the wind. Anyways, it is a comely place, houses a lot of writings that could occupy me till my eyes become too small. But have you ever thought of how the village would react on finding out the disreputable Esohe, infamous thief who was never caught in the act, is of the Order.”

         She glanced at me.

         “I guess right now you’re already thinking the Zephyrs are not that holy after all; it’s all a sham, the worship, the gods. Imagine if everyone harbors such thought. It would only be a little while before they start to worry about the meagre tithe they offer to cater for the Zephyrs. There are not very many places where Zephyrs are accepted. Revealing myself would be disastrous to my kind.”

         “You don’t know that. What is certain is at this rate, you won’t last a week.”

         She rose. “My father has ridden off. Why don’t we start heading for this well. Before the streets become full. I don’t want to be the spectacle of the village.”

         I could barely feel Esohe’s presence beside me while we walked abreast. I tried to avoid faces so no concerned person would enquire if I was helping her to the sickhouse. We traipsed across the area of the field far away from where villagers grazed their horses. After, we continued into the vast uninhabited thickety grove, blades of sere grasses scraping our feet.

         The well was not as deep as I had thought, wouldn’t shut out enough of the wind’s breath, and it was speckled with grass tufts on its wall and bottom. We stood at its edge, peering, and I supposed Esohe, too, was thinking of snakes. We wound a rope round a nearby stump and unfurled it into the well. And slowly we descended in.

         Stooped at the bottom, uprooting the tufts, Esohe said, “I hope I don’t die of a serpent’s venom before I fade into nothingness.”

         “I hope you decide to live in the sanctum before either of those happens.”

* * *

         Esohe didn’t ask, but I visited her in the well thrice a day, bringing food. She was shrinking at all sides, becoming misshapen, like a weathering termite mound, face receding into a lump, mouth tightening into a tiny pout, hair curling into distinct frills, and I could feel the powder of her skin, as though a mere stare could puff it off. Soon, she couldn’t eat much; could barely finish a scone or cup of gruel and began to prefer only boiled plums.

         “Are you just going to let yourself fade out?”

         “Same way old people let themselves grow old.”

         “If you show yourself now, you can still save some days of your life.”

         “At the expense of invalidating the Zephyrs and those that will come after.”

         “Your father stopped by my house. He’s worried.”

         She had begun to lose her voice. I was seated on the well’s bottom, just beside her, yet her words eluded me. The lemon oil I had sprinkled in the well could scarcely dwarf the underlying stench. But Esohe said she could barely smell a whiff; she was gradually losing that too.

         “My father will have to conclude me missing.”

         “It won’t be easy for him.”

         “I know.”

         After a while, she said, “The more I shrink, the more her voice becomes clearer; the wind, no longer a misty bluster.”

         “I wish I could hear too.”

         “Yes, I wish you could. It’s distinct, beautiful.” She smiled, a little stretch of her pout. “The wind’s thanking you. The departed Zephyrs, they wish there was a way to repay the favor.”

         “The air I breathe is enough. Tell the wind that.”

         “I think she heard you.”

         She asked me to take her to the surface to spend a moment; that even the Zephyrs in the sanctum came outside once a month, on the first Sabbath. She urged, but I tenaciously refused. The Zephyrs were almost a hundred feet below ground and she was scarcely over twenty, still savoring a good portion of the wind’s breath daily.

         “I’m sorry,” I said. “Here, I’m your keeper; it’s my duty to make you last as long as possible. A moment on the surface will cost you much. Very soon you’ll have all the air you can get.”

* * *

         Esohe was never much loved on the surface, so her absence was not felt. Only her father made noise, knocked on doors, questioned every villager walking on the street, beckoned neighbors to join him in a search, and I imagined them weaving out intricate excuses to decline. He continued stopping by my house. People claimed they saw the two of us walking together, he said. Yes, I affirmed, but I left her at the field.

         I was Esohe’s only friend; I had to join her father in the search. The two of us scoured the grazing field and beyond until we had to conclude she couldn’t be anywhere near; of course, there was no place to be beyond the field. But whenever he glanced at me, I saw suspicion spread over his face: what in the gods name have you led my daughter into?

         I began to carefully watch my path when going to visit Esohe in the well. I visited only once per day, with little food that would last her. I would nestle her to myself to shield her of the scarce yet poisonous air and tell her of the latest happenings in the village, not sure if she could hear. I told her Mudia was worried and sometimes joined her father and me in the vain search. I sang in low tunes to her and moved my body with hers. Some days, I spent the full day with her. The well quickly became dark, the nights were longer, and so we constantly lived under the golden hue of lamplight. I read to her, scoured for all the books I could find, and would read aloud. But in my alone time, I read records on the lives of Zephyrs, searched for what could make them last longer. There was no other way; only the sanctum.

         One night, when I was caressing her with olive balm so that the white-brown of her fading skin shone like metal, I brought her close to my ears and said, “No one deserves to spend her last days in a well.”

         I pressed her closer to my ears, yearning to hear her speak, but she said nothing.

         “I can take you out of this well. I can take you to the Sanctum, I don’t care who sees us. No one would recognize you. I’ll tell the keepers I saw you near the borders.”

         I felt her vibrations against my face, her gentle spasms, but I wasn’t sure if that was an approval.

         “Everyone should spend her last days with her kind,” I said “in a becalming comfort.”

         I pressed her to my face and breathed her in, tried to fill up myself with her, to absorb her aura, render it everlasting.

         “Who is your kind?” She spoke, her voice a gentle breath against my cheeks.

         I held her closer to my cheeks, and she muttered again: “Who is your kind?”

         “One who is like you.”

         Later, after a long quiet, I said, “One with whom you share love.”

         “Yes,” she muttered.

         I continued caressing her floury skin with my balm, watching her sparkle in the dimming light.

         “Please take me out of here.”

         I stroked her face and for a moment saw flashes of her former features; the subtle contours of her face before the wind had consumed her flesh. When the jar of balm was empty, I tucked her in my cushioned goatskin bag, and together, we climbed out of the well.

         On the surface, the night was far gone and tranquil. We rode together on my mare, and I trotted with prudent thuds. It was a long and raucous journey through the grove, but soon after, my clip-clopping became the only sound of the village.

         I periodically felt my bag to know if she was still in there, but I never looked into it. After a continuous ride without halting, the thoroughfare leading to my cabin became visible. I rode until I was at my door. The house was empty and humid. Mudia was at the mines.

         Esohe was almost half her size since we had left the well and could easily nestle in my hands. I laid her on the bed and swaddled her with my fleecy shawl but felt her resistant spasms. I uncovered her, left her bare, unclothed, and lay beside.

         All through the night, I felt her morph against me, into grains, into noiseless air, nothingness. I breathed in and let the rest of her fill the space of the room. I listened for the moans of the escaping winds.

* * *

         On the next Sabbath, I worshiped in the temple. I went before dawn so that I could stand just before the pedestal of the Zephyrs and have a complete view. The Zephyrs were more alike than I thought, the same shapeless features, many of them having the same heights, and I had to squint to see some of them. I focused on the indistinguishably minute ones all through my worshipping, those who resembled the last phase, who would barely last a day if left on the surface.

         When Mudia and I were riding back home, we sighted three men standing by our door. Tax collectors, I feared. As we got nearer to our cabin, the ravenlike judicial signet clipped to the collars of two of the men became visible. The third man was Nata.

         The night before, Nata had stopped by and directly asked me: where is my daughter? I couldn’t tell him where Esohe was. I didn’t know, she could be anywhere in the Sahara.

         “What are they doing here?” Mudia asked.

         The two judicial men strode to us before we could dismount. “Obehi Ehichoya, we have orders from the court to place you in custody.”

         They let me dismount. Nata blankly stared at me from a distance. What arrest-worthy evidence could he have given the court, to prove my involvement in his daughter’s disappearance?

         “What has she done?” Mudia was screaming. “This is absurd! She has nothing to do with Esohe’s disappearance!” I wished he would stop. Neighbors were already assembling.

         The men ignored him and manacled my wrists with cold metal and led me to their carriage beside the house.

* * *

         The aridness of the harmattan didn’t reach into my cell. Its stone walls were edged with fungus. It was dank at night and fusty during the day but always reeked nauseatingly like old moist hay. There were two other women in the cell, who were older and less interested in conversation than I was. I did not recognize them and deemed them foreign prisoners apprehended in the village.

         They didn’t stay long. They were led out four days later, the same day I was informed of my trial. It was scheduled for the first week of the following month. I imagined now that the news of how I was involved in Esohe’s disappearance must have pervaded the village; her only friend, how pitiable.

         I spent most of the time mapping out how to defend myself in court, what could her father have said against me. Perhaps he had enough corroborators who claimed to have seen me with Esohe beyond the grazing field, contradicting my claim. If that was all, then I could easily defend myself before the tribunal. But the intuition that there was a greater evidence kept gnawing on me; the court wouldn’t issue an arrest on a fragile foundation. Most nights, I didn’t sleep; I retraced my steps, searched for loopholes.

* * *

         The seven chiefs were present for my trial, hatted and seated on plush armchairs behind the king’s hand, who had a red left eye. Beside the king’s hand sat his clerk, already holding his quill, and at the door stood the staid custodian. At the left end of the court was seated Esohe’s father, Nata, his face grim as ever, staring straight at the blank wall opposite him. I, surrounded by nothing, stood at the middle of the court, a small distance away from the king’s hand. I was still trying to find a loophole and concoct a matching defense.

         After acknowledging the chiefs, the king’s hand looked at me and then lowered his head to the papers on his table. “Obehi Ehichoya, you have been accused with burgling the inner sanctum of the Order of Zephyrs on the first Sabbath of the past month. How do you plea?”

         The sanctum. The charge kept resounding in my head. Treason against the gods. I’d be sent to the gallows. I stared at the king’s hand. My legs began failing me.

         “How do you plea?” he asked again.

         “I do not wish to contend.”

         After the spectacle of me at the gallows, Mudia would certainly be sent away from the mines, and he might not find any other work to do. I wished I had told him of the gold buried in the garden; he might have been able to find a buyer at another village where no one would suspect the gold’s origin.

         The king’s hand ordered Nata to speak.

         Nata rose. “It’s no news of my missing daughter, Esohe. After searching the village with no result, I opted to check inside my house. My daughter is a lover of the pen; she writes everything down on her papers. I ruffled through her papers in hope for a clue, and I happened upon a heartbreaking discovery, which I cannot keep to myself or I would suffer the ire of the gods. In my daughter’s papers, I found the layout and writings of how she intended to steal the key of the sanctum and sneak in on the first Sabbath of the past month. I have handed the papers to the court. Obehi Ehichoya, I know, is my daughter’s closest companion and cohort.”

         “Obehi Ehichoya,” the king’s hand said, “several villagers have been consulted, and a few who were not at the temple testified to have seen you riding with Esohe Okhah on the first Sabbath of the previous month. Is this true?”

         “Yes.”

         “To where were you headed?”

         “I rode with Esohe to the sanctum, but I left with empty hands, took nothing.”

         The custodian strode to the clerk and whispered in his ear and returned to the door. The clerk leaned nearer to the king’s hand and muttered to him; they conferred for a while and turned heads to the door. The king’s hand nodded at the custodian.

         The pounding of my head heightened. The chiefs stared at me with gathered eyes as though they wished to impale me with their gaze and spare the hangman of his duty.

         Shadows loomed at the door. A jacketed man dark as tar strode in, cradling an open oaken box. The custodian directed him to a chair beside Nata. He held to himself the box, which must of course contain the loot. I had buried the gold deep enough, but it wouldn’t be hard for a determined seeker to find.

         The king’s hand ordered the jacketed man to speak.

         The man rose and held the box to his chest. “I am thankful for the unplanned reception. I am a keeper of the sanctum”—only now did I notice the moon-shaped signet on his collar. “I am here to speak for one of the Order, who is here with me.” He dug into his box and gently brought out what could have been a shapeless bough wrapped in wool, but though mostly immobile, it could manage few noticeable jerks. It was a Zephyr, looking so holy. I instantly peered at it, searching for familiar features, anything to match my last memory of Esohe, any familiar spasms. Its woolen garment made it look much less shrunk than the Esohe who perfectly fitted in my bag.

         The keeper continued. “I will speak out the words of the Zephyr to the hearing of the tribunal.” He gently raised the Zephyr to his ear.

         The keeper held the Zephyr to his ear for a long while, then began. “The Zephyr, on behalf of the Order, expresses discontent on how they were not apprised or consulted of a case that relates to the sanctum, their dwelling. Had the matter not slipped from the mouths of conversing keepers, such a case would have continued without the Order’s knowledge.”

         “It was agreed upon to leave the Order undisturbed,” the king’s hand said. “They need not hear of such a profane act.”

         The keeper listened again to the Zephyr, now for an overstretched period, during which the atmosphere grew denser. My legs were wobbling. I was standing in empty air. There was nothing to wedge myself against.

         “On the first Sabbath of the previous month, the Zephyr chose not to go to the temple. A while after the others had left, two young women appeared in the inner sanctum, for reasons unknown at first. But on further study, it became clear to the Zephyr that they had come to revere the dwelling of the Order.”

         The chiefs turned their heads to me and I held their gaze. I prayed within. I’d never thought of praying since my arrest, not to the gods, not to the Zephyrs.

         “Perhaps, out of overzealous faithfulness,” the keeper continued, “believing their worship and petitions were more acceptable if presented from the sanctum rather than the temple. The lengths to which some faithfuls can go to secure the favor of the gods can be as unimaginable or absurd as illicitly entering the sanctum to worship. It should be the temple’s duty to address the villagers, advise them of the limits, so they don’t go overboard with their faith.”

         I peered at the Zephyr, wishing I could hold it to my ears, thank it for the freedom, hear its voice, if it would be similar to Esohe’s, ask it about Esohe: can she be possibly here? Is she still living, in the winds? Is she happy? Does she have any words for me?

         A Zephyr was too pious to tell a lie. If it said we had come to worship, then we had come to worship; our gods defined truth.

         After a conferment among the king’s hand and palace chiefs, the trial was adjourned to the next day, and the keeper replaced the Zephyr in the box and strode out with it.

         I was sentenced to four months in the fusty and dank cell for unlawful entering and was fined twenty pounds of coins; the village could not afford the faithfuls yearning to access the sanctum. I always went early to the temple on first Sabbaths to stand at the front row and see the indistinct Zephyrs on their pedestal and focus on the most familiar, those of the last phase.

         In the following years, I journeyed with the pilgrims to the Sahara. The breath of the Sahara was sublime, gently slid through my every pore and slipped through my fingers like dreams, swirled from the flowing skies and from beneath the seas of cascading sands, eager to embrace me with its delight and impress its mark. Sometimes, when it was as quiet as empty, I heard it, her subtle distinct voice amidst her undulating sighs.

Copyright © 2020 Inegbenoise O. Osagie

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Inegbenoise Osagie is a Nigeria-based writer and editor whose fiction has appeared in West Branch, Juked, T-Gene Davis’s Speculative Blog, and elsewhere. He hopes to own two German Shepherds someday and is still deliberating on their names.

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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,

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