Beneath Ceaseless Skies #164 Read online

  The sky grew lighter as we grew closer, until it was only purple, untouched canvas, unwoven. The wall came into view. We reached it in three days. It was high and made of jade. As the dragon crawled to shore, my stomach tightened. How would I climb a wall so high? The sparrows circled me until I realized; they were meant to lead me over.

  “Goodbye, dragon,” I said, letting it bury its face once more in the stink of my clothes.

  “Your sorrow is lighter already,” said the dragon. “I am both happy and sad.”

  I climbed a sparrow’s back and grabbed tight to its feathers. I looked down upon the sea glistening blue and white and black; my body called out to return to it. The air was too dry. But there was no going back, not without Huan.

  On the other side of the wall massive trees stretched into an endless white sky, their leaves made of gold bells that rang in a soft wind. The trees did not stay in one spot, as trees did in our world, but moved with me, their roots sliding along the ground. They swatted at us with crooked branches. I clutched at the swallow’s feathers as she jerked to miss them. Finally we came to an area free of trees, where instead wooden pavilions as tall as the trees swayed in silver light. Inside the open-sided pavilions we passed up-close, weavers and other creatures slept standing up, leaning against the beams.

  The sparrow slowed and descended onto a carpet of red moss that stretched below us. I climbed off its back and stood looking up and down the rows of buildings so tall I could not see the tops from the ground, wondering where to go. I did not have to wonder long, for from one of the pavilions stepped a giant man-god in bright red robes that I realized formed the moss at our feet. His eyes were wooden and creaked as they moved. He was this place, and so I knew that he must be the king.

  “Climb,” he said, and he grabbed hold of the white beard that reached to his shins and shook.

  “What?” I said, shrinking back from his booming voice.

  “I expect you have come here to talk, and so I am telling you to climb, so that we might be face to face and can speak like two who are equal.” I grabbed hold of the beard and began to climb. He lifted the beard once I was halfway up, plucked me from his hairs, and sat me on his shoulder. “Though we are not equals at all,” he said. “We will never be equals, as I am sure you know. Why have you come to me?”

  “Your daughter,” I said, holding a strip of his robe so that I would not fall. “I want to be with her.”

  “You have come a long way,” he said. “And you do smell like a man, it is true. You have been at sea. You have much in common with men. But you did not want to be a man when my daughter made you so. You are a man no longer, and your marriage is revoked. Should you go back to being a man, your marriage would be restored.”

  “I can’t do that,” I said, for I knew that I would not be happy. I would have his daughter’s love, but what of my own love? Was there a reason he could not give me everything I wanted? He was tall, and loud, and weaved the world. He weaved us into being. I could hardly speak I was so angry. Why wouldn’t he just give us all we wanted?

  “Yes, you humans cling to what power you have. You want more than you deserve. Fine. I am impressed by how far you have come. I will not make you leave without reward. I give you two choices, then. Your first: you may have all that you ever wanted. You may keep your womanness, your womb. You may be with my daughter as you are. You may have another ship with which to sail the seas.”

  I could taste it, the satisfaction of all my life’s dreams met, like salt water on my tongue.

  “Or, your second choice, you can give it to all of your kind. You cannot have my daughter’s hand but can instead gift choice to others, to all of your humanity. I will make this man-woman power malleable. I will give you control of what you are. I will give you all blank slates to work with as you please.”

  It was not a fair choice, to pit my desires against those of my fellow people, against those of the women I heard cry at night, who could never be with me forever always, the way some of them wanted. I would be lying if I said I did not want both things but wanted the first more. My belly ached with the weight of this decision. How dare he.

  But one cannot change all the world in one day. One cannot take all the power at once. I would do what I could. I would give up Huan, beautiful Huan, who must be waiting for me, who had asked me to come for her, who I would never see again, to give my people their own power.

  “You know what my choice is,” I said.

  “I knew,” he said, “that you were a fool when I saw you riding your dragon to meet me.”

  “Can I see Huan?” I said. “One more time? Can I see her?”

  “It will upset her,” he said. “You have chosen your people over her. I cannot be sure that she will forgive you that. No, I think it best you leave the way you came.” He picked me up with his too-large fingers and dropped me upon the swallow’s back. “I hope you enjoy the complicated nature of the world you wrought. I made things simple for a reason, you know.” The swallow lifted into the air. I was grateful that I could no longer see him, though I could still hear his calls. “You will regret the ambiguity. You will regret the confusion. Things will not be as you think they will.”

  When we reached the wall, his voice disappeared, and I sunk my face into the bird’s back and screamed out Huan’s name.

  * * *

  My new Dragon’s Bane was waiting for me. The smell of my sadness, it said, was impossible to ignore. I did not go back to my homeland to check on the women there; those I met across the sea told me stories, of the confusion, of women making themselves men making themselves women again. Of in-between people. Of people of neither. I was no longer part of that world. Maybe I never had been.

  The sea brought me to you all, though neither I nor my ship led the way. We sailed on waves unfolding before us and washed up on your shore. You who bestow legends. You who weave stories into the world. I ask you for my name. I ask you for a legend never-changing, where Huan and I may be together in story if not in life. This is what I believe she wants, why she wove the sea to take me here.

  Give us this, please. A story that ends in happiness, a story of love. Give me a name that suits me.

  Copyright © 2015 Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

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  Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s fiction has appeared in magazines such as Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Interzone. She lives in Texas with her partner and two literarily named cats: Gimli and Don Quixote. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program and curates the annual Art & Words Show in Fort Worth, profiled in the March/April 2014 issue of Poets & Writers. You can visit her on Twitter @BonnieJoStuffle or through her website: www.bonniejostufflebeam.com.

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  THE METAMORPHOSES OF NARCISSUS

  by Tamara Vardomskaya

  I lay on the drowned grand piano, naked, my head that of a chess-horse, my hands and feet stumps oozing black-green blood onto the keys.

  “Beautiful!” the voice I knew so well thundered above me. “Beautiful! Come here, Oinhoa, I am sheer genius.”

  “Isn’t she... uncomfortable?” a gentler contralto responded.

  “Why would that matter?”

  And it didn’t matter. This was not my blood; it was but part of glamorous transfiguration. I was beautiful, or I believed I was. What did it matter, the beauty a woman was born with, my long fair hair that was now a wooden horse’s mane, my hands and feet that had once moved in the dance so skillfully? Beauty was a construction, a blueprint geniuses dictate to mere mortals who could not know for themselves what it meant.

  I had come to the Royal Conservatory of Halispell as a mere girl from the border provinces with a talent for dancing, with the faint hope of finding a genius mentor and inspiring him—it was undoubtedly a ‘he’—to re-shape me, to transfigure me, into something other than the raw material of a Hestland village girl.

>   Fool that I was, I had thought the mentoring would be in dance.

  The woman who had stood in a corner near the stage and watched me dance at my first year-end recital had seemed nothing extraordinary. Her simple pale-blue dress made her merely a splash of color from the stage, something to spot on when I spun, my head always returning to that splash to keep from losing balance and orientation. After the recital, when I was basking in the applause—not as much as for the true stars of the class, I knew; I was at the time a second-rank dancer, and I nurtured the hope of a mentor to send me to the first ranks—when she approached me, the face above the blue dress was plain, lacking classical features, and she moved like one untrained, her posture that of a pine tree among the slender palms that were my fellow dancers.

  “I am Oinhoa,” she said, and the name triggered a vague familiarity. “You danced beautifully, and you have a beautiful body. My husband wishes to speak to you. Would you join us at the Butterfly for a glass of wine tonight?”

  The Butterfly Lounge was a bit far from my lodging, and more dear than my student stipend’s means. She must have spotted my quickly-masked dread. “It will be on us, of course. My husband is very interested.”

  “Who is your husband?” I asked, and immediately felt like an ignorant provincial at her look of surprise.

  “You’ve heard of Avardi, I’m sure? The....” still smiling, she seemed to search for an adequate word, and finally settled on “...artist?”

  And now only focusing on her blue dress once more kept me from losing balance and orientation. Every man and woman at the Conservatory read Arts Today, and Avardi’s face was on this month’s cover in full glamour, shifting from himself to the breathtaking transfigurations he wrought. Here was a man who knew no veneration or limits, who proudly declared that he would not just challenge but annihilate the fossilizing artistic traditions. We girls had quickly passed the magazine around in the dressing room, whispering at the dynamic-captures, before the dance artistic director, gracefully withered as a century-old lemon tree, furiously confiscated it.

  But even before I had seen any of his art, I had read the old men in the monochrome papers railing that the moral fiber of our youths would be destroyed by this Avardi-ism; he had replied with “Moral Fiber,” a mocking composition of oat bran, excrement, and naked models that even Arts Today had not dared to print a picture of, but we all wanted to see.

  He had his choice of models, of performers in his static and dynamic transfigurations, the girls had whispered; he could choose the best. So this was his muse, the woman who had left the richest man in Europa for him, whom he adored such that he signed his own works, “Oinhoa-Avardi,” taking her name with his.

  The taxicab slowed before the fire-opal facade of the Butterfly, but my heart and stomach kept going faster. My only presentable dress, a simple black one, seemed all the more drab in these glittering lights, and I imagined that perspiration that my lightning-fast sponge bath had missed was still painting the crevices of my skin. In the few seconds I had before I had to follow the cool, confident Oinhoa out of the cab, I surreptitiously rubbed my calves because I’d had no time for a proper cooldown. Who was I, a dancer good enough to be accepted to the Royal Conservatory, good enough to have small solos, but clearly not among those destined for stardom? I had heard my teachers comment that I might make it as a corps dancer, fated to transform into one of a faceless mass with one objective: to be the same as all others.

  As all other details of the inside of the Butterfly Lounge turned into a faceless mass in my mind when at the corner table I saw Avardi himself, real to the last hair.

  If a small corner of my mind did note that he was shorter than I had imagined, and his voice was overly loud and had an unpleasant grating edge, the rest of me overrode that. His costume, a robe from an Eastern priest of three hundred years ago, the pantaloons of a Caltavan lord from four hundred, and shoes of crystal and paper from the imagined far distant future, clashed defiantly with the Butterfly’s aristocratic decor and decorum. I remember little of what actually happened that evening, except how seahorses and crab claws had sprouted out of Oinhoa’s dress and my own, how the wine had flowed like blood and my body wanted to dance to its pulse more than to the music, and how my heart had raced, wanting to itself break free of chrysalis and spread wings into the wind.

  I could not sleep that night and was late to rehearsal, the first of many I was late to before I started missing them altogether. What did it matter, the endless practicing of stag leaps and wolf spins and peacock poses to the tinkling of a grand piano, when I had been the stag and the wolf and the peacock and the grand piano, had been them at the bottom of the sea and in midden heaps and in rivers of cheese and when kissing a basilisk and an icosahedron while hanging by my ribcage from the pendulum of a clock? In contrast with the color of the Avardi studios, of the sea cliffs and the city ports where he created his transfigurations, with the flashing of capture-bulbs from the swarming journalists of the arts and culture worlds, the Conservatory where before I had so yearned to merit dissolving into the corps was grey and drab and empty. One would call it a soulless land of machines, but I knew what soul Avardi could breathe into machines. It was the old putrefying art of choreography, representing the hollow rotten legacy of the centuries, and exactly what Avardi fought against.

  And so I got my stipend suspended, and then myself expelled, for the Royal Conservatory of Halispell had no space even in its corps for dancers who did not deign to learn the choreography. I slept now in a corner of Avardi’s studio, thinking my blanket on the floor superior to the entire room I previously had. I would spend the time when he wasn’t transfiguring me holding the tools for his series of transfigurational portraits of Nimrod, the new president of Caltava. This new head of state had not yet joined the others in paying his respects, but his genius at social transformation in his country, razing ancient mansions to raise new towering public buildings and erasing hereditary classes to affirm a meritocracy for all Caltavans, fascinated Avardi as akin to his own genius at transfigurational art; he even dropped hints of perhaps going to Caltava himself.

  There was no shame in expulsion, Oinhoa told me quietly, herself ensuring that there was enough food left from their meals for me. Avardi himself had been expelled from the Academy of Arts when he was younger, and from the Transfigurationists’ Guild a few years ago, soon after his first cover of Arts Today.

  She did not say why, and I did not ask. I knew it was because the Academy’s and Guild’s minds had been lead-sealed as coffins against his new Art. Now he was on the covers of Arts Today and with kings and presidents and dynamic-picture magnates queuing to shake his hand, and where were they? I was right to expel myself from that cocoon.

  Now, in front of the arts critics whom the first-rank girls in my classes would have tied themselves into double knots to dance for, I stood, smiling, motionless in full arabesque, wearing nothing but a bandage binding my breasts, while Avardi explained to them that breasts can be detached from the concept of beauty, a woman without breasts, see, was still as beautiful. I would smile, my muscles taut as for a dance, still always keeping my eyes on Oinhoa’s simple colored dresses, so as not to lose my balance and orientation.

  The critics, though, seemed inattentive that evening, in the grand hall with the gurgling chocolate fountain; the roast pig, apple in its mouth as customary, seemed the only eye that met mine. Avardi was unveiling to them his new project, an exploration of beauty, a ripping of it apart and reassembling in a whole new way for this new world. “The Metamorphosis of Narcissus,” it was called, after the ancient transfiguration of that beautiful hero. There had been many other projects of his, he declaimed in his crowd-cutting glass-shaking voice, tying to that period of history before humans learned to control transfiguration: Actaeon turning into a stag (I had been that stag), and Daphne into a laurel tree (I had been that laurel tree), and Io becoming a cow (that project had used another model, which made me sick with envy as he brought it
up, yet I kept smiling). But the metamorphosis of Narcissus was one particularly dear to his heart. “For am I not a narcissist myself?”

  Yet for once, the big men and women in their suits and ties and dresses transfigured in order to grow the currently fashionable lilies were not fascinated by his glamour, or my beauty. Perhaps the lack of breasts does change a woman for the worse, but it was not a more beautiful woman they looked at, nor even at their wine and untouched chocolate and roast pig.

  Instead, they kept glancing towards the doors, their eyes following the messengers who would glide in, trying to be unobtrusive, and hand Hyacinthus Rudaikins, the editor-in-chief of Arts Today, a small note with the farwriting office stamp. I had rarely seen guests receive messages during such events before, and I could not recall ever seeing the guests unfold the messages immediately. But Rudaikins’s taut posture seemed to defy anyone who would dare censure him for breach of etiquette.

  My curiosity was cracking through my identity as a work of art. Instead of looking at Oinhoa’s dress I looked at the farwriting forms, each one trembling more than the last in Hyacinthus’s large hands.

  “It is a work that at last breaks the shell of being human, of being material,” Avardi thundered, for the first time audibly straining to regain the centre of attention, “and strips away our limitations, makes us one with Art. Makes us one with Art!” he repeated. “Makes us....”

  Hyacinthus threw down the last note, the hasty scribble on it ending in a blotch of ink. “Ladies and gentlemen. Nimrod has just invaded Hestland.” The editor-in-chief seemed not to need any effort at all to suddenly drown out the artist’s cry, even in as terrifyingly calm a voice as he had then, flat and still as the water reflecting Narcissus, and as uncaring. “Fifteen villages have been air-bombed in the last hour. There may be three thousand people dead.”

  I tried to stay focused on Oinhoa’s splash of pale blue, to stay Art, not a shell-bound, limited human.