Beneath Ceaseless Skies #145 Read online

  “Tell me, truly, why are you here?” the South-East Wind asked.

  “My fortune has wavered, has it not?” Berenike smiled: a tight gesture, like the final stretching of a bowstring before its release. “I come to offer supplication and sacrifices to the gods of this land, to see if they will favor me as the gods I know clearly do not.”

  “We winds are not like the gods of your land, prone to assisting mortals.”

  “You are only one wind,” Berenike said. “I hear there are at least fifty.” Fish bones piled under her steady fingers. She spoke as if of the price of grain or the location of high ground; as if of an army’s organization.

  The South-East Wind saw a great number of things: | I blow between the glass spires of the city In-barash and shatter them, I blow heavy and sharp, I scratch the bell-mouthed figures | from the scarred cheek of Berenike’s wind-worn figure after a storm thirty years beyond this moment to | I blow with a storm wind, tangled like braids | desert weather and / they stumble from the barren hills, their lips dry with the dust of a thousand bones, their hair thick with it, their tongues still alive, their voices still capable of demanding, at the bell-loud door, the location of the general who trod before them / visitors : the foxes offer one of their beadless young in return for shelter between the bell-figures : and ~ poor bell-less thing, how does it sing? ~ a future visitor over her chest she wears an ornament of silver and carnelian, tipped in bells, each ringing in me with a different note but not everything. Not Berenike’s destination.

  What a wind saw was as unpredictable as its path.

  “How far is it to the next temple?” Berenike asked.

  “Four days’ walk. Directly north. I advise you to walk at night—”

  “By the stars.” More eggshells joined the fish bones. “May I replenish my water skins here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I will set off tonight. I thank you for your hospitality.”

  “I thank you for honoring this temple.”

  Wearing her breastplate and greaves once more, carrying her javelin and several skins of water, the general Berenike walked from the temple when the moon filled the bell-mouthed figures with silver shadows.

  she crouches in front of the sandstone figure, her short hair catching the south-east wind, and examines its chest with the intensity of a person reading even though there are no words there, just the jewelry-lines so like the jewelry on her own chest

  The South-East Wind watched Berenike, frowning with un-sated curiosity.

  * * *

  ~ The North Wind blows through the bells and it is loud, loud, loud, too loud for us to endure, too loud to remain, too strong. The North Wind abates and—oh, it is our quieter ringing that is heard then, it is the play of the smaller winds, it is—

  Words? Not on the figure’s bell, no, that is smooth silver, so full of strength, but on the body, the beautiful body—they are never beautiful, they are never secretly a woman—women, two women—three: a palimpsest of women, mother under daughter, granddaughter like a scarf around them both. Words run around her—their—head like a game for a twisting wind.

  I play, I play, I play.

  Who is this Berenike?

  Victorious general of the battle of Norete, besieger of Tel Garat, founder of Berenikia. Daughter of Kesty, of the women who live across the sea of grass, and of Ariston, a Makad, who met in paid service fighting for the conqueror Kandros, who both fell in the battle at the river of milk.

  Who is this Mirtun who places her name at the figure’s base? ~

  * * *

  The winds raced around Berenike. The moon-silver desert stretched out, marked with dry, thin-stemmed plants and the stone-filled gullies of flash floods and, always on the horizon, never closer, the darting forms of foxes. They stopped moving just long enough to look over their shoulders at Berenike : in my West Wind body I tie bells the size of fleas to the offered fox’s ears so that it is as close to its beaded cousins as a temple upbringing can manage : before running on, chasing rats or frogs or each other. Their huge heavy ears flapped in the winds. Their yips punctuated the winds’ susurrus on the sands.

  : it is true that the Saqnaga foxes hide their beading underground, where even the winds cannot reach, so that none know how they create the beads and tie them to the short hairs of their ears :

  Berenike considered whether she could get one with her javelin.

  Deciding against the attempt, for now, she ate two of the dried fish that the South-East Wind had given her and sipped at one of her water skins. The South-East Wind had described the small watery night-flowers of the artiq plant, saying that they had saved several travelers in the desert—and adding that they were so rare that many missed them.

  It would not be a comfortable march, but Berenike had experienced far worse. At just five years old, in the baggage train of Kandros’s army, she had survived the desert of Šammuramat. At seventeen, after her second battle, the disaster of Kuš, she had fled into the high mountains where people with partridge bodies were rumored to live and had drunk the blood of an ibex to stay alive. At twenty-three, at twenty-eight, at thirty, at thirty-five—the decades since Kandros’s disappearance had been a chaos of victories and defeats, riches and privation, joy and fear. Some of the older soldiers told of unending victories with Kandros, of enemies falling like wheat under the scythe. Berenike listened, never speaking her doubts: that these were just stories.

  A single memory of Kandros: in the desert of Šammuramat, how Berenike had rushed forward to the single stream they had found and scooped water in a greave, her mother’s, the only item left to her when the soldiers divided her battle-slain parents’ spoils. She had sipped carefully from the narrower end. “See that little girl,” Kandros, standing nearby, had said. “She is the future of our army.”

  Berenike’s soldiers liked that story.

  They had followed her to fortune in the past five years, to success in battle and to the stability of Berenikia, to further conquest. Then Lysikos had claimed those lands, claimed their city—her city.

  Berenike kept walking, though her body wanted rest and more food than a pair of dried fish; though the sun started to rise, sending the foxes underground. Eventually she found a gully with an overhang of rock and slept there, sweating in the shade. At dusk, she returned to her feet.

  There were no foxes.

  : there are nights when they never emerge from their dens, when no winds know what they do :

  Smaller winds spun in the sand, waist-high.

  ( it’s very sweet that you think that )

  : am I to believe winds that are born and die in a moment? :

  ( can’t you hear them? )

  ( singing, singing! )

  ( oh, you don’t know that foxes can talk? )

  ( truly? )

  A fierce gust scattered the spinning sands. Berenike shivered: certain, for a moment, that someone was shouting all around her.

  : I admit that I imagine, sometimes, the foxes gathered in their dens, beading one another’s ears and sharing tales old and new :

  No foxes emerged for the entirety of the night, nor the next, nor during the hot day following that, in which Berenike walked under the sun knowing that she drew close to her destination.

  : I wonder how the bell-eared fox fared in those first months when it returned to the desert, its time at the temple done :

  Berenike smelled the oasis before she saw it. The wind blew sweetly around her, suddenly green and fresh, and Berenike quickened her pace—and then, over a rocky rise, saw the tops of date palms, and the circling of a pair of water birds, and the tall temple, covered in blue and white images unidentifiable at this distance.

  : I wonder what tales it told to its bead-eared cousins :

  The sweet wind stilled as she walked among the foliage towards the temple.

  A wind did not live in this temple. It was inhabited by human guardians: a pair of women, who Berenike found wrestling at the edge of the oasis. Their
muscular arms and backs gleamed with sweat. Their grunts accompanied the oasis-winds among the palm leaves, the high cries of birds, the whine of insects. Berenike watched approvingly.

  “Oh!” one suddenly exclaimed. “A visitor!” They broke apart, grinning. “Welcome to the Icranah temple.”

  “Welcome!” said the other.

  “I am glad to be here,” Berenike said. “I come to honor your temple.”

  “Then we, too, are glad that you are here. I am Iric.”

  “I’m Hatah. Do you want to wash first? You must be sweaty and dusty. We’ve got some water here for drinking as well.”

  Berenike gladly drank from the clay vessel, which was shaped like a smaller version of the temple, then stripped off her clothes and joined the women in the oasis. The feeling of fresh water against her skin brought a sigh of pleasure to her lips. Iric and Hatah combed each other’s dark hair, then swam to the water lilies growing across the lagoon to draw up the long thin stems: a small harvest, a fraction of the plants coating that part of the oasis with green and soft pink. Berenike watched hungrily.

  Cleaned and clothed, the three women carried water together to the temple, to be boiled for cooking and drinking.

  The temple stood tall and sturdy on the shore, like a vast and beautifully decorated post: blue and white rising out of the greens and browns of the oasis foliage. Steps angled around the temple’s exterior. Berenike craned her neck, seeing the images more clearly now: an array of unidentifiable creatures, part human, part constructed, part animal, part wind, all flying in swirls and gusts that were—Berenike squinted—each made of countless tiny creatures.

  “Do you paint the walls?” she asked as they climbed the many steps to the door.

  “Yes,” Iric said. “We renew them often. It is our greatest offering to the winds.”

  They led Berenike inside, where sunlight filtered through small square gaps in the brick walls, arranged in the shapes of animals. Hatah set a pot of water to boiling, then hurried outside. Iric cleaned the water lily stems in another pot of boiling water. A short while later, Hatah returned with six eggs and a trio of apricots.

  Berenike’s mouth started to water.

  As they shared the meal, Iric asked about Berenike’s journey. Berenike recounted only parts of it. The two women only saw—or heard, or felt, or experienced—the blowing of the wind they had each been married to: Iric to the West Wind, who was fond of the desert foxes, she said while smiling with a fondness of her own, and Hatah to the North-West Wind, who blew from a sea far to the north-west, where the ghosts of whales swam in the bitter black water. Berenike found it refreshing, after the South-East Wind at the temple of the bells, to talk with people who did not know everything.

  “We were each married to a wind as children,” Iric explained as Berenike chewed on the sweet lily stems. “Our lives are spent guarding this temple—or another of the temples of the great desert. If guardians do not enjoy one another’s company, they obviously cannot live together.”

  “We’ve managed thirty years,” Hatah said, coiling a length of Iric’ dark hair around her finger.

  “Yes.” Iric pretended to bite Hatah’s finger. Hatah leaned forward and kissed her on the lips.

  “Marriage to a wind does not prevent you from enjoying human pleasures, then,” Berenike said.

  Hatah laughed.

  “The winds do not care how we spend our time,” Iric said, “as long as the temple remains beautiful and all other honors are given to them.”

  “Besides,” Hatah said, “some of us need to have children.”

  “My sister has four,” Iric said. “One each from different visitors to her temple.”

  “How long have these temples been here?”

  “Oh, the oases shift,” Iric said, “some going dry, some opening like lilies, so that each temple has only been in its current location for hundreds of years, but there have been temples in this desert for thousands of years. There have been offerings for longer—for as long as there have been people here. That is a very long time.”

  “And before there were people?”

  “There were no winds,” Iric said. “How could there be?”

  Berenike knew this story; it had drifted across the hills and towns and harbors until it reached her, a girl learning a warrior’s skills, and when years later her city was taken by Lysikos she had followed it, like one of a pair of snakes leading her across the desert.

  “What do you mean by that?” she asked.

  “Without people, the winds cannot be as they are,” was all that Iric said, smiling over the last of the water lily stems. “Now, it will be sunset soon. You should prepare an offering.”

  “Yes. What must I do?”

  “The West Wind is blowing here at the moment and prefers food: a fruit, a poem. You must pick the first and compose the second.”

  Iric and Hatah showed Berenike where to find fruit. Then, on learning that she could write, they gave her a metal stylus and paper made of dried palm leaf and left her on the steps of the temple.

  Berenike wrote a poem of war: women riding into battle, with winds in their long braids.

  “You must give your offering to the wind on the temple’s roof,” Hatah said.

  “It is dangerous to linger there,” Iric said. “Place your food, then leave.”

  “I will.”

  She climbed the steps. She trod on the flat, un-patterned roof: five paces, ten, a bow to place her offering.

  The wind tugged at her skin. It hurt; like a hundred fingernails trying to pry her skin free.

  Breathing sharply, she turned and hurried to the stairs, to the temple’s cool, quiet, still interior. There, the three women passed the night with wrestling and caresses, shouting often with joy. There, they slept through the next day.

  In the cooling evening, she left, with water lily stems and more dried fish and boiled eggs still in their shells and a live—for now—chicken. With no sign of her pursuers at her rear, she walked north, to the next temple.

  * * *

  the woman speaks names into the winds: Kesty and Mirtun, the sandstone figure’s, and her own

  * * *

  Berenike made an offering at the next temple: her blood in a bowl of rodent-bone, poured into the sand-thick front of a desert storm, which laughed and flashed bright with lightning and scattered her blood in fine drops across the desert for a day’s march in every direction.

  Afterwards, the storm-scarred man at the temple drew water and blind white fish from the well. Provisions for her journey. He told her, as the fish dried, that almost forty years ago a man had gone into the desert from here and never returned. Berenike nodded, pleased.

  Then, finally, Berenike began the walk of almost two weeks to the central temple, where the winds were born.

  * * *

  she says: “The day I stepped onto the sea of grass, Grandmother Kesty, I was recognized as your descendent, as having a face and a fierceness of gaze so like yours. I heard your stories. How you rode away for glory and silver. How, before that, you taught the youngest girls to draw a bow and ride a horse in full gallop and sing louder than the wind, so that they could fight to defend themselves from any who would claim them. How you taught them to button their coats with the finely carved bones of their enemies. How you taught them to know the winds like siblings. I came for that knowledge, glimpsed first in my mother’s tales, then in my aunt’s. My aunt. Ah. I would wish to have been taken in by no other woman! She didn’t expect me: daughter of an older half-sister she had not known, whose life after leaving the sea of grass is its own epic. Derent who rode to the sun! My aunt called me beloved niece and finished the teaching my mother had begun, and I loved her. I would wish that her maps were smaller, that she took less pleasure in founding cities, that I did not have to learn how to oppose her. I came to the sea of grass for its winds and found so much more: a family among the women who live across the sea of grass, a lover, a home. But my aunt is a wind, unceasing.”


  * * *

  There were no people in the central temple. There were no winds, only the still, hot air. The temple’s walls were bare stone, its floors un-patterned, its rooms empty of offerings. Berenike walked among them, frowning.

  “We do not often get people here.”

  Berenike spun, already poised to hurl her javelin.

  A person stood just an arm’s length from her. A wind.

  “Which one are you?” Berenike said, lowering her arm.

  “Why are you here?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “This is an empty temple,” the wind said. “Abandoned. It belongs to no wind.”

  “I know the story.”

  The wind’s expression did not change. “Surely a general fighting and conquering in the name of Kandros knows how often stories are true.”

  Berenike couldn’t stop a small smile. “The men and women fighting for me tell this story: soon after her marriage to Kandros, the queen Roshanak received an envoy from the women who live across a sea of grass. My mother’s people. The envoy said that some young warriors had heard of a great army gathered on the western edge of the steppe, and they wished to try themselves in friendly combat against its soldiers, and perhaps join it, for a share of its wealth and glory.

  “Roshanak and Kandros arranged athletic games outside the grand city of Roshanak’s birth. The young warriors arrived, arrayed in embroidered jackets and trousers, jangling with the silver of their jewelry, and won prizes in sports from archery to wrestling to sprinting. Their request to join the army was granted—but women who fought were rare, so it was not always easy for the warriors. Many returned home.

  “My mother, however, found a man among the soldiers whose true aim and agility and singing impressed her, and she decided to have a child with him, certain that his traits would combine well with her own. Then the triumphs and trophies of the campaign distracted her from thoughts of home. Then she died in a battle, as did my father. What a marvelous story! My soldiers boast that both of my parents were fierce and strong. I am not certain that any of them think it is true.”