Beneath Ceaseless Skies #232

  Issue #232 • Aug. 17, 2017

  “Red Bark and Ambergris,” by Kate Marshall

  “No Pearls as Blue as These,” by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  RED BARK AND AMBERGRIS

  by Kate Marshall

  After she was taken, Sarai lived two years with a cloth bound over her eyes, learning scent and touch and taste, never once seeing the island that was her prison. When the day came for the blindfold to be removed, she thought at first her eyes must have failed. Home was a world of blue waters and red-bark trees, of jewel fruits and opal-bellied songbirds. Even the sand shone honey-gold and glittered where it clung to creases in the rock, tucked there by a warm south wind. Here on Felas, isle of the essence-eaters, there was only gray. Gray stone and gray water, gray robes and gray faces.

  Jarad laughed when she asked what was wrong with her and turned her by her shoulders toward the sea. He stretched out one finger, the tattoo that marked his Mastery stark against his skin. “See that? The crimson at the peak of the ocean’s curve. That is the isle of Verakis, seat of our beloved queen and her court of misers. They hoard gold and joy in equal measure, and do nothing of value with either. That’s where all the color’s gone, little seabird. There’s nothing wrong with you, only with this place.”

  She squinted, but her eyes were weak. She couldn’t see and couldn’t ‘sense that far. Still she stared. That far and farther, on and on past Verakis, over a gray sea and then a blue one, far beyond where the eye could reach, there waited red-bark trees and opal-bellied songbirds; there waited her sisters and her brothers, her mother and her father. “I want to go home,” she said. “I will go home.” Defiant. A fool, but what child wasn’t?

  A croaked laugh from Jarad brought her chin up. She looked to the structure behind her, the once-fortress, now-prison that dominated the island. Even blind, she had known it was the largest building she had ever encountered. With her sight returned, she could scarcely bear to look at it: half carved from the island’s rook-black rock, the rest a lighter stone stacked high enough that not even the narrowest spit of shore on the island escaped its shadow.

  “Don’t tell me this is my home now. It isn’t. I won’t stay here.”

  This only made Jarad shake his head. “This rock is no one’s home, girl. But only the best of the poison-tamers can leave it, and only to go to Verakis and live in a prettier cage. The rest of us—scent-makers, stone-tellers, all—we must get used to the gray, for we’ll never go home.”

  “Then I will be a poison-tamer,” she said. She would go south, and then further south, however she could. Over the gray sea to the blue.

  “Verakis is no home either,” he said. “And you are no poison-tamer. It is not your talent. Take this.” He pressed a sachet into her hand, tapped it. “What do you ‘sense?”

  “Vanilla,” she said instantly, scent and ‘sense telling her true. She could feel the faint tug of it below her ribs, almost imperceptible—a gentle essence, not a powerful one. “A Nariguan strain.”

  “And what do you smell?”

  She lifted the sachet to her nose, inhaled. “Vanilla,” she said again, not understanding the lesson.

  “For me it is home. It is the cook-fires in the field at harvest, it is the lines in my father’s face. Take this.” He took the sachet from her, gave her another.

  “Red bark,” she said, and lifted it to her nose without prompting. Closed her eyes. She saw her mother’s hands, stained from working the bark. Heard her auntie’s laughter and the rumble of her father’s voice. Felt the slanting sun on her skin as she ran, ran, over the dry earth of the forest toward the beach, toward the shore. “Home,” she whispered.

  “The scent has power to you because of your memories,” Jarad said. “Poison strikes us all the same, but scent is individual. A scent-maker must know the moments of their client’s life, must know what scents define them. And then they can summon any emotion, evoke any memory. That is where our power lies.”

  “Scents are for a rich man’s fancy,” she said, echoing the scorn she’d heard from the other essence-eaters on the island. “There’s no power in them at all.”

  She held out the sachet. He shook his head.

  “Keep it,” he said. “Your true training begins tomorrow.” He left her on the southern cliff above the colorless, crashing waves, the red-bark sachet clutched in her palm as she tried to pick out a spot of crimson against empty sky. If she could get that far, she could find a way to go further. To get that far, she would need to be a poison-tamer; she would need to be the best. And so she would.

  The wind snatched at the blindfold in her hand. She let it go. The wind flung it back toward the island and crushed it against the rocks.

  * * *

  The day Sarai was taken, she had left her chores and her scolding father behind and gone to wander the shores. She was careful to go to the south, where the leathery tortoise her mother’s mother’s mother had ridden on as a child spent his days staring out to sea; the north shore hosted the black-stained bows of the queen’s ships, here to collect what was owed the thrice-slain undying queen, and Sarai had been warned away.

  She had little notion of what being a queen meant. No one from Sarai’s island had stepped foot on the queen’s, nor had the thrice-slain queen ever laid eyes on the shadow-green treetops of Sarai’s home. Sarai knew only that her kinfolk gathered abalone and resin and red bark once a year and were given a stamped iron disk in return, which they added to the pile at the center of the village. Twenty-seven iron disks, twenty-seven years under the queen’s rule. They did not tell the sailors or the gray-cloaked official that they kept, too, the thirty-four copper ingots stamped with the hatch-mark lettering of the Principalities. The island lay at the lip of the kingdom. No navies defended them, no soldiers rattled lances on their shores. The queen and the Twelve Princes had bloodied blades before just to shift a thin black line a centimeter across a page; they would do it again. Then her kinfolk would bury the iron, they would dig up the copper; all would continue as it had before.

  Sarai understood none of this. She understood that the sky was vast and the sea was blue, and her feet were made for wandering. She sang to the old tortoise and turned cartwheels in the sand. She skipped among the shallows and picked up ruby starfish, prodded the translucent tops of jellyfish with her fat finger. And then she turned toward the tug.

  A little thing, it was. Like a fishhook just under her left rib, minnow-nibbled. Tug-tug-tug, and something else with it, a deep sense, a dark sense. When she focused on it, the world seemed impossibly large, and so did she.

  She found it nestled in the sand. A rock, black and yellow, the size of her father’s fists closed and pressed together. Ambergris. She’d seen it before; her mother wore a piece of it, the size of a child’s finger, on a cord around her neck. Proof that her mother was lucky, for she had found it the day Sarai’s father asked for her to be his wife. She’d walked away from him to think, and found it, and smiling walked back. She told him yes and broke the ambergris in half, one piece for her and one for him.

  This was tradition, not generosity. Half of what you found, you gave to the first person you met, or else misfortune fell on you. But if you did, you’d have great luck. The best luck. And the sailors and the officials always traded so much for even a small piece—and this piece was not small at all.

  This will be my luck, she thought, and ran to share it.

  * * *

  Felas had no guards; only the sea. Its doors were never locked. There was nowhere to go. This dull-edged, lifeless place was where every essence-eater lived from discovery to d
eath—if they were allowed to live at all.

  Under Jarad’s tutelage, Sarai made scents for the other apprentices. There were sixteen of them always, the apprentices; no more and no less. Gem-singers and stone-tellers and steel-weavers. The wind-kenner girl who huddled in the bitter cold to catch the taste of harvests and battles hundreds of miles away. The sea-breaker boy with his feet ruined from standing in the waves and ‘sensing storms before they rose, with his master, more broken still, her hand always on the nape of his neck as if she feared the waves would snatch him away from her. The quiet, hungry pair who took up the poison-tamer’s path.

  Every year, one or two or none of them achieved their Mastery, earned their ink-stain brand, began whittling away the years they had left making trinkets and weapons and wonders for a far-away queen. Every year, one or two or more of them failed.

  They did not speak of the dead. One child’s fall was another’s chance, and there were always more sails on the horizon.

  Sarai listened to the other apprentices’ stories, choosing dragon’s blood or sandalwood, rose or lilac, moss or bryony. It did not always come readily, the work, but she could lose herself in it, could lose hours and days to the service of a single scent, and when it was done, satisfaction suffused her. The day one of her scents drove a girl, weeping, to confess that she had planned to throw herself from the bluffs, Jarad smiled.

  “This is your talent,” he told her.

  But scent-making was the province of the unambitious. To serve the senses, to serve pleasure and whimsy. She would not win her way over the ocean with perfume-stained fingertips. She needed power, and for the essence-eaters, power was in poison. None of them were kept from the path to poison-taming, none forced to it; the queen trusted ambition more than coercion.

  So it was for every essence-eater, save the best of them.

  The best of the essence-eaters served one purpose: to keep the queen alive. There were six always, two and two and two to stand beside her, fingertips touching skin every minute, tasting and testing the essences inside of her. Three essences in particular: tarsnake venom, gillem oil, maddarek. Three times poisoned, not yet dead, because the essence-eaters kept the poison tame and still.

  As Sarai would learn to do, and leave this catacomb behind.

  Alone, because Jarad would not teach her, Sarai learned the ways these poisons killed, how quickly—six hours, three days, twelve hours. Boils, blackened skin, convulsions, liquefying lungs. She carried vials of them against her skin, fed pellets to rats and frogs and lambs so she could ‘sense the way they moved in the blood.

  She learned to ‘sense new poisons. Hundreds of them. Dozens she ingested herself, to feel the racking shivers, the scorching fevers, the roiling sickness, and to alter them, ease them, draw them out. Some of the poisons, anyone could survive. Some could be endured if the effects were stretched out over days instead of hours, months instead of days. To be one of the six, to be even one of the eighteen who lived in Verakis in case one of the six fell, there were one hundred and sixty-three essences to consume and survive.

  Jarad taught her tinctures to heal old friendships, to ignite new ideas. He taught her how to soothe, how to inflame. How to, again and again, bring simple pleasure, hardly noted, for some unseen courtier.

  She grew to hate him. It was not talent that held her back, she thought; it was that her teacher dealt in scent and pleasure, not in blood and poison. She attended her lessons with him in his workshop, weathered tables carved with the names of apprentices who’d come before, learning to balance the over-sweet of honeysuckle with the damp earthiness of moss, to turn the rank stink of musk into pure silk. And then she scuttled to listen to the poison-tamers’ lessons, to learn how the beating of the heart sustains and destroys, keeping the subject alive while pumping poison through them. To learn how to stop the poison without stopping the heart.

  The rocks below her room were littered with the fragile corpses of birds, her windowsill scattered with poison-painted seeds. She had survived sixty poisons. She was thirteen years old.

  * * *

  After Sarai had found the ambergris, she raced up the beach. Her mother would be at the north bay, because she of all of them spoke the queen’s tongue the best. Sarai wanted the first piece of ambergris to go to her, so that they would all be doubly lucky, and so she dodged the village, running through the thick trees instead with birds flitting above her, crying out so raucously she could not hear her own panting breath.

  She burst from the trees onto sand and thudded to a stop. There, in front of her, was a man. A dust-skinned man, colorless compared to her own complexion, dressed in weather-worn clothes that might have once been blue. He turned to her with an eyebrow raised. His face was crooked, a slash running through it; he had only eight fingers and one of those half-gone. A queen’s man, here to collect the queen’s taxes, here to spoil her luck.

  “Hullo,” he said in a voice like water churning gravel. “Who’s this?”

  She sighed and stamped and split her ambergris in two, and handed him a piece. He turned it in his hands.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “Whale puke,” she said, because she was feeling petulant, and because she didn’t speak his language well. But it wasn’t right, calling such a marvelous thing by such crude words, so she tried again. “Can you feel?” she asked. “It’s all the way deep and all the way dark. For hours and hours, and then breath again.” She moved her hand like a whale beneath the water.

  “What do you mean, feel?” he asked.

  “Feel,” she insisted, and tapped two fingers to the spot beneath her ribs where the tug always came.

  “Come here,” he said. “Follow.” An odd tone to his voice. Sad, maybe. She followed, because he was going down to the shore and there was her mother up ahead anyway, and her mother would be so pleased. So very pleased.

  It was the last time she saw her mother at all.

  * * *

  Jarad knew what she was doing, sighed over her. “It isn’t your talent,” he said when she lay in bed in her gray stone room with her muscles agony-tight, her joints hot as a bellows-fed forge. “You’ll kill yourself like this.” He read to her of distant places, of the scents that were found there. He told her of methods of distillation. He drilled her on accepted pairings, challenged her to create daring ones.

  A new child was brought to the island, blindfolded and weeping. She made him a sachet of cloves and cassia bark, the scents of his mother’s palms. He crept into her bed at night and she held him while he dreamed. His skill was slight, the island small. “I want to go home,” he said. Three months after he’d arrived, he did; she was called to pack the cavities of his body with funerary herbs for the journey.

  She swallowed wine laced with karagal and vomited blood for six days. “You have no talent for this,” Jarad said, and set a folded note beside her bed: her next assignment. On the seventh day, when she knew she would survive, she took the note and went to their workshop, where Jarad already sat absorbed in his own task. She was sixteen years old; she had survived one hundred and fifty-nine poisons.

  “Four left,” she said. Jarad said nothing. She set to work.

  The scent was for a woman from the Principalities. Sarai imagined the wrists the woman would dab the oil against, deep brown and delicate. Imagined her long neck, the pulse-points at the curve of her smooth jaw. Imagined her sprinkling oil-scented water on her blue-black hair, so that when her lover leaned close he would catch its scent and think—

  Think what? Scent was individual. It sparked emotion, teased out memory. No scent spoke the same language to two people. It would mutter nonsense to one, sing sorrow to the next, laugh joyfully to a third. Sarai saw with satisfaction that Jarad had included in his instructions two tightly-scripted paragraphs—one for the woman, one for her lover. Where they were born, where they had wandered. Where they first kissed, where their hearts had been broken.

  Sarai had set foot on two shores, the golden and the gray, but
her workshop was a scent-map of the world, and she had memorized it all. Wintergreen from the frost-glazed north, pebbles of balsam resin from the west, cinnamon and sandalwood, cloves and bergamot, amber and rose. She knew which flowers grew in the spring on sun-drenched hills, which clung to shadows; which towns made garlands of poppies and which of forget-me-nots during the festivals and feasts of marriage, and which woods they would burn for the bonfire when they danced.

  They had met in the winter, this woman and her lover, and kissed in the spring. They had fought once beneath the boughs of an oud-wood tree, and even though such wood was the most precious in the workshop, she twined its scent through, subtly, so they would not know the scent but would feel it—the fight, and the forgiveness afterward.

  And in among the notes that sang of his life and hers, she hid the scent of red-bark trees, which grew only on the golden shores. A scent they would not know; a scent to make them reach for unfamiliar things, so they would not be caught up forever in the past.

  When she was done she touched it to her skin. It would tell her little; everyone’s skin was different, and the scent was not for her. But it bloomed like a promise, if only a promise for another, and she nodded in tight-curled satisfaction.

  Jarad caught her wrist in his bony fingers and inhaled. “This is your talent,” he told her. “And this is what you love.”

  “Four left,” she repeated, and staggered on weak legs to bed.

  * * *

  Sarai would have stayed below decks the morning after she was taken, crying into the rough blankets of her new narrow bunk, but the scarred sailor who’d recognized her for what she was came to collect her.

  “You’ll want to watch,” he said. “You’ll want to see your home. Memorize it. You won’t see it again, and you’ll start to forget.” He spoke like he knew, and so she went with him back up to the deck. The wind had caught their sails already; the island was slipping away fast, so fast. She leaned against the rope that ringed the deck, trying to see every detail one last time.