Beneath Ceaseless Skies #162 Read online

  There, I thought, wheeling away. That will slow them down for a bit. But men like Akiiki sleep on the skins of lions. He was not afraid of me, and I would not surprise him again. Not in that skin, anyway.

  * * *

  I followed them for a long ways but saw no other opportunity to strike. I suppose I might have turned into a scorpion, or an asp, and ended it, but I do not like to use my magic for killing. In my girlskin, I hunt and defend myself like anyone, but magic is subtle, and its patrons must be subtler. So I observed.

  They were kind enough to the Lady Uduru—had they laid a hand on her, I would have killed them gladly.

  “Where are you taking me?” she asked, in between dainty sips of water. In the old days I would have rolled my eyes, but I was beginning to see how her body was a kind of weapon, and how she could wield it as cleverly as I could a knife.

  “To my brother,” said Akiiki. “You will marry him, and you will bring rain in every season.”

  “Will I?” asked the Lady Uduru. The way she said it answered clearly, No I won’t.

  “You will,” said Akiiki. “My brother will see to it.”

  The Lady Uduru was so bold as to laugh in his face. Oh, I loved her nearly as much as I had loved my lion body.

  Alas, Akiiki and his man were careful. They did not let her out of their sight. They took turns standing guard that night, and while the Lady slept a little ways off, and had her privacy, she had no chance to escape.

  I know. I kept watch all night.

  * * *

  They rose early the next day to continue their march.

  “This will be a very long trip on foot, I think,” said the Lady Uduru mildly, stopping to shake dust out of her shoe—it was a man’s pair, salvaged from the ruined cart.

  But Akiiki’s man shook his head. “We will take a ship this evening. We would have arrived last night, if it weren’t for that cursed lion...”

  The Lady Uduru cast her shoulder a frightened glace; I was riding in the folds of her dress, back in my little mouse-skin. That was no good! We’d have to escape before we reached the boat. Even if anyone came after us, and if they knew somehow which direction we’d been taken, they’d never find us upriver.

  Us—well, one thing was sure: they would not come looking for me.

  I tugged gently at my goatskin, just to see if it would be possible to put on an Uduru-girlskin if it came to that. The goatskin pulled back; it did not like that shape. My goatskin might be flexible, but my girlskin was unique.

  * * *

  The main thing to do was buy us more time, and by the time the Lady Uduru and her captors had taken their morning break for water, I had an idea. I folded myself into a golden sparrow when the men weren’t looking and flew off, scanning the ground. I did not have to go far to find what I was looking for: a sandy red hill built up against the side of an old tree.

  A siafu anthill.

  Surely even you know that the jaws of the siafu can carve flesh, and that when the siafu travel in their driving line, anything in their path will be eaten to the bone. It was not the season for lines to form, but I could not wait for the right time.

  Landing safely in the tree, I tugged myself into the skin of a siafu. It was the smallest skin I’ve ever worn, and I was half-afraid I’d burst out of it again, but my goatskin held as I entered the anthill.

  Ant brains are not like human brains; you have only to think something, and nudge the fellow nearest you, and he’s thinking it too. The fellow beside him knows it in a moment, and then... suddenly, the whole anthill knows, fast as thought. It’s a lovely way of communicating, when you aren’t trying to trick someone into doing something that isn’t their business.

  So I didn’t let myself think about why I was there. I only thought what I wanted. Time to go time to go it’s the time now hurry hurry, I thought to them. Ants, like all other creatures, love to be powerful, and so stirring them against their natures was not as hard as it might have been. It helped, I’m sure, that I was a rare female in a Queen’s harem.

  The ants came with me in a flood; I could lead them by little more than thinking, and even in an ant skin my will was stronger than theirs. We were not swift, but we did not have to be. We only had to cut off Akiiki’s progress. Once they got going, they were impossible to stop.

  When Akiiki reached our drive, fifty thousand strong, flowing like a deadly tributary through the sand, he cried out in frustration. “We’ll go around,” he snarled, and the three humans followed the ants upstream, hoping to find the far end and circle around.

  The Lady Uduru winked at a hyena lying in the shade of a nearby baobab. Her magic must have been getting better, because she was right: it was me.

  * * *

  Slow them down it did—but my tricks did not stop them, and in spite of everything they reached the river that night. There was a small port along the water, only an abandoned house and a creaky dock. A boat too fine for that river-harbor was moored in the black water.

  “The boat will have to wait for morning,” Akiiki growled. His manners became sourer, and his looks less pleasing to the eye, with every passing moment. I would have been proud of my work, except that the Lady was not yet free.

  Three men were waiting in the little house; all Akiiki’s men, ready to sail at sunrise. There was no one else; and no one else would come.

  “It is only a day by boat to his brother’s town,” moaned the Lady Uduru when I snuck into her private room. “What shall we do? I want to go home.”

  My family was better off for having sold me into the Lady Uduru’s service. But if there was a drought, their new fortune would dwindle to nothing in a single year.

  The land is kind to us when it wants to be, but sometimes it forgets. My family was better off if the Lady Uduru was safe in her fine house, with her fine books, wielding her cold manners in one fist and her magic in the other.

  “Hold out your hands,” I told her. She did, and I laid mine atop hers so that our palms touched. Very, very gently, I tugged at the edge of my girlskin.

  “Oh!” cried the Lady Uduru, yanking her hands away from me as though I was on fire. “What is that?”

  “I have a solution,” I told her. “I think I can look like you. But I think... I think we will have to exchange girlskins.”

  She gaped at me, and I smiled at her purely human expression.

  “I will become you,” I explained. “That is, I shall look just like you. But when I wear the goatskin, I am still myself inside—so I believe that if we do this, I shall still be me, and you will still have your magic, and you will be able escape, only...”

  “Only I shall look like you.” The Lady Uduru said this neutrally, but I noticed the way her eyes roamed over me, over my face and arms and down to my feet. I could feel the blood rising in my neck and face. At last she said, “I am older than you are.”

  “Then clearly you will get the better bargain in this trade,” I snapped.

  She laughed at me, loud and low in that fine deep-rooted voice, and I could not guess what her captors would be thinking if they heard her. “Then try.” She held her hands out to me, and I placed my palms on hers and changed my girlskin for the first time.

  * * *

  Every animal is different on the inside. I was long used to the shape of new bodies, but this was something else, because for all my changing, the girlskin was the only constant shape I knew.

  It was strange, too, to see Shanzi sitting across from me, staring at her hands in wonder, then staring at me in awe.

  I recognized her expression. It was the same one I had when I looked on her for the first time.

  “Well,” I said, “it worked.”

  Shanzi bent forward to examine me more closely. “This is very strange,” she murmured. “I don’t know if I like it.” Then her hands found her face and traced the shape of my nose and my lips—No, don’t forget, her lips now—and her ordinary face was overtaken by a smile. “No. I am certain. I do like it.”

  Ev
en in her new body, she was more radiant than I had been, and so I was quite sure that she had taken her magic with her, and that I had kept mine.

  “You can’t turn into a mouse and sneak out,” I told her. “You’ll have to find another way.”

  “I can go by the door,” she teased, rising on shaky legs—but I shook my head.

  “If they catch you, that will be the end of it.”

  “Then we will need a distraction,” she said with relish. “I have just the thing. Oh, and Shanzi?”

  I nodded.

  “However many yams I paid for you, you were worth it.” Her grin sat strangely on my face, but I did not dislike it.

  Shanzi raised her hands above her head, just as she had done in the grasslands. For a moment nothing happened—was the magic gone?—but then the air quivered with static, and a drumming of thunder shook the walls, and then, wonder of wonders, a bolt of that merciless blue lightening split the roof open, and then there was another, and another, reducing the room to rubble and letting the rain in.

  The first thing Akiiki thought of, of course, was his prize, and he was on me as soon as he could push through the rubble.

  “I don’t know your game,” he snarled, grabbing my arm, though clearly too afraid of me to hurt me, “but it won’t help! You’re still my prisoner.”

  “Yes,” I said, watching the faint outline of Shanzi disappear forever into the rain, “I am.”

  “I won’t take my eye off you again until you are safely in my brother’s house!”

  On he raged, but I was smiling to myself, because when Shanzi ran off into the night she had two ordinary feet, and by wiggling all my toes I had discovered that no matter who I appeared to be, I would always be a goatskin girl.

  * * *

  The rest you know. Your brother brought me here, and true to his word he has not let me out of his sight for a moment. But now it is just the two of us, and instead of the most desirable woman in the world with her life-giving storm magic, you have got me.

  One of two things will happen now. I will turn into an adder, and either you will let me go because I am worthless to you, or you will try to kill me for my impudence. If it comes to that, we will see who strikes first. I do not like to kill with my magic, as I said, but I will defend my life in any skin.

  After that? When I reach the open desert, I will tug myself into a lion skin, and I will leave you behind.

  Yes. It is possible that I will return the Lady Uduru to her own skin, and take Shanzi back.

  It is possible. But it is not the only choice a girl with my magic might make.

  Copyright © 2014 K.C. Norton

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  K.C. Norton’s work can be found at Daily Science Fiction, Flash Fiction Online, and Writers of the Future, among other venues. She lives in the least-rural part of rural Pennsylvania with a small cow-spotted dog. She can be found at facebook.com/greekpunk, and can be tweeted @kc_norton if the urge should strike.

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  COVER ART

  “Ancient Threshold,” by Sam Burley

  Sam Burley is a matte painter turned illustrator and is believed to currently reside on the continent of North America. Eye-witness reports describe him as a tall, stick-like, camera-wielding figure staring at the sky or driving around aimlessly with his dog named Rygel. On rare occasions he has been glimpsed careening through the air by any of several flimsy and horribly unnatural means of flight, apparently laughing. If seen, approach with caution… and preferably root beer. View more of his work online at samburleystudio.com.

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  ISSN: 1946-1076

  Published by Firkin Press,

  a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

  Compilation Copyright © 2014 Firkin Press

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