Tag: Beneath Ceaseless Skies

The Burning Girl by Carrie Vaughn

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Burning Girl by Carrie Vaughn (Beneath Ceaseless Skies #340, 7th October 2021) opens with three knights arriving at an abbey, and a teenage girl called Joan being brought before them:

[One] of the nuns ran back to the hall and returned with an unlit candle, one of the big beeswax ones used to light the chapel sanctuary. I knew what this meant: these knights had demanded a demonstration. At the sight of that candle, I nearly cried. I did not understand, did not want to understand, but I knew what was happening.
Ursula held the candle to me. “You must show Sir Gilbert what you are.”
“Mother Abbess, you said that I must never—”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“But you said that I would be damned—”
“Joan! If you do not do this for Sir Gilbert, the Norman army will destroy the abbey and all of us with it. Please.”
Mother Ursula did not have to beg for anything, particularly not from a low-born novice placed here out of charity and fear. A scrawny, awkward novice, coifed and shrouded in threadbare gray and carrying the Devil’s spark. But she begged now.
I held the candle before me where the Normans could see it. Its weight was potential; the wick beckoned. Already the spark rose up under my skin. Mother Ursula could not put a candle in my hand and expect I would do nothing.
I touched the wick. The candle lit, a tongue of fire flaring and settling.
“Mon Dieu.” This was whispered by the wiry, chestnut-haired man standing to Sir Gilbert’s right. The nuns made the sign of the cross.
Sir Gilbert smiled.

Joan leaves with the Sir Gilbert and the other two and, when they get back to his camp, she sees that he has gathered several other paranormals into his company: Ann (who was one of the two “knights” with Gilbert) can split the ground; Isabelle can control the weather; Ibrahim can talk to the birds; and Felix can run very quickly. The next day they travel to see William (the Conqueror) and, when Joan is presented to him, she spectacularly demonstrates her powers by setting a nearby haycart ablaze. This leads to William giving Gilbert and the paranormals the task of taking the city of York.
The last section of the story details the battle at York and (spoiler) their eventual victory. Then, afterwards, William’s men attempt to kill Gilbert and the others because of the threat they pose. However, after the group fight off the attack, Gilbert goes to see William and gets a reprieve and land in Wessex.
This is a readable enough piece but it is essentially the Norman Conquest redone with superheroes, and, like most superhero tales, the story has a number of overfamiliar elements: (a) misfits bond with other misfits; (b) there is lots of fighting; and (c) there is little sense of peril for the reader as it seems fairly obvious that the group’s powers will deliver them to safety. And, when that fails, William can always change his mind at the end of the story.
Not a bad piece, but it is somewhat formulaic and consequently a little uninvolving.
** (Average). 10,650 words. Story link.

The Garden Where No One Ever Goes by P. H. Lee

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Garden Where No One Ever Goes by P. H. Lee (Beneath Ceaseless Skies #373, 3rd December 2020) sees a young girl meet her lover in a deserted garden in the middle of a city; there, she gives them a pale red rose and they make love.
Later, as the young girl and her sister are getting magic lessons from their mother, the sister mentions that there are pale red roses growing in the deserted gardens, and that it appears like “the sort of magic a foolish young girl might make, if she were slipping away from her house to meet her lover in the middle of the night.”
The young girl continues to meet her lover there (the deserted garden is now full of roses) until, eventually, the Inquisition comes to question her about her liaison. The story then ends (spoiler) with the lover being hanged and the girl witnessing the event, whereupon her magic causes water to pour out of her and wash everything away.
This tale of forbidden and doomed love was too slight and too dreamlike for me.
* Mediocre. 1500 words. Story link.

The Past, Like a River in Flood by Marissa Lingen

Posted on by Paul Fraser 3 Comments on The Past, Like a River in Flood by Marissa Lingen

The Past, Like a River in Flood by Marissa Lingen (Beneath Ceaseless Skies #311, 27th August 2020) sees a geomancer returning to the magical university where she studied twenty years after a disaster that occurred there. She meets her former tutor/advisor, and they go to the walled up “Vault of Potions”—the site of two recent deaths—with the with the aim of opening it and forcing the university to deal with the contamination that has been festering inside ever since:

I’d handed those very stones to the professors who were standing in the entrance walling up the Vault, me and Ev Minor, shin-deep in the floodwaters with that eerie pink glow from the spilled potions’ ill-fated summonings getting brighter every second. That was the night everything I owned washed away and it was the least of my troubles. That was the night we lost Alden Glasshand, my first-year Incantations professor, and two students whose names I’ll never forget but whose faces I can never remember, pulled under the waters by the vortices that had suddenly surged beneath their feet when the powerful magics in the potions were accidentally combined. That was the night we slept on the top floor of the Library and didn’t know if we’d get down in the morning.

The only complication in this otherwise straightforward account is (spoiler) an alchemy professor who intervenes and stabs the narrator’s tutor as they are in the process of opening the vault (the alchemist wants them to leave it alone so the university can continue on as before). The narrator subdues her, and then makes what I presume in the story’s point:

“Putting something behind you doesn’t mean ignoring it. It means making sure it can’t hurt you anymore. It means making sure it can’t hurt anybody anymore.”

The setup/resolution structure of this piece is too simple,1 and seems constructed with the sole purpose of delivering the story’s message. That said, the setting and events are evocatively described.
** (Average). 4,450 words. Story link.

1. I’ve found that a lot of BCS stories feel rather fragmentary.

The Mermaid Astronaut by Yoon Ha Lee

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Mermaid Astronaut by Yoon Ha Lee (Beneath Ceaseless Skies #298, 27th February 2020)1 has a title that pretty much describes the story: a mermaid called Essarala wants to travel among the stars but lives in a planet-bound culture. Then, when an interstellar trading ship arrives in orbit for the first time, Essarala thinks she may have found a way off-planet—until she realises that the ship has no water for a mer to live in. Her sister Kiovasa suggests they should visit the witch beneath the waves for help.
After arriving at the witch’s lair, and discussing the matter with her—during which the witch gives warnings about the dangers and difficulties that will lie ahead—she says that she can give Essarala two legs like the humans. Essarala is determined to go and, even though she doesn’t understand everything the witch has warned her about, asks what the price is. The witch replies that one day Essarala will want to come home and, when she does, she should visit her again. Then the witch gives her a knife that will cleave her tail into two legs.
Later, after Essarala has cut herself and been accepted onto the crew, she is given to an alien called Ssen to be mentored. We see her develop as a crew member, and learn about some of her adventures:

Essarala learned to fly in skysuits in vast and turbulent gas planets, some of which had corrosive atmospheres. She saw twin sunsets over methane seas and meteor showers flung across brilliantine nighttime skies. She walked through forests of towering trees sharded through with crystal and breathed in the fragrance of flowers that bloomed only once a millennium. And she kept her promise, too: for every world she visited, she sang her sister’s name.

Someday I will go back and tell her of the things I have seen, Essarala thought again and again. But not yet, not yet.

Then, towards the end of the story (spoiler), Ssen teaches Essarala about special relativity, and she realises that time will be passing much more quickly for her sister on her world. Essarala begs the captain and crew to take her back home, and they generously do so. As soon as they arrive Essarala visits the witch as promised, to be told that the old woman will shortly die and that, given the wisdom she has gained on her travels, Essarala will replace her . Then the witch tells Essarala that her sister is still alive but that she doesn’t have long left. Essarala goes to find her, and the story ends with the two sisters together.2
I thought the idea of telling an SF story as a fantasy tale worked very well here (it’s possible to view the severing of her tail to become two legs, etc., as unexplained superscience), and it is an enjoyable and original piece. I also thought Lee’s elegant and concise writing style added to the story. The ending is perhaps not as strong as the rest of it, but that is a minor quibble.3
***+ (Good to very good.) 5,950 words. [Story]

1. This is a finalist for the Sturgeon and short story Hugo Awards for 2021.

2. There is a dedication at the end of the story to Lee’s sister.

3. Some of the commenters in one of my (private) FB groups (The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Fiction) thought that the lack of foreboding at the end of the story was a weakness. I thought that the uncertainty about her sister provided that.