Beneath Ceaseless Skies #207 Read online

  Issue #207 • Sept. 1, 2016

  “To Rise No More,” by Marie Brennan

  “George & Frank Tarr, Boy Avencherers, in ‘Beeyon the Shours We Knowe!!!!’,” by Thomas M. Waldroon

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  TO RISE NO MORE

  by Marie Brennan

  Patrixbourne, Kent: 1 April, 1828

  “Come back here at once, you naughty child!”

  The shouts faded into the spring air as Ada fled, laughing. When she gained the shelter of the trees, she slowed her pace; Miss Stamp would never follow her this far. She had tried once, the first time her charge vanished into the wood near the house at Bifrons, and had almost not found her way out again. To this day she swore the trees had moved when she wasn’t looking, and Ada was not foolish enough to tell her the truth.

  It was not nice to laugh at Miss Stamp, of course. She was in most respects an excellent governess. But it had become something of a game for Ada, creeping away when Miss Stamp was occupied to steal a precious few minutes out here.

  She soon came to the edge of a little pond, well-shaded by the trees. Ada dug in the pocket of her shawl and removed a small bun, only slightly worse the wear for having resided there since breakfast. She placed it on a low stone at the edge of the pond and said to the air, “Oh no, an unattended piece of bread! What if something were to come and take it?”

  “You have to do it right,” a familiar voice complained from the trees. “Otherwise it won’t work.”

  Ada turned a full circle, but saw nothing. “And what if I said you had to come out before I would do it right?”

  The voice said tartly, “Then I would tell you that I have all eternity, and can wait. You, on the other hand, are mortal. You’ll get hungry. And bored.”

  This was not far off the mark; by coming out here, Ada was missing lunch. “I could eat the bread myself.”

  “At which point there would be no reason for me to stay, would there?”

  “Oh, very well.” Ada picked up the bun, then laid it back down with an exaggerated flourish. “Out of the boundless generosity of my heart, I, the Honourable Augusta Ada Byron, do bestow upon the Good People of this wood—all one of her—this gift of mortal bread, to shelter her against iron, church bells, and other banes of this world.”

  She turned her back, as she had been instructed to do, and waited. The faintest scrape of noise came from behind her, and then, somewhat muddled by a full mouth: “You can look now.”

  The white dress of the girl standing by the rock was pristine, as if it had not travelled so much as six inches through the trees. Even its hem repelled the soil over which it trailed. When she arrayed herself on the stone, turning so the light coming through the branches struck her snowy hair, she looked as if she were sitting for a portrait. Only the bun in her hand and the bite she was chewing distracted from the image. The girl herself might have been only a little older than Ada’s twelve years—if one did not look too closely at her eyes.

  “Alarch,” Ada said, “why do you never let me see you before you’ve eaten the bread?”

  “Because it isn’t comfortable,” Alarch said. “Would you want someone to see you bare?”

  Ada shrugged, unconcerned. “Miss Stamp does, when she helps me bathe.”

  “Yes, well, you are not my governess, and I am not bathing.” Alarch bounced the bun in the palm of her hand. “But this is five bites, at least, so you will not have to turn your back again for some time. What shall we do today?”

  Regretfully, Ada said, “I fear I cannot stay long. But I was hoping to measure your wings, so that I might see how large they are in proportion to your body.”

  Alarch rolled her eyes in amusement. “You know that I could just charm you to fly, and you could skip all this tedious work.”

  “That would be cheating,” Ada said, indignant. “I want to fly on my own, not because you made it happen. Besides, you wouldn’t be able to charm me to fly in front of other people. Could you?”

  Alarch looked thoughtful. Her eyes were the only dark thing about her, apart from her feet. Today those were pale, but sometimes she forgot and they remained a deep grey. “I might,” she said, “so long as I had eaten tithed bread. But it’s always tricky, when the charm goes on a human. Would you like me to try?”

  “No,” Ada said firmly. “Mama would hear of it, and I shudder to think what she would say. I expect she would blame it on my father, and then lock me up with mathematical books and never let me out again.”

  She did not mean it as a joke, but Alarch laughed anyway. “Your father! I wish I had met him. We aren’t to blame for him, you know—at least, I don’t think we are. Not every madman is the fault of the fae.”

  “Are you going to let me study your wings?” Ada asked. She really did not have much time to spare, but she also did not want to talk about her father. Lord Byron’s death had not exorcised his ghost from her mother’s mind, nor from her own. All it had done was remove the possibility that she might ever meet him—for her mother, fearing his madness, had left Lord Byron’s household when Ada was only one month old.

  It did not help to think that if she asked, one of Alarch’s people might be able to call his ghost up for her to converse with.

  “Very well,” Alarch said, and put the bun down.

  No matter how many times she watched it, Ada could not see how the transformation happened. Alarch stood up from the rock, but somehow when the motion ended, a swan was perched where the girl had been sitting.

  The bird extended one wing. She was not, Ada thought, capable of sighing in that form, but if she could, she would have. Ada said, “You are a very good friend, to be so patient with me.” She did not want the swan-maiden to think her ungrateful. “And your feathers are beautiful, though I know I have told you that before. I am hoping to make my own wings out of oil silk, which will be much easier to shape than feathers, but it will not be nearly so beautiful. Did I tell you, though, that I have thought of a way to fix them onto my shoulders?”

  She continued chatting brightly while she took a knotted cord from her pocket and used it to measure first the swan’s wing, then her body. The wing was easily a yard in length, and wiry with strength beneath the feathers; one buffet could have broken Ada’s ribs. “I should take measurements from other birds as well, of course, as I think there must be variations between kinds. But I do not want to dissect anything. I will ask my mother for a book instead, one with plates to show me the anatomy. Or I have another idea, though I have not thought this one through very far, of fixing a steam engine to a sort of carriage, with enormous wings so that it can fly. But I think that would not be as enjoyable as flying on my own.”

  Ada did not need to mark her measurements down; she could hold them in her head easily enough. When she was done, Alarch shifted back into a girl. “A steam engine?” Alarch said, shuddering. “Ash and Thorn, what an unpleasant thought. All that iron.”

  “It isn’t for faeries, goose,” Ada said, using a branch to scrape the pond’s bank clear of leaves and twigs. “It’s for people. Mortals.”

  “Don’t call me a goose.”

  Ada stopped. “I do beg your pardon. Miss Stamp has been calling me that a great deal lately. I have been calling myself a carrier pigeon ever since I began thinking about these wings, but Miss Stamp says I am only a silly goose.”

  This mollified Alarch, who watched as Ada began to sketch a wing into the cleared patch of dirt. “I will never understand that sort of thing,” Alarch said after a time, gesturing at the sketch.

  “It’s only mathematics,” Ada said, surveying
her work. Her formal study of geometry was to begin soon, which would undoubtedly be of great use in this endeavour.

  “Your mother a mathematician, all numbers and rationality; your father a poet, all visions and madness. It’s so romantic.” Alarch sighed, smiling.

  Ada scowled at her. “It isn’t romantic at all. They got along dreadfully.”

  “No, but think of it! As if he were philosophic mercury and she, philosophic sulphur. Opposites joined together to make something greater than either one apart: the quintessence, the philosopher’s stone. Could that be you, do you think?” She gave a conspiratorial wink.

  “That’s alchemy,” Ada said, returning to her diagram, “and it doesn’t work.”

  “It doesn’t work for you, perhaps.”

  It had not worked for her parents, either. They had been opposites, but not the sort that could ever harmonize. And yet, Ada refused to accept that such harmony was as impossible as her mother believed. There must be a place for imagination, for dreaming, even in mathematics. That conviction, as much as the desire to soar through the air, was what inspired her to create these wings—as proof of her concept, that the two ways of thinking might work hand-in-hand. Numbers might build a way to fly, but they would do nothing without the will to fly in the first place, and that did not come from the rational part of her mind.

  No, it came from her association with a creature who was the antithesis of rationality: a faerie swan-maiden, an immortal creature who could be girl or bird at will, who could deceive a governess with charms such that she could not even find her way out of a small wood. Ill health had already sent Ada’s mother to a doctor; knowing that her daughter consorted with such impossibility would shatter her entirely. It would be the final proof that Byronic madness had won out over Milbanke sanity.

  “You aren’t mad,” Alarch said quietly. She always denied being able to hear people’s thoughts, but she had an unsettling knack for guessing Ada’s.

  Ada answered her with a half-smile and fiddled with a bit of loose bark on her stick. “If I were, might I not imagine my faerie companion reassuring me of my good sense?”

  “Come to London,” Alarch said. “I will introduce you to a hundred faeries and a dozen mortals who call them friend. Would that convince you that what you see is true?”

  This at least persuaded Ada to laugh. “No, it would only convince me that London is full of madmen. Which I think is true in any event, whatever my own state may be. But I do not care if I am mad, so long as it allows me to fly.”

  “You will,” Alarch said, with certainty. “And I will be there to see you soar.”

  * * *

  Bifrons, Kent: 12 October, 1828

  The ropes were gone from the house’s “flying room,” replaced by horse-tack and other oddments evicted from the stables by the arrival of their guests. Ada wandered among the clutter, fingers trailing across a piece of harness meant for a carriage. Might she not engage a harness-maker to craft the attachments for her wings? It would certainly be better than the ropes upon which she had swung thus far—especially now that those ropes had been removed.

  She sighed. Unless she meant to pay the man in faerie gold, her mother would have to be the one to engage the harness-maker, and her health was still too poor for her to return to Bifrons. Once she saw how far Ada’s plans had progressed, though... surely she would not chide her daughter for spending so much time and thought on the endeavour, when the proof of its feasibility lay before her.

  “It is mathematics,” Ada said stubbornly, addressing the piled equipment. “She should be pleased by that.”

  Her mother’s sidesaddle lay atop a wooden frame in the room’s far corner, just at the height of a pony’s back. It took a few moments of experimentation for Ada to settle herself properly, but soon she was perched in the saddle. She bounced in place, imagining a pony trotting beneath her. It was not so good as she imagined flying would be, but it might be enjoyable to try.

  When the door opened, it startled her. Ada’s twitch caused the saddle to slip around the frame, and she fell heavily to the floor.

  “My dear!” Miss Stamp rushed forward to help her up. “Are you hurt?”

  “No, I am very well.” In truth Ada’s knee felt bruised, but she did not want Miss Stamp to worry.

  She fussed over Ada regardless. “You did not hit your head, did you? No pain, no difficulty with your vision?”

  Her questions made Ada go still. “No, Miss Stamp. I promise you, I am unhurt.”

  “That is a relief.” Miss Stamp brushed her off, then turned to straighten the dangling saddle. “Were you pretending this was a horse? That is what it is called, you know—this sort of frame. But of course it is only a figure of speech.”

  Ada pressed her lips together. There was no doubt of it; something had put Miss Stamp on her guard. “Has my mother been writing to you? Does she think I am falling ill again?”

  The pause in Miss Stamp’s movements answered for her.

  Falling ill again—as if she had been ill the first time. But at seven Ada had been too young to understand that she should hold her tongue about the things she saw. And perhaps some of it had been illness, too; the entire period was too muddled in her mind for her to say for certain. She only knew that it had begun with her seeing strange things out of the corner of her eye, and that speaking of it had sent her mother into a frenzy of concern. After that it was headaches and bed rest, a cessation of her studies, and then, just when Ada seemed to be recovering, that dream of her father. She presumed it was him, at least. A dark-haired man in a bed, whispering “Oh, my poor dear child! My dear Ada! My God, could I have seen her... give her my blessing...” Then, days later, word that Lord Byron had died in Greece.

  She might have forgotten it all, dismissing it as nothing more than the fancies of an unwell mind, had her mother not taken this house at Bifrons. A house with a nearby wood, the wood with a pond, the pond with a resident swan-maiden. Proof that the things Ada had seen before were more than simple fancy.

  “There is no reason for Mama to be concerned,” Ada said. “I tell you, I am quite well.”

  Miss Stamp hesitated, then faced her. “Your behaviour has her worried. All this nonsense about making wings, the ropes strung up in this room, your supposed book of Flyology...”

  No wonder Miss Stamp had come looking for her here. She and Ada’s mother both thought this enterprise nothing more than a silly fancy, and “fancy” was a forbidden concept in this household. Why, Miss Stamp was even afraid of a simple metaphor—as if Ada would not be able to tell the difference between a wooden frame and an actual horse.

  But saying so outright would only get her into trouble. If Ada was to win this battle, she would have to do so on her mother’s terms. “It is mathematics,” Ada insisted, as she had before. “Geometry. I am only thinking of how my lessons might be applied.” And of what her lessons could achieve, when freed from the strictures her mother believed necessary—or inevitable.

  “People cannot fly,” Miss Stamp said firmly. “No equation can change that. You will only hurt yourself trying.”

  Faeries can fly, Ada thought, though she kept the rebellious thought to herself. And I will find a way to do the same. I will show that Mama’s world and my father’s need not be wholly apart.

  * * *

  Mortlake, Surrey: 17 February, 1829

  “The swans here are very snobbish,” Alarch said, sending a pebble skipping across the water of the Thames with a flick of her wrist. “They think that just because they are royal swans, that makes them superior to those of us from the countryside.”

  Ada sighed, watching the ripples dissipate in the chill grey water.

  Alarch nudged her with one shoulder. “Why the long face? Are you worried for me? You needn’t be. It would take more than some uppish swans to make me regret coming with you from Kent.” She laughed at her own pun.

  Unfortunately, it only made Ada more melancholy. The thought of Alarch being caught and marked durin
g the annual swan upping was not to be borne—even though she knew her friend could easily escape by taking on human form.

  Everything made her melancholy of late. Her mother’s recurrent illness. The removal from Kent to Surrey. The loss of Miss Stamp, who had gone away to be married; the imposition of Miss Frend, who, though not engaged as Ada’s governess, nonetheless oversaw her education with a strict and critical eye.

  Her failure to fly.

  Alarch regarded her with worried eyes. Ada made an effort to smile at her. “I am very glad to have you here.”

  “You have not asked to see my wings in ages,” Alarch said. “I used to be annoyed that you would poke and prod at them... but now I find I miss it.”

  Ada shook her head, staring once more at the Thames. “I do not think what I had in mind will work. The size of the wing, if it is to be large enough to lift me—my body cannot possibly generate enough force to move it. Not with the speed required.” Especially not when she kept growing. Every inch meant more weight for the wings to lift, without a commensurate gain in strength.

  “What of your other notion? The steam-engine, with the carriage?”

  Alarch must be concerned indeed if she, a faerie, was encouraging Ada to pursue such a prospect. Iron was poison to her very soul; the traditional tithe of bread only held that poison at bay, and then only for a while. Ada said, “It might work. But I do not have the mathematics necessary to design it.”

  Alarch laughed. “You will. Given the rate at which your mother is determined to teach you, it is only a matter of time.”

  A matter of time. Ada had already spent more than a year on this endeavour, and every passing day showed her how much further she was from her goal than she thought. When she was twelve, she had thought it would be done within the week. Now... even if she had a design that seemed effective, how was she to test it? A steam-engine could not be made in the parlour with wire and oil silk. And her mother would never fund the testing of such a thing, even if an engineer could be persuaded to try.