Beneath Ceaseless Skies #199 Read online

  Issue #199 • May 12, 2016

  “Cloud Dweller,” by E. Catherine Tobler

  “They Said the Desert,” by A.T. Greenblatt

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  CLOUD DWELLER

  by E. Catherine Tobler

  “Saw you out there.”

  At the familiar contralto voice of Grand Duchess Maria Romanov, who was neither a duchess nor a Romanov, Vasily Agranovsky lifted his gaze from his triangles of cold buttered toast and sat a little straighter. In the St. Cloud Hotel’s bustling Starlite Dining Room, the duchess joined him at the table uninvited. Her loose kaftan, embroidered with gold and ivory, combined with her imposing circumference to swallow the chair on which she perched. She appeared a fluffed owl upon a branch, not the reigning fat lady of Jackson’s Unreal Circus and Mobile Marmalade.

  “Out where, Your Grace?” Vasily knew quite well where he had spent his morning but asked because he had not noticed Maria while on his walk and perhaps she was mistaken in who she had seen.

  “The gorge.”

  She was not mistaken, and he regretted having taken a room at the hotel, such that others might become familiar with his schedule. But the St. Cloud Hotel was vastly interesting to him, the building having been moved brick by brick from its original location forty-one years prior. Townsfolk said it was filled to the brim with ghosts, that sometimes people vanished when they turned corners, that the hotel had been moved incomplete and carried with it the people of another time and place. Vasily wanted to stay beneath the very roof he would later walk off of. He wanted to walk without wires and disappear.

  He picked up a slice of his cold toast, regarding the partially blackened triangle before biting its corner off. He walked to Colorado’s Royal Gorge in the mornings because no one was there, and because the sky lines were more visible to him then. In the rising or setting sun, the innumerable lines that crisscrossed the vast space glowed like webbing. Town officials had plans to bridge the gorge, and Vasily laughed at the notion; the space was surely too large to bridge by any normal means.

  He chewed his cold toast. Maria watched him all the while, and he waited for her to say more, to lay the trap she wished him to fall into. But Vasily Agranovsky would never fall so easily; he was well-accustomed to walking upon high wires without a pole or umbrella to balance himself.

  Maria greeted the waitress who approached—a woman whose own daughter had vanished in the hotel’s halls—and submitted her breakfast order, the nature of which surprised Vasily. Perhaps it should not have, given that the hotel was providing rooms and meals as part of the entertainment contract between circus and city. The circus never lacked for interesting foods upon the train, but it was something of a treat to sit in a dining room and give an order to a server; to see them vanish and later return with china plates bearing one’s food. But where one might have thought Maria would order sides of fat-beribboned bacon and two dozen eggs, it was fresh fruit she requested. Being late summer, they brought her four peaches, startlingly sweet in Vasily’s mouth when she bade him have one.

  “Crates of these have been taken to Beth,” Maria murmured as she took her pocket knife to one globe, slicing paper-thin pieces of the sweetness from the stone in its center. “But the gorge.” She pointed at Vasily with the knife, peach juice brightening its sharp edge. “I saw you, walking the sky. Who knows you do this?”

  Again, Vasily said nothing. He wondered if Beth could make her customary marmalade with peaches, but he did not ask Maria. He watched the juice run along the knife’s edge, gather in a drop, and plummet to the tablecloth. A pale orange drop of rain against the white.

  “No one, I see.”

  He couldn’t deny her conclusion—no one knew, and he hoped no one ever would.

  Wherever he traveled, Vasily saw vast networks of lines—across the ground, stretching into the sky. It was the sky-bound lines that pulled at him most, that beckoned him to try his feet upon them. He had always strung ropes and wires to climb, between poles, trees, and buildings, but the lines that he had not strung—lines that existed of their own accord—were a challenge he never expected. In the Colorado west, he had found a place he had never imagined before, a deep stony gorge within the world, a gorge that held a river and a rail for the train but also held countless lines to walk.

  Vasily had learned that no one else could see these lines. The first time he had asked about them, he had appeared such a fool they’d thought him mad—so he was careful in a way most people would never have to be.

  “What do you think you saw, Your Grace?” Vasily asked, around the wad of cold toast in his cheek. He reached for his coffee, also cold, and forced himself to swallow both.

  Maria sliced another crescent of peach and curled it into her mouth. “You walked without wire, Vasily. You walked in the sky. Foolish man.”

  Vasily leaned into his chair, the wood creaking beneath him as though it meant to give way. With a practiced laugh, he discarded the rest of his toast triangle and brushed his hand over the linen napkin covering his lean lap. “This morning,” he said, “I was determining where to place the guylines for the weekend’s roof walk, if I mean to use them at all.” This was absolute truth, though it had happened after his jaunt to the gorge. “Perhaps you saw someone else.” He allowed his brow to crease with a frown, to appear concerned. “Someone local? Someone who should speak to Jackson about employment—someone who could unseat me from my own?”

  This idea was not as frightening as it had once been. His path to Jackson’s circus had not been a straight one; Vasily had always believed that his future rested within the realm of Olympians. His family had long joked of the way he would walk upon every ledge he encountered, rather than the steady, true ground. But the war had taken his family and his Olympic dreams. Fleeing the pogroms that consumed the only world he had known—running on distant ledges undreamed of—had given him a new sense of balance entirely.

  “You don’t wish anyone to know?” Maria asked. The question was tentative, more softly spoken than anything she had said before. It was almost not a question. Her fingers stilled upon the peach she held, the cut into its sweet belly much like the gorge outside the city. Edged with color, running black at its heart.

  “There is nothing to know, Your Grace,” Vasily said. He discarded his napkin across his now-empty plate—in the course of their conversation, he had eaten every scrap of toast, no matter how cold or blackened, and had swallowed every drop of coffee, for to leave any such luxury behind remained outlandish to him.

  Maria graciously did not question him as he stood from the table. He supposed that she, more so than others within the troupe, might understand his inclination toward silence and secrets. She kept her own company and rarely sought that of others, and Vasily only registered this as he took leave of her. She had sought him out. Maria had joined him of her own accord—and what vast distance had she bridged to do so? Regret was a close friend, and it flooded him as he stepped into the dusty street outside the St. Cloud Hotel to once again survey the rooflines. He did not see the precise ledges, only the stretches of emptiness from one ledge to the next. Emptinesses a man could vanish into.

  * * *

  He should not have returned so soon, but he could not resist going.

  Sunset turned the land to liquescent gold, the valley a momentary basin that would empty when the sun rolled below the jagged edge of the majestic Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Where the dark gorge split the ground, Vasily saw not the yawning black mouth untouched by sunset but the thousand strands of silver that traversed the opening and caught the day’s remain
ing sunlight. A spider’s web finely wrought by a keen-eyed jeweler, the strands were innumerable, but Vasily knew how to see the strongest among them, those that led with certainty from the edge of one world and perhaps into the next.

  He had never been a poet—he thought the war had carved out whatever sentiment remained within his heart—but here, at the edge of the world, something tugged at him. Something held its hand out and bade him come. Vasily placed his slippered foot against the strongest line and walked. Beneath his foot, the line hummed. It was like nothing he had experienced through the lines he had strung, a distinct vibration beneath his foot. Rope and wire had never sung for him, but these lines sent a small song through his entire being. He knew that if anyone was to see him, they would think he was walking unsupported through the sunset air. Maria had said so herself. Even so, his feet were unable to refuse the invitation.

  With each step, he grew certain that he felt beneath him the steps of another, the pressure of a foot rolling from ball to heel and back. He did not look down in an effort to determine if there was another set of feet braced against his own. He never looked down, for to look down was to doubt. Beyond that, the idea was impossible—the existence of another walker—for beneath him was the gorge alone, more than one thousand feet of tumbling granite split by the mighty Arkansas River. Vasily looked only ahead, so that it was his beloved Sarit he saw.

  The ghost of his Sarit was not entirely unknown at these heights, blue eyes still simmering with affection; Vasily always brought her with him in his thoughts, though in her life she had never joined him upon the wire. She stood without moving, unaffected by the wind, her eyes on him the way his own studied the wires. As if his slim figure were the only thing visible at this height and that beyond opened a vast nothingness she could not fill.

  Quick-fingered Sarit had not seen the lobsters of the cold east nor the sunsets of the warmer west, for she had been lost long before Vasily had known these American pleasures. But her toes, curling bare against the sunlit wire as they once had into blankets still warm with sleep, were achingly familiar to him. His breath caught in his throat.

  “Sarit,” he said, and the world shifted.

  It was as though speaking her name erased the sky’s phantom lines; as if the two ghostly constructs could not occupy the same space. He was certain it was in truth the final slip of the sun behind the mountain’s sharp edge that made the sky lines vanish, for he had witnessed this before. He could no longer feel the hum beneath his feet. Though the lines were unseen, he did not fall.

  The far end of the line whipped up, into the glow of sunset overhead, to enfold Sarit. He found the idea strange, that the line was embracing her, but it pulled her through the last bits of sunset, into the gorge, into the dark.

  Beneath his feet, the unseen line moved. He pictured it as ripples in a lake, growing larger and slower from the center of the initial disturbance. He knew, as well as he knew anything, that the wires he walked upon did not move in such a fashion, that what he now felt could not be explained by ordinary means. The line should have collapsed, should not have borne his weight a second longer, but he did not fall. He tensed and looked down. This was no wire; this was a strange sky line, a thing he did not fully understand. He called himself foolish as he beheld his own feet. His mind could not believe what his body knew, that he stood upon a line, for his eyes told him the line was gone, erased with the setting of the sun. Even though it had rippled, seemingly broken from its distant anchor, he felt the line’s support, but then he glimpsed the strange wonder of the figure—another walker—balanced beneath his own feet.

  Vasily stared, and so too did the other walker. How like me he looks, Vasily thought, and for a moment he believed that another him walked upon another line in a world he did not know. Within the other’s eyes, Vasily saw that he did not understand what had happened either. The other’s mouth moved in words Vasily could not hear, and as the line wobbled again, they moved for the firm ground of the gorge’s lip together. Vasily tumbled to the ground, half expecting the other to be at his side, but there was no one else there. Was the other sprawling upon a similar stretch of ground in his own world?

  In the high clouds, the last sun of the day still played, but below the mountains, darkness was gathering. The lines that crossed the gorge appeared as little more than chalk marks in the fading light, and Vasily did not trust himself to try them again.

  The walk back to the city took him past the dust-shrouded prison yards with their rough-cut stone buildings. In the dust clouds, Vasily thought he saw figures wandering, translucent and pale. Jackson had asked that the circus be allowed to perform within the yards, but city officials had denied him, given a potential and likely overexcitement among the prisoners at the very idea of a circus.

  (But would the prisoners not glimpse the wonders between the bars of their windows, no matter where the circus assembled, Jackson had asked. He pressed, his heart set upon the prison yard, but the warden said no, sir, we cannot, for it would be unkind to perform such feats in their own yard without inviting them— Oh, but we would invite them, sirs, Jackson insisted and the warden flushed red as rooster feathers. No sir, for these are jewel thieves and bank robbers and takers of innocents— Innocence? Jackson asked with a crooked smile, and yes said the warden, they would not cater to them.)

  Still, Vasily let his mind consider each roofline, the angles, and the spaces between. The buildings framed sections of sky that had begun to fill up with pinprick stars Vasily could not name but knew all the same. By the time he reached City Hall and moved onto proper city streets, he knew exactly how he would place his wires so as to escape, were he ever imprisoned. It would be unfair to any other prisoners, and he chuckled at the idea of them leaping onto his wires in an effort to leave. The prisoners were cartoonish figures in his mind, oversized hands clawing at the wire, clownish feet pressing into the face of the fellow who dared follow behind.

  (The reality was more difficult to consider, for it pulled Vasily backward in time; took him by the shoulders and turned him around, so that he was looking—truly looking—at what had been made of his home, his family. He had fled these things, by ledge and wire, but when he turned around they were still there, skeletons in the debris, and so he did not turn around (he did not look down, oh he did not look down). He did not consider the prisoners and every single thing each had left behind. He could not.)

  Further up the river, where a groomed trail wandered, sprawled the empty lot Jackson’s circus had been given domain over. Not so far from the prison that its residents wouldn’t be able to see the curve of the Ferris wheel against the sky or the jut of striped tents behind the river’s neat line of trees. The circus train herself rested on a spur line near the river, still home to those performers who had not taken the hotel up on its offer of free lodgings.

  The circus had not officially opened—that would be kept for the glory of the weekend—but townsfolk approached the lot to watch the crews set up. Even after sunset, many assembled outside the colorful triangular bunting strung around the lot—a makeshift fence that wouldn’t keep an infant out if one really wanted in. In the warm summer evening, they sweated and pointed, speculating on the nature of the tents, listening for the roar of the rumored lions, and perhaps hoped to glimpse the sequined leotards of the trapeze artists.

  Vasily slipped onto the grounds unnoticed; he did not normally garner attention unless he was upon a wire, above all else. On the ground, he was but another man hurrying from here to there. He threaded his way through tents and crates, and above him in the sky, Agnessa flew high and sure. He envied the circus’s siren; she could reach higher than even he could, and as she now skimmed the cloud tops in the very last sunlight, he wondered if she could see the lines crisscrossing the world. He had never asked her, for fear perhaps that she would say yes. What then?

  “Vasily.”

  Silas, Lawrence, and Foster ringed a low burning fire, some holding cups of coffee, others tin plates bearing h
alf-eaten pocket pies and bowls of steaming beans. With the workers, Jackson stood beside a rounder man Vasily did not know; he looked like Grand Duchess Maria’s matching half, and Vasily wondered if the circus was to gain a fat man. The man sported a crisp gold vest and a belt with a buckle that winked in the firelight; his boots were scuffed deeply enough that Vasily had no trouble imagining the man traveling with a cattle drive.

  “Cookie,” Jackson said to the fat man even as he extended a hand toward Vasily, “this is my sky walker, Agranovsky, I was telling you about. He can walk any line, real or imagined.”

  At the description, Vasily’s heart leaped hot into his throat. Had Maria told Jackson what she believed she had seen? Vasily could not believe she would have, yet fear convinced him otherwise. Why else would he say such a thing? Nothing in Jackson’s eyes answered the question; Jackson’s expressions were notoriously aloof for those who did not know him well, and Vasily did not. He had travelled with Jackson for years, but this had not made the men good friends.

  “Vasily, this is Cookie—he’s treating us tonight.”

  Jackson lifted his own plate, heavy with beans, cornbread, and roasted chicken that shone gold in the firelight. When Cookie pushed a loaded plate into Vasily’s hands, Vasily nodded in thanks.

  “Looks like you could use a few of these,” Cookie said. He slapped Vasily’s arm and laughed joyously, as if feeding people was what he lived for, and here, in the firelight with some of the exhausted circus crew, he had found his element. “Suppose walking the sky keeps you slender like a thread though.”

  “Needs must,” Vasily said, yet he took a generous bite of the cornbread and followed it with a heaping spoon of beans. They were spiced in a way unknown to Vasily, pricking his tongue with heat and sweet at the same time.

  “Jackson says you walk without a pole.” Cookie shook his head and bent to retrieve a battered coffee pot from the fire. He poured steaming coffee into a cup and offered it. “How is it you balance up there, in the sky?”