Under the Mountain’s Shadow
by Madalena Daleziou
She is a Greek writer living in Scotland. She holds an Mlitt in fantasy literature from the University of Glasgow. Her work has previously appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Deadlands, the other side of hope, and other venues. She can most often be found in a bookshop, or in front of a keyboard, writing stories with too many ghosts.
The Eighth Mountain is taller than the rest. It expands as far as the eye can wander. You can’t look North, or Northeast, or Northwest, without seeing part of it blocking your vision—and your way. It’s nameless, for it’s young as mountains go: thirteen years, three suns, nine days.
One day they’ll stop counting, Elissa knows. Her magic tells her many things, but she needs no magic to tell her that. They will simply grow bored. In this land, one can’t grow any other way.
Under the autumn sun’s gaze, Elissa makes her way amongst gray lavenders. They had a color once. Until last year, she could just about recreate it, mixing makeshift paints of beetroot and dark berries to humor the children when they asked what color the lavenders used to be. But they’re older now, and she too restless to hold a paintbrush.
They have forgotten their true color, child. They have forgotten.
They trail a bit ahead, the little girl and the dead boy. Each time a squirrel comes out of hiding, the boy goes after it. His pockets protrude with hazelnuts and breadcrumbs he saved from his breakfast to make the animals climb up his breeches and eat from his hands.
The girl watches everything; the timid deer, the blood-red, white-spotted mushrooms, the season’s last, swollen cherries. All growths Elissa can name and some she cannot. Did this white moss always cover the oldest tree trunks like a funeral cloak? Did the taproots always look like claws out to get you, or like animal feet struggling to run free? They did. Didn’t they?
Elissa stops short when the rose-path’s smell assaults her nostrils.
“Gloves on.”
The girl wordlessly fishes the tattered leather out of her pocket. She even stoops to pull up her left sock, slipped all the way down to her ankle. She’s native to the land and needs no mother to tell her she must fear it.
But they are not from here, Elissa tells herself. They’re from back home, and they are mine.
This is not strictly true. The girl is a Mountain child through and through; born too late. The wood’s sleepiness runs in her veins, the haunted branches are her bones. She regards her mother’s warnings with the resigned sigh with which children in these parts regard everything.
The boy only frowns. “It’s too warm.”
He’s still a child where squirrels are concerned, so Elissa sometimes forgets he is almost twelve, and no longer completely hers.
“Very well,” she says without raising her voice. “Next time you will stay with gran when your sister and I go for water.”
The woman Elissa is talking about is not the children’s grandmother, of course. Just a landlady kind enough to do business with Astarians. You must make do with what you have. Else the children might grow to think such family bonds are only a matter of fairytales.
The boy puts on his gloves deliberately slowly. When his lower lip is so tight against the upper, he looks like his father. He had also been a dead boy.
As they approach the Mountain, lavender memories give way to the sighing smell of roses. Or blood. They’ve always smelled similar. Haven’t they?
When they cross the bridge, the scent engulfs her completely. Elissa covers her nose with her scarf. It’s not nauseating, not exactly. The little girl seems immune to it. It’s the memory—
Elissa’s uncle would always bring roses when a child was born in the house. The room would reek of blood. There were three younger ones when Elissa left, her mother had been all alone, how could she make it—
“Mother?”
The slightest touch—hand on gloved hand, and by the time Elissa looks, the boy is already walking ahead. He also covers his nose with his scarf when in the rose path. He was born after the Mountain, too late, but he’d been in her belly before the Mountain rose. For three brief moons, he had belonged to her only, not to the Eighth Mountain-god.
The moment passes. The boy runs after a fat squirrel. And why should he wait for her? All she has is silly stories about flowers and their colors.
No new roses bloomed since the Mountain. No roses died either. They merely changed—turned wood, more than petal. Like the lavenders, they lost their color.
“What color did the roses use to be, Mother?”
They were red child, Elissa thinks, and so they might be again, if you cut them with bare hands and paint them with your own blood.
Not that she’d let them bleed for such trivial matters. No; she’ll force gloves on their hands, as if wool is enough of a shield—as if she doesn’t know better.
“I forget, child. I forget.”
Elissa hadn’t always known she would lose a child to the Eighth Mountain. Once, the rag doll against her chest and the little sister at her heels were her only babies. Nor did she know she would lose her home to it. She’d seen a lot of things, but no eye, no magic had foreseen the Eighth Mountain.
Aged four, she saw a red stream running from her mother’s thighs, staining the carpet—that’s how it started. Elissa screamed the baby was coming the wrong way and stormed off to wake the midwife and guide her to her home, among the fields.
Her mother had been too heavy to run after her. She’d yelled at Riella, her eldest, to follow Elissa and bring her home. Only then did she think to run her palm between her thighs. It had come back dry.
Elissa’s baby brother, Ryon, had been born healthy. Her mother lived. Elissa had brought the midwife just in time.
When Elissa’s father came home in a brief breath after dozens of battles, he looked at his second daughter differently. Pride combated pity in his eyes, his mouth a half-moon of sorrowful understanding.
Elissa had once overheard him tell her mother strange things; he could never weep over the bodies of his slain friends. Most of the time, he had seen their deaths already, so he had done his crying in private, at night, stuffing the lousy blanket in his mouth to muffle his sobs. In the morning, he would bite his cheek and force smiles upon his face and try to save them. Once or twice, he had succeeded. Most often, he had failed.
It all suddenly made sense to Elissa when she saw her mother’s blood on the spotless carpet.
She was there when little Nessa was born three years later. Elissa had seen no horrible thing about her. She had seen her mother in pain though. It had been enough to start flames under her feet and send her panting to the midwife’s doorstep once more.
She saw many things after that. Burns covering Riella’s hands—golden, evenly tanned from years in the orchards—and screamed at her not to touch the stove, still scalding hot from boiling marmalade. She had kept Ryon home, doing chores with her, when the pox broke that made his friends cry blood. Seeing the orange trees, heavy one blink, empty the next, she got her uncle to fix the fence and kept the thieves away.
The soldiers put an end to it when they brought her father, ashes in a little velvet pouch. Elissa had not seen him dying; she had hardly seen him at all those years.
The General gave Elissa her father’s rifle. There had to be a new soldier for every fallen one. She was the unlucky one. No first-born, so the family shop could keep going, but not too young to leave her mother.
Elissa looked up to the General, a good head taller, and saw a dead man.
Tell him. Tell him to go home to his old, blind father and little son, never to go South again trying to conquer what doesn’t want to bow to him.
Bile rose to her throat, the morning’s bread and orange marmalade clawing their way out. Her lips trembled, struggling with the premonition. But then the General came so close she could smell the wine in his breath. An outsider would think he was saying a word of balsam to an orphaned girl. Elissa never repeated his words to anyone:
“It’s this or the Inquisitors.”
He knew about her father. He knew about her.
That night, Elissa stared at herself in the washroom mirror, the little red lines veining her hazel eyes, her thick lids and long lasses. She looked and looked until it no longer felt like regarding herself, but a stranger. She blinked at the last possible moment, averting her gaze fast, finding she would rather not try that.
You are not dead yet, she told herself. You are not.
Studying her naked body in the mirror had never revealed burns where smooth skin should be. Never red roses blooming in her belly, nor bullets between her eyes, never pregnant blood down her thighs.
Just as well. It was bad enough to see people’s deaths. Nothing would be more unbearable than knowing of her own.
At least, so she had thought before the little girl and the dead boy.
They trail back carrying full buckets, fresh from the well south of the Seventh Mountain. It’s water this time. Stale, smelling of earth’s breath, but water all the same, not blood. It will last them three or four days. Then they’ll go back for more. It will be like every time then, like tossing a coin. Heads; smelly water. Tails; blood. The coin has no side for a good, clear well, close to home. It has no side for home either.
There is little military training left in Elissa’s body, but, at least, her arms are still strong. How could they not, with all this carrying? She is slower, of course. She feels the children’s restlessness.
“I’ll help, mother.”
“No need,” she tells the boy. “Plenty of time for calluses when you’re grown.”
She doesn’t tell him he might not grow much. At night, she will stuff her blanket into her mouth and cry herself to sleep.
“I must grow stronger,” the boy murmurs to himself.
He runs after a squirrel before Elissa can ask him what for.
Apart from Elissa’s family, only Clemen knew of visions. She told him some sleepy afternoon, balmy enough to dry her tears. Back when he was her best friend, not her husband. Before he became a dead boy.
When she was done talking, he’d put one arm around her shoulders in sweet awkwardness.
Go on, she’d challenged him wordlessly. Tell the Inquisitors, get a plump pouch of silver and exemption from service. I’ll be here, waiting.
He’d only rested his back against a blood orange tree and sworn he’d die before revealing her secret. They had to turn sixteen and be given rifles to find out someone knew already.
He only had one request; he had whispered it, kissing a tear away from her cheek before the warm breeze could dry it.
“Please, don’t see my death. And if you must see it, please, don’t tell me.”
She looked into his eyes and saw only blue-gray sea, too far for them to ever visit, too far. She saw trembling life.
Those had been the golden days—the most short-lived. Then the wheat ripened, and it was reaping time, and they would not be the ones to reap.
The evening before marching down to Liridem, they sat together watching the sun bleed. Elissa listened to his rumbling about all the things they would do in the southernmost land, as if there weren’t being sent south to die.
“We’re in the same order, at least, can’t you smile for that?”
“On my first day off duty, I’m taking you to see the sea, there’s a port down Lyontis. Say, haven’t you always wanted to see a ship?”
And then, further ahead.
“We’ll come home soon; I know it. We’ll join our families’ shops and drown in gold. Wouldn’t you like to get married in a crimson gown, in these golden fields?”
Elissa was used to looking at her feet when he spoke, at her skirts, or the cuticles she had pulled out of raw fingers. Safer that way. But she turned to look at him at that moment—was he really suggesting—
She killed the thought before dressing it with words, because the blue-gray eyes were not all she saw, not that time. She saw he would marry privately, in a haunted land, on a floor of grey lavenders rather that golden wheat. She also saw the red line cutting his throat and she almost flinched, lest blood splash her face.
“You fool,” she whispered, muffling a sob, “fabricating dreams like that when we’re sent off to die—”
“We won’t die,” he said, taking her face in both hands. “We won’t.”
So swollen with hope, so golden under the dying sun. Elissa recalled her promise. At that moment, she felt a thousand years old, but she was also sixteen, and didn’t know what to do with the longing in her chest. She told herself that she could be mistaken just this once. And, anyway, one kiss was not marriage.
So, when the dead boy kissed her, she kissed him back but did not close her eyes.
The coffee cup falls and breaks into a thousand pieces when Elissa’s son tells her he will join the Guard. She looks at the dead boy straight into his father’s sea-gray eyes and raises her voice for the first time since she met a landlady kind enough to do business with Astrarians. She has brought up the children with the same principle that kept her alive; head low, tongue drowned.
At times like this, she misses her big belly. When they were mere ideas inside her, unable to exist independent of her body, she could pretend that her life with them would be like any mother’s. While they remained inside her, their fates were silent.
When did she first see the boy’s death? Shortly after giving birth to him, or does she merely think so because a mother’s days are always endless when she knows she’s fated to bury a child?
Again and again, she tells herself that she saved her own mother that one time, when she saw blood on the rag under her feet. Sometimes it works. But back then, when her son was red and wrinkled in her arms, thoughts of her parents would only make her curl up, shrouded in blankets. Her husband, grown from a dead boy to a dead man for the occasion, had tried to talk her out of it.
“Why cry? Look what a child we have, in spite of everything. He doesn’t know we’re trapped. This is his land for better or for worse. No good to see us fretting over it.”
Elissa had buried her face in the curve of his neck; easier than looking in his eyes and hearing death whisper “soon, soon.”
Why am I crying? I want my mother to tell me what to do with this child, and I will never see my mother again. And one day, soon, my bed will be cold, by breast dry, my milk yellow. What do you want me to tell you?
“No,” she had said defiantly. “Liridem is not his land. He’s from home and he is mine.”
Her son is not a Mountain child, she keeps telling herself. He was conceived before anyone could conceive such a devilish thing.
But the Mountain is a thief. The locals cursed it and its demon-maker, but at least he made it to protect them from troops like Elissa’s. It was punishment for the sins of the Astarians, even those who had only followed orders.
Perhaps they deserved it. The buzz of Clemen’s honeyed nothings did little to change her mind on that.
“We were just scared children. They gave us rifles and marched us down here to die. Where’s the blame in that?”
Elissa had always envied him his easy smiles and untroubled sleep. It must be nice to think you’re blameless.
She has never felt innocent. She could have chosen the Inquisitors.
In her dreams, Elissa does not see death. She sees the Mountain being born. It’s the same thing. She’s there again, on elbows and knees, finding her way through darkness she can’t penetrate. The dead man who is not yet her husband must be somewhere close, and all the friends she has yet to bury. Her arms are protective around her belly. Not because of her son. She doesn’t yet know that she’s carrying a dead boy. It’s simply her first instinct to guard her softest parts from the demon’s fists.
Of course, she also knows this is no demon at all, whatever the Liridemian soldiers scream around her. Elissa knows Astarian dark magic when she sees it. It’s that notorious, even if the Inquisitors reaped most users like wheat. Those few who escaped the purge are hiding in basements in North Astar, or in the study in Mount Aefos,
biding their time. He must have borrowed their power, this Liridemian mage who created the Mountain. Most likely, he stole it.
Liridemians could never wrap their heads around it. Their own magic was for creation; a gift from their gods, to call rain when the earth cracked with thirst, to tame wayward waves and travel safely. They could keep their chests from taking cold in the winter with fires springing from their fingers or bid the wind to transfer their voices. But make an Eighth Mountain, taller and more haunted than all the seven holy ones combined? Only a god could do that, or a demon.
Well then, maybe some of Elissa’s people were demons too, wanting to reap a country as if it were their wheat fields, just because it stood between them and the richest sea ports. The rest were just complicit, scared children with rifles in their trembling hands. It was a particular kind of irony, for a Liridemian to use Astarian magic to force back home those Astarians close enough to the border and ensure they would never return.
That he also trapped those Astarians unlucky enough to be too far from home, that he lost control and haunted the land forever, closing it off from North, and Northeast and Northwest, and died before he could fix any of that… this must have been a mistake. No human could have wanted this.
Could they?
When Elissa dreams of the Mountain, she finds she no longer cares.
The Guard’s uniform is crimson, like living roses, like blood. Elissa likes the color on the boy. It brings out the golden undertones of his skin and the dark of his hair.
He looks like his father in more ways than one; Clemen was among the Astarians who took the crimson after the Mountain rose. How else to promise good intentions? How to reassure it wasn’t their fault that their superiors sent them to clear Liridem, to dig a blood path for Astarians to cross the sea—now impossible to tread because all the sea-mages are gone, and the Mountain’s long claws reach all the way South?
Seeing her son like this, Elissa lets herself hope for the first time in years. Her mother had survived. Riella’s hands remained golden, evenly tanned and smoothed by a hundred creams and ointments. Little Ryon never cried blood. Maybe, just maybe, her son is going to live. Perhaps the Guard will keep him from doing something thoughtless, such as going straight to the Mountain looking for a loophole, like his father before him.
She and the boy have reached a fragile truce.
“You will still live at home,” she tells him. “And when you are too old to live at home, you will visit every day.”
Deliberately slowly, he dons the gloves that go with the uniform, never raising his eyes. “Yes, mother. Whatever you say.”
He doesn’t mean a word.
Every day, the rose blooms in his belly. The visions have no logic. She saw her mother bleed once before giving birth, she sees him bleed every day. Perhaps he was already dead the moment she birthed him under the Mountain’s shadow.
She searches the deepest leaves and branches of her heart for love. She finds grief, and longing for Astarian wheat to tickle her legs. But there’s pride there as well. Liridem is safer while her son’s in it, even though he isn’t safer for being the Mountain-god’s. At least, blood doesn’t show when he’s wrapped in this shade of red—this is why they chose it.
Could this cloak be the crimson she sees in his belly? Perhaps it was never blood at all.
Hope killed her husband, but some nights Elissa hopes.
Most nights, she stuffs the blanket in her mouth.
With her brother away most of the time, the little girl grows restless. Sometimes she dusts the house in half a morning and reads all of Elissa’s books, the Astarian ones and the Liridemian ones. Then she tries to help around more, breaking things in the process. For every lost teacup, she grins to herself, because her mother notices her.
Forgive me, child.
Two dead in a family of four are two too many. She can’t bear to look at the girl. What if she sees something new, something crimson? If the dead become three, Elissa might start thinking they were never dead at all.
She might start thinking she’s been the ghost all along.
Each night, she and the boy go through the same ritual.
“You will never approach the Eighth Mountain. Never. Your father went and did not return.” She whispers, for the landlady not to hear, and for him to pay attention when she actually raises her voice.
He doesn’t look her in the eye. She can’t remember when he last did.
“Yes, mother. Whatever you say.”
There’s a woman preceding the soldiers who bring her son’s body home. Her hair is red, the color of roses, of blood. So is the scarlet blooming in his belly. They always looked the same. Didn’t they? Didn’t they?
The woman has a name of course. But in these parts, they don’t call her anything, unless it’s behind her back. Then, they call her Inquisitor, because wherever she goes, mages die. Liridemians used to celebrate their magic. Not anymore though, not after the Mountain. In taking revenge against the Astarians, the Mountain-god made the Liridemians a little more like them.
The woman is somber. “An accident,” she says. “He got too close to the Mountain. It affects your vision. Got impaled on a sharp rock. Sorry business, but he did not suffer a minute.”
Somber. Not sad.
Elissa cannot weep. After sixteen years of crying, lousy blanket stuffed in her mouth, her tears dried out. The woman is lying. She has heard Liridemians whisper it. Far too many accidents happen to magic-users nowadays.
Elissa had always known she would lose her son to the Mountain. But she had thought he would die because he was like his father; silly-hopeful, heartbreakingly young, thinking he could bring down a mountain.
She had never thought her son might be like her.
For the Inquisitor to bring his body, he must have been slain for a magic. Magic Elissa didn’t know he had. Was this why he wouldn’t look her in the eye lately? Did he see death, like her?
And did this all happen because, when she was sixteen like him, she chose the rifle instead of the Inquisitors? It is unbearable to lose a son for his magic. Especially so in a foreign land that only hunts mages because one of their own stole your country’s magic and ruined everything with it. She would appreciate the irony if her son’s blood wasn’t staining the rag under her feet.
Elissa falls on her knees. She never told her son about magic, or about Astar. She had been too busy waiting for the rose to bloom in his belly.
The girl is not little anymore. She will come of age before the next sun. Elissa doesn’t know what she would have done without her. Forget to eat probably. Die of forgetfulness.
She never looked her daughter in the eye, for two years, three years after the boy died.
But the girl will swear loyalty to this country whose branches are her bones, and Elissa knows the country is lucky to have her. She wants to hate the haunted earth under her feet, the smelly water and the wooden roses, but she can’t, no more. It is exhausting to hate a whole country.
The girl is pale as all Mountain children, none of Riella’s honey tan or her brother’s coal curls. There is not much color in her cheeks nor in her hair, pale gold under the shy autumn sun. Elissa helps her braid it. The girl’s fingers are clumsy and the locks unruly.
The girl turns abruptly, her braid only half-done, leaving Elissa no time to look away. No choice but to look into her daughter’s eyes. Gold eyes, like wheat. They always had the color of home. Didn’t they?
Elissa sees the fields. She sees herself running, rag doll pressed against her chest, baby sister at her heels. She sees the Mountain too, this life with her daughter, slow like a cold honey stream, this haunting emptiness. But no death. Not yet. Not yet.
“Mother,” the girl asks, “what was your homeland like?”
What was it like?
Golden, like your eyes, child, dripping honey, like the curls on your head, like this pendant, your father’s gift, cold on my chest, until I die. Home to berries red as sin and birds whose songs made grown men cry.
We had a little shop, and a jar of savings, one coin for each half-pound of blood orange marmalade. The silks, like water, were glistening in my hands and when sleep claimed our tired limbs, it took them to some warm, comfortable place. We slumbered to the sound of clear water and did not wake up to the scent of blood. I touched a thorny rose once. My finger bled, and the petals were the same color, blood, not wood.
But how can she tell her daughter this, when they dress to go to the well, placing bets between themselves—water this time, or blood? The girl might grow silly-hopeful then, like her father, and end up too close to the Mountain.
Elissa sighs as she ties a red ribbon at the tip of her daughter’s braid.
“I forget, child. I forget.”
© Under the Mountain’s Shadow by Madalena Daleziou. 2023. All rights reserved.
