A Mouth Full of Stones — Full Story
By Ceallaigh S. MacCath-Moran
“Let me see your tongue.”
Lia lifted her head and opened her mouth, tender with the greeting she had just given, as if an insect had carved the words upon her ashen flesh with a stinger. Around her, the other students leaned toward the spectacle, their eyes alight with malice. The teacher gripped Lia’s chin with a long thumb and forefinger, scraped a fingernail across the glossographia on her lips, frowned. “Have you been taught to read the rash in your mouth?”
“No, ma’am.” Lia cringed and slurped at the cobalt runnel of blood she left behind. “Mama says nobody knows what the letters mean.”
“If you can’t read them, and nobody knows what they mean, they aren’t letters.” The teacher jerked her hand away and gestured at Lia with it. “Children, your new classmate is a sick girl from a delusional kindred, and you are not to believe anything she says. Pity her instead. Pity everybody with her…infirmity.” She bent the slender length of her neck down until Lia could smell the disdain in her pheromones, narrowed her lavender eyes, and sank the knife of her rebuke all the way to the bone. “The next time you feel the urge to babble, do us all a favour and swallow it.”
Lia cowered at her desk and did what she was told. When the bright rays of Red Mother Sun called to mind a dead yellow star, and her mouth blistered in a language born under its aegis, Lia bore the sting of it in silence. When the taste of bread told of a grain that grew in the light of that star, she waited for the symbols on her lips to recede. Each time, a soft, black stone coalesced on her quiet tongue, and she swallowed it, the words and memories fading as it slid into her belly and settled there.
Later that day, Lia wept in her mother’s arms.
“Oh, my dear girl. You are not sick, and we are not delusional.” Betuna’s dark hair, redolent of spice, tumbled over Lia’s body like a shelter, a blessing. “You are a writ, a record of the Universe Before, like I am, like your grandmother is, and like my grandmother was before her. It’s a rare gift, but it is a gift; to you, to your teacher, and to everyone, everywhere.” An evening breeze blew across the garden, scattering pollen across the bench where they both sat. Black and grey blossoms turned inward all around them as Red Mother Sun sank below the horizon. “You know this.”
“She doesn’t believe us.” Lia shivered. Her own dark hair was matted against her back, and her dress was damp, and she was tired. They had been cruel, those children counselled to pity, who had pushed her into the creek on the way home. “She said if we can’t read the words on our skins, they’re not real.”
“She doesn’t understand us. Most unwritten don’t, and some are afraid of us, too.” Betuna pulled the wrap from her narrow shoulders and tucked it around her daughter’s. “Your grandmother could read her skin, a little. She was a Writ of the Hands and built the most wonderful things. When she was a girl, like you are now, she would wake from dreams to find blueprints on her palms.”
A nightbird called in the distance; a long, low sound. Lia yawned and spread her fingers wide to stare at her own palm.
“You are a Writ of the Mouth,” Betuna continued, rocking her, “and I expect you’ll be an historian someday, or maybe a storyteller.”
Lia stiffened, stared up at her mother, and made a vow upon the knife of her teacher’s rebuke. “I won’t. I’m going to forget the Universe Before and be normal, like everybody else.”
“Forgetting won’t make you like everyone else. It will only make you hard. Please,” a night wind rose upon the word, as if the world itself were echoing it, “don’t deprive us of a gift only you can give, and don’t deprive yourself of the right to give it.”
For a little while, Lia tried to remember her grandmother’s hands and do as her mother asked. But nothing could hide the blister of language on her lips, and nothing could temper the dark delight of her teacher’s reaction to it.
“A dirty rash can’t heal.” She was a pillar of bitter authority; scrubbing Lia’s mouth with a soapy cloth, scooping out the black stones that coalesced there, crushing them under a shoe with a venomous grin. It was a common enough occurrence that Lia no longer tasted the soap, but the terrible pity of her classmates left a more lasting impression. Her father’s outrage had bought him a similar pity from their parents, and he would bear the scars of it for the rest of his life.
So Lia practiced forgetting the Universe Before. Sometimes the memories were small as baby teeth; the echo of a prayer to an unknown god, the rhythm of a folk song. Sometimes they were big as the pocket of her cheek; a hundred different flowers on a dozen different worlds and the names for them she could almost hear if she tried. The recollection bloomed, the blisters rose, the black stone took shape on her tongue, and down it went, again and again, until her belly became a memory grave. It made Lia sad to forget, sadder still not to share what was given her, and hollow because she knew that something was missing when it was gone, though she could never quite remember what it was.
Betuna grieved bitterly, but what could she say to a daughter trading silence for peace? A year passed. Two. Three. Lia’s belly distended, and her long legs bowed under the weight of it. In time, the blister and sting of glossographia faded, and the nebulous memories underpinning them both came no more to mind. Lia’s mouth remembered nothing but the taste of soap, and the proclamations of her teacher were a litany in her thoughts that long outlived the woman who made them. One day, she sat down by the creek and could not get up anymore. It was then that Lia’s body turned to stone, and it no longer mattered what she remembered, what she swallowed, and what she forgot.
“Let me see your tongue.”
Amadi cupped an ear against Holy Lia’s mouth and opened his own. The sable flesh of his lips, cheeks, and chin was scarred with decades of glossographia like a canvas used so often the stippled impressions of the old art persisted under the new. A grunt that might have been a word emerged from his throat, and he nodded in the absent way of the elderly. It was said Amadi’s mind dwelt altogether in the Universe Before. It was known Amadi could read and speak the words that blistered his skin. If anyone could recover what the child had taken into stone, it was him.
Red Mother Sun rose above the tree line, casting an ochre light upon his vestments, adding copper to the dark grey of the morning. A distraught semicircle of writs crowded around the creekside garden, seething at the woman beside him. The young, strong man guarding them both - a Writ of the Dance who moved as if he remembered a different body - held his people back with nimble empathy, careful to leave Betuna’s remaining perennials untrampled. They were grieving, after all. Some had walked to the garden barefooted. Others had not eaten in days. Still others had traveled from elsewhere in the planetary system, where the unwritten wore the stone fragments of stifled writs as fetishes and claimed they encouraged dreams of the Universe Before.
Every one of them had come because Holy Lia’s hands were gone.
The granddaughter of her teacher, long-necked and lavender-eyed as the infamous woman herself, knelt to touch Amadi’s knee and spoke again. “Elder Writ,” her voice was a murmur of water over stones, barely audible above the creek itself, “there is no message on your flesh. What do you feel? What do you see?”
Amadi brought a shaking hand to her cheek, let it fall to the jagged stump at Holy Lia’s wrist, and sighed. “Nothing. The Universe Before never gives a gift more than once. I’m sorry, Sefe.”
“She was a child.” A tall man muttered over the crowd, and the air began to stink of grief around him. The little girl asleep in his arms woke at the smell of his pheromones and began to cry. Their collective distress carried like smoke on the wind. Nostrils flared, and barefooted, hungry, travel-worn writs fell to their faces in the damp earth, letting loose the sorrow they had carried to Betuna’s memorial garden. It was as if they mourned with Lia’s mother across time, for the girl who would never be an historian or a storyteller and for all the Universe Before would never express through anyone else.
After a while, a young off-worlder drew to his feet and glared at Sefe; the pheromones of grief transmuting to rage, the ashen color of his cheeks brightening to blue. “Why does Amadi pollute his mouth with an apology to you?”
Amadi replied for himself in the reedy voice of an old man pushed beyond his strength. “I asked her to come.”
The off-worlder stumbled backward a step and gaped at the Writ of the Dance. “Is he confused about who she is?”
“I meant no disrespect.” Sefe rose. A wisp of silver hair caught the early morning breeze and softened the angles of her face. She gestured at the cottage beyond the creek. “I live just there and come every day to…”
“To what?” The off-worlder found his balance, bared his teeth, clenched his hands into fists. “Your grandmother might as well have murdered that girl!”
The Writ of the Dance flung out an arm to hold him back. “Peace.”
“…to look after the garden her mother planted.” Sefe folded her hands at her waist, pheromones thick with sorrow and sympathy.
“You mutilated Holy Lia yourself!” An old woman stabbed a cane in Sefe’s direction. “That’s why you’re here; to find out what Amadi recovers before you break that poor, dead girl into fetishes.” She coughed, spat on the ground. “I hear they fetch a better price if you tell a good story about them.”
“Where did you sell her hands?” The off-worlder lunged into the Writ of the Dance’s out-flung arm.
The crowd pressed forward behind him, propelled by the fuel of his anger. A clot of mud sailed over the Writ of the Dance’s head. It struck Holy Lia’s shoulder and slid to the ground, but the one that followed hit Sefe in the neck.
Amadi reached up and tugged her sleeve. “Go home,” he murmured. “They’re not ready for this yet.”
Sefe squeezed his hand, gathered her coat above her ankles, and fled.
In the late hours of the evening, the garden was quiet again. The writs had gone to find hospitality among their kin in the valley, so Sefe returned to tend the perennials. The moons rose; one, two, three, four, gilding the dark foliage, illuminating her work.
“I didn’t expect to find you here.” Amadi crested the hillside alone, vestments rustling across the groundcover. “Are you well?”
“Well enough.” Sefe dusted her hands and helped him sit on a garden bench. She sat beside him and said, “I really shouldn’t have come today.”
Amadi’s frail shoulders rounded in a slump. “It was selfish of me to ask, but I wanted my people to meet you.”
“Whatever for?” Sefe flooded the air with the pungent pheromones of bewilderment.
“I hoped they would see the same gentleness in you that I do. We have a long road to travel together, your people and mine.” He patted her knee. “I’m an old man, and I want to believe there is peace at the end of it.”
Sefe gazed up at the moonlit sky. “He was right, you know. My grandmother might as well have murdered Lia.” She reached into the pocket of her coat and pulled out a small book bound in plant leather and vines. “I bring her journals here and read them, hoping to understand her someday, but I don’t yet.”
“Read to me.” Amadi turned toward her on the bench and gestured at the book. “Perhaps we’ll come to understand her together.”
Sefe opened the book to the moonlight, turned to a page marked with a ribbon, and began to read aloud.
“Let me see your tongue.”
It was an inconvenient time for Eman to blister in glossographia, but he had known it was coming the moment he shouldered the platform under Holy Lia’s body. The creek behind her swelled in a springtime flood, but he remembered the plashing of a river. The moss beneath his feet was damp and soft, but he remembered the slickness of another, ancient soil in the universe that had died giving this one life. A storyteller had stood beside that river, upon that soil and told the tale that would rise, blue as blood, upon his ashen face in a moment. He sighed, leaned around Holy Lia’s moss-encrusted legs and made a face; eyes bulging, tongue protruding, pheromones perfumed with forced amusement.
“Would you be serious, for once?” Ny was always telling him to be serious, which was funny because of the way his mouth puckered when he did. It was round as a vale cat’s butthole now. Ny squinted at his tongue and shouted, “Eman is blistering! We need to take a break and get it down before it fades.”
Together, the young pallbearers set Holy Lia’s body between the creek and a deep, new grave. Ny ran to fetch Eman’s bag, took out the recorder, and pointed at a rusting garden bench. “Sit and tell me what you see while I chart your face.”
Over the next few minutes, the glossographia carpeted Eman’s tongue, lips, cheeks, and neck in a tide of stinging pain. His mother said it was almost certain he would grow to become a Major Writ of the Mouth, but he hoped not. Major Writs went to study and be studied off-world, which would mean leaving his home, kin, and especially Ny behind. He was unwritten, but he was the best taustaff player in the valley and the closest thing to a brother Eman had.
Ny finished charting his face, waited for him to stop speaking, and nodded in Holy Lia’s direction, where the other young men from the valley were eating breakfast. “What an awful way to die.”
Eman pulled a carton of dried fruit from his bag and offered some to his friend. “It hasn’t happened to any of us in a couple of hundred years, but we haven’t had to stifle ourselves either.” He stuffed a handful of fruit into his mouth and spoke around it. “Don’t tell my kin what happened this morning, all right?”
Ny gestured at the others. “They’re going to find out anyway.” He frowned, leaned toward his friend, and murmured, “Eman, whatever is bothering you, I’m here to listen. But you can’t hide forever. Your gift is too important.”
“Watch me.” Eman shot to his feet, strode over to Holy Lia’s body, and knelt to caress the stumps of her wrists. The sour pheromones of fear rose from his own body and saturated the air. “I wonder if the constabulary will ever find her nose. I didn’t think there was still a market for writ stone fetishes, not since the treaty said they were…What was the word?”
“Remains.” Nostrils flaring, Ny followed and knelt beside him. “There’s a market for everything. That’s why the village is burying her.”
Eman cupped Holy Lia’s cheek, laid his forehead against hers, and laughed like a hollow drum beaten with a stick. “Great. How does the village plan to protect the rest of us?”
By the time the memorial service began, the whole village knew what had happened to Eman that morning. From the writs, and especially his kin, came the enthusiastic interest he hated so much. From the unwritten came a respectful mystification that made him feel like a freak. He glanced at Holy Lia’s mutilated face, wondered if the vandal was among them, and returned his attention to the writ priest who had come to eulogize her.
“This is why we know them; three Gods who paved the Way of Perpetual Arising and embedded awareness of it in each particle of the cosmos.” He stood at the creekside, droning in a pious monotone and a wash of beatific pheromones. “The leaf, the river, the cloud, the planet, the comet, the star all carry fragments of the same primordial tale. Have you heard it in the…”
Ny leaned sideways to whisper in Eman’s ear. “He likes the smell of himself, doesn’t he?”
Eman stared back at his friend, a mask of reproach on his face. “You’re joking? You? Now? At this completely inappropriate…”
“It’s like he’s been preaching for days in the same robe.” Ny’s lavender eyes were alight with humor.
“Would you be serio…?” Eman gaped, realized what he was about to say, and fell silent.
Ny sat up with a smug turn of the shoulders, straightened his tunic, and leaned toward the priest in a prim listening posture.
“By the triune constellation marked upon my face from birth and its mirrors in the skies of every world where we evolved, by the marks my brethren bear from every species we have met, I speak a truth already singing in your bones: You are an heir of spacetime, and the memory of you will never die the heat death.” The writ priest fell silent and gestured for the pallbearers to lower Holy Lia into the ground. Eman and Ny rose to their feet, and the levity between them shifted to gravity as they joined the others. The copper light of the sun roused the black leaves and grey petals of a new formal garden, a red mother calling her children to rise and dance. It glimmered on the stone of Holy Lia’s body, and then the earth summoned her down into the dark.
The gathering dispersed. Eman made obligatory conversation with his kin, but when they departed, he went to sit by the open grave. Holy Lia’s perfect stone plait was visible from above, surely braided by Betuna on the last day of her life. “Poor girl,” he murmured as Ny sat down beside him. “Wish I’d been there to save you.”
“I wish there was a history of her besides my foremother’s journals. They were the awfullest things I’ve ever read. But I felt like it was something I should do, that and helping to bury her, I mean.” Ny laid a long-fingered hand on his friend’s shoulder. “I can also make sure this doesn’t happen again, at least in my lifetime. So I’m going to do that, too.”
Eman crumbled a clump of moss-covered soil in a fist, cast it into the grave, and cursed. “Where does that leave me, then? In some faraway college off-world, where I can’t fight for the people I love? It could have been one of our neighbours who took her nose, and if it was, what does that mean for the rest of us?” Pheromones of resolve rose in the air around him. “I’m not going, Ny. I don’t care how important my gift is.”
“Okay.” Ny folded his arms, tilted his head, and stared into the distance. “Your kin are going to be mad about that, but we can handle them. And you won’t get the support you would at the college, but we can send them your charts and perceptions.” He nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, we can do this.”
A bevy of nightbirds woke in the tree above them and warbled. Eman swallowed, listened a moment, and sighed as if he had been holding his breath for days. “We?”
Ny rose to his feet and gave Eman a hand up. “You can tell jokes to my kids, and I can teach your kids to play taustaff.”
“That’s probably for the best.” Eman grinned. “You’re not really funny, you know.”
Red Mother Sun waned in the evening sky, gilding the silver in Ny’s hair. He grinned back. “And you can’t block a goal to save your life.”
Eman and Ny crossed the garden laughing, past the depression in the moss where Lia sat alone in the last moments of her life, and collected the shovels left for them by the creek. Then they returned and buried her together.
Afterword
Folk narrative traditions all over the world contain a version of ATU 1548 The Soup Stone, in which:
A soldier (traveler, monk) asks an old woman for food and lodging for the night. She agrees to the lodging but will not give him any food. The soldier offers to show her how to make soup from a stone…While the stone “cooks”, she brings him all that he asks for, one after another: flour, grease, meat (bacon), vegetables, etc. After they eat the soup, the soldier says he is too full to eat the stone (he sells the wonderful stone to the woman).[1]
