Beneath Ceaseless Skies #386, July 13, 2023
“To Dust Returned” by Rita Oakes
“That We Maye With Free Heartes Accomplishe Those Thyngs” by Thomas M. Waldroon
Reviewed by Mina
This issue contains two authors who are real wordsmiths.
“To Dust Returned” by Rita Oakes is a tale told by Corporal d’Hubert in Napoleon’s army. In an alternate Russia and Poland, at the beginning of the nineteenth century and in the face of revenants, d’Hubert remains loyal to his leader, Captain Feraud. At Vilna, d’Hubert once ben Ismael, witnesses the creation of a golem by the daughter of the rabbi, Vitka. The golem saves the city from the revenants but Vitka is declared dead by her father for daring to study secretly as a woman. She asks bitterly: “And wherefore can a woman not study and reason and conduct herself as well as a man? Why else have we minds at all? Should we be as the golem, no will of our own, but subject only to the will of a master?” D’Hubert offers her marriage; she gracefully declines. Once the captain has negotiated a retreat with the Russians, they leave the city. Vitka and her golem will accompany them part of the way.
This short story is an interesting mix of military history, Jewish lore and magic in a brutal, frozen world. In such desolation, each must decide in what they believe: d’Hubert in his captain, the captain in honour and Vitka in knowledge.
“That We Maye With Free Heartes Accomplishe Those Thyngs” by Thomas M. Waldroon begins with Ben sentenced to transportation to America. In the bowels of a convict ship, Ben feels that something is stolen from him by a gelatinous presence. Ben tells his sorry tale to the creature in the hold. It all started at Mother Gibbs’ ale house, which caters for men with a taste for men, some in women’s clothes, all with a female moniker. Here Ben meets and falls in love with George, a cordwainer dreaming of being a poet. Ben is briefly hired as cheap labour to move some curiously light kegs with strange contents (“oozing smoking ribbands”), and that oozing presence appears regularly throughout the story.
On the ship, Ben hears the sailors talk of smoke-like, jellied eels falling from the sky when the ship docked in London. Ben remembers the smoke man-forms he and George saw at a masquerade. Later, he and George discovered how London’s effluvia and miasma was being converted into something with consciousness, ravenous and feeding off memories, by men crazed for power. They destroy the factory producing the evil, but shreds of it survive. One shred is travelling with them on the ship, feeding off the prisoners. That Ben survives when many others die may be due to the wealth of memories of his colourful life. He reaches the new world like a slate wiped clean of his former life. Free from grief, anger and pain, but also with no memory of his love for George, his friends and his home (a London that is almost a character in its own right), all the things that made him who he was—a man stout of heart. This novella is written like a poetic and vibrant eulogy to that lost heart: “…honestly true stories are the ones that make us wish we could live in them ourselves, like shedding our old clothes and donning beautiful, clean, new, better ones.”