Beneath Ceaseless Skies #404, April 4th, 2024
“The Coffee of Torcat” by Devin Miller
“The Speech That God Understands” by Jonathan Edelstein
Reviewed by Geoff Houghton
First in Beneath Ceaseless Skies #404 is “The Coffee of Torcat” by Devin Miller. This short piece is marginally longer than the formal limit for flash fiction, but is written very much in that style, with all extraneous background information ruthlessly pruned away to leave a single, clear story.
The entire episode takes place in a coffee house that serves a semi-magical psychotropic brew. The narrator is a female General in the service of the Queen of the most powerful realm in an unspecified fantasy Kingdom. Under the influence of this memory-enhancing substance, we gradually discover that our protagonist’s unconditional love and esteem for her queen may not be as unreservedly deserved as the General at first believes. This is not a simple binary matter. The Queen is not a crazy or evil dictator but truly intends the best for her people. She commands a regimen of rigid discipline and unwavering standards but her Kingdom flourishes in her iron grip. The question that our protagonist must answer is whether the resulting loss of freedom and personal choice is an acceptable price for safety, stability and orderly certainty.
The second story in this issue is “The Speech That God Understands” by Jonathan Edelstein. This is a parallel history set in the University town of Tuluz (now Toulouse) in late twelfth century France. This alternative world closely mirrors its historical medieval equivalent, except for the open existence of a form of functional sorcery that some individuals still believe operates secretly today. Several of the protagonists exert power and influence through the numerology of the Kabbalah (originally a Jewish mechanism for explaining and influencing the physical world and still a fringe but distinct belief system today). Essentially, this is a detective story with an unusual setting and added magic.
There is a slight anachronism in the text which describes a fully functional and multiracial University of Toulouse at the end of the twelfth century. This University is ancient, but it was actually founded just under a half century after the date ascribed to these events. The reader can ignore this trivia entirely or may assume that events in parallel universes can run at slightly different rates since it has no discernible impact on the progression of the actual story.
The author has very clearly and realistically delineated the insular, dogmatic and superstitious attitudes of even the relatively better educated elite in the twelfth century Mediterranean nations and how those attitudes might be readily converted to misogyny and anti-Semitism under the correct disruptive pressure. The protagonists must track down and stop a rogue sorcerer/physician intent on causing dissent and chaos in the University to further his own ends.
Geoff Houghton lives in a leafy village in rural England. He is a retired Healthcare Professional with a love of SF and a jackdaw-like appetite for gibbets of medical, scientific and historical knowledge.