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    The Uske
    The Uske
    The Uske
    Ebook77 pages58 minutes

    The Uske

    By Mary Beth Bass

    ()

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    About this ebook

    In a crumbling otherworldly society once dedicated to life, love and beauty, one young woman must risk all to free...the Uske.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBoroughs Publishing Group
    Release dateJan 22, 2015
    ISBN9781941260616
    The Uske

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      Book preview

      The Uske - Mary Beth Bass

      The Uske

      Isia Sorgyre

      Translated by Mary Beth Bass

      www.BOROUGHSPUBLISHINGGROUP.com

      PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, business establishments or persons, living or dead, is coincidental. Boroughs Publishing Group does not have any control over and does not assume responsibility for author or third-party websites, blogs or critiques or their content.

      THE USKE

      Copyright © 2015 Mary Beth Bass

      Smashwords Edition

      Excerpt from Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem translated by Maryna Harrison.

      All rights reserved. Unless specifically noted, no part of this publication may be reproduced, scanned, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Boroughs Publishing Group. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or by any other means without the permission of Boroughs Publishing Group is illegal and punishable by law. Participation in the piracy of copyrighted materials violates the author’s rights.

      ISBN 978-1-941260-61-6

      CONTENTS

      Part I

      Part II

      Part III

      About the Author

      About the Translator

      THE USKE

      TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

      In her introduction to The Uske, Isia Sorgyre states that she wrote the dystopian romance in Old Sacerian rather than the contemporary Commonworld mix of Sacerian and English because the ancient language provided the distance necessary for a reader to take in the unspeakable reality at the heart of the story. In this first English translation of the story, I tried to do justice to Isia’s unsparing tale of love in a time of darkness. I used Sacerian only when there was no equivalent in English, or a few times when the aesthetic impact of an ancient Sacerian word was too hard for me to resist. Any errors or mistakes are my own.

      A few days before her disappearance, Isia wrote to me about her fears of what might happen to her because The Uske openly condemned synektos, the unconscionable weapon her government refused to admit existed even as they used it against their own people. She spoke of her complete lack of regret for writing the story, and of her newfound love for Otherworld whisky and radical poetry, especially 20th century Russian poet Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem.

      "Like the heart is ripped out with the pain of life,

      Like she’s thrown down and turned over,

      But walks…reeling…alone."

      Part One

      Destruction claims us all.

      —The Idrysi, by the Anomiad

      No one would have called him beautiful. Hollow-eyed and spider-thin, his changeable features blended with memories of other faces when his face was remembered at all. His layered voice melted into silence more often than it roared in fire. He wasn’t brave. Or noble. Or spirited. Or faithful.

      He sneered at her, the loose-limbed girl who smelled like blood, when she passed him on the street. Or in the alley behind the store where his mother sold trinkets to tourists who wanted cheap, disposable proof they had visited the ruined core of the Fallen City. The alley where he’d kissed her. Where he’d kissed many girls. And boys. Middle-aged women. Old men. Young women. Teenagers who wanted to get it over with so they could say they had done it. He never kissed anyone twice. No matter what was promised. Or threatened.

      If anyone pressed for more his mother slit their throats with the knife she’d made when she was a child. He dragged the bodies onto the footpath then covered them with woolen blankets so passersby didn’t have to see the faces. His mother called the police, who recorded the names then loaded the bodies into a van and took them to the burying ground.

      He felt nothing when they kissed him. Not desire. Not revulsion. Not boredom. Whenever anyone who wanted to kiss him touched his hand or his face or his shoulder, wherever he was, whatever he was doing, a noise like a mechanical blade sounded from deep within him like a machine coming to life after decades of silence. Then the thing that lived inside him took over and he kissed her, or him, or whoever it was, until they wanted to stop. When they did, it was over. The sentient mechanism quieted, and he went to his room above the store to sleep until the kiss and the hands on his skin, his mouth on another mouth and the parasitic scent of other flesh, receded.

      It wasn’t always like this. He wasn’t always like this. His mother had known what would happen and when it would come but she’d kept it a secret until the night before. Even then, she’d only told him what was necessary.

      His life will be grim enough, he’d

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