“There will always be more children, but only one icon,” I whispered, feeling more alone than I had since those first few nights out of Jarl. Antares would protect me only for the immortal spirit my body housed.
And nothing else. No one else.
“I’ll be in my cell.”
Chapter Three
The way to Adah’s chamber was stranger the second time, the path wound tight as a curl on the head of a babe, crooked as the channel that birthed him. I moved with bare feet, trailing the ragged hem of my traveling gown, carrying in one hand the cup I had taken hours before. Even as I reached it, the door was not the same, for inside the symbol I had touched was now a beating heart. It was sticky when I touched it and reluctant to let go of my hand.
He was not alone inside. A filthy woman sat begging at his feet or seemed at first to be begging. But she was on her knees before him, his manhood filling her mouth, and I thought at first how strange it was to see him with so common an organ, so common a whore.
“Has it been so long since you had one of your own?” I asked, my voice sounding strange to my ears. It was coarse but musical, too, a wild, discordant dance that leaped from my belly to my tongue and called all to pitch themselves this way or that. The voice of a goddess.
Adah measured my words before he took measure of my tangled gown, hitched by my own hands at my sides. In the same instant that he thrust the woman away, he thrust into me.
Because I did not bleed, I knew in that moment that I was dreaming. I woke, nails raking down the cold stone of my cell wall as they had down his skin in the dream. But Adah had no flesh. He was one of the stars he had spoken of, but I was a god, too, and while I could feel his heat, I could not be burned up by it. I felt sick and uncertain, sure that Theba took advantage of the feelings Gannet had roused in me to turn my heart to these dark visions. She could only lust, never love. Wasn’t that why she had hated Jemae so much?
And what was I to make of my racing heart? Was it hers, or mine?
The door to my cell remained closed, but I found myself checking my clothing, rubbing my face on a tattered sleeve, making sure now that my eyes were open in waking and wondering if the desire I had felt, fading now, had been Theba’s. As a goddess, she had lain with many men, mortals and immortals alike, but I had not known a man and was in no hurry to allow her the privilege of using my body in such a way. Despite the tug of memory that was of Gannet’s lips on mine, I wasn’t sure I even wanted him to have the privilege.
Not that he would have the chance now, if I changed my mind.
Shaking as though to clear the dream and my heart, too, of want, I tried to sit up but found that I couldn’t. My limbs were seized with heaviness of another kind as my perception shifted to see into the dark without even my needing to will it. What had been indistinct shadows now became the clear angles of the little cell, and a bundle half as long as I lay across my legs. With a shriek, I thrust my hands forward. I thought of plunging my hands into fur or worse, expecting Adah to be here. It was foolish, though, to think so, for the figure was much too small, and when it unfolded in sleepy agitation, the eyes of a child met mine without hesitation in the dark.
“He told me not to wake you,” the child explained. There was nothing in the voice, the short, shaggy hair, or sleeping robe to indicate age or gender. “But he didn’t say I couldn’t wait for you to wake up. But then I fell asleep, too. When did you last bathe? You really smell.”
The child was certainly younger than ten to be so candid. I smirked, too surprised for speech until I had extricated my legs from beneath the child’s frame. It was much easier now that the child had risen, too, though I realized that the meeting of our eyes had been chance. The child looked now in my general direction, but her eyes roamed, or his did, without settling more than a few seconds on shoulder, brow, or face.
“It’s been a while,” I admitted. I could feel her discomfort, for I decided that she must be a she, so akin was her distress to the kind I had felt in my sisters when they had been girls. It was a naked feeling but certain, too, in a way the emotions of my brother had never been like those of a boy, more the stirring of cricket’s legs than song. “Why did you want to wait for me?”
Brow furrowing in a fashion that was comical in a face so young, she drew three little fingers down her lips before answering.
“Adah sent me away and said that Theba had come, but I wanted to see. I don’t think you look like her, though.” She spoke swiftly, as though the words had longer legs than she and might outrun her. “My candle burned out, but I saw you first. You’re not very pretty, or terrible.”
“That explains why you fell asleep,” I responded, and because she could not see my smirk in the dark, I continued in a lighter tone. “I’m Eiren. Who are you?”
“Emine,” the girl returned instantly, though I could see her struggle no sooner than she had spoken. I felt the tender worries of the child snaking, like her limbs had, across my sleeping form. Her true name she buried, for she was an icon, just as I was, and had to learn to be only that, a lesson I would never master.
In tales, Emine bestowed beauty and good fortune upon those she favored and withheld them from those who displeased her. A heavy responsibility for a woman grown into such things, yet too much for a scrawny child.
“Well, Emine, perhaps you are partial to sitting in the dark, but I am not. If you take me somewhere warm and bright, I will say that it was I who found you.”
I had no idea if Adah would punish her, or if her fierce temperament would even submit to such punishment, but she was on her feet in a moment’s response. She didn’t say anything about my neglecting to name her as an icon, nor my refusal to own Theba, but I was not sure if this was the churlishness of youth or something else. Being the youngest of my family, I had little experience with children, much less with child icons.
Only when we had traveled a little distance in the corridors did I realize how cold my cell had been, and how she might have moved nearer to me while sleeping just to keep warm. That she had been sleeping, too, suggested to me that it must be night, or whatever counted for night within this place.
“Why are you here?” In her question, I heard the incredulous curiosity of a child, not ignorance. Why should I, with all the power and faculties of an adult, choose to stay?
“I don’t belong anywhere else anymore,” I admitted after a long pause. We had arrived in a chamber I had not previously visited. It had none of the touch of Adah, the braziers more numerous and burning, with flames tinted gold, green, and blue, and the walls hung with woolly fabrics instead of painted ones. The furniture, too, was small and arranged haphazardly: many chairs were pushed together to simulate a caravan, a great canopy draped from four others that were placed back-to-back in a square. Was this Adah’s notion of a nursery? I smiled, surprised at the ease of the expression, as Emine strode forward. She was lord in this place, at least, and not Adah.
Even as she settled before one of the green burning braziers, her features smoky in the haze of heat, my expression darkened. Had Gannet known this place? What of the icons of Theba who had outgrown their cradles?
I sat down beside Emine on a cushion.
“Where I come from, we tell stories,” I began, finishing the sentiment in my head as I had come to understand it for myself: when we cannot find the words to tell our own.
Like most children, Emine’s curiosity did not extend to those things that did not interest her, and she did not ask me where I was from. Instead, she did just as I had hoped.
“Tell me one.”
It did not surprise me that one of Shran’s histories should surface in my mind, his face as a child appearing nose first as though he broke through water. I had not told this particular story in some time, but it seemed appropriate, surrounded by the artifacts of childhood, to speak of the of the early years of a man whose own youth was often forgotten.
“As a boy, Shran often wanted a brother, and in his darkest moments, even a si
ster would have done. But he was born to his mother and father very late in their lives, and as they saw him grow only to his fourteenth birthday, he never had any brothers or sisters to keep him company and share in his mischief.
“Which is not to say that he did not have companions, of course. Before Theba laid claim to him, Shran was of interest to many gods and goddesses, and as the world then was young, there were some among them who were not yet done doing their own growing. Among them was the god Tirce, the mover of earth and stone.”
Nothing in Emine’s face changed to show that she knew the icon I had met in Jhosch, though I did not think that there was sufficient evidence to assume that the icons did not visit Adah, now and again. I suspected at least that Gannet had, and even as I warmed to the growing interest of the child before me, I wanted the attention of the man I had left behind. He had always been so cold when I had engaged him in storytelling, and I wondered now how much of that disinterest was built, stone by stony glance, to keep from growing too close to me.
“They met in a grove in the city of Re’Kether, which boasted as many wild things as it did the things that man had built. The trees were as tall as temples and the shallow pools as broad, beasts wandered without harness and the city’s people didn’t think to tame them. Though Tirce had assumed the guise of a young man, beardless but with many more seasons than the young Shran could boast of, he spotted the boy through a great fanned leaf and immediately shed the years that separated them.
“‘Where goes the prince of Kether?’ Tirce asked in the tenor of youth, stepping out from behind a tree and placing his hands on his hips. Shran was not to be daunted, and more than anything, hated to be recognized when he could not recognize in turn. No boy of ten would have failed to take advantage of the privileges his station allowed.
“‘I may go where I like.’
“Tirce smiled. ‘And so can I.’
“Not to be outdone and ignorant of whom he spoke with, Shran abused his power further.
“‘If there is no road, my father will build one. Someday I will, too.’
“‘If there is a mountain, I can move it.’
“Another boy might have conceded, but Shran was no mere boy. Mortal he might have been, but his temper was as stolid as the mountains Tirce claimed to move. Their foundations would have been easier to shake.”
I wondered now how the fact that Shran was among the First People figured into this telling. It was not unlike stories to exaggerate the character of the mortal man or woman, but Shran had always been special. Like Salarahan, his importance was measured not only in the number of stories we told about him, in his own histories, but how he figured in ours.
“Determined not to be outdone, Shran dropped to his knees, gathering a clod of dirt as large as both of his hands clasped together.
“‘You would have to be very strong,’ he surmised, packing the clod tightly in his palms. ‘But I know that it takes more than strength to build a kingdom, and I think it must be the same for mountains. Can you throw this without breaking it?’
“He passed the clod to Tirce, who accepted it with a smirk more befitting a boy than a god. Shran stepped back and watched as Tirce raised his arm high and hurled the clod of dirt, keeping it together through the force of his will. When it struck the hardened path through the grove and left an indentation rather than breaking apart, Shran knew at once who it was he had crossed paths with in the grove. The gods had never talked to him before, but it was not unheard of, in that time, to see them in their full glory.”
“There were no icons?” Emine interrupted, relaxed from the rigid posture she had taken at first, seduced by something other than the dark this time.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It was a very long time ago, and I did not know there were any such things as icons until I came to Ambar.”
But I did not want to tell Emine that story. I would maybe never tell it to anyone. I considered instead what her education thus far had lacked, and I did not feel so sorry for the answers I still awaited. Why the gods had chosen to walk among us then as equals, and now possess us, I could not know. For all that Theba’s presence had given me, this knowledge was not among her gifts.
“Instead of naming Tirce at once and admitting defeat, Shran gathered instead another clod of dirt, packing this one as tightly as he had the first. He considered it for a moment and then pulled a length of silk from his waist and bound it together. Without speaking or even acknowledging the god, Shran, too, lifted his arm as high and as confidently and hurled it as far as the god had done.
“‘I do not need a god’s power, but a man’s mind, to achieve great things, Tirce,’ the boy Shran exclaimed, naming the god, at last. Tirce laughed, beginning a friendship between a bold child and a curious god with the sound.
“That afternoon was the first of many where Tirce took a boy’s shape, as long as it took Shran grow out of his, and together they built the range of mountains that separates the lands of Ambar and Aleyn. Shran would throw stones, earth, and herbs, and Tirce would shape them in the air to fit the horizon. Shran did not crave much for brothers once he had shown a god how to behave as one.”
Emine’s gaze was approving as I finished the story, satisfied as I had suspected she would be at a story that featured prominently the exploits of children, even if they were big as myths and not so small as she. I had enjoyed the telling almost as much as she had, and like the smile that had crept across my lips when we entered the nursery, I felt the heat in my heart that promised healing of another kind. In moments like this, I was a child again myself, the warmth of my mother’s lap the whole scope of the world.
“Why are you here, Emine?”
She seemed surprised by my question, and without my skills, she could not read my meaning. Still, her answer was not without a gravity that many years cultivated.
“My mother and father put me out of the house and wouldn’t let me in again,” she said quietly, her brow and lips still as the brazier’s edge while she contemplated. “The big man came for me when I was sleeping on the street and made me return all the things I had charmed from their owners.”
Her victims would not have been unhappy to share, so persuasive could Emine be. That she had been abandoned surprised me more.
“The big man? Do you mean Antares?”
“I do not often give my name to children, for they will only forget it. And there are more important things to fill their minds with.”
I sensed Antares only after he had spoken. Emine didn’t start, but I did, turning like a guilty man facing his accuser. He was not looking at me, but at Emine, and if he came to lay punishment, it was upon her head and not mine.
With me he would not have dared.
“Emine, you should go.”
I bristled at her dismissal, but her obedience was absolute. For having dared to come to me in the first place, she must have been lonely. Did Emine have no one but Adah, when Antares was not here? With whom did she play? What tender-handed guardian washed and combed her, comforted her when she woke from nightmares? Even if I had been allowed to stay here, if I had wanted to, I could not have provided for her in that way. Mine was not a tender nature, not anymore.
It was this knowledge that stayed my hand when she rose, that did not regret when her eyes remained fixed like a bird of prey upon an unwitting prize. She was a strong child and reminded me of all my sisters, as they had been, or perhaps as I had imagined them to be. Emine moved quickly past Antares and out the door without looking back.
He was left to contemplate me, then. When he spoke, his words were matter of fact, though his tone had none of Gannet’s practiced coolness I had loathed and come to long for.
“You slept in your cell.”
I nodded, wanting to close my eyes and see Gannet in his place, to be near enough to his face to touch the border between heat and coldness, where mask yielded to flesh. Still now I did not know how much he knew, but anything, anything withheld was unforgivable when I wa
s driven to such horrors.
Or perhaps it was that I could not forgive myself, and so I must find a more comfortable target.
“Eiren, you don’t have to follow me to recover Alber, if you don’t want to.”
What I wanted was to undo all that I had done, to whisk clean my steps as the sea had cleansed the sands in Cascar, as servants followed after travelers dragging sand down polished corridors in the palace when I was a child. Here I was, but in Jhosch I had been, and the Rogue’s Ear, and Re’Kether, and my city, my Jarl, where my toddling feet had learned to walk from my mother’s womb and away from her.
“Why do you call me by my name?” I asked. That he called me Eiren was an affectation, now, when I had parted from those the woman Eiren could rightly have called friends. Theba was not so lucky.
I felt in Antares none of the certainty in his dealings with me that he had possessed with Adah and with Gannet. I had not known then that I should have observed him, or perhaps I would have discerned his true master sooner.
“I thought it made you more comfortable,” he answered, his own discomfort plain. Theba stirred within me, the hot crawling feeling I had come to think of as her influence creeping from somewhere near my heart but not my heart, across my skin, needling my eyes. She knew how she would order him, and in a moment I did, too. I was compelled to close the distance between us as I had imagined I would a moment ago if it had been a different man before me. She sensed a new power in me, and she wanted to abuse it.
I was speaking before the words were fully formed upon my lips, as though someone else had planned them.
“I am forbidden the things that would make me comfortable,” I said sinuously, the words slick as burning oil. I saw Antares as though through a filmy screen, felt as I did, sometimes, when I woke from dreams of falling to the fear that I was still. “My name is not among those things.”
The Dread Goddess--Book of Icons--Volume Two Page 3