The God Eaters

by Jesse Hajicek

  Ash guided the horse across the intact bridge and up the steps. Echoes of each hoof's fall clattered loudly inside, giving the impression of a vast space, but Ash didn't bother going in much past the rank of pillars.

  There's something here. Or someone. Some old god, some lingering scent of sanctity, and I've just ridden a muddy-hoofed animal into the temple. That's probably blasphemy. Well, let your curse fall on me, whoever you are, but don't blame Kieran for it.

  Gathering what strength he had -- a little more than he really had, it seemed, borrowing on credit

  -- he dismounted and pulled Kieran down with him. He couldn't stand; catching Kieran knocked him down, and it was all he could do to gentle Kieran's fall a little. Then there was no way he could get up again to unpack blankets and things, even if the mare weren't wandering away in search of the vegetation he hadn't let her explore on the way in. So he stayed where he fell.

  Sprawled, cradling Kieran in aching arms.

  I'll just rest a moment. Just until I'm strong enough to go catch that stupid horse. He could hardly find any sign of life in Kieran's mind at all now. As for Kieran's body, it was utterly limp, skin chilled and greasy, heartbeat weak, breath labored and loud. With each breath, liquid gurgled and clicked in Kieran's lungs. The sound was dreamily horrifying. Too terrible to be real.

  Through the remnant of the night, Ash lay listening to that sound. Through the blues and grays and purples of daybreak, through the gold and white of dawn, he listened to the wet rattle of Kieran's breathing.

  Until, just as sunlight flooded the western mountains, the sound stopped.

  The next few minutes were a chaos of frantic action in denial; trying to make Kieran take just one more breath, trying to turn back time just a few moments, to that last breath he'd allowed to slip by, as if he could have caught it with both hands and held it, shoved life back in; trying to trade anything, everything of himself to turn the broken body in his arms from a corpse to a person again.

  No use. No hope. Everything wrecked. Every second of his life in vain, all leading up to this second of understanding that Kieran was destroyed, that there was no more of him in the world anywhere. All that strength and striving, all that brilliance and cruelty and sweetness and fear and love, vanished like a voice in still air.

  He opened his throat and let the grief rush out; he couldn't stop howling, even though howling didn't help. If he could have smashed the world to powder, in that moment, he would have.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Like snapping out of a daydream, pattern where there had been chaos: he was suddenly whole and real. All the smallness of mortality, gone in an instant. Pain shed like an ill-fitting garment.

  The confining walls of a twisted, damaged mind, an injured body full of limitations and riddled with needs and fears like wormy wood, shucked aside. Free.

  Alone. Cut off. Amputated...

  No; not quite free. He could stretch, yes, unfurl, but there were still limits, only farther and less solid. These senses were not as precise as those of the body, either. There were reasons for mortality. Yes. Memory was stored in the brain more than in the mind. His recollections were vague. This pattern was weak, this pattern was missing things, contained new whorls and new colors, he didn't know himself now. What did these patterns mean? Whole spiral arms of himself were unfamiliar. Creations of the last life lived. Had this happened before? Had he ever made himself new before, just by living as flesh?

  More power. More power would be needed for thinking and knowing and being. There was power here -- stale, small. He drew it, and drew with it a sense of outside, of farther, deeper, higher, elsewhere. Prayers needled him immediately. Stinging rain of small entreaties. No proper offering, only begging and cursing.

  Then, right inside, heartfire, a pure black flame of lamentation. Rare, sweet, mind-stinging perfume of anguish, offered directly to him as --

  For me? -- no one could possibly hurt so much for me --

  -- a sense of place and form began to resolve. More appropriate in every moment, the sacrifice.

  Beauty of shape and color; beauty of broken heart, involved in him entirely. A song of screams, a kneeling dance of rocking and ground-punching and hair-tearing, an incense of tears.

  I didn't mean to hurt you so much, I'm sorry, I'm sorry --

  He might bless this mourner with a gift of madness. It would be a short gift; the line of that life was veering sharply toward the border. The intention was clear; he'd never seen an imminent suicide so free from blurring doubt.

  -- you idiot, you overdramatic stupid precious thoughtless wonderful selfish --

  Patterns within his pattern moved against him. Perspectives smaller and sharper than his own threatened to become him. He perceived a kinship with the corpse now, remembered what he should not have retained, images and qualities from that life. Only one life, out of so many. But new. There had not been anything new for so very long. There had not been a reason for anything. And this pattern, semi-self, rather than fading to feed his power, sank tiny barbs into his older substance and tore him.

  It was a sick thing, a broken thing, steely and smoldering and rusty and splintered; full of calcified, encysted passions, it was angry with a child's ill-aimed despairing anger, it was a child, he had been a child, he had been very nearly a man and then this stupid thing happened and it's never fair, it's like the world hates me, everything I touch turns to shit as a nearly direct result of actions taken centuries ago in order to eradicate him, propagating through the economy of history to include all his people in suffering like this, he doesn't deserve it, maybe I do but he's a really good person and this is just wrong as so many things had been wrong for such a long time.

  With a sight that needed no eyes, he perceived the body of the boy he'd briefly been. Its death was growing more final by the second; soon it would cool. Then rot. Then dry to dust. And he?

  Burdened with the part of self he'd grown while in it, would he crack? Rot from the inside?

  Would he -- unbelievable! -- ache forever for that dirty, skinny mortal who was even now hunched wailing beside the corpse? A creature that lived in a flicker, fragile, a life too short for learning, even if this particular life weren't planning to end itself before sunset anyway. Was it possible that even one moment -- face tear-glazed and blotchy raised howling, bloodshot blue eyes sightless to the sightless sky -- was now indelibly part of his pattern? Unacceptable.

  Unacceptable. Horrible. It could not happen like this. It might fragment him. It could destroy him. Already the colors of the newer, lesser self were beating back the true equations of his power, eating at them like a cancer.

  What am I, a ghost? If that were all, I'd say it was all right, at least I died free, but he -- how can I abandon him like this? I won't leave him, I won't!

  That suddenly, the lesser pattern overwhelmed the greater, and he was reaching for more power than he'd meant to draw. Sudden wind stirred the mourner's hair as the temperature inside the temple dropped; plumes of vapor now carried the mourner's keening sobs, leaking between clenched teeth. There would be nothing left, all would go into this effort. He feared that fighting with himself at this point would break him up like smoke. He would truly be a ghost, then. So there was only one option. But still the power wasn't big enough. To push, to kill, took only a little; all life was under tension, reeling steadily toward its end, and a sharp shock in the right place could break it loose. Forcing those parted strands back together, on the other hand...

  Trees in the garden stirred, then tossed, then thrashed and shed branches. Farther and farther he ranged, looking for anything he could use. Over the pool, down the stream, fog rolled. Within the temple, a skin of ice formed on the water in the channel. Even in the madness of grief, the mourner paused to wonder at the cold. From the depths of the earth, he tapped the groaning pressure of opposing stone, and the ground shuddered. Thunder rose up; dust sifted down.

  Almost. Almost. Now --

  Pain so intense was
a thing like ecstasy; he couldn't even scream for it, while his body wrenched with the effort of expelling the stuff that had drowned him. His state was something more than consciousness, and less -- all sensation, no volition. He was nothing but a giant swollen throat, splitting open with agony, heaving and heaving and heaving.

  Blocked, suffocating. Couldn't force it all out, lungs hitching, trying to inhale, choked, the stuff was reeling back in --

  Then hands on him, fingers in his throat, gagging him, but the blockage was going out again, these hands were -- someone was -- Ash was reaching down his throat and hauling out fistfuls of the stuff.

  And he was breathing. Searing, hot-cold air, more coughing, more pain. Then vomiting, and all the time his eyes and nose were running, and he could hear the sounds he was making, broken-backed-dog sounds... but he was alive. He had been dead. He was alive. Blind with pain, barely strong enough to breathe, but breathing. Heart stuttering like a string of firecrackers. Would have thought he was dying if he hadn't just been dead.

  Did I dream that?

  Does it matter?

  "Oh thank you oh thank you thank you." Ash was sobbing the words as if he couldn't hear himself, over and over like an incantation.

  Gradually he calmed; Kieran heard sanity return in his voice as it trailed away. Eventually Ash got up and moved around a bit, sometimes more or less near but always near enough. The compass around Kieran's neck knew where Ash was. Near enough. Talking, crying, cleaning with wet cloths, making a soft place for Kieran's head, petting and soothing. Warmth was returning. Fragmented thought began to pull together.

  When water dribbled between his lips, Kieran found swallowing a terrible effort. Nevertheless he had to make a further effort after that, to pry his eyes open and to smile.

  He was pillowed on Ash's lap. Above him, Ash's face was pale as dust, eyes black-circled as if he'd been punched twice. Dirty-haired, sunburned, tear-tracked, hollow-cheeked; beautiful, precious.

  "Oh Kai, I was sure I'd lost you. I felt you go."

  With great concentration, Kieran forced his lips to move. "Came back."

  "Please stay with me now. Please get better. You're going to get better, right?"

  He couldn't keep his eyes open anymore, but he managed one more word. "Yes."

  As pain seeped away, back to being bearable, a sleepy contentment came over him. Something very strange had happened, but he could think about it later. There was going to be a later. Ash's voice followed him down, a whisper: "Don't go too far."

  I won't, he thought gratefully. I don't have to, now.

  --==*==--

  Brilliant dreams came then. Dreams of pure color and meaning, without faces or time. He slept shallowly, dreamed close to the surface, half-lucidly, and never lost his sense of Ash's nearness.

  Sometimes he woke enough to perceive the real world outside his dreaming. There was birdsong, and a smell of green. He heard Ash talking to the horse. For a while Ash lay beside him, and they dreamed together, and then he saw things he'd never seen before: snow sifting through a streetlamp's glow of yellow gaslight; the smell of wet leaves and gunpowder and dog, cramped legs and cold hands, ducks rising from among rushes in a whirring, yapping cloud; a woman's face, lined and smiling, pencils stuck in the coil of russet braids that crowned her; a whispering, mist-covered sea.

  Best of all, when he woke in the dark, shivering, Ash woke as well, and talked to soothe him.

  The words came with pictures, sounds, even smells. I've smelled the sea. Never been within a hundred miles of it, but I know now what it smells like. He could feel his strength returning, drop by drop. He could be patient until he was well. It was all going to be okay now.

  --==*==--

  There came, inevitably, a time when he woke with a full bladder and a rumbling stomach.

  Morning was near, he could smell it in the air, and somehow the smell was lonely. The sound of predawn birdsong was lonely. Ash still slept, hadn't woken with him; that perfect connection was gone.

  He was cold, weak, and dizzy. For several minutes he weighed the warmth of the blankets against the pressure of his bladder. At last he surrendered to necessity and moved.

  Inch by inch. Every movement took concentration. His attempt to stand was nearly a disaster, and he went quickly back to his knees. Settling on a halting motion on his knees and one hand, like a three-legged cat, he made it as far as the edge of the top step, between a pillar and a stone-lined groove carrying a stream of smooth water. But one look at the stairs told him that there was no way he could make it down. So he pulled himself upright against the pillar and, leaning on it, pissed in the stream.

  Then he laughed. He'd befouled the temple. And he remembered dreaming that it was his own temple. A temple to him. In which case, using the sacred spring as a toilet was permitted.

  Now he had the problem of his trouser buttons again. Which, he realized, was not a problem at all. He didn't have to sleep with his pants on. There wouldn't be an early-morning scramble for departure; this was their destination, and he could lie around until he was entirely recovered.

  Sitting on the edge of the blanket, he methodically removed his boots, socks, and pants, smiling a little to see how yellow-pale his legs looked compared to his arms. Then he slid back into the warmth he'd left, and relaxed, and was ambushed by weariness. Surprised he'd gotten up at all.

  The next time he woke, Ash wasn't present. Kieran's boots were standing neatly together by the nearest pillar, but the rest of his clothes were gone. His compass told him that Ash wasn't far, though. He was out there, would probably be visible if Kieran sat up. Kieran didn't feel like sitting up. All he could do was lie here and wait for Ash to come back, but that was okay now.

  He was surprised to discover that he was completely certain Ash would come back, and would have been doing something good and necessary, and would go on doing good and necessary things. He hadn't ever known that kind of certainty before.

  Which left one unanswered question: What the hell does he see in me?

  --==*==--

  By the time Ash returned, he'd wandered a long way from that train of thought. He'd dozed a little more, but hunger kept him from really sleeping. So it was with great pleasure that he watched the redhead kneel and lay out his bundled shirt, spilling a pile of ripe vegetables.

  "Where'd you get those?" Kieran said. His voice was painfully hoarse, but he could achieve a conversational volume now.

  Ash gave a grin that seemed to light him up like a beam of sunshine. "You were right, it's just like a garden! There are garden plants running wild all over the place! I found tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, squash, there's corn but it's not ripe, everything's a little on the small side -- how are you feeling?"

  "Hungry."

  "I figured. Besides that?"

  "Tired. Bit sore. Uh... how are you holding up, Ashes? You looked pretty beat the other day."

  Ash came closer, and when he was no longer half-eclipsed by the bright day behind him, Kieran could see that he was much cleaner than before. His clothes looked cleaner too, and a little damp along the seams. His face was still too thin, but his color was healthier. Sunburn nearly gone, eyes no longer bruised. He said, "How am I? Better than I've ever been in my life." A bright fragment of laughter spun out of him. "Can you believe how much has happened in just a few days? Not even three weeks since we left Churchrock. At the moment, I'm in serious danger of starvation, and so are you. That would have really scared me a little while ago. Now I'm just thinking -- so we feast on fresh veggies today, and something's bound to turn up tomorrow. What the hell does tomorrow matter?"

  "Sounds like you've gone off your head a little." Kieran smiled to soften it.

  "Most likely. I don't have clue one what I'm going to do with this stuff -- I can't stew it, I forgot the saucepan where you had that fall." Ash had to roll his eyes up and think: "Day before yesterday." Kieran didn't blame him for hesitating; it seemed they'd been here much longer.

  "I'll eat it ra
w."

  "Can you eat eggplant raw? You can't eat squash raw. Just a second." He brought over a tomato -

  - smallish, as he'd said, but it gave off a dusty savor even before he cut it into quarters. He bit into a slice and chewed thoughtfully. "It's all right. Probably wouldn't like it if I paid for it, but for free, with hunger sauce, it's good. Here, I'll help you sit -- oh!" He said this last syllable in a tone of mixed pleasure and apprehension, because Kieran had managed to sit up all by himself.

  "You sure you're up to that? Want something to lean on?"

  "Nope." Kieran was as surprised as Ash was. "This isn't hard at all."

  They ate the tomatoes raw; there were just enough of the small, tough, intensely-flavored fruits to take the edge off their hunger. The one bell pepper Ash had found tasted bitter and woody, but they managed to get that down as well. For dessert, they had the remains of a bag of raisins Ash had lifted off the priest.