But she was his heart’s desire. For her he had turned from his duty and come home. He had loved her when it was forbidden. Why should he not love her when it was impossible?
“Yes,” he said. “I can.”
“Are you sure?” Her gaze seemed haunted. “It’ll always be between us, you know. Even if we never speak of it again.”
“I’m sure. As sure as I’ve ever been of anything.”
“Then I am, too. I love you. I told you before—I always came back to that.”
“Axane.”
He reached for her, but she put her hand on his chest, holding him away. “There are conditions.”
“Conditions?”
“Do you still have the necklace? The Bearer’s necklace?”
“Yes.”
“You must hide it. Somewhere where I’ll never come on it. I never want to see it. Never, do you understand?”
He nodded.
“This one’s harder.” Her hand was warm against his chest; he could feel the shape of her palm, the pressure of each separate finger. “If you come home, it must be for good. I have to know that, Gyalo. I can live with your belief. But you must swear that the rest of it is over. That it won’t come into our lives again.”
He saw that to give her any answer but the one she wanted would be to lose her. Though he had meant to tell her the truth—all of it, without exception—he looked into her eyes, and lied.
“It’s over, Axane. I swear it.”
For a long moment she watched him. Then she sighed and let her hand fall. “That’s good, then.”
Her touch had reminded him. He reached under his shirt, pulled out the cord from which her bracelet hung.
“My bracelet!”
“I meant to give it to you the night you found me.”
He picked at the knot, but it was melded fast with dirt and sweat and at last she had to get a knife to cut it. He took her hand and slid the silver circle onto her wrist, as he had done on their wedding day. She bent her head, looking at it.
“We must make a pact, Gyalo, to forgive each other. Not just now, but always. Every day. We must never grow to hate the differences between us.”
He pulled her into his arms. The gratitude he felt was indistinguishable from pain. “I promise.”
“We can live now.” She clung to him. “We can work and have children. We can grow old. We can do the things that people do. We can be happy.”
He closed his eyes on the underwater glory of her colors, and for just that span of time, let himself believe it.
Much later, he uncurled himself from around her and left the warmth of their bed. He pulled on clean clothes, and from beneath his desk retrieved the bundle he had been carrying when he came into the house. From one of his chests he took a length of cord and a square of waxed canvas. He emptied a wooden box of the scrolls it held.
He paused by Chokyi’s pallet to draw up the covers she had kicked off, then knelt a moment, looking at her and thinking of the evening just past. Axane had boiled water so he could bathe; she had scrubbed his back and shaved off his unkempt beard and combed and braided his hair. By that time Chokyi was awake, and while Axane prepared a meal he occupied himself with winning back her trust, succeeding well enough that she was willing, once they had eaten, to sit on his lap and allow him to amuse her by calling illusion in various shapes and forms. Her laughter was a lovely thing, almost as lovely as Axane’s; he could still feel the happiness their happiness had given him. Yet all the while, a fraction of him stood apart, a small, bright, dispassionate eye watching from the riverbank. Even as Axane and he made love, even as she lay against him afterward with tears drying on her cheeks, even as his own tears flowed, that little eye looked on, unmoved.
I’m not as I was. He had stopped short of telling her how deeply that was so. But she was wise. She would guess.
Fetching his boots, he tiptoed downstairs. In the dark kitchen he took a spade from the cabinet where Axane kept household implements, unlatched the back door, and stepped out into the biting chill of the night. The wind sent clouds scudding across the moon. In the shelter of its walls Axane’s garden lay quiet.
On the bench at the garden’s midpoint, he laid down the bundle and the canvas and the box. With the spade, he levered up several paving stones and set them aside. He scraped away the gravel beneath, and began to dig down into the cold earth. The light of life was abundant, even in that sleeping season—the thready glint of worms, the nail-head spark of pupating beetles, the pale glow at the crowns of the perennial plants in the garden beds nearby. But all of it was netted in dissolution, in the processes of decay and change; everywhere he looked he saw the patterns of unmaking, of undoing, of destruction. When he first perceived the world that way, in the Courtyard of the Sun, he had thought it a gift—but he had come to hate it, to hate the shift in his Shaper senses. He was not certain whether what he had done had actually transformed his ability, or whether his surrender to destruction had simply brought him to a truer understanding of its nature. Perhaps every Shaper came to that eventually, with enough practice. Perhaps it was how Râvar had seen the world.
Or perhaps only the Messenger must see it so. For to open was to undo, to unmake. The Messenger was destruction.
When the hole was as deep as his forearm, he set down the spade and sat on the bench to open the bundle. Within were two smaller packages. He teased apart the knots of the first; inside lay the Bearer’s necklace, its ancient gold shining in the intermittent moonlight, the bright-hearted crystal shimmering from its cage. The second package was rolled into a dirty ratist stole. Carefully he unwound the cloth, revealing a second mass of gold: Râvar’s necklace, streaked with soot, its links fused into a welted tangle around the fiery fist of the Blood.
He had found it on the night he and Diasarta and Apui and Lopalo slipped out of Baushpar. He had not had any intention of returning to the place where Râvar had died; but as they neared the broken gate he heard the sound of ragged chanting, and was swept by an impulse so powerful he did not dare refuse it. Ignoring Diasarta’s objections, he left his companions in the street and walked up to the house. A dwindling cadre of pilgrims still held stubborn vigil there—the very last of the Awakened City, offering up their lives to the memory of their Messenger. Earlier, he had removed the Bearer’s necklace and wrapped a stole around his head and face; with his marked palm and dirty, torn clothes, there was nothing to distinguish him from those wretched souls.
He stood among them, his gaze moving on the blackened timbers and the charred brick, his Shaper senses reading how the fire’s heat had transformed them. The roof was gone but the walls still stood; beyond the fallen portico, the door gaped like a wound. After a time he began to feel that looking was not enough, so he went round to the back where he would not be seen and climbed inside. His awareness of the pebble of quiet, the little wedge of disconnection between himself and the rush and bustle of the world, was acute that night; he let it guide him, wandering half-tranced through the ruins, followed in the dark by his own illumination.
At the front of the house, gazing up at the stars through a great hole in the second floor, he tripped over a piece of tile, destabilizing some precarious balance and causing an area in front of him, groaning and clattering, to collapse. It was several moments before he dared to move again. As he began to turn away, he caught sight of something glinting. Lifelight, he thought, with the reflexive urgency of two weeks spent searching for the faintest flicker of it. But with his rational mind he knew there was nothing alive there. In the next second, he realized what it must be.
Breathless with wonder, he cleared away debris and knelt, looking down at what he had uncovered: the Blood, shining from a bed of ash like a single coal left over from the inferno that had claimed the house. It was pristine, entirely unmarked. What were the odds that he should simply find it like that? Yet it felt right. It was proper
that this Blood, too, be given into his keeping.
He pulled the stole from around his face and rolled the heavy mass of gold and crystal into it. He tied it into the bundle that contained the Bearer’s necklace and carried both gems past Râvar’s faithful, their sad voices dying away behind him. For nearly three weeks the jewels had not left him, borne on his arm by day, at night used for his pillow. At last, he would set them aside. He had made a promise to Axane, and he would keep it.
The quiet in him stirred—almost like a voice, as it could be sometimes, speaking of a different promise. No, he told it, as he had before, as he would again, many times perhaps, in the months and years to come.
He had said no to Diasarta also. But you can’t, Diasarta had cried, shocked and angry, when Gyalo informed the ex-soldier that he intended to go home. This is only the beginning. There’s so much more to do. Gyalo knew he was right. To become the Messenger was not a choice for a single moment. To open the way was not a single act. It should be he who oversaw the dispersal of the Brethren. It should be he who walked the lands crying word of rata’s rising. It should be he who taught the new faith with its Foundation of Prayer: generation, in balance with the destruction he had made. Yet in the days after Baushpar’s fall he had felt, hardening in him, the determination to walk a different path. It was in Baushpar that he had first said, to the still part of him the god had touched, the part of him that perhaps was the god: No. Not in rejection—though he loathed what he had become, the blood upon his hands, the alteration of his Shaper senses. Not in anger—though he had been angry at first, so angry! Yet even as he shouted his rage at the indifferent sky on the first terrible night after the collapse, he understood what had been done and why. Understood, as he had said to Sundit, that a god’s purpose did not have to be palatable to mortals, nor was the god constrained to use them kindly. Not even his Messenger.
Not anger, then. Not rejection. Just … refusal. He had been called to duty. He would not answer. The Messenger who had opened the way would not pass through.
He whispered it aloud now: “No.”
Like a prayer, the word flew off into the night. And as sometimes happened, an answer seemed to come breathing back—not wrathful or impatient, but serene, implacable: One day.
His heart twisted. This, too, he knew: the price of refusal. The call had come, and it would not stop coming, no matter how many times he turned from it. One day it would grow too strong—with Diasarta’s return, perhaps, or some event out in the world—and he would not be able to prevent himself from answering. He had meant to confess this to Axane. He had meant to tell her that he would try to stay, but did not know if he could, or for how long. Instead, he had lied—because he wanted her so much. Because he, who had given the whole of himself to duty, desired this one thing for himself, if only for a little while.
Perhaps, when the time came, she would forgive him. Perhaps.
He thought of Sundit, to whom he had not lied—who, unlike Axane, would have been capable of understanding all the truth, had she chosen to accept it. He did not grudge her condemnation, which after all was little different from his own. He did not grudge her repudiation either, though he knew she would do all she could to work against the change he had set in motion. She might even be successful. But only briefly. Her struggle, like his refusal, was a hand raised against the inevitable.
He wished her well, in the time to come.
On the bench beside him the crystals shone, the fire at their cores shuddering in counterpoint. He wondered what had happened to the third, the one he had brought out of the Burning Land. Was it with the Brethren? Did it lie beneath the wreckage of Baushpar?
Softly he reached to touch the stones, first Marduspida’s in its cage of gold, then Râvar’s, careful of the razor facets.
Farewell.
He shrouded them in cloth again. He folded the waxed canvas around the bundle and placed the whole into the wooden box, whose lid he tied closed with cord. Kneeling by the hole, he set the box into it, then took up the spade and began to fill it up again, tamping the soil to make it level. He replaced the gravel and carefully reset the paving stones. With his hands he brushed the surface clean, then stood back to examine his work. No one but a Shaper would see there had been disturbance there. He would know where to dig again, when he had to.
He returned to the kitchen and put away the spade. He dipped water into a bowl and washed his hands, then rinsed the bowl and dried it and set it back where it had been. He stood a moment in the doorway, listening to the silence of the night, watching the shadowed garden, where the Blood lay sleeping in the earth.
“rata,” he murmured to the god who had claimed him, the god he had refused. The god he knew, as surely as he knew the ground under his feet, he would one day see striding home across the world, the flames of judgment leaping from his hands.
He latched the door and went upstairs, where his wife and child shone upon the darkness. He shed his clothes and slid into bed beside Axane, curving himself around her again. She stirred in protest of his chilled hands and feet, but did not wake. He lay in the green world of her lifelight, breathing her in, feeling in himself the familiar weight of love and change and guilt, and beneath it, hard as crystal, the little piece of him that did not partake of such things, that was not and would never again be of this world. It stirred, that quiet, but not quite as before. For the first time, he thought it whispered of forgiveness.
He closed his eyes, and sank into dreamless sleep.
Epilogue
The Exile
I WENT TO market today with my basket on my arm, like an ordinary village matriarch. I do such things very naturally these days, in this exile of mine. I don’t even trouble any longer to conceal my tattoo; here in Isar, where the Way never gained a foothold beyond a scattering of isolated monasteries, many do not recognize it, and those who do care little. I had completed my purchases and was searching among the stalls for a treat to bring to Utamnos, when I heard the sound of voices raised in some sort of dialogue. Not argument or anger; more like a poet’s recitation. I followed the voices to the market’s edge, where there is a shrine to the Aspect Vahu—or I should say, to the god Vahu, for that is what they believe in Isar. There were four men, standing on the steps. They were clad like paupers, yet they stood like kings. They were speaking of prayer, which they called the Sixth Foundation.
My first impulse was to turn on my heel and go. Yet a kind of awful fascination held me, and I stood listening as they spoke of prayer, of Promises, of rata awake. I already knew something of these doctrines, from Reanu’s travels—in the past two years such proselytizers have appeared throughout Galea, proclaiming the birth of a new Way of rata, defined by this supposed Sixth Foundation. Like Gyalo Amdo Samchen, they declare that Baushpar’s destruction was the first act of rata’s Promise, and marks the opening of the Way. Like Râvar, they call their new faith an act of generation and speak of the ensuing time as an age of Interim. It is such a jumble of principles that even I, who knew both false Messengers, cannot tell from which of them it rises.
The proselytizers’ faith was palpable, their passion and their joy (this struck me with great force: their joy). In other kingdoms, many must be moved by such a presentation. But this is Isar. They care nothing for rata sleeping here, so why should they care for him awake? The handful of spectators did not display reverence or shock or even distaste, but only the sort of curiosity they might have shown toward a group of jugglers or a band of minstrels. If the joyous speakers noticed this, they gave no sign.
At last I could no longer bear it and set out for home. An uncontrollable flood of memory beset me as I walked, the griefs and regrets that I normally hold prisoned in the darkest parts of me. I found, suddenly, that I needed to commit my thoughts to paper, an impulse I have not felt in a very long time. At home, I did not even pause to empty my basket, but went immediately to the storeroom—a barn once used for sh
eep shearing, which I have caused to be entirely paneled in cedarwood. I searched out the proper box and pried up its lid, smelling the dry odor of the chalk layered at the bottom to absorb moisture. This journal and my box of writing tools lay atop the rest, ready to my hand. It has been even longer than I remembered since I made an entry; I thought I had recorded something of our journey here, but in fact I set down nothing after that awful day, more than two years ago, when I realized that Taxmârata had won, that my spirit-siblings would yield to Gyalo Amdo Samchen’s heretical directives and dissolve the council.
How shall I bridge with words the time that has passed between that entry and this one?
I think I will not write of those final weeks in Faal. The bitterness of the battle I knew was lost, and yet could not help fighting, needs no recounting. Taxmârata had much time while I was absent to win my spirit-siblings to his view, which he did with all the fire and vigor he once employed to raise an army for Santaxma, back when the Caryaxists seemed the greatest threat the church might ever know. Those who would have supported me had already separated themselves—Kudrâcari and Ariamnes and Okhsa and Sonrida, who remained in Rimpang and refused to come to Faal, and Dâdar and Ciryas, who decamped soon after my arrival to join them. The rest, battered by events, haunted by our failures, shocked and shaken by the destruction of Baushpar, were all too eager to embrace self-destruction. Even Martyas, whose wicked cynicism utterly deserted him at the end. Even Hysanet, whom I’d hoped I could at least persuade to come with me into exile.
One day I woke, and knew that I would fight no more. With Reanu and Omarau, who were all I trusted out of the hundreds gathered in Faal, I made plans for a secret departure. It was not easy to arrange, for I was determined to bring with me my journals and Utamnos’s—more than three thousand of them in sixty heavy boxes. But Reanu managed with his customary resourcefulness, and in the middle of a starry summer night, I and Utamnos and Ha-tsun and Reanu and Omarau slipped away. No doubt when my spirit-siblings found me gone, they assumed I, too, had headed for Rimpang. Instead we traveled north, toward Isar’s remote and rocky coast, and settled in this town whose name I remember from my childhood, not far from the village where, fifty-two years ago, I was born.
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