by James Enge
She was drawing the sunline with her eye: from dawnpoint in the west to setpoint in the east.
“No, you’re not crazy,” she said. “I think the island moved more than we did.”
“Odd.”
“You are a master of all the arts, Morlock, but especially understatement.”
They made toward the island and circumnavigated it. The high cliff wall was open at only one point, and they landed there, on a beach of black sand and stones.
And bones. The beach was littered with dark decaying human bones.
WELCOME TO OLD AZH was scraped in wedgelike Kaenish letters on the sheer face of the cliff nearby.
“Well, the natives are friendly,” said Aloê, gesturing at the grinning skulls.
“Don’t think they’re natives,” Morlock said. “Kaeniar, maybe.”
“You can tell that from the bones—? Oh. You’re thinking of the boat crews from Hÿlohyphäntu’s temple. That makes sense. What happens to the boats?”
Morlock waved at the wet horizon.
“Oh. The island drifts and leaves the empty boats behind it.”
“Yes.”
“Or the gods can handle a boat without human help.”
“Perhaps.”
“I feel like I do all the work in our conversations, Morlock.”
“Work is good for you.”
“Then—no, never mind right now. But we’re not done with this. Shall we go on into the island?”
Morlock nodded. They went side by side, past the bones into the high narrow notch on the cliff wall. They came upon some stairs and climbed them to the top of the island.
There they found a citadel of black stone: narrow streets, with narrow high buildings clustering around a central plaza of unwalled red-pillared temples or assembly halls.
There were no people—not even any bodies, not even a mummy or a statue. There was nothing to indicate anyone had ever lived in the high empty city atop the island. If so, it was so long ago that even their ghosts were dead.
“I feel,” Aloê said, after they had been walking through the cold empty shadows for hours, “that we’re going to come into a room where the only thing is a bell on a wire and a sign that says, ‘Don’t ring the bell.’ But we won’t be able to read it, so we’ll ring the bell and some giant stone walrus will come out and eat us the way it ate everyone else. And then it’ll go back to sleep and wait for the next interloper. Is that how you feel?”
Morlock thought it over and said. “Not the walrus.”
“What, then?”
Morlock led her back to the stairway. He went down on one knee and tapped the topmost stair. “This is worn by weather, not feet. Have hundreds, have thousands of heresiarchs trod these stones over the ages?”
“You obviously don’t think so. This entire city is a distraction?”
“Maybe people lived here once. But what we seek is not here.”
She looked at him, his ragged dark clothes stained by sweat and sea salt, the twist in his torso emphasized by the angle he was holding himself at, the careless grace with which he moved that powerful misshapen body, his pale unbeautiful face beautifully lit with intelligence, his clever fingers gently touching the dry stone of the stair as if it were his lover’s skin.
She was his lover. Why wasn’t he touching her skin like that?
She took him down like a lioness taking a deer.
“Um,” he said as they went tumbling around the empty stone walkway.
“Enough of your fancy talk. You realize I was alone for a month, working on that boat, never having sex at all?” This was not strictly true, since she had masturbated herself to sleep every night, but it was true enough for argument’s sake. “I let you off the hook while we were aboard Fnarklo; you were so obviously unwell. But you’re obviously feeling better now. So: service me, champion. Fill me with your burning seed. Put your hands on me at least, damn it!”
He already was, disentangling her from her clothes with eager reverent skill, like a priest unwrapping some brand-new holy relic fresh from the relic-maker. She almost always tore some of his when they undressed each other, but she was as frantic to see and feel his body as he was hers.
“This is your religion, you know,” she whispered in his ear.
He drew back his face to look at her. “Sex? Like the Purple Patriarchy?”
“No, you lout. Love.”
“Oh.” He thought about it. “A god that suffers like love, heals like love, forgives like love, becomes angry and jealous like love? Maybe—”
“Oh, shut up for once!” she shouted, and greedily covered his open mouth with hers.
They coupled twice in the lifeless fraud of the empty city, and he brought her off twice more with his hands. They lay together on the stones for a time, basking in each other. On impulse, Aloê pushed herself into the visionary state, and Morlock (sensing this) ascended with her. Then for a timeless time their talic selves were as entangled as their limbs: coppery fire transfixed with black-and-white crystalline flames, black-and-white branches blazing with burning veins of reddish gold.
The vision faded, but the sense of closeness, of contact, did not.
“In some places we’d be married now,” she said sleepily.
“Um. Words for witnesses.” In his taciturn way, Morlock was reminding her of the binding feature of a marriage ceremony, in most parts of the Wardlands: someone to witness the commitment, whatever form it took.
“Yes,” she agreed. “Yes, I suppose so. We should look to that when we get back home.”
He writhed like someone in physical pain. “If you want to,” he said at last. “Mention it to me again when we get there.”
“Not if you don’t want to, of course.”
“Of course I want to,” he whispered. “But you will have . . .”
“. . . options? So will you, champion. No, listen, I’ve ridden your beast many times now, and you can’t tell me you never got a request for seconds.”
“Not never. Rarely.”
“The rare ones are the good ones. Or am I wrong about that?”
“No.” He touched her hair reverently, reverently. “No.”
“The idea of being with anyone other than you makes me sick. Didn’t you see that in me?”
“Wasn’t looking for it.”
“Look for it next time we’re in rapport. Or the time after that; we’ll have many times together. Our whole lives. I feel it. Do you want to cast some sort of mantia to see if I’m right?”
“No. I never look at the future about something that matters to me.”
“Why not?”
“Looking at the future changes it. I have you now. I have you now. That’s what matters to me. It will always matter to me that I had you now.”
“Then!” she whispered, and (because he was obviously ready) she threw her leg over him, and straddled him, and mounted him. “Who has who?” she asked, gasping. It was a perfectly reasonable question to which he did not respond, at least not with words.
Afterward, she was cold among the stones and the long shadows of the afternoon, and they put their clothes back on.
Speaking no words and needing none, they went back down to the narrow bone-thick beach, where a set of unpleasant surprises awaited them.
There was a new set of bodies on the beach: ten fresh ones, newly slaughtered with a single slice each across the neck. They were naked, and they seemed to have done the deed themselves. Anyway, there was a bloody razor-sharp clamshell in the right hand of each corpse.
One of the corpses was plump and hairless as a baby bathed in its own blood: Smÿlgondru, paying the penalty for angering his spidery god.
Near the narrow beach, half-sunk in the bitter green-gray water, was the wreckage of the galley that had brought the crew (and, presumably, their would-be god) to Old Azh. They had wrecked the ship before killing themselves at his command, it seemed.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was this: they had wrecked the Fnarklo, too: s
mashed it to bits on the rocky beach.
“Damn it!” Aloê said, fighting back tears. All those days of work wasted, and now they were stranded here if they couldn’t repair the boat. But that wasn’t really it. She had loved that crazy little boat, and now they had killed Fnarklo—again.
Morlock was looking all about. She followed his wandering gaze, and then she said aloud what they both were thinking, “Where did he go? Is there a door in the cliff wall we didn’t see?”
“Maybe.” Morlock shrugged.
While he looked at the stone, she looked at the sea and she shouted, “No! It’s below the water! It must be.”
“A cave below the water?” Morlock said doubtfully.
“Or one whose entrance is. It makes sense, Morlock. You saw an island alive with life and talic force. It’s not because of that empty citadel up there: it must be underneath. I’d better go have a look.”
Morlock’s expression grew even more doubtful, and she continued, “No arguments, Morlock. If some aged heresiarch made the swim, no doubt you could, too. But he knew where he was going, and we don’t.”
Morlock acknowledged the force of reason by opening both his hands. “I’ll fish wood out of the water,” he said. “No matter what happens, we’ll need a boat to leave the isle.”
“Right!” she said, although he was half-wrong about that. He needed a boat. In a pinch, she could swim, but it would be a very unpleasant pinch to swim all the way to shore.
She plunged into the water without further consultation, and without disrobing or disarming. She did not propose to meet this heresiarch (or a god fresh from the Apotheosis Wheel), half-naked and weaponless.
In the event, the cave was obvious as soon as her head was under the water: a bright mouth opening in the sheer side of the under-island. She swam straight into it, and before she knew it she was surfacing in bright breathable air.
As her eyes adjusted to the light she considered swimming back to fetch Morlock. But she decided not to, in the end: she would at least look around a bit first.
It was a decision with significant consequences, and her mind often returned to it later. But she never could decide if she’d made a good choice or a bad one.
There was a bright bland beach of yellow sand edging the dry interior of the undersea cave. Aloê lifted herself onto it and immediately found herself facing a solemn-faced denizen of the place. He sat, naked but clothed with an enormous sense of dignity, with his hand upon his chin. His silken hair, as white as snow, lay in loose curls across his scalp. His eyes were very strange: a white pupil, inside a white iris, inside a white cornea. The colorless eyes looked out of a colorless face—whiter even than Morlock’s fish-belly whiteness. His skin was almost translucent in its paleness, but apart from that he was extremely handsome, almost inhumanly handsome.
She was not feeling especially dignified herself, standing there dripping seawater (and, she abruptly realized, semen: she could feel a strand of it crawling jellylike down her thigh).
“I’m sorry if I am intruding,” she said in Kaenish. Her thought was that if Kaenish heresiarchs came this way to become gods, the locals might speak some Kaenish. Or, of course, the heresiarchs might learn a little of the local tongue—enough to get by.
Apparently that was the case, because the man just looked at her and said nothing. The inhuman dignity of his face never changed, even to acknowledge her presence. If he had not moved his head slightly to follow her movement, she wouldn’t have been sure he even saw her: his white-in-white-in-white eyes were hard to follow—empty of emotion, but seeming full of ageless wisdom.
They stood, golden eyes clashing against ivory, for a long moment. Then a kind of joyous barking and howling rose up in the cave beyond.
The ivory man’s face finally changed, expressing a transcendent wonder and joy. He said something like, “Ooof!” or maybe even, “Woof!” and tumbled over on the sand. He ran off on all fours, eagerly wailing in answer to the voices beyond, his sandy genitalia flopping in the air between his widespread legs.
“I seem to have misread the situation,” Aloê remarked to the empty beach, and followed the tracks of the beast she had mistaken for a person.
She walked up the beach into a kind of city. The buildings were built of bright translucent stone and the cave roof far above was gently, pleasingly luminous. Most of the inhabitants, pale people-like beasts like the one she had met on the beach, seemed to be in the street, yipping and howling with excitement. They were following a kind of domed vehicle or car, moving without an animal to draw it. Periodically the vehicle would pause and excrete, from several pipes in its side, a long gleaming chunk of wobbly red jelly. The people-beasts fell on them with great joy, pressing their faces into the gleaming red surface to gobble it up.
They were very polite, though. There was room for three or four people-beasts to eat at every rope of jelly, and they always shared. There was no fighting. Anyone who didn’t get a chance at the currently extruded jelly followed the vehicle, yapping and howling happily, as it moved on and excreted more jelly farther down the street. Aloê briefly wondered whether another vehicle came along later to spray down the streets, as in A Thousand Towers. But then she saw there was no need to clean up the leavings. There were no leavings. The people-beasts licked the very stones of the street clean of the jelly, and then carried on cleaning the jelly off each other with their tongues. The licking frequently became sexual, and many people-beasts were coupling in the streets still gleaming with their saliva.
Aloê was in no position to sneer, since she had recently been screwing in the street herself. But she did wonder whether sex always looked as absurd to an impartial observer as these wildly coupling beasts did to her.
Others, who were not having sex or had finished having sex, lay around in the street making grunts at each other that might have been conversation.
Only one figure, she saw as she carefully picked her way across the beast-crowded paving stones, stood apart from the others. He sat on a stone, wearing a short shirtlike robe, watching her approach with a lively interest in his warm gray eyes. Those eyes reminded her of Morlock, as did his dark unruly hair and long clever fingers. Otherwise he looked something like Naevros—without Naevros’ smiling catlike smugness.
“Welcome,” he said to her in Wardic. “Are you not terrified by the Keepers of the Wheel?”
“Is that who they are?”
“Once. Long ago.”
“What happened to them?”
“Some of them ascended to the Apotheosis Wheel and became gods or were destroyed. The rest, less ambitious, and more restful in their nature, gave themselves up to physical pleasure. Gods can’t know that, you know—to eat, to drink, to swim, to fuck—all these are alien to their nature. They are not sustained by matter and can take no pleasure in it.”
“Then why be a god?”
“Immortality. Many of those who come here feel their bodies failing. They fear death, and prefer to be gods. The Wheel kills most of those.”
“Oh? The Wheel is not reliable, then?”
“It is perfectly reliable. It never lets someone be a god who is unworthy of godhood, and it assigns each aspirant a godhood worthy of his nature—or her nature.”
“Who’s to judge all that?”
“The Wheel.”
“Do all gods come from the Wheel?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did Torlan and Zahkaar come from the Wheel?”
“I don’t know who they are.”
“You may know them as the Masked Powers—the Two Powers—as Fate and Chaos?”
“I don’t know who they are.”
She almost asked about God Creator, Sustainer and Avenger, but thought better of it. It wasn’t relevant to her current business, and she had no reason to believe this fellow anyway. The fact that she felt she could trust him she discounted: it was another reason to suspect him, really.
The stranger smiled with Naevros’ lips. “You are wise,” he sai
d.
“Thanks.”
“Too wise to consign yourself to the Wheel. Consider the considerable loss, and the dubious gain. If you want power, you can rule here with me, or even over me, if you prefer. You could raise these sad beasts back to the level of people by your example and teaching. And I could give you pleasure. Somehow I know we would be right for each other.”
She looked at him coldly. “Yes, you seem especially designed to please me. Of course, you must tailor yourself to the wishes of every aspirant. What do you really look like?”
“You would not wish to see it.”
“But I do wish to see it.”
The stranger gave a very Morlockian shrug and vanished. In its place was a bulbous, vaguely manlike thing formed from a transparent jelly. It looked like the food jelly, except it was colorless and glowed slightly. There was a hollow foggy place in the middle of its head, and from that a voice came forth—no longer much like Morlock’s or Naevros’. “This is as much of my true self as can be seen with your eyes.”
“Then there is more of you.”
“Much more, in the talic realm. I pervade the island.”
“Do many people take you up on your offer of sex and power?”
“Some.”
“What happens to them?”
“They join with these.” The gleaming arm with no hand gestured carelessly at the people-beasts.
“Then you are the true Keeper of the Wheel.”
“The truth is as I told you. But the Keepers made me so that they might give themselves over to pleasure, and become what you have seen, or ascend to the Wheel and become gods, in which case they left this place to meet their destiny.”
“Then you are the true Keeper of the Wheel.”
It bowed its gleaming, fog-holed head. “It is not part of my instructions to argue with you.”
“Why do you answer my questions? Are you bored here?”
It paused before answering. “I answer your questions, because I am instructed to do so: to ward off those who can be tempted from godhood, and lead those who cannot be tempted to the Wheel. I perceive that you will go there now.”
“In a moment. I am curious. Why do you obey these things who are no longer people? Why not leave this place?”