Our Lady of the Islands

by Shannon Page

  Sian took Reikos’s hand in the fading light; he squeezed hers back as they gazed into the darkness beneath the pier, trying to see what everyone was staring at. Many others had come to stand before her by now, standing knee-deep in the water itself, but she was still able to see the man step out from some even deeper shadows into a small clearing in the gloom.

  She had not forgotten his face. She didn’t think she ever would: young and handsome with those smoldering eyes, though he seemed far more serene tonight than he had the last time they had met. She gave Pino a grateful nod for having led her, finally, back to the man who’d beaten her into a different life, then set her adrift — in so many ways — cursed with this terrible ‘gift’. The priest was robed more traditionally this time, almost as if to pass for a brother of the Mishrah-Khote. Was this disguise, she wondered, or pretension? She tried to step forward, but the crowd had grown too thick, and would not part for her.

  Pino grabbed her sleeve. “No, my lady — after he speaks.”

  She schooled herself to patience, as the crowd around her strained forward too, as eager as she, it seemed, to get closer to this man, if for very different reasons. She tried to listen through the rush of surf, the evening cries of shore birds, the restless humming of the crowd around her, wondering whether she’d be able to hear him when he began to speak — and fearful, suddenly, that he might just slide back into the shadows when he’d finished, before she could reach him. Her throat felt suddenly dry despite the smothering humidity.

  When it came at last, his voice was surprisingly full and clear. The crowd gave an appreciative murmur as it carried over them with the soothing cadences and sweet rhythms of a natural-born orator.

  “My blessed friends — my spiritual family, welcome.” His face was relaxed, smiling and open. “I know you have wandered long and far to be here, and I thank you. I know too that the path ahead still seems unclear. But look around you: more join our numbers day by day. More wise, blessed souls are remembering the way of light, and turning from the dark, destructive path that Alizar has drifted onto in its rush to take what it then finds so little joy in, to rise by shoving others down, to sell all of its tomorrows in a frenzy to engorge itself today. More of our countrymen will join us tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and the day after that, until Alizar recalls itself at last, and wakens from the dark dream it’s been lost in. That bright day will dawn, not just on our nation’s loftiest towers, but on its lowest valleys too. On that morning, none in Alizar will live in fear or shame or anger any longer, for all will have their heart’s desire, and none will need what only others have. This I am empowered to promise you, by the very god who called me out of darkness, as he has called each of you. Him they call the Butchered God — who nonetheless comes ever nearer, to set the crooked straight, right what is imbalanced, and heal every inch of poor, lost Alizar!”

  His words washed over the crowd like a cool, exhilarating wave. Sian felt its power, despite herself. But she knew firsthand how capable this humble, sunny promiser of peace and harmony was of inexplicable violence. She recalled the crazed and bloodshot face he’d worn just a few nights before, and resolved to resist the seductive power of his oration. Surely there was some incitement to riot and revolution underneath his gentle-seeming words. While those around her closed their eyes and turned their faces toward the sky, already reaching for religious ecstasy, she opened her eyes wider, straining to hear the threads of sly deceit that she felt certain would be woven through this pretty speech.

  “I know you thirst for justice,” the priest went on. “You desire wages that the humble can feed their families on, not just more wealth for the lucky few who rule you.”

  Ah. Here it comes, Sian thought with grim satisfaction. The hook of resentment. Permission to punish the successful. Did those around her not realize how they were being used? If this man got his way, he might end up their new king, but they would find themselves impoverished still; his laborers instead of someone else’s.

  “You want more than tents and shacks in which to raise your children. You imagine an end to unpaid apprenticeships to unscrupulous and exploitive manufacturers.”

  That is not how Arouf and I have ever run our business, Sian thought with rising umbrage. This man painted everyone alike, with whatever brush suited his agenda. She had known he would.

  “You long to see the end of different rules for different classes, to enjoy the kind of privilege and education that your masters take for granted, to be free at last of those who deny you access to your own potential. I know all of this, and feel the pain and outrage these inequities fill your hearts with every day. Did I not crawl out of the same bleak slums and shantytowns that you are trapped in, day after weary day?”

  Did you? Sian challenged silently. Not this accomplished orator. This charlatan had clearly enjoyed the very privilege and education he now encouraged his audience to resent. She’d have bet her savings on it.

  “I will not pretend I do not know what it is like to dream of seeing those above us all cast down and overthrown,” he said, as if the admission were painful to him.

  Oh, she wanted to reach down, grab two handfuls of wet sand, and hurl them at him, but she was also increasingly conscious of her damned fancy dress. No point in bringing this mob down on herself instead. She wondered how much longer it would be safe for her and Reikos to remain here, if he took this rant where she was now quite sure it must be going.

  “But, though many of you surely wish to hear me tell you it is time to rise up in righteous indignation and bring our masters to their knees, burn their palaces, and drag them off in chains to rot in their own dungeons, or better yet, the slums they have created to contain you in, I must disappoint you. The god I serve wants no such thing — for you or for them.”

  What? Sian looked around, but with very few exceptions, no one around her seemed at all surprised, much less disappointed. They just listened more intently, some nodding as if this were what they’d come to hear. What twist in the old game was this?

  “The very masters who torment you today were forged in someone else’s torture chambers,” the priest said with a slow nod of his own. “They allowed themselves to be consumed by the very anger that tempts all of us here, and told themselves that when they had destroyed all those above them, they’d be free.

  “But free for what? That is the question they never thought to ask themselves. Free to rule instead of being ruled? But to rule whom? Free to wield the whip instead of bearing it? Against whose back?” He fell silent, gripping all before him with that burning gaze. “You know the answer, friends,” he told them softly. “Better than anyone else.

  “Their righteous tantrum of destruction freed them to rule you. To wield the whip against your back. They beat their persecutors down at last by becoming all the very things they’d hated most about them.”

  Sian shook her head, trying to understand how he would twist this bizarre new sleight of hand to his benefit, but she was at a loss. If he did not approve of beatings, how did he justify what he had done to her?

  “Give in to rage, my true and blessed friends, and you will know the truth of all I say — when you sit in their places as the world you oppress seethes and boils at your feet. You will know what they feel now, lying in their privileged beds at night. You will fear what they fear, and hide what they hide, and become as monstrous as so many of your leaders have become, running desperately from what you’ve taken for yourselves, and from those who want it taken from you in their turn. The god I serve … did not yield his body up for this. He does not feed you still so that you can rise up to be next year’s crop of monsters. No, the god I serve offers all of us on Alizar — high and low, rich and poor, wicked or innocent — something infinitely better.”

  Around her, Sian heard the sounds of quiet weeping, the sighs of murmured thanks, breathless affirmations of what the priest was saying, though she could not imagine why.

  “If you have heard the message I am chosen to
bear, then you already know what the Butchered God offers to us all, and how costly it will be — and has already been — for all of us to gain. If you have not yet heard his message, then listen to me now.”

  Sian strained forward, struggling to remember that she could not trust this man — that this, surely, was where the trick would be performed somehow, the worm revealed at the center of his lovely oratorical fruit.

  “The god who drew me out of my own hell bids me tell you that justice for both high and low, a life together without any cause for fear or shame or anger, a nation without need or inequality, will be ours as soon as every one of you wants such things more than you want what the ones who rule us now possess. Overthrow a thousand governments, and men will still make what they want out of the rubble. If you want what your oppressors have, that is what you’ll make — again and again and again. If you want something better than what your oppressors have, you must renounce all that those oppressors have to offer, and give yourselves to making a new world instead. Making! Not taking. The god I serve wants nothing short of this, my blessed companions: that we withhold nothing we possess — not our minds, our hearts, our bodies or our lives — from the one true task of making the new world. The cure we need, the dream we seek, these lie inside each of us, not out there. Inside ourselves is where the battle must be waged. The only place it can be waged. All else is doomed illusion. Set it down, my blessed companions. Set all of it down, and come make the world we want instead, together … out of nothing, if we must.

  “The god I serve be with all who hear him,” he said very quietly.

  Sian waited. For the trick. But nothing happened. Surely there was something more. Where was the final flourish? The impassioned crescendo, cunningly designed to bring this audience roaring to their feet, ready to do anything he bid? She looked around again at all the needy people, swaying, smiling, weeping softly in this eerie silence. What did they imagine they’d received? What had he offered them? He had told them nothing, really. What new world did he mean? He had described it not at all, except in the vaguest generalities. Why did any of them leave their lives and livelihoods to march and march across the islands — for this? And why did they seem so … gratified now?

  She turned to Reikos, and found him just as wrapped in unnatural silence as all the others. What did Reikos think he’d heard?

  She turned to Pino, whose face was washed in tears.

  “I cannot understand,” Pino whispered roughly. “How can he see what he describes, and yet …” He looked at Sian hopelessly. “Do you see now? Why I helped him bring you when he asked me to?” No, she thought, beginning to feel crazy. I don’t see any of what’s doing this to any of you. “How could I have known, my lady? Nothing in the world fits anymore.” He drew a deep breath, then another, wiping at his eyes. “If you want to speak with him, we should do it now. This is … when it happens.”

  “When what happens?” she asked, increasingly unnerved.

  “He lets us come to him,” said Pino. “All who want to. I thought that he just meant to talk with you that night. As he does with us.” He gave her a worried look. “I don’t know what he will do tonight, though, either. Are you still sure you wish to do this?”

  “Yes,” she said, turning back to Reikos. “Are you coming?”

  He blinked at her as if awakened from some kind of trance. “Of course. I too would like to meet this man.” He rushed to add, “And to make certain he has no ideas about hurting you again.”

  She shook her head, and started for the pier as Reikos and Pino flanked her. The crowd had begun to thin, drifting up and down the beach, or back toward the cliff-side paths. But as she neared the pier she was dismayed to see a long line had already formed between herself and the priest. More waiting.

  She joined the line, peering impatiently through the lowering darkness at the priest. He sat on a large rock now, flanked by two leaning pilings and several large, frightening men. Someone had lit a driftwood fire beside him, which was just starting to catch in earnest. His young face still seemed open and serene as he laid hands gently on the heads of follower after follower. Had any of these people been there, she wondered, when he had beaten her? Did they know about his other face? The one he wore when he was wielding his god’s heavy bone? Did no one care about such obvious hypocrisy? Such madness?

  Several times, after some brief exchange too hushed for her to hear, she saw him slip a fragment of some dark material into the mouth of his petitioner.

  This made her shiver. She had heard the rumors. Could what he was feeding them really be cured flakes of the Butchered God’s dismembered flesh?

  “I am not eating any of whatever that may be,” Reikos muttered in her ear, as if he’d read her thoughts.

  “Nor am I,” Sian replied. “For once, I am not hungry.”

  From atop the cliffs behind them, chanting floated down as prayer lines re-formed to set out through the darkened islands — with renewed enthusiasm, she supposed.

  One by one, those in line before her had their moment with the man before surrendering him to the next in line. Most left with smiles of satisfaction, or what seemed happy tears, though some went looking more perplexed or haunted than relieved by whatever he had told them. Either way, the line grew shorter, until, finally, Sian found herself before the priest.

  She let go of Reikos’s hand and took a step away from him and Pino to close the gap between herself and the priest. She didn’t kneel, as others had. She felt anything but overawed by this young zealot now. Where had the frightening young firebrand she remembered gone? She could see tiny beads of sweat on the soft fuzz of his upper lip in the firelight. How could she have let this veritable schoolboy take such power over her that night?

  For a moment, they just gazed at one another in the gloom. Then his brows climbed up a notch, and, to her surprise, he stood. “Our Lady of the Islands,” he said softly, astonishing her further with a delighted smile.

  “So I’m told,” she answered.

  She heard murmurs of amazement start to ripple down the line behind her as the news spread. Not what she’d have wished for, if she’d had a choice, but if the priest was safe here, she supposed she must be too.

  Beside him, two of his enforcer-bullyboys shifted their stances ever so slightly, their eyes still on the crowd, though Sian was certain they too had turned their attention to her. It suddenly occurred to her to wonder if they saw her as the potential threat now. Might they be worried about what her magic touch could do to their young charge? An amusing thought. She kept her posture relaxed, her expression calm, not wanting his guards to think she might be planning something — or afraid.

  The priest looked past her at her two companions. “And is that Pino with you?” he asked just as happily. “I am glad to see you, brother.”

  Pino shook his head, unwilling, or perhaps unable, to reply.

  “I have been searching for you,” Sian told the priest.

  “Am I so hard to find?” He gestured at the dissipating crowd around them.

  “When you wish to be, it seems.”

  “You think I have been hiding from you?” His smile widened. “Why would I do so?”

  “Maybe you still have a shred of conscience somewhere in there. Or feared I’d bring the authorities with me to drag you off in chains — as I have been dragged off.”

  His smile vanished. “That was an awful night. For both of us.”

  “For both of us?” she blurted in disbelief. “I’d say it was far easier for you. For a man who preaches so persuasively against giving in to rage, you wield a bone very convincingly.”

  The priest’s guards no longer pretended to look anywhere but straight at her. His charming face lost some of its youthful buoyancy as well. “I am not fool enough to try and fix what I was made to do to you, Domina Kattë. Some things must be left broken, whatever one might wish. But while it is true that all the physical pain that night was borne by you, do not think that proves I did not suffer too. Nothing I
have ever done … was so … horrific …” He seemed to have run out of words at last.

  “Then, by all the gods there are, why did you do it?” she demanded.

  He sighed and looked away into the darkness. “I am fool enough after all, it seems.” He turned back to her in obvious frustration. “My lady, the memory of what I was required to do that night will fill me with remorse forever. But I am no more able to outrun the god that we both serve now than are you.”

  “You have not answered my question.” She gazed at him implacably, realizing, as she had not until now, how many questions she needed him to answer if she was to find any peace. “I asked why?”

  “Why you? I do not know. The god makes his choices known to me. He does not explain his reasons. Why what was done to you? That I may be able to explain. Some, at least. For it was done to me as well, once.” He turned to the guards behind him. “I must speak with this one privately. We will walk up the beach alone. That way.” He pointed north. “Tell the people that I’ll be back to see them, if they wish to wait. Then make sure that she and I are not disturbed before we’re done.”

  They nodded, some heading past Sian to spread this doubtless unwelcome news to those still waiting behind her, while others headed north into the darkness, to clear the indicated stretch of beach, she supposed.

  “I trust you don’t expect us just to wait here,” Reikos said sternly to both Sian and the priest.

  Pino nodded grimly in agreement.

  “My friends will remain with me,” Sian said, no more comfortable than they were with the thought of heading off into the darkness with this man.