The Goddess Denied

by Deborah Davitt

  Sigrun slipped into the room on light feet, and watched for a moment. Adam sighed, and set his feet flat on the floor . . . and she knelt down and tied his shoes for him. Like I’m one of Tren’s damned grandchildren, Adam groused, mentally, but he didn’t let that one slip past his teeth. He slid a hand over her pale hair, instead. “Thank you,” he managed, and pretended not to notice how she helped him stand up again. Or that she ghosted down the stairs beside him, making sure he didn’t fall. “Doctors have a different anti-inflammatory they want me to try,” he told her at the foot of the stairs. “It’d be nice to move around a little more freely.”

  She nodded, and he saw relief in her face. He was at least addressing the elephant in the room, the specter of his own mortality. Adam hesitated at the door. He’d . . . made arrangements. He had a will, life insurance, purchased a spot in a rock-cut mausoleum for his body, appointed Trennus his executor and begged his friend to make sure Sig didn’t do anything stupid when he died. Sigrun’s name was on all his bank accounts, so the assets wouldn’t be frozen and out of her hands when he died. It was all taken care of, and yet . . . he’d never told her anything about it. He didn’t even know how to start the conversation. Sig, when I die, everything is taken care of, and I want you to move on, all right? Find happiness wherever you can. With Trennus. With his family. With Erikir, with . . . god, just with being able to live with yourself. And yet, even that conversation, in his mind, felt like a lie.

  And so he stood there for a long moment, in the doorway, words hovering on his lips. I should tell her. I should tell her what Sophia’s been hinting at for years. Except . . . if I say any of this, is it tantamount to surrender? Not that there’s much hope left. Though I don’t know that any of it will happen. But Sophia’s track record is terrifyingly good. His thoughts raced in circles, as they often did on the topic. Does it do anything, besides burden her further, to say, “Hey, Sig! Sophia says the world’s going to end on our anniversary. Oh, but cheer up. Even though I’m going to die, the Assassin’s going to take over my body. Which means no funeral. Probably no afterlife, unless my god happens to overlook the minor issue of trafficking with unknown powers. Probably just dissolution, instead. So direct the godslayer to the nearest mad god, when it happens.” Adam swallowed. He couldn’t fathom how he would ever agree to any of this, so either it was going to happen without his consent—which made him tend to eye Zaya a little suspiciously—or things were going to get bad enough that even sacrificing his soul was going to look like a good deal.

  “Do you wish for me to accompany you?” Sigrun asked, quietly.

  Adam grimaced, his train of thought derailed. Every time she used that formal tone with him, it made him feel shut out. “I think I’m going to drop by the Temple,” he said, abruptly. “You couldn’t go inside anyway.”

  “Ah. Of course.” She nodded and found his keys for him.

  Damn it. “Sig, I said I was sorry for snapping at you.” Please look at me.

  She looked up, the scant inch that separated their heights, and met his eyes. Smiled a little, and touched his face. “I accepted your apology, Adam, did I not?”

  “Then stop acting like I’m a stranger.”

  Sigrun stepped closer, and kissed him, lightly, and then moved away again, so quickly and lightly, she might as well have been a breeze. How impossible, he thought, as he walked out the door, for a mortal to be bound to such as her. She’d brought joy to his life for thirty-six years. And most days, he would do it all over again, in a heartbeat. But in his darker moments, he had to wonder if he’d brought anything to Sigrun’s existence but the promise of pain to come.

  In that particularly somber mood, Adam drove down into the old city. Past the palace of the Roman governor, where the banners of the Eagle snapped in the breeze, and then further east, through the ancient, winding streets. Memories assailed him as he did. The others, Kanmi in particular, scoffing at the cobblestones. Him defending them: It’s a very old city.

  Adam found a place to park, and walked the rest of the way to the Temple. The steps at the front were a trial on his knees, and he wished he’d squashed his stupid, stubborn pride, and let Sigrun fetch him the cane. Instead, he leaned heavily on a bronze railing, added sometime in the fourteenth century AC, and made his way slowly up the stairs. Paused outside one of the massive gates of the temple rebuilt along Herod’s plans, put on a skullcap, and looked back down at the wide plaza below.

  Two thousand years ago, there had been food vendors with carts and money-changers down there, and cages filled with birds and . . . everything else. Judea had chafed at the time at using Roman coins, but had been forbidden to mint their own. The money-changers had existed to exchange Roman denarii for Carthaginian and Persian coins, which had been perceived to be cleaner, because they weren’t Roman. Adam snorted under his breath at that errant memory from a long-ago history textbook. Alexander the Great had conquered this region, and left behind the Seleucids—Hellenes who’d ruled Persia—to rule over it, like Egypt. Persian coins had been just as much those of a conqueror . . . and a conqueror whose kings had ordered pigs sacrificed at the altar of this very temple. How Roman coins had seemed less clean to his ancestors was beyond him, but that was politics for you. Always of the moment, often petty, and usually incomprehensible to anyone not living in that era. Livorus would have laughed and told me that the new hate is always much more attractive than the old hate, but it’s usually just a passing fling before someone turns around and is faithful to the old hate all over again.

  He entered the Temple, passing through the Court of the Women, where both men and women were permitted to stand, another area of grand colonnades sheathed in imported white marble that made him chuckle a little under his breath. Herod’s vision of the Temple had owed a great deal more to Hellas than most people today liked to admit. Another staircase, and through another massive doorway, and into the Court of the Israelites, where only men were permitted. He didn’t have to immerse himself in one of the baths that were in enclosed niches all around the outside of this court, fortunately. He wasn’t here for any ceremonial purpose.

  Past this was the Court of the Levites, the priests, but naturally, he wasn’t permitted past their gate. Adam found a seat between two columns, and, for a while, just watched everyone around him. A few small groups of ten men or so, singing prayers for the dead, in various corners. A few others, saying quiet-voiced prayers for the safety of this son or daughter. All the different faces of Judea, from young conservatives who wore black robes and kept their hair and beards long, to older, more Romanized types, like himself, who wore westernized clothing. Even Rome used to consider trousers barbaric, Adam thought, remembering the old debates with Kanmi and Trennus, and looked around again. Some people had satellite phones tucked in their pockets or pokes, conspicuous by their rectangular shapes, though everyone seemed to be obeying the polite placards on the walls. Please turn off all electronic devices for the peace of your fellow worshippers.

  For a moment, Adam tried to picture those who had laid the foundations of the Second Temple five hundred years before Caesar’s rule, and what they would have thought of this motley crowd. Of the electronic devices in practically every person’s possession. They’d probably consider them tiny homunculi, like the dolls Trennus occasionally binds a spirit into under a short-term bargain to amuse his children, Adam thought. Or, as Sigrun likes to call her sat-phone, her tiny electronic master. They wouldn’t see Judeans as they knew themselves to be. They would see us as outsiders. And what would we see? Even conservatives, like Mikayel, what would we see, looking back in time? Shepherds and goatherds and merchants, who might have gone to a Roman bath before coming here, or might have immersed themselves in a mikvah, but . . . also might not have bathed in a week or more. We’d turn our noses up at the smell, at the very least. The lack of our education and understanding of the world. His eyes closed for a moment. And how would those of the Second Temple have seen those who worshipped at the First Temple?
David wore the ephod and his priests cast lots, the Urim and Thummim, to determine guilt or innocence, and to practice divination. His wife, Michal, daughter of Saul, placed a teraphim in their bed to deceive her father’s soldiers and allow David to escape during those chaotic times. And what was a teraphim but the earliest form of golem? My people moved on to animating men of clay before Saul forbade further magic. The Hellenes took the idea from us, animating Talos, who once guarded the shores of Crete. But a teraphim was nothing but the mummified head of a first-born son, preserved with spices and unguents, with a spirit confined within it, to give advice and prophecy when placed on the wall of a building or a tent. The people of the Second Temple would probably regard those of the First as . . . barbarians, still in love with magic, and half-idolaters, at best.

  No one likes to look at the entrails of a civilization. No one likes to remember that we all were barbarians, once. Trennus’ Gallic ancestors were head-hunters. Kanmi’s people have never been allowed to forget that they sacrificed infants to Baal and Moloch. The Romans waded knee-deep in blood to build their empire. We were no better or worse than any of them.

  So where does that leave us? He raised his eyes and looked at the ceiling for a moment or two. Here we are. No magic but what outsiders bring. Just science and the work of our own hands. No signs or portents, just a book of the law, and minds capable of reading and interpreting it, and a vacuum of silence above our heads. I’ve always told Sig that if a god or goddess sees themselves as a parent, then eventually, they must want to see their children grow up. Not to require being held by the hand and told how to put on their shoes.

  And yet . . . and all around us, the damned world burns. The gods of Nippon are still fighting—valiantly—in a losing battle. The Polynesian gods . . . wiped out, by all reports. The Mongols have all fallen back, surely because their tribal gods and spirits have been slain. The small gods, the landvættir of Greenland, gone. The small gods and spirits of Korea and Siam and the rest of southeast Asia, falling. All the disparate, disunited gods of the native peoples of Caesaria Aquilonis . . . gone, with the exception of a few. The Evening Star. Coyote. The Hellene gods, with the exception of Hecate and the titan, Prometheus, hiding in the Veil as a matter of . . . policy. Giving the Roman gods that much more a measure of safety as they try to defend their borders. The gods of Carthage are faltering. Baal-Hamon was already dead, by my hand and Kanmi’s wits. Dagon, dead. Baal-Samem, dead. Astarte and all the others might not have the power to withstand the mad gods. Not alone. He closed his eyes again. The gods of Egypt . . . already mostly dead, thanks to Akhenaten, but the handful that remain are few, and the Atenists are in disarray. The Mithraists have seen their god slain. The followers of ancient Marduk were left godless, and civil unrest has spread all through western Persia . . . well, what’s left of western Persia. There are tens of thousands of ghul on the other side of the wall. Chaldea, Media, eastern Assyria, all . . . decimated.

  The Qin gods are under attack. The Hindu ones. The Quecha and Nahautl and Gallic gods . . . all under pressure. The gods of Rome have half a world to protect, and they surely cannot do it all. The gods of Sigrun’s people are out and fighting, just as all the other gods besides those of Hellas are. Their god-born, like Sigrun, are being run from one end of the world to the other, trying to keep everyone alive.

  I once thought, when I was young, that I would do anything to avoid people who were certain about their path in life and their place in their gods’ eyes. Their certainty can start wars and civil strife. But when certain people lose all certainty? When they are lost in an abyss of fear and despair? How much more violently will they behave, to regain that feeling of certainty? How many people out there will turn on each other, turn on sorcerers and summoners and god-born, on the gods themselves, just because these people now have more certainty than they do? Or because they perceive them as being to blame for the void in their own lives?

  He was breathing rapidly right now, as if he were fighting. Wrestling with something or someone, right here in the Temple. His eyes remained closed, however.

  What are you waiting for? Is it all just going to come down to you and Ahura Mazda, staring at each other across Diocletian’s Wall, while the mad godlings scream at the borders?

  The thoughts were angry, and presumptuous, and he knew it. Probably prideful and damning, but how could he not think these things, having seen what he had seen, and knowing what he knew?

  And there was, of course, no answer. No signs. No portents. No lightning from the sky. No burning bushes. Not for him.

  Adam sat there for a while longer, seething quietly. Sigrun’s people believe that their gods can be held accountable. My people are taught that your ways are unknowable. Ineffable. I’ve always told her that belief doesn’t require proof. But it’s hard . . . so very hard . . . to look at this world. To see every other god fighting. And to see you do nothing.

  I’m not a prophet. I’m not a judge. I’m not a priest. I’m just a worn-out soldier with a mind for riddles, codes, and patterns. I can see Judea spread out all around me. The almond trees, the pines, and the pastures around the city; the palms, the grapes, and all the richness that has grown here in the last forty years. And yet, I suspect that this is not your doing. The safety of this land . . . is that your protecting hand, or is it because we have no ley and we have only a handful of foreign god-born and sorcerers and are thus . . . of no interest?

  Inti’s god-touched weapon was a heavy weight at the small of his back. He wasn’t really sure why he’d brought it with him today. Except, that if one went to make a challenge, one should be . . . open-handed about it. The weapon, for better or worse, was a part of who he was now. He had killed Inti with it, a willing sacrifice. He’d helped kill Hel, and had been the proximate cause of Tlaloc and Baal-Hamon’s deaths, too. The people in Nahautl and Carthage and Tyre who cursed the hand that had slain their gods cursed him, though they didn’t know his name.

  Adam ben Maor raised his eyes once more.

  And once again, there was no answer.

  He sighed, and stood. You make it terribly hard to believe in you.

  He went home.

  Martius 16, 1992 AC

  Most of Maccis’ weekends were now spent at the landsknechten barracks, learning weapons care, small squad tactics, and other such things, under the tutelage of Vidarr, and stealth training with Ima and a half-dozen other fenris and hveðungr. Today was an exception to that rule, as he’d made his way to the refugee center at his mother’s request.

  They’d just gotten in about a five hundred new people, many of them from Byzantium. Rome was reinforcing the city, but it was already jammed with refugees from the Anatolian countryside. Something needed to give, and refugees were, once again, being distributed across the Empire, much to the grumbling of the nations who were receiving yet more ‘useless mouths to feed.’

  Some were Lydians, from Asia Minor, who shied away from the jotun and fenris guards around the facility, a sure sign that they’d recently seen ettin and grendels. The Lydians, as a people, had long worshiped Cybele and Bacchus in orgiastic rites. After the incursion of Rome into their lands, however, about half had adopted Mithraism, abandoning polytheism for monotheism. “Mithras is dead,” Maccis could hear a knot of them murmuring, over and over again, as they clustered closely together. “The Unconquered Sun died for us, and will never rise again.” There were murmurs of assent and weeping, and he could see how bereft and bewildered they were. How lost.

  “What are we to do now?” one of them asked, his voice weary. “The priests told us that he was the one god. The true one. The one behind all the other gods, the source of all life and creation. And he died.”

  “Everything we were ever told was a lie.” That was a slightly angrier voice. Anger was all right. Anger was healthy, in a way. “The priests lied to us.”

  “I don’t care about the priests.” That, from a middle-aged woman, sitting against a wall in the crowded corridor. Her voice trembled
, and Maccis could smell her fear from twenty feet away. “What I care about is this. If it’s all a lie . . . if there is no god behind all the other gods, then there is no reason. No purpose. We exist because of random chance. And when we die, there will be no more awareness. We’ll just go out.”

  “Don’t say that! The sun still exists. The world still exists. Perhaps Mithras was just the messenger. A metaphor for something larger.”

  “Perhaps. Maybe. Possibly. Lie to yourself all you want, but it doesn’t change anything.” The woman’s voice shook. “We’re all going to die, and we won’t go to our god’s embrace. Maybe we wouldn’t even have done so even when he lived. Maybe there was always just nothing. And it was just a lie to keep us all in line.”

  Maccis stopped, arrested in mid-stride, and swung back around to go deal with that group first. He was, more or less nominally, an adherent of the Gallic gods. As a polytheist, he didn’t have much of an understanding of the vacuum left in a monotheist’s life when their one and only god died. Gods died all the time in his people’s stories, the stories of the Hellenes, even the stories of the Hindus. They killed one another, and then the story went on. Though, in truth, Maccis gave mostly lip-service to the gods of the Picts. What he believed in, really was . . . both a little broader, and a little more specific than that. He believed that divinity lived in everything. Right down to a blade of grass. That the universe, and the Veil itself, were bound together by natural forces, but carried in the mind of a god so far beyond human conception that humans were . . . almost meaningless, in the grand scheme of things. That life probably was evolving on millions of other planets out in the cosmos, since systems had a tendency towards order, and life was . . . self-organizing, within a chaotic framework. Some philosophers said that life was the universe’s way of understanding itself. Maccis liked that thought, most days, but he had no idea what the universe was trying to figure out on his world, at this exact moment in time.