Tuom gave a sharp intake of breath, and stood up.
“You saw it?”
He looked at her in wonderment, then bent back to the telescope. “A fire on the Twin!”
“And how did it look?” she said.
“A bright spark... A yellow lightning. It is gone. There it is again!” He was fascinated, and shifted himself so that he might be more comfortable at the eyepiece.
“The Twin is retreating from the Earth for another month. The Great Tide will flow back. But it is getting closer. Mark my words. The orbit of the Twin and the White and Red Moons are not as Sastrin, Hessind and the others suggest, that is pure ellipses. There is variation in them, a grand cycle beyond that already described. Floster Hessind’s mathematical model well established that there is an influence of mass from one body upon the other. Hence, I believe, the fire you saw, a result of flexion in the surface of that world that reveals the fires beneath.”
Tuom stood and smiled apologetically. “Flexion? Fires within worlds?”
“And where do you think our own volcanoes spring from? The inferno? The throats of dragons, chained underground?”
“You are rather leaving me behind with all this.”
“No matter. Just know, the device you have delivered to me today will help me prove this.”
“How?”
“I am afraid you would not understand.”
“What does it mean?”
The countess smiled. “I have my ideas, but I would not like to speculate. You will know the rumours concerning me. I am mad! I am dissolute! I am a man! I am a whore!” A touch of sadness entered her smile. “Only one of these things is true, and then only from a very narrow view. My true crime is to challenge the established orthodoxy of my discipline, and far worse it is that I am a woman. No, I must keep some secrets. I think you will have quite enough to gossip about when you return to the capital.” She took a step closer to him, and placed her hands on his shoulders. He smiled back at her. “Here, I am sure you understand the mathematics of this kind of attraction better.”
“Indeed I do,” he said.
“Mansanio!” she called, not taking her eyes from Gorwyn. “I will be retiring for the night soon. Please close up the observatory shutters. Then you may go.”
“Yes, goodlady,” he said reflexively. “Shall I prepare your room for you?”
Her smile, lustful and teasing, quite transformed her features. “No, that will be all.”
Mansanio closed the shutters, taking as long as he could. The countess’s whispers and giggles set a fire burning in him. Shame for her, and terrible jealousy for Gorwyn. Had he a knife, he fumed, he would smite him down, then we would see who laughed last.
But there was no knife, there never was. He was weak as milk, and loathed himself for it.
Their laughter tormented him as he descended the stairs.
CHAPTER FOUR
The God of Wine and Drama
“DRINK! DRINK! DRINK!” The patrons of the Nelly Bold hammered their tankards down in time with their words.
Eliturion, god, in one aspect, of wine, indulged them. A full firkin of ale was to his lips, small as a dainty bucket in his giant grasp. Foaming beer cascaded from the sides of his mouth, running down his long red moustaches, in amber falls, over his beard, his ample belly, and thereafter the floor. As much as he spilt, he drank more, the gurgle audible in his gut.
“Drink drink drink!” the patrons chanted with glee. As often as they watched Eliturion’s party piece, it still delighted them. “Drink drink drink!”
The god upended the barrel. The cries of the crowd became raucous. He stood, tipping the firkin right back. He held it away from him, slopping what little remained all over those nearest him. They shrieked with delight as he let out an almighty belch at the ceiling. Arms out, he turned slowly to let every handclap caress him. Then he cast the firkin toward the bar like a man at skittles, scattering drinkers. He sat down heavily. His ale throne creaked alarmingly.
The god was as big as gods were expected to be. In those years of the glimmer, that was larger than life. In recent centuries he had run to fat.
“Oi! Eli!” shouted the landlady. “Don’t roll your bleeding ale barrels about in here. How many times?”
Eliturion gave a raffish grin and another belch. “Sorry Nell,” he called back.
“Nell was my great-great-grandmother, you arse!” As the god was too large to admonish physically, she took her annoyance out on others, slapping customers out of the way, so that the barrel could be rolled out of the room and back to the cellars.
“Well, that should answer your question as to how many times I have been told that!” he crowed. The crowd laughed.
Nelly’s great-great-granddaughter, whose name was in actual fact Ellany, shook her head and stalked off back behind the Nelly Bold’s ornately carved bar. She had said it all before a hundred, a thousand times. As had her mother, and her father, and so on back to the beginning of the inn. Eliturion came and went, sometimes favouring some other drinking spot for a season or a decade, but he always came back to the Nelly Bold; crook-grinned and irrepressible as a pup. He was a fixture, part of her inheritance, so to speak, and damn good for business. So she left it at that. The crowd cheered her as she resumed her station.
“Give us a story, your divinity!” someone shouted.
“Yes, yes! A story!” someone else joined in. The request was taken up by many. Eliturion raised his mighty hands and smiled a smile, outwardly benevolent, forcefully demanding of calm.
“Really now?” he said indulgently.
“Yes!” the crowd shouted. “A story!”
Eliturion would give them a story, he always did. But even for a god as diminished as he the ritual question had to be asked, and ritual, minor objections raised, before he made a great show of giving in.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Eliturion.
“A story!” they roared.
“Well,” he said, signalling to Ellany for another drink. He scratched under his nose, a merchant’s gesture. “Drama is my second domain, drinking being my first.”
“Hooray!” the crowd shouted.
“Quieten down now,” he said. Ellany wheeled his drink over on a barrow, a more modest one-gallon pot. He nodded gratefully, lifted it, and took a long pull. The crowd waited. And then he began.
“The question you’ve got to ask yourself is,” he said, “where does a story start? I’m sure you have your ideas; with a great event, perhaps. A battle, or a catastrophe; with fiery rains and titanic waves, the gnashing of teeth and the end of an empire. Or if you are of gentler humour, something less dramatic: a conversation, or a conversion. Or a bet! Yes, a wager!” he said, his face lifting as if he had hit upon the very thing. But it fell again. “No, no. That will not do. Maybe you would consider the fundamentals of life. A marriage, a birth... A death, although that is more of an ending.”
“Give us a battle!” shouted something.
“Tell us about Res Iapetus and the driving of the gods!” said another.
“Hush, hush now, I’m telling this, not you, and tales of old Res put me out of sorts. Where was I?” He hunkered down conspiratorially. The crowd’s members drew in closer, many dragged their stools over as close as they could to Eliturion’s table. Conversation tailed off to a murmur, then an attentive quiet, rich with belches and winy breath. “There have been those of my priests, when I still had priests, who maintained stories have a force of their own, that they are separate from what, for wont of a better term, I am forced to call by modern sophists, ‘reality’, although from my perspective it’s all much the same. These priests had it that stories are dangerous things. Far more than a novelty or a moral message, they become something separate, a law to themselves, an artistic rather than objective truth that is as powerful as a stone cold fact. Not a lie, not at all. A subjective actuality, if you will, with a power all its own.” He paused. “It’s all shit, but a pretty idea.”
“You’re dru
nk!” shouted someone.
“And so are you,” the god retorted, pointing a finger. “But I have wisdom enough to know what I am talking about, whereas you are a nincompoop. And tomorrow I’ll still be drunk.” The crowd laughed. “Stories catch people up in them, yes; in the wildest sense people and stories feed off each other—people push stories onto one another, and so stories inform the fate of nations. A mage pushes his will onto the world by telling himself lies so convincing they become true, and so all stories have their power. The fundamental of it is that without people there would be no stories at all. You people give the world form through stories, and that makes people the more important to me, you understand? The world sometimes looks like it works to the rules of every legend you ever read, but who’s to say it isn’t the other way round? Because it is; I should know.
“It’s just that the ‘world’—not that I like the exclusivity of that term either—is a damn sight more complicated than you people will ever understand. Your appreciation of what this”—he cast his eyes heavenward and gestured to the rafters. Three dozen pairs of eyes rolled up, and saw stars among the smoke there—“this bauble of a universe is, is defined by the stories you tell to explain it. And by that I mean your creeds, you sciences, your philosophies, your faulty, faulty memories and recollections...”
“Eh?” said somebody. Someone else farted. Acclaim and disgust were shouted equally at him.
“What? What do I mean?” he shouted at the man who said “eh?” “Why, you goodman are a collection of stories that you have told yourself, nothing more. On occasion, your stories embrace a greater part of the truth, but never yet has one contained the whole, and never will one do so. That is why you will never understand, no more than the inhabitants of an anthill will understand the world beyond their nest, not matter how mighty tall it may become, or how involuted the motions acted out within.”
“Rubbish!” shouted someone. Such barracking was also part of the ritual of the Nelly Bold, hallowed by time since the inn had been built, when Eliturion, small and broken, had come in, draggled by rain and rejection for his first drink.
“People!” he declaimed, one fat finger in the air. “People tell stories. People are stories. People come first, and stories later. People are more important, that’s my opinion. I’m the god of fucking stories, and I know best.” He belched. The crowd cheered. “That’s probably why I am still here when my brothers and sisters are not.”
“Give us a story, you old windbag!” shouted someone. Others laughed. The more sober they were, the more nervous their laughter. Most laughed fearlessly.
Eliturion clapped. “You wanted a story, and then you shall have one. We are gods and are not affected in the same way as you mortals are by pernicious narrative. You should be wary what you ask of me, but now it is too late. So be it! Take your piece, and be wary of it.”
He lowered his voice.
“This story is about six people, six siblings. They’re at the heart of all this, so it’s them we’ll name as our principal dramatis personae, to use the Old Maceriyan term.”
“Who? Who? Which brothers?”
“I said siblings, you arse! And if you do me the courtesy and wait, then you shall find out! That is the simplest precept of the story! Listen, and discover!” His eyes flashed, the questioner quailed. “So, where to start? We talked about births. So, do you start with their births? And if so, of which sibling? The first? She’s a woman. Not to be discounted on that fact, although her father already has. Or the oldest son? He’s mad, but not so much as he believes, so perhaps not. Or the fourth? He plays the major role, at least for a while. Or the sixth? Sweet Rel with the world about to smash down on his shoulders, perhaps we should start with his birth?”
One of the patrons, ensconced away from the racket in his own high-backed booth, empty but for him despite the press, pricked up his ears. He had five siblings. He regarded himself mad. He had a brother named Rel. Such was Eliturion’s way to snare his listeners, often his stories concerned those who listened, though rarely did those whose lives were detailed dare reveal themselves. There had been suicides over it. The god drew no sanction over this. He was, after all, a god. No prison could hold him.
Very well, tonight was his night. As a teller of tales himself, Guis Kressind grudgingly appreciated the attention. He leaned forward to better hear what slander Eliturion would offer his family. For had the god not already intimated, that all stories are by nature lies? A truth he held fast to. It allowed him to hate his own work and not despair.
“Do you go back, look at their father in his prime, all arrogant and ambitious and dangerous? Do you go back to his father, or his mother, to see what made him that way? Or further, to whenever poor, impoverished so-and-so of so-and-so saved a lord which won a favour which granted a licence which garnered some wealth and set these six up for their privileged lives, five generations later? Don’t you think that would belittle the story of so-and-so, making his story only a backdrop on the stage for a story you happen to be more interested in? Unfair, goodmen and goodwomen! Unfair!” He sniffed thoughtfully. Eliturion never was one to allow a drama go unpaused. Guis thought him quite the worst actor in the Off Parade. “His story is quite a tale, actually. Who are you to weigh one life’s worth against another? Nobody, that’s who.”
“And what’s your qualification?”
“Shut up, idiot, he’s a god!”
“He’s a drunk more like!”
Eliturion smiled. “I am both. And the goodman there is correct. I am not qualified to judge, and that’s also a truth. But you asked for a story, and I choose the story to tell, so be quiet.”
He began again, and his voice boomed. “Do you go back to times when the Old Maceriyans ruled the Earth and there were a damn sight more gods around than there are now? Or back before, to the first men, of before that to the days of the Morfaan, or even before the gods were born, when dark titans subjugated the Earth and wild magic ran as quicksilver across burning skies?
“Yes yes, the gods were born. No, they didn’t create the world. Some of them used to say they did, before old Res Iapetus drove them away, but that’s not true. A god’s as much a part of the world as a man, perhaps less so, because a god doesn’t make stories, he’s just in them, a god is made by stories. Even me.”
“But you’re telling it,” said a youth at the god’s table, flush with drink and enraptured.
Eliturion dropped his head level with the youth’s own. “Marvellous! A finer level of idiot here this evening. Well done. See lad, I didn’t make this story, I’m only telling it.” He frowned and shouted at a man at the back. “Hey, you, yeah you. Are you paying attention?”
The man nodded quickly, eyes wide as a rabbit’s before the hawk.
“Good.” Eliturion sprawled back. His gut forced the table across the floor with a wooden groan. “We could of course take another path back, to whatever muddy little ball the ancestors of men first dragged themselves up onto two feet, or to when the ancestors of the ancestors of men swapped flippers for feet, gills for lungs. That happened, incredible though it may sound to you. Your lot will figure that our eventually, and I’ll be long gone by the time you do. Go back. Back to the birth of the world. This one, or that one, doesn’t matter. Or that time when the stars the worlds turn about first burst into light. Back, back, back, back, back, all the way to the one and only real beginning there is, when there was nothing. When there was only thought without will and all was formless and then light and fury and then... Oh! There was something. A whole lot of something.” He gazed thoughtfully over the heads of the crowd. A gulp of beer brought him back. “That’s not for the telling. It’d take as long as the universe is old, perhaps longer, what with a few embellishments and all.”
Through the window, people bustled about the square and the narrow alleys of the Off Parade, intent on pleasure. Inside the Nelly Bold, all had fallen quiet. “You have to take a stand! You have to pin them down! Stories! They’re not alive as s
uch, but they have the seeming of it, and that’s as dangerous as alive, if not more. Think on this, how do you kill something with the semblance of life, but which is not alive? Eh? Eh? Got you there, haven’t I? I digress. You have to square up to your story. You have to say, ‘This is where my story begins’—well, it’s not my story, you understand...”
“You already said that!”
“Hush now, so I did. You don’t have the patience for my story because it’s longer to tell than the time you have. Do you have four lifetimes to hear it? No. I’m not sure I do any more either.”
He drained his cup.
“So, not my story, but I do get to decide where it starts.” He leaned forward, his face aglow with divine mischief and beer. “And it starts with a hanging.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Eliturion’s Story
THE MAN ON the gallows was trying to be brave, although he wasn’t, and trying to be noble, which he once thought he was, but found himself, in dismay, to be a coward.
“I am not afraid to die,” he shouted, which was a lie. “I have done nothing wrong,” which was another. Nobody heard him. He had a reedy voice at the best of times, and now was the worst. Fear strangled it into a warble that failed him completely. He was the last to be hanged in a long line of men. The crowd’s bloodlust had run out long before this man’s last seconds ran out. They talked over him, not caring for his testimony, or for him, or his death.
The evening was drawing in. A poet would make some comparison there. The little extra life he had enjoyed during his wait was a concession to his former station. This station had not been exalted, but it was higher than the run of the herd of men, not quite a goodfellow, this man, but more than a goodman. And so he had breathed a few hours more. At the last, as the clocks prepared to chime the sixth bell and twilight approached, his breathing time was finally done. How quick time goes, more quickly even for gods than for men.
“I do not regret what I did,” he said. Another lie, for he would not have been where he was had he not done what he did. He had been found guilty, quite rightly, and had no one to blame for his predicament but himself.
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