by Demir Barlas
The oxen were, in truth, the heart of this ceremony. These volatile creatures served the Redcolds on the basis of a mute and immemorial understanding that, in times of stillness, they would be left quite alone to wander near the Redcold camps. The oxen were clearly not the oxen of the past; they were at least twice at large and thrice as ornery in their periods of reproductive madness, which were mercifully few.
The oxen heard the horn too, and they knew what it meant, and they meandered back to the Redcold yurts from their feasts and outcroppings. Alas that such magnificent coordination of life relied on the despotism of prophecy!
The Redcolds were on the move soon after dawn. Naturally, Astrid was at their head. She sat on the small bench that allowed her to control the movements of her oxen with ribbons of hide cut from their dead cousins. Riku joined her, as always. He had to sit very close to Astrid’s central position because, if he sat near either end of the bench, his weight would send any other rider into the air. In the beginning, they could at least put their arms around each other, but, by now, they kept their bodies to themselves, so the proximity was—to Riku, at least, because he still thought of sex—unnatural. Astrid had never lost the sense of intimacy, which, for her, had migrated from sexual heat to the hard-won trust and comfort of family romance.
Riku looked at the featureless landscape to distract himself and sat on one of his hands in unconscious simulation of the tactile pressure he had once shared with Astrid.
Astrid, for her part, was occupied by the thought of the building and the future it represented. To enter the building would be to betray the Goddess, but the Goddess had been responsible for the very disclosure of the heresy and its possibility. Astrid would have gone on mulling this contradiction had she not, an hour later, seen the massive cliff that had already come to her in the vision. It was on the summit of this structure, perhaps six hundred feet tall, that she would have to return Farinaz to the Goddess. It was on this summit, too, that Astrid would see the dual paths with actual eyes.
With a slight tug on the reins, Astrid brought her team of six oxen to a halt, and, behind her, the remainder of the Redcold caravan also stopped.
Tiny drops of effervescent snow kissed Astrid and Del as they looked skywards from the base of the cliff. Every Redcold was watching too. At their head was Riku, who had more at stake than anyone. He had just parted from his wife and daughter, who could afford no backwards glances. Their task lay at the top of the cliff.
Astrid was a strange sight. The corpse of Farinaz, wrapped in one layer of ox-hide, had been strapped to her own back. There was no other way to get the body up the sheer cliff, on which neither nature nor humanity had inscribed anything like a road.
The roof of the cliff was lost in broken families of clouds.
Astrid began the climb. She pried her fingers into the cracks at the base of the rock, inserted her leather shoes into their vertical salvation, and hauled herself and Farinaz off the ground. Astrid was a sister to the spider and the aquerne, a composite of the wind and light. To Riku, she seemed a human arrow framed against the rock, pointing in the direction of eternal ascent.
Del was right below Astrid. Her own climb, being unencumbered, was easier but for the knowledge of her mother’s greater vulnerability. Del took three deep breaths to erase her consciousness.
No human who had inhabited or passed through this valley in its innumerable epochs could have made this climb upon the monolithic fulgurite. That Astrid did so with a body strapped to her testified to some change in humans comparable to, if not as visible as, the change in the oxen. People were stronger. Specifically, tendons were stronger, muscles contracted more forcefully, and the nervous system was more efficient. The source of these adaptations was not nomadic life, for there had been nomads on the Laurasian steppes long before the Redcolds. Nature’s demands on the Redcolds, though exacting, were manageable without the kinds of physical adaptations Astrid and Del were demonstrating on the rockface. Whatever the explanation, Astrid and Del were making an impossible climb. They were hundreds of feet in the air now.
Parts of the rockface had been turned to glass, a massive vein of which now divided Astrid and Del. Two hundred feet from the top, Del made her only mistake. She gripped a ledge that was partially vitrified. The offending hand slipped, and Del was left with the solace of her left hand only. She hung on one hand for a moment, buffeted by sudden assertions of the air, but her heartbeat was unchanged. There was no reaction in her, only acceptance. She returned her right hand to the rock, allowed her feet to find their former positions, and resumed the climb.
Astrid had climbed many high places many times, as had the other female Redcolds, because there was enlightenment on peaks and summits, and such enlightenment might, one day, crown a Knower. There was no established path to this exalted state, but there was an accepted compendium of practices and disciplines by which, emerging from girlhood, a woman might be revealed as Knower.
Astrid had never been an enthusiastic follower of spiritual exercise. She had exulted instead in the physical tasks—in climbing and races, swords and silences, hunger and strength. Other girls of her generation had seen and embraced the spiritual dimensions of these tasks, but Astrid had been earthy and practical. She had been as shocked as any other Redcold when the nominating dream had come to her; when she had risen on that morning, left her parents’ yurt, stood in the center of the Redcold encampment, and spent a miraculous hour predicting what would happen. She had pointed to the north and foretold the coming of two hawks in pursuit of a third, and these had come. She had looked to the west and predicted the shape of the clouds. She had stood beneath the gaze of the last Knower, Tomris, who saw her with the third eye and ratified the transfer of kut into another woman.
It helped Astrid, in this suspended moment, that she had been more physical than spiritual, or that her spiritualty had itself been an offshoot of her physicality. Farinaz, though slight of stature, was still a heavy burden to carry eight hundred feet up a cliff as straight as a menhir. But Astrid knew how to disappear. From the moment her hand touched the rock, the being known as Astrid was banished; all being was vanished; all that remained was the act of climbing, and the act was unconscious of itself. There was no imposition of muscle and endurance on the immortality of the rock, no masculine attempt to wrestle the world. Instead, there was disappearance into the world, a disappearance so profound that the boundaries between self and world vanished. In that void, the impossible became likely. In that vacuum, a human could ascend to heights known only to hawks as long as the price of self-erasure was paid.
Astrid became herself again only at the top of the cliff. She hauled herself up on to the surprisingly flat peak, which was a roughly shelf perhaps fifty feet in circumference. She felt everything now: The soreness of each muscle, the exhaustion of bone and soul, but, overwhelmingly, concern for Del. Astrid looked back over the side of the cliff, but Del was nowhere to be seen. Del had already reached the summit! There she was, gathering moss at the far side of the summit and applying the small Sinwoyese lighter to it. Astrid smiled at the inherited intuition of her daughter, who knew that they would spend at least a night here.
Del undid the knots that bound Farinaz’s corpse to Astrid’s living body. Del gently lowered Farinaz to the ground, and, for a time, she and Astrid piled rocks on the woman who had been.
The task of burial complete, Astrid and Del sat together, warmed by the fire and looking out at the world. There were undreamed and dreamlike mountains in the distance. Far away, they saw the purple-shrouded lightning of the Storm that, in a current manifestation of its eternity, turned its sentient bulk to the north.
After an hour of silence, Del reached into her caftan for her favorite doll, the Wind Princess, who had made this lonely climb in search of the Lightning Prince. These dolls had a tempestuous relationship. The Lightning Prince, though friendly and powerful, was romantically disdained by the Wind Princess, who was much preoccupied with the governance of her
people. At intervals, the Lightning Prince resolved to hurl himself from the summit of a mountain tall enough to kill him, and it was only at such times that the Wind Princess cared for him. She followed him to the top to restrain him from his suicidal intention. However, she was furious with him and doomed him to fall the next time.
Del carried out this melancholy game in a particularly squeaky voice meant to convey the essential femininity of the Wind Princess and a series of sad, dutiful grunts to represent the Lightning Prince. Her fingers, so lean and strong against the rock, were just a girl’s fingers now, tied to the unresolved fate of her dolls.
The game ended as the Wind Princess hurried back down the mountain, leaving the Lightning Prince to cry alone upon the summit. This resolution must have been common, because Del put her dolls away immediately, as if at the end of a familiar ritual. Astrid had been watching her and smiling. Here was her baby—her baby, that beloved, simple lump, careening naked and laughing through the womb, too innocent for concealment, a happy, playing starfish! Astrid wanted Del to know about the vanished oceans and their lovely creatures, about butterflies and rain, about the gentler universe, but there was only this harder life of survival before them. Strands and ribbons of her daughter’s life settled in Astrid’s drifting mind. She remembered Del’s little face illuminated by the fireflies. She remembered Del’s increasingly intricate narratives of the Wind Princess and felt sadness that she, surely the ideal of the Wind Princess, couldn’t love the Lightning Prince and ordinary life. She remembered Del drinking from a glass—retrieved from Goddess knows where—for the first time, her small face fitting almost perfectly into the aperture. She remembered tiny feet that fit in her hands, Del’s inquisitive and courageous bleating on her first day of life.
Del removed herself from her mother’s side to be closer to the fire. It was getting dark. Astrid would maintain her vigil, but not in expectation of new direction from the Goddess. She was here to understand herself.
As the sun set, Del built another fire closer to her mother. Because the fire was humble, it would survive the jealousy of the wind spirits and survive all night—a long life for a fire. This task done, Del rested her head against a rock and fell asleep with the promptness of a barbarian.
Astrid’s gaze wandered over the horizon, stopping on the edge of a great forest through which the Redcolds’ recent wanderings had brought them. She knew that forest well. It was there that a younger Del had set a trap and caught two small finches. Del had promptly constructed a wicker nest for her new pets, whom she loved. She called the male Zebra and the female Feathers, and she watched them in their cage. Once, Zebra mounted Feathers with energetic squawks, and, days later, a tiny egg appeared in the wicker’s weave. The egg delighted Del, who opened the cage in order to place a proper nest inside. But the canny finches took the opportunity to escape instead, fluttering angrily inside the yurt until Astrid’s unwitting hand opened the flap and released them to the world. That was the day on which Del had sloughed off her childhood. Perhaps Zebra and Feathers had returned to the forest on which Astrid’s gaze now dwelled. Perhaps they had gone home. Wherever they had gone, they had taken something of Del with them.
The moon came up, Del fell asleep, and the fire burned low. Astrid was about to enter another trace.
It was summer in her vision, and she was in a field of grass, and there was a man in front of her. The man, not that she knew his name, was Jed Salt—not the actual Salt of Seaboard, for that Salt would surely have known her, but some Platonic Salt. The man was young, and he had a weak jaw and meager limbs, and he was smiling at her with helpless and crooked teeth. She looked at him very carefully, and she was certain that she had never seen him in any trance or in her waking life. He reminded her of an abandoned chick.
“I love you,” he said in some language of the spirit. Astrid didn’t know, and couldn’t feel, why this strange spirit should love her, but his love was undeniable and overpowering and evanescent, for he had already gone. His departure gave way to another vision, the golden vision: A path extending away from the summit of the mountain, a path to safety, a path that represented the continuation of the way she’d already seen on the previous night. But there was another, branching path that led to the building.
Astrid came to life again. She was still sitting in her meditative pose, which she could bear no longer. The sun had come up, and Del had built another fire. Astrid stood quickly, willing the blood back into her legs, and paced the summit briefly. The decision was before her: The building and its risky human promise of autonomy or the path and its divine assurance of safety.
“Your dolls,” Astrid reminded Del, and Del showed her mother that the dolls had been returned to an inner pocket.
“They’re ready.”
“They cooperate, don’t they, your Wind Princess and Lightning Prince?”
“They do,” Del admitted.
“They make it to the tops of mountains. They keep their people safe. And they love each other too, although that takes some seeing.”
“I know. And I see.”
“They let each other down sometimes. But they fix things up. Why don’t they have a daughter yet?”
“The stars have to be right.”
“Maybe they’ll come right one day.”
“But what did you see?”
“I saw a building.”
“Like in the factbooks?”
“Yes. And it’s here—it’ll be here, past that stretch of forest.”
“What’s in it?”
“Knowledge. Not the kind the Goddess lends me. Not just knowledge of the safe path. Something more.”
“Do we go?”
“It would mean turning away from the Goddess and risking the Storm.”
“What else?”
“Remaking the world. Freedom. Maybe.”
“Is that a good thing? Look how it ended last time.”
“We’re better than the ancients were. Maybe there’s something in the building to stop the Storm.”
“You won’t go,” Del concluded, reading her mother’s face. “Too much risk.”
“We’re alive. And always will be, as long as there’s a Knower.”
But Astrid’s other voice, the irresponsible voice, provided a silent riposte in her head: Alive for what? To roll from place to place. To eat and breed and die. Build nothing—
think nothing—be nothing!
“We should go to the building.”
Astrid cleared her mind. It needed clearing. The voice telling her to go the building was an egotistic voice—a voice that championed her own leadership over something greater. Or it was the voice of an old instinct, a prematernal instinct of curiosity and daring that had never quite been burned out of her by responsibility. Whatever it was, wherever it had come from, the voice—and the spirit who now came with it—had lost to the simple reminder of her motherhood. Yes, she could rebuild the world. Yes, the world would be better this time. The Storm would end, and the animals would return, and cities would rise, and humanity itself would be reborn. But these were uncertainties. Safety—safety, the unbroken covenant between the Goddess and the Knower—would have to be sacrificed by turning from the golden path.
Astrid was too decent to consider that she might send someone else to scout the building. That would be her responsibility. If she died on that errand, Del would be motherless and the Redcolds deserted. There was no other Knower; the Storm could take everyone, and an angered Goddess might refuse to consecrate another Knower.
Still, Astrid felt glad that she had told Del of the choice. It was easier to relinquish now. Astrid breathed deeply and, before long, she and Del were climbing back down the cliff to the waiting Redcolds.
Riku had awoken with the dawn and was watching the cliff face when he saw Astrid and Del begin their descent. He had passed an eventful night, left alone as he had been with Balder. Man and boy had not known what to say to each other, as they were inheritors of the muteness that accompanies mascu
linity. This muteness can be overcome. In fact, cohabitation with Astrid and Del had infused Riku with volubility he would have lacked on his own or among other women—women who would have been content to live divergent lives.
Riku’s emotion was, however, exercised only in the presence of his household, which had just gone up a cliff. He had not known how to speak to Balder, and Balder had not known how to speak to him, and Nya, at least, had gone to sleep early after expressing her simple needs for food and warmth, needs that Riku had easily met. Balder did not go to sleep, and Riku didn’t know whether to leave the boy alone or engage him. To leave him alone seemed callous. To engage him was impossible. So Riku had kept vigil until Balder had gone to sleep. Riku sighed deeply upon hearing the boy’s snore join that of his sister’s. He had felt the same satisfaction upon hearing Del snore as a child. Snoring was a beloved token of safety and a temporary respite from the pain of fatherhood. As Balder and Nya slept, Riku’s mind turned to his memories of Topaz. Everyone had known him as an odious man, and he had been suffered to live, because there was no law against odiousness.
With a shudder, Riku thought of his own shame—of the attraction he had felt to Farinaz, a fleshly nothing for the sake of which he might have left his own family. A single inviting word from her would have sufficed. The consequences would have been just as dire as the events that had actually unfolded. Topaz would have caviled, and Riku would have had to kill him, or be killed by him, thus leaving some set of children fatherless and tribal integrity shaken. Which would have been worse? The desertion of Del, to whom Riku owed an absolute and inborn allegiance? The abandonment of Astrid, who had given Riku the truth of himself? When Astrid had married Riku, he had been a figure of fun among the Redcolds, for whom his strength constituted no great incitement to respect. Riku’s strength was, somehow, a natural strength and not an earned virtue, and, aside from a few of the men and boys who marveled at his feats, the rest of the tribe made fun of his waddling gait and his puffy face. Astrid had been the only Redcold to see and believe in him. And, in his heart, he had betrayed her. Not just for Farinaz. He was faithless, faithless; his dutifulness as a father, as a husband, as a human was merely the shadow of his concealed guilt at being nothing and no one.