Gate of the Gods: Book 5 of The Windows of Heaven

by K. G. Powderly Jr.

  P’Tah-Tahut believed him on that point. He wanted to be equally certain of their cooperation on every other one. “Keep in mind, gentlemen, that my Lord and I have sufficient foundation in engineering between the two of us that we can learn your specialties with some extra time—time that we have plenty of. We would prefer that you—and Usalaq—each live to a ripe old age, developing the mysteries you have all studied so diligently. It would be best for all of us, but we can take the longer, harder road if need be. Will you return with me to Kush or shall I choose a second volunteer?”

  Inside the mace-armed circle of Nimurta’s elite guards, one acolyte fainted—the one that specialized in sun-powered quickfire devices—if Tahut’s memory served. The conductive metallurgist and water-wheel initiate simply could not stop vomiting.

  The senior acolyte who volunteered the information about Usalaq had studied under Tahut many decades ago. He stood in front of the others as if to shield them.

  P’Tah-Tahut cracked his knuckles; a sound like multiple explosions in the vast cave. He looked at the senior acolyte. “Do you volunteer?”

  The man looked down. “No. We will help you build quickfire-based industries for your cities—whatever you want.”

  The Vizier grinned. “That makes me feel generous. Gather the tools you will need, and whatever texts you can transport. I will leave a message with the squad of soldiers I’m stationing here to await Usalaq’s return. We leave for Kush tomorrow.”

  35

  Ninurta’s words fumbled—a new experience for him. Sweat drenched his face as sudden fever and body weakness made him wobble on the ziggurat stair platform. Only then did he see his missing Khaldi grandson climbing the steps toward him.

  Napalku had changed in two years; his dark brown face had hardened, with his arm muscles, by life in the wild. The question of how he had gotten past Ninurta’s guards only came to mind when the object of many search parties stood before him and spoke. At that point, Ninurta’s speech left him entirely—not simply his speech for the crowd, but his very ability to find and form words. The left side of his head felt numb, while a swarm of cicadas shrieked their metallic scream inside his skull.

  “You seem unwell, Grandfather,” said the young Khaldi, voice echoing off of the blue-glazed brick of the stairwell walls that amplified his words down to the crowd around the lower steps.

  Ninurta’s head spun as the audience below began to murmur.

  “You may call me Palqui, for I announce division from the sacred Watchers on High, ordered by their Judge and yours.”

  Some word-retrieval ability began to return slowly. “How…?”

  Palqui’s thick lips smiled—a terrifying, innocent smile. “You said to your neighbors, ‘Go to, boys, let’s bake bricks, and build ourselves cities and a ziggurat-gate to connect with the heavens.’ You said, ‘let us make a name for ourselves lest we be nomads across the Earth.’ Now the heavens answer you, Grandfather. Do you not hear the speakers from the void?”

  Ninurta had thought it was the crowd, but as he looked past his grandson, he saw that they had all fallen into a dreadful silence. Uniform minds think alike. The chattering voices were in his head, and in the air all around him, muttering from that empty place deep in his own inner void. When he closed his eyes, deformed, leering faces glared back at him from behind his eyelids, jabbering like accusative grey-green lunatics with garbled words that Ninurta could not parse, but which left no doubt as to their meaning nonetheless. He opened his eyes quickly.

  Palqui’s voice became a hurricane deflecting off the glazed bricks on either side of the upper staircase, “Listen to what they say! Earth divides, and you all shall have the gods you’ve desired! For the decree of E’Yahavah A’Nu is this: ‘Indeed the people are one, and they all have one lip, and this is what they begin to do? Now they shall show restraint at nothing they imagine! Go to, let us go down, and confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.’”

  Ninurta fought to get his words out, “Speaking I the Incantation of Nuddimud—of Nurrimud—of of Nimrud—of Ningirdzu; no—of Ninurta! Banish I you!”

  Palqui shook his head. “Grandfather, I confess, I have not stopped to think just what else must be undone inside the human mind, in order to confuse the meaning in our very language. I really haven’t considered this very deeply; but you will.”

  That was when fat Saeba began to shriek from behind.

  Ninurta swung around to see his oldest brother holding his ears and blundering about the flat-topped brick mound, screaming like a terrified girl. Saeba blubbered out gibberish phrases as he swayed like a drunken man.

  Kush seemed dazed, as if unaware of what happened.

  The sky darkened to a giant purple eye around the unfinished ziggurat as lightning flickered. Only it was not lightning.

  Ninurta called to his father, “Happening is here, what?”

  Kush looked up, huge eyes ready to explode from his head, and bellowed, “Kawākəbt!”

  Ninurta turned again to face Palqui—or whatever that renegade Khaldi called himself—and demand that he make sense of things.

  Palqui had vanished.

  Instead, an army of ghost-lit faces dipped and twirled from out of the bruised eye of heavy cloud, swinging around the ziggurat as deadly fireflies on a hot summer night, the vanguard before some terrible, age-long storm.

  Long, long ago in the Dreamtime the earth was dark. There was no light. A huge grey blanket of clouds kept the light and the warmth out. It was very cold and very black. This great grey mass of cloud was very low. So low that the animals had to crawl around… Only the Snakes were happy because they, of all the animals, lived close to the ground. The animals lived by crawling around the damp dark earth, feeling for fruits and berries. Often it was so hard to find food that several days would pass between meals… Eventually, the birds decided they'd had enough. They called a meeting of all the animals. The Magpies, who were more intelligent than most of the birds, had a plan: ‘We can’t fly because the sky is too low. What we need to do, is to raise the sky. If we all gathered sticks, then we could use them to push the sky up and then we could fly up with the sky, and make lots of room for everyone.’ All the animals agreed it was a good idea, and they set about gathering sticks. The Magpies took a big stick each, and began to push at the sky. ‘Look, it’s going to work! The sky! It’s moving!’ It was still very dark… The Magpies kept pushing the sky higher and higher, until they reached the highest mountain in the whole land. Then with a mighty heave, they gave the sky one last push! The sky shot up into the air, and as it rose it split open and a huge flood of warmth and light poured through on to the land below. The animals wondered at the light and warmth, but more at the incredible brightly painted beauty of the Sun-Woman. The whole sky was awash with beautiful reds and yellows. It was the first sunrise.

  —The First Sunrise

  (Australian Aboriginal

  Dreamtime creation myth)

  11

  Dreamtime

  36

  Tiva had not heard the voice in her dreams for many centuries, or the cycles of insane pipe music, since before the present world began.

  “He’s left you, Tiva, just like he always used to before you dreamed me to life, to work on his silly ship. What did he ever do but humiliate you before all your children with that new name he gave you—I’m hanging like a dead man from this oath of dust with you—sounds like an old sad love song from Grove Hollow. At least I’ve come back to you…”

  Tiva felt an icy kiss to her neck, and sat up in the dark. “Pahn!”

  Her skin crawled for several long seconds as she panted to keep from screaming, until she realized it was only a nightmare. She fished a live coal out of her bedside fire-pan with a tong, laid it against the wick of her cresset lamp, and blew on it until it ignited. She half-expected to see a young man in goatskin leggings standing over her bed, or a greasy horned monster with black-void eyes—both one in the same being—but her tin
y chamber was empty except for herself.

  The fallen Watcher, Pahn—whose name meant all—had once tried to seduce Tiva, long ago, during her youth in the World-that-Was. She had not felt such pervading horror since that time, when evil lay thick as a poisoned fog over every aspect of her life. Now she felt it once again. The room throbbed around her with a pressurized darkness filled with whispering voices and distant crashings. It stifled her ability to think, crushing her with mental images of broken faces and twisted limbs that made her want to close her eyes, to sleep, even if through the screams of children being murdered.

  Tiva jumped when lightning flashed outside, with a boom of thunder that shook the brick walls of her tiny bedchamber in the modest “palace” Nimurta had constructed for Pahpi Nu, T’Qinna, and herself.

  Lomina had taken lodging with her mother-in-law and her husband’s brother Yoqtani. Both had returned from Elammi to live in Surupag, after hearing about what happened at Arrata, and of Napalku’s disappearance. They helped Tiva and T’Qinna manage the estate for Pahpi Nu.

  Tiva got up and put on her wrap. The wind began to howl outside like foam-mouthed wolves besieging Surupag in the night.

  Her chamber attached to that of T’Qinna, to form one wing of a “palace” that could have fit inside the hearth hall of the ancestral home of A’Nu-Ahki, where they had lived before the Deluge. The building’s other wing housed Pahpi Nu’s quarters, and a small study that contained the few skin-rolls and tablets Kush and Nimurta had allowed their ancestor to take with him from Arrata. El’Issaq had convalesced there since Nimurta’s Vizier brought him south last year, after Saeba had almost beaten him to death. A modest hearth and dining hall connected the two sections, with a paved area.

  Another lightning flash and thunderclap shook the baked brick house, so close that Tiva felt it against her skin as she passed through the door hangings into T’Qinna’s quarters. The rain hit the roof of the colonnade surrounding the palace on its three outer sides, like a stampede of mad oxen. That noise always made her skin crawl. Sometimes it even gave her visual flashbacks of the Deluge that left her screaming in the night.

  T’Qinna sat up and saw Tiva at the door. “Storm wake you?”

  “No. Wish it had.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  Tiva told her about the dream; how it seemed like Pahn had actually spoken to her. “Can they come back? I don’t want to live through that kind of stuff again! What happened to us that we’ve already messed up the world so badly again before we could even get it started? What’s wrong with me?”

  T’Qinna rested her hand on Tiva’s forearm. “There’s nothing wrong with you. You didn’t cause this.”

  “Yes I did! If I’d’ve been a better wife to Khumi, he’d have never gotten so angry. If was a good mother, Khana’Ani and Rhea would have turned out better! All the delinquents are my children!”

  “Not all,” T’Qinna said.

  Tiva started to cry. “Most! And now I’m just feeling sorry for myself again, and I can’t do anything to help anything or anyone! The World-that-Was took over two thousand years to go bad! S’good thing I was born at the end of it, ‘cause I managed to mess this one up in less than one lifetime!”

  “Single-handedly, too.”

  Tiva twisted around to see T’Qinna’s face in the darkness. A flash of lightning lit up bright eyes and a warm, playful smile.

  Tiva started laughing, half in panic, and could not stop until they both heard someone calling in through the colonnade. The palace yard wall was not finished yet, so the townspeople had free access. Pahpi Nu liked it that way.

  T’Qinna put on her wrap, and joined Tiva at the window. A small family of laborers had taken shelter under the colonnade. The young mother had called inside when she must have heard Tiva’s laughter.

  “Pleez, sosickmai huzbandis. Sedit is ovyou that medicinezar.” The woman slurred some of her consonants.

  Tiva said, “Of course we’ll help. Are you well? Have you hit your head or something?”

  “Me nout! Huzbandis!”

  T’Qinna sent Tiva to awaken Pahpi Nu and El’Issaq, but Tiva did not feel so great about leaving her sister-in-law alone with the worker’s family. They spoke and behaved strangely, milling about as if moon-struck.

  “I’ll be fine, but we may need the men,” T’Qinna said, under the cover of another thunderclap.

  Tiva rushed through the hearth room, into the library. She did not know El’Issaq too well yet, so she went straight into A’Nu-Ahki’s chamber, and gently shook his arm.

  Pahpi Nu slid up under his blankets, already dressed in a pullover robe because of his night chills. “What is it, child?”

  Tiva told him about the strange family of the ill worker.

  The Ancient grabbed his staff, and hobbled after her into the study to awaken El’Issaq, whom he gently poked with the walking stick.

  The elder from the North woke with a start. “Archae Patera?”

  “What’s that, my boy?”

  Tiva stepped back from the cot as she heard Pahn’s voice audibly taunting her, yet somehow still inside her head. “Now it really starts to get fun, Tiva. Can you guess what happens next?” She wanted to scream, but only shook.

  El’Issaq began to raise his voice, as if agitated, but his words were even less intelligible than those of the worker’s wife. “Patera? Energo mou? Kati lathos?”

  A’Nu-Ahki bent over, and laid his hand on El’Issaq’s forehead. “He’s burning up with fever. Tiva, get me some rainwater. There’s a pitcher in the pavement garden outside!”

  She backed away and rushed out into the downpour. The pitcher was already overflowing by the flowerbed. Tiva grabbed it and went back in.

  Pahpi Nu was trying to keep El’Issaq alert. Tiva snatched a basket cloth from the hearth, plunged it into the pitcher, and gave it to the Ancient.

  “What is your name?” Pahpi Nu said to El’Issaq as he bathed his forehead with the wet cloth.

  El’Issaq’s eyes rolled up into his head, while he struggled to say his own name; all that came out was, “Oi’noima Aeolis.”

  Lightning blasted the pavement outside. Tiva heard T’Qinna’s scream from the other side of the house.

  37

  She knew not her name; only that the sky had fallen. A magpie bird hopped along the gray hardness under the cover of river-stone, sheltering from the fallen sky. She who had just awakened took the Magpie as her name, her meaning, the spirit of what she was. The howling emptiness demanded some form of order to fill itself with, and what else was there?

  Magpie was not alone. The man—her Man—lay by her, curled like a grub, shaking. Their children cried; hatchlings in the nest. This was the Beginning, and yet not so—Magpie knew what grubs were, that her man was her Man, and that her children were her hatchlings. That was something from the Great Dreaming—the continuous Beginning greater than she…

  They seemed to be in a shallow cave of terrifying, impossibly straight walls. The other magpie grew into a gray woman, who crouched by Magpie’s Man. For a moment, Magpie flushed with envy, afraid the woman would steal him from her. Then she saw the Woman give him water, and realized this was a mighty spirit, who only wanted to help them. She bathed the sweat from the brow of Magpie’s Man with the edge of her gray shroud, as a mother would to a child. The Woman was not gray, only her shroud—the color of the fallen sky beyond Shallow Cave.

  The sky had fallen and only the cave held up part of it with thick sticks of stone. Magpie wanted to fly, but she could not because the sky was too close to the ground. Beyond Shallow Cave, she would have found it impossible even to stand.

  Then she saw the Snake twist its way inside, behind Gray Woman. It slid along the sharp angle of the cave wall.

  Magpie knew that the Snake was happy at the fallen sky, because all animals were now as he, close to the ground, and unable to walk or fly. The Snake wanted all others to suffer its own limitations, for only then could it rule over them, for the Snake excelled
at living low. Perhaps it had made the sky to fall, or perhaps the sky had always been that way, Magpie did not know. She only knew it was wrong somehow that the Snake was happy. She did not like living low. She wanted to fly. Then the Snake coiled back to bite the kindly Gray Woman.

  Magpie picked up a rock just outside the shallow cave, and stalked the Snake from behind.

  38

  T’Qinna bathed the head of the fevered worker. His wife had fallen silent, while their children cried from fright at the storm. Lightning arced as something whipped across the portico pavement in the corner of her eye. The worker was burning up, so she was too preoccupied to pay it any mind.

  Lightning flashed again at her back in sky-spiders, revealing the flickering shadow of someone standing behind her with an upraised arm. Thunder clapped as T’Qinna rolled onto her side and came up with her thigh dagger drawn, yelling inside for help.

  The sick worker’s wife held a rock, poised to strike. But when she slammed the stone down, it crushed the head of a large viper that had been less than a cubit from where T’Qinna had been crouching. She quickly put away her dagger, before the woman saw how close she came to an unfair punishment for her courage.

  After striking the serpent several times, the worker’s wife dragged the long carcass out into the rain.

  T’Qinna rose to her feet and thanked the woman, just as Tiva and Pahpi Nu rushed out of the door from the house.

  She called to the others, “Everything’s fine! We just had to kill a venomous snake. Let’s get these people inside to some blankets.”

  39

  Inana awoke inside her jipar chamber in the House of Heaven, surrounded by a constellation of burning cresset lamps delicately arranged on the floor around her goose down mattress. Every portion of her body hurt. She gazed at her arms, thighs, and midriff, and found them covered in bite marks like hideous red and purple flowers. Her heart almost stopped for a second at the idea that she had contracted some form of plague. Then she noticed the individual teeth imprints, and began to laugh with a delirious relief.