by Adele Abbot
“I need to rest awhile, Calistrope,” Ponderos was firm. “I still hurt all over. Now you’re making my brain hurt as well.”
“Me, too,” added Roli. “I’m tired.”
Calistrope sighed. “I suppose there’s no reason why we shouldn’t stop for a while,” he looked around. “Not a lot of choice though,” they stood aside as a swarm of small hoppers skittered along the hard beaten trail, the swarm was followed by a pair of beetles intent on picking up and munching the slower individuals. “The bank is very narrow here.”
The river ran hard up against the valley wall at this point and the game trail they followed had become narrow and constricted. They rested awhile, fending off the attentions of a number of hungry creatures before Ponderos decided the aches and pains of walking were easier to take than constant hostilities.
They continued on slowly until they came to a place where the river became wide and shallow enough to cross without getting wet above the knees. On the southern and kindlier side of the water they began to look for a suitable place to make camp. They threaded their way through an area of large boulders and rounded a final spur of rock.
“What’s that?” asked Ponderos. A tall spire was visible in the distance.
“How should I know what it is?” Calistrope grumbled. “Why don’t you look at your map for a while and tell me what everything is?”
“Because you prefer to tell us.”
“Well. That’s a good enough reason, I suppose,” Calistrope searched his pockets for his copy of the map, checked his cuffs. “Do you have my map Roli?”
“Try your little bag.”
Calistrope rooted around in his bag. “I wouldn’t have put it in here, too many other… aha, here it is,” he opened the map and traced their route. “The Exhibition?”
The Exhibition was deceptively far off. The spire they had seen swelled to grander proportions, grew in height as they approached. It took on shape and form, it became a statue. A woman in flowing robes and a crown. She held her arm up above her head; she carried a cone shaped torch with a flame molded from some translucent material.
They came to halt a hundred paces away, their heads tipped back until their necks creaked.
Calistrope cocked his head to one side. “She’s not upright.”
“Ah, you recognize her?” Ponderos chuckled. “But I think you’re right, she leans a little to the left.”
“Is this the Exhibition, then.”
“An exhibit, I think Roli,” Ponderos pointed along the river bank. “See, there’s something further along and beyond that as well.”
“We should investigate these things Ponderos, they must be unique.”
“Calistrope, if you think I’m going to put one more foot in front of the other before I sit down for an hour or two, before eating and drinking my fill, then you can think again.”
“That goes for me, too,” said Roli.
“Oh no it doesn’t,” Ponderos did not mince words. “You are going down to the river to catch six or seven crayfish and a hatful of water for tea and Calistrope is going to help me bind my ribs. Are my words exact? Do I need to explain anything? No? Good.”
So Roli spent half an hour turning over stones at the edge of the river and ten minutes collecting driftwood for a fire. He filled Calistrope’s collapsible panikin with water for cooking and the shell which Ponderos used for brewing tea, set them on hearth stones to boil and at last, sat down. “There. It’s done.”
“Me, too,” Calistrope helped Ponderos with his shirt and leather vest and sat down himself.
They ate. Drank aromatic tea. “Oh, that was excellent, excellent. Those crayfish, Roli, some of the best I’ve had. Calistrope? What do you say?”
“Very tasty Roli. I believe I will sit here a little longer, there’s no point in risking indigestion.”
“None at all.”
Roli, by nature rather more restless than his older companions, roamed the shore. Ponderos and Calistrope were content to watch the water streaming past where high-stepping insects picked their way from one stone to another looking for tasty tidbits of their own in the magenta tinted foam and bubbles.
It was all very peaceful. Until, of course, Roli disturbed them with urgent cries.
“Now what?” asked Calistrope with resignation. He stood up and looked up the bank’s rise to where Roli stood with legs and arms spread out. “Now what?” he said more loudly.
In answer, Roli made a pounding motion with his right fist. There was dull thump, as though he had hit a bass drum.
Calistrope and Ponderos approached cautiously. It appeared that Roli was leaning his weight against thin air. It proved to be a barrier, a barrier so clear and clean that it could be sensed only by touch—except at ground level, Calistrope noted. Where the unseen barrier touched the ground, there was a sharp edge to the sand where it had piled up against it a little.
The barrier was non-reflective, non-refractive; it had no texture discernible, a finger slipped along the surface without registering sensation of any sort. Smooth, transparent, impassable. Roli had simply walked right into it.
“Impossible,” Ponderos decided. He shook his head and slammed his palm against the unseen surface with all his might. The blow produced exactly the same drum-skin noise as before.
“No, no,” Calistrope smiled. “It’s here isn’t it? So it is not impossible. You and I—even Roli, here—are accustomed to seeing apparent impossibilities. We call it magic.”
Ponderos sniffed. “There’s no magic here. No smell of it,” he closed his eyes for a moment. “No, I can’t feel a thing. No magic. This is just…”
“There’s a sign over here,” Roli had walked a little further along, around the barrier’s curve. “Can’t read it though.”
When they came to it, a small rectangular sign set at ground level, they saw it bore a single word composed of characters which none of them had ever seen before. Strange cursive lines with a half melted look to them, quite unknown.
It came as a minor shock to Calistrope and Ponderos. Apart from minor differences in dialect, speech and reading-writing were the same everywhere, understandable communications between human beings had long ago become instinctive. It was almost impossible to invent a new spoken or written word that could not be comprehended by all or almost everybody else.
They continued on and eventually discovered the barrier to be circular, a protective case right around the majestic figure within. A great bell-jar placed over the statue by some giant hand to protect it from the elements.
“Here is another sign,” Ponderos nodded at the small plaque. “And readable this time though it’s still gibberish.”
N’York, the sign said. As meaningless as before.
“I suppose it could be a place name,” Ponderos surmised. “They can sometimes seem irrational.”
But Calistrope was considering other aspects. He did not reply.
“This is more recent than the Ants’ map suggests, I suspect,” Ponderos suggested. “Look at the creases in her robes—as sharp as the day they were cut by the stonemason’s chisel. Even protected from wind and rain, they’d not stay as sharp as that, surely…”
“The map—at least the original—was made long before the world stopped turning,” Calistrope said. “When the sun shone white.”
“So the Ants told you.”
“I’ve no reason to distrust them, I’m not certain that ants can lie—that takes a human being, I think. Besides, it isn’t stone that the statue’s made from. I believe it to be metal.”
“Metal?” Ponderos was incredulous. “Come now Calistrope, that’s taking things too far.”
“Well we’ll see. Let us look at this next one. It seems to be a building.”
They walked away from the statue. The distance was a furlong or two to the building which took on a more and more wondrous appearance as they approached. So marvelous in fact, that the nearer they came, the slower they walked.
“That is beautiful,” b
reathed Calistrope. “The statue is inspiring but this is… this is pure beauty.”
For once Roli said nothing, both he and Ponderos were as stunned as Calistrope.
The structure was built from white marble with pastel hued veins of blue and pink and green running through it. Tall archways gave entrance to the interior which was shadowed but gave hint of intricate stone carvings and sweeping arabesques of silver inlay on the floors. The roof: sheets of burnished copper which reflected the burning rays of some unseen sun, slender spires topped with the heads of serene gods and goddesses. Despite the decoration, the architecture had a simplicity which defied time—it might have been created since the world ceased its turning or could just as easily date back to the great eras of Dispersal and the Rekindling of civilization.
The astonishing building was reflected perfectly in a pool of still water which lay before it, between it and the circular barrier which surrounded and protected it. The ground around the building and the pool was covered in a dense green of what they assumed was a sort of moss, a variety with short narrow leaves like miniature sword blades.
“And another sign board,” said Roli, first to break their silence. “Unreadable, too.”
On a tour around the building which was almost as incredible from the sides and rear as from the front, they encountered other signs in differing alphabets. One of them was lettered in familiar script, so mundane that it had no name and seemed remarkably out of place next to this exotic edifice. The Tomb of the wife of Al Jehan, it told them.
Calistrope frowned. “A tomb,” he said to himself. But Ponderos, less introspective, called their attention to the sand which was blown by a freshening breeze. The thin film of dust was sliding down to the ground leaving the surface of the barrier unstained and clear. It was, however, sliding down the surface of a hemisphere which evidently closed above the building.
Ponderos wondered if the barrier was in fact a globe, penetrating underground as far below as its height above.
Calistrope was still looked at the sign. “I wonder who this Al Jehan was,” he murmured. “And who was his wife. Why so grand a… Roli, I am out of touch with such matters, what happens to people when they die?”
Roli pursed his lips, shrugged. “Sometimes they are buried though more often burned.”
“A tomb though. What is the purpose of a tomb?”
“To keep the memory alive? I don’t know,” Roli kicked at a knob of rock. “In my family, we counted ourselves lucky if we could find enough to bury,” he leaned back against the barrier, his hands deep in the pockets of his surcoat. “This is morbid stuff Calistrope. Death is not fit subject for discuss…” Roli fell suddenly backwards onto the greenery which came up to the barrier’s perimeter.
Calistrope and Ponderos rushed forward to help him up and stopped just as quickly. The wind had abruptly died, the sound of rushing waters had stilled, the myriad squeaks and chirps of insect life were silenced.
From the pool in front of the mausoleum, the sound of a fish jumping left a widening ring of ripples on the surface which shattered the perfect reflection.
Somehow they were on the inside of the barrier while outside, beyond its invisible locus, the world was compressed, as though seen through a distorting lens. It flickered as they moved, like a scene seen though the gaps in a board fence and overhead, the clouds raced across a sky stippled with black and silver bars. The sun alternated between the timeworn maroon bloat and a blinding disc of white.
Chapter 9
To one side, the great statue looked down at them, her calm visage holding an enigmatic smile. To the other was the great building which had—on the outside—stood half a league or more in the distance; here it was no more than a furlong from them, an effect of crossing the barrier between dimensions.
For a few minutes they stood and looked at the Tomb of Al Jehan’s wife then, by common consent, walked on to the next building which now was revealed as a low pyramidal structure, perhaps three chains on a side. Even though it was low in proportion to its spread, it grew in stature until it dwarfed the building they had just left. A single portal was visible on the triangular side which faced the river. A narrow slot cut straight into the wall, internal radiance flooded out through the opening laying a long, straight path across the sand.
“Another tomb?” wondered Ponderos.
Calistrope shrugged. “Who knows?”
Attached to the sloping face just outside the entrance was a sign. In mundane characters it read: the Palace of Turain the God.
“Huh!” Roli snorted, looking up at the stark and unadorned slabs of sandstone, chisel marks still evident in the stone facing on the sloping walls. “Well. Turain the God certainly prefers his palace plain. Shall we go inside?”
Calistrope shrugged once more. “Why not? Another hour or two is not going to matter much one way or another.”
They passed through the entrance, so narrow that perforce, they walked single file. Each of them gave an involuntary gasp of amazement as they reached the interior threshold. “Not so plain,” said Calistrope, his eyesight blurring with tears until they became accustomed to the brilliance. Light bathed the whole interior in a creamy-white, shadowless luminescence. “And there,” he added when he could see plainly once more, “Turain the God.”
At the geometric centre of the hollow pyramid, on a raised dais, a great gilded statue sat indolently upon an equally massive throne. Beneath the gold leaf, the figure was naked, a huge belly swelled over massive thighs, great dugs drooped over the greater belly and had it not been for the obvious signs of masculinity, the statue could well have been that of a pregnant female deity.
In contrast to the rude, unfinished state of the exterior, the inside surfaces of the pyramidal palace were covered in white and pink alabaster slabs. Faces—both angelic and demonic—were carved along the tremendous arches which supported the enormous plates of masonry. The floor space was covered with square and rectangular courts filled with colored gravel.
The pebbles seemed to be gemstones, sometimes rough and dull, sometimes polished and sometimes cut and flashing like rubies and diamonds. Colors ran the gamut of the spectrum: red and blue, white and yellow, green, purple, indigo, black.
The area immediately surrounding the statue and its dais was bare, a border of plain white sand some two or three ells in width. Above them loomed Turain the God, the statue’s head halfway to the high ceiling. The dais was at waist height, the throne supported on a smaller platform upon the dais; ten blue-painted toenails faced them, the largest the size of a man’s hand print, one foot was a little in advance of the other.
Behind the glittering toes, a pair of gold bangles encircled each ankle from which rose a pair of shins to knees like cauldrons and thighs like tree trunks. From there, the eye traveled up and up, across the mound of belly, the puffy flesh of the chest, the fat wrinkled neck and to the severe face of Turain the God.
Turain looked sleepily down at them from slanted eyes all but enclosed by fleshy lids.
“Shall we go closer?” Ponderos almost whispered so overcome was he by the richness and the brilliance.
Hands rested on each of the throne’s arms. Fingers encased in rings encrusted with jewels grasped the rounded ends. One of the fingers, carrying a ring with a stone of clear translucent blue, twitched.
“Um,” began Calistrope and stepped back a pace.
“Er,” said Ponderos and followed suit.
“Ouch,” yelped Roli springing to one side as the hand closed on the space he had occupied a heartbeat before.
All three of them separated and backed away.
“Ha ha ha!” The God’s deep laugh rumbled away and echoed throughout the cavernous building like thunder. “Ha ha.” Turain bent forward, arm outstretched, finger straining forward. Just beyond his farthest reach, Ponderos stood firm. By the width of a hand, Turain was just unable to prod the Mage in his muscular stomach.
“Well well,” said the God. “After all this time,” he
boomed.
Ponderos’ gaze traveled up the finger, the forearm, the flaccid biceps and then to the great jowly face grinning down at him.
“Worshipers. Real, live people come to worship me.” Turain labored to reach Ponderos. The finger moved nearer by a knuckle. “Nearer little man. Come nearer and know what it is to have a God touch you.”
Ponderos remained where he was and strain as he might, Turain could not reach him without getting off his throne, something he seemed loath to do—perhaps because of his monumental weight. After a moment or two Turain relaxed and Ponderos moved back another step or two, over the low curb and onto one of the squares filled with gems. Calistrope and Roli did the same, moving back and sidling up to stand next to Ponderos.
“I have to admit to you that our allegiance is to another persuasion entirely.”
Turain frowned and it was though dark storm clouds gathered over them, then his expression cleared, bright sunlight shone from a corner of the lowering skies. “That is of no moment. You are here, that is what matters. Devotion to some other gloomy deity who won’t disturb his slumbers by looking over his demesne—how can you compare such a one to me?”
Turain leaned forward once more. “My worshipers feel my love for them, I care for them, nurture them. Come, let me but touch one of you and you will know what I say is the truth.”
“Why should you want our poor devotion?” Calistrope edged sideways, into Ponderos hoping his friend would take the hint and they could leave.
Turain’s eyebrows lifted towards the golden hairline with its artful border of curls. “Evangelism. I need more than you three to worship me. Without a following, I am chained here. Go from here and bring me converts, your reward will be great, more than your small minds could possibly envision.”
Calistrope had met Gods before.
A world with a history as long as Earth’s accumulates Gods by the dozen, by the score. Whatever event triggers the creation of a God or elevates a person to God-hood is, fortunately, a rare one. However, multiply that rarity by the millions of epochs of an aged world’s life and it must have occurred hundreds, thousands of times.