by R. Lee Smith
It had been there before him most of that last day, but the glimpses of greyish green he could see through the branches were not worth the inevitable stumble as his feet caught in the clutter of Gedai’s trees. He knew it was the ocean, the end of his journey. He knew it was a marvelous sight, utterly unknown in the city of his birth. He also knew it wasn’t going anywhere.
So when Nicci lost her footing and spilled herself down a sandy slope onto a fallen log, Meoraq called camp, meaning to stay through the night even though the afternoon had scarcely started. He felt no great sense of time lost in doing this—what was another day, more or less?—but considered it a test of his resolve to show patience. In that mind, he sent Amber away with the empty flask and knelt to inspect the injury, ha, of Nicci’s scuffed knee and bruised arm.
Amber returned in mere moments, the flask just as empty. She let it drop. “Come and see this.”
The three human males and Amber’s own Nicci sat around her, but Amber said this only to him.
Meoraq went and through the trees, not twenty paces from his camp, the forest broke and the ground dropped away. They stood at the top of a cliff, nearly sheer, six times the height of any city wall, plummeting down onto a deadly mash of rock and steel and ruin, sloping away over a wide swath of rust-colored sand, and there was the ocean at the end of it.
He had seen pictures. He had thought that would prepare him, that he could see the ocean and somehow still know how he fit beside it. But there it was and it was as deep as sight would go, so vast that it became the horizon, so entire that he could see the very curve of the world along its skin.
He did not think to look for the temple in that first moment. He did not think at all. Uyane Meoraq beheld the naked body of Gann—its breathing lung, its beating heart, its pregnant belly—and forgot his own entirely until Amber took his hand.
He looked at it, anchored suddenly into his own clay’s dimensions, and then at her. She did not meet his eye. She, too, was lost in the sea.
He looked back into the ocean and was at once dizzied. The way it moved restlessly toward him…it felt as though he were falling and there was nothing to grab at, no hope of rescue. He felt that he could fall along that undulating skin forever until he slipped up into the sky. He looked and saw Gann pressed to Sheul’s heaven with nothing between them, no difference at all.
“Is it…beautiful?” he asked uncertainly.
“I don’t know.” She hesitated and shifted a little closer. “I don’t like it. It’s too high. And everything down there…looks dead. I don’t know,” she said again. “I’ve never been to the beach before. This wasn’t what I imagined.”
“Hell, no,” Crandall announced.
They both turned, and just why he should be surprised to see the others, Meoraq truly did not know, but he was, as much as if he were seeing them for the first time.
Crandall crossed his arms back and forth in front of his chest, shaking his head for emphasis. “Hell, no,” he repeated. “The joy ride ends here. I am not climbing down that. Bull-shit.”
Meoraq looked again at the cliff, but not for long. The height, the eroded fingers of the ruins pointing out of the sand, the constant swallowing sound of the sea—the single glance that Meoraq took found its way to his belly and knotted there.
“You and the lizard can do what you want,” Crandall was saying. “I ain’t killing myself so he can plant a tree in Israel or whatever the fuck he thinks he’s doing.”
“Relax, man. There has to be another way down.”
“Says who? Don’t you ever watch the travel shows? Since when do they ever put temples where any old asshole can walk in?”
“Hey, Bierce.” Eric reached toward Amber, visibly thought better of it when Meoraq looked at him, then settled for pointing. “What’s that look like to you?”
Meoraq looked along the top of the cliff, since that was where Eric seemed to be pointing, but saw nothing except the same thick forest they had been struggling through for days. Yet Amber actually gasped, her hand clenching where she still held his. So Meoraq looked again, at the treeline this time and then the treetops and finally at Amber, who was looking back at him with wide, disbelieving eyes.
“You don’t see it, do you?” she said.
He looked a third time, squinting as if through smoke and darkness and driving rain, but saw only the same close growth of trees, too tall and thin for Meoraq’s comfort, almost black against the grey sky. With a little imagination, he could see a thousand, thousand crooked fingers, pointing in defiance at the God that had judged this land and found it wanting, but he could not see a temple.
Even when she pointed, he saw nothing but another tree, a little taller than the rest, but no more or less remarkable than any other. But where the others were wrapped in years of parasitic growth, dripping creepers and grasses that would have had no chance at life on the sunless forest floor, this tree stood naked, branchless, burnt black. A dead tree then, and yet he could see by Amber’s face that it was more.
“I cry,” he said. “What is it?”
“I…It…I don’t know.”
“Well, I don’t know either,” said Eric, shading his eyes in an effort to see the thing better. “But it sure looks like a transmission tower to me. Sheesh. Wouldn’t that just chap Scott’s ass?”
* * *
The walls that surrounded Xi’Matezh had been raised, it was said, by the Prophet’s own Oracle Mykrm, and his mark was said to have been carved on the very last stone to be set. Meoraq looked for it as they circled around in search of entry, but with only half an eye. There was so much else to see. The curious color of the stone—nearly black, mottled through with grey and green—made it all but impossible to see through the thick trees. Meoraq had never made a formal study of stone, but all the rock he saw beneath his feet was of that pale, flaking kind; this stone had been quarried elsewhere, brought for the singular purpose of enclosing this sacred place, and the sight of it did his weary clay great good.
They were beautiful walls, deceptively plain, perfectly molded. At one time, there must have been gates, but the damp corrosive air had claimed them and they had not been replaced. It gave him a twinge of disappointment, seeing that anyone could walk in, and he had to stop there in the opening with his neck bent until he had reminded himself that Sheul’s house was open to all His children. The inner doors, those were the true test.
“Are we going in or are we standing here all day?”
“Dude, just give him his space. This is a big deal for him.”
“Yeah, yeah. Lizardman’s gotta get right with the Big Liz. Meanwhile, I’m freezing my nuts off.”
Six breaths, deep and slow. One for the Prophet, who had been the first to enter these ruins and hear the true voice of God within. Two for his Brunt, who had surrendered everything, even his own name, to serve others in faithfulness and humility. Three for Uyane, the first Sword, father of his own line. Four for Mykrm, the hammer, who had raised the first true cities under Sheul and taught men to rule them fairly. Five for Oyan, who carried seedlings across the ruin of the Fallen world and brought life out of the poisoned earth. Six for Thaliszr, priest and healer, who had brought the man Lashraq out of death and restored him as Sheul’s own Prophet.
Meoraq raised his head and crossed through the gateless portal into Xi’Matezh.
He saw the ruins at once, ruins he had every reason to expect to see, ruins he had no right to resent now that they were before him. There were several buildings within the walls, much eroded by the ocean air, windowless, doorless, lifeless. He saw the thing the humans called a transmission tower—weathered, but still standing, still humming beneath his hand when he reached out to touch it. He saw no machines, but the courtyard was too well-kept to think none were here, even here.
The next thing he saw was the ocean, which he could see only because of the huge, tumbled hole in that beautiful wall. Not just one or two missing bricks, but a whole length of them, loosened by the constant pounding
of the waves on the cliffs or eroded by the wet wind that had pitted so many of these other buildings. If he and his humans all joined hands, they still couldn’t make a line long enough to touch both sides. This fine wall, the life’s work of who knew how many master masons, carried block by block to be raised here under Oracle Mykrm’s own living eye…This beautiful wall was falling.
But beside the hole, Meoraq saw the only thing that really mattered: a dark stone dome enclosing the true shrine and the heavy doors that sealed it. The doors were made of qil, the same as his sabks—a lost metal, from a lost age. Perhaps Oracle Uyane had made the knives from the scraps left after the doors were cast. Perhaps he had always carried a piece of Xi’Matezh with him and never knew it.
“Wife,” said Meoraq, and when she was with him, he began to walk.
“God, there better be wall-to-wall booze and burgers in there,” Crandall said, falling into step at his side.
Meoraq halted. He turned, his head cocked, and thrust his snout into the human’s flat face. “You,” he hissed, raking his gaze across the rest of them as well. “All of you. You wait here. This place is sacred.”
“Oh what the hell, man!” Crandall looked back at his people, then at Meoraq, and finally at Amber. “What, we’re not good enough to see God? We’ve come just as fucking far, haven’t we? Maybe I got some questions too!”
“Stay here,” Meoraq said again and snorted, blowing back the dirty hair from Crandall’s brow. “Look for your abbot’s ship. Wife, come.”
Crandall faced him down for a second or two, but did turn away in the end, pucker-faced and full of color. “Fucking lizard’s pet. Come on, guys. I ain’t standing out in the wind.”
Amber had a special look for him when Meoraq turned back to her, but he didn’t care. He went on ahead to open the outer doors of Xi’Matezh. The hinges were stiff, but they opened, blowing the dank, waxy-scented breath of the temple back at him.
The doors were too heavy to hold indefinitely. Meoraq gave his wife a not-so-subtle nudge with the toe of his boot and let go of them. They immediately began to swing shut, ponderous as doors in a dream, and closed with no more than a muffled whump, trapping them in black.
Meoraq took his pack off and found his lamp and strikers. He waited until his hands steadied before he made a light, and it was all there, just as he’d imagined: a thousand half-burnt candles like a second wall all around him, melted together, stacked one atop the other, like a city made of wax; the Prophet’s mark painted on the wall, renewed by countless pilgrims over the years; the building, not ruined but maintained, a relic outside of time, and the doors, marked with the names of those who had passed through. Meoraq raised the lamp and approached, his hand skimming the air just over the doors until he found one name he knew: Tsazr Dyuun.
“Your teacher?” Amber asked, watching him.
He grunted, his eyes tracing each line of each letter. They were not even, which surprised him some. He remembered Master Tsazr as such a meticulous man, but then making letters was a very different thing from teaching boys to beat one another senseless. Still…
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
He looked at her, his spines flexing forward. In the close air of this place, he could actually hear them flexing, which was so unnerving that he reached up to rub at them. “Why would you say that? I’ve walked across the world, woman!”
She averted her eyes, rolling her shoulders as she hugged herself. “This doesn’t look like much of a temple, is all. It kind of looks like a bunker.”
“Whatever it may have been before the Fall, it became a temple when God entered.” His eye wandered back to Master Tsazr’s name on the wall. “All things change when He enters, Soft-Skin.”
“I don’t want you to be disappointed.”
“How can I be? Look there.” He nudged at her arm and pointed to the wall. “The mark of the Prophet. Prophet Lashraq made that mark.”
Amber studied it with a singularly dubious expression. “It looks awfully fresh.”
“It’s been repainted, I’m sure, but he made it first. He was here, Soft-Skin. Here, where I stand.” He dropped his arm and turned to her, holding his lamp before him like a candle-ward. The flame underlit her odd face in unflattering ways; he leaned close and nuzzled at her chin. “Will you stand with me, wife? One more hour?”
“Meoraq…what if—”
He pushed his mouthparts against hers and rubbed them lightly together until she pushed him away, laughing. “Will you stand with me?” he asked again.
“I think my lips are bleeding.”
“Will you?”
“Oh for Christ’s sake, I have to say it?” She sighed, wiped her mouth, then suddenly raised both arms and dropped them loudly to her side. “I’m with you,” she said. “I’m always with you. So…open up that door, Meoraq. Let’s do this.”
He smiled, nuzzling her one more time, and put his palm to the lock-plate.
It warmed, clicked twice and began to hum. Lights came slowly to life all around the door, soft white and palest blue. Another click, and then the voice, echoing off the rounded shell of the dome so that it seemed to be speaking directly in Meoraq’s head: “Warning. This is a secure area. All access restricted. Warning. Lethal force authorized.”
“Nuu Sukaga.”
The humming changed pitch. Small vents opened to either side of the door. “Defense imminent. Present mnabed. This is your final warning.”
Amber took a large step back, catching at his arm, but Meoraq was not moved. “Nuu Sukaga,” he said again.
The vents closed. The door opened.
Deep in the darkened room beyond, Sheul the All-Father stood, the sword of war sheathed and the light of wisdom burning in His hand.
9
Amber never doubted for a moment that she would see a big, empty room and that was just what she saw. But she knew what Meoraq was expecting too, and so she knew what was going to happen next. And oh God, it hurt to see it.
“Father,” he said, and with a flicker and a whine, lights all around the room came wearily to life. As they strengthened, the huge monitor on the far wall lost some of its mirror-like shine, but still Meoraq took two steps toward it before he realized what it was. He stopped, blinking rapidly as he stared first at his reflection and then at hers and then at the rest of the room. There really wasn’t much to see. It was nothing but a reception area, reduced by military design to six angled walls, several banks of computer consoles, one horseshoe-shaped desk with a single chair aimed at the door they’d come in through, two other doors, and of course, the enormous display monitor behind the desk in which the yellow light of Meoraq’s lamp still sparked a ghost-like echo.
He took it all in, plainly puzzled but showing no doubt, no real concern. When Amber hesitated a touch on his arm, he gave her an inquiring glance, but shrugged off her silent sympathy and instead marched over to one of the other doors and nudged the lockplate. It blatted at him but didn’t open. “Nuu Sukaga,” he said, and the door behind Amber hissed shut.
“Locks engaged. Timeout to systems restart. Doors will open in ten and ninety. Present mnabed to override.” The lockplates lit up helpfully, but no one had anything to offer any of them.
Meoraq backed away from the door, looking frustrated but not alarmed, not really. He turned around again, all the way in a circle, as if checking to make sure God hadn’t materialized behind him while he was distracted by the door. He ended up facing Amber and the two of them just looked at each other for a while.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“I know.”
“Everyone hears Him!” he insisted, just as if she’d argued. “Everyone! He has to be here! It has to be…some kind of test!” He swung away, holding up his lamp and searching each shadowed, empty corner. “Father?”
The lights pulsed as if in answer and grew that much stronger. The big monitor flickered. Smaller ones evenly spaced around the otherwise featureless walls snapped on, one after the oth
er, showing first a clean black screen and slowly spilling out lines of silent code. Somewhere, speakers thumped on at an ear-splitting level and hummed their way down to something subaudible. “Operational drive activated,” said a lizardish voice. “Systems override. Searching for file. Please wait.”
“There’s no one here,” she said softly.
“He’s here! He has to be here! Maybe…” He turned back, still not panicked, still with that awful bafflement. “Will you pray with me? Maybe we have to pray.”
The big monitor flickered again and pulled up a very obvious load-bar. As it crept toward completion, that cool, androgynous voice came back with, “File recovery in process. Please wait.”
“I’ll pray with you,” said Amber. “Tell me how.”
But he didn’t, not right away. He just looked at her, standing alone in the center of that empty room with the big screen firing up behind him. The lamp in his hand trembled. He looked at her. He did not speak.
Amber gently took the lamp and set it down on the edge of the console nearest to her. He let it go, his eyes fixed to the little flame, but otherwise, he didn’t move, not even when she came back and tried to put her arms around him.
“He didn’t lie to me.”
“Who?”
“Master Tsazr.” Meoraq pulled out of her reach and paced back to the door, pushing at the lockplate twice before going on to the next door. “I saw him. I saw his face! He heard God’s voice! That is truth! It…” His long stride slowed. He looked at her again, lost between one door and the next. “It’s me.”
“No.”
Meoraq’s spines lowered until they were shivering close against his skull, but his back stayed straight and his shoulders squared. His eyes drifted from one computer to another, beginning and ending with the big screen and the nearly-there load-bar. “He doesn’t want to talk to me,” he said, and staggered without ever taking a step.
“Meoraq, don’t. Please, don’t.” She caught his face, made him look at her, but it was a long time before he saw her. “It’s not you, I swear it’s not.” And wildly, because anything was better than this…this awful dead confusion in his eyes, she said, “Maybe it’s me, okay? Maybe women aren’t supposed to come here. You did everything right, Meoraq, you know you did.”