Clarkesworld: Year Four

by Kij Johnson

  A year and a half after Maria has ripened for womanhood, I follow her along the creek, the farthest from the village, where fields are no more and matted greens reach as high as her knees. She picks thistles and lilies; thistle leaves she gathers into her basket and lilies she weaves into a garland. Thistle milk and lily pollen cake her fingers. She mutters a song in a small, high-pitched voice, she meanders and pauses, and so does her song.

  “I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.

  “As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.

  “As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons . . .

  “I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that you stir not up, nor awake my love, till he pleases.”

  A man in the village has been looking at her, he is older, square-cut; he has curly black beard and anvil-shaped thumbs. The man has talked to her father. Soon she will be given to the anvil-thumbed man, even though he does not look like an apple tree among trees of the forest. I have to act. I become a thistle-plant in her path. My leaves are oozing with white milk.

  She reaches for me and I pierce her finger with a thorn of my stalk. She recoils with a gasp. She tries to pick the thorn out but it is burrowing yet deeper into her skin.

  In two days almost all of her hand is red and swollen and she complains of pain. But on a third day she gets better and I can leave. My job is done. That day, my Master draws me in and engulfs me in His caressing presence. I wish for nothing else than to dissolve in the honey of His grace, to be a string stretched between His universes, shimmering at His touch. I forget that I wanted to ask Him why He wants her with a child. I forget everything.

  He praises my service and calls me his best. His Ur-Ag-ghel. He gives me a name, Gabriel.

  When I return to my world, it has been four months, and things have taken a bad turn.

  She is with a child but everyone is angry at her. She says she has lain with no man or spirit, she weeps and stomps her foot when her father interrogates her. An old village woman has looked between her legs and pushed on her belly and still everyone is against her. The anvil-thumbed man no longer wants to take her into his house. Her family no longer sits her down with them to dinner. She eats her meals among cattle.

  One night when moon is in full bloom she slips out of the cattle shed and follows the creek side far away from the village. She picks a place, crouches right at the water’s edge. She rocks back and forth, mumbles her song, verse, pause, verse. She mumbles and rocks, and lets water run through her fingers.

  “The watchmen that went about the city found me, they smote me, they wounded me; the keepers of the walls took away my veil from me.

  “I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if you find my beloved, that you tell him, that I am sick of love.”

  Her breathing is heavy, her voice is thin but still she hums her song. She waddles up to where the creek’s bank is steep and overhanging. She mounts it then jumps down into the shallows—the drop is higher than she is tall. A grunt is knocked out of her as she lands onto straight legs and folds up. She sits for a while, rocking, then climbs up the slope and jumps again. The third time, when she climbs up, she is limping.

  I fear for her. The third time she jumps I catch her in mid-air.

  She gasps, “Who is it? Let me go!”

  I lower into the water. My first words of human language squeeze out in a stutter.

  “I. Am. Gabriel messenger. What are you. Doing?”

  She probes with her fingers, far and wide around herself. Everywhere she probes, there is still me.

  “I hate the thistle-child,” she says.

  I understand something is going very wrong with His purpose, and it makes me terrified and lost, for He is great and so must be His plan. I, the messenger, must be at fault. “Is not thistle child,” I plead. “Is the child of one who is—” I am grasping for words,—“Who is—light? Who dwells on the Other Side of Things?” No, my words are hollow husks, no more. I recall the jellyfish-like crown into which He fitted my head, “Who presides on a shining—throne?” Then I find my footing, “Who is—God? You cannot hate it.”

  “Let me go!”

  “Please,” I say, “I am not good with words. I did not explain it well?”

  She cringes and tries to shift her body. “Let go, I’m sick!”

  She presses her hand to the bottom of her stomach and groans. With her other hand she reaches under her skirt and pulls a wad of herbs out of her female cavity. Crumpled leaves unfurl, pomegranate seeds fall out. It smells of parsley, rue. Of blood. She looks at it and begins to make noises like cackles and hiccups. Is this weeping or laughing?

  I have to save His plan. I wrap around her thighs and around her bleeding, I hold her inside and out in my cradle, and each time her toes curl and her fingers dig into me, I wrap her womb in words whose use I do not yet understand, random words out of her song, “My sister my love my undefiled your head is filled with dew and your locks with the drops of the night my rose my lily of the valley my wine my myrrh my mount Gilead my roe of the field my tower of vines my dove—”

  I carry her back to the shed of her family’s home and stay with her till she stops panting and curling her toes.

  “Does He love me?” she asks me. I think back to the unrelenting envelope of His caress spreading over my exposed inner side. What is love? He cannot touch her nor look her in the eye; He can only suck on my memories of her. If only I could show her, could do to her what He had done to me!

  “Yes, He does,” I say.

  “But you are not him?”

  “No. I am just a messenger.”

  “Why can’t I see you?”

  “Humans can only see my kind if we make an effort to be seen.”

  When she is asleep, I make a white lily and leave it on the ground next to her head. I leave in haste to set things right, to make balance the only way I can think of. I go to the anvil-thumbed man. He is asleep. I mount his chest and take shape of the fig vendor’s scale, only huge and fiery. “Thou shall take Maria as wife and take care of her every need,” I rumble, “She bears the child of God.” I sway my weighing bowls over his nose, I clang the chains, I spew noxious flames. Then I add, to my own surprise, “Thou shall not touch her as husband until her child is born.” Why did I say this?

  He is shaking and he swears to obey. Satisfied with my work, I leave.

  Over the next months I spend every night with Maria. She now has her own room in the anvil-thumbed man’s house. He treats Maria well and makes his mother serve her because her burden is heavy and she often feels ill. But at nights Maria refuses to have her mother-in-law in her room and prefers me. Without me she has night terrors, she tells me.

  She teaches me to speak more fluently. To read human faces. A broad smile. A narrow smile. A shadow of a smile coupled with a slight frown. These distinctions are important.

  I curl around her, I keep her cool, I prop her head. Her room smells of crushed rock and dew, and milk of her body. Cicadas’ tone hangs in the air, as if the indoors and outdoors are one. Sometimes she croons or moans when I rub against her skin. Sometimes she tells me to do it again.

  A white lily, found each morning at the head of her bed keeps the anvil-thumbed man and his mother in awe of the single-mindedness of the Divine purpose. How peculiar it is that He never pulls me in to Him during all this time, never inquires about the progress of His plan. How peculiar it is that I do not wish for it to happen.

  She keeps asking me to become visible to her and finally I acquiesce. I want to earn her praise and follow the description of a dream lover from that song she has been singing. I scrupulously reproduce the details such as “his cheeks as a bed of spices” and “his lips like lilies,” as well as “his belly is as bright ivory overlaid with sapphires” and in particular, “his legs are as pillars of marble.”

  Her recoil and disappointment are a surprise to me.

&n
bsp; The following nights she explains what the words of the song really mean. She guides me through my search of the acceptable human form. In the end I become what she wants me to be. I lie next to her and she asks me to kiss her lips. Then her neck. Then her breasts.

  The child that grows inside her is very fragile. Like me, it has to try and err at every step, groping blindly for a human form; like me, it is so eager to give up, for it is so lost in its ignorance of what it should become.

  By the time birthing comes, I have helped the child take the next step more than once. I have wrapped myself around it, teaching it to be human, passing the lessons Maria has been giving me. I have protected the mother from the child and the child from the mother; prevented the vinegar of divine essence from burning through a human body, prevented the human body, in the blindness of its wet ways, from attacking the divine.

  By the time birthing comes I am no longer certain I am just a messenger.

  A healthy boy is born. Maria recovers and all but forgets about me, tending the infant. I try to return to my old ways. I thunder through mountains, I bother oceans. I steal a red-hot rock from one of the Earth’s fire pits and keep it suspended in the skies until it burns out. It looks just like a star.

  But none of it feels the way it used to. The memory of His omnipresent love on my raw being, of the tug and tide of His universes makes me feel hollow. And the memory of the small gifts of trust and attachment Maria always had for me—her smile, her kiss, a stroke of her hand—while her whole body wailed and choked over its heavy burden, makes me feel hollower still. Her thinning voice, her sweat . . . I do not understand what the purpose of the Boy is, and it makes me restless.

  I return to where Maria lives—only to see more trouble. The King’s guard is going door to door, killing every male newborn. At least I travel faster than cavalrymen, faster than even the word of their doings. I manage to give Maria and her husband ample warning; they flee.

  Why did this happen? Eavesdropping in the King’s palace brings me the answer: the King has had a vision. Behold the Boy, it said, he will cause the royal death. Hence countrywide infanticides, they were but a royally sweeping response. A vision—is it not an act outside human powers? Does it not reveal a hand of a messenger? Has He appointed another messenger then, and if so, why is this messenger undoing His plan?

  What is His plan?

  The less I understand of my Master, the more I feel a slave.

  I burn with suspicion, insult. Jealousy. I rage high up in the sky, where air is so thin it no longer stains the void blue, to draw His attention to me. But The Other Side that He dwells in is not to be found even in the void.

  I visit upon my kind. The big and wild ones who roll upon deserts as sandstorms, and the old and sleepy ones who perch on mountaintops as helmets of ice. For all I know any one of them could have been taken in by Him and infested with His other purposes. I ask questions. For all I know, any one of them can have a reason not to answer. “Go to the Wise One,” they tell me.

  Before I do the pilgrimage, I call upon Maria and the Boy in their new home in Nazareth. She sees me walking up the road, cries, “Gabriel!” She hugs me. “Is everything all right? Last time you came it was with bad news.”

  “Yes, all right,” I say. I don’t know how to speak about my troubles. “You are pregnant, I see?” I thought it not possible.

  “What can I say? I’m a married woman . . . Joshua, greet Gabriel like I taught you.”

  The Boy hides his face in his Mother’s frock. Will he be turning into something inhuman as he grows up, I wonder. A fly buzzes by and I catch it. “Look what I got,” I say. I open my palm at his eye level and the creature tears out, its jet black hide flickers spectral colors. “A rainbow!”

  The Boy frowns.

  The Wise One lives at the bottom of the ocean in the deepest darkest gorge. As I fall through the chasm, I see gasses bubbling from the sheer walls that surround me, and heavy currents of dead, sulfur-saturated water buffet me from side to side. Animals I have never seen before crowd the rock mouths that spew sulfurous gas; they shine pale-green light on me and follow my descent with their bulging eyes. Mobs of pale, thread-like worms reach from the rock face, sway and coil around me. Strong as I am, I feel the enormous pressure with which water tries to force its way into me.

  At the bottom of the gorge there is a lake; its water is different from the rest of the ocean—colder? saltier?—and does not mix with it. I see the Wise One coiled up on the lake’s surface. He appears immature though he is older than me. Unlike the rest of my kind, he has refused to grow big and powerful. That is why he’s chosen to live under the crushing weight of the ocean. By now he probably could not survive on the surface. He looks much like the pale worms he lives amongst . . . Suddenly I realize the wisdom of his choice: He who dwells on The Other Side is unlikely to recruit him for His errands. The Wise One will never have a master because he wields no power. In being weak and small, and trapped underwater—he is free.

  I confess my story to the Wise One—everything but the part that I am as much a father to the Boy as my Master is. He ponders it, unhurriedly. The weight of water is wearing me out but I must wait.

  He says, “Why has He made you His messenger?”

  “I lived as a Temple stone for two hundred years. I assumed I knew humans. He believed me, I suppose. That’s why.” I add, “I did not know humans at all.”

  “Good,” he says. “Now tell me, wanderer, why have messengers?”

  The water pries, pushes, searches for openings. I’ve made myself impervious but it keeps trying. It cannot stop—thus is its nature. Suddenly I know the answer. “He cannot enter our world! Nor act upon it. Yet this world is to Him like a dry riverbed to the floodwater. It is only a balance that the flood desires, nothing more. He makes us serve Him because only through us can he change this world!”

  “And yet we are imperfect tools,” the Wise One says, “cumbersome, self-serving. Distractible. Swayed by passions. The Boy then, is—”

  “Is His plan to bypass our mediation! To enter this world through human agency. To talk to humans, to make them do His bidding without us as interpreters. But what is His message?”

  “You have said it yourself, seeker, there need not be any message, only—”

  “—only floodwater.”

  “—it being water . . . ” The Wise One undulates with satisfaction, and his coils bob up and down on his liquid bedstead.

  I am confused now—the water makes me so. New questions writhe in my mind like pale worms. “What is He? Why can He act upon us? What brought Him to this world? Or has He always existed next to it?”

  “Good, good,” the Wise One savors. “You have been to the boundary of the Earth, haven’t you? You have seen the dark void. I have not. But even water has holes in it. Empty space for thought. Imagine this: when a world is in its prime, like ours, ripe and overflowing with life, it attracts creatures like Him. Suppose life is a space for Him to pour in. He feels its presence from afar, like a ripple, a current through the Universes and He follows it. But there are obstacles. The pores in the sieve of this Universe are the wrong shape or too small for Him to enter. Peering through this sieve, He can latch onto our kind alone because our life force is the strongest of all—we are the only ones He can track. Or perhaps we are the only ones who can squeeze in and out through the sieve, alive.”

  Alive. I recall the shining wind, the pain of inversion. “If He . . . if the floodwaters were to pour into our world unhindered, would they drown it?”

  The Wise One loops onto himself, tightens the knot. “Drown it. Or leaven its life to a higher level. No one knows.”

  “If so, why had the Boy been put in danger?”

  “So many answers. Perhaps you only know but a small part of His plan. Perhaps His plan makes no sense. Perhaps He was testing you, not the Boy. Perhaps He was testing His other messenger. Perhaps—”

  How crushing, how unrelenting is the water!

  “Yo
u can see for yourself, discoverer. You can enter the Boy and find the answer.”

  Ripples in the lake, ripples in my vision. Spots of darkness, as if pores are widening in the sieve of the world.

  “Enter the Boy? Possess him? What if I hurt him?”

  “What does it matter if you do? Are you afraid of your Master’s wrath? Know yourself, messenger, then maybe you’ll know your Master—”

  I am already shooting up, shearing the walls of the gorge off, sending shreds of worm flesh tumbling into abyss. I flee, chased by the greatest fear I’ve ever felt—of waters rushing in.

  . . . An ocean, a sky. I float in between, a listless island. If His purpose was to tap into humanity in bypass of me and my kind, then I have made Him fail. His Son is not really His. He is mine, too. When will He learn it? How will He punish us?

  I spend most of the next sixteen years watching over the Boy, afraid to see signs of my Master’s plan, signs of the other messenger; afraid that my Master will pull me away from the Boy. Afraid to enter the Boy and see the answer.

  Every once in a while I visit his mother in what I now call my human-form-for-Maria. That’s the only human form I know. I reveal my presence with a white lily, and each time she blushes, finding it. She nuzzles the petals, her eyes searching for my shape. “Gabriel, you silly man,” she sometimes chastises me, “It’s winter!”

  I like it when she sits me to a bowl of pottage or tells me about her day. When I listen to her, the words of the Wise One become mute pebbles, a handful among many. I can throw them away. Sometimes she wonders what future holds for the Boy. I say I do not know.

  But without her, worry gnaws at me, and the Wise One’s words come alive. If only I could peek inside the Boy, just once, then I would know what he is capable of! I am tempted, oh so tempted! One day I find him at the sea shore, mending a boat. Alone. I succumb to temptation, I take possession of him.