The Shattered Goddess

by Darrell Schweitzer

  He appreciated that this time he owed his life to Kaemen. Of course. If he were killed here, mistakenly by some crazed Zaborman, the game would be over.

  Light came to the northwestern sky, pale and faint. Ginna always thought of it as dawn, although he realized that it was probably just a part of late afternoon. The sun rose in the east passed unseen through the region of darkness, nearing the edge late in the day, when a little light came through.

  Thus the “days” were getting steadily shorter.

  Only by this faint illumination could he and Amaedig see their breath coming out in white puffs. By this light they could make out the dark shapes, the long shadows of a town.

  He told her all that had happened. She said nothing. She seemed to be withdrawing into herself.

  They explored the town. Windows and doors hung open. Nothing stirred within the buildings. No pigeons roosted on the slate and tile roofs.

  There was little food to be had. Mold seemed to grow preternaturally fast in the changed conditions. What few stores they could find had spoiled. There was only a huge block of cheese which he chipped away at, the pieces falling off like chips of wood, until he came to the pure center the size of an apple. What meat hung in smokehouses was ruined. After a while, they gave up their search.

  They did find some clothing, though. Each took a heavier cloak, an extra shirt, and blankets. As sunlight became only a memory, the earth and air continued to cool. The mud of the unpaved side streets was beginning to harden. The ground was freezing.

  Only once did they find any trace of the inhabitants of that place. The severed hand of a child lay on a doorstep, bloodless and icy white.

  Ginna did not try to speak to the unresponsive Amaedig. All the world was silent.

  He was glad when they were in open country again, following the main road which passed through the town and went well beyond it. The country air seemed easier to breathe. Since his experience the previous night, he took note of how he breathed. Any pain in his chest caused dread. Each deep, bitingly cold lungful of air was savored.

  After a while he thought it best to try to maintain good cheer. He sang and was pleased when Amaedig joined in, but eventually fatigue and a depression he had never managed to dispel made him stop. She did too. His arm had never healed and was beginning to fester.

  Eventually, if it continued swelling, he would have to lance it or purge it with fire, and the remedy could be as bad as the hurt. His hands and face itched where the steam had touched them. His feet ached. He was still wet from having fallen in the fountain, and his teeth chattered. He held the extra cloak more tightly around himself.

  They stopped by a roadside shrine to eat some of the cheese. He noticed that the head of the figure in. the shrine, a local spirit, had been snapped off. Small birds had once nested behind the little statue, but the nest was long abandoned and beginning to fall apart. There was an egg in it, which for an instant he hoped would be edible. But it felt like an empty shell, and when he broke it there was nothing inside but a little dust. He was too tired to care if this were an omen, a portent, or whatever.

  But tired or not, they continued on in the hours of fading daylight. He was sure now that the days were getting continuously shorter overall, but one after another, there was no regular pattern to them. Some seemed to last only an hour, others three or four hours. Something was wrong with the motion of the Earth.

  Both of them gasped aloud one night when the moon attempted to rise in that part of the sky which was not wholly covered over. It was a wonder enough that the moon was rising in the west, but a welcome thing, even if it was only a faint smudge behind the clouds.

  They took advantage of the faint light and covered more distance.

  “I wonder if it’s a trick of our eyes,” he said.

  “No, it’s there. I think ifs a good sign.”

  “I don’t know. Let’s watch.”

  And watch they did, walking toward the veiled moon, until a short while later it set in the same direction it had risen.

  They came to a hollow in the ground and took shelter there. They lay together, huddled beneath their blankets and spoke of what they’d seen in occasional sentences with long pauses in between, their words like bubbles rising slowly to the surface of a stagnant pool.

  “What was it doing rising in the west?” he said.

  “Maybe it couldn’t get up anywhere else.”

  “It failed anyway.”

  She yawned and went to sleep. He remained awake for half an hour or so, remembering cosmologies he’d seen in musty old books. What if the world had fallen on its side? What if it rolled away from the sun entirely, into the eternal cold and darkness?

  The next morning when they came to a stream to drink, they had to break the ice on its surface first.

  The moon made no further attempt to show itself.

  They came to other towns, all deserted, but in various ways. In one every shutter and door was firmly barred. Thinking someone huddled within the buildings, they pounded on doors and shouted. Their voices echoed back in answer. In another every roof had been removed and dropped into the streets, as if some giant had been rummaging through jars and throwing the lids every which way. The place was almost impassable with wreckage. But no tower had fallen. No house had been smashed. In the middle of a square, a statue of a hero stood undamaged. The giant’s touch had been selective.

  A village behind a stockade of logs was simply gone. The gate to the stockade was still locked from within. Amaedig boosted Ginna up and he climbed the wall high enough to see over. There were only bare patches where houses had once been, swept clean, without any rubble.

  They found it more comfortable to sleep in the open, away from the towns.

  Once there was a weasel to eat. Ginna bludgeoned the cold, sluggish creature to death with a stick. They ate it raw.

  Now nearly delirious from hunger and weariness, having lost all count of how long they had been journeying, they came to the forest country. The land flattened out quickly, which was a relief, but the open stretches of dead grass or bare soil were more and more frequently interrupted by clusters of the largest trees Ginna or Amaedig had ever seen. When the sky had its faint streak of light in it, they looked like an endless array of black towers, vaster than anything Ginna had seen in the dead places beyond Ai Hanlo. The tops could not be seen at any time. Branches closed overhead like a roof, enclosing the gloom in a new kind of smothering closeness. By the time clearings were few and far between, and the underbrush had given way to the more open forest floor, it seemed they were indoors again, in some endless vault of wooden pillars. Each opening between two trunks was the mouth of a tunnel, part of an entangling maze. Shadows never lessened. Even during the brief days it was often impossible to see more than a faint and faraway suggestion of grey. Ginna thought of that grey sky as the last remnant of some body otherwise wholly covered with a cancer. It was dying. The world was dying. Merely to see, when the trunks were a solid wall and he and Amaedig could not pass, he made glowing balls with his hand. When he could, when the branches were not tripping him and scraping at his face, he juggled the balls, but eventually he would miss and they would drop to the ground and burst, or drift up and vanish like the last fireflies expiring in a world grown hostile and strange. He was not cheered by the sight of them. When he could, he preferred to make a single sphere, cage it between his fingers, and use this as a lantern. Amaedig followed him, holding onto his cloak.

  Always he would stumble and crush the ball, or his fingers would become numb with cold and it would slip away and go out. He would always make another one.

  When the distant grey was gone or hidden behind the trees, when actual night came, he had to have light to keep away the sheer terror of the dark until they managed to sleep somehow—always back to back for warmth, both of them wrapped in the same blankets.

  Once he slept fitfully and had a dream. His soul did not leave his body and he did not drift over the landscape, he merely saw
with eyes more sensitive than any other creature born in the light. At first there was nothing more than vague shapes against the deeper murk, but then a clearing appeared, ringed all around with trees like the legs of an army of titans. Walls and towers were rising out of the open ground, growing like crystals forming impossibly fast. The walls were vaguely shiny, like hard coal, and they seemed to reflect where there was none to reflect. The outlines were clear. The architecture was wholly alien. What were the inverted stairs for, slowly revolving around the tilted column? Stranger was the solid pyramid, without any means of entry, which seemed to shift and flicker as he looked on it. It was a pyramid, and then it wasn’t. Some walls were almost horizontal. There were bubbles of black stone rising out of the ground. As the vision became clearer he could see the folk of this place scurrying along the thick, heavy bridges that stretched between the walls. They were hunched over. They did not walk like human beings. Every so often one leapt off one of the buildings and flew.

  And then he understood. This was a city of the new world, as Ai Hanlo had been of the old, and the inhabitants were of the darkness, spawned like flies out of a puddle. They were claiming their Earth and taming it in their fashion. Kaemen had created all this. To them he must be a god. To them Ginna was an alien, perhaps frightening. He could not live among them in their world. It would be death. Their world was to come. His would pass away. It was the future he beheld. There had always been prophets, he knew, and he wondered if he were one of them. At times like this the past, present, and future seemed to run together like pigments being mixed. He understood.

  Halfway between dream and waking he reasoned thus, and as he drew more out of the dream, the scene faded. When he asked himself, “How am I asking myself anything when I am dreaming?” he was fully awake at once.

  The forest was moving around him. A wind blew between the trees with ever increasing fierceness. Branches snapped and crashed down. Leaves struck his face. There seemed to be other sounds besides the wind: chitterings, pattering footsteps, coughings and chatter, as if the very darkness itself had come to life.

  He slipped an arm around Amaedig and held her close. She muttered something in a dream of her own, but did not wake. He felt safer holding her, the way a drowning man clings to a log. Indeed they were drowning, scraps and flotsam of the old world sinking in the chaos of the new.

  The wind tore at his hair and clothing. A bough fell on him hard enough to make him grunt, but Amaedig slept on. He let her sleep. He envied sleep. He could not sleep now himself, and if he did, what might his dreaming eye see?

  Hours seemed to pass. He had never known anything so cold as that wind. It rose into a raging tempest, and all he could do was huddle against its fury.

  He was afraid that Amaedig wasn’t sleeping, but dead, that she had frozen. She felt cold. He shook her awake, and she sat up and looked around. Her hair whipped around in her face. She huddled with him.

  Then the wind brought a trilling, cackling sound, which drew closer and closer, changed direction, and approached again. There were heavy footsteps, the sounds of trees crashing and uprooted, but the thing did not seem wholly defined by direction and place. There was a crash of thunder and something massive, immensely long and heavy, passed overhead, making the night even darker as it cast shadow upon the shadows. Trees bent and snapped. Branches rained down.

  He imagined that it was the very spirit of Death passing over, coming at last to remove the remnants of mankind from the world.

  He did not imagine that, after it passed, it turned around, very obviously in one place and direction now, and started back.

  Amaedig took him by the hand and dragged him through the trees. He groped, allowing himself to be led. He didn’t know where they were going and was sure she didn’t know either. They went away from the sound, but the thundering was everywhere, and the wind tore at them like an army of ghosts. The trunks were almost a solid barrier, with only occasional and hidden openings. Once through, it was like diving into a raging, bottomless sea.

  The huge thing passed overhead again, flapping on enormous wings. They froze against a tree. All the forest trembled.

  Ginna found himself detached from the midnight forest, the danger, the flight, and somewhere in the back of his mind part of his consciousness paused to marvel at how much he could hear when sight was denied him. He sensed spirits and powers all around him, the forest closing in like an animate thing, a smothering avalanche of rough bark and wood and leaves. Somehow he perceived, by the sound of the wind passing through the dead leaves, that those leaves and their branches rose up tier upon tier until they formed a world of their own, divorced from earth and sky.

  He heard the laughter of the thing that followed him coming from every direction. Flight was useless. There was no place to run to when the foe was something not confined to one place. But his instincts and his legs and Amaedig paid no heed to reason. He ran. Amaedig ran.

  Suddenly the wind told him that the trees were on one side of him and not on another. Then the ground began to drop and the wind came with less force. The forest had broken. They were running down an embankment until it became too steep, then sliding among mud and stones. Into a valley. A new sound came: water rushing. A river bank. A new terror came with it, the realization that they could not cross the river and would be trapped on its shore.

  But then there was a light up ahead and both of them let out wordless cries of relief and astonishment Ginna saw it as something totally impossible, a miracle, a mirage.

  By the edge of the river a large campfire was burning and, even more impossibly, there were clear outlines of many men around it “Hey!”

  “Hello!”

  Instantly there was commotion in the camp. Forms scurried. Metal clanked. When they were close enough to see, they held their arms up to their faces lest they be blinded by the firelight. They could make out twenty men or more standing before them with swords drawn and spears pointed. Many bore shields of polished metal which gleamed in the reflected light “Wait!” cried Amaedig. “We’re friends.”

  A massive figure pushed through the throng and stood between die newcomers and the fire. He was a head taller than the rest and wore armor which glittered golden from the fire at his back. His beard was long and white and draped over him like a cloak. They couldn’t see his face.

  “What are ye that would come out of the darkness?” he barked in a strange accent.

  “Two... people. A girl and a boy.”

  “Or be ye two evil shapes, here to lure us to doom?”

  “No, we don’t want to lure you anywhere.”

  “Really,” said Ginna. “We don’t.”

  The spears still pointed. None of the shields was lowered.

  Behind them, up the bank in the forest, the thunderous passage continued, echoing trilling laughter in its wake. The thing seemed to move up and down the river, passing them, moving on, returning.

  “That spirit has haunted us these many nights,” said the leader. “Whenever we put ashore it is there, and it calls out to us when we are on the river.”

  “Then we’re safe from it with you?” asked Ginna.

  “There’s none that be safe from it anywhere, but it will not take us all at once. That is not its way. But it is cunning. What proof have ye that ye be not shapes created and sent by it? We have not seen a true human on these shores for a long time now.”

  Some of the warriors began a low, droning chant, either a prayer or an exorcism. Ginna looked at the unmoving leader, then at the fire. The fire seemed a wonderful thing. More than anything else he wanted to sit by it. He thought of all the comforting fires he’d known on the road with the caravan and Gutharad by his side, or even in Ai Hanlo.

  Tears ran down his cheeks from the hopelessness and despair of all the things he had lost, from being so close to that fire and still so far away.

  “Please... you must not send us away... We’ve come so far and we’ve been afraid for so long. We’ll die if we have to go. We’l
l do anything you want us to…”

  “Come forward, both of you, and come slowly.” Carefully they approached the cluster of men, looking apprehensively at weapons, then at faces, then at the leader.

  When they were close enough, that ancient warrior reached out and grasped each of them by the shoulder, squeezing hard. Then he touched their faces lightly. Ginna flinched as the hard, cold hand brushed his cheek. A ring on one of the fingers hit him in the eye. “Where have you come from?”

  “A long way,” said Amaedig. “From Ai Hanlo. In Randelcainé.”

  “That is a long way indeed.”

  The men stopped their chanting.

  Ginna and Amaedig were led to the fire and allowed to sit. Cautiously they got down, but as soon as he touched the ground, Ginna lost all sense of care, of fear, of everything. Every muscle in his body went slack. His breath came long and deep. He fainted into sleep, crumpling over sideways, his head in Amaedig’s lap.

  CHAPTER 9

  And Fires Burn on the Sea

  Ginna awoke to a song and the sound of rushing water. They were on the river. He was lying beneath a blanket on a gently swaying wooden deck. Torches were set around him.

  He sat up and saw that he was at the front of a long, open vessel with a single mast. The sail hung limply. The wind was gone. Below him, all the company sat at the oars, save for their captain, who stood at the opposite end, holding the tiller. All sang in low voices interrupted with grunts, and the oars moved in time.

  “Oh we don’t know fear and we don’t know greed,

  But we’re there to die when there is a need.

  First a stroke and then a stroke,

  We are the good companions!”

  There were many other verses, mostly about fighting and high ideals, and some he did not understand. After a while he stopped listening. He let himself lie back on the deck. He felt the river flowing beneath him, and the ship leapt forward with every stroke of the oars. He looked at the torches set atop the ship’s mast and along its sides. He tried to pretend they were stars. He felt himself dropping off to sleep again.