The Shattered Goddess

by Darrell Schweitzer

  He stood over the plains of Randelcainé, all things visible to him, viewing the strange towers raised up without fear of the sun.

  And then, for an instant, he withdrew into his tiny body, and was rocked from side to side among fleshy, sticky bands.

  He staggered over the plains of Randelcainé, his head roaring inside, his knees buckling.

  He spread his arms apart, reaching from horizon to horizon, and another voice called out from within him in something vaster than words, in the very language of darkness, and all the Dark Powers of the world came to him, pouring on his flesh like rain, becoming part of him, filling him with power, drowning that tiny speck of a memory called Ginna in a whirlpool of hatred.

  And Ginna felt their unreasoning, endless malevolence, the thundering of their hatred.

  And he felt the triumph of the other who shared this state with him.

  He became himself again, and he was standing in a vast, curving room draped in black. There were two huge, round windows looking out into darkness, and he knew them to be the eye-sockets of the walking corpse of The Goddess.

  He was facing the old, eyeless woman with the flames burning inside her. A bony hand reached out at him. She made a magical sign.

  You. Not now. You can’t wreck my plans now.

  He reached for his knife, but felt only his nakedness. She seized him. They wrestled, her fingers tearing into his arms. He rammed his knee into her and she bent over with a gasp and tumbled, dragging him down on top of her. The flames burned hotter in her eyes. He could feel their heat on his face. She was far stronger than he, like a living statue, irresistible as stone. Her mouth gaped wide, wide, drooling curses.

  The world reeled, horizontal to vertical to horizontal. They were thrown against a wall of bone. Suddenly his hands were inside her chest, closed together where her heart should have been, and they opened. He withdrew his hands as if from a muddy pool.

  The black hag exploded with light. In bursts, in sheets, in showers of sparks, she vomited light out of her mouth, her eyes, her ears. Her body burst asunder in light, the ragged sides flapping and split sailcloth in a tempest. Her arms flailed wildly. She screamed, and screamed, until her screaming was a wind, an avalanche, a force in itself.

  Ginna watched, horrified, fascinated. Then, in an instant, faster than thought, many things happened: up became down as the huge body crumpled. The witch was above him, then on him, grasping his back, clawing, locking arms and legs around him like an agonized, dying spider. Awash with light, she scrambled over him until her face was before him, her burning mouth stretching impossibly wide to swallow him, to close over his head like a hood, flooding his mind with thoughts and fears and memories not his own. The two of them fused together like melting figures of wax, losing all shape and form and substance in the great cauldron of light

  There were fires in his eyes. His flesh was hard as crystal, his joints grating as he moved.

  Something seized him by the hair, yanking his head back. His arms and legs were sinking into a soft mass. Yes, like wax. It was like swimming in wax as it hardens. He was frozen in place. He felt his body dissolve away; a thousand million voices whispered; a thousand million screamed, and above all the witch babbled an incomprehensible litany in the language of night. His sense of self was rapidly being broken up into countless, tiny particles and lost to otherness. He was sharing his mind with the witch, with the Dark Powers that still screamed to join him, with the lingering residue of The Goddess. He was a silent drop of water suddenly cast into the roaring ocean.

  He stopped falling. His knees straightened. He stood up. The witch stood up. That which had been The Goddess stood up. All in the same motion.

  The last thing he, Ginna, was able to do as a discrete, if tenuous remnant of his original consciousness, was to move his hands. His hands, with bony fingers the size of towers, long arms stretching to the ends of the earth. He brought his hands together; he thought his final thought; and separated them.

  There was a burst of light. The witch shrieked for the last time.

  A sphere expanded.

  Worlds. Hadel of Nagé had said. Those little balls of luminous nothing were embryonic worlds, and now one spread out and grew with all the strength of The Goddess behind it

  And the Earth was reborn. The new age began.

  Ginna sought a meaning, a revelation, an answer.

  He was not answered.

  * * * *

  It was to Tamarel, who had been Amaedig, that the final vision came.

  She sat with the Mother of The Goddess in the afternoon of her life, in the gentle light of the grove, by the edge of the fountain. The water was dark, but the Mother watched it intently. Tamarel looked too, and saw a tiny spark appear like the first star in an evening sky. It was equally far away as a star, only below. Surely the fountain was infinitely deep.

  The fish with the hourglass in its mouth stared forlornly. No water flowed.

  She wondered what the Mother saw. Did that spark mean that Ginna was still alive? She wondered what it would be like if she were ever to meet him again. She tried to tell herself that their last meeting had been a dream, and he would be his old self.

  But dreams tended to be true.

  Suddenly the Mother rose and said, “Come.”

  “What has happened?”

  “He has done what he was always meant to do.”

  The Mother took her by the hand and led her through the forest, away from the fountain. The trees grew nearer together. Even in the presence of the Mother, the shadows deepened.

  The Mother raised her arms, and cried out a command in something beyond words, in the very language of light The Powers streamed around them, forming a glowing vessel which lifted them up on the substance of light. It was like drifting on a cloud made of airy faces and bodies, with lacy wings of fire whirring everywhere. Tamarel felt herself lurch and twist at impossible angles. Then she was falling gently, her senses slipping away, into light.

  She came to rest, standing, on hard, polished stones. The blinding light faded into blinding darkness. The Powers hovered around them like a constellation of glowing moths.

  “We are in Ai Hanlo,” the Mother said. “Look.”

  Tamarel looked. She saw two red stars high in the sky, far away.

  “Ye lights, ye motes, ye flames of Powers, come to me!” The Mother cried out and the air around her burst into brilliance. All the Powers of the grove, all the remaining Bright Powers in existence came streaming to her command. They arched away from where Tamarel stood, over the plain like a rainbow of a thousand suns, revealing in their passing the wide plain, the ruined city of Ai Hanlo all around them, with half its mountain broken away, and beyond the city, on that plain, a colossal figure standing, a thing like a crudely carven stone statue, with red stars for eyes.

  The light gathered around it and faded. The world was dark again. The figure stood over the plain, tall as Ai Hanlo Mountain, grey and veined with glistening black and sprinkled with glowing dust.

  It folded its hands together and opened them. A sphere formed, brilliantly flaming but delicate, expanding like an immense glowing soap bubble.

  The light approached Tamarel like a wave. A hot wind preceded it. For an instant the sky was bright as day. She could see where the side of the mountain had been sheared away. She could see the yard where the katas had once exercised, and she knew that she was on a porch just outside Hadel of Nagé’s quarters. She had accompanied Ginna this far many times.

  The bubble passed over her. She, and all of Ai Hanlo were within it. Her eyes were dazzled, but when the drifting spots settled to the periphery of her vision and she could see again, she felt a burden lifted from her. She was no longer anxious or afraid. She was more alive.

  The stone being was transfigured, its outline softening, growing more human. For an instant she was sure that it had her friend’s face. His expression was one of beatific calm.

  Something touched her leg. She looked down, and at first
did not recognize what knelt before her.

  “Help me,” it croaked, and she knew the voice. It was Hadel. The thing which disfigured his face hung limp and steaming.

  “Take him. Heal him.” came a voice, and the broken mountain trembled. Tiles fell from rooftops. A cracked wall nearby gave way into a slide of debris.

  The God stood over Tamarel.

  “Can you understand it?” demanded her companion. “I can only hear the roaring of the wind.”

  “Yes, my beloved,” said Tamarel, ignoring her.

  The voice came like a cyclone, like a great wave rushing over the land, knocking them off their feet. It said many other things. To Tamarel they were words, to the other, only noises.

  The Priestess stood. The Mother sat huddled by her as Ai Hanlo crumbled around them.

  It was to Tamarel that the vision came. She looked to the east; she saw a face peering up over the horizon, a face half like a bird, but very wise, very beautiful, and she knew it to be a sign that the new age would not be wholly for mankind.

  She looked to the God. The stone figure was no longer stone, no longer crude, but graceful, lithe in its immensity.

  She saw the God dance the dance of life, juggling stars in his hands, placing them in the sky in new constellations. She saw the God raise a new moon. She saw the God reach to the horizon and bring up a new sun, sudden as thunder, filling the world with light. She saw the cities of the plain, which had never feared the sun, now vanish away, smashed with the hammer of light.

  She saw the God dance across the world, setting it spinning into a new rhythm beneath the sun and sky.

  She saw him increase in size, rushing up into the heavens, becoming more beautiful than the mind can conceive, than the tongues of men can describe, spreading like memory upon the wind.

  In the end was the Word, and the Word was light in Darkness and Darkness in Light, and the Word touched all the Earth and covered it.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Avatar of the Dancing God

  A million bubbles rose and fell in the foam of time. One of them, tumbling pale and golden, had been called Ginna. A mote of thought came together with another, and another, and slowly awareness grew, and a separation took place, and after a measureless interval, there was something which could name itself “I.”

  He stood in a meadow beneath a clear blue sky. It was noon. The sun was warm on his bare shoulders. He walked, feeling every blade of grass beneath his feet, every crumpled leaf from the previous autumn, and then the soft, dry dust of a road. A breeze caressed his nakedness.

  He juggled balls of light and wandered up a hill and down the other side. He met a traveler on the road, a tall, thin, pale white being with a bird-like head. It wore a cloak of iridescent purple. It regarded him indifferently and went on its way.

  From the top of the next hill, he spied a city carven all of coral, like an inverted pyramid, floating above the horizon.

  He came to a place of simple wooden huts, where shouting human children ran hither and yon. At the sight of him, they scattered. Then one came out of hiding beneath a basket and approached him. He smiled and let the balls of light drift. One of them burst on the boy’s forehead and he flinched, but was not afraid.

  A woman came running from a doorway, her face hidden in a shawl. She grabbed the boy and dragged him away.

  Ginna created more balls and juggled.

  “It’s him!” someone whispered in a booth behind a wicker screen. “He should go to The Mother.”

  He let the balls go, pulled the screen aside, and two women and a man stared at him in awe and terror.

  “Yes, take me to the Mother,” he said. Deep within him, a half-remembered emotion stirred. He savored the sensation.

  This was the most beautiful place he had ever beheld, and all its people were marvels, it seemed. It was good to be back.

  Hundreds were gathering, making signs with their hands that he did not understand. The crowd parted. A man of stately bearing, dressed in elaborate robes and a plumed headdress came forward. He beckoned. Ginna followed. Keeping a safe distance all the way, the man led him away from the village, through a wood, to a wall, through a gate, along a marble pathway lined with golden images, and into a temple. He tapped a small gong with a hammer, then left Ginna alone.

  The polished floor was cold underfoot He looked down at his reflection, and realized that he was faintly glowing and slightly translucent.

  He walked the length of a long corridor, into the heart of the temple. He came to a wide room lit from a skylight set in a dome. There, on a throne, sat an ancient woman like withered driftwood left behind by a storm.

  She opened her eyes slowly as he approached, but did not move.

  “Oh, it is you,” she said in a voice of infinite weariness.

  “Yes, it is I.”

  “You’ve come for an explanation at last.”

  “I am still... very puzzled.”

  “You have a thousand memories, and I have one, and you want me to explain?”

  “If you would.”

  “I have thought about it long, what you would be like if you ever returned.”

  “And?”

  “I think you have become an avatar of yourself, a fragmentary manifestation of a greater whole. But you mustn’t delude yourself. You are no more the Ginna that once was than I am... what I once was.”

  “You helped me once. Now help me again. Bring Amaedig—I mean Tamarel—to me.”

  “Even as I said, you are not the same. Nothing is. The Earth is a strange place for mankind now. We are few after the darkness. This is not our age. In the eyes of the new creatures, we are quaint and ancient and a little crude, I fear.”

  “Yes, I saw them. Bring Tamarel.”

  “Ginna, don’t you know me? I am Tamarel. The Mother of the Goddess died long ago, as soon as her task was complete. But you touched me and commanded me, and I obeyed, and lived, and five hundred years went by. Everyone thinks me divine. I’m still your priestess.”

  “But... they called you The Mother.”

  “When you were... You touched me, as a man touches a woman, and I found I was filled with your seed. I gave birth, in great pain and greater joy, to most of the forebears of present mankind, and to the... others. The world was repopulated through me, through you. I have earned my title.”

  “I wanted to love you.”

  “I wanted to love you too.”

  “But it was impossible.”

  “Now I only want to rest. Do you really need a priestess?”

  He reached out and touched her, and in the blinking of an eye, only her faded clothing lay in a heap upon her throne. He felt her spirit drift past him.

  Later, he came out of the woods and looked over a plain. He saw a broken mountain standing, pocked like a face wasted by disease with the ruins of a city. He thought of the towers he had seen standing in the desert, built during the world’s noon. They were gone now.

  He reached out and touched the mountain, cleansing it.

  The world was wholly strange to him now, wholly new, and he had no place in it.

  A brave and pious man followed him and, when he at last examined the spot where he had stood, he found that he had made no more impression on the ground than the passing shadow of a cloud.