by Diane Duane
“So I sent my own blood and power out into the world through one of my lesser selves, one of the daughters of wind and storm. A mortal man ‘caught’ her, and gave her and her descendants the only thing I could not, the seed of mortality. I knew you would eventually be born and come to me, and we would strike a different kind of bargain from the old one. Instead of many souls of which a little is given, one soul which gives...almost everything.”
“In return for what?” Mariarta said.
“Oh, power over wind and skyfire,” Diun said, “and the power to aim and always strike: the power of life and death, eternal youth...trifles like that.”
Mariarta gulped. She had already tasted such “trifles” and learned how hard it was to do without them, once you got used to them. “So you gave me power,” she said, “but incomplete...on purpose.”
“And I saw to it that the need for it grew. A young man came, with a book. He was my tool, though he didn’t know. And then came some shepherds, with a lamb....”
Mariarta blanched. “They were your servants—”
“Borrowed, briefly,” Diun said, stretching lazily, “for others of us move in the world through our servants, and one power may well do another a favor. I saw to it that your friend wakened magics he didn’t understand, and you went seeking your own power to put the trouble right.”
Mariarta was trembling with rage. “You—you have been conniving at my life since I was a child!”
“Since before you were born, actually,” Diun said. “But this is what gods do, my sister, my daughter; don’t take it so hard. Are you not a creature, and is not your business to be a creation? One would think you had a right to say how you ought to have been engendered.” Diun smiled.
For a few breaths Mariarta simply sat there, enraged. Made, she thought. Bred to servitude, like an ox or a riding horse! She shook with her fury, and behind her Grugni moaned softly, backing a step. “You’ll tell me now, I suppose, that I should think myself lucky to be a goddess’s chosen child.”
“That you speak to me so and yet live,” Diun said, very softly, “is more than luck. And as for the rest—see for yourself.”
The goddess did not move: but a great weight of anger and power descended on Mariarta, inescapable as avalanche, so that she was crushed onto her knees, the light crushed away from her eyes, the thought from her mind. Then Mariarta could see again. But not with eyes, and with more than sight. It was the world Mariarta saw, whole and entire.
She saw everything, as a god sees it. The flow of millions of years and lives, the shift of continents and borders, empires rising and falling, peoples becoming great, mastering their lands, passing away; but everything small and distinct, seeming far away. Mariarta stood apart, watching. There were patterns that repeated, great ones and small, and they were fascinating. All the small lives moving among one another, like grains of sand... The tiny sparks of light that were their lives, burning bright with emotion, fading low with weariness or the approach of death, they all stirred, rustled against one another, their brief frictions making them burn brighter, or extinguish one another in an excess of rage. Murders, Mariarta saw, deaths from sickness, lives wearing themselves out in long toil against the uncaring elements; mighty plots that spanned the rise and fall of kingdoms; brief joys, great loves; but they all seemed distant and worthy of little notice. They passed in a moment, like sparks flying upward from fire, millions of them, no one worth more than any other. The view was vast, and lulling...and Mariarta found it horrible.
I will not have my friends be grains of sand, Mariarta thought, struggling. To have a life, to be in a life, working and suffering, and then to have it become, or even seem, nothing more than this—I won’t! She pushed herself back from the vision, was horrified to find that it followed her, seemingly unrefusable. To lose love and anger, and the little pleasures, every small and simple thing—not even for this, not even this vision of power, of—peace—
And there was a certain peace about it. To be removed from the troubles of humankind: disease, death, anger, the troublings of love, all made distant, of importance to others far away, but not to you.... Mariarta gasped, once more fighting the breathlessness she had felt on the way in: the hallmark of agelessness, the end of decay—but also of normal human life. The goddess was inside her fully now, taking command of that foothold in her soul; and the foothold went both ways. Mariarta could feel in Diun the knowledge of mortals who had been possessed this way, but without success. It was hard for a mortal to know himself a god, and not fall victim to the knowledge. Diun knew how many a mortal before, becoming god-ridden, withdrew in astonishment to contemplate that remote and seamless vision of the world, and spent a thousand years amazed and immobile—leaving the god trapped too. Other mortals had fallen into fits of action meant to distract themselves from their immortality, and died, as the gods can when careless or briefly unconscious of their godhead. It was always a risk—
But Mariarta gasped for breath, and saw Werner Stauffacher’s face harsh in the firelight, turned away from Walter’s, so as not to see the younger man’s tears falling on their clasped hands. She gasped again, and thought of the clods of dirt falling on her father’s shroud—and the remote and peaceful vision became less acute. She thought of the rain sleeting down the bull-shaped bulk of stone on the alp above Tschamut: she thought hard of the light in the eyes of the Knight’s son of Attinghausen. The weight of years bowing her back lessened. She struggled to straighten herself, and suddenly found her eyes her own again, and looked straight into the surprised eyes of the goddess sitting on the couch across from her.
“You’ll have to do better than that, Diun Glinargiun,” Mariarta said, and got off her knees. “For you to be in me the way you desire, I must be willing, must I not? Even the One had to get the consent of the woman He fathered His child on. You might trick me into thinking you could not be resisted...and so make me my own jailer. But I know better. Nor can you have me on your terms only. When will you offer me what I want, Diun Glinargiun? Bargain with me in earnest!”
Diun was angry, but smiling. “I did not breed you to be stupid,” she said softly. “Perhaps I might have bred for...less acuity. But no matter: I am well pleased with what I have created. So then, my creature, you will make demands of me. Your mistress...your lady...” Her voice softened. “Your lover....”
Mariarta’s body awakened in the space between one breath and the next. That old breathing sweetness, the touch of soft wind on her neck, stroking, stroking downward, delicious warmth, like sunlight, stroking, there; more than the disembodied touch, but something real now, all through the depths of her, so that she arched her back, wanting—
“No,” Mariarta said, and the word jerked out of her, almost a cry: but angry. She opened her eyes and glared at Diun. “Not that either!”
“I can be that to you whenever you please,” the goddess said. “What are the brute lusts of men to that? You don’t know in your own flesh yet...but you can guess well enough.”
“I don’t care,” Mariarta said. The heat in her was anger again. “Now, what was it you were offering, Diun? Power over wind and skyfire, power to aim and infallibly strike? The power of life and death? ‘Trifles like that’?”
“Yes,” the goddess said: and lifted her hand.
The power swirled in and filled Mariarta. She collapsed to her knees, but not under weight, this time. Mariarta was pushed there by the force of wind roaring in her ears, blinding her, rushing into her lungs with the next breath she gasped for. Mariarta could smell the stink of lightning. Her skin itched with it, that unbearable dreadfulness that the föhn wind brought with it—like breathable rage that built inside you with every breath, leaving nothing of you in the end, only the wrath. The powers of wind and lightning raged inside her, threatening to leave Mariarta no room to exist, much less to master them. And that would suit her too— Those powers were another of Diun’s old footholds: another link in the chain being forged for Mariarta—unless she could break
it, or get a grip on it that would make it hers.
Difficult, though. This random, raging power was as seductive in its own way as the cool, remote vision of the world’s life had been. How easy to be an unfocused rage, like lightning held in a fist, released at another’s command: no need for control, only unleashed fury. The lightning seethed and crackled under Mariarta’s skin, the wind raged inside her, shouting down her mind. Surrender, give it all up, be the weapon you were forged to be...
But above the shriek of the wind Mariarta turned her thoughts to the murmur of talk in the inn at Altdorf, the sound of men angrily telling their grievances, determined to act, but in the proper time and way. The sound of rage, controlled: Theo putting down his winecup, just so, not a slam, but a soft click that was more comment than any amount of broken crockery. Mariarta gasped for breath to speak with, and found it. “It’s a useful thing, anger,” Mariarta whispered, “but not just for itself. That’s not my price. I had reasons why I came. We need reasons, goddess. Don’t you see that?”
She pushed herself to her feet again, needing the support of the nearby couch to do it. Grugni slipped under her arm for her to lean on. “Stop trying to master me!” Mariarta said. “If you do it now, I promise I’ll find a way to kill myself later. All the power you spent will be lost. Maybe you won’t even be left enough to survive.” Mariarta smiled. “Be sure, I would wait until you had invested enough in me before I acted...and I would see to it you suspected nothing. You would have a good slave—until one day it would be too late.”
After a few moments, Diun shook her head. “You are my other side,” Diun said. “My other half. My lesser one, perhaps....but what should that matter? Don’t you want to be complete, and whole? Your whole life, you have been becoming me...if only in small. Huntress and archeress, maiden and free, the one who speaks to the wind and lightning, and is answered. What else could be better? What else could you want to be?”
Mariarta blinked, feeling her eyes filling with tears—strange though it was. There was something pitiful in Diun’s voice and manner, and she found herself wondering whether having a goddess’s power for thousands upon thousands of years might not make one forget what it was good for. “Hasn’t it occurred to you that you might not know?” Mariarta said. “Don’t you want your creation to, what was it, ‘say the thing you never thought of’? Can’t you see that’s what I’m doing?”
Diun’s expression was strange. “It had not occurred to me,” she said softly. “What is it you want?”
“Help,” Mariarta said, “for the people I’m working with. Our rulers have turned cruel. We must be rid of them. We need our freedom: and to help that happen, I need the power to answer me reliably. As it stands, it can’t be trusted. That was your idea, of course....”
Diun looked wry. “War was always one of the great reasons we were called upon: hardly ‘the word I never thought of’. Oh, God, make us right, and be on our side!—that’s the cry. It hasn’t changed, I see.”
“We don’t need to be made right,” Mariarta said, getting angry again. “Is it wrong to want to live in peace, as free men, without having to suffer tyrants?”
“You say their words nicely,” Diun said, “but there must be more to it than that, to interest me. This talk of freedom, and tyrants: you think I haven’t heard it before?”
Mariarta stood still, gazing at a widening vista of memory in the back of her mind: the goddess’s memory, partially hers now. Long, dark, beaked ships, drawn up in a small bay, defying a vast armament of ships glittering in purple and gold. “A long time ago now,” Diun said, sorrow in her voice. “It lasted a while, that image of freedom. They triumphed briefly: and for that time, there was no people in the world like them. But they forgot what they had fought for, and became the tyrants themselves. The very word comes from their tongue. Can you be sure the same won’t happen to you?”
“Can you be sure it will?” Mariarta said. “And because it happened that way once, does it have to happen that way again? I thought you wanted to go out in the world and live, see new things. Why bother, if you’re so convinced already that nothing new can be?”
Diun regarded her, silent. “There’s more,” Mariarta said. “Who have I ever been, until now, but a crippled you?—as you say. Now, knowing these people, making common cause with them, for the first time I’m something else besides the archeress, the huntress, the strange one. What they do matters! For the first time, I’m becoming something besides what you made me. How should I not want that? How should you not, if what you’re saying is true?”
Diun was gazing past her, out the door; that sorrowful look again. “The world matters,” Mariarta said. “You’ve forgotten how much it matters! You’ve been away too long.”
Mariarta went to stand beside Diun. “Look,” Mariarta said. “Meet me halfway, lady. You want to come out into the world? I’ll carry you there, let you taste it through my life. Let you see again how much it matters.”
“There is the business of my worship—” the goddess said slowly.
“For the time being,” Mariarta said, “leave that to me. What’s worship, as you say, but being spoken to with respect? I think I can manage that. As for the rest—” It was her turn to shrug. “Perhaps you’ll earn it.”
The power that lives behind the lightning flared briefly in Diun’s eyes. Mariarta caught her breath. But Diun, after a moment, averted her glance. “I will do what you wish...sometimes,” Mariarta said. “In return—I want your wisdom, your counsel. Your aim. And the lightning and the wind.”
“Sometimes,” Diun said.
“They are not to be withheld without good reason,” Mariarta said. “Betray me, and you’ll swiftly find yourself without a hostess. Back here—trapped in this lovely timelessness—no chance ever to get out until the world’s over with, and everything becomes moot.” Mariarta swallowed, trying to keep her own composure in the face of the goddess’s own images of such an eternity.
“And immortality,” Diun said, watching Mariarta closely. “I cannot make you invulnerable: but ever youthful, and proof against death by disease and age, that you must be.”
Mariarta frowned. “I don’t know—”
“Sister-daughter, trust me in this at least,” the goddess said. “Those who have gods inside them burn out swiftly without the limited immortality that keeps their bodies safe. You’ve borne the power that’s been in you only because it was much diluted: no tschalarera has the strength that I their original have. Refuse my gift, and you may save your friends, but you’ll live to do little else.”
Mariarta frowned at that. “Trust you...” she said. “Well...I suppose we must start somewhere. So be it.”
Diun shook her head, smiling. Mariarta was perplexed. “Oh, the bargain will suit,” Diun said, and laughed. “But what a world I come into, where mortals will dictate terms to gods, and get away with it! I look forward to teaching them how matters ran in older days....”
“Come, then,” Mariarta said. “How will we seal this bargain? If we swear, what do gods swear by?”
Diun sat upright, reached off to one side for the bow that was the moon, upended it and undid the bowstring. The length of it, like a wire of light, sizzled with small lightnings as Diun pulled it free and wrapped one end of it around her left wrist.
“Our old oath is void,” Diun said. “The One’s child bridged that river. Now there is only my power to swear by: and that passes to you.” She held out the other end of the bright bowstring to Mariarta.
Mariarta took it. It stung like nettles, and made her hand shake, but made little feeling of heat—though the lightning-smell clung close as she wrapped the bowstring around her left wrist as well.
“Now we become one, as it was done in the ancient day,” said Diun: “I am in you, and my power is yours, until death frees you or your own will gives you to me utterly. And you are in me, mortal in immortal, as it was also done anciently—” Mariarta’s senses began to swim. She blinked and staggered, and Diun, sta
nding, reached out and steadied her. Mariarta cried out at the touch, for she felt it from both sides, as if it were she who touched and steadied. And there was a burning about it, like the bowstring’s, but more intimate, more terrible— “—together in Me,” Diun whispered, her voice trembling as she drew Mariarta close, “one until time’s end—”
Their lips met. The roar of wind was there, the crash of the lightning: a flush like fire passed through Mariarta and left her shaking as if with terrible cold. She ached and burned, but the burning was estatic, as if her blood ran fire, and her skin and eyes blazed from within. Mariarta staggered, wavered to one side, blundering into Grugni; he braced himself and held her against his side with his head until she could see.
Mariarta pushed herself away from him, stared around her. Diun was gone.
Hardly, said that voice from inside her, like her own thought. Come! Let us go see this world you promised me.
“In a moment,” Mariarta said. She glanced toward the couch: the bow was gone.
Not quite, said Diun inside her. The goddess turned Mariarta and walked her to Grugni and his pack. It was an odd feeling, frightening at first, and Mariarta was determined that she would feel it no more than she had to.
But her hands worked at the fastenings, and brought out the crossbow. I have been wanting to see one of these, Diun said, much interested. It’s as I thought— Mariarta blinked at the wood of the bowstock. It had a silvery sheen about it; not plain moonlight, but a hint that it was there when needed.
I would hardly leave without that, Diun said, amused. It will be needed later. But, quickly, come! There are other ways out of here than the one you came.
“I should hope so,” Mariarta said. She patted Grugni, which was looking at her thoughtfully. “Well, old friend?” she said.