by Jay Lake
I have not forgotten my promises, I thought fiercely, willing her to hear the silent words from behind my eyes. Then I was before the god I myself had instantiated from a flood of uncontrolled divine energy, naïve hope, and my own earliest memories.
Kneeling, I placed my children against his belly. Had the artist sculpted him standing, I would have laid them between Endurance’s feet as I myself had once played and sheltered beneath my father’s ox. This was the best I could do.
Then I touched one of the horns. A few of the prayers tied there stirred, so I brushed my fingers across them. Whatever power or influence I had with the divine I put to wishing the prayers might be heard.
“I am here,” I told the ox.
Now all the prayers on his horns stirred. The air felt thick, even a bit curdled. Something was present.
“I know you will not answer me. That is not your way.” Endurance was a wordless god, given to guidance through inspiration rather than immediate intervention in the lives of his followers. “But when I was a small child, you watched over me. Your body sheltered me. Your lowing voice called me back from danger. You followed where I wandered, and led me home again.”
I paused for a shuddering breath, wishing in that moment that my father could have seen this time of my life. He would have been delighted at his grandchildren, I was certain of it. And amazed at what had become of his ox. That, too, was certain.
“Watch over these children of mine, so new to the world. They do not know its risks. Shelter them. Let them wander, and call them back from danger.” In a rush, I added, “Also, please watch over Samma and most especially Corinthia Anastasia, for they are in grave peril, needing of shelter, and surely wish more than anything to be called back as well.”
I touched my girl. She gurgled, bubbles forming on her lips, and stared up at the curving flank of the ox god with the myopic expression that all new babies seemed to share. “This girl-child I name Marya, to honor a goddess slain unfairly, and through her, to honor all women.”
Behind me rose a muttering. People didn’t like that name so much. Marya had been a woman’s goddess, her name unlucky now after her demise, though I had avenged her deicide. These grumblers could fall on their own blessed knives. I was hardly going to name this child Green after me, given that my own name was a product of my enslavement.
I touched my boy. He didn’t bubble or coo, but rather turned his head toward me with a gummy, toothless smile. “This boy-child I name Federo, to honor a friend who died badly but bravely, his entire being possessed by godhood. And to honor the fact that nothing in my life would be as it is today without him. For good or for ill.”
That name raised a greater hubbub behind me. Federo had very nearly been the death of so many of us. But he was who he had been to me—the man who had bought me from my father as the smallest of girls, fostered my secret training to slay the late, unlamented Duke, protected me, before turning on us all when he was corrupted by divine power. Everything and nothing, enslaver and redeemer both. But in the end, he was just another of my kills, and a city’s-worth of trouble had come with that deed.
Careful of my balance and of their fragile little necks, I collected my children and turned to the crowd of well-wishers. “I give you Marya and Federo,” I called loudly enough for my voice to ring within the confines of the wooden building. “May they live long and happily under the protection of Endurance.”
That provoked a round of applause that was most pleasing to me. People pressed forward to touch the children, to touch me, to push gifts upon the three of us. I did not like this so much, but I understood it to be inescapable, at least not without deep gracelessness on my part.
So I smiled and let my children be welcomed into their lives.
* * *
Ilona had helped me back to the shadows of my tent. The brazier within was warm. I’d grown chill outside, and worried that the babies had as well. Their two little cradles were already drawn up before the potbellied brass heater on its curled-out chicken legs. Someone had placed chips of sandalwood on the fire. The scent was soothing.
My breasts ached again, and the children were fussing. I figured they would suckle a short while, then go down to nap. Both at the same time, if I were lucky. I was already learning what a trial twins could be.
“Let me hold Marya,” Ilona said. “You care for Federo first.”
I heard the pain in her voice. “If not for Federo, we would never have met,” I reminded her. Fleeing from his army, wounded and exhausted as I’d stumbled through the unfamiliar High Hills leagues north and inland of Copper Downs, I had been taken in and sheltered by Ilona and her daughter.
From that, so much had grown between us. I wished then and sometimes wish still that more might have grown between us. How different my life would have been.
“If not for Federo…” She couldn’t finish articulating her thought, though the words were clear enough to me.
“If not for Federo, Corinthia Anastasia would yet be with you. And your little house would still stand unclaimed by fire.” I slid out of my belled silk and my fine dress, pulled on a quilted cotton jacket that I left open, and settled little Federo into my breast—one privilege his adult namesake had never tried to claim from me, to the man’s credit. Looking up, I caught her eye and willed the haunting I saw in there to fade like darkness at dawn. “I know your pain, Ilona. And I will set it right.”
“No, Green. May you never know my pain.” She clutched little Marya so tightly that I briefly wondered if this was a threat. I was certain that Ilona had never trained to be a fighter, but a woman who’d lived alone in wild country as she had for years was dangerous enough in her own right.
“I have dreamed, over and over, of finding them. If I could run across the wave tops, I would already be gone.” My own words captured my imagination a moment, boots from some magic cavern out of a child’s tale that might take me from crest to crest in strides of a dozen rods per pace. I could feel how the wind would pluck at my hair, how the storms would dog my back without ever catching up to me.
“No one runs the waves except in a boat.”
“Ship,” I said absently, wincing as Federo sucked overhard. For a child with no teeth, he could chew far too well. “And I have crossed the Storm Sea three times already in my life.”
Ilona looked down at Marya. “You cannot take the children with you.”
There she touched on what had rubbed me hardest these past weeks. I had thought much about this exact question. “I cannot leave them behind,” I said gently. “They would be … well … claimed. They would be claimed by others.” Oh how true that would have been; I knew it then and still know it now all these years later.
“You stand too close to power.” She laughed, though there was no mirth in her voice. The joy of the Naming had leached from me as well, I realized. “The gods will strip you naked and bloody, and all you will get in return is a demand for more.”
The way she said that gave me a moment’s pause. After considering why, I spoke. “I have never seen you pray. Or lay out an offering. And you came of age under the Duke, when the gods here were stilled.”
“There are many voices in the High Hills.” Ilona stepped toward me and helped me switch the babies. “Not all of them boom from the grave,” she added as we completed our efforts.
She’d never spoken of her past, not between the time she’d left the Factor’s house and when I’d met her living in the cottage tucked within the feral apple orchards. Who had fathered Corinthia Anastasia, for example? How had Ilona come upon the trick of listening to the ghosts?
I’d just been handed a hint. Huge and painful and difficult, and one I could not pursue now. Would not, for love of her.
“There are many voices in this world,” I said gently. “As you said, not all of them boom from the grave. We will find your daughter, and we will bring her home. This I swear on the lives of my own children.”
“Don’t.” Ilona’s finger touched my lips. I
shivered at the caress, though she meant nothing so intimate by it. “Do not make me promises you will not keep.”
Stung, I replied, “I keep all my promises.” But even in those days, I knew that was not true. Such a thing could be true of no one except she who was a miser of her spirit and never promised anything at all.
Ilona’s eyes glittered with unshed tears as she walked away. Carefully I put the babies down in their cradles, then took up my knives and went out into the cold. My body might not be quite sufficiently healed for the work of readiness, but I could not deny it.
Besides, I needed to do something with my rage before someone else came along and stumbled upon the brunt of it.
* * *
I chopped again at the wooden man I had lashed together from beams and stakes. Chips arced away from me into the weeds. This was wrong of me—bad for my blades, bad for my own form, wasteful of the wood—but I needed to cut, and cut deep.
Everything ached, not just my breasts and loins. Muscles in my back and legs screamed their protest after long disuse. My arms burned with the exertion. My eyes burned with tears.
Trapped. So damned trapped. I had only one course open to me, and it was impossible for me to follow. How could I take the babies across the Storm Sea? How could I leave them behind?
Another flurry of blades and blows, and stinging pain to my wrists as metal bit wood. I imagined Surali’s face before me, cheekbones crushed under my assault, eyes bleeding, lips spread wide by the slash of my knives. The architect of all my troubles, she was a human woman as confounding to me as any god had managed to be.
I drove my long knife into the target so hard the blade sang as if it would break. A rope snapped, bits of hemp flying off in the air as the wooden man collapsed. Embedded, my blade went with it. I would deserve the trouble it would cause me if I’d broken the weapon.
“Feel better?”
Whirling, I confronted Mother Argai. She’d spoken in Seliu. Even after months here in Copper Downs, her Petraean vocabulary was largely limited to coinage, drinks, and cursing.
“What?” I demanded, feeling as clumsy with my words as I had been with my weapons.
There was no watching crowd. My bursts of rage and energy were well known now. Even Lucia had not followed me out past the temple foundations to watch me scramble among the weeds and piled dirt. Only Mother Argai, her face quirked into a curious expression.
“What, indeed,” she said softly. “What?”
“I don’t know,” I confessed. Now I was ashamed of my mood. Anger was not power. It was just anger. A disease of the soul, if one indulged the emotion overmuch.
Mother Argai sat on my broken pile of wood. “What don’t you know? What it is you should be doing?”
“Oh, I know that. We return to Kalimpura.”
“When?”
“As soon as…” As soon as what? When the babies were ready? When I was ready? My voice was small and shamed as I finished my thought. “As soon as I am able.”
“Breaking weapons does not increase the likelihood of you being able.” Her tone was mild, but I could hear the scorn as she tugged my long knife free of a shattered baulk of timber and flipped it toward me.
That was an old Blade teaching trick. Throw a weapon at a student and see what they did. Most people needed stitches only once or twice.
Not me. I’d never been cut that way. I snatched the spinning knife out of the air, whipped it against my forearm to sight down the edge, then sheathed it. “A dull blade.”
“And you?”
A dulled Lily Blade, of course. I’d stepped right into that bit of rhetorical trickery. “We are going,” I told her. “As soon as I can arrange passage. Will you inform Mother Vajpai?”
I had missed being so decisive. This was as if I’d woken up from a longer sleep than was reasonable.
“If you wish,” Mother Argai said quietly. “She has gone back to rest.” The amputation of Mother Vajpai’s toes at Surali’s orders was one of the many sins I held higher than the value of that wretched woman’s life. “What of your friends and enemies here?”
“For the most part, they are the same people.” I snorted. “Still, you have the right of it. I must make my farewells.” And parting bargains, it would seem.
That appeared to satisfy Mother Argai. “I will pass the word. The women of the Bustle Street Lazaret will wish to know.”
“I shall call there in the next day or so.” My arms were flaccid and my body ached, but I felt like me for the first time in months.
“Farewell,” she said in passable Petraean, and walked away.
Stumbling toward my own tent, I called for Lucia to help me bathe and rub liniment into my back and legs. And other things besides, no doubt, once we were snugged together and touching.
Of course, I had not reckoned on the babies crying and Federo learning a new trick of vomiting into his cradle while lying down. Neither bath nor gentle caress was mine that night.
* * *
The next day after having fed my children, I passed over breakfast and forced myself into my leathers for the first time since my pregnancy. They stank a bit of molder and old sweat. Sunlight and use would do them good. Not to mention the good such exposure would do for me.
It was time to go calling, remind Copper Downs who I was, and make my farewells to those who might care to hear them. I would start with the hardest parting of all—the god Blackblood, whose boy-priest had fathered my children, and who had prophesied to claim my son. Threatened to do so, speaking more accurately.
Ilona had goat’s milk for the children and Lucia to argue with. I tucked spare rags into my sleeve to clean myself if my milk ran hard while I was away, and headed into the streets outside the temple walls.
At the time, I had not left Endurance’s compound in almost two months, I realized. To simply feel cobbles beneath my feet was such a privilege. It was a delight to be passed in the street by total strangers. Horses! Wind! The rising scents of the slowly warming weather were welcome, as evidence of the wider world.
My children I already loved foolishly, in fact beyond reason, but these first few hours of escape since their birth were a blessing unlooked for. I thanked Endurance, which seemed safe enough, and proceeded happily upon my errands.
The Temple District was showing the first signs of spring. The trees that struggled in the great iron pots lining the Street of Horizons were putting out their first buds of leaf and flower. Vendors hawking food from carts and trays seemed to have improved their wares. People walking along the street smiled, or so I thought.
Life was better.
I paused in front of Blackblood’s temple. I had done murder here twice, or near as made no difference. First back in the dark days at the end of Federo’s reign as a god, I’d caused the then-priests of Blackblood to be locked within alongside Skinless, their patron’s fearsome avatar. Vengeance was exacted for their Pater Primus’ scheming treachery. The dents and warps in the great black iron doors were mute testimony to that day’s sorry massacre.
Later, I’d fought the twins Iso and Osi, agents of the Saffron Tower, on Blackblood’s front steps. They’d died a death of women. Whatever might have become of their souls afterwards, I could only hope and pray that they writhed in the unshriven torment foretold by their all too peculiar and misogynistic faith.
Staring at the steps, I wondered if their blood still stained the ancient, foot-polished marble. Though the steps were so worn and misused that any of a dozen shadows, stains, and discolorations could have marked the end of those wretched priests.
What was left of all my misadventures in this city besides the broken doors? I believed then that when I sailed away sometime in the few days hence that I would not be coming back. Too many complications here. Too many deaths.
And truthfully, Selistan was the home of my heart. My first memories were there. I harbored ambitions that my last would someday be as well.
I trudged up to the doors. They were tall, almost twice my heig
ht, and proportioned strangely to make the entrance seem narrow even to a large person approaching.
So much of religion was about architecture, I mused. Even the meanest godling has a shrine somewhere. The first impulse of followers seems to be to build.
Today I was not a follower, nor a supplicant of this peculiar god of men and their pain. I was Green, come to bid my farewells to one who had touched my life with long, strange fingers. My own fingers, short and narrow and oh-so-dark in this land of the pale-skinned, tugged at the doors to pull them open.
* * *
Within stank of old sacrifice and unwashed linens. A male smell. No woman’s temple ever held such an odor. I looked around the familiar sanctuary. One time I’d descended from the clerestory, and nearly been killed for my trouble. On another visit, I’d entered this place through the tunnels from Below, and nearly been made pregnant for my trouble. Front doors were not so easy for me, it seemed.
Narrow, dark pillars lined the dusty shadowed space like a rank of starveling caryatids. Moth-worn banners depended from the upper reaches, faded bands as bars sinister upon them where the fugitive light of day touched briefly with each passage of the suns. A reservoir of mercury stretched ahead of me in the middle—the Pater Primus’ scrying pool, where I had never seen anything but uneasy, muckled reflections.
Notable in their absence were the god’s priests, who might presumably be found in this house of their holy. I had never seen worshippers here, and Blackblood did not have a flock as such. This temple served other needs than the usual. He favored supplicants over congregants. Every wounded man or dying boy was his. That much was obvious from the lack of benches or kneeling bolsters or, really, anything at all in this hall.
Once again, the architecture of the spirit predominated.
I did not bother to call out. Instead, I walked purposefully toward the deeper shadows at the rear. Beyond was the fane itself, the altar where sacrifices were taken up or turned back into the world. From there the labyrinthine lower levels opened as well. Skinless, whom I counted as a friend of sorts, could likely be found in those depths. And the god himself, whom I had seen in two aspects thus far in my life.