My words resonated through the chamber. Misa shuddered and began to retch. The frog-skinned woman detached a lock of her scarlet hair and gave it, along with a sphere etched with my declamation, to their fleetest page. My volition rushed back into me as if through a crashing dam. I swelled with my returning power.
Magic is a little bit alive. It loves irony and it loves passion. With all the fierceness of my dead Land, I began to tear apart my straw body with its own straw hands. The effigy’s viscera fell, crushed and crackling, to the mosaic floor.
The narrow man, alone among the councilors, read my intentions. He sprang to his feet, forming a rapid protection spell between his fingers. It glimmered into being before I could complete my own magic, but I was ablaze with passion and poetry, and I knew that I would prevail.
The fire of my anger leapt from my eyes and tongue and caught upon the straw in which I’d been imprisoned. Fire. Magic. Fury. The academy became an inferno.
•
They summoned me into a carved rock that could see and hear and speak but could not move. They carried it through the Southern arch, the arch of retribution.
The narrow man addressed me. His fine, sensory hairs had burned away in the fire, leaving his form bald and pathetic.
“You are dangerous,” he said. “The council has agreed you cannot remain.”
The council room was in ruins. The reek of smoke hung like a dense fog over the rubble. Misa sat on one of the few remaining couches, her eyes averted, her body etched with thick ugly scars. She held her right hand in her lap, its fingers melted into a single claw.
I wanted to cradle Misa’s ruined hand, to kiss and soothe it. It was an unworthy desire. I had no intention of indulging regret.
“You destroyed the academy, you bitch,” snarled a woman to my left. I remembered that she had once gestured waterfalls, but now her arms were burned to stumps. “Libraries, students, spells….” Her voice cracked.
“The council understands the grave injustice of an Obligation,” the narrow man continued, as if she had not interjected. “We don’t take the enslavement of a soul lightly, especially when it violates a promised trust. Though we believe we acted rightfully, we also acknowledge we have done you an injustice. For that we owe you our contrition.
“Nevertheless,” he continued, “It is the council’s agreement that you cannot be permitted to remain in the light. It is our duty to send you back into the dark and to bind you there so that you may never answer summons again.”
I laughed. It was a grating sound. “You’ll be granting my dearest wish.”
He inclined his head. “It is always best when aims align.”
He reached out to the women next to him and took their hands. The remaining council members joined them, bending their bodies until they, themselves, formed the shape of a spell. Misa turned to join them, the tough, shiny substance of her scar tissue catching the light. I knew from Misa’s lessons that the texture of her skin would alter and shape the spell. I could recognize their brilliance in that, to understand magic so well that they could form it out of their own bodies.
As the last of the scholars moved into place, for a moment I understood the strange, distorted, perfect shape they made. I realized with a slash that I had finally begun to comprehend their magic. And then I sank into final, lasting dark.
•
I remembered.
I remembered Misa. I remembered Pasha. I remembered the time when men had summoned me into unknown lands.
Always and inevitably, my thoughts returned to the Land of Flowered Hills, the place I had been away from longest, but known best.
Misa and Rayneh. I betrayed one. One betrayed me. Two loves ending in tragedy. Perhaps all loves do.
I remembered the locked room in my matriline’s household, all those tiny lacquered drawers filled with marvels. My aunt’s hand fluttered above them like a pale butterfly as I wondered which drawer she would open. What wonder would she reveal from a world so vast I could never hope to understand it?
“To paint a bird, you must show the brush what it means to fly,” my aunt told me, holding my fingers around the brush handle as I strove to echo the perfection of a feather. The brush trembled. Dip into the well, slant, and press. Bristles splay. Ink bleeds across the scroll and—there! One single graceful stroke aspiring toward flight.
What can a woman do when love and time and truth are all at odds with one another, clashing and screeching, wailing and weeping, begging you to enter worlds unlike any you’ve ever known and save this people, this people, this people from king’s soldiers and guttering volcanoes and plagues? What can a woman do when beliefs that seemed as solid as stone have become dry leaves blowing in autumn wind? What can a woman cling to when she must betray her lovers’ lives or her own?
A woman is not a bird. A woman needs ground.
All my aunts gathering in a circle around the winter fire to share news and gossip, their voices clat-clat-clatting at each other in comforting, indistinguishable sounds. The wind finds its way in through the cracks and we welcome our friend. It blows through me, carrying scents of pine and snow. I run across the creaking floor to my aunts’ knees which are as tall as I am, my arms slipping around one dark soft leg and then another as I work my way around the circle like a wind, finding the promise of comfort in each new embrace.
•
Light returned and shaded me with grey.
I stood on a pedestal under a dark dome, the room around me eaten by shadow. My hands touched my robe which felt like silk. They encountered each other and felt flesh. I raised them before my face and saw my own hands, brown and short and nimble, the fingernails jagged where I’d caught them on the rocks while surveying with Kyan in the Mountains where the Sun Rests.
Around me, I saw more pedestals arranged in a circle, and atop them strange forms that I could barely distinguish from shade. As my eyes adjusted, I made out a soldier with his face shadowed beneath a horned helmet, and a woman armored with spines. Next to me stood a child who smelled of stale water and dead fish. His eyes slid in my direction and I saw they were strangely old and weary. He opened his mouth to yawn, and inside, I saw a ring of needle-sharp teeth.
Recognition rushed through me. These were the Insomniacs I’d seen in Misa’s library, all of them living and embodied, except there were more of us, countless more, all perched and waiting.
Magic is a little bit alive. That was my first thought as the creature unfolded before us, its body a strange darkness like the unrelieved black between stars. It was adorned with windows and doors that gleamed with silver like starlight. They opened and closed like slow blinking, offering us portals into another darkness that hinted at something beyond.
The creature was nothing like the entities that I’d believed waited at the core of eternity. It was no frozen world lizard, waiting to crack traitors in his icy jaws, nor a burning sun welcoming joyous souls as feathers in her wings. And yet, somehow I knew then that this creature was the deepest essence of the universe—the strange, persistent thing that throbbed like a heart between stars.
Its voice was strange, choral, like many voices talking at once. At the same time, it did not sound like a voice at all. It said, “You are the ones who have reached the end of time. You are witnesses to the end of this universe.”
As it spoke, it expanded outward. The fanged child staggered back as the darkness approached. He looked toward me with fear in his eyes, and then darkness swelled around me, too, and I was surrounded by shadow and pouring starlight.
The creature said, “From the death of this universe will come the birth of another. This has happened so many times before that it cannot be numbered, unfathomable universes blinking one into the next, outside of time. The only continuity lies in the essences that persist from one to the next.”
Its voice faded. I stretched out my hands into the gentle dark. “You want us to be reborn?” I asked.
I wasn’t sure if it could even hear me in its vastness.
But it spoke.
“The new universe will be unlike anything in this one. It will be a strangeness. There will be no ‘born,’ no ‘you.’ One cannot speak of a new universe. It is anathema to language. One cannot even ponder it.”
Above me, a window opened, and it was not a window, but part of this strange being. Soothing, silver brilliance poured from it like water. It rushed over me, tingling like fresh spring mornings and newly drawn breath.
I could feel the creature’s expectancy around me. More windows opened and closed as other Sleepless Ones made their choices.
I thought of everything then—everything I had thought of during the millennia when I was bound, and everything I should have thought of then but did not have the courage to think. I saw my life from a dozen fractured perspectives. Rayneh condemning me for helping her daughter steal her throne, and dismissing my every subsequent act as a traitor’s cowardice. Tryce sneering at my lack of will as she watched me spurn a hundred opportunities for seizing power during centuries of summons. Misa, her brows drawn down in inestimable disappointment, pleading with me to abandon everything I was and become like her instead.
They were all right. They were all wrong. My heart shattered into a million sins.
I thought of Pasha who I should never have saved. I thought of how he tried to shield me from the pain of his death, spending his last strength to soothe me before he died alone. For millennia, I had sought oblivion and been denied. Now, as I approached the opportunity to dissipate at last…now I began to understand the desire for something unspeakably, unfathomably new.
I reached toward the window. The creature gathered me in its massive blackness and lifted me up, up, up. I became a woman painted in brushstrokes of starlight, fewer and fewer, until I was only a glimmer of silver that had once been a woman, now poised to take flight. I glittered like the stars over The Desert which Should Not Have Been, eternal witnesses to things long forgotten. The darkness beyond the window pulled me. I leapt toward it, and stretched, and changed.
•
The Children of Cadmus
Ellen Kushner
The daughter speaks:
The daughters of Cadmus have a duty to their father’s house, and so do all of the sons, as well. And thus it is that we can never be truly happy, my brother and I. For he loves the night, the strange time when all men are asleep. He loves the swoop and glitter of the stars that the gods have set in the heavens, loves to watch the heroes and the monsters cartwheel their way across until rosy-fingered Aurora strokes them away before Apollo’s chariot. Only then will he fall into bed, my big brother, sprawled out on his couch half the day until the sun has passed the zenith of the heavens, when he comes lumbering out of his chamber, blinking and rubbing his eyes, looking for something to eat. I can usually find him something. It’s a wonder my brother and I ever meet at all. For I love the cold gray dawn, when the grass is still wet with dew. I love to be up before everyone except the household slaves and the keepers of the hounds, readying for the hunt, which I love best of all. The chase through the woods through the waking dawn, the dappled trees and morning shadows, the chase of the sweet, swift animals that we love even as we seek to break them and bring them to their knees to furnish our tables and our bellies and our feasts. I love to run with my spear and my hounds in my short chiton, legs free and arms free. …But those days are finished for me. I am Creusa, the daughter of Autonoë, the daughter of Cadmus, king of Thebes. I am of an age to be married, now.
You will have heard of our grandfather, Cadmus: he who sowed the serpent’s teeth, and brought forth a race of warriors to build our fair city of Thebes. He did not do all this alone. The god Phoebus Apollo told Cadmus where to find his fate, and Pallas Athena herself stood by him as he scattered the dragon’s teeth across the fields of Boetia. The gods love our grandfather Cadmus.
And we, in return, must love and honor them.
And so I do. I make my sacrifices to Zeus the Thunderer, to Hera of the Hearth, and to red Mars, fierce in War, who is father to my grandmother Harmonia, whose mother is seaborn Aphrodite.
But it is Artemis, virgin goddess of the hunt, I love. And that is my despair.
•
The son speaks:
My sister Creusa is quite mad. I said as much to my tutor, Chiron the Centaur, and he chided me, as he so often does. He is always whisking his tail at me—it stings but does not really hurt. And I would take ten times that sting to remain his pupil. For while Cadmus and my parents think the great centaur is teaching me hunting, we left that behind long ago. Chiron is a noble archer, true, and I’m not a bad shot thanks to him. But Chiron is a master of the art of healing and knows the movements of the stars.
The stars tell stories. Some of the stars are our own people, taken from the pains of this life up into the heavens. The stars make patterns, too, and surely it all means something. Here on earth, there is pain and blood and strife. But the stars move in an orderly way, pacing out a huge dance across time that no man has seen the end of.
If I watch long enough, I think I might learn.
As it is, I am often forced out of my bed into a cold and drippy day and expected to run about, shouting, following smelly dogs howling to wake the dead. They are perfectly nice dogs, ordinarily, but they become monsters when we hunt. And so I run after poor wild beasts that never did me any harm, to open great wounds in their sides with my spear or my arrows—if the dogs’ teeth don’t get to them first—to rip open their sleek and beautiful hides and ruin them forever, letting out their life’s blood in the process while the poor animals writhe and froth trying to escape.
When I leave this earth, I would not mind becoming a star, or even a full constellation. People will look up at me, and tell my story. And I will become part of the great pattern, the great dance.
Chiron says that I should not mock my sister’s dreams. He says that our dreams are our truth, even if we cannot achieve them. He says that I should help my sister, if I can, to bear the fate the gods choose for her. I’ll try.
•
The daughter speaks:
I cannot bear it. I cannot bear to think, because I am a girl, almost a woman now, that my fate will be to become the wife of any man. I wish to follow the goddess. I wish to run with her in the hunt by day, and lie with her and her nymphs by night. Instead, a man’s hands on me? A man’s mouth on my lips, a man’s body on mine?
The only rough hair and rough skin I want anywhere near me is that of my kill. Rather than yield to a man’s touch, I would become a lion, a boar, a hare, or a deer, myself.
Such transformations are not unheard of. The stories abound of men and women turned to animals, to trees or flowers or even stars, in order to escape a more terrible fate. The gods can be cruel, but they have always helped our house.
Whom shall I pray to, then?
To Phoebus Apollo, who desired and chased the fair nymph Daphne, she who ran from him—as I would run, even from a god—screaming for help? Just as his hands reached her, Daphne turned into a laurel tree. Her toes became roots, her skin bark, her hair leaves, leaving the god unsatisfied…. I don’t want to be a tree. I want to run, and run free.
To the great Zeus, lover of the beautiful mortal Io? He was powerless when his angry wife, Hera, turned pretty Io into a cow, afflicted by flies and unable to speak her torment. No help from the gods, then, and what goddess would hear my prayers? Hera, goddess of wives and hearths, wants me for her own. Wise Athena would mock me. And Aphrodite…her kind of rapturous love is not for me. Only Artemis the Hunter can save me.
All my life I have prayed to her. But if she has heard me, she does not care.
Is it because of my impiety? Do I love the goddess too much? There is a marble statue in her temple, with high round breasts and long white thighs. Once, when I was alone there, I reached out and touched them, running my fingers along all that whiteness, cool as stone but smooth as perfect flesh. Nobody saw me, I’m sure. I dream of touching them again. But I’m afraid o
f how even the thought makes me feel, all hungry with a hunger there is no food for, and aching like pain, only strangely sweet. All I have to do is think about touching her, to feel that way again. I don’t think there’s even a name for how I feel. It fills me utterly, and I am almost powerless before it. So I dare to call it love. Maybe this is why Zeus could not leave pretty Io alone, though it meant her doom. Or why Apollo ran after the screaming Daphne.
Maybe the goddess does not want such love from me. But it is hers, all the same.
•
The son speaks:
My sister grows pale. It is terrible to see. She weeps and spins, and burns herbs at the altar of Artemis. Now Creusa wants to build her own special altar to the goddess. Yesterday she begged me to bring her horns from a mighty stag, the finest in the forest.
I’ll do a lot for poor Creusa. So I suppose I’ll take a good sharp saw, and hack away at the next deer we kill. It’s not really the season for the great-horned stags. The older ones are cunning in the hunt, and the young ones not yet grown. But for my sister, I will make a stag appear, if I can. If it will make her happy.
•
The daughter speaks:
The suitors are coming. Four from the north, three from the south, and two from the east. They will expect hospitality befitting the House of Cadmus. I must be here to welcome them when they come.
Or I must flee.
What will I do, oh, what will I do? Choose the least horrible of them, and submit?
Or could I leave the safety of our city and of my mother’s house, to live outcast and alone in some wasteland without people? Live all by myself in a cave by a spring, devoting my life and my virginity to her who hunts by day and shines by night? My hair would grow tangled, my clothing or the skins of the beasts I caught. I would drink only water, eat the flesh of my prey. The only fire I’d ever see would be my own, the only voice the voices of my dogs, and of my kills. Can I do it?
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