by R. Lee Smith
The Great Spirit hesitated, then said simply, “No.”
“You did not tell me there would be no love.”
“It is eternity,” he said. He glanced at Urga, frozen and forgotten. “Olivia, there must be a challenge.”
“Must there?”
“You must break her to your will, or she to hers. It is eternity. There can be no unknowns.”
Eternity. She knew now how long that was. She, who could count the drops that filled the oceans, looked ahead and saw every hour outside of Time, and she was cold.
Yes, but he’ll live, she thought vaguely. This son of hers she had no interest to see, he would live. That was the price, wasn’t it? That was the bargain she had made.
She looked down, down past her dripping fingers to the still, slack, staring face of someone who had loved her only minutes ago. She looked away, across the gentle waves to the two figures sitting together in the sand, and beyond them, to the mountain filled with people she had given up her mortality for. She looked and saw, among the billions of flickering human lights, the two, still grieving, who had given her a mortal life to give up.
“Olivia!”
The power was hers to do with as she pleased, but there was no pleasure. The power was hers to do great things, but she had no interest to see them done. The power was hers to see her loved ones safe until the end of all their lives, but she loved no one.
Olivia brought Urga out of the ice. She came out hissing and staggering, fell to her knees, and stared up at Olivia in hateful silence, waiting.
Olivia said, “I can see now, how to kill you.”
Urga’s fingerless hands became hooks, became claws, became hands again.
“And so I will win any combat between us. Because no matter the hurt you inflict on me, you cannot kill an immortal and I can. Pain is so temporary.” Olivia knelt slowly beside the body on the beach, gazing at it. “Death is forever.”
Urga’s wings unfurled and folded flat.
“You know that, of course. You’ve dealt death often enough against the mortal lives you’ve eliminated, the lives you’ve helped to make. This life.” Olivia touched the corpse. It felt unpleasant, but she did not take its water away. This was important somehow.
Urga did not move or speak.
“I will not fight you for the word ‘mate’. I will not fight for the privilege of being penetrated in your stead. But I will kill you, Urga, if you do not promise me now to take back your vengeance and never to cast a curse of death upon any living thing again.”
“My children are none of your concern.”
“I am not interested in fairness,” Olivia said. She touched one of the mottled paint-signs on the corpse’s chest, traced it with her fingertips. “Conceive as you have always conceived. Birth your young through gullan wombs. But allow even those you do not touch to bear their young without blight. Your age of vengeance is ended.”
“They are mine.”
“I take them from you. All of them. Those living, those yet unborn… those dead.” Kodjunn. His name was Kodjunn. “You have only to refuse me again and I will not press further. I will only kill you and take them anyway.”
Urga considered.
Olivia took the wounds from Kodjunn’s body. She sensed that she could make it breathe if she chose, make its heart take up its rhythm, but she did not. Life was more than the workings of a body. Even in this state, she knew that.
“Will you take my mate?” Urga asked.
“No.”
The Great Spirit stepped back, his light flaring with emotion she could see, but not identify.
“Then I give you my word it shall be as you command. My blessing remains with those I bring forth. My curse ends.” Urga raised her wings and lifted herself into the sky. She hung there in the darkness, full and round and glowing with cold light, until the clouds passed over her. When they receded, the moon, and only the moon, remained.
The Great Spirit looked at Olivia. It was not in his nature to ask for favors, or even clarifications, only to give orders and see obedience. She knew already he would never give the one command he must wish most to make. He too had no comprehension of death. She supposed he must fear her, in some vague way that even he didn’t fully understand. The thought gave her no satisfaction; happiness was love.
“I have all the power in the world,” she told him. It was not a boast. “I can do whatever I want with it.”
He looked away.
“I don’t want this.”
“So I see.”
Olivia gazed down at the body. “He said that he would paint me tall. He said that I would be Olivia throughout and I would be good. It should be important to me that this is true. It should be…and it isn’t.”
“So you will usurp me,” the Great Spirit said. “You will take the world and all its children for your own. Ha. There is no mouth that does not drink from your blood. You could have them all.”
“I could,” she said thoughtfully, and looked out at them, all of them. “But I won’t.”
He frowned at her, took a single cautious step. “No? Will you consent to be bound here then?”
“No.” She faced him, not smiling. “This is my power. I can do whatever I want with it. Even give it up.”
The god’s mouth dropped open, soundless. He stared.
“I’ll always keep you guessing, big guy,” said Olivia, and let it all go.
It hurt, much more than taking it in had done. There was a moment when she wondered if she was about to die, but the moment eventually ended and she was still there. Insignificant, exhausted, filled with pain, but still there, and still, by God, Olivia Blake.
Kodjunn’s eyes were still open. She closed them. “I know this isn’t the ending you were expecting,” she said wearily. “I guess I don’t have the right to ask for favors anymore.”
“You will have anything within my power. Anything.”
“Take care of Kodjunn. Don’t just…wave your hand over him. I know you can, but…please. Find him a good place. Do it right.”
“Yes.” The Great Spirit bent and lifted the body into his arms. He looked down into the face that he had worn throughout this journey and his molten eyes dimmed. It was a long time before he looked at her again; something in him was changed, and it stayed changed. “I thank you, human. I thank you…Olivia.”
“I thank you, too,” she said. Why not? Thanks, like pity, was cheap, and she knew he’d want to hear it. She put her hand on Kodjunn’s chest and stood on her tiptoes to kiss the Great Spirit’s mouth. Then she turned around, stepped out of the puddle of now powerless and unremarkable water, and looked out over the water. The sun was coming up in the east.
She started walking home.
THE END
April 1994
November 2009
Also by R. LEE SMITH:
Heat
The Lords of Arcadia Series:
The Care and Feeding of Griffins
The Wizard in the Woods
The Roads of Taryn MacTavish
The Army of Mab
The Scholomance
Cottonwood
Coming Soon!
Last Hour of Gann
Excerpt from The Scholomance
By R. Lee Smith
Mara came home on a Wednesday with a mild sunburn and a bank receipt for eighty-three thousand dollars stuffed indifferently in the front pocket of her jeans. The house looked empty from the street, but her mother was in, sitting in the front parlor with the lights off, working on her second bottle of wine. Mara was tired and inclined to let her, but when she walked in and dropped her bags at the foot of the stairs, her mother said, “Your little friend sent you a letter,” and everything changed.
Mara paused, one hand on the banister, and looked back. She wasn’t aware that she had any friends at the moment. “Who?”
Her mother didn’t look up. Just sat and stared at the wall and sipped her wine. She wasn’t thinking. She wasn’t even remembering things, although t
here were plenty of photographs on the wall where her blank eyes rested. Caroline Warner was empty tonight, and so much bigger than the space her skin enveloped.
She was like this more and more often these days, whether or not anyone was around to see her. Usually Mara was content to let important matters slide until her mother felt like being lucid, but tonight she was jet-lagged and worn out, so she reached in and gave the blackness inside her mother’s head a light slap. Her mom jerked hard, spilling wine over her chest. In the darkness, the spreading stain looked uncomfortably like blood. Immediately, a feeling that was not guilt but probably should have been welled up and Mara thought, ‘There might have been a better way to handle that.’
But it worked. Color and life came slowly up from wherever they’d been buried. Caroline Warner looked dully around and thought, ‘Such a strange child.’
There was no love in the thought. Mara couldn’t remember if there ever had been.
“I have a letter?” she prompted.
“Are you home?”
“Yes. You got a letter for me?”
“I dreamed about you…I think.” She was fading out, thinking of the past, but in ways so blurred, even Mara couldn’t be sure if the things she saw had really happened. “Did you…take care of things?”
“Not yet, but I put the money in the bank in Nevada. I can call the firm tomorrow. My little friend…?”
“Your little friend sent a letter. I had to…I had to pay the postage due.”
“I’m sorry,” Mara said patiently. “Where is it?”
Her mother drank wine and thought, ‘Those aren’t my eyes. Those aren’t Cade’s eyes. Where did those awful, awful eyes come from? Jeepers creepers, just like the song. Where did she get those eyes?’
Christ, she could be at this all night. Mara ignored her mother’s mental ramblings and started looking for the damn thing herself.
The kitchen was trashed, and unless the care service had just up and quit while Mara was away, all this mess had happened after the girl left for the day at six. She’d be tempted to make some angry midnight phone calls, except that Jenny’s cheerfully illegible handwriting was down in the log: good apetite for din., quiet to-day but active!! Active, right. It looked like her mom had just opened up every Lunchsnax in the fridge, taken one bite, dropped it, and opened up the next. When did this happen? When did her austere, somewhat brittle mother turn into a crazy person? How did a woman go from a little chronic depression to…to wallowing in her own frigging Lunchsnax?
She needed to hire a live-in, that was all there was to it. Another damn brain in the house, one that wasn’t prone to peaceful lapses into nothing. God damn it.
Caroline appeared in the doorway, lightly swaying on her feet. She wasn’t drunk. “Is your father home?”
“He died two years ago, Mom. Where did you put my letter?” Mara dragged the garbage bin over and started gathering up wrappers and food indiscriminately, her lips pressed tight together, seething as she stared at the undeniable clarity in her mother’s mind. It was laziness, pure and simple. Caroline wasn’t crazy any more than she was drunk, she just wanted to be. Being crazy was easier than picking up after herself, easier than living life and doing things. Who wouldn’t want to be crazy and just let someone else pay all your bills?
“When…When is he coming back?” Her mother’s voice shook. She was thinking of the girls. There had been a lot of girls. “I need to call him.”
“He’s dead, Mom.” The hell with it, she’d leave the mess for Jenny, along with another hundred bucks. Two hundred, and orders for a refrigerator lock. And if Jenny pocketed the change, as Jenny so often did (in her cheerfully dishonest way), so be it. Mara was not in the mood to deal with it, and throwing money at the things one was not in the mood to handle was the Warner way. “He’s not coming back. He’s dead.”
“Oh. Oh no.” Caroline Warner began to cry. Amazing that she could do that and drink at the same time. She cried and wished she were back in Venice, back on her honeymoon when Cade still loved her. She wished she were back in a time before this horrible, ice-eyed person ever existed.
“I missed you too,” Mara muttered, and shoved herself into her mother’s head.
‘Postage due’ meant the post office, so Mara started there, calling up an image of the quaint little brick building to see what resonated. She thumbed through half a dozen memories before she found one in the right time frame (or at least, one with her mother in a stained blouse and uneven hair, looking vague as she walked with fat, happy Rosalie up to the glass doors. Rosalie made this a Monday or a Wednesday.), and pulled it open for closer inspection. The letter was a big manila envelope. The amount due was $18.03. Seemed excessive.
Mara let the memory spool out through her phantom hands, watching closely. Her mom came home, made poor Rosalie work too damn hard to make sure she got fed, and then went upstairs. She shuffled vapidly through the house and finally put the letter in the linen closet where she picked up some clean sheets. ‘That horrible person will be home soon,’ was the thought behind this lifeless act. ‘She’ll be home and tired. She should have fresh sheets to sleep in.’
As always when offered glimpses of her mother’s caring, however indistinct, Mara felt a surge of hopelessly mingled pity and anger, and something else, something that ought to have grown into some kind of tender feeling, if only it had known nurture. She closed herself out more gently than she’d torn her way in, and gave her mother a weary pat on the shoulder. “Go to bed, Mom,” she said, giving the words a push to make them root. “Don’t drink anymore tonight. Just go to bed.”
“I’m waiting up for your father. He’s…working late tonight. He works so…so hard for us.”
She could have told the truth again. She probably should. But her mother would take herself to bed as soon as she’d been ground down long enough by the command Mara had left inside her, and anyway, she’d bullied her mother’s muddled brains enough for one night. Mara left her bags where they were and went upstairs, rubbing her tired eyes.
She took the envelope from the linen closet into her room and sat down at the desk where she used to do homework, where she kept all their financial papers now. This was the only piece of personal correspondence she’d received in a long time. Two years, at least.
Mara Warner, said the envelope, and it had to be a friend, all right. Her parents were not nickname people; the whole rest of this wide world knew her as Kimara. Her father had wanted a son. Her mother, thanks to a smudgy ultrasound, had expected to give him one, and so they had planned out only boy’s names. Malcolm Cade, she was supposed to have been. The delivering doctor’s name had been Jonif Kimara, and that was good enough for the likes of her. Malcolm Cade would be preserved for the next child, preserved forever as it turned out. Life was funny.
Mara Warner, in the middle of the envelope. Neatly-lettered. She didn’t recognize the handwriting. Beneath it, her mom’s address. Mara’s address, since she’d never really lived anywhere else, unless you counted college. And in the upper left-hand corner, another name: Connie Vitelli.
‘Your little friend,’ her mom had said, and God knew Mara only ever had the one—then, now, or anytime in between—but all the same, she hadn’t expected to see this. Connie was gone, run off to find some Romanian fairy tale from which there was only a slim chance of coming back and, one would assume, no mail service at all. Gone away with just six words left behind her and none of them goodbye. Gone away when Mara’s back was turned, just like the sixteen years between them never mattered.
Mara’s hand strayed up to her throat, touching the cheap gold-colored chain for a cheap, gold-colored locket. Her birthday present. The very best birthday. Best Friends it said on the outside. “Best friends,” Mara murmured, looking at her letter. “Right.”
* * *
The friendship was, like all the great ones, a total accident. Mara never would have met Connie if crusty old Mrs. Matsuo hadn’t forced her second-graders into alphabetized double-r
ows for every possible occasion, even the walk to the lunchroom. Every day, sometimes twice a day, Vitelli, Constance stood side by side with Warner, Kimara.
Mara, who had been living with the worst faces of humanity all the years of her young life, had already stopped trying to make friends and would have been content to stand and stare at the back of Underwood, Trevor’s blonde head without ever speaking, but Connie was lonely. Lonely was a bit of an understatement, really. Little Connie was one of those friendless and fundamentally forgettable people who are born under a cloud of gloom and are pretty much fated to go through life unloved because of it. It used to be that such people could at least join a monastery (or a convent, as the case may be) where personality didn’t much matter, but in these fine and enlightened modern times, little Connie suffered ostracism without end: shunned by her peers, misunderstood by her family and overlooked by teachers, with nothing to look forward to but cruel jokes in the high school crowd, dateless weekends rolling over into desperate sex with strangers, failed efforts at counseling, and ultimately, a one-room apartment and half a dozen cats. Connie Vitelli was one of Life’s Great Throwaways, even at the tender age of nine, and yet one day, this wretched creature glanced over and interrupted her own hazy funk of human misery to think, ‘She always looks so sad. I should sit with her today. Maybe she’ll be nice to me.’
Mara did not consider herself to be sad, but even then she knew she wasn’t happy. Who could be happy, living like this? Over nine hundred kids went to Frieda Kahlo Elementary School, along with sixty-plus adults. The little ones were nothing but nerves, afraid of teachers, afraid of schoolwork, afraid of the buses, the playground, the bigger kids. The older ones were already turning ugly on the inside, learning how to lie, how to cheat, how to dominate and feed off each other. The grown-ups were the worst of all, because even the ones who still loved you had enough reasons to hate the job that it stained everything they thought about you, and there weren’t too many left who loved you in the first place. All those minds in constant motion, and the Panic Room back then was still just concrete walls and one big-screen TV she couldn’t turn off. No, she wasn’t happy.