People shouted and ran as we passed. Women snatched up their children. A pair of priests crossed their staves to make a sign against us. But Father ignored them all.
We came to a street of fine houses. Astonished faces stared down at us from high windows. Then Father led me to the end of an alley, down a tunnel, and into a yard behind one of the mansions. He knocked at a door. An old man appeared, by his garb a scholar. He gasped and made a sign to ward off evil.
Father pushed me inside.
“Teach my son what you know,” he said to the old man. “I will pay well.”
That was how I became an apprentice to Velachronos the historian, scribe, and poet. I knew letters already, but he taught me to make fine ones full of swirls and beautiful colors. Then he taught me something of the history of our city, and of the river and the gods. I sat with him for long hours, helping to transcribe ancient books.
Clearly Father wanted me to become learned, so that I would dwell in honor among the people of the city, and know at least modest comfort, as Velachronos did. The old man remarked on this once, “You seldom see a rich scholar or a starving one.”
But my sister was ignored completely. Once, when I came home after lessons and found Father outside of his workroom, I said, “What about Hamakina?”
He shrugged. “Take her along. It hardly matters.”
So Velachronos had two apprentices. I think he accepted us out of fear at first. I tried to convince him we were not monsters. Gradually he acquiesced. Father paid him double. I labored over the books. Hamakina, too, learned to paint beautiful letters, and Velachronos taught her something of music, so she could sing the ancient ballads of the city. Her voice was very beautiful.
He was kind to us. I remember the time with him fondly. He was like a grandfather or a generous uncle. He took us to the children’s festival that spring, and rose from his seat to applaud when Hamakina won the prize in the contest of the masks and the sparrow-headed image of the god Haedos-Kemad leaned forward and showered her with candy.
I felt too old for that sort of thing, yet Father had never taken me to the priests to declare me a man. It is a simple rite unless parents want to make it elaborate. There is only a small fee. I had already had my vision from the gods. Yet Father did not take me and I remained a child, either because I was somehow unworthy, or he merely forgot.
Meanwhile his sorceries grew more extreme. At night the sky flickered from horizon to horizon, and sometimes he came out onto the wharf in front of our house to speak with the thunder. It answered back, calling out his name, and, on occasion, my name.
The stenches from the workroom worsened, and there were more voices, more terrifying visitors in the night. But, too, Father would sometimes stagger about the house, pulling at his beard, flailing his arms like a madman, like someone possessed by a frenzied spirit, and he would seize me and shake me so hard it hurt and plead with me, “Do you love me, son? Do you still love your father?”
I could never answer him. It drove me to tears many times. I locked myself in my room and he would stand outside the door, sobbing, whispering, “Do you love me? Do you?”
Then came an evening when I sat studying in my room—Hamakina was off somewhere—and a huge barbarian adventurer climbed in through the window, followed by a little rat-faced man from the City of the Delta.
The barbarian snatched the book from my hands and threw it into the river. He took me by the wrist and jerked. My forearm snapped. I let out a little yelp of pain and the rat-faced man held a long, thin knife like an enormous pin to my face, pressing gently on one cheek, then the other, just below my eyes.
He whispered, flashing filthy teeth. His breath stank.
“Where’s yer famous wizard da’ who’s got all the treasure? Tell us, brat, or I’ll make a blind girl out of ye and tie yer guts fer braids—”
The barbarian merely grabbed me by the front of my gown in one huge hand and slammed me against the wall so hard that blood poured out of my nose and mouth.
I could only nod to my left, toward Father’s workroom.
Later, when I returned to consciousness, I heard the two of them screaming. The screaming went on for days behind Father’s door, while I lay feverish and Hamakina wiped my forehead but could do nothing more. It was only when the screaming faded to distant murmurs, like the voices I’d heard that one time before, like the voice that might have been Mother’s, that Father came and healed me with his magic. His face was ashen. He looked very tired.
I slept and the barefoot man in the silver mask knelt on the surface of the water, sending ripples all around my bed. He whispered to me the story of the heron boy who stood among the flock in the dawn light and was left behind when the birds took flight, standing there, waving his graceless, featherless arms.
A few weeks later, Velachronos threw us out. I don’t know what happened with him at the end. Perhaps it was just a rumor, or a culmination of rumors, or he might even have heard the truth about something I did not know, but one day, when Hamakina and I came for our lessons, he stood in the doorway and all but shrieked, “Begone! Get out of my house, devil-spawn!”
He wouldn’t explain or say anything more. There was nothing to do but leave.
That night a vast storm came up from the mouth of the river, a black, swirling mass of clouds like a monster huge enough to smother the world, lumbering on a thousand flickering, fiery legs. The river, the very marshes, raged like the frenzied chaos-ocean that existed before the Earth was made, while the sky thundered light and dark; and for an instant you could see for miles across froth-capped waves and reeds lashing in the wind; then there was only utter blackness and stinging rain and the thunder once more, thunder calling out my father’s name again and again.
He answered it, from within his secret room, his voice as loud as the thunder, speaking a language that did not sound like human speech at all, but shrieks and grating cackles and whistles like the raging wind.
In the morning, all the ships were scattered and half the city was blasted away. The air was heavy with the cries of mourners. The river ran beneath our house muddy and furious where before it had been mere shallows.
Many people saw the crocodile-headed messengers of the Devouring God that day.
My sister and I sat in our room, almost afraid to speak even to each other. We could not go out.
From Father’s workroom there was only silence that went on for so long that, despite everything, I began to fear for him. I met Hamakina’s gaze, and she stared back, wide-eyed and dazed. Then she nodded.
I went to the workroom door and knocked.
“Father? Are you all right?”
To my surprise, he opened the door at once and came out. He steadied himself against the doorway with one hand and hung there, breathing heavily. His hands were gnarled, like claws. They looked like they had been burned.
His face was so pale, so wild, that part of me wasn’t even sure it was Father until he spoke.
“I am going to die,” he said. “It is time for me to go to the gods.”
And, again despite everything, I wept for him.
“Now you must be a faithful son for the last time,” he said. “Gather reeds and bind them together into a funeral boat. When you are done, I shall be dead. Place me in it and set me adrift, so that I shall come, as all men do, to Surat-Kemad.”
“No, Father! It isn’t so!”
When I wept, I was remembering him as he had been in my early childhood, not as he had become.
He squeezed my shoulder hard and hissed angrily, “Quite inevitably, it is. Go!”
So Hamakina and I went together. Somehow our house had lost only a few shingles in the storm, and the dock below the trapdoor was still there. My boat was too, but sunken and dangling from its line. We struggled to pull it up, dumped it out, and set it afloat. Miraculously, not even the paddles had been lost.
We climbed in and paddled in silence for about an hour, far enough into the marshes that the waters were again shal
low and still and reeds as thick as my arm swayed against the sky like trees. With a hatchet I’d brought along for the purpose, I cut down several, and Hamakina and I labored throughout the day to make a crude boat. In the evening, we towed it back to our house.
I ascended the ladder first, while she waited fearfully below.
For the first time I could remember, the door to Father’s workroom was left open. He lay inside, on a couch amid shelves of books and bottles, and at a glance I knew that he was dead.
There was little to do that night. Hamakina and I made a cold supper out of what we could find in the pantry. Then we barred the windows and doors, and pushed a heavy trunk over the trapdoor, lest the evatim crawl up and devour the corpse, as they sometimes do.
I explored the workroom only a little, going through Father’s books, opening trunks, peering into coffers. If he had any treasure, I didn’t find it. Then I picked up a murky bottle and something inside screamed at me with a tiny, faraway voice. I dropped the bottle in fright. It broke and the screaming thing scurried across the floorboards.
The house was full of voices and noises, creakings, whispers, and sighs. Once something heavy, like a huge bird perhaps, flapped and scraped against a shuttered window. My sister and I stayed up most of the night, lanterns in our hands, armed with clubs against whatever terrors the darkness might hold. I sat on the floor outside the workroom, leaning against the door. Hamakina lay with her face in my lap, sobbing softly.
Eventually I fell asleep, and Mother came to me in a dream, leaning over me, dripping water and river mud, shrieking and tearing her hair. I tried to tell her that all would be well, that I would take care of Hamakina, that I would grow up to be a scribe and write letters for people. I promised I wouldn’t be like Father.
But still she wept and paced back and forth all night. In the morning, the floor was wet and muddy.
Hamakina and I rose, washed, put on our best clothes, and went to the priests. On the way, some people turned their backs to us while others screamed curses and called us murderers. In the square before the temple, a mob approached with knives and clubs, and I waved my hands and made what I hoped looked like magical gestures until they turned and fled, shouting that I was just as bad as my Father. In that single instant, I almost wished I were.
A whole army of priests followed us back to the house, resplendent in their billowing gold-and-silver trousers, their blue jackets, and their tall, scale-covered hats. Many of them held aloft sacred ikons of Surat-Kemad, and of the other gods too: of Ragun-Kemad, the Lord of Eagles, and Bel-Kemad, god of spring, and of Meliventra, the Lady of the Lantern, who sends forgiveness and mercy. Acolytes chanted and swung smoking incense-pots on golden chains.
But they would not let us back into the house. Two temple matrons stood with us on the wharf, holding Hamakina and me by the hand. The neighbors watched from a distance, fearfully.
The priests emptied out Father’s workroom, breaking open the shutters, pouring bottle after bottle of powders and liquids into the river, dumping many of his books in after, then more bottles, then most of the jars, carvings, and strange specimens. Other books, they confiscated. Junior priests carried heaps of them back to the temple in baskets. Then it seemed the exorcisms went on for hours. They used so much incense that I thought the house was on fire.
In the end, the priests marched away as solemnly as they had come, and one of the matrons gave me a sword which had been my father’s, a fine weapon, its grip bound in copper wire, its blade inlaid with silver.
“You may need this,” was all she would say.
Fearfully, my sister and I ventured inside the house. The air was so thick with incense that we ran, choking, our eyes streaming, to open all the windows. Still, the burners hung everywhere and we dared not remove them.
Father lay on the couch in his workroom, bound in gauze. The priests had removed his eyes and placed amulets like huge coins in the empty sockets. I knew this was because they were afraid he would find his way back otherwise.
Hamakina and I had to get him down to the funeral boat. There was no one to help us. It was a terrible struggle. Hamakina was, after all, only eight, and I was fifteen. More than once I was afraid we would accidentally drop him.
One of the gold amulets fell out. The empty socket gaped like a dry, red wound. I was almost sick when I had to put the amulet back.
The funeral boat was hung with gauze and charms. Incense rose from a silver cup set in the prow. One of the priests had painted a symbol, a serpent swallowing its tail, only broken, on the stern.
In the twilight of evening, Hamakina and I towed the funeral boat out into the deep water beyond the city, among the crooked masts of the wrecked ships, and beyond.
The sky faded gently from red to black, streaked with the purple tatters of the last few storm clouds. An almost frigid wind blew out of the marshes. The stars gleamed, multiplied upon the rippling water.
I stood in my shallow boat and recited the service for the dead as best as I knew it, for my father whom I still loved and feared and did not understand. Then Hamakina let loose the line, and the funeral boat began to drift, first downstream toward the delta and the sea; but in the darkness, just before it disappeared, it was clearly going upstream. That was a good sign. It meant the boat had caught the black current, which carries the dead out of the world of the living, into the abode of the gods.
I thought, then, that I had time to mourn. When we got back, the house was merely empty. For the first time in many years, I was not afraid. It was almost bewildering.
I slept quietly that night. I did not dream. Hamakina, too, was quiet.
The next morning an old woman who lived in one of the first houses at the other end of the wharf knocked on our door and said, “Children? Are you well? Do you have enough to eat?”
She left a basket of food for us.
That, too, was a good sign. It meant that the neighbors would eventually forgive us. They didn’t really think I was as my father had been.
I took the basket inside slowly, weeping half for joy. Life would be better. I remembered my promise to my mother. I would be different. The next day, surely, or the day after, Velachronos would take us back and we could resume our lessons.
Only that night Father came to me in a dream, and he stood before my bed wrapped in gauze, his face terrible behind the golden disks. His voice was—I cannot truly describe it—oily, like something dripping, something thick and vile; and the mere fact that such a sound could form itself into words seemed the greatest obscenity of all.
“I have delved too far into the darkness, my son, and my ending can only come with the final mystery. I seek it. My studies are almost complete. It is the culmination of all my labors. But there is one thing I need, one thing I have come back for.”
And in my dream I asked him, “Father, what is it?”
“Your sister.”
Then I awoke to the sound of Hamakina screaming. She reached for my hand, missed, caught the edge of the bed, and fell with a thump, dragging the covers onto the floor.
I always kept a lit lantern on the stand by the bed. Now I opened the little metal door, flooding the room with light.
“Sekenre! Help me!”
I stared incredulously for just an instant as she hung suspended in the air, dangling, as if an invisible hand had seized her by the hair. Then she screamed once more and seemed to fly through the window. For a second she grabbed hold of the sill. She looked toward me. Our eyes met. But before I could do or say anything she was yanked loose and hauled through.
I ran to the window and leaned out.
There was no splash; the water below rippled gently. The night was still. Hamakina was simply gone.
II
In the morning, the third after Father’s death, I went to see the Sybil. There was nothing else to do. Everyone in the City of the Reeds knows that when the great crisis of your life comes, when there is truly no alternative but surrender and death and no risk is too great, th
en it is time to see the Sybil.
Fortunate is the man who has never called on her goes the old saying. But I was not fortunate.
She is called the Daughter of the River, and the Voice of Surat-Kemad, and the Mother of Death, and many other things. Who she is and what she is, no one has ever known; but she dwelt, fearsomely, the subject of countless terrifying stories, beneath the very heart of the city, among the pilings, where the log posts that hold up the great houses are thick as any forest. I had heard of the terrible price she was reputed to demand for her prophecies, and that those who visited her came away irreparably changed if they came away at all. Yet since time immemorial she had dwelt there, and for as long people went to listen to her words.
I went. For an offering, I had my father’s sword, the silver one the temple matron gave me.
It was in the earliest dawn twilight that I slipped once more through the trapdoor beneath our house. To the east, to my right, the sky was just beginning to brighten into gray, but before me, toward the heart of the city, night lingered.
I paddled amid the wreckage left by the recent storm: planks, bobbing barrels and trunks, and, once, a slowly rolling corpse the evatim had somehow overlooked. Further in, a huge house had fallen on its supports, now awash and broken, its windows gaping like black mouths. Later, when the gloom lessened a bit, I came upon a capsized ship jammed among the pillars like a vast, dead fish caught in reeds, its rigging trailing in the black water.
Just beyond it, the dark, irregular mass of the Sybil’s dwelling hung suspended, undamaged by the storm, of course.
There’s another story they tell about her: that the Sybil was never young, but was born an old hag in the blood of her mother’s death, and that she stood up in the pool of her mother’s blood, in the darkness at the world’s beginning; and she closed her hands together, then opened them, and columns of flame rose up from her palms.
My father used to do that trick, and once he grew terribly angry when I tried it, even though I’d just sat staring at my hands, opening and closing them without understanding or results. It was enough that I had made the attempt. He was perhaps even frightened at first, at the prospect that I might try again and eventually succeed. Then his face shifted from shock to cold fury. That was the only time in my life he ever beat me.
The Weird Fiction Megapack Page 5