The crush of voices filled Mara’s head. Then the cathedral floated into view, and Mara wept from its beauty. It blocked the sun, as wide as a wheat field. Glittering silver pipes rose and feathered back from its sides. The bottom was bright brass, adorned with jewels the color of cat’s eyes. The walls of the cathedral were beaded glass that sparkled in the light like ten thousand waterfalls.
Mara covered her ears but kept pouring the music from her abdomen and throat. Penelope smiled around her own singing, pleased to be found worthy. The cathedral hovered low, settling over the atrium, its machineries visible through the glass—a clockwork of cables, metallic wheels, and spinning concave rods.
The choir was visible through the glass as well. Such beautiful faces, mouths wide, eyes moist and mysterious. The heavenly forms defied gravity, suspended in the cathedral as if borne on wings. The women sang with everything they owned, their flesh, their spirit, their bone, and breath, and blood. Aeolus was glorious, indeed.
With a great grinding noise, a gap yawned in the cathedral’s belly. A metal staircase lowered like a giant clawed hand, reaching through the opening in the temple ceiling. The grain swirled around Mara and Penelope, tiny tornadoes of yellow and brown. The columns of the atrium wobbled and threatened to cave in.
How would he kill them? Bury them under the granite walls? Or abandon them, let them starve with the rest of their people as the fruit shriveled and the game went to ground and the streams sank into the mud? How cruel would Aeolus choose to be?
Penelope brushed the veil back from her face. Her skin glowed, her cheeks were rosy, her eyes as bright as a virgin bride’s. Her lips moved as she poured her music into the cathedral, her throat trembled as she gave Aeolus all that she had. Mara’s voice descended, hitting the notes without thinking, relying now on ancestral memory to guide her. The sisters sang the songs they had learned in the cradle.
The cathedral hovered above them, fantastic engines churning and spitting and growling. The stairway descended lower into the atrium, the sharp edges of it visible in the dawn. The bottom lip settled on the marble floor in front of them, and the cathedral edged forward, scooping up fruits and vegetables and sacks of grain and bundles of cloth. Mara lost her balance and fell face-first into the offering pile. The stairway lifted, full now, and began tracking up into the maw of the cathedral.
Mara looked back, her ears ringing from the terrible, sweet resonance of the choir. Penelope lifted her palms in supplication, her mouth still parted in performance. Mara scrambled to her knees among the produce and goods and motioned for her sister. Mara wasn’t the chosen one. Penelope was. Aeolus did not smile upon trickery.
Penelope reached for the lip of the staircase. Mara extended her hand, slipping on the crushed tomatoes and melons. Their hands met, and Mara gripped and pulled, bracing herself against the railing. The cathedral hovered as Penelope struggled to climb aboard the retracting stairs.
The cathedral drifted upward, and the stairs cleared the atrium. Mara looked frantically about and saw the villagers in their colored robes coming down from the hills, running and pointing and shouting, their hymns forgotten. Penelope’s fine garments fluttered like sails, and her veil skirled away in the warm wind. Her black hair whipped around her face and caught in her teeth. Mara clung desperately to her sister as the cathedral floated east toward the sun.
They were ten temples high now. The staircase continued to lever upwards, like a great mouth biting the sky. Penelope’s face clenched in determination, and with a final effort, she managed to get one leg up on the rim of the stairway. Mara tugged, her hands damp with sweat and mashed fruit. Penelope slipped and nearly fell to the prairie below, but Mara gripped the shoulder of her robe and brought her aboard. They were just regaining their balance when the metal jaws closed and brought them into the body of Aeolus’s glorious cathedral.
The sisters hugged each other, blinking at the sudden darkness. Daylight leaked from a few crystalline portholes. A dim cylinder of fire hung suspended near the ceiling and seemed to ebb and flow in time to the accents of the continuous hymn.
“You almost let me fall, you crazy girl,” Penelope said, whispering even though the sound of the choir filled the chamber.
“Your robe is torn,” Mara said, trying to straighten the fabric.
“Aeolus will be angry at us.” Penelope giggled with hysteria.
“Hush. I had to help you.”
“But I knew the songs. I was to be the sacrifice.”
“I know.” She hadn’t the heart to tell Penelope that she would have failed without help. The lives of two were nothing compared to the needs of the whole village. Blessings had to be earned, sacraments had to be costly and whole-hearted, or else they were worthless.
“Are we accepted?” Penelope asked, looking frantically around as her eyes adjusted to the gloom. Metal walls surrounded them, rivets girding the concave ribs of the vessel’s hold. A door stood on each end of the chamber. Mara crouched so that the shifting vessel didn’t throw her off balance.
“Keep singing,” Mara said. No one knew what the sacrifice was supposed to do once Aeolus accepted it. Some of the old storytellers said the members of the choir lived forever, crossing the earth and spreading song and bounty, blessing the people in tribute to Aeolus. Others said that such conjecture was blasphemy and that humans shouldn’t speculate about the divine.
Penelope found the hymn’s tonic and rejoined the chorus. She stood among the holy spoils, her hair tangled, her ragged gown stained with red and orange. Mara knelt beside her, listening to the hymn. Her work was finished. She had helped with Penelope’s deliverance, and all that remained was for Aeolus to mete out her fate.
One of the tall doors slid open. A man in a black hood and leather tunic stood with his arms folded. A whip snaked from the crook of one elbow. The man’s smell, metallic and salty and pungent, filled the chamber. Penelope stopped singing though the choir continued its sonorous and melancholy tune.
“Aeolus?” Mara whispered.
The man spat through a gash in the hood. “Which is her?”
Penelope bowed her head and brought her hands gracefully together. “I am she, sir.”
The hooded head pivoted back and forth, looking at Mara in her coarse cotton dress as she knelt among the ruined offerings. “Pity,” the man said. “You both are in need of a little spiritual cleansing.”
He strode forward, raising the whip, his muscles glistening with sweat. The whip flicked across Penelope’s back, splitting her gown and slicing a strip into the soft flesh of her shoulder. She cried out in pain.
Mara leapt forward as the man drew back for another blow. The man shoved her against the wall and lashed again. Penelope raised her arms, and the leather striped her wrist. She gasped and fell to her hands and knees. The next blow sent her into unconsciousness.
Mara scrambled to Penelope’s side. She looked up at the torturer. “Aeolus shall punish you for damaging her.”
The man threw back his head and laughed. “She’s not yet begun to serve Aeolus.”
He wiped the blood from the whip with his hand. His tongue flicked like a lizard emerging from its crevice as he licked his palm clean.
Mara brushed the cloth away from the raw wounds in Penelope’s back. She kept one eye on the hooded man, but he made no move to attack her. Finally, he left, and the heavy door clanged shut behind him. Mara tended her sister until she finally regained consciousness.
“Mara?” Penelope whispered through parched lips.
“Shh. I’m here.”
Night had fallen, noticeable even in the dim belly of the cathedral. Still the choir carried on, though the timbre and pitch of the voices had changed as if some of the sopranos had been replaced with altos. Mara could find no water, so she squeezed juice from the tomatoes into Penelope’s mouth.
“I sang well,” Penelope croaked.
“Yes, yes, you did.”
“My best.”
“It was beautiful.”
“Then…Why?” Penelope’s eyes shone in the gloom.
“Who can know the ways of Aeolus?” Mara said, repeating the saying of a thousand sages and priests. Penelope slept fitfully, crying out whenever one of her wounds burst open as she changed position. The fire cylinder overhead pulsed throughout the night, hitting its lulls with the caesura of the hymn.
Morning leaked through the portholes just as the choir hit an adagio. A soprano pierced the air with a sadly sweet aria. The engines shifted into a low rumble, and the cathedral idled on the wind. The door thundered open, and the hooded man stood silhouetted against the bright light of dawn. He was without his whip. “Can you stand?”
Mara faced him with clenched fists.
The eyes were impassive inside the hood. “I meant her,” he said, raising his callused hand to indicate Penelope. “Come on, you vermin. Aeolus awaits.”
Penelope’s eyelids fluttered, and she emerged from her stupor with a groan. Mara stroked her sister’s hair and helped her stand. She whispered in Penelope’s ear. “I’ll be with you.”
Penelope staggered toward the hooded one, Mara helping her forward. The man turned without a word and led them up the staircase. It was the same one the women had climbed to reach the belly of the cathedral, only now it was locked into place in the hold.
Two women in soiled robes passed them on the stairs. One of them, a gaunt blonde with thin lips, glanced at Penelope’s wounds and then met Mara’s eyes. Mara shuddered at the pain and horror written on the young woman’s face.
“Get that tribute in storage, and hurry,” the man growled at them. The blonde’s eyes again fixed on the floor, and the pair stooped in submission. The man grabbed the blonde’s hair and tugged, and she emitted a small sigh of agony. He pushed her down the stairs and laughed, and then continued on as if he had swatted away a bothersome gnat.
Mara sneaked a look back at the injured woman whose hand was twisted at an awkward angle. Even more frightening than the man’s casual cruelty was the look on the stricken woman’s face. Mara could only describe it as a look of pity, as if what Mara and Penelope would yet endure was far worse than physical abuse. The choir shifted into a minor key, the diminished thirds punctuating the woman’s forlorn and fragile expression.
At the top of the stairs, the man stood aside as they came to a marble door decorated with multi-faceted gems and smooth carvings. Words were etched in the stone, but Mara didn’t recognize the language.
“Now you’ll get what you’ve been praying for,” their escort sneered. “A glimpse of the great Aeolus.”
He shoved the door open, and a warm, raw aroma assaulted their nostrils. The sudden burst of light blinded Mara. She caught Penelope’s hand and held tight. Her sister’s skin was chilled and clammy.
And thus we enter the presence of Aeolus, Mara thought bitterly. At our finest and most worthy. With our hearts pure and our tongues still. As scared as any cornered animal.
The hymn increased in volume, the collective voices reverberating off the sun-splashed crystal walls. The sounds were both grand and frightful—the breaking of lake ice beneath one’s feet, the rage of wildfire, the triumphant thunder of a drought-ending storm, the scream of a woman in childbirth.
Mara blinked away the blindness, and the snatches of color and light became shape, substance, and impossibility.
The thousand angels levitated in the great sanctuary, their arms spread like the wings of soaring red-and-white birds. Behind them, the sunlight sparkled in the crystalline body of the cathedral and reflected off the many angled surfaces. Mara’s breath caught in her throat though her lips moved in silent sympathy with the choir.
Beautiful, beautiful. All glory be to Aeolus.
She looked to the face of the nearest angel. The singer’s mouth was wide, the music swelling from the blackness of her throat. Her eyes were vacant, unmoved by the great rhapsodic hymn. She swayed in midair, and that’s when Mara saw the thin, silver wires that held the woman aloft. The illusion of beauty fell away.
All of them, a thousand women, dangled in torment. Blood soaked their garments and dripped to the floor in percussive accent to their hymn. The bright metal shanks of thin hooks protruded from their flesh. The wires were attached to golden rings that lined the cathedral’s brilliant ceiling, and the rings were set in a series of tracks and pulleys and gears.
Mara’s heart shriveled into a knot in her chest. As she tried to make sense of what her eyes were telling her, the grid work overhead shifted slightly, the wires tightened or slackened, and the women were pulled into terrible, new postures. The hymn shifted with their bodies, the fresh pain bringing new notes as the combined voices screamed their rapture. The angels rose or fell with the manipulations of the pulleys like broken dragonflies riding the ripples of a morning lake.
Mara fell to her knees, unbelieving. Penelope took two slow steps forward, her hand reaching out as if to wave away a fog. The hymn approached a crescendo as half the voices creating a dense underlying chord. The altos split into warbling counterpoint, and the sopranos pierced the cathedral’s air with the clarity of their mournful notes. The dripping of blood provided a steady rain of percussion, and the red stream on the floor was guided into gutters where it flowed sluggishly toward the engines in the heart of the cathedral.
Mara closed her eyes against the madness. A boot nudged her from behind, and she remembered the hooded man. The boot shoved again, harder, along her spine.
“Forward, you,” came his harsh voice. Penelope was already sleepwalking down the aisle that divided the choir. Mara stumbled to her feet and hurried after her sister, slipping on the film of blood that slicked the metal floor. They both saw their destination—the raised pulpit at the head of the cathedral, which was partitioned off with shimmering, red drapes and ornate, golden braid.
The rods and thin chains that controlled the machinery all led into the pulpit. Behind those curtains was the god Aeolus, the bringer of winds and the giver of blessings. The sisters were to approach, so that they might look upon their worldly master. The pair walked down the aisle, Penelope almost regally serene but her eyes dull and distant. Mara felt a similar hollowness and she tried to avoid looking at the tortured choir. But she kept fixing on the soul-torn faces that gushed forth blood and song.
The hymn thundered, wrapped around them like a solid thing, a haunting shroud. The hooded man followed closely behind, reaching out occasionally to adjust the hooks in one or another of the singers and bring forth a fresh eruption of harmony. They crossed the wet, red aisle and stood before the pulpit. In the grid work along the ceiling, gears shifted, wires slackened, and the singers eased into a series of slow, sustained arpeggios.
“Kneel,” ordered the hooded man. Mara looked back at him, fighting off her shock long enough to feel the burning rage in her heart. She could run at him. He had no weapon. But Penelope was so frail and wounded that Mara didn’t want to risk further injury to her sister.
Mara grabbed Penelope’s hand and joined her in a humble bow. The choir grew quieter, and the arpeggios segued into a round of alternating fifths. The drapes shook, and Mara looked up, curious about the face of a god that could perpetrate such atrocities. As the drapes parted, her first thought was that Aeolus looked wholly ordinary.
He emerged from the pulpit and descended a small set of steps until he was standing over the two women. Mara held his gaze. He was a man of average height, his hair thin and graying, and his violet robe was plain except for a run of silver piping along the shoulders and sleeves. His cheeks were hollow, and his thick eyebrows shadowed his close-set eyes.
“Aeolus?” Penelope whispered.
He didn’t answer. He looked over their heads to the hooded man. “How come there are two?”
“You must have over-blessed their village,” he said. “Made them feel so guilty that they were doubly indebted.”
Aeolus glanced at the choir, his face expressionless. “More mouths to feed,” he said. “Can they both sing?”
“I’m sure, once we get the hooks in them.”
“You shouldn’t take such pleasure in holy work.”
“Why? Is that a sin?” The hooded man’s voice was carefully balanced between humor and challenge.
“These women pay for the sins of others. Be careful that you pay only for your own.”
Why, he’s a MAN, not a god, Mara thought.
But why shouldn’t gods be men? They owned all the Earth. Why not the heavens as well?
Aeolus knelt and observed Penelope’s lash marks. “I see you’ve wasted no time, Ananke.”
Ananke. The hooded one. The shadowy power behind the gods. The gods that were men. Mara’s thoughts swirled in confusion, wove into the subtle shadings of the hymn, and evaporated among the melancholic notes.
“Yours is not the only necessary ritual,” Ananke replied. “Neither of us wants the sky to fall, do we?”
Aeolus looked sadly down at the women. “So, which of you is the singer?”
Penelope’s mouth opened and closed, like a landed fish gasping for air. Mara stood and looked down on the god. “I am.”
She waited for Ananke to interrupt, but he said nothing. Aeolus gave her a weak smile, and then nodded to his opposite. “String her up. And take this other to the cloister.”
Penelope found her voice and started to protest.
“Shh,” Mara said, touching her sister’s hair. “Silence is the sweetest music.”
Ananke pulled Penelope to her feet, heedless of her anguished moans. Mara watched them pass through the bleeding angels. The sun had moved higher, and the red-orange light sparkled in the cathedral glass like fire.
“So you’re a singer?” Aeolus asked, after Ananke and Penelope had disappeared through the far door. “And are you a woman? You look too young to bear children.”
“I have bled,” she said.
“Will you sing for me?”
“What about my village?”
“They will be blessed.” Aeolus folded his arms and almost smiled. “It’s unusual for an angel to negotiate with a god.”
Mad Stacks: Story Collection Box Set Page 32