by Greg Keyes
Even in Perkar’s dream, the pain remained—a nest of ants burrowing in his intestines—but it was, at least, muted. He lay in a grassy meadow, high in the mountains. Nearby, cattle lowed softly. It was an unusually vivid dream; he smelled the sweetness of the grass and the resin of spruce needles, even the almost-forgotten scent of cows. Wishing fervently that it were real, he knew it wasn’t. Only the pain was real, the hole in his body. The rest was just his mind trying to ease his death.
“Oh, no, it’s real,” a voice assured him. He turned at the words and smiled, despite the pain. There, perched on a branch, as regal as any lord of the air, sat the most magnificent eagle he had ever seen. It was a bluebolt, body feathered in black and white with a crown of almost velvety indigo feathers. Its eyes were fierce, the eyes of a warrior, a predator.
“Harka,” he said. “I must say you are more attractive in that form than as a sword.”
“It’s been long and long since I enjoyed a form like this, felt the wind in my pinions,” the eagle answered in precisely Harka’s voice. “I had actually forgotten, you know, what I was until that day you asked my name. I had forgotten having ever been anything but a sword.”
“And now?”
“Now the Forest Lord will clothe me like this. I can spend a few years in a mortal skin and then perhaps take up residence in the mountain. It will be good, feasting on rabbit and fox again!”
“I’m happy for you. I thought the Blackgod destroyed you entirely.”
“Not at all, though I admit I thought I was dead; having my body broken like that really hurt. But in the end he did me a favor, freeing me. Though I hated to abandon you, Perkar—believe it or not, I developed a real fondness for you.”
Perkar regarded the huge bird. “As I said,” he finally said, “I’m happy for you. But I wonder …”
“Yes?” Harka sounded almost eager.
“Can you tell me what happened? Exactly? It all went so fast.”
“Oh.” The god’s voice fell a bit, as if disappointed. “Of course.” He cocked his head. “Karak believed that only the River’s own blood could destroy him, and only at his source. That was probably true enough. But that thing—the Tiskawa the River made to seek Hezhi out—contained many things, many kinds of blood and soul. The ghost of an ancient Nholish lord, your old love the Stream Goddess, other, smaller gods—all were given puissance and life by the River. A potent combination, one that served the same purpose as true Waterborn blood. The death of the Tiskawa performed the same task as Hezhi’s own was meant to: killed him deader than a bone.”
“You are certain?”
“I am certain. I have flown over him, and I have seen. His death follows him downstream; when these waters reach the sea, nothing will remain of the Changeling.”
“And the River will be without a god. What a strange, strange thought.”
“Without a god, yes,” Harka said. “But not without a goddess.”
Perkar turned to him so sharply that, even in his dream the pain was suddenly exquisite. “What?” he gasped in both astonishment and agony.
“Well, there was one spirit inside of the Tiskawa uniquely qualified to take over in the capacity of lord of the river.”
“The Stream Goddess?”
“None other.”
Perkar sank back and stared up at the sky, happy despite the fact that he was dying.
“What a glorious world,” he muttered.
“Ah, yes, and that brings up the point of my visit—besides coming to say good-bye. In fact, if you weren’t so thick, you would know why I’m here.” The eagle hopped down, flexed its wings, and moved a pace closer. “You are about to leave this glorious world—unless you have changed your feelings about me.”
“About what?”
“More than once you cursed me for healing you. You asked me to let you die. Do you still want that?”
“You aren’t my sword anymore.”
The bird lifted its wings to the wind. “No, but I could do one last favor for a friend, if he wanted.”
Perkar chuckled. “Fine, Harka. I take it all back. I’m glad you never let me die.”
“Does that mean you’ll take my help, or would you rather expire as a hero, before you can make another mistake and start things all over again?”
Perkar shook his head ruefully. “I think I will take that chance, if your offer is genuine.”
“Of course it is.”
“Then I accept, and I wish you well in your travels, Harka. You were my only companion at times, and I was ungrateful more often than not—certainly more than I should have been.”
“Indeed you were,” Harka said. “Now, close your eyes.”
He closed them, and when he opened them, it was to Hezhi and Ngangata kneeling over him, each of his hands held by one of them.
The pain was gone.
“Perkar?” Hezhi asked.
“Hello,” he said. He turned to Ngangata. “Hello,” he repeated, wanting to say more, to explain to each of them what he felt, but the sheer joy of seeing them both alive and whole—and knowing that he himself would live—was more than he could contain. His words came out as sobs, and when Tsem joined them—he had been only a few paces away—they all clasped in a knot, wordless, gripping hands and shoulders and bloody chests. Behind them, Yuu’han watched—apart, his face expressionless.
It was finally Tsem who stated the obvious, after a few long moments.
“We should all bathe now,” he mumbled, and it could hardly be doubted that he was right. Hezhi laughed at that, and they all joined her. It was perhaps not the healthiest of laughter—more than tinged with hysteria—but it served.
When their chuckles faded off into strained silence, Perkar dizzily found his feet, and with Tsem’s help struggled over to where Brother Horse lay. Heen licked the old man’s face, clearly puzzled as to why his master refused to awaken.
“Brother Horse said to tell you good-bye, Heen,” Hezhi explained, from behind Perkar. The dog looked up at his name, but then turned his attention back to the old man.
“Good-bye, Shutsebe,” Perkar said.
The next few hours were something of a blur, and later none of them remembered very much about them. They carried Brother Horse’s body up and out of Erikwer and found that Karak’s men had vanished, presumably fled. Perkar could hardly blame them, if they had witnessed even the smallest part of what transpired below.
At Yuu’han’s direction they laid the body out, and sang the songs, and burned a flame for offerings, though they had little enough to give. Yuu’han had cut an ear from the corpse of Bone Eel, and he offered that to be taken to his uncle by the goddess in the flame. When Yuu’han sang his personal grief, Hezhi happened to hear, though she stayed a respectful distance away. One line stayed with her to the end of her days.
When they number the horses
When they count the sires and foals
Father, we shall know each other …
When Yuu’han was done, he departed, and then Hezhi went there. The old man’s face had fallen into its most accustomed lines, so that she seemed to read a smile upon it. Heen already lay with him, his head propped on Brother Horse’s feet, eyes puzzled. Hezhi knelt down and stroked the ancient dog’s coarse, dirty fur.
“He said to tell you,” Hezhi murmured to Heen. “But you already know.”
But she told him anyway, and Heen licked her hand, and together they sat there for a time.
Night came, and they built a larger fire to huddle about. Unwilling to bathe in Erikwer, they still reeked of blood and sweat and other, more offensive scents. Perkar passed the night restlessly, barely sleeping, suspecting that the others rested at least as poorly.
He napped briefly, before dawn, and when he awoke, he knew why his rest had been so uneasy.
“I don’t believe it,” he confessed to Hezhi. “I don’t believe that the Changeling is dead, even after all of this, all of our sacrifices.”
“I felt him die,” Hezhi answered,
“but I don’t believe it either.”
“Then there is one more thing we must do, before leaving Balat.”
Hezhi nodded reluctantly. “Yes. One last thing.”
XXXIX
The Goddess
Perkar placed his feet carefully on the broken red stone, though the way down into the chasm was neither steep nor particularly dangerous seeming. But after all that they had been through—and after searching for the better part of a day for a safe way down the mostly sheer cliffs of the ravine—it would be ridiculous and embarrassing to trip and break his arm or neck.
Below them the river churned spray into the air that the bright sun rendered into a million shattering diamonds and that imparted a wonderful cool dampness to the ordinarily dry atmosphere.
“It’s true,” Perkar said, speaking up to his companions still perched on the rim. “It is true. This is not the same Changeling I once knew.”
“Not at all,” Ngangata agreed.
Hezhi felt her own trepidation melt away. The scale on her arm reacted to the presence of the river not at all, nor did any part of her. This was just water, flowing through a narrow canyon of red and yellow stone. “It’s hard to believe that this slight stream is really the river,” she said.
“This is where I first saw him,” Perkar answered. “This is where my journey to you began—our journey,” he corrected as Ngangata came level to him on the trail. He patted the half Alwa on the shoulder.
“Well,” he called back up to Hezhi. “Come on down.”
“Wouldn’t you rather I stayed up here?” she asked.
“No. I would rather have you with me,” he answered, offering his hand to steady her for the next step.
With only a little slipping and sliding, they all reached the bottom of the gorge easily—even Tsem, though Hezhi noticed the half Giant kept casting uneasy glances back up, probably dreading the return climb to the top.
“Before you could feel his coldness, his hunger,” Perkar explained. “Now …”
“Now it feels like something living,” Ngangata finished for him.
Perkar nodded and shuffled his feet on the narrow stone beach, suddenly nervous. Nevertheless, he reached into a small sack at his waist and produced a handful of flower petals, which he sprinkled into the quieter eddies near shore. He cleared his throat and sang—tentatively, but gradually with more confidence and volume:
“Stream Goddess I
Long hair curling down from the hills
Long arms reaching down the valley
Reposing in my watery dwelling
On and on go I
In the same manner, from year to year …”
Perkar sang on, the song of the Stream Goddess as she had taught it to his father’s father, many years past. When he had sung it before, it had been to a quiet stream in his clan’s pasture, a little stream he could almost leap across. Here, the crash of the rapids almost seemed to add a rhythm to his words, and then new words entirely, so that seamlessly, he was singing verses to the Song of the Stream Goddess that had never been before. And then, almost without him noticing, he was not singing at all, but the song continued, and from the nearest eddy, a head rose, long black hair swirling in the agitated water, ancient, amber eyes in the face of a young woman gazing up at them with what appeared to be humor.
“… then came a mortal man,” she sang.
“His mother named him for the oak
For the spot where his caul was buried
In the very place I flowed
He grew like a weed
And he came to love me—”
Perkar stood, more and more embarrassed as the song continued, but by now it was a story they all knew. She sang of his foolishness, she sang of her anger, she sang of death. But in the end she finished:
“On and on go I
But not the same now, year to year.
The Old Man eats me not
No longer quickens he with my pain
By foolishness I was saved
By the love of mortal man I was redeemed
And on and on go I
Each year better than the last
No winter cold to eat me
Each season a different-colored spring.”
And as she sang her final verse, she rose up, more magnificent than he had ever seen her, and Perkar’s knees quaked, and without even thinking he knelt.
She approached and ran her fingers playfully through his hair.
“Stand up, silly thing,” she admonished. “We have been more familiar than this.”
“Yes,” he began, “but …” He shrugged helplessly but then met her eyes. “I don’t deserve this, to be part of your song.”
She laughed, the same silvery music he had heard for the first time what seemed like centuries ago. “Deserving has nothing to do with it,” she replied. “The Changeling is part of my song, and his name never deserved to be sung. But that is how the songs of gods and goddesses must be. You are a part of my story, Perkar, a part I cherish. After all, it was your love that ended my pain and gave me this.” She swept her arms wide, indicating the joyful crash of the water.
He kept his gaze frankly on hers. “Long ago, you told me not to be a boy, dreaming of the impossible. But I loved you so much, and I was so stupid. I would have done anything for you—save to heed your warnings. But this thing I have finally accomplished—in your song you say that my love saved you. But I must tell you truthfully, Goddess, I did not do all of this for love of you.”
She smiled even wider and swept her gaze across Ngangata, Tsem, Yuu’han, and Hezhi.
“He is such a silly thing sometimes, is he not?” She sighed. She turned back to him, her look one of mock despair. Then she gestured to Hezhi.
Tentatively Hezhi stepped forward. The Stream Goddess was the most beautiful woman she had ever seen. Even though she had thought she understood Perkar, she suddenly realized that she had not. She knew, intellectually, that much of what he had done had been motivated by a love for this goddess, but to actually see her, hear her voice, made it all different. Hezhi’s heart seemed to sag in her chest, as she remembered her own shadowed, ungainly outline on the floor in “Sheldu’s” damakuta. Regardless, she approached the goddess and was faintly astonished when the strange woman reached and took her hand. The skin of the goddess was cool and damp, but otherwise felt Human enough.
She was even more astonished when the goddess squeezed her hand and then placed it in Perkar’s.
“I never said it was love for me that ended the Changeling and set me free,” the goddess explained. “Only the love of a mortal man. Your love for your people, Perkar, your love for these companions, and your love for this girl. Those are the loves of a man, sweet thing, and those are what set me free.”
“I love you, too,” Perkar answered.
“Of course you do. How could you not? But you understand now what I told you so long ago.”
“I think so. I no longer dream of you somehow becoming my wife, if that is what you mean.”
She only smiled at him and then turned back to Hezhi. “Child, I have a gift for you.”
“For me?”
A second column of water rose and became something dimmer, more ghostlike than the very real goddess; but it congealed into a recognizable form nevertheless.
“Ghan!” Hezhi cried.
“More or less,” the apparition said curtly—but more than a hint of a smile graced his usually severe features. “Changed but not changed. When you chew up a piece of meat and spit the gristle out—I think I must be mostly gristle.”
“Ghan!” She was weeping again, though she thought that by now she would have no salt or water left in her body.
“Hush, child. You know how I despise such displays.”
“Do you?” Hezhi answered, wiping the lachryma from her cheeks. “I read your letter, the one you sent by the Mang. The one in which you said you loved me, that I was like the daughter—”
“Yes, yes,” he replied testily.
“Old men sometimes write maudlin things.” He softened. “And I probably meant them.”
“What will become of the library?” Hezhi asked. And then, in a blinding flash of insight, “Of Nhol?”
Ghan shrugged. “The library was my life, but I’m oddly glad now that I did not spend my last days in it. The books remain, and there is always someone. Someone like you and me, at least every generation or two. They will wait, just as they did for you. As for Nhol, who knows?”
“They will not worship me,” the goddess said. “I will not have it. It causes me more pain than pleasure. But I will not harm them, though it is a city that he built. Human Beings are able to change; that is the most—perhaps the only—wonderful thing about your kind. They will be as happy or happier without the River as they were with their god, given time.”
Ghan smiled. “It will be an interesting time, these next few years. I intend to observe them.”
“Observe?”
“The goddess has graciously consented to take this that remains of me downstream with her.”
The goddess nodded confirmation. “Unlike the Changeling, I have no desire to flow through a sterile land. I am more comfortable with neighbors, frog gods, heron lords, swampmasters. Perhaps your old teacher can take up residence in one of the many vacant places—a stream, a field, a mountain. I will invite others, too.”
“And who …” Perkar frowned and began again. “What of the stream that you inhabited of old?”
“Ah, that,” she said. “That is already taken care of; a new goddess lives there. Give her flowers as you did me.” She smiled oddly, a bit mysteriously, with some sadness, and came closer to him, speaking very softly. “Farewell, love. I have become large indeed, and it is a new thing. I have not yet flowed my length, and part of him still lives, though I slay more of him each instant. But it may be that when I have attained my length I will drowse for a time, and when I waken it may be to your great-grandchildren rather than you. I may never speak to you like this again. But of all mortals I have loved, you were both the sweetest and the most worrisome. You made me less a goddess and more Human than you will ever know. Farewell.” She stepped farther from him.