by Jane Kindred
Cree leaned over her, their stomachs slick with sweat and slipping against each other. “And I suppose he’d be a good little sailor and gobble your spunk right down.”
That did it. Ume arched into Cree and let out a muffled howl as she emptied into her.
Cree sat back and rode her roughly, stroking her own clit as Ume moaned out the last of it before Cree let go herself a few moments after, shuddering with a rippling wave of pleasure.
“So,” Ume sighed as Cree snuggled against her, both of them happily damp. “Was that a practice run?” She squealed as Cree pinched her nipple once more, this time not the least bit erotically.
“Gods, you’re incorrigible.” Cree planted a firm kiss on her lips. “I am not fulfilling poor Captain Paravar’s fantasy for him. He should count himself fortunate that he received the honor of the services of the most prestigious—and skillful—temple courtesan in the Delta at all.”
“Darling,” said Ume. “That just goes without saying.”
Paravar bid them farewell with obvious regret when the ship arrived at Rhyman the following morning. Ume regretted it a bit herself. She would have loved to see Cree dominating a man—and she wouldn’t have minded bending the captain over his desk once more either.
But they were one step closer to finding a way under the hill without the usual invitation. If there was anyone who could get them through the veil it was another Meer. And Ume happened to know that their old friend Ahr, who currently resided in the former temple of Ra as Lord Minister Merit’s Second, was acquainted with one more. Even if Ahr still couldn’t remember Pearl because of the enchantment of forgetting, he remembered the Meer who’d granted his vetma to be changed into a man. She lived in hiding in one of the soths, and Ume intended to petition her.
At the temple, Ume and Cree were granted immediate entrance. The servants remembered Ume from her visit the previous summer, and treated her almost like royalty. Merit had apparently kept the temple staffed with those who still remained loyal Meerists, and a courtesan of Ume’s stature was almost as revered by them as one of the Meer themselves.
But when Ume asked to see Ahr Naiahn, the faces of the loyal servants were downcast. Ume and Cree were shown instead to Ahr’s urn.
Their oldest friend was gone. And Merit had fallen into an inexplicable torpor. And they were no closer to finding Pearl than if they’d stayed in their rented room in Gundoumu Arazi.
Seventeen: Awakening
The Heart of Winter had come, and Jak was well enough to enjoy it. Once again, Mound RemPeta was chosen for the honor, one of the few mounds fully recovered from the gales of autumn. The symbolic observance reminded Jak painfully of the last Heart of Winter. So much seemed the same. Geffn’s aging parents, Rem and Peta, ruled the roost, as spry as ever. And Mell and Keiren, members of the moundhold now for more than five seasons, alternated between doting upon and teasing each other as if they were still newly handfasted. But the players had slightly changed; there was Geffn’s Sevine this time instead of Ra.
Sevine was leery of Jak, and perversely, Jak did nothing to ease her fears. During the ritual of bread making, a tradition reserved for women, Sevine hovered about Peta, anxious to please her future mother-in-law. Jak’s tradition was baiting both the men drinking and debating in the gathering room and the women cloistered in the kitchen, as a protest against the stilted adherence to gender roles by moving freely between both spaces. It clearly agitated Sevine as Jak came and went through the women-only space at every excuse.
On one of Jak’s excursions to the kitchen, looking up as though only just noticing the repeated intrusion, Sevine frowned and nodded toward Peta. “Should Jak be here? Doesn’t he—I mean, she—I mean—” Sevine managed a pretty blush and convincing dismay. “Oh…I forgot.”
Jak scowled at her, spoiling for a fight. “You didn’t forget. You’ve been watching me all evening.” Coming closer to the group gathered around the table, Jak stepped into Sevine’s personal space. “You deliberately insulted me.”
Sevine looked to Peta and Mell with an anxious silent appeal. She’d obviously expected to get away with the slight and knock Jak down a peg or two. She hadn’t expected a confrontation. Jak didn’t move, and no one moved to help Sevine.
Her pink cheeks turned red with defiance. “You’re the one who’s been deliberately rude to me. So intimate with Geffn, so coy, trying to embarrass me in front of the entire mound.”
Jak’s anger was ameliorated by an urge to laugh. “Coy? I don’t believe I’ve ever been coy in my entire life.”
Though her blush deepened, Sevine stood her ground, and Jak was grudgingly impressed.
“Perhaps it was an honest mistake. So let me just explain things to you in simple terms, in case no one has. It’s the confines of the concept of gender I take exception to, the idea that one’s parts somehow dictate who they are, separating people into limiting categories and roles based on their sex. Rejecting that doesn’t mean I wish to be labeled male, any more than I wish to be labeled female. But regardless of pronouns, by the silly little rules of society, I am allowed in this kitchen. And just so you don’t make the same mistake again, here’s something to make sure you don’t forget.”
Jak grabbed Sevine’s hands and pressed them to the hitherto undefined chest with a vengeance, squeezing Sevine’s fingers around the unmistakable breasts beneath the loose work shirt, and eliciting a startled squeal. “There you are. That ought to give you something tactile to remember.”
Jak walked away, feeling smug at the peals of laughter from Mell and Peta. Something caught Jak’s eye on rejoining the gathering, drawing Jak’s gaze downward to where Sevine’s hands had been. Two white, flour-dusted handprints marked the shirt.
The ceremony of lights followed shortly afterward, the lamps extinguished and the mound in darkness until the first candle fluttered into life. It was the perennial story of renaissance. Life had gone under, but indomitably returned, springing forth out of the elemental void from uncertainty and shadow into radiant abundance.
Sevine giggled in the darkness while they awaited the first candle. It could only be Geffn toying with her as he used to do with Jak. After indulging in a moment of self-pity, Jak gave it up with a sigh. There was nothing wrong with Sevine, and Jak had relinquished Geffn long ago.
The first light spilled into the absence, turning blankness to a feathery shadow world in which faces wavered, partially in view at the flash of the candle’s brilliance then occluded by a wavering flicker. The next candle appeared, lit by the first as it crossed the room, and the scene became duskily romantic, barely seen. This candle and its bearer rose and crossed once more in the path of the star, each flame to its opposite point. It was Jak’s turn then, and Jak stood as the flame hissed into being. The room was dancing with a soft, delightful illumination, and Jak saw who sat at the opposite point.
Sevine glanced about in dismay to see if someone else was nearer to Jak’s trajectory, but there was no evading it. Jak would pass the kiss of light to her. Jak came forward, feeling crude and unrefined before the graceful Sevine. Sevine held up her candle, her face young and petrified before her more seasoned rival. Poor Sevine. It wasn’t her fault Jak was miserable.
Jak looked up from the candle under mischievous lashes. Standing an inch from Sevine’s outstretched hand, Jak plucked at the collar of the work shirt Sevine had so recently imprinted, darting a glance down into the shirt and back at Sevine with a meaningful lift of an eyebrow.
Sevine’s cheeks reddened even in the dim light, and then a small sound sputtered through her tight lips despite her desperate attempt to retain her composure. Geffn looked at her curiously, having missed the gesture, and Sevine was finished. She broke up loudly into nervous laughter and covered her mouth, and Jak ducked down and let their wicks come together. “I was just making sure,” Jak whispered with a grin. “They might have gotten away.” Sevine succumbed to a spasm
of laughter, and Jak walked away as though unconnected to the source.
There was a truce between them after that, and Jak relinquished Geffn’s attention to her. Watching them, however, was still a needle prodding Jak’s sore spot. At the last Heart of Winter, Jak had been celibate by choice, self-contained and content. Jak had needed no one, and desired no one. Naiahn aovet, aovet naiahn. In Deltan, the phrase was painfully ironic.
Then Ra had come out of the white and shattered every construct Jak had embraced, leaving Jak full of holes. Even Jak’s friendship with Ahr had been altered, both of them exposed to feeling where there’d been none before—or none that needed expressing in the platonic compromise they’d struck. Ra had cut Jak open so that elements flowed both out and in, and then had taken from Jak what she’d incited Jak to need.
The celebration was energetic, and Jak was seated once more on the steps, an outsider this time by fate instead of choice. Jak’s moundmates had won the eternal debate after all: one had no true choice, and exercising the illusion of it led to folly. Jak stood and took a wrap from the peg, ascending to the clarifying cold above. It was where Jak always went to mull over problems of philosophy—though Jak hadn’t expected abstract philosophy to become life.
There was only starlight on the blue-shadowed snow. The Heart of Winter fell on the last new moon before the solstice so the darkness would be absolute. Jak knew the Haethfalt terrain even in the dark, even through concealing snow, feet charting automatically toward the north, tracing the path to the small outer mound as though they didn’t know Ahr was dead. There was no cloud cover tonight to repeat the storm from which there’d been no turning back. Perhaps Jak would go down to Mound Ahr and light a candle to soften Ahr’s darkness.
A sound of respiration stopped Jak on the path. There had been wolves close to the settlements this winter since the storms had altered their hunting grounds and left them hungry. Jak turned toward the sound, nape prickling. Perhaps it was only imagination or a trick of the night. In a depression of snow, Jak saw it, hunkered down. It was a wolf, or—
Jak’s breath jarred painfully in the healing lungs. The dark shape was becoming defined. A woman’s shape—an unclothed woman with inhuman lengths of dark hair.
Ra had returned. She appeared here somehow in the same manner as before, as though she were the symbolic vegetative deity herself, gone under with the turn of the year, and once again come forth.
Jak shouted at the apparition. “Go away. I don’t want you.”
The naked woman lifted her head, still crouched and holding on to herself in a feral stance. It was Ra. Her lips moved, blue and soundless, only the rapid breath escaping. Jak realized she was quickly becoming hypothermic.
“Damn you. I don’t believe this.” Reluctantly, Jak went to her and put the warm wrap over her shaking shoulders, and she took it wordlessly. “Why don’t you just conjure something?” Jak demanded. “You obviously have the ability to end up here. Or did Shiva send you?” That was the more likely—Shiva and her mysterious orchestrations.
Jak looked down at Ra’s frozen feet. She couldn’t stay out here. Jak took her by the shoulders. “Dammit, come on then, Ra.”
The shivering face looked up at Jak and there was something peculiar about it. The eyes— “Ra?” she gasped, grabbing at Jak. “Ra?” The eyes were indigo.
Jak swept her to her feet and looked into the blue-black depths. Unexpectedly, she was no taller than Jak. Her limbs, even through the woolen wrap, were like ice. Jak whirled her about and began to run with her back toward Mound RemPeta, but her frozen feet stumbled, already unable to carry her. Jak lifted her and plowed with effort toward the mound, stumbling once on an embankment and gathering the wet bundle once more from the snow.
The door flew open under Jak’s boot, and the party came to an astonished halt. “I need help.”
Geffn bounded the stairs instinctively, taking the limp, unconscious body from Jak’s arms.
“Blessed sooth.” Rem came forward, face flushed with drink and the warmth of the fire. “You’ve brought her again.”
“No,” said Jak as they hurried with her down the steps. “It isn’t Ra. It’s Ahr.”
The golden lights had returned. Pearl watched them drift and float, winking in and out above his bed like fireflies in a summer meadow at dusk. Beside him, someone stirred, the Caretaker attending him while he slept. She rose and stood over him, a crystal bowl filled with pale, milky gold liquid held in her hands.
“Drink,” she instructed, holding it out to him.
Pearl took it from her and did as he was told without question. It tasted like honey and wildfires.
“Drink it all.”
He intended to. When he handed the empty bowl back to her, he saw Mnemosyne standing behind her in the haze of firefly lights.
The statuesque woman let one of the gold tufts alight on her palm and blew on it, snuffing it out. “Do you know, Pearl, that you fill the halls beneath the hill with these lights when you’re on the mend?”
“I do?”
“You do. Our realm responds to you, shaping to your whims.”
“You’ve been quite ill,” the Caretaker added. “The activity of the Meer in the other realm seems to upset you. You mustn’t allow yourself to become entangled in the emotional intensity of what you paint and draw. As I told you before, you must learn to shut out what doesn’t concern you. Focus on what you wish to see and let the rest flow past you.”
“What the Caretaker means,” said Mnemosyne, with, it seemed to Pearl, a touch of annoyance at the Caretaker’s remonstrative tone, “is only that you need to be a little more careful. We don’t want to see you come to harm. But we would never wish to hamper your creativity. Your vision is what’s important.”
The Caretaker bowed stiffly, as though Mnemosyne had given her a silent directive. “We’ll let you rest. But try not to let what you see affect you so deeply. The affairs of other Meer no longer concern you.”
Pearl nodded. But what he saw did concern him. The very nature of the Meeric flow said they were connected. Ra’s madness, a continent away, had nearly destroyed him. Shiva’s darkness had actually maddened and destroyed MeerHraethe. All Pearl had ever seen in his visions—except when he’d meditated with purpose on the vetmas of the people of Soth Szofl while he sat on its throne—were the lives of other Meer. And now those lives were undergoing rapid, tumultuous change, affecting those he cared about.
The Caretaker and Mnemosyne left him to his thoughts, and he had plenty. He hadn’t realized his moods had an effect on the reality under the hill. If he was merely a glass reflecting the light and shadow of the outside world, why did the things he looked for appear when he needed them? He’d thought it was the Permanence providing these things to accommodate him, but now he wasn’t so sure. And why would his thoughts and even his health affect the atmosphere around him?
Since he hadn’t done it consciously, he wondered if he could. Pearl lay back on his pillow and watched the twinkling golden lights. Could he make them pink like the ones that floated throughout his usual quarters? He concentrated on a single light and willed it to change color. It seemed for a moment the light was fluxing, dimming and glowing bright again, wavering from a pale gold to a slightly warmer hue. But that was all. He couldn’t be sure it had been his influence that affected it.
He tried to say it aloud: Pink. But though it was a single syllable, the combination of sounds at the end of this word proved too painful for him to execute.
The table beside his bed held a box of paper and a tray of colored pencils. Pearl sat up and pulled them onto his lap, and began drawing the room and the lights floating through it. He used the warm gold and sunny yellow tones to depict the lights, and then he took the pinks and roses and colored over the gold. As he drew, the light in the room around him turned paler and softer, with a decidedly rosy glow. Even the warm, firewood scent became a swe
et bouquet. Pearl set down the pencils and looked around him with satisfaction. He’d redrawn reality.
Eighteen: Perspicacity
At a glance, she could have been Ra’s twin, though on close inspection, there were obvious differences between them. Huddling in Jak’s four-poster bed, curled among the quilts, she resembled the man called Ahr—the nose, the mouth, the color of the eyes without question. But she possessed an indefinable quality that had made it easy to mistake her for Ra. The hair had been the final trickery. In the glow of candlelight, it was Ahr’s kerum brown, but the length was simply Meeric. On the moor, lit only by starlight, it had appeared to be the rich ebony that was the final sum of Ra.
Jak sat before her on the bed, overcome and unable to speak. Ahr could only have returned because Ra had willed it. What Ra had termed “renaissance” couldn’t just happen spontaneously to an ordinary human being. The spirit needed time to renew, just as the physical elements needed time to break down and rejoin the greater fabric of the universe, and it frightened Jak what might have been compromised with the lingering ashes left behind. Ahr wasn’t meant to be part of Jak’s lifetime, not anymore, and Jak had been grievously resigned. To think otherwise would have been a daily cutting at the wound. But Ra had apparently spoken, and here she was.
Jak clung to her hand, precisely Ahr’s, amazed. This was the Ahr whom Ra had seen in the street, and it was no wonder she’d captured the heart of a god. Jak needed to maintain the connection of touch to be certain she was real.
Ahr stirred after a bit and made a soft sound of distress, drawing her feet up as though beginning to feel the thaw. They’d bundled her here while she trembled from the cold, heating stones in the fire to wrap in blankets around her. She’d given no sign of awareness of them, locked in a palsy of shock. The others, baffled and without answers, had long since retired for the night, but Jak, understandably, had remained on this vigil.