by Geoff Ryman
Breath escaped from Cara, with relief. She and Epesu looked at each other’s eyes. “Yes,” Cara said. “That will work. By the hold I have on your soul, I tell you to die quickly and without pain, and take the Apple with you, back to Hawwah. Stay in the garden with her, and take all the good things of your life with you.” Looking away from her, Cara swung the sword across Epesu’s neck. The head fell backwards, looking up. Blood gushed upwards in a pulsing fountain, slapping the floor in sheets, droplets spraying in the wind, against the walls and over Cara and Stefile. The body stood for a very long time, held either by Epesu’s will or Cara’s. Finally it fell, and when it dropped, the Apple was gone, back into the Land of the Dead.
Cara turned, arm around Stefile, and pulled open the door. The corridor beyond it was thick with the Dead, reaching out for them, mouths working in silent unison. “They can’t hurt us,” Cara said, and together she and Stefile plunged into them. They broke through them as if through thick shrubbery. The hands of the Dead, given some substance by the Flower, could hold them for just a moment.
Disruption followed the Flower. As it was wrenched from Epesu’s chamber, as Cara and Stefile stepped through the door onto the stone, there was a roar of wind, and a cracking of wood, and suddenly the entire structure of the chamber, beams, planks, shingles, loom, mats, parchments, shutters, were burst apart, smashed away from the wall, as swiftly as an explosion. Cara and Stefile ran, eyes closed against the torrent. The air was full of chips of wood, and dust, and bits of precious metal like knives. They gasped for breath, heads turned, groping their way along the corridors, brushing aside the hands of the Dead. They crawled up the steps, out of the temple, feeling their way.
Outside, on what had once been the roof, the great wooden arms that hoisted up the carriage were being rent apart. With long painful screeching, sheets of gold were being torn up from the domes of the towers. Plates of metal bobbed, glinting in the air as if on wires. Beaten by the wind, hands covering their eyes, Cara and Stefile stumbled up to the narrow stairway between the towers. Cara, feeling the smooth warmth of the Flower, thought of Epesu, and thought of herself, sinner, murderess, and felt tears start in her eyes. She was crying for the contrast, between the dark worlds that were, and the world that the Flower promised. The Dead followed them, out of the Wensenari.
The Wound Between
the Worlds
The Flower was Life itself. Everything that lived wanted it. They followed Cara too.
The rats from the kitchens of the Wensenara, plump and brown, waddled after the Flower, and clambered up the steep stone steps. In the light of the Flower, worms rose out of the soil of the vegetable gardens. They were made translucent in the light, and were driven wild, thrashing. They reared up on each other, into a wave of pale flesh. Cara and Stefile waded through it, kicking. The wave slipped sideways on itself, tumbling away from them.
They climbed out of the crevice in the cliff. As they pulled themselves over rocks, into the plateau forest, something white shot straight at them. Cara had time to glimpse its heavy-headed shape, two dark eyes in front, before she turned and ducked, hunching over the Flower. Claws scrabbled briefly against her armoured back, before the white shape soared away, over the valley, veering helplessly in the wind. It was an owl. Overhead, in the light of the Flower, great spirals of predatory birds—hawks and falcons and a single eagle—turned on the columns of air that rose up from the cliffs. Cara and Stefile ran for the shelter of the trees.
The wind in the forest blasted between the trees swirling dust and needles up from the forest floor. The wind made a sound in the branches like the sea. The branches whisked Cara’s and Stefile’s faces like brooms. Insects, driven like the rain pelted into them. Suddenly, screeching, a flock of starlings, caught in a funnel of air, whirled around Cara and Stefile, slamming into the trunks of trees and through the branches. Beating their wings, they entangled themselves in Stefile’s hair; she tried to haul them free, shouting something to Cara that she couldn’t hear. They fought their way into a clearing, and there was a sudden drop in the wind.
The starlings settled over Cara in a blanket. “Stef, get them off!” she shouted, trying to cover the Flower in her hands. The birds pecked at her hands, at the Flower that shone so clearly through them. Birds covered Cara’s wrists, swarming over each other’s downy backs.
The light of the Flower could not be dimmed. Its light pierced Cara’s back and armour, showed clearly through all the layers of dust and branches. In the sky overhead, the birds of prey folded their wings behind their backs, and plummeted out of the sky as if they were spears. They tore through the tender upper branches and broke apart on the larger ones, explosions of blood and feathers against the trunks. The single eagle, larger than any, crashed through all, eyes blazing with the light of the Flower. The branches raked its feathers out, and cracked its sides, and it slammed into Cara’s back with all its weight, at blinding speed. Cara was thrown on the ground, with a cry. The birds covered her, seething. Beetles worked their way up from the ground, and squirrels, too anxious until now, bounded forward onto her back. “Get off!” shouted Stefile, and tried to beat them back. The silence, had she noticed it, might have seemed ominous.
Then from behind them came a rumbling and a crashing, and low rising moan. A wall of dust seemed to advance across the forest. Suddenly, like a breaking wave, it swept through the clearing. Stefile howled as it hit them. The wind tore a strip of her heavy hem loose from her skirt. It pulled the beasts away from Cara, sent them rolling over the ground. Cara and Stefile huddled, low to the ground, covering their faces from the dust and needles.
They waited until the wind was merely strong and steady before standing again. When they did, Stefile hissed “Cara!” and clenched her hand.
Crouched at the base of each tree, sheltering, were wolves. Their fur blown in the wrong directions, their faces screwed shut at it, the wolves smiled, either with the wind or aggression, unsheathing yellow-rimmed fangs. Their thin, slit eyes seemed to burn with the light of the Flower. Stefile gasped and looked behind them. She saw a wolf, as silent as a shadow, dart from one tree to another. They were being encircled. She heard Cara’s sword being drawn.
She also saw, through the trees, a giant elk, gambolling like a fawn, tossing its great antlers, dancing. Stefile could see every hair along its back. The conifers swayed in the wind, and it was as though everything in the forest was marching towards them.
Stefile felt herself lifted up, the torn flap of her dress lashing. As if caught in a vortex, she and Cara were rising. The wolves closed in under them, like water. They sprang up into the air on powerful hind legs. One of them caught the loose strip of cloth and tore it free. The rough bark of a tree crept slowly past them as they rose. In the light of the Flower, it looked like continents, with valleys and mountains. On the ground, out of the blowing dust, as though part of it, came the Dead.
Halfway up, the tree had split with its own weight. Humming with the spell, Cara lifted them both up into the crevice, and left them leaning against the raw wood and sticky sap. The shield clamped itself over Cara’s chest, over the Flower, like a tortoise’s shell. Her mind and body felt like lead. Circling, circling, the magic would keep circling inside her head, even as she slept. Fatigue that even the Flower could not heal lay like a metal bar across her eyes. Cara discovered she yearned to be free of the magic, yearned for her year to be over. She listened to the wind, and cradled Stefile under her arm.
“What manner of thing?” Stefile wondered aloud. Her eyes too had been burned with the light of the Flower.
It was the silence that woke Cara. Silence, and the sudden, sickening knowledge that the Flower was gone. She leapt forward with a start that nearly pitched her out of the tree.
“Stef!” she cried out in panic. Stefile was not beside her. Cara pulled herself to the edge of the crevice, her feet wedged into it, to lean out.
The wound Cara had rent between the worlds had healed. Everything was still and
radiant with light though there was no sun or moon. All around her, covering the branches of the trees were birds, silent and calm. On the wide, heavy branch that had pulled the tree open, Stefile sat.
“I’ve got it,” she said. Her face was mournful, baggy and her hands were stained with sap gone black with dust. “Don’t worry.” Listlessly, she swept away the insects that crawled towards her and the Flower.
“I ate some of it,” she added.
“Oh, Stef,” groaned Cara, feeling only sadness for her.
“All these birds came, and the insects. You were asleep. I thought to keep it safe, the shield let me take it. And I ate. Just one petal.”
“Poor Stef,” said Cara, knowing how the Flower pulled. “I’m sorry. It’s all right.”
“I didn’t do it for me!” said Stefile, quick anger in her voice, and then went still, hanging her head, and picking the bark.
“For who, then?”
“For the child,” she replied in a pale, bitter voice. “Our child.”
It was a moment or two before Cara said, “Oh, no.”
“For the last time, Cara, is it true what you tell me about yourself?”
“Yes,” admitted Cara.
“That you go back? After a year?”
“Yes! Yes it is.”
“Then what happens to the child? A child that you fathered, after a year? Does it live? Does it die?”
Cara shook her head, helpless with guilt.
“Then you shouldn’t have stuck yourself up me if you didn’t know, should you?”
“No,” replied Cara, so softly that even she could not hear it.
“Anyway, that’s why. I thought the Flower could save it. No other reason.”
“How long have you known?”
“Oh! Since the Unwanted Way. I knew in the pass, in the mountains. When the witch held me, I kept hoping it was the spell that was stopping the blood. But it hasn’t come, Cara, and it won’t. I can feel the thing move.”
“I’m sorry, Stef.”
“So am I. How can I be a mother, living the way I am, like a vagabond, thieving. With the Galu, and all of this! Where am I going to live? What am I going to do with it? Take it home? I don’t know my grandparents’ names, and my Ata wouldn’t have me. If I can still find him, after we killed the bondmaster. Tell me what I can do! You’ve eaten from Hawwah’s apple, you’re the great sorceress who turned herself into a man, you’re its father. Tell me! What can I do?”
Cara could not answer.
“Tell me what I can do, or I’ll throw this thing to the wolves!” She held the Flower out over the air.
“We’ll send you to my Aunt at Long Water.”
“Oh!” sobbed Stefile in outrage. “Oh that is good. Home again, to some woman I don’t know, patient little wife to be. And what will I get at the end of that? A husband? A life? I’ll get a squealing brat, like all the others, and maybe not even that. Nothing! Not even you!”
“Would you rather have the child in the middle of a battlefield, with all the Galu about it?”
“I don’t know about the Galu. It’s you who hate the Galu, I don’t care about the Galu, it’s you who want to bring them down and be Sir Hero, Haliki. Cara Haliki. Sir Dear Daughter Hero.”
“I am very, very sorry this happened,” Cara said, her voice clear and calm, but darkening.
“So am I. By the Gods, I’m sorry. I wish you’d left me at home.”
“Whose child would you be having, then?” asked Cara, “How much time would the bondmaster let you have with it, before he made you give it over to the crones, or made you work with it tied to your back, or even sold it. I told you what I was. You chose not to believe it.”
Stefile’s eyes were narrow. “That does not leave me with much, Cara.”
“I’ll help you all I can. It’s all I can do.” Cara looked at her, trying to draw softness and surrender out of Stefile’s eyes. Stefile picked at the bark, and did not look up.
“You want to be rid of it,” stated Cara.
“Yes.”
“You ate the Flower for it.”
“Fool of me.”
Cara thought of the Destroyed Woman, Cara with the broken face, who would never marry. “I’d want it,” she said.
“Then you can have it,” replied Stefile with an angry sputter of a chuckle. “What will it do for me, the Flower?”
“You’re going to live forever,” said Cara, as if by stating it as flatly and as baldly as possible, she could somehow make it comprehensible. “You’re never going to die. You’re never going to age.”
Stefile gave a chortle of amused fear. “What am I going to do with forever? Sixteen years has seemed long enough in this life for me. Cara? I’m alone, Cara. I’m frightened and I’m more alone than I ever thought it was possible to be. Look at me!” She gave another shivering laugh. “Stuck up a rotting tree, with a baby inside me, and a man for its father who is really a woman, telling me I am going to live forever, because I have just eaten part of the living God. Me?” She began to sway back and forth with laughter, shaking her head. “I want to go home . . .” she began, and couldn’t finish, couldn’t speak with laughter. Finally she was able to gasp out, as if it were a joke, “And there isn’t any home!” She was crying too.
“Stef,” said Cara quietly. “Give me the Flower.”
“Why,” she replied, wiping her cheeks. “Are you frightened I’ll drop it?” Then she saw why.
“Just give it to me, Stef.”
“Oh no,” said Stefile. “No. I don’t want the role of Hawwah. I don’t want to be blamed.”
“No one will blame you.”
“Really? Not you? Tell me that you are not doing this for my sake, or I really will throw it to the wolves. May the wolves live forever!”
“It is true. I am doing this for my sake.” She was. Desire for the Flower flooded over her. “But I think I do love you anyway. And I will love the child.”
“Oh! They all say that. I’ve seen what comes next. Here.” She stretched across the space between them, and gave Cara the Flower. A thrill of expectation shivered through Cara as she took it. She really was going to do it.
“Maybe,” said Stefile in a weary, hopeful voice, “Maybe it will stop you going back.”
“Maybe,” replied Cara, without much hope. The Flower, like warm, clear water was in her hand. She slipped her thumbnail under one of the petals, and ran it up to the top and tried to prize it free. She pricked herself on the thorn, shook her thumb, sucked it. The petal she had chosen clouded over, suffused with blood. She tried again, more carefully, and with a slightly moist sound of breakage, the petal came free. She put it in her mouth. It sat on her tongue, heavy, cool, and soft, without fragrance, tasting of nothing at all. Then very suddenly it melted, even the thorn. Without Cara swallowing, the Flower became part of her.
Nothing changed. There was no thunder or rising wind. Cara felt as she had felt before. She held out her hand to Stefile. “Come on, come on, love, sleep at least.”
Stefile looked at her, across the space between them, exhausted, emotionally cold. Cara was suddenly frightened that their love had run its course. The fear made her go very still and patient and accepting. “I want to stay here and think, Cara,” Stefile answered her. “You sleep.”
Feeling somehow defeated, Cara pulled herself back into the crevice, hugging the Flower to her. She would just have to see, just have to see about everything, everything was in balance. She could lose to the Galu, Stefile could leave. She settled back against the wood, and swirling in her, kept in abeyance only, was every emotion.
Fear of loss, fear of loneliness, fear of having sinned. Pride in the power of her loins, jealousy. Cal Cara Kerig could have no children. Guilt and concern: it was Stefile who would have to bear the pain and pressure. And love, love for the child, love for Stefile, Stefile who might not want a woman with a ruined face; child, child with no name yet who might yet die. Life everlasting. Knowledge. And the mystery, Hawwah’s mystery,
that still did not feel solved, as if the womb were a cavern that extended all the way back to God, a portal through which each human being climbed into life. Women were closer to life. Cara was glad, after all, that she was not really a man. Magic. Magic and fear and something that was sweet and clean and wholesome, the life that people yearn for and which never quite comes, even to immortals.
Sleep.
The Beast that
Talks to God
Stefile was shaking Cara awake. “Cara, Cara get up. Get up!”
Cara lurched awake. “What? What is it?”
It was day now, almost afternoon, with a high sun, and a light breeze. The crevice in the tree seemed deeper and wider, and the whole tree seemed to lean backwards. Cara thought, in the confusion of half-sleep, that it was she who was lopsided.
“Cara,” said Stefile, her face tense and expectant. “Cara. The Wordy Beast.” She grabbed Cara’s hand and pulled her. Cara’s back was covered in sap, strands of it followed her, as she stood up, wondering what Stefile meant.
The Wordy Beast, that she had seen defaced on the walls of the palace of the Galu; the Wordy Beast that Stefile yearned to see, Asu Kweetar, the Most Noble Beast, that Cara had never quite believed in, until now.
There, on their wide branch, weighing down the entire tree, sat the Most Noble Beast, on white haunches, four or five times the height of a man. It was all white and beautifully muscled like a lion. It had a mane of white feathers, and enormous white wings that were held outstretched for balance. Its eagle face was fierce, its beak was hooked, and its eyes were silver, like metal, with a vertical iris like a cat’s. Over one of its lion shoulders a bow was slung, with a quiver of arrows behind it. Around its neck, it wore a necklace of purple amethysts. It sat, unmoved and unblinking.
“Are you Kweetar?” Cara asked, still unsure. “Can you speak?”
“Yes,” the beast said, like a knife in Cara’s mind. Its beak did not move. Its mind spoke, with the clarity of a blade.
“When I was a girl, I dreamed I’d see you, Wordy Beast,” said Stefile, beaming with delight. “And I have. Is it true that you whisper stories to children, in the night?”