by Geoff Ryman
Suddenly he was aware, with a sense of just having woken, that he had been staring at the Flower for a very long time. The flesh about his eyes was shivering with pain, and streaming with tears, but he could see the Flower now, dimly, an outline of blue.
Cara and One Dress were in the room. They weren’t there before, when had they come in? Galo felt a stab of vivid venomousness that almost revived him. Wrapped in furs and breathing out steam, they were as damp and hot as their genitals. He was cold. It was the cold that was so confusing him, and the pain in his jaw, and the awful light, bruising his eyes. All the room around him seemed darker now, like twilight, his eyes were so burnt by the light.
“How long has he sat there?” Cal Cara asked.
Asu Kweetar replied, “Since the sun first struck the ice and made it boom and batter.”
“The Flower holds him?” asked Cara.
“Completely,” said Asu Kweetar. “He loves it. He loves it beyond words, beyond thinking, more than any of the smaller beasts, more than any human. More than you, Cal Cara Kerig. It is very strange.”
Lies, thought Galo. Nonsense. I feel none of that. He was staring at the Flower again. He could see it very clearly now, each petal of it. There, he thought with satisfaction, finding little flecks of bright light in the midst of its crystalline softness. Imperfection. Even there. Everything was botched by this God. This is a universe that has been ruined by its maker. The universe is a cage that God has trapped us in, and we do not have the strength to unmake it, to tear ourselves free of it. Then, unbidden a thought came to him. Still, anything that was perfect would not change. It would not be alive.
“How long has it been since he took it?” Cara asked.
What does that mean? the Galo asked himself, angrily. Took it! I don’t want it. Took it? What does that mean?
“His heart has beaten four thousand times since he ate of it,” replied the beast.
Ate it! thought Galo, with disgust. What an absurd thing to do!
“Has he slept?” the girl, One Dress, was asking. “The change seems to take hold when you sleep. It is a smaller death, in which the Flower takes root.”
A smaller death in which the Flower takes root! Oh, the simpering pretentiousness of it! Why did peasants always think that power consisted of being kind and half awake? All regal doziness, being oracular and vague, as though creatures that ruled never had to have a clear, hard thought. Oh she was a vulgar sow, immortal or not. I think they probably call each other ‘Sir’ and ‘Lady,’ writhed the mind of the Galu in impotent hatred. I’ll stake a thing or two that for all their immortality, they’ll go back to live on a farm. They’ll raise ducks and geese, and give them pet names. Then they’ll eat them.
Love the Flower! Eat the Flower? That? It was as bad as the sun. Promising light and warmth, but it raised blisters on his skin, and was followed in this God’s universe by winter. Love the Flower! By the Serpent, he wished he could get away from the Flower! A sudden fury seized him. He would show them how he loved the Flower. Love? Was this love, Cal Cara?
He grabbed the Flower in both hands and pushed his fingers into it, between the petals. Cara and Stefile shouted and sprang forward, dim in the dim room, and Galo gave a squeal of pain, struck perhaps by a fresh blaze of light; there was a sudden crack; the Flower broke down the middle, and heedless of the blood on his fingers from the thorns, the Galu shredded it.
Was it night? Suddenly, everything was dark, except where the Flower was. The Flower was on the table. Galo blinked to clear the water from his eyes, which seemed to be sore from grit. The Flower! Reminded that he hated it and had meant to destroy it, he lunged forward, rose to his feet, pulling out fistfuls of its petals, growling, sobbing as he rent it apart. Flakes of it settled like snow, twists of the Flower gleaming on the table like broken diamonds. Panting and wiping his eyes, he watched them glow.
The Flower was on the table, and the Galu was full of confusion and dread. Something terrible held him. How long had he been sitting there? Hadn’t he been standing before? Shreds of the Flower’s destruction were all about it on the table. They moved, drawing themselves up in the middle, using their thorns like hooks to pull themselves, migrating, as disgusting to the Galu as slugs. He swept them off the table, and following the sweep of his hand, he saw them on the floor, the petals, writhing and turning and suddenly burgeoning, a clear line of division appearing down their middles. The floor was covered with them, small, roiling larvae. With a yelp of horror, he began to grind them under his feet, kick them away from him.
Then he saw . . . Oh, sweet Serpent, sideways winder, defender against God . . . saw what he had done. Shifting, growing, steady with light, clear and pure, one after the other, after the other, were many Flowers. They were piled in the corners, nearly to the ceiling, penetrating each other with warm light. Everything else was lost in darkness. He turned, and in terror this time, savaged the Flower, hands clawing at it, but before he was done, he screamed, and let it drop, and buried his hands in his armpits. The Flower rolled, to join its brethren. The Galu felt something shiver and shrink in his chest, felt a wizening and a weakening. His three eggs, his children, his other selves, were dying, like apples withering with age. He opened his mouth, nearly healed now by the Flower, to scream and felt their souls so like his own escape like vapour.
“Father Serpent, coiled at my breast!” he howled. “Help me! Help me!”
“Come, Galo,” said a voice out of the darkness. It was Cara. Hands helped him to his feet. “We’ll let you rest now.”
Galo felt his hair floating free from his forehead. He awoke in warm water, looking out over a coral reef. It fell away beneath him, in tormented pinks and greens and whites, rippled with sunlight, to blue depths where all other colour was lost. Straight ahead of him, deeper than the deepest jewel, the blue extended into the heart of the ocean, layers of light going out mile on mile. There was no sound.
Galo tried to stand up, but couldn’t. He tried to look down and couldn’t; he could only lower his eyes. There was no body beneath him, only coral, as though all the reef had become his body.Odd, he thought, scowling with puzzlement. Water, salty and warm, filled his mouth and throat. Oh. I see. Well it was one way of disposing us, I suppose. He felt no fear, or panic.
A parrot fish, a brilliant turquoise, lazed along the reef just below him, its tail idly stroking the water. Galo marvelled at the perfection of its beak, open shut, open shut. Small black fish moved in a flock with a geometric precision, all to the left in unison, then all to the right. They did not swerve or scatter as the parrot fish swam up behind and then over them, leaving behind a gap in their formation. So gentle, so orderly, thought Galo. He heard a strange hooting, like an owl, but more resonant. A trumpet fish swam by, its mouth a long horn of crusty tissue. Its hooting was taken up all along the reef. Light, sweeping the reef in rays like searchlights, struck the trumpet fish and its translucence, and Galo saw the fish’s spine, and the twisting of blood vessels around the spine, and the brown clumping of its heart and its bowels together, all of it precisely, delicately in place. Far off in the ocean, a pallid white like a moon in daylight, swam a shark, its shape as simple and ferocious as a spearhead.
A shadow settled over Galo, beside him, and heavy, sandalled feet crushed the coral near his face. It was Cal Cara Kerig. She carried an old barnacled chest with her, and adjusted it on the sloping reef, somewhat in front of Galo so that he could see her, and sat on the chest, holding it so it would weigh her down.
“Well, Galo,” she said, amused. “You did it, didn’t you?” she spoke clearly through the water, no bubbles garbling her words. Her lungs were full of water. She could not drown.
Galo pouted.
“I know this might seem somewhat extreme,” Cara continued, “but we had to find some way to make sure you could do no harm. I tried to find an interesting place for you. Are you comfortable?”
“No,” mouthed the Galu, silently in the water, and felt it wash, cooler, through
his mouth and out through the opening of his neck, where his head had been severed. A small fish began to tug experimentally at his cheek. Cara brushed it away.
“Don’t worry about those,” she said. “We heal rapidly, us immortals.” She tapped her chest, where the hole had been. The armour too had healed.
“Go away,” mouthed Galo.
“Oh Galo, now, now. I’m here to keep you company. I thought you might be bored. I’ll visit you often.”
“Yuck,” mouthed the Galu, and stuck out his tongue.
“Then I’ll bring some of your brethren to you,” said Cara, more darkly. “You did us a very great favour, Galo. You showed us that the Flower is inexhaustible. Do you know what I think, Galo? I think the Serpent has been caught, himself. Secret Rose, every action is another. He thought he would use you and me to destroy the Flower. Instead, the Flower has used him, to set itself free in the world again. Humankind will be lost to him. He has lost, Galo.”
Galo sucked the small fish into his mouth and chewed it, vengefully. He squirted it out, cloudy remains and shreds of flesh, sideways at Cara.
Cara chuckled underwater. “Goodbye then, Galo. You’ll have all eternity in which to think, and a brain that will not age. You will come to some very interesting conclusions, I think.”
And I won’t be able to tell anyone about them, thought the Galu in cold anger. He had loved words, and now he had lost them.
Cara let go of the trunk, and it rolled down the reef, making a clicking sound through the water as it struck the coral. She kicked her way farther up the reef, breaking the surface, dancing, floating as she walked. Bubbles marked her passage, twirling in the water, round and white like pearls.
Galo watched and listened for a very long time.
The Warriors who
Carried Life
Culmination came swiftly, in winter, through snow. Snow fell over the South, like the Food of the Gods, in flakes. The people of the South had never seen snow before. It came at night, in a high wind, and some of them thought that the stars were falling. Overhead, the greatest of the stars seemed to be carried aloft, across the sky. Those who saw it felt their hearts leap up, unaccountably, and they saw, as if it were day, all the land around them, covered in white, that sparkled where the light hit it. Had the world changed forever?
Culmination came where no human eyes could see it, save for those of the warriors who had remained to serve the Galu. They were called the Loyal Dogs, encamped with their masters in the Most Important House, in the heart of the City from the Better Times.
Snow fell, shreds of cloud the warriors thought, and the strange cold, as unnerving as fear itself, had driven them inside. The beautiful songs of murder were played to soothe them, and they all sat together, all persuasions of warrior, in the main hall of the School of Angels. There were still flowers on the table, grown as always by the women in the garden of the School. Ravening birds had eaten the butterflies. Charcoal braziers smouldered, to keep the hall warm. Shadow Men played dominoes with the Men who Advance like Spiders. They tried to keep each other hearty, with murmured jokes and wine. Their women sat together, in postures of civility. They knitted, or dandled on their knees beautiful children from the villages, who had taken their fancy for a day or two. They dressed the children in the costumes of princes or gods or sailors. They treated them to sweetmeats and watered wine, until they had to pass them over, regretfully, to the kitchens to be killed. It was considered a delicate, harmless hobby for the wives of the warriors with such work to do.
At one table, the Masters of the Fighting Schools sat together, poring over maps, speaking in restrained voices, making marks. The villages beyond the marshes, outside the destruction made by the Fire, were being divided up and scheduled for extermination. The Galu would go in advance, and the Dogs would follow. The Dogs took a certain subdued pride in the work. The human race was to be superseded in an efficient, orderly fashion. Now that the armies of those who had deserted the Schools were destroyed—the Baked Men had been the least Loyal of all, and the Poison Man had led them—the work could proceed. The Loyal Dogs felt themselves to be instruments of a great change, part of a grand process that transcended their own feelings or scruples. It was a terrible struggle for them. Even the inarticulate Men who Cut Horses talked long into the night with the Angels, who felt it their duty to guide and advise.
The Loyal Dogs spoke of Heart. They meant the kind of courage it took to face the things they had to do. They raided villages upstream to collect women to do work. They collected the children, to eat. That took more Heart than anything else. The herding and killing of children was done in shifts to spread the unpleasant chore. To make sure they all had a hand in it.
They worshipped their masters, revelled in them. Trained, disciplined, taught to love war, they loved the power and the invincibility of the Galu. They danced for them, sang for them, tried to speak like them, dress like them. The Angel Warriors discarded their spotless white for purple. When the Galu ached to be hewn, their other selves heavy on their breasts, the Loyal Dogs killed them, and thought of their own glorious death that would come—by immolation, by the sword—when the work was done.
There was a tremendous sense of companionship among the warriors, the old boundaries between the Fighting Schools had been lowered in an effort to fill the black pits that would open up in their souls at night. They would cry out, then, and comfort each other. Helping each other across, it was called, and spoken of no more directly than that.
“We are the last,” the Angel Dogs intoned, “the last of humankind. We must behave with reason and with dignity. This is necessary, this thing that has happened. We must be sure that it is done swiftly, cleanly, with a minimum of trouble. It must be done with regret, with sorrow.”
So they sat, that winter’s night, trapped in the Angel hall, nervous, impatient, trying to keep their spirits up, trying not to hear the insinuations of the wind.
A warrior entered, a Shadow Man. He and his mechanical doubles stomped their feet and shook their heads to shake off the snow. Only his head was covered by a hood. Glancing self-consciously about him, he made his way as unobtrusively as possible to the table where the Master of his school sat.
“Salmu, Isshas. There is something,” he said.
“Yes, Capesi, yes,” said his Master, without looking up.
The man did not want to speak. “There is something. In the sky.”
“Yes, Capesi, we know. It is called snow.”
“It is a great light, Isshas. A great light.” He was murmuring now, thin-lipped. “Like a new star.”
“A new star. You have been draining the cup, Capesi!”
“No. It comes from the North, towards us. It is very close.”
“Well, let it come!”
“It is being carried by Asu Kweetar. The Wordy Beast. And two warriors. I could see them from a long way off.”
“The Wordy Beast! Did he talk to you, then?” an Angel said, leaning back on the bench, smiling.
“Yes,” said Capesi, quietly. There was a roar of laughter. “He said he was coming to destroy us.”
“You are frightened, Capesi,” chuckled his Master. “Come, come, we can’t have you frightened. We must send Asu Kweetar and his two masters away! Aye?” There was a murmur of assent. “Well? Up then!” roared the Master, and the warriors gave a boisterous yell, and leapt to their feet. Here at last was sport, in the long night.
Holes had been knocked through the walls between the Schools. The word spread quickly. “Ho, ho, Capesi,” the warriors teased. “There best be something in the sky after this!” They snatched arms from the storerooms and strode out into the night, hands on each other’s shoulders.
“Aiee!” they cried, and pointed, for the sky in the North was ablaze with light. The snow as it fell, gleamed with it, twinkled with sudden pinpricks of it. Snow was already gathering in drifts in the corners of the courtyard. The warriors scooped handfuls of it, and chased their women, who shrieked, and da
rted away, laughing. As a joke, they gave piggyback rides to the Baked Men, who laughed like idiot children. The Men who Fight like Turtles walked upright into the courtyard, balancing their armoured shells on their shoulder. The playful Spiders, who scorned their earthboundness, gleefully rang their shells like gongs.
“So where is Asu Kweetar?” smiled the Shadow Master. He was keeping close to Capesi; they would have great games with him, later.
“He is coming,” said Capesi. “I stood on the walls, and could see farther than from here.” He cast his eyes on the ground; there was one thing he could not bring himself to tell his Master. Capesi knew what the light was.
Then it was upon them. Silently, the white beast swept low over the walls. The warriors turned as it passed, cheering, because there would be a fight. Then they saw the Flower. Its light flashed on the snow, as if reflected from a thousand mirrors. They felt the light too, and the cheer went sour, and fell away. The light pierced the crystal water of the snow and broke into colours. The snow was like pieces of rainbow, and before they could call up a name for it, the Loyal Dogs knew from where the light had come.
“Lamps,” suggested one of them. “Lamps for the storm.” But no one said, yes, that was it.
They could hear the whistling of the great beast’s wings. They could see two warriors on its back. They saw something else, held in a net, but linked by filaments as well, that glowed. There were flowers, many flowers, linked by light.
“It is a Flower,” admitted one of them. “But that one is clear, not White.” There was a murmur of assent.
“There’s more than one there,” another corrected him. “There weren’t many Flowers.” He meant in the Book.
As suddenly as if she had been clubbed, a woman fell to her knees, covering her mouth, sobbing, mewing out words no one could understand. “Up, woman, up!” her husband shouted and tried hauling her to her feet.
“But there were! There were many Flowers,” she told him. “There were! On the Tree!”