Lost Gods

by Micah Yongo

  “You did not bury him.”

  “We did not know whether you would have him burned, buried or cast to the waters.”

  Yasmin, trembling, hugged herself as she stared down on the body. Hassan’s beautiful body. It took a while for her to notice how Imaru’s guard had come to stand beside her now, at her shoulder, staring down at Hassan’s body with her. He removed his hood, revealing a shaven scalp.

  “It is likely Noah saw it happen,” he said. “He will be different now. He will know already this world is not safe.”

  Yasmin looked at him. The man seemed clearly older than her yet his skin was glossy and smooth, like he’d been cut from some refined slab of black marble. And something about the way he stood there, still as a mountain, blocking out the sun…

  “Who are you?” Yasmin said.

  The man turned slowly, fixing that implacable grey-eyed gaze on her once more. “I am Imaru’s master, Yasmin. My name is Sol.”

  Forty-Three

  F A I T H

  He keeps trying to make the clay set but it won’t keep. The grey lumpy suds squirm around his hands, slopping through his fingers, like a toddler not wanting to be cradled.

  “You’re pressing too hard. You must be gentler.”

  It’s what his father always says, or used to say, back when he was still here, his uncle too. And so he pats the muddy soft brick like dough, coaxing it to shape. It’ll need more sand before it’s baked, he knows. He’s done this before. This is all familiar.

  When he turns to stand, the salty warm air that wafts into his nostrils is familiar too. He can see that everything is the same. The same broad hammer-shaped beachhead, sprawling far below where he stands on the promontory, the peninsula pointing out from the rocky cape like an arrow. The same cool grey horizon above it, meeting with the sea where he and Uncle would fish. But his uncle isn’t here. No one is here. And it seems to be speaking to him, the sea, the soapy lispy wash of its waves as they lap and crash, calling out, beckoning. Be gentler. Be gentler. And so he turns back to the bricks to obey, but they are gone. His bloodtree stands in their place, its stark barren height taller than he remembers, and there, on the lowest bough, a giant white eagle sits perched, waiting, its long black talons patiently gripping the wood, the tough wrinkly skin of its feet a pale grey, and its pure white plumage glinting in the half-light like the silvery scales of a fish, as though the feathers are hiding the moon. He has never seen the eagle before, in truth he has never seen a creature like it, but when it turns and looks at him, Neythan recognizes who it is.

  “You took too long to find her,” it says, the same voice that was the sea’s.

  “I did not know where to look.”

  The eagle is twice the size it ought to be. Her eyes have the same amber-gold glint as before, faintly fluorescent, like distant flame. She stands on the bough facing to the north, but with her gaze turned to him.

  “Why didn’t you help me?” he says. “Why didn’t you help me as you helped her?”

  The eagle’s bony brow arches over her stare. Her hooked narrow beak looks like ivory. “I could not help you, Neythan. It is as I told you. The heart receives no more than what it desires. And you had strayed from your path. You were unclean.”

  Neythan pauses. “I was unclean.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Her gaze lowers, eyeing the ground. “Do you see the earth beneath your feet?”

  Neythan looks down at the soil. Dark and silty. Cool, clean and soft between his toes.

  “In a king’s palace,” the eagle says, “or on the breast of his garment, the same is dirt. Here, it is only soil. A thing is not unclean because of what it is. It is unclean because of where it is.” Her words seem to issue with the same slow surging weight of the sea. “You were where you ought not be. Your soul had strayed. You were out of place. I could not help you. Arianna was quicker to hear, quicker to heed. You are not as she is. You refuse to see what you cannot understand.” She nods behind him to the waiting coastline. “You are as a vessel that thinks it holds the sea. You believe whatever you can hold is all there is. She is not like this. This is why I could help her. I could not help you.”

  The eagle continues to watch the waters behind him. Neythan turns to see too, but when he looks the sea and coastline are gone. Replaced by desert, blank and empty, stretching out toward the horizon. Neythan stares over the arid, pale ground. The eagle is standing beside him now, nearly as tall as he is, watching the cracked, barren land.

  “The time is short,” she says.

  He can feel the ground vibrating. The dust atop it shivers. And then he can hear the sound of voices. Like the voices of men but lower. Deeper, mournful, groaning, thousands of them, swelling louder and louder and coming on from some unfathomable distance or depth too far or near to tell.

  Neythan turns to the eagle.

  “They are songs,” she says. “Though not the songs of men. They are songs of blood. Of the blood shed by the hands of men.”

  The rumbling is growing. The ground is quivering like an earthquake, making it hard for Neythan to keep his balance. He lifts his arms to steady himself but beside him the eagle remains still. And then he sees the dust before them begin to lift, rising into the air in slow curlicues, like tongues of incense smoke, like limbs taking form, coming to life, all across the horizon.

  “What’s happening?”

  They’re beginning to lean toward him, reach for him, slow, swaying arms made of dust. He sees they are red, as red as blood.

  “I must go now,” the eagle says.

  “Go? Where?”

  The eagle’s wings lift and stretch, their span as wide as a barn. The feathers flicker against a silent wind as she rises into the air. “They are unclean.”

  Neythan looks back to the desert. The mournful voices are growing louder as the dust continues to coalesce, rising up above them, a forest of slim bloody vines stretching skywards, as a shadow in the distance behind it all begins to pierce the horizon like the sun at dawn. He shouts to her.

  “You must stop this.”

  “I cannot,” she says. “Just as I could not help you.” The eagle is suspended against the sky, hanging calmly as her gaze shifts to the horizon of red tendrils sprouting from the desert as the low groaning chorus continues to grow. “The songs too are unclean. They are the work of man, and they are what brings them.” She looks down on him again. “Only a son of man can prevent the sins of man. That is why we call to you. There are laws between you and me.”

  Neythan tries to run but the ground jerks and upends him. The dust continues to rise, the shadow rolling across the sky, lengthening out from the horizon as these living red pillars reach toward him like swaying serpents, singing sad and deep as he tries to scramble away on the ground. They’re trying to touch him. One lays hold of his ankle.

  Neythan jolted awake in the cartbed, sweating. He could feel the slow dip and rise of the wheels beneath him as they trundled along the uneven road.

  Arianna roused from beneath her blanket on the other side of the cart. She peered out drowsily. “What… What is it?”

  It was early evening, the sky still brooding between day and night, like it had in his dream. Neythan stared out at the lengthening road in their wake. The shallow tracks of the wheels lined the dust along the darkening plain like snake trails.

  “The Watcher,” he said.

  Arianna slowly sat up. “What did she say?”

  But Neythan just stared at the twilit trail behind them.

  “You’re awake,” Caleb said from the driver’s seat, glancing over his shoulder. “Good. And just in time.” He looked at Neythan in the cartbed and then pointed ahead.

  Neythan pushed himself upright and turned. He saw it. The familiar hulking shape ahead of them, looming high and black against the dim sky, its dark peak touching the moon. Finally. They had arrived. The Mount of Ilysia.

  “Good… Evil… Why be distracted by such things? T
hey are the creations of men. As are the gods. But perhaps these are a noble fiction. All the blood men spill, for vengeance, for conquest, for power… Amongst the animals there is no need to right such acts. For them, to slay or devour is a part of life. But our nature does not allow us to think this way. For us there must be a reason. And that reason must have a name.”

  Arvan the Scribe,

  king of Sumeria and second Sharíf of the Sovereignty,

  at the council of the First Laws

  Book I of The Writings of Yoaz son of Abiram,

  First Scribe of Hanesda, in the twelth year of our king

  Forty-Four

  H O M E

  Neythan remembered the feather shadows of the trees as they dappled his face, caging the sun beyond gnarled boughs and greenery as his uncle bore him on the long journey north to Ilysia. He remembered how strange it felt, the journey, his mind so numb and empty, a still and quiet weightlessness to it all somehow as if captured snug in the buoyancy of a breezeless lake, being carried along without thought as the wheels of the cart shuddered over the root-knotted soil, and then later, as they passed clear of the forests and into the plains, the rubbly bumps of an open featureless terrain stretching mile after dusty mile beneath the sharp white glare of a naked sun.

  But what he remembered most were the words of his uncle, his voice hoarse and thin, a taut whisper meandering over his shoulder as he sat at the reins and floating back to Neythan in the cart behind like drifting smoke. All the way there, day after day, murmuring quietly and tensely like there would be nothing more important he would ever say. He told Neythan of Ilysia and the Shedaím, and of how Neythan was born to be one of them and how Ilysia was his real home. He said the Brotherhood had dwelt there for centuries, abiding secretly in the mount and separated beyond reach of the world by its great height and its thick wooded roosts of pine, oak and rock and the welcome fact of its being so unfeasible and pointless to scale.

  “That’s why they chose it,” Sol had said. “The peak’s so tall and difficult, unreachable to all but a few… as is the way of the Shedaím.”

  He said it was there Neythan would come to truly know himself, and without going there be estranged from ever knowing himself and instead be lost. He said there in Ilysia he would surrender his life and will to a way that was ancient, and that men often resisted surrendering themselves in this way, because they lust for freedom, but that this lust is a deceit. He said there is no such thing as a free man and that each has his own master of one kind or another, and that a man who finds a good master comes to know rest and he who doesn’t knows little, but a man with no master at all is as chaff driven by the wind and finds no rest though he thinks himself free. But no one is free. Neythan knew that now.

  He sat in a trench downwind from the settlement, watching the villagers of Ilysia ready for sleep in the distance through the trees. Their quiet and tiny shadowed shapes wandered around tidying and putting out evening fires. Just like usual. Routine waits for none. Arianna sat beside him with her back to the village, leaning against the dirt wall of the trench, eyes to the sky, staring at the silver black night, the moon one-third full and the stars as multitudinous as dust, the whole thing like a deep wide sea of glittering mica above them. No clouds.

  “I used to think they were eyes, you know,” Arianna said quietly, as Neythan watched another extinguished flame smoulder in the distance. “Millions of eyes. Far away. All watching.”

  Neythan glanced first at her and then up into the tinselled blackness. “The eyes of who?”

  “I don’t know. The night. The gods maybe.”

  “There are no gods.”

  “You still believe that?” She said it casually, as though the idea was quaint, or mildly amusing.

  Neythan thought about it, returned his gaze to the village. He thought about the Watcher. He shrugged.

  “I never believed it,” Arianna said. “Even before I saw the Watcher.”

  “Why not?”

  “There’s too much of everything. The sky. Thunder. The way the rain is sometimes, when the wind is up. And the sun, these stars… all of it is too much. Whenever Master Johann would tell of the old faiths and say why they were no more, I’d never see why… No one ever says where all this came from. No one explains.”

  “Why must it come from somewhere?”

  “Everything comes from somewhere. Things don’t just pop out of thin air unbidden, do they?”

  Neythan shrugged.

  “At Hanesda, they told me in Súnam they believe the stars are firelamps. They say the gods flung them across the heavens to mark the seasons as you or I would mark a road or field. Like boundary stones. That’s what the Súnamites believe. They don’t renounce the faiths there, in Súnam. Did you know that?”

  Neythan nodded.

  “Because I didn’t. I didn’t think there were any who defied the First Laws.”

  “Súnam does not belong to the Sovereignty, and even if it did it would be too distant to be ruled by sovereign law. A sharíf’s arm can only stretch so far.”

  “And since when did you become so expert?”

  “I met one – a Súnamite.”

  Arianna looked at him. “Is that so?”

  “An old woman… a priestess perhaps.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “Not much. She didn’t want me to think her a priestess.”

  Arianna seemed to find the thought pleasing, amusing even. She sat back again. “I think I’d like Súnam,” she said. “I think I’d like to go there one day.”

  Neythan glanced sideways and then back to the settlement. He watched the last fire go out in the distance, saw the ashy smoke merge with the night. “There. That was the last one. We should wait an hour or more, until we can be sure they’re all asleep. That way we’ll walk through unseen. Who knows, perhaps the elders will be asleep too when we reach the temple.”

  “If they sleep,” Arianna said, as she dropped her gaze and turned her attention to the village.

  “Everyone sleeps,” Neythan said.

  “Just as everyone dies,” Caleb added. He was sitting away from them, deeper in the trench.

  Arianna looked at him, and then Neythan, nudging her chin in the little man’s direction. Neythan just shook his head, don’t ask, and continued to watch the village. Caleb had been that way the last day or so, his mood growing grumpier and more sullen the closer they drew to Ilysia. Hunger, most likely. The hardest thing about the journey here had been finding food. They’d expected to make do with whatever game could be found in the open country – hares, field rats, perhaps the odd jackal – but in the end had to feed mostly on crop scraps, swiping the not yet whitened heads of unripe wheat stalks along the fringes of fields belonging to villages they’d not risk entering in case the Shedaím kept spies there or they came, again, upon Jaleem. They ate the kernels dry mostly, raw and chewy, chomping as they walked and using what remained by day’s end to roast over the fire. The one day they managed to happen upon meat was when they found a diseased ewe alone in a field. Probably left there by some hired hand to whom the flock didn’t belong. They ate the meat sparingly, tugging out the healthy remaining flesh and leaving most of the carcass. Couldn’t chance getting sick now. It gave them strength enough to finish the journey and make it here, at least.

  And so here they now sat, less than two hundred feet downslope of Ilysia. Three weeks from Qadesh to the mount, another day to scale it and make their way to this grassy trench, squatting with empty stomachs and watching the village like waiting thieves.

  They waited a while more, and then rose from the ditch and began to stalk up the shallow incline toward the settlement. The houses were no more than dreary blunt shapes against the gloom, draped by the moon’s half-light. Here and there they listened for the slow murmuring sighs of sleep, cringing with every pace as they sought to pad lightly through.

  The settlement was a crescent-shaped commune. Stone-cut houses and wood shacks leant against the slo
pe and barred the way through to the Forest of Silences; a mile-deep stretch of trees and neat greenery that led up toward the mount’s zenith, where the Tree of Qoh’leth and the Temple of Elders awaited. Neythan guessed it would take them about an hour to reach it. He’d seen the peak only three times, counting the swearing-in. The first time as a child, Daneel goading him into scrambling up the hill beyond his bloodtree to take a look. In the end they’d gone together, and together received a beating when Tutor Maresh found them hiding in the rushes staring at Qoh’leth’s tree. They’d never seen a tree like it. They’d never seen anything so big.

  The second time was the day Uncle Sol was sent away, but even then Neythan didn’t see the temple, forced to wait outside the giant willow’s drooping canopy as they led Sol through the curtain of boughs and sprigs to the temple within to be judged. Father gone. Mother gone. Uncle exiled. That was when Neythan first felt the shadow inside himself, that soul-deep weariness. Heavy, cold and creeping, like a kind of grief, making him want to cease everything and everyone, even himself, like that cool night when he held the blade and watched the stars and if not for Yannick would have taken the blade and…

  He pushed the thought away, burying it, the way he’d been taught, the way Master Johann said he must.

  They carried on through the village to the stream on the other side that marked where it ended and the Forest began. They crossed over, stepping on the wide flat stones just beneath the surface.

  Neythan had always loved the Forest but he’d seldom visited by night. It was never the same at this hour. The stillness, so comforting by day, became something different, inverted somehow, cloaked by a quiet sense of menace that made him think of tombs. The tall trees blocked out the moon, casting long sepulchral shadows that marked the slope as the steep grassy rise disappeared into further darkness.

  They slowed as they passed Yannick’s tree. It was leafless now, the trunk gaping open with a deep wide crack down the middle and the dead boughs leaning out to either side of the wound so that the branches touched the ground. Pockets of empty bark riddled the ashy grey wood as though the whole thing were being eaten from the inside. Neythan almost slowed to a halt it was so unrecognizable. Arianna too, allowing Caleb to guess at whose it was. He lit the small claypot lamp he’d brought with him to take a closer look.