“I need to ask something of you,” he whispered.
“I’ll do anything for you, Revered Father, you know that,” Tsulia said under her breath. Their eyes met.
“Anything?”
Her wet curls fell over her eyes as she looked down at the soaked clothes clinging tightly to her body. “Anything.”
“Are you happy with this Moon-chaser?”
She peered up into his eyes again. “No. He can give me no children.”
“I can annul your marriage.”
Tsulia’s sad dark eyes brightened. “I want to do what’s right. He’s cheated on me with almost every girl at the Hollow, but I have no one else.”
“You have me.”
Tarbet could feel her excitement grow.
“Are you saying?”
“Yes. I need a son to carry on Seti’s dynasty. You have proven your loyalty and worthiness. I absolve you of your marriage vows. Will you take them anew, here and now, with me?”
Tsulia looked as though she would faint, but Tarbet held her steady. “Yes, Revered Father, I vow always to be your wife!”
Tarbet did not know where his sudden energy came from, when he pressed his new bride against the smooth stone wall, and kissed her.
When T’Qinna awoke on the thirty-ninth day of their interment, she immediately noticed the sharp decrease in the storm’s noise. She almost shouted for joy. Then she heard muffled shouts from across the galley, followed by a series of breaking objects, and the slam of a cabin door.
She made it out onto the mess deck in time to watch Sutara stomp past a family of quizzical faces toward the privacy of the after sections. Iyapeti appeared at the door to their stateroom, his eyes dull and jaw hanging. T’Qinna expected him to retreat inside, and lick his wounds. Instead, he stepped out into the galley.
“She’s insane,” Iyapeti said. “I can’t get through to her anymore.”
A’Nu-Ahki said, “It’s only been five weeks. Give her time.”
“Time? I’ve never seen her like this. She says wild things, like she wants to jump out and swim to the mountains! She was up at the aft window early this morning. The storm’s letting up. She could see the northern peaks. I told her she was being crazy! Then she got all hysterical.”
T’Qinna broke into a cold sweat. She tore off after Sutara, and called back to her husband, “U’Sumi, tell them about my dream!”
The compartments did not seem as labyrinthine as in her nightmare, but T’Qinna’s heart pounded just as madly while she ran. She climbed to the mezzanine, and raced for the aft conning shack. She found the window shut and superstructure areas empty. Catching her breath, she slid down the railings of the after-most ladder to the livestock pens. After a frantic search, she found Sutara in the cattle walk, by the manure desiccators. ‘Peti’s wife shoveled dung onto the drying screen in furious chops.
T’Qinna approached cautiously. “Can we talk?”
Sutara forced a brittle smile, but her large eyes hid beneath a fallen clump of walnut hair. “That depends on what,” she whispered.
“I know you hurt. I lost my mother in a horrible way, too. Is there anything I can do to help?”
Sutara exhaled—a hiss of escaping steam from a volcanic fissure. “No. ‘Peti and I had a fight. Beyond that, everything’s fine.”
T’Qinna trembled, dreading to say what she must. “With respect, Suta, it’s painfully clear that everything’s not fine at all. ‘Peti said you were going to swim for the mountains…”
Sutara cut her off, “As usual, he wasn’t even listening to me! All I said was that I wished I could swim to the mountains! There’s a difference!”
“Is there?”
Sutara gripped her shovel with white knuckles, either to reinforce the effort behind her crisp smile, or to swing the blade at T’Qinna. “T’Qinna darling, you and I have been friends since you arrived among us. If you wish it to remain so, you must learn not to pry into my affairs. Whatever problem I may have, it’s under control. Is that understood, darling?”
T’Qinna’s voice was a wilting squeak. “Yes, Sutara,” She wanted to tell her the dream, but her tongue became a lead weight. Though she cried inside to E’Yahavah for help, her courage drained away nonetheless.
Another earthquake woke Tsulia. A muffled crash outside told her something else had just tumbled off into the growing chasms. The noise slowly subsided to a low rumble, until only her body shook. Women wept nearby, though the storm’s muted roar had lessened. Tsuli turned to Tarbet, but found his side of their blanket empty. I’m the Archon of Seti’s wife!
Gut-churning stench filled the musty air.
All Tsuli could see were the tattered rags Nestrigati and Tarbet had hung over the corner where she and the Archon slept, ostensibly to provide them some privacy. A wet scraping sound and several terse whispers penetrated the moth-eaten barrier.
Something splashed in a pot of water.
Tarbet slipped through the veil, and crouched over Tsuli. She felt his haggard eyes crave her like food. His thinning face simultaneously terrified and elated her, as she smiled up at him. The Archon of Seti shall anchor both my body and soul! My father never gave me any affection, and Moon-chaser only used me. But Tarbet understands me! He’s so many centuries beyond me that he seems to know my very thoughts before I even think them…
Tsuli asked, “What’s happening out there, my love?”
The Archon’s eyes darted about. His normally strong chin quivered, and was dark with beard shadow—despite being able to shave again since their arrival at Floodhaven. He answered her with a stutter that somehow frightened her more than the rumbles outside. “Everything’s f-fine. C-close your eyes, my wife, and swallow what I place into your mouth. It’s nourishment sanctified b-by E’Yahavah for this time of testing.”
Tsulia obeyed without question, trusting implicitly the Archon’s ability to make holy miracle food. Tarbet’s hand felt wet and cold as he stroked her cheek tenderly, and pressed the bite-sized object into her waiting mouth. His lips trembled when he kissed her forehead.
The morsel had a slimy texture, with a bitter flavor like the blood from when Tsulia accidentally bit her tongue. Something about the taste with the horrible smell brought an instinctive knot to her chest. She forced herself to swallow the thing without chewing.
“What are they doing outside the curtains?” she asked, overcoming her vague sense of dread to open her eyes again.
Tarbet averted his eyes. “You mustn’t worry about that. Trust me.”
“I trust you, Great Father. You’re the Seer of Hope! But what did the Titan mean by what he said—you know, just before we were married?”
The Archon turned, his eyes aflame, and slapped her across the face. “Stop asking so many questions! It’s for your own good, I tell you!”
Tsulia cowered into the corner. “Don’t be mad! I didn’t mean to! The others mocked you, and most of them are dead! I don’t want to die!”
Tarbet fell on her, and kissed her in ravenous gryndel gulps. She responded with a willing squeak.
“I’m sorry!” he panted. “You will not die! But what I command is for your good! I promise you again, when this is over, I will make you the second Khuva—mother of the new humanity!”
Tsulia reeled at the fresh reminder of his oath. The disgusted stares of the other women outside the rags could not shame her this time! Tarbet can take me to wife if he wants! He’s the closest thing to E’Yahavah on Earth! I wonder what Moon-chaser thinks of that?
Tarbet pulled away to go back outside the hangings.
“Please don’t leave me,” she said, and clung to his cloak.
“I must,” he whispered, kissing her again. “Much has to be done if we are to survive.”
She wanted desperately to ask what, but dared not arouse his wrath again. “I want to help,” she offered instead.
“You already have.” He released for her the ghost of a smile. His tan skin tone seemed to return just a little.
; The softening of the rain, the love of the most powerful man left in the world—apprehension fled Tsulia’s heart in a manic euphoria.
Another quake rocked the ziggurat hall, as the Archon rose to pass through the curtain. Tarbet pitched into the rope-draped rags, and brought them down to reveal the abominable truth beyond.
Tsulia’s ecstasy shifted to horror so fast that it robbed her even of the ability to scream. She stared, frozen, at the end of all sanity, until bile rushed up her throat in a vicious heave that ended just short of her mouth.
A few cubits away, Moon-chaser’s waxy face froze with his final panic captured on it. His dead bulging eyes screeched silently at Tsuli from out of Under-world, but she no longer had any way left to heed them. A pack of crimson clown-painted ghouls, Nestrigati, Farguti, and others tore into her ex-husband’s open chest cavity with knives, sharp stones, and their bare hands, carving up hundreds of morsels like the one stuck in Tsulia’s throat.
Behind them all—gorged and snoring, with his white-less black eyes flared open—slept Avarnon-Set, high captain of their mock deliverance.
Tarbet stood and wrung his dripping hands. “Moon-chaser was mutagenic from the Red-sore Elixir; you said so yourself,” prattled her new husband’s gibber-logic. His words crushed responsibility onto the small of her back for her little indiscretion. “How could he father a new race?” The Patriarch-king of all humanity shrugged. “He was the rational choice.”
Tsulia’s wail started in the pit of her stomach, the moan of an imprisoned spirit somehow trapped already in Under-world’s void. It mounted slowly into a shriek that kept coming, and coming, and could not be silenced by Tarbet’s pleading, nor afterward by his threats, and blows.
Tiva shrank into the ill-lit recesses of the second deck stalls to escape from her most recent fight with Khumi. Another in a string of pointless arguments, she had decided halfway through to let him have his way. As always, it was easiest to shut herself off like a machine.
At least she could usually predict Khumi’s unreasonable demands…
“You little sow!” The memory of Sutara’s voice hissed again.
“Now that had been impossible to predict!” Tiva held up the charred burn that still throbbed on the back of her hand. She muttered to herself, “How many other secret enemies and wounds do I get on this voyage?”
“Maybe I should just go live with the pigs, and be a sow,” she answered herself. “It might be safer.”
Tiva’s life with A’Nu-Ahki’s family in many ways had become as terrifying as her former lives at both Grove Hollow and Henumil’s house. A’Nu-Ahki has become so demanding, and everyone else, so distant. I don’t know whom I can trust anymore—except maybe T’Qinna. If it wasn’t for the endless work, I’d go crazy! I just don’t want to fight anymore—with anyone.
For that reason, she had not told anybody how she’d gotten the nasty scar on her hand. Maybe if I don’t say anything, Sutara will see that I don’t want to make trouble for her, and she’ll leave me alone.
A couple of large gold eyes blinked at her from out of the shadows, barring her way further aft. T’Qinna’s sphinx, Taanyx, stood guard outside the stall where her wild pygmy-panther consort lay tethered.
“What do you want?” Tiva asked the graceful animal.
The tall striped cat cocked her head affectionately, and purred.
“So you want to be friends? Are you sure you want to be shipmates with a sow like me?”
The sphinx slinked over and nuzzled her thigh.
“No, I don’t suppose you’d care about that. Do you mind guests? I won’t be a bother. You and your mate look much nicer than the pigs.”
The cat’s eyes seemed to understand every word. Taanyx turned to her mate in the stall, gave a brief yowl, and then led Tiva inside. The soft fuzzy warmth and the soothing feline purr felt like all the love she would ever need for the rest of her life. Khumi’s wife soon fell into a deep sleep.
Q’Enukki watched the second core fragment slingshot past the Earth. The net gravitational forces worked with that of the first core shard to boost the planet’s rotational speed, shortening the days, hours, minutes, and seconds slightly, but adding roughly five days to the solar orbital year by the resulting loss of calibration with the lunar cycle.
Shifting tectonic plates buckled, as mantle tides blew huge seams up along either side of the great rift—someday to be known as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. This super-eruption worked with cycling mantle magma currents generated by subduction, to drive the continental plates apart at their peak velocity. The submerged western craton drove so hard over the initial subduction line that the plate split apart inside the tropic, north of the Equator. The northern slab torqued toward the Pole, while the south stayed on a slower westward heading. Smaller subduction arcs tore open between the two western plates, later to become the Puerto Rican Trench.
The star-gate-creature’s relative motion, which simulated that of an object in close Earth orbit, carried Q’Enukki eastward, where he saw the clouds thinning over what remained of his old land of Akh’Uzan. A more rarified atmosphere, subject to greater extremes in temperature and pressure differentials, dispersed some of the global rains from high-pressure regions to intensify them in low-pressure ones. This broke up the uniformity of the storms even before the worldwide rift geysers began to slow.
The globe-wrapping fissure ended in what was once Khavilakki, where the continental craton grew too thick for further breakage. There, massive geologic movements began to generate the largest series of killer tsunami waves that would ever exist.
Nu wondered at the silence that graced the morning of the forty-first day. Last week they had cut the main drogue cable, hoisted another flat stone from the reserves, and dropped it through the hull pool. Barque of Aeons still lay tethered, but now just clear of the wrecked drydock assembly submerged to starboard. Nu had also deployed two aft secondary stones and three forward ones on the port side. These kept the ship from washing toward the ruined mooring trough, should the winds change again, or the seas draw out. Since then, they had weathered storm and tsunami with only minor trouble.
This morning, the deck was so stable that A’Nu-Ahki wondered if the ship was not isolated from the ocean again by some new volcanic dam. He crawled out of bed, dressed, and climbed toward the aft conning shack for a look. Inside the mezzanine loft, he immediately noticed the lighter gray of the skylight through the ventilation slots. Then he heard the silence.
The rain had stopped.
Nu almost shouted for joy, until he found that he was not the first one up to the stern viewport that morning.
Sutara leaned against the open window, peering out at the eerily calm waters, carpeted in patches by floating tree trunks. She had torn her skirt off at the thighs, and wore a hastily made satchel strapped to her back. Half of one leg hung out the window, bent at the knee, though her full weight was still on her other leg, inside.
Off in the distance, mist-shrouded mountains stretched west on either side—the only break on a gray horizon. Above the mists, the pale overcast rode high enough that the forest-stripped peaks were easily visible.
“The waters recede,” Suta said absently.
Nu asked, “Are you leaving us then?”
“I’m a good swimmer. If I pace myself, the mountains aren’t far.”
“I’ll wager they’re farther off than they look. I also think the waters recede only to mount up again for another set of big waves.”
Her voice seemed indifferent. “Then I’ll die like my father.”
“Is that what you want?”
“No!” Suta suddenly screeched. “I just can’t live with your so-called justice!”
“I know what I did was terrible. I wish I could change things. I wished I could have made another choice even as I made that one. I don’t expect you to believe me now, but I really wanted your father with us…”
“No you didn’t! You showed more grief for the loss of your precious scrolls than you eve
r did for my father—or my mother!”
“Let’s talk about this.”
She turned her head to face him. “I believed in you!”
Outside the window, past Sutara, the distant, watery horizon began to rise.
Nu’s heart pounded. He tried to approach the shutters without alarming his daughter-in-law.
Sutara responded by shifting her hips to a full straddle over the sill. Her eyes never left him. “Don’t make me jump!”
“I’d rather you didn’t,” he said softly. “Please look outside.”
The bulge of water behind her began to rear up into a speeding wall.
“So you can pull me in? I’m not stupid like you all think!”
A’Nu-Ahki saw the wave approach the farthest western peaks on either side. He now had a reference with which to measure its height. The mountains disappeared beneath it, and still it grew.
“Nobody thinks you’re stupid, Sutara. We love you…”
“Why should you care if I jump?” She cried. “I’ve just told you that I don’t believe in your E’Yahavah anymore! I’ve listened to your prophecies enough to know that you’ll risk no impurity in your New-world! Shouldn’t you just throw me off, like you flushed the titan?”
Nu felt the tug of the wave’s draw, as the waters near the mountains drained toward the growing wall to pile up into a gigantic crest. If he did not act now, Barque of Aeons would seize on its tether, consumed by the undertow, while water-driven rocks crushed it as a box of balsa wood.
“It’s not my place to throw you off,” he answered, taking a step backward to the oracle panel. “E’Yahavah has already accepted you.”
“Get back from that oracle! Anybody else comes, and I’ll go!”
The wave sped in, larger than the tallest mountain Nu had ever seen.
A’Nu-Ahki held his hands together. “I need to give some instructions to the others right now. I promise nobody else will come. If I call them up here, you can go ahead and jump, knowing that I’m a liar.”
The Tides of Nemesis (The Windows of Heaven Book 4) Page 22