by Jane Kindred
Ahr swallowed. That was truer than Jak knew. He got to his feet and took a cup from the sideboard, pumping water into it at the sink with deliberation, and then turned and crouched to hand the cup to Jak. “This is none of your business,” he warned, voice low, as Jak took the cup.
Eyes heavy with judgment regarded him over the rim. “The hell it isn’t. Ra is a member of our mound, and you’re a Deltan Expurgist. And she—” Jak looked at Ra, and the fire went out of the steel eyes. The ruby streaks of Meersblood still marked Ra’s cheeks. “She is MeerRa of Rhyman.”
Ra picked herself up and backed away. “No,” she said. “No, that’s wrong. You’re wrong.” She stared at Ahr through ashen eyes. “Tell Jak that isn’t true.”
Jak gave Ahr a brief, unyielding look. “I believe he’s been waiting for you.”
A surprised, bitter outburst escaped him. “Waiting for Ra!” He wasn’t sure if the tremor in his voice was laughter or mounting hysteria. He’d left Rhyman to escape Ra. Rhyman was full of Ra, wherever he went. He wiped his mouth where he’d spat the words like a madman, and Ra focused on the ring on his finger.
From within her cloak, she drew a thread that hung about her neck. On its end dangled another piece of jewelry, this one more ancient, more ornate, and designed for a larger hand; but both contained the set of rubies at their center, rubies that looked like Meersblood, caught and solidified.
Jak stood and went to examine it. “Where did you get this?”
She flashed Jak an apologetic look. “I spoke, and it came to me. I knew my conjury before alarmed you, so I hid it.” Ra lifted her eyes to Ahr’s, and her face changed, as though an integral piece of it that had been missing had fallen into place. He was all out of outrage, and the fear it had been staving off crawled over his limbs like the tendrils of a poisonous vine. “It was you,” she said mournfully. “You’re the maiden in the veil.”
Despite the bitter cold surrounding the mound, Ahr began to sweat. He felt Jak’s gaze on him, probing the secrets of his past like a divining Meer. The last thing he wanted was to have this denouement, to discuss his seduction and corruption at the hands of Ra, here before Jak.
“Well, meerrá.” He used the Deltan oath with bitter sarcasm, folding his arms as he met Jak’s eyes. “I guess you didn’t see that coming.” He looked away, his eyes focusing on the arched window that had been his comfort and now only reminded him of Temple Ra. A high crescent of white piled against the pane in sharp contrast to the darkness while more snow hurtled in the howling wind. There was no way he could send Ra and Jak back out in that. “And I guess I’m hosting dinner.”
Beside Ahr at the stove, Jak whipped rubbed sage and garlic into the soft qirhu cheese from his larder while Ahr pulled together the ingredients for a quick frybread. He could tell Jak was biting back questions, but had honored his desire not to talk about Ra’s revelation. Ra, in turn, seemed to have slipped into a nearly catatonic state, perched on Ahr’s cot like a statue and staring into the fire.
Jak glanced at her as the first few loaves came out of the oil. “You should try these, Ra. I don’t think you even ate at all today in the excitement.”
Ra took a breath as if coming to life and shook her head. “I’m not hungry. The two of you should divide what you have between yourselves.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You have to eat.”
“She doesn’t.” Ahr’s jaw tightened with stony understanding. “Her kind can probably go for days without sustenance. Just as they can consume the bribery of an entire soth in a single sitting.”
Ra turned away, but not before he saw the flush of shame on her pale cheeks.
“There’s plenty,” Jak insisted. “You should at least taste Ahr’s frybread. It’s really delicious.”
Ra looked back at Jak with an entirely different expression, ebony eyes bright, as if there were a level of intimacy between them he hadn’t guessed at. As if she and Jak had— Ahr sucked in his breath. Sonofabitch. She seemed oblivious to him. “Peta and I made a wonderful bread for the feast.”
Ahr took a step toward her, and when he’d caught her gaze, he held it with a look of defiance. “My food is perfectly good. We don’t need anything you’d make.”
As he’d suspected, his challenge brought out the real MeerRa. The look of bright innocence and eagerness was gone as she rose from the cot, her face slipping into the mask of an idol while she approached him slowly. But what she did next, he hadn’t expected.
“Nothing, Ahr? What about wine? Chutney? Fowl? Roast cattle?” As she spoke, the sideboard filled with the decadence of an obscenely conjured feast, platters of silver and crystal dishes trimmed with gold materializing just as easily as the food that filled them, as though specificity were not even required, merely her thoughts behind the words necessary to speak them into being.
The sight of it made his blood run cold. He’d never really seen her conjure. He’d been a believer, but only in the abstract.
Ahr swallowed. “I will not have necromancy in my home. Get rid of it.”
Her expressionless mien fractured for an instant. “Contrary to popular belief, to create is much simpler than to destroy. We are often stuck with what we make. Whether we want it or not.” Ahr’s heart pounded and his gut tightened. Her words had conjured much more than what was visible.
Jak stared wide-eyed at the bounty. “Maybe we shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, Ahr. Who knows how long we’ll be stuck together.”
Ahr’s head and his heart pounded in competing beats, so many emotions warring with each other inside him he thought he might be torn apart. “She’s bewitched you.” He shook his head. “You have no idea who she is, Jak. What she’s capable of. But I suppose it wouldn’t matter to you anyway.” He picked off a leg of the stuffed bird and began to eat with exaggerated enthusiasm. “Since gender is immaterial.”
“What wouldn’t matter?”
“That MeerRa raped me.” He said it casually, hoping it punched Jak in the gut. But to give the lie to his words, Ra, amidst the resplendent feast that was a testament to her power, began to cry. Tears dripped like the wax of a red candle down the alabaster cheeks.
Staring wordlessly, Jak stumbled back and sat abruptly in Ahr’s remaining kitchen chair.
Ahr dropped the ravaged bone against the sideboard with a clatter and dug his hand into the steaming cavity of the hen, taking out the savory center and eating from his fist. “Well done,” he said with a mouthful, and nodded his approval. “It’s excellent artifice, Jak, you should have some. Though the tears are a bit much.”
Ra met his eyes with an expression that on anyone else he would have called humility, the pink in her cheeks underscoring the dripping red. “You were my great crime,” she acknowledged. “But it was one of weakness, not force.”
“Weakness?” Ahr poured himself a goblet of wine and laughed into it as he drank. “The Great weak Meer in his golden litter. I suppose it was I who seduced you?”
“I let you in, Ahr. I condemned us both. I let you in through the cloth that separated Meer from men, and in that moment you were already defiled.”
Ahr’s hand fumbled, and he spilled the wine. “No. You defiled me when you took my virginity.”
“Took it?” Ra’s tone evinced genuine incredulity. “I thought you gave it to me. I gave you mine.”
A strangled sound meant to be a laugh escaped him. “The myth of the celibate Meer. In all those undeserving years of your parasitic feeding on the soth of Rhyman, you’re going to claim I was your only indiscretion? You never even looked at my face.”
Ra’s eyes had filled once more with a rim of red stain. “You kept your veil, Ahr. I honored that.”
“Honor.” The word stuck him like a knife in the gut. “And how did you honor me when I begged for you to speak on my behalf? When I exposed myself to the shame of the Delta?”
Ra made a vague
motion with her hands, clearing invisible cobwebs. “To speak is to create,” she murmured to herself, repeating it, trying to comprehend something that was beyond her reckoning.
Ahr moved toward her as if compelled. “You don’t remember all of it, do you? Vetmaaimeera.” He couldn’t resist the mocking entreaty. “You created without ever opening your mouth.”
She flinched, stepping back from his advance with dread in her eyes. “What creation? What do you mean?”
The misery he’d buried inside him like a stone weighing down a body against the deep bed of the Anamnesis rose mercilessly to the surface and nearly pulled him under. Ahr gripped her shoulders and held her gaze with his. He would show her no mercy. “RaNa, you son of a bitch.” He flung her from his grasp, and she struck the wall with her shoulder blades drawn back in defense. “Your daughter.”
Ra’s mouth opened, but she made no sound as she slid against the stone, staring at something they couldn’t see. “It broke. On the steps… It broke open.” Understanding dawned in her eyes at last. “Nana,” she whispered, and then shrieked, “RaNa!” The scream pierced the mound and shattered the pane of Ahr’s window. Ra dropped to her knees, gripping her head between white fingers, repeating a soft moan as she rocked: “Nana. Nana. Nana.”
Ahr wrapped his arms around himself as if that could protect him. “I didn’t think they’d touch her,” he said quietly. “She was a child.” The shame he’d tried to leave with his womanhood on the dusty floor of MeerShiva’s den was strangling him like a rope of eelgrass beneath the Anamnesis.
Ra began to retch, but only a clear liquid poured from her lips, and Jak, whom Ahr had forgotten for a moment, fading into the woodwork at the spectacle he’d begun, finally moved to help. Ra looked up with eyes that forbade it and after a moment of impotent misery, she climbed to her feet and mounted the stairs.
Jak bounded after her. “Ra, you can’t go out in that. I barely made it here.”
Ra turned and shook her head, her obsidian eyes like sunken bits of coal, and put her hand on Jak’s cheek. “It’s too late, Jak na Fyn. I shouldn’t have come.” Her other hand pulled down on the latch behind her, and as the door flew open, the wind caught her hair in a wild twist of whipping darkness against the snarling snow.
Jak grabbed for her as her hand slipped from the latch, but Ra moved like the wind itself, and she was gone, swallowed up into a swirl of white that nearly knocked Jak backward.
Ahr hurried up the steps and pulled the door from the frozen fingers to close it as Jak stood motionless. “You won’t find her. She’s Meer. The storm is nothing to her.”
Steel eyes accused Ahr silently of all he was guilty of, but he was destroyed by the whispered sound of Ra’s grief still echoing in his head. “He called her Nana.” Ahr choked out the words. “My Mila. My child.”
Eight: Reflection
The Meerchild huddled over the strip of parchment, one hand sketching rapidly, its eyes transfixed as the images came to it through the mirrored glass. Drawing after drawing, there was nothing but a suggestion of gray tones that were the spaces between an angry swirl of white. The Meerchild shivered in the thin cotton shift that came to its knees, though the cold wasn’t here with it, rubbing its toes together as it leaned forward on its knees and drew.
The awful whiteness stung the flesh and tore the breath from the lungs. Knees and elbows ached with bruises from stumbling in the blinding white. It drove against the body, merciless and cruel, like a many-tailed whip in the hand of an angry master. The Meerchild had felt those before, had learned its lessons well at their lashing.
There was nothing but the drawing. Not even the Master mattered when the drawing came. Pain didn’t matter. Hunger didn’t matter. Want and need and desire sang in the Meeric blood, rushing in and out with every breath, sharing images and sounds, tastes and smells, and the touch of things the Meerchild had never known—a mother’s kiss, a soft blanket, the feel of a smooth stone skipped over water, the prick of a thorn in a bush full of roses. Stories danced in the darkness of the glass and whispered their secrets, and the Meerchild drew.
Out of the vague shapes of whiteness suggested by the frame of the smudged stick, a whirlwind of black marks spun suddenly from the Meerchild’s fingers, a black river covered in ice. It was the river of remembering, the river that flowed through every Meer’s veins. It curved and flowed around a face as pale as the snow. Dark eyes pierced the page, wide and haunted circles, lines of pain, a mouth that trembled, frozen tears in dark, violent streaks. It was the most beautiful face the Meerchild had ever seen, and it rendered the lines with reverence.
The face looked out across the landscape of endless white and focused on a spot in the distance, and in that spot on the parchment, no bigger than a hundred-piece coin, the Meerchild sketched the whole of the Delta. Cities and temples and hills full of flowering trees flowed out of the razor-thin edge of the charcoal into that singular spot; rivers and waterfowl populated it; tiny people hurried to and fro; barges floated, and carts rolled. The beautiful, haunted face regarded the spot with purpose. The Meer was returning.
The child sat back, satisfied, and gazed upon what it had drawn, making the soft sound of fingers and palms in the air next to its ears that soothed it like a Deltan spring rain it had never experienced.
The Meerchild smiled and nodded. “Ra.”
Jak had said nothing, offering neither comfort nor condemnation, merely sitting beside him by the fire, rightly overwhelmed by it all. Ahr felt like a brittle shell, a poor imitation of a human being that when broken open would yield nothing but stagnant water. The Ahr that had been—consort of a Meer, mother of a goddess, instigator of a genocidal movement—he despised her; but the Ahr he was now was nothing more than a coward and a lie.
He turned the ring on his finger, recalling the words of MeerShiva: “You are the mother of RaNa of Rhyman.”
Before RaNa, Ahr had been open, like the orchid depths of her own female sex. Even the Meer’s abandonment of her hadn’t occluded those unwary petals. But the theft of RaNa—Mila, as she would have been called if she had been her mother’s to keep—had torn the succulent skin of those petals at their center, and Ahr had curled, black-green and putrescent, into herself. All that had mattered for the next dozen years was retribution, and Ra’s undoing.
“Remember me while you rot,” she’d said as they fell upon the Meer. “Remember Ahr!” They were the last words MeerRa would ever hear.
But it was the sight of RaNa in her slender innocence, broken and naked before MeerRa’s astonishment, a woman who would not be, that had driven Ahr to transmutation. She could no longer bear to look on her own form. She was ashamed to be a woman.
So Ahr had done the unthinkable. She had sought out one of the Meer in hiding. There had been fewer than a dozen Meeric principalities in the Delta at the time of the Expurgation, but rumor had it at least one had escaped.
She found MeerShiva in the dark of a moonless night.
Ahr stood before a darkened, industrial building over a recessed iron grate that enclosed an uninviting cellar. Rumors in the markets of Soth In’La suggested the coal woman who lived here was the fugitive Meer from the eastern Delta. Meeric sympathizers were few, but it was surprising how much information one could purchase in the markets with the passive currency of the caste of the veil.
She lowered herself into the window well in which the grate was nestled and tapped against the metal with the ring on her right hand. The darkness was quiet, but in a moment, she heard movement below and saw the concealed light of a brazier. She tapped again, but the burrow remained silent.
“MeerShiva,” she whispered, and the hint of light was extinguished. “Hear me, Shiva,” Ahr petitioned. “I mean no harm to you.”
The grate opened with a sudden scrape of rusty metal, and Ahr scrambled back to keep from falling. A dim face peered up at her from the shadows.
�
��Get in at once,” hissed the Meer. “If you are so bold.”
Ahr lowered her limbs into the darkness and tumbled at the dusty feet of Shiva. The Meer motioned from beneath a hooded cloak toward the interior of the cellar, and Ahr rose and obeyed. After drawing a heavy bolt across the grate, Shiva uncapped the lantern and lowered her hood to reveal a gaunt, coal-smudged face and a tangle of dusty hair. It was a far cry from the oiled and gilded head of the majestic Meer.
“It’s true, then. You shovel coal and sell it in the market.”
“What of it?” Shiva emanated distrust. She was an older woman, possibly ancient. No one knew how long the Meer lived. Coal dust lined the creases beside her eyes.
Ahr bristled at the escaped sovereign, though she needed her now. “Why don’t you just conjure what you need for food and shelter?”
Shiva sat down before a table made from an empty coal bin turned on its head, nodding toward the other stool. Ahr hesitated and then joined her. Shiva might be at her mercy, but she was equally at Shiva’s, and she would have to lay her anger aside.
“You have a score to settle still,” said Shiva. “It was not enough for you to see them dashed against the stones.”
Ahr shivered, drawing her cloak tight.
“I am not the one who wronged you.” Shiva leaned close. “And you have had more than retribution.”
Without warning, Ahr began to sob. Shiva stared at her as she shook and wailed, allowing her no mercy. Ahr covered her face with her hands and tried to still the emotion, but the flow of tears had triggered the desperation of un-solaced sorrow and self-pity. She wept into her hands and rocked the table with her shuddering. Shiva remained impassive until the unbidden outpouring subsided and Ahr peered up from beneath her fingers, gasping for breath. She pressed the back of her wrist to her face to try to wipe it clean, but at last Shiva had stirred to produce a kerchief for her to blow her nose and dry her eyes.