The Paladin's Odyssey (The Windows of Heaven)

by Powderly Jr. , K. G.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” A’Nu-Ahki said.

  U’Sumi looked to his mother, who should have been indignant. Please be indignant, Mahm! Instead, she looked as though she would crumple in foaming shame, except for her grip on the door.

  She pleaded, “Nu, the boys!”

  A’Nu-Ahki’s jaw tensed. “We talk in the loft, ‘Miha, now!”

  U’Sumi had never heard his father use that tone with his mother before—nor with anyone for that matter. Neither had he ever seen his mother so slouched and pale, with purple bags beneath her eyes, as if caught in some red indecency that school boys only whispered over with nasty laughter. Could she really have been with Tarbet? It seemed so surreal, like a nightmare where the familiar mixed with the strange to transform even common words and images into something garish and sinister.

  What else have they hidden from me?

  U’Sumi could not stand it. He did not wish to invade his parents’ privacy, but he could not live without knowing. What if I’m not really the son of…? No! It was unthinkable!

  So was what he had heard in the courtyard.

  Lumekki returned to his tower. The other sons of A’Nu-Ahki went back to the common hall. U’Sumi turned into the library, below his parents’ loft apartment. Inside, he could hear muffled arguing upstairs. He followed the noise to the south wall, where a scroll rack reached to the ceiling.

  At the top of the sliding ladder that rode along a track by the wall shelves, sat a slot that contained a work of Q’Enukki called On the Ten Heavens and Eternity. U’Sumi climbed as if to reach for that volume—a subject that everyone knew fascinated him. As he got closer to the ceiling, the voices of his father and mother grew more distinct. U’Sumi rested his hand on the scroll, as if to grab for it, and listened.

  “Why, ‘Miha? By Underworld, I think I’m going to throw up!”

  U’Sumi knew how his father felt.

  “Nu, I’m sorry, please let me explain!”

  “What’s to explain? You told me your betrothal to Tarbet didn’t work because of his womanizing—you failed to mention that you were one of the women!”

  “You and I were forced to marry under such strange conditions—I didn’t know you! I didn’t know how you’d respond!”

  “But you came to know me! You could have told me after ten, twenty—even two hundred years—I would have understood!”

  “I was afraid! You’re the best thing that ever happened to me and I was afraid of what it would do to us!”

  “Did he force you?” A’Nu-Ahki spoke in a menacing growl that made U’Sumi wince. This was not the voice of his father but of a stranger.

  Silence.

  “Did he?”

  She moaned, “Oh, Nu, not at first! At first, I thought I had found what I have in you! I didn’t stand on ceremony. I was so relieved to be free of the Watchers. When he approached me, I felt it would be okay to give in to him—he was going to be my husband anyway! But something went wrong the minute he touched me. I felt like he was—well, as if he was one of them! I couldn’t understand it. It terrified me! The feeling made me… you know… stiff. That made him angry. I asked him to stop but he refused! Only then did he force me! Nu, please don’t make me go on! I tried to stop him then—really I did!”

  “Why didn’t you complain to the Archon?”

  She hesitated. “You know how long ago that was. Sa-utar was still a world power in those days. The Archon was Tarbet’s ancestor. Lumekkor was already at war with Y’Raddu. I had political considerations to think of. Tarbet’s fathers, Rakhau and Kunyari, paid me to keep things quiet and keep the peace. So there you have it, the truth at last! I’m just a high-paid whore; like the people in the valley always say!” She began to wail.

  U’Sumi’s head swam as bile rose in his throat. He turned so he would not vomit on the scrolls, and almost fell off the ladder in panic.

  His puke splattered on the sandaled feet that stood at the summit of all earthly wisdom and holiness. He did not know where the Ancient had appeared from—he had not seen him at dinner or in the courtyard. Yet somehow, U’Sumi’s great grandfather, the last remaining son of Q’Enukki the Seer, stood at the base of the ladder waiting to receive his vomit offering.

  Muhet’Usalaq glared up at him, blazing coal eyes kept from burning him off the ladder only by the mahogany wrinkles that clasped them safely in their sockets. Those fleshly windows into history, flaring so near to its end and to eternity, had power that made it unnecessary for the Ancient to speak. His iron will seemed to seize the young man’s clumsy body and collapse it like a rickety tent of dried bones.

  U’Sumi slid down the steps to land on his rump in the puddle of his own vomit. He twisted around, removing his tunic to wipe the feet of the Prime Zaqen free of the chunky splashes. He wiped and wiped as tears ran down his face; but the stink would not go away. When panic and confusion expended themselves and nothing but ash remained of his world, he cast himself upon the rocks beneath the shadow of an unapproachable colossus. He did what nobody would have dared; threw his arms around those archaic pillars with yellowed parchment feet and wept uncontrollably.

  A hand rubbed through his hair, not to thrust him away, but to draw him closer. “It seems the house of Kunyari has this affect on every young person they touch,” said an ageless, surprisingly sympathetic voice.

  U’Sumi dared not look up. How could he have heard?

  The Old Man said, “They did to my daughter what they did to your mother, you know.” His voice cracked with a frail exhaustion that aged U’Sumi’s heart with a horror of its own. “They did to me as they have done now to you.”

  U’Sumi squeaked, “You?”

  The Zaqen gazed down on him; eyes warm, inviting coals, not ready to burn him down at all. The distant silence of holy mountain fire had just come to earth in the form of a lamb.

  The Old One said, “Let us get you cleaned up.” Then he looked down at his own feet and grinned, “and me too.”

  U’Sumi had never seen Muhet’Usalaq smile. Nothing is the same anymore!

  He pulled himself to his feet on the edge of the ladder and finished sopping up the puddle with his tunic. Then he stripped down, while Muhet’Usalaq went out to fetch him some new clothes. The elder returned with not only clothes, but also a basin of water and some towels with which they both scrubbed themselves and the stone floor by the ladder.

  “Come with me for a walk down by the forest brook,” the Ancient said, once they had scoured everything as best they could. “I can help you wash these old clothes of yours.”

  “Thank you.”

  The mountain brook trickled a stone’s throw from the monastery gate, well hidden in the close forest greenery. Everyone had retreated to some private corner, as if to hide from what had happened and what was about to. The Old Man and the boy who had just become a man saw no one else as they crossed the courtyard to the outside.

  The Ancient muttered, “As the father, so goes the son,” while U’Sumi scrubbed out his clothes on a submerged rock.

  “How did it happen? What happened?”

  Muhet’Usalaq shrugged. “Carelessness, a young woman with a trusting heart, her father with a blind faith that these things never happened in ‘good’ families; it might have been any of the above or none of them. I do not really know anymore. Her name was S’Rai. She died at the Rout of Salaam-Surupag with most of my other children, alone, and unloved by a husband. As far as I knew, she still felt like the used spurning of a worthless man, though I tried my best to help her past it. Nothing I said or did mattered.”

  The Ancient’s eyes relived a deep and ancient feud. “Rakhau had seduced her during a visit to Sa-utar—that was before he got to be such a bloated grease bag. He promised to marry her, but when she turned up pregnant, both he and his father denied the child was his. She bore a son, whom she named ‘Uruk,’ three years before your father was born.

  “Tormented your father no end, that boy did—insanely jealous that A’Nu-Ahki woul
d get the inheritance, being firstborn of my firstborn. I tried to be a good father to Uruk. Nobody ever called him a bastard his entire short life. Qayin’s heart beat in him though. He was largely responsible for those crazy stories about your father being a seed of the Fallen Ones.”

  “What happened to him?”

  Muhet’Usalaq hung his head. “According to your grandfather, he died bravely enough, defending Salaam-Surupag along with his mother.”

  “Along with my father’s first wife,” U’Sumi added.

  “That is correct.”

  “Did my father love his first wife more than he loves my mother?”

  The Ancient gazed down on him with eyes sadder than U’Sumi had ever seen them before. “Is there anything that has ever happened before today to make it seem so?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “Your mother is an extraordinary woman who has had a difficult life. Neither you nor I have faced the temptations she has had to endure. Your father will not think any the less of her in the end; nor should you.”

  U’Sumi met the Elder’s eyes full on for the first time. “Why have you never spoken to me before?”

  Muhet’Usalaq laughed—an odd sound, resonant with the woods and the bubbling brook that raced between their toes. U’Sumi had never heard the Ancient laugh before either.

  “What do you mean, I have never talked to you, lad? Of course I have spoken to you.”

  “Not like this. You go for months—even years, it seems—without saying a word and not just to me. The whole valley knows that you are the Prime Zaqen of Akh’Uzan. Yet all they do is belittle and slander you. Why don’t you assert your power over them? Why do you sit still for it?”

  The Old One smiled, his eyes faraway. “I did, as you say, ‘assert my power over them’ once—not long before you were born, actually. My boy, you can lead a unicorn to grass, but you cannot make him eat of it if he does not wish. For decades, I tried reasoning with them, pleading with them to put aside their prejudice against your mother. I even shut down slanderous rogue printers. The offenders merely outsourced their propaganda to printers in Erdu. Since I no longer see the benefit of enforcing the kind of authority I have through bloodshed, I guess there is not much left for me to say.”

  “To me there is. You’ve lived over nine-hundred years! You’ve seen over a third of all history first hand!”

  The Ancient nodded. “Ah, I see what has happened between us. It is my centuries, you know. Time flows for me so rapidly—it seems to me this morning that you nursed at your mother’s breast. Yet your fifty years is the sum total of your life—a long time for you—all your experience, all you remember, bound up in a finite number. But for me your fifty years is less than one eighteenth part of my whole time—a breath, a vapor.

  “So much I want to share with you and meant to share. Yet I sigh to myself and say, ‘tomorrow.’ Then it seems to me that I have spoken with you recently, when it has actually been almost twenty years. Forgive me and try to understand that the rate at which we both experience time is proportional to the number of years we have each seen under the sun.”

  “I understand,” said U’Sumi, who really didn’t. “But soon I go off to war. Can I come to speak with you each day until then?”

  “War? So near the end of all things and they want you to fight in one of their stupid wars? Of course you can come. Bring your brother too. I will have time to spend with the young one after you two older ones leave. Do not worry. E’Yahavah is merciful. Your father lost all his sons to the last big war. It will not happen that way again. Not with things this close to the end. You can count on it. But be careful all the same.”

  U’Sumi had not thought of how all his long dead half-brothers and sisters had met their end at Salaam-Surupag. Suddenly being the “botch of Akh’Uzan” did not seem so bad.

  THE PALADIN’S ODYSSEY | 367

  More lovely than Pandora, whom the gods

  Endowed with all their gifts; and O, too like

  In sad event, when to the unwiser son

  Of Japhet brought by Hermes, she ensnared

  Mankind with her fair looks, to be avenged

  On him who had stole Jove’s authentic fire.

  —Milton

  Book IV of Paradise Lost

  THE PALADIN’S ODYSSEY | 367

  3

  Pyra

  T

  he airy golds of the vaulted chapel interior worked with carefully angled quickfire lighting pearls to create a blazing halo around the speaker’s giant mother-of-pearl podium. High Priestess Pandura’s firm breasts, youthful chic and perfectly painted skin concealed the fact that she was pushing two hundred and fifty years old.

  None of it fooled Pyra. From the fifth row, she listened to her grandmother eulogize the great titan-priest Epymetu and heard things she had never known before. Pyra figured that either her grandmother had just made them up for the occasion, or she was just being her secretive self, or both. There was no way to know.

  There never was with Pandura.

  Pyra almost laughed, but that would have been bad form for a funeral—even this one. Still in your prime, sure, but not without some fine crow’s feet near the eyes, Grandmother! How you hate it when I call you that! You could otherwise pass as one of my friends, if only the novices didn’t know you so well! She almost added, and fear you, but stopped herself even within the privacy of her own thoughts. Sometimes even thinking was a dangerous game to play in the Temple of Aztlan.

  The eulogy continued. “A hundred years ago, I was sent to this Temple with a gift from the gods of the Sacred East—a crystal ampoule that held the sum knowledge of human architecture discovered at Ayar Adi’In and by the Temple of Ardis before it. The Sons of A’Nu entrusted Epymetu and his brother Prometu with fashioning a new and better form of human. My crystal contained a map of the very codes of creation to guide them. It is thus fitting that my name, Pandura, means ‘All Gifts’…”

  Isn’t this supposed to be a tribute to Epymetu? Pyra complained to herself, not at all pleased with fifth row seating among the children. I’m almost thirty-two, after all!

  Pandura was just warming up. Waves of gold and red hair wreathed her perfectly formed head like a dancing flame. “Prometu had the foresight to warn us of the dangers in manipulating the foundational mysteries of our existence—for his name meant ‘foresight.’ Did he not in his youth steal the secret of quickfire and bring it to the men of the West? He gave us the beginning of wisdom and angered his former masters greatly by doing so, though they eventually overlooked this early supposed transgression.

  “With his knowledge, we eventually built a differential calculating engine more powerful than any before it—powerful enough to handle the complexities of our sacred research more quickly than even the engines of our former masters. His tragic capture by those unworthy masters, and then his execution, was a difficult blow to our sacred revolution…”

  You big phony! You hated Prometu! You laughed when you heard how enemy agents had captured him and returned him to the East, where they tormented him many years in the fortress of Kaukir Ardis until he died. Pyra had overheard Pandura’s reception of that little communiqué as a child.

  Prometu had wavered in trusting the new gods. Grandmother had often complained about him. She had even called it a “nice touch” that the enemy used Prometu as a live test subject for medical experiments in regenerative tissue. They had removed parts of his liver and somehow used fetal stem cells to make it grow back each time, until his new liver tissue metastasized and consumed him with cancers.

  Pandura sniffed. “Worse yet, we now endure sorrow on top of sorrow with the demise of my beloved consort, Epymetu—whose name meant ‘hindsight.’ Fortunately both he and his brother were excellent teachers…” She took a moment to dab away a frugal tear, lest it ruin her eye-liner.

  “Many will say that hindsight is the lesser of the two gifts, but it is by hindsight that we learn from history. My Epymetu was in no way his brothe
r’s inferior…”

  The silent outrage crept unbidden into Pyra’s mind, hidden behind a properly worshipful face. You used Epymetu as you’re using my mother! It’s all just a big power game for you, isn’t it, Grandmother? Her thoughts added, As you will soon begin to use me, just before that line of reasoning became so terrifying that she automatically shut it down too.

  I’ll soon be a priestess—someone who will help people, Pyra reminded herself. That’s what this is really all about anyway, isn’t it? Maybe a bigger ideal justifies your actions, Grandmother? After all, even the scary stuff eventually helps people, doesn’t it?

  “It was by careful hindsight that my beloved Epymetu saw how the Great War of the East had turned the minds of the older titans away from the gold and silver aspirations of their youth. Their thoughts and hearts have fallen in value to bronze and now even harsh iron, as their Dynasty of Steel seeks to renew its lordship over us by T‘Vul-qayin’s armored weapons…”

  Now we have weapons of our own, though, don’t we, Grandmother? Pyra smirked. Her mother’s face came to mind, with a vague uneasiness.

  Pandura raised her arms to the vaulted ceiling. “Our chosen Powers, Tsey’Us and his brother, High Psydonu, have shown us a new way! Tsey’Us fashioned my path and led me forth from the old gods of the East to bring the Gift to Epymetu, who built upon it. This brought forth our present power and prosperity, the culmination of which happened when High Psydonu married my sister priestess Klyeto and produced in her child his own material form—our New Titan, Psydonu, who rules at Thulae in the sides of the North…”

  After he married his own mother—eew! Pyra couldn’t help but think, even if she regarded the thought as a venial blasphemy. Psydonu is special, she reminded herself. If he’s his own father, then I guess it’s okay for him to marry his own mother, isn’t it? Pyra mind could never quite be free of the confusion—or revulsion—produced by the idea. She thought it best to refocus her grandmother’s eulogy.