I looked behind us. “I hope not. I hope she stays in her apartment.”
We found the Des Plaines River and boogied south. And south. And further south.
“Are we there yet?” I whined. My nerve wasn’t at its best. I’d been fantasizing this showdown for several hundred years. The reason I hadn’t forced it was because I’d never been able to picture myself winning.
Better turn that frown upside down. I’m gonna need a peck of can-do on this one.
We flew south along the river forever, skimming a mere hundred feet above the water. I could see fish leaping high out of the water as we passed, birds massing in the sky behind us, and the constant foaming up of fresh leaves and flowers along the banks of the river.
I was looking to either side, cussing and wondering if we should have gone north along the river instead, when I saw it.
“Get a load of that. At two o’clock, half a mile north of the river.”
Suka swung slightly right, and soon we were cruising down into the parking lot.
The temple was a monster, a pocket-stupa with more frou-frou than a wedding cake, layers and layers of blinding white sculpture and carvings set in extensive gardens. I looked around, thinking of elbow room and things to pick up and hit a god with.
“I’m a fucking idiot,” I said.
To mortal eyes, the temple was no doubt gorgeous, a big, glorious celebration of tradition and holiness and blah blah. For me it was also just a little bit alive—not maybe like a beehive, but at least like an ant colony. Stuff going on deep inside. Glowing warm spots of divine power.
I looked down at myself. I glowed, too. That was a comfort.
“Stick around,” I told Suka. “But stay out of sight. I may need you alive to go back and tell Rathi what happened.” I took a deep breath. I faced the temple. “Here we go.”
I found that I too could be invisible—my powers really were stronger. At midday on a weekday hardly anyone was in the temple. I swaggered through the place in my wrestler’s loincloth, pretending to look neither left nor right, but keeping eyes and ears open for the divine inhabitants.
Shiva had a shrine in a nice little room all to himself. I wondered about that. I would have thought he’d be out in the main room, where everyone could see how big his lingam was. It looked as though my theory was right. I took a deep breath, crossed and uncrossed all my fingers and toes, and strode in, clanging the bell at the threshold as I came.
“Bring out your dead!” I hollered, pitching my voice to the frequency where the gods speak.
I listened. There was a sense of scurrying, of frantic e-mails flying, someone’s hand reaching for the Big Red Telephone. Yup. Things had definitely gone corporate up there.
I said with more confidence, “I’m waiting.”
I heard whispers and hissed arguments behind doors. And…was that a whiff of som ras? The nectar of the gods? It almost smelled as if the White House staff had been sparking up a doobie to while away a long, supervisor-free afternoon.
I tuned in tighter to the gods’ frequency. The room was going transparent. I stood on a lotus-inlaid floor that floated several inches above the carpet and fancy rugs piled on the physical floor. The lingam-idol of Shiva faded away and became a doorway into a far grander hall decorated with much grander idols of the big boy, depicting him conquering demons, mating with his Shakti, blessing and smiting, yadda yadda, idols marching off into infinity.
“Ssst.”
I didn’t turn my head. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted Indra peeking around a pillar.
“Where you been, asshole?” he whispered. “Good to see you.”
I allowed myself a smile. Troublemaker Indra. I hoped he would stick around. It would be nice to have a witness who wasn’t married to the current administration. Especially if I—no. Stay positive, Kama.
I squinted. “Dude. What are you wearing?”
“Casual Friday.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Watch the door, ’kay? No mortals,” I said out of the side of my mouth.
I heard Indra say, “You got it.”
I took another deep breath.
Down the infinitely long hallway, I could hear footsteps…big footsteps. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. The mighty one hove into view, and I saw what I’d been hoping I’d see.
Bit of a paunch. Touch of embonpoint. The big guy had been letting himself go.
Not to put too fine a point on it, he was waddling.
I swaggered forward until I stood at the doorway to his impressive foyer. With every step I took, I grew taller, until I was His Lordship’s height. Eye to eye, I thought he looked a little stressed out. He was always blue, but the circles under his eyes spoke of too many long nights in the boardroom and not enough days on horseback, smiting.
“Well, short-arse?” Shiva said, his brow furrowing.
“Half a millennium since we met and this is what you have to say to me?”
He scowled. “How about some respect?”
“How about I piss on your floor?” That was hot-headed maybe, but I felt keyed up.
Shiva looked over his shoulder, then around the room. I relaxed a little more. “What’s your fucking problem? I was in a meeting,” he grumbled.
Whoa. A meeting. I said, “My problem is fucking. I want my ashes back.”
I shifted into the first position of challenge. I knew I looked buff and trim and ready to fight.
He looked me up and down. Then he took a breath. He grew five feet taller.
“Think you can take me?” I said. I took a breath and expanded with him. My hair grew out—snaked over my head—and formed the proper top-knot, an inch taller than his top-knot. “‘In a meeting,’” I added scornfully. “You’ve gone soft. I bet you have quality circles now.”
“You punk!”
His Lordship’s frown grew thunderous. He took another deep breath and swelled up even further. Now his head and shoulders were bent, too big for the doorway. He glared up at the lintel as if it should grow with him—and maybe he had expected it to. As it was, he thumped the upper doorway with his fist.
Nothing happened.
He bent his back, grew even further, until he was a monstrous giant trapped in a tiny doorway. His face grew red, his shoulders bulged, he pressed upward—
“Oi!” came a distant voice. “We’re trying to have a meeting back here!”
A chorus of other faraway voices drowned out the first.
I smiled. “Why don’t we step outside and settle this like men?”
Shiva growled long and low, a frankly blood-curdling sound. “Indra!” he bellowed. “Make a storm! Clear the parking lot!” He shrank until he could get through the doorway. “And you—you cockroach—I’ll settle your hash outside.”
He stomped past me, passing straight through the temple wall.
I followed.
Out in the lot, we squared off. Shiva was flexing and glowering, and I was trying to look suave and relaxed, while Indra cooked up some dark clouds and spattered the few mortals wandering the lot with brief, swift, heavy rain. The mortals squealed and ran for their cars. In moments, the parking lot was empty.
Here we go, I thought. There was a nice, fat concrete urn about four feet high beside me. I picked it up and hefted it.
“Indra!” Shiva bellowed again. “Strike him with lightning!”
Lightning speared down out of the clouds—and struck ten feet away from me. I took a big bite out of it as it passed. Sixty million volts boosted my power way past what I was used to. I tossed the urn. “Catch.”
Shiva caught it in one hand and hurled it back at me.
I put out a hand armored in lightning and deflected it. The urn skipped off the lightning and smashed onto the asphalt, leaving a nasty gouge. “Missed me by a mile.”
I had had a whole spiel worked up for this moment, but right now I couldn’t remember it. All this fresh power was making me cocky. I wanted to taunt this fat slob until he tried to stomp me and threw his back
out.
That strategy worked fine until he started throwing fire.
I’m not crazy about fire.
A fireball the size of a Volkswagen Beetle bounced toward me. I just managed to jump over it as it rolled by.
“Isn’t that one of Agni’s fireballs? I thought you needed a permit for those.”
“You’ll be dead before we find out,” Shiva promised grimly. He was sweating.
So was I. I hate getting burned to death. I fucking hate it.
Shiva wound up with another fireball. I danced over to the cement urn, now pretty chipped up, and bowled it back at his ankles. He gave a hop, missed, and tumbled over it. “Ow!” His fireball dissolved and he grabbed his knee. “Dammit, that’s my bad knee!”
“Oh, boo hoo. I think you’re afraid to talk to me because then I’ll find out what a chairmeister you’ve become. Everybody else has gotten used to it by now. Last time I saw you, you had, like, some balls—”
I leaped out of the way as he cranked the fireball back up and lobbed it one-handed.
“You little shit, you can’t organize your way out of a wet paper bag!” he howled.
“Why should I? I make love, not mid-quarter projections based on a two-year plan nobody can stick to.”
He growled low, still feeling his knee. “I’ll roast you alive for a hundred years!” He swung at me and I dodged away, laughing.
“Don’t feel bad,” I panted, coming down with my bare foot on a shard of broken concrete and holding back a cussword. “Every major religion on the planet is infected with pyramidiasis. Do you have occupational safety regulations now? The Christian hell does. Any demon who lifts more than a thirty-pound damned soul has to wear a back support belt, am I right?”
He swayed to his feet, favoring that knee, and rubbing the small of his back. “What’s got into you? You don’t have any devotees.”
“Nineteen. I have nineteen devotees. Wait, I lie, they’ve got gandharvas, so that’s thirty-eight.”
He shook his head, looking puzzled. “That’s not enough—” Suddenly he whipped his arm around from behind his back and slammed down a fireball. It missed me by a hair and stuck in the parking lot where it stayed, melting and burning the asphalt and sending up a column of foul black smoke.
I tried to step back.
My feet were stuck in liquefying tar.
I looked up at Shiva. He was growing again, and even with the low cloud ceiling there was plenty of room for his giant, glaring head.
He leaned down. “You’re a pest, Kamadeva,” he said. “Why didn’t you stay dead? You had the cushiest job in heaven. All you had to do was preside over weddings and purifications. Sprinkle some colored pixie dust on a spring festival once a year. Nobody else had it so good.”
“Everybody has it that good—if you’ve deposed them and—stolen their jobs and—broken them to the lower ranks,” I panted, struggling to unstick my feet. “You dump us all—into—the purity—spirituality—and chastity division. Fuck that noise.”
He shook his head. “You came back for your ashes. Fine. Here they come.” He raised both arms to the sky and formed a fireball between them. It was the mother of all fireballs. Ten times bigger than the others.
Shit, I thought. Rathi is not going to like having to pick my ashes out of a lot of melted asphalt.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I found my green parrot hiding in the temple doorway, half watching them fight with one wing covering his eyes. The pigeon I rode in on gave him a look. Then it tried to snuggle up to him. I remembered him now. Suka, my husband’s vahana.
“How’s it going?” I muttered.
“Not good,” Suka muttered back. “Pissing contest.”
I bit my lip. I was mostly me—that is, mostly Rathi, the mountain, the goddess who understood what was going on. But the me who was Rathi the younger kept shoving forward to watch the action. There was a bubble of silence over the parking lot—I supposed that Shiva had made it, to keep everyone else from witnessing his humiliation at having to crush Kama again.
I didn’t quite know what to do.
I do. Let me out there.
That was little Rathi. “What do you think you can do?” I murmured to my mortal self.
Right now they were shouting at each other and making faces. My heart jumped into my mouth when I saw Shiva throw a fireball. Kama wouldn’t like that.
I didn’t like that. “I’m going in closer.” Somewhere in my six thousand years I must have known some way to stop them.
Shiva threw a particularly hot one that set the pavement on fire. I almost screamed in terror when I saw that Kama was stuck in the tar.
Now! Let me talk to them now! yelled little Rathi.
I faded back and became…a thirty-something civil rights attorney in a three-piece suit, marching across the parking lot with my heels snapping and my chin jutting toward a seventy-foot-high god who was threatening to burn my husband to a crisp. Again.
Forty feet away I stopped, because my shoes were sticking in melted tar. Could Shiva even see me through all this smoke? Asphalt fires were breaking out all over the parking lot. I felt my eyebrows frizzle.
Kama looked very small, standing up to his ankles in tar, staring up at the wrath of Shiva.
All the love and tenderness and hunger and passion and, yes, all the lust he had awakened in me seemed to balloon up over me, an ocean of frustrated desire, a limitless reservoir that trembled, water-balloon-like, needing only a touch to explode into a million billion trillion tears.
Shiva tore his giant fireball in two. Now he had one in each hand. He raised them, leaning over my Kama, and took aim.
I released the reservoir.
An ocean of warm salty water burst over all our heads. Shiva looked up, ducked, and covered his head with both arms. Kama vanished under the deluge. The parking lot fires went out, sending up columns of steam where there had been roiling black smoke. I stood as long as I could, until my soggy suit and sheer reaction from letting go of all that desire drove me to my knees. The water fell and fell and fell, not like rain but like ocean waves, great cowabungas of sexual urgency that battered me and knocked me over. I stopped trying to stand up. I stopped trying to see. I just waited it out.
At length, I calmed down. The battering waves of desire quieted to gentle rain and then stopped falling. Even the columns of steam cooled.
I pulled myself together and clambered up onto my sopping wet, sensible pumps.
*come, this will never do,* said my goddess self. *you cannot appear before them like this.*
“Wow. Did I do all that?” I said.
*come on, come on. court’s in session. your turn to plead.*
“I never plead,” I snapped.
I looked down at myself. My shoes were dry. My suit was dry and crisply pressed. My hair, which weighs a ton when wet, was again dry. I patted my chignon—yes, still tidy, except for a single curl, which I tucked in.
Shiva and Kama, both only double human size now, sat on the asphalt looking like two drowned rats.
I took a long, calming breath.
I walked forward.
“Have we finished the demonstration of bad manners?”
Shiva looked up first. “Who are you?”
“Rathi,” Kama said, his voice trembling. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“You shouldn’t have come here without me,” I retorted.
“Rathi? You’re the wife?” Shiva squinted at me.
I smiled. “I’m his lawyer.”
Shiva went pale.
Kama might have spoken, but I held up a hand.
“I think we can accept the hostilities as fully expressed. Now, how about some negotiation?”
“What did you hit me with?” Shiva said, squeezing water out of his ruined topknot.
“That was four hundred and fifty years of suppressed female sexuality.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Seriously.”
I fixed him with the look that had broken the Sandsrei
cht defendant in the witness box. “Seriously. And there’s plenty more where that came from. That is what happens when you try to keep women away from sex.”
Shiva peered at the sky, as if trying to see the invisible reservoir of desire that I could see so easily.
Kama was picking tar off his bare feet, his head bent, trying to hide a smile.
“It’s happened before. And then…” I raised both palms, as if to call down the waters again. “The flood.”
“That was the purification. The rage of God. The most recent end of the world,” Shiva said, frowning. “Everybody knows that.”
“Just like a man to call it the end of the world when a woman shows her sexual power.” I shrugged. “Think what you want to. But sooner or later, if you try to deny women the right to sex, you had better learn to swim.”
Shiva just sat there and stared at me. Water dripped onto his nose from his sopping, flopping top-knot.
“Come,” I said, “you surely have demands to make in this negotiation. No? Shall we hear from Kamadeva first, then?”
I looked at my husband. my husband. How odd to feel it was true, in both my selves. “Kamadeva. What do you want?”
He seemed well recovered, although there were still bits of black tar on his ankles. Apart from a few scuffs on shoulder and hip from bouncing around the parking lot, he was whole. His loincloth—torn from my living room curtains how long ago? Only a couple of hours?—hung damply about his hips. He looked good enough to eat.
He looked at me, then at Shiva. “I want my ashes. I want my body, my wife, and my life.”
I looked at him meaningly, my eyebrows raised, as if peering over invisible spectacles. “Anything else?” I said pointedly.
He blinked. “Oh. Yes. And equal sexual rights for women. Um.”
“In fact,” I said, “we demand equal rights for women in all things. Sex, property ownership, marriage and divorce, child custody, equal pay, equal job opportunities, freedom from harassment, education, healthcare, daycare, the works.”
Shiva scrambled to his feet and threw his hands in the air. “Fine! Bankrupt me, why don’t you?” He flung a hand behind him at the temple. “Do you know what I was doing when this weenie interrupted? Reviewing contract demands from the rakshasas’ union. We’ve been at it for six weeks. They want workers’ compensation for time lost due to injuries and disabilities incurred while fighting heroes.” He shook both fists in the air. “Do you have any idea what that’s going to cost?” He clutched his topknot, found again that it was coming down, and impatiently started pulling cobras out of it.
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