A Broken Paradise (The Windows of Heaven Book 3)

by Powderly Jr. , K. G.

  “It means E’Yahavah spoke to me in detail about his rescue plan…”

  Nestrigati spoke right over him again. “You have comforted us all by accurately foretelling the nature of World-end, and when it would come, so that we can all be prepared. Why undermine that holy calling now by coming up here to spread fear and discourage our labors, which you have inspired?”

  “Is that what you really think I’m doing?”

  “Oh, I know you mean well. Your ship is a grand venture that I am sure will see you through World-end safely. I have every confidence of meeting up with you after it’s all over—if you haven’t been swept too far away—that is. Why can’t you respect me enough to afford my prayers the same power and honor I give to yours?”

  “It’s not a question of whose prayers are stronger, or about respect—how could I not respect the man who risked his life to save my son and father? It’s about the fact that I specifically asked him about Floodhaven. What part of that don’t you understand?”

  “What are you implying—that I have impure motives?”

  A’Nu-Ahki said, “Nonsense! None of us is completely pure—I have made no such implication! It is not as though I haven’t offered to expand my vessel’s living quarters, and even to build a second ship. Nor has my reading of the prophecies been far-fetched. How can you call me A’Nu’s Comforter, and believe I would lie about the very words of E’Yahavah?”

  Tiva wondered if Nestrigati would ever answer as the silence stretched on. Then he said, “Nu. I find your demand that we return to the valley misguided at best, arrogant and hateful at worst. If I haven’t gained your respect by now, I don’t know what else I can do.”

  “There is only one E’Yahavah. I know what he said about how we are to survive. I have gold left in the coffers from Paru’Ainu. If we start now, there’s still time to build a second ship. I can berth two hundred more on my vessel, with my commanded cargo. A second ship could berth well over a thousand—that’s a hundred more than you have living up here. We could build it in the pan drain downstream of our drydock, where it would have as much protection from the mountain run-off as our vessel. But we’d have to start now; otherwise the wood won’t have time to harden properly.”

  “No! No! No! No!” Nestrigati shouted. “It’s ludicrous! If we’re not safe without you up here, what makes you think we’d be safe in a second ship with you in the other one?”

  “It has nothing to do with me personally! You would be following the divine pattern under E’Yahavah’s appointed leadership for this time…”

  “It’s not about you, it all about you—which is it? My backers would never go for it! Besides, yours are not the only prayers E’Yahavah hears! ‘Every’ does not always mean every!”

  “Are you willing to gamble your life, your family’s, and all these people on such a strained technicality?”

  Tiva jumped at a loud slam—like that of a fist hitting a table. Then she heard Nestrigati say, “Leave my haven, before I start to think of you as a false Comforter!”

  “E’Yahavah’s Word-speaker explicitly said that nothing on land was safe. I told you this the day after it happened, and ever since. If you think I’d lie about such a thing, you can’t think I’m the true Comforter, Nestrigati, so stop pretending. You can’t have it both ways.”

  “So it’s all about you!”

  A’Nu-Ahki’s voice sank to growl. “Not because I want it to be.”

  Tiva scurried away from the entrance when she heard A’Nu-Ahki’s approaching footsteps. He emerged from the passageway looking haggard.

  “We’re done here,” he grunted, and motioned for her to follow him down the central stair to where the cart and pack beast were tied.

  Tiva understood emotional exhaustion. She saw it in her father-in-law’s eyes, as they wound down the mountain trail back to Q’Enukki’s Retreat in the cart. He said nothing, but she knew that he must have been doing something similar to what she had been doing over her morning quarrel.

  Hindsight taunted her in the silence with all the witty retorts she could have made at Khumi. Ours was just a stupid spat. What must A’Nu-Ahki be going through in a dispute with so many lives at stake?

  She only spoke because she did not want to get sucked back into her own cycle of bitter ruminations.

  “I’m confused, Father.”

  “So am I.”

  “I mean this thing with the Floodhaven Elder. It’s plain that you used to be friends…”

  “So you were listening?”

  She flushed. “I’m sorry! But you both got rather loud.”

  He smiled with only half his mouth. “So we did. I was once his captain. He also saved the lives of my father and ‘Peti at the Battle of the Balimar Straits. The Aztlan chain-cannons were raking through our trenches, after the enemy captured U’Sumi and me. Nestrigati led a strike on the enemy gunners, and disabled their weapon before it could exterminate the wounded in the trenches where my father and Iyapeti lay. He then carried them out from behind enemy lines.”

  “That would make him a brave and noble man,” Tiva reasoned, reshaping her original comparison of Nestrigati to Henumil.

  “Yes it does. Not too bright, but brave and noble.”

  “Why then does E’Yahavah want to kill him in the World-end?”

  “He doesn’t.”

  She felt herself sinking back into a layer of Lit reality that she had really come to hate—even now. “Why then won’t the Divine Name make an exception for Floodhaven?”

  “Do you also think I’m just being cruel and unfair? Or that E’Yahavah doesn’t care about these people?” he asked, looking away from her to watch the narrow mountain path ahead.

  “No, I just don’t understand; that’s all.”

  “Neither do I; really. Nestrigati has many noble qualities. Still, nobody can claim that the Divine Name owes them for their comparative nobility in contrast to thugs and giants—or even to most of the Seer Clan. E’Yahavah has given us an explicit plan that we must follow in order for it to work—like any set of directions for any procedure meant to operate in the real world of cause and effect.”

  Tiva laughed without mirth. “I used to think I wanted to live in the real world. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “We all have days like that, Dear One. But we live there whether we want to or not. Nestrigati is trying to bend reality to his will. He’s selective about which part of the Seers’ revelation he embraces, as if he can make the parts he dislikes magically untrue simply by not embracing them. He doesn’t seem to understand that it’s all for real.”

  “He’s built Floodhaven. That makes him pretty close.”

  The cart rounded another switchback in the trail, and settled back on to a straightaway. A’Nu-Ahki turned and looked at her again. “It does no good if a physician correctly diagnoses an illness, but refuses to prescribe the proper remedy. We all have a choice here. We can join the world in shaking our fists at the heavens—which changes nothing—or we can heed the prophecies—all of the prophecies. In the end, E’Yahavah has said what he has said. If Nestrigati had truly listened, we would not be riding down this mountain road alone.”

  Tiva asked, “How did we come to this?”

  “Us personally, or the world?”

  She glanced at him. “The Seer Clan.”

  A’Nu-Ahki stared off ahead. “I’ve been giving that a lot of thought lately. I’m not sure any one answer can cover it. I suppose the Basilisk exploited our blind spots while we relied too heavily on our own strengths.”

  “But everybody relies on their strengths.”

  He nodded. “Yet, it’s often in the shadow of our strengths that our blind spots are largest.”

  “Which strengths hide the Seer Clan’s big blind spot?”

  “That is no easy question. Centuries ago, we focused exclusively on preserving and teaching Seti’s exposition of the Sky Signs and Q’Enukki’s prophecies. We memorized them and quoted them for everything—still do.”

  T
iva squinted at him. “Was that wrong?”

  “Quite the contrary; it’s the only true foundation for all knowledge, wisdom, and life. Where we failed was in how we sometimes applied them. For one, we focused only on spiritual and moral issues to counter the broader tendency among the Orthodox to chase economic and political power.”

  “But hadn’t the old priestly system become decadent by doing that?”

  “Quite. Yet that didn’t cancel our responsibility to explore and manage E’Yahavah’s creation—which was his first command to us all. We forgot that Seti and Q’Enukki didn’t just speak prophecy—they laid the foundations of art, history, and technology, which became dominated by the inventions of Qayin’s children only after we neglected to build there. Our father believed that E’Yahavah was creator of all reality—not just the spiritual side. When persecutions and massacres drove us from land to land—and even hindered us in Seti’s country—we retreated further and further into where we felt safe and strong.”

  “I don’t understand. We came to Akh’Uzan to take refuge from the evils of the world. How else could we have survived?”

  The Old Man smiled. “How else indeed? There’s the quandary—or part of it. Of course, we need our refuge in E’Yahavah. Everybody needs a place of rest and protection. But the walls of that refuge need gateways that allow mercy and truth to go out and penetrate a cursed world—to keep bad things from getting worse and right things from becoming unthinkable in the closing minds of men, who are already naturally drawn to evil. That takes a divine perspective in all of reality—not just in ‘spiritual’ areas.”

  He stared beyond the trail ahead, as if remembering. “Once it looked as though the culture was a lost cause, we wanted to save individuals. But individuals aren’t restored in a cultural vacuum. As time passed, our clan isolated itself too much. We saw how the Orthodox of Seti had been swallowed up by worldly ambitions, so we went to an opposite—and ultimately just as disastrous—extreme: We stopped taking reasonable risks.”

  “Weren’t we driven? Weren’t we forced to retreat? It’s not fair to lay the whole thing on us!” Tiva didn’t understand why she felt so defensive. It was not as if she had been there when all the tough decisions went down.

  A’Nu-Ahki reached over and squeezed her shoulder gently. “I’m not laying it all on us. Of course, we were often driven, and much of what happened to us was unavoidable because of it. We suffered and grew strong, but we began to take pride in our spiritual strength, and that was our downfall. We looked down on new generations that had never heard the truth because their parents had neglected to teach it to them. We despised the way they dressed—the way they behaved—their lack of common sense—but we stopped trying to understand and reach them.”

  He laughed in a way that somehow seemed to Tiva more like a deeper kind of weeping. “We found our refuge in Akh’Uzan, and slowly stopped seeking refuge in E’Yahavah. We surrounded ourselves with the taboos and sacred words of the Sacrifice and the Work. We comforted ourselves in an illusion of spiritual purity, when we had forgotten the substance of it long ago.”

  Tiva said, “You keep saying ‘we.’ You never did this.”

  A tear ran from his eye as the cart navigated another hairpin turn. “My kindly daughter, how I wish that were really so.”

  T

  iva often volunteered to care for the elders and T’Qinna to avoid her husband’s shipyard frowns. He seemed to treat her like an intruder rather than a helper in his work. T’Qinna was getting back on her feet anyway and even worked a couple days a week inside the great ship’s crew suite.

  Tiva enjoyed the relative solitude, though she felt uncomfortable around the Ancient. Today Muhet’Usalaq insisted on walking down to the village not long after the others had left for work. She sensed something was up, but as usual, nobody had bothered to tell her what.

  She slowly shuffled down the trail with her arm looped around the Ancient’s. His large tufted brows arched higher than usual, and the white of his hair fluttered in the gentle breeze around his deeply furrowed brown skin. His icy blue eyes seemed harder than she had ever seen them.

  Tiva was sure that the Ancient merely tolerated her most of the time. She suspected that he still saw her as a “whorish woman on probation” or something. He never said bad things to her. He never said anything at all. At times, she wished he would just call her a bad name, so she could be sure. Yet he kept silent in his ancient world long dead, and let her dutifully guide him. At least he wasn’t mean as she thought he was, back when he was just “the Old Crow” to her and Farsa. If he thought bad things about her, he kept them to himself. Tiva was almost certain he thought them, though.

  The trail began to hug the rock outcropping as it turned toward the Shrine. Tiva heard angry shouts ahead, and tried to slow the Old Man down. He pulled away from her, and began to speed up, scraping toward the noise at a remarkable pace.

  When Tiva caught up to him, she pulled him to a halt, come what may. He did not object. By now, they could see the commotion.

  A detachment of Dragon-slayers stood before the Shrine, ceremonial spears outstretched against A’Nu-Ahki and his sons. U’Sumi covered the Shrine guard with his not-so-ceremonial automatic hand-cannon taken from the wreck of Samyaza’s “Phoenix Fleet” command astra many years ago.

  “What’s going on?” Tiva said, more to herself than in expectation of an answer from the Old Man.

  Muhet’Usalaq deigned to speak to her. “Trouble! I’ve sent A’Nu-Ahki to retrieve the Treasures and Atum-Ra’s cask, which are rightfully his.”

  The context for Noah’s education was harsh—a confining ark in the midst of a world-destroying flood. An equally shocking and harsh program of education will also be called for in our own time. Once humans set themselves up as gods, they don’t want to settle for less. How will we be able to convince people that they cannot have every comfort they desire, or possess or consume whatever delights their eyes? How will they become willing to limit their goals to more modest levels? At issue is a reorientation of our most basic vision and a transformation of our most fundamental practices. Is there a way to think and act beyond the paradigm of human exploitation?

  —Norman Wirzba

  Caring and Working: An Agrarian Perspective

  17

  Barque of Aeons

  Not even the forest birds broke the tense silence that fell on the foothills trail in front of the Shrine Cave.

  “Gentlemen,” A’Nu-Ahki said, for the second time, “I have here the key to the Shrine and the Sanctum. The Charge of Iyared still binds me as keeper of the things inside. The time has come for me to reclaim custody. The Ancient gave it to your leader in my absence on only a temporary basis, and on condition that when the time came I would be able to reclaim what was deposited.”

  Tiva saw her brother Yargat step out in front of his guard contingent. He shouted, “We do not recognize the claims of heretics!”

  A’Nu-Ahki seemed unperturbed by her brother’s insult. “Even if I were a heretic, the writ of custody still rests with my house, and the tokens would be recognized in any Magisterium of Seti. Not even the Archon can annul the deathbed charge of one of his fathers, even if he can reinterpret everything else away into oblivion. I don’t want trouble, but I am asking you one last time to stand aside according to lawful authority. If this erupts into violence, no court in the land will convict me for claiming what is mine from those who would rob me.”

  A dark figure rounded the corner on the trail from the village, and came to a halt. Tiva had not seen her father’s face in many years. She began to quiver all over, driven all the madder by the fact that neither her father nor brother seemed to take any notice of her at all. The only consolation was that she was apparently not alone here. Henumil scowled at his son, the Dragon-slayers, and A’Nu-Ahki all with seemingly equal disdain.

  Henumil growled. “I came as soon as I heard. What goes on?”

  Yargat cried, “The apostates have come to steal
away the Treasures that protect our valley!”

  Henumil looked to A’Nu-Ahki. “Why now?”

  “The time draws near. The place aboard the ship has been prepared for them. Iyared gave me the charge, and you gave the Ancient your word.”

  Henumil folded his arms. “The Ancient I will recognize,” he cocked his head toward Muhet’Usalaq, “despite his weak mismanagement of this valley. But you are nothing but a heretic.”

  U’Sumi cocked his hand-cannon, but Henumil did not budge.

  Tiva almost ran into their midst, afraid to watch either her old or her new family die in bloodshed, but the Ancient held her back with a surprisingly strong grip. She glanced up into his eyes and saw a fatherly protectiveness there she did not expect.

  A’Nu-Ahki signaled for his son to lower the weapon.

  Muhet’Usalaq quietly motioned for Tiva to stay where she was and then shuffled out into the forefront. “I knew you would break your oath,” he shouted when he came to a halt before Tiva’s father.

  For a second Henumil looked down, as if unable to face the Ancient One squarely in the eye.

  Muhet’Usalaq said, “Henumil, son of Urugim, I gave you a chance to share in the holy charge given us by Iyared, and shared by your ancestor with honor. Not only do you seek to break your oath to me, but you have mismanaged the keeping of these tokens by turning them into stinking idols! Do you think I have not followed closely the way you have made out this shrine to be some kind of talisman against World-end? Praying to Atum-Ra and these relics, which can neither hear, nor speak, and thinking that you reach to the spirit of the First Father—what nonsense!”

  Yargat trembled, and sidled up to the Chief Dragon-slayer. “Father, do you not see? Even the Ancient has turned from the ways of the Fathers. He utters blasphemy!”

  “What do you know about the ways of the Fathers, you little sludge rat?” bellowed the Ancient. “I stood before Archon Aenusi, who learned from the lips of Seti and Atum-Ra himself, when he yet ruled as Archronos in Sa-utar! I saw the early fathers teach and make judgment! The idea that Atum-Ra’s own descendants would ever pray to him or his corpse, as if he had god-like power, would have been repugnant to him, and to all that knew him! My father would have found it even more revolting.”