Blade of Tyshalle

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  Images clustered thickly, visions in her mind's eye. Every puddle became a rice paddy. Every field burgeoned with corn and wheat. Fish swarmed the river so thickly that men lined the banks to catch them with their hands. Cattle and swine bore fat healthy young at need, all year round.

  Is lumber needed for the building of homes? Acorns scattered in a patch of dirt became mature oaks in days—in an hour, just like this tangled spring of her creation.

  Is the air dirty? Overnight, a billion new trees--a rain forest to order. Your river alone could support BILLIONS.

  And you'll kill billions to give it to them, she replied. She summoned sharp-edged images of the primal village filled with bloating corpses, and filled their depths with the onslaught of murder in Ankhana itself.

  Ah, yes, the disease. Sorry about that.

  Sorry? SORRY?

  Quite. You must understand, dear girl, this was an instinctive—ah, shall we say, preconscious?—maneuver on Our part. From the days when the appellation "blind" was more than a metaphor. An image grew within her of a newborn infant, eyes not yet open, groping for the fit. This is the great advantage of having allowed Ma'elKoth into Our Union: His vision makes things rather dazzlingly clear.

  Think of the disease this way: She saw an oak spring from fertile soil, saw the sapling shoot forth branches and the branches open leaves to the sun—leaves that shaded the ground beneath it, so that by the time the tree was mature, all the other little trees beneath its limbs had died for lack of light. Purely natural. Nothing malicious in the slightest.

  On the other hand, one cannot argue with success, can one? Rather clears the board at one swipe. Ah, well: We would take it back if We could—but this is a difficulty you have already addressed, is it not?

  And you killed me for it!

  Not at all. We killed you because you opposed us. We killed you because you are selfish and willful. We killed you because your opposition would kill Us. We killed you, justifiably, in self-defense.

  Look at this: Within her consciousness wheeled the globe of Earth, spinning silently in space: a tiny island in a vast and hostile ocean: an island jammed with fourteen billions already, and more on their way every second. Earth passed the brink of ecological collapse two hundred years ago. Only an extravagant waste of irreplaceable resources has allowed the human race to continue thus far; only a die-off comparable to the Cretaceous can save it now. Five years from now, ten at the most, the die-off will begin.

  This is why We killed you: because you would deny the human race what it needs to survive. Can you say We were wrong?

  She could not even hope that this was a lie. The truth streamed into her. Twelve billion people would die. Possibly more. She could not imagine it, not even with the power of the god: a planet carpeted in human corpses.

  Now see Overworld: Imagine a new Earth, untouched. Imagine Earth as if it had always been in the care of a kindly goddess. With you and your power to guide Us, We could make of this world a perpetual garden.

  She could not even lift her head to summon a response.

  She was drowning in the truth.

  She clung to a single strand of resistance: the distant howls of her daughter's anguish.

  7

  Ah, yes, Faith. A writer of your world—Our world—once posed the problem this way: If you could ensure the future survival and happiness of all humanity by allowing one single wholly innocent, utterly inoffensive being to be tortured to death, would you do it? This is a conundrum only when faced by mortals. For gods, the answer is clear. Obvious. You find the stories wherever you look: Attis, Dionysios, Jesus Christ—the Wicker Man, by any other name.

  But Faith— Pallas began to recover some scraps of her outrage. She's my DAUGHTER.

  But, dear girl, it was you who gave her over to this torture. We merely use the tool you have crafted for Us.

  Faith? Shh, Faith, I'm here. It's all right.

  But Faith could only sob. She was, after all, just a little girl: yet another in the endless litany of innocents violated by a god. By two gods, Pallas thought. The blind god, and me.

  She could have sung Faith a human life; instead, she had sung her own dream: complete, perfect union with one she loved.

  The cruelty of what she had done had never occurred to her. How could I have known?

  Now within her she saw Ma'elKoth in all his majesty: the chiseled face, the glorious sweep of hair, chest like a barrel and shoulders like wrecking balls; she saw the limpid purity of his eye, the transcendent nobility of his brow. At his side stood Faith, naked, sobbing; the two of them were joined somehow, in some way that she couldn't make her mind clearly resolve: as though Faith's two hands had melted together within Ma'elKoth's grip. She need not suffer so; it is you who prolongs and compounds her suffering. It is you who can release her this very instant.

  I can save her?

  The image of Ma'elKoth extended his other hand toward Pallas, in a gesture of peace. Of friendship. Of union. All you must do, he told her, is take Our hand.

  But Pallas Raithe turned away.

  She didn't even know why.

  8

  Take it, the image of Ma'elKoth insisted. Does your daughter's suffering mean so little to you? Take Our hand, and We no longer have need of the child. We will have no reason to harm her.

  Perhaps she had lived with Hari for too long; perhaps that was it. And you'll have no reason not to.

  The image of Ma'elKoth rolled and shifted, rippling from within like a reflection in a water pot gone to boil. For an instant another face showed through Ma'elKoth's classic beauty: a skull stretched with parchment and raddled with mold and rot, tangled teeth stained grey-brown, eyes glaring with an endless, limitless hunger that terrified her. Yes, a part of Us desires her suffering. The love of cruelty is as human as is the love of a mother for her child. But when you join us, your desires will color Ours. You have learned this from the river; does not your will color its Song? Join Us.

  Pallas wept. I can't.

  The blind god showed her a girl child, perhaps eight years old, crouched in an alley behind a Manhattan Labor tenement. She smeared snot from her lip with a dirty hand, and coughed thickly into a drizzle of grey rain that raised blisters on her exposed neck. Can you look at this child and say she has no right to breathe clean air? No right to eat fresh food? Can you tell her she has no right to be free?

  The girl picked listlessly through a mound of garbage, only to cry out in joy at finding a dirt-greyed chicken leg with yet a few scraps of meat upon it.

  I serve the river, Pallas answered hesitantly, searching her feelings. She's not my responsibility

  But she is. You know of her suffering and you have the power to save her. What crime has she committed, that you can condemn her to the life you know she must live?

  She's living in the world you made

  And We have accepted responsibility for that. We are fighting to change it. What are you fighting for?

  She summoned an image of the headwaters of the Great Chambaygen before the days of the Khryl's Saddle railway: the pristine crystal trickle over mossy stones among the majesty of the God's Teeth. She summoned the rolling waves of virgin forest below the mountain slopes, the slow curve of an eagle riding a thermal, the splash of a grizzly haggling salmon

  Come now, dear girl. This is fatuous. Consider this bear of yours for a moment: Should this bear threaten the life of that young girl, you would kill it without hesitation.

  She insisted, desperately obstinate, I will not have your faceless billions unleashed upon my world.

  But they are not faceless, not at all. "Faceless billions" is only a phrase. It's a slogan that you invent to dehumanize them: as abstractions, it is easy to condemn them to their hideous fate. But they are not abstract. Each is a human being, who loves and hates, who cries when he is hurt and laughs when she is happy. All of them are right here. Every single one has a face. Would you like to tell them, in your own words, why they must choke to death on the ruined c
inder of Earth?

  Don't pretend you care!

  You know We care. You can feel it. Each of them is a part of Us; how can we not care? We care precisely as much as they do.

  She had run out of answers; even in this new aspect, Ma'elKoth remained remorselessly logical. She could not imagine allowing ten billion people to die for the sake of bears and elk and trees. But still, she resisted, and still, she did not know why. Perhaps because Overworld was so beautiful, and Earth was so . . . ugly.

  Only because We were too young—too blind—to shape it properly. Overworld need not suffer the same fate. Again, a vision blossomed: a city surpassing Athens of the Golden Age; surpassing Imperial Rome; a city emcompassing the best of London, Paris, St. Petersburg; a city with the grace of Angkor Wat, the majesty of Babylon.

  Even those bears for which you seem to care so much, and all the trees—every creature, in fact, that grows in the earth or walks upon it, swims the waters or soars the air—can remain. And everywhere she looked, the city opened itself to parks and woodlands, stretches of prairie and silver curves of rivers.

  Overworld need not be a second Earth. Between Us, We can make it a second Eden: where women bring forth young in comfort, and men no longer water their fields with the sweat of their brow Where all that is, and all that ever shall be, is peace.

  And this was the world of which she had always dreamed, wasn't it? Maybe that's why she and Hari couldn't ever quite manage to be happy: that dreamworld of hers wouldn't interest Hari one little bit. He'd hate it.

  He'd say, "Eternal peace? That's for dead people."

  He'd say, "Sure, to you it's a city. To me, it looks like a hog farm."

  Of course, the blind god told her with a hint of irony. In Our second Eden, there is no place for a Caine.

  9

  She remembered sitting in Shermaya Dole's simichair, running the cube of For Love of Pallas Ril. "Fuck the city," Caine had said. "I'd burn the world to save her." And she had never understood how he could say that.

  And yet, the answer is so simple. He is evil From the raddled memory that rode the brain within the body that she now wore rose another memory: Hari again, older now, grey in his hair, no beard, only a smear of time-salted stubble along a jawline threatening to become jowls, shrugging in a sedan chair at the rim of a crater high in the Transdeian mountains, near Khryl's Saddle. "The Future of Humanity," Hari had said, slowly, a little sadly, as though he were recounting an ugly but unavoidable truth, "is gonna have to fuck off."

  How could he say that? Could he really believe it?

  You see? We are not your enemy. He is. He is evil incarnate. Shall We list some of his crimes?

  Oathbreaker. She saw his face through Faith's eyes of memory, as he struggled in the grip of the Social Police and swore that he would save her. As he swore he would make everything turn out right.

  Liar. Images cascaded from For Love of Pallas Ril, as Caine ruthlessly and repeatedly lied, even manipulating the King of Cant—his closest friend—into risking his own life and the lives of every man he led.

  Murderer. She experienced again finding him in a dank back alley of Ankhana, at the end of Servant of the Empire. She experienced again holding him in her lap as he bled out his life from a deep belly wound, left by the sword of a guard outside the bedchamber of Prince-Regent Toa-Phelathon. She experienced again the shock and sickness of recognizing that the rag ball on the cobbles nearby was no rag ball, but was the blood and shit-stained head of the Prince-Regent, murdered in his bed.

  She could not argue with any of these charges, and yet—

  And yet

  Caine

  In the instant she thought his name, she felt his rhythm in the Song: a savage throb of rage and despair masked with dark cheer. She could feel him where he sat at this very instant: chained to a sweating limestone wall, naked in his own shit, gangrene eating his useless, lifeless legs.

  She saw the star of absolute white she had glimpsed once before, in the Iron Room, as she had lain bound upon an altar while he bargained with a god for her life. He burned raw surging energy, sizzling, profoundly alive.

  That star

  She remembered facing the god Ma'elKoth in the battle that had raged across the skies above Victory Stadium, seven years ago. She could have crushed him—the river had sung power unimaginable—but the cost of that victory would have been the deaths of tens of thousands of his Beloved Children and untold millions of the trees and grasses, fish and otters and lives of all kinds that fed the river's Song. So she had offered up her life, and Hari's, for the sake of those numberless others.

  All these years she had blamed him for turning away from her. But it was I who turned away. He was less important to me than creatures I had never seen, and who had never seen me. How, then, can I claim to have loved him? With the love of a goddess, perhaps: the love that cherishes all lives equally, but none especially. Being both goddess and woman has made me a poor goddess, and a worse woman.

  Now the choice she faced was a mirror-reversal of that one: She could take the offered hand—she could cooperate, instead of kill and in so doing save not only the massed billions of Earth, but save her daughter as well.

  And still, she did not.

  Could not.

  Could not forget what they had done to Faith. Could not reward them for it. Could not become an accomplice to her daughter's rape. Could not, finally, do as she was told.

  Because she didn't like them.

  Illumination dawned within her, and in the new light she saw what had held her back.

  It was Raithe.

  She had reconfigured his body—and his body had reconfigured her. It shaped the way her will could be expressed; it shaped even her self-image, and the way she thought. She was now something other than she had been, before. She was now a little more human.

  More like Caine.

  There had burned in Raithe a star of his own.

  Now at last she could understand why Hari would get so angry when she would ask him to release his unhappiness and flow with the river. She thought wonderingly, I suppose that if it's wrong to be unhappy, human beings wouldn't be so good at it.

  But this is only a reflex dear girl; an artifact of the body you have seized. If you take a different body, your answer may change.

  This body is my body. This answer is my answer.

  The stakes are too vast to be settled by an accident of biology.

  Are they? Then, I suppose you would have to call this— She allowed herself a bitter interior smile. —bad luck.

  She resummoned the blind god's world-Rome, that Edenic city of peace overspreading the whole of Overworld. She sent their joint vision soaring through its skies and diving among its shining white buildings, through its streets and rivers, into its gardens and parks, among its pools and trees, through bedrooms and dens, searching the whole of the blind god's fond future.

  What do you seek?

  She found bakers and butchers, scribes and dustmen, farmers and gleaners, teachers, storytellers, playful children, and amorous lovers. She found carters and coopers and masons and millers; she found housekeepers, potters, glaziers, and smiths. She found every sort of human being save one.

  What? For what do you search?

  l am looking for a white star.

  Think not of beauty; beauty is a seducer. There are lives at stake. What of the children?

  A wise man once told me, she thought succinctly, that compassion is admirable, in mortals. In gods, it is a vice.

  You would kill the human race for the sake of one man?

  No, I suppose I wouldn't. A slow certainty grew within her heart and swelled until it spread out among the trees in the newborn Ankhanan jungle. But who says it's one or the other?

  You serve either life, or you serve death.

  What kind of life? This fight isn't between life and death. It's between your life and his life. Guess what? I like his better.

  He is evil. You have seen his evil, and know its truth.


  Another wise man once told me that when somebody starts talking about good and evil, I should keep one hand on my wallet.

  She felt a wash of quiet resignation that was almost a shrug, and then a darkening of tone to bleakly impersonal threat. If you are not with Us, you are against Us.

  She passed one infinite instant examining herself for fears and second thoughts. She found several of the former, but of the latter none at all. Let it be so.

  There came a long, considering pause.

  Then:

  We have your daughter.

  And she is your only weapon, Pallas answered with all the coldness of Raithe's wintry stare. You dare not harm her.

  Perhaps so. You, on the other hand

  You, We can hurt.

  10

  A universe away, in the cool green glow of electronic screens that showed a thin young man kneeling on the surface of a river with a sword in his hand, the body that had once contained Ma'elKoth rumbled, "It is better this way."

  The body that had once contained Arturo Kollberg replied, "More fun."

  "Yes, fun. Like the Labor clinic."

  "Yes."

  "Yes."

  In perfect unison, they murmured, "It's a pity there's no way to tell Caine that we're raping his wife."

  11

  In that instant, Pallas Raithe began to die.

  All across Ankhana, trees and grasses and flowering plants sagged, wilted, softening and decaying, dripping stinking black goo while still on the vine. This black goo had a chemical reek, of acids and metals and burning oil, and where it dribbled over stone and wood it left vividly permanent stains. Ivy that had scaled the heights of the Colhari Palace wilted, sweating the black oil; corn that had sprung from city streets curled and withered and bled across the stones. Where the oil drained into the river, it killed fish and smothered reeds; in the stables where oat bins had become burgeoning gardens, it flowed around the lips of stamping horses, who choked and vomited and fell kicking to the earth.

  The black oil burned Pallas Raithe where it oozed across her skin. The burns swelled with blisters that blackened and burst to release oil of their own that burned her burns again, sizzling deeper and deeper into her flesh. She pushed herself out from among the rotting cattails, back into the river, letting the water close over her, but it could not wash away this acid. It wasn't on her skin; it came through her skin.