The Bride of the Blue Wind

by Victoria Goddard

  ***

  This time, Sardeet could see the invisible.

  ***

  “It may be,” said the eagle, “that it is an affront to the gods and not to mortals.”

  “It may be,” replied Arzu, “but in the world the gods are accustomed to acting through men.”

  “Love I see here and grief,” said the eagle. “And grief I see and love in the aerie above.”

  ***

  There were the books, and the table full of flasks where he made his ointments, and the wall of ingredients.

  And there, hanging on the wall on six hooks, where she had seen only his magic cloaks — for invisibility, he’d said, kissing her; for disguise; for the shapes of other beings; and three days she had been silent, and content—were the bodies of six women.

  Each of them looked deflated. Each of them had a rip in her belly. And there was, Sardeet saw, a seventh hook.

  “Soon,” he was muttering, pouring one liquid into another liquid. “Soon. And this time—seventh time—yes.”

  The ghosts were pushing her back, and Sardeet tiptoed as quietly as she could manage—not as quietly as she could under his silence—but he did not turn—she closed the door in the mirror softly.

  ***

  “I will take you,” said the eagle.

  ***

  When she lifted the key from the lock her hand was covered in blood.

  Five

  The eagle carried them one in each taloned foot. It had permitted them to undo the scarf binding them, but the offerings they left to it or to the gods or the djinn. It carried them not out into the desert—like their sister they were surprised—but straight up the face of the mountains, to a palace of blue glass that caught the sunlight like a mirage, but whose door opened to the eagle.

  It flew inside a vast hall to a throne made of a silvery blue glass, and set them down before it before flying out again. Once the sound of its wings faded there was no sound at all.

  Arzu said softly to Pali, “The opal.”

  Pali gave it to her, and Arzu took out a thread of green, which had been Sardeet’s favourite colour, and tied it around the stone with a special knot. She played out about an ell of thread before cutting it with the ivory dagger. She offered the dagger to Pali, who shook her head and displayed her open hands. Arzu remembered then that the injustice was to be righted without use of weapons, that the Warrior might prove herself worthy of a sword.

  Once she let the opal hang loose they waited. Pali now had nothing but the golden comb in her hair. Arzu had in her bundle only her skeins of thread and the dagger.

  The glass around them suddenly emitted a noise like a soft bell. Pali turned to Arzu to see that the opal dangling in her hand had started to move.

  They followed its gentle swinging. Each time they came to an intersection—and there were many, the palace was a maze of curving walls and interconnected rooms—they paused to see which way the opal moved. Pali had seen dowsers at work looking for the hidden springs, and knew the knot that tied the opal, but not the braid in the thread that made the knot.

  They wound through the blue rooms. None of the openings afforded a glimpse to anything besides more cool blue glass. No sight of the outside, no art or fabric within, nothing but room after room of cool empty glass.

  ***

  The fire in her had started to move. At first it expanded, pushing away all thoughts of fear or even pain, and then, as it contracted suddenly to a tiny spot below her womb, every tiniest portion of her body, inside and out, came alive and into full consciousness of agony. Sardeet dropped the keys and tried to rub at her hand with the other. She kept missing across the huge expanse of her belly.

  On the second expansion she made it halfway to the bath, but the contraction caught her and she fell to the ground in agony, and once down she could only lie flat.

  Olu-olurin came in and stood over her, with the flask in his hand. His eyes roved over her body with great pleasure, and when he saw the blood on her hand he grinned.

  “We did not speak of the penalty for opening that door,” he said.

  She felt the expansion rising up in a storm of euphoria, but before it could engulf her again she managed to ask: “What are you?”

  He smiled and kissed her on the lips as the euphoria catapulted her briefly into divinity before the contraction pulled her back down into bitter humanity.

  “I thought you would never think to ask,” he said.

  ***

  At an intersection where seven rooms led off at angles to each other, the opal stopped. It refused to move even when Arzu swung it. They looked at the silent palace around them, trying to hear any sound of habitation.

  “It’s a maze,” said Arzu. “We’re lost.” She began to unwind her last long skein, but then Pali said—“There—I see someone—” and started running. Arzu hastily followed, seeing nothing but a flash of green amidst all that blue and hoping it was not just a trick of the light.

  ***

  “I am Lord of the Blue Wind now,” said Olu-olurin. “I was a wizard of the City of Enchanters, half djinni and half human. I was beautiful: taken as a consort by one of the Wind Lords. She was gentle, did not bind me, came to love me. Over time bent to me, bowed to me, was swallowed by me, as the little whirlwind by the greater. I made a bargain with one of the devil-kindred for knowledge beyond the lot of a little wind.”

  Sardeet could not speak, since he had begun to answer her question, but he seemed to know her thoughts, for he kissed her nose.

  “Those in the desert? The Twelve work through men and lesser spirits. My fellows of the lesser winds? They have their own concerns, their own searches … to become one of the Twelve is a long and arduous task. A thousand years I have been studying the ways. Oh, the things I have learned. I am half djinni; I have through my disciplines destroyed the mortal part of me. Thus far a Wind Lord. But I am of human kindred: not truly immortal. Not one of the Twelve. That comes another way.”

  He caressed her body, running his hands over the designs on her belly that were now nearly etched into her skin. She shuddered with mingled desire and fear, and he smiled at her. “I have learned the ancient secrets. I have discovered new ones. I learned how I could bring those mortal women nearly towards divinity. The tribes send out their most beautiful to be brides to the winds, if we choose. I live at the edge of the desert, that I might choose first. The Blue Wind, lover of beauty. I will be one of the Twelve, and beautiful as you, fire as you, alive immortal. The seventh body will be mine, the fire in its heart my soul. The Twelve admire beauty best of all. When I take upon me our child’s body they will call me home.”

  ***

  Pali ran after the green figure only to have it disappear on her, but by then she had heard a voice speaking. She crept forward to see what had befallen.

  ***

  Sardeet opened her eyes to see that the ghost women had left her, all but the one in green, who stood anxiously until Sardeet looked at her. Sardeet could barely think through her horror and her desire, but nodded.

  Olu-olurin whipped around but the ghost had vanished. Sardeet felt the wave of euphoria expanding in her. The fire in her was spreading—she could feel it nearly ready to spring forth—

  “Each time I refined it. Each time I realized that what I needed was to refine myself, my body.” He stroked her belly eagerly. “I impregnated my wives. Enchanted them, enhanced them, broke the chains of their humanity until they became worthy vessels. At the rebirth left the old husk for the new glory, each time with more fire, less clay. Each time one step closer. This time your beauty was so divine already that I think—this time is enough.”

  His hunger was so naked she turned from him and as the contraction seized her retched liquid fire across the floor.

  ***

  This room was still all cool blue glass, but there were cushions in a smattering of colours off to one side, and what Pali took to be a cistern in the centre of the room. A huge mirror to the left reflected them; instin
ctively she stepped to one side to be out of its view.

  Between the mirror and the cistern stood a man who looked as if he’d been shaped out of the same glass as the walls—all blue, naked, and with a strange flame running inside him. He had been speaking. He leaned forward to kiss the figure before him.

  One of their mother’s most prized possessions was an alabaster jar she had won from some caravan long ago. It was simple, without carved ornamentation, but its lines were perfect enough to draw tears from an unwary soul. On special feasts their mother placed a candle within it, and it glowed like the divine idea of beauty.

  That was what Arzu thought, seeing her sister, and she heard no words.

  Pali listened to the blue man explain himself, and saw that he seemed fair set to rape her sister—marriage or not she could see no consent left there—and as she saw that she saw the light in Sardeet suddenly wink out, and her sister collapsed across the floor with a trickle of fire coming from her mouth.

  ***

  In Sardeet’s mind, the soft voice of her child said, “Name me.”

  ***

  Pali did not wait; she had been trained not to wait, once the decision was made. She let out a wild yell of warning, and as the blue Wind Lord turned in shock she had already landed upon him, and bore him skidding across the floor. Arzu ran to kneel beside Sardeet, pulling her yarns apart until she could disentangle the circlet she had made before the sphinx.

  “Sardeet,” she said, wrapping her sister’s hands in an intricate looping, tying on additional strings, knotting the special patterns that she had been taught by her grandmother in the women’s tent before she went to learn from the carpet makers.

  “Sardeet.”

  ***

  She was finally cold, but the fire was all around her. She felt languid, delighted, unable to be afraid. She tried to think. This was not her husband reincarnate; this was the voice she had been hearing all these months. She would not let her husband take this god away from the world.

  ***

  “Sardeet. Sardeet-savarel. Sardeet.”

  ***

  Pali crashed Olu-olurin straight into the mirror, and shattered it all over the floor. Scarlet blood spilled out across the blue glass, and some high keening rose out of the strange whispering silences of the palace.

  Over by the bath, Arzu cut the last string of her working.

  In her deepest contraction yet, Sardeet found a voice in her mind, and: “Arvoliin,” she said; Flame of the Fire of Love.

  ***

  When Sardeet named her child the air in the room seemed to catch fire. All four of them stopped, waiting: Pali sitting on Olu-olurin, her hands around his neck, not quite completing the twist. Arzu kneeling beside Sardeet, her hands on the web keeping her sister human. Olu-olurin’s black eyes glittering with an emotion without a name. Sardeet, curled around her enormous belly, listening.

  ***

  All of them heard the god say, “Now.”

  ***

  Sardeet cried out in silent agony, her body arcing off the ground, her face blazing out of pain into ecstasy. Arzu pulled her last length of thread, pure gold, and when her sister arced a second time and gave birth in a great fountain of fire, it was she who received the newborn god into her hands and used the gold thread to cut the cord of fire that seemed his umbilicus.

  Her hands were steady, though Arzu’s face was as twisted with pain and wonder as those of the ghost women she could not see who stood beside her.

  Pali’s arms contracted in fear and wonder and fury, and the snap of Olu-olurin’s neck breaking echoed loud.

  Before the sound had died the god had lost his infant form, and stood there before them a winged flame. They stared.

  He spoke to Arzu: “Be wise”; to Pali, “Be joyous”; to the last momentary glimpse of Olu-olurin, “Repent”; to the six dead women, “Be at peace”; and to his mother, “Beloved.”

  And then he was gone.

  ***

  Pali dropped the corpse of her sister’s husband upon the floor. She felt the need to say something, but could think of nothing that was remotely appropriate.

  “Never once,” said Sardeet, “did he ask me my name.”

  “That was ill done of him,” said Arzu.

  “He killed six wives before me.”

  “That was even less well done of him.”

  “He accidentally fathered a god.”

  Arzu paused judiciously. “Perhaps it was that you mothered one.”

  “He will call you home one day,” Pali said softly, and Sardeet began again to cry, though now her tears were salt.

  ***

  It took six months for Arzu to knot a new carpet from the threads she found in the palace, and that was with both Pali and Sardeet helping unravel the fabric of cushions and clothes. Arzu worked beside Sardeet, who lay in her bed weak and chilled for long days, and sang to her the songs of their people, while Pali made an inventory of the treasure-room and considered what best to do.

  ***

  It was a year and a day from the meeting at the crossroads that Pali and Arzu brought their sister Sardeet-savarel home from her marriage to one of the Wind Lords. She was not yet seventeen, and more beautiful than ever, though her face was grave and her attention seemingly turned to a distant sound, and people wondered if she had left part of her soul behind her in the holy desert. That she had done well in her marriage was an understatement; though people did wonder how it was that she could be widowed who had wed one of the gods.

  That Arzu should have knotted a carpet that could fly even over the Black Mountains was considered a tribute to her skill and wisdom, and her new gravity—and the marker of the gods’ touch in her untimely white hair—meant that the murmurs that she would become Queen after her mother’s retirement displeased no one; though she herself was best pleased when she designed a carpet that finally captured something of the beauty of the lord of the eagles, and she achieved the second mastery.

  People knew the stories about the Warriors of the Mountain. When they saw Pali dismount in her black veils, bearing no weapon, with her sister the new widow beside her, her cousins and clansmen backed away from both of them. For if Sardeet’s beauty was fully worthy of a god’s attention, it was surely Pali who had made her the god’s widow.

  After the mourning-feasts, Pali chose not to return to the mountains. Still dressed in the flowing black garments that were the First Veil, she took the best horse out of the line that had given her the dapple-grey, and with saddlebags full of the treasures of Olu-olurin, set out to return the bones of his dead wives to their homelands.

  ***

  In the next ceremony of dedication, after Arzu presented her eagle carpet and after they burned the frankincense that Pali had sent from some far corner of the world by devious routes and terrified traders, the shamans caused to be engraved on the stele of the Oclaresh clansmen the name of the newest of the gods.

  After her father finished the engraving, Sardeet put on widow’s white and went walking in the desert to look for stones that might show her another path. She found a white rock sprouting with garnets, and jade of her favourite green, and another ingot of fool’s gold, and she stood there for a long time before it occurred to her that the answers to her questions no longer lived in the wind, but in the world.

  She was just seventeen when she went to the city.

  Author’s Note

  Thank you for reading!

  The Bride of the Blue Wind begins the stories of the Sisters Avramapul, who will go on to many adventures by themselves and as part of the Red Company. The Tower at the Edge of the World, which tells of the origins of another member of the Red Company, is currently available. Look for the first novel of the Red Company, Small Rebellions, in late 2017. Victi Magnifcamur, a related story set many decades after The Bride of the Blue Wind, will be available in mid-March 2017.

  You may also be interested in my earlier novels, Stargazy Pie (Greenwing & Dart Book 1) and Till Human Voices Wake Us, whic
h are set on different worlds within the same narrative universe.

  You are also welcome to visit my author website and join my mailing list for information about new releases, both available at www.victoriagoddard.ca.