Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder from the End of Time (23 page)

I looked up at the sky, and saw dark clouds passing before one another. But the air felt dry. I doubted it ever rained in this place. I doubted, too, that time passed normally here or that the sun rose and set, or that there even
was
a sun in the sky behind those clouds. The sky was just suffused with faint light somehow, leaving an endless twilight.

I was about to remark on this to Azrethemne, when she whispered to me, very intently, “No. Be brave. You said you were a hero. Don’t lie about it. That’s all you have left.”

Then it was she who was leading me. I followed her to the top of the dune. From there we could behold the ocean, dark, almost oily, its waves smearing sluggishly onto the shoreline, never breaking into white foam. Cold wind blew.

Hundreds of people had gathered on the beach, far more than I’d seen at the inn, the mass of them spread out, scattered across the sand like the stumps of tree trunks in a drowned forest. Some stood out in the water, the waves washing between their legs or over their shoulders. I strained to see in the poor light, and could not be sure, but it seemed that thousands more stood even further out, motionless as statues, their heads black specks against the dark sky and the even darker water. The only motion was of a few newcomers, who arrived at the edge of the beach, found their places, and then stood still.

I made no attempt to understand. I was beyond understanding now.

“Look,” Azrethemne said, pointing.

It took a while for my eyes to adjust, to make any sense out of what I saw. I wanted to cry out, but did not. I felt only an abstract, resigned terror.

A huge, black barge rose and fell on the slumberous waves, its sails filled with wind, a floating mountain, more vast than any vessel ever build by man, a craft for giants, surely. But now the giants had died and the vessel drifted, torn rigging and sails streaming in the wind. A groaning came from the depths of it, like a hurricane blowing over the mouth of a cave.

And yet the barge drew no nearer. It hung like a painted backdrop on the sky.

Azrethemne squeezed my hand. She trembled.

Without realizing what I was doing, I began to walk down toward the beach.

She pulled me back. “No.”

Numbly, like one half-awakened from a dream, I appreciated that she had just saved me from some terrible danger, for all I didn’t know what that danger was. I could only react. I could only let her lead me. I didn’t know if she understood better than I, was more than merely afraid, but she had a certain strength, a direction. I could only follow.

We turned our backs on the ocean and the black barge. I looked back over my shoulder once and caught sight of what might have been either a man or a woman so tall, so immense, that the pale face rose in the sky higher than the sun at noon. Gorgeous robes flapped on the wind and covered the darkness, filling the sky. But the eyes were closed and the figure’s arms were folded upon its breast like those of a corpse laid out; and this apparition stood in the sea or beyond the sea, dwarfing even the great barge; and I could not have turned away from that face, ever, if Azrethemne had not yanked me once more and said, “Come
on!
” most urgently.

We made our way back the way we had come, over the crest of the dune, out of sight of the sea, wandering for a long time between further dunes, then between hills, keeping our gaze firmly upon the ground, watching our feet, always avoiding the ridge lines, lest we glance back over the distance, and behold, and be affixed by what we saw and drawn back down to water’s edge, into the oily sea.

It seemed that the great apparition, dead though it was, had begun to speak now, whispering in our minds, in my mind at least, but somehow I found the strength, the concentration to tell myself over and over again, no, no, it was only the wind blowing sand, only the blown sand rustling among the harsh grasses.

When at last neither the girl nor I could go any further, we fell down in our exhaustion into the featureless sand. Here the landscape was indeed without any variation at all, no so much as a mound or a stone, and it seemed to go on forever like that.

I realized that I was terribly thirsty. I couldn’t bring myself to believe, though, that I had come all this way merely to die of thirst.

Azrethemne trembled again, with the cold, and I drew her to my side, drawing my thin, outer robe around the both of us.

She began to tell me of her life then, what scattered bits she could recall. As it had been for me, her words came haltingly at first, then in a torrent. She had been gone from the world for a long time, but she remembered growing up on a boat that plied the river trade between Ai Hanlo and Zabortash. But that was so long ago, she said, that it seemed to be the life of someone else. Then she’d begun to have visions. She fell down in a frenzy and prophesied, and managed to slip out of the world. Someone had told her once that in the time of the death of the Goddess, when all is in disorder, when the remains of divinity drift across the world like ashes, having no substance, it is particularly easy to lose one’s grip and end up…somewhere. She had wandered through dim, half-created places for a long time. For a while she was in the company of a young man, a boy actually, who was as often as not more helpless and afraid than she, a prophet and priest and fellow exile named Tamliade—she kept repeating his name—whom she had somehow rescued and come to love, only to lose him again in a confusion of fire and blood, an ocean of blood which filled the world until she sank and drowned in it, and found herself washed up onto the threshold of the Inn of Sorrows, as I had first beheld her.

This tale seemed…no more fantastic than any other, but there was one striking thing about it, something I couldn’t quite grasp with my mind. It had to mean something that her story was
not over yet
. She believed that she was in a labyrinth, looking for the one corridor with light at the end of it, through which she might emerge back into the waking, living, concrete world.

Now I was a wanderer like her, but I lacked her courage, and I was ashamed to hope that she might rescue me as she had this Tamliade—yet I did hope it, though I could not put the notion into words. What could I say? How does one relate thirty years of nothing? I started to repeat the tale of how Black Veiada had stolen Kodos Vion’s heart.

I lost the thread of the story somewhere, and could only weep.

Azrethemne in turn told me stories of heroes, how many of them were quite ordinary men at first, even inferior, mediocrities who had never sought out any adventure, who had fled from challenge or danger or honor, but who were nevertheless propelled on to become something greater.

I wanted to believe that. I desperately wanted it to be true. After a time, I felt a little less ridiculous for my efforts.

We slept, huddled in my robe.

* * * *

Black Veiada came to me in a dream. She walked soundlessly over the sand, making no footprints, and she stood over me, staring down with the gaze of some ancient stone colossus, yet at the same time as ethereal as a cloud. Her face was wrinkled, her eyes sunken and dark. Her hair and cloak streamed in the wind.

“Friend of Kodos Vion, arise,” she said.

In my dream, I got up.

She offered me a goblet of wine. I drank. My will was not my own. I recognized the taste. It was the same as the wine at the Inn of Sorrows, sweet and bitter.

“Friend of Kodos Vion, come. I want you to understand.”

I thought of Kodos Vion again—as if I had ever stopped thinking of him—how he had made me what I was, out of nothing, performing a miracle which now was ending.

I turned from Black Veiada and ran, staggering, kicking up sand, hoarse from gasping in the cold air. I topped a rise—which hadn’t been there a minute before—and looked down, not on the sea, but on a common tavern standing incongruously in the middle of the wasteland. Light streamed from the windows. Even at a distance, I could hear the sounds of merriment.

As I drew near, I could make out some of the words of a song:

“Oh, I stink to high heaven,

me bed’s an old coat,

but if ye don’t like it,

well bugger the goat!”

I ran to the door and leaned against it, gasping, listening. I
knew
that voice.

I pounded hard as I could, looking back over my shoulder in terror for any sign of Black Veiada. The door opened. I tumbled into a room filled with people. Someone grabbed me by the arm, hauled me up, yanked me around, and I was face-to-face with Kodos Vion. His breath was thick with wine, his eyes wild.

“Wake up, boy!” He shook me hard. “Don’t tell me you’re worn out already! Up! Up!”

They were all laughing at me. Thousands of faces, like fireflies flickering in the dim light, laughing at me.

Kodos Vion began to dance, swinging me around like a rag doll, his voice like singing thunder:

“
Bugger the goat!

Bugger the goat!

There’s not too much choice,

so go bugger the goat!”

I wept. I didn’t understand how I’d gotten to this place. It was impossible, but I so desperately wanted it to be real.

“Oh look at him! A few drinks and he’s cryin’ like a baby!”

A perfumed, naked woman put her arms around me, jewelry clinking.

“Ah, poor baby. He needs cheering up.”

“He needs more than that,” said Kodos Vion, waving her away. He led me across the room. The crowd parted for him like a sea.

We went out through a little door into a yard. I gaped in astonishment. The night sky was clear overhead, filled with brilliant stars. Over a fence I could see rooftops and towers. We were in Ai Hanlo.

Kodos Vion relieved himself against a post. Then he took me by the arm again, gently this time, and backed me against the fence. He was alive. He was
real.

“You’re a
disgrace
, boy, blubbering like that. I don’t know why I put up with you.”

“I’m not a boy. I’m thirty,” was all I could say.

“Well you haven’t learned much in all those years. That’s why I brought you out here. Someone needs to explain the facts of life to you. Brace yourself. Here’s the big secret:
There are no facts of life
!” He roared with laughter, bending over, slapping his thigh. “But wait! There’s more. The philosophers tell us that because the Goddess is dead there is no meaning or order to anything. Well, who’s to care about that.
Shit
.… Only appearances matter. If something seems to be real, accept it. Don’t ask any questions. If you act like a man instead of a blubbering boy, then you are a man. If you act like a poet, you are one. Be a hero. Be anything. What goes on
inside
that soggy little head of yours hardly matters. Only what’s outside matters, what you and other people can see. That’s the key to happiness. It’s the one thing you can be sure about.”

I wanted to tell him that I didn’t believe a word he was saying, that I didn’t think he did either, because somewhere in the back of my mind I hadn’t forgotten this was a dream, not real, that he wasn’t real, I wasn’t real, as if such concepts or distinctions made any sense under the present circumstances. But the words did not come.

Suddenly a look of utmost terror came over his face. He gasped, staggered away from me, clutching his chest. Then he screamed,
“She has stolen my heart!”

The door swung open, slamming against the wall. Wind roared. The air was filled with swirling sand.

Black Veiada stood in the doorway, holding up his beating heart for me to see.

“I need this for
my beloved
,” she said intensely, her words almost like a prayer. “He has waited too long. He shall wait only a little longer now.”

With impossible agility, like some huge spider, she scurried up the outside of the tavern, onto the roof, and was gone.

“Help me,”
Kodos Vion gasped. “You said you would help me. Why have you done nothing?”

He lay in the sand at my feet. Now there was no tavern, no yard, fence, or starry sky above. Again we were in the midst of the featureless wasteland, in that unchanging half-darkness.

“
Why?
Why? Why?” His voice faded. The wind blew sand over him, burying him, as if he were sinking in quicksand. “Help me.…” His face was covered up. He was gone.

“Help! Help!” I screamed, digging frantically. I shrieked, babbled like a madman, “Helpmehelpmehelpme!”

* * * *

I came to myself, still screaming, digging with my hands, hurling sand aside.

Azrethemne put her arm around me, to restrain me, to calm me.

And I stopped, and sat down, exhausted, staring at the hole I’d dug. There was no sign of Kodos Vion.