Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder from the End of Time (24 page)

“I
saw
her,” I said. “She came to me. It was Black Veiada.”

“Yes, it was Black Veiada,” came a voice. “That’s how you know—”

The two of us jumped to either side, then stared into the hole. What had been a rounded lump of sand opened its eyes. The features became clearer: a man, buried to his neck, his face drawn, as if in great pain. His skin was almost blue.

Without a word, Azrethemne and I began to dig. We uncovered the buried man’s bare shoulders, then his arms, then his chest, blue-white as the rest of him, cold to the touch. He gasped for breath, sucking in great gulps of air.

Then Azrethemne let out a cry of amazement and disgust and turned away. I kept on digging for several minutes more, unable to stop.

The man had no genitals, or legs either. His upper body just went on and on, his endless ribcage like that of some huge serpent, his flesh the same continuous blue-white. He lay on the sand, limp, wheezing. I had uncovered at least fifteen feet of him. The rest of him seemed to pass horizontally into the sand, buried no more than a foot down.

“It’s no good,” he said. “I saw Black Veiada too. I’m part of the island now.”

“What island?”

“Haven’t you figured that out? In every direction, the black sea. You’re surrounded. There is no way off, but that black ship. Please, please. It’s cold. Cover me up.”

Azrethemne couldn’t bring herself to actually touch him, but from a distance she heaved handfuls of sand, and we covered him back up to the neck, then crouched beside him.

“
What
are you?” I said.

“As you see. As I said. Part of the island. Once I was a man and had a name. But I’ve lost all that. You do, you lose everything, when Black Veiada comes for you at last. Think of it as a big melting pot. She melts us down like old, broken bronze statues, bent knives, rusty lanterns. She wants the raw material. When she comes for you, when you see her, you will change very quickly.”

“No.”
I said.

“No,” said Azrethemne, and for the first time she seemed truly afraid.

“You can’t help it. Perhaps you will become like me. Perhaps no more than this.” He heaved a hand up through the sand, then let sand trickle through his fingers. “Maybe I will be like this too, in due time.”

“But
where
are we?”

“In some halfway-formed world. One of those dark regions you can fall into when there is no god or goddess to keep everything in place. Think of it as some stray bubble in the foam of creation, but a creation that’s running out, like water spilled on a leaky floor. In sorrow you come here, or in madness, or maybe led by some magic so powerful and strange that once you use it you can’t find your way back. I don’t remember how I got here. But you know all this. You’re here. That’s enough. The
how
does not matter. It merely
is
.”

He closed his eyes. He sighed, as if greatly wearied from the act of speaking, and from raising his hand. His hand and forearm lay on the surface of the sand. I buried them.

“Please,” I said softly. “Tell us more. Who is Black Veiada? What can we do to overcome her? We have to. We have to know. It’s very important—”

His eyes fluttered open once more. I could barely hear his voice. “Perhaps she will show herself once more. Then you will know…everything…too late. As for what you can do…nothing. You’re here, aren’t you? She has you now.”

“It won’t be like that,” said Azrethemne firmly. “No. We’ll get away. We’ll just keep on going—”

The eyes closed, but I could still make out the voice.

“You’re very strong to have come this far. No one has done as much in centuries. But still, no matter how far you go, you always return to the point where you started. There is no other way.”

“But why?” I demanded. “Why?”

“The island, you see, only has one side.”

We left him. Hand in hand, walking slowly, dreading whatever we should find, we walked and walked for an indeterminate amount of time, until the landscape began to rise like a series of little, motionless waves. We climbed a dune.

I heard the sound of waves.

We looked down on the shoreline, where thousands of people stood on the sand or out into the oily water, and beyond them, the great, black deathly barge rose and fell, as huge as the black, featureless sky.

It was in that moment that something within me changed, that I understood I had stopped running away. From then on, I would confront Black Veiada. I would rescue Kodos Vion if I could. It wasn’t merely because there was no place left to run, but because I felt, keenly, the desire to help my friend, and to help Azrethemne too, who was brave, who was good, who was strong, who did not belong imprisoned forever in some twilight land of lost souls.

I didn’t care what happened to myself.

We sat down, overlooking the beach, and waited.

“Come witch,” I said aloud. “Black Veiada, come. I am ready for you.”

* * * *

She came once more, in a dream. I was not aware of going to sleep. I think Black Veiada merely reached out and touched me, drawing me into the dream.

She stood before me upon the dune, oblivious to Azrethemne as if she could not see her, or did not deign to. She offered me the goblet once more.

“Drink, friend of Kodos Vion, and all will be clear. You need to understand. You are the one among thousands who must understand, and in the end act of your own free will. Now are the stars fallen into place like tumblers in a lock. The time is at hand. Drink.”

I drank yet again that strange bitter and sweet wine. My senses were heightened. I heard the blood rushing within my veins. I felt every particle of dust in the air as it fell against my face.

I wanted to scream at her, to call her murderess and thief, but somehow her voice soothed me. I did not run away this time.

“It is the wine of vision,” she said. “Now, behold.”

And I saw Black Veiada as she had been when she had her name because of the color of her long, beautiful black hair. Jewels sparkled in it, like stars in the midnight sky.

She stood before me, there, on the top of the dune, overlooking the beach, and the darkness of the sky cleared behind her, like a curtain drawn aside, revealing unfamiliar stars, in constellations new and strange.

Then we were no longer on the beach at all. I saw her in many places, at many times. She was a slender girl, a princess of a city carven all of polished black stone, where the winds of the world were captured and tamed in the high, black towers, and lay at her feet like sleepy leopards. Even then she was a witch, and I could not condemn her for it, for she had a great and burning desire to know the secrets of things, the mysteries of heaven and earth and of the countless half-worlds, the things known by the Goddess and those hidden even from the Goddess.

I saw Black Veiada as queen, reigning in glory over that city and country compared to which even Ai Hanlo, or any other place I had ever known was but a squalid collection of hovels.

Yet it was because of this glory that the Goddess came to envy Black Veiada. Because Black Veiada was the most powerful witch who ever lived, who could reach out and touch the Moon and change its phases, or halt its passage across the sky, the Goddess feared her.

Further, Black Veiada loved a man, a mighty warrior and king without peer in that age. The two were to be wed, and in their union all the world would be drawn together, so that men would worship king and queen alone and have little use for any other. For this, the Goddess hated her.

The Goddess herself had been mortal once. In Black Veiada’s youth it had been little more than a century since a storm of divinity had whirled around some girl and raised her up. Such things happen by nature. When a god or goddess dies, divinity dissipates, like a dying wind, and there is a period of darkness and confusion, but in time, as inevitable as a new sunrise, the holy winds regain their strength, and gather, and rage, howling, and another god or goddess is created, and the interregnum ends.

When her epoch was still new, when the Goddess was still partially human, she had human emotions, magnified by her condition, but human nonetheless, and she was jealous and afraid and truly terrible in her anger.

I saw, in my vision, the night of Black Veiada’s wedding. Two royal trains gathered on a terrace beneath a huge silver dome held aloft by spiderweb-thin arches of some impossible glass. All the city was ablaze with lights. The full Moon rose over the sea. The winds, which were the queen’s servants, sang softly amid the dark towers.

White flowers rose out of the pavement, like fountains bursting with foam in slow motion, rising up, taller than trees, opening out as the moonlight touched them. Maidens in sweeping dresses made a solemn procession through the forest of blossoms, while the king’s warriors stood at attention, their armor gleaming in the pale light, their swords raised on high. Children in white held candles and rang little bells. Overhead, great ships of metal and glass drifted in the sky, silent as clouds, trailing luminous streamers.

The lords of the land stood silent. Priests gathered. At the very center of the terrace, under the dome, the king and queen waited, each holding a crown to be placed on the head of the other.

There came a moment of hushed expectation. Even the winds were still.

Then the sky split apart with a blinding light, and there was a great shout; and the earth shook and the sea rose up in wild waves.

The Goddess herself rose up beyond the horizon, towering over the world, clad in the wildest aspect of the dark side of her nature, her face filled with madness, with rage and hate. None could look on her. The crowds fell down and covered their faces, or else died as they stood. The Moon was shadowed, covered over by her hair. Lightning flickered as she moved. Huge serpents writhed around her waist and arms, spitting fire.

The black towers toppled, and the fires roared, blasting the roofs off the whole city. And the people cried out for their queen to save them.

She stood on the terrace, as the silver dome disintegrated around her.

There came another flash of light, and another, and another. In my vision, now, only I could see all that happened. I saw the bridegroom king raised up in a whirlwind and strangely transformed, his eyes glowing brilliantly, burning with the fire of the Goddess. One of the courtiers, shielding his eyes with one hand, reached up with the other and caught the flailing king by the ankle, but, as soon as he touched him, burst into flame and blew away in a puff of ash.

The king’s face changed for a moment into a glittering crystal mask, then back into flesh, but terrible to look upon. He was standing in the air now, atop the whirlwind, high above the city, growing taller, less distinct, like one turning into a cloud. He stood beside the Goddess and she embraced him. He looked once more upon Veiada with longing, but then his newly divine nature overwhelmed him, and he did not look again.

I saw how it ended, the sky filled with smoke, the city tottering, sliding beneath the ocean or falling into newly opened chasms in the earth which devoured it like hungry mouths. The silver dome came down like a cloud of shards. The glass arches fell like tinsel, raining over corpses and charred flowers and the few, struggling survivors, who did not survive much longer. Only Black Veiada escaped in the end, by her magic, closing space around herself like a cloak.

I saw her later as a wretched wanderer. I felt her endless days as if they had been my own. I dwelt with her in caves and forests, in every desolate place, always hiding from the sky and the sight of the Goddess. Only her pain kept her going. In the darkness, then, hidden away, she learned more secrets, gained more powers. She extended the span of her life. Her hatred would not let her die. All this while mankind knew nothing of her, and worshipped two divinities, the great and terrible Goddess foremost, and, to a lesser degree, her Consort. Statues to the pair were raised in every land, showing the two embracing, serpents entwined about them both.

It was the custom of Veiada the Exile, when she stole upon these statues on cloudy nights, to smash them to pieces.

I saw the years and centuries pass. The wine of vision revealed to me how the Consort came back to Black Veiada.

On a certain night the witch sat, deep in a cavern where the stone fangs of the mountain dripped. Moonlight shone dimly through a tunnel, touching a little pool. The witch sat away from that light, in total darkness.

Then the light went out. She looked up, at first thinking only that a cloud had covered the Moon.

Pebbles rattled in the tunnel. Someone called her name.

“I am here,” she said.

The voice called again, and again she said, “I am here.”

Moonlight reappeared. Now startled, frightened, she ran to the tunnel mouth. There was no one there. She scrambled on all fours up the steep way, scattering stones, until she came to a ledge high above a valley. There she sat, looking at the Moon.

A cloud covered it, and more clouds filled the sky, swirling around the mountain. Lightning flickered.

On the ledge, in the darkness, as thunder rumbled low and far away, the two lovers met and embraced.