Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder from the End of Time (30 page)

It seemed that he had been there for a long time. He stood with another soldier, warming his hands over a pot of coals. Nearby, a huge, curving horn hung from a wooden frame. Someone would blow on that horn to announce the dawn, as soon as the first glow of sunrise was seen from the walls. He had done it often.

He chatted idly with his companion. The night remained dark. The stars had not moved. The other soldier’s conversation brought up memories of campaigns in distant lands, of forced marches, long hours in camp, and longer hours on this wall, waiting for an enemy that never came. The city had not been threatened since his father’s father’s time.

Velas Ven did not remember any of this, but it came to him. It was part of another man’s life.

A pair of soldiers came to relieve the other two, who walked away, their spears slung lazily over their shoulders. Velas Ven was left unnoticed by the coals.

* * * *

In the same hour of the night, he came to an academy of scholars and took his seat in their great reading room. Torches and braziers cast long shadows on the walls. The bookshelves were shrouded in darkness. Here and there shuffling figures in ankle-length robes moved along the shelves, holding candles, peering, groping for the volumes they sought.

He sat at a desk and strained his tired eyes once more by the light of a little lamp. The pages before him were written in a script and a language strange to Velas Ven, and covered with abstract figures and diagrams, but he understood them. He had the memory of long years of research. His whole life had passed in this academy. Now he was very old. He struggled desperately to find what he sought, the answer to some great mystery, before death claimed him.

There was a pain in his chest. He labored for breath.

He came to the last page of the book, looked up, and extinguished his lamp. The master of the academy came over to him, gently put his hand on his shoulder, and said, “Have you found the answer?”

“Yes, I think I have.”

“Then come into the lecture hall, and tell it to us.”

The old scholar rose from his bench. All torches, braziers, and lanterns were put out or carried from the room, leaving Velas Ven sitting at a desk in the dark.

He groped after them, but could not find the lecture hall. Finally he came to a door, fumbled with a latch, and pushed it open.

Outside in a courtyard, the old man was waiting with the lantern.

* * * *

Still the stranger’s gaze held him, but he was angry, and able to exert himself.

“Have you come to haunt me? To lead me forever? To drive me mad? Explain yourself!”

Then the other spoke for the first time. His voice reminded Velas Ven of his grandfather’s, until he realized that it was what his own voice would sound like when he grew old.

“I come in fulfillment of your wishes. You will come with me one more time, and everything will be clear. You have my promise.”

The old man drifted over the ground like a puff of smoke. Velas followed him along a deserted street. The stars sparkled overhead, unmoving. The festival was far away now. He heard no footsteps but his own. The lantern floated in the air before him like a moth.

They came to the open gate of a cemetery. There, stone images of the dual Goddess stood on either side, their arms joined in an arch overhead, holding a stone sun.

Within, a crowd of mourners gathered around an open grave. Many held lanterns and torches. He lost sight of the old man in the crowd. He pushed his way through, gently, asking again and again, “What funeral is this? Who has died?” But no one answered. No one acknowledged his presence.

He came to the forefront of the crowd. A priest droned something, holding aloft a reliquary containing a splinter of a Bone of the Goddess.

The old man with the lantern stood in the grave, next to the open coffin. No one seemed aware of him, except Velas.

“If you want to understand,” the old man said, “come here. Look into the face.”

But Velas did not look. He closed his eyes tight and stood at the edge of the grave, hugging himself, trembling. The night air was suddenly very cold.

“No,” he said. “I won’t look. I don’t want to see.”

Hours seemed to go by. He lost all sense of time. When he finally opened his eyes, he was alone in the cemetery with the old man. It was still night. There was no open grave.

“Very well then,” the old man said, holding the lantern up by his own face as he approached Velas.

Velas saw the other’s features very clearly. He screamed. The light was blinding. He fell to his knees, holding his hands over his eyes. The flame of the lantern roared all around him, consuming the world.

He fell.

* * * *

Velas Ven awoke stiff and sore, face down in cold dust. He rolled over and sat up, blinking. There was light. He was afraid, but after a while he saw that it was only the dawn come at last, gently touching the monuments in the cemetery. High above, on the wall of the Inner City, a soldier blew on the curving horn.

* * * *

He told stories, speaking of wonders, of fantastic things, the dreams of his people. He told of common things too, of everyday lives, of lovers, children, fathers, soldiers, tradesmen, and many others. He even made the scholar’s lot seem an adventure. He made his audience feel the trembling excitement of discovering a treasure at last, after many years of labor among books.

And he told of sorrow and loss.

He was even more popular than before. His stories were written down and read in the great courts. Once he was brought before the Guardian himself. After he had finished his reading, the Guardian of the Bones said to him, “You have described these dreams and these many lives more vividly than anyone else, as if you were a kind of universal spirit, able to look into every man’s heart, to share and live out every man’s life. But there is no apparent moral. What does it all mean?”

Velas Ven shrugged and laughed. “Holy Lord, how should I know? I’m not a philosopher.”

He was asked that question many times. He always gave the same answer. Sometimes he gave it sadly.

Quite late in his life, he married a woman named Nomonig and they had one daughter, Ael. She was a brilliant girl. She asked many questions.

Once he took her aside and said, “Daughter, the Goddess died long ago. She is buried beneath our feet, at the heart of Ai Hanlo Mountain. Her power is almost gone. But sometimes a little bit of it, like vapor, seeps up through the cracks in the pavement. Our minds shape it, and we in turn are shaped by what we have unknowingly created. These events are called miracles.”

Ael was grown and had children of her own when Velas finally died, very old and very tired. At the funeral, before the open grave, while the priest droned on and held a reliquary aloft, one of Ael’s children tugged on her sleeve and whispered, “I thought I saw Grandpa pushing through the crowd. He covered his face and fell down on his knees. I think he was saying something.”

She replied, “Hush, child. It is only the wind stirring up the dust.”

THE SHAPER OF ANIMALS

“When my husband’s horse came home without him,” the Lady Nestra often said, “I knew there was no hope. One of his boots was still in the stirrup. I knew then that I had lost my Lord Caradhas, the most matchless of husbands. The City of the Goddess was saved at the battle of the Heshite Plain. Etash Wesa was overthrown, and the world was spared the one who had proclaimed himself the new god, but I died in that battle too. My soul bled. A great wound had been torn in my heart. My life was over, though my body still went through the motions of life.”

All the upper class visitors to Ai Hanlo, where the Bones of the Goddess lie in holy splendor, knew of the Lady Nestra, and avoided her, for she was in mourning, and had been for a long time. She appeared at the great festivals, in the spring and autumn. Of old, when the Goddess was alive, those festivals were times of spectacular manifestations, when Her power would be witnessed by all, and the signs and the seasons would be changed, and miracles occurred freely. But, after the death of the Goddess, the festivals were merely gatherings, to renew the ancient rites, it is true, but mostly people came just to celebrate themselves and the passage of time, and to trade. No one prayed for miracles anymore, except the wretched mendicants who gathered in the public squares, and the Lady Nestra.

She was still young and beautiful, yet when she appeared in public draped all in black, she was like a sudden chill that moved through the city, and a hush seemed to follow her when she walked daily around the battlements of the wall of the inner city, beyond which no commoner may pass. She would pause each time over one of the shrines set in the wall, where the mendicants gathered, and call down to them, and join in their pleadings, that some lingering fragment of the Godhead might touch her, and grant her a miracle.

The members of the court could not avoid her, for she was a great lady. She commanded people into her presence, hardly realizing what she was doing, and as social necessity dictated. Inevitably, she would tell of her sorrows, and often she would weep long and hard, and others would weep with her.

It was whispered that she had draped the whole city in mourning for a funeral that went on forever, but no one could deny her.

So it was that others came to pray, and many petitioned the Guardian of the Bones of the Goddess, the holiest of men, that somehow, someday, the Lady Nestra would find peace.

* * * *

There was a knocking at the door of her chamber one night. Lady Nestra looked up from her writing, but did not rise from where she sat. The door swung open, and the Good Guardian himself, Tharanodeth IV, entered alone, his long robe sweeping the floor.

At once Lady Nestra dropped from her chair onto her knees.

“You may rise and sit,” he said.

She sat. “Holy Lord, I am greatly honored.”

He waved his hand. “It cannot continue,” he said gently. He took a stoppered vial and a little ivory box out of a pocket and placed them on her writing-table. “It cannot continue. The very Powers are without rest.”

Still she only looked at him with longing, not daring to hope, and again the Guardian spoke.

“Have you some image of your husband?”

And, very tenderly, Lady Nestra unwrapped a silver dish she had received on her wedding night, into which her husband’s features had been worked in fine relief.

“Ah, excellent,” the Guardian said. “You must seek into the darkness with these things. In this vial is the wine of vision. Pour it into the dish. Then open the box and add the powder that is inside. It is made from the dust of the tomb of the Goddess. You need know no more than that it is very powerful. Stir it into the wine, then look, and see, and believe what you see. Beyond that, merely hope. Hope that enough of the echo of the passing of the Goddess remains, and that the Powers have not wholly dissipated.”

As the Guardian made to leave, Lady Nestra opened a coffer filled with rare jewels, but Tharanodeth did not even pause on his way out the door.

It was on that night that the Shaper of Animals arrived in the holy city, for all Lady Nestra did not know of him. Indeed, no one witnessed his advent, but when dawn came, his wagon was merely there among the many others in the Courtyard of the Upraised Hand, where tradesmen and merchants gathered for the festival. He didn’t seem to have any draft animals. Perhaps he had merely appeared out of the air, but in the first light of day he opened his shutters and his door, and hung out a sign with birds and beasts painted on it in bright colors.

Perhaps he had come solely for the Lady Nestra, a miracle shaped by the Guardian from the fleeting traces of holiness that lingered over the Bones. But by mid-morning a fat, mustachioed jester had entered the wagon, then come out again with a white monkey that laughed at his jokes. And a poet entered, and left with something like a peacock that sang in an exquisite, half-human voice; and a girl-child bore away a large-eared ball of red fur which listened to her every secret.

Perhaps the Shaper came for these people too, and many more. Or, perhaps, even the Guardian did not know of his presence, or what the wine of vision would reveal to the Lady Nestra. No one can ever know, for all things are uncertain in the time of the death of the Goddess.

* * * *

The Lady Nestra wept softly the following night, as she placed the silver bowl on her marble writing-table. Slowly she poured the dark wine into the bowl, obscuring her husband’s image, all the whole reciting a rhyme, every stanza of which ended with the name of the man she had loved and lost. She added the powder from the ivory box, while her maid went about the room, extinguishing candles one by one.

She stirred the wine with a silver rod. The pale grey powder swirled in the center. Then, as the last candle was snuffed out, the wine began to glow a deep red, the swirling mass dark against it.

She called her maid over. The woman’s face was a pale oval in the faint light, her eyes wide with astonishment and even dread.

“Rilla, what do you see?”

“Only the magic light, Lady.”

“Then leave me,” Nestra said. “This thing is not for you. Go and wait outside the door.”

The maid curtseyed and went. Torches flickered in the corridor outside, and the light from the bowl diminished as the door opened, then brightened again when it was closed.