Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder from the End of Time (34 page)

For a long time he said nothing, and then he asked her, “What shall we do?”

“Don’t you know?” she said bitterly, but more in sorrow than in anger. “You’re the magician. You know everything.”

“No. Please understand. I am a stranger here. I don’t know everything. I have come to learn many things. Guide me, will you?”

So they set forth, and wandered through many lands. Nowhere did they encounter anyone Sansha knew. Nowhere did they hear the name of Etash Wesa spoken, and when once, at an inn, Kudasduin asked about him, the hearers made signs and hurried away, leaving them alone in the room. They left that town quickly. The world was apparently free of the armies of the possessed king, but Etash Wesa was remembered.

“It is all one in Eternity,” Kudasduin said, and Sansha did not seem to understand what he meant. As he felt the experience of the days, the texture of time, of eating and sleeping and walking, of mingling with strange people; as the sights and sounds of the ancient Earth settled on him and changed him even as a river is changed by the streams flowing into it, he became less sure of what he meant himself.

“I have had a dream,” he announced one morning as they sat at breakfast around a campfire by the side of a road. “I dreamed I had two brothers, and they were waiting for me, still as statues in a round, golden room. 1 dreamed they were frozen outside of Time, enduring forever, alive but not alive. They moved very slowly inside their room so that in the centuries of my dream I saw one of them blink an eye and the other raise his hand, and that was all. But I felt for certain that they wanted me to go to them.”

“Will you go?” Sansha asked.

“No. It’s just a dream. It’s fading now.”

They came into Zabortash, the land of the magi, where the full moon ripples in the air of the tropic night, and tall birds with glowing eyes wade in the sluggish rivers and call out with the voices of men. There Kudasduin had much converse with scholars, even with the grand magi, and once or twice with the wading birds, which were rumored to live for centuries and to have overheard much from the ghosts that whispered in the swamps. He was as much a mystery to the magi as they to him. About his conversations with the birds, he said nothing. All this while Sansha earned money for them by weaving common cloth, and also those special fibers known to the Zabortashis, which are made out of dreams.

Kudasduin learned much, and he made copious notes, but still he was without understanding, and he knew that his mission into Time was not yet over.

They ventured north through swamps and forests, along the banks of a great river, until they came to a place called the Edge of the World, where the trees of the jungle grew so thick that they formed a solid barrier, miles high, which shut out the sky.

They began to climb, with Evorad slung on Sansha’s back. For months they sojourned in the branches, travelling both vertically and horizontally, never touching earth until they came to the Hanging Land, a tract two miles long and one thick, suspended in the tangle of the treetops. They found a metal citadel there, and were guests of winged philosophers.

And the chief philosopher, a man nearly eight feet tall with spindly legs and arms like rods, whose silken black wings touched either wall of his cell, looked into Kudasduin’s soul with a glass, and into his dreams and memories. In the end he said, “You are not as others, and again you are as others. Go where you will and come to the end which the Goddess dreamed for you before she died. Know that she was of Eternity, before she fell into Time and perished, and she could look into the past and future even as you turn your head, to right or left.”

Then the philosophers took Kudasduin, Sansha, and Evorad in their arms and bore them up, flying for half a day through the winding ways of the treetops at the World’s Edge. In the dim evening they broke through into the clear sky. Below, in the night, the forest looked like a vast black sea, rippling in the wind. They flew horizontally for the full of the night, until they came to solid ground beyond the edge of the trees, and set the three down. They drifted away into the sunrise like a flock of birds.

Sansha was numb with wonders by now, and said nothing, and the boy was still. Kudasduin lay down and dreamed again of his brothers, and in the centuries of his dream each second that his brothers lived through was a year to him. He had no idea how long he had been gone, nor any concern over it.

When he awoke, the dream swiftly faded, and it troubled him no more. But he was indeed troubled by what the philosophers had told him, and by the mystery of the world around him.

* * * *

At last they came to Ai Hanlo, the holiest of cities, where lie the Bones of the Goddess. There the wind from the grave of the Goddess, which is called Fate, clouded Kudasduin’s mind even more, until for long periods he completely forgot about Eternity and his two brothers waiting for him in the time chamber. He took Sansha to be his wife and Evorad to be his son. In time they had another son, Evoraduil. Again Sansha worked as a weaver, and Kudasduin consorted with philosophers. All the world was new to him, all the world filled with wonder, and he observed every part of it, and wrote his findings in a great encyclopedia. Before long he was famous as a scholar throughout all the Holy Empire, but when men praised his wisdom, he said, “No, I am the most ignorant among you. I know and understand so little.”

Humility was added to the list of his virtues. Soon students gathered around him, paying rich fees to be instructed. His days were filled.

All the while he kept the stoppered bottle he had brought with him out of Eternity. Before long, he was no longer sure what it contained or what it was for. He wrapped it carefully in a cloth, placed it in a little coffer, and put the coffer in the bottom of a trunk by the foot of his bed.

So the years slipped by, and he lived like other men, even as the winged ones had seemed to prophesy. Then one day he chanced to be in the great square of the city, seated on the edge of the fountain there, lecturing his students, when right in front of him an ancient, feeble man, who seemed to have taken half the morning making his way across the square with the aid of a stick, fell down on the pavement and lay still.

One of the students went over and came back, reporting that the man was dead.

“What caused his death?” Kudasduin asked.

“Merely age,” the student said. “The fellow had been around so long it was inevitable.”

Kudasduin looked at his own reflection in the water of the fountain. He saw that his hair and beard were white. Suddenly he was afraid. He rose, dismissed his students, and hurried home. But he did not go in. He stood in front of the house, pacing back and forth, wringing his hands, muttering nervously, while memories flooded back. He remembered the time chamber.

He put his ear to the door and heard his wife within, talking to his sons. He couldn’t bear to confront them, so he ran away and hid until late that night, when he returned with stealth and, taking the smallest lamp he owned, crept into the bedroom. Careful not to wake Sansha, he unpacked the trunk and got out the stoppered vial. He went from the house as quietly as he had come, then ran through the streets until he came to a small gate, which he knew to be unguarded.

He walked with long strides across the plain, away from Ai Hanlo, toward the distant hills, searching for the auroral light where the time chamber intruded into the world. He wasn’t sure where it was. Then he thought of the bottle. Perhaps if he opened it, he would be back in Eternity.

He took it out, and was working the stopper loose when he heard someone running breathlessly toward him.

It was Evorad, now grown to be a man. He put the bottle away.

“My father, where are you going? Why have you left us so secretly? I woke up and followed you. Even now Mother does not know that you are gone.”

And Kudasduin cursed his own folly, and felt remorse, and said merely, “It is nothing, I would have come back in the morning. I came out here to study the stars.”

The two of them spent the rest of the night gazing at the wheel of heaven. When Kudasduin finally saw a light on the horizon, it was not a sign of the time chamber, but of dawn.

* * * *

“What is death?” he asked his students one day. He had over a hundred of them. They no longer met in the square, but in an academy.

“It is a journey,” someone offered.

“I am already on a journey,” he replied. “I have come a long, long way. How is death any different?”

“Your present journey is but a prologue, a preparation. You have travelled through all this life, only preparing to depart. The long road is still before you.”

“I do not understand.”

And this was a great marvel, that the wisest man in the land did not understand.

Later, Kudasduin’s granddaughter, Evorad’s child, came running to him and said, “Grandmother is dying. Come quickly.”

He could not come quickly because his joints were stiff, but, with the aid of a cane, he made his way to Sansha’s bedside.

Her face was sunken and lined, her hair a flawless white. She opened her eyes slowly. She spoke in a whisper. He leaned forward to hear.

“I thought you would be late,” she said. “I didn’t want to leave without seeing you first.”

“You’re not leaving. There is much to be uncovered. You must help me explore the world yet.”

He looked up at the doctor his sons had summoned. The man shook his head sadly and turned away.

“You are always uncovering things, my scholar,” Sansha said. “Can you do without one more mystery?”

“You are the mystery. I have not uncovered what it means to live with you, to love you. I have only begun my investigation.”

“You will have to fill your encyclopedia with incomplete results, with guesswork.”

He wept long and hard. His sons and the doctor left him alone with Sansha.

She coughed once and stopped breathing.

In panic he looked around, wondering what to do. He felt utterly helpless. All his researches, all his knowledge was for nothing if this could happen.

He noticed the trunk at the foot of the bed. He heaved the lid up, tossed aside clothing, books, bags of coins, jewelry, clutter, until he came to the little coffer. He took the bottle from within, pulled out the stopper with his teeth, and hurried to Sansha.

His hands trembling, his face a grim mask, he forced open her mouth, and poured some of the blue fluid down her throat. He had one desperate hope, that her death was still like new-poured wax, not yet hardened. He hesitated but a moment, and even then grew afraid that it was too late, before he stuck his finger into the bottle and touched some of the liquid to his tongue. There was no sensation. It tasted like air.

Time pooled around them, like water dammed up. He saw his wife’s spirit, sitting up out of her body, not yet ready to take the first step on its long journey. He coaxed it gently back into her, then, as reversed time began to flow forward again, and the instant of her death arrived once more, he breathed into her mouth.

“Husband,” Sansha said a while later, opening her eyes.

Later still he went to the window, held up the bottle in the sunlight, and saw that there was only a single drop of the fluid left.

* * * *

They lived together for many more years, their descendants so numerous they seemed to fill half the city. In time, Kudasduin retired from the academy. He became the subject of fabulous tales, of legend and even myth. He continued to write his encyclopedia. Later volumes were attributed to his successors, or other men of the same name.

“I am just beginning my explorations. Always, I am just beginning. Everything is a prologue,” he would say to Sansha.

“What have you discovered so far?”

“That being alive is a mystery. That being human is a mystery. That love is a mystery without an answer.”

“That is enough. Must you seek further?”

And he told her again, as he had many times, all he could remember of the time chamber, of his brothers who waited for him frozen in Eternity, of his desire to return to them.

He showed her the bottle. She turned it over in her hand and gave it back.

“You have such wonderful dreams,” she said.

He shrugged. “I suppose I do. But I don’t know which is the dream. Do I sit in the chamber, dreaming of Time, or am I here, dreaming of Eternity?”

She kissed him gently. “You are here.”

* * * *

One night he fell asleep at his desk while writing a page of his encyclopedia. Sansha came to him and touched him on the shoulder.

“Yes, yes, I know. It is very late. But I have so much to do. I have no understanding. My mission is not complete.”

“It is too late,” she said. “I am leaving now. I came to say goodbye.”

“Leaving? You can’t. Where are you going?” He looked up and saw that she was dressed in travelling clothes all of black, that her face was lighted from within like a paper lantern. He knew what these things meant and began to weep, begging her to remain behind.

“I have already gone,” she said. “You cannot follow.”

She receded from view. He heard no footsteps. He hurried after her. She vanished around a corner in the hall. He paused by the bedroom, and he saw her body, clad in a nightgown, leaning half out of the bed in a grotesque position, already stiffening.