Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder from the End of Time (35 page)

Quickly he went to the trunk and got out the bottle. He regarded his wife’s corpse for just a second, then ran after her spirit.

When he saw her again, she was far away, along a road. He called out her name. She did not turn. She did not answer.

He felt the fabric of Time rushing against him, holding him back, but he struggled on, like a swimmer against the current. Soon the road was filled with travelers, many dressed as Sansha was, their faces glowing, men and women of every race and nation, all of them walking on their last journey out of the world.

“Sansha! Sansha! Come back! I don’t understand yet! There’s so much we haven’t done!”

He pushed his way through the crowd. He leapt up and saw her across a river of heads and shoulders. He waved and shouted, but she did not turn, and on and on they went, joined at every bend in the road by countless thousands.

At the very last, there was a flickering light ahead, an auroral 1ight. He got out the bottle. He made it to Sansha’s side.

“Come with me,” he gasped. “Come back. It isn’t too late.”

She faced him, and, very briefly, she knew him.

“It is too late,” she said. Then she walked into the light and was gone.

He was afraid, confused. He did not follow. He stumbled through the crowd and left the road.

He seemed to be standing in a field. He was unutterably weary.

He opened the bottle, and poured the last drop onto his tongue.

* * * *

“You have returned,” said Zon.

He was too weak to close the door of the chamber. Thandos closed it.

“I have seen…wonders.”

“You are wondrously transformed,” said Thandos, regarding Kudasduin’s wrinkled face, his silver hair, his bent back and withered limbs.

“I have found a wonder of wonders, a mystery of mysteries, the reason men bear the pain of age and death. All this and more.”

“I must have overlooked something,” said Thandos. “I must go again, as you did, and see what you saw.”

“Yes,” said Zon. “It is to be investigated. Go, Thandos, and come back and report. I shall question our brother while you are gone.”

Thandos put his hand on the door, then paused. He asked Kudasduin, “What is out there?”

“I…cannot say. All things and nothing. In the end I did not understand it.”

“Then I will have to go out and see.”

“No!”
Kudasduin screamed, lunging at the control panel. His aged heart burst. He was dead in an instant, but his body fell against the lever he had been reaching for.

The time chamber was flung far from the world, into the darkness of the abyss.

COMING OF AGE IN THE CITY OF THE GODDESS

We live in a time of strange and terrible miracles.

—Telechronos

I.

“The Herald of the Goddess came to me last night,” Aerin said. “He stood outside my window. I know that’s who it was. He’ll come back for me tonight.”

He was fourteen years old and trying to be very brave. He sat up very straight on the wooden bench in the boot room of the house. Outside, wagons rattled by. Women shouted in hoarse voices. A piper played flat, squealing notes. It was market day in Ai Hanlo.

His sister Mora was a year younger than he. She sat beside him on the cramped bench and spoke in a hushed tone.

“Yes. I saw him too. I thought I heard him call my name as I slept, but of course he didn’t, because he lost his voice on the day the Goddess died. But I sat up, and saw him through the crack in the shutters.”

“I did too!” said Vaenev, who was ten. He crouched across from them, underneath a shelf.

“You didn’t!” hissed Mora.

“I did! I did!” He jumped up, hitting his head on the shelf, which was only a loose board. Boots and shoes tumbled down.

“Be quiet!” said Aerin. “But I did.…”

“He’s lying,” Mora whispered. “He just wants to tag along.”

Vaenev made a face and stuck out his tongue.

“I don’t know if he did or not,” said Aerin. “Nobody can know, except him.”

“I did,” said Vaenev so softly they couldn’t really hear him.

The three of them sat in silence for a while. Vaenev fidgeted with the fallen shoes.

“We’ll have to tell Mother and Father,” Aerin said finally. He looked into their faces. Mora was clearly frightened. Vaenev was sullen. He didn’t show much when he was afraid, Aerin knew. His brother didn’t like to seem the youngest. But now, in just one more night, none of them, not even Vaenev, would be children any more.

* * * *

Their mother wept when she heard the news. She set aside her needlework and leaned back in her chair and wept softly for a long time. Aerin’s face went red. He didn’t know what to do. He felt helpless at the very time he wanted to be strong. He merely watched the tears running down his mother’s face.

Mora took her mother by the hand and said gently, “It’ll be all right.”

“I know. I know. It will be.”

Aerin could tell she didn’t believe that. Vaenev stared at his feet, flexing his toes. When a servant girl wandered in, their mother calmly told her what had happened.

The girl put her hand to her face, her mouth forming a wide “O.”

“All three
at once
?”

“None of your business! Go fetch my husband
right now
!”

The girl ran from the house. and returned a few minutes later with the children’s father. He wore an apron, and was covered with flour up to the elbows.

“Aerin, tell him,” Mother said.

“We…last night…the Herald came.”

Father looked quietly at Aerin, then at Mora, then at Vaenev.

“All three of us,” Aerin said.

For a time, Father comforted Mother.

“You and I were both Summoned. We both had our Revelations. We’re none the worse for it.”

“I know,” she said, “but still I am afraid. They’ll be changed. Will they even know us? What if we lose them completely? Things like that happen. the Goddess is dead. Who’s to prevent it?”

“Hush. Nothing will happen to them. They’re just growing up. You’ve been listening to idle gossip.”

“There was the little girl of—”

“Hush.”

“All three…at once.…”

“It’s better that way. It’ll all be over at once. Then there will be nothing to worry about.”

Father wiped his hands on his apron and addressed the children, almost as if they had just arrived in the room.

“Well. I’ll get cleaned up, then we’ll go see a priest.”

* * * *

The three children were dressed in their very best as their parents led them up narrow streets that were so steep they had steps cut in them. Aerin wore a velvet tunic with a belt of woven gold, Mora a white gown with a sash and shoes embroidered in silver thread. Vaenev’s tunic was white and starched. he looked uncomfortable in it.

None of them said anything. Aerin studied the faces of the people they passed. Sometimes he saw a kind of understanding. Many were indifferent, a few awed or afraid. Once an old lady made a sign of good luck, furtively so only he could see it.

It occurred to him that such things must happen every day. He knew that the population of the city was declining, that there were great, abandoned districts, but still there were enough people left that children must be having their Revelations constantly. He had heard of it. He had seen children led away before. A friend of his had been through it all, but would say nothing about it. Aerin wasn’t sure how he had been changed, save that he had become secretive. But all those things were abstractions. It was so different, now that the thing was happening to him.

High up Ai Hanlo Mountain the lower city met the upper in a broad square with a fountain in the middle of it, beneath a wall. Mendicants gathered there, waiting for the times when the priests would appear atop the wall and bless those below. But they never passed beyond that wall. No man of the commons ever did. The inner city was reserved for the Guardian of the Bones of the Goddess and his court.

Still, there was a door in the wall which anyone could open. Father opened it. The five of them crowded through, into a little room that was completely dark when the door was closed again.

Father dropped some coins into a bowl and rang a bell. After a few minutes footsteps came from somewhere in the darkness. A shutter slid back, and they could hear the priest breathing.

“Yes?”

“My children,” Father said. “They’ve seen the Herald of the Goddess, all of them.”

“All? How many children do you have?”

To Aerin, the priest’s voice sounded old and tired, perhaps a little bored.

“Three, Reverend One.”

Mother spoke. Aerin could tell she was trembling. “Is that…bad? That…all three at once, I mean.”

“No,” the priest said, and now his voice had become friendly and reassuring. “There is nothing wrong with all three at once. When the Goddess was alive, all children who were twelve years old saw the Herald at the same time. It happened every year in the spring. It must have been easier to manage that way. But that was centuries ago, and now that the Goddess is dead, her power is fading. Her Herald still comes, but he comes whenever he will. But still he is the Herald, bringing revelations, and it is all the same. So let us go and prepare.”

The priest came out. All of them filed into a little, private courtyard. There he gave each of the children crowns of stiff cloth, half black and half white, with black ribbons hanging from the white side and white from the black, symbolizing, Aerin knew from many recitations, the dual nature of the Goddess.

And then he knew why he was afraid. With the death of the Goddess, her will had been extinguished, but fragments of her power remained, undirected, settling at random. What came to him in the night could be from her evil aspect as readily as from her good. That was the way of things. The world was uncertain.

On the way back to the house, people covered their faces as the crowned children passed. Now everyone who beheld them knew for certain what had happened, and it was bad luck to look on someone on the night of their Revelation.

When they got there, Mother and Father hung black and white ribbons out the windows and placed a wreath on the door.

“We’ll be at Grandmother’s,” Father said. “We’ll come for you in the morning. Then we’ll celebrate.” When the priest wasn’t looking, he made a good luck sign for all the children to see. Then he and Mother were gone.

The old priest prepared the ritual meal, and Aerin, Mora, and Vaenev ate: unleavened bread, greens, and water, the diet of an anchorite. When they were done, he said to them, “You three know what a Revelation is, don’t you?”

“Yes, Reverend One,” they said in unison.

“Good. Then you know that on this night the Herald of the Goddess will bring each of you a message, a separate and different one for each, a fragment of the godhead, even as the Herald is himself such a fragment.”

“But Reverend One,” said Aerin, “are we not all fragments of the godhead?”

The priest smiled. “You are a bright boy.”

“I have studied.”

The priest began a long explanation of how all living things emanate, ultimately, from the divine, and how at the end of each cycle of the Earth’s long history, when the god or goddess dies, mankind continues for a while like the ripples in a pool after the stone has settled to the bottom, but always diminishing, the world becoming ever more barren, until sometimes there are only a single man and woman remaining, and a single seed, before a new god or goddess is reborn. At the end of time, which cannot be far off, the process will simply stop.

Then the priest noticed that Mora was listening patiently, but with a pained look on her face, and Vaenev was staring at the ceiling.

“In any case,” he concluded, “the Herald is an active
thought
of the Goddess, given form by her will, and sent to each of you so that you will learn, in some way, what direction the rest of your lives will take. You will all experience different things. Each experience is private and holy. Therefore you must not speak to one another after you have retired for the night, nor must you ever tell anyone what you have seen. To tell it is to lose it, and to lose it is to wander directionless forever. Do you understand all this?”

“Yes, Reverend One.”

“Then I’m sure you understand, but I must ask you anyway: do you understand how terrible a thing it is to lie about a Revelation? If any of you have not truly seen the Herald, you are surely lost. I am required to ask this, and to hear your answers. Have you truly seen the Herald of the Goddess?”

“I have seen him, Reverend One,” said Aerin.

“And I,” said Mora.

Aerin looked expectantly at Vaenev. Mora was trembling.

“I have, too,” said Vaenev.

“Very well, then. I want you to consider how lucky you are. Did you know that not everyone gets a Revelation any more? It happens less frequently every year, as the power of the Goddess fades. And some people don’t get them until they’re very old, when it’s too late. That’s why the world is such a confusing place.”