The Shattered Goddess (25 page)

The light gathered around it and faded. The world was dark again. The figure stood over the plain, tall as Ai Hanlo Mountain, grey and veined with glistening black and sprinkled
with glowing dust.

It folded its hands together and opened them. A sphere formed, brilliantly flaming but delicate, expanding like an immense glowing soap bubble.

The light approached Tamarel like a wave. A hot wind preceded it. For an instant the sky was bright as day. She could see where the side of the mountain had been sheared away. She could see the yard where the
katas
had once
exercised, and she knew that she was on a porch just outside Hadel of Nagé’s quarters. She had accompanied Ginna this far many times.

The bubble passed over her. She, and all of Ai Hanlo were within it. Her eyes were dazzled, but when the drifting spots settled to the periphery of her vision and she could see again, she felt a burden lifted from her. She was no longer anxious or afraid.
She was more alive.

The stone being was transfigured, its outline softening, growing more human. For an instant she was sure that it had her friend’s face. His expression was one of beatific calm.

Something touched her leg. She looked down, and at first did not recognize what knelt before her.

“Help me,” it croaked, and she knew the voice. It was Hadel. The thing which disfigured
his face hung limp and steaming.

“Take him. Heal him.”
came a voice, and the broken mountain trembled. Tiles fell from rooftops. A cracked wall nearby gave way into a slide of debris.

The God stood over Tamarel.

“Can you understand it?” demanded her companion. “I can only hear the roaring of the wind.”

“Yes, my beloved,” said Tamarel, ignoring her.

The voice came
like a cyclone, like a great wave rushing over the land, knocking them off their feet. It said many other things. To Tamarel they were words, to the other, only noises.

The Priestess stood. The Mother sat huddled by her as Ai Hanlo crumbled around them.

It was to Tamarel that the vision came. She looked to the east; she saw a face peering up over the horizon, a face half like a bird,
but very wise, very beautiful, and she knew it to be a sign that the new age would not be wholly for mankind.

She looked to the God. The stone figure was no longer stone, no longer crude, but graceful, lithe in its immensity.

She saw the God dance the dance of life, juggling stars in his hands, placing them in the sky in new constellations. She saw the God raise a new moon. She saw
the God reach to the horizon and bring up a new sun, sudden as thunder, filling the world with light. She saw the cities of the plain, which had never feared the sun, now vanish away, smashed with the hammer of light.

She saw the God dance across the world, setting it spinning into a new rhythm beneath the sun and sky.

She saw him increase in size, rushing up into the heavens, becoming
more beautiful than the mind can conceive, than the tongues of men can describe, spreading like memory upon the wind.

In the end was the Word, and the Word was light in Darkness and Darkness in Light, and the Word touched all the Earth and covered it.

CHAPTER 13

The Avatar of the Dancing God

A million bubbles rose and fell in the foam of time. One of them, tumbling pale and golden, had been called Ginna. A mote of thought came together with another, and another, and slowly awareness grew, and a separation took place, and after a measureless interval, there was something which could name itself “I.”

He stood in a meadow
beneath a clear blue sky. It was noon. The sun was warm on his bare shoulders. He walked, feeling every blade of grass beneath his feet, every crumpled leaf from the previous autumn, and then the soft, dry dust of a road. A breeze caressed his nakedness.

He juggled balls of light and wandered up a hill and down the other side. He met a traveler on the road, a tall, thin, pale white being
with a bird-like head. It wore a cloak of iridescent purple. It regarded him indifferently and went on its way.

From the top of the next hill, he spied a city carven all of coral, like an inverted pyramid, floating above the horizon.

He came to a place of simple wooden huts, where shouting human children ran hither and yon. At the sight of him, they scattered. Then one came out of
hiding beneath a basket and approached him. He smiled and let the balls of light drift. One of them burst on the boy’s forehead and he flinched, but was not afraid.

A woman came running from a doorway, her face hidden in a shawl. She grabbed the boy and dragged him away.

Ginna created more balls and juggled.

“It’s
him!
” someone whispered in a booth behind a wicker screen. “He
should go to The Mother.”

He let the balls go, pulled the screen aside, and two women and a man stared at him in awe and terror.

“Yes, take me to the Mother,” he said. Deep within him, a half-remembered emotion stirred. He savored the sensation.

This was the most beautiful place he had ever beheld, and all its people were marvels, it seemed. It was good to be back.

Hundreds
were gathering, making signs with their hands that he did not understand. The crowd parted. A man of stately bearing, dressed in elaborate robes and a plumed headdress came forward. He beckoned. Ginna followed. Keeping a safe distance all the way, the man led him away from the village, through a wood, to a wall, through a gate, along a marble pathway lined with golden images, and into a temple.
He tapped a small gong with a hammer, then left Ginna alone.

The polished floor was cold underfoot He looked down at his reflection, and realized that he was faintly glowing and slightly translucent.

He walked the length of a long corridor, into the heart of the temple. He came to a wide room lit from a skylight set in a dome. There, on a throne, sat an ancient woman like withered
driftwood left behind by a storm.

She opened her eyes slowly as he approached, but did not move.

“Oh, it is you,” she said in a voice of infinite weariness.

“Yes, it is I.”

“You’ve come for an explanation at last.”

“I am still... very puzzled.”

“You have a thousand memories, and I have one, and you want me to explain?”

“If you would.”

“I have thought
about it long, what you would be like if you ever returned.”

“And?”

“I think you have become an avatar of yourself, a fragmentary manifestation of a greater whole. But you mustn’t delude yourself. You are no more the Ginna that once was than I am... what I once was.”

“You helped me once. Now help me again. Bring Amaedig—I mean Tamarel—to me.”

“Even as I said, you are not
the same. Nothing is. The Earth is a strange place for mankind now. We are few after the darkness. This is not our age. In the eyes of the new creatures, we are quaint and ancient and a little crude, I fear.”

“Yes, I saw them. Bring Tamarel.”

“Ginna, don’t you know me? I am Tamarel. The Mother of the Goddess died long ago, as soon as her task was complete. But you touched me and commanded
me, and I obeyed, and lived, and five hundred years went by. Everyone thinks me divine. I’m still your priestess.”

“But... they called you The Mother.”

“When you were... You touched me, as a man touches a woman, and I found I was filled with your seed. I gave birth, in great pain and greater joy, to most of the forebears of present mankind, and to the... others. The world was repopulated
through me, through you. I have earned my title.”

“I wanted to love you.”

“I wanted to love you too.”

“But it was impossible.”

“Now I only want to rest. Do you really need a priestess?”

He reached out and touched her, and in the blinking of an eye, only her faded clothing lay in a heap upon her throne. He felt her spirit drift past him.

Later, he came out of
the woods and looked over a plain. He saw a broken mountain standing, pocked like a face wasted by disease with the ruins of a city. He thought of the towers he had seen standing in the desert, built during the world’s noon. They were gone now.

He reached out and touched the mountain, cleansing it.

The world was wholly strange to him now, wholly new, and he had no place in it.

A brave and pious man followed him and, when he at last examined the spot where he had stood, he found that he had made no more impression on the ground than the passing shadow of a cloud.