The Shattered Goddess (4 page)

“Just live. I hope you can do that. Then, if there is a destiny hovering about you, it will be fulfilled. If not, you’ll still be happier.” He took a ring from one of his fingers and gave it to
Ginna. “Wear this always. It will tell people that anyone who harms you will face the curse of my ghost. It is my last command to you that you survive. See that it is carried out.”

“I love you,” the boy wept. He leaned over and put his head on the old man’s chest. He sobbed without restraint.

“I love you too.” Thin, pale fingers with skin dry as parchment stroked his hair. “I don’t
believe guardians are supposed to love anyone. We’re supposed to be beyond all that”

Someone knocked on the door to the chamber.

“Holy Lord,” came a voice. “Are you awake?”

Ginna sat upright, stiff with terror.

“Go quickly,” whispered the old man. “It’s one of my accursed doctors. Very skilled, utterly useless now. A bore. You wouldn’t want to meet him.”

The boy left
the bedside without another word. He drew aside a tapestry, pressed on a stone, and left the way he always did.

* * * *

Shortly before dawn, Ginna lay awake atop a heap of straw in his room in one of the short, squat towers overlooking the
kata
stables. The quiet of the night was broken only by the occasional snorts and whines of the beasts and the far off cries of the watch.

He chose to be alone then, but it occurred to him that most of the time he was alone anyway without any choice. Courtiers and soldiers ignored him as just another urchin. The stable folk, the trainers of the
katas
, the smiths, and the serving women were always polite. They tried to act naturally around him, as if he were no one special, but he knew, he could secretly sense that they were a little
in awe of him and a little afraid. He sometimes overheard snatches of whispered conversations. He was, after all, so often led away by men of purpose and bearing. Someone was showing him more attention than he would normally merit, and trying to hide the fact He was, rumor had it, part of some intrigue, perhaps a child of high rank being hidden until some danger was past. But the gossipers could
never possibly imagine the truth, that he was being summoned by The Guardian himself, that he was Tharanodeth’s friend.

His friend
. It occurred to him that he had only two friends in the world. He knew so few people. He had been educated only by Tharanodeth, and spottily, learning whatever it had moved the old man’s fancy to teach him.

Tharanodeth and the girl Amaedig, whose name meant
Cast Aside. And now Tharanodeth was dying. But he could weep no more. He had exhausted his supply of tears that evening, and there was only a hollow ache within him.

“Ginna.”

He sat up with a start. The straw rustled. He peered breathlessly into the gloom. The world was absolutely still. Something had shut out all the sounds of the night

“Ginna.”

“Here I am.” His heart
pounded with bewilderment, then terror, then joy when he recognized the voice, followed by terror again. It was impossible that he was hearing that voice now, in this place.

“Ginna.”

Tharanodeth stood in the doorway to the room. He had the carven staff in his hand and he wore a travelling cloak and his walking shoes. His face shone brightly, as if a lantern were held up to it, and
yet there was no lantern.

“Ginna, I am on the road now. It is a long way. Goodbye.”

“Wait! Where are you going? Don’t go!”

The light went out like a candle extinguished. The boy leapt up and stumbled out into the hallway which was filled only with the echoes of his shouting.

It was very dark every way he looked, and when he fell silent the night was still.

He walked
the battlements until dawn in search of his friend, hoping for another glimpse, but he asked nothing of the few people he met. They couldn’t help him. He dared not tell them what he had seen.

The new day found him in a wide, high hall. The sun touched the blue glass of the skylight, flooding the room with color. On opposite walls were hung portraits for the bright and dark aspects of The
Goddess. One, clothed in midnight, remained dark. The other, astride a dolphin, glowed with the brilliance of the sunrise.

Remembering when he had first met her, he placed his hands together, then parted them, and a ball of light rose up for The Goddess to see.

Suddenly trumpets sounded. Cymbals clashed. Many metal-shod feet tramped. Two huge doors swung wide in front of him, and suddenly
the room was filled with people. First came the trumpeters, then a squadron of soldiers in full armor, with richly decorated shields and banners trailing from their spears. Drummers drummed. A line of boys Ginna’s age rang bells and chanted. Countless courtiers, lords, and ladies followed, all in their richest attire. In the midst of them was a chair on a platform, held aloft by eight burly
men.

Ginna was so bedazzled by this intrusion that he just stood there in the middle of the floor, gaping.

“You there! Brat! Get out of here!” A captain in a scarlet cape and winged helmet came forward waving a sword.

“No. Let him stay. Let him be the first to congratulate me.”

Ginna looked up to see who had spoken. Everyone else looked up too. When
that
voice was raised,
all others fell silent. He recognized the pudgy, pale figure on the platform, even though he had not seen him in years and certainly had never seen him like this, dressed in vestments which were black on one side and white on the other, and holding a golden staff in his hand.

It was Kaemen. He was only a month older than Ginna, but now he was the new Guardian, the holiest person in the world.

The great mass of people divided and flowed around Ginna like a stream around a boulder until the chair of Kaemen drew near him. Then the bearers set it down.

“Come forward,” said The Guardian, his girlish voice cracking in an attempt to be deep and commanding.

Ginna didn’t know what to do. Court etiquette was wholly strange to him. He had never spoken to a guardian in
public
before, or even with any noble lord.

He fell on his knees, keeping his eyes to the floor.

“You may kiss my hand,” said Kaemen. “Yes, Ginna, I know who you are. They say you are magical and were sent to bewitch me
when I was a child.
”

“Oh no! I wouldn’t—I could never do that—
Dread Lord!
”

“Of course you couldn’t. But you tried and you failed. Now it amuses me to see what
you will do next”

“Holy One! I would never do anything. I didn’t! Please forgive me!” Ginna desperately hoped he had said the right things. Apparently he had.

“You may kiss my hand and look upon my face. Consider yourself greatly honored.”

Hastily he made one of the few court gestures he knew, that of Blessing Received, and to be sure he repeated it twice more. Then he raised
his head, and took Kaemen’s sweaty, soft hand in his own and touched it to his lips.

The Guardian was doing his best to look on impassively, to demonstrate that this inferior did not concern him one way or the other, but he could not completely hide his astonishment when he noticed that Ginna wore Tharanodeth’s ring. And Ginna could not fail to see that flash of pure hatred on his face,
even though he recovered almost at once.

Kaemen’s eyes were blue voids, revealing nothing.

The whole of the day and much of the evening were filled with the coronation of the new guardian and the funeral of the old. Countless rituals had to be observed, and officials, called Masters of the Act, oversaw each with scrupulous care. Kaemen alone was able to descend into a certain vault,
while his attendants sang a hymn which could never be sung on any other occasion and were accompanied by instruments which could accompany no other song. He was the only one who could bring forth a certain reliquary containing a splinter of bone of The Goddess, and of all the living he alone among them was permitted to touch the inestimably holy corpse of his predecessor, to open the mouth, place
the reliquary within, and close it again. This one act, with all its prayers, pauses at preordained stations, and pantomime re-enactments of the highlights of Tharanodeth’s reign, took hours.

Ginna was relieved that The Guardian let him go on his way after that first encounter. He watched the proceedings from a tree at the back of the crowd. The whole population of Ai Hanlo was present,
this being the only time when the folk of the lower city were allowed within the forbidden precincts. He had never imagined there could be so many people alive in one place.

Tharanodeth lay on his bier with his travelling cloak wrapped about him, his death-staff in his hand, and his walking shoes on his feet. And yet Ginna knew that his friend had departed the previous night and was already
well along his final, perhaps endless road.

He was left behind with his only remaining friend, Amaedig, and with Kaemen, who might be ignoring him for the moment, but had certainly not forgotten him.

CHAPTER 3

The Bright Hope

As far as Kaemen was concerned, what was wrong with the world was that there were so
many
disgusting people in it. Vile, obnoxious, stupid, every one of them. And then there were the lesser sort—soldiers, servants, common folk. They were just beasts, animals, oafs. Oh, they could give you the time of day and blather about trivia, but they were animals
nonetheless.

“Yes, my lord,” this and “Yes, my lord” that. They knew how to grovel, which was only proper, but they didn’t mean it He knew they all hated him. They were out to see him dead. He was sure of it. They had been working against him for a long time.

His earliest memories were of screaming for food or when he’d wet himself in his cradle, and the idiot nurses
wouldn’t come
. He’d screamed himself hoarse. It was amazing, he told himself when he was older, that he had any voice left at all.

His idea of a perfect world was one in which everybody was dead except himself, and there weren’t even any squawking crows to peck those millions of eyes out Just rotting corpses—no, just bones. He would stroll among them and kick the skulls around like balls, and then pause,
and his laughter would shatter the silence.

Anything would be an improvement over what he had to live with. Once he had come back from spending an hour in the cemetery, contemplating the way things should be, when a veritable army of nurses surrounded him, fluttering like silly birds.

“Oh
there
you are, little one!” they said. “You
shouldn’t
wander off like that. You
mustn’t
get yourself
dirty playing among those
ghastly
gravestones. Ugh! The
slime
and the
mold
. You’ll get them into your
brain
if you don’t take care of yourself. Come away now. It’s time for your
bath
. Scrubba-dub-dub, won’t that be
fun?
”

He wanted to say that perhaps there was something to be said for slime and mold after all, but didn’t. They dragged him into the palace, past sneering, snickering priests
and courtiers, and they even stopped to talk to that sanctimonious asshole he had for a father. (“Oh, he’s been out in the dirt again, Holy Lord, and isn’t he a morbid child; I don’t know what to do with him, and if he were not your son I’d say—I mean it’s his nature, but—”

“You must be patient with him,” said Tharanodeth, but of course he didn’t mean it, the smiling hypocrite.) When they
got him into his own chamber (That
other
boy, who had all the personality of a flowerpot, was across the hall babbling and juggling balls of light) they peeled off his soiled clothing, stirred the bathwater to foam up the soap, and lowered him in.

It was cold!
He shrieked and kicked and bit one of the women on the hand until she screamed. They were trying to freeze him with that accursed
water, then drown him under the suds.
Cold!

“Now, now,” cooed one of the nurses. The water wouldn’t have gotten cold if you hadn’t run off like that. We couldn’t find you.”

“Who brought it? Who?”

“You know who. The two big, strong men who always do. Konduwaine and Tiboth.”

“Then it’s their fault Kill them!”

All the nurses stood back in surprise. He took the opportunity
to leap out of the tub. His naked body was already turning blue. He was shaking all over.

“Kill them! Kill them! Kill them!” He grabbed a stool by one leg and banged it against the floor until the leg broke off. He brandished the leg like a sword. “I want them dead! Throw them in the furnace and bum them up. If I can’t be warm, they’ll be very warm.”

“Little Lord,’ said one of the
women. “We can’t do that. It isn’t right.”

He remembered who he was and stood up straight, trying to cut a commanding figure. Even young as he was, he knew how ridiculous he looked. For years afterwards he played the scene over again in his mind, multiplying the indignities he had suffered.

“I shall be guardian one day,” he said. “I am only a little child now, but when I grow up, unless
you do what I say,
I shall flay you alive!
Go!”

He waved his arms and made a face. They all retreated from the room in confusion. He put on his dirty clothing, just to spite them. After a while they came back, trembling, and the one who had contradicted him said, “We have done as you ordered.”

Liars. He knew they were all liars. He had to find out for himself. He went over to the flue
and sniffed. Then he smiled. At last they had done something right. There was flesh burning down below. Two different men brought a new tub of water in, and it was hot enough this time.

But
later
he saw the culprits working in another part of the palace. He had been tricked. Someone had thrown a heap of old skins into the furnace, and that was what he had smelled.

The most frustrating
thing about the whole affair was that when he found out, and complained to his father, the old fool refused to execute Konduwaine and Tiboth.

That was how they had always treated him when he was small. As he grew older, things hardly improved.

No one understood him. No one. He often dreamed of being underground in a dark place, where all he could hear was water dripping. In his dream
he tried to move, but his limbs were like stone. He had the distinct impression that not only was it dark, but that he was blind, lime in his dream did not pass the way it did in waking life. He could lie there for days and days, buried and unmoving, and he would return to the world to find that only a few hours had passed.

Once he told Hadel the Rat about it and got back some gibberish
about disbalanced vapors in his stomach. “Must be something you ate,” he’d said. “Here, put this powdered herb in your drinks for a while.” But Kaemen wasn’t
that
stupid. He threw the poison away secretly. Later he cursed himself for being exactly that stupid. He should have saved it and fed it to Hadel first, then the nurses, then Tharanodeth.

And there were times when he knew he was not
dreaming, when a lady stood by his bed. She was absolutely black, more like a bottomless hole shaped like a bent old crone than a living creature, and she would lean over him, sink her fingers like blades of ice into his brain, and he would hear her voice inside his head.

“When you are lord, everything will be as you want it to be,” she said, and that was comforting, but she went on to add,
“I will be with you.”

Sometimes she said things so terrifying he nearly went mad with the horror of them, and his inability to confide in anyone added to the burden. Afterwards his head would always hurt, and he could never tell anyone why, and he knew that the idiots around him were secretly laughing at his pain, even if they didn’t understand it.

Finally there were those rare intervals,
impossible as they might have seemed to him in retrospect, during which he had known calm. The black hag did not always whisper inside his head. Sometimes she went away entirely. Perhaps she was asleep. Then he was free for a little while. It was then that he looked at the people around them and noticed how they smiled without malice, and he saw other children playing among themselves. He
envied them. They had mothers who cared for them. His was always so distant, so rarely seen, always followed by a train of gaudily-dressed ladies fluttering fans in front of their faces. He could hardly remember what she looked like when he was older. On top of all her other offenses, she had proceeded to die when he was six.

In these strange moments of weakness he wanted more than anything
else to have a real friend. He would wander about the palace crying, asking everyone he met, “Will you be my friend?
Truly
my friend?’

Of course they would smile and say, “But Little Lord, we are your friends. Everyone loves you.”

Later the black hag would tell him how they all hated him, and he saw she was right. The pains, the dreams would come again. The frigid hands would dip into
his skull and pull his spirit out, then carry him away into a midnight land of empty houses and crumbling castles, where bestial, grotesque things crawled and tittered among the ruins. He would open his mouth to scream and darkness would come pouring out, spreading like thick oil until it smothered the whole world.

Only then would there be complete quiet. Only then could he rest

And
because no one understood him, because he was alone with no one to turn to, because he hated those around him so bitterly, there could be no defense against that darkness, and, as the years went by, he gave himself over to it absolutely.