Beyond the Gate (The Golden Queen) (Volume 2) (22 page)

When he finished, Koti took his pupils to the edge of Andou, where the river Marn flowed in from the Whitefish Mountains. There a great sea of rounded boulders had lain for millions of years, deposited by glaciers.

Koti’s students worked diligently among the boulders for twenty years, carving each of them into great images from their tradition, showing the War of the Gods that would someday come, when Goddess Peace would finally put down the Dark Spirit of Strife, when Fertility with her many orifices overcame the sexless Barrenness, when all the ten thousand gods of virtue ascended to their rightful domain.

The place was renamed Valley of the Gods, and one could walk through it for weeks staring at marvel after marvel.

And Koti did not only create great works in stone, he married a wise woman who had a talent for shaping lives. They loved one another passionately, and well Gallen remembered the countless times they wrestled as one while making love in their garden bed, under the evening stars at their summer home. His sweet wife Aya gave birth to eleven talented children, so that together Koti and Aya became a great patriarch and matriarch, admired by all.

After sixty-two years, Koti’s body grew frail even though he was still young, for he had worn it out in the service of his art and of his family and of his people.

By then, Koti’s fame had grown so great that his own people built him a throne and begged him to slough off his mortal body so that he could reveal himself as a god, for the works that he had designed for his apprentices were not only apparently without number, they were also without equal.

But Koti convinced the crowds to stifle their acclaim, and he prepared for death.

And so it was that the Makers gathered fifty thousand men and women, and they bore Koti’s ravaged body upon a pallet carved of sandalwood, and they sailed with a thousand ships across the sea, as he lay dying.

Together they marched to the City of Life, where the great columns of crystal memory rose high and haughty and gray against the white mountains on the skyline.

His people came arrayed in their finest garments of scarlet, and they swung golden censers of incense before his pallet, filling the sky with sweet-smelling smoke of green. The drummers and flutists played before him, and women danced with bells on their feet and tambourines in their hands, their voices rising in haunting music.

At the City of Life, he had his memories recorded and gave the humans samples of his skin, and fifty thousand people wept upon the stairways to the Hall of Life and petitioned the human lords to prepare a new body for the greatest of Makers.

And there the memories of Koti ended, but the memories of his disciples were recorded thus:

And so the humans studied Koti’s works, studied his memories, and they judged him: “We know that Koti’s work is magnificent in form, but it is flawed in content. His work is filled with boundless passion, but we fear the images of the gods he has formed. We fear that his work will fuel a dangerous resurgence of idolatry. He has impeded the cause of mankind, and therefore will not be reborn.”

And so his disciples took Koti home and tried to nurse him back to health, but on the cruise home, Koti was so humiliated by his treatment at the hands of the humans that he swore to eat no more. Because of his poor health, he died within the week.

So all Makers swore a vow that none of them would ever go back to the human lands seeking rebirth, and none would sell their wares to humans. Since the greatest of them had been judged unworthy, the Makers knew that mankind esteemed them as dust.

Gallen felt the weight of Koti’s life in a great surge. He lived through the passion, the genius, the years of toil, the intense love he’d felt for his family, all in moments, gained the insights that Koti had had, then witnessed the final humiliation and death.

And Gallen knew, he knew surely, that mankind had judged Koti wrongly, that they had been blind to his greatness.

And suddenly, the colors swirled in his head, and Gallen began to recall the life of Doovenach, a humble woman of the Roamers, the hairy people of the plains.

She had been born under a weathered oak tree in a warm rain, and had lived her life on the open plains beneath the sky. As a child, she had learned the call of the thrush, the scent of the rabbit. And during the summer storms, when forks of lightning beat the earth, the tribe would huddle under wide trees, and Doovenach would huddle under her mother’s sagging breasts and watch the dark clouds, listen to them growling.

For countless days she had wandered the golden plains, under Tremonthin’s suns, harvesting handfuls of wild oats, rose apples, and black peas. She grew to hate the biting black flies that followed her herd, never realizing that they were so tormented only because her people had a law against bathing—for when one bathed in the infrequent pools of the grasslands, he dirtied water that others might drink.

But mostly, Doovenach remembered a sense of peace that flowed as wide as the prairie, and she remembered the good times hunting for mice to eat with her sisters, or the time that the tribe wandered east all summer until they reached the end of the world, where it dropped over cliffs to salty water, and together the whole tribe jumped off into the ocean and swam about every day until the weather turned cold, then they climbed out and headed west for another three years until they bumped into the mountains.

At times it would rain or snow, and Doovenach would huddle beneath a tree, her furry hide wet and cold, and she would curse her life on such miserable days.

Like others of her tribe, she had been born into a society that knew no possessions. Her people ate the wild grasses from the plain, hunted with sticks and rocks. When they brought down a deer or an antelope, they squatted and cut the fresh meat with knives, divided it equally among all.

Other races sometimes hated them, for the Roamers could not understand the concept of ownership. If they found a cow in the wild, they would eat it. If trees were filled with fruit, they fed. And afterward some person of another tribe would come and claim that they owned this cow or this tree.

And so Doovenach remembered times when other peoples would chase the Roamers and beat them. They once found a field of peas, and men with clubs came to chase them away, and when one of the men hit Doovenach’s mother, his long club also struck Doovenach’s baby brother, crushing his skull.

And she remembered a time when her people wandered into a town, hoping to drink from the troughs where horses drank, and people in hats and tunics and dresses laughed at her nakedness, and their children threw rocks at her. Doovenach found a beautiful dress as blue as her eyes drying on a bush, and she tried to put it on, but some people came out of a house, shouting, and their dogs bit her legs and drove her away.

And when she was eighteen and beautiful so that the males of other clans wanted to mate with her too much, Doovenach ran away and crossed through a great town, and while she was hungry, she went into an inn and began to feed from a table.

The people of that town gathered around and laughed at her nakedness, and a man claimed that she was eating his food. She tried to run then, for she feared he would beat her, but he only laughed and said that he would trade her for the food, give her something good, then he took her into an alley and beat her and savagely mated with her.

When he finished, he threw coins on her, and other men from the inn also came and mated with her, too, ignoring her cries but leaving more coins, until at last when the men had all finished, a wench from the inn came and explained to Doovenach how to use the coins.

Doovenach had never owned anything. It seemed to her that her very bones whispered that the root of all evil came from lusting after the possessions of another. And her very bones told her that the earth and all of its riches belonged to all. And because Doovenach had never possessed something to call her own, she had never learned the great secrets of exchange.

But once she learned this great secret, Doovenach returned to her people with money and sought to teach them. She told them that their lives would not be so harsh in the winter if they took money into town and bought food, and she explained that they could mate for money, but her people could never seem to comprehend her words. Or perhaps they never believed them.

So Doovenach returned to the city and rented a comer in a stable where she could sleep in warm straw, close to the sweet smell of horses. She made money by breeding with any man who would have her, and she learned to both take and give great joy in the act. Many were the men who would suck at her hairy breasts and cry out in ecstasy as they made love. And though she never bore children, she helped care for children of the streets who had no homes. For many years she studied other races and learned their ways.

Often in the winter, younger Roamers would come in off the plains and Doovenach would share her food with them, let them sit under her shelter, but the others never learned her ways. They respected her and knew she was wise, but she was wise in ways that they could not comprehend.

And so, when Doovenach began to grow old and ugly and could no longer earn much money, she journeyed to Northland with a friend and sought rebirth, hoping to be young again, hoping to become a teacher for her people.

The human judges in the City of Life recorded her memories and took her skin sample, and Doovenach’s memories ended there. But she gave money to her friend, and her friend’s memories were also recorded. After many days the humans passed judgment on Doovenach, saying, “Although you claim to be a devotee of human ways, you have never understood anything but the most surface concepts of capitalism. You have rented the barest shelter in a stable, and sometimes bought food, but beyond that, you have never gained any possessions, never sought to obtain the virtues that would assure rebirth.”

“But I have advanced the cause of mankind,” Doovenach protested. “I gave joy to many men.”

The human judges said: “You sold them pleasure. You were only a whore, catering to their most basic instincts.” And they sent her away.

Doovenach shrugged, and she was not angry. She had lived her life, and she reasoned that if the humans had given her another, then perhaps on some cosmic scale the universe would have been thrown out of balance, and someone else would have had to go without being born.

But after that, the Roamers did not go to the human lands seeking rebirth, for even the wisest and most human among them had been found unworthy.

And the colors swirled, and Gallen began to recall the life of Entreak d’Suluuth of the bird tribe. And just as suddenly, he was in the night again.

There was a searing moment of pain, and Gallen found himself lying on the ground. He could smell grass and mud. There was a familiar weight of his mantle on his head and shoulders.

The night felt so strange, so cold. Gallen struggled up, until he could see Maggie squatting over him, her dark red hair limned by moonlight. She was holding his hands.

“Oh, Gallen, are you all right?” she asked. Gallen’s mantle heightened his vision, and he could easily see the lines of worry in her face. In the darkness the pupils of her eyes dilated to a seemingly unnatural width.

Gallen struggled to his feet. It was well past midnight, and silver-lined clouds rolled across the night sky. Two minutes. He had been under for two minutes, and in those moments, he somehow felt the weight and pain of two lifetimes. He’d tasted the flavor of those lives, of people’s feelings, in a way that he’d never imagined. “We are our bodies,” the Bock had said. And Gallen wondered if that creature really understood the depth of those words—understood the sense of peace the Roamers felt in traveling the wide earth, or the passion the Makers felt while kneading mud for the potter’s wheel.

Gallen recalled dozens of experiences, all whirling like butterflies in his head—Doovenach tasting wild anise for the first time; an old man of her tribe dying of hunger. Koti as a young man, painting a tin glaze over a pot before it went into a kiln.

Gallen felt as if he were tumbling, tumbling; his emotions were still jangled. He felt exultation that was somehow displaced, without a reference to any experience he could imagine. Right now, he thought he should be feeling relief at getting free of the Inhuman, or disgust at his own humanity … or something. But the Inhuman:” probe seemed to be stimulating his emotions directly.

“I … can’t think. I can’t think!” Gallen said.

“Why not? What are they doing to you?”

“Memories—” Gallen said. “I’m remembering lives.”

“The dronon made the Inhuman, and they don’t want you to think!” Maggie said, squeezing his hands. “Whatever the dronon show you, they don’t want you to think. Gallen, I know how memories are recorded. They can be edited. They can be misremembered. It’s easy to fake them. But even if these are genuine, the dronon don’t want you to think: you might disagree with them, and the dronon don’t tolerate that.”

Gallen looked up at her, knew that she was speaking what she believed was the truth, yet dangerous thoughts kept flooding through his mind, welcome snatches of memory. He felt far more experienced in life, far wiser than ever before. He reveled in his new memories, as if they were a new great cloak that weighed heavily on his shoulders, but was yet new and comforting. The memories that the Inhuman offered were sweet and exotic and tinged with pain, and he hungered for more.

Maggie was human, and she accepted the human agenda without question. But neither she nor Gallen had ever looked beyond the human agenda. Neither of them had really considered whether the benevolent Tharrin were running the universe in the best possible way. Gallen remembered the deadly rose, left as a warning on Fale. And now, Gallen recalled the lives of the people of Babel, saw how their lives were thrown away, how their needs were ignored. They suffered. They suffered. Ignorance, poverty, lawlessness, death. The humans of Tremonthin could protect the people of Babel, sweep all of these ills away, but they did not.

“Maggie,” he whispered. “I need to go under again. I need to know more!”