Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder from the End of Time (18 page)

He froze for just a second, and the monster had him by the ankles, pulling him toward the fire, scattering the burning stones. He kicked and wriggled, clinging to outcroppings of rock, but he was pulled relentlessly back. He vomited up all he had eaten. The other had him like an enormous spider, crawling over his body, smothering him with stench. His shirt ripped. Teeth sank into his back. He screamed and rolled over, but the thing rolled with him, arms locked around his chest, squeezing the breath from him. He reached back, caught a handful of greasy hair, yanked, twisted, but still the teeth tore at him.

A rock came away in his other hand. Without thinking, he swung it around, slammed hard, and the grip was gone. He kicked furiously, felt the other fall away—surprisingly light—and he was free, crawling, stumbling out of the mouth of the cave, up the slope the rest of the way, until he was out of the crater, and he stood, swaying, looking over a landscape of dark hills and a featureless plain. In the distance, in every direction, there was a glowing barrier. The horizon burned, as if with a multiple sunrise that never came in this timeless half-world.

He was too weak to go on. He sat down where he was, trembling, his shirt in tatters, his bleeding back exposed to the frigid air. The cold sank into his lungs. It was hard to breathe. He sat there gasping.

He was safe here. He knew the madman couldn’t follow. It was so cold. He thought of returning to the cave, retrieving what was left of his jacket.

No, he realized. He wasn’t thinking right. He couldn’t go there again.

He tried to understand what the madman had told him. He didn’t know what was true, what was happening. He tried to get up, but fell forward and lay face down. He wondered: would he turn out like the old man, like Etash Wesa, consumed by his vision? The fear of this drove him on. He tried to get up again, crawled a little ways, and lay still. He felt pebbles and sand against his face, the blood drying on his wounds, the cold. In his delirium, spirits came to him like tall, thin, wavering flames. He rolled onto his side and looked up at them. Only their faces were distinct, like wrinkled, intricately-lined masks of old age and death, their eyes burning with holy fire. Only one of them spoke, but all mouthed the words.

“He shall join us soon. His vision has ended, like the others.”

A wind blew through the valley, numbing Tamliade, carrying the spirits away.

He slept, resigned to his end. He was like a taper, cast into the darkness, into the night, flickering, dying.

When he slept, he did not dream. Here, where the ashes of dreams settled, it was not possible to dream further.

* * * *

When he awoke, a hooded figure sat on a stone with a glowing skull in his lap. Tamliade saw every detail clearly, as if he were already close to death and his senses were changing into those of a ghost.

Veined, wrinkled hands held the skull, the hands of an old man. The skull itself was almost translucent. It glowed like a paper lantern. There were six holes drilled in it, forming a line across the top.

“Behold,” the hooded one said in a gentle voice, a filled with contented calm. “I have found the treasure I sought in my dreams. It was here all along, within my own skull. My spirit ventured even to this bare and barren place, but I had it with me the while. I yearned for it. I could not perceive it, until now. Listen, stranger, and know the peace that does not end.”

Curiously unafraid, Tamliade sat up, and waited.

The hooded one raised the skull to unseen lips and blew through one of the holes, covering and uncovering the rest with his fingers. The eye sockets lit up, and the skull sang, and the sound was more than music. Tamliade had developed a new sense, a hearing beyond hearing, and his very self was overwhelmed with something so intensely beautiful that time came to a stop for him, and he was suspended like an insect in amber in one ecstatic now. The skull sang in something other than words, and his hurts no longer bothered him. He did not feel the cold, or hunger, or exhaustion. The terrors he had known melted away, and all the sorrows and memories of sorrows were like a fading dream, almost gone now that he had, for the first time in his life, truly awoken. The skull sang, and it seemed he had always been here on this rock-strewn ridge by the lip of the crater. He basked in the glory of the song like a planet beneath the sun.

Once more spirits gathered around him, settling like mist. He could see them clearly, men and children of all races and nationalities, some familiar, some strange, some clad in outlandish costumes, some not men at all, but sexless, naked, their bodies covered with golden fur and terminating into serpent form below the waist.

He saw joy on the faces of all of them, and he felt that joy himself. There was one among them in the flesh, a man of indeterminate age with skin and scraggly hair, filthy, clad only in a loincloth. He was little more than an animate skeleton. His joints were raw and bleeding. But his look was one of absolute exaltation. Tamliade knew that this one would soon lay aside his useless body, as he himself would, and remain here forever, in the place all dreams, all quests, ended.

* * * *

It was only very slowly that he realized that the song was diminishing, and more slowly still that he could tell that he was walking down a gentle slope, led by someone. Passively, still filled with the song, he followed, until the land leveled out into a plain of mud and occasional boulders. On the horizon, fires burned, no nearer than before, no farther away.

His senses concentrated on one thing at a time: was walking; his shoulders hurt where he had been burned; something heavy pressed on his shoulders; a musty-smelling coat was draped around him, reaching down to his ankles, large enough for two of him.

It seemed forever as he sat, as the other sat beside him and proceeded to dig mud out of her ears with her little fingers, shaking her head as she did so.

The one who had led him away was a girl about his own age. Her face was oval and pale, her hair dark and tied back. She wore what must have once been a brightly-patterned dress, now ragged and filthy. One white knee showed through a tear in it. Her feet were bare and caked with mud.

As he looked at her, it seemed she was the only person he had ever known, the only one besides himself who had ever existed. It seemed that he loved her intensely, and that she was very beautiful.

After she had cleared her ears, she grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him.

“Wake up! Say something! What’s your name?”

She held him where he had been burned. He cried out and drew back. She let go. The pain brought him more into himself. His life was coming back to him. His name was just beyond reach. He could almost say it.

She put her arm around him and helped him to his feet. He winced from the pressure of the wounds on his back. He stood, dazed, swaying.

“Here,” she said. “Let me help you.” She got the coat off. He trembled in the cold, doubled over, but she straightened him up again, worked his arms into the coat sleeves, then arranged them so he hugged himself gently, holding the coat shut, his fingertips barely sticking out of the ends of the sleeves. She led him by one arm. “Come on. Walk. I’ll tell you about myself first. Then you tell me who you are.”

So they walked toward the burning horizon, and she told him that her name was Azrethemne, that she was a boatman’s daughter; from the southern reaches of the Endless River, near Zabortash. She wasn’t from any country. She was born on the river. He was very tired. He wanted to lie down, but still she led him, and still she spoke. In her earliest childhood strange dreams had come to her, and she had sensed a vast and strange world right at the edge of her perceptions. She had heard the whispered words of the Goddess as they drifted like ashes in the darkness. She fell into fits of vision. Her parents thought her mad. They commanded her to stop, and beat her when she did not. The other girls laughed at first. Then they shunned her. Then her mother grew more and more afraid.

“It was like that with me,” said Tamliade.

Her family ferried up and down the river, taking cargo and passengers. When there were rich passengers and extra coins to be had, she would dance for them and shake her tambourine, or play upon the flute. Once, while she danced, and the boat drifted lazily on a broad expanse of the river, the sun began to dance too. It came toward her across the water, its face dimmed to a bronze mask with rays around the rim and a face in the center, worn by one in a long, scarlet robe, dancing. Then a voice spoke to her, telling of this dark place to which she would journey, of the one she would rescue, and of a further journey. For this purpose she had been born into the world. To this, her dreams led.

“I saw the masked one clearly,” said Tamliade.

But her father was a greedy, clinging man, a failed magician who could only do a few tricks, for all he claimed to be as great as a Zabortashi magus.

“I knew a successful magician,” said Tamliade, “No, I think, two.”

Her father would not let her follow her visions.

He commanded her to foretell the future, to tell the fortunes of rich passengers who paid him. When she could not, again he beat her. Then he somehow became convinced that he was the one who had the dreams, but that she had stolen them from him, that he was the one around which the storm of divinity gathered, in whom holy fire raged. In truth he had never had a dream in his life, even a simple one, like most people have. He was dead to dreaming. Still, he was sure to be the one who would rise into the heavens, breathe new life into the sun, and shape the moon with his hands. Or so he said. At first people laughed at these delusions. Then they were afraid. All the while her visions came more intensely. Spirits gathered around her and shrieked things she could not understand. The dreams filled her. She was losing herself. Then one day her father made her drink a draught that made her dream all the more. He performed a grotesque blasphemy of a rite he had only half learned, much less understood, called
psadeu-ma
, enabling him to share her dreams. And he clung to her, wrestling with her as she writhed on the deck of the boat.

When she fell out of the world, he came with her.

Soon he was transformed horribly. She fled from him. Ever since, he dwelt in a cave, waylaying newcomers, convinced they were all thieves come to steal his dream.

“I think I met him,” said Tamliade.

She made to embrace him, but paused, then took his hands in hers. They stared into each other’s eyes, and wept, and there passed between them such an understanding that Tamliade knew that he had finally found someone like himself, who understood, whom he could understand. He knew that he loved Azrethemne, that the feeling was real, not just something that rose out of his delirium. More than anything else he wanted to help her, to spare her some of the suffering he had gone through.

He tried to sort things out in his mind. He was still being directed toward some end. If he was to be the one who was to come after rhe Goddess, he would raise Azrethemne into the sky with him, to be his consort. He would not be alone again, even as a god. If that was to happen. Somehow, now, he didn’t think so.

He wanted to know why things had turned out this way. But an old slave had told him once:
There is no why
. Things merely happen. Either accept them or don’t. It makes no difference.

Now that he had found Azrethemne, he was almost content to accept everything. But he knew he had not seen the end yet. The masked one had told her she was created for some specific task. The masked one was a sending, a manifestation of Etash Wesa. When he considered that, he was again afraid, both for himself and for Azrethemne.

First, he told her his name, which had returned, and what he could recall of his life. As he spoke, memories came like a torrent. He told her what he could, bit by bit, sometimes out of sequence. He hoped she could make sense out of it all.

Again, the two of them wept. He knew that she understood.

* * * *

Once, after they had paused to rest on a boulder, Azrethemne staggered when she stood up again. Tamliade steadied her. He could tell she was very weak. How long had it been since she had eaten? She had not gone the way of her father. How long had it taken for her father to get into his present state? He asked her. She had no idea. There was no way to measure time in this changeless land. Perhaps he had truly been transformed in a few days. Perhaps time moved at a different pace for him. She didn’t want to talk about it.

So they marched on, across the nearly featureless plain. The ridge, the crater, the lake where he had emerged were all behind them now, lost in the darkness. They stopped and rested many times. Sometimes they slept, even in the mud where there were no boulders. They would lie still, both of them wrapped in his coat. Getting up again was harder each time. His body seemed heavy. He had no strength at all. Oddly, the actual pangs of hunger had long since ceased to trouble him.

Once Azrethemne fainted, and he held her up. They stood, embracing, facing the burning horizon. Her eyes were closed.

She mumbled something unintelligible.

“Is there any way
out
of here?” he asked, hardly expecting an answer.

She opened her eyes, stared for a while, and spoke slowly. “I think…in all the dreams I had of you, we walked this way. The dreams ended here…we were walking. If there is any way, this must be it. We couldn’t just stay where we were.”