Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder from the End of Time (5 page)

Thus I feared every sound, every movement, every change in the direction of the wind, lest these be enough to unmake me. All the confidence I had gained in the years of my life ran away like water. I was nothing. An illusion, even to
myself
. A speck of dust drifting between the years.

I wept like a child abandoned in the cold and the dark.

And I argued: can an illusion weep? Can its tears make a blanket wet? But then, how could I, with the senses of a dadar, know the blanket to be real, or the wagon, or the tears?

I looked up front and saw only the horse nodding as it walked, and Tamda huddled at the reins. I did not speak to her, nor did she turn to speak to me. I think she was nearly as afraid as was I.

And I argued: But I have sired two sons. Two? One died when the cold of winter settled into him and spring did not drive it forth, but even in death he was real. He did not vanish like a burst bubble. And the other—he lives yet. Just this year he was called by a voice within him to journey south to the holy city of Ai Hanlo. I walked with him a long way, then wept when he passed from sight around a bend in the forest path. Does this not make me a man?

I was back to weeping. All roads of thought seemed to lead there.

I looked up again and saw that the sky was beginning to darken.

“Stop,” I said to Tamda, and she reined the horse. She was trembling as we made camp. We went through the motions of settling down to supper, but suddenly she was in my arms and sobbing.

“Please…don’t go away. Don’t leave me. I’m too old to learn to be without you.”

I was sobbing too. “I love you. Does that not make me a man? How can I prove it? Can a shadow feel such a thing?”

“I don’t know. What is going on? Are we both mad?”

“No, it isn’t that. I’m sure.”

“I wish it were. To be mad is to be filled with passion, and at least that’s real.”

Although both of us were tired and hungry, we made love there on the ground as the stars came out. But even as I did I was haunted by the thought that a shadow may make a shadow’s love and know nothing better.

Later, it was Tamda who put into words what I was groping for. She gave me a plan for action.

“You must find this wizard whose dadar you are,” she said, “and kill him. Then you’ll be free. You won’t fade away. I’m sure of it. We must go to him when he summons you.” She took a sheathed knife and put it inside my shirt. “When the time comes, surprise him.”

Then I got up and fetched my folio of drawing paper. I sat down beside her and paged through the book. I stopped to stare at the image of the frog king. I couldn’t help but admire the artistry. It was good work. When I wasn’t practicing my more esoteric skill, I simply drew. Sometimes I sold the pictures in towns we passed through. Sometimes I even sold the ones I’d made while healing, after the spirits were dispersed and we didn’t need them anymore.

I began to draw. I closed my eyes and let my hand drift. It didn’t seem to want to make any marks. I felt my hand slide along the page, the charcoal only touching paper seven—eight?—nine times?

Then I opened my eyes and saw that I’d made a fair outline of the Autumn Hunter, which vanishes from the southern sky as the year ends.

“We travel south,” I said.

* * * *

When first I looked over the plain by day, I thought of the fish from the deep ocean crags—now bursting out of the water altogether, into the air. As far as I could see, green and brown grasses rippled beneath the sun. Here and there stood a scrubby tree. A herd of antelopes grazed far away. Once we passed quite near to a green-scaled thing walking upright on thin legs, fluttering useless wings in annoyance at our presence. It stood twice as tall as a man, but looked harmless, even comical. I had heard of such creatures, half-shaped, still forming. They are said to emerge whenever one age ends and another begins. I had heard they were commoner in the south, as if the strangeness radiated from the holy city of Ai Hanlo, where the actual bones of the Goddess lay.

The journey was comforting. I relished every new experience more than I had any since I was a boy. But then the melancholy thought arose that it was only because I was about to lose these things, all sensations, all perception, even my very self, that they seemed more rare and exquisite.

Tamda slept in the back of the wagon while I drove. Horses are supposed to be able to detect supernatural creatures pretending to be men, but ours behaved normally for me.

The plain was divided by a winding silver line, which I knew to be the Endless River. It was said to engirdle the world. My son said he would follow it on the way to the holy city. I stopped by the bank to water the horse and to bathe. Tamda awoke and prepared a soup with river water. Later, I took up pen and paper and began to draw.

She watched me intently.

“Is it a message from our enemy?”

It wasn’t. A bird bobbing on a reed had caught my fancy, and I made a picture of it. It was a charming little sketch, the sort some rich lady would pay well for.

Later, in a town called Toradesh, by a bend in the river, a man came to us, begging that we rid his father of the spirit which possessed him. There were many people around, and I could not refuse. Tamda and I were shown into a basement room, where an old man was kept tied to a bed. His eyes were wide with his madness. He did not blink. There was foam at the corners of his mouth. He stank of filth.

The picture I drew was of a long flight of stairs, winding down into the darkness. Once I had departed from my body, I was on those sodden, wooden stairs, descending into a region of dampness and decay. At the bottom I waded knee-deep in mud until I came to a slime-covered door. I pulled on an iron ring to open it, but the wood was so soft that the metal came away in my hand. I kicked the hole thus begun until it was big enough for me to wriggle through.

On the other side something massive and hunched over, dark with glowing eyes, sat nearly buried in the muck.

“Begone!” I said. “I command you, leave this place. Be vomited up and leave this man.”

The thing turned to me and laughed. Its voice was that of a child, but hideous, as if the child had never grown up, but lost all innocence and wallowed in cruelty for a thousand years.

“Gladly would I leave,
dadar
, for the soul of this man is rotten and there is not much left of it. But you have no soul, so where would I go?”

“If I have no soul, what is this standing before you?”

“It is the dadar of a dadar, the image of an image, the rippling of water made by another wave.
Dadar
, Etash Wesa made you, and sends you as a present to his brother, Emdo Wesa. There is enmity between them, which you shall consummate. More than that you need not know. Your actions are his, your thoughts his. From now on, he shall guide you.”

In the blinking of an eye I was back in the basement room, and the old man was mad as ever. Tamda let out a startled cry. She had not called me. The townspeople scowled and muttered something about “theatrical fake.” Tamda tried to calm them. We had failed, she told them, and thus would demand no payment. We left the town at once. It may have only been the subtle and remote workings of Etash Wesa, directing my fate, which prevented us from being smeared with dung and driven out with rods. Someone mentioned that as the traditional punishment for frauds.

* * * *

I was drifting. Sometimes in a dream I would see a hill or a bend in the road or men poling a raft along the river. Sometimes I would draw pictures of these things or awaken to find that I had drawn them. Especially in these cases, when the image was firmly in my mind, I could be sure that sooner or later I would behold those things while waking. I drove the wagon when I could, letting instinct which I knew to be the instructions of my maker be my guide.

I didn’t have any doubt now that I truly was a dadar, a thing like dust carried in the wind. I was going to confront Emdo Wesa. Then what? Would some other secret of my nature be revealed?

Once I fancied that in the presence of Emdo Wesa I would explode into flame, consuming both of us. For this purpose alone I had been created. The rest was random happenstance.

Tamda said little as the miles went by. She knew she was losing me. Sometimes when she did speak she mentioned things I could not recall at all, as if I were slipping away from myself, becoming two, real and unreal, a reflection again reflected.

* * * *

I awoke in the middle of the day, the reins at my feet. The horse had wandered to the side of the road to graze, pulling the wagon askew. How had I gotten there? I didn’t remember any morning. Last I remembered, we were travelling nearly into the sunset. Tamda was asleep in the back.

I had a vision of a man in an iridescent robe, bent over a steaming pot. I could not see his face. His back was toward me. He was missing the last three fingers of his right hand. With thumb and forefinger only he reached into the pot, immersing his arm all the way to the shoulder—and yet the pot wasn’t a third that deep—and as he did there was a scratching inside my chest, as if a huge spider within me began to stir. I gagged. It was coming up my throat, into my mouth.

Then it retreated back inside me and there was a sudden, intense pain. It had wrapped its legs around my heart, and was squeezing, until blood rushed to my temples and my head and chest were about to—

* * * *

I awoke with a scream. A flock of startled birds rose all around me, wheeling in the twilight of early dawn.

I was sitting by a campfire in the middle of the grassland. There was no sign of Tamda or the wagon.

Flames crackled. There was no other sound except that of the birds. I let out a grunt of surprise.

“What’s the matter? Don’t you know where you are?”

I looked up, regarding the speaker, saying nothing. He stood opposite me, a spear with a rabbit impaled on it in his gloved hands. He had a long beard, black hair streaked with grey, and he wore a long robe alternately striped blue and red. For an instant I feared he was the man from my vision, but by the way his hands worked, spitting the rabbit over the fire, I was sure he had all his fingers. I guessed him to be slightly younger than myself, and by his speech, a foreigner. He seemed to take my presence for granted, as if we had met before this instant. Carefully, trying not to reveal the gaps in my memory, I got him to tell me what I wanted to know.

“You may have heard of my country,” he said. “Here in the north the people say the air is so thick in Zabortash that men carry it around in buckets, into which they dunk their heads when they want to breathe. They blame our foul dispositions on this. But these things are slanderous lies. Am I not a man, like any other?” He smiled when he spoke, and I felt sure he was deliberately mocking me. This was a new terror, but I forced myself to remain calm. I allowed that he seemed a man, like any other.

“Now you, on the other hand,” he went on, “seem strange. Last night when you came upon my humble camp, you were like one walking in his sleep. ‘Who are you?’ you asked, and I said ‘I am Kabor Asha,’ but a few minutes later you asked again, and again I answered, and it seemed that your mind wandered even farther than your body did. Most strange.”

He offered me some of the rabbit. When we were done eating, he noticed that I was watching him as he wiped his gloves clean, without removing them.

“You are wondering why I don’t take them off and wash them, of course. I can’t, you see, because I am not alone. In my country no magician bares his hands in public. It’s obscene.”

“You are…a magician?”

“That’s another rumor they have here in the north, that everyone in Zabortash is a magician. It’s not true, but they are so numerous that there is no work for many. That is why I wander, you see, to practice my art.”

And again I wondered if he were mocking me, but I made no sign. An idea came to me. Another magician could help me against my enemy. At the very least, it would complicate Etash Wesa’s plans. So words poured out of me in a torrent. I was well into my story before I realized what I was doing. Then there was nothing to do but finish. I told him all.

“I know of Emdo Wesa,” he said when I had finished. “I can take you to him. Then the whole unpleasant business will be over and you’ll be free.”

“Wait! What business? What am I supposed to do? Who are you? How do you know—?”

Before I could do anything he stood over me. He had opened his robe. Beneath he wore some sort of armor. The scales glittered blue and black, close against his skin. I had a sudden fear that it wasn’t armor at all, that he was some kind of reptile—

The cloak closed over me, covering my head as he knelt to embrace me, hugging me to his chest.

His flesh was cold and hard as iron. I couldn’t feel any heart beating.

“Help! Wait! Where is my wife? What have you done—?”

“You didn’t tell me you had a wife,” he said as he pushed me over backwards and tumbled onto me.

The ground did not catch us. We were falling off a precipice, tumbling over and over in the air, the wind roaring by us, for a long time. I screamed and struggled, and then all the strength went out of me and I hung limp. He straightened out from our hunched position and stopped somersaulting. I could see nothing but darkness beneath his cloak, but somehow I had the impression that he bore me in his arms like a bird of prey carrying off a fish.