Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder from the End of Time (7 page)

But then I saw that there were no footsteps in the sand. I walked forward a step, and then there was a single set. I was not wet, so I had not come out of the waves, to have my tracks washed away behind me. No, I had been deposited here, out of the air.

When I pulled up my shirt, I saw the closed wound on my chest, red and swollen, the end of the black thread sticking out of it. It hurt when I breathed deeply.

Everything was true. I could not weep. All the salt water in creation was before me, so what would my tears amount to? Besides, I had expended them all before.

Anyway, a dadar is not a man, and his tears are all illusions.

I prayed to the bones of the Goddess, wherever they might be, and I called on the Bright Powers, repeating the names of them that I knew. But what are the prayers of a dadar?

Then I knelt down and began to draw in the wet sand. My hand moved by itself. Only when I realized what I was doing did I take out my dagger and use it as a stylus.

* * * *

I made a crude outline. It was only a suggestion of a shape, and there were no colors to it, of course, but somehow this act set my senses spreading like smoke over the land and sea. I felt every wave in its rising, every grain of sand pressing against the rest, here concealing a shell, there a stone. I felt the chill of the great depths and the crushing currents beyond the reach of the sun. I heard the long and ancient song of the whales, a fragment of that single, endless poem which the leviathans have called out to one another since the beginning of the world. I seemed to pass out of my body for a while. There was no sensation. Then came a vague sense of direction, as if I were being led by invisible hands to the edge of an abyss.

I became aware of the drawing again. It had grown far more elaborate. My gaze drifted from it to the sky, and I saw that the sky was no longer blue, but a vivid, burning red, and I looked out over the ocean, which was now an ocean of blood, new and thick and spurting from some torn artery as huge as creation.

An object broke the surface near the horizon. It was little more than a speck, but it grew larger as it neared me, moving like a ship even though it had no sail or oarsmen to propel it. It was a rectangular box, rising and falling in the waves of blood, drawing ever nearer the shore, until I could discern quite clearly that it was a coffin of intricate and antique workmanship, embossed in gold and covered with strange hieroglyphs.

My will was not my own. Of its own volition my body rose and waded into the sea, till blood rose above my waist. My mind wanted to flee, but remained there, helpless, until the coffin was within arm’s reach. Then it ceased to rise and fall; but remained perfectly still, oblivious to the movement of the waves around it.

I watched with the terror of inevitability, like some prey cornered by the hunter when there is no further place to run, as the lid silently rose. Within was darkness, not merely an absence of light, but a living, substantial thing.

And slowly this darkness faded, and my new eye penetrated it. I saw Etash Wesa, the enemy against whom I had been sent, the one who had remained on earth for so long, never venturing out of time, the one who had fought so many feuds with so many enemies.

Indeed, by the look of him, Etash Wesa had made many, many dadars. His almost shapeless pink bulk floated inside the coffin, awash in blood, slowly turning over. In the gouged-out bulk which had been a head, there was an opening—I couldn’t call it a mouth—which mewed and babbled and spat blood when it rose above the surface. One stubby remnant of an arm twitched like a useless flipper. And yet, this was no helpless thing. Somehow I knew it was almost infinitely aware and powerful, and that it had grown far, far away from the humanity that spawned it, until it no longer saw or felt as men did. I think it touched my mind and its presence was an intense, exquisite torture beyond the ability of words to describe or the mind to conceive. No one thought can encompass the mind of Etash Wesa.

In its twisted way, with something other than a voice, it seemed to be saying, “My dadar? Where is my dadar? I have been separated from it, and yet I shall find it.”

The greatest terror of all those I had known was that Etash Wesa would indeed find me. I could look on him no more. Somehow I could move again. Screaming, I stumbled onto the beach. I obliterated the drawing. I covered my eyes with my hands. I pounded my head to drive out the memory of what I had seen, but still the red sky looked down on me, the sea of blood washed at my feet, and the thing in the coffin murmured.

I picked up my knife out of the sand. If I lived not another instant it would be preferable to living in the sight of Etash Wesa. What did I care of my promised freedom? What did I care of strange wars between wizards? What did I care, even if the world would be better off rid of Etash Wesa?

I did what I had to. I gouged out the eye Emdo had given me. Had I burst like a bubble then, it would have been a blessed escape.

I heard Emdo’s voice for an instant: “No! Stop!” Then he was gone. The pain was real. The blood ran down my face. I gasped, fell onto the sand, and lay there, panting, bleeding, waiting for the end to come.

I waited for a long time. The sun set and the stars came out. The salt tide went out and came back in again, nudging seaweed against my feet.

The rest is a muddle, a fever dream within a dream within a dream. I think someone found me. I remember walking along a road for a time. There was a bandage over my empty socket. There were a few words, a song, a carriage wheel creaking and rustling through dry leaves. I think I lay for a day beneath the hot sun in the middle of a harvested field. A boy and several dogs came upon me, then ran away in fright when I sat up.

Somehow I came to Ai Hanlo, the real city, where the Guardian rules, where the bones of the Goddess lie in holy splendor at the core of Ai Hanlo Mountain. I remembered slowly—my mind was clouded, my thoughts like pale blossoms drifting to the surface—that my son was here, that he had come to serve the Religion. I went to the square of the mendicants, beneath the wall where the Guardian comes all draped in gold and silver to bless the crowds. I slept with the sick and the lame. Somebody stole my boots. So, barefoot, tattered, stinking, my face a running sore, I went to the gate of the inner city and demanded to see my son. But the soldiers laughed and sent me away. I begged, but they would not call for him.

But what is the begging of a dadar?

I prayed to whatever Forces or Powers there might be, to the remaining wisps of holiness that might linger over the bones of the Goddess, but what good are the prayers of a dadar?

What good? At the very end, when I sat in a doorway, very near to death, a gate opened and a procession of priests came out, and I saw a face I knew, and I pushed through the crowd with the last of my strength. I called my son’s name and he stopped, and recognized me, and wept at my wretchedness. He took me to his rooms and comforted me, and later I told him that above all else I wanted to rejoin Tamda, his mother, my beloved, if she would have me, knowing me to be a dadar, without a soul, an uncertain thing.

“But Father,” my son said, “consider what uncertain things all men are. What is a man, but a bubble in the foam, a speck of dust on the wind? Can any man know that his next breath will not be his last? Can he know how fortune will treat him, even tomorrow? What of the calamities that carry him off, or the diseases, or even that one, faint· breath of damp midnight air which touches his old bones and makes an end to him? Then what? Do we walk a long road till at last we come to the paradise at the top of the world, there to hear forever the blessed music of the Singer? Or do we merely lie in the ground? You think these are strange words, coming from me? But the Goddess is dead, and the last remnants of her holiness quickly drain away. All things are uncertain. The world is uncertain. Will the sun rise tomorrow? Father, you are weeping. How can a mere projection, an empty thing like a skin filled with wind—how can such a thing weep? It may deceive itself, but not others. I see your tears. I know that you are more than a sudden, random, fleeting shape, as much as any man is. Yes, a man. If you were not always a man, I think you have become one over the years through your living and your love.”

Which brings me back to weeping.

When at last I was able to travel from Ai Hanlo, my son went with me. We followed the way Tamda’s wagon was said to have gone, asking after her in every town. She made a few coins singing, people said, or selling sketches or doing sleight of hand. She looked thin and worn, they said.

At last we found her at a crossroads. It had to be more than just chance. She leapt down from the wagon and ran to me. Again we all three wept.

Later she said to me, “We are always uncertain. If you fade away, so shall I, when we are old. It may be very sudden. How are you unlike any man in this? Stay with me. Let the days pass one at a time, and live them one at a time. You can love. How are you unlike any man in this?”

Which brings me back to weeping.

THE DIMINISHING MAN

Regard the city as it blankets the whole of Ai Hanlo Mountain, that axis on which the world turns in this time of darkness and transition. From the heart of the mountain the fading power of the Goddess still flows in a trickle.

In holiness hear this.

In the time of the death of the Goddess hear this.

Blessed prince of cities, hear this.

Regard Ai Hanlo, The City, where dwells the Guardian of the Bones of the Goddess. From the summit, from a skylight in the golden dome of the palace of the Guardian, the signs are first seen, and the seasons, and the days, and the years.

It is said that from that vantage point the Guardian observed the life of the magician Emdo Wesa, and was troubled by it, but later approved.

Such things are said. Such things are rumors. Who can know what the truth is, in the time of the death of the Goddess, when even the Guardian is troubled?

In holiness hear this. In the end it comes to holiness.

Now the tale is of Emdo Wesa.

I.

It was in Ai Hanlo that Emdo Wesa dwelt, both in an empty city by himself, in a gray world of another plane, dusty and still, and in the city of jostling crowds, with his days filled with the cries of peddlers, the rumble of carts on the cobbled streets, the shouting of children, and the drawn-out, dirge-like chanting of pilgrims as they made their way in long lines up the steep side of the mountain to the inner city where once a day the Guardian would come forth to bless them, and touch the sick with a reliquary containing a fragment of a bone of the Goddess.

Emdo Wesa lived in two places at once because he was both a mighty magician and a wretched old man. Both aspects were masks, concealing one another. He was tall. He was thin. His pointed beard had been black, but was graying. One of his eyes was gone, the socket covered with a leather patch. He wore the long blue-and-red-striped robe, the cylindrical cap, and the heavy boots of a wandering magician of Zabortash, and he would never remove his gloves in public, as no Zaborman would, thinking the showing of hands obscene. But he was no common conjurer. Nor was he any common old man. He lived in a wide, heavy, covered wagon of Heshite make, which was kept parked in a particularly stinking alley. When he needed to go somewhere, so the urchins said, he would carve the shapes of horses out of the air with a special knife, one at noon, the other at midnight. One horse was yellow-white in color, the other inky black. You could tell when he was preparing for a journey, because he would have one horse standing around for twelve hours before it was time to carve the other.

He made love potions and broths to drive out the ague. He spoke to the stars on behalf of those who gave him a coin. He sold dried human tongues which he had gotten from wrestling from sundown to dawn with revived corpses. At the last instant, each corpse would try to give him the kiss of death, thrusting its tongue into his mouth, and he would bite it off. These tongues made talismans of awesome potency.

For all this, Emdo Wesa had a harried look about him, like that of a man who fears his death the next instant, the next hour, the next day, but does not know which it will be. He once let slip that he had a brother who was a monster, who hated him, and waxed stronger inexorably.

* * * *

One evening, while reading in the back of his wagon by the light of an oil lamp, the smoke of which further discolored the wagon’s canopy, Emdo Wesa fell asleep over the book and had a vision.

He found himself standing on a plain of smooth, cold, black glass before a city made of flickering panes of light. Within he saw the ghosts of the builders, skeletons glowing faintly, drifting up and down like fish in a still pond. He walked toward the place. The Sun rose. The Sun set. Three days seemed to pass, and still, with no way to measure his progress on the featureless plain, the city seemed no nearer.

Then he sat down, waiting until he was wholly calm, until his body no longer felt the frigid glass beneath him, and he performed the rite of
psadeu-ma
, which he had learned as a boy, when studying to be a priest of the Guardian of the Bones, before magic beguiled him. He opened his soul, not to feel the lingering echo of the death of the Goddess, as only the holiest of men can do, but to be touched by the city.

And yet, as he did, he felt the power of the Goddess more clearly than he ever had before. It ran through his body like a fever. It shook him like a rag in the wind, so awesome, so vast it was, even as it faded, even in death.