Endurance (27 page)

Even in those days of my youth, I understood the value of small kindnesses in life.

*   *   *

I awoke in the later hours of the night, to judge by the lowered, glowering moon above the swift-moving clouds. The forced window rattled with the fast, nervous air. The squalls I'd seen the afternoon before had taken their time, but were still on their way. The impending rain rendered seeking the rooftops now an unlikely choice. I felt a bit guilty about appropriating my host's tiny rented room, so I took some time to straighten and clean. I even mended the torn shirt he had set out in his clothespress. Leaving the room better than I had found it, including the silver tael on the washstand, I headed to the cobbles and into the city before the rains that seemed likely to arrive with the dawn.

The baby hungered me, and tugged once more at my incipient nausea, so I ignored the roughening weather to slip around to the bakery near the Textile Bourse for a fresh cardamom roll and some kava. The woman there smiled to see me. I knew I'd risen in their estimation, because this time I was invited to sit in the kitchen and eat while two large, silent men worked the ovens. They were stripped to the waist, and their reddish-gold skins sweated in the heat like the demons of baking. They kept themselves clean with towels and wore long padded gloves to handle the breads.

The woman sat with me a little while once I'd tucked in. “We know you,” she said shyly.

That
was worrisome, but it could mean anything. “You are kind,” I mumbled around a mouthful.

“You called the ox god, and spared the city.” She nodded her head. I looked up at a sudden gap in the gentle noises of baking to see both the men—her brothers?—standing at attention with the butts of their long wooden paddles grounded to the floor. They nodded as well.

“Endurance called himself.” I found myself embarrassed. “It was only my voice that made the prayer.”

That brought a shrug from the woman. She handed me a small fruit with a ribbon tied to it. “Offering. For the god, for you. Our thanks.”

She would not let me pay, either. I ate the cherry—a single one at that, strange offering though it seemed—and tied the stone into the ribbon to slip within my pocket. I bowed, took my leave, and went to find the twin pilgrims. Avoiding any chance of being viewed by prying eyes from within the Textile Bourse was my first step. After that I slipped into the burgeoning morning traffic of the city along with the beginning of the serious rain.

*   *   *

Iso and Osi were unsurprised to see me. So unsurprised, in fact, that they had already laid out a third setting for tea before my arrival.

“A fortune told?” I asked lightly. Their warehouse echoed with the drumming of the storm on the high, flat roof.

“Our rites are thorough,” said Osi.

Iso nodded. “Sometimes common sense is enough. Even for old men such as us.”

Common sense and good finger on the pulse of rumor, I'd bet. Anyone who made it their business to learn their way around the local gods of necessity learned their way around much else of the local life as well. And these two certainly had long practice at both.

“I thank you.” The Eyes of the Hills seemed to crackle inside my shirt, as if their velvet bag were alive. Likewise I fancied the twins' attention drawn toward the hidden gems. Once more my memories of the encounter with Desire loomed large.

One thing at a time. These two had no place in my troubles, but I did not yet know them well enough to trust them with everything that had befallen me. How I wish I'd listened to that thought more carefully at the time.

“Tea first,” Osi said.

Iso: “Then we will speak more of gods.”

So tea we took, amid some very polite and inconsequential talk of local foods and the fall harvest and the inadvisability of eating shellfish that had not been bought off the decks of a boat just in. Always they passed the sentences back and forth between them as if in some private game. I had to strain not to hear them as one man. I knew that would be a mistake.

In time the tea service was wiped clean. They were fastidious in handling what I had used, and avoided my immediate presence with an almost eerie grace that was both fascinating and irritating. Once again ignoring my own inner wisdom, I laid aside my feelings on the matter in the interests of my larger needs. We had taken seats on mats laid in a circle so that we made three even points. I sat watching them as they watched me.

“You have been touched,” said Iso.

Osi added, “The gods follow you as a dog will follow a cat in an alley.”

“I am not bait, nor prey, for them.”

“No,” Iso agreed. “But once a way has been opened from the divine into a human mind, it is easier for the divine to follow a second time.”

“Though far more often,” his brother added, “whatever god opens the way guards his prophet with jealousy.”

“You are most unusual, Mistress Green. You speak with several gods, and for none of them.”

“We know priests who would give all to be touched as you have been.”

“They can have it!” I almost shouted. These two certainly knew how to spark my fears and anger. “This is worse than being swarmed by beggars. You can kick a beggar, or outrun her. No door can be locked firmly enough to deter the entry of a god.”

Iso shook his head gravely. “Though they often manifest as human, and we speak of them so, you would be better served to think of the gods as forces.”

“As you might think of a storm, or an earthquake,” Osi added.

That, I could understand.

Iso continued. “But directed. And with intelligence.”

Osi touched his brother's arm, as if for emphasis. “To call them beggars does not properly describe your experiences, or characterize the nature of the divine.”

“But they
are
beggars,” I protested, realization dawning within me. “The gods demand attention and sacrifice and devotion. If enough people turn away from them, they fade. All the power of a goddess is in her followers.”

Iso leaned close, so that I almost thought for a moment that he might touch me, ritual cleanliness or no. “We have learned much. Wisdom passed down from older times, that was once used like swords in the hands of warring priests.”

“When the titanics fell,” Osi said, “the world was wounded. How could it not be so? Just as when a mother dies the child's heart is stricken, even if that child has grown to be a general of armies.”

His brother picked up the thread again. “This hermetic tradition has prevailed since the time of the titanics. For even now one or another of the oldest, deepest gods may sometimes emerge into the workaday world.”

I almost spoke of my meeting with Desire in the ruins of Marya's temple, but held my tongue in the face of their unfortunate views on women. Instead I offered, “Choybalsan was a new god emergent on the strength of an older power requiring a vessel.”

Osi nodded gravely. “Hear this, one of the greatest secrets, a secret so great that it abides in plain sight for any who wish to pluck at its wisdom. All gods are the same, beneath even their bones.”

Iso: “There are magics and magics in the world. You already know this, in your life. You have told us of petty miracles, finding lily petals in the wake of a great moment.”

His brother continued, “Or the small readings the arbogasters perform in the market for a bent copper tael and a handful of beans. Their price may be mean, but their power is no less to those who scrimp to purchase such seeings.”

“I understand something of these matters,” I protested. “There are layers in all the world. This does not surprise me. How could it, unless I were a fool? There are layers in this city. Layers of class, layers of politics, layers above and below the streets.”

“Do you understand,” Iso asked, “that all those layers are but the same? As if you folded a piece of silk, and looked at each fold separately, but then spread it flat again.”

Osi added, “The gods worshipped in the temples of the city are to the titanics as the avatars of those gods are to their temple masters.”

“Tulpas,” I breathed. “The ghosts below.”

Iso nodded vigorously. “You already know something of this lesson. But even the great titanics themselves are as the ghosts below to the Urges who first made the plate of the world and directed the string of suns in their course across the endless sky.”

“All layers,” his brother said. “The silk folds endlessly ever upon itself.”

As silk did, ringing softly with the voice of thousands of bells. I could see in memory my grandmother's silk flowing down her shoulders, her last voice in this world. Each bell like a little god, planted in the folds of life?

Still, coming from the twins, the words seemed to border on sophistry. Yet at the same time, their description resonated with much of what I had experienced firsthand. “You ask who made the garden in which Father Sunbones and Mother Mooneyes first waked the birds and beasts of this world?” Desire, when She'd manifested to me, had been so
large
. Even a fraction of Her emotions, Her grief and pity, had threatened to batter my soul to shreds. “So you say the gods are all the same at their bones, as with this unfolded sheet of silk. In your conception, there is no difference but that of degree between the Urges and the titanics and the gods of a city and the ghosts that haunt the high graves or the dark sewers.” Like bells of different sizes, ringing together.

“Precisely,” the brothers said in unison. A shared expression of smug triumph passed across their faces. I wondered what point it was they thought they'd scored, beyond sharpening a small facet of my education.

Yet, even though the idea appealed with a symmetry that was pleasing to my mind, and echoed nicely with my own memories, it could not simply be so. Otherwise, what was the
purpose
? That everything turned upon itself, and was the same, again and again?

Osi spoke, as if turning aside my question as yet unasked. “If you comprehend this hierarchy among the gods, and how it is not so much rungs on a ladder as points on the grade of a hill, then you understand the gods and their relationships to power.”

“A ghost, or a weak avatar, survives on his own power,” I said slowly, setting aside the larger question in favor of their example. Now I was thinking of the two ghosts I was personally acquainted with. Both the Factor, whom I knew well, and Erio, whom I barely knew at all, had been mighty persons in their life. In the case of the Factor, his continued presence seemed to have been driven more by strength of purpose than sheer, simple birthright. Or any supposed place in some divine order of the world. I knew nothing of Erio's rule or his life history, but the arrogance of his tomb suggested much.

The twins nodded in time with my thoughts.

Fine, I knew how to follow a lesson. I considered the hierarchy. “An avatar, a strong one at least—” Here I thought of Mother Iron and Skinless. “—survives from energy of place or purpose, usually lent by a god. Or perhaps a modest following of their own. People might offer small sacrifices. While a god, for example, Choybalsan or Blackblood, must have the prayers and pieties of priests and a congregation. But a god writ large enough, a titanic such as Desire, lives off the strength of other gods.” As wolves live off the strength of deer? “Urges would be an expression of the strength of the entire world taken as a whole. Do I have the right of it?”

Osi stirred, but Iso spoke. No look passed between them, but as so often was the case, I felt as though I'd witnessed a shared thought. “A fair summary. In your terms, the worship of men falls at what seems to us the midpoint of the scale. We can glimpse larger forces as we see distant storms on the horizon. We can take smaller ones almost in hand as if they were aspects of the natural world, like morning mist or shells on a beach.”

I tried to imagine taking Mother Iron in hand. Their model of the universe certainly did not account for every possibility. Which was all the more of a pity, as it possessed a certain elegance of form.

Osi: “The titanics are mostly departed. Sundered, shattered, lost to us back in the time when the lands on the plate of the world were first peopled with men and beasts.” His voice slowed, as if he thought carefully to see forward through his words. “Yet you mentioned Desire.”

His interest in the mother-goddess bothered me, though I could not yet say how. “I was raised for a time in the Temple of the Lily Goddess, who so far as I understand these things is a daughter of Desire. She was the first titanic who came to mind.” I reached for another example, from the stories I'd read. “We are all slaves of Her brother Time, for example, but I do not treat with him, or do his bidding.”

Iso quirked a smile. “Every one of us does time's bidding. You are not exempt, Mistress Green.”

“As may be.” I resolved to change the subject, for this conversation had gone far deeper into the seductive trappings of theory and principle than I'd intended. Certainly I would not be discussing Desire's manifestation with these twins. Not until I understood their fascination better. “I am here today to seek very practical advice from you in the matter of Blackblood. Surely he is a splinter of some titanic god, but I could not name his theogenitor. He makes a claim upon the child I carry, a claim that I deny as false. I would deter him and avoid his scrutiny. That would be a great gain for me. Can your hermetic knowledge teach me to protect and shield my child?”

Could it serve to cloak me in divine benison, like my belled silk?

The twins exchanged another glance. This one was long and slow, and I received the impression less of a shared thought than of an entire extended dialogue passed wordless right before me.

Their sheltering warehouse bulked large and silent, and this morning, cold. The rain outside was a harbinger of the increasingly foul winter weather of this city, though autumn was not yet completely fled from the rooftops and gutters and ragged-leaved trees. A storm or two from now and the very air would be worrying at the building's corners like a dog gnawing a bone. Today it was merely a cloak of wet and stolid quiet, tingeing the harbor-scent of the wind and undermining my own hopes.