Three Moments of an Explosion (16 page)

Maybe they’d say, “Was he unhappy?” I talk about old sadnesses sometimes—no matter how often you say to yourself, “No, this is yours, keep this, they needn’t know, no one cares about your miseries,” it’s hard to say nothing. So some of them might say, “He had a child once and the child’s gone.” They might say, “He carried something with him, poor slave.”

They’ll talk about how a man was taken when he was very young and had a tiny baby and a wife, when everything was starting. Taken from a place that called itself a city so it could have a god, and that its little god was taken with him, it as a hostage, he as a slave.

They’d have to report to the city that the jailer was dead—I don’t like that word any more than you, but it’s what they call me, when they don’t call me slave. They’d have to wait here and perform my duties until a replacement was sent.

Oh, you should hope that doesn’t happen! I can’t help thinking of those rough young men polishing you, or burning your incense. Oh, woeful! I can’t help laughing.

You don’t need to look at me like that. I’ve no intention of walking out into the dirt, no matter that I’m tired.

You are kind. I see it in the cast of your eye. I see how wistful you are when you watch the sky. Is that a weapon you hold, or a crook to snag animals? Is it a pole to feel the depth of a stream?

There’s lemon-peel wrapped around the wood. It may spit, but I hope you like it.

Goodnight, god.

I could take weapons from the armory, but what would I do? There’s no getting past the soldiers. And they’re my countrymen now, I suppose.

Officers come sometimes, from the city. And priests and oracles. Not very often, but when they have new hostages to jail, or sometimes to mark a ceremony or anniversary. They all sing, they go,
luh lah, cayya luh lah,
and so on. I could have learned the tune a long time ago, it’s almost always the same song. I choose not to learn it. I’m not called on to sing. It amuses me to watch the soldiers rumbling away.

Once a high priestess and priest came and sang a different song. It was hot, for all the clouds and the storms. I was nearly as wet as them, even stuck under this roof, I was gushing with sweat as I followed them. They were old, older then than I am now, and he was bruised and had scabs on his arms and legs and she breathed hard, but they came quickly up the stone stairs to the captain.

They talked in the armory. I brought them wine and moved slowly so I could listen. The holies were thoughtful and grim. The priestess kept her eyes on the storm.

“We’ll get them,” she said.

“They took all of them?” the captain said. She said nothing so the priest hesitated and nodded.

“They fight well,” he said.

We were at war again. A small war against a fading port. Our battalions had stormed down the river and along the coast. But our enemies had sent their own men, in disguise, into our city. They killed the guards and godnapped our gods.

“Is that why all this shit?” the captain said, pointing out of the window at the hot rain. The old priest rubbed his eyes and hit the table with his fist. The priestess bared her teeth.

Was I alarmed? I don’t think any more than a little. Our gods are well-guarded, though, our soldiers well-trained, our city fortified. I was surprised anyone had been able to take them.

Mostly I was curious. What would happen? All of them? The Queen of the Gods, the Great Farmer, the Clearer of Filth, the Soldier with the Whip, the Moon? They were
all
gone? That had to be bad. The Spirit of the City was gone? Without them, how could our soldiers fight? But they must fight, I thought. Would they be able to get our gods free? Would they negotiate? Pay ransom?

“Bastards,” the priestess said. “Bastards and sons of bastards.” She sang a song I hadn’t heard before and haven’t heard since.

The rain didn’t stop for twenty days. It ruined the crops. It sent a farmhouse sliding down the slope of the hill, taking the whole family with it but for a baby who was left squalling under a tree where her cot wedged.

I didn’t see that: it was on the side where there are no windows. I heard the soldiers talking about it before they left for war. They checked their spears and their armor. They were relieved by an untrained group who didn’t know what they were doing and made a terrible mess. The wood they gathered was green and too young to burn.

Then the captain of the relief after
that
told me about working in our city’s temple just before coming here, about how proud he’d been to serve in the presence of our gods. So I learned we had them back. I don’t know what our city, where I’ve never been, did to retrieve them.

The old priest came back once. At the end of that year it was he who came to wish winter away and sing the usual song to the soldiers who stood shivering in the courtyard. I stood at the corner of the window in the lowest of the cells and watched them.

The priest was nodding as he sang. I remembered his anger. I remembered when his companion said, “Bastards,” and I realized I didn’t know if she meant the godnappers, or the gods who’d let themselves be taken, who’d let everyone down.

Here: you have a smudge on your chin. There. And let me turn you so the sun isn’t in your eyes.

I’m sorry I’m not very talkative. I dreamed of my family, of quiet. It was a good dream.

Was that you?

If it had been up to me I’d have taken you to the uppermost cell. I could clear the rubbish out from the alcove—it wouldn’t take long, I should have done it years ago—and put you there.

One of the soldiers here is very young and very boastful. I see him in the courtyard challenging all his comrades to wrestling matches. He’s beaten at least one time in three and whenever he is he blusters and complains and insists that there was cheating and that he won, really. He has no malice and they like him, and I do too. Sometimes I do little things for him. Anyway, he told me the war’s over. This last war.

“There’ll be people coming soon,” he said. “We beat the other city and that’s just that. Just as I was getting ready to fight, too.”

I’m telling you because I’ve seen the sadness in your gold eyes and I don’t think you deserve it, though you’re the god of my city’s enemies. So I want you to know that you’ll be going home soon.

The war’s over, and we won. There’s no shame in it. The city always wins and almost always will. Your people are coming, so they must have paid ransom.

I hope they did.

It’s nothing, you shouldn’t worry at all. Don’t pay me attention.

There was a time we destroyed the hostages.

Everyone agrees it was a terrible thing, so don’t look like that, I beg you. No one would do it now. That war god I told you about? He was broken apart.

It was a bad king who ordered that done, because he was angry with our enemies. Yes, it worked, it crushed them, but it was shameful.

I see you aren’t afraid. You impress me.

I’m alright. You don’t need to worry about me, not at all.

It’s been good to know you. You’ve been an interesting guest. I know: prisoner. But let me consider you my guest? I’ll be sorry when you go.

If I look a little sad, it’s just that there are so many questions I should’ve asked, and I don’t know how long we have now. I want to know about your family and your city. Your people, who worship you. Who are coming.

Why do you look sadder?

You’ll be back with them soon. Don’t you hear me?

You do. Shall I cover your eyes? Will you send bats to tell your worshippers where we are? Where you are, with me to talk to you?

This is the best wood I have. I’ve put all the perfume I have on it, and I’ve shaved it into little slivers as best I could with these old fingers. Aren’t you enjoying it?

You know, it occurred to me—I have to say this quietly, and I shouldn’t say it at all, which is why I have to whisper it into your metal ear—that maybe that soldier heard wrong. Maybe our city lost. Maybe your priests will come and kill the men downstairs and set you free and carry you back to your city on their shoulders in triumph.

I don’t know if they’d consider me your enemy. Don’t worry. I’m not worried.

But it doesn’t seem likely. My city’s armies are stronger, the gods are bigger and heavier and made of more gold.

And even if that is what’s happened, that doesn’t cheer you, does it?

God why are you so sad? There was a little boy whose spirit ate the bones of his neighbors while he slept. Shall I tell you a story? Will you tell me stories? How do you rush across the valleys? When you fly is it with the slow strokes of a heron? Do you scatter farms with blood? How do the hunters of your city honor you?

Oh you must remember the Washing of the Mouth! When one minute this was wood and gold, and then it was you. Do you remember, these eyes for you to see with, these hands, this staff you carry. When the people made you?

I’ll tell you a story, then. This is a story I tell myself from time to time. A tiny city was overrun by soldiers who took its little god and a very young local man to look after it. The two of them were locked away together. The man was sad because he’d seen the soldiers kill his family with swords and now he was without them. The god was sad for godly reasons. Because he’d let his people down and now their crops would rot, and because he knew how they’d come for him and look at him when they got him back and no one had ever asked him to god them.

The man cried and he was angry with the god. “My baby’s dead,” the man said. “My wife is dead. What good are you? Set me free. You’re the only god of my city so you’re the god of everything. Harvests and war and childbirth and everything. And death. I’m too afraid,” the man shouted. There were knives in the armory but he wouldn’t pick them up. “So you do it for me. Don’t I worship you? Do it.”

The god felt the man’s worship, and, farther away, the worship of his other people as they approached with ransom. It gave him no strength, it made him tired.

The man and the god watched from the top window of the tower. “They’re coming,” the man said, “and you’ll have to start doing your job again.”

The man looked into the god’s silver eyes. The god looked into the man’s gray. The man jerked like a toy, grabbed his chest, gasped and wheezed and fell down.

The priests and the soldiers of the victorious city came up the stairs, escorting the defeated holy men and women. They heard a great crash and a scream. They rushed into the top room.

Strewn across the floor were the remains of the captive god. The man had smashed it against the walls. It was all in pieces. Its wood was in splinters. Its metal was twisted. Its gems—and there were never many—were scattered and broken. There in the middle of the rubbish stood the young prisoner. He was slapping the sides of his own body and his head, screaming and staring with wide eyes at his own hands.

The high priest assured his defeated enemies that this hadn’t been his orders, that it was an insane action by this slave. Who was, he reminded them, one of their own countrymen. Nonetheless, the deicide brought a bit of shame to the priest. It had occurred under his city’s authority. Of course their city had to stay under his city’s control, but they could keep their ransom. And the slave, he told them, would be executed.

But when they’d gone, he looked thoughtfully at the young man, who was still gripping his own flesh as if it bewildered him.

“I’m going to have you whipped,” he said. “But what happened? You hate gods now? All of them? Or just your own? For failing you?

“If you ever do anything like that again without instruction,” he said, “I’ll have you killed. But I need a slave who has a bit of scorn for gods. A bit of spite. Just enough not to be cowed by them.”

He had the young man whipped, and then he had him bandaged, and then he told him what his duties would be. And the new slave said to him, “Not spite. Pity.”

Don’t be afraid. Were you sleeping? I’m going to take my hand off your mouth now.

Can you see the moon?

Oh thank you. You’re kind. You are a kind god. Let me kiss your cold face.

Tonight I could hear the soldiers downstairs like snorting calves. I heard them eating and laughing, shuffling in their blankets, and I started to hear them more and more clearly. I heard, I heard the secrets that floors and walls tell in their creaks. When I got up I don’t remember, or how, perhaps I flew as if my feet had little wings, or as if my head was a cloud. But I was by the window and that moon talked back to me in its light.

There are things about the ways bodies see. There are things to be said for how flesh eyes see night and fail to see it. But to look through shadows to where the mountains are like the teeth of fishes again! Everything’s silver like the metal that was upstairs on the floor a long time ago.

The soldiers are moving early. Visitors are coming with tribute for you.

Don’t be sad, god. What you’ve done—it’s such a thing.

Follow my finger towards, yes, there, not a bat but a moth, and its heart rises in its little moth chest because it’s in love. Geese will wake and cry in the day soon, and the lava in the ground will answer them.

I’ll put my arms around you. These are old man’s arms but let me carry you my friend, let’s rise, like when you fly. Yes you’re heavy even though you’re not so very gold but I don’t care how heavy you are. I’m not as heavy as I was once, either, or as strong, but I’ll carry you.

Look. In the mountains are rock machines and rock ships with eyes, and we can see the edges in the seamless stone that separate those things from the rock that holds up the trees.

Your worshippers are coming. I know. Come up with me to the top room.

They’re coming to buy your freedom, you small heavy god. Your city’ll be a colony and your worshippers’ll take you back.

Come in. That’s only wood on the floor. All the scraps of silver they took away, years ago, to make more of their own gods in the city. That wood I leave there for nostalgia. To push it into my fingers.

You never heard my name and I never heard yours. It doesn’t matter at all. Listen to what that angry cloud is telling you, the mutter of all the animals on the crest of the hill.