Smoke in the Glass

by Chris Humphreys

  ‘Brother …’

  ‘Go.’ Bjorn’s eyes gleamed within the bear’s while his voice was clear in Luck’s head. ‘If your visions are true, you have to go and find a way to save us. And I can give you the time to get away.’ They heard a crack of stick on the path. People were coming through the birches. ‘Besides, brother, you are a terrible fighter as a man, and I suspect it will be the same for you as a bear. You will only get in my way.’

  ‘It is the truth. So I go.’

  He shoved the bear’s left foot through the dragging rope loop of the boat. ‘Hear me though, brother. Hold them for a while. Lead them astray. But don’t get taken again. Your pretty head may only be filled with bear shit and vanity but it is still best upon your shoulders.’ He bent to the boat, picked up his brother’s weapon in his mouth, dropped it into a bush. ‘And with what I’ve learned, we are going to need Bjorn’s swift sword in what is to come.’

  If a bear could grin, it did so now. ‘I love you too, little brother god. Now go!’

  Luck obeyed. Entered one stand of trees just as the mortals came from another. He didn’t see them – but he heard their cries of terror, as a bear stood on hind legs before them, roared then ran at them. They, of course, would only have heard the bear. It was Bjorn’s voice though that followed Luck up the slope.

  ‘Come, jackals. I have your deaths right here.’

  As roars merged into screams, Luck set his bear legs to the mountain and, dragging the boat, began to climb.

  9

  The Bridge

  Every third night in the City of Women, a half-dozen would gather in Besema’s room to card and spin wool, knit, weave. The llamas on the terrace beside the house supplied some and more was brought by guards from the countryside around. Muna, in charge of the city, allowed this gathering when she forbade most others because she liked what resulted: clothes, blankets, tapestries, all to be traded across the realm for the luxuries she craved that the city itself did not produce – jewellery, wines, sugared sweetmeats. Most profit went to please her and her intimates; but Besema did not resent this because she got what she most wanted: to be left alone to gather with friends, to feast and laugh the night away.

  Atisha was amazed at the variety of food that each woman brought – spicy stews, smoked fish, dried fruits softened in tangy sauces. Of the five guests on each of these nights, three were always new while two always the same, Besema’s closest, oldest friends, Yutil and Norvara. And they, in addition to rich dishes, always brought skins filled with distillations of fruit, corn, or cactus. The more of these that were consumed, the noisier the room got, filling with memory, with laughter, songs.

  On her first night Atisha heard tales of men and their clumsy love-making that made her blush, even though she considered herself worldly in such matters. She also learned that many in the city loved each other in every way it was possible to love – including the three friends. When Yutil was reminiscing about a night they’d had – in details that again made Atisha blush – Besema claimed it was an age ago, and anyway she was too old for all such nonsense now. Norvara had guffawed at that, adding on a loud whisper to Atisha while gesturing at Besema, ‘If Intitepe is the god of love, meet the goddess.’

  Atisha had blushed a third time. She did not have those feelings for women. But perhaps she would learn to. She knew that she would need to feel again the way she’d felt with him. And the idea of any other man touching her …

  At her first celebration, the night after she’d arrived, she’d attempted to keep in the shadows and nurse her babe. She was uncertain as to her status – was she a prisoner, a servant? She’d come forward to clear dishes, to refill gourds. But soon enough she’d been sucked into the celebrations, made to sit, eat. No story was demanded of her, though while the others told theirs she would often glance up to find one of the women, especially one of Besema’s intimates, staring at her. She assumed her host had told them something of her. It was natural, she supposed. Like Besema, they were all older women from different parts of the land, so none would understand what it meant to have been ‘the One’.

  It was on the third such night of celebration, however, eight days after her arrival, that Atisha discovered how wrong she was.

  It began with an argument at night’s end. The other three women had just left and only Besema’s close friends remained. Norvara was from the northern province, Palaga, and still had the height and strength of that land, though the long, thick hair that once must have been as bright as ripened corn was now a coil of spun silver. Atisha had been told that northerners were foul-mouthed and quarrelsome, and Norvara appeared to confirm this, under the influence of all the liquor she’d drunk that night.

  ‘Goat shit!’ she exclaimed loudly. ‘It is called the constellation of the scythe because it looks like a fucking scythe.’

  ‘And what does a Palagan know of scythes?’ Yutil replied. She was a lowlander like Atisha, so also smaller and brown-skinned. She had matched Norvara gourd for gourd – and had reached the stage where if her closest friend had declared there were really three moons, she’d have argued for none. Now she continued, ‘Palagans grow no crops to use a scythe on. Whereas we of the coastal valleys live by them. Is that not so, Atisha?’ Without waiting for a reply, she forged on. ‘The constellation you refer to is called the belt of aztapi. Because on the day when the blue moon is at her greatest height, it girdles her—’

  ‘Girdle this!’ Norvara made a stunningly obscene gesture of inserting something long and large into her mouth, her tongue bulging out one cheek. ‘We may not spend all our lives kneeling in the dirt like you peasants – no insult intended, sweetness,’ she added to Atisha. ‘But we in the mountains are closer to the skies and so see more clearly the—’

  ‘Clearly? When you are face down on a rock every night sleeping off the effects of that urine you call beer? Hah!’ Yutil rose, swayed slightly, then strode to the door. ‘Come, Atisha. Come, Besema. Let us show this Palagan drunkard the truth of the stars.’

  ‘You all go.’ Besema stood and moved to the back of the room, to the door there that opened onto a room where she spent most of her time, that Atisha had yet to see. ‘I have something to show our new friend.’

  The two others turned back. ‘Really?’ Norvara said. ‘She is ready?’

  ‘She is. And we will need her help if we are to—’ She broke off, waved them out. ‘Go. Let Atisha the Sober rule between you over belts and scythes. I will call you when all is prepared.’

  Yutil led the way, Norvara behind. After a glance back to make sure Poum still slept – she did, nested in blankets near the fire, Fant asleep before her – Atisha followed.

  The air was sharp cold, the inhale like an icy dagger, the first out like smoke. But it was pleasant after the aromatic fug of the hut, and Atisha stood for a while breathing, slowly, deeply. It was a clear night, with neither moon too bright, and thus the stars glimmering clear. Another sparkle came from below to their right – lamplight in the window of the hut at the bridge’s far end. Ten of the male guards would be in there around their hearth, three others walking and shivering until their turn at warmth. There were five more guards in the city itself. Eighteen men and close to three hundred women. Atisha had wondered from the beginning if that caused any problems but had been too shy to ask.

  Atisha swiftly found aztapi’s belt and would have ruled in her fellow lowlander’s favour. Truly, the constellation would have made a very poor scythe for any farmer-god. But the argument had moved on by the time she joined the other two. ‘There, I tell you,’ said Norvara, pointing. ‘She showed it to us only last month. Has corn wine destroyed your memory?’

  ‘It must have yours. Or your sight,’ Yutil replied, ‘because you are pointing at an eel, not a snake.’

  ‘Faugh! There is no difference between the two.’

  ‘Again, spoken like a true northerner. Atisha and I could describe s
ix types of eel to you, couldn’t we, child?’ Yutil leaned out over the parapet and spat into the darkness below. ‘Could you even find your own now?’

  ‘Of course. It’s just … it’s … fuck! Where is it?’

  ‘And where the fuck is mine?’

  Both women burst out into laughter. Atisha frowned, not seeing the joke. She felt excluded, the stranger again. So she sought something else – her star, the one that Intitepe had named for her. Found it swiftly, hearing his voice as he told her where to look:

  ‘Remember, my love,’ he’d said. ‘Find the Spider, its left eye, the leg below that. Follow that leg down, past the cluster of seven monkeys? There, the brightest one. You are immortal too now, for you will for ever be remembered … in the skies!’

  She found it, closed her eyes to it – and to halt the tears that threatened to come again. Through all her fury, beyond the anguish of his betrayal, there was a part of her that still could not believe what had happened. That he whom she had loved so much, who she’d been certain – certain! – loved her with an equal passion in return, had cast her away. Six passings of the blue moon before, she’d still been in the paradise she’d found within his arms, gazing upon a world that he shared with her, revealed to her, with the power of his extraordinary mind. Now, where was she? On a freezing terrace in the City of Women, listening to the drunken laughter of two of them. Her eyelids failed to trap her tears.

  ‘What are you crones cackling about?’ Besema said, emerging to join them at the parapet.

  ‘We can’t find our stars,’ Norvara cried. ‘Where’s your eel?’

  ‘Snake,’ Besema said. ‘It is there.’ She pointed and Atisha, following the arm, saw the serpent. ‘Can you still hear him say it?’ Besema continued.

  ‘Could I ever forget?’ laughed Yutil.

  ‘Nor me,’ said Norvara.

  Atisha looked at her. Then at the other two, who, like Besema, also raised their arms and pointed into different sections of the sky. Dread took her, even before they began to speak all together, words that were so familiar.

  ‘There. The brightest one. The one I named for you …’

  ‘Yutil!’

  ‘Norvara!’

  ‘Besema!’

  They cried their names separately, then joined to speak again. Their voices changed, deepened. Became his. ‘You are immortal too now, for you will for ever be remembered … in the skies!’

  Their cries rang out into the night, echoed faintly off the granite cliff faces across the gorge. Died. And in their fading, something died in Atisha too. All longing for the time now past – on the knowledge that Intitepe had said exactly to her what he’d said to these, to countless others. These three had been ‘the One’ as well, and he’d loved them as such. Placed them in the skies, and replaced them in his bed. And in that moment all her tears dried up, and she exchanged all the love she’d felt for hate. She was shocked to discover that the two had only ever been but a single breath apart.

  Besema must have seen it on her face. On her own, mockery passed. ‘Come, little one,’ she said, gently taking Atisha’s arm, ‘I have something that will make you forget everything else. Especially him.’

  Atisha followed the others back into the house. She thought that Besema was going to give her strong liquor, though she knew she’d never found the distraction in it that others did. Yet the older woman reached for no gourd, simply said, ‘Look.’

  She did – and could not make any sense of what she saw; wondered if she had taken too much drink before. She gasped, which woke Fant, who saw in his turn, leapt up, began to bark …

  … at the sphere floating in the middle of the room.

  ‘I call it my Air Moon,’ Besema said, stepping forward, bending close to the sphere, which allowed Atisha to get some sense of its proportions, for it was of a similar shape, though double the size, of the old woman’s head. ‘The skin,’ she continued, tapping that, causing the globe to sway and move away from her, ‘is woven only from the finest hair, the inner hair, of the llama’s coat. I cover the outside with the fibre of the astami grass, also woven. This,’ she tapped what looked like a small wicker herb basket, set below the globe and joined to it by strands of twined reed, ‘contains the power.’

  ‘How … how can it hover like that?’

  ‘Come closer and you’ll see.’ Atisha did, and Besema reached a finger into the basket’s open top. ‘See? It burns in here.’ Atisha leaned over, saw that the basket contained a thin-walled bowl of metal, and within that embers glowed. ‘For years, I watched papyrus, some quite large pieces, rise from my hearth and vanish up the chimney. I always wondered why, yet for the longest time never thought to try to answer myself. Until I fashioned some different shapes, watched how differently they rose.’ She tapped the globe again, spinning it the other way. ‘What I came to realise was that the hot air inside must somehow be lighter than the cooler air around it. Then I thought that if I contained that heat inside a surface, the object must rise through that cooler air.’

  ‘It is … amazing.’ Atisha stretched out a finger and, on Besema’s nod, touched the skin. The sphere spun away and she smiled. ‘A wonderful plaything indeed.’

  ‘It may be more than a plaything, sweetness.’ It was Norvara who spoke, coming forward. ‘It may be a way off this mountain.’

  ‘For a mouse?’

  ‘For a woman perhaps.’ Yutil stepped up, and blew out a long breath that spun the globe again. ‘Besema has been working on a much bigger one. Maybe in a few months we can try it out. Maybe even—’

  The cry was sudden, loud – llamas squealing on the terrace beside the house. ‘Better than guard dogs – I mean no insult, Fant.’ Besema stepped up and grabbed the sphere, as the dog barked again. ‘Someone’s coming who does not care that we know that they are. That’s not good.’ As she spoke she was moving to the back room, whose purpose Atisha now understood. ‘Clear all away. Try to make it look like we were working.’

  They couldn’t do much. The bowls and pots of the celebration were everywhere and llama cries were now joined by the crunch of boots on frosty ground. Poum had woken, to instant tears, so Atisha went and snatched her up just as someone grabbed the door handle outside. Yutil had shot a bolt at the first warning; the door was rattled hard. ‘Open this door!’ a woman called. ‘Open before we break it down!’

  ‘Muna,’ said Besema, returning and closing the door behind her. She looked around, shrugged. ‘Best obey the bitch.’

  Yutil pulled back the bolt, stepped hurriedly away from the door as it flew inwards. Two male guards entered first. ‘Why do you lock the door?’ said Muna, stepping in behind them. ‘Have you something to hide?’ The bangles at her wrists jangled as she swept her fleshy arms around the room. ‘What’s this? A celebration?’ She stooped, ran a finger around a bowl, licked it. ‘Ha! You treat yourselves well, don’t you? I allowed you to meet to work, not to – Pah!’ She’d picked up a gourd, sniffed it, threw it down. Liquid spilled. ‘Well, now you can celebrate this.’ She looked back. ‘Enter and say why you have come.’

  Another man walked into the hut. He was dressed differently from the guards, in the thigh-length red-banded tunic and sandals of God’s Runners. Where Atisha had taken three weeks to reach the City of Women, relays of runners would make it in one. They carried the important news and messages the length of the realm. They carried Intitepe’s commands. Seeing the man, Atisha shuddered.

  The man pulled out a rolled papyrus. It was held together by a wax seal, red and in the shape of a flame. He broke it, raised it to read aloud. ‘Intitepe, God of Fire and the Light, commands this.’ He looked straight at her. ‘That the woman known as Atisha will, with her child, be taken to a secure place and held there till God’s daughter comes. Mother and child will both then be brought back to Toluc, for judgement.’ He rolled up the scroll. ‘He has pronounced and will be obeyed.’

 
The Fire God’s daughter, Atisha thought. Tolucca. She of the raven mask and the obsidian dagger. Who’d sat beside the birthing pool, waiting to take any son born and keep him alive only till he could be given to the lava. Intitepe had spared her and Poum that, to await what he called ‘developments’. It was clear that he’d changed his mind.

  No one protested. There was no point, not with the guards and the runner standing there, hands on their daggers. Yet after Atisha had wrapped Poum up in her carry sling, Besema came and pressed some things on her – a wool blanket, a sealed jar of stewed fruits. Leaning close, she whispered. ‘It will take two weeks before the woman comes. Believe …’ she got out before Muna barked at her. Besema gave Atisha’s hand a final squeeze then let her go.

  That touch, those words and the look in her friend’s eye were the sole comforts Atisha took with her, as she and her baby were led away to prison. Fant, with Besema’s hand in his collar, began to howl.

  Boring, Intitepe thought. How boring it is, putting down rebellions.

  Crouched on the hilltop, he watched as the last of his soldiers marched quietly into the defile below him, before turning back to the plain ahead, and the rebel camp that lay there. It was scarce dawn and these rebels would be as predictable as all their forebears. A few would be in hide tents, most would be sprawled upon the bare ground, drunk on fermented cactus juice and on their petty triumphs – the burning of towns, the rape of women, the killing of tax collectors.

  On a few occasions in the past they’d also been drunk on immortality.

  Like last time, Intitepe thought, and yawned. It happened once every hundred years or so, some boy born in some peasant’s hut who, nonetheless, had a god’s blood in the veins. Hailed as a saviour, there were always some disgruntled people who would acclaim the child – or man, if the immortality had just been discovered – and march to place him on Intitepe’s throne. But it was already occupied, as the child or man would discover as he died, the way all other rivals had, when the lava consumed them. Immortal women were sometimes born too. Though they were not prophesied to kill the god, he didn’t like the idea of other immortals around, and had … accidents arranged for them. The few he deemed truly harmless he let live. Like the Crone of Palaga, who’d died at eighty, been reborn, and lived to one hundred and seventy-seven before her latest relatives, bored with her ceaseless demands, cut her head off.