by M F Sullivan
Maybe it was because a complicated woman knew she was complicated, and had to take better care of herself than a woman who was sane, straight-laced, and harbored no tragic secrets. Had to put on a more alluring front or pay greater attention in areas of self-care: Miki’s makeup-whitened face looked pure as the plumage of the snowy herons and cranes that patterned her shimmering kimono. Even as she yammered at the frenetic pace of a chatty person denied adequate conversation for more than a month, the effect was doll-like. “Dude,” this doll exclaimed, “I’ve been dying here without you! I was driving away from that antique music store—who uses records, anyway, I mean, what?—and Kahlil was up in the front seat and he looked and me and was just, like, ‘Are you crying,’ and I was like, ‘What? No way, stupid, I don’t cry,’ but of course it turned out I was and I cried for, like, twenty minutes, so that Kahlil had to drive for a while, and—”
“Why were you crying?” asked Dominia, to the prostitute’s exasperation.
“Because I was afraid I would never see you again! Idiot.” Falling back upon her own two legs, Miki began to fan herself with the long sleeve of her glorious robe while her two huge eyes rolled toward the ceiling. “If you make me cry again, I’m going to have my servants whip you.”
“We don’t do that,” said one of the Bearers.
“We’re not servants,” said the second.
The third qualified, “Not yours, not yet.”
“Quit spoiling my power fantasy,” shrieked Miki, hands balled into invisible fists while the General laughed. “If you’re going to follow me around like a bunch of baby ducks, just play along!”
“I missed you, too,” said Dominia to the little woman, who regained her grin as if it had never gone. “But I’m happy to see you now, and I’m glad I’m back in time for your—wedding.” Only barely missed that beat.
“Oh, I knew you’d make it! The Lady said the wedding was scheduled based on your arrival, not the other way around. Anyway, you want to walk in the gardens with me? I’m not going to be allowed to walk on unconsecrated ground anymore after the marriage. The next time it happens will be in two thousand years, when the next avatar accepts my body—unless the world ends, in which case, I’ll walk much sooner!”
“You knew what you signed up for with this gig, right?” Dominia thought specifically of Trisha the hotel porter, with a background of Kahlil’s (frankly, valid) concerns about Miki’s retention of self-identity.
With another wave of that vast furisode sleeve, the devotee of the Lady said, “Sure, I knew! I mean, this past forty days, I’ve had everything I’ve ever wanted! Forty days of servants, getting my face stuffed…” She was, as it happened, looking “softer” since last they’d met, and Dominia smiled; Miki grimaced. “Dude, we have to get you new teeth today.” That smile vanished. “Sorry, just…needs another few minutes of healing, looks like. Anyway…I’ve been allowed to basically do whatever I want, other than be alone. Honestly…I’m tired of it. But it won’t be my problem much longer, right? This way!”
It was amazing to Dominia how brave the woman was. Perhaps unaware of her fate, or perhaps imbued with divine valor, Miki led the way to the gardens while going on like a magpie about all the things she’d done and seen in Cairo over the past few weeks. Everyone here felt a reverence to some abstract goddess—the substance of darkness, itself—but Dominia felt a reverence for Miki, who had come far from the place she started in life and now rested at the cusp of a long dream’s fulfillment. That reverence only doubled as the girl chattered on: “And I’ve just become—super religious over the past few weeks, like…praying every night”—memory stirred in Dominia even before Miki continued—“for you, too! Especially for you. You’re why I started praying again at all. I haven’t since I was a kid.”
The prostitute’s self-conscious laughter for her emerging spirituality was ended by the General’s embrace. “I heard you,” she said, to Miki’s wide-eyed surprise. “You saved me while I was there. Thank you.”
“Oh…oh…” Visibly unsure how to respond to this kind of emotion from Dominia, Miki stiffened up, breathed with a hiccup, then began to sharply pull away. “Well…well, don’t get all—all soppy about it, stupid! And don’t hug me so tightly…you’ll—smear my face…”
Miki’s tears were bound to do that on their own. Springing from the martyr with the haste of hidden emotions, the avatar-to-be pushed up her long sleeves and pointed forward. “Let’s go!”
Beneath the rising moon, Dominia took her first breath of fresh air—air from her home and her world—in far too long. The temple was thick with the humid scent of women, beautiful in its tapestry of perfume, sex, and powders, but the martyr’s senses, hyper-tuned to smell flesh on account of her natural hunger for it, were as relieved by the gentle aromas of innocent nature as her eye was relieved by the low light of the torchlit garden. She hadn’t seen landscaping like this since her last trip to Europa: something at Kronborg or Versailles, maybe. Yet, she might go so far as to say Cairo’s garden was more beautiful than either of those. The effect of rolling hills and a kind of mystical forest had been achieved within an enclosed palace courtyard. A thousand plants flourished, exotic flowers and vines artificially engineered to resemble the impossible plants of the Kingdom within the event horizon. Not even these matched that beauty, but they came close with cotton-candy-pink flowers springing in clots among orchids resembling the crystalline petals with which the Memory Bride wove her crown.
But the extraordinary element was not the flowers. Dominia was most enamored by the arrangement of its walking paths, which reminded the General of the contemplative labyrinth advertised for the patients of the Kyoto hospital. Far from a maze designed to confuse, this arrangement of open paths nonetheless tangled into what Dominia perceived would be, if viewed from above, a decorative knot of Celtic origin. The chords of the knot were distinguished from one another by low-set hedges, much like the hospital labyrinth, and were crossed with similar ease should the fancy to move to another path come to the mind. Yet even this beautiful design was not the most striking feature, for as they drew close, her eye resolved the four paths that led into the knot were guarded by statues: images of goddesses, whose marble gowns pooled about their feet with such liquidity that mere material garments dared not approach their grace.
At first glance, they were but marvelous artifacts of ancient time, these lovely statues: on the left, a maiden bent to wash clothes in an invisible stream, her hair in one thick braid that tumbled down the cloak upon her back, her head eternally lifted in alert at the approach of fleshly visitors; on the right, a madwoman, who gripped some hallucinated adversary by the throat while a trio of ravens in flight tore her age-thinned locks; but ah, the center! That helmeted Valkyrie who gripped a halberd with one taloned hand while the other, low by the armor of her hip, beckoned to the path at her right: a detail almost missed by Dominia against the background of the raven’s wings unfurling from the deity’s back.
“Who is that?” asked Dominia, her hush giving way to synchronicity’s chill when her friend answered, “Oh, Her? That’s the Morrigan.”
She had never heard that word before, because it was, like all other epithets of the Lady, illegal for martyrs to speak.
Miki then went on, so excited to chat that she missed both Dominia’s visible fright, and its increase as the martyr’s eye neared the statue. The face beneath the partially opened helmet plainly resembled her own; the General felt exposed as must have Valentinian when first he saw, through whatever animal’s beady eyes, that the Hierophant rendered his likeness in paintings. Desperate to pretend this was a coincidence and to keep Miki from noticing, she tried to devote her attention to the conversation at hand.
The garden was arranged in honor of Trisha’s predecessor, way back when the now-departing Lady claimed the throne in 1974. Or when She began the process of claiming Her throne, anyway. “The transference takes a few years,” Miki said. “I’ve thought about it lately, and it’s been happ
ening slowly, a bit at a time, my whole life. It’s just now, I’m approaching the epicenter, and things are happening so fast…”
With a sad hiccup, she laughed, and Dominia took her hand. The human smiled, looking genuinely bashful for what the martyr suspected to be the first time in her life. “I don’t have anything to say that could comfort you.” The General felt queasy about it, herself. “But I’ll be by your side for as long as I’m allowed.”
“Thank you… Anyway, it’s said on the eve of her coronation, this Lady saw into the future until the end of time, and demanded the creation of this, the finest garden ever seen on Earth, because of your Father.” As Dominia laughed, the human protested, “It’s true! It was impossible to keep him from knowing where they were located, She saw; but She also knows him as well as you do. He could never bring himself to destroy a thing as beautiful as this garden. It’s said he’s even invited to walk in it, if he comes alone. The legend is the invitation pacifies him into leaving Africa in peace; he’s never taken us up on the walk through it, either. Good thing, because this is where”—she dropped her voice because of the trailing Bearers—“we keep the encrypted hard drives with the Red Market data on it. Hidden in these statues.” While the General tried not to laugh at the ease with which her friend spilled state secrets, the human went on at normal volume. “Let’s all pray he never comes.”
“Not in this life,” Dominia said as they passed the hooked claw of that warrior Morrigan.
Within the maze, the only difference in the paths was the order in which one encountered the statues. At each juncture rose another piece featuring one of many figures she did not recognize. Miki took joy in their naming: Venus, Minerva, Juno, these, the General recognized from their prevalence in the artifacts, plays, paintings, and myths that her Father prized. As the skeleton of the Western world ever decayed to a more hollow state, these goddesses had been so overwhelmed by their male counterparts they must have felt, to the Hierophant, “safe.” Robbed of any liberating meaning. The same could be said of the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, who stood and knelt on the left and right-hand side of a juncture near the center of the maze. But many other names had escaped even Dominia’s well-read knowledge due to her Father’s curated electronic library, which censored many books from her digital accounts over the course of her three-hundred-year life. Ishtar, she had known only because it was a dirty word, one let slip into the public presumably to keep them from wanting to know more. But there were more permutations than the General could have anticipated. Inanna, Isis, Izanami, Astarte, Nuit, and more than even Miki could identify when you got into the plethora of faces given Her by the Hindu or Buddhist societies. Not even all the Greeks had been in Dominia’s education. She had not known of Hekate except in Valentinian’s passing reference and references in different folios of Macbeth, nor long meditated on pale Persephone, whose appearance (moon-whitened marble hair tumbling over one winsome, bare shoulder, with aching doe eyes turned sadly toward the viewer) recalled, to her pain, fair Cassandra.
In her enthusiasm, as ever, Miki did not notice Dominia’s moments of introspection. “Hekate is the Greek Lady of crossroads, in three parts, like the Morrigan. Or three-faced, at any rate. Crossroads are also sacred to Izanami”—she waved as they passed the divided goddess, whose proud and elegant appearance held the leash of a ghoulish duplicate crouched in the middle of birthing a heinous monster—“but I prefer her stepdaughter!”
With an imitation of a trumpet’s fanfare, Miki raised her arms as they rounded the corner and found themselves before a statue most beautiful, indeed: a woman whose Rapunzelian hair, trailing down her back, was nearly long as the kimono that pooled so far down the pedestal it trailed behind, as if the goddess had been exploring and made it back to her place just in time to be viewed. “Amaterasu,” said Miki, who, even in her own beautiful furisode, did not hesitate to kneel and kiss the statue’s hem. “The sun goddess. My sun goddess.”
Who seemed to shower her languid smile upon Dominia. The General noticed this when she looked up from her study of the incredible detail of the goddess’s delicate hand, clutching as it did the marble-bamboo handle of her parasol, and found that beatific expression waiting for her. The goddess’s gaze focused on the white orb cradled in the statue’s other hand. This, for some reason, summoned in the General the uncanny notion that she prepared to drop the sun into Dominia’s hands. Despite the silliness of it, the martyr moved from the way as Miki said, “Her story was what brought me here. Why I started to wake up all those years ago… I saw her.” She searched Dominia’s face for skepticism and was emboldened by its absence. “She woke me up and told me I could be whoever I wanted to be. That she would help me, and I would help her.”
When Dominia looked away from her second, safer scrutiny of the statue, Miki intensely studied not the goddess but the martyr; the human looked away, but the General pondered the look’s true meaning as her friend carried on. “Amaterasu’s best story is about how she was driven by her shitty brother to hide away in a cave, so all the other gods had to lure her out by throwing a party. The goddess of dawn and dancing threw off her clothes and put on such a goofy show that all the gods were in a hilarious uproar, and Amaterasu had to peek out of her cave to see what the hubbub was about. Lo and behold, they’d set a copper mirror outside, and she was dazzled by her own reflection! She saw herself, see? The sun.”
“And then?”
Lamely, Miki shrugged. “Then they yank her out and cut off her brother’s nose or something. It’s a fairy tale, you know how it ends.”
“Happily ever after,” Lazarus answered. His voice so startled Miki that, with a cry, she sprang in the direction of her meandering Bearers only to trip over the hem of her kimono; the man was forced to skip over a hedge to join their path and catch her. He had emerged from the Norse Fates, but who knew where he had started? Dominia sensed she hadn’t seen a quarter of the statues here. A peacock, likewise startled by the sudden noises, shrieked past as Lazarus set Miki upright, then adjusted the saffron fabric of his own kimono. “Good thing the Lady doesn’t have to walk,” he joked.
“You surprised me, you dope! You can’t surprise people in a messed-up world like this one.”
“Then we better get around to fixing it, because I hate walking on eggshells.”
“Why did I get put in a man’s kimono, again?” Dominia asked of Miki, noting as she had the fabric and texture of Kahlil’s and having the difference brought to mind by Lazarus’s appearance. With a sniff, Miki said, “Because you’re a man.”
As Dominia rolled her eyes, the girl insisted, “Well? There are two types of people allowed at the wedding and the coronation: Red Market women, and men they’ve slept with. And you’re not a Red Market woman, so you must be a man!”
While Miki laughed at her, the General pinched her butt with a discrete hand and elicited a squawk so similar to the startled peacock that, in the distance, the bird answered. As if she had done nothing, Dominia asked, “Where’s Basil?”
“Inside, waiting for you with the Lady.” While Dominia’s pulse skipped, Lazarus said, “I’m here to bring you to Her.”
“Is this it,” she murmured, afraid to hope. “Do we get to—Cassandra—”
“You can have her back,” assured Lazarus, “but I’d like to talk to you first, if you don’t mind.”
Anything at all, just to see that diamond again. “I’ll see you later, okay, Miki?”
“You’ll sleep in my room,” said the girl with a cheeky grin. “There won’t be any escape from me, don’t worry!”
On their return along the path, Lazarus fell into slight lead, and was silent until out of earshot of the Bearers. When sure they were alone, he said, “You know what’s weird: there are often lots of differences between iterations, like how things are done or said or formatted. But no matter how many times I’ve lived this life, this garden is always the same. All the statues in the same place, all the chords intersecting into knots at the same poi
nts. How is that possible? Even throwing dice, they’ll fall differently every time if it’s a nonfatal roll. The chords of this garden are not fatal in their format, yet every time they appear in the same manner, the same order. The same statues.”
“Maybe their order means something,” observed Dominia, following, from the corner of her eye, the earnest face and clasped hands of kneeling Mary Magdalene before she passed from view. “Like a sentence for the initiated.”
“Could be. Probably is. I guess I never think to ask them about it.”
“Sort of surprises me that you don’t know.”
“Why should I know the Red Market’s specific esoteric symbol set? I already know what they’re driving at. You’re the one who needs the symbols. All you people who haven’t lived what I’ve lived and seen what I’ve seen.”
“I suppose that’s true.”
As they emerged from the labyrinth, Lazarus took a breath and turned, frowning, to Dominia. “There are many other things that do not change. Fatal things. History-altering events. Vital moments in games and war: these do not change once a track is picked, so this is the only chance I get to speak to you before certain events occur. I urge you, Dominia. Please don’t forget about Valentinian.”
The joyful promise of Cassandra’s diamond still fresh in her mind, the General had indeed forgotten the way the men had, in that dream-space, urged her to choose the magician over her wife. Mirth fell from her face, and from behind her deflating spirit, she assessed Lazarus with an eye not just wary but weary.
“Cassandra is the whole reason I looked for you in the first place.”
