by Mike Ashley
“You never answered my question. Why did you think I was your son?”
“It is a very old sorrow.”
I didn’t command him. “Can you . . . tell me?”
He sat down on the edge of the bed and gazed up at me. “I was called Aukin, son of Nevat. I dwelt far beyond any land you ever knew, beyond the mouth of the Great River and across the sea among the people you would call barbarians. I had a wife. I loved her very much. Is that a surprising thing, even for a barbarian? No, it is not. When she died bearing my first son, and my son too was dead in her womb, my grief was without bounds. The gods of my homeland could not comfort me, for they are harsh spirits of the forest and of the hills, and they do not deal in comfort. Therefore I came into your country, first to the City of the Delta, where I prayed long before the image of Bel-Hemad and gave the priests much gold. But he did not answer me, and when I ran out of money, the priests sent me away. So I wandered all along the Great River, in the forests, on the plains, among the marshes. I tarried with holy men in the high mountains. From them I learned to dream. They thought they were teaching me contentment, but no, I clung to my bold scheme. It was this: I would be the mightiest dreamer of all and travel beyond Leshé to the lake of Tashé and farther, and I would find my son who had tried but failed to enter the world, and I would bring him back with me. The dead have been truly reclaimed by the Devouring God, so there is no hope for my wife, but the unborn, I thought – I still think – perhaps will not be missed. So far I have succeeded only with the first part of my plan. I am here. But I have not found my son. When I saw you, alive, here, I had hope again, just briefly.”
“This is the Sybil’s doing,” I said.
“Yes, I can tell that it is, by the mark on you.”
“The mark on me?”
He got up, rummaged among the debris, and handed me a broken piece of mirrored glass.
“Didn’t you know?” he said softly.
I looked at my reflection. The spot on my forehead where the Sybil had kissed me was glowing as brightly as had the eyes of the evatim.
I handed the glass back to him, and it was then that I noticed that my hands, too, gave off a faint light where my mother had touched them at the very end. Where the guardian-serpent’s lips had touched me when it took the coins, the skin was seared and healed into a smooth white scar.
I sat still, staring at my hands.
“If I really am a sorcerer,” I said, “I’ll try to help you. You don’t have to be afraid of me.”
He offered me a cup. “Here, drink this.”
“But I can’t. If I drink anything here, I’ll–”
The old man sighed. “You are still an ignorant sorcerer. This water is from Leshé, from the river where it is filled with dreams. It will give you many visions. It will truly open your eyes, but it will not bind you to the dead. The waters of Tashé will do that, but not those of Leshé.”
“Do I need to see visions?”
“I think you do, to get where you’re going.”
“This is the Sybil’s doing again,” I said.
“Yes, it is. Drink.”
I drank. The water was very cold and, surprisingly, sweet. My whole body trembled with it. Only in the aftertaste was it bitter.
“Now go,” said Aukin, son of Nevat, who had lost his own son.
I stood up, balancing myself precariously on the image of the god, and caught hold of the window-ledge, then heaved myself up. For a moment I dangled there, looking down at the old man. He waved me on. I heaved again and felt a blast of hot wind against my face and chest, and sand stung me, as if I had crawled out into a sandstorm.
Then I was falling, not back into the room, but down, away from the window as directions somehow reversed. The window receded above me and was gone as I tumbled head over heels through hot, blinding, blowing sand.
Visions came to me:
As I fell, I saw the whole of Tashé spread out before me. I saw that each dead person there dwelt in a little space formed out of some memory from life, either a pleasant one, or, if some guilty memory tormented him, an endless terror. So the domain of Tashé was an incongruous tangle, a jumbled mass like the inside of the Sybil’s house.
And as I fell, I was in many places at once. I walked on soft moss to the edge of a pool, deep in a forest suffused with golden light. Three young girls sat by the pool, washing their hair. A young man, scarcely older than myself, sat by them, strumming on a lyre. All around them, the forest seemed to go on forever. Pale white fishes drifted through the air among the trees.
Then I took one step back from the pool, and the forest was gone.
I ran beneath the pale stars over an endless expanse of bricks so hot that they burned my feet. Bricks stretched glowing to the black horizon. I wept with the pain and began to stagger. It was all I could do not to sit down. Smoke and flame hissed out of fissures. Still I ran on, gasping for breath, streaked with soot and sweat, until I came to a window set horizontally in the ground, in the bricks as if in a wall. The window was open. A curtain blew straight up at me on a searing gust. Still, somehow, I had to look.
I swayed dangerously, then dropped to my hands and knees, screaming aloud at the new pain. I crept to the edge, peered in, and beheld a king and his courtiers below me, all sitting solemnly at a banquet table. Yet there was no feast before them, and each face was contorted in unimaginable agony. Their bodies and clothing were transparent, and I could see that the hearts of these men and women were white hot, like iron in a forge.
And again, I saw a girl in a pleasantly lit room, singing and spinning forever. A man sat at her feet, carving a piece of ivory into a form that was somehow infinitely ornate and beautiful but never complete.
And I lay, naked as I was, in a frigid stream amid snowbanks. A blizzard made the sky featureless white.
And crowds babbled in a marketplace; and I was alone in endless, silent halls thick with dust; and I walked on water to a ruined tower where men in white robes and silver masks awaited my coming; and a resplendent pirate paced back and forth endlessly on a single deck suspended in the middle of the air. He looked up, startled, as I plummeted by.
And I saw into memories, into the lives of all who dwelt in that land of Tashé, and I knew what it meant to be a king, and a slave, and in love, and a murderer, and I knew what it was to be old and remember all these things vaguely, as in a fading dream.
And I found my sister, Hamakina.
I fell amid swirling, stinging sand, and suddenly the sand became millions of birds, flapping their soft wings against me to hold me up. All these birds had my sister’s face, and they spoke with my sister’s voice.
“Sekenre, I am here.”
“Where?”
“Brother, you have come for me.”
“Yes, I have.”
“Brother, it is too late.”
I wasn’t falling anymore, but lay choking in a heap of cold, soft ashes. I sat up, spitting out ash, trying to wipe ash from my eyes.
In time, tears and spittle gave me enough moisture to clean my face, and I could see. I was in a garden of ash. Fading into the distance in all directions, white, bare trees stood in neat rows, leafless, yet heavy with round, white fruit. Ash rained from the sky, the ash, the sky, and the earth all featureless gray, until I could not tell where earth and sky met.
I stood up amid dead flowers with stalks like winter reeds – huge, yet delicately preserved in every colorless detail.
The ash fell heavily enough that I could feel it striking my shoulders in clumps. I was coated with it, until I too seemed a part of this place. I held my hands over my face, struggling to breathe and to see, while making my way along a path amid sticks that might have been the remains of hedges, the ash cool and soft and knee-deep.
The overwhelming smell in the air, the odor of the ash, was intensely sweet, unpleasantly so, strong enough that I felt faint. But I knew I could not stop here, could not rest, and I took one step, and the next, and the next . . .
<
br /> In an open place, which might have been the center of the garden, a wooden shelter stood half-buried amid drifts, a domed roof atop squat pillars. The roof was shaped into a wide-mouthed, staring face, the mouth already clogged as if the thing were vomiting gray powder.
Hamakina sat waiting for me there, on a bench beneath that strange roof. She too was barefoot and in rags, plastered with ash. But her cheeks were newly streaked with tears.
“Sekenre . . .”
“I’ve come to take you back,” I said gently.
“I can’t go. Father . . . tricked me. He told me to eat the fruit, and I—”
I waved a hand toward one of the white trees.
“This?”
“It didn’t look like this then. The trees were green. The fruit was wonderful. It smelled wonderful. The colors were . . . shining, changing all the time, like oil on water when the sun touches it. Father told me to, and he was angry, and I was afraid, so I ate . . . and it tasted dead, and then suddenly everything was like you see it now.”
“Father did this?”
“He said it was part of his plan all along. I didn’t understand a lot of what he said.”
“Where is he?”
I drew my sword, clutching it tightly, furious and at the same time aware of how ridiculous and helpless I must have seemed. But it was my sword now, no longer my father’s, given to me by the Sybil for a specific purpose –
“Sekenre, what will you do?”
“Something. Whatever I have to.”
She took me by the hand. Her touch was cold. “Come on.”
I don’t know how long we walked through the ash garden. There was no way to measure time or distance or direction. But Hamakina seemed to know for certain where we were going.
Then the garden was gone and it seemed I was back in the cramped, swaying darkness of the Sybil’s house again. I looked around for her luminous face, expectant, but my sister led me without any hesitation across a rope bridge above an abyss, while vast leviathans with idiot, human faces swam up out of a sea of guttering stars, splashing pale foam, each creature opening its mouth to display rotting teeth and a mirrored ball held between them. I gazed down through the swinging, twisting ropes and saw myself reflected there on the curving glass.
Somehow Hamakina was no longer with me, but far away, down below, inside each mirrored sphere, and I saw her running ahead of me across featureless and beneath a sand-colored sky. Then each monster sank down in turn and she vanished, and another rose, its jaws agape, and I saw her again.
There were black stars in the sky above Hamakina now, and she ran across the sand beneath them, a gray speck against the dead sky, receding into the black points which were the stars.
And each leviathan sank down and another rose to give me a glimpse of her, and from out of the abyss I caught snatches of a song she sang as she ran. Her voice was still her own, but older, filled with pain, and a little mad.
“When I am in the darkness gone,
and you’re still in the light,
come lie each day upon my grave;
I’ll lie with you each night.
Come bring me gifts of fruit and wine.
Bring them from the meadow.
I’ll bring dust and ash and clay;
I’ll bring gifts of shadow.”
Without any transition I could sense, I was suddenly on that endless expanse of sand beneath the black stars, and I followed her voice over the low dunes toward the horizon and a black shape that huddled there.
At first I thought it was one of the stars fallen from the sky, but as we neared it the thing resolved itself, and I slowed to a terrified walk when I saw the pointed roofs and the windows like eyes and the familiar dock beneath the house, now resting on the sand.
My father’s house – no, my house – stood on its stilts like a huge, frozen spider. There was no river, no Reedland at all, as if the whole world had been wiped clean but for this one jumble of ancient wood.
When I reached the dock, Hamakina was waiting for me at the base of the ladder.
She turned her head upward.
“He is there.”
“Why did he do all this to you and to Mother?” I said. I held onto the sword and onto the ladder, gripping hard, trembling more with sorrow than with fear or even anger.
Her reply startled me far more than anything the dreamer Aukin had said. Once more her voice was older, almost harsh.
“Why did he do all this to you, Sekenre?”
I shook my head and started climbing. As I did the ladder shivered, as if it were alive and felt my touch.
And my father’s voice called out from the house, thundering:
“Sekenre, I ask you again. Do you still love me?”
I said nothing and kept on climbing. The trapdoor at the top was barred from the inside.
“I want you to love me still,” he said. “I only wanted what was best for you. Now I want you to go back. After all you have done against my wishes, it is still possible. Go back. Remember me as I was. Live your life. That is all.”
I pounded on the trapdoor with the pommel of my sword. Now the whole house shivered and suddenly burst into white, colorless flame, washing over me, blinding me, roaring in my ears. I let out a yell and jumped, barely clearing the dock below, landing facedown in the sand. I sat up, sputtering, still clutching the sword. The house was not harmed by the fire, but the ladder smouldered and fell as I watched.
I slid the sword under my belt again and started climbing one of the wooden stilts. Once more the white flames washed over me, but they gave no heat, and I ignored them.
“Father,” I said. “I am coming. Let me in.”
I reached the porch outside my own room. I was standing in front of the very window through which Hamakina had been carried away. All the windows and doors were barred against me, and flickering with white flames.
I thought of calling on the Sybil. It would be my third and last opportunity. Then, if I ever did so again – what? Somehow she would claim me. No, it was not time for that.
“Father,” I said, “if you love me as much as you say, open up.”
“You are a disobedient son.”
“I shall have to disobey you further.”
And once more I began to weep as I stood there, as I closed my hands together and opened them again. Father had beaten me once for attempting this act. Then I had gotten no results. Now I did, and it was as easy as breathing.
Cold blue flames danced on my outstretched palms. I reached up with my burning hands and parted the white fire like a curtain. It flickered and went out. I pressed my palms against the shuttered window. Blue flames streamed from between my fingers. The wood smoked, blackened, and fell inward, giving way so suddenly that I stumbled forward, almost falling into the room.
I climbed over the windowsill and stood there, amazed. The most fantastic thing of all was that I was truly in the house where I had grown up, in the room Mother, Hamakina, and I had shared, and in which I had remained alone for half a night at the very end waiting desperately for the dawn. I saw where I had once carved my initials into the back of a chair. My clothes lay heaped over the edge of an open trunk. My books were on a shelf in the far corner, and a page of papyrus, one of my own illumination projects, was still in place on the desk, with pens and brushes and bottles of ink and paint all where I had left them. Hamakina’s doll lay on the floor at the foot of the bed. One of Mother’s hevats, a golden bird, hung from the ceiling, silent and motionless.
More than anything else I wanted to just lie down in that bed, then rise in the morning, get dressed, and resume work at my desk, as if nothing had ever happened.
I think that was my father’s last offer to me. He was shaping my thoughts.
I walked out of the room, the floorboards creaking. I knocked on his workroom door. It, too, was locked.
Father spoke from within. He sounded weary.
“Sekenre, what do you want?”
It was a completely a
stonishing question. All I could say was, “I want in.”
“No,” he said after a long pause. “What do you truly want, as my son, for yourself.”
“I don’t know anymore.” I drew my sword once more, and pounded on the door with the pommel.
“I think you do. You want to grow to be an ordinary man, to live in the city, to have a wife and family, to be free of ghosts and shadows and sorcery – on this we are agreed. I want that for you too. It is very important.”
“Father, I am not sure of anything. I don’t know how I feel.”
I kept on pounding.
“Then why are you still here?” he said.
“Because I have to be.”
“To become a sorcerer is a terrible thing,” he said. “It is worse than a disease, worse than any terror, like opening a door into nightmare that can never be closed again. You seek to know. You peer into darkness. There is a certain allure, what seems like unlimited power at first, then glory, then, if you truly delude yourself, vast wisdom. To become a sorcerer is to learn the secrets of all the worlds and of the gods. But sorcery burns you. It disfigures, changes, and the man who becomes a sorcerer is no longer the man he was before he became a sorcerer. He is hated and feared by all. He has countless enemies.”
“And you, Father? Do you have countless enemies?”
“My son, I have killed many people in my time, thousands—”
That, once more, astonished me into helplessness. I could only say, “But why?”
“A sorcerer must have knowledge, not merely to ward off his enemies, but to live. He hungers for more dark spells, more powers. You can only get so much from books. You need more. To truly become a sorcerer, one must kill another sorcerer, and another, and another, each time stealing what that other sorcerer possesses, which he, in turn, has stolen by murder. There would be few sorcerers left were it not for the temptations, which recruit new ones. Sorcery goes on and on, devouring.”
“Surely some magic can be used for good, Father.”
I stopped pounding. I looked down at my hands, where they had been marked, where the flames had arisen so effortlessly.
