February 2021 Volume 11 No 2
The Patron God of Tawn
by
Dustin Steinacker
In Syna’s dream, the she-wasp comes to her. In all their hours together, the aging Unfolder has seen the patron god with her own eyes only twice, and not in half a century at that. But there’s no forgetting some things. In every way, Eotrene is exactly as she remembers.
“You weep,” the god says, looming and detached, her mind running its myriad paths. Then she cocks her head, suddenly present. “For me, child? Why?”
Syna can’t make out the features of the god’s high tower--only that there’s no veil between the two of them. She sees the god in full. That vicious beauty, that elemental confidence, a form rich and lush. She has seen this god kill and seen her rule with shrewd compassion. She knows her better than she knows any person.
“Because I can smell lamb and cinnamon and rosemary cooking outside, Sacred Ascendant,” she manages, looking down. “I hear the children of the morning vendors playing outside my window. You will leave me when I wake. And so even as I commune, I mourn.”
“Oh, little one,” Eotrene chirps, kneeling and raising her Unfolder’s chin with a curled limb, “you have always, always mourned.”
“Conqueror,” Syna finds herself saying as the dream fades, along with the god’s touch. “Hallowed One. Where are you?”
But the she-wasp can’t answer her, not for true. The patron god of Tawn is gone.
~~~
Tawn’s leaders wait three days for their god to return. After all, a divine mystery might resolve itself through divine means.
But on the morning of the fourth, a Moonsday, the city governor joins Unfolder Syna in her daily climb of Eotrene’s high tower steps. She tries to ignore the man behind her, his footfalls sounding flat on the stone. Since her youth, she’s taken this journey alone. Through the teardrop windows, the city’s peach-colored spires fall beneath her along with the wall of heat that blankets it.
As she climbs the dull pit in her stomach rises in kind. Soon it gnaws at her throat.
She knows the precise turn where the stairway opens into the patron god’s quarters, but for the governor it’s a surprise. At the apex, he holds back just outside the room. This is now a matter of state, his presence says. But he knows he doesn’t belong here.
Unfolder Syna steps forward. Her ankles throb. Above her head stretches the interlocking spines of the tower’s vaulted ceiling, and before her hangs the massive tapestry dividing the room in two: the patron god’s veil.
“Do you...see her, usually?” Gholand asks from the stairs.
“Governor, are you suggesting she may be here, but silent? Or do you respect me enough not to ask such a thing?” She sighs. “Yes, I see her every time.”
“In full?”
Gods, you’re getting comfortable asking sacred questions.
“No. In silhouette, behind the tapestry. But she’d be standing in the light’s way. I’d know.”
It was a Nonesday, the last time she’d seen that shape, as she’d received the patron god’s daily edicts.
Look out at the city, Unfolder, Eotrene had said, from behind her veil, too holy for mortal view. See the roofs, that earthy umber. The remnants of last year’s dust season. Soon the dusts will come in again, after the harvest, and the people will scrub and scrub their walls and their streets, but only you and I will know how much dust still hangs over Tawn. Our vantage gives us sight they ever lack.
Syna has never asked for more than what the she-wasp saw fit to give in any moment. Riddles were riddles but a god’s utterances were something more. They explicated themselves over time. But how could she have known the surprise that awaited her the next morning? If she had, if she’d any idea at all, the things she might have asked Eotrene--
She swallows, hard, and stills her mind.
“I hate to doubt you, Holiness,” the governor says with care, “but I have to know. Before...”
“Say it.”
The man bites his lip. “The magistrates are getting antsy. Before word gets out, we’ve got to”--his voice breaks into a choked whisper--“to see for sure. I think I should be the first to tell them. If it’s true.”
Syna nods slowly and cups her shaking hands before her mouth: “Come!”
Two boys emerge from behind the tapestry. They meet their Unfolder’s eyes with bright expectation.
Eotrene’s nameless attendants. The younger has been raised by the older; he knows no other life. They alone are permitted to pass through that godly veil to see the she-wasp in her earthly form. Attending to her needs and wants, bathing her, bringing up her pungent meals.
“Little ones.” Syna meets their eyes in turn. “You’ve told me that Eotrene has left her tower. Do you swear it? She’s not behind this veil?”
“Not asleep, perhaps?” adds Gholand from the doorway with a nervous, inappropriate laugh.
“She doesn’t sleep,” the younger boy says with a child’s bluntness. The other only nods.
Syna eyes the tapestry with trepidation. Woven silk tells the story of Eotrene slaying Kovial, Tawn’s last patron god, more than five decades before. Here she is battling the massive ocelot, the two intertwined like frenzied lovers. And there, drowning him, struggling but slowed by her venom, in his own water gardens. And finally, delivering the godbeast to the city for the skinning.
She remembers the day well. She had been Kovial’s attendant.
“Very well,” Syna mutters. She stands, lifts the divide, and walks through.
The two boys shriek and dart after her. “Unfolder,” the older says, eyes wide, “you’ve entered her dwelling!”
And here are the accoutrements of a god’s life, so mundane in the light. No treasures, no cushioned bolsters lining the room for lounging, nothing like that. Only a rough-woven carpet, a washbasin, and a squat, draped shelf inlaid with mother-of-pearl, its contents unknown.
“Entered a god’s dwelling?” she mutters. “Not so, little ones. I’ve only parted a tower’s curtain.”
But her gaze draws her forward, to the walnut slats laid up along each flat section of wall, floor to ceiling between the enormous slatted windows of the towertop, one of which has been shattered. On Syna’s side of the tower the wood was always smooth, but here they bear shallow engravings, finer and more ornate than any she’s ever seen. Ringlets and cryptic maps of places unknown, glyphs and inscrutable figures. This is years, decades, of quiet labor. And circling the room, Syna reaches the point where the designs stop--
Now realization chokes her tight.
She’s not here. Gods, she’s really not here.
The sun rises as surely as Eotrene governs Tawn, it is said, not the reverse. This is darkness at noontime; this is unfathomable.
“Governor, Tawn is godless,” Syna croaks. She walks through the curtain, past white-faced Gholand, and calls up from the stairs: “Come. We’ve got a city to keep together.”
~~~
There, in the governor’s hearing-room, sitting at the center of the god Kovial’s enormous pelt, Syna seeks the eye of the hurricane.
It’s an old exercise, the only way that she’s found to turn her holiness to her advantage amidst statesmen. In a room full of chaos, people seek the calm of the eye. Her calm. She can’t always be the most persuasive, but she can be one thing--she can be still.
But today, it isn’t working. Today, she’s as muddled as the others. She’ll find no calm here, only a counterfeit.
“Is there a chance,” Governor Gholand asks his magistrates, rubbing an eyebrow as he paces, “that Eotrene vies for the capital? What other cities might she take?”
Tongues cluck in response.
“Wel
l? Why else would she go out into the world?”
Chetme, the city’s governor-second, speaks. “Look at this pelt, sir. I wasn’t alive then, but clearly Kovial was hardly lean in his final days. The she-wasp saw weakness.” She shakes her head. “But Kyomen, at the capital? She has to know she couldn’t challenge him and live.”
Muttered complaints and cries of outrage.
“Oh, quiet now,” Chetme says. “That’s a truth, not a blasphemy.”
“Besides, the two are friends!” cries a thin, balding district magistrate whose name Syna can never quite hold onto, turning from the garden window with a flourish that makes others jump. His face reddens. “As far as gods know friendship.”
The governor ignores the man, who turns back to the window with a wounded huff. He faces Syna. “No one knows the gods, but you of any alive come close.” He waits, and she realizes the question.
It’s in his eyes, and now she sees it in the others. In this show of debate, a pleading. He needs her to reorder these events, to put them into some form he can grasp.
I could do it, she realizes, and the thought freezes her through. But yes, she is close enough to Eotrene’s glow to give her mortal words a godly patina. And why not, just a little? She could speak reassurance.
A god has her reasons, Governor, her inscrutable patterns. Eotrene loves the city. She’ll return. She’s even spoken of leaving her tower before, just for a few days of course...
She feels faint. Shame runs through her. She finds herself shrinking away from Eotrene’s tower, outside and looming. An evil thought indeed! And one unworthy of her role.
“We are close, in our own way,” she only says. “I know as much of her mind as she cares to have known. But her whims are her own.”
That seems to satisfy the others. They mull.
Even in silence, the uncertainty in the room is thick. And with it, disquieting memories grow in Syna’s mind: Kovial’s last pathetic cries as he realized that tooth and claw would never pierce his enemy’s carapace. His voice growing weaker as he felt the venom work, his eyes reflecting such utter despair and defeat as he swiped impotently at the more vulnerable flesh kept carefully from his reach...
He looked at her, his nameless attendant, then. As if she could possibly help him.
She bore that memory like a canker for nine years afterward, taking it as evidence of her new patron god’s brutality. But on the day of her majority, even as she stood in waiting for passage across the sea, away from Tawn, still nameless, she received notice that the she-wasp had selected a new Unfolder.
Alone, she climbed the new high tower’s steps, dreading this second meeting, dreading her new life in this service. As she ascended, she was greeted with an odor like the sweetness of meat just before it turns.
Who she met at the apex defied all memory, all expectation. The god’s form was as she remembered: a woman’s torso melding into a great carapace. Six thin and reedlike limbs. A face with mandibles and perceiving, bulbous eyes. But there was wisdom in those eyes, and compassion. Primordial might, tempered with presence.
Eotrene had giving her a name that day: Syna. No longer just a nameless former attendant of the gods, but Syna. Whatever the name meant in the gods’ tongue, she loved it, because it was hers. She has held it close since.
Another god I’ve served, lost? She despairs, as the heads of Tawn bicker and speculate.
Heads turn as wooden clogs clatter on the stone outside.
A well-dressed man flings open the sash from the garden stairs and runs through. He cradles a screaming baby in his arms. Syna recognizes the servant: he tends the water gardens, Kovial’s former dwelling-place.
“Pardons, barging in like this!” he says. “But you have to understand--under the circumstances--”
The man trails off at the governor’s raised eyebrow.
“What I mean to say is, administrators, the she-wasp has been sighted. In a manner of speaking.”
~~~
The sharecroppers’ children lead them through the maze of river-irrigated rice. They run ahead impatiently and then double back when their elders fall behind.
They walk a narrow spine of earth raised between pools of partly-submerged rice. Syna hears a splash and a curse and allows herself an inward smile--she grew up tending the palace water gardens and still knows solid ground from floating crop. She breathes deep the healthy pond smell.
“Where were you playing? Where were you when you saw her?” asks Gholand, not for the first time. The little ones only call for him to hurry.
Reaching the earthen steps of the mountain, they climb.
Terraces stretch out on each side, enormous flooded steppes carved out of the soil. A flock of tame goats scatter and hop to and fro along the raised edges of the paddies in animal urgency.
When Syna’s knees feel nearly ready to give, they reach it--a dry plateau dotted with huts. People file out to meet them; sharecroppers who years before moved closer and closer to their crop to thwart poachers, until they found themselves within it.
“Was it here? Did it happen here?” asks Gholand. By his side, the governor-second sourly wrings out her gown.
The apparent ringleader of the children points down the flatted ridge of the mountain beyond them.
The governor waves the children off with a sigh and they disperse, back to play and chattering. He approaches the gathered crowd.
“What did you see? Old woman--Baba--were you outside? Were you watching? You there, lad, you work the paddies, don’t you?”
A voice speaks from the crowd, frail. “What has gotten into your god?”
Gholand’s eyes go wide.
Before he can respond, Syna steps in. “Who said that?” she asks with a gentle, and she hopes disarming, smile.
The crowd parts with guilty looks between them as they expose the speaker. She is a truly ancient thing, slumped against the light wooden wall like a discarded tool, thinning hair wrapped in a kerchief. She wears a pair of workbreeches, hiked to her knobby and mud-crusted knees.
“What has gotten into your god?” the woman repeats, lip curled. Vice Governor Chetme opens her mouth to speak, but stops at Syna’s cautioning glance.
“Baba,” says Unfolder Syna as she sits by the woman’s side, “Eotrene is our god. Yours and mine. Or do we have another?”
With faltering arms, the woman unravels her kerchief to reveal a stitched ocelot.
Of course. Syna is moved by the care put into the likeness.
“Kovial?” laughs the governor-second. “Who’d worship such a creature?” Chetme trails off at the lethal look in Syna’s eyes. She seems prepared to defend herself, but she can see she has no allies here. She blushes and departs for the stairs, fiddling with the brooch at her neck as if to pull herself forward by it.
“I’m sorry, Baba,” says Syna. “I knew Kovial. I was his attendant, as a child. He was a friend.”
But it’s too late. The woman’s eyes are already distant, retreated. She clutches the kerchief in her shaking palm, muttering a prayer, ignoring Syna’s questions and apologies. She will offer them nothing more.
~~~
The two mortal heads of Tawn stand alone and watch the paddies below.
“What are we now, without Eotrene?” Governor Gholand asks. He lowers his forehead into his hands. “Look at us. Our god’s become some rumor on the road, sighted but never found. Like a creature of myth.”
She puts a hand on his shoulder--gently so as not to make it too familiar a gesture. When she speaks it is low and close to his ear: “Foul, to say that. If you were overheard?”
“Tricky times,” Gholand only says, shaking his head.
Another god will take the city in time, Syna knows. But without a fight and a victory, will the people accept it?
They hear a quiet cough from behind. The two jump. Syna nearly falls to the rice-pool below. A young man reaches out to steady the Unfolder, mortified, but pulls back as she finds her balance.
“Holiness? Go
vernor?” He nods at each of them in turn. “The old woman you were speaking to, Gleah, she was the only one to see the patron god, excepting the children. And she said some things, before you came. About Eotrene.”
Syna raises an eyebrow.
“The rest of us heard her wings,” he continues, “but she actually saw her. She showed herself, Gleah said, out in the sun!” He casts his head downward. “Not that I--not that I would have looked, Holiness.”
“And what did the patron god do?” Gholand asks. “After she showed herself, did she speak?”
“No.” He swallows hard. “Just came down to drink, Gleah told us. Like an animal, flitting about and sipping at the pools. Her words, not mine.” He pleads. “Unfolder, what does it mean?”
“And it was Eotrene, for certain?” asks the governor, who takes the man by the shoulders. “It wasn’t the god of Mouth’s Bay? Or the great osprey, the God of Knowing from the saddles?”
“I’m sorry, I wasn’t there!”
“Describe her, as you heard her described,” Syna says.
The man does so. His terms are simple but fit a secondhand account. Gholand faces Unfolder Syna, his brow raised. He’s never seen Eotrene. For him, her existence beyond the tower veil is a matter of faith and history.
Syna feels heavy. She knows it must show in her shoulders, but she can’t stop it. “That is the she-wasp.”
“The woman could be lying.”
“Could. We’ll talk to the children. But she’s seen Eotrene, and if what she says is true, well...”
Well, what? she asks herself. She only knows, somehow, that things are worse than they’ve thought.
Far worse.
~~~
The next day the first news comes in, from the saddles of the mountains inland: The God of Knowing has left his summit temple, the osprey abandoning his clans and settlements.
Soon they hear of gods of the lakes swimming aimlessly, of other gods hunting like base carnivores. Banmud, the great orangutan, has killed her Unfolder and then claimed an area in the center of her city. She attacks any who venture within. Even the lower gods, those who have no cities, whose forms are therefore not holy and who mingle with humans and rule what they can, have turned into little more than beasts.
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