The Hidden Icon

by Jillian Kuhlmann

  Gannet’s gentle touch on my mind interrupted my thoughts, expressing a desire to speak with me. The little intimacy I had with him was another strange and guilty comfort, though I didn’t know whether his actions were courtesy or protocol. I supposed that I would know when we reached Ambar and there were others, though the idea of being so vulnerable to so many was not one I was willing too much to imagine.

  “There’s still time to teach you,” he announced softly, answering my unspoken fears. Perhaps I was not growing as disciplined as he claimed. I didn’t answer, but there wasn’t any lesson of his that I would refuse. I knew that soon enough there wouldn’t be time.

  “Perhaps you could teach me something practical?”

  My tone was light as I unpacked a bedroll from Circa’s saddle, testing its thickness against the chill. Though several fires were burning strong already, I wasn’t sure I would be welcomed to sleep next to any of them. It was my hope that the soldiers who would no doubt be set to guard me while I slept would build a fire of their own.

  “Like breathing underwater?”

  He knew, and my surprise brought an image of one of the sirens unbidden to the surface of my mind. Gannet’s expression changed as surely as if he had experienced my near drowning himself, and he closed the little distance between us so that when he spoke next, it was as though he were making conversation with the pack he began urgently to remove from Circa’s saddle.

  “Did you tell anyone?”

  His hiss blended perfectly with the smooth sound of leather strap sliding over saddle, and I shook my head, quickly attempting to appear as occupied as he. We faced Circa together, arms and shoulders brushing as we methodically removed saddle, bridle, and the single, achingly light pack.

  “When would I have had time to do that? We were just chased out of Cascar.” I paused, hoping my eagerness wasn’t as plain as it felt to me. “Did you know about them?”

  “Some stories are only stories, Han’dra Eiren,” he said abruptly, as dull as though he remarked upon the sheen of Circa’s coat. I could feel the turbulence in his touch and his mind, and while I had expected an unfavorable reaction from him when he learned of my rescue, this wasn’t what I’d expected.

  “Then you’d rather I were dead?”

  “We can’t talk about this right now. Tonight. Stay quiet and stay with Morainn.”

  He deposited a satchel of necessities into my arms, a reserve of rations and water following. It seemed he’d recovered more than the book from the burning barge. I couldn’t carry these and all the rest without concentrating, and my anger dissolved into embarrassment as I moved awkwardly toward the fire. I wasn’t surprised to find Morainn enthroned already on not one but several bedrolls, piled on top of each other.

  “Triss will never forgive you for all of the clothes that have burned up. But she’s taken to the foolish Cascari and is afraid of you, so she may prattle less when you’re around. I must keep you close to lessen my own suffering,” Morainn said plainly, teasing Triss, but more than a little bit serious. I wasn’t sure if I was meant to laugh or not, but true to Morainn’s words, Triss remained quiet, shooting me furtive looks. If Morainn and Gannet hoped to keep Theba a secret, they would do better to sedate me until we reached Ambar.

  As though we had reached some agreement hours before on the shore or cast our hands together in blood, Morainn patted a square of bedroll beside her. I knew I could not refuse her, and I found I didn’t want to.

  “Then we’ve lost everything?” I asked quietly, eyeing the guard settling down on only hard earth to sleep, the few packs that I hoped would contain rations enough to see us through to Ambar. Why did I care about the backs and bellies of murderers? But I did, if only to counter the terrible feelings Theba conjured in me when she took control. When I let her her take control.

  “Not everything,” Morainn replied. As though to punctuate her statement, she produced an assortment of Cascari delicacies: fruits elegantly cut and set into other fruits, sweet rice wrapped in tender leaves, crumbling spice bread. I did not feel guilty accepting her offer, for these things would not have traveled well: already the flesh of the fruit browned, the leaves wilted.

  “Triss, go and get us some fresh water.” Morainn’s command interrupted Triss’ hungry gaze at the fruit that remained, and for all I did not care much for the girl, I knew I owed it to her to save her one. I’d nearly drowned her, as well as myself. But as soon as she had departed, Morainn looked at me as though the water had merely been a diversion. We had a limited amount of privacy, sitting so close and talking low, and Morainn intended to take advantage of it.

  “I want you to know,” she began, casting her eyes as earnestly to the fire as she had at first to my face. “Gannet and others like him believe you to be Theba. I believe it, too, but I don’t think it makes you any less than who you have been. Icons live many lives. I’ve met two Dsimahs,” Morainn continued, mentioning another, gentler goddess, “and they were completely different. The first died an old woman before she could fulfill whatever purpose it was she returned for.”

  She paused, as though there was something she wanted to say, but wasn’t sure how to, or if it should be said. Morainn being Moriann, she forged ahead.

  “For most people, there will be no distinction between you and Theba. But what happened out there… you can’t be blamed for Theba’s violence any more than you can be faulted for telling Eiren’s stories. You’re a force of nature, and a victim of it, too.”

  Tears filled my eyes, and I was grateful for the haze of heat that obscured our faces. Her confession deserved something more from me than gratitude, though, and I found I wanted to talk with her as I had not wanted to with Gannet. He insisted that to be Theba meant I couldn’t be anything else. With Morainn there was still room to be me.

  “I don’t understand how she has lain quiet in me all of this time.” My voice was as hushed as hers had been. In stories Theba was a brutal and jealous force, but she wasn’t easy to understand. She could be hurt and was most famously betrayed, but unlike her human counterparts, unlike me, she could feel no empathy, and preferred to wound many times over more deeply than she had ever been.

  “I don’t know how, either. Icons are always taken from their families at young ages and raised to know who and what they are. In Ambar, everyone knows what is expected of them,” she mused grimly, and her expression darkened. “It’s not just the icons, either.”

  I wanted to ask her what she meant, but even as I opened my mouth Triss returned with water. Imke was behind her and Morainn engaged them both as though our exchange had exhausted her. I allowed their idle conversation to continue without my input, searching instead the shadows beyond the fire’s light for Gannet. I felt readier to speak with him, now that I had spoken with Morainn. Now that I had unwittingly begun to tell my secret, the rest felt like a wall of sand, ready to crumble at any moment. I waited, sucking the sticky grains of rice from my fingers and, despite the urgency of my heart, felt my eyes grow heavy with exhaustion. Even the stony ground beneath my too-thin bedroll seemed welcoming, but I wouldn’t relinquish the world, not yet.

  “I think I should face my fears, as Han’dra Eiren does.”

  Morainn’s voice demanded my notice, and I realized that not only was she talking about me, she was looking at me also, and her handmaids, too. I blanched in surprise at the attention.

  “What fears can Han’dra Eiren have?” Imke did not need to allude to what had happened to make her meaning any clearer. I didn’t like being the center of any conversation, let alone this one.

  “Perhaps she can tell us,” Morainn said softly, but with an air of command, eyes traveling from the inscrutable faces of her servants to mine. I didn’t have the impression that Morainn was testing me, but was instead sounding the depths of the others circled around the fire. This was a move deft enough to mark her as Gannet’s sister, and I found myself smirking despite my anxiety.

  He was listening, too. I could sense him now, li
ke a shadow more treacherous than any cast by the fire, a potent darkness. He was waiting, and I knew I wouldn’t have what I needed until they had theirs.

  As a girl I might have said that I feared the tribes of dawn and dusk, savage ghosts who stalked those hours for children who were out of bed when they shouldn’t have been. Only a few years ago my nightmares would have been populated by Ambarian soldiers. Now an ancient tale came to me, one whose meaning couldn’t be lost on anyone truly listening.

  “There are crimes that no mortal punishment can atone for, and of one such crime was Herat guilty. Half as many years as she had been alive had she been imprisoned for the murder of her mother and father. Though she suffered greatly, she felt no regret, no remorse. This grieved her jailors but grieved most Adah, the immortal lord of justice.”

  Even as I said his name, I wondered if the Ambarians knew him as an icon. Imke’s attention seemed to weigh no more or less upon me for all she had asked for this, though I was pleased to see that Morainn had relaxed even as I began the dark tale.

  “Adah knew that he couldn’t make Herat repent, not when she valued so little what she had taken. He knew he must cause her to want and to treasure, and then take from her what she would never know she had been given. But no matter how Adah tried to challenge Herat he couldn’t succeed in making her repent until he sought the counsel of Theba.

  “Theba knew well the hearts of mortals, how fickle and weak they could be, how subject to flattery and covetousness; those hearts especially that were corrupted in some way, as Herat’s was. Because of this, Theba urged Adah to take the guise of a mortal and pose as one of Herat’s jailors. He would be kind to her, he would make her love him, and then he would leave her. It would be easy with a mortal, Theba insisted. This Adah did and readily, for he liked so well the plan’s fruition that he was blind to the possibility of failure. But because Theba would not be satisfied without some sport, she wagered that Adah should have only a year and a day to make Herat love him, and if he could not, she would kill Herat.

  “When Adah came to Herat and allowed her small pleasures, when he protected her and improved the conditions of the cramped and pest-ridden cell she had inhabited, she grew to trust, and later to love. It was easy, as Theba had said it would be, and when Herat and Adah had shared days and sleepless nights enough, the god chose to bring the murderess to her true punishment at last.

  “Were there no other souls for the god to judge in that time?” Imke’s peevish interruption was not an uncommon one. I recalled my brother Jurnus’ exclamation, similarly timed, when first my mother had told us this tale. Unlike Jurnus, however, I expected Imke already knew the answer to her question.

  But Morainn didn’t give me the opportunity to silence her handmaid.

  “Adah was no more immune to the thrill of vengeance than the goddess whose counsel he sought, nor the mortal woman he judged. Go on, Eiren.”

  No one would dare to contradict Morainn, and I could have no higher command at present. I continued.

  “When Adah begged Herat to escape with him and laid out for her how it should be done, she seized upon his mouth with her own as readily as she did this chance for a new life. It was done in the night, with Adah’s intervention to clear the way and dull the senses of the other jailors. Theba took the shape of a jailer outside of the prison, and when she advanced upon the pair as she and Adah had plotted, Herat froze, her instincts dull from neglect. Adah, however, was ready, and he fell upon Theba’s blade even as he sunk his own into a critical organ so that Theba seemed to lay dead and Adah dying. If Herat attempted to escape even as her lover lay dying Theba would have her life, and if she stayed, Adah his justice.

  “The god could not have wished for a finer end to his scheme. Herat fell to her knees, her muffled cries mere husks of the pleasured sounds they had made together in the dark. He felt nothing as he slipped from his mortal form, but Herat felt horror enough for many pairs of thwarted lovers. In his cold and lifeless face she saw the death masks of her parents, knew that she had lost what once she had taken. Instead of fleeing the prison she descended within and closed the door upon her cell, locking it from within before tossing the key out of reach down the dim, earthen corridor.

  “The body Adah had inhabited disappeared, but Herat saw it before her everytime she closed her eyes and often when they were open, too. She lived for many years with no companion but her grief and her regret, while Theba and Adah both found new schemes to amuse them.”

  The last of my words dissipated like smoke or starlight, the telling hanging like a curtain over the camp. Without speaking, those who had remained seated for the length of it tucked into their blankets, if they had them, and turned their faces away from me. The quiet that descended was not resentful, but each man and woman that settled around the fire that night bedded their own demons as willingly as Herat had bedded hers.

  I didn’t go to sleep, however, but rose and stepped around the already slumbering body of Triss, passed the fire which a lone guard stood awake to stoke and tend to those helpless in dreams. She didn’t look at me as I passed her and out of the fire’s light, but I could feel her attention as keen as the blade of her sheathed sword. I’d earned a moment’s privacy, or perhaps she, too, was afraid of me now.

  Gannet waited for me at the perimeter of the camp, sharing with me briefly his sense of the scout that had just begun another circuit around. If we left now, we would both be assumed asleep around the fire. Gannet took my hand, and we did.

  Though we carried no light, my surprise at Gannet’s touch was trumped by the dim outlines of the path ahead of us, the trees that had been growing increasingly thick as we had wended away from Cascar. This must be another of his gifts. In this strange semi-sight the trees seemed like straight backed women in line at the well, their baskets and pots balanced upon their heads in the shapes of the stiff foliage.

  “Why that story, Eiren?”

  I sniffed and dropped his hand, though I knew the darkness couldn’t disguise me from him. He seemed to drop my address in these moments, when I was most likely to be taken by surprise.

  “Perhaps you should ask Imke why she challenges me to reveal what I fear. I suspect she knows already.”

  Gannet didn’t reply. Herat’s story crowded my heart. Her story made me sorrier now than it ever had before, that she had lived out her days in such grief, whether I believed it earned or not. Her life was more than just a lesson, now. She had suffered and caused suffering, and so had I. But I couldn’t hope to simply be put in chains and left to have out my days.

  But Gannet wasn’t thinking about Herat. Not now.

  “What you saw was an illusion,” he said at last, and it was as though no time had passed between our exchange over Circa’s saddle.

  “But you saw it, too.” I reminded him of the dream we’d shared on our flight from Cascar, the feathery brush of webbed fingers across my cheeks and so his, too.

  “What I saw was what you believed you saw. It wasn’t real.”

  “I don’t know why you’re afraid, but I’m sure that you have more to fear from insisting that I am a liar,” I hissed. But I couldn’t be sure that Gannet was afraid, it just seemed like a reasonable assumption. Why else would he allow gods to walk among us, but not other equally unbelievable things?

  “You’re not a liar, Han’dra Eiren, but you’re not always in control of what you see... or do.” Gannet’s tone had not exactly softened, but had approached something more like patience as he revisited his usual lecturing ground. I was Theba and Theba me, and in the case of my survival, no doubt, what had really happened would be outside the scope of my understanding.

  “I don’t need you to believe me. I saw what I saw.” The words struggled from my lips, and I was uncomfortably aware of my rising ire. I wondered if it belonged to Theba, or to me. Gannet touched a hand lightly to my shoulder, illuminating his face and the stand of trees we occupied in the same instant.

  “Just keep it to yourself. The kr’o
umae belong in stories, only in stories,” he answered, using a word that I did not recognize. “The others will never understand.”

  And he was among them. Wishing to keep what little comfort I had in remembering the siren’s scaled, alien face, I pressed the memory into a fold of my mind, a pocket even Gannet’s deft hand might not reach. It didn’t matter that he didn’t believe me, or why. Gannet didn’t own every mystery in the world.

  “What is this?” I asked, retreating to a safe subject as I gestured around us at what moments ago had been only deepest shadow, but had been illuminated for me at Gannet’s touch. The moment stirred his fingers slightly, and as though in accommodation, he pressed his hand more firmly against my shoulder. In the desert his proximity had been unnaturally cool, but here, where the night was chill, he seemed heated from within. As a stranger I had wanted nothing to do with him, but now I wasn’t sure if I was more interested in what Gannet could tell me about me, or what he might reveal about himself.

  “Something practical.” Gannet answered, the fuzzy outline of his mouth an indeterminate smile as he quoted my earlier request. “I can show you, but I’ll have to let it get dark again, first. Are you ready?”

  That he posed the question before plunging me into sightlessness was generous. I nodded my agreement. When he released hold of me this time, I was prepared.

  “Light is generated by all living things even in the night; you must simply learn to recognize and magnify that light. Close your eyes,” he instructed, though I couldn’t see the logic in what he asked. I could see no more with them open as I could when closed. Despite my reservations, I complied.

  “Don’t think about what you can’t see,” Gannet continued, though it was not a criticism. “You don’t need to know the shapes of things to know that they are there: the outlines of the trees, your hands, the slope of the path. Even the smallest stone has friction and energy at its core; it is lit from within.”