The Hidden Icon

by Jillian Kuhlmann

  Agathe’s brows lifted and settled again in a moment. Whether she was aware of how easily I read her or not, this was the only sign she gave of anything less than studied regality.

  “We meet as we must,” she said vaguely, more a diplomat than I.

  “Our people have for many generations worked together with yours. Blood calls to blood,” Colaugh said. He spoke of the Ambarians and the icons among them, not at all in ignorance of his purposeful exclusion of Aleyn. It was purposeful. For Morainn I might’ve been more than Theba, and perhaps even for her mother, but not for him. I looked at Morainn, my discomfort growing. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. Perhaps Morainn could join me in my quarters after the opera, and we could talk as we had, freely, breaking bread and passing a cup. I almost thought then to suggest as much, but a herald was admitted by one of the servants. I could see his intentions as if they waved on a flag before him, the whole of his speech to the royal family, to me, and later, to the opera’s audience, embroidered in the air.

  It spared me having to listen, at least.

  I rose at the appropriate time to follow behind the royal family, thinking of such processions at home before we had been driven into the desert. As the youngest, I had always come last, and now I was more distant from them than I’d ever dreamed I could be. I imagined my mother and father, my siblings, turning their faces toward the north in wonder over me, and my heart ached with regret and with guilt, too. I’d felt something like family with the icons during the past few weeks, but nothing, nothing could compare to what was written in my blood and on my body, the press of a lifetime’s worth of embraces, pinches, and other affections. What had been there first, I wondered? The body born of my mother and my mother’s love, or Theba?

  The opera house was deeper within the mountain than the palace, and I had the sense that it served as a center for the city in a way the palace could not. The face of the house was carved much as the palace was, seeming to spring from the stone itself, but where the palace had all of the impressions and comforts of a structure that is human made and one whose sole purpose is for human shelter, the opera house boasted no such familiarity. The latticed stone at the front and sides glowed with an unnatural light, and I saw within that mineral doused fires burned green and blue. There was no gate but the lane deadened, grown broad with the stones laid in beautiful, intentional patterns. If there were characters or images I couldn’t pick them out, but the delicate tracery of mortar suggested more than simple labor.

  I recognized none of the guard who stood at attention outside, and wondered if perhaps the soldiers that had accompanied Antares had been given well deserved leaves from their posts. They hadn’t been friends, not remotely, but I was grateful that the eerie shadows drawn down the liveried, armored men were not across faces that I would have recognized by fireside. I didn’t see Antares, either, and hadn’t seen him since the morning he’d slain the man in the snow. I’d learned from Morainn that while attacks of that kind were far from common, Ambarian law did not leave much room for such offenders to explain themselves. I didn’t see how a people who revered Theba would behave much differently towards murderers, or attempted murderers.

  I felt my heart hammering as the guards that had accompanied us parted to join their company in lines outside the opera house, spear points muted in the strange light but made somehow more deadly. I wanted to walk beside Morainn, but she followed immediately behind her parents, and I several steps behind, as though I were both a guest they wished to distinguish and a leashed animal, padding in deference behind her masters.

  My heart found no rest, of course, when the wonders immediately within the opera house were muted all by Gannet standing to one side. He didn’t look at me, he didn’t even look up. I read nothing in the bowed, golden brow, and I noticed all the icons that waited with him. Unlike the guard that stood outside the opera house, they were in two lines to one side, their eyes fixed on the ground, their garb as rich and bright as mine. Braziers were burning with the strange glow all around. At first glance it seemed like the night sky, populated by scattered and senseless constellations. The ceilings glowed with runes, a masterwork of some precious metal inlaid in the stone, tier upon tier of private boxes pocketed in the mountain’s walls and looking down upon a many-seated ground floor. An oval-shaped stage was lit by fires of green and gold and blue at the center of the opera chamber. I marveled only briefly for the opera and Gannet both, for Colaugh and Agathe were proceeding up a flight of spidery stairs to our left, Morainn flowing up an identical set on our right. Witless, I looked from mother and father to daughter and back again, but it was Morainn who gestured to me, and she I followed.

  Two guards trailed behind me but remained at some distance. Despite this opportunity to speak with Morainn, my attention was all in keeping my footing. There were many torches to light our way, but I was disconcerted by the occasional and considerable break in the stone, through which I could see the perilous distance growing between our feet and the ground floor. The opera house was ancient, and it felt like the Rogue’s Ear had. I remembered Gannet’s warning that the tunnels we had passed through hadn’t been made by mortal hands, nor intended for mortal passage. I wondered if the opera house had at some time served another, other worldly purpose.

  Gannet. I felt his nearness like I did my own breath. Why hadn’t I joined the icons in whatever it was they were doing below? I didn’t think now that I could bear his going away again without speaking with him, daring to touch him again.

  When I guessed that we had climbed halfway up what felt like the whole mountain’s side, Morainn turned down one of the narrow passages that boasted curtained entrances to the boxes and an ample view of the stage. She parted the curtain on the last and I hoped for a place to sit within, as I was exhausted from nerves and the climb both. The guards did not follow after us, the curtain falling again over the entrance with a rustle of finality. Morainn’s breath of relief was nearly as loud, though she did not take one of the chairs gathered around a brazier, burning a smokeless fire for warmth. I didn’t sit, either, but looked eagerly toward her. We were framed by an opening at the front of the box, providing a perfect view of the stage and the boxes opposite ours, which were already beginning to fill with dark shapes.

  “Very soon they’ll take you down there, and keep you,” Morainn said suddenly, her hands clutched in the rich fabric of her gown. She caught my eyes, and hers were vulnerable and flashing. I didn’t know if she meant where the icons clustered in the opera now, or below ground, where we had been. I didn’t think it mattered. “Mother told me that was what they did with Gannet. He was four when he was taken, and she didn’t see him again until he was twelve, and then only secretly.”

  My breath was sharp. Already I could see that I didn’t belong in the palace. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might not have the freedom to retreat when I wished.

  “It’s different for me,” I explained, though for all I knew it wasn’t. “Gannet was a child.”

  Morainn did sit down then, whipping her skirt with a force I thought might stir the fire from the brazier. I sat down quickly and close beside her.

  “You’ll see soon how different you are,” she said, the sadness in her voice made sadder still by how final, how thorough, was her belief in the words. I couldn’t respond in any kind before she continued. “I won’t watch with you. I am supposed to, of course, but I told him that I couldn’t.”

  She looked over my shoulder at the entrance, but when I turned, there was no one there. Morainn’s next was quieter still.

  “Shortly after it starts, he’ll come. He can’t be seen here. The icons never watch. But because you are who you are, you’ll watch from here. Just this once.”

  Though I had a moment’s fear that she spoke of Paivi, she would have referred with such familiarity to no one but her brother. If my heart had hammered before, it beat flush against the fabric of my robe now.

  “I don’t know what I am, Morainn
, but I do know that I am your friend,” I offered as finally and as firmly as she had expressed what I could only read as regret. “No matter what I see tonight, I’ll still be after.”

  When she looked up, I thought perhaps her eyes had bleared from looking in the fire. “I didn’t expect that we would be friends, Eiren, but we are. Theba can’t change that.”

  She said it as though we spoke of a different person, as though when realized, Theba would eclipse me entirely, preserving our friendship like an insect in amber. How true or right her feelings, I was filled with too much terror to pry. Morainn rose then and I did, too, our tight embrace not unlike the ones I shared with my sisters when I bid them goodbye. I would see Morainn again, but this was goodbye to something between us.

  The opera house was well-filled now and humming with hushed conversation. Morainn passed back through the curtain. I looked down on the ground floor and I couldn’t distinguish between one person and another. I felt exposed all the same, not wanting to draw too near the edge of the box lest my solitude be noticed by some keen, distant observer. I could see the shadows at the stage’s back, and I wondered if even now they disguised the players. What sort of people could they be, playing at icons playing at gods? My gaze traveled from the stage to the curtain entrance to my box and back again, waiting for some appearance in either place, something to attract my attention away from dark thoughts. It was the stage, first, and though I’d hoped to speak with Gannet privately before the opera began, my curiosity got the better of me.

  On stage two figures, a man and a woman, moved towards each other from opposite ends of the oval. Their skin and clothing glowed in the firelight, making them far easier to see than the patrons who were level with them. I wondered what alchemical work was this, some powder or paste that gathered and reflected the light from the strange fires. As they neared the center, all conversation ceased abruptly, and seats were taken in startling silence. The pair on stage moved in study around each other, circling as prey and predator might, as uncertain lovers, establishing trust or dominance or both. Unwittingly, I moved nearer the box edge, taking a seat for fear I might now miss something.

  “In the beginning of the world there were many gods capable of creation, but only one who could destroy.” The voice emerged from the shadows, bodiless but clear. “It was Theba who claimed the broken blade in the forge, the fallow crop, the stillborn babe. If we didn’t have her to reap, how could we ever know the value of our sowing? She taught us. In our earliest history Theba laid with the mortal Shran and conceived with him a child.”

  There were other figures in the shadows but only just visible, their limbs thrashing out onto the stage in a wild, soundless dance. The man and woman collapsed onstage and I bit my lip, my chest tightening in the moment before the woman rose slowly again, climbing over the man and coming finally to stand with one foot on his chest. One of the figures at the edge of the stage crawled forward on her belly before rolling over onto her back, offering herself to the woman standing. I knew this story already, but not like this.

  “Theba does not suffer life and so the child was cast from Theba’s womb and into the body of Shran’s mortal wife, Jemae. She didn’t survive his birth, and Salarahan grew to manhood in ignorance of his true mother.”

  I felt a chill groan through my body, followed by the heat of anger. It came from another place and was simply thrust through me, like a spear point, like a man, like a babe. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t known a man or born a child, I felt the alien presence of each. Was I the only one to be affected this way, or did the opera have some unnatural hold on the whole audience?

  “When Salarahan came of age he betrayed his true mother in word and deed, and for one hundred years Theba punished him. His brothers ruled the kingdom their father had left behind, true in their service to Theba. Their rewards were great, and they would be living still if Salarahan hadn’t thrown off the yoke of death and returned to the world of the living. He cast Theba from his heart and from the hearts of those who would follow him, parting the kingdom and slaying his brothers. He made war. Those who remained faithful to the dread goddess, she who had provided for them, fled north, and Salarahan and those like him abandoned Re’Kether for the south.”

  My breath stopped. I should’ve guessed that Re’Kether would play some part, but that I had been there, that I had nearly been killed there, was too much. My shock and what happened next on the stage distracted me from arguing the validity of what the opera’s narrator claimed. The figures around the periphery of the stage threw themselves in part into the light, and their bodies, too, were cleverly painted, so only this leg or arm or even only a head would shine in the light, the rest obscured. It was a massacre of bodies behind the woman, who neither looked at them nor shook at the horror that fanned out on all sides. The man I had taken to be Shran was so still and so lifeless I wondered if perhaps he hadn’t actually been killed. The woman that was Theba bent, however, and touched his cheek with such profound tenderness that I could feel it like it were my own cheek, my own hand, and his eyes fluttered open and I knew that he lived. He rose like a man on a string, and she led him off stage.

  The curtain rustled softly, and I tore my eyes away from the stage, sensing Gannet before I could see him as he crossed quickly and quietly to the chair beside mine. I imagined lifting a hand as the woman on the stage had and trailing my fingers from brow to mask lip to cheek, but even as my fingers twitched Gannet looked at me, his expression unreadable.

  Watch, Eiren.

  It was difficult to do as I was bid, but in the moment I had given to Gannet the figures on the edges of the stage had come forward, and the woman was nowhere to be seen. There were two groups now, and while one powdered themselves with white, the other smeared their faces and limbs with gold. Snow and sand. Ambar and Aleyn. I wondered then that it hadn’t occurred to me that the Ambarians would think Theba’s story this story, the sundering of our world, but I was more curious still how there could be something I didn’t know about so ancient and frequently told a tale?

  The woman who was Theba appeared in the midst of the white-powdered bodies. They quaked at her presence and I quaked with them. It was difficult enough to imagine myself, let alone a third, as some representative of the vengeful goddess.

  “In their trials to cross first the desert and then the mountains they forgot her, what she had done for them, what she had done to them. Theba wanted Salarahan no more, and she would forge her own kingdom in the north. But they were weak, and must be made strong. She lit in their breasts the fires of ambition, and they fought to win her favor.”

  At these words, the white-powdered figures began to turn on each other, wrestling and inarticulate as animals. From their hands sprayed red, and whether it was blood or some other concoction I couldn’t tell. Half of the stage grew slick with it as figure after figure fell, gurgling, scrambling, spitting. Theba stood among them untouched, and when they had finished their numbers were much diminished.

  The gold-powdered figures had played no role in this conflict, gathered together in tight groups, heads turned inwards and bodies inclined completely towards each other in protective circles. Theirs was the isolation of Aleyn, their survival dependent upon a commitment to harmony. The contrast between the groups, the white now bloodied red, brought tears to my eyes, and I watched Theba pass between them, embraced by Ambar and shunned by Aleyn. She hadn’t been content to destroy the world, but would remake it in blood and darkness and pin the blame upon her mortal son. When next the narrator spoke, the voice was magnified to haunting clarity.

  “Many hundreds of years passed, a thousand, and Theba brought forward her servants, the icons, to work her will in the world. She told them that she would return in body herself when their greatest moment was upon them, when they would return to Re’Kether and reclaim what had been taken. They worked and waited, icons and mortals alike, for her coming. They were told they would know her in the stars and in the air when she came again.”
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  I had not forgotten that Gannet sat beside me, but I was suddenly keenly and painfully aware of my body, that they were speaking of me and yet somehow not. Gently, Gannet placed a hand upon mine, which had gone white with tension in my lap. We looked together. I didn’t need the audience’s rapt attention to know that what came after was new.

  “Fifteen years it took to claim her.”

  The Ambarians followed obediently behind Theba, their footprints wet and red as they crossed the stage. The Aleynians didn’t resist them, but lay down one by one in positions of subservience. I felt my face grow hot as Theba surveyed, her eyes dark hollows in the strange light on the stage. The fires guttered low and my heart grew wilder and heavier still as Gannet’s hand tightened over mine. I couldn’t keep from looking at him now, wondering if I might find as many answers in his eyes as the would-be Theba on the stage withheld.

  “Please forgive me,” he whispered, his hand transmitting nothing to me but his body’s heat. I started when his fingers found my throat amidst the folds of hood and robe, brushed from chin to cheek and settled there against my pulse.

  He spoke but I didn’t hear his words, for even as I thought to return the tenderness of his gesture in countless ways my attention was tugged inexorably back to the stage. All were in shadow but Theba. She stood as still as though she were made of stone, and if there had been gasps and whispers in the audience in response to earlier scenes, all were grave-silent now.

  “You’ve made yourselves worthy of me,” she began, her voice wholly unlike the narrator’s, low and cold like a sound that begins in the earth and grows to topple mountains. “What Salarahan divided I will reconcile, from blood and boiling sea a kingdom will rise again and that kingdom will be yours.”