The Goddess Denied

by Deborah Davitt

  Everything took time. Kanmi needed to arrange for travel papers, since Carthage had just been placed under martial law. He needed to pull strings, and young Agent Duilus made the unfortunate mistake of trying to block Kanmi’s travel permits on the grounds that an investigation was pending on him. That took exactly one phone call to resolve, and that phone call involved Adam ben Maor.

  So, three days later, Kanmi was back in Carthage, where he hadn’t been, other than Himi’s graduation, since just before leaving for the University of Athens. He’d spent a few years at the Carthage School of Applied Magic and Technology, a distinguished prep school that had taken him in as one of their scholarship students. He’d had to fight the wealthy and the privileged students there every damned day, the ones who came from old sorcerer families, and who might only have had a thimbleful of talent, themselves, but plenty of money. Thus, most of his memories of Carthage itself were . . . unpleasant.

  The city itself, razed by the Romans over two thousand years ago, had been rebuilt in antiquity, along Roman lines. Thus, the downtown streets aligned to a neat grid, although they were far too narrow for modern uses. There was a forum, bathhouses, an arena . . . and all of them, after six postmeridian, were shut down today. No lights in any of the shops, no motorcars on the road, and no people out on foot, other than legionnaires, prowling in small, armored vehicles. “The riots didn’t look that bad on the far-viewer,” Kanmi commented to the driver of his vehicle, a young member of the local gardia.

  The younger man glanced at him in the passenger seat, and rubbed at his thick moustache. “They haven’t been publicizing the fact that there have been armed clashes every day since then. They don’t want to give the CLP any kind of acknowledgement in the media.”

  “Can you give me any numbers?”

  “Wish I could, but, security—”

  “Yes, I thought as much.” Kanmi stewed, quietly, in his seat. This makes no sense. Part of me, truly, does think the world would be a different, even a better place, if Rome’s yoke did not lie so securely over the necks of half of it. But this doesn’t even make as much sense as the Quecha provinces of Nahautl rebelling against their regional government. They had a different language and culture from their rulers, they had a different history, they . . . have only been under the rule of the Empire for six, seven hundred years, give or take . . . and they had no regional autonomy. Carthage and Tyre have regional autonomy. We govern ourselves, mostly. We’ve spoken Latin for two thousand years, but they let us keep our language, our gods, our customs. About all we do is pay taxes and send levy troops to the Empire, and they take care of the hassle of defense and diplomacy and everything else. What is there even to fight about?

  He arrived at the hospital past visiting hours, but a kindly nurse, on hearing how far he’d traveled, made an exception, and snuck him into Himilico’s room. “He’s one of my favorite doctors to work with,” the Nubian woman told him as they hastened down one of the hallways. “It just kills me to see him like this.”

  Like what? Kanmi wanted to shout, but he held his tongue. The woman was doing him a favor, after all.

  In the room, he understood a good deal better. He could smell antiseptics and the resinous smell of plastic tubing from the IVs. Plastics were rare and valuable enough that these would surely be sterilized and reused after Himi was done with them. His eyes found the foot of the metal bed, where a catheter bag was about half-full of urine. Yes, they haven’t let him stand yet. If he can even do that much. Spine wounds are spine wounds. His gaze fell on the surgical scars on Himi’s arm, from the break that had occurred when Kanmi had been in Nahautl, and closed his eyes for a moment. Baal take it all. He’s a grown man. This isn’t my fault. But somebody’s going to pay.

  He found the chair beside the bed, and sat down. Reached blindly for Himi’s hand, and took it.

  The touch woke his son. “Father?”

  “Sorry I’m late.” The words held none of Kanmi’s usual humor. “Martial law out there.”

  “So I hear.” Himi’s voice was lifeless, and he closed his dark eyes again. “A Roman soldier shot me in the damned back.”

  Bitterness and rage. Himi had had a solid forty-eight hours since awakening from surgery to get his mind around the subject. “You were treating a wounded civilian?”

  “Woman who’d been trampled by the crowd. Bleeding. Fractures, internal injuries. I don’t even know if she survived.” Himi tilted his head back against the pillows, still not looking at his father. “And then some fucking legionnaire thought I was a threat.”

  “We’re probably never going to know what happened,” Kanmi said, quietly, and moved his hand to his son’s shoulder. “It was crowded and confusing. He could have been aiming at someone near you, and missed, or someone could have jogged his arm. Someone could have taken the weapon out of his hands. As is . . . I’m going to take a look at the bullet with the forensics team here. Make sure it’s actually from a rifle. If it’s got rifling marks at all . . . we can track down the weapon used to fire it. Maybe.” He gripped Himi’s shoulder a little more tightly.

  “You may as well whitewash the walls of Tartarus, Father. None of this is going to get me to be able to walk again.”

  Kanmi’s free hand clenched so tightly the knuckles ached, but he kept his other hand, on Himi’s shoulder, feather-light. “As soon as you’re stable enough for transport, I’d like to take you to Judea,” he said, simply. “Not only are their surgical specialists a little better than those here—don’t give me that look. Your colleagues are good, but they don’t measure up against Hellene, Judean, and Nipponese standards, and you know it. These doctors are pioneers in their fields. And if they can’t do something . . . maybe Caetia or Asha can. It can’t hurt to ask.”

  Kanmi had correctly interpreted the first mutinous expression. Finally, Himi muttered, “I’ve looked at the X-rays, Father. I’ve seen the charts. I’m missing half of two vertebrae, and the spinal cord itself was severed. They . . . reattached it . . . but nerves just don’t grow back.”

  “Have you seen what Asha and Caetia can do?” Kanmi forbore to mention that Sigrun’s powers might not work, if the wound was too well-healed by the time they got there. He’d considered asking the valkyrie to come with him but . . . could he ask her to take that kind of wound? When he hadn’t even known Himi’s full condition till he got here? “I mean, if you’d rather sit here in a hospital bed and brood, I can arrange to leave you alone here. Pull the shades down, turn out the lights for a couple of years. Or you can come with me, and maybe even heal.”

  “Why don’t you tell Asha to come here and fix me?” Himi challenged.

  Kanmi closed his eyes. “Because I don’t think she can hear me from fourteen hundred miles away,” he said, dryly. “I’m not a god-born. I yell into the wind, I get a face-full of saliva.”

  “Pick up the phone.”

  “Asha doesn’t talk out loud. Ever notice that?”

  “One of the children or Trennus can pick up and translate.”

  “And then she has to find me, a voice on the wind, pop herself through the Veil to here, leaving no double of herself at the house . . . yes. How about if we do it my way, Himi? The world only revolves around you a little bit when you’re hurt. About this much.” Kanmi held up thumb and forefinger, spaced an inch apart, and conjured a smile for Himi, taking as much care to construct the expression and his gently chiding tone as he’d ever put into a spell.

  He arranged for transport within the next two days, once the doctors were in agreement that Himi could be moved, if only in a flat position, on a back board. Kanmi dug into his savings, chartered a flight, made arrangements to be able to leave from the otherwise locked-down airport, and dealt with bureaucrats. He actually fell asleep on the trip home, and awoke to find Himi staring at him from where the gurney was locked in place in the aisle of the small plane. “Father?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Thank you for coming to get me.” Himi hesitated. “Did you . . .
happen to check to see if my mother was . . . all right?”

  Gods. No, I didn’t. She’s not my job anymore. Kanmi exhaled. “I can make some calls when we touch down.”

  “No. It’s all right. I can . . . call her myself.”

  The Judean doctors were able to make some suggestions; they wanted to take powdered cow bone and reconstitute it into a custom form manufactured to fit Himi’s missing vertebrae. It was an innovative procedure only being conducted in two hospitals in the world right now; the other one was in Kyoto. Himi nodded a little over the literature, muttering under his breath. “They’ve only been doing this in humans for five years, Father. And while that will . . . stop the bones from sawing on what’s left of the cord, which will . . . stop the pain from shooting up my back . . . nothing’s going to fix the nerves.”

  “You know, giving someone their doctorate is supposed to mean that you’ve learned how to ask questions, not assume that you know all the answers,” Minori told Himi, crisply, and straightened the covers over his form again. They’d had to rent an ambulance to take him to the hospital and back again. “Lassair and Sigrun will be by this afternoon.”

  “I don’t see you with a medical degree,” Himi shot back, grumpily. He was definitely demonstrating that patients, no matter their background, tended to take out their anger and depression on their nearest and dearest.

  Sigrun was less than sanguine after examining Himi. “I cannot take the wound,” she finally assessed, sounding upset as she perched in the bedside chair. “It needs to be fresh. I should have gone with your father when we first heard. I am sorry.”

  Himi’s lips tightened, and Kanmi could almost feel a quieter version of his own anger radiating from his son.

  However . . . Lassair said, calmly, I believe that I can repair the damage. It will take some time. You are correct to say that nerves heal much more slowly than the rest of the body. And it will require, I think, practice, to learn to walk again. The nerves and the muscles will be untried, untested. They will need to learn to perform their tasks. But it should be possible. She tipped her head to the side, smiling. The sooner we begin, the sooner you will be healed.

  Kanmi closed his eyes in relief. It wouldn’t be easy, but it would be possible. And that was all he asked.

  Four weeks into Himi’s rehabilitation, which consisted mostly of the younger man cursing at his various nurses, including Latirian, who had been volunteering at the Judean hospital for a year now, and who helped him with his physical therapy once or twice a week, Kanmi was called to Adam’s office. “Is this an official visit?” Kanmi said, after tapping on the glass pane beside the door and sticking his head inside. “Should I remind you that I bill by the hour?”

  “Come in. Close the door.” Ben Maor looked haggard.

  “Oh, so it’s real business, and not just lunch.”

  “Yes.” Ben Maor gestured Kanmi towards a chair, and the sorcerer took the indicated seat, reflecting that the Judean’s relative youth had stopped irritating him right around the same time he, Adam, and Minori all started showing their age so much more than Trennus and Sigrun did.

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “Couple of things. Toss up a sound-dampening field, would you?” For Adam to request this inside Praetorian headquarters made Kanmi’s eyebrows rise. Adam waited for Kanmi to finish warding the room before continuing. “First, we got the results of the forensic analysis on the bullet they took out of Himi’s spine. It was definitely fired from a rifle. I’m sorry, Esh.”

  Kanmi’s stomach lurched, but he’d more or less been expecting that reply. He rubbed at his jaw for a moment, and shook his head. “Like I told Himi a month ago . . . could have been a miss. Could have been taken out of the gardia member’s hands. It was battle, and shit happens in battle.” Unfortunately, in this case, shit happened to my son, who’s going to take a long damned time just to learn bladder and bowel control again.

  Adam interlaced his fingers and propped his elbows on the desk. “I . . . hoped you’d see it that way, Esh. That . . . lets me talk about a couple of other things.”

  Kanmi raised his eyebrows, and the commander nodded at him. “First, that agent last month who tried to block you from leaving the city? He’s filed a formal complaint against both you and me for obstruction of justice.”

  A barely audible growl emerged from the back of Kanmi’s throat. “Well, that will go nowhere,” he predicted, grimly.

  “Actually . . . .”

  Kanmi’s eyebrows rose again. “You’re pleased to jest.”

  Adam exhaled. “We might let it go somewhere.”

  That definitely got Kanmi’s attention. “Why?”

  “The Carthaginian Liberation Party,” Adam said, quietly. “You’re the one who collects extremists as a hobby. Characterize them for me.”

  Kanmi grimaced. “Somewhere in the red,” he acknowledged. “They consider themselves a populist group. Liberty, equality, and the brotherhood of the downtrodden lower classes. They claim to want liberation from the Empire for Tyre, Carthage, and the other parts of the old kingdom. More than just limited autonomy; full-on independence.”

  “Sounds like something you’d have been in favor of in your younger years.” Adam’s tone was bland.

  “I’ve served Rome, and I did so willingly and loyally, but sometimes I wonder what the world would be like without Roman armies all across the world, Roman ideas in our minds, Roman words in our mouth, Roman coins in our pockets.” Kanmi exhaled. “That being said? Carthage is much better off as one nation in the empire, as opposed to standing alone. No import/export levies from the rest of the Empire. Inexpensive grain from Egypt, Novo Gaul, and Nova Germania. We’d have to raise and maintain our own standing army, defend our own borders, set up diplomatic exchanges with dozens of other governments . . . most of these people have no idea what it takes to make a nation, a nation. All they want is power for themselves, and be damned to reality.”

  Adam chuckled, a tired sound. “Government is expensive.”

  “Agreed.” Kanmi rubbed at his jaw again. “You’re leading up to something. You try to be subtle, coming in at it from different directions, but for someone trained in both stealth and interrogation, you’re very obvious sometimes, old friend.”

  “Only because you know me.” Adam stared at his interlaced fingers. “What’s the level of threat from the CLP?”

  “They were on the watch list before last month, but I don’t think anyone anticipated this level of armed response.” Kanmi’s tone was noncommittal.

  “What got you watching them?”

  Kanmi grimaced. That, was another story entirely. “Partially that they’re Carthaginian,” he admitted. “And, partially, because they have an unusually large number of sorcerers and technomancers known to be involved in the organization. Some of that is education level, though the more educated someone is, the less likely they are to identify with populist causes. They tend to adhere more to the liberal label. But somewhere between fifteen to twenty percent of their known affiliates are magic-users of some sort or another.”

  Adam nodded, slowly. “Back in fifty-four, that shaman of the Morning Star that you and Tren weren’t around for . . . asked Livorus if he knew where his gods were. Tlaloc went off the map. No one really noticed, because his worship was in decline. Most of the Tawantinsuyan gods went quiet, but . . . they had about a thousand of them, and gods don’t answer every prayer, anyway.”

  Kanmi’s eyebrows had gone up. This sounded like a complete non sequitur, but this was Adam’s usual style, if he could set up the way he wanted to do so. Circle around the map, take every objective, eliminate all support structures for the enemy, and then strike for the heart. “And then there was Loki. Whom the northern gods knew had gone missing, but they concealed that from everyone else in existence, because, really, who wants to admit that you’ve got a self-willed weapon capable of destroying a major city that’s gone off the grid?”

  “Exactly.” Adam unlatched his fing
ers, and set them, palms down, on the desk. “Tlaloc? Not a highly-worshipped god in Nahautl, thirty years ago, and the Roman gods had made serious inroads on the belief structure there. But there were, give or take, a hundred million people in Nahautl who believed in Tlaloc. Inti, Supay, all of them . . . smaller population, only thirty-six million worshippers.”

  “But Inti was their chief god,” Kanmi said, quietly. “Explains the devastation. Minor god of a medium pantheon, major god of a small pantheon. Loki . . . .”

  “Major, but not lead god, of a major pantheon.” Adam’s voice was tight. “Here’s another thing to consider. Age of the pantheon. How long the gods have been . . . accruing power. Sigrun’s gods have been around for . . . give or take, two thousand years. Nahautl and Tawantinsuyu’s . . . maybe eight hundred or a thousand, other than maybe Quetzalcoatl? Cuzco wasn’t settled until 1190 AC. Tenochtitlan wasn’t built until 1325 AC. Their people had those gods before establishing their seats of power, but . . . how much power did they really accrue, before their people built them empires and arranged for mass worship?”