The Goddess Denied

by Deborah Davitt

  Sigrun blinked, looked up at Niðhoggr, and whispered, “Who sent you?”

  A hissing sound, that she’d come to associate with laughter. “We must come up with a better system of communication than my asking questions, and getting yes and no answers. Perhaps I could teach you to write?”

  More hissing laughter, and then the dragon launched himself for the sky. Sigrun shook her head, as rattled as all the crockery in the neighborhood, and strode up the front steps to give Adam a kiss. “What’s going on?”

  “Inside, inside,” Adam insisted, and, past the door, whispered in her ear, “There’s been word from Kanmi. Min’s going to Alexandria to meet him tomorrow.”

  Aprilis 1, 1984 AC

  She walked through the streets of downtown Alexandria, just a small, unassuming Nipponese woman. In her bones, she knew she was past fifty, but there was an unaccustomed spring in her step today. Limbs that usually felt leaden felt young. Part of it, she knew, was anticipation. She might get to see him today.

  Her hair was tied back in a neat bun, and she wore, as she so often did, a gray silk kimono jacket over a pencil skirt. She knew that her hair had gone iron-gray in the past three years, but a glance in a plate-glass storefront window told her a different tale: there, her hair was dark and glossy. Her skin was smooth and unlined, and the red lipstick she’d chosen to wear outlined lips that were fresh and full and inviting. Her eyes, darker and more lustrous than she remembered, widened at the sight of her own reflection. I look twenty-two. Twenty-three, at the most.

  She clutched her handbag, and kept walking, the salt-touched, humid air rifling at her hair and skirt, and the sun beating down on her head. Alexandria was a noisy, crowded city with eight million people crammed into its confines. It had a refugee-camp-turned-slum on the outskirts, filled with Jutes, Cimbri, and other Gothic types, displaced for fourteen years now. But the city was, fundamentally, a Hellenistic invention; the ancient capital of Egypt had been Thebes, or Memphis, or whatever city had suited the whims of a given pharaoh. When Alexander of Macedon’s lieutenant, the first Ptolemy, had declared himself king, he had taken what was a small coastal enclave for the armies of Hellas and Macedonia, and turned it into the capital of a nation. The palace of the Ptolemies still stood, used as a residence by the Roman governor, and served to host the Imperator, when whatever descendant of Caesar and Cleopatra took a whim to see the ancestral homeland. Dozens of marble-clad buildings stood at the center of town, cheek-by-jowl with more typical classical-era Egyptian buildings. Temples to Isis stood beside temples of Venus, and everywhere, everywhere, there were people.

  The Great Lighthouse still stood on the coast. Oh, it had been rocked by earthquakes between 912 and 1279 AC, but the Egyptians and Romans had rebuilt it; Alexandria was far too important a port on the Mediterranean to be allowed to languish without a lighthouse. The Great Library still existed, as well; Julius Caesar’s troops had almost burned it by accident, but the then-general had ordered his men to douse the flames, at any cost. Both were major tourist attractions, and the city itself was beautiful, for all of its crowds. The long tradition of both medicine and magic practiced in Egypt showed in its healthy populace, and the Roman obsession with sewers and drains ensured that they stayed that way.

  Minori looked around again. She definitely thought she was being followed. And the glances of the people around her, who should have seen nothing more than a young tourist, dressed up in a conservative suit in an effort to look older, seemed a little more hostile than they should have been. Nerves. Nothing but nerves, she told herself.

  No, you’re being followed, Lassair told her. The former and current lictors had gathered together on hearing of the letter currently sitting in Minori’s handbag, and they’d come up with a plan to try to ensure her safety. Kanmi had been missing for three years. Even the strongest mind could be broken in that time, by torture, or by other, subtler means of indoctrination. If it was even him that would be meeting her. But the letter had definitely been in his handwriting, with references to current events, and a couple of old phrases he and Minori had used throughout the years. Married jokes. And Kanmi had promised an explanation.

  But, reality was, it could be a trap. He could be broken. So precautions were needed, and hence, Lassair had actually entered into Minori’s body. She wasn’t manifesting, naturally, but she could flare out in a full-body shield the instant danger threatened. Of course, there were . . . pros and cons to that. Lassair was a highly noticeable spirit. People were magnetically attracted to Trennus when Lassair was shielding him. Some of Lassair’s beauty and vitality poured through into a mortal host possessed by her. Which explained some of the spring in Minori’s step, and certainly explained the youth blooming in her face. And Minori was also highly conscious of the fact that the beautiful and eternally-youthful creature was . . . intimately connected to her at the moment. In my younger years, I think I would have fallen over myself, half-embarrassed, and half deliciously aroused. I can see why Lassair and her sisters were such a temptation to her former summoner. Who wouldn’t want to look and feel this good, all the time? Minori kept the thought very much at the back of her head.

  Above her, in and among the rooftops, she knew that Sigrun was shadowing her, moving from chimney to chimney, and ducking behind satellite dishes. Anything that would give the valkyrie cover, while Trennus and Adam were posing as window washers, working out of an anonymous brown van near the café. Trennus’ hair was tucked up into a workman’s hat, and coveralls hid his tattoos . . . but they’d added a little makeup to cover the ones on his forearms, so he could roll up his sleeves. Nothing could be done about his height, but smoked glasses hid his eyes. Adam, however, required almost nothing to make him anonymous. Coveralls, a hat, smoked lenses, and letting his beard grow in had taken care of that. Once Minori made contact, they had earphones on, so they could hear anything that the microphone taped to her ribs happened to pick up. And there were radio beacons in the soles of her shoes, with an ‘easy-to-find’ beacon in her handbag. All the electronic redundancies, just in case someone managed to banish Lassair.

  After all, Kanmi knew her Name.

  She found the correct café name, hovering in the middle of a window in a blaze of enchanted light—no neon here. Egyptians prided themselves on a tradition of magic that went back six thousand years, at least. Sensen, it read, in hieroglyphs and Roman lettering; there was also an image of a lotus blooming. Symbol of rebirth. Hopefully, a good omen.

  Inside, the place was dark and a little cramped. Almost all of the seats were away from the windows—deterring the use of the new parabolic microphones. Minori’s nose twitched a little at the strong smell of coffee, and allowed the proprietor to escort her to a seat—though she politely requested one where her back was against the wall, and where she had a good view of the front door and the kitchen exit. She’d forgotten how young women tended to be treated. The proprietor couldn’t be older than sixty, but he fussed over her as if she were out after curfew, and certainly in the wrong part of town. “What can I get for you?” the man asked, patting at his shaved head with a white towel, as the overhead fans failed to stir the muggy, steamy air. His Latin was thickly accented, but quite understandable.

  “Oolong tea, if you have it. If not, jasmine will do.”

  “Anything to eat?”

  “No, thank you. I am waiting for a . . . friend.” She set her handbag down on the table, and when the tea arrived, Lassair said, mildly, Steelsoul says not to drink. I sense no ill-intent in the proprietor, but drinks can be drugged.

  Oh, what a wonderful world we live in. Minori sighed, and watched the room out of the corners of her eyes. There were quite a lot of men in the café, all settling in for extended lunch-breaks, from the looks of them. Many of them had work shirts and pants stained with dirt, but a handful looked immune to sweat, and she could feel power radiating off of them. See it in their dark, deep-set eyes, as conversation had dropped to a lull, and many of them turned to look at the
young, foreign woman in their midst. Minori shuddered. She had . . . gotten used to feeling alone again, or so she’d thought. But she hadn’t felt this alone, this alien, in a very long time.

  The door slid open at the front of the café, and Minori’s eyes flicked up, and her heart almost stopped. Oh, gods. It’s him. It’s really him. Keeping the joy off her face, the relief, was almost impossible, but she’d been schooled in the harsh precincts of the Imperial Court in Kyoto, decades ago, in how to hold her face almost perfectly impassive. She knew her eyes gave her away, however, and lowered them back to her cup, trying to peek at him as he spoke to the proprietor as if he knew the man. Rapid-fire words in Egyptian. He’s picked up another language, Minori thought, tucking that fact away, and risked another look through her lashes.

  Her heart ached at the sight of him. His hair was as gray as her own, and he’d tanned, deeply, wherever he’d been. Many more sun-lines and wrinkles, and a parchment-like quality to his skin that suggested imperfect health. Kanmi was, after all, sixty this year. He’d never gotten fat—he used far too much energy in spell-casting for that—but he had lost tone once he’d left the Praetorians. Currently, he was lean, and almost weathered-looking. Eroded. His steps were as leaden as hers usually were these days, but his eyes had locked onto her. Narrowed. Anger practically radiated out of him for a moment. Lassair? Minori begged.

  I can barely see him, Lassair replied, in a tone of perfect horror and anguish. His spirit is barely visible. It is like looking at someone who has endured horrific suffering, and has locked themselves away inside of themselves . . . or one who has been bound. Unwillingly.

  Kanmi took the seat opposite her at the table, and just stared, for a long, dark, brooding moment. Then, without so much as a gesture, the air around them formed the usual sound-dampening dome. Minori could feel it. Then he leaned forward and gritted out, one hand over his mouth to obscure the shape of his lips, “Baal’s teeth, Masako, but you had better have a very good reason for being here.” Her head snapped back, and she blinked, and Kanmi looked, just for a moment, horrified. “Nothing’s happened to your mother, has it?”

  “Kanmi-kun, it’s me.” Minori wanted to reach out her hands across the table and take his, but his expression currently forbade it, though he blinked, twice, at hearing her voice. “Asha is currently providing me a little protection.”

  Kanmi exhaled, a little of the rigidity going out of his body. “All right. That makes this . . . slightly less awkward. I had just told the proprietor here that I was picking up my prostitute. Try to look as if we’re haggling over price.”

  “Your what?” Minori said, her eyes going wide.

  “Work with me. I had to have a reason for meeting a strange woman in a café and maybe, gods help me, disappear with her for an hour or two, and I didn’t think that saying I was here to meet with my wife would be at all believable.” He pulled a jingling bag from his side, and began sorting through the coins within. “Of course, you look incredibly expensive right now. I might be the envy of every man in the café. Every man in Alexandria, in fact.” His eyes lifted, and met hers, and behind the caustic tone, she heard the real emotion. “Gods, it is so good to see you, Min. I . . . just thinking of seeing you again has been . . . the only thing . . . .”

  She could see him fighting with the emotion, and knew without being told that they were being watched. Every man in the café, indeed, had locked eyes on them. Minori smiled and looked up through her lashes. I was trained to be a concubine when I was very young. Let’s see what I remember. Admittedly, I am about to act like a very poor sort of concubine, indeed . . . my mother would be grossly offended by my lack of decorum. She stood, eyes lowered, and moved around to his side of the table, slipping directly into his lap.

  “Gods, Min, right at the moment, you look young enough to—”

  “Shh.” She reached for her hand-bag, and removed a small book of woodprints from it. It was actually a classic novel, written somewhere in the 900s AC, with illustrations, but everyone knew what Nipponese woodprints were about. Everything, of course, must be shunga. Minori turned slightly in her husband’s lap. “Try to look as if you’re choosing something from a menu.”

  Kanmi put his head against her shoulder for a moment. It was killing her not to see his face. “I’d forgotten how good you are at improvising.” He began to flip through the book, pointing at various images periodically. “Quickly. Tell me about the children.”

  “Himi’s fine. He can walk. Most days, he only carries the cane for show, and he’s the terror of the apprentices at rounds, or so I hear. He and Latirian got married last month, right before she entered the JDF as a combat medic. She wants to do two years.”

  Kanmi went rigid behind her. “Himi married one of Tren’s brood?”

  “It gets better.” Minori reached again into her hand-bag, and managed to produce a folder with pictures, as Kanmi delicately kissed the side of her neck. She went so far as to line up the pictures with the book, as if comparing a diagram with an actual photograph, and her lips twitched. This is probably more fun than it should be. “Here’s Himi and Latirian getting married. Double ceremony, priestess of Astarte and priestess of Áine. Some Gallic love deity. Of course, Asha was there, so . . . I think they’re quite adequately bound.” She turned the page in the book in his hand, and lined up another picture beside it. “Here’s Bodi and Jykke, and their little girl. She was born in Ianuarius, a month early.” Minori was trying not to remember Sophia Caetia’s words right now. “They decided to call her Ayzebel. Good, solid Carthaginian name.”

  Kanmi put his head against her throat again, and she could feel something hot and wet streak against her neck. “And here’s Masako and Solinus,” she added, flipping another page. Here, Masako really was the age that Minori currently appeared to be, in a white dress, and long strings of black beads, curled into Solinus’ side. Solinus had been caught in his fatigues, with his hair freshly-shorn, but he’d long-sufferingly, at photographer’s request, ignited one of his hands as he wrapped it around Masako’s waist.

  Another hot, wet drop, and then Kanmi whispered, “I’m going to kill Trennus. Just for the record. And possibly his son, too. It may take me a while.”

  Oh, what a thing to say, Lassair said, but her voice was sad, not teasing. He cannot hear me, Truthsayer. He cannot hear my words at all. He is too tightly bound.

  Kanmi pointed imperatively at something in the book, and told Minori, “Come on. Haggle. I want to get you out of here. I have a hotel room, it’s warded as thoroughly as I can make it . . . we can talk there.” He wrapped his arms around her waist, and added, quietly, “And, if you can forgive me, maybe other things.”

  “There’s nothing to forgive,” Minori said, quietly, and began to go through his bag of coins, sorting and stacking them. She knew how . . . in-demand . . . geisha were. Not that a geisha was necessarily a prostitute. That was a western misconception. But beautiful, gracious Nipponese women who could almost pass for a highly-trained geisha were in huge demand in Roman and Persian brothels. She sorted out an aureus, and then that amount again, in silver, and turned to look back at him, almost inquiringly, but told him, “I can’t leave with you, not until we know what’s been going on, Kanmi.”

  “The others are watching.” It wasn’t a question. “The CPL, as well as the PG.”

  “Listening, too. Wire.”

  Steelsoul asks why you told him that? Lassair sounded dubious.

  Because if I do go to a hotel room with him, he’s going to find it in short order, don’t you think?

  Kanmi already had moved his hand, however, directly to her ribs, just under her right breast. “I know. I could detect the radio transmissions coming from it. Please, please tell me that it’s our people, Min, not . . . some over-eager puppy.”

  “Our people. The lictors.”

  “Thank the gods.” For a wonder, that sounded sincere, and Kanmi divided the stack of silver denarii from the aureus, and tapped solely on the gold coin as
if bargaining. “They bound me, Min. They’ve . . . learned a lot, from the mistakes of other groups. We knew they were conservative about their recruiting. They vet their recruits, and you’re only pulled in slowly. After many loyalty checks.” He shuddered, and Minori shook her head, and tapped firmly on the pile of silver. “And one of the ways they ensure loyalty?” His voice was sick. “They took me from the conference to an old shrine in the desert. And they held me, blindfolded and bound, with a gun to my head . . . and cut my hands open, so I bled into a fire. Blood sacrifice, Min. They fucking blood-bound me to Baal-Hamon.”

  Minori froze in his lap, feeling him shake. Her proud Kanmi, who laughed in the face of the gods. Oh, he knew they existed. There was no one who knew it better. But he’d always refused to worship them. He’d gone through the motions in his first marriage, more or less for Himi and Bodi’s sake, but it simply wasn’t in him, to be bound to anything, or anyone. Other than to those things he chose to be bound by—his family. Her. His fellow lictors. His loyalty to Livorus. “Gods,” she whispered, and he moved half the stack of silver to the same side of the table as the golden coin. Minori turned—a movement she found surprisingly fluid, considering the fact that her hips usually ached these days—and straddled him, her skirt hiking up as she did so. Kanmi’s head hit the wooden backing of the booth they sat in with a ringing thud, and she caught the look on his face. Devastation. Being bound like that . . . he couldn’t find anything more emasculating, short of being actually gelded, I think. “Doesn’t that mean that Baal-Hamon knows you’re . . . ?”