The Goddess Denied

by Deborah Davitt

  Adam looked down at Sigrun in their bed. She was curled up into a tight ball, almost childlike, and he slipped back the covers lightly, not wanting to wake her unnecessarily. Her reflexes were such, however, that as soon as the sheets shifted, her eyes opened, and for a moment, they were blank and dazed as he slipped under the covers with her. “Adam? What time is it?”

  “Noon.”

  A pause. “Oh my gods. You shouldn’t have let me sleep—” She started to roll out of bed, and Adam locked his arms around her.

  “You needed it. There are plenty of cooks at the refugee camps right now.” That had been what she’d been doing all week. Helping make and distribute food, beyond prefabricated ration packs.

  “I know, I know. I still . . . should be doing something.” She craned her neck to look back at him. “What’s wrong?”

  She knew him too well. “I just finished my letter of resignation.” He settled his chin on her shoulder. “Do you think your gods might let you take, oh, a decade or two off, so you could . . . I don’t know. Spend my golden years with me?”

  As a joke, it fell flat. He could hear Sophia’s words in her mind. Caesarius 32, 1999. That’s the day the world will end, she says. Twelve years. Not decades. I’ll be . . . seventy. No. Fuck prophecy. The world doesn’t have to end. I’ll never accept it. I’ll just . . . find a different way to fight it.

  But from Sigrun’s silence, and the way every muscle in her body tensed, Adam knew that Sigrun knew more than she liked to let on. After a long moment, she said, quietly, “Every moment that I may choose what to do with, I will spend with you.”

  “Then stay home this afternoon. There are plenty of volunteers. I want to be selfish today.”

  “All right.” She acceded so swiftly, and so completely, that Adam was taken off-guard. He was used to more fight from her, so she must really have wanted to stay precisely where she was.

  That afternoon, she planted an apple core in the backyard, and Lassair and Saraid came over to watch the process. Lassair asked, her ruby eyes interested. This came from Freya’s own hand?

  “Yes. I am not sure why she gave it to me, but I am following her orders. If belatedly.”

  As withered and dry as the fruit was, the seeds proved viable, and a sapling sprouted within hours of being placed in the earth. That alone would have been enough for Adam to know where she’d acquired it; and over the next week, he noticed that every time he walked by the sprout, the scent of its leaves curled out and made him feel . . . surprisingly healthy and well. The Temple elders are going to have a fit if they realize what’s growing in our backyard, he thought, ruefully. He didn’t think he could eat of the tree’s fruit. But he did like the idea of being able to sit in its shade, and smell the fragrance of its blossoms and fruit on Sigrun’s skin.

  A week later, they received Kanmi’s bones, with the unexpectedly swift decision from the Emperor that the technomage was to receive a full military funeral, with the honors due to a Defender of the Imperium.

  That took another week to organize, and Trennus and Adam, as the executors of Kanmi’s estate—a courtesy, so that Minori wouldn’t have to deal with anything—took care of that. The public declaration of the man’s honors, and the details of his final mission was left as classified, but the news media was allowed to report that the sorcerer had successfully taken down the CPL from the inside as the result of a seven-year undercover mission, which had, in the end, cost him his life.

  The funeral was surprisingly well-attended. Adam knew that Kanmi had made few close friends in his life, but he’d had hundreds of associates. People with whom he’d maintained correspondence, like Lady Erida, who arrived red-eyed at the funeral with her spirit-mate, Zhi, and their children. Dozens of former students arrived, including many, like Jykke, Bodi’s wife, whom he’d found in the Gothic refugee areas, and identified the gift of sorcery in, before it could drive them mad. Jykke’s eyes were filled with tears as she kept an arm around Bodi’s waist the entire time. Bodi, for his part wept unabashedly as he stood to give one of the eulogies. “My father was my hero,” he told the audience, without hesitation or preamble. “In his life, he never once backed down from a fight he thought was necessary. When I was a child, he told me, that there are monsters in the world, and that there are people whose responsibility it was, to go out and fight them, so that other people didn’t have to do so. I wanted . . . nothing more, than to be as good a man as he was. To be a sorcerer, if I had the gift, and to go fight monsters, as he did.” The words were slowing down as Bodi spoke, and finally, he shook his head, and just stopped, unable to continue, and stepped down, passing the wooden casket, draped with an Imperial banner, complete with eagles.

  After the casket was lowered into the ground, and the large marble slab pushed in place over the filled grave, a few people were still left behind. Ima and Vidarr had come in from the east, to bear witness, and they stood at the graveside, as two large fenris, one white, and one dark brown, trotted over to the grave. Dr. Larus Sillen, and his wife, Linnea, both stood there for a long moment, and Minori reached out and embraced both enormous creatures. Larus, in particular, almost whimpered as he spoke to the rest of them. I respected Professor Eshmunazar enormously. He and I spent many happy hours discussing physics, and its applications both in engineering and in magic. He often joked that he could build me an engine that would cut the time of the flight to Mars by half, if only the Judean Space Administration would allow the use of magic in space travel. The fenris scientist hung his head. I had thought him mad with grief over the injury to Himilico. The disappearance, a tragedy. And then . . . all of this. He paused. Dr. Eshmunazar . . . Minori. I apologize if this makes you uncomfortable, but . . . this is our way now. I must give voice to grief, and all will join with me.

  He threw back his head, and howled, and for miles around, all across the city, fenris paused in their tracks and echoed him, an homage that went on for fifteen full minutes, in spine-tingling intensity.

  When the fenris and the jotun had left, it was down to just Adam, Minori, Trennus, Sigrun, Lassair, and Saraid. Trennus cleared his throat, and pulled out a bottle of arak from a pouch tied to his belt. “Kanmi used to drink this,” he said, eyeing the bottle dubiously. “I thought it might be appropriate.” He opened the bottle, and took a sip, grimacing. “Gods. This is terrible.”

  Adam accepted the bottle, and took a sip, almost gagging at the licorice flavor. “He used to dilute it with water,” he pointed out, and handed it to Sigrun.

  “Any drink that changes color when you mix it, cannot possibly be a good idea.” The weather had been holding steady as overcast, with little spatters of rain, all afternoon, and a cool breeze kicked up now, as Sigrun took a sip, made a face, and passed it to Minori, who drank, and passed it along the line.

  At the end, Minori said, quietly, “You know what he’d be saying right now?”

  “‘Guys. Give me a fucking glass.’” Adam said it, smiling slightly.

  Trennus upended the bottle over the grave, letting the fluid run out. “‘No, seriously, a glass. Just because Rome calls us all barbarians, doesn’t mean we have to live down to their expectations,’” Adam went on, imitating Kanmi’s tones, and the others began to laugh, Minori on the verge of tears as she did.

  “Oh, better,” Trennus said. “He’d be pointing out that this place isn’t an ushnu, and yet, here we are, making a libation offering to his spirit. And that if we kept up with this long enough, he might well come back as a god.”

  Minori put her head down against Trennus’ arm, and laughed through her tears. “I . . . . hope so. My people have long worshipped our ancestors. If anyone. . . if anyone has enough strength of will. . . and he knew his Name. . . it would be him.”

  “He’d do it just to piss people off,” Adam told her, simply, and Minori laughed and wiped at her eyes afresh, as they all surrounded her and escorted her from the cemetery. Trying to show her, without words, that they would never allow her to be alone.

&nb
sp; Chapter 14: Lateral Spreading

  For two thousand years, or close, no one had truly believed in the ancient creatures of mythology. Oh, there were the early bestiaries; Aristotle's Historia Animalium was one of the first, and there were other works by Herodotus and Pliny the Elder, filled with fanciful creatures. The leucrotta, part lion, part dog, and possibly part hyena, with the voice of a man, and capable of calling to humans inside of houses, to come out, so that they might be torn to pieces in the darkness? Any rudimentary summoner would tell you that this was nothing more than a variety of a fetch, a malevolent spirit able to manifest in any form it chooses, but who craves the trust of its victims, and feeds off the emotion of betrayal as surely as off the victim’s flesh and blood. A parandus? A split-hoofed creature with antlers the size of a bull, who can also change shape at will? Surely, someone once glimpsed a forest spirit in full flight away from a hunt, and decided that this must be one of a whole species of mortal creatures. Pliny the Elder, who perished during the destruction of Pompeii, and wrote so many learned volumes, insisted that there were creatures such as basilisks, which he attributed geographically to the Carthaginian provinces of North Africa, and described the creature with meticulous detail, down to a white crest, upon its lizard-like forehead. Modern natural philosophy and the superior understanding of magic in the world today have discredited most such legends.

  Oh, the natives of the Hindu-Kush have been known to speak of the yeti, and the natives of Caesaria Aquilonis have tales of the sásq’ets, said to be giant, cannibalistic wildmen who purportedly have lived in the forests there since time immemorial. Parallel myths existed in every culture, to include the Goths, with their legends of the jotun, the fire giants who would forge the weapons that would start the end of the world. No one believed in such creatures until 1970 AC, when the Great Northern War began, precipitated by the death of the goddess Hel, and the presumed exile of Loki from this world. The jotun were joined by the fenris—surely never intended to be created in such numbers, for they are difficult to keep fed in a world somewhat lacking in giant herbivores such as the wooly mammoth—and the lycanthropes, or hveðungr, who serve as the bridge between these two strange off-shoots of homo sapiens. The people of northern Europa who mostly retained their human forms, but found themselves with bestial appurtenances called themselves the nieten. And these four subspecies represented proof that an age of wonder had come upon us all. Not to mention the lindworms—small dragons capable of flight and predation. That the lindworms were suspected to have once been humans, even as the jotun, ettin, grendels, and fenris were, made it all the more poignant and horrifying, at once. As yet, however, no lindworm has ever been proven capable of speech, as the fenris are.

  They were followed, however, seventeen years later, by a flood of new creatures: dryads, centaurs, satyrs, naiads, gorgons—yes! actual gorgons!—harpies, minotaurs, and a handful of cyclopeans, not to mention the leonnes of North Africa and the wide variety of new nieten subtypes that appeared at the same time. The vast majority of these mutated humans started out sane, but the mad godlings spawned by Baal-Hamon’s death appeared to take delight in torturing these creatures, and, for that matter, other humans. Those who had already sunk into deep depression as a result of seeing homes, families, and livelihoods destroyed might well run mad through the streets after suffering at the hands of a godling. Those who were already embittered by seeing their bodies, the basis of their entire self-identity, changed overnight, into something monstrous—might be twisted into homicidal rage by a mad god.

  It was, as a result, a time of great effort by those people equipped to untwist minds warped so. I have been privileged enough to observe the procedure several times, as conducted by a spirit bound to my fellow summoner, Trennus Matrugena. I will not commit her Name to paper here, but there are few in Europa today who do not know of the Lady of the Wilds, as the fenris all name her . . . and as the harpies, sirens, dryads, naiads, and others have all come to know her, as well.

  —Lady Erida Lelayn, “On the Age of Wonder,” Modern Thaumaturgy and Technomancy. University of Jerusalem Press, vol. 1, Spring, 1989 AC.

  ______________________

  Februarius 2, 1988 AC

  The small, clockwork alarm clock on the bedside table shrilled, and Sigrun reached for it with a groan, trying to still it with clumsy fingers before Adam was too badly disturbed. Then she sat up in bed, rubbing at her face. For the vast majority of her adult life, her eyes had snapped open, automatically, at sunrise. In places as varied as garrisons in Asia Minor and on the Raccian border, bunkers in the Great Northern War, tents in the Persian-Mongol Conflict, and in hundred horrible government-rate hostelries from Nahautl to Germania, she’d learned to sleep when she could, and could drop off even with cannon and mortar fire going on overhead. What is wrong with me? she thought, and rubbed at her face again, lying back in bed beside Adam’s warmth. She’d been unable to get to sleep before three antemeridian for close to a year now, found it difficult to wake before seven antemeridian, and spent the bulk of every morning in a haze. Caffeine processed too quickly through her system to have any effect, so she resorted to very hot showers and exercise to try to wake up. It’s a lack of self-discipline, she told herself, as she did almost every morning. Get up.

  It was difficult, though. Adam needed less sleep these days, too, but that was largely a function of his age. He stayed up late, himself, many nights spending two or three hours out with the telescope. He’d invested in a good quality one, and a camera attachment, so he could photograph interesting stars and galaxies, night after night. And of course, he was retired now. He worked three days a week with Judean Intelligence, and more or less made his own hours. Sigrun thought he’d probably go insane with boredom if he stopped work . . . which was what all his hobbies were. New ways of working. Hence the telescope, the renewed interest in godslayer lore, the polishing of his rusty Aramaic. The meticulous attention he paid to the yard, and his plans to redo the floors in the house. “The floors are fine,” she’d told him. “We’re not zoned to turn this place into a bed and breakfast. It’s just the two of us, and we don’t use most of the rooms.”

  “Well, it will make the place easier for you to sell, eventually,” he’d told her.

  “I won’t be selling it,” she’d told him, with a note of finality. What good would it do to explain to him that her will had, for over a decade, been set up so that Latirian would inherit the house, when the time came? Little gifts of money to all the children and grandchildren of their friends, and the bulk of it turned over to charity? Leave no ripples in the water.

  Now, she looked down at him, and lifted a strand of his hair off his pillow. The dark brown had gone almost entirely white in the last year. Stress, she knew, and, damnably enough, guilt. He was carrying enough guilt for the entire world. Guilt at Kanmi’s death. Guilt for all the deaths over the years that they hadn’t managed to prevent. Sigrun had her fair share, too, but, as she kept pointing out to him, they’d done the best they could do with the information they’d had at the time. Damn Sophia for not giving us more. More information, and we could have averted so much of this. But, then again, my sister believes she has no choice in anything.

  Sigrun sighed and pressed a kiss to Adam’s warm, relaxed shoulder, and slipped out of bed, and from there straight into the shower, trying to leach away the exhaustion with hot water.

  And then off to work. There had been an existing enclave of Hellenes in Judea for decades, mostly clustered south of the university district. Little Hellas had always snugged cheek-by-jowl with Little Nippon, as a result. Most of the residents had been engineers affiliated with the space program. That neighborhood was now bursting at the seams with refugees, and a tent city extended far out into the grasslands that were developing around the edge of the city. Some of the refugees were Carthaginian, but the majority were Hellene. About half of the residents were still human. Some had mental illnesses, and refugee-on-refugee violence wasn’t uncommon. The city g
ardia had jotun and fenris officers patrolling the tent city around the clock. It tended to help when some of the people were cyclopeans, who were on par with the jotun for size. It vaguely amused Sigrun, that the fenris and the jotun, whose neighborhoods had been picketed by protestors calling for them to go home, were now part of the forces of law and order, trying to keep another immigrant community in line.

  Sigrun had once again been tagged as the liaison officer for the Praetorians. She wasn’t Hellene, but her command of the language had near-native fluency, and she had a sister still living there, which got her points with the refugees, when the subject came up. She was careful not to mention that her sister was a Pythia, however. Most of the refugees could have, with justified bitterness, demanded How did the Oracle not know that this was going to happen to us?

  She didn’t think that the answer of One of the Pythias knew, but she didn’t believe anything could avert it, so she didn’t speak of it would go over very well.