The Kingdom of Gods

by N. K. Jemisin

  I paused then, because Shahar was looking at me oddly. “What in every god’s name are you talking about?”

  “Nothing. I’m babbling.” I yawned, my jaw cracking with the effort. “Sleep makes me stupid. Never liked it.”

  “Mortalfuck,” she said, looking thoughtful. “Is that —” She paused, grimacing, too refined to say the word beyond repeating my term. “Being with a mortal. Is it such an anathema among gods that you use it as a curse?”

  I blushed, though it bothered me that I did. I had nothing to be ashamed of. Pushing myself up on my elbows, I said, “No, it’s not anathema at all. Far from it.”

  “What, then?”

  I tried to seem nonchalant. “It’s just that mortals are dangerous to love. They break easily. In time, they die. It hurts.” I shrugged. “It’s easier, safer, to just use them for pleasure. But that’s hard, too, because it’s impossible for us to take pleasure without giving back something of ourselves. We are not …” I groped for the words in Senmite. “We do not … It isn’t our way. No, it isn’t natural to do things that way, to be nothing but body, contained only within ourselves, so when we are with another, we reach out and the mortal gets inside us — we can not help it — and then it hurts to push them out, too …” I trailed off, because Shahar was staring at me. I’d been talking faster and faster, the words tumbling together in my effort to convey how it felt. I sighed and forced myself back to human speed. “Being with mortals isn’t anathema, but it’s not good, either. It never ends well. Any god with sense avoids it.”

  “I see.” I wasn’t sure I believed that, but she sighed. “Well. Give me a moment.” She stepped back into her room, not shutting the door, and I heard her wrestle with the cloth of her dress for a few moments. Then she returned, wearing the sleep shift instead of holding it in front of herself this time. By this point I had sat up, rubbing my face to try and banish the dregs of sleep and the memory of my bloody, torn-out heart. When Shahar sat down on the bed, she did so gingerly, at its edge, out of my arms’ reach. I didn’t blame her for that or the fact that she seemed more relaxed after my speech about avoiding sex.

  Still, there was something odd about her manner, something I couldn’t put my finger on. She seemed jittery, tense. I wondered why she hadn’t just stayed in her room and gone to bed, once she’d seen that I wasn’t dying.

  “How did your meeting with, ah …” I waved a hand vaguely. Some noble.

  She chuckled. “It went well, though that depends on your definition of well.” She sobered, her eyes darkening with a hint of her earlier anger. “You’ll be pleased to know that I did not follow through on my plan to challenge the resistance, per your advice. The message I sent instead — I hope, if I’m right about Lady Hynno — was that I would like to negotiate. Find out more about their demands and determine whether there’s some way that we might meet them. Without throwing the world into chaos, that is.” She glanced at me warily.

  “I’m impressed,” I said truthfully. “And surprised. Negotiation — compromise — is usually anathema to Itempans. And you changed your mind because of me?” I laughed a little. There were some good things about being older. People listened to me more.

  Shahar sighed, looking away. “We’ll see what happens when my mother hears of it. She already thinks I’m weak; after this, I may not be heir for much longer.” With a heavy sigh, she lay back on the bed, stretching out her arms over her head. I could not help myself; my eyes settled on the very noticeable contrast of her areolae under the sheer shift. They were surprisingly dark, given her pale coloring. Perfect brown circles, with soft little cylinders at their centers —

  Useless stupid animal mortaling body. My penis had reacted before I could stop it, jabbing me in the belly and forcing me to sit up from my usual slouch. It hurt, and I felt hot all over, as if I’d come down sick. (I had. It was called adolescence, an evil, evil disease.) But it was not just her flesh that drew me. I could barely see it with my withering senses, but her soul gleamed and whispered like rubbed silk. We have always been vulnerable to true beauty.

  I dragged my eyes away from her breasts to find her watching me — watching me watch her? I did not know, but the hunger in me sharpened at the unalarmed, contemplative look in her eyes. I fought the reaction back, but it was difficult. Another symptom of the disease.

  “Don’t be stupid,” I said, focusing on mundanities. “It takes great strength to compromise, Shahar. More than it does to threaten and destroy, since you must fight your own pride as well as the enemy. You Arameri have never understood this — and you didn’t have to, when you had us at your beck and call. Now, perhaps, you can learn to be true rulers and not merely bullies.”

  She rolled onto her belly, which brought her to lie between my legs, propped on her elbows. At this I frowned, growing suspicious, and then wondering at my own unease. She was just a girl testing the waters of womanhood. An older version of I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. She wanted to know if I found her desirable. Did I not owe her the courtesy of an honest response? I lowered my knees and sat back on my elbows so that she could see the evidence of my admiration in the tented sheet and the heat of my gaze. She immediately blushed, averting her eyes. Then she looked at me again, and away again, and eventually looked down at her folded arms, which were fidgeting on the covers.

  “I think Mother wants me to marry Canru,” she said. Her words had an air of effort. “The Teman heir I told you about. I think that’s why she’s let me be friends with him. She’s never let anyone else close to me.”

  I shrugged. “So marry him.”

  She glared at me, forgetting her prudishness. “I don’t want to.”

  “Then don’t. Shahar, for the gods’ sakes. You’re the Arameri heir. Do what you damn well please.”

  “I can’t. If Mother wants this —” She bit her lower lip and looked away. “We have never sold our sons or daughters into marriage before now, Sieh. We didn’t have to, because we didn’t have anything to gain. We didn’t need alliances or money or land. But now … I think … I think Mother understands that the Temans might prove pivotal, given High North’s increasing restlessness. I think that’s why she’s letting me handle things with Lady Hynno. She’s putting me on display.”

  All at once she looked up at me, and there was such ferocity in her expression that it struck me like a blow. Why?

  “I want to succeed Mother, Sieh,” she said. “I want to be head after her. Not just because I want power; I know the evil our family’s done to you and to the world. But we’ve done good, too, great good, and I want that to be our legacy. I will do whatever it takes to achieve that.”

  I stared at her, taken aback. And mourning. Because what she wanted was impossible. Her childhood promise, to be both a good person and an Arameri, to use her family’s power to make the world better — it was naïveté of the highest order. I had seen others like her, a few, one every handful of generations within Itempas’s chosen family. They were always the brightest lights, the most glorious souls of the whole grimy bunch. The ones I could not hate, because they were special.

  But it never lasted, once they gained power. They streaked through life like falling stars across the heavens, brilliant but ephemeral. The power killed the glory, dulled the specialness into despair. It hurt so much to watch their hopes die.

  I could say nothing. To let her see my sorrow would start the process early. So I sighed and turned onto my side, pretending boredom, when in fact I was trying hard not to cry.

  Her frustration flared like a struck match. She got up on her hands and knees and crawled over to me, bracing her arms on either side of my body so she could glare into my face. “Help me, damn you! You’re supposed to be my friend!”

  I stifled a yawn. “What do you want me to do? Tell you to marry a man you don’t love? Tell you not to marry him? This isn’t a bedtime tale, Shahar. People marry people they don’t love all the time, and it isn’t always terrible. He’s already your friend; you could
do worse. And if it’s something your mother wants, you don’t have a choice, anyway.”

  Her hand, braced on the covers in front of me, trembled. My senses throbbed with the waver of her conflicting yearnings. The child in her wanted to do as she pleased, cling to impossible hopes. The woman in her wanted to make sound decisions, succeed even if it meant sacrifice. The woman would win; that was inevitable. But the child would not go quietly.

  With that same trembling hand, she touched my shoulder, pushing until I twisted my torso to face her. Then she leaned down and kissed me.

  I permitted it, more out of curiosity than anything else. It was clumsy this time and did not last long. She was off the center of my mouth, covering mostly the bottom lip. I did not share myself with her, and she sat up, frowning.

  “Does that make you feel better?” I asked. I honestly wanted to know. Shahar’s expression crumpled. She turned away and lay down behind me, her back to mine. I felt her fighting tears.

  Troubled, and worried that I had somehow harmed her, I turned to her and sat up. “What is it that you want?”

  “My mother to love me. My brother back. The world not to hate us. Everything.”

  I considered this. “Shall I fetch him for you? Deka?”

  She tensed, turning over. “Could you do that?”

  “I don’t know.” I could not change my shape anymore. Traveling across distances was not so very different, save that it involved changing the shape of reality to make the world smaller. If I could not do one, I might not be able to do the other.

  As I watched, however, the eagerness faded from her expression. “No. Deka may not love me anymore.”

  I blinked in surprise. “Of course he does.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Sieh.”

  “I’m not,” I snapped. “I can feel the bond between us, Shahar, as clear as this.” I took a curl of her hair in my fingers and pulled on it, gentle but steady. She made a sound of surprise and I let the curl go; it bounced back prettily. “You both pull at me and at each other. Neither of you likes me very much now, but otherwise nothing has changed between the two of you since those days in the underpalace, years ago. You still love him, and he still loves you just as much. I’m a god, all right? I know.”

  I was not strictly telling the truth. It was true that Shahar’s feelings toward me had waned, though they grew stronger with every hour I spent in her presence. Deka’s, however, had grown stronger, too, even with no contact between us for half his lifetime. I didn’t quite know how to interpret that, so I didn’t mention it.

  Her eyes went wide at my words — and then welled with tears. She made a quick, abortive sound: buh. As soon as she uttered it, she clapped a hand to her mouth, but her hand was trembling.

  I sighed and pulled her against me, her face against my chest. It was only when I did this — only when she felt safe from eyes that might look upon her humanity and judge it a weakness — that she let herself break into deep, racking sobs so loud that they echoed from the walls of the apartment. Her tears were hot, though they cooled rapidly on my skin and as they pattered onto the sheets. Her shoulders heaved against my arms, and as the sobs grew worse, her arms went hard around me, squeezing me as if her life depended on my solidity and stillness. So I gave her both, stroking her hair and murmuring soothing things in the language of creation, letting her know that I loved her, too. For I did, fool that I was.

  When her tears finally stopped, I kept stroking her, liking the way her curls went flat and sprang up again as my hand passed, and thinking of nothing. I barely noticed when her arms loosened, her hands coming to stroke my sides and back and hip. I kept thinking of nothing when she eased my shirt up and laid the lightest of kisses on my belly. It tickled; I smiled. Then she sat up to look at me, her eyes red-rimmed but dry, a peculiar intent in her eyes.

  When she kissed me this time, it was wholly different. She nudged my lips apart and touched my tongue with her own, sweet and wet and sour. When I did not react, she slid her hands under my shirt, exploring the flat strangeness of a body that was not her own. I liked this until one of her hands went farther down, her fingers tickling hair and cloth at the edge of my pants, and then I caught her wrist. “No,” I said.

  She closed her eyes and I felt her aching emptiness. It was not lust. Missing her brother had made her feel alone. “I love you,” she said. Not even an admission, this; it was simply a statement of fact, like the moon is pretty or you’re going to die. “I’ve always loved you, since we were children. I tried not to.”

  I nodded, stroking her hand. “I know.”

  “I want to choose. If I have to sell myself for power, I want to give myself first. For love. For a friend.”

  I sighed, closing my eyes. “Shahar, I told you, it’s not good —”

  She scowled and lunged forward and kissed me again. I was stunned silent, the objection dying in my throat. Because this time it was like kissing a god. The quintessence of her came through the opening of my lips and drove itself into my soul before I could stop it. I gasped and inhaled a white shivering sun that pulsed strong and weak but never went out and never blew up. A rocky determination, jumbled but sharp-edged, with the potential to become as solid as bedrock. When I opened my eyes, I was lying back and she was above me, still kissing me, her hands coaxing sighs from me despite my reluctance. I did not stop her because I am supposed to be a child but really I am not and my body was too old to provide me with a child’s defenses against reality. Children do not think about how magnificent it would be to become one with another person. They do not yearn to lose themselves in force and sensation and panting. Children think about consequences, if only to try and avoid them. It takes an adult to abandon such thoughts entirely.

  So when her hand slipped into my pants this time, I did not stop her. And I did not protest while she explored me, first with her fingers and then, oh gods, oh yes, her mouth, her mortal husband could have the rest but I would marry her mouth and fingertips. I murmured without thinking and the walls went dark because there was mischief in what we were doing and that gave me strength. Despite this, I lay there helpless in the dark as she learned to make me whimper. She tormented me with this, tasting every part of my body. She even licked En, where it lay on my chest. Greedy thing, it rolled so that she might try its other side, too, but she didn’t notice.

  I touched her, too. She liked that lots.

  Then she straddled me. There came a moment of lucidity in which I caught her hips and looked up at her and said, “Are you sure —” but she pushed herself down and I cried out because it was so wonderful that it hurt, flesh is not at all a terrible thing, I had forgotten that it could feel good and not just grotesque, it was so nice not to be used. She felt the same as a goddess inside. I whispered this to her and she smiled, rising and falling above me, her mouth open and teeth reflecting the moon, her hair a pale moving shadow. Then we shifted and I was on her, not out of any paltry mortal need on my part to dominate but simply because I liked the sweet mewling sounds she made as I angled my way into her, and also because I was still a god and even a weak god is dangerous to mortals. Matter is such tenuous stuff. So I controlled myself by focusing on her flesh, on her hands stroking my back (inadvertently I purred), on my own clenching tightening quickening excitement, on carrying her only into the good parts of existence and none of the bad ones.

  And when she could bear no more, when I knew it was safe to bring her back to herself, when I was sure I could stay corporeal … only then did I let her go, and myself as well.

  She fainted. That is normal when one of us mates with a mortal. Only the very extraordinary can touch the divine without being overwhelmed by it. I fetched a damp towel from the bathroom and mopped up the sweat and saliva and so forth, then tucked her against me under the covers so that I could breathe the scent of her hair.

  I felt no regret, but I was sad. She was farther from me now, and I was the one who had sent her away.

  8

  Tell me a sto
ry

  Fast as you can

  Make the world and break it

  And catch it in your hand

  I slept again. This time, though, since Shahar had renewed my godly strength — experimentation and abandon are close enough to childish impulses to suit me — I was able to sleep as gods do, and keep the dreams at bay.

  When I woke, Shahar was not beside me, and it was noon. I sat up to find her near the window, wrapped in one of the sheets, her slim form still and shadowed against the bright blue sky.

  I hopped up, assessed myself to see whether I needed to piss or shit — not yet, though clearly I needed to brush my teeth — and then went over to her. (I was cold again. Damnation.) When she did not move at my approach, lost in thought, I grinned and leaned close and licked a bare spot on the back of her neck, where her hair had not come completely undone during the previous night.

  She jumped and whirled and frowned at me, at which point I belatedly realized that perhaps she was not in a playful mood.

  “Hello,” I said, feeling suddenly awkward.

  Shahar sighed and relaxed. “Hello.” Then she lowered her eyes and turned back to the window.

  I felt very stupid. “Oh, demons. Did I hurt you? That was the first time … I tried to be careful, but —”

  She shook her head. “There was no pain. I … could tell you were being careful.”

  If she wasn’t hurt, then why did she radiate such an ugly, clotted mix of emotions? I struggled to remember my handful of experiences with mortal women from before the War. Was this sort of behavior normal? I thought it might be. What, then, should a lover say at a time like this? Gods, it had been easier when I was a slave; my rapists had never expected me to give a damn about them afterward.