by Jane Kindred
She came toward him and his eyes stung with the effort of remaining where he was instead of leaping up in flight. “Meershivá!” she spat again. “May I rise? Are you not risen from my own blood? You are Shiva’s!” she shouted. “You rose as Meer when I expelled you into this world. Stupid boy.” She turned and receded once more into the shadow of the starlit corridor.
“And that,” she threw over her shoulder—too far for him to have heard so clearly, yet he did—“is the force of your Meeric blood, which you have ignored. Do you think I’m an imbecile to accuse you of lecherous thoughts against me? Do not try my patience with your idiotic fears!”
Ra waited until the sound of MeerShiva’s retreat had been absent for some time before he attempted to move. His legs wouldn’t hold him, so he crawled from the room like an ape and made his way clutching the white curling pillars of the temple until he reached his bed. Sending away the servant who waited to undress him, he curled into his cushions, cramped and seized with discomfort. He began to cry, staining the cerulean pillows with the mark of the Meer.
Still weeping, he jerked himself to seek release, but it wasn’t quick, as he was accustomed. It took a quarter of an hour for him to expel the tension of this hardness, and when he did, the release was more painful than the erection had been. His body seemed to shudder forever, and he couldn’t help but cry out as it was drawn from him. When he’d finished, he drew up the bed sheets to wipe himself off and found with horror that he’d ejaculated blood.
There was blood on her fingers where Ra had reached below the waist of her skirt at this memory, unconsciously quieting somatic pains of sympathy. She stared at the stain, perplexed. Ai. Another period. She didn’t have them often. Other women, she knew from experience with Jak, had them monthly. She hadn’t bothered to take note of her cycle, nor when to expect it.
Ra sat at the edge of the abyss. The bridge had crumbled long ago but for a narrow ledge that had been the railing to one side of the road. She was lucid for the moment and fixed in time. No phantom chariots raced by her to the city of the gods. She had left Jak, ripping out her own heart.
For a moment, she thought to go back. She was clear. She would concentrate on paying attention to the time, make sure not to wander. She needed Jak. But Jak had hung from her encircling fingers, throat crushed and bruised, fighting for breath. She recalled it now in horror. Her scream of negation brayed back at her from the far wall of the gorge—“Nai! Nai! Nai!” Nai, she could not go back.
Why had she renaissanced? What masochism, what arrogance had prompted this? MeerRa had lived longer than he deserved and should have stayed dead, a mercy to the world. She remembered that too, for the moment: knowledge beneath the earth. Knowledge that Ahr was alone. Misery. Desire. Ra had burned with these beneath the ground, and even without the impetus of utterance, these words had shaped the elements. Ra had centered heat and pressure in the rotting core of his corpse, and his essence had blazed upward from the volatile mix. He’d felt the fire and the release as the last of MeerRa had burned away, white-hot pain that was welcome. That which was Ra had chemically altered, now vapor and dust, basest elements joined with the moving current of the vital earth.
Incarnations were the avatars of the whole, eruptions of uncontainable fervor for life, upwellings of the Mother’s blood. Ra, ebullient, had burst into being, a fool drunk on the passion of animation, a fool who sought the Other—the sovereign avatar whose body expressed the rapture of living. Ra had deliberately emptied the stores of a lifetime of memory into the purification of fire, brashly suppressing logic, wisdom and experience—and the catalogue of three hundred and eighty-eight years. He’d done it to allow this new Ra to seek her folly, to seek Ahr.
Ra stared into the purple shadows of the abyss with pain. Twisting in her breast now was the knowledge that she’d come forth, resurrected like a narcissistic erection, and had forgotten RaNa in the dirt.
The acid she’d taken of Ahr’s hatred burned her, a heat far worse than the cleansing of cremation. The poisonous emotion ate at her from the inside as maggots had once done to the flesh. Ahr had forgiven Ra, miraculously, for the unforgivable crime the Meer had committed against the mother of his own child. Ra had thought this would free her from the darkness that haunted her—vetma, blessing, from the One. So she’d absorbed what pained Ahr most in payment for his gift. It had given her peace and comfort to do so, to do something, however small, for the bright diamond that was Ahr.
But the peace had been transitory. Slipping into the vacated place of her guilt at robbing Ahr of their daughter was the knowledge of the final abandonment of RaNa. Because of Ra’s absorption with himself even in the grave, their child was lost to them forever.
Ra contemplated the plummeting depths of the abyss. End it now. Exercise the wisdom and the fortitude that is the accidental birthright of your blood. She rose up on her haunches and embraced the pull of vertigo. She swayed, a stalk of wheat in the castigating winds of Munt Zelfaal. Only the balls of her feet balanced at the edge of oblivion. Go under. Go under. Let Ra, like RaNa, benignly fertilize the earth.
A stone scuttled from beneath her foot, bouncing and rappelling off the many crags below. Her hair whipped up in a gust of wind, a chaotic tangle like a noose about her throat that destroyed her nerve. She threw out her hands in panic and tipped her balance in the wrong direction. One limb sprang from the jagged cliff as though the ground had been swept from under her.
Ra fell, legs dashed against the side of the gorge as she grappled at the rocks for purchase. A portion of the rock from which she’d meant to jump was in her hand, a shard from the cliff’s edge tightly grasped. She’d thrown her other arm across the crumbled remnants of the bridge in a mutiny of resistance against the sensible reconciliation of death.
The stone in her right hand was like the sturdy throat of Jak. The cliff side struggled with her, feeble and ineffective as Jak’s resistance. She was Meer. She was a god. The pitiful concerns of temporary life in the wake of her power were not worth her notice. Was she not Shiva’s? Formed of the most potent elemental blood? Was she not ageless, surpassing time, a continuance of even greater Ra in the distance beyond history?
She began to laugh, and the screeching of a powerful bird reflected back at her in place of an echo. Ra crushed the stone to dust beneath her fingers, dangling from the toppling decay of the bridge by one hand. Her hawkish laugh reverberated through the convolutions of the gorge as she pulled herself up by her left arm to straddle the ancient railing. Horses screamed by her, their hooves resounding over invisible stone. She jumped to her feet on the six inches of the relic’s width and ran laughing, foot over foot, above the perilous drop. She was an immortal and the world beneath her feet an insignificant toy.
Fifteen: Desolation
“Ra is mad,” said Jak flatly.
Geffn swallowed. This was no surprise, and yet to hear Jak say it—something cataclysmic must have happened. He eyed the laceration once more, a single stroke nearly identical to the several that marked Ra’s cheeks.
Jak nodded, fingertips brushing the mark. “She did this. She also tried to kill me.” Geffn expelled a breath of outrage. “She wasn’t herself,” Jak protested. “But you and the others were right. The Meer are mad. She’s mad. But I love her, Geffn.”
Geffn smoothed his hands along the armrests of his chair, maintaining himself against the insult of Jak’s admission. One could not be faulted for whom one loved. It was painful, also, to hear of Ra this way, though his infatuation with her had dissolved in the reality of her being. He wasn’t surprised to hear of her insanity, but the suddenness of it, the totality, that she would turn against Jak—he hadn’t wanted to be right. It was his worst fear, materialized.
“You know I have to tell the others. A council will have to be convened. Though sooth knows how the mounds can defend against a recreant Meer.”
“There won’t be any need for that.” Jak�
��s voice was emphatic as Geffn raised a doubtful eyebrow. “Ra has gone. I’m alone at Mound Ahr.”
He lowered his eyes from the misery in Jak’s. He was relieved, emphatically unburdened, but he couldn’t convey that to Jak. He breathed as he hadn’t since Rhyman. “How long?”
“A week,” said Jak. “Maybe two. Perhaps less. I’ve been sleeping odd hours. The days run into one another.” The strong, impenetrable Jak had been stripped away. It hurt Geffn’s heart to see his former mate this way.
“Jak, come home. No one blames you. We haven’t removed your name from the moundhold.”
Jak’s head shook, but there was little resolve behind it. “You threw her out,” Jak accused. “Her state was precarious, near starvation, and you threw her out. She wasn’t mad then.”
Geffn tried to take Jak’s hand but met resistance. “Jak, she was.” He hated to say it. “We all saw it. All but you.” He rubbed his eyes, tired at last after a night of insomnia. Jak was silent, wavering between resentment and the inevitability of Geffn’s truth. “She may have always been,” he added, his voice kinder than his words.
Ra climbed hand over hand, un-winded, surmounting the rubble from an ancient rockslide that covered the remainder of the cradle of EldRud—the “Old Road”—beyond the gorge. She would possess Soth AhlZel at last, as Shiva had always feared. Mother’s sun was at an end.
Outwardly, MeerShiva had ignored him after their one communion. He hadn’t been sure what her pronouncement meant: You rose as Meer when I expelled you into this world. Meeric words were not passive, and despite the lack of formal acknowledgment, she had spoken. You rose as Meer. Therefore it must be so. She had also spoken of his inattention to the force of his blood, and he realized it was likewise so. He’d never listened to the current. It had never occurred to him.
The vision of the pearls had been the first time Ra had abandoned himself to the unconscious direction of thought. It had been an accident almost, a moment of heedlessness, which he more correctly recognized now as the opposite: a moment of attention. Now that he’d heard the sound of his blood, he couldn’t imagine how he’d not noticed it before. The air crackled with it. At times, it was deafening.
These events were evidence that he was fully Meer, and he began to act as such. With trepidation, he conjured and mounted his dais on the next sacred eve, the first time in four years he hadn’t spent one on the floor before MeerShiva. He feared she would fling him down when she appeared. He’d arrived before the sun was fully set, and she entered the chamber of the altars as the last line of gold traced the temple arches. She paid him no more mind than when he’d been her petitioner, and etched in the dying light as though her body sliced through it into darkness, she ascended to her own exaltation.
Twilight was swift here, and they were soon consumed in orchid colors. The stars came into being overhead, a vast silver canopy that was the only covering of this chamber. A mere dome over Shiva’s head would have been effrontery. She was MeerShiva.
They reigned together from that night forward. Ra had become a clock to her where there had never been time before. His ascendance toward physical maturity was its ticking down.
The pinnacle of Winter was before Ra. Its peak was cloistered by an imposing wall, still standing after all this time. It had kept out all invaders in its infancy, when barbarians and marauders were the inhabitants of the world. Soth AhlZel was the beginning of civilization, and her glory had spread until the hill country, the glens, the wastelands and at last the wide delta stretching to the sea were peopled with her superior stock. Her enemies, the crude nations who’d scorned her beginning and failed to subdue her, were driven out until they took flight across the ocean itself.
Ra scaled the high, forbidding wall, sharp with the irregular erosion of ages. Her feet found footholds where no mortal could. This was nothing to her. She leapt onto the top of it, twenty feet over the cold catacombs that were the rubble of AhlZel at Zelfaal’s peak, her feet effortlessly placed between two narrow breaks in the collar of spikes with which the wall was adorned. Her skirt whipped away from her legs, a flag, of which she was the pole, mounted in triumph on the wall. Her hair streamed back, stray locks cutting the air before her face, and she breathed in the thin, ancient air of Soth AhlZel in exultation. Below her it lay: crumbled, decayed—the city Ra’s coming had once brought to ruin. Now Ra had come again and Soth AhlZel was hers.
The purple hues and incongruous embellishments that now distinguished Mound Ahr had become depressive. Jak slept among the piles of silk and eiderdown that enveloped the bed, cold on the side Ra had left as though one half of Jak’s body had necrosed. The crops they’d sown together were neglected, and the un-milked goat, her miserable bleating unheeded, leapt from her pen and deserted Mound Ahr for more attentive environs.
Jak dreamt of Ra sitting in a gray boat on the Anamnesis, carried farther away while Jak stood dumbly on the bank. There was a hollow feeling at Jak’s chest. Naked, Jak looked down to find an uninterrupted torso covered only by skin. Ra had taken Jak’s breasts.
“I am not anyone,” Ra called, standing in the boat and holding them out, one in each hand. “I must have them.” The nipples pointed up from her palms like two delicate confections topped with colored cream. “Shame.” Ra’s voice drifted toward the bank as she held up one breast. “And Reason.” She lifted the other, and then brought the first to her mouth and took a bite. The skin bounced back like a well-beaten cake, and the nipple curled over, a toppling dollop of icing. Ra consumed the rest and dropped the remaining breast into the water, where it floated, a gardenia, disappearing in the distance on the current of the summer stream.
Jak turned in sleep away from the barren side of the bed and cupped both hands over the breasts that were still where they belonged.
It seemed, on another night, for a few blissful, dreaming moments, that Ra had returned. Jak woke to find her seated on the edge of the bed, and stared, wordless, unable to convey the overflowing of relief. Ra smiled and kissed Jak’s forehead.
“My love,” she said. “My touch replaces any that has come before. Only I will have touched you.” She pressed Jak into the blankets and drew up Jak’s nightshirt, glowing silver in the moonlight through the violet blue of the gemstone window. Ra offered up her hands for Jak to hold as she lowered her mouth into the warmth that waited for her, and Jak cried out as the silken tongue pressed in and in, as though it grew. Ra’s lips and teeth favored the external divisions of Jak’s sex while her tongue pervaded the internal.
Jak felt erased, as though the flesh dissolved beneath Ra’s touch and was rebuilt cell by cell, virginal, unmolested. An extraordinary heat radiated from the epicenter of Ra’s attention, and as it swelled through the flesh, Jak’s body relaxed into a fully receptive state as it had never done. Jak came, and a rush of fluid poured into Ra’s mouth, and Ra drank. The orgasm faded and another began. Jak had never known such rapture.
“What is left of reason loves you desperately,” whispered Ra, her cheek against Jak’s thigh. Her hands dissolved, and Jak sat up to find her gone, only now truly waking. Waking was unpleasant, and from then on, Jak avoided it.
A knock on the door prodded into Jak’s sleep. It was neither night nor day, the blue window casting indistinct shadows on the mound’s interior: twilight, at one end or the other. Jak drew the ponderous colors tighter against the outside, head buried beneath layers of fabric that still smelled like Ra. There was nothing from outside that mattered. The persistent, steady sound was only an insignificant detail, like the periodic pauses in sleep to use the privy chamber, or, if Jak thought of it, to eat. It had no meaning, and prompted no response.
The door creaked gently open—doors in Haethfalt had never needed locks—and the more direct pewter of half-light, not painted in shades of blue as Ra’s light was, roused Jak with indifferent curiosity. Over Jak’s shoulder, at the edge of the bedcovers, a face came into view.
/> “Jak,” said Peta. “We’re worried sick about you.”
Jak sat up reluctantly, hugging the blankets, though it was stifling in Mound Ahr, and far from cold.
“Mound DarSevineMaraJun found your goat in their pasture with an infected teat.” Peta’s voice was scolding out of relief.
“Oh,” said Jak. “The goat. Poor goat. I’m sorry.”
“You can’t keep yourself locked up in here,” Peta insisted. “And you’ll have no crop to harvest next month. You’ve let it go. Close up Mound Ahr and come home.”
Jak curled up once more as though to sleep. “I am home, Mother Ta. Go back to yours.”
Peta sat on the edge of the bed and pulled the covers away from Jak’s protesting grip. “You’re angry still, but you call me mother.” She shook her head. “Forgive us, Jak, for what seemed like cruelty to you. The mound is too quiet without you.”
Jak laughed feebly. “You miss my contention, do you?” With a sigh, Jak sat up, fingers riffling through hair in need of washing. Much had been neglected. “Geffn wouldn’t even come with me to find her. I asked him, and he refused.”
“I know.” Peta rubbed Jak’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. Try to understand what danger you’re asking Geffn—and the entire community—to embrace. She nearly killed you, Geffn told me. You, whom she loved. She could kill us all with one thought, and it is not a possibility, it is a certainty. You must let her go.”
“I miss her,” said Jak.
Peta wrapped her arm around Jak’s shoulder. They were quiet for a moment, each understanding the other. How different from Jak and Fyn. Mound RemPeta had always been home, and Rem and Peta—and Geffn—always family. There was nothing here for Jak in the oppression of violets and indigos but a constant reminder of loss. It was a choice between compromise with those who had broken Jak’s trust, or death of heartache. For here in Mound Ahr, Jak couldn’t live. It was a bittersweet undercroft in which Ra’s influence lingered like the smoke of funereal incense.
