by Unknown
And, oh, when the key turns. It is beautiful. It is barely within my power to describe it. She walks, she bows, she sits, she stands with arms folded, and head cocked as if deep in thought.
She is deep in thought.
As if....
She....
Wait. There is the knock at the door. Entropan Klumner must be here. Mother will be so happy to receive him.
♦ ♦ ♦
Evening
I think I am safe here.
I think they won’t find me.
That here, in the detritus of our city, I may
♦ ♦ ♦
Later
It is quiet now. They have left me alone, the beggars, the children. The night air is cold. There is little light. I will write what I can while my pen and nib last. Thank the inhabitants of the Beyond that I held fast to them when Entropan Klumner came.
Entropan Klumner....
I shall do my best to set down here events as they occurred to me. Not all is straight in my mind.
I remember being in almost an ecstatic state when I greeted Entropan Klumner. I was giddy. He enquired after mother and whether she was well enough to receive visitors.
“Of course,” I gushed.
On the way up the stairs he asked after the nature of the injury done to my arm. I had wreathed it entirely in bandages. I do not wholly remember why. It pains me terribly and, in all honesty, I am afraid to look. I believe I told him it was a work injury.
We achieved the upper landing and I escorted him into the room in which mother was cavorting. Before descending I had wound her mechanisms very tightly to ensure she would....
I cannot....
I must. I am sorry.
I had wound the mechanism very tightly to ensure that she would perform for the entire duration of the Entropan’s visit.
The effect she had on Entropan Klumner, as he entered the room and saw her walking in her tight circles, was very pronounced.
He screamed.
It was a blood-curdling sound, one of pure and unadulterated horror. He started back, clutching at my clothing and throat.
“What have you done?” he asked me in a state of utter shock. “What in the name of the sands have you done?”
His eyes were half out of their sockets, the skin around them stretched thin and white, the blood vessels quite visible. His nostrils were splayed wide and flared with each breath. His lips were curled back exposing his teeth and gums, tight lines etched around his mouth, emphasizing the appearance of that orifice. I remember his appearance with remarkable clarity.
I was perfectly calm. “See?” I said. “She is quite recovered.”
Entropan Klumner struck me at that moment. He attacked me with a ferocity I could not comprehend. He beat me long and hard and left me bloody, barely comprehending, in the ashes of the grate. He was shouting the scripture at me, spitting it in my face. When he had dealt with me he seized a poker from the fireplace and brought it down with sickening force on mother’s spine. There was the crunch of plaster and the whine of metal. Mother spasmed soundlessly. He struck her again and again, still yelling the truth of our faith. I screamed at him to stop, that he was killing her, but I was too weak to stop him. I was far too weak.
Eventually mother stopped moving. Entropan Klumner discarded the poker, panting. Mother sagged forwards, arms drooping to the floor. One of her glass eyes fell out and rolled across the floor. Her skin was dark and ugly looking, discolored by the tanning process. Her tongue, black and stinking, stuck from between poorly affixed teeth. A line of thick, clumsy stitching ran down her neck to a gaping hole in her back from which protruded the stub of a bronze key.
And my screaming sounded like the roar of sand engulfing me, clogging me, stopping me up, filling me.
My scream died then and I sobbed, for in that moment, in her second death, I saw her for what she was: a grotesquery; the work of a mad-man.
My work.
Mother, forgive me. You told me. You told me the sand claims all things, that all things must give way and be replaced. I finally saw that truth in my hideous attempt to keep you safe from the tide of time. We cannot stop the sweep of the clock’s hands. To stand in its path is futile. So utterly futile.
I ran then, once that realization came to me. Entropan Klumner was still advancing upon me, still shouting the scripture. I should have stayed, I should have begged forgiveness. But the shame, oh, the shame.... I ran.
My jaw was bleeding. One eye was almost swollen shut. I tumbled pell-mell through the city. I cannot be certain of my route. I fell from one place of degradation to another. I was harried by the detritus of the streets—beggars and itinerant workers. I was desperate for a hiding place, but I cannot hide from myself.
Now I sit in the refuse of this city and of my life. I must repent. I must go to the Entropans and be cleansed of my sin.
Mother, you must forgive me.
♦ ♦ ♦
Second Day of the Descendency, Third Quarter
How to describe such a day? How to describe such emotions?
I write from a cell. They have let me keep my diary, my pen, and the last of my ink at least. Entropan Klumner has taken pity on me.
I came to him at dawn’s light. I begged him to allow me to make my repentance. Over and over I told him that my remorse was genuine, that I can embrace the shifting of life’s seasons. I begged him. “For mother’s sake,” I said. Eventually he took me in and made arrangements for the ritual to begin.
In a chamber, in a spot of brilliant light, I stood at the center of a circle of Entropans. Piece by piece I removed my ragged clothes, stripped down until I was as naked as the day I came into the world, as naked as I shall be when I leave it.
But I shall not leave this world as I entered it. I cannot.
There was no pain as I took the bandages from my left hand.
No, it is not a hand any more. It is a mass of tentacular flesh, knotted with thick blue veins. Fibrous tendrils extend where once my fingers were.
I stared at my arm, my hand, my sin, my faithlessness imprinted upon my flesh. I raised it, flexed it, feeling unfamiliar muscles contract. I watched strange fluid pulse beneath the surface of swollen, membranous skin. It is utterly new. It is flesh I have never seen before. It is horrifying.
It is beautiful.
The Entropans ceased their chanting. There were cries of horror, of outrage. They cast me from their chamber. There can be no forgiveness for me now. I shall be expelled from the city. I shall be sent out into the Badlands.
Even they cannot accept this change in me.
Sometimes I cannot either. Sometimes I weep. Sometimes, when I think upon the fact that I shall be expelled in five days time, I am convinced that I will be unlikely to survive more than a day in the badland sands. Sometimes I believe that I will die and will lie as still and dry as mother’s tanned skin.
And yet, at other times....
Sometimes I think I may live. Sometimes I look upon my arm, upon my changing flesh, and I think that it may not be so terrible to let the sands take me where they will.
Copyright © 2009 by Jonathan Wood
PODCAST STORY
The God-Death of Halla
Tina Connolly
Halla got halfway out the window, stolen brooch in hand, and then the dizzies hit.
She swore as the world rocked around her. She kicked off the sandstone wall by instinct and thumped to the ground. The gold plate stuffed down her shift knocked her ribs and all her breath whooshed out. She gasped like a fish in the humid air.
Voices.
Halla stumbled over the cut stone and clover of the landowner’s garden. Her breath rushed back with loud wheezes and she flung herself into the ubiquitous bamboo groves dividing one house from the next. A bamboo leaf sucked into her mouth and she spat.
Once her family had been guests at this very house. Her father, one of the elite liaisons between the landowners and the holy, had been deeply honored...and feared. Hall
a had sat on that very bit of stone in a starched white shift, praying that she wouldn’t disgrace herself. But that was ten years ago and several classes above. That memory wouldn’t save her fingers if she were caught this morning.
The landowner was a heavy woman, whose flesh swung through the gaps in her chiton as she thudded around the side of the house. Two maids trailed her. “I heard someone!” she panted. “Search the house!”
Halla breathed relief as she crept through the narrow gaps in the bamboo stands, one hand pressing her laboring ribs. The dizziness was gone now. It was only short sharp bursts these days; nothing like the attacks of her childhood. The big ones came at predictable times. Stupid of her for staying in the house that long. The open brooch pricked her palm and she drew it up, watching its emeralds glitter in the green-tinted light. It was an unexpected haul, worth the pain in her side. If she added it and the plate to her small cache it might...might it be enough to buy a bit of land?
Halla squinched her eyes shut against that hope. She tucked the brooch under her shift and twisted her way out the other side of the grove.
The heart of the city was even more crowded today—market and temple, sellers and enforcers. The temple reared in the air as she turned corners, a golden glamour of stone, an island in a sea of blue-robed holy. She wended through priests, temple assistants, nuns, novices: all preparing for the next day’s celebration. And there, as she had known—a crowd gathered in the judging square at the temple’s front, where the Mouth of the God stood on the dais.
Morning judging had begun.
Sick fascination drew Halla in. She kept low, slipped behind a group of sturdy landowners. Ragged laborers argued in furtive voices, one gesturing with missing fingers. The stolen plate was rigid against her chest and she rolled her shoulders forward as she watched, trying to make her shift hang loose.
As always, the Mouth was flanked by his two young novices, a boy and a girl. His hidden hands, folded in his blue robe, signified that he carried out only the directives of the God. The girl and the boy stood in for the God’s two immortal assistants: mute Habek and one-handed Iva.
“Fellow possibilities of the God,” said the Mouth. He was dark and thin with sharp eyes. His smooth voice slid to every corner of the crowded judging square. “He is glad you have come to be with those who have erred, as they submit to divine will. Your eyes will be his eyes as he sees his will accomplished. We are all the eyes of the God.”
“May he see through us,” answered the crowd.
A palanquin stood at one corner of the judging square. More priests crowded around it, and a young boy in blue—the priestling, the chosen one—sat inside it. Tomorrow on the new decade he would be invested as the new Mouth. Then he would be the one to hear the directives of the God, to relay the justice of the divine.
“Through you, he will hear the accused submit to his fair judgment,” said the Mouth. “We are all the ears of the God.”
“May he listen through us.”
Two nuns lit smoky torches. The laborer being judged was chained to a pole in the depression at the foot of the dais. Guards fanned out around him and a short priest stepped forward, a moving bundle of net and feathers in his hands.
Halla spread her feet apart, bracing herself. She swallowed.
The Mouth made no gesture, spoke no words, just looked at the prisoner. The prisoner’s head swung up as the compulsion of the God surged through the Mouth and touched him. The short sharp dizziness hit Halla at the same instant. She kept her feet braced and rode it out. She did not know why she was attuned to the moods of the God, but so it always had been. Yet another reason she should have her rightful place back, among the holy rich.
“Morsel of the God,” said the Mouth. “A landowner has accused you of robbing him with a knife. Tell us what you have done.”
The man’s head swung wildly, his fingers grasping towards the straining netted bundle. The touch of the God on an unholy man was not pretty. Halla could sense it, crackling the air from the Mouth to the man. It was a compulsion that filled him with blood lust, blanketed his mind with one urge: kill the dove. “Nothing, I did nothing.”
The short priest held the dove just out of reach as the man frothed. The torment would not cease till he succumbed to the God’s compulsion and killed the bird—and the priests would not let him have the bird until he confessed. No one could resist the will of the God for long.
Then the Mouth would proclaim the sentence. The God generally decreed temple service for landowners, whipping or mutilation for laborers. But if the crime or the victim was great enough—death.
If the God decreed death, the priests would take the prisoner this night to the ring on the hill and chain him there. At dawn, the God would lay that same bloody compulsion on one of his subjects to carry out the execution. Perhaps someone who stood right there in the unruly crowd, gloating over the man’s agonies. Someone hard at work right now, or fighting or stealing or praying. The God chose at random. It was part of the service to him, and it had to be carried out. The condemned man would be executed.
Just like her mother.
Halla realized her crossed arms were digging the rim of the plate into her sore ribs, and she forced herself to let her arms fall.
“You must speak the truth of the story,” said the Mouth.
“I wasn’t there. It wasn’t me.” The prisoner shook, but he wasn’t crying. Sometimes they cried.
“We are all the fingers of the God,” intoned the Mouth.
“May he work through us,” answered the crowd. A ragged laborer woman next to Halla spat. Another was weeping.
The man was red and white now, neck corded, trying to reach the dove to kill it. This was the moment when they broke, when they babbled, when they said anything.
Halla lowered her head and turned away. She slid through the crowd to the back of the temple. There the shops and houses pressed up against it in profusion, there you could slip away unseen. Her heart still beat high with the tension of the judging square. Unreleased tension—the uncompleted death of the bird rang her bones like a prickling line of ants. The prisoner was holding out against the God longer than most.
Halla wove around blue-robed nuns, a landowner in gold embroidery, a dirty berry-seller with a wooden hand cart, until with a snap the prickles vanished and her bones went silent. The bird must be dead, and the touch of the God, vanished. She wondered, not for the first time, how it felt to have the God leave you. To know his touch, painful as it was, and then to see it go, to be human and plain once more. Her prickly visions were surely a millionth of what it would be to know the God himself. She crept into an alley shadow, away from the clash of crowds.
There she stood in darkness and tried to maneuver the plate down her shift. When she finally slid it free, she looked up to see the dirty berry-seller, leaning on his cart and looking straight at her.
Her first reaction was a shock of recognition, which she immediately dismissed. Her life had changed for the worse a couple times; instead of consorting with the landowners and holy, she knew the laborers and thieves. Yet even they had beds and roofs. She had not yet stooped to familiarity with vagrants. The man was old, his hair a white tangle. His face was so wrinkled and his grey eyes so wandering that she could not tell if his expression was lust or disgust. Plain old idiocy, likely.
She stashed the plate behind a pile of fish netting in the alley, hoping he wasn’t alert enough to steal it. Still, it was nothing compared to the brooch, or to what she might find within the temple. “Here you go, old man,” said Halla, and flipped him a cent. “Just stop staring at me.” The coin landed in a paper twist of yellow gooseberries. Halla stared a moment, then flipped her thumb and strode past. “You didn’t see nothing.”
She hurried on to the hidden door that led into the rear of the temple, attempting to match her rhythm to the crunch of people. Her palms were wet. The image of the prisoner, red-faced and shaking, was strong. But today was the day to slip into the temple—al
l the extra pomp would be out for the decade celebration tomorrow. The tithing room, the indoor altar, the worship hall—all those places would be guarded. But there was a little room at the back where ceremonial props were stored. Ten years ago she had been there with her father, just before the last investiture. They had met the Mouth in that room. Six-year-old Halla had played with a stained golden bowl while they talked in hard voices.
Her father had taken her into the temple through a door at the rear . She neared the bamboo stand that concealed it, looking for the opening. Ten years was a long time.
It occurred to her that she had been hearing one particular noise since she left the alley—the rolling of a cart. She turned around. The old berry-man was shuffling behind her. Following. Looking up, around, anywhere but at her. But following.
“What the hell are you doing?” Halla demanded.
“You forgot your pretty plate.” It was tucked under his arm. He was eating berries from two paper twists: blackberry, gooseberry, blackberry again.
She glared. “My business if I did.”
“You’ll never get rich that way. I’ll hold it for you while you go in the temple.”
Her hand flicked to the dagger at her belt. “Give me my plate and leave, if you want to help me.”
“Don’t go in there,” he said. “Dangerous. They’ll chop your fingers off, chop chop.”
She took a step closer to him. He was stupid, harmless—yet her spine was on edge. “Do I know you?”
He moved bamboo stalks, tottered right to the door. “Go back to robbing the landowners, my pet. It’s safer.”
Halla slammed her open hand into his shoulder and he staggered, fell back. “Move.” She reached for the door’s handle.
