I glanced at the next byre and saw Darvin still breaking apart his bale, then back at my own work, nearly finished. I said to Arash, “My heart sings within me and the load is light.”
He smiled. “The Ecstatica comes no sooner for your efforts. Do not weary yourself before the praises are sung.” His tone was gentle, but chiding for all that. Working too hard during the day meant inferior revelry, and I hung my head. Putting work before worship was not done.
“I move to the rhythm of the shanty,” I replied, chastened. He patted my shoulder and moved on. Thus warned, I forced myself to move at a more measured pace. Slow, it was so slow! The sun barely moved across the sky and my muscles cried out to be pushed, as though they had just awakened from a too-long sleep and needed to be stretched. I chewed on my lip, wanting the light to wane and the Ecstatica to begin. I needed to know if Jonna had told me the truth. I needed to be more careful. Beneath Arish’s gentle words lurked the threat of real chastisement.
The thought alone was enough to slow me down as I remembered my last sentence to iso. Some things simply are not done; when they are done, the only response is rejection. Silence. Shunning. Iso meant serving myself meals while everyone else looked at everything but me. It meant sleeping in the byre because those who do not exist do not have bunks assigned to them. It meant days of biting my tongue, because the only thing worse than being ignored when I was silent was being ignored when I tried to speak. Nobody breaks iso until everybody does, all together.
There is no telling when it will fall or when it will end. Sometimes, after worship, the fellows of the shanty will rise and one of them will not exist. And then, days or weeks later, they will rise from worship again and it will be over. It has happened to me several times, and while it is possible to guess that it will be coming soon, I never knew for sure.
There is nothing as terrible as walking through home as a stranger that no one will touch. So I bent to my work, paying careful attention to my rhythm, focusing on the slight creak and pain in my hips and knees and shoulders. It was strange. It hurt, but better pain than shunning.
By the time I had finished, fighting against the shriek of muscles begging to vent an upswelling of energy, against the dull moan of joints begging for rest, there was still an hour or more until the evening meal. No one would be expecting me in the kitchens, or the creche, or the byre, or the field. Now was one of the times that I would sometimes go to the place of the dead, but I did not want to go there now. Not yet. Not until after I knew whether Jonna had spoken me true about the Ecstatica.
Instead, I wandered between field and byre. As I walked, I tried to think about yesterday, and last night, and today, but my mind refused and so I strode along the path with nothing in my thoughts but Jonna's eyes and hands, lips curving above her stubborn chin. I wondered what her loose canvas pants and vest hid, and my musing led me to other memories, lit by the green light of Isana's gaze, and I was not as careful as I should have been.
Memories of the lone night when I had seen Isana's eyes grow soft as her lips were morphing into the sight of them cold and empty when a sudden chill drew me back to the world around me. Not ten feet away, I saw a hooded figure in a robe, radiating a bone-searing cold. I knew what it was - one of the Great Ones’ chosen servants, come to pass along the desires of Those Above and Below. It would speak with their madness-inducing tongue and move with their geometry-denying grace. I stepped off the path and bowed my head, waiting for it to pass.
Its every motion was graceful and smooth. It glided with an elegance that no human could ever match. But we try. Every evening when we come together to exalt the Great Ones who returned to us, we try. With flute and drum, we mimic their voices. With every gesture and step, we strive to emulate their grace. We join flesh for their glory. We die for their sustenance. And when one of their servants comes, we give them the entire path out of respect. This is the way it is done.
After it passed me by and my breath no longer steamed in the frigid air of its wake, I looked up the path the way it had come and saw the creche before me. I had wandered in a circle. A sudden madness seized me and I followed in its wake, striding to the door, opening it, bowing my head before the nurseling that greeted me.
Several children were gathered in the teaching room. A robed nurseling was leading them in one of our many songs, their high piping voices following along with the nurseling's thready rasp. The one at the door cocked its head to one side, huge bulbous eyes watching me, unblinking.
“The nursery, Singer.” I was surprised at how difficult it was to speak in a properly respectful tone. “I felt a madness upon me, a desire to behold the newest.”
The nurseling said nothing, only turned so that I might follow. They do not speak. Their voices are only for songs. We passed through the creche to the nursery at its center where the infants and smallest toddlers slept. Two robed figures strode between the cribs and pallets, the music of their voices washing over the babes. I felt none of the warmth and security that usually came when I remembered being watched over in the same way.
The one that had brought me waited as I approached the newest babe. As I looked down on him in his crib, tentacles came from the sleeves of her robe and lifted him. The nurselings do not have hands as the ordinary shantyfolk do; some do not even have arms. Instead, they bear the mark of Those Who Returned. Their tentacles are not well-suited to the labor of field and byre, but no hands are half so gentle when cradling the young or tending their hurts. Like all those with the Look, they are highly respected.
This one held up the babe for me to see him more clearly, tentacles admirably suited for supporting his overlarge head on his spindly newborn neck. I did not reach out to touch him, though I wanted to. It was not for the ordinary to handle the newly born. He wriggled a little in the rubbery cradle, and opened his eyes. They were dark, without iris or white, and they bulged with the Look. I saw that his nose was no more than a pair of slits in his fat round face, that scales gleamed in the hollow of his throat. He was marked. Chosen.
Somehow, I thanked the nurseling, voice hushed as was proper in the creche, and I left. Never before had I failed to rejoice at the birth of a child with the Look. All children were treasured, but those with the Look were special. Those Above and Below had touched them.
His eyes haunted me. There was no trace of Isana in him, though I had looked. In the curve of his ears, the shape of his chin, there was nothing to indicate that he had been born of her body. She was gone. The honor of her death meant nothing before that single stark fact. She was gone, and nothing of her remained, not even in her son.
I had so hoped that he would have her eyes.
* * * *
By the time I returned to the center of the shanty, the evening meal was beginning. I accepted my share of meat and boiled grain and brew and found a place at the end of one of the tables, where I usually sat. The talk was of the servant that had passed me on the path. It would be staying for the night. I listened, but did not speak. No one was paying the slightest attention to me.
Or so I thought. I was just about to tip out some of my brew when I noticed Arash watching. I smiled at him, pretended to take a large swallow. He nodded and looked away without smiling back. I took the chance to set my mug back down on the edge of the table, so that when I took my hand away it fell. Feigning consternation, I leaped up and snatched at it, too slow to save it before it spilled out its contents. The liquid soaked into the dust and between the cracks of the stones immediately; it was impossible to tell how much had been lost. My tablemates stared, murmuring in sympathy.
I sighed. “At least I had almost finished it,” I said with what I hoped was the right mix of relief and chagrin, fighting the pounding of my heart. “I would hate to trouble the kitchen for more when they have already cleaned up for the day.” The others at my table nodded agreement. It was rude to trouble the kitchen, or anyone else. Their expressions indicated no surprise at my clumsiness, but Arash's face when I glanced quickly at
him on my way past left me feeling cold. He suspected. Careful. I would have to be more careful.
Though I had been among the last to retrieve food, I was one of the first done. After setting my dish and fork and mug on a rack to dry, I returned to the center and began to stretch in preparation for what was to come. As I did so, others came to join me. The musicians collected their instruments and set up around the perimeter. They would not come into the center until the madness seized them.
The drums began, their deep regular beat soon joined by the skirling of flutes. I took a place near the edge of the gathering crowd, adding my voice to the chorus, my feet to the dance, stealing glances around at my fellows while they did the same. Their faces reflected the same ecstatic joy that always characterized the ritual; for them, everything was as it should be and all was right with the world.
But it wasn't.
The drums were ragged and out of time with each other, no two following the same beat. The flutes all seemed to be playing in different keys, with a dissonance that grated unbearably. Nor was the singing any more coherent. The words that usually carried me to heights of frenzied union with my fellows and with Those Who Returned were idiot mumblings, unintelligible. I felt no more connection with them than with the calling of crows. Less, because the cries of the crows fit my expectations. This cacophony did not.
You ever listened to the music without the communion brew?
I watched in amazed horror as the dancers stumbled and reeled, nearly colliding on several occasions. If I had stayed still instead of making my own weaving way among them, I would have been bowled over long since. What was happening?
Their expressions said nothing was wrong at all. In fact, judging by their faces, they thought this was all wonderful. I knew the communion they were feeling, the contentment and the joy, and it was strange indeed to be left out of the shared experience. The work of a shanty's farm is necessary for physical survival, but the Ecstatica is what transforms life and makes it worth living. Without the Ecstatica, we are only lonely animals; in it, we are made whole, one with each other and with the Great Ones we serve. Our lives gain meaning through the Ecstatica and its revelatory madness; our deaths gain meaning as they are given to Those Above and Below.
So what was this stumbling chaos? What was this wreck that I was watching, from which I was excluded? For a moment, I entertained the notion that this was somehow Jonna's doing, that she had managed to interfere with the sacred process of the ritual. But then I would not be the only one on the outskirts, confused and frightened.
Lupan crashed into my shoulder, grinning wide, never even noticing me. Her voice raised in song, she turned in a halting twirl and dove back into the center of the teeming mass of bodies. I fell to one knee and rose awkwardly. As I had wrestled with unanswerable questions, the tone of the ritual had changed. The singing was fragmenting even further as the singers grew distracted, coming together and moving apart. They stumbled more as muscles weary from a long day’s work were taxed by unceasing motion. I stayed on the edge opposite the musicians, darting in and out of the center knot's periphery in a pretense of normalcy. Though my stomach twisted, I plastered an expression of devotion on my face and hoped without prayer that no one would notice anything unusual about my behavior.
I might as well not have bothered. Nobody was paying any attention to me. Already the most heated were beginning to consummate the spiritual union with a physical one. Flesh tangled and writhed, clothing was abandoned in careless heaps. The flutes had already stopped; soon, the drums would join them, their rhythms abandoned for the ones now being played out before me.
Hands around my upper arms drew me back until I could feel gyrating hips grinding into me from behind. I bit back a shriek, forcing myself to move with them. Darvin's voice, worn with use and weariness, filled my ears with the tongue-twisting words of the Great Song. Heart racing, I maneuvered him slowly toward a larger concentration of bodies, drawing him down to the ground and then rolling away when he grew distracted by Naumal's sweat-slicked breasts, heftier than my own. For a moment, I felt guilt, but she seemed to welcome his touch in some way that I could not, and I took advantage of the moment to flee.
I didn't intend to go anywhere in particular, but habit drew my feet back to the place of the ancient dead. It was cold after the frenzy of the Ecstatica, cold in a way that made me gasp more than the run itself. Because I made no effort to move quietly or carefully, I startled a sleeping crow, who scolded me.
Like the crow, I felt betrayed. What had happened? What had I seen? Nothing was as I remembered. None of it was right. Moonlight spread over me as I huddled in the grass, hugging my knees. Was the whole thing a lie created by the brew? Had it been a lie all along, and I an unwitting participant, thinking myself a celebrant when I was nothing but one of those shambling idiot creatures I had seen?
I shook. I wept. I tried, over and over again, to wrap my mind around it all. The Ecstatica was supposed to give us a glimpse of the truth, because a glimpse was all we could manage without the protection of sacred madness. Because to see more than a glimpse was to become mad, and madness was not to be sought by the unworthy. Perhaps that was truer than we thought, for the truth beneath the Ecstatica was enough to make me question my own sanity, though I knew I had not been so blessed. I was no madling.
Finally, though, despite wrestling, despite fleeing, there was one question I could neither outrun nor answer. If the Ecstatica was a lie, what other lies did I believe, all unknowing? What were Those Who Returned, really?
“Monsters.”
I had not realized I had spoken aloud, or that I was not alone, until I heard Jonna's soft reply. It should have surprised me; jumpy as I had been since dawn, I should have reacted. Perhaps it was only that I was exhausted, but I did not move, not even to open my eyes.
“I have always thought them gods,” I told her. “That humanity, in a time of great and terrible need, read from the books and began to sing the songs, and they came, and they saved us from ourselves. They brought the gift of madness that we desperately needed, and in gratitude, we continue to read from their books and sing their songs, and they embrace our dead to give us life.”
“Oh, the books were read. Foolish men read ‘em without knowing what would happen. Then the eldest horrors came. They enslaved humanity and bent most folk to their wills. They chain us and eat our dead.”
“Why?” I asked, raising my head at last to look at her. She was sitting very close and watching me. Her eyes caught and held me; they were grey with the barest flecks of green. Like moss-touched stones. Like the stones of the dead all around us. She was frowning.
“I don't know. They don't seem to need us, really. But they do feed on our deaths somehow. Or maybe it's just that they're protecting themselves from the power of death by stealing it.” She paused. “They fear it, y’know.” At my confused glance, she gestured around us at the stones. At the ancient dead. “Why d’you think you never see their servants around here? These places're poison to them. If we knew why, maybe we could change things.”
I shook my head. I said nothing. There were no words for what I felt. It was a deep emotion, swelling like the crest of a wave, tearing me between certainties. The Ecstatica was a lie; the Ecstatica was the only truth. Those Who Returned were our saviors; Those Above and Below were our enslavers. Death begets life; death begets only death.
Isana. The sight of her blood, the too-bright crimson rush of birthing, the light going out of her deep green eyes before she even beheld her child. Her lips, cracked and dry as all the force of her was poured out into the Great Ones Above. The emptiness of her. The stillness of her. If Those Above and Below were not gods, if the Ecstatica was a lie, then what was her death for? What good was it all? I remembered the tears I had shed last night, the night Isana died, the night I met Jonna. Had I known, even then? Was this terrible, appalling truth already pressing against me, waiting to be recognized?
How long had I been lied to, and for
how long had I been doing the lying?
Jonna's hand on mine was gentle, tentative. I glanced down as she laid it there, surprised and not surprised. The people of the shanties touched all the time. I had the feeling that Jonna's people did not.
I looked up into her grey eyes. They were calm, and a little afraid, and a little worried. Was she concerned for me? I was. “I don't know what to believe,” I whispered. Part of me wanted to flee back to the shanty, to find and drink the brew, to believe. To stop doubting. To stop wondering. To silence the questions that filled me.
I never wanted to see the shanty again. Disgust filled me, as strong as the fear, as strong as the strange nameless thing that still grew inside me. I could not return, knowing it for a lie.
The fear in Jonna's eyes faded. The worry grew and changed, becoming something else, something for which I had no name. It did not look like what was within me. It looked like something new, something strange. Something gentle. She lifted her hand, and my hand with it, and she pulled gently. It was like Darvin pulling me toward his embrace; it was nothing like that at all.
I went. Into her arms. I fell into her eyes as her lips touched mine. Soft, softer than Isana's. My eyes wanted to close; I did not let them. There were no lies in hers. The wave inside me crested and broke.
“I do not want to go back to the shanty,” I whispered.
“Then don't,” she said, and kissed me again.
I feel no guilt for what passed there, among the grasses that swayed above the dead. I like to think that the dead, long past such moments, treasure the nearness of life even if they lack it for themselves. I imagine that they remember what it was for them, so long and long ago.
She was lanky, her body strung tight with muscle, with fewer curves even than my own lean form. No one had ever found me desirable outside the Ecstatica; without broad hips and weighty breasts for child-bearing, I had little to offer. I had never been beautiful.
Apotheosis: Stories of Human Survival After the Rise of the Elder Gods Page 6
