The stranger watched him with strong emotion in his eyes. “I was a priest in that temple.”
“I know you were, my friend.”
The well-dressed young man pressed his hands together intently and stared at Asawas as he felt something profound occur in his heart. “I search,” he continued, “for a man whom I feel destined to meet.”
“There is a man of ancient shadows whom you must meet, yes; and then there is the man born of the new light,” Asawas told him.
“And you are the man born of the new light.”
“I am. But our time is not yet, Thameron: it is still in the future, when these disguises that we wear will be discarded, and all humanity will wait between us. Neither you nor I are completed yet.” Asawas stood.
The crowd in the square now drew away from him, and from the well-dressed Thameron, as though some invisible Voice had urged them all to do so. Even the beggars who sat beside Asawas sensed a power present and scrambled away in the dust.
“You come to me full of pain, afraid and grieved, young man. I know who you are and what you are. It is a destined thing, ro kil-su.”
Thameron bowed his head shortly. “Lo abu-sabith.”
“You are terrified of the evil within you; that is why you allow it to overpower you. Do you not understand that it is the shadow, and that I am the light? The shadow hides all things; the light illuminates the All. Only good can be more terrifying than what you hold burdened in your heart. All things within the All.”
“All the paths at once.” Thameron spoke slowly, as though to himself only, remembering some personal anguish.
Asawas shook his head. “Why did you search for the All within your heart when you had not yet opened your heart to those around you? That is the only path you need.”
“But I attempted that! I strived—”
“You did not. You elevated yourself; you were not humble. When did you kiss the feet of your masters in the Temple, Thameron? When did you pray to have heaped upon you the leprosy that damaged the ill man you comforted? When did you humble yourself so severely that On, in his beingness, might be one with you, and all within you? You did not do these things. You sought concourse with things and spirits, you sought to elevate your spirit in the belief that you were worthy. Why did you not repudiate yourself?”
“I am only a man!” Thameron replied boldly, becoming angry.
Some in the crowd began to whisper and make noises.
“The Church I served…killed thousands—hundreds of thousands—and it burned books, it destroyed whole cities in the name of the Prophet. It mutilated children! Its soldiers raped women! It sanctioned murder and greed and foulness! And because I asked questions and searched for answers, they cast me out, they called me evil! And now you demand that I humble myself?”
“Why for, Thameron, do you question the meaning of the ever-occurring god when even your masters at the Temple, in their arrogance and pride and indulgence, never questioned it? Even they—the hypocrites and brutes, poisoned by the material things of life, sad and fallen even as they sat high, not comprehending the true heart of the god even though they believed that there is a god—even they, in their gross errors, did not question that there is the moving hand of the ever-occurring god, the all-in-All, the now and the forever. Yet you did.”
“I am not—evil!” Thameron protested.
“You are fear,” Asawas replied in a chillingly quiet tone. “Even as I speak to you with love, and am unafraid in the presence of the all-god, you are yet afraid; and so you are the vessel. You are the fear we have produced in the uncertainty of our humanness. You are the doubt that does not strive but, in its arrogance, is satisfied.”
Thameron said something defiant and foul.
“You know what you are, Thameron, and I know what I am. Our time is not yet. Your spirits and visions and your voices from the shadows could not warn you of me because your powers are deep, while mine are given from on high. Yet know this: if you would now throw yourself into the dust, beg On for forgiveness, and let me place my hands upon your bruised heart, you and I may yet save mankind from itself.”
Thameron stood shivering in the hot sun, staring at the prophet.
“Will you do this, Thameron? Or do you still fear all that humanity strives for, all that On is becoming?”
He swallowed thickly, his hands curled into fists. “Fool.…”
Asawas slowly blinked his eyes; thin tears dripped down his cheeks. “It is destined, then, and we both understand that.” But then Asawas pointed to a child sitting in the road, colored and swollen with disease. “Won’t you take up this child, Thameron—even this one child—and give yourself unto it?”
Thameron looked at the child, and he felt a chill in his bowels. Its mother was sitting nearby; she showed Thameron a gaze full of dread and anguish. Her child.
“How can I,” he whispered, “knowing what it is that I am?”
Asawas turned from him. “You believe this of yourself, therefore you are this. I doubt every moment that I am On, therefore I am On. Begone, Evil One. Your sadness shall bring ruination upon us like a storm of death, a plague of tears, a rage of fear upon all the lands. When next we meet, we will be voiceless; but the hearts of all people will scream their understanding. Who am I to quell the tears of humanity? I am only the word of their god…just as you are the bringer of their hell.”
“I do not seek to bring evil!” Thameron shouted at him.
“The storm,” Asawas replied, “does not know that it floods the land, yet many perish despite the storm’s ignorance. Whether you know or do not know, whether you believe or do not believe—you are chosen, ro kil-su. Men have hungered for your appearance for they doubt their own ability to do evil even in this hour of their growing evil. The storm comes, and you and I are the storm, Thameron. I was wrong to try to alter that.”
“Fool!” Thameron spat at him. “I don’t know you! I’m a sorcerer!”
The crowd around him gasped.
“My power is my own,” he declared, “and gained through hardship and suffering!”
“God suffers more than you do, with your gaining of this power.”
Angered by this presumptuous priest, Thameron stared into the crowd and spied a man leaning on a staff. In two quick strides he was beside him; he yanked the staff from the man’s hand and held it aloft for Asawas and the onlookers to see.
“Am I afraid?” he yelled, his face glossy with perspiration in the sun.
“What is good? What is evil? I have achieved my seat in a place where both are the same. Do I accomplish evil if I believe that what I do is not evil? Where then is the evil?”
“The storm does not know that it floods the land, yet many perish despite the storm’s ignorance. Whether you know or do not know, whether you believe or do not believe—you are chosen.”
He cast the staff to the ground where, instantly, it was transformed into a thick serpent. The serpent curled and hissed, showing fangs and black unblinking eyes. Everyone in the square screamed and turned to run; mothers picked up their children; people swung hands and arms in all directions, hurting one another in their excitement and fear.
Asawas alone did not run away. Kneeling, he extended a hand toward the serpent. Hissing threateningly, it slithered toward him, its head swaying like a fist. Asawas grasped the serpent by the throat and held it up.
“I see no serpent,” he announced. “I see only a stick. Am I wrong in seeing this?”
He dropped the serpent to the dust, and even as it struck the earth, it was transformed once more, becoming again the rigid staff of wood.
Thameron stared at Asawas with narrow eyes. “You are a sorcerer!” he proclaimed, turning to announce it to everyone present. “You presume to bring these people the word of God?”
“I am not a sorcerer; you know this. I am a man who sees the Truth and can divide the truth from its false aspects.”
The crowd, full of wonder, began to come forward again; some of them expre
ssed shame in doubting the strength and insight of the prophet.
“Go from here now,” Asawas bade Thameron. “We shall meet again, soon enough, where both our paths are meant to end.”
Thameron said nothing more to him but moved on, out of the square and down the street, never looking back.
As many faces stared after him, mumbling and whispering, Asawas intoned privately:
“On,” he whispered, “we do not cause these things, but their truth is deep within us.”
When Thameron was a small, distant figure at the end of the road leading from the square, thunder rumbled in the hot skies above. Faces turned to look up at the clouds, and hands lifted to feel the first sprinklings of rain.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Elad awoke early to the sounds of Salia playing with her puppies. He rolled over in their bed and watched her; she didn’t notice him. She was naked and crouched on a wide rug in the middle of their vast sleeping chamber, where she was teasing her two puppies with one of the slim silver cords she used as a belt. Salia wriggled the cord while the puppies, heavy-footed and awkward, stepped on it, tried to catch it to gnaw on it, fell into a tumble, and began wrestling with each other. Salia giggled uncontrollably.
“Shhhh!” she whispered to the puppies, holding her free hand over her mouth as she wriggled the cord. “You’ll wake up the king!” She glanced over her shoulder toward the bed and caught him looking at her. Salia smiled. “Oh, did we wake you?”
“Yes.…”
Playfully, she dropped the cord over the rolling puppies, then stood and stretched. Soft morning light moved gently over her pink body and shined in her golden hair; she closed her eyes and yawned, then opened them and eyed Elad mischievously. She walked toward him slowly, but not with conscious seductiveness; her smile and her walk were the smile and walk of a young woman, almost a girl, despite her being so alluring a woman.
Elad patted the cushions and made room as Salia slid in beside him. He watched the movements of her body as she lay back; then he wrapped his arms around her and laid his head near hers. Salia playfully flicked her tongue at him and licked his nose, as one of her puppies might happily lick her, with affection.
She asked him, “Can we go out today?”
“Where did you want to go?”
“Just…out. I want to go riding. Let’s take some horses and go riding. Wouldn’t you like to do that with me?” She seemed to be almost a child, asking her parent for a favor.
“I don’t know if I have the time to do that today. Your father could escort you.”
She pouted, the brightness leaving her eyes. “But all he does is lecture me whenever we go riding.”
“What does he lecture you about?”
“Being queen. Being a wife. He always does that.”
Elad chuckled.
“What am I going to do when he goes back home?”
Elad didn’t have an answer for that.
“I don’t want to stay here by myself,” Salia protested.
That wounded him, although he knew that she probably hadn’t meant it to. Elad realized again how young his wife was and how little she knew herself and knew of life, and how much she relied upon others. “I’ll try,” he promised her, “to find time today to go riding with you.”
“Don’t ‘try’,” she complained. “Tell me we’ll do it. Can’t you just take the afternoon to be with your wife? I want to be with you.”
“I can understand that.”
“People don’t take me seriously,” Salia told him. “They don’t think I’m the queen, or even a woman. They think I’m just, that I’m just here.”
“That’s not true.”
“Oh, it is, and you know it. We never spend any time together. If we spent time together, people would understand me better.”
“We’re together now,” Elad reminded her, and kissed her shoulder to coax her.
“Oh, we’re always together when you want to try to…make puppies.”
“Try to what?” He laughed out loud, so overcome that he slapped a hand on the cushions. “Try and make puppies? Is that what you said?”
Despite her frustration, Salia giggled. “You know what I mean!”
“Yes, my heart, I know, I know!” Elad was still chuckling. The comment was charming; he embraced Salia strongly.
And as he held her and smelled the good smell of her and felt her golden hair on his face, Elad thought to himself that that expression was just one of the many things about Salia that so intrigued him, and even delighted him: she always referred to sexual expression in euphemisms, and sometimes in wildly childish euphemisms. Her temperament was confusing, too. It was so mercurial that, often, she would ignore Elad’s amorous impatience and occupy herself with mundane things: examining herself before her mirror (“Am I really all that beautiful? Look at me. I have the same sort of nose as that old woman we saw today!”), or playing with her puppies, her birds or her kittens (“Look! See him? I think our king wants us to come to bed, but we’re not sleepy yet, are we? No, we want to play some more!”), or talking about some trivial matter with exaggerated importance (“I don’t think the women who do my hair are doing a very good job with it. I think I should do it myself. Abgarthis told me I could do my hair myself, if I wanted to, but father says I shouldn’t, that I should let the women do it because they’re supposed to.”). But then, at other times, when Salia’s curiosity or passions were aroused, whatever time of the day that might be, she would approach Elad in their lovemaking with the same intensity and sense of importance that she had displayed before her mirror or in her childlike rapport with her animals.
These shifts of mood in her seemed to Elad wholly without plan or intent; they were spontaneous, and only more evidence for him that Salia did not know herself, that her personality was far too reliant upon arbitrary incidents and moods and comments that she overheard. On one occasion she had been erotically aroused simply by watching the colors of the sunset reflected in the mirrors of their sleeping chamber; on another evening, Elad had come in to discover Salia weeping copiously because her puppies had refused to cooperate with her when she had tried to teach them some new tricks. Nothing he could say or do would console her.
On most mornings since their marriage, then, when he and Salia were at breakfast with their ministers and courtiers, Elad had regarded Ogodis with the critical attitude of a man totally appalled by his father-in-law’s methods of child-rearing. What had the imbur done to create so inconsistent a personality in his daughter? What had he failed to do? What sort of father would raise a child who was constantly awed by her own extraordinary beauty yet did not seem vain about herself, only intrigued, as one might be by someone else’s appearance? What sort of father would raise a daughter who communicated better with animals and pets than she did with women of her own sex?
Once or twice, Elad had also wondered about his own motivations in wedding the most beautiful woman in the world. Was it pride that had provoked him? Had it been only an impulse? Had it been a desire in him, when he felt his own life collapsing around him, to begin a new life, one on his own terms, one that he could control utterly?
He returned to the smell of her and the feel of her golden hair.…
“Making…puppies!” Elad grinned, and he turned Salia’s face toward him and kissed her. But when he sensed that she was not yet in the mood to answer him, he lay back, listened to the bickering puppies, and—because his mind was full of a thousand things that morning—considered a sudden, odd idea.
“I know you’re the queen,” he told Salia frankly and soberly. “And I don’t want you to feel like you’re unwelcome here. The people will come to respect you; they’ll come to love you.”
Salia eyed him doubtfully.
“It’s only because I was recuperating that things have become disjointed. But we’ll change that. I mean it.”
“I’d like to believe it. I don’t like spending all my time inside the palace when I know the whole world is out there, and I wa
nt to do things and be part of everything.”
“And you will, you will be. I promise you that. Salia—do you believe me?” He eyed her sincerely.
She smiled. “I’ll try.”
“You’re still very young,” Elad said to her. “But that’s probably for the better, you know, because my mother was very young when she became queen, and she became a very important woman.”
“I know,” Salia told him. “I’ve seen her portraits. She was very beautiful.”
“Yes, she was.”
Salia eyed him cunningly, then, and while Elad was not aware of it, she quietly sneaked her hand under the covers and grabbed him between the legs.
He whooped.
Salia acted repentant. “Ohhh…should I make it better for you? Do you want Salia to make it better for you?” She grinned and blew gently on his face, but continued to hold him and lowered her head to his chest and kissed and licked him. “Poor Elad,” she sighed, laying her face on his chest and looking up at him with wide eyes. “You like Salia, but you don’t like Salia, and you don’t know what to do with Salia. Poor Elad. I know.…”
“That’s not true,” he said.
She smiled. “Oh, that’s all right. I know how you feel, but it’s all right.” She threw back the covers and began kissing him on the chest and belly.
While Elad, ever uncertain but growing a smile, watched her puppies gambol and yelp on the carpet.…
* * * *
Galvus was absent from breakfast that morning; Elad asked Omos why that was. The prince’s shy friend explained, “He didn’t say anything to me, but I saw him leaving very early.”
“I think,” Adred interrupted from across the table, “that he might have gone riding. I saw him heading toward the stables from my window.”
“Riding?”
Adred shrugged; the king glanced at Salia, then at Orain.
“He hasn’t done any riding since he was here last,” she told him. “Perhaps he misses it and just wanted some fresh air.”
As they were finishing their breakfast, Abgarthis entered, in his usual haste to be busy with things. He had received some dispatches and requested that Elad peruse them as soon as he could.
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