Idol of Bone

by Jane Kindred

  “Are you happy here?” Ra amended.

  RaNa’s face worked, trying to puzzle out what was expected of her. “I am honored to serve Rhyman.”

  Ra stared into the midnight eyes. She had of her mother the only thing he truly knew of her face. He rose abruptly and left her there, unable to contain the depth of feeling that had come over him.

  On another day, he sent for her, and RaNa came obediently, approaching him in his austere room of throne and altar. She bowed graciously with one hand behind her back and feet crossed, the small toes adorned with jewels. Ra observed the care with which she’d been dressed, in garments as fine and opulent as his own. Her miniature robe was vermillion and gold, the gold a sheen of intricate threads embroidered on the dark fabric. Her garment crossed in front and buttoned down the side, ending in a straight line above the glinting feet. Her dark head, with a braid of hair the color of his own stretching down her back, was still lowered, waiting for what her elder wished of her.

  “None of that between us,” he said, and RaNa looked up at him. She’d been trained in the ways of the Deltan Meer, and variance wasn’t among her instructions. “Custom is for the benefit of your subjects,” said Ra. “One as old as I has no use for custom.”

  “How old are you?” she asked, and then bit her lip since she hadn’t been asked to speak.

  Ra laughed and stepped down from the chair, once again flouting custom. He held out his hand to her. “Come walk with me,” he offered, and she took his hand uncertainly. He was awed by the touch of the small hand in his as they passed under the arch of the great courtyard. In all his years, he couldn’t recall having walked hand in hand with anyone.

  “How old do you think I am?” he asked as they stepped out into the orange light of early evening. Trees swayed along the banks of the river on which the temple stood.

  RaNa looked up at him. “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll tell you a secret.” Ra kept his face solemn, and RaNa fixed her earnest attention on him, impressed. “I don’t know either.” He smiled, and RaNa wrinkled her brow, unsure how to respond to him. “The Meer have greater power over our elements. And greater responsibility. Time is inconsequential and often melds together for us, indistinct. Your time as a child is but an instant of the life that lies ahead of you. Don’t rush toward that empty stretch of time, Na.”

  They’d come to the steps that led down to the river, and Ra nodded to the sentinels who stood beside them. The servants fell into place behind the Meer and followed as Ra and RaNa descended. The perfume of early summer was on the water, blossoms rotting on its banks. Ra let go of his daughter’s hand and tested a foot in the water. RaNa stood back, wondering what he meant to do. Her hands flew to her face, astonished, when Ra dove into the river. He came up laughing. He’d struck the water awkwardly, as it was his first time at such a thing, stinging his chest and plunging himself downward with a mouth full of water. He shook his long hair, and water sprayed onto the assembly at the river’s edge.

  “Come, Na,” he called to her.

  RaNa stared at him as if he were mad. She looked down at her velvet dress and then back at the guards, passive on either side.

  “Come.” Ra laughed. “It’s not so bad!” He splashed her playfully as he moved farther from the bank.

  RaNa stood a moment longer, face twisting with conflict, and then took a deep breath, stepping down from the marble into the river with a solemn expression. She drew in a sharp breath as the water swirled about her legs. It rose to meet her gingered steps, and RaNa stumbled, accustomed to the soft and steady ground of the temple. Submerged to her shoulders, her small body faltered in the current. Panic transformed her features as the water tugged at her, and RaNa shrieked and flung her arms out, wide and erratic, flailing in the river’s flow.

  In an instant, Ra waded to her and caught her up. The water was only waist high for him here and he held her above it. To his surprise, she threw her arms around his neck, wrapping her wet limbs about him and holding on so tightly he nearly stumbled.

  “It’s all right, child,” he assured her. “I won’t let go of you. You are safe with me.” He was mortified that his attempt to draw a smile from his daughter had instead terrified her. He waded out of the water and tried to put her down on the steps, but RaNa clung to him, a shivering spider. He waved the bewildered sentinels before them and carried her back up to the temple.

  All attempts to coax her from him so that she could be taken out of her wet things were futile, and at last Ra dismissed the servants and sat down with RaNa still wrapped about his neck before the rumbling fire they’d laid for her in the great hall. Ra knelt on the stone floor beside the adamantine pit with his burden. As the first logs began to pop and settle in on one another with the comfortable sound of sifting ash, he realized RaNa had fallen asleep. Ra marveled at her impulsive trust in him; she was a child after all.

  When RaNa woke in the morning, still curled in Ra’s lap, she sat up and observed her father. He couldn’t fathom what she contemplated behind the piercing indigo.

  Her handmaid came for her, and RaNa rose and went to her chambers wordlessly. Ra, stiff and scored with the stones’ markings on his legs, rose also and returned to his Meeric duty.

  Weeks passed without encounter. There were meditations, conjurings and rituals to attend to. Returning from their annual boon to the commonfolk, Ra attempted once more to engage RaNa in some kind of communion. The stifling ride through Rhyman in his private litter had brought back on a wave of sense-memory the ride with Ahr. He had wept, staining the bowls of rose and violet water with spirals of red. RaNa was his only link to her, the one indelible proof that he’d penetrated the human wall of separateness and been, once, within Ahr. RaNa was his solace.

  He sent for his daughter when she returned to the temple after him, and subject to him, she obeyed. Standing before him, she appeared as formal and impassive as ever, but she remembered not to bow before him.

  “Hail, Na,” he greeted her, and RaNa’s mouth gave away the girl within the idol, parting in surprise at his address of her as equal, rather than subordinate. “What do you think of the People’s Procession?”

  She paused a moment to think, as though it hadn’t occurred to her to do so before. “It serves the good of Rhyman.”

  “And what of your good?”

  RaNa’s puzzlement was plain at this question. Her brow knitted with concentration, her face intent with thought as she sought an answer.

  Once again, Ra laughed and came down from his dais, putting his hand on her head. “Nana,” he chided. “It shouldn’t be such work to think of your own good.”

  “Why do you call me that? Na, and Nana?”

  “It is more your name than mine is.” RaNa meant simply Ra’s Daughter. “Only Na rightfully belongs to you.” RaNa absorbed this information. “You are Nana,” Ra added. “My little daughter.”

  A small crease formed at the edges of the midnight eyes and the corners of her mouth curved hesitantly. At last, he’d found something that pleased her.

  With the gentle curling of a growing vine, RaNa transformed before Ra knew it from the petite replica of a Meer into a willowy young Meeress in her own right. She was devoted to her father, who seemed to her always mysterious, consumed at times by some great despondency that only the sight of her seemed to cure—and sometimes seemed to cause. They were each other’s company, in a fortress that kept them from the world.

  Her father’s pride, she rode among their subjects in an open litter on the annual processions. The templars had planted this idea, believing it would sway a discontented people toward the fealty of tradition, entranced by the vision of the New Meer; a new breed might restore their faith. It soon became apparent this wasn’t the case. The Meer continued to bring them prosperity, but little of it seemed to reach the common subjects, and the people of Rhyman and the Delta began to shift with unrest.

>   Ra couldn’t understand it. The discontent trickled to him in distorted bits, stories of greedy rioters who begrudged the Meer their offerings and were put down in their rebellion by the faithful templars. His prelate advised him that a feast day benison was needed. Give the people something extraordinary—let MeerRaNa give her first gift to her subjects.

  RaNa’s attendants prepared her for this generous presentation. She’d sat with Ra before in receiving petitioners, but this was a special performance. Vast things were asked of the Meer on these occasions, requests that would exhaust their strength to conjure.

  It was one thing to say “pearls”, and draw their essence out of the matter of thought and into the hands of the fortunate subject; or to answer some question that preyed upon an old man’s mind about his fate, to reach into the chaos of life’s threads and pluck one out to tell the elder he would die peacefully in his sleep. It was another thing entirely to set in motion something that must spiral out into the world and continue on its own over time: the fertility of crops from seed not yet formed; the promise of fame or wealth or love, requiring that fate be subtly shifted in the petitioner’s favor to the tangling of an endless skein of threads; the spark of life in a fallow womb that an ended line continue.

  RaNa was solemn in her responsibility. She would do her best.

  Ra emerged from his bath to the ceremonial chamber and RaNa watched as he was transformed into the gilded idol. The warm oil was poured over her head, and RaNa stood still while it trickled over her face and past her eyes. Topaz and gold beads were woven into the dark sheen, and it was braided in a thick rope that hung down her back. Her attendants stroked the sacramental paint over her body, rubbing it in to ensure that none of her skin was missed. She submitted to this covering of her body, sparkling gold smoothed over the tender beginnings of her breasts, insinuated into the intimate folds of her regenerative power. She was ready. Meer and Meeress descended to hold court.

  The crowd was discontent. Ra was shocked by the sound of derision murmuring through the body of the mob. “A painted harlot,” someone whispered. “They’re incestuous,” said another. “All that bounty wasted on an obscene girl, while mine has no bread.” This wasn’t the rhythmic chant of petition. Some of them didn’t speak these thoughts aloud, but they came to the pair of Meer just the same. They’d tuned in to them, ready to receive.

  RaNa didn’t falter; it wasn’t for her to pass judgment on these affronts. She was the vessel of their want and must empty herself of simple feeling. She heard the petitions of those who came to her, and endured the emboldened denigration of the growing unrest in the crowd.

  Ra ached as he sat watching. Something had gone wrong, and his people hadn’t embraced his child. The air was pungent with foreboding. He tried to understand the chaotic whisperings in the pool of foreknowledge, but it was unintelligible. It was as if there were a madness on the people, and he could no longer read them. He fought his fury that this rabble dared to insult his daughter. For the first time in his reign, he felt the temptation to use conjuring for harm. Ancient Meer had been a different breed, dark and vengeful, and he felt their blood burning in him. Only RaNa’s serene presence stayed him. She was magnificent despite their ungraciousness.

  In the banquet hall, its mirrors long since restored from the fateful vandalism before her coming, RaNa joined him. Her doll face was stained with two red stripes that cut ominous fissures through the gold. Ra’s heart lunged. He held out his hands to her, and RaNa came to him.

  “They despise me,” she said. “What have I done?”

  He drew her into the comforting circle of his arms. “You have done nothing wrong, Nana. There is some madness in Rhyman.”

  She tensed against him. “Someone said—” She paused. “Someone said I was the daughter of a whore.” She looked up at him from the moist depths of night, her eyes dark moons ringed in red portent. “Who was my mother?”

  Ra extricated himself, held mercilessly by those eyes, fathoms deep. She’d never asked him, but he’d seen this coming in her ascent toward womanhood. He’d caught her watching herself in mirrors, stretching her fingers out to touch and letting them hover in the space before the glass, the way the secret hovered between them. Only out of respect for him had she contained her questions.

  “Your mother,” said Ra, staring past her into the distant fabric of time, unaware for a moment that he’d stopped speaking. RaNa waited. He exhaled. “Was not Meer.” Ra resumed his silence then, as though that had answered it, but she was no longer a child, and such passionless facts no longer satisfied her. She wanted to know. He sighed deeply. “She was blameless, pure. The shame was mine.” RaNa’s dark orbs blinked at him, unyielding. He didn’t know how to go on.

  “Did you hurt my mother?” She spoke in a voice so quiet he wouldn’t have heard it if the silence in the room hadn’t been so complete. The sounds of night, of the river, and of the indefinable hum of the earth itself were absent.

  Ra felt a palpable wound in his chest. “No. No, Nana,” he said earnestly. It was unbearable that she’d harbored this fear that she might have been born of violence. “She came to me willingly.” He drew himself up from the unconscious sag of his shoulders. “But I was Meer. I knew the law. It was unforgivable.”

  RaNa smudged the dark tears from her cheek, looking up at him for an eternal moment. “You loved her. It was a crime of passion.” His daughter was too astute.

  “Yes.”

  RaNa sat in the chair that waited at the table’s foot. Graceful and reverent, his goddess of absolution, she took a pale grapefruit from the table and began to peel it, dusting the air with the mist of its skin. The ritual feast had begun. Ra sat also, at the head, and they ate in silence, devouring the bribery of the soth of Rhyman.

  When they finished, they descended to the stone circle where contemplation was to begin, threading their way through the scattered rows of sacred candles. Side by side, they sat in the center of this population of wax and flame, legs folded triangles before them in meditative pose. The incense left by their attendants consumed the air, and the flickering confabulation of the waxen mob, a murmur of hisses and whispers, impregnated their minds and began to speak of Rhyman’s needs, lusts and desires. The unruly light transformed them into two tawny statues made of undulating shadow and scintillation.

  “How did my mother die?” RaNa spoke abruptly from the threshold of her trance.

  Ra’s head was heavy and the present was insubstantial and vague. He was descending into the void of his darker mind. “Ahr?” he murmured. “She lives.”

  “Ahr,” she repeated.

  As Ra slipped deep into the flow of seeing, focused on the needs of the people of Rhyman, he felt RaNa pause, stepping mentally from the river of their shared knowledge and letting it wash past her. She was devoted to her Meeric obligations; held them sacred and inviolate. It was unthinkable that she would refuse her duty. But instead of her consciousness in the flow, he heard her speak.

  “I want to see Ahr.”

  Ra woke to the sound of screaming. He was in his bed, as he always found himself after ceremony, and groggy with the night’s exertion. He tried to leap up at the terrible sound but stumbled on the floor. His limbs were of no use yet, and he was blind. His body’s custom was to regenerate after such a trance with a deep sleep. He usually slept for twenty-four hours or more.

  RaNa. RaNa was screaming. Ra grabbed hold of the bedpost and threw himself away from it toward the wall, staggering in this way along the corridors of the temple to the sound of his daughter. Voices, like the insistent entreaties to which he’d succumbed in the night rose in the courtyard, dissonance and din. Where was Merit? Where were the sentinels? RaNa!

  Ra staggered from the temple, his sight returning to him in a riot of undulating dizziness and color. RaNa was perched before him at the edge of the courtyard steps, wheeling in terror from the temple arch, propelled by a rabble
of strangers. He heard one thought: mother, and then astonished silence as the steps rushed at RaNa with a violent force and a flare of white exploded in her head. He heard it echoed in his own, like the sound of a thousand clay pots breaking.

  And then on the steps—on the steps—

  Enough! No further. No further. Nana! Nana! It was enough the first time; death had been the only mercy in that moment; death had been the only comfort; death had been Ra’s lover—please, the blow, quickly—let him die—let me die—take this unbearable thing away; let it end; please; have mercy. Erase; eradicate; forget; oh god, oh god, forget!

  Ra convulsed on the floor of her rented room, the body desperate to dislodge the soul. She arched back against the seizure and the vision, the thing she’d fled even sweet death to escape. A sound issued from her mouth that was neither a scream, nor a wail, nor human words, but the sound of her lungs contracting, rejecting air and expelling it violently into the world as a dreadful stridor, as though breathing itself were poison.

  She lay still. Traitors, her lungs accepted the return of her enemy, and the vapors of life rushed in, filling her chest so that it rose and fell with a pain like fire. The descending sun crept in along the wooden planks and pointed at her with a narrow, triangular finger. Sweat glistened in her hair—a starburst of wild snakes around her head—like the sacred oil of a god’s anointing, and soaked her white sleeping-gown of cotton so that her naked form was outlined.

  She’d repaired the damaged slate of memory. She had restored it. Ra lived.

  The Meerchild rocked forward, drawing as quickly as it could. The goddess emerged beneath its blackened fingers, supine on the floor of a wooden room. She was here, so close the child could smell her. She was in Soth In’La. The Meerchild hadn’t known the name of In’La until the visions whispered it. She is here, they told the child. She has come to Soth In’La. She lives.

  The child drew the folds of the white gown clinging to her sleeping limbs, the black snaking lines of her hair against the wood, the beads of sweat upon her brow. It drew the window high above her and the winter light upon the floor. It drew the city of In’La and its odd contraptions, its wharf and its piers. It drew the temple in which it had unknowingly spent its entire life.