Idol of Bone

by Jane Kindred

  They entered the courtyard in the pitch of night, shrouded in the temple’s silence. Already the bodies were terrible from the moist autumn heat, swollen and smelling of putrefaction. They’d lifted Ra from RaNa’s body, Merit mercifully taking the shoulders while Ahr lifted the legs, and placed his body on a length of canvas, which Merit wrapped around him. RaNa must wait for their return. They carried their burden through the abandoned temple to the steps beyond and down to the river. Merit, still possessing the hard body of a litter bearer, bore most of the weight.

  A small boat waited at the river’s edge, moored at the steps. Merit lifted Ra in his arms with reverence to place him in the boat and indicated another length of canvas on the steps. “Bring her down.”

  She was to go alone to this terrible reckoning. Ahr turned weakly toward the temple. Merit didn’t condemn her with words, but this spoke more loudly than a volley of rage.

  She covered the body first, unable to look at it, and rolled it into the cloth. Then in her arms she lifted the child she hadn’t held since it had suckled at her breast. Heavy with her burden, she mounted the marble stairs to the temple, bringing the final offering of this body to the altar of the god. In silence, she carried her through the gilded arches where RaNa had spent her privileged life; in silence, descended to the river where RaNa’s father waited. Merit took the body from her and laid it down, and Ahr climbed in.

  They floated downriver, undertakers from the netherworld, over black water skimmed occasionally by unidentified life. Merit rowed to the bank when they reached the basin of the graveyard, and they completed their procession with the bodies over the hill. Merit had already dug the graves, and he laid Ra to rest beneath an olive tree, with RaNa’s small grave beside him. Ahr stood by while he lowered RaNa. He allowed her that mercy.

  He arranged the child’s hands over her body and paused a moment, removing the ring from her thumb where she’d worn it in anticipation of maturing fingers. Then he climbed from the small grave and replaced the earth, sealing the souls into permanent slumber, a slumber that Ahr would envy, as she’d envied them all else.

  Merit pressed the ring into her hand, and she shook her head and backed away from him, but he gripped her fingers with his superior strength and forced them down over the ring, engulfing her fist. He shook it roughly, and his eyes told Ahr with finality that she would not escape this sentence. He had protected her, but he would not protect her from her guilt.

  It was the last she saw of him.

  The Minister turned now and glanced at his prisoners. Ahr met his eyes, and Merit paused, his expression confused. Ahr was worrying the ring on his finger, and Merit looked down between the bars. Ahr stopped his hand. He’d kept the ring in his pocket, glad the guards had been too nervous to search him. He ought to have left it there.

  Merit met his eyes once more, scanning his face, his expression dark. He turned to the watchmen of the Guard. “Take a break,” he ordered. They left without argument.

  Ahr sat unmoving with his dinner tray in his lap as Merit opened the cell.

  He closed his hand over the ring, grinding it into Ahr’s skin. “Where did you get this?” Ahr debated whether to answer. How could he answer? The answer would be preposterous. “This will get you hanged, sir. Where did you come by this? Tell me!”

  Ahr swallowed his mouthful of food. “You gave it to me, my liege.”

  Merit jerked Ahr’s face toward him and looked into his eyes, his own going wide with fear. “I gave it to a woman,” he said fiercely. “She was a daughter to me.”

  “I can never have been that, Merit,” said Ahr softly. “How misplaced your loyalties have always been.”

  Merit stumbled back and landed on the opposite bunk. “How?” He shook his head. “You’ve refused to identify yourself to my Guard. Tell me your name now; I must hear it.”

  “Ahr Naiahn.” The appellation was Deltan for “no one”.

  Merit shook his head. “How?”

  “My answer would incriminate me, sir.”

  “Meericry?” Merit whispered. “You sought one out?” Ahr didn’t answer. Merit rose and threw his arms around him, knocking the tray to the floor, and Ahr submitted, stunned. “I thought you’d taken your own life. I thought I’d driven you to it. Forgive me.”

  “Forgive you?” Ahr drew Merit’s arms away. “Sooth,” he swore in Mole. “You’ve done nothing to forgive.”

  “You kept the ring. It was too much. You torment yourself with it. I shouldn’t have made you take it.”

  “No.” Ahr shook his head. “Nothing could have been too much.” Jak had roused at this reunion and stood watching in the awkward dress at the bars of the cell. Ahr nodded toward Jak. “Mene midt dalfalend, Jak. My friend from the wasteland.” He translated as he spoke. Jak met and held his eyes at the word “friend”.

  Merit took Jak’s hand through the bars. “Vetta, zira.” He lifted the hand to kiss it.

  “My friend prefers not to be addressed according to gender,” said Ahr. “These clothes are an insult.”

  Merit raised a curious eyebrow but released Jak’s hand and offered a respectful bow. “Mene auffen.”

  “He apologizes.”

  “No offense taken,” said Jak. “It’s an honor to meet someone who has loved Ahr.”

  “Nai auffen,” said Ahr to Merit, pausing over the second part. “Ischvetseh…ahnmidtlif Ahr.”

  Merit smiled and inclined his head. “Likewise.” He looked back at Ahr. “I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do at the moment about the clothes. It’s out of my hands. But perhaps I can influence the prelate in favor of your freedom.” He lowered his voice. “The charges. Is there any truth to them?”

  “That I consort with MeerRa of Rhyman?” Ahr laughed spitefully. “Here? Now? How can there be? Ra was consigned to the earth without fire, as you well know.”

  Merit grimaced. “There was a fire. The body—spontaneously combusted.”

  “Ai, Ra.” Ahr shook his head.

  “If there is anything to confide, it will remain with me. My loyalties are constant.”

  Ahr avoided his eyes. “If Ra lives, I’m afraid you cannot hope it will be for long.”

  Nineteen: Reunion

  The toll of her privation was beginning to show.

  “Come on, Ra,” Geffn urged. “Come away from here.”

  Ra was returning the earth to its place in the small grave, smoothing it over with precision. “The ring,” she murmured. “Ahr has the ring.” She stood and headed down the hill toward the Anamnesis with purpose.

  He followed her swift stride with relief, but his relief was transitory. Ra paused when she reached the bank and sat as if already winded.

  She looked up with her dark eyes intent as he approached. “You must see that I reach Mound Ahr.”

  Geffn sat beside her, depressed at the mention of the Deltan. He took her hand, saddened by the slightness of it, all bones like the hand of her dead child.

  “Ra,” he pleaded. “Eat. Be sure of it.”

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Geffn. It’s too late for that. I can no longer stomach it. But I must see Ahr before there’s an end to it.”

  He laid his head in her lap. “Please, Ra. Whatever happened in the past is over. Let me care for you. Don’t do this.”

  She put a hand on his head like a priest conferring a blessing. “In another life, I could have done so. But there has been too much pain.”

  He closed his eyes, his chest rising and falling against her insubstantial thighs. “Ahr isn’t in Haethfalt. He’s been arrested in Rhyman. He and Jak.”

  Ra’s hand paused in smoothing his hair across his temple. “Jak? My Jak?”

  Geffn glanced up at her. He’d been a fool. It had never been possible between them. He sighed, his head and his heart weary. “They’re being held in the dungeon at the temple. I hadn’t meant t
o tell you. I suppose I was hoping if I didn’t mention them, they would somehow…cease to exist.” A leaden weight seemed to settle in his stomach. “Oh god.” He sat up, his head clearing as if he’d languished in a drugged state and someone had doused him with water. “I didn’t mean that. Oh god, that’s horrible.”

  “My temple?” Ra jumped to her feet with a sudden resurgence of energy. “My temple still stands?”

  Her temple. He understood so little. She was right. He didn’t know her, and he’d been arrogant, idiotic, to stand in the way of such a being as though he could keep her like a foundling. He raked his hands through his hair. “It still stands.”

  In an instant, she’d thrown off her boots and was plunging into the reeds at the river’s edge to forge her way across. She was going to her temple.

  Geffn hurried after her, shocked by the cold of the distant snowmelt as he jumped into the water. Ra was swimming at a speed he wouldn’t have thought possible a moment before. He struggled to keep up with her against the current. Near the confluence of the Anamnesis with its branching tributaries, the river was a half-mile wide. He reached the other bank exhausted and close to hypothermia, sprawling among the reeds and rushes as he tried to catch his breath.

  But there was no time to recover, for Ra was moving again, brushing aside the rushes with a furious force. He stumbled after her, his chest burning and his muscles cramped in his side. She traversed the length of Rhyman, its groves of industry and markets nothing to her. Geffn tried to keep up, bashing his knees on the cobbled streets as his exhausted limbs faltered in her wake. He’d lost her by the time he reached the square, and he fell onto his knees by the roadside, cursing himself. He couldn’t go on without rest.

  Ra cut back to the bank and into the river as the temple loomed ahead, thrusting her way through the cover of its marsh grass. She would enter by the steps, as was her right. Ludtaht Ra belonged to her.

  She swam to the steps beneath the water and emerged from the darkness of the river into the soft glow of torchlight from the inner court above. Determination drove her as she climbed the bone-white steps, dripping and hunched on all fours like a specter of retribution from the deep. They’d taken her RaNa, and they would pay for it. She saw only that moment on an endless spool in her head: RaNa whirling in terror on the balls of her feet. They had broken her, and she lay shattered in a grave on a beggar’s hill.

  At the entrance to the private courtyard, Ra rose up to her full height before the startled guards. If they’d been in her command, she would have had them dismissed for their incompetence and inattentiveness. They were too startled to cry alarm, staring with mouths open like dumb beasts as she advanced on them. She flung them like rags across the stone, inconsequential. The sentinels inside the arch were better trained, and they raised the alarm, but these she also grasped like stalks of wheat and tossed aside. They were irrelevant. Insignificant. She was MeerRa of Rhyman, and they were trespassing upon her glory.

  Torchlight blazed on the gold filigree of the marble columns, setting the stone orbs at their tops aglow with a glittering orange fire. Beneath her feet, their reflection wavered on the glassy sea of blue-black gemstone tiles—the indigo sea in which Ra had been able to see nothing but Ahr’s eyes once he’d draped her upon it. He’d both worshipped and devoured her. In the smothering heat of his passion, compelled to know every part of her, a slave to her, he’d never considered her youth.

  It stunned Ra now, thrust like a bruising fist into the womb she hadn’t had then.

  MeerRa didn’t age, and it made him forget that the blush of youth in the ordinary beings around him was truly that. They were delicate, untested things, for whom—as for Ra now—everything was new. And yet he’d taken possession of Ahr, barely on the crest of womanhood, and shattered her innocence as surely as the mob had shattered his RaNa’s.

  Ra moaned softly against the ache in her head. The past lay over the present like a muddy layer of silt, and she faltered, uncertain. Ahr had taken the ring. It didn’t belong to her. Ra had come to get the ring and return it to the hand where it belonged. RaNa waited in the river, waited in the Anamnesis to be remembered. Ra had left her there.

  He’d been teaching her to swim.

  Ra passed through the glittering columns and waded over the river of tile. Where was RaNa? She couldn’t remember. The child had been sitting in a beam of late-afternoon sun, fussing. Crying for her mother. No. No, that was long ago, in the dust of the Meeric Age. This temple, for all its glory, was only an empty relic of an extinguished race. Perhaps it had always been. Ludtaht Ra. The place of Ra. A cage. A display case.

  Before RaNa’s coming had turned it into something almost like a home, before the incense of Ahr’s body and the music of her moans had made a true temple of it, Temple Ra had been nothing more than a musty museum. MeerRa had been a statue, a painted oddity the faithful came to look upon as a symbol of their devotion, a talisman for the fulfillment of their desires.

  He left it only once each year for the annual procession, seven days in which the museum’s priceless piece was transported as a traveling exhibition. For more than three hundred years, he’d been a useless poppet, impotent and flaccid but for the hands that animated him—the hands of the priests templar. Ra had given them his power, believing it to be his sacred duty, entrusted himself to their will—even, in the end, to the care and handling of his most precious possession. His child. His RaNa.

  But for good or ill, RaNa’s coming had changed everything. Had it not been for RaNa and the life she breathed into Ludtaht Ra and into Ra himself, he might have heard the people’s discontent, but he could blame only himself for that. It had been almost worth the death that followed to have those dozen years of living after the dusty centuries of emptiness. But for RaNa, and Ahr who had seen him, he might have remained an empty idol, a hollow into which the Meeric Anamnesis flowed and from which it returned with its simple vetmas, given to the faithful of Rhyman. But for RaNa…

  Her shriek of terror had woken him. She’d turned toward him on the steps as he staggered from the temple, wheeling at the end of her braid in the grip of a templar’s hand.

  “Nana.” Ra gasped the word like a dying breath, nearly doubled over, thrusting her hands against her ears at the sound of shattering clay pots. Blood poured down her cheeks as she raised her eyes to her temple. She couldn’t say whether it was her tears or the bleeding of her own cracked skull that ran toward the ground. It didn’t matter. Ahr was here. Only Ahr mattered. Ahr and the ring she’d stolen.

  Inside, the captain of the Guard hastened toward her over the great spans of the temple with a regiment of the Temple Guard behind him. She knew him as he came close, though it surprised her that he was older.

  He’d been a lion of a man. Like all of the bearers of the Meeric palanquin that traversed Rhyman on the People’s Procession, Merit had towered above his contemporaries. He’d been a golden god next to Ra’s dark divinity.

  She remembered the moment he stumbled, the moment that had been the undoing of them all. Merit had been appalled at the suggestion when Ra asked him later if he’d stumbled on purpose, but Ra knew. There was no question that the bearers had been complicit in Ra’s sedition. It would have been impossible not to know. But Merit alone had taken the action that had altered the course of Ra’s existence and the future of the Delta forever. Merit had taken the responsibility upon his head because he’d seen his master’s fevered anguish.

  Even now, she loved him for it.

  From the moment Ra had brought Merit before him after that unspeakable act, there had been a bond between them. Merit had been Ra’s right hand, the first true friend the Meer had ever known. After three centuries, to have suddenly woken from his inert state to gain both a lover and a friend in one, swift, precipitous moment had been a greater vetma than any boon MeerRa had ever granted.

  And now Ra’s beloved servant was white-haired and careworn
, whittled shockingly by age in the brief years between Ra’s death and renaissance. It was the curse of ordinary men, and one that would have kept MeerRa from forming any such bonds for most of his long life, even if he hadn’t been a dull, somnambulant fool.

  But he was here: the one who had given Ra Ahr.

  Ra nearly forgot her purpose as she stood within the courtyard bower and watched him come close. He didn’t know her yet. But he was her Merit. She waited for him as if she’d only been a moment away.

  Twenty: Retribution

  Merit came to a halt, holding his hand up to his men to wait.

  A devouring goddess stood before him, black funerary garb dripping on the tiles; dark, serpentine hair cascading over her in great, wet sheets, and her face dripping blood. Despite the dreadfulness of her countenance, he would know that solemn, beautiful face, those unbearable eyes, anywhere. This was his lord. Merit’s heart nearly failed him.

  She stared at him wordlessly, motionlessly, so still he feared she was a phantasm after all.

  “My liege,” he whispered. He dropped his sword upon the tile before her and threw his body down beside it on the ground. Silent as the grave, Ra crossed the tiles. Merit sobbed as her bare feet appeared before him. “My liege, my liege! Forgive me, meneut. I have failed you.”

  Ra crouched before him and laid a hand on his shoulder, and he trembled uncontrollably. “Merit.” It was the voice of his lord and yet subtly different. His trembling stilled. “Rise and do your duty. Your Meer has returned.”

  Merit obeyed, unable to meet the terrible kindness in her eyes, and took up his sword. The men of his Guard were looking at one another in confusion.

  “Disperse,” he ordered. “Or your next act will be one of treason.” They hesitated, but one look at Ra convinced them to obey.

  “Ahr is here,” said Ra when they’d gone. Her eyes held a dangerous emotion.

  “Yes, meneut.”

  “Take me to her.”