Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder from the End of Time

by Darrell Schweitzer

  “Has another goddess fallen from the sky?” someone asked.

  “No, but a similar duty is upon me.”

  So the Guardian went forth, dressed the half-white, half-black vestments of his office, with his staff of power in his hand and wax plugs in his ears. It was the first time in centuries that the feet of a guardian had touched the streets of the lower city which surrounds the base of Ai Hanlo Mountain. He walked past deserted shops and houses, then out the Sunrise Gate, onto the plain. So great was the crowd that it took him many hours to get within sight of the singer. He stepped over the corpses of people who had been entranced by the music of Ain Harad, but not sustained by it, and so had perished of hunger and thirst, and, as of old, of ecstasy.

  When he stood before the blank-faced lyre player, he spoke a word that only the Guardian may know, and held aloft a reliquary containing a splinter of the bones of the Goddess.

  Silence struck the crowd, as if the spinning world had suddenly snapped to a halt. All stood frozen in shock. For Ain, returning to himself, it was the most exquisite of agonies to be wrenched from his contemplation of the Bright Lady. But some remembrance of his former life came to him and, dazed, not sure of where he was or how he can come to be there, he stared with reverent awe into the face of the Guardian, that holiest of men, and paid heed when the Guardian leaned over and whispered a command in his ear.

  Obediently he went at once, parting the crowd as he passed, and made his way in silence out of the land of Randelcainé, wandering ever northward, knowing many hardships as he grew from boy into man, never able to rest until he came to that place where he could resume his music and his song. He crossed mountain ranges on the backs of wild beasts. Though the oceans would no longer bear him up; he couldn’t walk on water anymore; he crossed them on the backs of whales, taming and commanding each with that single word the Guardian had spoken, until at the very last, close to death, he reached a warm valley in the middle of the ice country at the top of the world.

  There he crawled to the base of a tree and sat up, his back against the tree, the warmth of the valley washing over him, bringing faint sensation into his frozen legs. He dreamed once again of the Bright Lady, and once more touched the strings of his lyre. As before, he played without ceasing, and the spirits and the Powers swarmed around him like bright bees.

  In Randelcainé, those who had heard him could not return to their lives after having known such beauty. Some retired to monasteries and caves, where they worshipped little sounds and shadows and the rustlings of leaves and conversed with the silence. The streets of the city were quiet for a generation. Those who did not shut themselves away lived out their lives in longing, wishing only to travel beyond death so that they could hear that song again. Thereafter, all those who died were dressed in traveling cloaks and shoes, and staves were put into their hands, that they might rise from their funeral biers and walk the long road into paradise.

  In time Ain Harad was united with his family, for the lord of the goats had become the lord of the dead. Those very near to death could just barely hear his song, faint and far away, growing louder as they sank out of this life. First his father came to him, then his mother, then his brother Zadain, who was slain in battle.

  Thus, by the wisdom of the Guardian, the world came a little closer to order amid the chaos that followed the death of the Goddess.

  THE STORY OF A DADAR

  It was in the time of the death of the Goddess that the thing happened, when the Earth rolled wildly in the dark spaces without any hand to guide it, or so the poets tell us, when Dark Powers and Bright drifted across the land, and all things were in disorder.

  It was also in the open grasslands that it happened, beyond the end of the forests, where you can walk for three days due south and come to the frontier of Randelcainé. All was strange to me. I had never been there before, where not a tree was to be seen, anymore than I had been to a place where there are no stars. All that afternoon, my wife Tamda and I drove our wagon through the familiar woods. Slowly the trees began to seem farther apart, and there was more underbrush. I remember how the heat of the day faded quite quickly, and the long, red rays of the setting sun filtered between the trunks, almost parallel to the ground, giving the undersides of the leaves a final burst of color before twilight came on. The trees ahead of us stood in silhouette like black pillars, those behind us, in glory. Above, little birds and winged lizards fluttered in the branches. I reflected that these things had always been thus, even in the earliest times, when the great cities of the Earth’s mightier days stood new and shining, and other gods and goddesses, the predecessors of the one which had just died, ruled the sky. Those ancients could just as well have been seeing this sunset and this forest through my eyes.

  Then a wagon wheel sank axle-deep in mud, and I didn’t have time to reflect on anything. The two of us struggled and gasped in pained breaths that we weren’t young anymore. If only our son were still with us.… But he had gone away to serve the Religion. What is religion when your wheel is stuck?

  When at last the wagon rolled free, stars peered down between the branches. The night air seemed very cold. We sat still, panting, until Tamda had the good sense to get our cloaks, lest the chill get into us.

  So it was that we emerged from the forest in darkness. At first I was hardly aware that there were no more trees. It seemed merely that there were more stars, but then the moon came up and revealed the vast dark carpet of the plain rising and falling before us. Imagine a fish, which had always inhabited the dark and narrow crags among the rocks at the bottom of the sea, suddenly rising up, into the open wonder of the sea itself. So it was. Overhead the Autumn Hunter was high in the sky. The Polar Dragon turned behind us, and the Harpist was rising. By these signs we knew our way. Neither of us wanted to stop for the night. I suppose plainsmen feel the same way, their first night in the forest. So we pushed on and shortly before dawn reached our destination.

  The village glowed on the plain like a beast with a thousand eyes, reclining there, alive with torches. We would never have found it otherwise. The houses were all curving humps of sod, hollowed out and walled with logs. Had they not been lit, we would have passed them in the night, thinking them little hills.

  We were expected. Everyone was awake and waiting. A man in a plumed helmet took our horse by the bridle and led us to a building larger than all the others.

  “Are you Pandiphar Nen?” asked the chieftain who stood at the door.

  “Yes. You sent for me,” I said. “You understand, then, that I do not heal broken bones, or cure any sickness which can be cured with a herb or a little spell?”

  “Yes, I do, or I would not have sent for you.”

  “The price is high.”

  “Please, bargain later. It is my daughter, sore afflicted. She has…left us. Her mind is in darkness, far underground.”

  Tamda and I climbed down from the wagon seat. I got my bag out of the back. We were shown inside. The house had but one room, and a fire burned in the middle floor. The smoke hole wasn’t large enough, and the air was thick. On a pile of hides to one side a maiden lay, her eyes open, but her gaze distracted. She did not seem aware of us. She rolled her head and muttered to herself. I listened for a moment, catching a few words, but most of it was strange to me.

  “Put the fire—out,” I said to those who had come in with us.

  “And leave us alone.” This was done. I waited for the smoke to clear.

  Then I made a mixture of the ground root of the death tree, the water of life, common flour to hold it all together, plus other ingredients, including something called Agda’s Toe. Agda was my master, to whom I had been apprenticed when I was fifteen, some thirty years before. Then I had believed he had an infinite supply of toes, which could be regrown whenever he cut them off and sold them to pharmacies all over the world, but of late I had had my doubts. He never took off his shoes in public.

  I ate a spoonful of the mixture and washed it down with wine. I sa
ng the song of the false death, with Tamda at my side to make sure that I did not truly die. She would hold my wrist and take my pulse, counting one heartbeat a minute, and listen for a shallow breath about as often. If I got into trouble she would shout my name and call me back. She alone had this power.

  I departed. At once my awareness was out of my body, sharing that of the girl. I saw through her eyes. Tamda and I stood absolutely still, distorted out of shape, like tall sculptures of glowing jade. The room was full of a white mist, and in it swam things like the luminous skeletons of fishes, and some, like impossible herons made of coral sticks, walked on a surface below the floor, wading in the earth. They sang to me, trying to lull me into sleep within a sleep, but I paid them no heed. They were common spirits of the air. I had seen them many times before.

  I turned inward. Indeed, the girl’s soul was far beneath the earth. I had a sensation of sinking a long way in thick, muddy darkness before I had an impression of a hunched shape, like something carven out of rough, dirty stone, embedded in her.

  I began to draw the spirit out. Literally, I drew it. By a trick known only to healers, I was both deep inside the girl’s soul and in my own body. I was aware as my hands took up drawing paper and charcoal and began to sketch the image of the spirit. When I was a child I had always had an urge to draw things in the dirt, on walls, hides, scraps of paper, any thing, and my father always boxed my ears and told me not to waste my time. But when I began to draw things he had seen in his dreams, and things others saw in theirs, he understood my talent. Everything after that, even my apprenticeship to Agda, was a refinement of technique and nothing more.

  I knew what to do from much experience. As my hand moved over the paper, I wrestled with the thing inside the girl. Soon I saw it more clearly, a frog-like king clad in robes of living marble. He had long, webbed claws like a beast, but his face bespoke vast intelligence and age. I understood him to be a creature from some earlier age of the Earth, trying to return now that the Goddess was dead. His eyes seemed to speak to me, saying, “Why should I not have this girl, and walk beneath the sky again?”

  “You shall not have her,” I said in the language of the dream, and as I spoke, my hand completed the drawing. Then my body got to its feet, stood over the girl, and with a pair of tongs reached into her mouth, pulling out first my spirit, then the other. It was like flying up out of a mountain through a little hole in the top, into my own hand.

  “Pandiphar Nen,” said my wife, and with the sound I came into myself. I was whole and fully awake. The white mist and the things in it were gone. The task should have been over. The second spirit I’d extracted should have melted into the air now that I had captured its image.

  But the stone king was standing before us. Tamda screamed. It turned to stare into my eyes, and its gaze caught me as surely as any prey is ever charmed by a snake. I was helpless.

  “Dadar,” it said. “Know that I was placed here to bring this message to you from worlds beyond the world. I am sent by your creator. Know that you are a dadar, a wizard’s shadow and not a man, a hollow thing like a serpent’s skin filled with wind, pretending to be a serpent, deluding itself. The master shall make himself known shortly, and then you shall be sent on the task for which he made you, his dadar.”

  Then, howling, the creature went through the closed door of the house like a battering ram, scattering wood and screaming at the villagers outside.

  I was in a daze, only half aware of anything.

  “Let us get away from here,” Tamda was saying. “They’ll think we’re witches. Hurry, before they regain their courage. Forget about the payment.”

  “I don’t understand,” was all 1 could say. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like that.”

  She gathered our things and bundled me into the back of the wagon. No one interfered as she drove away from the village.

  * * * *

  The wagon rattled around me. Sunlight burned through the canvas cover. I lay in the stuffy heat, thinking.

  The problem, and the reason I felt so much dread, was that I did understand what had happened. My spotty education was more than enough to include everything I needed to know. Some wizard had directed me, his dadar, into that village for his own ends. I knew full well what a dadar was. The world has never been thick with them, but they have been around since the very beginning. They are projections, like a shadow cast by a man standing before a campfire at night, but somehow the shadow is given flesh and breath and a semblance of consciousness. Hamdo, the First Man, made one. He had shaped with his hands the egg from which all mankind was to be born, but while he slept by the River of Life, a toad came along and swallowed it. Then a serpent swallowed the toad and a fox swallowed the serpent, and was in turn devoured by a lion, which fell prey to a bull, which was eaten by a dragon, which in turn was swallowed by an Earth Thing for which there is no name, which before long found itself residing in the belly of a Sky Thing which remained similarly nameless. Therefore Hamdo climbed the mountain on which the sky turns, charmed the Sky Thing to sleep with his singing—for he was the greatest of all singers—and then, on the mountaintop, he made a dadar of himself, and put a feather in one of its hands and a burning torch in the other. He sent it inside the Sky Thing to make it regurgitate the Earth Thing, the dragon, the bull, the lion, and so forth. From inside the toad it cut itself free, rescuing the egg. Things were different in those days, I suspect. Animals don’t eat like that now. But the dadar was still a dadar, a reflection in the mirror of Hamdo.

  More recently, the philosopher Telechronos spent so much time brooding among the ruins of the Old Places that he nearly went mad. He made a dadar for company. It became his leading disciple.

  And a king of the Heshites was found to be a dadar. The priests gathered to break the link between the dadar and its master, lest some unseen, malevolent wizard lead the country to doom. The link was broken and the king crumbled into dust. A dadar is an unstable, insubstantial thing, like a collection of dust motes blown into shape by the wind.

  Thus I feared every sound, every movement, every change in the direction of the wind, lest these be enough to unmake me. All the confidence I had gained in the years of my life ran away like water. I was nothing. An illusion, even to myself. A speck of dust drifting between the years.

  I wept like a child abandoned in the cold and the dark.

  And I argued: can an illusion weep? Can its tears make a blanket wet? But then, how could I, with the senses of a dadar, know the blanket to be real, or the wagon, or the tears?

  I looked up front and saw only the horse nodding as it walked, and Tamda huddled at the reins. I did not speak to her, nor did she turn to speak to me. I think she was nearly as afraid as was I.

  And I argued: But I have sired two sons. Two? One died when the cold of winter settled into him and spring did not drive it forth, but even in death he was real. He did not vanish like a burst bubble. And the other—he lives yet. Just this year he was called by a voice within him to journey south to the holy city of Ai Hanlo. I walked with him a long way, then wept when he passed from sight around a bend in the forest path. Does this not make me a man?

  I was back to weeping. All roads of thought seemed to lead there.

  I looked up again and saw that the sky was beginning to darken.

  “Stop,” I said to Tamda, and she reined the horse. She was trembling as we made camp. We went through the motions of settling down to supper, but suddenly she was in my arms and sobbing.

  “Please…don’t go away. Don’t leave me. I’m too old to learn to be without you.”

  I was sobbing too. “I love you. Does that not make me a man? How can I prove it? Can a shadow feel such a thing?”

  “I don’t know. What is going on? Are we both mad?”

  “No, it isn’t that. I’m sure.”

  “I wish it were. To be mad is to be filled with passion, and at least that’s real.”

  Although both of us were tired and hungry, we made love there on
the ground as the stars came out. But even as I did I was haunted by the thought that a shadow may make a shadow’s love and know nothing better.

  Later, it was Tamda who put into words what I was groping for. She gave me a plan for action.

  “You must find this wizard whose dadar you are,” she said, “and kill him. Then you’ll be free. You won’t fade away. I’m sure of it. We must go to him when he summons you.” She took a sheathed knife and put it inside my shirt. “When the time comes, surprise him.”

  Then I got up and fetched my folio of drawing paper. I sat down beside her and paged through the book. I stopped to stare at the image of the frog king. I couldn’t help but admire the artistry. It was good work. When I wasn’t practicing my more esoteric skill, I simply drew. Sometimes I sold the pictures in towns we passed through. Sometimes I even sold the ones I’d made while healing, after the spirits were dispersed and we didn’t need them anymore.

  I began to draw. I closed my eyes and let my hand drift. It didn’t seem to want to make any marks. I felt my hand slide along the page, the charcoal only touching paper seven—eight?—nine times?

  Then I opened my eyes and saw that I’d made a fair outline of the Autumn Hunter, which vanishes from the southern sky as the year ends.

  “We travel south,” I said.

  * * * *

  When first I looked over the plain by day, I thought of the fish from the deep ocean crags—now bursting out of the water altogether, into the air. As far as I could see, green and brown grasses rippled beneath the sun. Here and there stood a scrubby tree. A herd of antelopes grazed far away. Once we passed quite near to a green-scaled thing walking upright on thin legs, fluttering useless wings in annoyance at our presence. It stood twice as tall as a man, but looked harmless, even comical. I had heard of such creatures, half-shaped, still forming. They are said to emerge whenever one age ends and another begins. I had heard they were commoner in the south, as if the strangeness radiated from the holy city of Ai Hanlo, where the actual bones of the Goddess lay.