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

by Darrell Schweitzer

  “He looked surprised.”

  “Even my brother can be surprised. That is why I am still alive. I have eluded him many times. But he grows stronger, and I think that he could cover up the whole world like a cancer if left to himself. Therefore I must have you with me when this dream comes again.”

  The boy was silent. They sat down and ate an evening meal together. Then, as they were ready to go to sleep, he asked another question, unbidden. It was a curious thing. Emdo Wesa noted it.

  “Master, if magic changes the magician, but you are not the way your brother is, then what has it done to you?”

  “Ah…again, well asked. You grow bolder—”

  “I didn’t mean to—”

  “No, be still. It was well asked, and I shall answer. I have remembered to be humane and compassionate, unlike my brother. Therefore I have not changed as he has. But I have paid a great price. Look.”

  He took off his gloves for the first time in Tamliade’s presence, revealing that he had no hands, but instead flickering lights, like soft, sculpted flames, replacing flesh and bone up to the elbows.

  The boy let out a scream of terror, got up, and ran.

  “Tamliade! Where are you going?”

  He stopped running and came sheepishly back to the campfire.

  “I don’t know.”

  The hands glowed like paper lanterns.

  * * * *

  The dream came to Tamliade again among the hills, on the borderlands of Hesh. It was in the autumn of the year. They had been travelling for more than a month, and had left the plains behind. The forested slopes around them were filled with brilliant colors by day. But night, leaves rustled, the wind chanting the dry litanies of the death of summer. Among the stars, the Stag fled across the sky, the Winter Dogs at its heels.

  The magician and the boy sat in a clearing on a cloudless, brisk night, waiting for a pot of stew to come to a boil. Suddenly Wesa was aware that the boy was staring up, but not at the stars. His eyes were unfocused.

  “Tamliade?”

  There was no response.

  He snapped his fingers in front of Tamliade’s face. Again, nothing.

  He knew what to do. At once he carried the boy to the back of the wagon, then went around to the front and got in, huddling in the compartment behind the leather curtain. There he preformed psadeu-ma, opening his soul to Tamliade’s vision, becoming one with him.

  Through the eyes of the boy and with his feelings and memories, he first sat in a puddle of rainwater, viewing things there which were not reflected, his leaf boats drifting forgotten across the image. Then darkness, drifting, and finally sharp sensation. He was cold all over. He felt the night air on his bare shoulders and back. His knees were sunk in mud. A stick figure moved before him on a gray field, then fleshed out into a puffy-faced man dressed in a dirty smock and round skullcap.

  Naked, the boy knelt before the tethering post to which his wrists were bound.

  “A good slave,” the man was saying, “obeys and obeys and obeys. He does not question. He has no will of his own, no feelings. He may only anticipate his master’s wishes, and never displease him. His mind is inferior. Remember that. You are stupid! You are scum!”

  The overseer’s cap was that of a freedman. He hadn’t had it long. He waved his hand to signal someone standing behind the boy. A whip cracked across Tamliade’s back, again, again, again. He screamed. He tried to stand up. The whip caught him around the legs and yanked him down into the mud. He let himself sink there, trying to escape the pain, the shouting, the screaming. He curled around the post, glancing up one last time to see the overseer begin to fade, to darken, to melt into a black mass, more of a silhouette cut out of the air than a living man.

  Then Tamliade’s spirit was drifting from his body. It was someone else who whimpered, far away. He felt nothing. The sound of the whip reminded him of a village tanner beating hide.

  Another sensation: Again, the night was cold, and his bare feet sank ankle-deep in mud, but this time a soft, long-needled branch brushed against his face. It was the branch of a ledbya, the hair-needle tree. Little winged lizards fluttered higher up, invisible but noisy.

  He emerged into a clearing where the forest floor was made of smooth, black glass. He turned to look back the way he had come, and the trees were gone. There was only the black glass, vanishing into the murky distance. The sky overhead was dark, with less than a dozen stars in it.

  He walked a long way, and with every step the glass grew colder. The soles of his feet stuck to it. He was afraid that all his body’s warmth would be drawn out and he would freeze solid, standing there forever. He skipped and jumped, and shivered with the cold.

  Then something glowed red on the horizon, a flickering, like distant flames. He ran toward it.

  A dome of pale light rose, and there were towers around it, a half-seen reflection of a ghost of the city of Ai Hanlo.

  Somehow, next, he was there, inside the city, among the towers, in a kind of maze. He wandered for hours through corridors and courtyards, through galleries and narrow streets. The transition between indoors and outdoors was more subtle than he could fathom. He crossed a wide square and suddenly found himself in a room no larger than a closet and hung with draperies in which luminous threads seemed to shift and form ever-changing patterns as he watched. For a time he stood there, hypnotized, but a feeling of excitement came over him, of dread and expectation and indefinable longing. He pushed the curtains aside and forced his way into a vast hall filled with incomprehensible machines, some of them only made of flickering fields of light, others of multi-colored, glistening metals. There was a transparent column in which spheres the size of houses drifted up and down, passing through one another again and again, like no solid thing. A dark hemisphere of rough metal occupied much of the middle of the floor. It remind him of a turtle shell, but this would have to be a turtle large enough to devour horses. Inside it, hammers beat. In time they found a rhythm, which became a harmony, which became a kind of song.

  Then he was in a corridor again, long and dark, with light at the far end. Up ahead, he heard the faint sound of weeping. He hurried toward it, toward the light.

  Something he had taken for drapery suddenly turned around, and for an instant he beheld a beautiful lady veiled in blue the color of dawn, clad in a robe streaked with purple and dark orange like the last moments of sunset; and the horned Moon gleamed in her hair and the stars trailed behind her like a cloak. The scene was all a jumble. He was with this lady in the corridor. From a clearing in the forest of ledbya trees he saw her drifting across the sky, silent as a cloud. He felt in her presence the vivid, unmistakable nearness of the power of the Goddess. His body shook with it. In this realization, the minds of Emdo Wesa and Tamliade began to separate. The magician understood. The boy did not.

  The lady wept. Rain fell down on Tamliade. He lay naked and whimpering in the mud, his wrists tied to the post. Men were crashing through the bushes all around.

  Emdo Wesa felt his hold on the dream slipping. He struggled to submerge himself again. Once more he became Tamliade.

  His father had him by the ear. They were in the smithy.

  “You are mad. You are an imbecile,” his father shouted, his face only inches away, spittle flying. “You wander off after whatever drips into your hollow head.”

  His father pinched his arm hard. “Look at that. Scrawny. No muscles. Useless. You’ll never be anything but a tramp. Away with you. Wander the roads and follow your vision. And starve for all I care.”

  His mother wept.

  He sat in the hot dust at a crossroads beneath the glaring sun, rattling a begging bowl.

  An old woman led her blind husband up to him, saying, “Holy One, you have been touched by some fragment of the Goddess. Have you the power to heal?”

  A bird alighted on the lip of the bowl and began to sing, in words and a voice like that of a little child, of Ai Hanlo the holy city. He had a vision of Ai Hanlo rising against the
horizon, its golden dome aflame with sunset when all the plains were dark. He saw himself walking the long and winding road to Ai Hanlo, where lay the bones of the Goddess in holy splendor, where the Guardian, the priest-king who watched over them, would surely be able to explain his vision to him.

  But the bird stopped singing and grew into an enormous black eagle and seized him by the hair, carrying him high into the air. He looked down on the city, the road, on the Endless River flowing past like a glittering serpent in the starlight. The sunset was gone. The sky was wholly dark. With a thunder of wings, the eagle shut out the stars, filling the sky. There were mountains below, passing like great whales beneath the sea. Then the land was black and smooth, and before him was the city of lights, ghost of Ai Hanlo, flickering in and out of existence like a mirage seen from different angles.

  The bird did not take him there. It alighted in a tree and let go of him. He fell with a bump onto soft loam and ledbya needles. The winged lizards chittered at him.

  An old, blind slave, whose face was criss-crossed with the scars of the lash that had taken his eyes, sat beside him, saying, “A man’s fate is a man’s fate, and life is but an illusion. There is no why. Therefore, be comforted.”

  Emdo Wesa felt himself failing out of the dream again. Tamliade seemed further and further removed, only a half-remembered echo, like the ringing that lingers in the air long after a gong has become silent.

  A bird dropped out of the tree onto the wizard’s knee, followed by another, and another. More landed on his shoulders. In his old body, with his flaming hands, he was naked. The claws of the birds dug into his flesh. The blind slave melted like wax and slowly became a huge, black bird with a beak the color of blood.

  “Brother, I have found you,” it said.

  “Even the greatest of magicians knows fear when his death is upon him.”

  II.

  In holiness hear this.

  It ends in holiness.

  Now the tale is of Tamliade.

  * * * *

  The boy heard the old, blind slave droning on and on. The voice faded to a whisper, the individual words slowly submerging. Then there was only wind.

  Another sound came. The lady was weeping. No, she was singing, and in thousands of voices, fragmented like a statue dashed to pieces. The voices became shriller, harsher, like a million birds crammed into a tiny space and shrieking all at once.

  He rose out of his dream, and awoke in the back of the wagon, among the wicker crates.

  The million birds still shrieked. The wagon, massive as it was, shook like a toy in the fist of a child.

  Countless tiny bodies slammed against the other side of the leather partition. From within, over the thundering cacophony, came the voice of Emdo Wesa shouting, “No, Brother, you haven’t got me yet! And you shall not!” Then the voice cracked in desperation, and there were high screams, almost like those of a woman, interspersed with strange words.

  The wagon shook all the more. The birds shrieked louder. Emdo Wesa’s voice was gone.

  Tamliade was over the tailgate in an instant, but his foot caught on something in the baggage, and he tumbled down onto the ground. He recovered quickly, but stood there trembling, taking one step this way, another that. He wanted to rescue Emdo Wesa. He wanted to get away. His mind was in confusion, fighting with itself.

  Before he knew what he was doing he was off and running. He leapt over the remains of the campfire and the forgotten stewpot and kept going, but when he was a short distance away, he heard the magician call out in a voice louder than anything human, like thunder, shaking the earth, repeating a formula three times. The cries of the birds were drowned out.

  Then there was only silence.

  The boy stopped and turned around. It was morning, he noticed for the first time. The sky was growing light. But the wagon was glowing more brightly than the sun. It drove off the last of twilight. The glare of it was blinding. He covered his eyes and fell to his knees.

  Emdo Wesa spoke clearly, in a voice scarcely louder than ordinary conversation, “Lady. I give you my hand. Take me now into your dwelling place.”

  The light faded. Tamliade uncovered his eyes and was astonished to see that the wagon had not been wholly consumed. It stood as it always did. The horses were hitched to it, impassive as statues.

  He rose slowly. His greatest fear now was that the magician had gone off somewhere, leaving him alone, unable to cope with what was happening. He approached the wagon slowly.

  “Master?”

  The front flap opened and Emdo Wesa crawled wearily out. His clothing was in rags, and he bled from countless cuts. He stumbled, seemed about to fall, and Tamliade ran forward to catch him. But he caught himself, and slid down to the ground, sitting with his head against the front wheel.

  “Master?”

  Wesa looked at him almost as if he didn’t recognize him. After a time he spoke.

  “Oh there you are. I knew you wouldn’t run away again.”

  “What happened?”

  “My brother. He came through the dream. I’ve driven him away for now.”

  * * * *

  Tamliade and Emdo Wesa fled from Etash Wesa thereafter, never spending more than a few hours in the same place. It was too dangerous to camp. They would stop for a meal sometimes, then drive all night, one relieving the other at the reins. The horses, fortunately, were tireless.

  “I do not think we can elude my brother for long,” magician said. “He has altered himself too much. He moves outside the physical spaces, without regard to distances, and somehow he can sense our presence even if we stop long enough to piss. Do not ask me more. I cannot put a description of him fully into words.”

  “Master, is there anything I can do?”

  “Only one thing. You must behold the vision clearly one more time, long enough for the two of us to pass into it and gain whatever power is to be had from it. We must hope that my brother will stay away long enough for us to do this much.”

  “But the dream just comes. How can I control it?”

  “You can’t. Imagine yourself creeping up on a sleeping giant. His hair is long and blowing in the wind, whirling all around. He has one silver hair, his dream hair. Eventually it will blow within your reach. When it does, you must seize it and climb into the great dream. You can’t know when. Just be ready.”

  Days turned into weeks, and autumn into winter. They were heading north. The cold came earlier in this part of the world. The hills of Hesh were long behind them. There were rolling plains again for a while, brown and gray and covered endlessly with mud and dead weed stalks, and then the faces of two kings rose up out of the earth, carven out of huge rocks, with sharp features and pointed, towering crowns worn dull by the winds of years. Trees grew on their eyebrows. Tamliade looked back, and saw four low hills behind him, the knees of the kings as they slept beneath a blanket of soil.

  Emdo Wesa paid them no heed. He drove the wagon on a straight path between them, and almost at once the ground rose into high, sharp ridges, into cliffs, and there were mountains all around, revealed as they drove through curtain after curtain of low-lying clouds. The air was damp and so cold it was almost painful to breathe.

  Out of the grey sky rain whipped into their faces, then sleet, then snow, and the world was white and pale grey and the blue of ice, and everything faded into sameness a short distance away. Only a slight darkening betokened nightfall. Once, when the way was wholly obscured, Emdo Wesa stood up on the wagon seat, took off his gloves, and parted the storm with his flaming hands.

  The boy was filled with fear. He was exhausted. He was cold. They hadn’t eaten anything but scraps of cold meat for days. The wizard went on like a thing of clockwork, oblivious to all, his mind caught up entirely, Tamliade was sure, with formulae, stratagems, and enchantments. He wondered if he would be noticed if he froze to death and fell off into the snow.

  For a time the storm eased a little, and the wagon crawled up the side of a huge, rolling slope like an
insect on the body of a beached whale.

  “I think my brother has sent us this storm,” said Emdo Wesa when the tempest returned. “I am sure he has.”

  Once, suddenly—Tamliade was not sure if it was day or night—he drew the wagon to a halt and left the boy behind as he stepped off the seat onto an invisible stairway, and climbed into the sky. Lightning flashed for hours amidst the blizzard, and a thunder like the tread of giants shook the land. When the magician came back down all he said was, “My brother is close behind us now.”

  In the end they came to a high mountain pass blocked with enough snow to entomb a city. The magician reached out with his burning hands to melt the snow, but it refroze almost immediately. An hour’s worth of trying left a long trail of strangely sculpted ice shapes, but the pass was as blocked as ever. They could not go on. Emdo Wesa spied a cave and drove the wagon into it, leaving the howling storm behind. Tamliade found the darkness comforting, but still it was intensely cold inside. He sat still on the wagon seat, passively awaiting whatever was to happen.

  The magician got down and lit a fire with his hand, burning only air for fuel.

  “Now we must wait,” he said. “Here, perhaps, shall be our battleground.”