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

by Darrell Schweitzer

  The spirit sank down into the fire. The flames crackled. The night was still.

  * * * *

  In time the boy came to Ai Hanlo, the famous city at the center of the world, where lie the bones of the Goddess in holy splendor. He was sixteen then, his face darkened by the sun, his body hardened to many privations, but still the spirits roared within him. For long periods he could not even remember who he was.

  He climbed the narrow streets, up Ai Hanlo Mountain, to the gate of the inner city, where dwelt the Guardian of the Bones of the Goddess with his priests and his court, presiding over the Holy Empire. He stood before the gate for twelve days and nights, shouting in strange languages, thundering with the voice of the powers within him, helpless and invincible, agonized, afraid, filled with strange ecstasies. In the darkness, spheres of light like tiny suns flickered around his head.

  At last the gate was opened and the Guardian summoned him into his own household.

  II.

  Because he had had so many visions, because he had heard the echo of the death of the Goddess more clearly than had anyone for generations, because he was the conduit through which holy manifestations poured into the world, Tamliade was made a priest at once. He went through no novitiate, for all he was not learned, for all he could barely read and write his own Heshite tongue and spoke the Language of the City awkwardly; for all he knew nothing of the lore of cultures long since vanished and could pronounce none of the secret names of the Goddess.

  Every day he came before the Guardian and his advisors, and told them of his dreams. When a vision came by daylight, he went and reported that, too, as soon as he had recovered.

  Scribes recorded everything he said in elegant script. Scholars came from many lands to marvel, to read, and to listen. All the while he was cared for. He ate more regularly than he had in years. He wore fine clothing. Tutors filled his empty hours. He learned of epochs before his own, how each period of history has a god or goddess, by whose dreams it is shaped; how the present was a chaotic interregnum between the death of one divinity and the birth of the next.

  The new god would be discovered soon, he was assured, and his terror mounted.

  The Guardian himself instructed him in certain facets of holy lore, words of power and, as he passed certain thresholds of understanding, the secret names of the Goddess, one by one.

  He was allowed nearly complete access to the ancient library of the guardians, encouraged to read anything he wanted, from history to romance poetry to hagiography. Once he overheard one librarian whisper to another that the future could be foretold by what books he chose. It was a more reliable method than casting painted stones, the man said. The other nodded.

  So his days passed, frequently interrupted by visions. Autumn approached. The sky turned a sullen grey as rains threatened. He had not been beyond the wall of the inner city in nearly a year.

  * * * *

  It was a rare afternoon in that season when the sky was clear, and the sun sank into the west in a splash of purples and reds.

  Tamliade stood before an open window, looking out over the land, watching the sun set, when suddenly he felt the familiar dislocation of the onset of a vision, and it seemed that the sun rose again, in the west, searing the sky, and came hurtling toward him. The room he stood in filled with light. He felt heat through the open window. He reached to close the shutters, but the glare was too painful. He fell to his knees, covering his face with his hands.

  Then it was dark. He looked up, and saw that stars shone in the night sky.

  The sun, diminished to a dimly glowing disc, hung in the air before him, just inside the windowsill.

  It had a face on it like a mask. Behind the eyes, embers burned.

  There came a voice like something shouted through a long metal horn.

  “Come to me.”

  He rose and followed the thing as it drifted out of the room, along a corridor where huge tapestries billowed in a draft. He came to a massive double door of wood and iron. The apparition hesitated, passed through in a way his eye could not follow, its light shining through from the other side where the two doors met. He pressed with all his might against cold iron and damp wood, and slowly the door creaked open enough for him to slip through. He found himself at the top of a curving staircase cut into the rock of Ai Hanlo Mountain. Down, down, he followed the glowing face. At first the stairs and walls were dry. Then they became wet, covered with nitre and mold. The stairway opened out into a cavern piled high in rotting crates. Rusting, unlighted lanterns hung from beams overhead. At the bottom of the stairs, he walked across an irregular, rock-strewn floor. The light that led him grew less. Darkness and cold closed in. In places the floor was ankle-deep in mud. His shoes a sucking sound as he walked.

  He came to another door, just as massive as the first, but so rotted that pieces of it came away in his hand. The sun face drifted through. He broke away enough wood and followed.

  The light was very dim. He thought he saw tall grasses growing around him. He thought he saw trees of immense height, vanishing overhead into darkness, and vines overladen with moss that hung like matted hair.

  He thought the way narrowed, that he was again in a small space, an underground room.

  The disc came to rest against a far wall.

  “Do you not know me?” it said.

  “No, I do not know you.”

  The light went out. Below it, something began to glow a dull red, like old embers someone has blown upon. Flames flickered in the mud. By their light he saw a dark, rectangular object. The flames rose higher. He saw that it was a coffin, intricately carven. Slowly the lid rose. There was a red light within.

  Blood poured out of the coffin, like water from a fountain, sizzling through the flames, splashing over him.

  Within the coffin floated something that had once been a man, something without any limbs but one quivering stump of an arm, without a face, with only a lipless hole for a mouth, vomiting blood.

  “Tamliade,” came the voice again. “Do you not know me? I am Etash Wesa.”

  He screamed, covered his face, fell over backwards, splashing blood.

  He was still screaming when soldiers found him writhing on the floor of a long-disused storeroom, his clothing dripping scarlet. They knew who he was. As soon as they saw that he was not bleeding from any grievous wound, they took him by either arm and hauled him in front of the Guardian as fast as they could run.

  Tamliade knelt, exhausted, sobbing, in the throne room of the Guardian, beneath the great golden dome of Ai Hanlo.

  The Guardian dismissed his retainers, then bade the boy to rise. But he did not. He merely babbled of what he had seen.

  “It is Etash Wesa. He is the brother of my master, Emdo Wesa. He is a monster, a thing wholly changed by magic. He is a cancer, my master said. He will destroy the world if he isn’t stopped. It isn’t possible to understand him. It isn’t possible to know how powerful he is, what he can do. Emdo Wesa was afraid of him. He fought him. With the magic that ate him away, he fought him. He wanted to save me. But now he’s gone, and Etash Wesa has found me!’”

  “I know about Etash Wesa,” the Guardian said quietly. “He exists beyond the material world. You, Tamliade, are on a precipice. Above, a glorious summit. Below, an abyss, in which lurks Etash Wesa. The great danger of dreaming, the danger which is greatest to you of all people, is that you will fall into that abyss, into the power of Etash Wesa.”

  “He has found me. What can I do?”

  The Guardian was silent. Tamliade looked up, and saw that he had been kneeling on a floor mosaic of the Goddess in both her aspects, dark and bright, with the moon in her hair and the sun in her hand.

  “You must think on the Goddess,” said the Guardian, “When Etash Wesa reaches for you, direct yourself away from the abyss, toward the summit. Otherwise it will be the malevolence of Etash Wesa, rather than holiness, which flows through you into the world.”

  * * * *

  Several night
s later he lit a lantern in his room, so he could sit up late reading.

  The light poured out of the lantern like glowing smoke, pooled on the floor, then rose in a luminous column, which gradually took on the shape of his old master, Emdo Wesa. There was a gaping hole in his chest where his heart had once been. White flames burned in there now. His eyes were gone. Flames burned in his sockets, and in his mouth. His face was expressionless. His magician’s gloves were worn or burned through. His hands were made, not of flesh, but of pale, flickering light.

  Still, Tamliade was overjoyed to see him. “Have you come to help me? I need you.”

  “I am lost,” said Emdo Wesa, his voice a distant whisper, like the wind. “I have seen the road that the dead walk on, when they journey away from life, but I cannot follow it. It…shifts from my gaze…because I have never truly died and yet do not live…”

  “I have seen Etash Wesa. Help me.”

  “You of all would be the first to glimpse him. Yours is the sight. You cannot comprehend the evil of him, or the enmity that exists between us. These things are vaster than the dark sea between the worlds.”

  “How can I get away? What can I do?”

  “I am lost…I cannot follow the road…I thought I would learn so much, discover, explore.… There’s nothing out there.”

  At draft blew through the room. The candle flame inside Tamliade’s lantern flickered. Emdo Wesa was gone.

  * * * *

  Still the visions came with greater intensity, at any hour of day or night, overwhelming his every sense. Often as he sat at lessons or meals, or as he walked alone with his thoughts, he would suddenly fall to the ground and writhe like a rag doll shaken by an invisible hand. He shrieked, and babbled holy names. He crashed into walls, overturned tables, and dug with his hands, casting up dirt and stones, all the while screaming, “Help me! I don’t want any of this! Take it away!”

  But more often than not his words were not intelligible, and those who came to restrain him would glance at one another and say, “He is in the ecstasy of his vision. Who knows what he really sees and hears?” All knew how the pangs of divinity had come upon the girl who had become the Goddess, millennia before, and they wondered aloud, “Could this be the one?”

  All others who beheld him dropped to their knees, their faces pale with awe.

  At last, when he could bear it no longer, he came to a decision. In all the hagiographies, and also in the romances and even the sober histories, when someone was touched by the wind from the grave of the Goddess, which is alternately called holiness or fate, it was never any good to run or to hide. There was no place to go. The wind sought one out. It was a hot wind, igniting holy fire which consumed or transformed or molded anew. The only thing to do, Tamliade concluded, was to turn and face the wind, to walk into it, to force whatever was going to happen to him to happen now, simply to get it over with.

  He was filled with a dread which nearly froze his resolve, but also, for all he tried to deny it, with anticipation. Already his mind was being filled with thoughts he could not describe even to himself, any more than one born blind and raised entirely among the blind could describe sudden and overwhelming sight. He felt the lure of the transcendent, the unknown and unknowable, which could mold him as a modeler shapes clay, into something beyond his power to imagine.

  He decided on a journey. He told no one about it. The Guardian, he knew, would never let him go. He had no friends. People were unfailingly polite to him. They answered when he addressed them, but he knew that to the priests he was a prize exhibit, a miraculous resource, and to the novices, who were more his own age, he was a freak to be whispered about.

  Then, there was Etash Wesa to be considered, Etash Wesa who waited for him at the periphery of dreams, waiting for a chance to pour into the world, to seize control.

  If he turned to face his visions directly, wouldn’t that draw Etash Wesa to him?

  He considered. He didn’t really believe the Guardian could protect him, and if Etash Wesa was to find him, he could do so just as easily in Ai Hanlo. Besides, he hoped that whatever was to happen to him would happen before Etash Wesa was aware of it, even if this meant his own dissolution.

  He was willing to take every risk. He couldn’t go on like this.

  * * * *

  Tamliade sat in his room in the middle of the night, with a single lamp burning. He looked around at all he possessed, or all that had been provided for him: a few books, a trunk with a few clothes in it, an easel where a half-finished painting stood. He had decided once that he would like to learn how to paint. So a tutor in this subject was sent for. But when he began, a dream came upon him, and when he awoke there were only smears of paint on the canvas. Some people claimed to find meaning in it.

  He looked around at these things. There was nothing. This was the closest thing he had had to a home in a long time, and he would not miss it.

  So he rose and put on travelling clothes: baggy trousers, boots, and a many-pocketed jacket that reached to his knees. He stuffed a hooded cloak into a bag. He could use it as a blanket. Into the bag also went spare clothing, a tiny lamp and a bottle of oil, and one book, beautifully illuminated, filled with the offices of the priesthood and tales of famous adepts designed to guide the reader through the journey of this life.

  Then he peered into the corridor outside his room to see that no one was about, and left. His heart was beating rapidly. Every sound seemed exaggerated, sure to betray him. But he came undiscovered to the kitchen. There cooks snored on benches. He tiptoed among them with desperate care, and took bread, cheese, dried meat, and a bottle of wine. As an afterthought, he took a long knife. He couldn’t find a scabbard for it, so he wrapped it in a towel.

  From a cloakroom beyond the kitchen he took a staff and a broad-brimmed hat.

  He slipped from the Guardian’s palace out a window. He came to a place he knew, where a tree grew against a wall of the inner city. So long had Ai Hanlo been secure that no one had bothered to cut it down. The tree embraced the wall. The wall supported the tree. Stones and twisted branches intermingled. It was easy to climb down from the top of the wall into the tree. The branches enclosed a little world, where birds had nested for centuries. He saw them asleep, perched in rows or gathered in clusters. He climbed more carefully than ever, struggling to be silent, but one bird awoke, and another, and another, and soon they burst into the air in a cacophony of shrieks and a muffled thunder of wings.

  He froze, sure that someone would come running.

  But no one came. So he continued his descent, came to a rooftop, and dropped into a street.

  He wandered in the dark, muddy labyrinth of the lower city. Once someone called to him from a doorway and made a lewd suggestion. Another time he heard footsteps all around him, and stood perfectly still in almost total darkness until they were gone. At last he found a secluded niche between two tall, shuttered buildings, and sat down to await the dawn.

  He awoke in twilight and began walking, always downhill. Sunlight touched the roofs and reached into the alleys. Shutters banged open. He followed the earliest risers until he came to one of the city’s great gates. He didn’t know which one it was. He hesitated, for he knew that the guards at the gate often questioned those who left the city at odd hours, or charged them a toll. He didn’t have any money.

  But luck was with him. It was a market day. During the night ships had come to the docks, and already trading stalls were set up all along the road that led from the river to the gate. Inside the city, shopkeepers swept their doorsteps, lowered canopies, and set up goods. Soon the square before the gate was filled with people. It was an easy enough matter for him to go out.

  Then he ducked under a rope, went between two stalls, and turned away from the road, coming after a while to the edge of the cultivated fields beyond the city, and onto the broad plain to the south.

  III.

  He travelled for three days and nights. The autumn rains hadn’t quite started, so the sky was fi
lled with clouds, while the plains were still dry with the dust of summer. The days were pleasant, the nights cold. Always Ai Hanlo Mountain remained visible behind him, the golden dome of the Guardian’s palace like a sun setting in the blue-grey mist of the mountain.

  He slept in hollows or in occasional groves of gnarled trees, and ate of the food he had brought with him, also roots and a fat, flightless bird he struck down with his staff. In his years as a wanderer he had learned to survive in places far more desolate than this.

  On the fourth day he came to the site of a city far more ancient than Ai Hanlo, perhaps even older than Ai Hanlo Mountain itself. All he saw at first were mounds of stone and earth. It was hard to tell that they were not natural formations. Grass and stunted trees grew over them. Wild goats scampered away as he approached, and a lizard, walking upright on its hind legs, stood on a mound and hissed, then jumped, and glided a short distance away on stubby wings.

  But in the evening, as the sun set and the shadows shifted, the city manifested itself to the sound of bells, which he heard faintly at first, then more clearly. They rang, and towers and walls rose on every side, translucent as smoke, merging with the darkness of the oncoming night, becoming more solid, shutting out the sky. At last, when the clouds broke overhead, silver rooftops gleamed beneath the stars, and Tamliade’s footsteps echoed down long, empty streets. Every once in a while he would catch a glimpse of the dome of Ai Hanlo, still glowing with the light of the vanished sun.

  The windows of the city began to glow softly. He hurried on his way. Still the unseen bells rang. Then the people of the city were all around him, bearing lanterns. ringing hand bells—tall, slender folk with long golden hair and pale faces, clad in golden gowns.

  He came to a square where there was a statue of some hero grappling with a giant.