It seemed that the great apparition, dead though it was, had begun to speak now, whispering in our minds, in my mind at least, but somehow I found the strength, the concentration to tell myself over and over again, no, no, it was only the wind blowing sand, only the blown sand rustling among the harsh grasses.
When at last neither the girl nor I could go any further, we fell down in our exhaustion into the featureless sand. Here the landscape was indeed without any variation at all, no so much as a mound or a stone, and it seemed to go on forever like that.
I realized that I was terribly thirsty. I couldn’t bring myself to believe, though, that I had come all this way merely to die of thirst.
Azrethemne trembled again, with the cold, and I drew her to my side, drawing my thin, outer robe around the both of us.
She began to tell me of her life then, what scattered bits she could recall. As it had been for me, her words came haltingly at first, then in a torrent. She had been gone from the world for a long time, but she remembered growing up on a boat that plied the river trade between Ai Hanlo and Zabortash. But that was so long ago, she said, that it seemed to be the life of someone else. Then she’d begun to have visions. She fell down in a frenzy and prophesied, and managed to slip out of the world. Someone had told her once that in the time of the death of the Goddess, when all is in disorder, when the remains of divinity drift across the world like ashes, having no substance, it is particularly easy to lose one’s grip and end up…somewhere. She had wandered through dim, half-created places for a long time. For a while she was in the company of a young man, a boy actually, who was as often as not more helpless and afraid than she, a prophet and priest and fellow exile named Tamliade—she kept repeating his name—whom she had somehow rescued and come to love, only to lose him again in a confusion of fire and blood, an ocean of blood which filled the world until she sank and drowned in it, and found herself washed up onto the threshold of the Inn of Sorrows, as I had first beheld her.
This tale seemed…no more fantastic than any other, but there was one striking thing about it, something I couldn’t quite grasp with my mind. It had to mean something that her story was not over yet. She believed that she was in a labyrinth, looking for the one corridor with light at the end of it, through which she might emerge back into the waking, living, concrete world.
Now I was a wanderer like her, but I lacked her courage, and I was ashamed to hope that she might rescue me as she had this Tamliade—yet I did hope it, though I could not put the notion into words. What could I say? How does one relate thirty years of nothing? I started to repeat the tale of how Black Veiada had stolen Kodos Vion’s heart.
I lost the thread of the story somewhere, and could only weep.
Azrethemne in turn told me stories of heroes, how many of them were quite ordinary men at first, even inferior, mediocrities who had never sought out any adventure, who had fled from challenge or danger or honor, but who were nevertheless propelled on to become something greater.
I wanted to believe that. I desperately wanted it to be true. After a time, I felt a little less ridiculous for my efforts.
We slept, huddled in my robe.
* * * *
Black Veiada came to me in a dream. She walked soundlessly over the sand, making no footprints, and she stood over me, staring down with the gaze of some ancient stone colossus, yet at the same time as ethereal as a cloud. Her face was wrinkled, her eyes sunken and dark. Her hair and cloak streamed in the wind.
“Friend of Kodos Vion, arise,” she said.
In my dream, I got up.
She offered me a goblet of wine. I drank. My will was not my own. I recognized the taste. It was the same as the wine at the Inn of Sorrows, sweet and bitter.
“Friend of Kodos Vion, come. I want you to understand.”
I thought of Kodos Vion again—as if I had ever stopped thinking of him—how he had made me what I was, out of nothing, performing a miracle which now was ending.
I turned from Black Veiada and ran, staggering, kicking up sand, hoarse from gasping in the cold air. I topped a rise—which hadn’t been there a minute before—and looked down, not on the sea, but on a common tavern standing incongruously in the middle of the wasteland. Light streamed from the windows. Even at a distance, I could hear the sounds of merriment.
As I drew near, I could make out some of the words of a song:
“Oh, I stink to high heaven,
me bed’s an old coat,
but if ye don’t like it,
well bugger the goat!”
I ran to the door and leaned against it, gasping, listening. I knew that voice.
I pounded hard as I could, looking back over my shoulder in terror for any sign of Black Veiada. The door opened. I tumbled into a room filled with people. Someone grabbed me by the arm, hauled me up, yanked me around, and I was face-to-face with Kodos Vion. His breath was thick with wine, his eyes wild.
“Wake up, boy!” He shook me hard. “Don’t tell me you’re worn out already! Up! Up!”
They were all laughing at me. Thousands of faces, like fireflies flickering in the dim light, laughing at me.
Kodos Vion began to dance, swinging me around like a rag doll, his voice like singing thunder:
“Bugger the goat!
Bugger the goat!
There’s not too much choice,
so go bugger the goat!”
I wept. I didn’t understand how I’d gotten to this place. It was impossible, but I so desperately wanted it to be real.
“Oh look at him! A few drinks and he’s cryin’ like a baby!”
A perfumed, naked woman put her arms around me, jewelry clinking.
“Ah, poor baby. He needs cheering up.”
“He needs more than that,” said Kodos Vion, waving her away. He led me across the room. The crowd parted for him like a sea.
We went out through a little door into a yard. I gaped in astonishment. The night sky was clear overhead, filled with brilliant stars. Over a fence I could see rooftops and towers. We were in Ai Hanlo.
Kodos Vion relieved himself against a post. Then he took me by the arm again, gently this time, and backed me against the fence. He was alive. He was real.
“You’re a disgrace, boy, blubbering like that. I don’t know why I put up with you.”
“I’m not a boy. I’m thirty,” was all I could say.
“Well you haven’t learned much in all those years. That’s why I brought you out here. Someone needs to explain the facts of life to you. Brace yourself. Here’s the big secret: There are no facts of life!” He roared with laughter, bending over, slapping his thigh. “But wait! There’s more. The philosophers tell us that because the Goddess is dead there is no meaning or order to anything. Well, who’s to care about that. Shit.… Only appearances matter. If something seems to be real, accept it. Don’t ask any questions. If you act like a man instead of a blubbering boy, then you are a man. If you act like a poet, you are one. Be a hero. Be anything. What goes on inside that soggy little head of yours hardly matters. Only what’s outside matters, what you and other people can see. That’s the key to happiness. It’s the one thing you can be sure about.”
I wanted to tell him that I didn’t believe a word he was saying, that I didn’t think he did either, because somewhere in the back of my mind I hadn’t forgotten this was a dream, not real, that he wasn’t real, I wasn’t real, as if such concepts or distinctions made any sense under the present circumstances. But the words did not come.
Suddenly a look of utmost terror came over his face. He gasped, staggered away from me, clutching his chest. Then he screamed, “She has stolen my heart!”
The door swung open, slamming against the wall. Wind roared. The air was filled with swirling sand.
Black Veiada stood in the doorway, holding up his beating heart for me to see.
“I need this for my beloved,” she said intensely, her words almost like a prayer. “He has waited too long. He shall wait only a little
longer now.”
With impossible agility, like some huge spider, she scurried up the outside of the tavern, onto the roof, and was gone.
“Help me,” Kodos Vion gasped. “You said you would help me. Why have you done nothing?”
He lay in the sand at my feet. Now there was no tavern, no yard, fence, or starry sky above. Again we were in the midst of the featureless wasteland, in that unchanging half-darkness.
“Why? Why? Why?” His voice faded. The wind blew sand over him, burying him, as if he were sinking in quicksand. “Help me.…” His face was covered up. He was gone.
“Help! Help!” I screamed, digging frantically. I shrieked, babbled like a madman, “Helpmehelpmehelpme!”
* * * *
I came to myself, still screaming, digging with my hands, hurling sand aside.
Azrethemne put her arm around me, to restrain me, to calm me.
And I stopped, and sat down, exhausted, staring at the hole I’d dug. There was no sign of Kodos Vion.
“I saw her,” I said. “She came to me. It was Black Veiada.”
“Yes, it was Black Veiada,” came a voice. “That’s how you know—”
The two of us jumped to either side, then stared into the hole. What had been a rounded lump of sand opened its eyes. The features became clearer: a man, buried to his neck, his face drawn, as if in great pain. His skin was almost blue.
Without a word, Azrethemne and I began to dig. We uncovered the buried man’s bare shoulders, then his arms, then his chest, blue-white as the rest of him, cold to the touch. He gasped for breath, sucking in great gulps of air.
Then Azrethemne let out a cry of amazement and disgust and turned away. I kept on digging for several minutes more, unable to stop.
The man had no genitals, or legs either. His upper body just went on and on, his endless ribcage like that of some huge serpent, his flesh the same continuous blue-white. He lay on the sand, limp, wheezing. I had uncovered at least fifteen feet of him. The rest of him seemed to pass horizontally into the sand, buried no more than a foot down.
“It’s no good,” he said. “I saw Black Veiada too. I’m part of the island now.”
“What island?”
“Haven’t you figured that out? In every direction, the black sea. You’re surrounded. There is no way off, but that black ship. Please, please. It’s cold. Cover me up.”
Azrethemne couldn’t bring herself to actually touch him, but from a distance she heaved handfuls of sand, and we covered him back up to the neck, then crouched beside him.
“What are you?” I said.
“As you see. As I said. Part of the island. Once I was a man and had a name. But I’ve lost all that. You do, you lose everything, when Black Veiada comes for you at last. Think of it as a big melting pot. She melts us down like old, broken bronze statues, bent knives, rusty lanterns. She wants the raw material. When she comes for you, when you see her, you will change very quickly.”
“No.” I said.
“No,” said Azrethemne, and for the first time she seemed truly afraid.
“You can’t help it. Perhaps you will become like me. Perhaps no more than this.” He heaved a hand up through the sand, then let sand trickle through his fingers. “Maybe I will be like this too, in due time.”
“But where are we?”
“In some halfway-formed world. One of those dark regions you can fall into when there is no god or goddess to keep everything in place. Think of it as some stray bubble in the foam of creation, but a creation that’s running out, like water spilled on a leaky floor. In sorrow you come here, or in madness, or maybe led by some magic so powerful and strange that once you use it you can’t find your way back. I don’t remember how I got here. But you know all this. You’re here. That’s enough. The how does not matter. It merely is.”
He closed his eyes. He sighed, as if greatly wearied from the act of speaking, and from raising his hand. His hand and forearm lay on the surface of the sand. I buried them.
“Please,” I said softly. “Tell us more. Who is Black Veiada? What can we do to overcome her? We have to. We have to know. It’s very important—”
His eyes fluttered open once more. I could barely hear his voice. “Perhaps she will show herself once more. Then you will know…everything…too late. As for what you can do…nothing. You’re here, aren’t you? She has you now.”
“It won’t be like that,” said Azrethemne firmly. “No. We’ll get away. We’ll just keep on going—”
The eyes closed, but I could still make out the voice.
“You’re very strong to have come this far. No one has done as much in centuries. But still, no matter how far you go, you always return to the point where you started. There is no other way.”
“But why?” I demanded. “Why?”
“The island, you see, only has one side.”
We left him. Hand in hand, walking slowly, dreading whatever we should find, we walked and walked for an indeterminate amount of time, until the landscape began to rise like a series of little, motionless waves. We climbed a dune.
I heard the sound of waves.
We looked down on the shoreline, where thousands of people stood on the sand or out into the oily water, and beyond them, the great, black deathly barge rose and fell, as huge as the black, featureless sky.
It was in that moment that something within me changed, that I understood I had stopped running away. From then on, I would confront Black Veiada. I would rescue Kodos Vion if I could. It wasn’t merely because there was no place left to run, but because I felt, keenly, the desire to help my friend, and to help Azrethemne too, who was brave, who was good, who was strong, who did not belong imprisoned forever in some twilight land of lost souls.
I didn’t care what happened to myself.
We sat down, overlooking the beach, and waited.
“Come witch,” I said aloud. “Black Veiada, come. I am ready for you.”
* * * *
She came once more, in a dream. I was not aware of going to sleep. I think Black Veiada merely reached out and touched me, drawing me into the dream.
She stood before me upon the dune, oblivious to Azrethemne as if she could not see her, or did not deign to. She offered me the goblet once more.
“Drink, friend of Kodos Vion, and all will be clear. You need to understand. You are the one among thousands who must understand, and in the end act of your own free will. Now are the stars fallen into place like tumblers in a lock. The time is at hand. Drink.”
I drank yet again that strange bitter and sweet wine. My senses were heightened. I heard the blood rushing within my veins. I felt every particle of dust in the air as it fell against my face.
I wanted to scream at her, to call her murderess and thief, but somehow her voice soothed me. I did not run away this time.
“It is the wine of vision,” she said. “Now, behold.”
And I saw Black Veiada as she had been when she had her name because of the color of her long, beautiful black hair. Jewels sparkled in it, like stars in the midnight sky.
She stood before me, there, on the top of the dune, overlooking the beach, and the darkness of the sky cleared behind her, like a curtain drawn aside, revealing unfamiliar stars, in constellations new and strange.
Then we were no longer on the beach at all. I saw her in many places, at many times. She was a slender girl, a princess of a city carven all of polished black stone, where the winds of the world were captured and tamed in the high, black towers, and lay at her feet like sleepy leopards. Even then she was a witch, and I could not condemn her for it, for she had a great and burning desire to know the secrets of things, the mysteries of heaven and earth and of the countless half-worlds, the things known by the Goddess and those hidden even from the Goddess.
I saw Black Veiada as queen, reigning in glory over that city and country compared to which even Ai Hanlo, or any other place I had ever known was but a squalid collection of hovels.
Yet it was be
cause of this glory that the Goddess came to envy Black Veiada. Because Black Veiada was the most powerful witch who ever lived, who could reach out and touch the Moon and change its phases, or halt its passage across the sky, the Goddess feared her.
Further, Black Veiada loved a man, a mighty warrior and king without peer in that age. The two were to be wed, and in their union all the world would be drawn together, so that men would worship king and queen alone and have little use for any other. For this, the Goddess hated her.
The Goddess herself had been mortal once. In Black Veiada’s youth it had been little more than a century since a storm of divinity had whirled around some girl and raised her up. Such things happen by nature. When a god or goddess dies, divinity dissipates, like a dying wind, and there is a period of darkness and confusion, but in time, as inevitable as a new sunrise, the holy winds regain their strength, and gather, and rage, howling, and another god or goddess is created, and the interregnum ends.
When her epoch was still new, when the Goddess was still partially human, she had human emotions, magnified by her condition, but human nonetheless, and she was jealous and afraid and truly terrible in her anger.
I saw, in my vision, the night of Black Veiada’s wedding. Two royal trains gathered on a terrace beneath a huge silver dome held aloft by spiderweb-thin arches of some impossible glass. All the city was ablaze with lights. The full Moon rose over the sea. The winds, which were the queen’s servants, sang softly amid the dark towers.
White flowers rose out of the pavement, like fountains bursting with foam in slow motion, rising up, taller than trees, opening out as the moonlight touched them. Maidens in sweeping dresses made a solemn procession through the forest of blossoms, while the king’s warriors stood at attention, their armor gleaming in the pale light, their swords raised on high. Children in white held candles and rang little bells. Overhead, great ships of metal and glass drifted in the sky, silent as clouds, trailing luminous streamers.
The lords of the land stood silent. Priests gathered. At the very center of the terrace, under the dome, the king and queen waited, each holding a crown to be placed on the head of the other.
Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder from the End of Time Page 17
