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

by Darrell Schweitzer

  They came to the open gate of a cemetery. There, stone images of the dual Goddess stood on either side, their arms joined in an arch overhead, holding a stone sun.

  Within, a crowd of mourners gathered around an open grave. Many held lanterns and torches. He lost sight of the old man in the crowd. He pushed his way through, gently, asking again and again, “What funeral is this? Who has died?” But no one answered. No one acknowledged his presence.

  He came to the forefront of the crowd. A priest droned something, holding aloft a reliquary containing a splinter of a Bone of the Goddess.

  The old man with the lantern stood in the grave, next to the open coffin. No one seemed aware of him, except Velas.

  “If you want to understand,” the old man said, “come here. Look into the face.”

  But Velas did not look. He closed his eyes tight and stood at the edge of the grave, hugging himself, trembling. The night air was suddenly very cold.

  “No,” he said. “I won’t look. I don’t want to see.”

  Hours seemed to go by. He lost all sense of time. When he finally opened his eyes, he was alone in the cemetery with the old man. It was still night. There was no open grave.

  “Very well then,” the old man said, holding the lantern up by his own face as he approached Velas.

  Velas saw the other’s features very clearly. He screamed. The light was blinding. He fell to his knees, holding his hands over his eyes. The flame of the lantern roared all around him, consuming the world.

  He fell.

  * * * *

  Velas Ven awoke stiff and sore, face down in cold dust. He rolled over and sat up, blinking. There was light. He was afraid, but after a while he saw that it was only the dawn come at last, gently touching the monuments in the cemetery. High above, on the wall of the Inner City, a soldier blew on the curving horn.

  * * * *

  He told stories, speaking of wonders, of fantastic things, the dreams of his people. He told of common things too, of everyday lives, of lovers, children, fathers, soldiers, tradesmen, and many others. He even made the scholar’s lot seem an adventure. He made his audience feel the trembling excitement of discovering a treasure at last, after many years of labor among books.

  And he told of sorrow and loss.

  He was even more popular than before. His stories were written down and read in the great courts. Once he was brought before the Guardian himself. After he had finished his reading, the Guardian of the Bones said to him, “You have described these dreams and these many lives more vividly than anyone else, as if you were a kind of universal spirit, able to look into every man’s heart, to share and live out every man’s life. But there is no apparent moral. What does it all mean?”

  Velas Ven shrugged and laughed. “Holy Lord, how should I know? I’m not a philosopher.”

  He was asked that question many times. He always gave the same answer. Sometimes he gave it sadly.

  Quite late in his life, he married a woman named Nomonig and they had one daughter, Ael. She was a brilliant girl. She asked many questions.

  Once he took her aside and said, “Daughter, the Goddess died long ago. She is buried beneath our feet, at the heart of Ai Hanlo Mountain. Her power is almost gone. But sometimes a little bit of it, like vapor, seeps up through the cracks in the pavement. Our minds shape it, and we in turn are shaped by what we have unknowingly created. These events are called miracles.”

  Ael was grown and had children of her own when Velas finally died, very old and very tired. At the funeral, before the open grave, while the priest droned on and held a reliquary aloft, one of Ael’s children tugged on her sleeve and whispered, “I thought I saw Grandpa pushing through the crowd. He covered his face and fell down on his knees. I think he was saying something.”

  She replied, “Hush, child. It is only the wind stirring up the dust.”

  THE SHAPER OF ANIMALS

  “When my husband’s horse came home without him,” the Lady Nestra often said, “I knew there was no hope. One of his boots was still in the stirrup. I knew then that I had lost my Lord Caradhas, the most matchless of husbands. The City of the Goddess was saved at the battle of the Heshite Plain. Etash Wesa was overthrown, and the world was spared the one who had proclaimed himself the new god, but I died in that battle too. My soul bled. A great wound had been torn in my heart. My life was over, though my body still went through the motions of life.”

  All the upper class visitors to Ai Hanlo, where the Bones of the Goddess lie in holy splendor, knew of the Lady Nestra, and avoided her, for she was in mourning, and had been for a long time. She appeared at the great festivals, in the spring and autumn. Of old, when the Goddess was alive, those festivals were times of spectacular manifestations, when Her power would be witnessed by all, and the signs and the seasons would be changed, and miracles occurred freely. But, after the death of the Goddess, the festivals were merely gatherings, to renew the ancient rites, it is true, but mostly people came just to celebrate themselves and the passage of time, and to trade. No one prayed for miracles anymore, except the wretched mendicants who gathered in the public squares, and the Lady Nestra.

  She was still young and beautiful, yet when she appeared in public draped all in black, she was like a sudden chill that moved through the city, and a hush seemed to follow her when she walked daily around the battlements of the wall of the inner city, beyond which no commoner may pass. She would pause each time over one of the shrines set in the wall, where the mendicants gathered, and call down to them, and join in their pleadings, that some lingering fragment of the Godhead might touch her, and grant her a miracle.

  The members of the court could not avoid her, for she was a great lady. She commanded people into her presence, hardly realizing what she was doing, and as social necessity dictated. Inevitably, she would tell of her sorrows, and often she would weep long and hard, and others would weep with her.

  It was whispered that she had draped the whole city in mourning for a funeral that went on forever, but no one could deny her.

  So it was that others came to pray, and many petitioned the Guardian of the Bones of the Goddess, the holiest of men, that somehow, someday, the Lady Nestra would find peace.

  * * * *

  There was a knocking at the door of her chamber one night. Lady Nestra looked up from her writing, but did not rise from where she sat. The door swung open, and the Good Guardian himself, Tharanodeth IV, entered alone, his long robe sweeping the floor.

  At once Lady Nestra dropped from her chair onto her knees.

  “You may rise and sit,” he said.

  She sat. “Holy Lord, I am greatly honored.”

  He waved his hand. “It cannot continue,” he said gently. He took a stoppered vial and a little ivory box out of a pocket and placed them on her writing-table. “It cannot continue. The very Powers are without rest.”

  Still she only looked at him with longing, not daring to hope, and again the Guardian spoke.

  “Have you some image of your husband?”

  And, very tenderly, Lady Nestra unwrapped a silver dish she had received on her wedding night, into which her husband’s features had been worked in fine relief.

  “Ah, excellent,” the Guardian said. “You must seek into the darkness with these things. In this vial is the wine of vision. Pour it into the dish. Then open the box and add the powder that is inside. It is made from the dust of the tomb of the Goddess. You need know no more than that it is very powerful. Stir it into the wine, then look, and see, and believe what you see. Beyond that, merely hope. Hope that enough of the echo of the passing of the Goddess remains, and that the Powers have not wholly dissipated.”

  As the Guardian made to leave, Lady Nestra opened a coffer filled with rare jewels, but Tharanodeth did not even pause on his way out the door.

  It was on that night that the Shaper of Animals arrived in the holy city, for all Lady Nestra did not know of him. Indeed, no one witnessed his advent, but when dawn came, his wagon was
merely there among the many others in the Courtyard of the Upraised Hand, where tradesmen and merchants gathered for the festival. He didn’t seem to have any draft animals. Perhaps he had merely appeared out of the air, but in the first light of day he opened his shutters and his door, and hung out a sign with birds and beasts painted on it in bright colors.

  Perhaps he had come solely for the Lady Nestra, a miracle shaped by the Guardian from the fleeting traces of holiness that lingered over the Bones. But by mid-morning a fat, mustachioed jester had entered the wagon, then come out again with a white monkey that laughed at his jokes. And a poet entered, and left with something like a peacock that sang in an exquisite, half-human voice; and a girl-child bore away a large-eared ball of red fur which listened to her every secret.

  Perhaps the Shaper came for these people too, and many more. Or, perhaps, even the Guardian did not know of his presence, or what the wine of vision would reveal to the Lady Nestra. No one can ever know, for all things are uncertain in the time of the death of the Goddess.

  * * * *

  The Lady Nestra wept softly the following night, as she placed the silver bowl on her marble writing-table. Slowly she poured the dark wine into the bowl, obscuring her husband’s image, all the whole reciting a rhyme, every stanza of which ended with the name of the man she had loved and lost. She added the powder from the ivory box, while her maid went about the room, extinguishing candles one by one.

  She stirred the wine with a silver rod. The pale grey powder swirled in the center. Then, as the last candle was snuffed out, the wine began to glow a deep red, the swirling mass dark against it.

  She called her maid over. The woman’s face was a pale oval in the faint light, her eyes wide with astonishment and even dread.

  “Rilla, what do you see?”

  “Only the magic light, Lady.”

  “Then leave me,” Nestra said. “This thing is not for you. Go and wait outside the door.”

  The maid curtseyed and went. Torches flickered in the corridor outside, and the light from the bowl diminished as the door opened, then brightened again when it was closed.

  Lady Nestra leaned low, watching intently as the mass of dust became a solid disc. Now the bright fluid swirled around it, like clouds around the eye of a storm.

  She spoke words in a secret tongue, and points of light appeared in the dark circle. She spoke again, and they were stars, and she was looking through the silver bowl into the night sky.

  Something was moving there, in the darkness. Wings passed before the stars, and something darker than the sky took shape, a great bird flapping slowly across the star field.

  “I am here,” Lady Nestra whispered. “If you are the one I seek, come to me.”

  The thing came. For an instant she shared its vision, and saw Ai Hanlo whirling, rushing up at her, and she recognized the wall of the Inner City and the great, golden dome of the Guardian’s palace. Then the view narrowed, and the bird was hovering outside a shuttered window, above a small garden.

  She looked up and listened to the wings flapping and scratching against the shuttered window of her room. But she did not rise from where she sat by the table.

  A voice came from without, first a confused babbling, like some animal’s attempt to imitate human speech. Then the voice softened, and said very distinctly, “Beloved.” And finally it said, “Dearest Nestra, it is I, Caradhas.”

  She peered into the bowl once more. The bird was still there, but it drew nearer, and she could see that it had the face of a young man with pale skin and dark hair. It was the face of Caradhas.

  Therefore she got up, taking the bowl in her hands with desperate care. Still the wings scraped and fluttered outside the window.

  “Now guide me,” she said, speaking into the bowl.

  Behind her, metal creaked. She turned around suddenly, the gasped with terror, afraid she had spilled the contents of the bowl. But the image merely rippled.

  She looked for the source of the sound and saw a tapestry billowing in the darkness from a draft, pressing against her husband’s armor where it stood in a corner. The sword scraped against the thigh piece.

  For an instant she had hoped—

  But that was not the way of this magic. In the bowl, the bird was rising out of the garden outside her window, drifting on the air over the roofs and battlements and tangled lanes of the holy city.

  “Rilla, come here at once.”

  The maid re-entered, reverent with awe when she saw her mistress standing there with the glowing bowl.

  “Lady?”

  “Did you hear it? At the window?”

  “No, Lady. Nothing.”

  “But I heard it,” said Nestra. “We must go. I am sure this time.”

  The maid reached for the black cloak Nestra always wore, but her mistress shook her head and indicated another which hung on the peg beside the black one, but was never worn. It was blue and red, embroidered in threads of many colors against the background of a gold circle, showing the double aspect of the Goddess, bright and dark, one figure astride a dolphin, with the sun in her hand, and the other holding a tree and wearing a crown of stars. It was the cloak her husband had worn to the battle of the Heshite Plain.

  Rilla led her mistress out of her room, gently guiding her by the arm down a flight of stairs, across a common hall where a few late diners and their servants looked on in silence as Nestra passed with the bowl of Seeing, and out into the night. All the while the Lady never took her eyes off the image, but merely described what she saw to her maid, and allowed herself to be led. When they came to the gate leading out of the inner city, into the lower or outer city, the guards there did not question her, for they saw the bowl and recognized that this thing was of the Goddess.

  Nestra followed the bird, and was led by Rilla, through many districts where few ladies would venture alone at night, but they were not molested. So, in time, she came to the wagon of the Shaper of Animals. She paused then, and the image of the bird suddenly vanished. The bowl shone with pure white light, brighter than a lantern. All around, campfires burned low and wagons and tents were dark. Loud snoring came from a window overlooking the yard. Farther away, a dog barked.

  The Shaper’s wagon was dark and silent, but she approached it confidently, her footsteps scraping gently on the paving stones. It was only as she placed her foot on the first of three steps below the door that lights came on in the windows, slowly, like the opening eyes of a great beast lazily rousing itself from sleep.

  Rilla gave a little cry and shrank back.

  “If you wish to wait outside, you may,” Nestra said. The door of the wagon swung slowly outward of its own accord. She entered, holding the bowl gingerly. She was not aware of her maid following her.

  The inside of the wagon seemed far larger than the outside, half-illuminated by the light from her bowl. Shadows flickered. She had the impression of a deep forest and of thick vines and leaves that gleamed with a touch of gold, but her eyes somehow couldn’t define anything. The whole place was like a rippling reflection by moonlight, and again, it seemed alive, as if every part were an outgrowth of every other part; and the very darkness sighed and shifted.

  She turned to her left, then to her right, trying to see by the light of her bowl. Then a lamp rose in the center of the room, seeming to float in the air. It was a heavy, silver thing, like the head of a horse, open-mouthed, with fire in its teeth. By this light she saw, in the back of the wagon, shelves of bottles with things floating in them, but she had no chance to examine them closely.

  The Shaper of Animals stood up in the darkness, behind the horse-head lamp. His face was long and pale, his beard silver, and he wore a silver robe; but his huge, hunched shoulders were not like those of a man, and he did not move as a man would on two legs. Beyond that, Nestra could not define his strangeness. When he shifted his great bulk, there was a sound half like leaves rustling, half like the tinkling of coins.

  “You are the Lady Nestra, wife of the Lord Ca
radhas,” the Shaper said in a gentle voice.

  “I am.”

  “Give me the bowl.”

  She gave it to him, then tried to snatch it back.

  “Wait!”

  He ignored her and calmly raised the bowl to his lips. She watched bewildered as he slowly drank the contents. After a long, silent pause, he handed the bowl back to her.

  “You do not need this anymore,” he said. “It has served its purpose.”

  “I saw in it—”

  “You saw in it what you wished to see, what you needed with the deepest yearnings of your heart to see. Therefore you have come to me, for it is my profession to provide people with what they truly want.”

  She swayed. She thought she might faint. He motioned her to a chair. She hadn’t noticed any chair before, but there was one. She sat, nervously running her hands over the armrests. They felt like mere polished wood.

  “Can it be? Truly?” She could not find the words to say any more, for all her mind screamed her husband’s name. She sat there, trembling, drenched in cold sweat.

  “Lady, by my art I shape animals, causing each one to be the perfect companion for each individual person. Each of my creations is unique, as each customer is.”

  She stiffened. “A pet? You mean the perfect lapdog? I don’t need a pet.” She put up a brave front, but she was more frightened than angry.

  He spoke to her soothingly, like a parent to a pouting child. “I assure you, Lady. It will be far more than a pet. Consider this: you peered into the night with your magic, seeking the one thing which might end your sorrow, and you found me. Has your magic, which is of the Goddess, misled you?”

  “It cannot,” she said weakly.

  “Then it is more than a pet I offer you.”

  She took off three rings from her fingers and tossed them toward the Shaper. She didn’t hear them hit the floor.

  “You require a fee. Will these do?” He did not even glance down.

  “As you say, Lady.”