The Bride of the Blue Wind

by Victoria Goddard

  ***

  In the palace of blue glass, Sardeet had spent many days silent: but she had also learned many things.

  She had learned that there were one hundred and forty-four kinds of spirits, and how to command the lowest six.

  She had learned that there were other worlds, and that in certain places, by certain rituals, and at certain times, one could pass through the veils between worlds, and perhaps even return; and she learned twelve such passages, though her husband laughed to answer her, for her beauty was made immortal in time at the cost of its circumscription in space.

  She learned that many, but not all, of the old stories held truth.

  She learned other things. That the food came from the gift-offerings of a hundred tribes, brought there by her lord’s little winds. That the eagle was one of a dozen, proud and great, the guardians of the Black Mountains. That the Wind Lords rarely consulted with each other, each having his or her own jurisdiction, and that the Twelve Lords of the Great Winds were the only ones who lived in the centre of the Desert of Kaph as the stories told.

  She was lazy and a little curious, and—youngest and fairest of her clan—rather spoiled, and she delighted in rich things. Silent or speaking, she was attended by the silver wind and by two djinn of a lower order whom she learned to order with gestures and will. They brought her clothes, foods, delicacies, music—one djinni could sing—and most of the time she revelled in the luxuries of the palace of blue glass.

  It took some months before she quite recovered her head from the sheer profusion of delights. True to his word, her husband gave her his keys, answered her questions, and fulfilled every desire of hers except for the door out. He seemed to take pleasure in her in-turning, as she began to learn the bounds of her prison. He made no effort to threaten her; he didn’t need to. He did not try to enchant her into loving him, for it had been a long time since he had been human himself, and he did not remember anything but the passions; and those he was happy to fulfill.

  She had not been raised to idleness, and one day when she had asked three questions in a row about the passages between worlds Olu-olurin sent her away with a laugh and a caress and three days of silence before her. He was busy with some project of his own, which she did not dare ask him about, being sure that a day of silence would not be the only repercussion of the answering.

  It was early, and the thoughts of doors between worlds excited her, and she was otherwise bored with the now-familiar luxuries, and so she took up the keys of the palace of glass and began trying to match each with a door.

  This was not so easy as it at first seemed, for though the palace had very many rooms, most of them had no locks. There were seventy-seven keys on the ring, from ones made of iron longer than her hand to a tiny golden key barely the length of the first joint of her thumb. It took her some weeks to find all the locks.

  She found Olu-olurin’s treasure room, which distracted her for a short while, but her eye had grown satiated and she no longer wondered at riches however grand. She found a back door into his study, where he sat beside a wall where six magic cloaks hung by their necks. He smiled at her with a glint of amusement and something that made her shiver a little and kiss him, until he laughed and sent her away with six days of silence for explaining the purpose of the six cloaks. She found a door onto a platform on the tallest tower, and that nearly stopped her from further exploration, for with the free winds in her hair she felt a stirring of old desire.

  The palace from above looked like the desert rose she had found as a little girl and given her sister Pali when she went into the mountains to become a warrior, only blue instead of gypsum-pink. Sardeet looked long out past the bounds of her world. The palace sat on a ridge at the edge of the mountains; the golden desert stretched east as far as the eye could see. Even as Sardeet watched she saw the mirages begin, the desert djinn—now she knew what to look for, could begin to name them—jousting with each other in sandstorms and whirlwinds, a ring of false visions around the centre where the keenest-eyed lived, the Lords of the Twelve Winds.

  West, north, south, the mountains were black and bare and precipitous. Below her the palace spread out like a flower, humming with rainbows and bound winds, with the half-invisible spirits of fire and air Olu-olurin had bound to him. That was no door out: if she jumped she would not land; she would be caught.

  It did not, in fact, occur to her to jump.

  At last the only key whose lock she had not found, whose secrets she had not ferreted out, was the little golden key. By this time she had passed several more periods of silence and speech—her only true measure of time’s passage apart from her monthly cycles, which had grown far more irregular than they had been in world-without (as she called it to herself), and which gave her three days of absence from her husband’s bed; which was a trial to her, for if he did not waste love he certainly abounded in passion.

  She searched the whole palace three times over for the lock the key might fit. She did not ask Olu-olurin where it was; this was the closest thing to her own she had, and she treasured the careful hunt to assuage her curiosity. The periods of silence did nothing to reduce her curiosity, which seemed to burn clearer and stronger in her as the days passed. Olu-olurin watched her come and go with a smile on his face that was not a human smile, but she had already begun to learn what she might lose in her passage to divinity, and she did not question or fear him for the predatory glint to his expression.

  She feared very little, did Sardeet-savarel.

  Three

  Pali and Arzu took the road of the dead into the mountains.

  The tribesmen of the Middle Desert—rarely those of the cities, who were afraid of the nomads, and built tombs on the eastern roads out of their habitations instead of coming this far into the desert—brought their dead to this path, which led towards the only pass through the mountains to the holy desert. Those who died well were built tombs; those who died in sin were left to be made clean by the desert scavengers. Some tombs were mere cairns of rocks, others more elaborate dressed-stone monuments. All of them with open doors, that the spirits might come and go as they pleased. All the skeletons with white threads knotted about them, that their bodies might not.

  The road went due east, lined with bones. Their horses stepped along smoothly through three days of the dead, until suddenly they reached the Gate of the Mountains, and the first of the guardians of the way.

  This was a sphinx, tawny as a lioness, her eyes milky blind, her talons brown with old blood. The bones about her feet had no look of rest; they were scattered.

  Their horses were fearful but superbly trained, and Arzu’s white mare took comfort from the dapple-grey’s calm interest. The sisters rode at a slow walk up to the sphinx, who sat directly in the way. Wings arched up and blocked the pass from sight as well as passage; the feathers were tawny and gold and brown as a desert partridge.

  Pali and Arzu looked to each other, and then Arzu dismounted and went to bow before the sphinx, which was smiling.

  “Mother of gods,” said Arzu, “we are two sisters seeking our sister, and we beg that we may pass you by.”

  The sphinx was very still, except that tip of her lion’s tail flicked beside her. Then she said, “Daughters of the middle desert, this is a gate for the gods and the dead.”

  Arzu bowed again, and drew forth a long scarlet thread, and a white one, and one of gold, and while the blind sphinx seemed to watch, she knotted them together, hands outstretched before her, her long embroidered robes shushing as she moved.

  “Mother of gods,” said she, when the threads had formed an intricate circlet, the three strands tightly knotted together; to Pali’s eyes it looked something like the message Arzu had sent her and something like the bridal crown and something like the glinting white strands used to bind the dead they had passed. Arzu held up the circlet. “Mother of gods, which knot is that which joins these three threads?”

  The sphinx bent her head down. Her breath puffed across them,
warm as a summer wind and meaty. The horses moved restlessly, and Arzu’s white pulled hard against the reins Pali held in her hand.

  “Daughters of the desert,” she said, “you may pass.”

  And she lifted up one wing, so that behind the golden body they saw the golden desert. Pali dismounted and made her warrior’s bow to the sphinx, and then she and Arzu walked through the narrows between the sphinx and the stone, and the horses trembled along behind them.

  ***

  Sardeet had asked and been answered five more questions, and in the silence of the third day of these Olu-olurin came to her in the evening, and said: “New life has quickened within you. Good.”

  And he bade her drink from the flask of divine tears she had brought into the desert with her. She could only swallow the tiniest mouthful; it was fire all the way down.

  “Each day,” he said to her, “you will drink again, that our child will be born free of mortal impurity.”

  ***

  At camp that evening Pali took the circlet of knots and asked what the answer was.

  “We are human beings,” Arzu said. She touched the scarlet thread. “Made of flesh and blood, mortal, animal.” She touched the golden thread. “Made of spirit, soul, fire from the flame at the heart of the world, immortal.” And she touched the white thread, which bound the other two together. “And, mystery of mysteries to the gods who come of nature, we can take the mortal with us into immortality, by our art, by our will, by our love.”

  ***

  Sardeet had thought the tears would become easier to swallow over time: but although she could feel her body changing over the days that followed, the pain grew no less. Each morning after her bath she stood before the great mirror while her attendant djinni robed her, and stared at the fire kindled in her belly.

  Olu-olurin was more attentive than before, and fed her delicacies with his own hands. Strange foods, she knew, and some things designed to give gifts to this half-divine child. He sent his servant winds out into the desert to bring back treasures: something like sugar, except for the way that it continued to sparkle in her blood; something like slaurigh, except that when she drank it she felt drowsy with power running through her veins to the throbbing being taking form in her womb.

  She was not sick, as she had seen older cousins be sick with their pregnancies. She found her passions pouring into the fire; she could not think of it as a child, not when she stood each morning before the great mirror and saw it glowing like a burgeoning sun.

  ***

  The pass through the mountains was straight, and far ahead they could see the golden desert, but before they reached there they came to the mouth of a cave.

  The road passed directly in. Far on the other side, like a window—both had seen windows in the mountain fastnesses of their orders—they could see the sand golden in the morning.

  They could also see that the road did not go straight across, but steeply down, and that there was a steep uphill on the other side leading to the sun.

  “Twelve days it took the king of the walled city to cross,” said Pali, looking down it.

  “We cannot take the horses,” said Arzu.

  She and Pali looked at one another. Their horses were the finest in the land, save their mother’s; and it was said their tribe loved their horses more than life itself. “More than life, but less than our sister,” said Pali, as she unsaddled her dapple-grey, and was grateful for the veils that hid her tears.

  Arzu rearranged her bundles: a carpet, a store of skeins, the ivory dagger, the jade stone with the hole in it, and some food. Pali bore nothing but the knotted message, the blue scarf, the three stones her sister had given her, and under her veils the golden comb.

  They bid their horses return to the sphinx—either passage to grazing or a quick death would be their lot—and then, with Arzu taking Pali’s left hand, they entered the darkness of the depths of the mountains.

  ***

  As the fire within her grew, Sardeet began to see the invisible.

  She asked her husband what he was giving her one day, when for three days he had fed her something that looked like pistachios and tasted like heaven, and which left her drowsy and happy. The drowsiness was not new; she had taken to rising for her bath and breaking her fast, and then lying dreamily on her cushioned couch until the djinn carried her to her husband’s throne-room, where he fed her and spoke spells over her womb.

  He was exceptionally attentive to her body, refusing to let her walk if she had the merest hint of a yawn, pressing more djinn into service. She forgot sometimes whether she was in a passage of silence or of speech, for the fire seemed to be pulling her words into it, her thoughts, her emotions, her memories. Her curiosity was swallowed in the sheer momentousness of bearing a god.

  He turned to her with surprise, as if he’d forgotten she could speak, and smiling, said, “They are pistachios.”

  They did not taste like pistachios, she thought. They tasted … different. More real. More themselves.

  It was in the silence after that meal she saw the first woman.

  ***

  The road down into the dark was smooth and wide, as befit the road for the dead, Pali thought; the gods would fly above the pit. She and Arzu walked down, not speaking. Arzu was agonizingly tense, and Pali wanted to tell her to calm down, but she knew her sister did not have the benefit of three years training with the Warriors of the Mountain, and she did not want to alert the guardians of the dark to their presence.

  Still, drawn by living breath, they came.

  ***

  From some dim custom from her human life, not yet swallowed by the fire within her, Sardeet remembered the desire for fresh air. She struggled her way up to the tower. The djinn were forbidden the heights, and the silver wind did not leave her rooms, so Sardeet went up the last stairs alone and on foot.

  At the top of the stairs, crouched in the corner of last turn, huddled a woman.

  Sardeet stopped. The fire within her shifted, and she felt something else move in her that she could not name.

  It was a day of her silence. Sardeet could not speak, could not make so much as a whimper or a moan of pleasure, could not laugh or snort or click her teeth. Even her bare feet were silent on the blue glass.

  The woman sat with her knees drawn up and her face down. Her black hair spilled loose across her body, four feet or more in length, far longer than Sardeet’s unbound. She wore loose green trousers and a long green tunic, of silk figured all over with sinuous embroidery in darker greens. Sardeet stood before her at the top of the stairs, panting soundlessly, the fire in her belly throbbing counterpoint to her heartbeat.

  At last the woman looked up. Her skin was lighter than Sardeet’s, more bronze than copper, and her eyes slanted and almond-shaped. She was as beautiful, and in her black eyes Sardeet saw a light that she could almost put a name to, and tears of a grief that reached out and clenched around her heart.

  For the first time since she had first eaten Olu-olurin’s food she felt something with her whole heart.

  The fire in her leaped up and then twisted away from the grief, as if it was anathema to the god growing within her, and Sardeet spasmed into a silent cry and collapsed on the stairs.

  When at last she could look up the woman was gone.

  ***

  At first it was just the clicking.

  Pali and Arzu had walked hand in hand along what did not feel like a slope, but a straight road; they could see the golden circle of light far ahead of them but it illuminated nothing, merely blinded them.

  From the sides and behind came the tik-tik-tik of many chitinous feet. Arzu squeezed Pali’s hand very tightly. In her left hand she was readying the circlet she had knotted for the sphinx, and below her breath she murmured some of the words of power she had learned in the long nights at the monastery.

  Pali drew from inside her robes the piece of gold pyrite. It was about the size of her fist, and had several pointed crystal extrusions. She drew out the
sash and gave it to Arzu, who pried her fingers loose from her sister’s. Murmuring prayers Arzu knotted one end about Pali’s wrist and the other about her own, so that when they released each other’s hands they had about four feet between them.

  There were, so it was said in the stories, two scorpion-men for each day of the journey below.

  ***

  Sardeet did not ask Olu-olurin about the woman. She asked instead about the pistachios.

  “They are ordinary,” he said in aggravation, with an expression that said her interruption was decidedly unwelcome. As her belly grew rounder he had stopped paying much attention to her head. Now she had to feed herself from the plates he brought, while he knelt beside her naked body and drew designs on her skin with paints and other substances. She was growing less hungry for food by the day, but the pistachios were still something she could taste.

  But she had asked where exactly they came from, and he was obliged to tell her, so after he had finished muttering an incantation over her—it felt like settling into the bath of a morning, except for being fire—everything he did now was fire, accompanied by clouds of sacred incense—she waited patiently, eating the entire vast bowl of pistachios, until he said, “Fine! They come from Oclaresh! Are you satisfied?”

  And, of course, she was silent. He smiled at her with an almost-human satisfaction in her silence, and bent back to his incantations over the god in her womb.