Over his shoulder she saw the second woman.
***
The scorpion-men came first from the left, to Arzu the weaver. They soon found they did not like the touch of the knots on their legs, for they felt the triple pull and push of the human paradox as an assault against their very being. They were guardians of the dead, built of the dead, fashioned out of giant insects and men who had fallen into grievous sin long ago when the world was another place.
To have a sudden tug of human mercy, or love, or artistic passion, when all was grim and stable and dark, would, Arzu acknowledged, be quite difficult.
***
The second woman was from the south, dark-skinned and with crinkled hair in elaborate braids. She was taller than Sardeet and thick-limbed and looked for a moment like a panther—Sardeet remembered, with a flash of pain and another silent spasm, her sister Arzu.
Olu-olurin looked up in disgruntlement. “Be still,” he snapped. “I shall have to begin again.”
Sardeet looked at him with wide eyes, trying to feign a passion she no longer felt, and his own glance met hers with an answering desire. She had not realized how much he had become entwined with her, nor did she know that between her human beauty and the divine power growing in her, he could barely contain his eagerness for her. He found her most desirable when silent, especially when she lay in one of his drowsy enchantments.
He was only going to give her the fruit that softened her waking mind, but she looked at him with such invitation that he forgot himself in the instant and began instead to shower her with his own kisses.
In the midst of this he ate some of the fruit from her own mouth, and when he had satisfied himself, he lay back amongst the clutter of their meal and slept.
Sardeet looked for the second woman, to see her gesture: come.
***
Pali, on the other hand, held a piece of iron pyrite the size of her fist, and when she hit the scorpion-men she created light.
***
The woman led her back to her own rooms. Sardeet had not called the djinn to her, instead panted along slowly, feeling drowsy and unwieldy and undeniably curious.
The woman stopped before the mirror. Sardeet, as ever, looked first at the glowing fire within her, and wondered what manner of god it would be, and how it would come forth. She had mostly stopped looking at herself, finding the change in her shape disconcerting. When she did meet her own glance in the mirror she sometimes felt she could see the fire rising up behind her eyes.
Now she looked. The woman beside her had no reflection. Sardeet herself stood there, her face radiantly beautiful (more beautiful than it had been; even she noticed), her eyes heavy-lidded, the designs Olu-olurin had painted on her looking like the intricate knotting of a carpet design. Her skin was coppery though she had been so rarely in the sun, and lit from within like glass.
Sardeet turned her head with difficulty to see the woman pointing impatiently at the mirror. Her face was beyond impatient, was twisted with a grief as strong and dowsing as the woman on the tower stair. Sardeet cried out silently, reaching to touch her, but though the woman stood at her side her hand passed straight through without resistance.
Pain seared through her. She doubled up around her great belly, and the silver wind caught her before she fell. Sardeet had a sudden memory of watching a horse foal with her sisters, and before she drank what the djinni brought to her she uttered a silent prayer in her heart for them.
***
In the absolute dark and silence after the screeching and the sparks and the chitinous horror, while Arzu shuddered and twisted at the end of the sash binding them, like a kite snagged by a falcon, Pali said, “Two.”
***
Incredibly, she grew bigger.
Olu-olurin came now to her rooms, and she did not leave them, could not go more than a few dozen steps without flagging. He fed her again with his own hands, and rubbed ointments over her body, and gave her drinks and sweetmeats and sang incantations, and in her womb the fire burned ever hotter.
When she sat in the bath, the water steamed and bubbled around her.
She could not bear the touch of any cloth for long. She spent her days in the bath on Olu-olurin’s suggestion, the djinn replacing the steam with cold water. She bade them sing when her husband was not there, the strange songs of the djinn that she’d tried to learn at the beginning of her sojourn. In the water, with the scented steam rising about her, the ethereal voices singing of inhuman things, the fire glowing through her skin, she could believe she was transfiguring into a goddess.
***
“Seven.”
***
She had entirely lost track of how long she had been there, how long pregnant, how long she might yet have to bear this uncanny burden. In the mornings when the djinn lifted her from her couch, the silver wind whirling about her, she would go stand before the mirror. Every morning she told herself she would examine the mirror for what the woman had been trying to show her.
***
“Seventeen.”
***
Every morning her glance drifted down and she stood in smiling adoration of the fire within her, until Olu-olurin came. His touch alone of all things was cool, and she welcomed him eagerly.
***
“Twenty-four,” said Pali, as the last scorpion-man fell over with a ringing crash onto the stone, taking her pyrite with it. She shook her hand free of the vibrations and to loosen the tightness that had come with clenching the stone so long.
Arzu whispered, “In the dark. With only a stone.”
Pali said, “I have two more, my sister,” and tucked Arzu’s hand in her arm, and together they walked up the slope to the circle of gold.
Four
One night she woke to see arrayed about her bed six women.
Sardeet had lost track of what were dreams and what waking sensation. In both the fire was growing heavy, and recently—she did not know how recently—it had begun to speak to her. It did not speak in any words she understood, and its voice was neither male nor female, and its rhythm followed a distant beat she could not comprehend. But she had learned something, in her questions and her answers, about the Wind Lords, and she knew that comprehension was not what they required. Only obedience, and desire, and worship.
For the god in her womb, whispering like the softest wind over the sand in her mind, she felt love.
***
When they looked at each other in the sunlight on the other side of the passage, Pali saw that Arzu now had hair entirely silver. Arzu saw that Pali had white spots up her arm, and wondered what lay hidden beneath her veils.
Neither asked the other what she saw. Instead they turned and saw before them the Great Desert of Kaph, stretching in a level golden plain to the horizon where the winds were gathering a sandstorm to meet these intruders.
***
The fire seemed to be drawing everything of hers to feed its insatiable growth. She stroked her belly along the lines of the inscriptions Olu-olurin made, which did not wash off however long she stayed in the bath watching the water boil around her. She woke in the dark sometimes to see him standing over her, murmuring, glowing with his own power. She slept sometimes to have him walk in her dreams, still murmuring, raising passions that were never consummated but instead consumed by the fire.
She woke again in the light, and he was kneeling at her side, his voice unwavering, his attention entirely distant from her.
She smiled at her belly, listening to the inner voice growing stronger and yet lovelier, a counterpoint to Olu-olurin’s chanting. She was drowsy and languidly pleased, lying on the cool glass—she could no longer bear any touch of cloth, anything but the glass, and the water, and his hand. One of the djinn brought her food, but she was no longer hungry, turned her head away. As she lay on her back on the floor her belly rose up before her like a tethered moon.
She blinked, and it was night, and Olu-olurin still knelt beside her, still chanting, and still the fire grew.
He paused, and as her eyes closed again, she said: “What will that achieve?”
And he said, reaching up to stroke her face and breasts with a hand that no longer felt cool: “Power.”
She smiled, and no longer needed any potion or food to drift away to the contemplation of what glory grew in her womb, nor his incantations to open the door to her mind so that the god could learn power over men.
***
Pali saw the crevasse before Arzu stepped in it. When Arzu stopped at her touch, Pali knocked a pebble in. It made no sound as it fell.
“It is only a handswidth across,” Arzu said.
Pali had her eyes closed. “I feel the wind,” she replied; “it is blowing like the wind off the glaciers.”
Arzu looked down at the crack at their feet, and drew out two skeins of thread: one blue as the sky or the scarf binding them, the other yellow as the sand in the distance before them. She chose two threads of the blue and two of the yellow, and braided them in an intricate pattern broken by careful knots. She then tied it very carefully to the jade stone Pali handed her, and laid it across the crevasse.
The jade weighted down the far side. On the nearer side she tied it to an outcropping of the black rock of the mountains. Over the crack, a pace across, stretched a ribbon wide as a finger.
Arzu went first, and Pali behind her, step by step, for seven days.
***
Sardeet woke to see Olu-olurin still kneeling beside her, but no longer chanting. He had lost his human seeming at some point, was now entirely blue, skin, hair, fingernails. Sardeet had not tried to think for a long time, but some old memory of a story stirred in her. The Wind Lords had their ranks, she knew. The highest were invisible. The lowest—
The fire flared, and she shifted position slightly. When she opened her eyes Olu-olurin had disappeared again.
Behind where he’d been in a semi-circle stood the six women, and all stared with horror except for one, the one in green, who looked at Sardeet with compassion and the grief that twisted her heart so.
She blinked, and Olu-olurin was giving her the tiny spoonful of the tears of the god, and as she swallowed the only food that had passed her lips for weeks, he smiled at her with that inhuman smile and said, “Soon.”
***
At the edge of the holy desert, Pali and Arzu laid out their bait.
“It is said,” said Arzu, “that the great eagles know the speech of men.”
“Yes,” said Pali, and across the carpet that Arzu had spread on the sand before them, she placed the gypsum rose. Arzu laid down the bridal circlet. After a moment, Pali added the message knotting, with its emblem of blood calls to blood in need, and Arzu placed the weeping statuette upon it. She and Arzu were still bound together by the blue scarf.
“It is said also,” said Arzu, “that they know curiosity.”
“Yes,” said Pali, and moved the stone over slightly so it sat upon a black background.
“It is said also—”
“Hush,” said Pali, who had glanced upwards, “the eagle comes.”
***
Sardeet woke in a dream of an oasis to find that the six women were trying to touch her.
They could not touch her, of course; they were invisible, intangible, of the spirit world. Yet she was passing more and more into that world herself, and though some time ago she had felt nothing when she moved her hand through one of the women’s forms, now their efforts felt like cool water.
She smiled, and groaned silently, though she did not remember what question she had asked her husband, what answer she had received. Perhaps it was still the same day since she had asked what he was working with his incantations.
The women would not leave her alone. Each time she started to slide away from consciousness, into the half-dreams where the fire had swallowed her entirely until she became a creature of the air like a free djinn of the holy desert, or the other half-dreams where she sat cradling a child, both of them entirely human, except that his eyes were fire, they touched her.
Finally she pushed herself up to her feet. She could not remember the last time she had stood. She swayed a little with dizziness, The god in her womb sang to her of beauty. She stumbled towards the mirror, drunk on the power within her, ready to look at her god from that other reflection and adore.
The women stood in front of the mirror. Sardeet tried to push them away, but though each brush of her hand through their bodies made them shudder, they crowded ever closer. She stumbled a step forward, looking for the mirror, pushing dumbly against the thickest cluster of ghosts. She couldn’t make a sound, not even groan in exasperation. She could only push against what felt like thick cool air, until she realized she did not stand before the mirror, but had been led to its back.
***
The eagle was huge: certainly big enough to carry them, one in each talon. It landed on the sand before them, and stood looking, with first one eye and then the other. Pali saw herself reflected, and wondered what the eagle thought of the human women before him.
Arzu knelt as she had for the sphinx. “Lord of eagles,” she said, “we are two sisters seeking our sister, and we beg you to help us.”
The eagle had a very yellow beak; its nostrils were lined in orange. Its feathers were a rich bronze, catching gold in the sunlight. Arzu yearned to weave a carpet showing its magnificence. Pali wondered what it ate.
“Why?” said the eagle. “I have my own kindred.”
***
The back of the mirror was not silver, as were the hand-sized mirrors Sardeet had seen in the world-without. It was made of a sleek grey stone, which even unpolished caught reflections of the light in her eyes and her womb.
Sardeet was not looking for her reflection, however. The women were still touching her, smothering her, pushing down the fire that had nearly consumed her. She could think clearly, at least a little.
In the middle of the stone was a keyhole.
***
Arzu said, “These are our offerings to you, lord of eagles.”
“Little enough,” said the eagle, and clenched one claw after another in the sand. “What blood is it that gives birth to a god? What marriage that is consummated in fire? What little desert stone that compares with a palace all of glass?”
***
He had not told her the punishment for opening that door.
***
“There is injustice here,” said Pali, “and we come to avenge it.”
***
The keys were on the other side of the room, beside the bed she had not slept in for so long she’d half-forgotten its purpose. Yet when she knelt to pick up the keys she rested her hands on a cushion a while before she could push herself up, and was immediately lost again in the fire.
In her dreams, she asked Olu-olurin what god her child would be, and he laughed and said: “Mine.”
***
“I am listening,” said the eagle, formally.
***
She woke with a voice calling her name fading away in her ears, running out of her body in a huge rush of loss. She opened her eyes to see nothing but the spirit women crowding her, plucking at her hair, her skin, her hands, all to waken her. They were nearly solid today.
“My name,” she said aloud, so she must not have asked Olu-olurin about the god. “Where is my name?”
The women moved in greater urgency, the panic in their movements and expressions strong enough to reach through the fire. Sardeet grabbed the keys and was at first unable to push herself up. Finally she pushed herself on her rear to a glass pillar, which she was able to use to lever herself up. As she pulled the glass groaned.
All the palace seemed to ring in sympathy. Sardeet panted loudly and then, with two spirit women under her arms as if trying to keep her upright, and the others dashing before her and the front of the mirror, she went to the back and the stone door with the keyhole for the golden key.
Her tears running down her face into her lips tasted like the go
d’s.
***
“It is no injustice for the Wind Lords to take as a bride or a bridegroom one on their vision quest,” said Arzu. “This is why they go arrayed in their wedding-clothes, in case they prove worthy. For their beauty, they are given the life immortal.”
“So it is,” said the eagle.
***
The key turned easily, and opened a third door to Olu-olurin’s workroom.
***
“Our sister,” said Pali, “weeps. We have come to right that wrong.”
The Bride of the Blue Wind Page 3
