by Clive Barker
Of all the mornings to be plagued with such distraction! The beguilements of the flesh had no place in the work ahead of him. They'd brought the last Reconciliation to tragedy, and he would not allow them to lead him from his sanctified path by a single step. He looked down at his groin, disgusted with himself.
“Cut it off,” Little Ease advised.
If he could have done the deed without making an invalid of himself, he'd have done so there and then, and gladly. He had nothing but contempt for what rose between his legs. It was a hotheaded idiot, and he wanted rid of it.
“I can control it,” he replied.
“Famous last words,” the creature said.
A blackbird had come into the tree and was singing blithely there. He looked its way and beyond, up through the branches into the burnished blue sky. His thoughts abstracted as he studied it, and by the time he heard Clem coming up the stairs with food and drink the spasm of carnality had passed, and he greeted his angels with a cooling brow.
“So now we wait,” he told Clem.
“What for?”
“For Jude to come back.”
“And if she doesn't?”
“She will,” Gentle replied. “This is where she was born. It's her home, even if she wishes it weren't. She'll have to make her way back here eventually. And if she's conspired against us, Clem—if she's working with the enemy—then I swear I'll draw a circle right here”—he pointed to the boards—“and Til unmake her so well it'll be as though she never drew breath.”
19
The law-defying waters were compassionate. Though they carried Jude through the palace at considerable speed, roaming through corridors their passage had already stripped of tapestries and furnishings, they treated their cargo with care. She wasn't thrown against the walls or the pillars, but was borne up on a ship of surf that neither faltered nor foundered but hurried, remotely helmed, to its destination. That place could scarcely be in doubt. The mystery at the heart of the Autarch's maze had always been the Pivot Tower, and though she'd witnessed the beginning of the tower's undoing, it was still, surely, her place of debarkation. Prayers and petitions had gone there for an age, attracted by the Pivot's authority. Whatever force had replaced it, calling these waters, it had set its throne on the rubble of the fallen lord.
And now she had proof of that, as the waters carried her out of the naked corridors and into the still severer environs of the tower, slowing to deliver her into a pool so thick with detritus it was almost solid. Out of this wreckage rose a staircase, and she hauled herself from the debris and lay on the lower steps, giddy but exhilarated. The waters continued to surge around the staircase like an eager spring tide, and their clear desire to be up the flight was contagious. She got to her feet, after a little time, and proceeded to climb.
Although there were no lights burning at the top, there was plenty of illumination spilling down the stairs to meet her, and like the light at the springing places it was prismatic, suggesting there were more waters ahead that had come into the palace via other routes. Before she was even halfway up the flight, two women appeared and stared down at her. Both were dressed in simple off—white shifts, the fatter of the pair, a woman of gargantuan proportions, unbuttoned to bare her breasts to the baby she was nursing. She looked almost as infantile as her charge, her hair wispy, her face, like her breasts, heavy and sugar—almond pink. The woman beside her was older and slimmer, her skin substantially darker than that of her companion, her gray hair braided and combed out to her shoulders like a cowl. She wore gloves, and glasses, and regarded Jude with almost professorial detachment.
“Another soul saved from the flood,” she said.
Jude had stopped climbing. Though neither woman had made any sign that she was forbidden entry, she wanted to come into this miraculous place as a guest, not a trespasser.
“Am I welcome?”
“Of course,” said the mother. “Have you come to meet the Goddesses?”
“Yes.”
“Are you from the Bastion, then?”
Before Jude could reply, her companion supplied the answer. “Of course not! Look at her!”
“But the waters brought her.”
“The waters'll bring any woman who dares. They brought us, didn't they?”
“Are there many others?” Jude asked.
“Hundreds,” came the reply. “Maybe thousands by now.”
Jude wasn't surprised. If someone like herself, a stranger in the Dominions, had come to suspect that the Goddesses were still extant, how much more hopeful must the women who lived here have been, living with the legends of Tishalulle and Jokalaylau.
When Jude reached the top of the stairs, the bespectacled woman introduced herself.
“I'm Lotti Yap.”
“I'm Judith.”
“We're pleased to see you, Judith,” the other woman said. “I'm Paramarola. And this fellow”—she looked down at the baby—“is Billo.”
“Yours?” Jude asked.
“Now where would I have found a man to give me the likes of this?” Paramarola said.
“We've been in the Annex for nine years,” Lotti Yap explained. “Guests of the Autarch.”
“May his thorn rot and his berries wither,” Paramarola added.
“And where have you come from?” Lotti asked.
“The Fifth,” Jude said.
She was not fully attending to the women now, however. Her interest had been claimed by a window that lay across the puddle—strewn corridor behind them: or, rather, by the vista visible through it. She went to the sill, both awed and astonished, and gazed out at an extraordinary spectacle. The flood had cleared a circle half a mile wide or more in the center of the palace, sweeping walls and pillars and roofs away and drowning the rubble. All that was left, rising from the waters, were islands of rock where the taller towers had stood, and here and there a corner of one of the palace's vast amphitheaters, preserved as if to mock the overweening pretensions of its architect. Even these fragments would not stand for much longer, she suspected. The waters circled this immense basin without violence, but their sheer weight would soon bring these last remnants of Sartori's masterwork down.
At the center of this small sea was an island larger than the rest, its lower shores made up of the half-demolished chambers that had clustered around the Pivot Tower, its rocks the rubble of that tower's upper half, mingled with vast pieces of its tenant, and its height the remains of the tower itself, a ragged but glittering pyramid of rubble in which a white fire seemed to be burning. Looking at the transformation these waters had wrought, eroding in a matter of days, perhaps hours, what the Autarch had taken decades to devise and build, Jude wondered that she'd reached this place intact. The power she'd first encountered on the lower slopes as an innocent, if willful, brook was here revealed as an awesome force for change.
“Were you here when this happened?” she asked Lotti Yap.
“We saw only the end of it,” she replied. “But it was quite a sight, let me tell you. Seeing the towers fall—”
“We were afraid for our lives,” Paramarola said.
“Speak for yourself,” Lotti replied. “The waters didn't set us free just to drown us. We were prisoners in the Annex, you see. Then the floor cracked open, and the waters just bubbled up and washed the walls away.”
“We knew the Goddesses would come, didn't we?” Paramarola said. “We always had faith in that.”
“So you never believed they were dead?”
“Of course not. Buried alive, maybe. Sleeping. Even lunatic. But never dead.”
“What she says is right,” Lotti observed. “We knew this day would come.”
“Unfortunately, it may be a short victory,” Jude said.
“Why do you say that?” Lotti replied. “The Autarch's gone.”
“Yes, but his Father hasn't.”
“His Father?” said Paramarola. “I thought he was a bastard.”
“Who's his father then?” said Lotti.
>
“Hapexamendios.''
Paramarola laughed at this, but Lotti Yap nudged in her well-padded ribs.
“It's not a joke, Rola.'1
“It has to be,” the other protested.
“Do you see the woman laughing?” Then, to Jude: “Do you have any evidence for this?”
“No, I don't.”
“Then where'd you get such an idea?”
Jude had guessed it would be difficult to persuade people of Sartori's origins, but she'd optimistically supposed that when the moment came she'd be possessed by a sudden lucidity. Instead she felt a rage of frustration. If she was obliged to unravel the whole sorry history of her involvement with the Autarch Sartori to every soul who stood between her and the Goddesses, the worst would be upon them all before she was halfway there. Then, inspiration.
“The Pivot's the proof,” she said.
“How so?” said Lotti, who was now studying this woman the flood had brought to their feet with fresh intensity.
“He could never have moved the Pivot without his Father's collaboration.”
“But the Pivot doesn't belong to the Unbeheld,” Paramorola said. “It never did.”
Jude looked confounded.
“What Rola says is true,” Lotti told her. “He may have used it to control a few weak men. But the Pivot was never His.”
“Whose then?”
“Uma Umagammagi was in it.”
“And who's that?”
“The sister of Tishalulle” and Jokalaylau. Half-sister of the daughters of the Delta.”
“There was a Goddess in the Pivot?”
“Yes.”
“And the Autarch didn't know it?”
“That's right. She hid Herself there to escape Hapexamendios when He passed through the Imajica. Jokalaylau went into the snow and was lost there. Tishalulle—”
"—in the Cradle of Chzercemit,” Jude said.
“Yes indeed,” said Lotti, plainly impressed.
“And Uma Umagammagi hid Herself in solid rock,” Paramarola went on, telling the tale as though to a child, “thinking He'd pass over the place not seeing Her. But He chose the Pivot as the center of the Imajica and laid His power upon it, sealing Her in.”
This was surely the ultimate irony, Jude thought. The architect of Yzordderrex had built his fortress, indeed his entire empire, around an imprisoned Goddess. Nor was the parallel with Celestine lost on her. It seemed Roxborough had been unwittingly working in a grim tradition when he'd sealed Celestine up beneath his house.
“Where are the Goddesses now?” Jude asked Lotti.
“On the island. We'll all be allowed into their presence in time, and we'll be blessed by them. But it'll take days.”
“I don't have days,” Jude said. “How do I get to the island?”
“You'll be called when your time comes.”
“That has to be now,11 Jude said, “or it'll be never.” She looked left and right along the passageway. “Thank you for the education,” she said. “Maybe I'll see you again.”
Choosing right over left she made to leave, but Lotti took hold of her sleeve.
“You don't understand, Judith,” she said. “The Goddesses have come to make us safe. Nothing can harm us here. Not even the Unbeheld."“I hope that's true,” Jude said. “To the bottom of my heart, I hope that's true. But I have to warn them, in case it isn't.”
“Then we'd better come with you,” Lotti said, “You'll never find your way otherwise.”
“Wait,” Paramarola said. “Should we be doing this? She may be dangerous.”
“Aren't we all?” Lotti replied. “That's why they locked us away in the first place, remember?”
If the atmosphere of the streets outside the palace had suggested some post—apocalyptic carnival—the waters dancing, the children laughing, the air pavonine—then that sense was a hundred times stronger in the passageways around the rim of the flood-scoured basin. There were children here too, their laughter more musical than ever. None was over five or so, but there were both boys and girls in the throng. They turned the corridors into playgrounds, their din echoing off walls that had not heard such joy since they'd been raised. There was also water, of course. Every inch of ground was blessed by a puddle, a rivulet, or a stream, every arch had a liquid curtain cascading from its keystone, every chamber was refreshed by burbling springs and roof-grazing fountains. And in every tinkling trickle there was the same sentience that Jude had felt in the tide that had brought her up here: water as life, filled to the last drop with the purpose of the Goddesses. Overhead, the comet was at its height and sent its straight white beams through any chink it could find, turning the humblest puddle into an oracular pool and plaiting its light into the gush of every spout.
The women in these glittering corridors came in all shapes and sizes. Many, Lotti explained, were like themselves, former prisoners of the Bastion or its dreaded Annex; others had simply found their way up the hill following their instincts and the streams, leaving their husbands, dead or alive, below.
“Are there no men here at all?”
“Only the little ones,” said Lotti.
“They're all little ones,” Paramarola observed.
“There was a captain at the Annex who was a brute,” Lotti said, “and when the waters came he must have been emptying his bladder, because his body floated by our cell with his trousers unbuttoned.”
“And you know, he was still holding on to his manhood,” Paramarola said. “He had the choice between that and swimming—”
"—and instead of letting go, he drowned,” Lotti said.
This entertained Paramarola no end, and she laughed so hard the baby's mouth was dislodged from her teat. Milk spurted in the child's face, which brought a further round of merriment. Jude didn't ask how Paramarola came to be so nourishing when she was neither the mother of the child nor, presumably, pregnant. It was just one of the many enigmas this journey showed her: like the pool that clung to one of the walls, filled to brimming with luminous fish; or the waters that imitated fire, from which some of the women had made crowns; or the immensely long eel she saw carried past, its gaping head on a child's shoulder, its body looped between half a dozen women, back and forth across their shoulders ten times or more. If she'd requested an explanation for any one of these sights she'd have been obliged to inquire about them all, and they'd never have got more than a few yards down the corridor.
The journey brought them, at last, to a place where the waters had carved out a shallow pool at the edge of the main basin, served by several rivulets that climbed through rubble to fill it to brimming, its overflow running into the basin itself. In it and around it were perhaps thirty women and children, some playing, some talking, but most, their clothes shed, waiting silently in the pool, gazing out across the turbulent waters of the basin to Uma Umagammagi's island. Even as Jude and her guides approached the place, a wave broke against the lip of the pool and two women, standing there hand in hand, went with it as it withdrew and were carried away towards the island. There was an eroticism about the scene which in other circumstances Jude would certainly have denied she felt. But here, such priggishness seemed redundant, even ludicrous. She allowed her imagination to wonder what it would be like to sink into the midst of this nakedness, where the only scrap of masculinity was between the legs of a suckling infant; to brush breast to breast, and let her fingers be kissed and her neck be caressed, and kiss and caress in her turn.
“The water in the basin's very deep,” Lotti said at her side. “It goes all the way down into the mountain.”
What had happened to the dead, Jude wondered, whose company Dowd had found so educative? Had the waters sluiced them away, along with the invocations and entreaties that had dropped into that same darkness from beneath the Pivot Tower? Or had they been dissolved into a single soup, the sex of dead men forgiven, the pain of dead women healed, and—all mingled with the prayers—become part of this indefatigable flood? She hoped so. If the powers her
e were to have authority against the Unbeheld, they would have to reclaim every forsaken strength they could. The walls between Kesparates had already been dragged down, and the plashing streams were making a continuum of city and palace. But the past had to be reclaimed as well, and whatever miracles it had boasted—surely there'd been some, even here—preserved. This was more than an abstract desire on Jude's part. She was, after all, one of those miracles, made in the image of the woman who'd ruled here with as much ferocity as her husband.
“Is this the only way of getting to the island?” she asked Lotti.
“There aren't ferries, if that's what you mean.”
“I'd better start swimming, then,” Jude said.
Her clothes were an encumbrance, but she wasn't yet so easy with herself that she could strip off on the rocks and go into the waters naked, so with a brief thanks to Lotti and Paramarola she started to climb down the tumble of blocks that surrounded the pool.
“I hope you're wrong, Judith,” Lotti called after her.
“So do I,” Jude replied. “Believe me, so do I.”
Both this exchange and her ungainly descent drew the puzzled gaze of several of the bathers, but none made any objection to her appearing in their midst. The closer she got to the waters of the basin, the more anxious she became about the crossing, however. It was several years since she'd swum any distance, and she doubted she'd have the strength to resist the currents and eddies if they chose to keep her from her destination. But they wouldn't drown her, surely. They'd borne her all the way up here, after all, sweeping her through the palace unharmed. The only difference between this journey and that (though it was a profound one, to be sure) was the depth of the water.
