The Shattered Goddess (19 page)

He awoke in a cold sweat, in the light of the trees.

It was early morning. The leaves had begun to glow a pale green, drifting above him like shining moths.

The voice of the Powers came to him again.

She is risen.

* * * *

“Did you know,” the girl-child told him, “that we are not the original inhabitants of
the Earth? There’s an old story, and I’m not sure if I really believe it, that some god went mad long ago, and destroyed all life. He wiped the world blank as a clean slate. But when a new god came into being—or perhaps it was a goddess; I think it was—the memories of mankind still lingered like echoes of shouting in a cave, and our ancestors were created in the likeness of those who had gone before,
but without their souls, so we can only struggle all our lives and throughout all our history to fill the roles laid down by that other human race, like actors rehearsing parts in a play, without ever really understanding the design or purpose overall. Like I said, I don’t really believe this. It’s too depressing. But it does explain some things.”

* * * *

Ginna and Amaedig lay naked
by the shore of a rippling brook, in the light of the trees. In the light of the trees the white water seemed a pale green. Their bodies were a soft, greenish yellow.

They held each other and knew each other as men and women have ever since there were men and women, filling roles laid down by their predecessors or not. And when the lovemaking was over, they rested side by side.

He
had not known such peace since...

The leaves on the ground and the branches above rustled with the passing of spirits. Ginna laughed inwardly. If indeed the Powers were watching, he hoped to make them sick with envy, if indeed they were prone to such fleshy failings.

He was glad just then to be solid, material, made of living flesh, to be human. He never wanted to be anything else.
He turned to look at Amaedig and was silent for a long time, watching her breasts gently rise and fall with her breathing. Lying thus, she was beautiful or nearly so. In his eyes she was special, set apart from all others. Her shoulders were in a slight shrug all the time. It did not matter. Her name, meaning “cast aside,” was a malicious cruelty in itself, while at the same time a record of her
life, and his, as both had been cast aside to drift in the wild current of the world and come at last to rest on this pleasant shore.

Finally she turned on her side and faced him.

“Are you asleep or what?”

“Just thinking. I don’t want to leave this place, ever.”

“But we can’t stay here. You know that.”

“I know that but maybe if we live just for each minute as it passes,
and never try for more than the next minute as it comes, maybe there will be enough of them for us. I know that all I ever really wanted out of life was to be ordinary and unexceptional and live like everybody else. To be a part of the world rather than a stranger wandering through it I want to love you, and travel as we did with the caravan, and tell people stories of what we’ve seen and sing
songs for them, and earn our keep that way. Is that too much to ask?”

“Who are you asking?’

“I don’t know. I mean... it’s not like that.”

“The world you want to travel through isn’t there anymore.”

“Then why can’t we stay here? What have we got to go back for? Nothing will change here. If someone is really destined to deal with Kaemen, let it be someone else.”

She
did not answer. Then he was aware she was weeping.

“Hold me close,” she said. “I’m afraid that something will happen to force us away from here. I know it. We can’t run any more. There’s no place left to go.”

After a while they made love again. Again they lay in silence. He folded his hands together and made a globe of light, which drifted up a ways, then dropped down onto his chest
and remained there. He contemplated it as it rolled with his breathing.

He picked it up and handed it to Amaedig. As soon as she touched it, it burst.

* * * *

He found the lady sitting atop a grassy knoll in the height of the afternoon, surrounded by the flickering Powers. Above her the trees thinned out. Patches of grey emptiness were visible beyond them.

He climbed up
beside her and sat down. Suddenly he found himself without words.

“You want me to send them away so they don’t overhear,” she said, indicating the Powers.

“Yes.”

“But that isn’t what you’ve come to tell me.”

“No.”

“There’s no need to send them away. For the most part they have no memories as we do. Sometimes they can recall an event which happened five hundred years
ago, but the day-by-day passing of time doesn’t mean much to them.”

“Still, can’t you—?”

“All right, if it will make you more at ease.” She raised a hand and spoke a word in a tongue he had never heard before, and at once they were gone, quick as flames snuffed out “Now, as you were saying.”

“I have been thinking about the things you’ve told me, and what other people have told
me. About my whole life. I don’t know who my parents were. I don’t think I ever
had
parents. I’m not like other people.”

“No,” she said, “you are not. I know this to be so. Don’t ask me how just yet. Go on with what you wish to say. Get it all out or you’ll burst.”

“I’m not stupid. I can see the obvious. I’m the one who is supposed to put an end to Kaemen, right? Like some hero in
an old epic.”

She smiled and nodded. “The poets tend to exaggerate, but in essence, yes.”

“But what can I do, kick him? He has all the power, all the magic. The only thing different about me is I make balls of light with my hands. I couldn’t kill a fly with one.”

“In time you will find out what you can do, and do it I am confident of that Meanwhile you will conduct yourself with
dignity and courage, as befits a hero. You are one, you know.”

“No!”
He slammed his fist into his palm and at once felt it was a silly gesture. He made a glowing sphere, let it drift, then caught it. “I won’t fight him,’ he said. “I won’t do it. I’ll stay here forever. Let someone else be the hero. If this is an epic, tell the author I resign. I never asked to be a part of it.”

She
grabbed him by the shoulders and jerked him toward her. The sphere rolled out of his lap and broke against the ground. She spoke to him in a way she never had before, firmly, impatiently, like a sergeant of the palace guard giving orders.

“You didn’t ask to be born, did you? Do you ask for your every breath, for the blood that your heart pumps?”

“No, the world takes care of these things,
without ever consulting you.”

“That’s just what Amaedig—”

“If she said that, she was right. Entirely right. Now be still and listen, and I will tell you the story of yourself as I observed it through my fountain before it was clouded. I saw the darkness come into being, and I saw how you were a part of it.”

“I—?”

“Shut up and listen!”

She told him tersely, without
any mercy, sparing no feelings, the complete tale of his life, how he had come into being, how the witch lay beneath the ground for a day and a night before the demon came to her, how their bargain was fulfilled, and how the demon created him from the flotsam at the bank of the river, giving him the semblance of flesh and the eyes of his mother, through which Kaemen had watched his movements all
these years.

He understood everything now, how the demon had climbed up the side of a tower in the dead of night to place him in the cradle, so the witch could be near enough to the one she wanted to possess. Somehow the hag’s malice had grown beyond all bounds, until even she could not comprehend the vastness of it. She was a pawn of limitless forces. Her actions were as inevitable and
impersonal as the great storms and earthquakes. And he understood one final thing: Kaemen was as innocent as he had been before the evil possessed him. His deeds were not his own. Had the witch not poured into him, but remained in Ginna, their roles might have been reversed.

His face was pale. He was shaking with fear when he broke in, “Am I really human then, and not a clump of weeds and
mud? Do I have a soul?”

The lady’s grimness softened a little as she said, “Yes, I think you do, and it is a good soul. What is a soul but a kind of motion, like ripples on a pool when a stone is cast in? Anything which lives, which moves through the years has a soul, and have you not met this requirement?”

“But why me? Why does all this have to involve me?”

“As I said, you were
never consulted. You must understand you are not living in an epic. There is no author. It is more like an avalanche or a tide, a thing of blind nature. Long, long ago, many cycles before any of those we call the ancients were living, before those nearly erased ruins which mar our deserts were built, so far into the past you cannot begin to imagine it, a man who was counted as wise in his era
said
forces must balance
. Another, about the same time, said,
for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction.
So it has always been. When the world is tilted askew, it straightens up and comes into a new equilibrium. The universe generates the means. Against the overwhelming darkness, it has generated a source of light, and you’re it. It is not even destiny. You are not asked to accept
it. It merely is. Why you? When a barrel springs a leak, does the hole ask, “Why me, barrel? Why me, water?” No, before the leak there was no hole. It came into existence for that purpose. You are that hole, my friend, and through you the divine leaks into the world once again.”

Throughout all his adventures, he had never known more terror than at this instant. Her every word was sentence
and execution. He realized now that he could never have anything he wanted, never wander across the world with Amaedig at his side, never go back to Ai Hanlo and live in quiet obscurity among the dusty corridors.

“But what if I stay here? What if I don’t do anything?”

“Somehow you will do something. Even here our skies are beginning to darken. Either this place will also be wholly
dark, or it will be cast off from the world, forever beyond the reach of mankind or of powers, or anything. But even then, light will come to counterbalance the darkness. There is no running away. You see, my friend, and I hope I can call you my friend, you say you are smart and can grasp the obvious, the obvious thing is that from you the next god will come. Perhaps you will be like my daughter and
speak with the thunder. Perhaps it will come about in some other way. You could sire a god, or one could even rise up out of your death. Yes, it could be that. I shall not hide anything from you. I have conversed with many spirits and studied much during my long years, and I think I know something about how these things work. When the Goddess knew she was dying, she set on me the task of overseeing
the transition into the new age. Or she was moved to do so by the forces that made her what she was. So I have watched and waited until you were able to come to me. That is my whole purpose. When there is no deity and all is chaos, the natural balance creates another one. I am merely part of the process.”

He leapt to his feet and, without a word, ran away from the knoll. After a while his
voice broke forth in shrieks and sobs. The Powers were all around him as he crashed through the underbrush, into the forest. He ran, stumbled, fell, got up and ran again. Distances and directions were hopelessly confused. His cries echoed back from the spaces between the trees, from all sides at once. He wasn’t running from anywhere to anywhere. It was just a thing his body did. His mind was a total
blank. It was too painful to think. He just wanted to become something which ran like the wind, like one of the Bright Powers, without memory, without will or consciousness. The forest was an endless green ocean. He wanted to swim to the very bottom, then breathe deeply, and lie there quietly forever. His screams were like flames. He screamed all the more, to be reduced to a fine ash, that he
might drift like a cloud. He had no feeling, no sense of actually running. Branches smashed into his face. Blood ran from his nose. His knees banged on stone and earth and fallen logs every time he stumbled, but all these were sensations of the body, remote, abstract, something to flee from.

The Powers were all around him, flashing, chattering. He felt light in the head. His chest heaved
and his lungs were burning. He was floating up out of his body and his legs turned to powder and sank down... down...

Darkness rose to receive him, but paused a little ways off.

There was a voice calling his name.

The lady came to him in her old age, in the faint light of the evening, and she found him lying on the ground, gasping hoarse, painful breaths, unable to scream any
longer. She stood over him as he rolled and muttered like one in a deep fever. Then she crouched down, put her arms around him, and helped him to sit up.

“It is good to be so human,” she said. “You’re not some lifeless thing of weeds. I think that somehow you will still be yourself even after you have done what you must do.”

“What I... must.. .”

“You must restore the balance
of light and darkness. That is all I can say.”

At last he was able to think of someone other than himself. It was a new terror to him that he might have drawn Amaedig into this, that his love-making might have touched her too deeply with his own fate.

“Amaedig. How is she?”

“Why, she is well.”

“If I am such a god, can I perform a miracle?”

“What sort of miracle?”

“I want to do something for Amaedig. Even if I had no choice,
she
did, and she chose to come and help me. So I want to help her if I can.”

“I don’t know that she had any choice,” said the Mother of the Goddess. “It was her role to keep you alive and guide you until you reached me.”

“You mean it wasn’t predetermined that I would? You mean I could have died?” he said bitterly.

“I don’t know. Perhaps. Maybe if you had been smothered in the cradle, the movement of forces would have settled on another.”