Jay Lake - Endurance

I settled into a comfortable tailor’s seat. The belled silk gathered around my thighs and flowed to the floor at my back. In this place I did not even have my short knives, but Endurance was not the Lily Goddess. My offerings to him were drawn neither from strength nor violence.

This god I had seen in direct manifestation, the day we had brought down Choybalsan and poor Federo. I knew Endurance. He had risen unbidden from my own memories to take form in a numinous moment of theogeny.

Closing my eyes, I leaned forward until the top of my head rested against the nose of the ox. I let the smell of incense and feet-and this close to the fane, rotting fruit-wash around me.

The heat came first. Those halcyon days of my earliest youth, when the sunlight was a hammer to smash flat anyone’s ambitions. I felt it pass through me like fire through a hay barn.

I strained for the smells that went with that heat. Scorched air. The dank water of the rice paddies. Clay banks at the edges. Plantains and bougainvillea. Ox dung. My father’s musky sweat.

When I found those I began to weep. Pinarjee, Shar had said his name was Pinarjee, but my father had sold me away, sold away my name and turned his face from me. He’d never even told his second wife of my existence.

A shadow fell upon me. Once again I was small enough to fit beneath the standing ox. The white hair of his flanks met in a troubled gray line like a storm cloud down the center of his belly. I could have reached up and grasped onto it as monkey infants cling to their mother’s fur.

I let the shade protect me from the heat. I let the ox’s earthworn smell protect me from the memories of my father. His solid presence shielded me from all that had passed before and all that was yet to come. Surely he saw better than I, but Endurance did not warn me of the future. Looking back now after all that happened, I suppose I would not have turned away even if he had.

In time-short or long, I could not say-a sense of need began to fill me. Not my need, for I was safe and happy returned for a little while to the last carefree days of my life. The god’s need. The calling that had descended first upon Chowdry, then me.

Without words I knew I was Endurance’s champion. The god was not jealous of my oaths to the Lily Goddess across the Storm Sea. They simply did not signify to him here in this place. He had warded me, and I would ward him.

“From what?” I asked, the words escaping my lips.

The tropical sun blazed even hotter, fire in the sky fit to blister my skin.

From what comes, I thought. No, Endurance thought, and gave the idea to me.

I knew enough of gods to understand that their lot was not easy. Neither was my own.

The shade of his belly grew cooler, deeper. Though the world around me threatened to catch fire, I was safe. For now.

“So you ward me yet.”

With those words, I opened my eyes. The silk was heavy on my shoulders. Smoke curled before me. All the prayers had been blackened to ash. The fruit on the plates was desiccated, the breads curled and hard. Even the incense sticks had been reduced to worm-gnawed dust, already collapsing. Time had been stolen from around me to feed the vision I had just been granted.

“You wanted me back in Copper Downs,” I told the statue of the god. Rising, I rubbed his forehead for luck, right between the horns. “I suppose you have me. Whatever it is you fear.”

Thoughtful now, I doffed the belled silk, carefully folded it, and placed the tinkling bundle between the ox statue’s forelegs. My inheritance would be more safe here with Endurance than under my own arms in the days to come, and I had missed sewing the bells before. Always, I caught up. Besides, this would be another binding between me and the ox god.

When I walked back outside, the young acolytes were gathered before the entrance. Many carried their tools of construction or survey, so for a brief moment I thought I saw a mob. Then I realized that no, they simply awaited me.

“I have prayed to the god,” I said.

“We know,” replied the grinning young man who had served me sausage. His expression was serious now, though the humor never seemed far from him.

I realized that my face itched. When I touched my scarred left cheek, my finger came away bloodied.

A while later I sat at the now-empty eating tables with the young man, whose name proved to be Ponce. He served as a factotum to Chowdry in the management of the temple building project. Ponce’s enthusiasm for the work of Endurance bubbled, even as a light, gusty rain pattered off the canvas stretched above us and quested in from the open sides.

“How does this god call to you?” I was quite curious. My own connection to the god was clear enough, but also deeply personal. Uniquely so.

“Endurance is, well, new.” A seriousness flashed across his face. “More concerned with peace, or a calm center, than most gods. Here in Copper Downs we have a god for fishermen and a god for death and a god for women and a god for the rules of fate. The Temple Quarter is like a market full of stalls. Each sells some shade or scent of prayer, some form of protection or enlightenment or passion or redemption. Endurance just… exists. His purpose is a gentle wholeness.”

“There is something to the muteness, is there not?”

“Exactly! You understand.” Then his cheeks flushed, that red which only Stone Coasters can find in their embarrassment. “Of course you would understand. You birthed the god.”

My hand touched my belly. All the morning’s food lay heavy upon me, but not hard, and the baby still didn’t seem to mind. “I birthed nothing,” I told him. “At most I was midwife. Endurance is a vessel for a much older power that needed a place of safety to abide.”

The long-lost heart of the pardines, stolen by the late, immortal Duke, released by me to settle into Federo and twist him beyond recognition, then once more released by me into the god Endurance. From forest to field, by way of the stone streets of Copper Downs.

I prayed in that moment that I should never have to touch such power again. Another contact would twist me more than it already had, and I did not want to think of the effect on my child. Would that my prayer had been granted.

Finally Ponce spoke again. “Endurance is peaceful. The city needs peace. Some of my Selistani brothers and sisters see the god differently, but for those of us from Copper Downs, that is enough.”

“A god who does not demand so much,” I said absently.

“Oh, no. Endurance demands everything.”

After that, I went to help them with their foundations.

Chowdry remained absent through the morning, as did anyone else more senior than Ponce. I wondered what they might be about, but did not trouble myself too much. Instead I helped measure foundation courses around the hole of the mine opening, and even took my shift wielding a spade to turn what earth could be turned until someone with stouter tools and longer arms was available to break the rock beneath.

I wondered what the plan was for the permanent temple. I hadn’t the heart to tell Ponce how misplaced their stable-altar was. Endurance had been a creature of open fields and sunny skies, not confined to a dank, straw-floored enclosure. Surely Chowdry knew the truth.

But then, here in Copper Downs, maybe they understood a stable better than they understood a rice paddy. This cold, meager northern sun encouraged no one to remain outdoors overlong.

To each people their own meanings.

As I levered some good-sized stones away, Ponce approached me. A black-robed lad followed, younger than me, with a badly shaven scalp and a look of incipient panic about him.

I paused from my labors, holding my mattock tight in lieu of a real weapon. It could smash a skull better than my bare fist. “Greetings again.”