Jay Lake - Endurance

Not much of a prayer, and smacked more of funeral rites than a healing chant, but it was what I could manage in the moment.

I laid the women out side by side. The first victim was beyond all hope. Even if the very spirit of the goddess took over her body, her face and neck were crushed. She would never breathe or eat, though somehow her brown hair still seemed rich as life. The second one, whose dark hair and freckled coloration suggested they might have been sisters, at least had found her breath.

Water spattered on me. I looked up for rain, but saw only silver light. The air tingled.

I realized the Lily Goddess had not only heard my prayers, She was answering them directly. In that moment, I was too exhausted to drop to my knees or show obeisance, so I sat back on my butt and impatiently awaited the divine.

Now I knew why no one had run to aid me. I was cloaked in the goddess’ glamour. I had witnessed this in Kalimpura, that only a few could see Her while most others knew nothing but echoing, chilly silence.

“I am here,” I announced. “You might as well get this over with.”

The Lily Goddess stepped out of a place between the air and the sky and smiled sadly at me. Much as with Blackblood, I saw someone who could have been mistaken for ordinary from a distance, except Her body fairly vibrated with power. My goddess was an explosion contained in the shape of a woman. Her hair was the color of all women, Her eyes shifted from gray to green to black to blue to violet to silver, all with the twisting flash of a windborne leaf in autumn. She was all sizes and shapes and ages, from gawky girl to matronly mother to withered crone.

She was all women.

“You never manifested so in the Temple of the Silver Lily,” I said softly. Always She was a wind, a rush of water, a voice possessing the Temple Mother.

Never before have I appeared to you.

Had I been standing, Her words would have driven me to my knees after all. Her lips moved, but the sounds did not quite match. That sense of power arced out of the goddess like water from a stormy sky. My loins went soft and wet, and I felt the first shudders of orgasm take me.

I knew that the tingle of power from the Eyes of the Hills I now carried was less than one of Her nail parings.

Though I tried to answer Her, my own words were muted.

You are Green.

All I could do was nod. That was like moving boulders with my neck. Pleasure arced through me, so intense it was painful, all the worse because I was not free to throw myself into the sensation.

You follow one of My daughters.

It was slowly penetrating to me that this was not the Lily Goddess. Another nod, more rocks dragged by the sheer force of my neck and head. Fluid rushed from my sweetpocket, as it could when a lover touched me just so for a time.

She stepped-if that could be the word-to the two women I had laid out.

My grandchild Solis is dead.

The woman with the crushed face seemed to sigh and settle. She had been lost to life already, but something more had just gone out of her. I clenched my thighs and tried to control myself, against the mad, mad pressure.

A titanic! The realization was so horrifying I wanted to flee into unconsciousness. If I could have stopped my heart to escape Her, I would have.

My grandchild Laris lives.

The surviving sister-if that was who they were, siblings-seemed to breathe easier, though still trapped in the awkward unconsciousness of the badly wounded.

The goddess turned back to the shattered temple. My breathing shuddered so hard I feared to choke. Then I prayed to choke.

My daughter is passed from the world.

The grief in Her voice was the mourning of the ocean for those mountains ground to sand along its beaches. She cried as the stars do for one of their number tumbled from the night sky to strike the earth. I wanted to die for Her loss, to lay myself down as a cloak over Her suffering, and spare Her even a beat of the anguish that threatened my very sanity.

In that moment, I saw for the first time what it might mean to be a god. Not power, but responsibility. Not awareness, but omniscience. Not emotion, but something so large it would shatter the human soul.

You know Me now.

“Yes, Mother,” I whispered, as though the words were drawn from me as with burning pincers. The fires of my lust were all but forgotten.

Your Lily Goddess is one of My daughters.

Desire.

The girl-child you carry is Mine, through your goddess.

Once again, my passion blinded me to sensibility. All I could think was to rise up in anger, ready to shout: You will not have my daughter! The flame of my rebellion, never truly doused, flared even under Her eternal burden of time, power, and sorrow. Nearly crushed beneath the majesty of Her titanic awareness so poorly contained in the swirling woman’s body She wore, I still had to laugh. Or tried to. By the Wheel, this was difficult.

“Blackblood told me…” I gasped. The words were birthing hard. “… that I would bear…” Another gasp. This was like lifting stones. “… a boy-child.” My mind leapt right past the obvious answer to those rare unfortunates born both man and woman in one conflicted body. Fool that I was, I did not want to know then what would come in time, what choices these prophecies would bring me.

Then She was gone without ever having been there. The wreckage was full of shouting men and crying women, while boys tugged at the beams and people swirled around me. No one seemed to take note of me, though several bent to attend to the two women I had rescued from beneath the rubble. I felt spent, as if a lover had used me hard through all the watches of the night, and forced me to orgasm far beyond the limits of either reason or passion. I knew I reeked of sex.

And fear. Sweat poured from me, even in the cold.

I could see why a woman might want to be a priestess of that goddess. I could see more why a woman would run screaming.

Laris, the survivor, opened her eyes and looked at me. She could not gain enough of herself to speak, but I saw that she knew, and that she understood that I knew.

I nodded to her, and touched my cap, mouthing the words We shall meet again.

Wrapped in the last of Desire’s glamour, I walked away unnoticed. My plans for the Eyes of the Hills were forgotten now, set aside in the rush of thought about what sort of power it took to slay a goddess. No wonder Erio had feared.

Anyone who could make such a death magic as to shatter the divine could just as easily have shattered this city were they of a mind to do so. The fault lines that would likely issue from Marya’s fall might do it for them.

I found myself deeply disturbed by Desire’s intervention. Familiarity with the gods had lent me a dangerously casual attitude, but still, I have never grown easy with such encounters, then or in the time since. All through my life I have learned over and over the lesson that there is an order to the existence of the gods, just as there is an order to the lives of men. That I had known since my grandmother’s funeral at the beginning of my memories, and I would recall it until the day I was laid out with the white and the red painted upon my own face.

Having Her come to me so was as daunting a violation of the world as having my grandmother return from her burial platform in the sky to correct my words and deeds. Or worse, her grandmother.

The world’s grandmother.

This was not right.

During my time at the Factor’s house, I had been exposed to any number of books on the divine. They largely contained views of the gods as some historical aspect of the life of the city and its people. In those days the gods were still sleeping away the years under the somnolence of the Duke’s magic, so I suppose that had been deemed safe enough.