P. Hodgell - The Sea of Time

“You would really, really like to try.”

“You never tell me anything!” he burst out. “For example, why did this boy just call you ‘Talisman’?”

Jame almost told him, but stopped herself.

“I’ll answer as I see fit, thank you. As for you,” she turned on Kroaky, “why did you shove me into that maelstrom?”

The ginger-haired boy shrugged. “For fun. Why else does anyone do anything? Besides, I hear that you Knorth are remarkably hard to kill. Consider it a test.” He took her arm. “Now come along if you want to see how these festivities end. But not you,” he added to Graykin. “You aren’t welcome where we’re going.”

Leaving Graykin behind to melt resentfully back into the shadows, Jame let Kroaky tow her through the crowd, then shook off his hand. “Where are we going, and why do you keep touching me?”

“Don’t you like it? Fang does.”

“That’s another question: what is a Waster doing here?”

“That’s your fault, indirectly. She lost her family at the Cataracts. The Horde tends to eat its orphans, so she wandered westward to Kothifir in search of a new clan.”

“And those are the Undercliff children?”

“Yes. Runaways and orphans, most of them. The boy with a broken head is better, by the way.”

“Glad to hear it.”

They were in the back alleys now, approaching a dark hole in the road.

“The Undercliff again?”

“After you.”

The huge cavern below bustled with people, as crowded as the square above. Some were Overcliffers in their bright, holiday clothes. Others were Undercliffers, more subdued. Many seemed to be from outside the city, farmers and herders, perhaps, and some even from the Wastes, notable for their blue cheches .

“This is best seen from above,” said Kroaky. He made another grab for her arm, and grinned when she evaded him. They climbed the stair to the children’s sleeping cave. Fang met them, scowling, at the top.

“Why did you bring her ?”

Kroaky attempted to put an arm around each and was rebuffed by both.

“Now, ladies.”

Jame sat down on the ledge overlooking the cavern, followed by Kroaky and, reluctantly, by Fang, who placed herself on his far side.

“How far back do the caves go?” Jame asked.

“Miles and miles,” said Kroaky, dreamily, “getting smaller and smaller and smaller. That’s where the Old Ones live. Oh, there are wonders in the depths—draperies of stone, cascading water, lace-thin shelves, caverns that glow with even a hint of outside light, silent pools where eyeless fish swim and nameless creatures eat them. Just think of it: all that below and above, tower on tower of marble, limestone, and travertine. They say that only the god-king keeps one from collapsing into the other.”

Fang snorted. “If so, he doesn’t always succeed. What about those rock falls this past spring? We lost one whole branch of side caves and the river nearly broke through.”

“That wasn’t his fault,” said Kroaky, with a rare show of defensiveness. “He was distracted during the last Change.”

“He always is. And it’s getting worse.”

“As I understand it,” said Jame, “King Kruin exiled the Old Pantheon Undercliff. Why?”

“His precious prophet didn’t want any competition, did he?” said Fang. “Not when he claimed to represent the one true god.”

“What prophet?”

“The leader of the Karnids, of course.”

“What god?”

“As to that, all I know is that they claim this world is only a shadow of the one to come where the faithful will be rewarded and the rest of us will suffer.”

Jame had heard of such beliefs before, and of other prophets, but this one somehow sounded different. Perhaps it was because of the black history that the Kencyrath shared with Urakarn.

“I take it that Kruin’s son Krothen doesn’t share that view,” she said. “Why hasn’t he welcomed the old gods back?”

“How many d’you think we need Overcliff?” Kroaky demanded. “Krothen is enough for us topside.”

“And the guild lords.”

“Huh. Them.”

“And the grandmasters.” Now Jame was goading him, but she was also unclear about the difference between the three lords and each guild’s individual grandmaster.

“You call them gods?” Kroaky laughed scornfully. “All right, so they have special powers, but they aren’t immortal. What’s a god without that?”

“Still,” said Fang, “you have to admit that the Changes have come more frequently and hit harder since the Old Pantheon gods were exiled. The king should think about inviting them back.”

Jame agreed. “It isn’t safe to lock up gods in your cellar, so to speak.”

Kroaky harrumphed, then pointed as if glad for the interruption. “Hush. Here they come now.”

Faint music sounded from the back of the cavern and the crowd stilled. It drew nearer, echoing—pipes, flutes, drums, something eldritch that might have been the wind whistling between the worlds. Figures advanced carrying torches. Their shadows preceded them, casting fantastic shapes on the cavern’s fissured walls. The crowd drew back as the procession entered the body of the cave.

Jame was reminded of Mother Vedia’s approach on her feast day. There, in fact, she was, again seated like a living statue on an upraised litter, again surrounded by her dancing, snake-wreathed attendants, but this time without bats or followers.

Before her went a gross figure looking like a younger version of the Earth Wife but also hugely pregnant, attended by a host of waddling women in a similar state.

After them, unaccompanied, came a skinny crone carrying a box. While people cheered the other two, they turned away from this last figure, shielding their children’s eyes.

“The Great Mother in her aspects of healer, life-bearer, and hungry tomb,” said Kroaky, raising his voice over the renewed clamor of the crowd as the next god emerged from the shadows.

“What’s in the box?”

“Death, of course.”

Jame regarded the diverse figures and remembered her conversation with Gran Cyd, queen of the Merikit. Showing her a fertility figure and an imu , both representing the Earth Wife, she had said, “These images were ancient long before Mother Ragga was even born,” which made sense since the Four had only come into being with the activation of the Kencyr temples, some three thousand years ago.

Jame had wondered at the time if the Earth Wife and the other three of Rathillien’s elemental Four, while each a distinct individual, wore different, older aspects in different cultures and were subject to older stories. Here, perhaps, was the answer.

It raised a further question, however: how had the deification of the Four affected the Old Pantheon, which preceded them?

There was the Earth Wife, at any rate, in three of her earlier native aspects.

Next came a cauldron seething with river fish. Fingerling trout crept over the edge of the pot and pulled up a figure glittering with scales. Cold round eyes regarded the crowd through a net of green hair and pouting lips parted over needle teeth in a smile meant to entice.

The Eaten One, thought Jame, or some variation of her, probably linked to the Amar. Did she also take a human lover? Where was Drie now, still blissfully in his beloved’s arms or deep within her digestive tract?

The goddess of love and lost causes walked behind her, backward, gazing into a mirror whose surface rippled like water. Around her feet, threatening to trip her, swarmed a host of green and yellow frogs.

“Geep!” they chorused. “Geep, geep , GEEP!”

Rain pattered in their wake.

Gorgo, thought Jame, happy to see an almost familiar face, or faces. She wondered how he and his priest Loogan were doing in Tai-tastigon. Sooner or later, she would have to find out.