P. Hodgell - The Sea of Time

The last frog hopped frantically past, followed by a long, low, dark shape with a scaly tail on one end and a cruelly toothed snout on the other, waddling on the plump, pale limbs of a human baby.

More followed. Those clearly aligned with the Four seemed to fare the best. Others passed as phantoms of their former selves, and received little recognition from the crowd. Who now worshipped that dog-faced being or that drifting tatter of silk, that murky orange glow or that thing of clattering bones?

A dazzling light entered the cavern.

“Ooh!” breathed the crowd, and covered their eyes.

Jame peered through her fingers at the sun in all his glory. She could almost make out a figure at the heart of the blaze, a man in red pants stumbling forward supporting a giant, swollen phallus with both hands. It was this member from which the light emanated.

The moon circled him, her face alternately that of the maiden, the matron, and the hag, just like the pommel of the Ivory Knife. She looked up with shifting features and saluted Jame.

“Sister, join us!”

Was this also a mortal who had undergone at least a temporary apotheosis—like the guild lords above? Like Dalis-sar in Tai-tastigon? Like she herself, eventually, if she became That-Which-Destroys?

Heat washed through the cavern, worse than when the sun had come among them, but without his dazzling light. A woman carrying a hearthside firepot, a martial figure clanking in the red-hot armor of war, and then came a stillness. Heat gave way to a sudden, mortal chill. Jame felt the sweat on her brow turn cold.

“I won’t look,” said Fang, and hid her face against Kroaky’s shoulder.

A cloaked and hooded figure had entered the cavern. He made his way forward slowly, feeling ahead of him with an iron-shod staff. Why should he cause such dread? Perhaps it was the smoke seeping from within his garments. Perhaps it was the stench of burned flesh. Perhaps it was because he came alone, without attendants, and all turned their backs on him.

“Nemesis,” said Kroaky, glaring down defiantly although his voice shook. “I had nothing to do with the old man’s death. Ask Tori. He was there.”

“Wha—” Jame started to ask him, but memory caught her by the throat.

My father, nailed to the keep door with three arrows through his chest, cursing my brother and me as he died. . . .

“It wasn’t our fault,” she said out loud. “D’you hear me, Burnt Man? Neither one of us was there!”

Wind frisked into the cavern. It swirled around the dark figure, teasing apart his robe, releasing streamers of smoke until with a flick it twitched away the garment altogether. For a moment, a man-shaped thing of soot and ash hovered there. Then the wind scattered it.

The crowd cheered.

“They think he’s gone,” said Kroaky in an oddly husky voice, “but he always comes back. Like sorrow. Like guilt.”

The wind remained, now tumbling about the onlookers, snatching off this man’s hat, flinging up that woman’s skirt. Laughter followed its antics, all the louder with relief. A figure appeared, whirling like a dervish in a storm of black feathers, long white beard wrapped around him, feet not quite touching the ground.

“Who . . . ?” asked Jame.

“The Old Man,” said Kroaky, almost reverently, holding down his ginger hair with both hands. “The Tishooo. The east wind.”

“In the Riverland, we call him the south wind.”

“Well, he would come at you from that direction, wouldn’t he? In fact, he moves about pretty much as he pleases, the tricky old devil. Some say that he governs the flow of time itself in the Wastes, don’t ask me how. Here we most often get him direct from Nekrien. He keeps away the Shuu and the Ahack from the south and west, from the Barrier across the Wastes and from Urakarn. We don’t honor those here.”

“What about the north wind?”

“The Anooo? That blows us the Kencyr Host and occasional weirding. Blessing or curse? You tell me. Without the east wind and the mountains, though, Kothifir, Gemma, and the other Rim cities would be buried in sand like the other ancient ruins of the Wastes.”

The procession wound around the cavern until it reached its center. Here torches were set in holes drilled in the limestone floor and the avatars of the Four joined hands within the circle. They began to rotate slowly sunwise. Their worshippers formed a withershins ring around them, then another going the opposite way, and so on and on, alternating, to the edges of the cave. Jame grew dizzy watching their gyrations. Everyone was chanting, but not the same thing:

“There was an old woman . . .”

“There was an old man . . .”

“There was a maid . . .”

“There was a lad . . .”

The circle next to the gods slowed, swayed, and reversed itself. One by one, the rest corrected themselves until all were revolving the same way, those innermost going slowly, those outermost running, panting, to keep up. The world seemed to shift on its axis. Torches flared blue, casting shadows across an open space grown impossibly wide, split by fiery sigils.

They had opened Sacred Space.

Into it stepped two figures, one dressed in loose red pants, and the other in spangled green. Jame recognized the former as the engorged sun god. The latter was the redhead into whose arms she had thrust the gilded boot, the winner of the boys’ run. So that was how they chose the Challenger, which she nearly had become. Again.

The boys bowed to each other, then crouched and began to glide back and forth, sweeping alternate legs behind them. At first their movements were slow, almost ritualistic, and incredibly fluid. One swung his foot at the other, who ducked under it, then swung in his turn. Thus they pinwheeled across the open space between fiery sigils and back again. The Favorite in red aimed a leg sweep at his opponent. The Challenger in green jumped over it. In the middle of a cartwheel, the Challenger launched a roundhouse kick at the other’s face. They were seriously going at it now, weaving back and forth, striking and dodging in a fury of limbs.

Jame watched intently. She had learned the basics of Kothifiran street fighting from Brier, but had never before seen two experts engaged in it. They barely used their hands at all except to block foot strikes, and their legs seemed to be everywhere in graceful, swinging arcs. Some moves were like water-flowing and some like fire-leaping, but in surprising combinations. No wonder first Brier and then Torisen had beaten her at the beginning and the end of her college career, both knocking out the same tooth now barely grown back.

The Challenger leaped and twisted. His foot, scything through the air, caught the Favorite a solid blow on the jaw that dropped him where he stood.

The crowd roared. All the women in it rushed into Sacred Space, collapsing it, converging on the new Favorite whose smug look turned to one of dawning horror. A moment later they had overwhelmed him.

“There,” said Kroaky, patting Jame on the back. “Aren’t you glad you didn’t win the run?”

The archery butts were manikins made of twisted straw, mounted on the backs of giant racing tortoises. Each tortoise had a handler and spiked collars that prevented it from drawing in its head or limbs. There were two dozen of them in all, straining with slow, ponderous strength against their leashes. Two cadet ten-commands waited on their mounts with bows strung while the handlers wrangled their unwieldy charges into a loose battle formation.

It was a hot, windless afternoon on the dusty training field south of the Host’s camp, and one of many such lessons there. Jame wiped sweat off her forehead with a sleeve. Like the other cadets, she was wearing a muslin cheche as protection against the sun. Her burn had peeled away and a tan was starting in its place. Still, she wasn’t used to the southern heat.