Elizabeth Hand - Black Light

“She is preparing him for sky burial,” said Ralph in a sleepwalker’s voice. “He is her father. Her father and her lover, and their god.”

“How—how can he be a god? He’s dead and I—I can see who he is.”

“He is dead because she killed him.”

“But why ?”

“Because it is what must be done. Because he is the god who travels between worlds. Between animals and men, between this world and the world of the dead. He is a god, and goes willingly; but we must help him on his way. That is the compact men and women made with the gods, long ago. That is what the Benandanti forget, or refuse to remember—that death is a journey, too. It’s all like this—”

He made a circular motion in the air, the same words and the same gesture Axel Kern had used in the chapel at Bolerium. I shook my head, too tired to argue or question him.

Ralph did not to notice. “The Benandanti see all other ways as chaos, and that is what they fear more than anything,” he said. “ Mysteries. They seek to explain away all that they can’t control. When all else fails, they destroy what they do not comprehend. They made themselves the foes of the great mystery religions and their adherents, and for millennia have stood guard against the rebirth of those forces which they believe will undo all their own great works. And this —”

He swept his arm out in front of him. Light streamed from it like sparks from a smoldering log. “ This is where—and when—the Good Walkers were born.”

A few yards away the redhaired girl lifted her head, staring at the sky as though she saw her own image reflected there. In the distance the waiting circle was still. Between the two, silent girl and assembled dancers, only the scattered members of the reindeer tribe seemed alive, the air before them touched with vapor where they breathed. We might have been there for a quarter-hour or a thousand years, frozen figures on a great chronometer, when suddenly something else moved upon the horizon: a black cloud that broke apart and reassembled as it drew toward us, dispersing the motionless dancers as though they were rotting fenceposts.

At the same time, the girl bent forward—slowly, with, no sense of urgency—and began to gather the corpse in her arms. It seemed weightless, or else she was far stronger than I. She hefted the body and started toward the birch tree. Her expression was so far beyond grief or normal human sorrow that it was masklike, almost peaceful. It was the face of the virgin holding her son, or Demeter carrying the grain to be winnowed. I could not imagine this girl laughing or weeping or even sitting in repose; could imagine nothing but this solemn bearing away, repeated for all eternity. When she reached the foot of the birch tree she paused, head bowed.

That was when I realized what the moving figures on the horizon were. They were horsemen, riding steeds hardly bigger than the reindeer but far more fleet. The air rang with the sound of their hooves, the jingling of harness and their voices, high and clear and jubilant, as though they had just awakened to a morning golden with sun and all of life a promise.

And perhaps it was morning, because now I had to shade my eyes to see them. The uncanny twilight that had bathed the steppes was breaking up. Tatters of gold shone between indigo clouds. Stars flickered in them like fish in a net, then disappeared. The sudden flood of light made even far-off objects seem distinct, crisp as though cut from paper. I could make out tufts of hair bristling along the horses’ necks, the serpentine patterns embroidered upon harnesses and the same patterns repeated in tattoos upon the bared breasts of the horsemen. There were women, too, their hair in pigtails like the men, their expressions no less fierce and joyous.

But what was strangest about them, and most unsettling, was that each horse wore a kind of headdress, tasseled and heavily embroidered in bold colors—blue, red, black, green. The headgear covered their skulls so that only their eyes were visible through small holes, and rose in two leather pillars between their ears. Gorgeous branching pillars, tasseled and hung with ornaments of gold, and unmistakably meant to signify antlers.

“See how it begins?” said Ralph in a low voice. “They are like cuckoos, leaving their young to nest in the homes of others, until eventually of course all the others are driven out, driven to extinction by them.”

“But who are they?”

“They are the Benandanti, although it will be centuries before they give themselves that name. Right now they are little removed in time and belief from their origins, which are as you see them—”

He nodded toward the girl. “And this, too, the Benandanti can neither accept nor forgive—that they issued from the same stock as those mysteries which they most despise; that their gods and monuments are formed of the same blood and stone as ours. That if you go back far enough and long enough, you will see only two faces staring at you from the darkness: the hunter and the mother. The Benandanti deny one and have debased the other; but they will not be denied forever. Gods do not die any more than we do. They sleep, and are awakened, and sleep again. They weave the same patterns endlessly, and all through time we are only bright bits of color picked out across their work.”

And then I saw not just the taiga unfolding beneath the sunrise, but an entire world, a glowing diorama with colored globes whirling overhead and small bright forms moving on the earth, like miniature puppets or gaming pieces. There were the reindeer people, frozen beside their horned steeds, and there the invaders upon their caparisoned horses, a carpet of dust beneath their hooves. The reindeer tribe did not move, not until the horsemen were upon them; and then they toppled like chesspieces scattered by a child, the undergrowth beneath them and red.

As though it were a time-lapsed film, the scene changed, to men and women standing quietly between cattle with huge curved horns; and yet it was not different at all. The men raised knives and slaughtered one of the bulls; a woman wept, and another coupled with a man in the dirt. And then again there was a circle of girls and boys, holding hands and executing an intricate dance, leaping from one foot to the next while in the center a man was bound to a tree with looping strands of ivy. The dance broke up but the man remained, a girl holding a cup to his lips while he drank, red running from the corners of his mouth and staining his breast. Flames rose about him, and once again the horsemen came, though they were different this time, their mounts heavier and the riders armored. And yet again there was a young girl, redhaired, naked, embracing a woman while others stood in a protective circle about them. The woman became a man, but the redhaired girl did not change. The man stood motionless while she tore his robes from him and drew him to her until the two of them collapsed to the earth. There was a burst of crimson and gold; the man disappeared. The girl remained, consumed by fire.

And then I saw before me the same scenes that had been enacted upon Muscanth Mountain. A boy lying upon the ground, bound with ivy; a stag crashing down as hunters rushed to draw blood from its breast.

Only this time I did not run away. Like all those other figures suspended between earth and sky I was caught in the pattern. I turned to Ralph Casson, and he nodded.

“Yes,” he said, as though I had finally guessed the answer to a riddle he’d posed hours ago. “It’s all real, Lit. As real as anything gets, actually.”

“But—but I don’t know anything!” I cried. “How can I be a part of any of it, your Malandanti or the rest, when I just heard about them tonight?”