Peter Dickinson - Earth and Air

The dance went on and on, fiercer, wilder, madder. Rapt in their ecstasy the dancers could not tire. And yet, in an instant, in response to no sign or call, they halted, motionless apart from their heaving lungs.

In that silence the Bull-man stalked into the temple.

He stopped barely a yard from where Yanni was lashed. He was no masked man. He was huge. His shoulders were above the upstretched arms of any of the dancers who came whooping and crowding round him, and then fell back into a ring, silent apart from faint eager whimperings, a pack of dogs waiting to be fed. The firelight rippled across the brass of his body. The shadows in its folds and clefts were black as the new-moon night. He stank of animal essences. The pillars of the temple seemed to pulse and waver with his presence, as if Yanni had been seeing them through rising air.

Everything had changed with his coming. The glamour that had protected Yanni so easily this far with its solid-seeming illusions, giving him an almost contemptuous confidence in his ability to outwit the men, seemed to weaken and thin to a gauzy veil. If the god had glanced down at him it would have melted away. But he would not.

“The power flows into him in the instant of the victim’s death,” the goddess had said. “To look at the victim before that would be to anticipate that moment, and so dilute its power.”

The god paid no more heed to the dancers than he did to Yanni, but stood gazing out above their heads while they waited imploring. At last he took a heavy pace forward, and another, and another. The drum rattled. The dancers reformed their ring and began slowly to circle their god, the circle moving with him as he paced up the temple and stood outlined against the fire. Now they ringed both fire and god.

With a sweep of his arm the god strewed a handful of dark grains onto the flames, and a white blaze flared, too brilliant to look at, and died as quickly away, leaving the space enclosed by the pillars filled with a smoky red glow that seemed to come not from the fire but from the stones of the temple themselves. The air within that space reeked with a heady odour, sickly sweet, dazing the senses.

Yanni concentrated his will and forced it away, at the same time freeing both body and mind from his own illusion of drugged torpor, and became fully alert, himself. He felt the glamour the goddess had given him return, though weakened. Perhaps it would still do, he thought. Provided the brass god did not look at him until the moment came.

As before, the drumbeat quickened, the dancers spun faster and faster, stamping, prancing more and more wildly, whooping and calling, flinging heads and arms, thrashing themselves into a mindless, ferocious ecstasy, an agony of lust for the blood of the coming sacrifice.

The god reached the Bloodstone, stalked round it, turned, laid his dish in front of him and waited, massive, impassive, his great beast eyes glinting orange in the red glare as he stared out over the line of pillars at the darkness beyond. Thanassi and Dmitri broke from the spinning circle and raced back down the temple. Dmitri knelt, gripped Yanni by the ankles and pinned them to the floor. Thanassi untied the rope and reached for his wrists.

Yanni was ready for him, gripping in his right hand the stub of side-branch of the olive he’d cut, so that the short length of the main branch lay directly above his wrist. Though weakened, the illusion held, just, and made it seem to Thanassi that he took hold of the wrist itself, real not simply to his eyesight but to his touch as well, real skin, real flesh and bone against his palm and fingers. Yanni clung to the side-branch as they lifted him and raced back past the fire. The ring of dancers opened to let them pass, and they swung him up onto the Bloodstone and spread-eagled him in front of their god.

The god had not moved. This was the moment of extreme danger. Though the god might not look at Yanni directly, the illusory wrist that Thanassi held must lie near the edge of his vision, and surely, if he should glance this way . . .

He did not. Through half-closed eyes Yanni watched him take up the flask and pour a dark liquid from it. The bowl was out of Yanni’s line of sight. With the same calm slowness the god set the flask back on the dish and started to raise arms and head towards the sky. In his right hand he now held the knife, its bronze blade shaped like a pointed leaf and incised with symbols. Now!

Yanni let go of the olive branch and gently moved his own arm, invisible to Dmitri and Thanassi, down past his body. He found the edge of the dish by touch, reached further and found the stem of the goblet.

He waited. The god grew taller, reaching up, yearning, demanding, summoning. The dancers moaned in their nightmare orgasm. The god opened his vast bull mouth and bellowed. The dancers reeled back and crouched down, hiding their faces. And the little illusion behind which Yanni had been sheltering crumpled away and fell to dust.

The god did not stir as the reverberations of his thunder dwindled away over the harbour.

Dmitri and Thanassi had fallen back with the others, letting go of the victim, but Thanassi had gathered his wits and was lurching back towards the Bloodstone when he realised that there was something unexpected in his grasp. He looked and saw the piece of olive wood. He gave a sudden astonished shout, an ordinary human cry, a crack in the surface of the ritual.

The god glanced down.

It was too soon. “Wait till he is about to strike,” the goddess had told Yanni, but the illusion was gone and that moment would not now come. He flung the contents of the goblet into the face of the god and instantly rolled himself aside, dropped, and scuttled away between the stunned and stricken dancers.

Behind him the god screamed. Not in surprise or anger, but in agony, the unimaginable agony of a god.

Yanni reached the darkness beyond the pillars and turned to look. The great brass beast still stood where he had been but something was happening to his face. It was melting, bubbling, falling in golden and burning dribbles onto the naked flesh below.

But Yanni had been forced to act too soon. The god was stricken, but not destroyed. He mastered his pain. The scream stopped. He drew himself up and began to summon his power back into himself. The melting visage hardened and became a ghastly contortion of a face, with its two huge eyes glaring out of it.

Again Yanni turned to run and again stopped. In front of him, all along the rim of the bowl ran a line of lights. Lanterns. Women’s voices began to call “Ulululul- leh. Ulululul- leh. Ulululul- leh” . Tall figures appeared on the slope in front of them, shadowy—Yanni could see the gleam of the lanterns through their bodies—an armoured man with a high plumed helmet and shield, a smiling naked woman, another woman, with a hunter’s bow in her hand and a quiver at her back, and more. They raised their right hands in a gesture of command, of banishment.

As if by owl sight Yanni could see what was happening, though it was not something he saw with his eyes; but the night seemed to be patterned with threads of power as with their residual memories of what their ancestors had once believed the women invoked the old gods back into momentary existence. The old gods gathered that power into themselves, shaped it to their purposes and passed it on, focussed on a single point, not where the new god stood beside the Bloodstone, but at somewhere in the pitch-black sky above him.

From the temple the new god answered with a bellow, and he was a god with living power, while they were only ghosts of what they had been. For a moment their shapes thinned and wavered, and ripples of weakness ran along the threads of power, tangling its pattern. But the women’s calling continued unfaltering, the old gods regathered their strength and the pattern returned, centring itself into a single last illusion, so strong that it ceased to be an illusion and became for a little moment part of the reality of this world, solid as a boulder.