Idol of Blood (13 page)

Th
irteen: Exposure

The mound was as quiet as a tomb. It was early yet, though the sun had already risen. If Haethfalt days in winter were oppressive in their brevity, highland summer days were blissfully long.

Jak hesitated at the door, not quite a stranger, but no longer a name in this moundhold. A knock with the iron ring before entering seemed the best compromise. Jak knocked and peered into the peaceful pale that was characteristic of morning in this mound, and felt a pang of homesickness. The hobnail glass brick decorating Mound RemPeta just above ground level allowed a diffuse illumination that trickled overhead in rays of glowing dust and left the rooms below subtly touched with the suggestion of light. Rem had been a master mound builder in his day, and this mound was truly one of the finest in the Haethfalt settlement. The stillness seemed sacred and unpierceable, but Jak had violated it already.

“Hello?” Most likely no one was up. For a moment, silence returned Jak's greeting, and then a creak in the gathering room at the bottom of the stairs revealed a figure in one of the high-backed, overstuffed chairs. Geffn was seated in the haze. “Geff.” They observed one another, and Jak tried to summon words. “Forgive me for intruding.”

Geffn rose and waved Jak in toward the mound's interior. “You're still welcome here.” There was a distinct emphasis on the word “you're”.

Jak descended the stone spiral of Rem's unique staircase, one hand moving along the banister in a wistful caress of the polished wood. Geffn was quiet, and uncharacteristically calm. They'd passed over some threshold of their relationship—or he had—that had softened his resentment. Forgiveness seemed possible. Perhaps they were finally to be friends. Jak was willing but for the injury of Geffn's betrayal of Ra—and even that, Jak conceded, had been just after all. Look what had become of her.

Perching on the edge of the chair opposite Geffn as he relaxed once more into his, Jak studied him for a moment. A single lock hung down from the cowlick at his forehead, the russet wave almost aglow in the ethereal light.

“I don't want to wake anyone, Geff. I came to talk to you.”

Geffn nodded. “It's time we talked. But before you say what you've come to say, let me speak.” Jak's mouth parted in objection, but Geffn went on, determined, words tumbling over each other in his earnestness. “Please, Jak. It's important to me. I know you're wounded by my support of the mound against Ra. I want you to know that it wasn't malicious. I agonized over this. I can't be certain it was right, but it's where I stood—and stand. You must have realized I'd imagined myself a suitor of Ra's. It was absurd. When I saw her in the Delta, in her element, it was an awakening. I don't harbor any ill will toward her, nor toward you, but I fully support the custom of staying out of Deltan entanglements. The Meer are too dangerous. I worry about you.” He paused for a breath and looked at the mark on Jak's face. “It looks as if I have cause.”

“Geffn,” Jak tried to interject, but he held up his hand in a gesture evocative of Ra.

“That isn't what I wanted to discuss with you. Not all of it. There's something else.” He was intent on his own thoughts, looking down at his hands on the arms of his chair, unaware of Jak's agitation. “We've not broached it. We've avoided it—or perhaps I have. But I think,” he said with a breath, “I think it's time we dissolved our union formally. To release one another. I'm prepared to accept that.” Geffn looked up, obviously relieved at having spoken his piece.

Jak was thrown, enough to neglect for the moment the urgent matter at hand. Geffn's words had brought an unexpected ache.

“Don't tell me I've surprised you. You must have wanted this for some time.”

“I didn't.” Jak sighed at Geffn's snort of disbelief. “I mean, of course it's ended, but this…this is so final. I wish…” Jak had never been at such a loss for words. “You know I love you.”

Geffn's expression was incredulous. “My gods, Jak. You can't expect me to believe that.”

“I wish you did. I wish you understood. I've always loved you, Geffn. Always.” His face was flushed with anger, still misunderstanding. “Shit.” Jak blew a stray hair out of the way in frustration. “You don't know how guilty I feel about, about everything. I love you. I do, and I did. But I've never been
in
love with you.”

Geffn sat back, his face still flushed, but now it was with relief. “Well. At last. Something that sounds true.”

“I didn't always know that. I wanted to be in love with you. As long as I can remember, you've been the most important person in my life. I have so much regret about how this has ended—and how it began. I've made nothing but mistakes.”

Geffn let out a sigh. “There's fault in how it ended, perhaps, though I don't see how I can truly fault you for your lack of desire. But there was never any fault in how it began.”

Tugging distractedly at the binding that held back the habitual ponytail, Jak tried to make him understand. “Geffn, for soothsake. You were a child. I'm no better than—” Jak paused, horrified at the word that had almost come out. “I violated our friendship, your trust in me. I was responsible. I seduced you.”

Bewilderingly, Geffn laughed. “Seduced me?” He put a hand of reassurance on Jak's knee. “You mean that summer. You couldn't be more wrong. I was dying for you to make a move. Soothsake. Sex was all I thought about then.”

“Which is why it was wrong.”

“No, Jak. It was
fun
. That's all.” Geffn didn't allow Jak to protest. “And it wasn't the beginning of anything for me. It was after Fyn passed on that I saw you truly. After you came back from your mourning journey. I was no child then, was I? If anyone's guilty of any impropriety, it's me for turning consolation into arousal. You were so sad, and all I could think of was getting my stones off. It's no wonder I put you off sex. I used it as a means of comfort for you while satisfying myself. When it became lovemaking for me, you were only tolerating my touch. And I continued to ignore it.”

Jak was near tears, which was unacceptable. Geffn was the one who had a right to grieve, not Jak. “You didn't put me off sex,” Jak protested. “I loved being with you. It wasn't mere tolerance.”

“Jak, it was. Even before your decision, I knew it. Soothsake, it was obvious. You never climaxed. I pretended not to know it, but I knew.” Geffn moved his hand to Jak's in a comforting gesture.

Jak's shoulders shook with the effort not to cry. “Stop being nice to me. You've got this all wrong.
I
was the aggressor.
I
wanted the sex.”

“No, you didn't.” The warmth of Geffn's brown eyes wouldn't allow Jak to lie any longer, and the tears were impossible to fight.

Jak looked down to try to hide them, whispering hoarsely, “No. I didn't. But I wanted to make you happy.”

Geffn leaned forward and pressed his thumb against a steady stream of salt water, smoothing it over the slope of Jak's cheekbone. “That's no way to be intimate with someone,” he said gently. “It isn't supposed to be at your own expense.” Jak was already recovering from the tears, thrusting them away, and Geffn drew back abruptly. “But you worked that out with Ahr,” he added with a sudden touch of meanness. “Do you allow Ra to—?”

“Don't.” Jak stopped him before he finished the sentence.

Geffn moved back in his chair. “I'm sorry. That was cruel. I suppose I do have a bit of bitterness left. I can't help wishing you'd desired me, and hating that you give yourself to others without reservation.”

“Geffn, I need to tell you—”

“No. Forget it.”

“I need to tell you!” Jak insisted. “I don't want you thinking this. I never give myself without reservation. I didn't give myself to Ahr at all. To Ra—to Ra it's been with great difficulty, but she is…”

“Meer,” said Geffn, and Jak had no other explanation to offer. “Look, Jak, I really don't need to hear this. I don't want to.”

“I need to say it.” Jak took a deep breath, letting it out on a trembling of fear. “When you and I had sex that first time in the loft…” Jak's lungs felt as thin and brittle as parchment. “I wasn't a virgin.”

Again, Geffn laughed, clearly not understanding. “Soothsake, Jak. It never bothered me that you'd had lovers before me.”

“No.” Jak's head shook almost violently. “I never had any other lovers.” Geffn's face was bewildered. “Kol,” Jak managed, and as always the word was sickening.

“
Kol?
” Geffn recoiled. “You—?”

“He hurt me.” The words were nearly inaudible. “I didn't know how to reconcile what had happened to me. I didn't know—”

“Fucking
sooth
!” Geffn exploded. “Fucking sooth.” He leapt up, and Jak shrank from him, but Geffn hurled his arms around Jak's tight body, crushing Jak against his chest. “I'm sorry. Oh shit, I'm sorry. Gods, why didn't I know?”

“Don't be sorry for me,” Jak protested, trying to pull away. “That isn't why I told you.”

Geffn held on, refusing to let Jak escape. “I understand why you told me.” He kissed the top of Jak's head, and for once Jak didn't resist him. “Sooth, this isn't pity. It's outrage. It's pain. Let me hold you, for the love of truth.” His lips lingered on Jak's hair. “Why couldn't I have done something? My gods, I want to kill him. I'd drag him out of the ground and tear his bones to shreds if he'd been buried.”

“Please don't tell anyone else.” Jak leaned wearily against his chest. “Don't speak of it to me again.”

“No.” He shook his head. “Of course not.” Geffn loosened his hold and kissed Jak's hair once more, seeming to realize the rare moment of intimacy was over. He sat back in his chair, and Jak sank deflated into the other. His eyes went to the mark on Jak's cheek. “Does Ra—?” He faltered. “Is she good to you?

“Ra,” said Jak with a painful sigh. “Ra is everything to me. She's why I've come.”

Fourteen: Excoriation

There was a pain in her skull. She didn't know why. Ra was climbing, focused on the remains of the old road before her—climbing home. A team of horses thundered over the road, tasseled and cloaked, and drawing tremendous gilded chariots, so bright in the summer sun they were almost blinding. Ra watched them pass, up over the stone bridge that had fallen some hundred years ago, and across the expanse of nothing to span the gorge.

Chariots
, she mused.
When did we ride in chariots?
Her hair had been bound then in red-mud-painted braids, like a thousand snakes descending.
His
hair—Ra had been a boy then. She cupped her hands over her breasts and made a hum of pain at the momentary intensity of the pulse in her head. How did one grow from a boy into a woman? Where
was
the woman?

The Great One—Shiva—Mother
.

Young Ra sat before the altar in that time before, the meditative pose, his head bowed over his lap. MeerShiva stared over his head. He was not acknowledged. It had been hours. Ra didn't mind the waiting; it was doubtful she would acknowledge him at all. It was well known that she was ageless—at least as far as historic memory was concerned—and with long life came peculiarities that must be indulged.

Ra's father had been only a young Meer of ninety-three when Shiva chose him, and yet even he had succumbed to the madness within MeerRa's brief years. Ra himself hadn't known MeerHraethe. Hraethe's temple was in a distant province, and he'd traveled to
Soth
AhlZel only to give Shiva his seed. It was an unusual
vetma
, requested at the Festival of Spring by the templar priests at AhlZel. They feared Shiva, and wanted another. Shiva knew it. She didn't care. And so Ra had been born.

Ra heard only from the whisperings of servants what had become of Hraethe, that he'd leapt from the heights of his temple after conjuring a plague that would consume most of his subjects. MeerHraethe had been obsessed with the fear that he would be devoured, suspicious of everyone who petitioned him for
vetmas
, never sleeping lest he be taken by surprise. The Meer's numbers had dwindled since the time of that custom, and Hraethe had been in no danger of the barbaric legacy. He was a prized commodity. Though Shiva, Ra knew, had survived those days, living the years of her youth as a wild witch in the swamps whom none dared attempt to capture.

The sun stained the white walls of pearl with red as it sank below the mountain. Shiva, as Ra stole a look at her, appeared for an instant to have been caught after all, stabbed in the heart and flowing red over the altar. Now the sun was gone, and Shiva was a cool blue shadow beneath her ceiling of stars. She rose. Ra was not acknowledged.

He waited until MeerShiva had passed. As lesser Meer, it was an affront to rise and look on her. His tutors had gone some weeks ago, proclaiming him endowed with all the wisdom of his race. Although, he thought stubbornly, he ought to have been born with it. Was he not Meer? They had irritated him. He had his own altar now, though he didn't yet grant blessings to his subjects. Some aspects of Meerhood took strength and practice. He would sit in audience of
vetma
seekers when Shiva decreed it and not before. It was this he'd come to seek of Shiva. He was audacious.

Ra hadn't officially seen MeerShiva until his recent maturity at the age of nine. He'd been kept out of her way and had only glimpsed her as a dark blaze of power as she moved through her temple. When he'd dared to look at her after the tutors had gone, he was awed by her.

She moved like a softly shifting cypress whose roots glided in the earth, and seemed as tall as some of those that lined the temple grove. Her skin was the color of an icicle, her veins blue threads of tatting beneath that permeable barrier. Her hair, in keeping with his image of the tree, was a long mahogany branch wrapped thick and firm behind her head with silver wire. It looked formidable as a weapon, and he noted to himself to stay clear of her lest she snap her head to one side and strike him with it. Her eyes were the venom-green of dragons, piercing into him like claws when she saw he observed her.

This picture of her he'd captured in an instant, but it was an instant too long. He'd courted his own destruction. Terrified, he bowed on arms and knees before her. Shiva stood over him, the mere rustle of her violet robe enough to make him wet himself. She could smell it, feral creature that she was, and she laughed in scorn, a cracked crystal sound that bounced from one vast pearlescent arch of Temple Shiva to another. His humiliation had saved him. She left him alone, the black, deadly gaze the only occasion she had looked on him.

To prove himself not a coward, he began after that to seek her audience regularly, coming before her with head low and sitting down to wait for her acknowledgment. What he would say if she ever bid him to speak it hadn't even occurred to him to plan. The terror instilled by her quiet breathing, like a huntress cat waiting in the grass, and the subtle cinnamon scent rising like heat from her skin, was enough to occupy him thoroughly. He ached, his muscles stiff by the time dusk fell on her indifference.

Ra persisted with his stubborn vigil, coming before the great Meer before each of the sacred days in the year—thirteen in all—as was the allowance, and Shiva persisted in her silent confirmation of his irrelevance far longer than custom dictated. The acknowledgment of a novice Meer fell normally between the seventh and tenth years of life, dependent upon the potential strength of the new Meeric power. Ra's deferential presence before MeerShiva was disregarded until he reached his thirteenth.

He'd recognized early on that his persistence thwarted his goal. Shiva was irritated by him. But he wouldn't back down, and neither would she. The end result was that four years of Ra's supplicant position passed without notice of him, and Ra was not to be included in the annual procession, nor to leave Temple Shiva for any purpose, until Shiva blessed him.

In the beginning, Ra sat strained, his attention focused on MeerShiva, his demeanor anxious. Probably, she could smell his fear even from her dais at the altar. After some time, it became rote: he would approach, bow and sit; she would stare at nothing, idle and, it seemed, unbreathing until the sun had died for the day. Ra ceased to fear her. She was predictable. Now he only concentrated on his petition, meditating on what he might say on his own behalf, should she ever bid him to speak.

This pattern was so unaltering that Ra's mind began to wander as the sacred eves passed, until he found himself, finally, completely unaware he was in Shiva's presence.

He was studying her foot at first, circled and entwined with gold thread on which small pearls, her sacred stone, were strung. The foot became meaningless, and he was rapt at the subtle glints of changing light over the surface of the pearls. The thread appeared to slither over the hills and valleys of its wearer's skin, a snake of white, cerulean, lavender and gold that his mind followed into a serpentine den, deep underground, penetrating and undulating through miles of dark, succulent earth.

The fabric of that earth became immense, its composition, its particulate structure, a visible cathedral into which he was drawn. He felt composed of earth. He could taste it like blood on a bitten tongue, its elements discernible as metallic essences so overwhelming that his tongue felt erect. The earth was a moving, molten current; a saline river; a gush of blood in the vaults and chambers of a titanic heart. There were sounds: weeping and chanting, singing and wailing. His head thundered as though struck from the inside with the force of their cacophony. They insinuated themselves into his veins, his lungs. He wept them.

This tempest of perception became a single thing: a bead that was himself and not himself, swelling outward and encompassing all that surrounded him. It was a single pearl on Shiva's foot. It was tremendous. All of him was an erection.

The high keen of the pearl was snuffed out on a sharp yowl, an exclamation. It was the warning pitch of a predatory cat. Something had grabbed him, and he opened his eyes in pure terror. Nails sharp as blades were clutching his cheeks, and he was facing the goddess. Shiva had summoned him.

“What have you to say?” she hissed, her eyes destroying him. They would tear him open before the claws had a chance.

Ra opened his mouth and his jaw worked, but only silence came out of him. He felt as though she'd torn his tongue from his mouth and held it bleeding before him.

“
Nothing
.” She dismissed him with a jerk of her head, her eyes despising him. Retracting her lethal fingertips, she pushed him aside and strode from the room. The skirt of her garment struck him like a storm tearing by. She was already beyond him, growing smaller in the endless vault of the hallway that retreated from the altar room.

“
Vetma, ai
MeerShiva!” Ra expelled the words on a breath of terror, and they echoed back at him, his changing voice a mocking, high sound of cowardice.

She stopped, and though she was a dozen steps away from him, he felt a wave of hot fury ripple from her.

May I rise as Meer. May I rise as Meer!
He'd said it in his head a thousand times.
Spit it out!
He vomited the words. “
Vetmaaimeershiva!
May I rise as Meer?” He was shaking, feverish, and felt his skin was melting, dripping into the floor like a candle.

MeerShiva turned, her hair glinting as her head came around like the tail of a scorpion. “
Meershivá!
” she hurled at him, taking her own name as the highest oath that could be uttered.

Ra thought he would die. The terror of this exchange with her was bad enough, but worse, he was still hard from the surge of whatever had possessed him, and surely she could see it, rising against the loose cotton of his pants. She would think it was arousal, that he was shamefully lustful of her, his own mother. He tried to will it down, but the engorged veins wouldn't recede. It wasn't the sort of idle erection he'd had before, the sort that came of vulgar thoughts and friction. It was painful and nauseating and had nothing to do with sex.

She came toward him and his eyes stung with the effort of remaining where he was instead of leaping up in flight. “
Meershivá!
” she spat again. “
May I rise?
Are you not risen from my own blood? You are Shiva's!” she shouted. “You rose as Meer when I expelled you into this world. Stupid boy.” She turned and receded once more into the shadow of the starlit corridor.

“And
that
,” she threw over her shoulder—too far for him to have heard so clearly, yet he did—“is the force of your Meeric blood, which you have ignored. Do you think I'm an imbecile to accuse you of lecherous thoughts against me? Do not try my patience with your idiotic fears!”

Ra waited until the sound of MeerShiva's retreat had been absent for some time before he attempted to move. His legs wouldn't hold him, so he crawled from the room like an ape and made his way clutching the white curling pillars of the temple until he reached his bed. Sending away the servant who waited to undress him, he curled into his cushions, cramped and seized with discomfort. He began to cry, staining the cerulean pillows with the mark of the Meer.

Still weeping, he jerked himself to seek release, but it wasn't quick, as he was accustomed. It took a quarter of an hour for him to expel the tension of this hardness, and when he did, the release was more painful than the erection had been. His body seemed to shudder forever, and he couldn't help but cry out as it was drawn from him. When he'd finished, he drew up the bed sheets to wipe himself off and found with horror that he'd ejaculated blood.

There was blood on her fingers where Ra had reached below the waist of her skirt at this memory, unconsciously quieting somatic pains of sympathy. She stared at the stain, perplexed.
Ai
. Another period. She didn't have them often. Other women, she knew from experience with Jak, had them monthly. She hadn't bothered to take note of her cycle, nor when to expect it.

Ra sat at the edge of the abyss. The bridge had crumbled long ago but for a narrow ledge that had been the railing to one side of the road. She was lucid for the moment and fixed in time. No phantom chariots raced by her to the city of the gods. She had left Jak, ripping out her own heart.

For a moment, she thought to go back. She was clear. She would concentrate on paying attention to the time, make sure not to wander. She needed Jak. But Jak had hung from her encircling fingers, throat crushed and bruised, fighting for breath. She recalled it now in horror. Her scream of negation brayed back at her from the far wall of the gorge—
“Nai! Nai! Nai!”
Nai
, she could not go back.

Why had she renaissanced? What masochism, what arrogance had prompted this? MeerRa had lived longer than he deserved and should have stayed dead, a mercy to the world. She remembered that too, for the moment: knowledge beneath the earth. Knowledge that Ahr was alone. Misery. Desire. Ra had burned with these beneath the ground, and even without the impetus of utterance, these words had shaped the elements. Ra had centered heat and pressure in the rotting core of his corpse, and his essence had blazed upward from the volatile mix. He'd felt the fire and the release as the last of MeerRa had burned away, white-hot pain that was welcome. That which was Ra had chemically altered, now vapor and dust, basest elements joined with the moving current of the vital earth.

Incarnations were the avatars of the whole, eruptions of uncontainable fervor for life, upwellings of the Mother's blood. Ra, ebullient, had burst into being, a fool drunk on the passion of animation, a fool who sought the Other—the sovereign avatar whose body expressed the rapture of living. Ra had deliberately emptied the stores of a lifetime of memory into the purification of fire, brashly suppressing logic, wisdom and experience—and the catalogue of three hundred and eighty-eight years. He'd done it to allow this new Ra to seek her folly, to seek Ahr.