Gods of Earth (48 page)

“I can’t believe Chance left without me,” Sarah whispered. “Why would he do that? I’m his protector.”

“He may have had no choice,” Thetis said. “The makina may have made him go.”

“The makina,” Sar mumbled, ominously, as the sea came into view, and beyond it the northern reach of the Sæwall. “The makina may be alone with him. That is ill news.”

Chance sat on the floor of the narrow airship, stunned, staring at nothing.

After a long while, Wadjet came and put her hand on Chance’s head.

“I lost Seth,” he said. “He died saving me. He died horribly. In terrible pain. I lost him. I lost him. Another death on my conscience. Why did he die for me?”

“He loved you,” Wadjet explained.

And that was it, of course. But this only made Chance’s burden heavier.

“And Sarah’s alone with that false god!”

“The god will come after us,” Wadjet said. “Sarah can hide, escape, and you can return and save her, when this is over. When
you’ve killed this rotten thing. I will come with you, to get my ship.”

Chance grabbed her hand and squeezed it.

Seth is dead, he thought. Sarah is lost. Thetis is lost. The Guardian is bound, perhaps dead. My arm is broken. My village is soon to be burned, its people eaten. My brother will soon be beyond saving, if he is not already so.

“Oh great God,” Chance whispered. “Have pity on me. Have pity on us all. Our way cannot get worse. It cannot get worse.”

“Yes it can,” Wadjet said.

Her hand suddenly gripped tightly back on Chance’s palm. He looked up at her through his tears. She stared with wide eyes toward the front of the ship, the points of her fangs just showing behind her open lips.

Chance climbed to his feet and looked at Mimir.

The makina stood with one hand out. She gazed at her palm in reverie. On it rested two dice of bone.

PART III

YGGDRASIL

CHAPTER

43

“W
hy are you doing that?” Chance demanded.

Two days had passed. Chance paced and turned in the narrow back of the cabin like a trapped animal in a tight cage. All the people he loved had died or were threatened with death, and he could do nothing but fret the limits of this tiny cabin as they glided slowly over a tossing sea, deafened by the roar of the ship’s loud engines. Sometimes he stopped and wept when he remembered Seth or worried over Sarah. Other times with Wadjet he picked at their meager scraps of food. And through it all, Mimir maintained a terrifying concentration as she rolled her dice, hour after hour, over the controls of the airship.

A division of the space arose. Mimir crouched in the front of the cabin, silent, ignoring them, studying the results of her dice as if they were surprisingly complex. Chance and Wadjet stayed in the back half of the cabin, by the door. They sat on crates or—one at a time because the space was so narrow—lay on the floor. Most often, Wadjet sat while Chance paced.

The end of the second day, the sky turned gray, and sheets of light rain fell on the airship, making a susurration sometimes audible over the monotonous howl of the engines.

Finally, Chance could bear the makina’s silence no longer.

“Why do you do that?” he demanded again. He rose and walked toward her when Mimir did not answer. She only rolled the dice again. Chance slammed his hand down over the bone cubes. The makina looked at him, as if just recognizing him.

“Stop,” he said. “That solves nothing. You yourself explained to us how empty it is.”

Mimir put her hand on his chest, and smoothly but with unstoppable force pushed him back. Chance stumbled, his broken arm hindering his balance, and fell beside Wadjet.

Wadjet, who had been mostly silent for the two days, spoke to him as she helped him to his feet. “She will kill me soon.” She did not bother to whisper.

“Surely not!” Chance said.

“Soon. But she won’t kill you. You’re useful.”

Chance’s bitterness overwhelmed him. “May God damn every person who finds me useful.” It hurt his heart to utter such profanity, but his anger had won over his restraint.

Wadjet raised a lip in a defiant smile: she approved of the sentiment.

“Why does she take us to the Well, if she means to betray us?”

Wadjet shook her head. “I don’t know. But remember this. She will fear the modbarrows.”

Mimir looked at Wadjet sharply, her silver eyes turning voluntarily from the dice for the first time that day. She stood. Chance held his breath, expecting an attack. But behind Mimir the clouds had parted, the gray pillars of rain falling on the sea before them were divided, and through the gap Chance saw now a dark shore lined with hills. Behind these rose mountains, densely forested and, beyond, a black cord stretched higher than he could have imagined
possible, from the horizon up through clouds and into a remoteness where it became invisible. It seemed to stretch all the way to the stars.

He pointed. “What…?”

“Yggdrasil,” Wadjet said. “The World Ash.”

Mimir turned her back to them, looking over the sea and the controls at Yggdrasil, clutching her dice in a fist.

“Yggdrasil,” Chance said. And at its foot, Chance knew, lay the door to the Numin Well. Would he know how to find it? Would he know how to open it? And how was he to face this thing Ma’at? Would he be able to pass through the door that Ma’at guarded?

He had assumed that Thetis and the Guardian would be with him when he reached the end of his journey. He could curse the Guardian’s distrust, to have told him so little. Now he had to hope the makina would take him there, and then allow him to complete his mission. Given Mimir’s sullen transformation, this seemed to him unlikely. A terrible battle with the machine was coming, and he would have to fight this battle alone. And if by some miracle he won, he would not know what to do next: how to find the door, how to face the gatekeeper Ma’at, how to get beyond Ma’at.…

The ship began to drop, moving closer to the approaching shore.

“Why are you in exile?” Chance asked Wadjet.

Hours had passed, as Mimir stood unmoving with her back to them. The ship crossed low over the sharp black peaks of the steep mountains. Before them, Yggdrasil split the darkening sky, but seemed to grow no closer.

Wadjet and Chance sat on the floor, a dried fish between them. They broke off flaking white pieces with their fingers and then chewed slowly on the salty parched flesh. They passed a cup of
water. Chance hesitated over the intimacy: after her first sip, he could taste the smell of Wadjet in the water.

Wadjet looked at him, seemingly deciding what to answer. Finally, she said, “I killed a chimpanzee.”

“Was he soulburdened?” Chance asked.

Wadjet nodded.

Chance marveled at this a moment. He had never known of a Truman—or any man in any community of which he’d heard—being punished because he had killed one of the soulburdened. But then he thought: yes. Yes. Seth’s death had been murder.

“Why did you kill him?”

“He was a.…” She searched for the word in Common. “He beat a friend, another chimpanzee.”

“And there was a fight?”

“No fight. Chimpanzees are very strong. I had to defeat him before there was a fight.”

Chance found himself morbidly longing to know the details. Wadjet’s teeth were fierce, but she was thin, with lean arms and legs, and she never carried a weapon—at least not one that he had seen. How did she kill some strong soulburdened beast? He remembered the immovable solidity of the bear that had attacked him by the riverside, after he had fled the Guardian. He flexed his bicep, naked after Mimir had torn away his sleeve, feeling the stiff skin there from the scar the bear’s claw had scraped into his arm.

But instead he asked, “If you cure this disease, will you be forgiven?”

Wadjet showed her fangs. “I don’t ask anyone to forgive me. I am not sorry. I do not want to be a Steward. They’ve done no harm to me, with this punishment of exile.”

“But.…”

“I want to show the Stewards what I can do, without their help and their rules and their endless counsels. And I want to cure friends, so that they might live their lives a while and have children
as they want, and those children can live their lives a while. After life, there is nothing, Puriman. Or so I believe. You have to live your life now, as wild and well as you can. The Stewards are like your ‘wise’ Elders, like that fretting guild woman, and these old beings—” she waved the back of her hand at Mimir contemptuously. “They have their puffed worries and their struggles and their rules and their schemes and their histories—always they have their histories, their rotting books and old tales, as if nothing was ever dead and done. They think all of this history turns on their choices. They never live a day wild. They live in a cage.” She looked around their cramped cabin and she sneered at it as if Mimir had constructed the little space for the very purpose of confining them.

“You can’t be sure that there’s nothing after death,” Chance said.

“You can’t be sure that there is anything after death.”

Chance opened his mouth to answer, then hesitated.

“You can’t,” Wadjet repeated. “Now ask yourself, which is more likely? You’ve seen how the world goes, Puriman. It’s not made for men; it’s not a nursery for human beings. It’s not made for anyone.”

“God’s world is our home,” Chance said, paraphrasing one of the New Psalms of the Purimen.

“No. We’re all without a home. Once you have the idea of a home, once you understand the world that much, that is the moment you become homeless.”

That sounded absurd to Chance. But also, somehow, disturbing. He pictured his home on the shores of Walking Man Lake, the tall walls with graying shingles. Now, of course, his house and village both would seem tiny to him, after having seen Disthea. He thought of the cool plaster of this own room, with its familiar cracks. The dark warmth of the kitchen. The smell of the lake. The cacophony of the frogs in spring, singing in the swamp just down the hill from the road. The sound of the church bell echoing in the Valley on a Sunday.

Would that still be home to him? Without his parents? Perhaps with the rejection of the Purimen? Would it still be home after all he had seen, after he knew of the suffering and anger that seethed outside the valleys—and also the great beauty and accomplishments outside their realm?

If not, he had no home.

Wadjet tore off the head of the fish, stuck it in her mouth, and crunched away at it, grinding the skull as she glared angrily at Mimir.

Night fell. The airship roared through the dark. Mimir seemed to see as well at night as in the day, for she continued to stand with her back to them, as still as a statue, and to stare out the black windows as if guiding their ship. Every few minutes she threw her dice, and snatched them out of the air on the second bounce to read their faces.

Chance slept fitfully, after exchanging glances with Wadjet that conveyed somehow the agreement that the two of them would trade time sleeping. He slept first, and Wadjet awoke him in the dark by pressing gently on his shoulder.

He sat up and looked about sleepily. Mimir still had not moved. Without warning, Wadjet stripped off her pants and shirt and rolled them into a pillow, and, wearing only thin briefs and a top, lay down to sleep, stretching out like some wild animal.