Indomitus Oriens (The Fovean Chronicles) (4 page)

             
Glynn nodded. When the One Place had been destroyed by Chaos, the goddess Water had been struck dumb. Earth, who loved her, had taken her to a burning remnant of the One Place to warm her, and bonded with her to sustain her, and to rock her from side to side.

             
Water had birthed Life in his embrace, and Life had spread all manner of living things upon Earth’s divine body.

             
Eveave had stepped in by creating the ‘Rule of the Gods,’ which protected Life’s children from the direct influence of the Gods.

             
However the gods found indirect ways…

             
They prayed together. Glynn ignored the hard stone that made her knees throb, the stiff posture that made her back ache. She ignored the dryness in her throat from taking no drink, and she prayed even until her voice cracked.

             
She knew the pain served its purpose. The discipline of enduring it, the suffering, brought one through to the other side and, there, to enlightenment.

             
After hours and hours, knowing the sun had not only set but had risen, Chaheff spoke the final prayer and they were done.

             
She stood smoothly and with decorum, the only hint of her discomfiture the smudge on her white robes around the knee.

             
Uman servants appeared as if from the stone walls with food and drink. Glynn took a goblet full of red wine and waited for her mentor to drink. When he did, then she sipped, the tart liquid soothing her raw throat.

             
She didn’t thank the Uman. It wasn’t their place to be thanked. They would serve, she would cast, that is what they did. You didn’t thank the Caste of Warriors for killing, the Caste of Merchants for selling, or the Caste of Artisans for making these goblets every time you used them.

             
It was simple in its grace, and all parties understood it.

             
“Sore?” kindly old Chaheff asked her.

             
She bowed her head and smiled. “I persevere,” she said. “It is a matter of the mind and what it will hear from the body.”

             
“We are about to let you sing a song, Glynn.” Chaheff’s kindly brown eyes focused on Glynn’s violet ones. “You were chosen to be a Caster, because you came to your father on your own, and like me with mine, you told him, ‘The most powerful thing in the world is not a knife, or a sword, or a spell, or a god, but a thought.’”

             
“A song is a thought you sing out, in a way to get others to believe in it. Lose control of your thoughts, and you will unleash the most powerful thing there is, and be at its mercy.”

             
“I can sing it out, my Lord teacher,” Glynn promised him. She searched his eyes, silver on silver to anyone else and lovely violet to her. Even now, exhausted from the prayer, the song remained burning in her mind.

             
“I have no doubt you can,” Chaheff squeezed her shoulder. “But what will you do with the thought?”

Chapter Two:

             
The Evolution of Woman and Man

             
Lunch on the company dime was at a sit-down restaurant—specialty burgers, curly fries and double-large sodas served in glasses, not paper cups.

             
They sat together on the outdoor porch, where they could smoke. Melissa had her Marlboros from her car.

             
“Stupid no smoking laws,” Bill complained. “Like we aren’t Americans.”

             
“Tell me about it,” Melissa said. She took a long, satisfying drag. Bill had learned she was twenty-four, dropped out of college, followed some band around for two years, ended up here for lack of a better place and lived with two roommates.

             
“This your only gig?” Bill asked.

             
She took another drag and exhaled it. “It is for now,” she said. “I tried working in an office but I don’t have the clothes.”

             
“They can be pretty strict,” Bill said.

             
“Yeah, they can,” she said, accentuating the ‘yeah.’ “Like, show one bit of cleavage and it’s, ‘Adios, slut.’ So I said, ‘Screw that,’ and came here.”

             
“Never sold before?”

             
“Girl Scouts. Can you believe it? Me in one of those uniforms? My sister said I was a total geek and she wouldn’t join.”

             
“I don’t know,” Bill said. “I really love the cookies.”

             
“Oh, I could kill for the cookies,” Melissa said. She sat back in her chair and blew a puff of smoke in the air. “You know the thin mint ones? I think I went up a pants size on those things.”

             
Bill prevented himself from looking at her middle. He still wasn’t comfortable with the rules in the office; better to stay quiet.

             
“But you’re not from here,” he pressed. That was as personal as he dared get.

             
She took a drag and shook her head. “Nah,” she said. “Main—ah, born and raised. I thought I would take a break from the northeast, from city life. I like it down here. It’s nice. You know your neighbors; people come over to your house and say, ‘Hi.’”

             
Bill grinned. He had no idea who lived next door to him at the apartment.

             
“So what’s happening with sales for you?” Bill asked, as their meal arrived. “Are you following the steps?”

             
She nodded, reaching for her burger. She had a healthy appetite for a girl. Women Bill knew were either fat or sweating every calorie.

             
“It’s like, I follow the steps, yanno,” she said, “but then they ask some stupid question, like, ‘How much money will I make in my first year?’ and I am like, ‘I don’t know—a lot.’”

             
Bill choked on a mouthful of beef. He almost felt like he was shooting pieces out his nose. He chewed and swallowed, feeling like a horse at a trough, and finally said, “You said that?”

             
“Well, the stupid card didn’t tell me what to say.”

             
She was referring to their script cue cards. You had a pack of laminated cards with numbers on them, and you could shuffle through them by number, so that if you were on card seven, and a client answered a question one way, then you went to card ten or, another way, card fourteen.

             
Newbies always got the cards mixed up, or read them and didn’t listen.

             
“I can show you a trick to that,” Bill said. “I used to have the same problem with that question.”

             
“Really?” she asked. The expression on her face seemed so grateful, as if she had asked him to cure her father’s cancer, and he’d just said he could. “That is nice.
Thanks
, Bill.”

             
She smiled a giant smile, putting him right on his guard.

             
“Yeah, not a problem,” Bill said.

             
They ate quietly for a while.

             
“So no kids, no woman, no fun—what’s up with you, Bill?” she asked, taking a bite of her French fry. “You gotta have something going in your life.”

             
“I do?” he asked. This had become way too personal, and he didn’t like it. “Why is that?”

             
She shrugged. “I dunno,” she said. “Cuz otherwise you live your life between commercials? What did you do at my age?”

             
“At your age?” Bill said. “I was at Woodstock, or telling everyone who would listen how great being at Woodstock was.”

             
“Really?” she said. “You were there? That is
so
cool. Was it really all, like, drugs and sex and cool music?”

             
Bill laughed. “Maybe in some peoples’ minds. It was mostly bad weather, too many people with too few facilities, and a bunch of people thinking they were going to save us. The music was good, though. That was the last time I saw ‘The Who’ live.”

             
“Wuh—who?”

             
“
The
Who,” Bill said. “Before your time.”

             
“Guess so,” she agreed. “Did you want to be a rock star?”

             
Bill laughed. “When I sing, wild dogs show up trying to mate. No, it made me want to hate the government and protest the war.”

             
She nodded sagely. “Korea.”

             
“Vietnam,” he corrected her, angrily. “Cripes, what do they teach you kids in school?”

             
“Not a lot,” she said. “Which is how I landed this great job. So, you can show me how to sell?”

             
“Yeah,” Bill said.

             
“And can you tell me something else?” she asked.

             
She looked right into his eyes, and Bill thought,
Here it comes, oh, boy.
This is her whole angle.

             
“What?” he asked.

             
She looked down, and looked up, and said, “What is it we’re selling? Because I have been selling it for three days now, and I have, like, no friggin’ idea.”

* * *

Glynn knelt alone at her personal altar, dedicated to Adriam.

Most Uman-Chi worshipped Adriam.
Some preferred Eveave, and most of them were women. Glynn felt as if the god-mother forced justice on those who didn’t need it. Most Casters were men, Uman-Chi men worshipped Adriam, and so did she.

“Oh, Adriam, who is great and wise,” she intoned.
“Clear my mind, my burdens and past. Give me the moment, that I might serve thee in it.”

She spoke the litany, and imagined herself alongside a stream.
Her mind became a pitcher, and she emptied it into the clear water. The thoughts became fish that swam away.

Out poured the worry that she was not up to her challenge.
Out poured the male Casters who judged her. Out poured the thorny beast of a fish that was her hatred for the Conqueror. Out poured her longing for her father and her brother.

And in her stream, a great, white fish with jagged teeth and long, whale-like flippers devoured all the others, and looked up into her vessel, hungry for more.

And that was not good. If she could not clear the stream, then she could not have the moment. If she could not have the moment, then she could not cast.

In her mind’s eye, she knelt by the stream, she lowered her top, and she leaned forward.
Her breasts dragged the water, its cold embrace bringing rise to her nipples, and she nourished the white fish.

It looked hungrily to the pitcher and, seeing nothing, addressed her breast.
She felt the pull within her as the beastly thing suckled, the pain of its teeth on her soft flesh.

Being an enchantress, a woman who cast spells, made Glynn rare in and of itself.
She had come to the
Ultimate Truth
at the unprecedented age of 90. With precious few women to learn from, Glynn’s methods were, by necessity, mostly her own.

To create, she’d realized, a man gives from himself.

To create, a woman gives
of
herself.

She bore the pain
. She nourished the fish and, when it had its fill of her, it swam away without a backward glance. Her stream ran clear, sweet and free, and her mind reflected it.

Her non-corporeal energy floated out from her body, in her imaginary world and in her real one.
She looked down upon her two selves, pristine in the dream and real in her little chapel, alongside her rooms in the royal palace.

She saw the little imperfection in the skin beneath her shoulder.
She touched it, and connected her lifeline back to herself. She reached out with her power, into the cold air of a day in the month of Adriam, and wrapped the city in her ethereal self.

She would do this every day, many times a day, exhausting herself and, at the same time, defining her strength.
Each day saw her a little stronger, a little better, a little more able to disperse herself.

When the time came, she would sing.
If she lost the song, if she lost the thought, she would use this newfound power to dispense the energy she released. Giving of herself, she would save her people and her city.

Transitioning herself from caster to conduit, Glynn Escaroth of the Family Escaroth prepared herself for singing.

* * *

Melissa sat at her cubicle, squeezed in front of her work station.
Her headset made her ear sweat, her top made her boobs sweat and Bill’s hamburger-breath settled in her nose. She scrunched in between him and her desk, in a space too small for more than one. Bill’s big ol’ belly took up a lot of room—most of which she needed.

She felt frustrated.
She did a job that seemed stupid to her, getting people to work from home selling ‘products,’ to other people who worked from home. Personally, she saw it as a sucker’s bet, but people sure sold it and people sure bought it, and if they could do it, why couldn’t she?

“Hello?”

Someone picking up the phone startled her back to reality.

“Hello, Sir,” she said.
The Teleminer program on her screen told her this was Edward Befram of Hershey, PA, that he was 35-50, and that he owned his own home. “Is this Edward?”

She girlied up her voice like Bill had shown her.
She called him Edward, not Mr. Befram, so he would warm to her. What man didn’t like a call from a girl?

“Yes.”

She picked up the caution in his voice—already on to her. Bill raised his eyebrows, prompting her to move forward.

“I called because I heard you were looking for a change in your life?” she asked, making her ‘provocative statement.’
She had made that up on the spot. Bill grinned a wide, wolfish grin. She felt some of the anxiety drain out of her—she was doing ok.

“You heard that, huh?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. Now she caught herself warming to this person, too. “I called because we don’t have a rep in Pennsylvania, and if you’re looking for a change, we’re looking for a rep.”

Bill nodded.
The man seemed interested. She flashed through her cards, giving him little bits of information, making him ask for more. In five minutes he had asked her how he could get more information on this, and she set up the program to send him a mail packet while updating his contact. He wanted her to call him—this was a good lead.

She clicked off after her prospect did, and looked at Bill, feeling six feet tall and super-charged.

“See how easy?” he asked her.

She couldn’t help herself
—she hugged him. She felt his body go rigid like iron, but it didn’t bother her. She pressed her cheek to his beard and her breast to his chest, and gave him a squeeze.

“Well, um, uh, good job,” he said, when she let him go.

She adored the shyness, the gentle chivalry. A boy her age would have had his hand on her ass or worse—not Bill. He turned his body a little away from hers, not wanting for her to know she had excited him. Of course, she wouldn’t have noticed otherwise—she wasn’t a perv or anything. Now she warmed to him even more.

“Again?” she asked him.

His eyes widened. He thought she was going to hug him again. She found it so funny—he was so
cute
. Not Brad Pitt cute, but teddy bear cute.