The Lightning God's Wife: a short story (2 page)

“Priestess, I’ve finally found you.”

***

She’d coaxed him to stand and stagger to the cave, his arm
heavy on her bowed shoulders.  He fell unconscious as soon as he collapsed on
the floor, uncaring that only hard stone and sand pillowed his head and
cushioned his body.  Revida tossed one of her two blankets over him and left
him to sleep.

The boy had built a small fire of dried twigs and scrub
brush by the time she’d taken care of his father.  His sister stayed close to
him, her thin arms wrapped around herself as she stared unblinking at the
sleeping figure half hidden by the blanket.

Revida retrieved her pack and took out her dwindling store
of food and drink—two skins of tepid water and a gnarled slab of dried, cured
lizard meat.  She brought them to the fire and sat down across from the
children.  “What are your names?”

The boy pointed to himself.  “I’m Ninun.”  He tapped his
sister on the knee.  “This is Derketo.”

Revida’s eyebrows rose.  “Is that so?”  Whatever their
circumstances, no one could accuse these children’s parents of piety.  To name
one’s offspring after the god of winds and the goddess of fish bordered on
blasphemy.

As if hearing her amusement, Ninun’s eyes narrowed and his chin
rose.  “We’re the children of Atagartis.”

Revida broke off a piece of the dried lizard.  “So are we
all.”  She passed the meat and one of the water skins to him.  “Here.  It isn’t
much.  The lizard can be bitter, and the water is warm, but it will ease the
gnawing in your belly and wet your tongue.  Drink sparingly.”

They ate in silence, grimacing so fiercely at the taste of
the lizard that Revida had to hide her grin behind her hand.  The girl Derketo
tapped her fingers on the cave’s rock floor.  “There’s water here,” she said. 
“Beneath our feet.”

Revida paused with her water skin tipped toward her mouth. 
“How do you know?”  The gods were a wretched lot if they put a water diviner in
this dried husk of a world.

Derketo flattened her hand harder to the ground and closed
her eyes.  “It calls to me.”

Revida sighed.  This was punishment for blasphemous names. 
Twenty-five years ago, Derketo would have held a high place in society, a
citizen of value—useful and prized.  Now it didn’t matter if her senses were
accurate, and they were.  No one would believe her.  At best she’d be shunned,
at worst, hunted and executed.

“You’re right,” she told the little girl.  “I sensed it as
well, though I can’t tell how far down it is or how much is here.  You’ve the
makings of a water diviner.”

Derketo gave her an odd, knowing smile.

With more water close by, Revida sacrificed a small splash
from her drinking stores to clean the soot off her hands and instructed Ninun
to do the same.  When his father awakened, she’d clean the grime off his face. 
His strange eyes fascinated her, and she was curious to know what he looked
like under the layers of dirt.

She set the water skins aside for refilling later and
repacked what remained of the cured lizard.  “What were you and your father
doing wandering these parched wastes?”

There were no verdant places anymore, not even the watering
holes.  The shores of those shrinking oases had been trampled to mud and the
withering trees eaten down to their roots by starving animals.  The stricken
villages perched nearby fought each other for access to the muddy waters.  It
was a harsh existence but still better than here, where the land was nothing
more than baked earth, cracked and barren.  Nomads and exiles like Revida
wandered its unforgiving terrain, but it was no place for children.

The sun slowly sank in the west, bleeding off heat and
leaving behind a rising cold that could freeze a person without shelter or
warmth.  Ninun held his hands over the cheery fire he’d built for them.  “We’re
bound to the earth,” he said, and Revida was caught by the sudden maturity in
his voice.  “Cast down and hunted by the Bitter Dark who seeks to destroy us. 
We’ve been running from him for many years.”

 “And found yourselves a long way from nowhere.”  Revida
rose and dusted off her hands.  “Find a comfortable place to sleep and curl up
together.  I’ll give you a blanket to share.”  She retrieved one of the water
skins and made her way to where the children’s father slept.

The angry welts lashing his skin oozed dark spots through
his ragged shirt.  Revida carefully untied the laces, baring his torso.  They
looked even worse fully exposed.  Her strengths didn’t lie in the healing arts,
but she could clean the dirt away from the lashes and pray they weren’t deep enough
to poison.

She worked quickly but gently, pausing now and then as he
shifted restlessly and mumbled incoherent sentences.  Revida tore a strip off
her already threadbare skirt, wet it and cleansed his face.  She gasped and
almost dropped the cloth at the sight of his washed features.

She knew this face, had seen it in her dreams every night
for a quarter of a century; had traced its contours from eyebrow to jawline. 
His eyes were different—dark brown in her dreams instead of the liquid silver
that had gazed at her earlier.

When he’d awakened at her command, his voice had been
hoarse—as gritty as the dust shrouding him from head to toe—unlike the deep,
dulcet tones that seduced her in her sleep and bound her tears behind her eyes
so long ago.

“Priestess, why do you weep?”

Revida stared at the shimmering image haloed in cerulean
light.  “Nirari no longer speaks to this handmaiden.”

She sensed his anguish, far greater than her own, though
his words cast down her grief.  “Save your tears.  They are all that’s left of
Nirari.”

***

She managed to sleep that night despite the cold and the
sudden surfeit of company.  She dreamed as well.  The lover in those dreams
looked much as the man she’d coaxed into the cave—dark hair, handsome face. 
And something else her eyes couldn’t see but her soul sensed—a vast power
beyond human understanding, a timelessness that saw future, past and present.

He’d first appeared to her when she was a young woman
grieving over the silence of the goddess she served.  Revida had been a water
diviner since she was younger than Derketo and a rain priestess after her first
blooding.  All her life she’d felt the presence of Nirari, the rain goddess. 
Her whispers filled Revida’s spirit; her blessing of life-giving rain watered
the crops and topped the wells.

Then one day a storm, unlike any had ever witnessed, surged
out of the south.  The clouds were blacker than the sap pitch the village men
boiled to keep off the biting flies.  The clouds would have turned the day to
night except for the lightning that struck the earth.  The winds tore the roofs
off houses and snapped tree limbs like kindling.  The rain fell in torrents for
eleven days, bursting rivers over their banks, washing some villages away and
burying others under rapids of mud.

Where Revida had once prayed to Nirari for rain, she prayed
for it to stop.  It did.  Everything halted except the lightning.  The clouds
vanished, the winds died and the rain didn’t fall.  At first grateful for a
surcease of the rain, Revida’s traumatized village praised her efforts.  Two
years later they chased her into the wilderness, pelting her with stones as she
ran.  She had prayed too hard, too well.  The rain had stopped and never
returned.

Her dream lover had appeared that first night she spent in a
forest, huddled under a mound of leaves for warmth.  Revida had cried herself
to sleep.  It was the last time she’d weep.

He’d come to her most nights since then, often her sole
companion as the years, with its many hardships and few joys, passed.  She’d
married a man from a village who knew nothing of her life as a rain priestess
and bore him a child.  She lost both—one to war, the other to illness.  She had
mourned them—still mourned them—but she had not wept, not even in her dreams
when her lover held and comforted her.

In this dream, he stroked her hair, still dark and
lush—unlike the dry, iron-gray it was in the waking world.

“Brave woman,” he said.  “You saved my children.”

Sometimes it was difficult to swallow the resentment. 
“Then you are in my debt,” she said.  “You didn’t save mine.”

His eyes darkened even more, and his hands swept her
back.  “I can create life, Revida, but it’s beyond my power to return it once
it’s taken.  There is another far greater than I who can do so, and her will is
unknown even to us.”   

“I’m afraid,” she said and leaned her forehead against
his chest.

He buried his hands in her hair and kissed the top of her
head.  “Don’t be.  I’m with you, as I’ve always been.”

The dream faded, and Revida awakened to the murmur of voices. 
She rolled over, ignoring the ache in her bones.  Ninun and Derketo sat on
either side of their father.  He was sitting up, the blanket pooled in his
lap.  Except for his eyes, he was the image in her dream.  Revida thought
herself too old to blush, but heat crawled into her cheeks.  She was no longer
the youthful woman in her dreams, but an aging crone, homeless and nomadic.

A shot of anger burned away the last bit of somnolence
weighting her eyelids.  Her succor through long years of exile had been dreams
of the lightning god Atagartis.  He had come to her in her dreams, their mutual
grief over the destruction of the goddess she served and the wife he loved
bringing them together.  That sorrow had become something more in those dreams,
and Revida held fast to them as she aged and the world gasped for water.  What
trickster demon had entered her thoughts and defiled them by putting the face
of the god she loved onto a stranger?

Ninun was speaking to his father.  “Derketo says there’s
water under the cave.  The priestess sensed it as well.”

The man nodded, his features grim.  “Have your sister lead
you to it and hurry.  We don’t have much time.”

Appalled, Revida sat up abruptly.  “You can’t send them
alone!”

He gazed at her, no surprise at her wakefulness in his
expression.  “Why not?”

She scowled.  Men.  “Because they’re children.  We don’t
know what danger might be down there.”  She lurched to her feet, cold, grimy
and unhappy to start her morning like this.  “I’m going with them.”  The water
skins needed refilling anyway, and she looked forward to a scrubbing if there
was enough water to spare.

His mouth curved upward, a reflection of the smile she
remembered from her dreams.  She bristled, indignant.  “They’ll be fine.  Trust
me.”

She snorted.  “Trust you?  I don’t even know your name.”

The smile faded, and his gaze intensified, making her look
away from him.  “You know me, Revida.”

Revida backed away from him, unwilling to accept what her
spirit whispered inside her.  She had asked the children their names but
withheld hers.  They couldn’t have told him her name.  A shiver snaked its way
up her spine.  “I’ll go with your children.  You’ll be fine.  We won’t be gone
long.”

He remained silent, but she felt his gaze heavy on her back
as she fashioned a makeshift torch and led Ninun and Derketo further into the
cave’s depths.  They scampered ahead, disappearing into the gloom.  “Slow
down,” she called to them.  “You’ll get lost, and I’ll never find you.”

Her torch wouldn’t last long, but the scent of water was
heavy in her nostrils, its presence a high hum in her ears.  It was close, and
she’d made note of the few turns they’d taken so far so they could backtrack in
the dark.  She caught a glimpse of Ninun’s face, pale in the wavering
torchlight, before he turned a corner and disappeared.

Revida cursed under her breath and sped up to catch him. 
She entered an expansive cavern with a high ceiling from which stone in the
shape of fangs hung and trickled water.  More of the stone teeth erupted from
the floor, and she had the unnerving sensation of standing in a giant’s mouth,
waiting for its jaws to snap shut.

Movement flitted in the corner of her eye, and she caught
Derketo skipping amongst the rock teeth toward a pool of precious water.  She
didn’t stop at its shores, and Revida cried out too late to Ninun.  “Stop her!”

The girl plunged into the water and sank.  Revida cursed and
sprinted toward the pool.  Ninun’s powerful grip on her arm lifted her off her
feet and yanked her back.

“Wait,” he said, and Revida gawked at him, the air whistling
through her nose as she gasped in shock.

The boy stared at her with changed eyes.  They’d turned the
same translucent blue as his father’s, and his hold on her was far stronger
than any child’s.  He indicated the pool with a thrust of his chin.  “Watch,”
he instructed.

The pool bubbled, sending ripples toward its shore.  A fish,
scaled in shades of blue, indigo and scarlet, leapt out of the water , arced
and dove again.  A girl’s laughter echoed in the underground chamber followed
by a voice wreathed in giggles.  “See, priestess?  I can swim!”

Revida exhaled, stunned.  “Blessed mother of storms.”  She
turned her gaze to Ninun who released her.  “You aren’t human children, are
you?

He watched her with an expression as ancient as his face was
young.  “No.  We’re older than all the generations who worshipped us.  But we
are children—Nirari’s children.  And Atagartis’s.”

Revida’s knees buckled.  She would have fallen had Ninun not
caught her.  The torch slipped from her hand and guttered at her feet.  The
chamber remained lit by the glow emanating from the pool and the
brightly-colored fish that still cavorted in its depths.

“You are the keeper of whirlwinds and zephyrs,” she said.

Ninun pressed a finger to her lips.  “Shhh, priestess.”  He
winked.  “I remember you well.  You’d sing when you prayed to my mother.”