#12 - In The Face Of That Eternity

I will kill you all. You’ll never hurt me again. Why did he get love and I get torture? I’m alive and I will outlive you.  You will all serve me and grovel to me and give me the respect and fear.  Fear hurts me. But it is better than being vulnerable, like a child.  Children are to be beaten to make them respect authority.

“So children deserve to be beaten because they are vulnerable?”

“Who are you who dares ask me such a question?”

“A mother. A mother who does not think you deserved to be abused.”

“Mothers die.  Mothers are murdered. You cannot save them. They cannot save you.”

“Your mother is safe with me where no one can harm her.  I am concerned for you and distressed that you were wrested from me.”

“YOU AREN’T MY MOTHER AND YOU NEVER WERE.”

“How do you know?”

“You don’t sound like my mother.”

I am surrounded by loving arms and rocked, even as I rage and squall and call her names.  I can feel how strong she is and how she loves me.  I scream myself hoarse and then into silence and her loving never wavers.

I am loved? As horrible as I am? She loves a monster?  I raped and killed and destroyed and burned.  I tortured. I beat my own children. I beat my own wife.  Yolend.  She’s close to giving birth.  She is safe from me, with me in this cell.  I cannot beat her to miscarriage and he soft, gentle, loving Ahrimaz would never lay a finger on her, even to pretend to be me.

There is the Imperial birthing chamber and she’s there… she’s surrounded by courtiers all in cloth of gold with their long walking sticks and truth-tellers, in their surgically precise robes and hoods, their genderless faces blank as they prepare to announce the birth and whose child this is.

This is my Yolend.  I can tell. But she looks happy and determined.  I see there are no bruises on her face, or her wrists, despite her skin being bare of paint and powder. She looks as strong as this Yolend, and yes, she is singing the child into the world, the way her people did, before I demanded that they stop.  He’s letting her sing.  He’s letting the Yhom sing again.  Oh, Gods, that hellish noise!

“Your mother sang to you.  Out of her pain, she sang to you.  You tried to save her.  That was why it happened.  You nearly got her away from him and he couldn’t have that.”

“I failed her.  He made her say it to me…”

“Under duress.  Not true.  She loved you.”

“She still died.  I don’t know who you are, but I’ll tell you.  He left her with us.  I don’t know how the flies found their way underground, but they did.”

“I know.  I was there with you, though all I could do was witness.”

“Scorch YOU! Scorch you all to the fiery hells!”

“Your mother is still alive in this world.”

“She’s still alive in the other world! No. no no no no nonononononono—ahhhhhhhhhh---“

I floundered off the floor, screaming, throat hurting me, chest hurting me, arms wrapped around my chest as if to keep my heart from beating out of it.  And then, of course, soaked with sweat, my nightclothes wrinkled and uncomfortable, I wrote it down. Limyé will want to read my crazed dreams.

I run a hand over my clean-shaven chin and decide that I will definitely continue with the beard.  It makes me different from him.

*

Limyé shaved me, washed my hair, took me out to the valley.  All the way outside the city.  It was quite late at night and I’m so surprised that they even have the streets lighted at all, they are so backward.  He put me in a litter and my two on-duty guards carried me out to where I could imagine I was alive.  I’ve been buried so long that I did weep, though I didn’t snivel so they wouldn’t see or hear.

The tree… was the same… though there were thousands more empty cages hung on the branches, candle glasses to not harm the tree.  Ribbons.  I could see the ribbons floating in the breeze and beyond the highest branches… stars.  No matter where I am, my world, this world, the stars are the same.

“This is the Goddess’s Veil,” Limyé told me.

Of course it is. I am outraged that this is a Goddess Shrine, open to everyone.  This was MY place.  MY safe space. How dare all these people rub their souls all over the only place I could cry?  How could they?  I cannot hold onto my rage.  The water drags it off me, the sound of the wind, the flocks of tame songbirds. The raked gravel paths, so peaceful. The moss covered carved seats these people have put in.  Glass candle lanterns set here and there, flickering light in the darkness. The lanterns are green and blue and gold and have little tiger faces on them so that the light shines through their eyes. In the depths of darkness the God is here.  How...odd.

The waterfall is a crescent perhaps four paces across, and the water is about ankle deep at the lip, above.   Below is a carved out space behind the water. One can walk behind the veil and hear nothing but the rush of it.  It is barely thick enough, when it plunges into the pool, to hide behind.  The pool it falls into is deep enough to swim in so I used to dive through the waterfall, just to feel the rush and the roar, the pounding on my back, the soothing of my oft-bruised skin with cool water.

I was still only wrapped in towels, and my wet bonds.  I pulled on them experimentally and found to my disappointment they were not about to stretch, or give way.  Limyé you know I have to keep trying this, so don’t take it personally when you read this.

He helped me out of the litter, once they’d taken me past the tree and down the narrow, raked path to the Veil.  Then got into the pool with me, robe and all, and let me float, my head on his hand, looking at the stars. They are the same as in my world.

Perhaps, in the face of that eternity, I am not so bad.