The Warrior Who Carried Life (17 page)

“Life?” said Cara, and pushed him from her. “You call it life?”

“What else would you call it? Except, of course, that I cannot die.”

“What your Father hates about life is that it is always new, always changing. You always stay the same. You are dead, Galo.”

“Oh, I am born again the same each time, yes. Same memories. But isn’t it tiring, Cara, to have to start over again each time? How do you know who you are?” His voice took on a note of genuine interest. “The time you have to spend learning about the world! Learning how to speak! The inefficiency of it. And the idea of coming out of someone else! How can you stomach that? How strange your relations with each other must be. In and out of each other, in out, and out pops a new one, as shapeless as a lump of dough with about as much character, half yours, half someone else’s, something that must depose you, if it’s to have a life of its own, boot you out of your own house. It’s a wonder you don’t all kill your children at birth. And the act itself! All those moist clicking noises and secretions. No wonder it is counted as a sin.” The Galu shuddered. “Our way is much cleaner.”

“
Cleaner
!”

“Swifter, then.”

“Why did you burn the marshes?”

“Oh, Cara. Don’t be so relentless. I’m not going to tell you anything you need to know.”

“Were there rebels hiding there? Can you starve, Galu? Can you die at all? What will you eat, now that the fields are gone?”

The Galu gave a low chuckle. It was a question he would enjoy answering. “We eat the dead, Dear Daughter. We crack open their bones and make soup. Sometimes we eat the living.”

Cara gave a shivering laugh. “You make me very angry, Galo, but I am angry in a new way, and I have new things to do with my anger. You are coming with me.”

“Am I?”

“Yes. I came here to kidnap one of you.” Both of them grinned, as if at a shared joke.

“Kidnap,” repeated the Galu, enjoying its absurdity. “Why?”

“So that I can find out how you react to the Flower.”

The Galu gave a mocking laugh. “We hate everything it stands for!” Then he added, almost pityingly. “Kidnap me? Look around you, Cara.”

“I know, Galo. I’ve seen them. Do you really think you are a threat to me?”

“We can’t kill you, Cara. But we can overpower you. There are enough of us to hold you down. You will make a very good carrier, Cara, to replace the one you killed.”

Leaking out of all the shadowed doorways, into the central garden came the brothers of Galo gro Galu. “We all love moonlight, Cara, and wells that have gone dry. We all love you. We are never alone, because we move in unison.”

There were five hundred and seventy six Galu who bore the name and face of Galo, and they had his mind as well. They all came forward, with the unanimity of bees, all with the same hard smile, all making the same clacking, crackling noises, over and over with their tongues. The Spell of Fire.

Cara struck Galo across the face, all her great weight behind her fist, and slung him over her shoulder. She too was muttering spells. She leapt up on the lip of the well, and took Stefile’s hand. There was a spark of flame at the tips of Galu’s fingers, and suddenly a shaft, not of wood, but of living flame, flew out of them at Cara. It cracked open the armour over her breast, Stefile involuntarily screamed. Like a dog scrambling in dirt, the fire clawed out scraps of flesh, searing them black. Cara fell backwards into the well, pulling Stefile with her.

The Spell of Fire was the first and simplest of the spells, but the third, and therefore stronger, was the Spell of Rain. Rain fell, drenching, out of the low wispy clouds that could not hide the moon. There was a hissing of steam on the Galu’s fingers, and they yelped, and shook them. They sprang forward to the edge of the well. There were mutterings of confusion, and a cry of “Light,” and murmurings of spells. By the time a tongue of flame, sheltered by a saddle, burned over the mouth of the well, all it showed was a dry stony shaft that was empty, all the way to its bottom pavements. Empty, that is, except for the fading echoes of laughter.

And Galo gro Galu thought:

Why are they laughing?

He lurched from side to side, only dimly aware that he was being carried.

A male voice boomed close to his ear. “It makes no difference! It makes no difference at all!”

Being carried?
the Galu wondered.

“How does it feel?” asked the female, concerned.

Strange
, the Galu tried to reply, but his jaw flapped lopsidedly, and made a grinding noise inside his head.

“Good, good, it feels good. Touch the hole,” said the man.

Disgusting
, thought Galo.
Do they think of nothing else?

“It’s healing shut!” squealed the woman.

Does it do that?
wondered the Galu, his knowledge of human anatomy sketchy at the best of times.

“Now you may truly call me heartless,” said the man, and roared again with laughter.

I don’t understand what is happening
, Galo realised. His hand struck rock, as they ducked low.

“Well, hello, Galo,” said the male. “You’re awake again. The One Book talks about this place. Keekamis built the wells of the City by tunnelling underground to the river. That is where we are going.”

For a swim?
thought Galo. He regretted the beautiful ash on his body. It would wash away. He heard splashing underfoot and wondered if they were already swimming or not.

“I am going to learn from you, Little Galu,” Galo heard the voice promise him. “I’ll learn what the Flower will do to you. I’ll learn many other things too. I’ll go on learning. Nothing can kill or hurt me. I am a very powerful sorceress. You made me that.” Galo felt himself kissed on the cheek. He tried to wipe it off. “I will be your undoing,” the voice added. “I will also save your soul.”

Galo heard the splashing of water deepen, and he felt himself plunge into it, felt it close, green and cold over him, felt a thick-fingered hand clamp over his nostrils and mouth.

He felt the lurching and the kicking of the body that held him, felt his hair floating, felt himself floating, as if dropping off to sleep. Perhaps he did lose consciousness for a time, for very suddenly he was gasping for air, his head held under the neck above water.
Seagulls
, he thought dully. All about him was a flock of seagulls, bobbing on the water. They seemed to accept him as part of the floating garbage on which they fed. Instead of flying away, they sat on the water, their hooked bills turned sideways with their heads, their alert eyes looking upward at the light. The light was descending.

Suddenly the Galu felt himself shot through with pain. The light seemed to pierce him in rays, and he tried awkwardly, to scream. His mouth and jaws flapped, and a part of his mind made suddenly clear by a shaft of light understood that his jaw was shattered and his palate cleft.

He began to rise. Dazed and sickeningly confused by a pain he did not understand, the Galu thought it was the seagulls who lifted them all out of the water. Seagulls circled about him in the air, screeching, beaks open. Drops of water glinting with light fell off his legs through a space below him that was suddenly vast.

“I can’t swim,” he said, bewildered. He remembered someone speaking—or was she speaking now?—it was the girl, One Dress, saying, “I tried to breathe underwater, and my lungs filled with water, but it didn’t matter.”

“Keep still!” another voice commanded him, slicing into his skull like the barbs of light. How was it that he was not cold, wet as he was in this wind? What kept him warm? The countryside below him was a ghostly grey. It flickered past, so quickly, in a blue-white light. They passed over a great fire.

My brothers have started without me
, he thought. Streams of white smoke rippled out of black fields that sparkled orange and red in lines that were crinkled with ember. Farmers burning stubble. Harvest.
Where are we?
he wondered, and looking up saw a great, white, fierce face, like an eagle’s. As if in the middle of a dream that he did not like, Galo wanted to lose consciousness again, and he did.

Galo gro Galu awoke in breathtaking cold, hearing thunder and strange music.

Light, dazzling, stung him, and he held up his hand, turned his head away. The thunder seemed to crackle under his feet. The walls, away from the light, were smooth and glossy and white and blue. They were made of ice. Light filtered through it, following cracks, catching on bubbles in it. Beyond the walls of ice, something moved.

Distorted by the ice, rippling, the shape filled Galo with unease. It seemed to billow like a cloud, and it flickered with light. He looked away and up. Another, overhead, seen through a ceiling of ice, was black, surrounded by what looked like lacy swirls. Enormous feathers perhaps, or fins. The blackness gaped. Galo gave a little gasp, and pulled his eyes away, his heart pounding as if at a narrow escape.

“You are very wise to look away,” said a voice. It was too close, nauseatingly close, inside his head. Something was in the room with him, ahead, where the light was most blinding. “Those are my brothers and sisters. They are unknown to you and humankind, and have no interest in either. The few men who have seen them clearly have been struck dumb and blind.” Amid the whiteness, a white form sat, wrapped in loose white robes. Dimly, Galo made out an eagle’s head, in a haze of reflection, and lion’s paws. Dimly, he heard music, sounding like a lyre, pierced by a whistling, a sweet sad dying fall, from somewhere within the honeycomb of ice.

“Where . . .” the Galu began, and felt a raw scraping of bone inside his jaw that made him squeal in pain.

“Do not try to talk,” said the voice. “This place is Siretsi Takan, the Top of the World. The Flower is there, in front of you.”

The Flower? Galo simply could not see it. It was lost in light. He screwed his eyes shut, and covered them with his hands, but the light was as searing as before. Turning his head, he felt for the Flower with his hands, finding a table made of ice. Its top had melted into a rough, pockmarked surface. In the centre of it was the Flower, plump and slightly warm. He could cover it over with his two hands.

That is it?
he thought.
The Flower? This great thing, that is all it is?
It made him angry, disappointed in a way, and scornful. He wanted to shred the thing, and shatter it. But his hands, laid over it, did not move. He turned his head and opened his eyes to the light, for just a moment.

Suddenly he was aware, with a sense of just having woken, that he had been staring at the Flower for a very long time. The flesh about his eyes was shivering with pain, and streaming with tears, but he could see the Flower now, dimly, an outline of blue.

Cara and One Dress were in the room. They weren’t there before, when had they come in? Galo felt a stab of vivid venomousness that almost revived him. Wrapped in furs and breathing out steam, they were as damp and hot as their genitals. He was cold. It was the cold that was so confusing him, and the pain in his jaw, and the awful light, bruising his eyes. All the room around him seemed darker now, like twilight, his eyes were so burnt by the light.

“How long has he sat there?” Cal Cara asked.

Asu Kweetar replied, “Since the sun first struck the ice and made it boom and batter.”

“The Flower holds him?” asked Cara.

“Completely,” said Asu Kweetar. “He loves it. He loves it beyond words, beyond thinking, more than any of the smaller beasts, more than any human. More than you, Cal Cara Kerig. It is very strange.”

Lies
, thought Galo.
Nonsense. I feel none of that
. He was staring at the Flower again. He could see it very clearly now, each petal of it.
There
, he thought with satisfaction, finding little flecks of bright light in the midst of its crystalline softness.
Imperfection. Even there. Everything was botched by this God. This is a universe that has been ruined by its maker. The universe is a cage that God has trapped us in, and we do not have the strength to unmake it, to tear ourselves free of it.
Then, unbidden a thought came to him.
Still, anything that was perfect would not change. It would not be alive.

“How long has it been since he took it?” Cara asked.

What does that mean?
the Galo asked himself, angrily.
Took it! I don’t want it. Took it? What does that mean?

“His heart has beaten four thousand times since he ate of it,” replied the beast.

Ate it!
thought Galo, with disgust.
What an absurd thing to do!

“Has he slept?” the girl, One Dress, was asking. “The change seems to take hold when you sleep. It is a smaller death, in which the Flower takes root.”

A smaller death in which the Flower takes root! Oh, the simpering pretentiousness of it!
Why
did peasants always think that power consisted of being kind and half awake? All regal doziness, being oracular and vague, as though creatures that ruled never had to have a clear, hard thought. Oh she was a vulgar sow, immortal or not.
I think they probably call each other ‘Sir’ and ‘Lady,’
writhed the mind of the Galu in impotent hatred.
I’ll stake a thing or two that for all their immortality, they’ll go back to live on a farm. They’ll raise ducks and geese, and give them pet names. Then they’ll eat them.

Love the Flower! Eat the Flower? That? It was as bad as the sun. Promising light and warmth, but it raised blisters on his skin, and was followed in this God’s universe by winter. Love the Flower! By the Serpent, he wished he could get away from the Flower! A sudden fury seized him. He would show them how he loved the Flower. Love?
Was this love, Cal Cara?

He grabbed the Flower in both hands and pushed his fingers into it, between the petals. Cara and Stefile shouted and sprang forward, dim in the dim room, and Galo gave a squeal of pain, struck perhaps by a fresh blaze of light; there was a sudden crack; the Flower broke down the middle, and heedless of the blood on his fingers from the thorns, the Galu shredded it.

Was it night? Suddenly, everything was dark, except where the Flower was. The Flower was on the table. Galo blinked to clear the water from his eyes, which seemed to be sore from grit. The Flower! Reminded that he hated it and had meant to destroy it, he lunged forward, rose to his feet, pulling out fistfuls of its petals, growling, sobbing as he rent it apart. Flakes of it settled like snow, twists of the Flower gleaming on the table like broken diamonds. Panting and wiping his eyes, he watched them glow.

The Flower was on the table, and the Galu was full of confusion and dread. Something terrible held him. How long had he been sitting there? Hadn’t he been standing before? Shreds of the Flower’s destruction were all about it on the table. They moved, drawing themselves up in the middle, using their thorns like hooks to pull themselves, migrating, as disgusting to the Galu as slugs. He swept them off the table, and following the sweep of his hand, he saw them on the floor, the petals, writhing and turning and suddenly burgeoning, a clear line of division appearing down their middles. The floor was covered with them, small, roiling larvae. With a yelp of horror, he began to grind them under his feet, kick them away from him.

Then he saw . . . Oh, sweet Serpent, sideways winder, defender against God . . . saw what he had done. Shifting, growing, steady with light, clear and pure, one after the other, after the other, were many Flowers. They were piled in the corners, nearly to the ceiling, penetrating each other with warm light. Everything else was lost in darkness. He turned, and in terror this time, savaged the Flower, hands clawing at it, but before he was done, he screamed, and let it drop, and buried his hands in his armpits. The Flower rolled, to join its brethren. The Galu felt something shiver and shrink in his chest, felt a wizening and a weakening. His three eggs, his children, his other selves, were dying, like apples withering with age. He opened his mouth, nearly healed now by the Flower, to scream and felt their souls so like his own escape like vapour.

“Father Serpent, coiled at my breast!” he howled. “Help me! Help me!”

“Come, Galo,” said a voice out of the darkness. It was Cara. Hands helped him to his feet. “We’ll let you rest now.”

Galo felt his hair floating free from his forehead. He awoke in warm water, looking out over a coral reef. It fell away beneath him, in tormented pinks and greens and whites, rippled with sunlight, to blue depths where all other colour was lost. Straight ahead of him, deeper than the deepest jewel, the blue extended into the heart of the ocean, layers of light going out mile on mile. There was no sound.

Galo tried to stand up, but couldn’t. He tried to look down and couldn’t; he could only lower his eyes. There was no body beneath him, only coral, as though all the reef had become his body.
Odd
, he thought, scowling with puzzlement. Water, salty and warm, filled his mouth and throat.
Oh. I see. Well it was
one
way of disposing us, I suppose
. He felt no fear, or panic.

A parrot fish, a brilliant turquoise, lazed along the reef just below him, its tail idly stroking the water. Galo marvelled at the perfection of its beak, open shut, open shut. Small black fish moved in a flock with a geometric precision, all to the left in unison, then all to the right. They did not swerve or scatter as the parrot fish swam up behind and then over them, leaving behind a gap in their formation. So gentle, so orderly, thought Galo. He heard a strange hooting, like an owl, but more resonant. A trumpet fish swam by, its mouth a long horn of crusty tissue. Its hooting was taken up all along the reef. Light, sweeping the reef in rays like searchlights, struck the trumpet fish and its translucence, and Galo saw the fish’s spine, and the twisting of blood vessels around the spine, and the brown clumping of its heart and its bowels together, all of it precisely, delicately in place. Far off in the ocean, a pallid white like a moon in daylight, swam a shark, its shape as simple and ferocious as a spearhead.

A shadow settled over Galo, beside him, and heavy, sandalled feet crushed the coral near his face. It was Cal Cara Kerig. She carried an old barnacled chest with her, and adjusted it on the sloping reef, somewhat in front of Galo so that he could see her, and sat on the chest, holding it so it would weigh her down.