The Veiled Throne, page 6
To resolve their dispute, they each picked a soul and watched their incarnated progress through the mortal sphere. And then, just as the two souls were about to shed their earthly bodies and cross the River-on-Which-Nothing-Floats to enter the afterlife, the gods asked them to tarry and answer a few questions.
“What is the ocean?” asked Lutho of the soul he had picked, who had lived a life as a dome-headed whale.
“The ocean is a vast, boundless realm of desolation in which massive, sleek lords careen, each as lonely as a star in heaven,” said the dome-headed whale. “When they meet, the only language spoken is that of battle. Every day, I dove into the inky abyss to pursue the many-tentacled, sharp-beaked squid, and let me tell you:
“O scaled fish, O tooth-skinned shark, all kith and kin of the finny tribe,
O turtle, O nautilus, all armored denizens of the deep,
Hear the bone-breaking beak tear into battle-scarred flesh,
Watch the bright blade-barbed teeth cleave off arm and tentacle!
One is a water-guzzling demon with lantern-bright eyes,
The other a thick-helmeted warrior who quaffs air.
Will the ever-tightening limbs crush the whale’s skull like the vise of Fithowéo?
Or will the snapping jaws fling the head-full-of-feet into Rapa’s eternal sleep?
“I have seen all there is to be seen of the ocean, Lord Lutho and Lord Tazu. It is a briny dominion of warfare and stratagem, where all mortals contest for supremacy in a dance on the precipice of death and oblivion.”
The two gods nodded. Then Tazu asked the same question of the soul he had picked, who had lived a life as a skittering shrimp in the coral reefs off the shore of the Big Island.
“The ocean is a warm, inviting cloud of living water that surrounds the rainbow-hued terraces of my city, the capital of the Crustacean Kingdom. We made our homes in reef caves, whose walls were studded with jewel-like shells, the bones and crusts of animals who had staked their homesteads there before us. During the day we strolled through gardens of anemones of every hue and variety, and during the night we slept on beds of the softest sponge. We dined on the spicy algae grown along the wide avenues of our colorful conurbation, and devoted our time to the contemplation of the finer things in life.
“Once, my friend, a hermit crab, visited me, and as we neared nightfall, I said:
“ ‘The crushed green kelp is brewing, the white cowry cups salted and crisp.
A hint of chill in the evening tide; tarry for another sip?’
“We drank kelp tea and admired the dancing jellyfish who glowed and pulsed in the liquid empyrean like the legendary fireworks spoken of by hallucinatory poets. We spent the whole night discussing contemporary philosophy and the elegant compositions of the classical Thalassa Poets. It was my favorite night.”
“Do you recognize the ocean described by the skittering shrimp?” Lutho asked the dome-headed whale.
The whale heaved his failing body to the surface, and as sunlight refracted through the spray from his blowhole, a rainbow-hued reef city appeared briefly. “Not at all,” he said with wonder and regret. “I’ve soared over countless coral reefs in my life, but never have I imagined the beauty of the sights described by her. How I wish I had lingered to look closer.”
“Do you recognize the ocean described by the dome-headed whale?” Tazu asked the skittering shrimp.
The shrimp, too old to dance anymore with grace, swayed and tumbled in the ocean currents. “No. I have never imagined that the world outside the reef is so vast and dreadsome, full of titans warring in the darkness like gods in primordial chaos. How I wish I had been bold enough to explore.”
“I was wrong and you were also wrong, brother,” said Lutho to Tazu. “The mortals cannot ever become as wise as we are, but it isn’t because of their lack of divine insight. The world is infinite, but the lives of the mortals are finite. Nurture and nature are both powerless before all-devouring Time. Look at how disappointed these souls are at learning how little they knew. It’s impossible for the finite to ever discern the truth of the universe in its infinite multitudes.”
“To the contrary, I was right and you were also right, brother,” said Tazu to Lutho. “Do you not see the wonder in the eyes of these dying bodies or hear the awe in their fading voices as they imagined the world through each other’s stories?”
“What good is a story that comes at the end of a life?”
“Though each individual mortal experiences life for but a score of years, they can draw upon a store of stories left by all their forbearers. The race of humankind grows toward infinity, even as the nature of each individual is limited. Nature may describe tendencies and circumscribe potentialities, but it is within the power of each soul to nurture itself for another life, to imagine a course not taken, to strive for a different view. Through that yearning by the finite for the infinite, the portraits painted by all the mortal eyes may yet piece together a grander truth than our divine understanding.”
“If I didn’t know you better,” said Lutho, “I would almost say you’re turning kindhearted toward the mortals. Will you nurture them by my side?”
“I am the Lord of Chaos,” said Tazu. “I am neither kind nor unkind. It is my lot to introduce chance into the lives of the mortals, and watch as their natures unfold.”
And this was why, from then on, Lutho asked remoras to attach themselves close to the eyes of dome-headed whales, so that the little fish could clean parasites and dead skin off the giant eyelids, so that the small might share their stories with the grand as brother and sister, so that the magnificent finned lords of the ocean might see realities with more care and clarity.
And this was why, from then on, Tazu’s storms periodically tossed the tiny inhabitants of coral reefs onto distant and strange shores filled with alien leviathans and antipodal krill, so that they could see what they never would have seen, so that they could hear stories they never would have heard and tell stories they never would have told, so that their natures could be nurtured by new experiences.
* * *
“You must have so many stories about the gods and heroes of Dara,” said Goztan, imagining that unimaginable life the man had led and trying to understand his strange deities.
“And some of them may even be true,” said Oga, chuckling. “But it’s not fair to hear a story without telling one in return. Would you share a story with me?”
“I’m no storyteller,” she demurred.
“Everyone is a storyteller,” he said. “That’s how we make sense of this life we live. Misfortune and affliction test us with one blow after another, most of which we don’t deserve. We have to tell ourselves a story about why to make all the random manipulations of fate and fortune bearable.”
She had never thought of it that way. After a pause, she said, “All right. I will tell you a story, an old story passed down the generations, from mother to daughter, father to son, grandparent to toddler, votan to taasa.”
* * *
Long ago, before there were Lyucu or Agon, before there were gods or land or sky or sea, the world was a milky soup, where light was not separated from darkness, nor life from un-life.
One day, a gigantic long-haired cow drank the universe. In the last of her stomachs, the universe began to curdle, much as we make cheese in the stomach-pouches of calves.
As the pieces of the universe separated from each other, a wolf was born. The wolf cried silently in that churning chaos, trapped and suffocating. He lashed out with his teeth and claws and ruptured the cow's stomach.
Pieces of the universe spilled out. The solids turned into land, the liquid turned into the sea, and the vapors, full of flavors and spices, turned into the sky. The wolf sucked in the first breath in the whole universe, and then howled until the sky vibrated in sympathy.
The wolf was Liluroto, the All-Father, and the cow was Diaarura, the Every-Mother. This is why every birth is accompanied by pain, and every breath of life sustained by an act of slaughter.
The All-Father and the Every-Mother roamed over the newborn world, devoid of life. They coupled and fought, fought and coupled—and this is why there is no distinction between the pleasures felt during sex and the pleasures felt during battle. They spilled blood into the soil, seed into the sea, and their howling and moaning and panting and growling stirred the skies. Plants and fish and beasts and birds sprang up from these shreds of the divine, and the world was now full of life.
The All-Father animated every living thing by pricking it with a strand of his hair, and this is why all of us, from humans to voles, share the same base nature. The Every-Mother then fed each living thing a drop of milk, and this is why all of us, from garinafins to slisli maggots, yearn for something more than mere existence.
They also bore children, who were the first gods. The gods had no form and every form, for they were both of this world and not of it, much as a reflected image seen in the calm water of Aluro’s Basin is both true and not true. There was Cudyufin, the Well of Daylight, the first-born. The sun was her eye, and she was both the voice of judgment and the offerer of praise. There was Nalyufin, the Pillar of Ice, the hate-hearted. The moon was her mouth, and she was the reaper of the weak and the numbing comfort for those near death. There was Kyonaro-naro, the Many-Armed, the dissatisfied. He had a thousand limbs, each with a will of its own, like an octopus gone mad. He was constantly at war with himself, and when one limb ripped off another, ten more limbs sprang up in its place. Eventually, Kyonaro-naro ripped himself into a thousand-thousand-thousand pieces, and each piece climbed up and found a place in the heavens as a star. But some of the smaller pieces had lost so much of the All-Father’s and Every-Mother’s strength that they could not ascend the dome of heaven at all. They became humans, remnants of a broken god stripped of divinity, and full of strife and discontent.
And there were many other gods besides these, each an aspect of the thousand-eyed, thousand-thousand-hearted, thousand-thousand-thousand-limbed Will that animated the milk of the universe. They loved, fought, and bred, with one another and with the All-Father and Every-Mother. Each day the world was transformed anew because new gods were born.
While the All-Father and Every-Mother roamed over the world, satisfied with the results of their labor, the young gods tested out their strength by playing in the sea, through the air, and over land, much as young children of the people of the scrublands act out their dreams with grass-woven armor and charred-bone weapons. Some decided to hold a peeing contest, and that is how we have lakes and rivers. Some wrestled and tumbled, and the muddy tracks thrown up by their kicking and thrashing turned into mountains and ridges. Some, more patient in nature, colored the fruits and flowers with bits of paint taken from the brilliant clouds at sunset and sunrise. Some caught animals and took them apart, reassembling the pieces into new creatures: mounting a walrus’s tusks inside a catamount’s mouth produced the tusked tiger; slotting the lungs of a star-snout bear into the body of a fish yielded the whale; and putting together the neck of a serpent, the feet of an eagle, the head of a moss-antlered deer, the wings of a bat, and the torso and stomachs of a cow led to the garinafin.
Then the All-Father and the Every-Mother called all the gods together for a council.
“The humans are your votan-sa-taasa,” said the All-Father.
“But the breath of divinity has left them,” said the Every-Mother. “They sit upon the land like rocks that have fallen from the sky, their once-bright glow fading into obscurity. They complain to the All-Father and me constantly.”
“You must do something to provide for them,” said the All-Father.
And so the gods set about trying to create a homeland for their less-fortunate siblings. In that process, they reshaped the landscape of Ukyu and changed its fauna and flora, all to find a way for the humans to be more satisfied with their lot, and to praise the gods rather than complain.
So came the Ages of Mankind. The gods tried everything, sometimes turning Ukyu into a desert, sometimes flooding it with the deluge of a thousand-thousand storms. Sometimes they coddled the humans, and sometimes they punished them with trials and tribulations, hoping to craft their character to be closer to the gods’. Even the form of the humans themselves had to be changed to fit with the new world. But no matter what the gods did, the first four Ages all ended in failure. The humans would not stop complaining.
And so came the Fifth Age of Mankind, when the gods used all their power to turn one corner of Ukyu into a paradise. This was when humans finally began to look much as they do now, and they lived in a world that was neither too wet nor too dry, neither too cold nor too hot. Water sweeter than kyoffir flowed freely over the earth and animals willingly lay themselves at the feet of the people for slaughter. There were no seasons, no storms, no years of drought and starvation. The gods thought of everything, and they couldn’t imagine any reason the humans would not be satisfied.
But it was not to be. Instead of treasuring the gift of the gods, the humans set to despoiling it. Instead of simply taking what the land gave willingly, they tried to tame the land to force it to yield more. Instead of praising the gods for their generosity, they fought amongst themselves, striving to claim to be gods themselves. Instead of working together as one people, they celebrated division and discord, and as they warred with one another, they forgot about the gods.
The All-Father and the Every-Mother had had enough. “If they cannot be satisfied by us, then let them find their own satisfaction.”
They sent monsters of every description into paradise and destroyed it. They cast the people out of their homeland, stripped them of all the signs of their vanity, and scattered them to every corner of Ukyu. The gods then decided to give free rein to their own impulses, to play and romp as they wished. The world was again plunged into chaos, almost like it had been in the first days after Liluroto had eaten his way out of Diaarura.
Once again, the All-Father and the Every-Mother called a council. The gods agreed to impose some order to their play. They set up the seasons and the tides, established cycles of growth and decline, gave the fleet-footed mouflon and the sharp-tusked tiger both their time and place.
And that was how Ukyu became the scrublands at the beginning of the Sixth Age.
The chastised humans gathered into small tribes, their life one of endless toil and terror. Hairless, weak, without the teeth of the wolf or the claws of the eagle, they survived on carrion and cactus fruit, huddling in the bushes whenever the sky cracked with thunder. Summer heat killed them with thirst, and the storms of winter felled them with starvation. They had no tools, no clothing, no knowledge of how to live in this new world. They were the All-Father and Every-Mother’s least favorite children, failed gods who survived but could not thrive.
Two friends, Kikisavo and Afir, decided that they had to do something to relieve the suffering of the people. Kikisavo, who had six fingers on each hand, had the strength of ten bears and his voice was as loud as thunder. Afir, who had six toes on each foot, had the endurance of ten spiral-horned mouflon and her feet were quick as lightning. The two were such good friends that they thought of themselves as votan-sa-taasa. They called each other “my breath.”
They vowed to find the All-Father and Every-Mother. “We shall wander the earth, neither of us taking mates nor having children until we come face-to-face with the World-Makers and demand that they return us to paradise.”
Kikisavo and Afir turned west and dove into the sea. They asked every fish and crab, “Have you seen Liluroto and Diaarura?”
A great whale swam toward them, intent on swallowing them in its yawning maw. But the companions showed no fear and went straight for the whale’s tail, tying it into a knot so that the whale could not slap them with his flukes. They wrestled in the airless, lightless deep. The whale was not only strong but also clever, and whenever it seemed that the humans were going to win, the whale transformed into something else and fought again. He slipped from Kikisavo’s grasp as a slippery eel; he evaded Afir’s hands by hiding among the corals as a giant clam; he faded into the lit water near the surface as a transparent jellyfish. But Kikisavo and Afir would not yield, and always they managed to find the whale and begin the fight anew.
For ten days and ten nights they fought in the ocean, and the waves from their struggle wrecked the coast. On the tenth day, the creature transformed back into the shape of a whale and tried to drown Kikisavo by trapping his legs with his jaws and diving deep. But Kikisavo stuck his hands into the whale’s blowhole to keep him from breathing, and Afir swam to the surface, where she gulped down big lungfuls of air that she carried down to Kikisavo and fed him mouth-to-mouth. Finally, the whale yielded.
“I am Péten, the sly trickster,” said the whale. “But I must admit that you’re cleverer.”
“How can humans return to paradise?” asked Kikisavo and Afir.
“Though I know the answers to a thousand riddles and the truth behind a thousand-thousand lies, I don’t know the answer to that,” said Péten. “But I will teach you how to build traps and plot ambushes so that you can hunt for more food. Take my sinews, with which you can weave nets and make slingshots.”
Kikisavo and Afir thanked him and went on their way.
They turned south and trekked into the endless desert of Lurodia Tanta, where the oases were far apart and sandstorms changed the landscape every hour. For ten days and ten nights they wandered in the wilderness until they came into a lush oasis guarded by a giant she-wolf, who would not allow them to come near and drink the water.
Although Kikisavo and Afir had no weapons and no armor, they were not afraid. He jumped onto the back of the wolf and would not let go, and she led the wolf on a wild chase around the oasis, through the water and over the dunes. Although the wolf leapt and bucked and snapped her jaws, she could neither dislodge the resolute Kikisavo nor catch the fleet-footed Afir. Finally, the wolf tired and begged for a respite.
