Falling Idols

not in the manner he probably intended. Because if there was room for mistakes — and in his failure and simplicity he seemed to be just that — then there was always room for atonement, and death would not be the harsh judge she’d grown up being told it was.

He led her onward, and they stopped awhile to watch a hawk on the wing, a dark scythe against the blue, riding air currents in slow, lazy spirals. The sun was high overhead when they reached a gulley between a pair of facing cliffs, and she followed him into it. A half-mile later he pointed out a spot along the wall where some ancient river had carved out a slice from the base to leave a smooth hollow, fifteen feet high and sheltered from wind, sun, and rain by a sloping overhang.

Yes. Oh yes. Here was where Memuneh came when Austin didn’t see him for days.

It was an art gallery, petroglyphs faded by the ages but indelibly left upon the rock in red and white and black and brown ochres. The oldest, he told her, predated the birth of Christ by six thousand years. Some were contemporaneous with that; others a mere eight centuries years old.

How haunting they were: animal totems and the undulating lines of giant snakes, spirals and spoked circles and stars, hand prints and faces with gaping fanged mouths, skinny hunters with their spears. But most mysterious were the bulkier figures more than human, with huge staring eyes, or great racks of antlers or curving horns, or simply rendered dark and solid in their broad-shouldered inscrutability.

They demanded silence and slow breaths, and she was glad to offer it to them.

“The people in Miracle are no longer even aware this is here,” Memuneh said. “Austin knows, but would never tell them.”

She nodded. It was just as well.

“I only wanted to bring them light,” he said, “and hold those who needed it when it was dark for them. I believed that I brought enough light for all of them, but there were so many who wanted to possess it. Light. How can light be possessed?”

He told her then that he’d watched them kill over it. Not publicly, but in secret, at night. He admitted that there had to have been more behind it than what he witnessed, but four of those who already lived here had driven three new arrivals into the desert, far past the other side of town. Graves had already been dug, and to keep the murders from being given away by the sound of distant gunfire, they were committed with a shovel and a pick-axe. “‘It’s our angel,’” Memuneh told her one of them had said, “‘not yours.’” He’d not shown himself in Miracle since that night.

She felt sickened. “You … you couldn’t stop it?”

“Stop it?”

“Just the sight of you would’ve done it — don’t you think? God!”

Memuneh stared, tender face suddenly alien to her, seemingly amazed that she could even suggest such a thing.

“It was only their bodies dying. They did not. Bodies always die. Why would I stop something so natural? I comfort suffering and remove it if I can, but death? There is no stopping that. Death is its own law.”

Then why, she demanded, had he let the murders drive him into seclusion? Why abandon the rest and douse that precious light he’d been so eager to bring? Why sit on his ass in the desert and wait for Austin to come along and finding him crying over it?

Because their eyes were all so weak, he explained, they could hardly see a thing. Even in his presence, he’d realized, they saw nothing but the few years of their own tiny lives.

“And that was a surprise to you?” Gabrielle said.

“Why I might come here? They thought it was for them alone.” He pointed to the petroglyphs, three of the more ghostly figures, the highest off the ground at a dozen feet and among the oldest, he’d said. They were like none of the others, the three bodies long and bladelike, tapering to points. Each dangled one arm at its side and held the other straight out, trailing something the neolithic artist had depicted as thin streamers; from the same arm an arc swept up and overhead and down the other side, like a corona or a single vast wing.

“I’ve been here before,” he said. “The one on the left was me.”

Soon, on the return hike, he did most of the talking.

*

“There are no angels and no devils, not as you believe in them … those of you who believe at all. There are only the Kyyth, and how you see us.

“We shared your birth as a separate species and have walked alongside you ever since, only rarely making ourselves known for what we actually are. Some of us choose to play to your expectations. Some choose to confound them.

“But it is for you that we exist, and for no other reason. We exist so that you become what you were meant to be.

“We began as thoughts in the mind of what you have named God, and Allah, and Brahma, and Ialdabaoth, and Ahura Mazda, and all the other names. We fell from that mind into independence so we could remain here. Because then we were all that was left of what some of you much later named Deus Absconditus — the God Who Went Away…”

*

Late that afternoon he sensed Gabrielle returning before she came into view, and waited for her out behind the shack. She was alone, Memuneh having accompanied her only so far, then turning around again.

She stuck her head beneath the faucet and he levered up a cooling gusher over her neck and scalp. As she stood dripping, the water soaking into already sweaty clothes, she’d look at him and smile, look away and frown, look at her feet and shake her head. A day alone with Memuneh could do that to anyone.

“The thing is,” she said, “I’m not sure that I even believe everything he told me.”

Austin swept sodden hair from her eyes. “I think some things he just makes up … to fit the way he wishes they were.”

“But he believes them, doesn’t he?”