merciless, even monstrous, not only to others and ourselves, but to the Hundred as well. We walk the Shortest Path, the labyrinth of the Thousandfold Thought. This is the burden the God has laid upon us, and the burden that the Gods begrudge.'
She found herself on the surface of his voice, for once hearing it with a musician's cold ear: the tunnelling harmonics, the resonance that forced it into unheard immediacy, the papery rasp that raised it outside the circle of the world.
The voice that had conquered the First Holy War, then all the Three Seas. The voice of the King of Kings, the mortal echo of the God of Gods… The voice that had conquered first her thighs and then her heart.
She thought of that final afternoon with Achamian, the day that Holy Shimeh fell.
'I haven't the strength! I ca-can't b-bear losing any-any-m-more…'
'You have the strength.'
'Let Maithanet rule! He's your brother. He shares your gifts. He should rule…'
'He is Shriah. He cannot be more.'
'But why? Why?'
'Esmi, you have my love, my trust. I know that you have the strength to do this.'
A gust from over the dark sea. The violet sheers roiled and billowed, parted like gossamer lips.
'The White-Luck,' he whispered in a voice that was the sky, the curve of all horizons, 'shall break against you.'
She gazed up at his face through sting and tears, and it seemed that in it she could see every face, the mien of all those who had bent upon her in Sumna, when she had kept a whore's bed.
'How? How can you know?'
'Because the anguish that makes mud of all your thoughts, because the fear that stains your days, because all your regret and anger and loneliness…' A haloed hand cupped her cheek. Blue eyes sounded her to the bottommost fathoms.
'All this makes you pure.'
Iothiah…
'Cursed!' Nannaferi cried. 'Cursed be he who misleads the blind man on the road!'
All old voices failed in some manner; they cracked or they quavered, or they dwindled with the loss of the wind that once empowered them. But for Psatma Nannaferi, the breaking of her voice, which had once made her family weep for its melodic purity, seemed to reveal more than it marred, as though it were but paint, hoary and moulted, covering something furious and elemental. It struck over the surrounding clamour, reached deep into the packed recesses of the Catacombs.
Hundreds had gathered, filling the Charnal Hall with sweat and exertion, crowding the adjacent tunnels, stamping the detritus across the floors. Torches bobbed like buoys at sea, casting ovals of illumination across the bowed ceilings, revealing pockets of expression in the shadowy masses: smiles and howls, mouths fixed about wonder-disbelieving wonder. Smoke pooled in the dark gaps between the lintels. Fingers of light probed the niche- pocked walls and the innumerable urns packed within, cracked and leaning, limned in ages of dust.
'Cursed be the thief!' Nannaferi shrieked. 'For he who dines on the fortune of others is a bringer of famine!'
She stood naked before them, wearing her skin like a beggar's rags. White-painted sigils sheathed her arms to the pit and her legs to the crotch, but her torso and genitals gleamed, adorned only in sweat. She stood withered and diminutive before them, and yet she towered, so that it seemed that her blood-soaked hair should brush the low ceilings.
And he sat before her, naked and immobile on a beaten chair. A slave's chair.
The White-Luck Warrior.
'Cursed be the homicide, the murderer, he who lies in wait to slay his brother!'
She parted her hairless legs, paused so that all could see slick lines of blood running from her shining pudenda. And she grinned a proud and vicious grin, as though to say, Yes! Witness the strength that is my womb! The Great Giver, the Son Bearer, the gluttonous Phallus Eater!
Yes! The Blood of my Fertility flows still!
The ecstatics immediately before her wept at the miracle, stared with the eyes of the strangled, tore their hair and gnashed their teeth. And their rapture became grounds for the rapture of the cohort behind them, and so on, through tunnel after forking tunnel, until a thousand voices roared through the closeted deeps.
'Cursed be whore!' she cried, not needing to read the text, the Sinyatwa, on the scuffed stone at her feet. 'Cursed be she who lies with men for gold over seed, for power over obedience, for lust over love!'
She bent as though to abuse herself. With the blade of her right palm, she scraped a line of blood, drawing it up to the creases of her swollen sex. She huffed in pleasure, then raised her bloody palm for all to see.
'Cursed be the false-the deceivers of men! Cursed be the Aspect-Emperor!'
There are pitches of passion that are holy simply for the intensity of their expression. There is worship beyond the caged world of words. Psatma Nannaferi's hatred had long ago burned away the impurities, the pathetic pageant of rancour and resentment that so often make fools of the great. Hers was the grinding hatred, the homicidal outrage of the betrayed, the unwavering fury of the degraded and the dispossessed. The hatred that draws tendons sharp, that cleanses only the way murder and fire can cleanse.
And at long last she had found her knife.
She stepped over the scriptures, pressed the slack pouches of her breasts against the sweat of his neck and shoulders. She reached around him with her arms. Holding her right palm like a palette, she dipped the third finger of her left hand into her issue, then marked him: a horizontal line along each of his cheeks.
They gleamed menstrual crimson. Wurrami, the ancient counterpart of the thraxami, the lines of ash used by mourning mothers.
'Ever!' she cried. 'Ever have we dwelt in the shadow of the Whip and Club. Ever have we been despised-we, the Givers! We, the weak! But the Goddess knows! Knows why they beat us, why they leash us, why they starve and violate us! Why they do everything save kill!'
She prowled around him, raised her buttocks across his hips. With a shrill cry, she thrust down, encompassed him to his grunting foundation. A broken chorus of cries passed through the congregation, as the penetration was multiplied in heart and eye.
'Because without Givers,' she shouted in a voice hoarse for passion-doubly broken, 'there is nothing for them to take! Because without slaves, there can be no masters! Because we are the wine that they imbibe, the bread that they eat, the cloth that they soil, the walls that they defend! Because we are the truth of their power! The prize they would conquer!'
And she could feel it: he the centre of her, and she the circumference of him-an ache encircled by fire. Hoe and Earth! Hoe and Earth! She was an old crone splayed across a boy, her eyes the red of blood, his the white of seed. The crowd before them bucked and heaved, a cauldron of avid faces and sweat-slicked limbs.
'We shall stoke!' she moaned and roared. 'We shall foment! We shall teach those who give what it means to take!'
And she slid, drawing her loose buttocks across the plate of his abdomen. His was the body of a man newly wed-a father of but one child. Slender, golden for the perfection of its skin. Not yet bent to the harshness of the world, to the toil that all giving exacts.
Not yet strong.
'There is the knife that cuts,' she croaked, 'and there is the sea that drowns. Always we have been the latter. But now! Now that the White-Luck has come to us, we are both, my Sisters! On our seas they shall founder! And on our knife they shall fall!'
She rode the hook of him harder and harder, until he convulsed and screamed. The earth shook-the unborn kicking at the Mother's womb. Gravel streamed from the ceilings. And she could feel the hot flood him, the outward thrust. And then, with his slumping, a kind of inward breath-and it was her turn to jerk rigid and scream. She could feel her strength fill him, the knitting of muscle across his frame, the scarring, the aging strong of a body wracked by years in the world. The soft hands that clawed her chest became horned with calluses, thick with throttling strength, even as her scrotal breasts rounded, lifted in the memory of a more tender youth. The smooth cheek against her neck became leathery with unlived seasons, gravelly with the memory of another's pox.
