The Crippled God

Badalle watched the children close in, watched their hands lunge out, snatching wallowing insects, stuffing them into eager mouths. We go round and round and this is the story of the world. Do not flee us. Do not flee this moment, this scene. Do not confuse dislike and abhorrence with angry denial of truths you do not wish to see. I accept your horror and expect no forgiveness. But if you deny, I name you coward.

And I have had my fill of cowards.

She blew flies from her lips, and glanced at Rutt. He clutched Held, weeping without tears. Beyond him stretched out the terrible flat waste of the Glass Desert. Badalle then turned back to study the Snake, eyes narrowing. Torpor unsuited to the heat, the brightness of the sky. This was the sluggish motion of the exhausted. Your fists beat us senseless. Your fists explode with reasons. You beat us out of fear. Out of self- loathing. You beat us because it feels good, it feels good to pretend and to forget, and every time your fist comes down, you crush a little more guilt.

In that old place where we once lived, you decried those who beat their children. Yet see what you have done to the world.

You are all beaters of children.

‘Badalle,’ said Rutt.

‘Yes, Rutt.’ She did not face him again, not yet.

‘We have few days left. The holes of water are gone. We cannot even go back — we will never make it back. Badalle, I think I give up — I–I’m ready to give up.’

Give up. ‘Will you leave Held to the Shards? To the Opals?’

She heard him draw a sharp breath.

‘They will not touch Held,’ he whispered.

No, they won’t, will they. ‘Before Held became Held,’ she said, ‘Held had another name, and that name was Born. Born came from between the legs of a woman, a mother. Born came into this world with eyes of blue, blue as this sky, and blue they remain. We must go on, Rutt. We must live to see the day when a new colour finds Held’s eyes, when Held goes back to being Born.’

‘Badalle,’ he whispered behind her.

‘You don’t have to understand,’ she said. ‘We don’t know who that mother was. We don’t know who the new mother will be.’

‘I’ve seen, at night …’ he faltered then. ‘Badalle-’

‘The older ones, yes,’ she replied. ‘Our own mothers and fathers, lying together, trying to make babies. We can only go back to what we knew, to whatever we remember from the old days. We make it all happen again, even though we know it didn’t work the first time, it’s all we know to do.’

‘Do you still fly in your dreams, Badalle?’

‘We have to go on, Rutt, until Held stops being Held and becomes Born.’

‘I hear her crying at night.’

Her. This is her story: Born becomes Held, Held becomes Mother, Mother makes Born, Born is Held … And the boys who are now fathers, they try to go back, back inside, every night, they try and try.

Rutt, we all cry at night.

‘We need to walk,’ she said, turning to face him at last.

His visage was crumpled, a thing of slack skin and ringed eyes. Broken lips, the forehead of a priest who doubts his own faith. His hair was falling out, his hands looked huge.

‘Held says, west, Rutt. West.’

‘There is nothing there.’

There is a great family, and they are rich in all things. In food. In water. They seek us, to bless us, to show us that the future still lives. They will promise to us that future. I have seen, I have seen it all. And there is a mother who leads them, and all her children she holds in her arms, though she has never made a Born. There is a mother, Rutt, just like you. And soon, the child in her arms will open its eyes. ‘I dreamed of Held last night, Rutt.’

‘You did?’

‘Yes. She had wings, and she was flying away. I heard her voice on the wind.’

‘Her voice, Badalle? What was she saying? What was Held saying?’

‘She wasn’t saying anything, Rutt. She was laughing.’

Frost limned the driftwood heaped along the strand, and the chunks of ice in the shallow waters of the bay crunched and ground as the rolling waves jostled them. Felash hacked out the last of her morning cough and then, drawing her fur-lined cloak about her shoulders, she straightened and walked over to where her handmaid was building up the fire. ‘Have you prepared my breakfast?’

The older woman gestured to the strange disc of sawn tree trunk they were using as a table, where waited a mug of herbal tea and a lit hookah.

‘Excellent. I tell you, my head aches. Mother’s sendings are clumsy and brutal. Or perhaps it’s just Omtose Phellack that is so harsh — like this infernal ice and chill plaguing us.’ She glanced over at the other camp, thirty paces along the beach, and frowned. ‘And all this superstition! Tipped well over the edge into blatant rudeness, in my opinion.’

‘The sorcery frightens them, Highness.’

‘Pah! That sorcery saved their lives! You would think gratitude should trump petty terrors and imagined bugaboos. Dear me, what a pathetic gaggle of hens they all are.’ She settled down on a log, careful to avoid the strange iron bolts jutting from it. Sipped some tea, and then reached for the hookah’s artfully carved ivory mouthpiece. Puffing contentedly, she twisted to eye the ship frozen in the bay. ‘Look at that. The only thing keeping it afloat is the iceberg it’s nesting in.’

‘Alas, Highness, that is probably the very source of their present discontent. They are sailors stranded on land. Even the captain and her first mate are showing their despondency.’

‘Well,’ Felash sniffed, ‘we must make do with what we have, mustn’t we? In any case, there’s nothing to be done for it, is there? That ship is finished. We must now trek overland, and how my feet will survive this I dare not contemplate.’

She turned in her seat to see Shurq Elalle and Skorgen Kaban approaching, the first mate cursing as he stumbled in the sand.

‘Captain! Join me in some tea. You too, Skorgen, please.’ She faced her handmaid. ‘Fetch us more cups, will you? Excellent.’

‘Beru bless us,’ Skorgen hissed. ‘Ten paces away and the heat’s melting us where we stand, but here-’

‘That will fade, I am sure,’ said Felash. ‘The sorcery of yesterday was, shall we say, rather intense. And before you complain overmuch, I shall observe that my maid and I are no less discomforted by this wretched cold. Perhaps the Jaghut were delighted to dwell within such a climate, but as you can well see, we are not Jaghut.’

Shurq Elalle said, ‘Highness, about my ship …’

Felash drew deeply on her mouthpiece, ‘Yes,’ she sighed. ‘That. I believe I have apologized already, have I not? It is perhaps a consequence of insufficient education, but I truly was unaware that all ships carry in their bellies a certain amount of water, considered acceptable for voyaging. And that the freezing thereof would result in disaster, in the manner of split boards and so forth. Besides, was not your crew working the pumps?’

‘As you say,’ Shurq said. ‘But a hundred hands below deck could not have pumped fast enough, given the speed of that freezing. But that was not my point — as you noted, we have been through all that. Bad luck, plain and simple. No, what I wished to discuss was the matter of repairs.’

Felash regarded the pale-skinned woman, and slowly tapped the mouthpiece against her teeth. ‘In the midst of your histrionics two days ago, Captain, I had assumed that all was lost in the matter of the Undying Gratitude. Have you reconsidered?’

‘Yes. No. Rather, we have walked this beach. The driftwood is useless. The few logs we found were heavy as granite — Mael knows what they used that damned stuff for, but it sure doesn’t float. In fact, it appears to have neutral buoyancy-’

‘Excuse me, what?’

‘Push that wood to any depth you like, there it stays. Never before seen the like. We have a ex-joiner with us who says it’s to do with the minerals the wood has absorbed, and the soil the tree grew in. In any case, we see no