old generals, it would be won by those who could keep eating.
“Lord Drowning’s army can feed themselves from the storehouses along the east and north roads,” said my mother, who attended all our councils.
“Destroy the roads,” Tazu said.
I heard my mother’s breath catch, and remembered the oracle: The roads will be broken.
“That would take as long to do as it took to make them,” said the oldest general, but the next oldest general said, “Break down the stone bridge at Almoghay.” And so we ordered. Retreating from its delaying battle, our army tore down the great bridge that had stood a thousand years. Omimo’s army had to go around nearly a hundred miles farther, through forests, to the ford at Domi, while our army and our carters brought the contents of the storehouses in to the city. Many country people followed them, seeking the protection of God, and so the city grew very full. Every grain of ze came with a mouth to eat it.
All this time Mesiwa, who might have come against the eastern army at Domi, waited in the passes with his thousand men. When we commanded him to come help punish sacrilege and restore peace, he sent our angel back with meaningless messages. It seemed certain that he was in league with Omimo.
“Mesiwa the finger, Omimo the thumb,” said the oldest general, pretending to crack a louse.
“God is not mocked,” Tazu said to him, deadly fierce. The old general bowed his forehead down on his thumbs, abashed. But I was able to smile.
Tazu had hoped the country people would rise up in anger at the sacrilege and strike the Painted God down. But they were not soldiers and had never fought. They had always lived under the protection of the soldiers of peace and under our care. As if our doings now were like the whirlwind or the earthquake, they were paralyzed by them and could only watch and wait till they were over, hoping to survive. Only the people of our household, whose livelihood depended directly upon us and whose skills and knowledge were at our service, and the people of the city in whose heart we were, and the soldiers of the peace, would fight for us.
The country people had believed in us. Where no belief is, no God is. Where doubt is, foot falters and hand will not take hold.
The wars at the borders, the wars of conquest, had made our land too large. The people in the towns and villages knew no more who I was than I knew who they were. In the days of the origin, Babam Kerul and Bamam Ze came down from the mountain and walked the fields of the center lands beside the common people. The common people who laid the first stones of the great roads and the huge base stones of the old city wall had known the face of their God, seeing it daily.
After I spoke of this to our councils, Tazu and I went out into the streets, sometimes carried in litters, sometimes walking. We were surrounded by the priests and guards who honored our divinity, but we went among the people, meeting their eyes. They fell on their knees and put their foreheads to their thumbs, and many wept when they saw us. They called out from street to street, and little children cried out, “There’s God!”
“You walk in their hearts,” my mother said.
But Omimo’s army had come to the River of Origin, and one day’s march brought the vanguard to Ghari.
That evening we stood on the north balcony looking toward Ghari hill, which was swarming with men, as when a nest of insects swarms. To the west the light was dark red on the mountains in their winter snow.
From Korosi a vast plume of smoke trailed, blood color.
“Look,” Tazu said, pointing northwest. A light flared in the sky, like the sheet lightning of summer. “A falling star,” he said, and I said, “An eruption.”
In the dark of the night, angels came to us. “A great house burned and fell from the sky,” one said, and the other said, “It burned but it stands, on the bank of the river.”
“The words of God spoken on the birthday of the world,” I said.
The angels knelt down hiding their faces.
What I saw then is not what I see now looking far off to the distant past; what I knew then is both less and more than I know now. I try to say what I saw and knew then.
That morning I saw coming down the great stone road to the northern gate a group of beings, two-legged and erect like people or lizards. They were the height of giant desert lizards, with monstrous limbs and feet, but without tails. They were white all over and hairless. Their heads had no mouth or nose and one huge single staring shining lidless eye.
They stopped outside the gate.
Not a man was to be seen on Ghari Hill. They were all in the fortress or hidden in the woods behind the hill.
We were standing up on the top of the northern gate, where a wall runs chest-high to protect the guards.
There was a little sound of frightened weeping on the roofs and balconies of the city, and people called out to us, “God! God, save us!”
Tazu and I had talked all night. We listened to what our mother and other wise people said, and then we sent them away to reach out our minds together, to look over our shoulder into the time that was coming.
We saw the death and the birth of the world, that night. We saw all things changed.
The oracle had said that God was white and had one eye. This was what we saw now. The oracle had said that the world died. With it died our brief time of being God. This was what we had to do now: to kill the world. The world must die so that God may live. The house falls that it may stand. Those who have been God must make God welcome.
Tazu spoke welcome to God, while I ran down the spiral stairs inside the wall of the gate and unbolted the great bolts-the guards had to help me-and swung the door open. “Enter in!” I said to God, and put my forehead to my thumbs, kneeling.
They came in, hesitant, moving slowly, ponderously. Each one turned its huge eye from side to side, unblinking. Around the eye was a ring of silver that flashed in the sun. I saw myself in one of those eyes, a pupil in the eye of God.
Their snow-white skin was coarse and wrinkled, with bright tattoos on it. I was dismayed that God could be so ugly.
The guards had shrunk back against the walls. Tazu had come down to stand with me. One of them raised a box toward us. A noise came out of the box, as if some animal was shut in it.
Tazu spoke to them again, telling them that the oracle had foretold their coming, and that we who had been God welcomed God.
They stood there, and the box made more noises. I thought it sounded like Ruaway before she learned to talk right. Was the language of God no longer ours? Or was God an animal, as Ruaway’s people believed? I thought they seemed more like the monstrous lizards of the desert that lived in the zoo of our house than they seemed like us.
One raised its thick arm and pointed at our house, down at the end of the street, taller than other houses, its copper gutters and goldleaf carvings shining in the bright winter sunlight.
“Come, Lord,” I said, “come to your house.” We led them to it and brought them inside.
When we came into the low, long, windowless audience room, one of them took off its head. Inside it was a head like ours, with two eyes, nose, mouth, ears. The others did the same.
Then, seeing their head was a mask, I saw that their white skin was like a shoe that they wore not just on the foot but all over their body. Inside this shoe they were like us, though the skin of their faces was the color of clay pots and looked very thin, and their hair was shiny and lay flat.
“Bring food and drink,” I said to the children of God cowering outside the door, and they ran to bring trays of ze-cakes and dried fruit and winter beer. God came to the tables where the food was set. Some of them pretended to eat. One, watching what I did, touched the ze-cake to its forehead first, and then bit into it and chewed and swallowed. It spoke to the others, gre-gra, gre-gra.
This one was also the first to take off its body-shoe. Inside it other wrappings and coverings hid and protected most of its body, but this was understandable, because even the body skin was pale and terribly thin, soft as a baby’s eyelid.
In the audience room, on the east wall over the double seat of God, hung the gold mask which God Himself wore to turn the sun back on its way. The one who had eaten the cake pointed at the mask.
Then it looked at me-its own eyes were oval, large, and beautiful-and pointed up to where the sun was in the sky. I nodded my body. It pointed its finger here and there all about the mask, and then all about the ceiling.
