Leely pushed past me and went out of the cavern. He plopped down on a shelf of wave-rounded pebbles and stared outward, his lips making silent words.
“By all that’s holy,” breathed Poracious. “Look, low down, against the water.”
We saw. Light. Shadow on one side, shadow on the other, shadow above, and light under, between.
“Legs,” I told them in my dreamy, languorous voice. “We only saw its upper part before. Now we are seeing between its legs.”
The Nodders had been only busts, then? Only heads and necks of Behemoth? There was more to the creature than that? Well, yes, my dreaming mind assented. Well, yes. Time went on. Eventually we saw its wings, which had until then been folded along its back. Eventually we saw its marvelous face, its wondrous eyes, its great adamantine teeth.
It stopped when the ocean was no deeper than its knees. Whales leapt around its legs. Gyring eagles made its aureole, and the wind of its breath pushed us to and fro, like little flags.
“I’ve seen it before,” whispered Poracious. “Somewhere.”
“Ancient earth,” Lutha replied. “Was it Babylon? Was it Ur? Mighty winged creatures were carved upon its walls.”
“Winged cattle,” said Poracious. “But that is mythology.”
“This is not myth.” The ex-king smiled. “And this is no kind of cattle.”
Lutha clung to Poracious as she backed into the cave, they two pulling me with them. Anything else was past doing. Past believing. Past thinking on. We were ants, crawlers between the hairs of immensity.
Leelson dragged Lutha into his arms and held her close. I saw sweat on his face. I saw fear.
“Come forth,” said a voice out of the whirlwind.
There was no place to hide. Stones shattered into powder. The cliff danced. Great boulders skittered through the cavern roof and bounced between us, close as a hair!
Lutha grabbed me by the arm and dragged me back against the wall, but it did no good. Dust rose from the floor in clouds, boiling upward, threatening to smother us in stone ash.
“We must go out,” I cried at them. “We can’t stay under here.” I broke away from them and ran. Lutha came after me. We stopped in the entrance. Leely and the ex-king hadn’t moved when the rest of us had retreated. Leely lay where he’d been before. The ex-king clung to a stony pillar, his back to us, staring up at the great face that floated above us like a thundercloud.
The head bent; a mighty hooved forefoot withdrew from the sea, rivers running from its fetlock, alive with silver fishes. The foot stamped down.
The world shook to its roots.
“Come forth,” said the voice once more.
There was no denying that voice. There was no hiding from it. All of us shambled out into the open air, where we stood like drunken, tethered creatures, unable to move unless the voice commanded us.
We didn’t have to move. It came to us, jarring the world with every step. We fell and got up. It took another step. We fell again, and got up. We leaned together, like floppy dolls, holding each other erect. Leely lay on the ground where he had stayed all along, waving his hands, saying nothing, nothing at all, his eyes fastened on that which came.
Beyond the hugeness was a sky full of birds, a million pairs of beating wings, a whirl of white terns, a swerve of black-backed puffins, a spiral of silver gulls rising on the wind. I knew their names. They all had names. Before each mighty foreleg, a bow wave of life rushed upon the shore to wriggle, to stride, to fly, to crawl. I tasted a sweetness of mown grass and a salt-clean tang of the ocean wind.
In the end, we stayed on our knees, unable to get up again.
“Is this your tempter?” Leelson asked me, through trembling lips.
The stories had not said it was so huge. The stories had said it was male. This was not male. It smelled like flowers and spices and fragrant smoke. It tasted of … marvel. It wore a high crown. It spoke to us in thunder.
“Will you go home again?” it asked. “Will you go to your proper place? To Dinadh, where I had placed you?”
I saw Lutha’s head move. Nod, nod. There was Leelson, nodding. Mitigan nodding. I felt what they felt. How tempting to go home once more. To Dinadh. To the winding canyons. To the sweet songs of the songfathers.
“Will you go home again?”
Would I go home again? To the lies the songfathers told? To the pain of the House Without a Name? To that terrible destiny for my daughters? To connivance at that evil by my sons? To sell truth and wisdom short in order to buy the false hope of immortality?
Somehow I got to my feet.
“No,” I cried. My voice was the cry of a small bird against that mighty thunder. Still I cried, “No. I will not!”
“Not me, neither!” trumpeted Snark, as though my words had wakened an echo in her.
I felt Lutha’s eyes, and Poracious’s. They didn’t understand. Ah, but they hadn’t known the House Without a Name. Their wombs had not held what mine had held.
The mighty head bent above us like a cloud descending.
“You were given worlds to share,” it whispered in a voice like an avalanche. “But you would not share. You were given life to treasure, but you did not treasure. You counted your own lives holy and all other lives expendable. All my creations you have subverted, all my wonders lost and slaughtered and betrayed. I made a garden to receive you. To make clear my intention, I set my creatures around you to be your companions; you have made of your habitation a termite mound, and of that garden a desolation!
“So now I have made your world suitable, a place where you can serve my creation. What more do you deserve than that?”
I couldn’t answer. There was no answer.
“Now I have drawn a bowstring around all mankind, and in the
