“Will you go to the place I have allotted you?”
Somehow I kept upright. “No,” I cried, my voice breaking. “Mankind deserves no more, but this woman would rather die, knowing the truth, than go back to live that lie! I choose truth! We are not immortal. My mother wasn’t immortal. She died. She did not eat my face; she died!”
The face faded. For a moment it was not there. The place it had been was blank. Then the earth shook again mightily, tumbling us about, and a face returned, a lion’s face, an eagle’s face, a face of leaves, of fruits, of fishes, a woman’s face, terrible and pitying. I knew that face. A mother’s face!
Leely was up, running toward the sea, the rocks, the tidal pools, the squirming eels, the tentacles, the quivering, hammered surface of the sea, toward the great creature as he made the same noise he had made that other time: the scream, the command, the roar, the whatever it was! And the ex-king went after him, calling out some wordless warning, trying to catch him, trying to get him back.
Too late! Too slow! The great head bent down. It was coming at Leely, but the king got in the way so it caught him first. Oh, he never made a sound, not a sound. I heard him crush between those teeth and I heard the soft sound of his body hitting the stones. The huge head tossed, making a great gust of wind, a buffet that knocked us all away as it withdrew with the child!
It crushed him. He screamed. It drew him up. Lutha went past me like a wind. She leapt. I ran, I jumped. Snark was beside me, even Poracious, all of us, jumping, trying to reach Leely where he hung between those mighty jaws, between those great teeth, screaming all the way.
“Lutha Lutha Tallstaff Lutha sister mother love!” he cried, a terrified voice, a voice like every child who ever was abused or frightened.
“If you choose truth, will you live by it?” cried the Great Beast. “Reflect!”
Blood rained around us. An arm. A leg. Oh, by all the gods of man, by all merciful deities, a baby, a child, falling around us, torn into bits …
Lutha screamed as though rent apart, a sound of such pure and utter pain that it pierced us all. Leelson seized her and pressed her face against his chest so she wouldn’t see, so she wouldn’t hear! Oh, I wished I hadn’t seen Leely’s blood on its jaws, on the ringlets of its mane. Leely’s blood on the stone. Leely’s blood falling on the raised knee, the mighty foot that came down and down and down, to shake us like dice in a cup and cast us away into utter darkness. I wished I hadn’t seen, but I could not do as it commanded.
We came to ourselves after a time. A day. A moment. Who knows? We crawled into our cavern, dragging Lutha, who lived, and the king, who did not. Him we rolled in blankets against the back wall. Her we put near the warmth of the stove, and I held her head in my lap while I wiped bright blood from her forehead where she had fallen against the stone. Snark was beside me, her hand in her pocket. I knew she held a weapon. Like her, I watched Mitigan and Leelson where they raged in a corner, not at one another. Now they were allies in this matter. Now Snark was their enemy, I was their enemy. We had refused the bargain. We had denied the word of the tempter.
Lutha moaned.
“Don’t leave him like that!” she whispered at me. “Oh, don’t leave him like that. Leely-baby.”
I hushed her.
“My baby.”
Oh, yes. Baby. All our babies. All our wealth of babies that we had worshiped more than life itself.
“Nothing there,” whispered Snark, shaking her gently. “Listen, Lutha. Maybe it wasn’t real! We got Jiacare’s body, but there was nothing there but him. I looked ever’where.”
I hadn’t seen her go out, but she wouldn’t lie. Not Snark.
“But there was blood,” Lutha cried. “Blood falling …”
“Not even blood. Me and Poracious’ve looked real careful, over and over again. There’s no blood.”
“Where did Behemoth go?”
Snark shrugged, looking at me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not sure. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s still there. It hasn’t gone anywhere.”
“I thought it went down into the waves,” said Poracious in a little-girl voice. “I thought I saw it go there. We can’t see under the water.”
“We couldn’t see it now if it was right outside,” Snark said. “It’s getting dark.”
She was right. The day had gone as in an instant while we cowered.
“Was it also the tempter?” Poracious whispered to me.
“I believe it was,” I told her.
“Your ultimate Ularian,” said Leelson, from the shadows.
“That’s not who it is,” whispered Lutha. “Why can’t you see who it really is?”
“If it’s Ularian, we’d taste it,” Poracious objected.
“No,” Lutha whispered again. “That was for us. It is disgusted with us. It is simply disgusted!”
Poracious stared at her as though she were crazy. “What are you saying?” she demanded querulously. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Lutha closed her eyes, refusing to answer. Her face was agonized. I remembered our talk, on that other world, the night before we came to the omphalos. She had spoken of the guilt she had felt when she thought Leely was lost among the Nodders, wondering if she would grieve. Now he was lost, utterly, and she grieved. I held her, rocking back and forth, unable to forget that dreadful rending.
“Why?” cried Poracious. “Oh, why …?”
Yes. Why. I stopped listening to the others. They went on talking, mostly Leelson and Mitigan, asking each other questions that neither could answer: What might we do to help ourselves? Should we stay where we were or go elsewhere?
After hacking each alternative to
