A Broken Paradise (The Windows of Heaven Book 3) (4 page)

“
Are you saying the Evil was necessary?”

“No. Just that E’Yahavah
was willing to suffer it out of love for you and those like you. It would have been better had the Evil been shunned. Knowing that you would not shun it, however, E’Yahavah took it upon himself to pay the ultimate price, and suffer it for your sakes. He has not revealed how he will do that to me, but He has promised that he will.”

“I still do
not completely understand, but I accept.”

Samuille
smiled. “As do I. We can never know what might have been, had Atum refused the fruit, or if Shining One had not rebelled. We can know only that the Evil is something E’Yahavah suffered, not his character or goal for creation. Because of his character, we can also know that Evil will have an end. This will not remove your horror at what you are about to see, nor should it, but it can make it bearable until the time of the Greater Good and the Greater Joy.”

‘I hope,’ said the Steward, ‘that you have not already broken any of these rules?’

John’s heart began to thump, and his eyes bulged more and more, and he was at his wit’s end when the Steward took the mask off and looked at John with his real face and said, ‘Better tell a lie, old chap, better tell a lie. Easiest for all concerned,’ and popped the mask on his face all in a flash.

John gulped and said quickly, ‘Oh, no, sir.’

‘That is just as well,’ said the Steward through the mask. ‘Because, you know, if you did break any of them and the Landlord got to know of it, do you know what he’d do to you?’

‘No, sir,’ said John: and the Steward’s eyes seemed to be twinkling dreadfully through the holes of the mask.

‘He’d take you and shut you up for ever and ever in a black hole full of snakes and scorpions as large as lobsters—for ever and ever. And besides that, he is such a kind, good man, so very, very kind, that I am sure you would never
want
to displease him.’

‘No, sir,’ said John. ‘But, please, sir… supposing I did break one, one little one, just by accident, you know. Could nothing stop the snakes and lobsters?’

‘Ah!…’ said the Steward; and then he sat down and talked for a long time, but John could not understand a single syllable.

—
C.S. Lewis

The Pilgrim’s Regress
, Chapter 1;
The Rules

1

Shrine

Tiva knelt on the biting pebbles her father had scattered over the pavement inside the new Shrine cave. Glancing furtively to either side, she repeated the
Grand Worship Antiphon
of Q’Enukki
just loud enough for the Acolyte to hear, but not loud enough to disturb the other patrons in the display chamber. The Three Treasures sat before her in a crystal case between two ceremonial Dragon-slayer guards; sacred icons to protect Akh’Uzan’s valley from the destruction everybody knew was coming.

It was
crucial the Acolyte hear Tiva’s devotion. For he could either let her move on to her other duties unhindered or make her life a living Under-world by reporting some failing, real or imagined, to their father.

Yargat, her eldest brother from her mother’s previous fertility cycle, had joined the acolytic order the year Tiva was born. He worked the Shrine every other day, so she could never evade his shadow
for long. All her life it had been, “Yargat this, Yargat that, or Yargat never did such things when he was a boy”—as if he could do no wrong!

Tiva sometimes wished she could tell her parents a few things about their precious Yargat—
although she wouldn’t have known where to start. It surprised her how little she actually knew about him herself, considering.

He doesn’t love his new wife, for one thing. Then again, why would he? He should
never have divorced his first wife. She was nice, at least.

I
t bothered Tiva that her brother was already on his second wife—not that this had anything to do with anything—but it helped occupy her mind in the damp boredom of the Shrine. Yargat’s first wife was only a dim memory; a smiling dark lady with large, gentle hands, that used to hold Tiva close as a small child—more than Mother had, it often seemed. Nobody in the family ever mentioned Yargat’s first wife. Father said that Yargat had divorced her for some kind of uncleanness—whatever that meant. The woman had since left the valley. That was odd because she never smelt bad.

Yargat’s second wife—a dull turnip of a
wench who reeked like sour lentil soup—rarely spoke around her husband’s family. Tiva found this normal enough. It also made the Turnip Lady easier to avoid, which Tiva also found just fine, because in most families, the women chattered endlessly together until everybody knew everything about everyone else.

Fortunately,
of the women in Tiva’s family, only Mother did much talking and usually that was only to distract dinnertime conversations away from what wasn’t being said. For Tiva, what wasn’t being said was far more interesting than what was. “What wasn’t said” actually controlled life at home, and in her rambling private thoughts that wandered like uneasy ghosts though the endless labyrinth of her mind. The problem was that Tiva had never figured out how to say what wasn’t said even to herself.

Her acolyte brother was no help there.

She shifted again on the Shrine’s gritty floor. Her imagination could only whisk her so far from the kernels that dug into her knees, even if what passed for sanity depended on her ability to withdraw into that inner world.

Yargat stood beside her, motionles
s and silent, like some horrible gnarled tree. Unpredictable—with big octopus eyes that peered through her in a way that she could always feel—he often frightened her even more than Father did. At other times, he seemed like her only protection from the Fear.

Tiva knew that despite everything she hated about Yargat, he
usually covered for her with their parents when she came to Shrine late from playing with Tsuli after class. On the other hand, there were also those random times when he said weird, horrible things to Father about her, just to show how easily he could get her punished. Either way, he was the only one who seemed to understand the Fear—at least she hoped he understood it.

Whether secret benefactor or hidden snare, when it came to dealing with Yargat, Tiva had decided long ago that it was best just
to try to think of other things. The praise chants helped—their memorized repetition droned on meaninglessly enough that she could mouth them while her thoughts flew to more pleasant places, or at least, more interesting ones. She vaguely knew that her thoughts were more complex than those of most girls her age—ever shifting, calculating behind eyes that took in everything,—seeking ways to fill in all the maddening blanks.

There were lots of tho
se.

A heavy hand rested on her shoulder and brushed aside some black curls that had fallen out below her bulky veil. Tiva shuddered.

“Your Celebration of the Promise is complete,” her brother intoned in his affected Low Archaic dialect. “Go home to Mother and eat the evening meal; for Atum-Ra has seen your devotion and is pleased—may the Divine Name be praised. Hurry now. I will give you a good report. Mother told me to remind you that Father has called a meeting of the Dragon-slayers tonight. She will be with the ladies to prepare refreshments, so you will need to watch the young ones until after midnight. I will come to check on you.”

Tiva readjusted her veil
. If I can keep from dwelling on it, maybe it won’t eat up my
whole
life. Maybe there’s hope for some kind of sanity
—
even if it’s only the make-pretend kind.

She rose and turned to leave, knees aching from her celebration.

“You have a birthday coming up soon, do you not?” Yargat asked, just as she reached the archway to temporary freedom.

Tiva didn’t turn. “I’ll be twenty-three,” she said.
Maybe he’s just being nice
—
he often is, you know—when you least expect it.

“Hardly a little girl anymore
; you are almost a ‘tween-ager. I will be sure to bring you a nice present—may the Divine Name smile on you.”

“Thank you,” she said,
and then took off down the hill toward the village as fast as her clumsy ankle-length frock allowed.

Tiva’s father had built his house connected to the local altar
, which had been around long before the shrine. A drab structure of mud brick; it was always the first thing she saw when the hillside trail broke through the trees into a meadow, before the old section of the village. Then she remembered how bad an idea it was to hurry home until she absolutely had to, and slowed her pace. Instantly she regretted it, but not enough to walk fast again. Some things were less unpleasant than others were.

The meadow flowers split
open around her in mad red slashing eruptions. She meandered through them without looking—somehow they always hurt her eyes. Their odor gagged her like cloying perfume on the colorfully dressed dead woman she had once secretly watched her father and mother embalm for funeral rites. Still, it was the lesser unpleasantness.

Tiva gazed past her home at the newer part of town
, to avoid looking at the flowers. She didn’t know why the big pink-red blossoms should bother her more than the sight of the ziggurat beyond the brook; only that they did. The Archonic immigrants built the stepped pyramid only recently, one side to house the new boys’ academy, the other for the girls. Tiva’s first month there had gone poorly. As far as she knew, nothing bad had ever happened to her in the meadow flowers—they just had revolting shapes like open sores.

She
hoped things would get better for her at the new school, once more people discovered who her father was. But that parent-inspired delusion died faster each time she thought it through. Being in charge of the Seer Clan Dragon-slayers was not the same as being big man of the valley. Not anymore, likely not since before Tiva was born. The Immigrant Quarter had grown larger than the old town, and the newcomers care nothing for sacred authority. The war also drove in more refugees every week.

If the new
comers didn’t care that her father was Chief Dragon-slayer, they must have thought even less of him being Leading Priest of the Seer Clan. Her father had explained to her one night, before the war, how necessity had forced this double duty on him. It had been one of the rare moments of warmth between them, when he had actually seemed to confide something important to her. He had even squeezed her shoulder a little, and smiled briefly. Henumil, son of Karmis almost never smiled.

The old Archon had recently excommunicated the Seer Clan—Tiva’s tribe—because of
their views on the prophesied Divine judgments known as the World-ends.

“If the regular priests refuse to make offerings for us, then sacrifices in the Clan must continue somehow,” Father had said, meeting her eyes with his in a way that had elated her. “I don’t think it
is a coincidence that the Archon died of heart failure only three weeks after what he did to us.”

Tiva fi
gured her father was right. Why call a Divine judgment a “World-end” if it didn’t really mean that the world would actually end? Of course, there were two of them. She had never quite figured out how the world could end twice—wouldn’t the world ending once be final enough? Still, necessity had confirmed Tiva’s father as Leading Priest only recently.

As an elder descended from
Clan Urugim—one who had obeyed his ancestor’s command and made the famous exodus through the Haunted Lands—local leadership naturally fell to Henumil. Tiva’s family took great pride in this, although she suspected it had more to do with the slaughter of their people at the recent Battle of Balimar Straits than with her father’s actual status. Since his return from the Aztlan War six months ago, who else but Henumil was left of the original settlers?

The Prime Zaqen’s
sons were now all dead.
A just punishment for welcoming that white witch daughter of Qayin into our midst,
Tiva reasoned—more in imitation of her parents than from any personal malice.

She
held up the back of her hands to her face and thanked the Divine Name for their deep mahogany hue. Her mother had told her that the sons of Qayin were pale because their priests attached blood-sucking vipers to their children until they were old enough to marry.

Sacrificial tradition said that the life of every living thing was in the blood. Tiva’s parents had taught her that the richer the life in the blood, the more it showed in the depth of reddish-brown in ones skin. The House of Henumil had particularly rich skin tone, even by regional standards. Qayin’s descendants, living far from the presence of E’Yahavah, were no doubt a lifeless lot. The White Witch had a few bastard sons, according to Henumil, but they were too young to serve as clan elders. Thus
, the power had come to Tiva’s father, where it doubtless belonged.

Fortunately for
Henumil’s family, after the Seer Clan Regiment had taken such heavy casualties on the far side of the Straits, the tiny garrison left under Henumil’s command north of Ayar Khavil—on the near side—received hardship discharge from the new Archon and came home. The few survivors of Balimar Straits that had evaded capture also returned.

Many of
Tiva’s friends were now fatherless or missing older brothers. Even she understood vaguely how this created a major power shift in valley politics. She had hoped it would improve her school situation, but no luck there. In many ways, it only made things worse.

Nobody knew Tiva paid
any attention to Clan politics. It fascinated her how some men could tell others what to do and actually have them obey without question. Her father sometimes could tell the valley people what to do, but only in things like sacrifices, and among the Dragon-slayers.

She always liked to listen in on meetings where her father bossed the
slayers around—though she barely understood half of what she overheard. Tiva kept her meager awareness to herself, marshaled in her dark mental chambers along with anything else she found interesting or pleasurable. She knew only one thing with any certainty—fun things always got taken away
.

The erupting flowers ended at the edge of town, where she loped through the small garden
, into her father’s house.

Food already
sat out on the low stone table.

Tiva’s mother, a mousy woman with a pinched face, rushed the family through a supper of bread and lentil gruel.

“No dawdling, now. You know how important it is that your father set a good example in the valley. He can’t be late…”