A Broken Paradise (The Windows of Heaven Book 3) (6 page)

he etchings on the stone reinforced their ideograph regulation of Tiva’s world with archaic repetitions. She didn’t comprehend much of what they said, but what she could follow seemed to forbid many things that everybody either did secretly, or wished they could get away with doing.

She wanted to bang her head against the slab until her brains gushed out. The holy power that supposedly came from Atum-Ra’s Cask had lost its ability to burn into her heart
, as though it was just an old box with a crusty dead guy in it. Part of her still wanted to unravel the mystery of her situation, while most of her simply craved the ability to shrug it all off with Farsa’s kind of unruffled insolence.

Some uncleanness both Father and Yargat could believe… but nothing so horrible that it will get me in too much trouble
…

Her first penitential yarn had not satisfied Henumil. It had doomed her to a second day before the stele. The grit on the floor bit into her knees through her long smock. She would have given anything for an interruption.

A familiar heavy hand rested on her aching shoulder.

Well, almost anything!

Yargat stood over her. His hand moved under her boxy veil, into the curls around her neck, a spider probing for prey tangled in its web.

“I spoke to Father for you,” he said quietly. “I reminded him of E’Yahavah’s mercy. He’s agreed to let me counsel you in pr
ivate.” Yargat removed his hand and held up the keys to the Shrine’s inner sanctum. Then he turned to shut and lock them both inside the vault.

“Here?” She swallowed her sudden nausea.

He suddenly broke from his fake
Low Archaic dialect and spoke to her in a refreshingly normal voice. “I know you don’t get it. That’s okay. You don’t need to be afraid anymore. Everything’s gonna be fine.”

“But, here?”

His eyes flared for a split second, then softened. He smiled at her with warmth that actually met those same eyes, and spoke quietly. “Wanna know a secret? Don’t tell the others, but between you and me, I think Atum-Ra’s been dead a long time. He doesn’t speak as often as he used to, and he sees even less inside that beautifully decorated old box.”

Just a crusty dead guy…
Tiva hung her head and shut herself off inside like some big-city machine.
If only I could shut myself off forever…

Yargat gently helped her to her feet
, and whispered, “I would keep our special times secret—for your own sake. Father and the others would not get it at all. I’ve been schooled at the academies in Sa-utar, so I know a few new things that Father doesn’t—stuff the sages and mages have just found out. Things aren’t like what you think. Still, Father probably is.”

He sat Tiva down on Atum-Ra’s coffin and
removed her veil, freeing her luxuriant black curls.
New things…
On the First Father’s sacred coffin!

“I understand you, Tiva. But if Father knew what you were doing, he’d publicly shame and disown you for playing whore. That’s what it’s called, you know,
‘playing whore.’ Boys often get around it. But girls—like when Ish’Hakka enticed Atum-Ra with forbidden fruit—girls caught at this game are not so lucky. Why’ja think the Watchers came down on us, after all? Girls just drew’em down! I know it’s not fair. I wish it were different. Maybe someday it will be. I’ll keep you out of trouble if I can. We all have weaknesses, after all. I just want you to get it, so you can feel safe and happy.”

On one level
, she believed him implicitly. On another, she noticed that he’d gone from total silence to talking too much too easily too fast. The sense of wrongness lurked too close to the surface, a contradiction in the running conversation in her mind that she could not quite see past.
At least he’s finally told me the name of the game.

Yargat continued, his dark blue eyes flashing dreadful anticipation, “I know, Tiva, it’s not that you mean to do anything wrong—you simply can’t help yourself. It just happens with some girls—you unknowingly have this effect. I mean, you never dress immodestly, do you?”

“No.”

“Exactly!
Yet you still create fire in boys and men.”

“But I don’t want to! I don’t mean to!
”

His shoulder massage felt so soothing
. The relief at him finally talking to her was greater than Tiva had expected.

“
I know you don’t. I also think I might know what’s happening. Did you know that the sages at Sa-utar are learning more from the Guild about how the glands of our bodies actually control what we think and do?”

“No—what’s the Guild?”

He pinched her neck. “The Guild’s not important. The point is; it’s really not anybody’s fault.”

Tiva now knew that the Guild was probably the most important thing about what Yargat was saying, but she didn’t dare press him about it now.

“Though it’s not your fault, Tiva—or mine—there’s danger for you if this were to get out. Our people misunderstand so many things, like the kind of pressure you’re under. I’m here to help guide you through safely—so it stays contained, between you and me—like a sacred trust. If anybody found out about you, I would no longer be able to help. I would want to, but things would be out of my hands. Right now, I do everything I can to make sure Father doesn’t punish you and that he knows how devoted you are at Shrine. I remember how he gets too, you know.”

“You do?”

“Yes, I really do. I know it’s been hard for you lately, both at home and with the new school and all. I’m sorry you’ve had to go through all that. I know you only want to do the right thing.”

She wanted to ask him what the “right thing” was, but was too afraid.
What if the right thing is really the wrong thing—the horrible thing?

Yargat
kissed the top of her head. “You can relax now and trust me. I’m your friend. I’ve got things worked out with Father now. It’ll get better as long as our counseling times go well. I’d really be sad if you got thrown out into the street, because you’re my favorite sister in all the world.”

She wanted to believe him with all her heart—it would make things so much simpler. Yet she felt the same sick emptiness in the pit of her stomach when he slid down next to her onto Atum-Ra’s sarcophagus.

O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon

That monthly changes in her circled orb,

Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.

—Shakespeare,
Romeo and Juliet
, Act 2, Scene 3

2

Moon Goddess

T
he dinnertime nightmare quickly rose to a frantic pitch. Stomach acid erupted halfway up Tiva’s gullet at her father’s tirade, making it impossible for her to finish her meal.

“The wench ought to be made a public example of! By all the Holy Watchers, what’s happening to the morals of this community?”

For a second, Tiva feared that he somehow spoke of her.

Then Yargat, who had come to visit with his silent turnip wife in tow, answered, “Zebuli brought it on himself with his strange view of Q’Enukki’s Precepts. No wonder his daughter’s in trouble.”

“I hear she’s been tramping around with lots of boys,” Tiva’s mother said from over by the clay pots.

“She’s up at Grove Hollow with the war deserters, playing whore for food and a place to sleep,” Tiva’s youngest brother said with a laugh. He made forbidden hand gestures under the table at
her other younger brother.

Tiva felt the blood drain from her face.
Even my baby brother knows what to call it! I only learned this year!

Henumil glared at the boys, as if to remind them they were too young to take part in an adult conversation. “If she was my daughter, I’d have to make a public example of her
.”

Tiva now knew exactly where she stood.

Yargat eyed her just long enough to reinforce what he had told her about the disparities between boys and girls. She had not wanted to believe it, but—at least in this respect, possibly others—he had spoken the truth.

The sooty brick walls of the dining alcove shrank in on Tiva. The air grew close, as her head began to swim. Stomach acid raged—a volcanic fissure ready to explode—until she began panting to keep her bile down.

“Are you feeling well, Flower?” her mother cooed.

The lady’s cooing was almost as bad as her yelling; sickly sweet
—like the meadow flowers that looked like open sores—which brought Tiva’s meal up to her mouth just short of hurling it altogether.

Henumil paused
in his tirade. “What’s the matter, girl? Did your food go down wrong?”

The fleeting concern in his eyes made tears swell in hers.

Tiva gasped. “I’ll be fine, Father, But may I please be excused?”

“Certainly, dear.”

She raced from the room, then outside into the field behind the house, gulping droughts of the night air as she ran. Only when she made it behind the first row of wheat stalks did Tiva drop to her knees and retch.

argat spoke to Tiva all the time now, as if he was a completely different person. It frightened yet elated her, especially when he talked to her as if she was a grown-up or something—telling her complicated secrets and stuff. He even explained to her about the Guild—how it helped the mages of Seti with new science and medicine.
That made the Guild good, didn’t it?

Yargat even sounded like a mage himself
; rambling mostly about new discoveries on how the human body made its own natural elixirs, which controlled her behavior, and his reactions to it. He told Tiva that her body made elixirs whether she wanted it to or not. He seemed especially interested in that; though he never made it clear exactly what her bodily elixirs and humors—another word he used—actually made her do to entice him so much. She wasn’t even sure always what the act of “enticing” was, or how she did it. Maybe it wasn’t as much what she did as what she was.

Yargat confirmed her suspicion one morning when he told her that she could not stop enticing any more than a flower could stop having a sweet scent. At first
, she smiled after he said this—like he was saying something nice about her—until she remembered the red and pink meadow flowers that looked like horrible open sores. Tiva detested flowers, but she had to admit that they couldn’t help smelling sickly sweet. It at least made her feel better that, whatever “enticing” was, she couldn’t help doing it.

One morning Yargat even told her that it was possible for mages to make the elixirs outside of the human body and use them to fix people who were always afraid or always sad. This gave Tiva a wild hope that maybe they could make an elixir that would fix her so she didn’t entice so much. She was tired of enticing—it
always seemed so slimy and worthless. Many mornings she physically hurt after counseling with her brother at the Shrine.

Nevertheless, she listened hard to everything Yargat told her about the elixirs. Maybe this new knowledge would even make it worth the times she hurt after morning Shrine. It slowly dawned on Tiva that if elixirs controlled how people behaved, then who
ever could control the elixirs could control people. This epiphany flamed her hope to an all-consuming passion. It also quietly terrified her in ways she could not understand.

One morning, about seven months after Yargat started talking to her
; Tiva woke up from a nightmare she could not remember, except that it ended with shadows whispering horrible things to her.

The Dream-shadow
s said,
“Hope with terror; hope from terror; hope is terror… Isn’t hope always just another terror in disguise?”
She shook it off as nonsense—nightmare nonsense—but the idea would not go away.

After all, Yargat knew about the magic and he only spoke of it to her
, which meant that she too might eventually get the special knowledge he had learned at Sa-utar if she was patient and did everything he told her. Someday they might even make elixirs of their own. Tiva imagined using one on Father to keep him from being angry so much of the time.

This hope grew—until the day
that Tiva heard about the “Girl’s Elixir” the sages started giving to certain girls at their local academy.

Her friend Tsulia had fallen behind in her studies
, and gotten all weepy for weeks on end. She even lost interest in playing with Tiva and Weri. Tsuli’s instructors quietly took her to a special sage that gave her the Elixir. In a couple weeks, Tsuli was back to normal, as good at her studies as before. She even wanted to play again—which was when she told her two friends about what had happened to her.

T
iva found the news crushing.

She
suddenly realized in a flash of dark brilliance that the Guild had not given the mages of Sa-utar—or her brother—any real knowledge about the elixirs at all, only the elixirs themselves. She could never tell the academy matrons about how she unintentionally “enticed” without revealing what was going on with Yargat, which meant everyone else would find out. Around the same time, she noticed something else too.

Yargat repeat
ed things he had already told her—things he had no doubt memorized himself—ideas his Academy instructors must have wanted him to believe about the elixirs. He never spoke about how they actually worked or of their ingredients. When Tsuli told her that the Girl’s Elixir required a specially-trained sage from the Guild to administer it, all hope died. The mage in Yargat’s eyes rapidly faded away, as the Fear returned to Tiva in a new, all-penetrating, far more menacing form.

Soon it was as bad as before—worse, because things were far more complicated
than she ever could have imagined. In the end, Yargat’s torrent of words ran through her mind in desperate litanies to try to ease her quaking conscience. Yet the magic was gone from them, just as the spiritual power had departed, from Atum-Ra’s cask.
This isn’t my fault! My bodily humors are just out of balance or something, that’s all. I’ve never been able to control what happens—it just happens. We can’t help it. The horrible feelings will pass!

But they didn’t pass. The Fear kept growing, day by day, too much to bury, too much to fake—until it consumed the last empty shell of elation.

Then, one day, it happened.

There was no decision to it—the torrent just snatched her away.

Tiva hardly remembered her walk down from the Shrine. What happened afterward became a blur. She paced around the outer court of the Girl’s Academy like a caged animal. Her stomach churned with violent sensations that had no name. Rage— shame—love—hate—humiliation—pain—desperation—secrecy—despair, her blood foamed with an emotion none of these words adequately described, and yet somehow it included all of them together and more—more than she could contain any longer.

Usually she settled her nerves enough during the early morning walk from Shrine to Academy that the trembling didn’t reach the surface. Most times
, she could lock her face into a mask and force her limbs to the outward tasks of getting to the ziggurat, and finding her first dialogue session.

Not today.

A year had passed since she had begun morning “counseling” with Yargat. Tiva didn’t understand—it wasn’t as though she hadn’t settled into the routine. She did everything he said correctly and listened to him carefully to try to understand. Yargat only said good things to Father about her now, but it seemed to make no difference with the Fear.

What’s happening to me?

Her veil lay trampled in the dust, where she had just thrown it.

Tsulia, along with Tiva’s other girl friend from the old Seer Clan school, followed her furious pacing with the tenacity of terror. They seemed to shout in at her with muffled voices through a thick haze.

Tsuli wailed, pointing to the broken veil frame, “Tiva! Are you crazy? Your father’ll kill you!”

Weri tried to grip Tiva’s shoulders, but she couldn’t hold on. “Tell us what’s wrong? Maybe we can help! Did your father cane you again?”

They were both so out of touch, as if they spoke from behind a cloudy glass, with feeble clinging hands that only got in her way. From somewhere outside of herself, Tiva heard her own voice answer them. She had just enough control not to speak of her brother’s “counseling,” but her far-off outburst found plenty else to vent for her friends’ benefit.

“I can’t do anything right! It hurts all the time! Ugly is pretty, and beauty is ugly! Celebration is
wretched and emptiness is joy! It’s all so hard! I can’t—I can’t do this no more! Why is this happening to me?”

“What hurts? Can’t do what?” Weri cried, trying again to hug Tiva into a halt from her violent pacing.

Tiva broke free, hurling her friend into the bushes. “I can’t be pretty! No je-jewelry or f-face paints, because it’s vain! No instrumental mu-music, cuz that ‘licentious piper of Lumekkor’ invented it! Your fathers at least let you learn music and wear some pretty stuff! I get nothing but pressure!” She turned on her listeners and shrieked, “I can’t go back there!”

If either of them had tried to touch her just then, Tiva was quite sure she would have broken their arms off and killed them with her bare hands.

After an uncomfortable silence, Tsulia said, “Tiva, you’ve gotta go home some time. It’s okay. In less than twenty years you’ll get married…”

“What—to some boring Lit Dragon-slayer or an acolyte like my brother? Don’t make me laugh at my own funeral!”

Tsulia stepped back.

Tiva’s thoughts
sharpened to a razor edge. “Is that what you want, Tsuli—to spend nine hundred years of dripping Under-world on Earth with a man trained to crush your dreams in the name of a god just as impossible to please as he is? Do you want to live and die that way?”

Both girls
’ jaws trembled, their eyes filling with tears. They seemed unable to reply.

“Why don’t you both join the real world!”

Tsulia clutched her hands together in front as if ready to wet herself. “Oh Holy Watchers—now you’re talking blasphemy, Tiva! Your pahpo’s really gonna kill you now!”

“Blasphemy! Blasphemy!” mimicked a strange girlish voice from behind some large ferns.

Weri shrieked.

Tiva let out her breath when Farsa stepped into the open. They had barely spoken to each other since their last encounter, except for an occasional nod or a desultory wave.

Farsa walked slowly toward them until she stood just a finger’s width from Tsuli’s face. “So her pahp’s gonna kill her, huh? Tell me something, Rag, who’s gonna tell him, you?”

“No Farsa, honest!”

Farsa glanced at the soiled veil in the dirt near Tiva. “What’s wrong, you get kicked out of Lit paradise? Or did World-end just come a few years early for you?”

“No,” Tiva said, but then quickly changed her mind, “I mean, yes! That’s exactly
what happened! The kick part!”

Farsa shook her head. “Go to! You ain’t the first, an’ Under-world’ll puke up its dead before you’ll be the last.”

Tsuli and Weri huddled together like war refugees.

Farsa exhaled sharply
. “You need help. I think I can put you up for a few days. My folks are merchants. They travel a lot, so I get the homestead pretty much to myself since they threw my brother out—‘cept for my pahp’s concubines, but most-a them’re as young as me, one even younger. Pahp’s a real fig, he is.”

Insane hope swept Tiva up in
a spinning wild dance with her internal organs. “Thanks!”

Her two friends
looked at each other, but kept silent. A lioness gaze from Farsa made it clear that she would strictly enforce their implied promise of continued silence.

The Upperclassman turned and grinned at Tiva. “Go to! First thing we gotta do is get you outa them Lit ‘fits and into some real
clothes.”