“Theba does not suffer life and so the child was cast from Theba’s womb and into the body of Shran’s mortal wife, Jemae. She didn’t survive his birth, and Salarahan grew to manhood in ignorance of his true mother.”
I felt a chill groan through my body, followed by the heat of anger. It came from another place and was simply thrust through me, like a spear point, like a man, like a babe. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t known a man or born a child, I felt the alien presence of each. Was I the only one to be affected this way, or did the opera have some unnatural hold on the whole audience?
“When Salarahan came of age he betrayed his true mother in word and deed, and for one hundred years Theba punished him. His brothers ruled the kingdom their father had left behind, true in their service to Theba. Their rewards were great, and they would be living still if Salarahan hadn’t thrown off the yoke of death and returned to the world of the living. He cast Theba from his heart and from the hearts of those who would follow him, parting the kingdom and slaying his brothers. He made war. Those who remained faithful to the dread goddess, she who had provided for them, fled north, and Salarahan and those like him abandoned Re’Kether for the south.”
My breath stopped. I should’ve guessed that Re’Kether would play some part, but that I had been there, that I had nearly been killed there, was too much. My shock and what happened next on the stage distracted me from arguing the validity of what the opera’s narrator claimed. The figures around the periphery of the stage threw themselves in part into the light, and their bodies, too, were cleverly painted, so only this leg or arm or even only a head would shine in the light, the rest obscured. It was a massacre of bodies behind the woman, who neither looked at them nor shook at the horror that fanned out on all sides. The man I had taken to be Shran was so still and so lifeless I wondered if perhaps he hadn’t actually been killed. The woman that was Theba bent, however, and touched his cheek with such profound tenderness that I could feel it like it were my own cheek, my own hand, and his eyes fluttered open and I knew that he lived. He rose like a man on a string, and she led him off stage.
The curtain rustled softly, and I tore my eyes away from the stage, sensing Gannet before I could see him as he crossed quickly and quietly to the chair beside mine. I imagined lifting a hand as the woman on the stage had and trailing my fingers from brow to mask lip to cheek, but even as my fingers twitched Gannet looked at me, his expression unreadable.
Watch, Eiren.
It was difficult to do as I was bid, but in the moment I had given to Gannet the figures on the edges of the stage had come forward, and the woman was nowhere to be seen. There were two groups now, and while one powdered themselves with white, the other smeared their faces and limbs with gold. Snow and sand. Ambar and Aleyn. I wondered then that it hadn’t occurred to me that the Ambarians would think Theba’s story this story, the sundering of our world, but I was more curious still how there could be something I didn’t know about so ancient and frequently told a tale?
The woman who was Theba appeared in the midst of the white-powdered bodies. They quaked at her presence and I quaked with them. It was difficult enough to imagine myself, let alone a third, as some representative of the vengeful goddess.
“In their trials to cross first the desert and then the mountains they forgot her, what she had done for them, what she had done to them. Theba wanted Salarahan no more, and she would forge her own kingdom in the north. But they were weak, and must be made strong. She lit in their breasts the fires of ambition, and they fought to win her favor.”
At these words, the white-powdered figures began to turn on each other, wrestling and inarticulate as animals. From their hands sprayed red, and whether it was blood or some other concoction I couldn’t tell. Half of the stage grew slick with it as figure after figure fell, gurgling, scrambling, spitting. Theba stood among them untouched, and when they had finished their numbers were much diminished.
The gold-powdered figures had played no role in this conflict, gathered together in tight groups, heads turned inwards and bodies inclined completely towards each other in protective circles. Theirs was the isolation of Aleyn, their survival dependent upon a commitment to harmony. The contrast between the groups, the white now bloodied red, brought tears to my eyes, and I watched Theba pass between them, embraced by Ambar and shunned by Aleyn. She hadn’t been content to destroy the world, but would remake it in blood and darkness and pin the blame upon her mortal son. When next the narrator spoke, the voice was magnified to haunting clarity.
“Many hundreds of years passed, a thousand, and Theba brought forward her servants, the icons, to work her will in the world. She told them that she would return in body herself when their greatest moment was upon them, when they would return to Re’Kether and reclaim what had been taken. They worked and waited, icons and mortals alike, for her coming. They were told they would know her in the stars and in the air when she came again.”
I had not forgotten that Gannet sat beside me, but I was suddenly keenly and painfully aware of my body, that they were speaking of me and yet somehow not. Gently, Gannet placed a hand upon mine, which had gone white with tension in my lap. We looked together. I didn’t need the audience’s rapt attention to know that what came after was new.
“Fifteen years it took to claim her.”
The Ambarians followed obediently behind Theba, their footprints wet and red as they crossed the stage. The Aleynians didn’t resist them, but lay down one by one in positions of subservience. I felt my face grow hot as Theba surveyed, her eyes dark hollows in the strange light on the stage. The fires guttered low and my heart grew wilder and heavier still as Gannet’s hand tightened over mine. I couldn’t keep from looking at him now, wondering if I might find as many answers in his eyes as the would-be Theba on the stage withheld.
“Please forgive me,” he whispered, his hand transmitting nothing to me but his body’s heat. I started when his fingers found my throat amidst the folds of hood and robe, brushed from chin to cheek and settled there against my pulse.
He spoke but I didn’t hear his words, for even as I thought to return the tenderness of his gesture in countless ways my attention was tugged inexorably back to the stage. All were in shadow but Theba. She stood as still as though she were made of stone, and if there had been gasps and whispers in the audience in response to earlier scenes, all were grave-silent now.
“You’ve made yourselves worthy of me,” she began, her voice wholly unlike the narrator’s, low and cold like a sound that begins in the earth and grows to topple mountains. “What Salarahan divided I will reconcile, from blood and boiling sea a kingdom will rise again and that kingdom will be yours.”
The figures that had retreated to the shadows begin to sing, crawling forth on their bellies and broken limbs to kneel at Theba’s feet. I couldn’t understand them, and wouldn’t even if the language had been one I knew. I was clouded with anger and horror and triumph and the desire that sprang from Gannet’s fingers still on my skin. I couldn’t pick out what emotions were mine and which belonged to the fierce figure on the stage.
“Eiren,” Gannet whispered, and I turned back to him as the chorus continued, swelling even as the fires’ light diminished further. His thumb traced a pattern now, one that sent a strange fire dancing down my limbs. “Eiren, I can’t stop what is coming.”
What he could not stop was more than what happened on the stage, what it represented, more than my sliding easily from my chair to his lap, careful not to dislodge his hand from my cheek. I felt a parting like two pages in a book splayed open for an herb to press, like my lips against a hot cup, eager for the sweet tea below the humid rim.
Don’t stop.
When Gannet’s left hand raced opposite his right, my own swept to the steady plane of his chest, he bending and I reaching so our mouths could meet. I knew enough of thirst to recognize in him a deep desire to drink, and he was in the same moment hard and sweet and soft, practiced severity entirely absent as he kissed me. There was none of the restraint he had shown weeks before, and I wouldn’t have known how to stop had I wanted to. Little more than a breath passed between us; only the most witless sound of pleasure was given room between lips parting and pressing again. I couldn’t hear the chorus on stage for the rebellion in my ears, the fire burning up my chest that had nothing, nothing, nothing whatever to do with Theba. It was Eiren who claimed him with a hand fixed just so above where his heart pounded, the lines in my palm pulsing with a rhythm they could not forget. A human hand, a human heart.
Theba could not make me take anyone, or kill anyone, or betray my people. Theba, who knew so much of betrayal. If I were to build a kingdom it would be in peace, as Salarahan had done.
“Eiren, Eiren,” Gannet’s lips hummed against mine, but my attention was drawn suddenly below. The players had moved to the top of the stage and were bowing not at Theba any longer but out, towards us. It seemed they were finished, for there were no fierce visages among them, but smiles, and hand holding, and even the fires had grown brighter. But then there was a scream, and chaos burst through the line of happy players. Dark figures moved among powdered ones, and as they did the players fell, shadowy stains spreading over their spare clothing. This was not the trick they had played earlier, but real blood. I couldn’t see their faces in detail, but their thrashing was like none of the mimicry that had come before it. Gannet rose and I was lifted in part by my own will and his hands, which had dropped to my arms and gently, if urgently, tugged me up.
I saw her, then, the Theba figure, held between two figures covered from head to foot. I saw, too, the glint of a knifepoint against her throat. I half expected that she would look at me, accusing, terrified that she should die in Theba’s name, my name, but her eyes were fixed on a spot on the ground floor of the opera, where no doubt a lover, mother, or friend stood. She was only a girl, so young; I could see that, now that the guise of Theba was gone.
There was a swelling in me as the knife slashed across her throat, as her blood splashed across her garment and on to the stage. So much, vibrant and thick, and as it ran so, too, did my sense of myself. While Gannet had held me I had been completely Eiren, but now I was Theba, all cold and outrage.
“You will never do what you have come to do, Theba!”
“We will go to our graves if we cannot bring you to yours!”
The attackers’ voices rang out from below, chilling me to the bone as I recalled the same words from the man who had attacked me, who had died by Antares’ hand. These, too, seemed to have no concern for their own lives as they leapt to the ground and began to lash out indiscriminately with their weapons.
Yes,
I thought, or Theba did, stealing from heart to vein to head.
You shall.
Even as I felt myself ready and wanting to unleash some judgment upon them, Gannet locked my arms against my sides, forcing me to look at him.
“Eiren, you have to go, get out of here. Find Najat, if you can.”
He kissed me and it was enough to bring me back to some part of myself, but too, too brief before he was thrusting me away, his keen eyes on the stage. I saw the fires flare there, and wondered that the attackers had not anticipated this sort of retaliation.
“I can help you!” I shouted, but even as I did I felt the cold anger rising in me again, blotting out the heart of me that wanted to stay with him because I cared to preserve his life. The cry for vengeance was stronger still.
“It’s you they want, icon of Theba, and no matter how strong you think yourself they will have you if you do not
go
,” he insisted, his last a command I couldn’t refuse. I tripped down the stairs, a tremor in my bones that was fear of what waited for me below, and all that had been woken within.
Chapter 24
Below was chaos. I lost myself in a tangle of limbs, fabric, and screams as everyone who had been in the opera house tried desperately to get out. For the moment, despite my lurid robe and the story it told, no one was paying any attention to me. It was a grim relief, to have the death of Theba onstage eclipse her presence in me.
It didn’t make it any easier to move against the crowd. I would be too great a target if I tried to escape by the front entrance, so I struggled instead deeper into the theatre in the hopes that there would be another way out. I squeezed through and stepped over several bodies, but this was not the work of the assassins. These were the victims of panic, but I didn’t stop to help, I couldn’t.
I was surprised when I reached the stage, confronted by the slick reflection of blood in the brazier light. There was more pooling on the stage than seemed like could have come from only one woman, or even ten. Though the fleeing citizens of Jhosch still swelled and shrieked at my back, I felt myself suddenly alone. And more than a little frightened.
“Eiren!”
Paivi’s voice was followed quickly by his hands, taking me roughly by the shoulders and pulling me back into a recessed pit near the stage. His thoughts projected forward from his mind, easy to read: he was surprised to find me here, and highly agitated, too.
“Gannet sent me away,” I explained, feeling a little like a child who had been caught somewhere she shouldn’t be.