Kushiel's Avatar (Phedre's Trilogy #3)

The Yeshuite mystic Eleazar ben Enokh had claimed the Name of God was the first Word spoken, the Word that brought all creation into being. Whether or not it is true, I do not know; no two nations hold the same story as to how it came to pass. We are Elua's children, the last-born, and we took the world as we found it. But I know there was great power in that Name, and when it blazed in my thoughts, I beheld the world through different eyes.

Imriel didn't like it.

I learned why, a week into our journey.

It was the campfire that struck me that night, the glowing orange caverns of embers beneath the stacked branches, the flames leaping above and sparks ascending in a column into the black, black sky. How long did I watch it, marveling? A few seconds, I thought, though I daresay it was a good deal longer, until I realized my arm was being shaken.

"Phèdre!"

"Yes?" I inquired. "I'm sorry, I was thinking."

Imriel shook his head and looked away. "You weren't," he mut tered.

"Imri." I waited until he looked back at me. "I'm trying. It's like having someone shout in your ear, can you understand? When it happens, it's all I can hear. I didn't know it would be like this, or I would have told you. But there was no one to ask and no way of knowing.”

"You look like you did in Daršanga," he said, half under his breath.

"What?'

"You look like you did in Daršanga.'" His voice rose, scared and defiant. "When you sat with the Mahrkagir, in the festaJ hall, your face—you looked the same, exactly the samel"

"Really?" I asked Joscelin.

He raised his eyebrows and shrugged.

It made me Jaugh. Elua knows why, but it did, and once I had started, I was hard-put to stop. All the absurdity of our long journey, the immensity of our task, the chaos that followed in our wake, the endless variations of the pattern I seemed destined to follow; it all came upon me at once. "Ah, Elua.'" I gasped, wiping my eyes. "Well, gods are like patrons, it seems. The shape of their desire may vary, but the manner of possession all comes to the same in the end.'"

Imriel regarded my mirth with apprehension.

"She's fine," Joscelin told him.

He looked doubtful.

"Oh, Imri." With difficulty, I managed to gather my composure. "It's nothing like Daršanga, I promise you. Listen, and I'll tell you what happened."

I told them both, then, what had happened after I had entered the temple on Kapporeth, and it seemed my laughter had freed my voice to speak. I told them the furnishings were those described in the ancient writings of the Tanakh, and how the priest offered incense, then led me into the inner sanctum. And I told them of the Ark of Broken Tablets, and the cherubim atop it with faces like those of Elua's Com panions. I told how the priest and I had lifted the lid, and the silent rubble had formed a Name I could not read.

And I told them how the tongueless priest had spoken it, and what had befallen me.

They listened, the both of them, and Imriel was wide-eyed as any child hearing a tale of wonder, no longer fearful. What Joscelin thought, I could not say.

"Do I really look like I did with the Mahrkagir?" I asked him later that night, lying against him in the tent with our cots pushed together.

"Mm-hmm." He was half-asleep, his arms around me. "And like you did at the bathing-pool, after I caught that fish."

"Where we made love?" I propped myself up on one elbow to look at him.

"Yes." His eyes opened in the dim light, amused. "And when that arrow grazed you and Imri put snakeroot on the wound, and in Nine veh, when you informed me we had to go into Drujan. Phèdre, I'm used to it. Daršanga was different, but this . . . your wandering around with the Name of God in your head is just one more damned thing to get used to."

"Am I that hard to live with?" I asked.

"Yes." His arms tightened around me. "But it's worth it."

Matters might have fallen out differently that night if Imriel had not been asleep in the tent with us; as it was, it merely made me think— and suggest to Imri with no especial tact that he might enjoy bunking with Bizan or Nkuku the following night, which he did with a good will, for any display of affection between Joscelin and I gladdened him. I may say that we made good use of the time, and I was well content with it. And whether it was the purgative effect of laughter, relating the story or our lovemaking, I cannot say, but the insistent presence of the Sacred Name grew easier to bear in the days that followed.

Like as not, though, it was the rains.

They began two days after our conversation.

After our travels in Khebbel-im-Akkad, I thought I knew somewhat of rain. I was mistaken. The rains that fall in Jebe-Barkal are like naught else, and no one travels in them. We did, though. If I had not seen that landscape once already, I would be hard pressed to describe it, for more often than not, it was a solid veil of rain through which we journeyed. We rode where we could, and walked where we could not, leading our horses through treacherous gullies and over rain-loosened scree. In the plains, we plodded along the banks of a rain-swollen Tabara River, our heads lowered, water running off us in sheets.

In the early part of the day, the rains would cease for a time.

That was when the flies came.

Blood-flies, Kaneka had called them; I remembered that, now. They were black and vicious and their sting hurt like fury. Our animals were half-maddened by them, and we humans were scarce immune. It got so one welcomed the rains. In the evenings, the rain and smoke kept them at bay, when we could muster a fire. Betimes the firewood was so sodden, not even Bizan could coax a flame. We all took to carrying tinder wrapped in oilcloth.

"We can make camp, lady, and wait out the rains," Tifari Amu said to me after five days of misery. "In the highlands, it is not so bad. We can build shelters that will last, and there is easy game."

"How long?" I asked him.

He shrugged. "Three months, perhaps."

It would be winter by the time we reached Menekhet, and too late for any ships. I gazed at Imriel, shrouded in a burnoose; Joscelin, his shoulders hunched against the downpour. Our bearers cursed and pleaded with the donkeys, whose short legs sunk deep in the mire. "What do you say, Tifari?"

"That only madmen travel in the rainy season." He regarded the straggling line of our company. "Madmen, and us. You ask me? I want to go home, lady. If you have the heart for it, I say we press onward."

"Onward it is," I said, thinking, home.

EIGHTY

IT WAS a miserable journey.There are no words to describe it. We took to travelling in the morning hours, when the rains had ceased. Once the sun rose, it heated the muddy earth until it was like journeying through a steam-bath, thick and swampy, the air filled with the green reek of rotting vegetation. It was impossible to keep anything dry. Our stores of grain rotted and sprouted in the sack.

We lived, for the most part, on game.

And when we could not get it fresh, we went hungry, for most of what we carried had spoiled. Mercifully, there was water in abundance, and lush grass for our mounts. Would that we could have eaten the same! But Tifari and Bizan brought down game enough between them to fill our bellies two days out of three, and where we followed the river, Joscelin was able to fish. The fish, at least, didn't mind the rains.

Flies continued to plague us, and illness. Yedo, one of the bearers, caught a fever that laid us up for three days. At its worst, he raved incoherently, and his brow, when I felt it, was dry and burning for all the moisture about us. Willow bark might have helped, had we any, but we didn't. I sat with him through the night, sponging his brow, remembering Ismene, the Hellene girl who had died after we left Darśanga.

Ismene died. Yedo lived, the fever breaking before dawn, leaving him wrung-out and sweating freely in the damp air. Who can say why?

And then we broke camp once more, and slogged onward, treading through the sucking mire, making our slow way toward Meroë. The saddles chafed our horses and their proud Umaiyyati heads hung low, sodden manes plastered on drenched hides. It went no better for the donkeys, bearing heavy packs. We treated the sores with powdered sulphur, which turned to a damp paste in the humid air. It didn't help, much. Nothing did. Where there were sores, the blood-flies laid eggs at night. Imriel and I grew deft at picking them out, our fingers smaller than the rest.

"You could have been at court," I reminded him. "Eating poached quails' eggs and sugared violets from a silver platter."

He scowled at me from beneath his dripping burnoose. "I would rather be here."

To his credit, Imriel never complained—and he kept up with our company, his boy's hands grown adept at handling the reins of his gelding. The frailty of Daršanga's ravages had concealed a wiry strength and he had, Elua be thanked, a strong constitution. While the rest of us coughed, itched, ached and stung, beset by flies and agues and thorns, Imri remained hale. The worst injury he took was a fierce sunburn from riding bareheaded in the clear morning hours, his sodden burnoose hung from his saddle to dry.

I may say, once again, that without Tifari Amu and the others, we would have been hopelessly lost a dozen times over, wandering the highlands to catch sight of the river where it cut, deep and rushing, through gorges. Despite my best efforts to protect it, Raj Lijasu's map got soaked in the omnipresent rains, the ink running until the markings were blurred and unreadable. In the mountains, Tifari took the lead; in the plains, it was Bizan. And the bearers—Nkuku, Yedo, Bomani and Najja—contributed in no small part.

In this manner did we make our way north across Jebe-Barkal, mile by weary mile. We saw no other human life, which was as well, for our passage-tokens from Meroë were battered and mudcaked and wholly unrecognizable. We saw lions, at a distance, and my heart leapt at the sight. It was in the early morning, across the rain-washed plains, sun- gilded steam rising in the dawning heat of day. They'd made a kill, or found one—lions, Bizan told us, were nothing loathe to scavenge—and surrounded it, five females and a single male.