The Younger Gods

"Will you stop that?" she flared.

"Anything you say, Ara."

BE NO MORE

Chapter One

"Your presence there should conceal Enalla and me from Aracia, Little-Me," Balacenia told me while we drifted through the chill air above Aracia's silly temple.

"I'm not sure that I follow you, Big-Me," I told her. "If everybody's right, the Beloved's older sister has had her mind turned off by the bug-woman they call Alcevan. If her mind isn't there anymore, she won't recognize anybody, will she?"

"That's one of the things we need to find out, Eleria," Big-Me replied. "If Aracia's mind is still working to some degree, we might be able to pull her out of Alcevan's grasp."

"I wouldn't get my hopes up too much, Big-Me," I told her. "That stink Alcevan's using on Aracia is probably about the same as the one that showed up in Tonthakan in Dahlaine's part of the world. If we had Ox and his war-axe here, he could probably solve the problem for us."

Big-Me shook her head. "The others and I have talked it over already," she said. "Alcevan could very well turn out to be the key that'll lock the Vlagh away permanently, so we don't want anybody to kill her just yet."

"Why not just send for Veltan?" I asked. "If he took the Vlagh to the moon and left her there, she'd never be able to come back, would she?"

"I'm not sure that Veltan could do that, Eleria. That might step over the line that we don't want Aracia to cross. We all love Veltan too much to take any chances."

"Just what do you want me to do, Balacenia?" I asked her.

"What happened to 'Big-Me'?" she asked with a faint smile.

"There's nothing wrong with 'Balacenia,'" I told her. "It's a very pretty name, and I like to use it every now and then when I'm talking with you. Just what do you want me to do?"

"Why don't you just tell Enalla—who'll appear to be Lillabeth—the stories about the pink dolphins you played with when you were younger?" She paused. "You do know that it was the time you spent with those dolphins that separated us so much that we'll probably never be able to merge again, don't you?"

"The Beloved didn't mention it," I replied, "but I'd more or less come to realize it myself. Don't worry about it so much, Big-Me. We might not be such a bad thing, you know. There will be two of us during the next cycle, so we'll be able to get a lot more done. Don't forget that Longbow's mine, though."

"You love him, don't you?"

"Of course. I think we all love Longbow, don't we?"

Balacenia sighed. "We may all love him, but you're the one who owns him."

"I wouldn't say 'owns.' Nobody owns Longbow. I think that if we got right down to it, we'd find that he owns us. I wouldn't let my hope of pulling Aracia back to normal build up too much, Big-Me. You don't have to mention this to the others, but I'm almost positive that we've lost Aracia permanently. Little Stinky has her pretty much tied down."

"Stinky?" Big-Me said with a little laugh. "That does identify Alcevan, doesn't it? You're absolutely perfect, Little-Me."

"I don't know about 'perfect,' Big-Me. I do have my share of faults, you know. Anyway, 'Stinky' sort of came to me from nowhere, and I scraped it off the wall. Sometimes I have trouble finding the right word when I'm using people-talk. I still speak—and think—in the language of the pink dolphins." I paused, as I almost always do. Then I said, "Isn't that neat?"

And Big-Me broke down and laughed.

Balacenia sort of faded out of sight as we drifted down through the shabby roof of Aracia's poorly constructed temple. I could still sense her presence, but she wasn't visible anymore. Enalla was sitting in Lillabeth's ornate room, and she looked so much like Lillabeth that she even startled me. I had met Lillabeth during the war in the Beloved's Domain last spring, and I'd joined her during our joint recitation of her Dream—to the great chagrin of Aracia, who'd been desperately trying to hide that Dream—so even though I knew that she was really Enalla, I felt quite comfortable with her.

"We are the same person, Eleria," Lillabeth's other personality reminded me in a voice that was a bit more mature than Lillabeth's. "We're much the same as you and Balacenia are."

"Not entirely, sister," Balacenia's voice told her. "Eleria here spent most of her time with the pink dolphins during her early childhood, and I'm afraid that the dolphins permanently separated us."

"Why did Zelana permit that?" Enalla demanded.

"The Beloved had her mind on music and poetry," I explained. "She was very fond of the pink dolphins, and after Dahlaine dropped me in her lap, she knew that somebody—or some thing—would have to nurse me. That's when she turned to Meeleamee."

"Dolphins have names?" Enalla asked, sounding a bit startled.

"Oh, yes," I replied, "and they also have a language. The Beloved speaks their language, so she could call out to Meeleamee when she discovered that I couldn't live on just light the way she does. Meeleamee nursed me, and in some sense she was the mother I never had."

"Aracia just handed me off to a fair number of local women to nurse me," Enalla said. "I never grew as close to any of them as you did to Meeleamee. They nursed me, but I never grew attached to any of them."

"That's probably what kept you from having any fun when you were a baby. The pink dolphins seemed to think that teaching me how to swim was almost as important as nursing me was. I could swim like a fish long before I learned how to walk."

"Why don't you tell me all kinds of stories about your pink dolphins, Eleria?" Enalla whispered. "Balacenia and I are fairly sure that might persuade Aracia that we're just an empty-headed pair of little girls." Then she spoke louder. "How in the world could a baby possibly learn how to swim?" she asked as if she was terribly interested.

"It's not really all that difficult, Lillabeth," I replied. "Meeleamee wasn't the only female dolphin who was nursing me. There were many others as well, and more of them turned up in that pond inside the grotto when they heard that I was rewarding the ones that nursed me with kisses."

"So that's where you picked up your kiss-kiss habit," Enalla said. "I've always wondered about that."

"I found out early that kisses and hugs will get you almost anything you want, Lillabeth," I told her. "I kissed Longbow into submission in about five minutes. Anyway, the pink dolphins began to herd fish into the grotto so that I could learn how to feed myself. Once a baby starts to grow teeth, nursing the child can start to be quite painful. Dolphins are sea-animals, so they live on a steady diet of fish. They started to give me bits and pieces of fish, and after a while they decided to teach me how to catch fish by myself. They were all very pleased when I caught and ate my very first fish."