No mention of creating the river, note, whispered the ant. He does not dare presume so far, even though so far she is his willing ally.
“After making them He named them. But when he had named Ant....”
An almost inaudible indignant hiss in my ear. The usurper did not make me. Ant was already one of my names.
“...Lord Sun was distracted by Ant’s capering, and so He forgot to name the last.”
Caper, did I? fumed the ant. For that one? Never! Flames snapped. One woman pulled a hazelnut to her with a stick.
“Unnamed and nameless, it roamed the world on thousands of dark and silent wings killing, swallowing souls. No one had ever died before. The people cried out to Lord Sun.”
We were already here, already part of a confederation of peoples who lived in what is now Lord Sun’s territory. We welcomed any newcomer who seemed willing to live at peace with us.
We were betrayed by our bonds to the river Schael. But the last one, the one he dares not name, even the Schael is wary of her.
“But Lord Sun had forgotten to name it! And as it was nameless, he could not speak of it. But Lord Sun heard the cries of the people. He called His creature gods together and said, Make flowers, as many as you can. They made flowers—cornflowers, poppies, chamomile, hawkweed, violets, every kind of flower. The Lord Sun covered his light so that the unnamed one would not see what they were doing. This was the beginning of night, when Lord Sun covers His brilliance so He may work His plans in secret, and triumph in daylight.”
The sun, said the ant, is a star. The world turns, and in the night we are on the side facing away from the sun.
“When the Sun rose the ground was covered with flowers. And in the heart of each one, poison. With its thousand wings, the nameless swallower of souls landed and drank. And poisoned, it died. And nothing that dies ever returns.”
That last is true enough, said the ant.
Though apparently I had died and returned—or something like it. The thought should have disturbed me, but everything was so distant, so unreal.
One would do well, the ant continued, to be sure one’s enemies are truly dead.
That night I lay awake on a mat while forty women and girls slept around me, and the ant whispered in my ear.
Any good sized river (the ant said) can be assured of a comfortable living. Let it only be navigable, prayers and sacrifices will follow. The river Schael does not care if people love her or hate her, or who dies when she floods her banks. Does not care if war or disease destroy whole peoples near her. Others will eventually replace them, and they too will need the river, and sacrifice and pray. Children fetching water, fishermen, pilots of boats loaded with flint cores or copper or furs, anyone whose life depends on the river, will make offerings in the hope that she will at least not turn against them.
Since she doesn’t care, she doesn’t—usually—expend any effort to harm them. The prayers and sacrifices continue unabated, and the Schael receives them and cares nothing for their origins.
I sometimes wish for a river more like the Nalendar, to the west, who takes an interest in commerce, who nurtures the peoples along her banks. But the Schael is the river we have.
We made agreements with the Schael, for our own sakes and for our people. Three centuries of careful negotiations, of convincing her that the agreements would not curtail her riverine pleasures and prerogatives. I would be an hour reciting the details of those agreements, and the specifics are not relevant just now. What matters is that when the interloper came, and offered her half of almost every sacrifice he received, she broke those agreements. It was a minor matter for her, so much power does she have, so delicately constructed had the agreements been, for her sake.
For all of us but one it was a grievous blow. Our words had been made untrue, and while we were still reeling under the sudden loss of power, that usurper who calls himself Lord Sun had but to speak us into captivity.
That one remaining, whom I am forbidden to name, older even than the river, capricious and chancy, ravenous in one season, abstemious in others, beautiful and deadly dangerous: she forced the interloper to meet her in open battle. At the point of defeat, she said, “When I confront you again, your power will be broken.”
The interloper, knowing that if she had the power what she said would certainly be true, said, “How will you confront me again if you are dead?”
And she replied, “Anyone who knows me can tell you that dying and returning from the dead is in my nature.”
After that he was at pains to remove all traces of her from his territory. Impossible, of course—even the empty space where her name once was leaves a shape that speaks of her. And if he suppressed all memory of her she might come on him unawares because no one recognized her. But he has done his best.
Which is why (the ant concluded) there are no butterflies here.
Over days the routine of the house became familiar to me. People would gather at the foot of our hill before sunrise to make offerings to Hondjetat. They cut themselves with small stone blades and bled onto strips of unbleached linen, which they burned. They called her Beloved of the Sun and begged her to grant favors when she ascended to godhood on the first day of summer. They left dried fruit and milk and eggs.
Hondjetat herself made bread for Lord Sun. Daily she left the house with the bread and a pot of milk, attended by two girls who lay blankets before her so she didn’t step on the earth. Anyone else crossing the plaza would look down and clear quickly out of her path.
The rest of us spun, wove and embroidered, ground barley and made bread. Essferend watched us all, and missed very little. She knotted and unknotted lengths of leather, counting things—quarts of barley, loaves of bread, pots of milk carried from outlying villages by thin, nervous children. How many received, how many consumed, how many needed for tomorrow and the next day and the next.
Days and weeks passed, and though I learned the names and the faces of the women around me, they never excited any other sort of familiarity. This did not distress me—I had nothing, after all, to compare it to.
It didn’t snow again, or rain. The autumn had been uncharacteristically dry, the women said to each other, and this winter as welclass="underline" only the one snow, no rain. This did not seem to alarm them. Every first day of summer Lord Sun in the person of the hawk spoke the prosperity of the next year—plentiful harvests for those who had pleased him, less for any who had failed in their devotion. Famine, perhaps, for villages that had offended him. But no town or village had offended him last year.
The skies cleared and the air warmed. The tattered remnants of the winter’s only snow melted away, spring breezes gusted, and the women took their work outside and sat in the lee of the house. Below, Hondjetat made her slow progress across the plaza. The girls attending her had to scramble to keep the blankets from blowing away. Men in leggings and short cloaks, women in long dresses, brought their own work out or hurried back and forth on errands as mysterious to me as everything else.
I put a fine bone needle to bleached linen, made small, precise stitches with indigo thread. The ends of the cloth streamed and fluttered in a gust.
What power there is in deception! said Ant.