For a moment I didn’t understand. “You wished I would die,” I guessed. She’d almost gotten her wish.
“When they brought you in from the river that night, I thought no, that wasn’t what I really wanted! But it was. I’d wished for it.”
“It wasn’t your fault.” I sat up, pulled my blanket up around my shoulders against the chill night air. “You’re not a god, your wishes don’t come true.”
“But I’m going to be a god after....” She didn’t finish.
“Are you afraid?” Just like my almost-death, she’d wished and wished, and then it had happened.
“What was it like?”
“What?”
“To....” She hesitated. “To be so close to a god.”
I hadn’t thought much about what it was Eritiri had tried to kill me for, about what it meant, that honor that Hondjetat had cried over losing, wished me dead over. I felt foreign, uninvolved in what was happening. And no one had contradicted that feeling. No one had been particularly kind, or behaved as though they had any attachment to me.
The Beloved of the Sun, said Ant, tiny and quiet, is decked with flowers and ornaments of shell and copper and gold. She is burned alive on the first terrace of the interloper’s mound. Willing self-sacrifice holds a great deal of power, and she carries with her the prayers of the people, accumulated over months. It is a feast for the god who can achieve such a thing.
“I didn’t die,” I said to Hondjetat, when I thought I could master my voice. “The river only used me to speak. So I can’t tell you what it’s like to die, or to become a god.” I thought a moment. “You wanted it so badly, and now you have it and it frightens you. Are you afraid to admit to Lord Sun that you don’t want it?”
“No! I want it more than anything. It’s what I was born for. I am nervous...frightened,” she amended. “A little. But Lord Sun said it won’t hurt.”
The man, or the bird, I wondered?
“It’s not that,” Hondjetat continued. “It’s...I remember what it was like, when we heard it would be you. I thought my whole life was over. I don’t want to make anybody feel like that. And how much worse it must be, to know you had it but then it was taken away from you.”
Hondjetat had so far struck me as teary and vacuous. Now I saw she was also absurdly generous, and I found I liked her for it. “I’m not angry. I’m not jealous. You didn’t steal anything from me.”
Hondjetat kissed me on the cheek. “Thank you!”
When I am free to speak as I wish, said Ant, oh, what words I will say.
Even captive, Ant had plenty of words. All night it whispered, telling me about the flavor of the dirt under the city, the extent of Lord Sun’s territory, the lives of ants, from eggs to larvae to pupae to adults. The diplomatic maneuvering of sister queens and their attendants. Schisms and epic battles.
Butterflies, Ant said, tickling the inside of my ear, also go from egg to larva to pupa. The pupae develop inside a case that hangs from leaves or tree branches, or lies underground. Because they are helpless during this time, the case is often disguised as a twig, or a dead leaf, or something else a bird wouldn’t want to eat.
For some species the transformation takes mere days. For others—in the desert, or on cold mountaintops—the pupae lie dormant for years, until it rains or the air warms sufficiently. Many peoples, including the Zuxogo, and your peoples before the usurper came, consider butterflies to be a symbol of rebirth and resurrection.
“Ant,” I whispered. I wanted to sleep.
It hasn’t rained all spring.
“Ant.”
It’s almost morning. You should get some sleep.
I sighed but didn’t answer, and knew nothing more until morning.
When I woke I went to see Lord Sun. I heard voices through the door, the chorus of clay heads sighing, “Nothing threatens Lord Sun. No one opposes him.”
“Say it again,” came the man’s voice.
“Nothing threatens Lord Sun. No one opposes him. Nothing prevents the rain.”
“Something prevents it,” insisted the man.
“Nothing,” sighed the voice of Ant.
I thought of the river telling me Ant was closest to her. The door opened, and I entered and prostrated myself.
“What did the Schael say?” asked the man.
I repeated the river’s words about not knowing what the Zuxugo had carried, about neither knowing nor caring about the Nalendar’s desires.
“But something is wrong,” said the man.
“All of you say it!” screamed the bird.
“Nothing threatens Lord Sun,” chorused the clay heads in fluting, discordant moans. “No one opposes him. Nothing prevents the rain.”
Silence, then, as though we waited for something.
“Go down to the river, girl,” shrieked the hawk. “Listen if it speaks to you. Tell me what you hear.”
“Yes, Lord.”
“And,” added the man, “don’t tell anyone what you’ve seen and heard here.”
I took my spinning to the riverside. Now I could speak, I hadn’t spoken much to the other women, nor they to me, but it was oddly lonely with nothing but the rush of the river in my ears.
“Ant,” I said, “what prevents the rain?”
Nothing, said the ant. It sounded pleased with itself.
“Then why doesn’t it rain?”
How did you get your name?
I frowned. “It’s just what people call me.”
If people called you Woman Who Spins, would that be your name?
“I don’t know. Is that how names work?”
Is Lord Sun, Lord Sun?
“You say not.” Movement in the grass beside me caught my eye. A stubby fragment of stick wiggled forward and back, slowly moving towards me. I wound thread, set down my spindle, leaned forward to look.
An ant, larger than the one sitting inside my ear. The stick it carried was still much larger than it was. Looking closer I saw it wasn’t a stick, but something mottled in a way that suggested it was. “What is this?”
That, said Ant, is a very small part of a very large surprise. It’s almost the last. It has taken a long time to collect them, and bring them such a long distance, and put them in place.
I remembered Ant whispering to me about butterfly pupae disguised as twigs or dried leaves. “You said there were no butterflies here.”
There aren’t. But look, here comes Essferend.
I looked up. Essferend strode purposefully along the shore towards me, and sat beside me without greeting me. I picked up my spindle, suddenly guilty for shirking.
“I heard what you said to Hondjetat last night,” Essferend said after a while. “You’ve changed.”
She seemed to want an answer. “Have I?”
“You don’t remember.” Her habitual frown deepened, her mouth grew tighter. “You laughed at her. You mocked her for even daring to think she might be chosen. For two weeks you spoke of nothing but being Lord Sun’s beloved. How much better you were than Hondjetat or Eiritiri. You were insufferable. Eritiri only did what everyone else wanted to do.”
If I had remembered, perhaps I would have been ashamed. But it was as though Essferend was talking about a stranger. She never liked you, said Ant. I wound thread and let the spindle drop. “You were passed over,” I guessed. “You wanted it as badly as Hondjetat, or Eritiri.”
“You’re not different after all,” said Essferend bitterly. “Just quieter about it.”
“I don’t remember anything. I only understood after Hondjetat spoke last night. That everyone comes to that house hoping to be chosen.”