Would the Rokka Mama, returning to Sanis Al, be whole? Or would what Kantu was about to do shatter her forever?
Turning around suddenly, Kantu cried, “I love you, momi,” and flung her arms around her mother. The Childless Men still gripped her, but Tesserree’s tears ran down Kantu’s face like kisses. From there, Kantu ran to rain kisses on Mikiel’s burning eyelids, and on Crizion’s forehead where the blue jewel still glowered, and then she went to Manuway and pressed her lips to his, and his arms clenched around her, and his heartbeat hammered into hers. She felt, for a moment, that he would lift her and spirit her away on his carpet, saving her from death as he had not saved Inilah.
Kantu did not know where she found the strength, but something wholly inexorable filled her, and she staggered from Manuway’s arms.
Then she backed up to the edge of the known world, where the Fa her father now knelt, palms upraised. His position denoted reverence and relief and grief, and Kantu understood once again with that same jagged clarity that he loved her more than his own life, and would have gladly given his life if it could possibly have made a difference.
“I want you to know,” Kantu said, staring at Mikiel’s fierce white eyes, her mother’s streaming face, Manuway’s rounded shoulders, her father’s bowed head, her brothers, the Bird People. “I want you to know,” she told them all, “that this is my choice. This is my will. My life for yours. My blood for rain.”
Taking the bronze crescent from Fa Izif’s open hands, Kantu raised it to her throat, and with one quick snicking motion, she slashed through skin, muscle, vein, and artery.
Before she could even feel the pain, she turned around and stepped off the cliff.
Night parted as she fell. Somewhere in the black depths of the canyon, a sun burst open, rose up. Belly down, Kantu fell, bleeding out. Her blood fell onto the sun and sizzled there. The dark was gone, and everything was light and song, a chorus of young girls singing.
Kantu knew them. She had almost been one of them, daughters dead at five that their land might thrive. Five times five years Kantu had outlived the Fa’s long line of daughters, and now at her death was a woman grown. She had known fear and friendship and love. She had seen beyond the boundaries of Sanis Al.
At five she would have been happy to give her life for the rain. But she would not have understood all that she gave.
Kantu fell, bleeding out, and she heard the singing.
She fell into light, but even in that blind radiance, she knew her friends were with her. Three to a carpet, speeding past her freefall, keeping pace, the Bird People attended her death all the way down.
Manuway was there, and Elia. Ranna and Vishni. Mikiel, winged, and Crizion riding with her, a new scar on her forehead and her face her own again. Kantu felt them with her as she fell, but she could not see them. Everything was heat and light. She knew she should be cold by now, but her body was turning to molten gold.
And then she went to a place where even the Bird People could not follow.
Kantu fell through the center of the world, thence to the top of the skies. She crashed with a thud and opened her eyes.
There was a land here, at the end of everything.
Fiery golden roses bloomed along golden roads, and the hot wind was heavy with their sweetness. Rivers of red lava ran beside the roads, and the rivers and the roads all led to a ring of tall mountains made of glass, where crystal towers sparkled, the smallest of them taller than the Shiprock. From these towers, ten thousand girl children with diamonds on their brows and mantles of white feathers trailing from their shoulders came running, falling over themselves to greet her.
“Kantu! Kantu!” they cried.
“Beautiful Kantu!”
“Storm Bird!”
“Rain Bringer!”
“The last of us to fall!”
“The first to fly!”
Kantu wanted to beg them to explain, but her throat was slashed open, and her voice had drained out with her life’s blood.
Laughing, they took her by the hands, by the hem, by the sleeve, by whatever they could touch, and like a rushing wave bore Kantu up the tallest mountainside, this one of red glass with a glaze of gold upon it. They pulled and pushed and danced around her, coaxing her along the path. They stroked the torn flesh of her throat, and the rags of her clothes, and her big, beaky, oft-broken nose, and Kantu, though she was tired, felt she had barely walked at all but they gained the peak.
The children pointed down, and Kantu looked where they gestured. From this unbelievable height, atop a mountain of the sun, Kantu could see the world. Her world. Her feeble, arid world, fragile as a child’s ball—and in dire need of her attention.
“It was too big for us,” the children told her. “And we were too small. But you are different. You are strong enough to last.”
How? Kantu wanted to ask. How am I different?
For answer, the children cast her from the mountain.
She did not fall again. This time, her great white wings flared out around her, gathering the hot wind beneath them. Her bones turned hollow as flutes, and her bloody rags were changed to burning feathers. Kantu shot down from the mountaintop in a swift stoop, parting the air like a knife through silk. She swooped steeply first over that fiery country, her eyes seeing everything at once, in the most minute detail. Only when she was kissing distance from the ground did she pull up again, her massive talons snatching great clumps of flaming roses as she rose. With these clutched firmly to her feathered belly, she left that burning golden country, left all those laughing, singing, waving little girls, and returned to the world.
Such monumental winds Kantu brought back with her, gathered like nestlings under her wings. Such sheer sheets of lightning when she blinked, and dazzling white tridents of light spearing the heavens from the diamond in her brow.
In this world, the tremendous trailing roses that she gripped in her talons swelled and blackened into clouds that wept fits of rain. She seeded the sky with storm petals, and beneath her shadow, Bellisaar and Sanis Al bloomed.
By the storms, Kantu announced her presence. She also sent rain dreams, a ceaseless stream of them, to the Fa and his wives, to his sons and soldiers and to all the people of Sanis Al.
“Hear me, S’Alians, for I am your god. It is I who bring the rain, and I who put pause to it. Listen well as a new law falls upon our land. There is to be no more sacrifice. Sing for your thunder. Dance for your floods. Lift the first fruits of your harvest to the altars of my temples. But no more—no more!—will rain be bought by innocent blood. Raise your sons and daughters in the fullness of life. I am the Rok of Rok Moris. I am the Thundergod of Bellisaar. I am the Raptor of Sanis Al, and I am here to stay.”
In her sleep, the Rokka Mama smiled. Lines of worry and anguish vanished from her brow, and she murmured, “That’s right, pili,” breathing more deeply and freely than she had done for twenty-five years.
And the Fa, who had not slept since watching his daughter step off a cliff, lingered over his thirteenth wife as she dreamed. With no one to see him, his eyes wept tears that glowed as blue as wizard light. His face shone like the Red Crescent washed clean.
After weeks of good rain, the young god tired of flight. She drew the floods back into her wings and left the Red Crescent for a time, searching for something familiar. She scanned the far horizons until she landed on a low earthen hill she thought she knew, then rummaged around in herself for a form she barely half-remembered.