The girl had tried to express that feeling in the paintings and sculptures she made — and she’d waited for the normal sense of things, the unbroken skein of thoughts and associations and actions that made up her world, to heal her.
Chaos in the Sima, the council of elders. Voices raised in the Em Hadderek, the place of gathering. Normality circled at a distance, like a bird that has left its nest because of some perturbation and now can’t settle again.
The girl was armoured against the chaos around her, at least to some extent, but it was hard not to be troubled when wise man and fool shouted anger at each other and everyone voiced disdain for the elders. Love was both the foundation of society and its mortar: if that failed them, what would be left?
The dissenting voices said that the People shouldn’t have left Ginat’Dania, the Eden Garden that had been their home, that God hadn’t sanctioned it. This led on inexorably to debates about what exactly God had sanctioned, and about the failings of the Messengers, or rather of their supreme shepherd and commander, Kuutma-that-was. He had betrayed the People, the rumours went, by falling in love with a woman in his charge, and by mourning her too much when she was dead. His judgement had become infected. He had let the enemies of the People live and grow stronger, and ally with one another. Until finally he himself had fallen in battle against the strongest of those enemies, the out-father Leo Tillman and the rhaka, the she-wolf Heather Kennedy. It was because of these failures that the People had had to move, in a caravan of sealed trucks, from their old home beneath Mexico City to the present Ginat’Dania thousands of miles north and east of that place.
The new Kuutma stood aloof from such allegations, mindful of the dignity of his office.
But the rumblings of protest grew, and finally they split the Sima itself. One of the three council elders had voiced the most terrible of heresies, the abomination of abominations. His peers had had no choice but to expel him from the chamber, and later that day it was learned that he had left the city — had gone out into the world, unsanctioned, unaccompanied, without name or blessing or commission.
Whereupon the city rocked crazily, like a boat when someone has stepped from its belly onto the shore and left it too light, too high in the water. The People were frozen and breathless, listening to echoes from a sound no one had heard.
And then, inexplicably, long after she’d stopped thinking of such a thing as being possible, the girl was summoned. Not by the council of elders but by Kuutma himself, known as ‘the Brand’ — the leader and commander of the Elohim, who held all truth in his heart and all vengeance in his hand.
The summons came at a time when she was least prepared to answer it. She was working on a massive canvas, the largest she had ever attempted. Standing at the top of a ladder, spattered and splotched with paint from head to knees, she was painting an angel’s face when two angels appeared to her.
They were Alus and Taria, Kuutma’s own personal attendants, and bodyguards. Their sudden arrival in the girl’s studio almost made her fall off her ladder with shock.
‘You’re wanted,’ Alus said simply.
They waited in silence while she washed herself, nervous and a little ashamed to be naked before them.
Walking between the two women, through the busy streets around the Em Hadderek, and then down the massive stairway beyond, the girl looked shyly but yearningly first at one and then at the other.
‘See anything you fancy?’ Taria asked her brazenly.
The girl blushed to the roots of her hair. ‘I’d like to paint you,’ she said. ‘Your muscles are so beautiful.’
The angels thought that was hilarious, and said that they might consider sitting for the girl some day when they were free. But then in a more serious tone Alus reminded her that it was Kuutma she was going to see, and it would be better right now to keep her thoughts focused on that.
They took her to Kuutma’s quarters, on the city’s lowest level — which in the street argot of the People was sometimes called het retoyet, ‘the dregs’. Kuutma had a modest apartment there, far less than he was entitled to. But like his predecessor, he was a man of modest tastes.
He was, moreover, a warrior, who had lasted in the ranks of the Elohim longer than most, and had the scars to prove it. Not on his body: though this Kuutma had been called on to kill many in the world outside, he had never (so far as anyone knew) taken wound or hurt. The scars were on his soul and the girl could see them there when first she looked into his eyes.
He was a solid, compact man, a little under average height but broad across the shoulders and with a sense of massiveness about him that, like the wounds, was not purely or even primarily physical. True, his hands were huge, and his forearms roped with muscle: but his broad, flat face — unusual among the People, and perhaps suggesting a Slavic out-father somewhere in his ancestry — had about it the stillness of profound meditation. He was bald, as the last Kuutma had been, but what had seemed martial in his predecessor looked on this man like the askesis of a monk or a hermit: a humbling of bodily pride, a stripping down to basics.
‘Thank you for coming,’ he said to the girl. His voice had a curious accent to it, the vowels forward and elongated — probably a survival from his last field posting, which would fade soon enough now that he was at home again among the People.
‘Of course,’ the girl said, blushing a little, caught unawares by Kuutma’s gentleness and consideration.
What he said next surprised her even more. ‘I owe you an apology.’
That seemed unlikely. He was Kuutma, after all. He was one of the names, and he held the fate of the People in his hands. Uncertain what to say, the girl simply shook her head.
‘Yes,’ Kuutma said. ‘I do. On behalf of the last Kuutma. You were assessed and the results were impressive. You should have been called into service, as your brothers were called. Your mind and temperament fit you well for it. You have the resilience to survive outside Ginat’Dania. To adapt, among the unchosen, without losing yourself to their ways. You also have, very obviously, a powerful imagination that will enable you to innovate in situations for which your training has not adequately prepared you. In any event, I called for you today to right the omission that has allowed you to languish here, unused.’
The girl’s heartbeat suddenly became perceptible to her, rising from unfelt background to a heavy hammering in her chest. It was hard to draw a breath. Not the Kelim, she prayed, to a God she seldom troubled. Please, please, not the Kelim. Don’t let my life go the way of my mother’s life.
‘I feel that what I do here is valuable,’ she said, in a voice that sounded in her own ears despicably weak, almost pleading.
‘Of course,’ Kuutma said, still gentle. ‘That’s in your nature. Wherever you are, and whatever you do, you will find a way to be useful. But there are places where you’re needed more than you’re needed here.’
Please.
‘And so I have decided that you will become one of my Elohim.’
Almost, the girl shuddered. Relief flooded her, and then joy. She was called — and to a vocation to which she could give herself without reservation. The Kelim served the People with their womb alone, and in the process were lessened (though everybody pretended otherwise). The Elohim served with hearts and minds and hands. A knife or a gun, she imagined, was only like any other tool — like the brushes she used when she painted, except that they were limited to the one effect, the one colour. She wasn’t afraid of violence. Painting was already violence. She was full of violence, as far as that went.