the division of the mother
(a tripartite tractate)

Introduction to this translation: In the Division of the Mother (so titled based on its introductory paragraph) the anonymous author presents a whimsical retelling of verses 1-6 of the Ethos Book of Creation. The treatise was most likely composed in the southern desert of Nisan in approximately [date censored]; numerous elements can be traced to early pagan cults of the desert tribes, particularly the emphasis on feminine elements of creation. The text's structure also parallels that of On The Reality Of The Rulers, which may indicate a connection between the documents or simply evidence of similar cultural syncretism in both cases.

The main characters in the Division of the Mother's mythological narrative are, of course, God Himself, rendered ominous and manipulative by this imaginative text; the Mother, who later divides into the "carnal Mother," [original ancient Fatima characters censored], and the "spiritual Mother," [characters censored]; the shadowy Rulers who are her offspring; and a final, mysterious masculine figure, the Connector. The narrative focuses primarily on the carnal Mother, however, following her fall and disgrace, and her covenant with the text's demonized God.

[...] - indicates a lacuna in the manuscript.

() - indicates text is approximate due to partial illegibility.

The division of the mother, which happened at the beginning and from which the reality of the world came.

The mother was first two female principles, but the two principles were the same and called by the same name. And the two principles were the perfect mind and the perfect womb. When the two principles were one the reality of the world came forth from them. From their incorruptibility came the rulers and the connector, who created them.

The rulers brought forth men and women, and they [...]. They laid plans and said, "Come, let us lay hold of the mother, so that we may seize her in her totality [...], and create for us a paradise that we have made in which to wait for God." The connector [...] alone [...] (he/she/it) is [...] helper [...] and [...] with the face of a beast. [approximately ten lines missing] The rulers spoke to (them), saying, "(Do not) trespass on the mind of God, or touch the mind of God; by touching it you will die. The present form of the world is passing away. (For this purpose) the world will return to God and [...] eternal paradise will move in the stars."

This was [...]. They are blind and do not understand that this is to make him strong, and he will resist the mind of God. They put on iniquity and cause the righteous to be disrupted.

The rulers said to one another, "Let us pursue them." And when they saw the mother with the connector, they became agitated and began to move back and forth, and their desire was for the woman. The rulers said, "Come, let us lay hold of her," and pursued her. And she fled them, and the connector was with her. And the [...] power [...]. And when they had seized her she laughed at their foolishness and became the spiritual mother, and left them, and the one that they defiled was only her shadow. Her shadow was the carnal mother and (had no) body. They defiled her foully, and seized her, and they defiled the tree of God that was her wisdom, so that they made themselves incapable of wisdom. And the mother was divided and in two parts. The part that was the spiritual mother was [...], and the part that was the carnal mother was her shadow.

Now all these things came to pass by the will of God. God placed the tree of wisdom in the carnal woman, so that she became endowed with his spirit. Afterwards, God spoke to the woman, saying, "Be at peace, your time is coming, you will be the time that will come. And you will not die, but become a living soul that lives incorruptibly in the body."

The woman comprehended what was told to her and became a living soul. She follows the commands of God because God has created her and given the tree to her. She is the living soul that (guides) the pitiful souls and is occupied with the affairs of the world. (This is) why she is named the carnal mother. She has put on carnality and (the end) flows out from her. She is comprehending the [...] which builds toward the ark of God. And the rulers know her and through her they discover the tree of wisdom.

Then when God saw that all of these things had been done He began to sleep deeply. In their arrogance the rulers commanded that they would rule over mankind while God was sleeping, so that paradise would be restored. And they touched the mind of God and made themselves holy chariots with his (angels) and ruled over the kingdoms of mankind. And the connector and the mother were becoming new flesh [...] and were always separated from each other. And they will rule until God is awakened and paradise comes again and makes the world new, and the true man reveals the existence of the spirit of truth hidden by God and the rulers, and the true woman becomes one, and the truth is set free to the kingdom of truth, and the age of peace is created. And the sons and daughters of the truth will be freed from the chains of the rulers, and will sing, "Truth is the being of the light, and the son and the mother are the light of the world, and the circle has not broken! Glory, glory, in the highest! Amen!"

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[(R)ETRY OR (Q)UIT]

Then:

Sand covers the crashed hulks in drifts. Rock settles around the generator, and soil, and grass grows in the soil. The ordinary men and women move away from their origin by three generations, then four, then five. They learn the desert, and the fertile lands around the desert. They work it until it grows. This is, the emperor senses, how it has always been done.

The emperor has no empire, but his ministers call him so because empire is his eventual destiny: it is to be a holy empire, wholly his. He accepts this comfortably enough. The people they meet who are not like them greet him with something less than fear, a little more than respect. Their generations speak of God first as a matter of fact, then as a matter of belief, then as a matter of unbelief or uncertain belief or fanatical insistence masking unbelief, and sometimes kill one another for their choices. In the end it all matters little to anyone, least of all to God. The office he assumes for them is less and less like a high priest, more and more like a king. Thirteen in all, they circle the desert, his sedan chair borne up on their naked shoulders, and they attend to the people. They provide the semblance of order. And this, too, is how it is done.

In a ragged collection of tents and huts along where the sand grades to gray dusty hardpan, windblown until they seem to huddle and cower, bearded men with decorated heads approach him gravely, eyes cast modestly to the rock. There is a woman, they say. She screams.

He sits high in his chair and waits for the rest. When they are ready, they give it.

They say that as a girl she was sane as any woman, and as a young woman as well, but one day, some time after she was engaged to be married, she was suddenly changed. She began to scream and seize and wail, and nothing can make her be still. Her betrothed was enraged and demanded the return of her dowry, and her father cast her out, but she gave no sign she was aware of what was happening, only went on screaming and screaming. (And now they hesitate, and glance among themselves, and he continues to wait.) When they tried to drive her out, they found that they could not, and were forced to move away from her instead. Men sicken or die, they say, who meet her gaze. The slightest touch of her finger can break the bone of an arm or leg. The lightning itself seems to answer when she calls; she can burn the sky. No such thing has ever happened before. And she won't stop screaming. People have left, and those with nowhere to go are afraid.

Take me to her, he says when they have finished speaking. The greybeards are clearly shocked by the command, and horrified, but they obey without question. They lead him around the village, past the deep-sunk well, away from the gray rock. Into the desert.

He hears her long before they arrive: an awful, desolate, howling cry, yes, distorted and made inhuman by the vagaries of the wind, but still a human voice. The men from the village are frightened, of course, but he finds himself eased by the sound. He counsels them to hang back, and takes only his ministers into the caves from which the scream comes amplified. The caves are deep, scoured white inside by sun and sandstorms. In places their walls are shot through with quartz.

She is a woman of unremarkable shape, dark like the people of the desert, filthy and naked inside a dangling tatter of rags. She writhes on the cavern floor, her hands in paralytic claws, her limbs seeming to bend against themselves. Her face has been gouged and scratched. There are mats in her hair. Her eyes are naked lunacy, the tangled tails of rats weaving together in their burrows.

He knows her at once. What's become of her cannot be common in a world so young, where torture has barely been thought of yet.

He goes to her, removing his helmet as he does, and though her power scorches the walls of the cave and smolders the sand, he is not so much as scratched. It was not meant to be used against him, or his ministers, and its source will not permit it; their destruction is work two other men will have to take up on her behalf, ten millennia from now. He takes her up from the ground in his arms. She only struggles for a few seconds before she faints, limp dead weight against his chest, her cheek pressed flat into his robe. She is weak already. Her body won't live long like this. Not, he supposes, that it matters to her.

His ministers confer amongst themselves, then press around him where he stands holding her, a slim doll in his much larger arms. They are eager to suggest. They should keep her, they tell him. She knows the mind of God. Her madness is only partly pain; the other part is prophecy. They would know it, the knowing of which has driven her beyond the point of reason, destroying herself through generations, refusing in the only way she can the gift of life that has been given her. Maybe they think she'll give them eternal life as well, although of course they say nothing like that, and eternal life is something they have no reason not to expect. Keep her, they urge him, the shadow of the Mother in the place of the Mother that was lost. She is the sefirot that will lead to the wisdom of God.

They're exaggerating, of course, like they always do. But what could it hurt?

The greybeards gape as he emerges from the cave, their king, the terrifying girl held unconscious in his arms. A choke-leash of crude chain is fashioned, and fixed around her neck at one end, around a crossbeam at the back of the chair at the other. She may ride at his feet up on the travois, or she may learn to run. In the years that follow, she comes to do some of both.

After they are gone, he orders the village destroyed.

---

Between their passenger and the spreading settlements, travel becomes more difficult. He commands that fragments of crashed technology be collected, their functions restored, a citadel assembled for himself and his ministry, from the old lightweight alloys and newer, cruder, heavier metals made on this world. It will take a very long time, and the lives of many of his subjects, but he has no shortage of either. Outside in the deserts and fields men are growing mean grains and domesticating local wildlife; they cultivate around the buried fragments of God's ark, bending beam-rifles into ploughshares. This technology has no meaning for them, no direct relevance to their survival. Already they have entirely forgotten how it functions and why. But he has not forgotten, and he will not forget.

A throne replaces his sedan chair in the growing structure, and she is chained at the foot of it. The choke-chain is exchanged for a softer, less imperative collar of leather, bound to the metal links. Her screaming has subsided in the intervening time, made impractical by her need to run and, perhaps, less important by time, and now she is only dully silent. She can be coerced to eat little, but sleeps much. When she is awake she only lies as still as she does when she's sleeping, and her open eyes fix on a constant, empty space in the far distance, and will not turn from it to anyone or anything, as though she is looking in constant mad horror at some unimaginable monstrosity that only she can see. Possibly at time itself: he thinks this once and then turns away from the idea, shaken and not knowing why.

He does not like her presence here; he has begun, in fact, to wish his ministers had never talked him into it, that they had left her to stand or remain where she lay. But they took her, and they have her now, and letting her go at this late date seems like more trouble than it could possibly be worth. She's involved now, and perhaps they do need her. The Gazel come to her sometimes, in ones or twos or threes, and lie with her, as though perhaps they believe this gesture could bring them closer to the divine prophecy that sleeps locked behind her unseeing eyes, even bring them into a kind of union with her that would confer some of its majesty onto them. If so, they leave disappointed. She lies boneless and limp throughout, her eyes still fixed on whatever far-flung thing holds her attention so desperately, and against her doll-like calm their grunting and striving seem animal, base. He ignores this as best he can, thinks of warning them off, then thinks better of it. It isn't as if she's actually helpless, and he prefers not to become involved in the situation any more than necessary. It all makes him uncomfortable.

Every now and then he catches her looking at something -- her hands in her lap, the doorway to his throne chamber; once even him, and that time gives him a particularly nasty jolt -- and often on these occasions, her cracked lips are moving, fast and lightly, as though she were speaking or chanting. He listens, even kneels down on the floor to put his ear near to her mouth, but he cannot hear what she is saying. If she's saying anything at all.

He wonders, and wonders often, if they should be making themselves monstrous to her so irrevocably.

Work progresses on the citadel; corridors and hatchways and security measures weave themselves around him at their center, fractal patterns spiraling outwards from a single point -- or in from outside. He doesn't know, and it doesn't matter. Either way, and whatever happens now and after this, he remains at the center. And so does she.

---

The guardian angel comes to him, now that he is somewhere to be found. He finds himself pleased. The angel has been wandering, seeking his purpose, and relations have remained unsteady at their best. Although the angel treats him more companionably with time, the emperor senses he has yet to be forgiven for the way they began, and is neither surprised nor offended. They were all young, and the young make mistakes.

Manners are scarely made before the sight of the woman gives his visitor pause. Who is that? he asks, frowning down at her from the mouth of the girded corridor that leads to this place. It occurs to the emperor to evade the question, but he decides against it. Best to show that the time of the closed mouth and the closed fist between them is done.

The shadow of the Mother, he says. What was left behind when she escaped capture. The last word substitutes itself smoothly for the us that came first to his mind, with no audible hesitation, but the flat gaze the angel gives him makes it clear that neither has he made a clean escape.

Not in the slightest, in fact. Why do you have her here? Is she your captive? The angel comes into the room, toward her, his gaze already fixed. This is all very irritating.

My ministers insisted, he says, and lets some of his annoyance show as he does. They seem to believe she's very important to us.

Oh? And not only a trophy for them to enjoy? For that he has no answer, and doesn't bother trying to give one. At last the angel looks up, and the emperor can hear a sour anger twine into his voice. Why is she restrained?

She's insane. She'll harm herself if she can.

She's already harmed herself. He drops to one knee beside her, reaching for her, and with sudden alarm the emperor wonders if any such failsafe protects him from her power; the answer seems obvious, that of course none would.

Be careful! His voice is sharper than he intends, and the angel pauses to look at him again, inquiringly. She's dangerous.

This explanation seems to interest the guardian angel little, however; he turns back with a dismissive air. I can hardly imagine you would keep her, were she not. His fingers reach toward her neck, then touch it. The emperor waits, but nothing happens. She lies moveless and empty-eyed. The angel's fingers slip between the collar and her skin, revealing sores he has never even realized were there. He always tries not to look at her so closely. May I examine her, and tend her wounds?

The question is a formality. Whether or not he gives permission will have no effect on what the angel does. He gives it anyway, and the angel moves around her with a graceful assurance he has not seen before. He has never seen him act as a physician, and this realization startles him.

Can you hear me? he asks, as he does, and then, Can you speak? She hasn't yet, but the emperor sees no point in telling the angel what he can observe for himself. Her eyes never turn to him, never shift from the center of space where they fix. Can you tell me your name?

He almost protests this final absurdity, but before he can, she does it for him. I don't have one, she says. Her voice is soft and completely without expression. Even as she speaks, her eyes do not shift or refocus; she is still staring, still horrified by whatever it is that lies just beyond their sight. The angel is taken aback nonetheless, hovering for a long moment with his hand just over her skin.

Then what should I call you? he asks, finally, as though she would converse with him, as though this were all perfectly natural. But her eyes never move, and she says nothing else.

The angel examines her, and does what he can for the sores on her neck; he pronounces that her health is poor, and the emperor agrees. He doesn't bother to explain that there isn't much he can do about it. The remove themselves from her presence when he is done, retreating to the emperor's more private quarters to conduct their primary affairs. He is glad that the angel seems to be coming around. He's... someone to talk to.

As the angel's leaving some time later, fastening his cloak again around his neck, he glances back at the woman still slumped in the throne room. Unchain her, he says, without other preamble. She is not an animal.

No, the emperor says, from his sprawl. He hasn't bothered to rise from his couch. But please don't be fooled by her appearance. Neither is she human.

The angel glares at him. None of us are.

My point exactly. They look at each other for a long moment, and the angel is the first to break it. He looks away to the corridor, to the world outside.

Still, he says, this is disgusting. And unworthy of you.

He tries not to be flattered. What exactly do you want me to do? She'd run away. She'd hurt herself, or someone else.

The angel shrugs. You have nothing if not time, he says. Laziness does not suit you, and neither does cowardice.

He looks up sharply, stung, but the angel is already gone.

---

He returns to the throne room, disconsolate and annoyed. She is still slumped on the floor, the draperies the minsters have placed around her (always shabby, it seems, no matter how many times they might have been changed) pooling around her in a sea of red and rare purple. Anger flashes, helpless and ridiculous. He feels like kicking her.

You shouldn't let him come here, she says, in that soft, fast, toneless voice, and he snaps his head to look at her. And she is looking at him. Her eyes are still glassy and riveted as a doll's, but they are riveted up onto his face. The effect, the way her neck is turned to point her head up at him, makes her look as though someone has posed her that way, and he finds it disturbing. He belongs to the Contact. All things of the Contact are outside the system and therefore uncontrollable. He's dangerous.

Remembering how he said the same about her to the angel in question, he says, Don't be absurd. He's a nursemaid. His heart is soft as a woman's.

Even if he tries to serve you, he'll ruin you, she continues. He finds he doesn't like having her looking at him. She doesn't seem to blink. Even they blink. He won't be able to help it. It's just what he is. It's what he was made for. She makes a sound: something like a whispering sigh, shaky and strange. He is dangerous. You shouldn't let him touch you.

His hands are in fists and he has no idea why. What do you know about it? he snaps.

I know everything, she says. Her voice carries no inflection at all.

Just shut up.

The dull grit of his tone surprises them both. She turns her head back, slowly, away from him. He imagines he can hear tendons creaking in her neck. Her gaze fixes out in space again, but he could swear something is on her lips that is almost like a smile.

He has a cell built, but before it's finished, she dies.

---

His relief is short-lived. The ministers swarm him almost at once, agitated and excited. They know where she's been reborn. They can track her now. They must retrieve her again, must continue to retrieve her. Immediately. Immediately.

Laziness may not suit him, but it's hard to summon the strength for argument when he can see so little point in it. He lets them go, but refuses to go himself, no matter how many times they ask and insinuate and cajole. They have his authority already; they don't need an extra dose to swing, like a club, around their heads. And he doesn't want to be involved. He tells himself this over and over again, letting it cover and pay for all, clinging to it as his mantra in this matter and gradually in more than a few others. He doesn't want to be involved.

It never occurs to him until much later that he already is.

They keep her in the cell, without chains. She still doesn't eat.

Time passes.

---

He pushes under the flap of the tent, into the dry semi-darkness, smoky and scented from lamps and incense. He towers in its small dark space, his helmet silhouetted by the gap against the twilit low-country sky for a few seconds until he lets the flap fall back. She is twisted up on the heap of cushions, her head pushed into an embroidered pillow, not crying out but only holding her mouth open, soundlessly, locked. Sound itself is a vocabulary insufficient to her experience; even the wordless distilled languages of pain, of horror, of anger cannot speak for her, cannot map the abjected country she travels. She is beyond expression, beyond imagination. No one can reach her, for fair or foul.

He comes inside and stands before her. He looks at her. She rolls her head back, and looks at him.

How long does this go on? she asks him.

He says, Forever.

He carries her out of the tent and into sunset grasses, back to his ministers, back to his traveling party and the citadel beyond it. The place they are now beginning to call the Empire of the Sun; Solaris, in the old tongue. Clasped in his arms, her mouth pressed against his chest, she says mushily, again and again, Cain. Cain.

Cain. Let me go.

He doesn't. He can't.

---

Five years later, she blasts her cell door open, short-circuits the citadel's bay doors, and escapes.

Then:

He had heard the baying dogs even before he left his own front step, and paused to frown out at the hills, whose dark hulking shapes the half-moon light had outlined. They had sounded far-off, though, miles at least, and he'd thought little of it. Some hunt riding out from the nearest town, which wasn't very near at all.

But closer to the well the sounds were louder. It was hard to judge distance from sound here -- things echoed between the hills -- but he thought the hunting party must be close by, perhaps even on his land. He frowned again and stopped, the lowland winds tearing at his hair and clunking the bucket-hooks heavily on wood, and the longer he listened the more his frown turned grave. His land stretched for a considerable distance, but that was no excuse.

He lifted the yoke from his shoulders and set it on the ground; the buckets would be scoured with dust within minutes, and would have to be washed before he could come again to the well, but that concern was already fading from his mind with the steady approach of the howling. There were sounds of men now, too, which could only be heard at closer distances: shouts and roars, the coordination of a midnight search. When he turned back toward the house, he saw with a start the first pricks of light in the hills to the north -- lanterns, or pitch torches, he judged. That was too close, and they weren't turning back.

The cottage door banged out of his hand and against the wall with the night gusts, making earthware crockery shiver on his shelves. He stormed in past it with his hair still full of the wind, and took his sword down from the wall. Its edge was keen enough to satisfy him when he popped it from its sheath, and he nodded. It was a fine blade, not prone to dull. Still, something to be grateful for.

He took off in the direction of the lights at a run, his sandals striking up puffs of dust fast and silent on the dry earth, his hand on the sword in its sheath. He had only been on the move for perhaps three or four minutes before he heard the voice.

It was wordless, low, only crying out with almost no breath at its back and all character lost in its distress. He slowed and then stopped, frowning, casting about in the darkness for its source; it must have been close, or he couldn't have heard it over the approaching sounds of dogs and men. There was a rocky groove in the ground several feet to the left, where rocks had tumbled and a few low shrubs sprouted up, and he took a few steps in that direction before spying the shadowed form hunched over in the dust. It was small -- female, tumbled asprawl in the ditch. She was unquestionably hurt, and he went to her with his hand falling from his sword-hilt.

He couldn't have said how he knew her. He didn't know himself. She was pale-skinned and red-haired where before she'd been dark of both, rounded at the curves where she'd been starved and scarcely there. Even her eyes were closed, hiding whether or not they still held that doll-like glassiness, but none of that seemed to matter. It was unquestionable that she was not the same woman, and equally unquestionable that she was. The woman Cain had been keeping, the one who had been bound at the emperor's feet, who had stared fixed into the distance and told him she had no name, miles and lives and centuries ago. The one Cain had called the shadow of the Mother, and whom he had told Cain to set free. It was her. He couldn't explain, and he didn't have to. He would always know her on sight.

Now she lay fallen in the dust of his north field, breathing in harsh whimpers, folded in on herself. Her clothing was torn and she was bruised and raked with scratches. Her feet were bare, and they looked savaged, barely recognizable. Something was wrong with her right ankle that had rendered it swollen and misaligned; on first cursory glance he thought it was better than broken, probably worse than twisted.

He took a step closer, and her eyes snapped open at the sound. That answered his question, at least: they were sharp, not the least bit glassy, but wild and strange as an animal's. She saw him, though, and let them close again. "It's you," she said. Her voice was airless and dry. She was clutching her lower leg in both hands, not quite daring to actually touch her ankle. "I wanted to find you."

"You found my land," he said, trying to sound stern but only achieving nonplussed. Suffice it to say that she had changed, but not by becoming any less peculiar. "That is a good start. How did you know where I would be?"

"Cain did." She seemed untroubled by the irrelevance of the question, and to believe that her answer should make perfect sense to him. Her eyes opened again, and she regarded him with naked animal candor. It was a hunt; she had the fox's gaze. "Will you help me?"

"Help you?" His mouth could seem to say nothing that wasn't stupid and useless. It was the way the language spoken here had changed, in part; he was still learning it, and it was hard to find the words he wanted. He wasn't good with languages, and would never be, in all the time to come -- would always speak like a stranger, wherever he happened to speak. "What do you mean?"

She lifted her head into the wind; it blew away strands of her hair, flipping it around her face in wild tangles. Lifted her head to the sounds of the army -- as he now realized that was what it must be. The way they were moving down the mountain, the way the moonlight threw back off metal. "They're coming to take me back," she said, her eyes fixed up on him. "The Ministry called them out after me. Please. I couldn't think of anyone else."

He could hear running feet now. There would be a time to deal with all of this later.

"Can you run?" he asked her, instead of answering. "Or even stand?"

She made a wrenching, miserable sound, a caught sound. "No. I fell -- "

But he didn't wait for the rest. He only bent down and picked her up out of the dust, in his arms. She was small, and very light, and clasped her arms around his neck at once with her head pressed to his shoulder. He was able to run with her all the way to the house.

Inside in the lamplight, she was even paler, her hair such a deep red it was startling. There was a spray of light freckles across her nose and the tops of her cheeks. The top of her head would come perhaps to the center of his chest if she could stand before him. He could hear the shouting voices still coming outside, and tried to set her down on the rug before his waning fire, but she clung to him and shook her head. "No -- take me with you. I can help."

He looked down at the top of her head dubiously. Her hair was drifting against his chin, tickling at what little stubble proved he hadn't shaved. "How?"

She turned her face up to him, and he almost jerked away. She did look like a wild thing, all stare and instinct. "I just can. Hurry."

So he took her back outside.

They stood, he with his sword drawn in one hand, she on her good ankle and her bloody feet, his other arm around her waist supporting her upright. She hung on his shoulder like dead weight, still breathing hard into the rough weave of his tunic. This was absurd, he should have left her inside. It was too late now, though; soldiers were pouring toward them out of the darkness, their armor clunking heavily into itself, pointing, calling over their shoulders, raising swords and pila and torches. He fell into a limber position of readiness, turning his blade toward the approaching party across both of their bodies.

One man, ahead of the others by a few paces, slowed, and shouted to him: "That woman! She belongs to the emperor and the Gazel Ministry! Return her or we take her by force!" No surprises there. He held his sword a little higher.

"She belongs to no one," he returned, his voice carrying on the wind. "And you are trespassing. I advise you to leave."

They didn't so much as slow. He prepared to fight, but before he could, the running soldiers struck against a wall of fire.

It towered out of nowhere, seeming to leap out of the dry earth, sudden orange light splashing out wide from its center and bathing the whole scene. The flames reached up for the sky in a laddering frenzy, crawling over each other, wrapping the bodies of the armored men in the space of seconds. The draft as the fire consumed the air around it sucked both their hair toward it. He could feel its heat on his skin, could see it lighting the face of the woman who stood clinging to him, and in the dimness of his shock noticed she was sweating, and her lips peeled back from her teeth, her mouth working slightly. She was doing it. Whatever it was, she was doing it.

The men were screaming now, cooking in their breastplates and helmets and greaves like copper ovens. The air was heavy with the sick-sweet smell of burning meat and hair.

Those who'd been luckier -- or at least slower -- began to fall back, on the other side of the fire, staring. A few turned and ran, but he assumed those were only the real cowards. The rest held their ground, wincing as their comrades screamed, but waiting. Considering.

A few long moments later, well after the screams had wound down and stopped, the fire flickered and died, and her weight shuddered and increased on his shoulder; he turned to look down at her, blinking in the return of darkness, and found her slumped against him, gasping, trembling with exertion. Well, at least he could see why she couldn't simply have handled this herself: she was already exhausted, and this act of creation seemed to drain her. When the remaining soldiers glanced at each other and resumed their charge (uneasily, he thought, and at a much more cautious pace), she raised her head again, though, and lifted her hand with its palm out. The night wind seemed to pick up in front of them, and then to become something huge, monstrous, making him struggle just to keep his feet even on the right side of it. On the wrong side, the soldiers were simply swept up and flung, with limbs flailing, as though an invisible arm had lashed out and knocked them all aside. As he watched, one landed on a clutch of rocks with an awful, back-broken crunch; by the scream that sounded somewhere out in the dark, another had fared almost as badly. Her arm thumped back down like stone, striking on his chest and midsection and startling him again, and only that made him notice that her breath was the hardest yet, hot and sour on the side of his neck, her weight leaden. He looked down and found her unconscious, her cheek slumped onto his shoulder, held up by nothing but his arm and body.

He returned his attention to the soldiers slowly emerging out of the darkness again; there were no more than five or six of these, some of them apparently nursing broken limbs. Now it was his turn, but the remaining sum was paltry. No matter.

The first soldier -- burly, strong, apparently unharmed -- to reach him again ran at him like a lunatic, sword thrown out ahead of him in wobbly arcs as though he meant to cut weeds with it instead of a man. The sword was short and dark, pitted copper, nothing at all like the gleaming curve of steel with which he met it. There was no time to try to set her down, and he might not have anyway, not and have to worry about one of them getting in behind him and spiriting her away. He simply hefted her up in the circle of his arm, lifting her feet from the ground, and spun into combat with her warm weight on his shoulder. At least they wouldn't want to kill her, and would have to take extra care to avoid her body while fighting him. That would give him back some of the advantage he was losing in balance.

He tried not to wound the man mortally, but the clumsiness of the situation, his limping comrades closing in on either side and joining the fight, and the soldier's own overexuberance made such fine control impossible. The tragedy was that it was always easier to kill than to wound. The first assailant fell with his neck cut like a pig's, the second jetting blood from his mouth and from a shoulder where there had once been an arm, the third he didn't even notice how. It was dark, and the fever of combat had descended in spite of everything, in spite of how long it had been forgotten. Now all that was here was darkness.

When he was sure he had cornered the last of them, he breathed deep and forced the fever to lift from him, having to work harder against it than he might have expected -- to not want the satisfaction of blood and meat and bone. He had tried not to think of himself this way. The last soldier fell only to his knees on the dry earth, striking up dust under them, his eyes flickering shut and mouth crying out on its own as the blade flew to his throat. But it didn't cut -- only held there, blade to the skin, the faintest tickling kiss. The smell of urine came to him in a small gust of wind between their bodies, and he bore it with patience. He stood like that, the woman hanging over his shoulder like a sack of harvest grain, most of his hair pulled loose and blowing into his face, until the soldier noticed that he wasn't dying and was surprised into opening his eyes.

"Get off my land," he said, in a voice that rasped with the dust that had been blown into his throat. "Tell whoever sent you how many died tonight. Tell them that it is not worth the cost to come again."

The soldier stared at him. He was perhaps twenty, and had a rash -- grayish-black in the moonlight, probably red under normal circumstances -- up his neck and jaw and one cheek that disfigured what would otherwise have been good looks. His mouth was slack and open, and twitching slightly. It would have to be good enough.

He stood back, letting his sword return to his side, and the soldier did not move. He stayed on his knees, trembling in the dust, perhaps unable to believe that he hadn't died, or wasn't about to do so. On his shoulder the woman's slight weight had become heavy; very heavy. It hadn't been much challenge, but all the same he found that he was tired -- and, to his surprise, angry as well.

"Run!" he shouted at the soldier, with the full roar of his voice behind it. The soldier jerked as though his throat had been cut -- and no doubt pissed himself a little more -- and swiveled around, falling on his face before he could even try to get on his feet. He scrambled, swayed, fell, scrambled again, got up when he was already in motion. And he did run. He ran hard, and he ran until he could no longer be seen.

He stood with his bloody sword and watched the soldier's backtrail, and then he sighed. He hefted the woman higher in his grip, and took her back inside.

The fire had been allowed to gutter, and he thought with no real amusement that he could always wake her and ask her to start it again, if all else failed. Then he pushed with his shoulders through the curtains dividing his sleeping area from the rest of the room, and laid her down on the heap of draperies and pillows that covered the berth that had been too wide by half for years now. Her clothing was a filthy ruin, on closer inspection; it would have to be disposed of, though some could possibly be salvaged for rags. She lay where he left her, lips slightly apart, hand curled up by her cheek, streaked with sweat and dirt and dust. Her eyes were darkly circled underneath, as though underlined for emphasis. He backed up to look at her feet, and found them terribly cut, punctured and slashed in at least a dozen places each, swelled and gruesomely red-purple. Had she come all this way barefoot, over the desert and mountains? Was that possible? In any case, he'd have to treat them right away, or she'd be at risk of infection, maybe even gangrene. Always assuming she wasn't sick with half a dozen somethings already. Her ankle was also puffed and shiny, but that he thought would do well enough on its own.

He left her, cleaned and stowed his weapon, and went to build up the fire. It took him a long time to set it blazing again, and no little work. He had learned all these skills, these skills of living from one day to the next like a human among humans and like a man with no wife, clumsily and slowly, if at all. His sword came to him much more naturally, as did healing. He had a dim, cloudy, half-realized memory, no doubt from very early in his existence, of setting a child's broken arm unthinkingly in a strange town, binding it to a board with reeds, while the little boy screamed and wailed and finally subsided into sniffles; he thought he remembered doing this before he had any clear idea of the meanings of or words for the ideas arm or bone or board or even child. He had only seen what was wrong and known how to fix it, and done so. The rest of what had happened in that town, he could no longer remember.

When the fire was strong and hot again, he lit a torch from it and went out to see to the bodies.

It was unpleasant work, but not long work; he was finished well before the moon had even reached its peak, and went to retrieve the buckets afterward. He cleaned himself and them with the water he still had in his bor, and then went back out to the well. He drew a great deal of fresh water, more than he had first planned to, and the first two loads went directly into a large basin, which he then set on the hearth to warm while he fetched the rest.

She was still unconscious, or even asleep, when he finally finished his tasks, although he had hoped she would wake. It didn't matter. He undressed her like a doll, lifting her upper body from the bed and then her lower to work the remains of what might once have been robes out from under her. He examined the injuries he hadn't seen before with a clinical eye: a healing, splintery pucker under her right arm that could have been made by an arrow glancing off her ribs, still-oozing scrapes on her knees and palms from when she'd fallen scarcely a mile from here, something like scourge-marks lashed over her shoulder from her back, a pink weal of burned skin curling at an angle on the inside of her hip and upper thigh. The skin it faded into on either side was creamy and smooth, and he had to blink away a moment's intrusive awareness of her as a woman rather than as a patient; the small black space between her lips, the curls of coppery hair leading to the tip of the cleft that disappeared between her lax, closed thighs. It unsettled him, to be so taken off guard, and he was careful to touch her body as little as possible as he lifted her again from the bed.

She woke up in the bath, by degrees; the water was very warm by now, but even by the fire the air outside it was not, and made less so by contrast. He dipped a pitcher in the water and poured it out over her hair, bathing her like a child, and she moaned and murmured something too thick and soft to hear. When he touched her shoulder her head jerked up, and she squinted her eyes open, and turned her head fast to look at him. He did not recoil from her this time, keeping his hand where it lay, although she had startled him. For that first second there was no recognition in her gaze, and its wild intensity was arresting. She looked like she might bite. Or more likely something worse, considering what he'd seen tonight.

Then she did seem to know him, and relaxed, easing back into the water. "Are they gone?" she asked with her eyes closed. She sounded tired and wistful, but not very frightened. He pushed hair out of her face, then took up the pitcher again.

"Yes."

She tilted her head back into the water as it poured over her again. Her wet hair was straighter and a darker red, almost bloody. He lathered the cake of soap between his hands and worked his fingers in, from her scalp downward, and she pushed her head against his hands with a soft sigh, like a cat. It made him catch himself, and think a little more clearly. In some ways she seemed very like a child; he had never been a father himself and likely never would be, but he had cared for the Contact as a young boy more than once, and found that he had habits to fall into. But they were the wrong habits. She wasn't a child -- was actually older than he was, and he'd guess her current body would have been able to bear children of its own for at least a decade. He would have to be careful of what was appropriate.

He left her to bathe herself, and went to search in dusty cupboards for something for her to wear. She hauled herself out of the bath before he could offer her help, and now that she was awake, he averted his eyes politely as she knelt on the hearth for the fire to dry her. She seemed to have no modesty of her own, but why would she? It wasn't as if it were her body. He left the shift he'd found for her warming on the stones nearby, still smelling of the dried sage it had been packed with, and he took out the bathwater to pour it out over the dry earth. It was quite brown and lye-smelling, and he couldn't have blamed the earth for wanting it little.

He came back to find her dried and dressed, but still kneeling in front of the fire, untangling her wet hair over her shoulder with her fingers. Her eyes were hazy and distant, and calm.

"Why did you come to me?" he asked. She glanced at him, unsmiling and opaque.

"I knew you'd help," she said. At first he failed to interpret it as an answer to his question, and it took several seconds for his frown to break.

"How?"

She shrugged, and turned her attention back to her hair. It was already curling again, though still dark with water. "You didn't want Cain to keep me, before. You were angry." She plucked at the shoulder of the shift. "Was this your wife's?"

He stared at her. He was angry now, he realized; it had surprised him again, beating up behind his eyes like an approaching drum. "Yes," he said shortly. "So you knew I would help you escape because I had not wanted you to be a captive." She nodded. "What would you have done if I had not?"

Now he thought at last he could identify an expression on her face: mild contempt, as though she found this entire line of questioning ridiculous. "I don't know. Something else. But you did."

Somehow even more nettling. "So you came to use my pity as a shield. You remembered that I did not want you chained, and for this you brought the army of the Empire down on my head when all I wanted was to be left alone." The last words came out spat from his mouth, and he took a deep breath after, grasping for calm.

"Yes," she said, when he was done, as though he had stated the very obvious. "I can leave, if you want."

He looked at her for several minutes longer, and then sighed. "No. Right now you cannot even stand up." He turned away from her again, to look for more necessities in the cluttered cottage instead of at her, sitting by the fire in his wife's chemise. "Will you let me treat your wounds?"

She shrugged again, though he only caught it from the corner of his eye. "You don't have to. It isn't bad, and I heal fast."

"Still. Your feet..."

"All right."

He cleaned the cuts with dried herbs in vinegar, bound them in clean linen, and she clutched the stones of the hearth and winced but did not cry out. They did not speak further. He probed her ankle gently, confirmed his initial diagnosis -- sprained, not broken -- and decided it was too late for cold to do much good; he propped it up on a rough pillow instead. The moon was down by the time he was finished. Before too long dim sunrise light would begin to trickle through the windows, cool and blue-grey.

"Is it because your wife died?" she asked finally, startling him. He looked at her, found her eyes only mild and curious again.

"What?"

"That you wanted to be alone." She tilted her head, more childlike than ever. "That's what you said."

There was really nothing to say that wasn't the truth. "Yes," he said. He kept his eyes on her ankle. It was a very ugly purple, but already looked better than it had been. "Is there much pain?"

"Some. The cuts are worse. Cain has been very angry with you." He started to ask What? again, then held it back at the last moment. He'd heard her perfectly; at this point it would only be for effect. "He thought it was foolish that you married her, and thinks it's more foolish that you give up everything to mourn her. He thinks you've betrayed him."

It was difficult not to be angry, but there was nothing in her tone to suggest that he should be, either. She was just so matter-of-fact, curious, innocent, entirely unaware of her potential for offense. The question of whether she would care if she did know seemed almost a moot one. "He said so?" he asked, in his mildest, most controlled voice. She looked slightly surprised.

"No. That's just what he thinks." Again she did not elaborate further, and again he decided to let it go. He strove to keep his voice patient, to fight the edge that crept in.

"And is that what you think?"

She shrugged. "I don't think anything." But she looked at him, long, considering. "...Why did you have a wife? You must have known she would die."

He took a long moment's pause himself, to ponder the question. It had been a long time since he had spoken to anyone at any length, and he wasn't entirely used to its rhythms again just yet. And these questions were harder than she might know. "I did," he said, at last. "I think I had not fully realized what it meant that I would not."

She frowned. "What do you mean?"

He didn't answer that question, but sat back on his ankles, beside her on the hearth. "I married her because I loved her," he told her, after another pause. "I did not think anything else would matter."

"But it did," she said. Almost a question.

"Yes," he said, and sighed again. "It did."

After a while, she said, "I'm very tired."

He helped her up, then, and to the bed, and she went without complaint. He had not meant to sleep there beside her, as he had last slept beside his wife almost half a century ago, had meant to take a few blankets and bed down on the hearth, but she asked him to stay with her and in the end he did. He doused the lamps and lay on his side facing away from her, aware of her warmth in the dark, too conscious of it when she curled up tight around her knees and pressed against his back. He woke up in the middle of the night on his back, with her clasped to his chest in his encircling arms, shaking and keening in the grip of some invisible nightmare, and he stroked her hair and foggily hushed her until she was calm and slept easily again. And then he was kept awake for some hours afterward, staring up into the empty darkness above her, by the smell of sage and her skin.

---

The next day nothing happened.

When he unwrapped the bandages from her feet to clean the wounds and change their dressings, pink new skin had closed over all of the injuries but the most severe, and even those had scabbed healthily and seemed to be recovering. The ankle was only puffy now, and when he prodded it she winced but shrugged when he asked her about the pain. She was right; she did heal fast. Not too fast, not so much so that it would be noticed by those who weren't paying close attention, but faster than the ordinary human's pace that he seemed to keep.

He brought her the best of his culinary abilities -- a pathetic sort of gruel -- and she ate it without comment, and with little apparent interest. He kept no animals, but he had neighbors with herds only a few days away and could usually find game in the hills, and he could at least dry and salt meat, whatever skills he might be lacking; his little stretch of land could be coerced to produce grain and stubby vegetation in the rainy season, from which he had finished harvesting no more than one full moon before. They were well-stocked with food, and he was grateful. He had been looking forward to a solitary winter before, but now he didn't want to have to leave her. The contradiction troubled him, though not greatly.

She slept most of the day, but when she wasn't asleep, she watched him: cleaning and tending his sword more thoroughly than he had been able to the night before, carrying water, working on projects around the cottage. He allowed it, in spite of his discomfort, if only because her curiosity seemed genuine, and because for the most part she seemed to respect what he'd said he wanted, and did not speak.

"Where is the Contact?" she asked once, when he had only been sitting before the cold fireplace, lost in his own thoughts. It startled him, and he looked at her sharply, although she didn't seem to mind. She was sitting up on the bed, her legs curled around her, the one with the sprained ankle sitting awkwardly on top of its fellow. She still wore his wife's chemise. It was longer on her than it had been on its original owner, he noticed, coming almost to her ankles even when she sat, and fit much more tightly across her bosom and belly and the swell of her hips. Her hair fell loose and uncovered to her waist, in tight kinks. He blinked at her, then frowned.

"I do not know."

She frowned back at him, tilting her head on one side in that same catlike way. "But that's what you do. Isn't it? He's your responsibility."

He tried not to sigh. That was not a word he had been looking to discuss.

"Yes," he said, shortly, instead of saying so, and stood up to attend to another one of the hundred meaningless things he attended to alone. "But at this time, I do not know."

She didn't ask again, but he found himself avoiding her curious watchfulness for some time afterward -- afraid he would convince himself he saw contempt in it; or worse, pity. Convictions that would say more for his own state of mind than for hers, no doubt. But when he finally looked, there was neither. She had gone to sleep again.

When she woke up, she asked to be moved back to the hearth, and he complied, setting her down with great care for her injured lower legs. She started the fire (with his flint and steel, he saw, and was amused after his thoughts of the night before), and he brought her flour and salt and herbs and water from his stores when she asked for them, and as he watched, bemused and a little chagrined, she made a dough that cooked into a flat, crisp bread on one of the hearthstones. Frequently, as she did so, she would pause, and sometimes even close her eyes, as though she were thinking very hard. Or trying to remember something, nearly forgotten. The evening meal was much improved by her contribution, and he vowed to himself that he would ask her to teach him, with no real conviction. It also did not occur to him that such a vow would mean that he expected her presence to continue.

They slept side-by-side in the bed again that night. When he lay down, curling around her turned back, she shifted, but said nothing. Then she asked: "How long ago did your wife die?"

He shut his eyes, and breathed in the smell of the dying fire. "Almost fifty years," he said. He felt her move again, but did not open his eyes to see if she had turned to look at him.

"And you're still here." It wasn't a question, she could see it plainly for herself, but he nodded anyway. "You aren't looking for the Contact, or cooperating with Cain, or concerned about making him angry with you. You're just -- staying here."

"Yes."

She stirred again. "Why?"

He waited for the annoyance, even anger, but it did not come this time. "I am still grieving," he said, quietly, unable to remember if he were repeating himself or not. She shook her head, whether in disagreement or frustration he couldn't tell.

"But don't you feel..." She paused. "Trapped? Or bored?"

"I feel almost nothing," he said, and until recently, it had been the truth. He thought about the rest of her question, though, and at some length.

"I was... not prepared," he said at last. "It was strange to be two, and now it is stranger to be one again. The loss is very large, and terrible." He let silence fall again, considering. The wind moaned around the little house in a soft, dying voice. "Like a hole, that goes through everything and shows there is nothing at the center. It has undone me. I do not know how to be well again.

"But I think I stay because I am afraid, someday, I will."

The sound of her uneven breathing came to him only faintly, and he opened his eyes. But there was nothing to see. It was dark, and her back was still to him. But her hand was a small white fist on her hip.

"I understand," she said, in a small airless whisper. He didn't know why she would, but he didn't question her, either.

---

On the third day, Cain came.

The emperor found him at the well again; water was scarce between rainy seasons, and he would fill his reserves as much as possible while it was high. He lifted his head to pull sweat-threaded hair from his face, and found the man's large figure approaching from the south, shimmering only a little where the morning sun hit the haze of dust above the ground. It wasn't so bad right now, but in a few months it would be impossible to go outside without his head wrapped and eyes slitted, the ground itself rising to fling its dry outrage at anyone foolish enough to try to cross it. And it would be cold. There was no sign of the emperor's usual traveling retinue, nor of the means of his arrival. He supposed Cain had his ways, all the same -- or else, possibly he had even walked the whole way, like the woman had. It was far, but not so far, from the citadel to here, especially if one wasn't barefoot and pursued.

He felt his anger rising, wondered at it, and then suppressed it. Presumably coming alone was meant to be a sign of peace.

He waited, standing with the empty buckets balanced on the well's marker of loose stones, until Cain had come all the way to stand on the other side from him, looking at him across the dark hole in the earth. He wore both his helmet and the full weighty mass of his robes, thick dark purple stitched with filigrees of gold, no less majestic here on the dusty plains of unnamed land for being entirely out of place. These were less promising signs, but not necessarily threats, and he held his ground.

At last, Cain sighed. "Where is she?" he said.

He said nothing. After another pause, Cain turned to look -- presumably; the false face of his helmet gave little away -- in the direction of the cottage. The emperor had been inside it, but only once; he had honored the demand, made on that occasion, that he never return. "Naturally," Cain said, as if he had been answered. "Is she well?"

There was no point in staying silent, he supposed. "Well enough," he said, and set one of the buckets aside and tethered the other to the line, lowering it down into the well. Cain watched with no apparent interest, but how would he know for certain?

"You must stop this," Cain said after a long moment, in a tone he supposed the emperor thought was kind. "It's absurd. My ministers are furious; they're demanding either her return, or your head."

"They are welcome to try to take either." There was a soft wet sound, like a sound made inside a mouth, as the bucket hit the water. Cain sighed again.

"She's dangerous. I told you that before."

"I will risk it."

"To herself as well." He kept his head mulishly down, hauling up the bucket in swift arm-over-arm strokes. It came up wet and cool, smelling of minerals and the dark. "You must understand. I want to keep her safe."

"You want to keep her prisoner," he said, blandly, into the other bucket as he dropped it. The emperor made a slight sound that could have been a snort, a smothered cough, or yet another of those infuriating sighs; he couldn't find it in him to care which.

"Why are you bothering?" Cain said at last. "How does this serve you?" And that, at least, made him look up, nettled, into the helmet's impassive gaze.

"It does not. She asked for my help, and I gave it." He straightened, pulling up the bucket with strokes that had to struggle not to be fierce. "Why are you here? I never wanted her to be kept. You never wanted to keep her. Now she is gone. Can you not be satisfied?"

It was Cain's turn not to answer for some time, and he was still as the wind spun around him. When he did, he said with perfect equanimity, "When you forbade me from your home before, I believe what you told me was that you would not allow my corruption to taint the new life you had found, the one you had spent here and shared with your wife. Please tell me: is her taint really such an improvement?"

He stared for a few seconds, then began shouldering his burden, reattaching the buckets to the yoke and settling it over himself. "Excuse me. I will not stand here and allow you to embarrass yourself."

And Cain jerked just as he'd meant him to, his hands twitching into fists inside his draping sleeves. But there was no satisfaction in it.

"It doesn't matter what you decide," Cain called across the well when he'd taken a few steps away. The resonance of his voice turned hollow in this wide space. "By now I'm sure she knows a prison when she sees one."

He stopped, but refused to be goaded into speaking; and eventually he hoisted the buckets and kept walking. Cain might have stayed and watched him until he was gone, he supposed, but he never turned to look.

---

"Cain was here," she said -- didn't ask -- when he returned to the cottage, and he held in his own sigh. So much for the hope that he might be able to protect her. She was sitting in front of the hearth, making bread again; she'd started hobbling around on her own a little since that morning. She wore a shift and robe of his wife's today, although she still didn't seem to have seen fit to bind or veil her hair. "Was he angry?"

He shrugged, unshouldering his burden and pushing hair back behind his shoulder. "I suppose. It is hard to know what he is."

She made a small sound, turning her eyes back down to the dough between her hands. "At you, or at me?"

"I think both."

She nodded, as though she'd been expecting that. "I should go soon. He's not sure now because it's you, but he'll do what they want in the end. He always does when it's about me."

"The Gazel?" She gave him a look that very eloquently called him an idiot for even having to ask, and he almost laughed. Then couldn't quite, remembering what Cain had said. "You cannot go. You cannot walk."

"I can a little," she said, and this time with a touch of an edge. It took him by surprise; he hadn't heard her speak with such emotion before. "Soon I'll be able to more." She shook hair out of her own face, her hands buried in dough, and looked a little cross when it tumbled right back in. "I think he's afraid."

He tilted his head to the side. "Of what?"

"I don't know." She armed the strands of hair aside instead, leaving a little bit of flour across her cheek. He couldn't suppress a smile, thinking back, of flour and harvest, of wide eyes and kissing under the day-bright full moon... The smile melted away eventually, but slower than he would have liked it to. "It's getting harder for me to know his mind."

"His mind?" He came toward her, the water forgotten now. "Why do you say that? That you know his mind and know things because he does? How would you know that?"

"I know everything," she said. As though telling him her hair was red. She folded the dough in on itself, pressed it flat with her hands, began to press it out on the stone to be cooked. He frowned at her, waiting for more, but she seemed to have no more to say.

"What do you mean?"

She was silent for a time, a time so long he thought she wasn't going to answer. Finally she said, shortly, "I know everything. God tells me."

"God?" he repeated. Feeling his way in the dark. "God... speaks to you?"

"Yes. All the time." Even shorter now -- much, much shorter. "I don't want to talk about this."

"You mean God -- "

"I don't want to talk about this." Not just the same words, but the same tone, the same inflection. It actually made him dizzy for a moment, as though it were him and not her, as though he had slipped backward and come to the same moment a second time. She stared into the fire, her eyes fixed straight ahead. Its light made dancing ghosts inside them, and for the first time in a long time he thought of her as he had first seen her, chained to Cain's throne.

"...All right," he said at last. "May I ask you something else?"

She looked at him then, her eyes wide again -- those half-wild eyes. "What?"

"What should I call you?"

She frowned, and tilted her head. "What do you mean?"

"What is your name?"

"I don't have one." She dismissed the question with her answer, actually waving it away with one hand. The gesture was oddly charming. "I told you that before."

That made him cock his head again, forcing him to pause. "You remember that?"

"Of course."

Of course. "I must call you something."

"Why?" He didn't answer, only looked at her, and eventually she shrugged. "Cain calls me miang. It isn't really a name."

No, at best a title: the compound word that meant fleshly mother, or carnal mother, in the language this present one had evolved from. "It will do."

She glanced at him again, as she dusted the flour off her hands. "What about you? I know what you are, but I don't know what your name is, either."

The question startled him for no real reason -- took him so aback, in fact, that he was left gaping at her as he had done at Cain, before he could compose himself. At last he surprised himself doubly with a sound not unlike laughter. "I have no name either," he admitted. "If I have I do not know it. Before, when the people of this place found me, they called me Israfil. It is a common name among them."

And she nodded, as though this, too, had been expected. "I think it's better not to have names," she said. "We're not like them. We know what we're for." He had nothing really to say to that, and after several long moments she added, "I'll go soon. I would have had to even if Cain hadn't come."

Don't, he almost said, and then didn't.

"This -- is not a prison," he said instead, hating the large clumsiness of the words in his mouth. "You may go or not, whenever you wish."

"You were angry when I came." She was cocking her head again, again childlike and curious, not quite innocent. "I thought you wanted me to go."

He said nothing, and when she turned her attention back to the cooking bread, he went out with the buckets to fill his bor.

---

"I don't mind," she said in the dark. "I really don't. It's all right."

"If you want," she said, in the dark. "If you want."

---

She seemed to grow easier in his presence as the days passed, or at least less curious; she no longer watched him as he filled his time, instead finding ways to fill her own and assist him. Instead, when she didn't seem to be looking, he began to watch her. He began to wonder why he had not noticed her sadness, or the searching way she looked out at the horizon when he opened the cottage's door. Her restlessness haunted him, made it even harder for him to sleep beside her.

She prepared meals, cleaned, sewed, did the things that a woman was taught to do, and as though she were reading the instructions from a book that only she could see. She healed fast. He tended her, and listened for armies in the hills, and woke up one morning, and then another, and then another, with his eyes still closed, wondering if this time there would be no one in the bed -- or a corpse.

But for now, each time he opened his eyes to her sleeping back. And he supposed for now would also do.

---

"What will you do after you leave?" he asked her, while she worked. He hadn't really intended for her to take on so much of the work involved in the upkeep of the house, but she didn't seem to pay him any attention when he tried to tell her so. If she could keep from being idle, she seemed to need to do so. She shrugged, not looking at him.

"Move on. Find a place. Do God's will in the world."

"Which you will know because... he tells you?" He was still testing this ground, finding out how far out he could go into its particular mystery without punching through the crust under his feet.

"Yes." Still short, but he thought not as short as at first. "I have a lot of work to do."

He hesitated, unsure if that had been a conclusion to her discussion of the future or a rebuke based in the present, but no answer seemed forthcoming. Finally he risked asking, "If your work is so important, why do the Gazel want to keep you?"

"They're selfish," she said, and the bluntness of the way she said it made him smile. "They want power and they think they know best. They think I'll bring them what they want."

"Will you?"

"Not on purpose." That actually made him laugh, and she looked up at him, nonplussed and perhaps a little pleased. "I'm for more than just them."

He wanted to ask more -- and probably he could have, she seemed to be in a congenial mood for it, as much as she could really be said to have moods -- but he found himself stopping himself, telling himself it would keep until later. Perhaps wanting to ask, but not quite wanting to know the answers. "Must you go?" he asked instead, and he was perhaps the one most surprised by the question. It seemed to have come from his mouth independently, on legs of its own.

She was looking at him, anyway, her head tilted. "You said I could."

"I did not say you must."

No change in her expression; no movement. "I thought you wanted me to."

"I did not say that either."

"You wanted to be alone."

"I did."

"Do you not want to anymore?"

"I do not know."

"Do you wish I would stay?"

"I do not know!" Cracking the room into silence; he was so sick of it all at once, sick of her questions and her dreamtalk answers, sick of chasing her in circles and at the end finding what he'd taken for her had been his shadow. His voice in the sudden quiet was something almost a demand. "Must you go?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because I have to."

"That is not an answer."

"Yes it is. It's just not the one you want."

"Why?" He paused, letting himself catch up with himself, letting himself finally really look at her. At the calm way she was sitting on her knees, her sunset hair spilled over the shoulders of his wife's dress, looking up at him from the cottage floor. "Do you not know?" he asked, at last, and he asked it with a heavy, terrible sort of gentleness. The voice of miserable understanding.

She smiled at him. It was a fox's smile; animal and meaningless. A movement of the mouth.

"Do you understand?" she asked.

"No," he said, after another moment's pause; "no, nothing." Another moment, and then he added, "I apologize. I did not mean to lose my temper."

She shrugged. "I don't think you did, really." That won another half-smile out of him, this one rueful. She seemed to consider to herself, to chase down a difficult train of thought. "...I am grateful to you, that you've let me stay here, you know. I am very grateful."

Many thanks for your hearth and home, he thought. A most gracious host. All blessings on your house. Good night. Good night. Good night.

"You will forget me as soon as you have left," he said, a moment later. Another small smile curling his lips, not quite amused. "You came across me in your road and used me for a tool, and for a weapon. And I should not have expected more. I knew where you have been, and who claims you as property."

She looked at him for some time, thoughtfully. "I will not forget you," she said without looking away, measuring the words. "I never forget anything."

He looked back at her, but could see nothing in her eyes. What sadness had he thought he'd seen in her? What anything? Had he really been so ridiculous, so arrogant, as to believe that the glass he had seen through darkly had begun to clear? At the end she was as inscrutable as the face of Cain's helmet, as tumbled rock. As much a mystery as that of death, and even that she had surmounted.

"How terrible," he said, at last. It was all he could think of to say.

Unsmiling, solemn, she said, "Yes."

---

"If you want," she said, and he did, that was the hell of it, he did.

It was hard to know what she was thinking, if she was thinking at all. Her arms around his neck and legs around his bound him into a loose, warm web, but that could have been no more than reflexes, or the sake of appearances, or both. Her breathing in his ear was quick and regular, and sometimes she made sounds. He closed his eyes, no change in the darkness, and thought of Cain standing across the well from him, the long wrapped tail of his hair below his helmet whipping in the wind, Cain saying She's dangerous, and the way her hair had looked wet in the firelight, like it was full of blood. He thought of the grave he had made his wife and how her clothing, at the changing of the season when it had been put away for a time, had smelled like it did now, on this stranger in his bed, like sage and like time passed. He thought nothing. He thrust his fingers under the curls of her hair on the woven pillows and thrust his shaft in her wet heat and against all his better judgement at last he wanted her, wanted her, and like her sister was said to have done she had removed herself, and left him with only the shadow of her with which to try to be satisfied.

And her breathing sped up with his, and her fingers pressed divets in his back like shallow graves for seeds, and she dropped a murmured Yes -- yes, that's good in the cup of his ear when it was meet to give him something, but she bit into his shoulder when she climaxed almost hard enough to draw blood, and he followed her knowing that nothing was all right, and nothing was good enough, and nothing was forgiven. Not for him, at least.

He lay later with his fingers knotted into hers, but neither did that fool him. He waited for the sun to rise and, when he did sleep, dreamed restlessly of being born.

---

She didn't say she was going to leave before she did, but he knew it was coming anyway. Her feet and ankle had healed, and the winds and dust had begun to pick up in earnest; he knew she could hear them as well as he could, if not better for unfamiliarity. They would trap her if she stayed much longer, and she carried travel on her like a scent. He did not try to argue again, but only waited, and then he lay awake with his eyes closed and his muscles carefully lax on the morning when she slipped silently out of the bed, dressing and vanishing into the waking dark. He didn't know if she knew he was awake or not, and supposed it didn't matter either way. There was no point in trying to prevent her going. Only an argument with the emperor to be lost, and he didn't give those away lightly.

She would be all right. Of course he knew that. She'd probably be better off than he would have been in the same circumstances. And at least this time she had shoes.

He lay still as dawn began to stain a pale rose through the lids of his eyes. If he wanted, he supposed, he could get up, look through the crack of the door and most likely still see her in the first light, out on the plains, walking away from him. If he wanted. He didn't. The sight would not tell him anything he didn't already know, and he felt with some certainty that he would have the opportunity to see it again.

An image came to his mind, startling in its clarity and suddenness: her meeting Cain by accident out on the plains, he coming and she going. The two of them standing across from each other as he and Cain had done, taken aback by each other, unsure of their instinctual responses. The wind a chaperone.

Prophet, Cain said, in this vision, and she smiled invisibly behind the veil she had pulled across her mouth and nose, to protect from the dust.

Yes, she said. But not yours.

Whose, then?

And her smile, as she walked ahead and past him.

He dozed, but did not sleep again. Finally he rose, and set about the morning's tasks, listening to the wind rising outside. In a matter of weeks, perhaps days, it would be impassable; the few families who lived for miles around would be bound in their homes, trapped by the dust, making do with what they had for the long winter. He tried making the bread the way she always had for his morning meal, but he couldn't do it; the flour clumped up, the dough fell apart in his hands. He supposed he would never learn the trick of it.

When he was done, when the cottage was clean and everything he could think of had been attended to, he packed a few satchels, filled skins with water. He glanced around, one more time, at the cottage where he had lived so long with his wife, so short with the fox he had almost taken for a woman. He had expected to grieve, but in the bright light of morning he could hardly remember why.

He left in the early afternoon, with the sun hard on his back.

He turned north, toward a seaside village where he knew the Contact to be living. He would be a boy now, no more then fifteen or fourteen years old, perhaps happy but more likely lonely and often afraid. A kind doctor would appear from the desert and befriend the child, teach him old stories and how to know herbs by sight and smell, and watch him. No one would think much of it; they never did. Travel had grown easier, and there were many wanderers, much space in between places to wander to and from. And he had a way of passing unremarked.

He had no way of knowing if it was the same direction she had taken, and the longer he walked, the more convinced he became that he didn't care.

---

The next time he saw her was nearly two centuries later, in the king's court of a city-state far to the west. He spotted her from afar amid some dozen like women, recumbent on the dais, in heavy necklaces and a dress that started just below her breasts, and the veil of a concubine. Her new body's hair and skin were dark, but he thought something about the eyes was the same.

It didn't exactly take him by surprise when the summons came to him after the court session, delivered by an enormous and fortunately patient eunuch, but he couldn't say he'd been expecting it, either. He followed the guard to a side chamber, and they both waited until she appeared from behind a curtain. From closer up she was still quite beautiful, and he could see the patterns of henna on her skin, under the sheen of perfumed oils. The eunuch stepped back respectfully to the arched stone entryway, but did not leave.

"We mustn't touch, or speak privately," she said, and he blinked; she'd used the first language, the oldest one they both knew, not the present one of this land. It took him long grasping moments to remember the workings of its grammar, to his chagrin. "I'm property of the king. You'd lose a hand, and I my head, and while these would constitute no more than temporary inconveniences for either of us, they're still inconveniences best avoided." She paused, seemed to find her place. "What are you doing here?"

"The Contact is here," he said, before he could think about it too much and allow his tongue to trip him up. She had left him dizzy, in more ways than one, or even than three. "Not in the city. In a family of serfs in the farms outside. How are you?"

That seemed to throw her off balance. "...What do you mean?"

"What I said."

"Well," she said, with her brows creased, and then seemed to shake it off. "I'm well."

"Good." He thought of reaching for her anyway -- as far as he could tell the eunuch was deeply unconcerned with either of them -- and then didn't. "What are you doing here?"

"Working," she said, vaguely, and then shook her head. "If you're going out to the farmland, you should be careful. Tribute is high, and I understand anyone coming from this direction is either to be feared or assassinated."

"Thank you. I will be cautious." He hesitated again, and then finally said, "It is good to see you."

She smiled, and only then could he see the vestiges of her as she had been, as he had known her before; although it had learned manners and grace, there was still a hint of the fox in her smile. "Is it?"

He couldn't imagine what his expression must have looked like, but it seemed to soften her. "It's good to see you too," she said, without waiting for him to answer. "I'd heard you were working again; I'm glad to see it's true."

He inclined his head, as politely as he could manage under the circumstances. "We all do what we must."

"Yes." She glanced over her shoulder, and then turned back to him; her veil rippled, making an enigma of half her face. "I should go. I'll be missed."

"I should also."

They stood looking at each other for an awkward pause, and then he turned, starting away from her. He had taken no more than a few steps before her voice called, "Israfil."

The name was so old now he almost didn't recognize it, but he did in time to turn back, looking at her questioningly. Her hands were folded in front of her skirts, and in spite of her harlot's finery she looked very grave. "I didn't forget," she said, sounding almost apologetic.

He wasn't sure exactly how to answer that, or if she wanted an answer at all. Instead, he thought for a moment himself, and at last decided to try one more time to cross the ground that had been forbidden him: "Does God still speak to you? Do you still know his mind?"

She stared at him. Just when he was becoming unsettled, convinced that she didn't actually know what he was talking about, all at once her expression seemed to break open; and she offered him, one more time, her animal's smile.

"If you don't want to hear the answer," she said, "then don't ask the question."

Then she was turning to go, her anklets jingling, her steps soft in her again bare and hennaed feet. "Find me again sometime," she said, without bothering to turn enough to say it over her shoulder. "We'll talk."

And she left, and then he left, nodding to the eunuch before he returned to his business, passing out of the stone walls and then out the gates of the city into sprawling farmland latticed with canals and bordering crops; the sun and wind renewed him, lifted his spirits, and he hitched his pack up on his shoulder, determined on a whim to ignore her good advice. It was too fine a day for caution.

He set off for the outermost shares, for ramshackle hovels and the Contact's land. He followed the road, taking it at an even pace, gazing up when he could at the clear blameless sky. He went toward his duty, and toward the world of men, and toward a future where he would see her again, in fair circumstances and in foul, in the laps of kings and in the gutters of rotting cities; where they would fight and fuck and laugh and hurt each other in ways they could now scarcely imagine, and where no matter where they met, she would always speak the language much better than he.

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