reminded of Mother Vedia’s approach on her feast day. There, in fact, she was, again seated like a living statue on an upraised litter, again surrounded by her dancing, snake-wreathed attendants, but this time without bats or followers.
Before her went a gross figure looking like a younger version of the Earth Wife but also hugely pregnant, attended by a host of waddling women in a similar state.
After them, unaccompanied, came a skinny crone carrying a box. While people cheered the other two, they turned away from this last figure, shielding their children’s eyes.
“The Great Mother in her aspects of healer, life-bearer, and hungry tomb,” said Kroaky, raising his voice over the renewed clamor of the crowd as the next god emerged from the shadows.
“What’s in the box?”
“Death, of course.”
Jame regarded the diverse figures and remembered her conversation with Gran Cyd, queen of the Merikit. Showing her a fertility figure and an imu , both representing the Earth Wife, she had said, “These images were ancient long before Mother Ragga was even born,” which made sense since the Four had only come into being with the activation of the Kencyr temples, some three thousand years ago.
Jame had wondered at the time if the Earth Wife and the other three of Rathillien’s elemental Four, while each a distinct individual, wore different, older aspects in different cultures and were subject to older stories. Here, perhaps, was the answer.
It raised a further question, however: how had the deification of the Four affected the Old Pantheon, which preceded them?
There was the Earth Wife, at any rate, in three of her earlier native aspects.
Next came a cauldron seething with river fish. Fingerling trout crept over the edge of the pot and pulled up a figure glittering with scales. Cold round eyes regarded the crowd through a net of green hair and pouting lips parted over needle teeth in a smile meant to entice.
The Eaten One, thought Jame, or some variation of her, probably linked to the Amar. Did she also take a human lover? Where was Drie now, still blissfully in his beloved’s arms or deep within her digestive tract?
The goddess of love and lost causes walked behind her, backward, gazing into a mirror whose surface rippled like water. Around her feet, threatening to trip her, swarmed a host of green and yellow frogs.
“Geep!” they chorused. “Geep, geep , GEEP!”
Rain pattered in their wake.
Gorgo, thought Jame, happy to see an almost familiar face, or faces. She wondered how he and his priest Loogan were doing in Tai-tastigon. Sooner or later, she would have to find out.
The last frog hopped frantically past, followed by a long, low, dark shape with a scaly tail on one end and a cruelly toothed snout on the other, waddling on the plump, pale limbs of a human baby.
More followed. Those clearly aligned with the Four seemed to fare the best. Others passed as phantoms of their former selves, and received little recognition from the crowd. Who now worshipped that dog-faced being or that drifting tatter of silk, that murky orange glow or that thing of clattering bones?
A dazzling light entered the cavern.
“Ooh!” breathed the crowd, and covered their eyes.
Jame peered through her fingers at the sun in all his glory. She could almost make out a figure at the heart of the blaze, a man in red pants stumbling forward supporting a giant, swollen phallus with both hands. It was this member from which the light emanated.
The moon circled him, her face alternately that of the maiden, the matron, and the hag, just like the pommel of the Ivory Knife. She looked up with shifting features and saluted Jame.
“Sister, join us!”
Was this also a mortal who had undergone at least a temporary apotheosis—like the guild lords above? Like Dalis-sar in Tai-tastigon? Like she herself, eventually, if she became That-Which-Destroys?
Heat washed through the cavern, worse than when the sun had come among them, but
Before her went a gross figure looking like a younger version of the Earth Wife but also hugely pregnant, attended by a host of waddling women in a similar state.
After them, unaccompanied, came a skinny crone carrying a box. While people cheered the other two, they turned away from this last figure, shielding their children’s eyes.
“The Great Mother in her aspects of healer, life-bearer, and hungry tomb,” said Kroaky, raising his voice over the renewed clamor of the crowd as the next god emerged from the shadows.
“What’s in the box?”
“Death, of course.”
Jame regarded the diverse figures and remembered her conversation with Gran Cyd, queen of the Merikit. Showing her a fertility figure and an imu , both representing the Earth Wife, she had said, “These images were ancient long before Mother Ragga was even born,” which made sense since the Four had only come into being with the activation of the Kencyr temples, some three thousand years ago.
Jame had wondered at the time if the Earth Wife and the other three of Rathillien’s elemental Four, while each a distinct individual, wore different, older aspects in different cultures and were subject to older stories. Here, perhaps, was the answer.
It raised a further question, however: how had the deification of the Four affected the Old Pantheon, which preceded them?
There was the Earth Wife, at any rate, in three of her earlier native aspects.
Next came a cauldron seething with river fish. Fingerling trout crept over the edge of the pot and pulled up a figure glittering with scales. Cold round eyes regarded the crowd through a net of green hair and pouting lips parted over needle teeth in a smile meant to entice.
The Eaten One, thought Jame, or some variation of her, probably linked to the Amar. Did she also take a human lover? Where was Drie now, still blissfully in his beloved’s arms or deep within her digestive tract?
The goddess of love and lost causes walked behind her, backward, gazing into a mirror whose surface rippled like water. Around her feet, threatening to trip her, swarmed a host of green and yellow frogs.
“Geep!” they chorused. “Geep, geep , GEEP!”
Rain pattered in their wake.
Gorgo, thought Jame, happy to see an almost familiar face, or faces. She wondered how he and his priest Loogan were doing in Tai-tastigon. Sooner or later, she would have to find out.
The last frog hopped frantically past, followed by a long, low, dark shape with a scaly tail on one end and a cruelly toothed snout on the other, waddling on the plump, pale limbs of a human baby.
More followed. Those clearly aligned with the Four seemed to fare the best. Others passed as phantoms of their former selves, and received little recognition from the crowd. Who now worshipped that dog-faced being or that drifting tatter of silk, that murky orange glow or that thing of clattering bones?
A dazzling light entered the cavern.
“Ooh!” breathed the crowd, and covered their eyes.
Jame peered through her fingers at the sun in all his glory. She could almost make out a figure at the heart of the blaze, a man in red pants stumbling forward supporting a giant, swollen phallus with both hands. It was this member from which the light emanated.
The moon circled him, her face alternately that of the maiden, the matron, and the hag, just like the pommel of the Ivory Knife. She looked up with shifting features and saluted Jame.
“Sister, join us!”
Was this also a mortal who had undergone at least a temporary apotheosis—like the guild lords above? Like Dalis-sar in Tai-tastigon? Like she herself, eventually, if she became That-Which-Destroys?
Heat washed through the cavern, worse than when the sun had come among them, but
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