No Post Today!

Dear Readers,

I'm not going to have time to write a post today, since I will be off to a convention this weekend.

I'll return to my regular schedule next week!

Have a good one.  Hugs all around to those who want one!

Chapter 22: A Sphinx's Spectacles

           Asteri crossed his hooves and looked down at the map.  “Aren’t you tired yet?”

            Naida didn’t look up from where she was carefully tracing crinkly bits of shoreline, lying on her stomach on the enormous parchment that the chimera had pulled out of a storage cubby.  “No.  I’m just about finished…”

            “It’s been a whole day!”

            “I have a lot of catching up to do!” Naida set the pen carefully in its holder and rolled over on the inland sea that she’d already drawn. She laid her head on her arm and was asleep in a moment.

            Asteri watched over her as she slept, lying in the golden light of the library.  Then sat up and hunched his shoulders, breathing and straining as if he could make himself grow faster just by willing it. For an instant there was a flickering image of wings over his back but they were no more than shadows of shadows, a ghost of true wings.

            He didn’t even notice when Temis spiraled slowly down from her door, soaring without flapping so she didn’t disturb the papyri, the papers and pens.  “She’s finally asleep?”

            Asteri startled and nearly rolled off the edge they were on.  He drew a huge breath and then clamped his lips together, let it all out in a long, quiet hiss. “Don’t scare me like that!”

            “Sorry,” Temis said but didn’t sound terribly sorry.  “Syb is still sleeping off her great work and I had no idea this Kitten would be so book hungry.”

            “Hmph.  More drawing hungry.  She’s worn down three blue pencils just edging the ocean she’s drawn.”

            “Have you gotten to her country yet?”

            Asteri rose and trotted over to the south coast.  “You see.  She did the coast and the mouth of the Nile, but then broke off and came back up here to detail this island.”

            “She’s afraid of it.  Of learning about her people.”

            “I don’t understand why.”  Asteri sat down by the stairs with a huff. Temis reached out and gathered Naida up in her forepaws cuddling her against her breast.  “I’ll nap with her in my nest for a bit and we’ll be down again in a bit.”

**

            Next day Naida came hopping down the stairs, refreshed and ready to start where she’d left off and Temis glided down to settle neatly on her haunches, folded her wings with a flip and wrapped her tail around her paws.  She settled her long hair with a shake.

            “Asteri! Asteri did you SEE the cold storage cave? There’s whole AUROXEN hanging in there!  I didn’t know there were that many on an island. I thought there would only be sheep and there’s cheese!  And air-dried hams twice the size of what I had!  There’s jars and jars and jars of things from Silk Road!  All the way EAST!  The hams… there’s dried racks of ribs I couldn’t eat one by myself if I gnawed on it all week! ‘n fish bigger ‘n me! ‘n-“

            “Yes, yes,” Asteri bounced up the spiral stairs from below, a bag full of scrolls hooked over one horn.  “Temis, I need the Kitten… Your spectacles are hanging in a niche I cannot get into.” He waved his head, curling horns spreading wide now, the scroll bag swinging wildly.

            “Hey!” Naida ducked under the swinging bag.  “Temis?  What’s he talking about?”

            The sphinx ducked her head, looking sheepish.  “I… well in the last little while… I’ve found it hard to read.”

            “She means the past two hundred years…”

            “Oh!” Temis put her muzzle in the air.  “Bring up someone’s age!”

            “I’m older than you!”

            “Only in your adult form!” she teased.  “You have to grow up again!”

            “Oh, just rub my muzzle in that,” he snorted.  “Naida come on, it’s only down eight floors.”

            “Only eight floors,” she said.  “I’m coming.”

            On that floor there were grand wooden shelves with gigantic codexes bound in leather, chained to the shelves.  In the distance there was an echoing animal call and Naida stopped.  “Don’t worry,” Asteri said.  “That’s just another librarian.”

            “Good?” Naida shivered.  “Asteri can we just get back to Temis please?”

            “Oh, yeah.  Over here.”

            The shelves were too narrow for Asteri to fit between now, and Naida wondered how Temis had gotten there in the first place, or whether she’d dropped her reading glasses while she was flying.

            The spectacles hung in one of the chains, and Naida reached up and unhooked them gently.  The books stirred in their shelves and she looked up, startled, but they were all still.  “I’ve got them!”

            “Great!  Hey, Naida I can still fit up the stairs… ride me up!”

            She clambered onto Asteri’s back, wondering why she needed to ride when it was only eight floors, but he leapt onto the spiral and Naida gulped and caught her breath.  “The library is always growing,” Asteri said as he jumped up a dozen floors.  And then another dozen.

            “But… how can I find anything?”

            “It doesn’t shift if you’re on a floor, but it does when you’re not looking.”

            “I’d better stay with you or Temis then…” She said, uncertainly, breathless, clinging to Asteri’s ruff as he bounded up trying to catch up to the floor they’d left Temis on.

            “Yes.  Here we are.”

            “Oh, I didn’t bend them did I?”  Naida slipped gratefully off Asteri’s back.  “They’re beautiful!”  She looked at the metal rimmed glass lenses.  They were ground out of some kind of rosy crystal and when she reached up to help Temis slide the loop over her head, found herself gazing into magnified pink tinted lion’s eyes.  “Does your hair go over or…”

            Temis grinned.  “Over, please.”

            Naida gently pulled the long blond hair/mane over the loop, settling the glasses firmly on Temis’s head. She put up a talon and adjusted them slightly before looking over the tops at Naida.  “Before you ask.  One of the Smith’s apprentices made them for me, before they fell in love with His Wife… as they all do.”

            “Um…”

            “I have a stack of codexes here for you.  We are going to start with the rise of humans and how they came to Kush for the first time forty thousand years ago.”

            “Um…”

            “Start with that polished horn there with those marks burned into it.  That’s the oldest human record I have.”

Chapter 21: From Chomolungma to Mahalangur Himel

            The baby roc hurtled out of the exploding island into the night sky, screaming its pain and rage at having lost its prey and been defeated and imprisoned.  It tumbled in the soothing radiation in the upper atmosphere and grew, and grew.  It devoured ash and drank in the spilled blood of those dead in the disaster.

            But the thing it ate most was shame. A roc losing its prey? A roc forced to drop an infant? The human wizard had paid in dream pain for setting it on such a tiny morsel but the Chimera chasing it had not let it settle to devour the child, nor even lick the blood of the father off its claws.  The Chimera had grown and grown and fallen on it in a thunderbolt, ripping itself into three, one to catch the child and two to fight and drive the bleeding core of itself into the depths of the earth, into the life-giving lava, but sealed the door and left it locked away for more than a decade.

            An eye-blink of time but cut off from the radiation from the sky, from the asteroid belt and the crackle and spark of the moon generating lightning in a thousand ways the roc… no name now.  Un-Named I shall be!  It cried.  I am Un-Named!

            It could not see or smell the prey it had lost, but there were traces of heart-creatures all around the eruption bearing her smell.

            It nursed its rage and its thought on the wind from the sun, and considered. As it floated above turning earth it caught a streak of light hurtling across the plateau and down Chomolungma leaving a trail of power and sparks of stars in its wake.

            Its wings began to unfurl in the warm sun and it turned its fiery eye on the snow below. The creature hurtling toward the Silk Road moved so quickly that rock and melting snow and slush tumbled down the sides of the sacred mountain. It yipped and chirruped as it ran, as though laughing, lightning following in its footsteps.

            The roc folded its wings and opened its beak, feathers burning as it fell through the air.  Its target, a red speck on a snow field looked up, jumped all the way to Chukung but couldn’t avoid the deadly strike completely.  It was knocked, tumbling, leagues away crashing into snow pack in Mahalangur Himel mountain and all the snow and rock crumbled in around it falling all the way from the peak, burying it in tons of ice.

            Self-satisfied, the roc flapped its wings once, twice, and soared back toward the heat rising from the golden deserts.  The prey, if it lived, wouldn’t get its heart creature. If it lived, it would be dreadfully damaged. 

 

It was strong enough to rise past the earth’s moon now, to rise up and swim in the oceans of one of the other belted worlds… the thick seas of the Elemental moon. The roc shrieked its defiance to the wizard who would have it hunt specks of meat on a thin aired planet. No more petty magics.

 It ripped the blood collar of its slavery off its leg and dropped it into the Indian sea.

**

The High Priest in Kush, in the middle of the prayers for propitiation and succor to all those under the column of fire, fell unconscious, blood streaming from his nose and ears.

Briut, the second priest, picked up the litany as acolytes carried Kyan away to the healers and people wailed that someone or something had attacked their Voice of Amun.

The Candace stood before her throne and joined her voice to the priests' until calm settled on the temple.

**

            “Kehemet,” the Candace beckoned to her mother-in-law as she sank back down on her throne.  The woman leaned close as though she had asked for a sip of water from the cup she held.  Amani-shakete sipped and under the cover of the goblet whispered.  “I would speak to you after.  Someone is attacking us and we need to find out who.”

            “Of course, my queen,” she said, eyes rimmed with kohl and with lapis powder.  Her phoenix raised itself on the back of Amani-shakete’s throne, and sang with the priests.

Chapter 20: Show me Aegypti

            Naida sat, fourth level down from the doorway Temis had opened for her, a stack of scrolls beside her, a map pinned open to the floor where she knelt, a table covered in codexes and a chair with a precarious box of scrolls on it next to her.  The broom she’d used to carefully sweep her way down the human stairs lay drunkenly against the steps.

            Temis had flown down one level at a time as Naida had swept and polished her way down, calling out how to find certain maps or books or scrolls she wanted.

            There had been a whirl of explanation how to find things and then Temis had looked up and said.  “Start with this scroll and that map.  Everything else is something I’m interested in.  I’ll be back.” And launched herself off the edge of the level, leaving Naida by herself, her legs and arms aching from all the running and carrying.

            “But…” Naida sat, surrounded by more scrolls than she had ever in her wildest dreams imagined, overwhelmed and suddenly very, very lonely.

            “I’m here,” Asteri said.  He hopped over the broom handle and settled next to her, neatly avoiding the paper spread everywhere.  “You’re not alone.”

            Naida buried her face in his ruff.  He had a ruff now, as well as his curling horns.  A ruff as soft and clean as fulled angora wool.  She didn’t cry but sat, shaking.  “Asteri… the… the volcano didn’t happen because of me, did it?”

            He snorted.  “You don’t have that kind of power yet, dear child of my Ushera.” He lay down and she curled up against him.  He’d gotten a lot bigger in just the one night and day.  “It is possible that the Great King, who ceased shedding Persian blood, lost his Great One, lost his love… swore he would conquer Atlantis… and the Goddess didn’t want him to.  That’s my theory.  He’s probably running around with a red leather collar on, as a captive of the Labrys’s Queen, oh, sorry, ‘honoured guest’, with most of his navy on the bottom of the sea.”

            “So nothing to do with me.”

            “As a side note, perhaps.”

            “Oh.”  There didn’t seem to be anything else to say.  “I miss…” she stopped as her throat clogged up.  “I WON”T cry again.  I won’t!”

            He nuzzled her hair.  “It’s all right to cry for those who’ve gone on over the Belt Bridge to the Goddess’s land. It speaks well of you that you weep for those who mistreated you.”

            "Zeno and Oios never mistreated me!  And Pero, and Deno, and... there were lots of good Afarisi!  Just some nasty harpies.  Not ALL of them!"  Naida drew a hand across her face, angrily shoved her hair back behind her ears, growled and caught it in a knot at the back of her head.  “Cursed wire-hair that I am! I should shave it all off!”

            Asteri stuck his nose in her hand, at the nape of her neck.  “Stop that.  Your hair is like your mother’s.  You are as dark as your father and he has ebony skin. And your mother’s eyes are gold like yours.  People say that it was a gift to your grandmother from the Goddess Sekhemet, for bravery. Granted your mother curses her hair when she has it done up.”

            “I’m not brave.”  Naida looked at her hand, dark against Asteri’s white fur.  “I… don’t know my people and my mother’s world and I’m supposed to be a princess?  I might… do something stupid like accidentally fart in the lemonade or something.”

            He sputtered goat laughter.  “Not likely, Kitten.  I like Temis’s name for you though I’d be more inclined to call you ‘kid’.”

            “Are you sure?”

            He answered the real question. “You have a whole winter to learn not to mess up and Sybaris is a far better teacher than Temis.  The sphinx thinks that everyone just needs to have the information thrown at them – like – ‘Here, READ!’”

            It was Naida’s turn to sputter laughter.  “That’s exactly what she did today.”

            “Sybaris won’t do that.  In fact I won’t.  And if you get stuck you can ask me.  I’m remembering more and more as I get older and as you get older.” He leaned over and turned his head to gaze at the map.  “Lend me your finger as a pointer and point where I direct you.”

            She sat up. 

           “See that island shaped like a dot with a long tail?”

            “This one?”

            “No, up five or so…. Yes, that one.  That’s the one that isn’t there anymore.”

            Naida stared at the map and her finger slid over.  “Does that mean that Afaris was somewhere around here?”

            “Pretty close… Jump that island mountain there… to yes… that one.  One day this island will blow up.  I think the Sun Twins are just using Sybaris as an excuse to ‘cork’ this volcano.  As long as she and Temis are here it won’t blow up.”

            “Ohhhh.”  She leaned against his shoulder.  “Show me how to point to Atlantis…”

“Why don’t you get a blank scroll and that pen… that strange one over there… and draw your own map?”

“All right.” She scrambled up and gathered her materials, laying out her own scroll with one of Asteri’s hooves as a corner holder, a paper weight that showed endless snow, and an amethyst geode.  “Where’s Aegypti from here? And… home?”

Chapter 19: How Did That Happen?

            I, Sybaris, Spinner of Light and Darkness, Sister to all the Medusae, Defender of Children, The Lurker Beneath the Bed who Eats Darkness, call upon the Shining Twins in the name of a child. I call upon Apollo and Artemis, not for myself. Athena, Wise One, oh, Olympians, there is an injustice and a hubris happening in the lands You call Yours.

            “WHAT SAY YOU, SNAKE?”

            “A human wizard or wizards called a Roc into existence, to carry off a Queen’s child and I wish to let her parents know that she is safe and being instructed by Temis and I.”

            Owls.  Owls and Horses. Waves of all the Seas of the World. Bees and White Stags. The White Doe and an endlessly pouring glass of wine. Forge Fire and Goddess Blood and Thunderbolts rumbling, Blue Fire, Darkness and waving Grain, Spiders and Flowers and Bears and sheep, herds and herds of sheep, a Distaff and a Drop Spindle, as the Olympians debate.

            “PERMISSION TO REACH OUT OF YOUR PRISON, SNAKE. FOR A QUEEN’S CHILD’S SAKE."

            I bow low before the Godssssss.

            “She’s mocking you, you know, brother.”

            “Shut up, Hermes.”

  

          The Candace stirs in her sleep and the rope bed on lion feet, that keep tender human flesh up off the floor, away from the scorpions, creaks.  Her consort puts out a hand in his sleep and takes hers.  Intersting.  Her spirit shows venom where there should be none.  I shall have to tell her.  I recognize venom.

            “Amani-shakete.” “Jahi.” My dream talons draw their spirits out of their tiny dreams and into the greater one. “My name is Sybaris.”

            Jahi raises his staff between his wife and I, the hawk’s eyes shining brightly as the Son of the Sun wonders if He wants Snake for lunch.

            “Peace, my love,” the Candace says, her hands brimming over with blood and power that she holds up to me. All the blood of all the women with her shimmering in her soul.  “She comes peacefully.”

            “I do.” I coil myself away from them, politely.  “I have permission from Those Who imprison me to speak to you.  Your daughter is alive.  Asteri is with her, growing up once more.  They have sheltered with Temis and I and I have taken a liking to her.  Her Ushera has not yet come but is on its way.”

            “Wife, let me go fetch her home!” Jahi’s eyes are as bright as the falcon’s.

            “The winter is deep already here, with the first blizzard burying us in ash and ice, after the Goddess’s answer to Atlantis kissed the sky.”

            “I see.  Do you have the power to show her to us?”

            A single drop of my blood shines on the end of my talon and in it, reflected as in a mirror, is Naida-Efra, in her shining joy of the library.

            “She…” The Candace’s voice nearly breaks with love and pride. “She looks happy, though underfed!”

            “The villagers who succored her mostly died in the disaster,” I say.  “I will be her teacher until she can come to you in the spring.  I will see her schooled as a princess.”

            Jahi grabs for his wife’s hand and nods at her. “Be more than just Teacher, oh Lamia.”

           Goddess.  They know me?  She reaches out a finger and touches the ruby in the centre of my forehead. “Be her Guide and God Mother.” The woman’s power is like a jolt through my centre, all the way down to the tip of my tail.  I… respect her.

            “I will.  You needn’t compel.  I will be her Spirit Mother to the end of my strength and Asteri and I will see her home.”

            “If you need help, fly into our dreams and we will spend our strength for her and you.”

            “Indeed.  She is loved.  Amani... look to who gives you wine... there is venom there...Good night, parents of my child!”

            I tumble back into the bars of my island cage, their stretch snapping me back over leagues of space, my trail a falling star against the Belt. I am coiled into a knot and confused.  I haven't been so confused in a thousand years! How on the earth did that happen?  She and he are like my sisters, coiled around my heart when all I did is open a small space for a small girl.  How did that happen?

            Sybaris groggily opened her eyes in her hot pool, stared around as if she’d never seen her firefly lights before, shifted her full belly a trifle and pillowed her head on her arm, going back to sleep.