Eleven: Anamnesis

Images swam in the Meerchild’s glass, but the Master wouldn’t be pleased if it drew these. They were from another time, a time before the end of the Meer. Its fingers itched to draw them.

The pictures formed like the pieces of a puzzle being laid, edges touching one upon another while leaving the shapes of others unfilled. The knowledge that these were past instilled the child with an indefinable anxiety, knowing they were moments it could never touch or be a part of. But the pieces of this temporal puzzle fell into place like lotus blossoms carried on the great river, inevitable, unstoppable, careening toward their end in the cataract of the Expurgation.

It was a chronicle of moments in the life of MeerRa, memories indelibly impressed upon the fabric of time and now recalled from the Meeric Anamnesis as if something had dislodged them:

The infant handled puzzle blocks painted in gold runes between plump fingers, indifferent to their worth. Like everything else that was to be experienced, to be known in the small mind, they must be tasted. The pink gums worried the wooden corners of a block, moistened it with a light trickle of saliva that caught the light, and the sticky fingers released it. It was more accurate to say “released” than “thrown” or even “put down.” The hand hadn’t yet acquired the dexterity to take responsibility for such an action.

The Meer watched from the shadows of the arch that defined this terrace, entranced by the delicate trail of silver that still moistened the block. Late evening sun through the courtside entrance lit this corner of the room with a mild copper glow, and the child, in a red abundance of draperies below her beaded collar, gilded and embroidered with precious stones, was a bright flame. The dark beginnings of curls cooled the effect above the padded cheeks—or perhaps they were coals not yet succumbing to the heat. The carpet too, beneath the child, was red vermilion, streaked throughout with fiery fibers of gold thread. It was a brief stop in the sun’s descent beyond the courtyard, a moment long enough to paint these details like a brilliant oil on the canvas of MeerRa’s memory.

The child had tired of the blocks. When she looked up with dimpled brow for the caregiver and perceived herself alone, the bright visage crumpled from the top of her brow to the stubby chin in a piteous lament. Ra’s body moved forward of its own accord to the quickening of anxiety in his chest, but the woman assigned to watch over the child was only folding diapers on the divan behind the baby.

She rose at once and went to the child, lifting her up and clucking to her. “Now, there,” she murmured. “What’s all this fuss?” The child quieted, content that the caregiver was within sound of a cry.

Ra drew back into the shadows, turning away from the open terrace to the cool passageway already dimming to stone blue in the dying light from the west. It was not for Ra to interfere in the affairs of the child. She was Meer, and was cared for by the most devoted temple servants. She was not his own.

He watched RaNa from the coiling corridors of the temple, careful not to defy Meeric tradition, though this watching was, in fact, an indiscretion. His obligation was attentiveness to the petitions of the altar and not the spying on of children and maids, but he couldn’t remain unaware of her small presence in the cool, vaulted chambers that had once been occupied only by himself.

The young Meer’s attendants were necessary in the early years, thus granted this extraordinary privilege of temporary lodging in the forbidden chambers. They went about their duties quietly, keeping RaNa largely out of view, for the Meer should not be disturbed with the mundane guidance of a child, despite its heritage. Ra had to content himself with observations from a distance, however brief—sometimes, while the child and her attendants slept, entering the nighttime stillness of the nursery to stand over the magnificent cradle in which the holy head rested.

His own head was often heavy on these nocturnal wanderings. He had defied a millennium of sacred custom in sharing his seed with her common mother, and nearly a century of unwritten edicts against the procreation of the Meer. He couldn’t explain what had propelled him to such selfishness, and he worried this in his mind continually.

The woman, Ahr, had seen him, rather than the god. He had been intrigued at first because she dared to meet his eyes, though it was against both religious and societal propriety. Those eyes alone among the crowd were asking nothing. Others repeated their supplications—grantmeohMeerRa-letmeohMeerRa-givemeohMeerRa—in a stream of meaningless, monotonous sibilations. In meditative concentration, he could focus on the individual entreaties, separating one from the whole, and use his acquired wisdom to choose which of these ought to be answered. The sound could be a breathtaking union of harmonic intonation, rising like a single-chord vibration on an ancient string, or the sound of insects chanting mysteriously in the heat, but on that day it had been a grating cacophony.

He’d ridden annually through Rhyman, seated unmoving in the sacred meditative pose, for more years than he could remember. He didn’t know his own years, in fact. It hadn’t been material. The Meer aged differently than ordinary men, and Ra had been in his early adulthood far longer than this woman had been alive.

What provoked him to rebellion, he couldn’t say. It must be considered a deliberate act that he ceased to listen to their supplications in meditative repose and took to watching them, both envying and despising their simple existence. They couldn’t see him within his curtained palanquin, positioned on his belly to peer through a narrow, sheer slip of silk that let in the light. They wouldn’t have thought to see eyes peering back at them, even if they might have strained and focused on that carefully arranged pleat—but she had seen him. She had met his eyes.

Even from that distance, her eyes were something he might drown in, a color between blue and black: indigo ink. The eyes had followed him, expressionless, while her head, covered and cosseted with cloth, had remained still, slightly bowed, as though she too were praying, though he knew she was not.

This procession through the streets of Rhyman was an annual benediction to the people. The Meer would be brought close to them—close, for this brief period, to the commoners instead of the upper castes who were allowed preferential places at the temple. This was the People’s Blessing and would be repeated for seven days, until the solstice came.

Ra slid down to the litter’s floor again the following day, and again peered out, and at the same press of people in the road, the same turn in the procession, he saw the eyes. This time his gaze went to the cloth that protected the virgin’s face from shame. It sloped beneath the dark, intent eyes over the suggested shapes of nose and cheeks and mouth. Ra felt peculiar staring at these hinted features, vague dips and valleys in the cloth. His stomach tightened and his pulse quickened, and he felt a surge of anxiety, as though in peril.

He hadn’t been looked at in this manner, as a man instead of an icon, by anyone that he could recall. She frightened him. It was as though he’d been invisible, a ghost who had become used to traveling among the living without notice, hiding in the body of a statue that was prized for its value in precious metal, but never perceived as part of the vessel itself. She was a medium who saw through to him, an entity for whom he was suddenly material.

On the third day, Ra waited, sick with anticipation, for the litter to reach the place in the road where she’d been. When the indigo eyes perceived him, they were nearer than they’d been before. She’d managed to move forward in the ranks of petitioners. Instead of a yard away, she was in the throng that reached up for the benediction of the Meer, grasping at the tassels that they might have a fleeting touch of the holy, and bowing low to kiss the underside of the litter as it passed by. It was a chaos of bodies, each intent on his own petition and his own ardor for the embodiment of the Meeric religion.

She stood among them, perhaps a foot away, not bowing or scrambling for a blessing by proxy, asking for nothing. And yet she asked for everything, asked the worst of him, by touching him with that lucid indigo. She exposed him. Ra felt torn from her gaze when the procession moved on.

By the fourth day, Ra was truly ill with disquietude. He shook with chills and fever as the litter plodded forward. He didn’t want to see her, couldn’t bear to be seen again by those eyes, but the thought of her not being there when the procession rounded the bend was terrifying. He dreaded and longed for the hour to move to their appointment.

When he saw her, it was as before. She watched him from among the frenzy at the litter’s edge. Ra dropped his feverish cheek to the soft pillow that now felt like fire. He couldn’t look into her eyes again.

But he was compelled, driven once more to seek her gaze on the following day. He was still ill, but he looked for her anxiously and met her eyes when they passed until he could no longer see her in the throng. He became afflicted with the obsession that he was a spirit, and once her eyes no longer saw him, he would cease to exist. Again the following day he subjected himself to the anxiety and hope that racked him, again feverish and cold in alternating currents. He was growing mad with the thought of the holiday’s end, thinking, This is the second to the last day that I will see her. Tomorrow will be the last.

He was consumed with the idea of touching her, to make sure she herself was no phantom. He recognized the ache and hardness in loins he’d almost forgotten belonged to him. The Meer were thought not to feel this simple lust. His genitals were a mere dangle of flesh that had no meaning, were never to be used, vestigial. But he was no longer a flaccid god; she’d commanded him, and he had risen.

The seventh eve was on him, the culmination of the people’s parade. MeerRa vomited in terror throughout the night. He could eat nothing they brought to him when the sun rose. He trembled, unsteady when they dressed him and lifted him into his place. The procession began, and Ra wept hot tears against his fever. His mind tormented him with its single purpose: This is the last day I will see her. Today is the last. The procession seemed to move too quickly, hurtling toward the bend in the road he dreaded, though it had seemed to crawl before.

He was there, much too soon, and she was there, her eyes upon him for the final moment. He steeled himself against a fear that made his heart squeeze in on itself and his blood rise to a dangerous force against his veins, then slid his fingers beneath the sacred curtain, intending to steal a brush against her skin before she was gone. The bowing and litter-worshipping throng about them was less interested in the flesh-and-blood Meer than in the symbol of their faith and their own frantic supplication. They took no notice of what went on at the corner of a curtain.

He’d missed her. Bustled past, he could no longer see her, but she’d been just there: an inch away from him. He was in agony. This last moment had been too brief, and she was gone. Something brushed his fingers, and he tensed. It was another set of fingers. They lingered on his; the person was keeping pace beside the litter. Their possessor did not bend and press lips against the holy hand as a supplicant would. It must be she. Ra wove his fingers subtly between the others, and the friction of this flesh aroused him so that he nearly cried out. They would be parted in a moment. She couldn’t follow for long without drawing attention.

The litter was jostled and careened on one rear post, and Ra heard the rebuke of the trailing templar priests behind him. The litter stopped. Amid the rumbling murmur of givemeohMeerRa-blessmeohMeerRa were the angry shouts of the templars and the litter-bearer’s anxious apologies. The cool fingers still crossed his. Ra’s heart lunged into his throat, and he swept back the curtain an entire inch in madness. He expected to see the jockeying crowd focused on him in awe, expected to be mobbed with importunities, but for this momentous second, all attention was on the unfortunate bearer who’d stumbled and dishonored the Meer.

But she was there. She gripped his hand, eyes wide. Ra reached out and pulled her forward by the other hand as well, until she was within the curtained realm, head and shoulders inside. He couldn’t believe what he’d done. He’d condemned her to arrest by the templars. She was looking up at him, expectant, her heart pounding beneath a breast that rose and fell in suspended motion. He whisked her in, holding his breath as she scrambled lightly up. There was a moment where the litter-bearers shifted, sensing the difference, and Ra was stricken, waiting for the templars’ outcry, but it didn’t come. The offending litter-bearer had been sufficiently chastised, and the procession was beginning again—and this woman was inside.

Their eyes had done their speaking these seven days, and must continue to. Ra’s desire was painfully obvious in his own, and hers stared back a silent complicity. He wanted to see within the veil, but she didn’t remove it, and he would not. He coaxed her down against the cushions and stared, no idea what he should do. Her breasts rose and fell with her anticipating breath. He reached his hand out and placed it over her heart, pressing his fingers together over the thin fabric. The firm circle of her breast was thunderous. He must touch her, see something of her.

Audacious, he slipped his hand into the collar of her dress and nudged it down, his hand alight with tiny whorls of sensation. She breathed in sharply, rising up to meet him, and he lowered his mouth, compelled, onto the peak of her flesh. She moved beneath him, her skin taut and bobbing against his tongue, making tiny sounds of ecstasy. Frantic, he unfastened the ties of her dress and unveiled her body, and was nearly overcome at the sight of her. He fell forward to her chest, trying to contain himself, alarmed by what he felt. She arched her throat and teased her body with the soft caress of his hair draping her. He would die of this surge of adrenaline, this quickened flow of blood. He released himself from his garment and let the innervated flesh touch the skin of her stomach. He feared her reaction; feared his own. Would she allow this? Could he dare? He could not think beyond the moment, to consequence.

Except for this presumptive touch, he tried to hold himself away, but she moved her body so that he slipped down between her legs, and the inky eyes were insistent, urging him on. He leaped into her without considering her virginity, and she made a sharp sound, stifled immediately, her eyes springing with moisture. He cursed himself for his stupidity, but the velvet strength of her flesh against his distracted him from practical considerations. He too gave unbidden release to a cry, and feared the attention of the bearers and the templars, but the pace of the procession didn’t slow.

He melded with her, trying to absorb her, to get closer, as though they could be one body, thundering forward on instinct. She rose up toward him in the same pursuit, midnight eyes always on his until he clenched his own shut in response to the jolt that was rushing through him. He flooded her, shooting forward on a tide of indescribable pleasure, and she shook beneath him, muffling her gasps in his hair. Undone, he fell forward once more, resting against her bosom, his hands touching her face through the veil.

Through the commotion of disconnected sound in his ears, he heard the singing of the welcome at the temple square. Ra rose to his elbows in dismay. She would have to be put back together. They couldn’t be discovered. He tried to cover her, catching his fingers in her ties, and she took this over with deft fingers. He was still inside her, and he didn’t want to be separated from her, but there was no time for this irrational indulgence. He’d hurt her at the onset, and he didn’t want to do so now. He touched her tender sex with his fingers, stroking her to ease himself out, almost driving them both once more into delirium.

She thrust her skirt into place, eyes fixed on him, asking what he meant to do now, whether she would suffer for this. There was no other way to get her out but to hope for the miracle that had allowed her in. He peered between the gauze at the rear of the litter, caught by the eyes of the litter-bearer who’d stumbled, his broad shoulder red from the weight of his burden. This man knew, they all four must know what their Meer had done; the weight and motion had been borne by them. The bearer nodded and indicated the space between himself and his companion. This one too was complicit.

Ra wasted no time in lowering his lover between them to the street. A drape trailing behind the box covered her until she ducked beneath the litter and emerged on the side, kissing the tassels as though she’d been supplicating there. They were outside the steps, and Ra was carried up and away from her, watching through his peephole until he could no longer see her eyes.

Once inside the temple and returned to his throne, he dismissed the templars and ordered the fumbling litter-bearer to stay behind, apparently to rebuke him personally, a terrible humiliation. They were left alone.

“What is your name?” Ra looked ahead toward the dying light and not to his side where the servant stood at attention.

“I am Merit, your holiness.”

“I want to know, Merit.” Ra’s face turned red with embarrassment for the first time in his long adulthood. “Did you stumble on purpose?”

“On purpose, my liege?” The man didn’t flinch. “I would never deliberately offend you. It is my duty to hold you up, and I will do so to my death.”

Ra looked at him then, and received communication from the eyes of yet another commoner. “You are true to your name,” said Ra. “I would like you beside me as chief attendant. Inform the prelate that I have enlisted you, and send him to see me.”

Merit bowed low and went to the great arch.

“And Merit.” Ra looked ahead once more, and his voice faltered. “Find her name.”

“It is done, my liege.”

Merit brought him first the name of Ahr, a worker in the market who bundled leaves for a tea merchant, and then Ahr herself, secreted from her master’s house in the night. Ra hadn’t meant to go near her again, had only wanted to know her name.

“Are you here of your own will?” he asked her.

“Of course,” was her reply, and at the sound of her voice, he’d abandoned his dais and drunk her intoxicant. He would taste her, every part of her, as often as he could before sunrise.

When she wasn’t before him, he resolved each time to let her alone, to return to the honor of his duty to Rhyman, but when he brought her to the temple each time to tell her, he would smell her and lose all reason. He knew every part of her except her face, a mystery he couldn’t penetrate, for it was hers to lower the veil, and she did not. Sometimes he kissed her through it, desperate; but her body was his substitute for her lips, and he kissed her breasts for hours and her sex until she was weak. His blankets, his clothes, and his hair smelled indelibly of her. He didn’t think about the future of this treasonous alliance. He couldn’t think about it. He would not.

Fate intervened, and Ra was forced to do without her while his attendant was ill with a fever. He counted Merit as his only friend, and Ra’s impatience at the separation from Ahr was soon overshadowed by worry for his friend as the fever wore on. He was afraid he would lose not only Ahr to distance, but also Merit to the more final parting of death.

Merit was out of danger after several days, but weakened by the illness, and convalesced throughout the summer’s turn to autumn. Ra began to feel responsible for Merit’s illness, guilty for his anxiousness to see Ahr despite Merit’s state, and culpable for the strain he’d put on Merit with the secrecy of his clandestine affair. He punished himself with putting Ahr out of his mind. He must leave them both alone and cease demanding their complicity in treason. He must be the Meer of Rhyman.

Merit returned to duty, and Ra didn’t send for Ahr, allowing no opportunity for his servant to question him. A feast day was coming, and Ra must concentrate, retrain himself to hear the single sounds from chaos, gather his strength for what the aristocratic petitioners might ask of him. Conjury exhausted, and the sorts of boons requested by the upper castes would drain him of all his stores of strength. He meditated, pushing away the scent of Ahr in his memory, ignoring his body when it sprang to arousal at an unbidden thought of her. He fooled himself after several weeks into believing his madness for her had passed, that Ahr was forgotten.

Merit, once again, was the instrument of his distraction. He came to Ra one morning with a folded paper, and Ra stared at the small rectangle on his table fearfully. The hint of bergamot was hovering over it. He stilled his pulse and opened it. Ahr had written one word: Father. Ra’s heart began to hammer and his stomach lurched. He’d known it, of course; it had been the only possible outcome, the one thing foreseeable even to a simpleton. Wives intent on conception did not receive such attention from their husbands as Ra had spent on Ahr, had spent in Ahr. There had been no regard for the time of moon when she’d come to him. He’d lavished his seed on her. Meer seed. He swallowed and waved Merit away with a nod.

Merit paused. “Your reply, my liege?”

“No reply.”

By ignoring it, Ra imagined the child would never be born. If he didn’t acknowledge, it couldn’t be happening. He was trapped in an impossible place that offered no solution but this insane logic. Meer children were not conceived, not in more than a century; and Meer did not beget them in the wombs of ordinary women. This hadn’t happened. It would not be.

Negation was far less effective than creation. What was, was.

The maiden Ahr was discovered in her fallen state by early winter, when gossips in the market began to note the disappearance of her waist. Strangers assumed she’d bedded the master of the house in which she worked, and her master assumed he’d harbored a whore. Ahr held her tongue about her lover, going about her business in the virgin’s veil despite the scorn of passersby, and sent regular entreaties to the temple, always the one word that said all. The entreaties were ignored.

It was a feast day that brought Ahr to him at last. Food arrived at the temple, offerings of the most elaborate kinds, extravagant, revolting. He would need this prodigal array of sustenance to expend the energy they sought of him. Ra spent the day fasting in a ritual bath, prepared by a dozen attendants who washed him and poured oil into his hair and braided it with a thousand gold trinkets. He was painted then in gold grease, rubbed into every part of his skin while he stood naked. He was their golden god come down to hear their prayers.

Among the throng, Ahr came to him, wrestling her way through the affronted aristocracy, a blue blaze of color over a portentous belly startling them into giving way. There were gasps and laughter and condemning looks for the deflowered woman who dared to wear the veil as though she were a virgin, refuting her obvious state by wearing color instead of matron’s black. She managed to reach the front, the coveted spot where petitioners might be heard if there were not too many before them. The sun was close to setting, and the Meer would soon be deaf to them, having chosen whom he would bless, to listen no more. He would retreat into the temple’s interior and gorge himself on the obscene feast, and then he would conjure, and someone would receive his boon.

She stood before him, not bowing, not chanting her request. The crowd was aghast. She must be insane. She spoke to him, low and earnest, but he didn’t acknowledge her. The rumors that the Meer had impregnated her began to buzz throughout the temple steps. They waited for an act that would give him away as an ordinary man and mark the strange woman with the stain of treason. She implored him. He ignored her. She went mad and touched him, clawing at him, screaming at him, beating at his chest. For some inexplicable reason, the chief attendant didn’t set his men on her, didn’t have her beaten or arrested. The lunatic cursed him as she was led away, and petitioners shrank from her. MeerRa stood. The sun had fallen. The day was over.

Ra was alone in his temple. Even the servants to the Meer could not be present for this ritual. He paced the banquet-laden room, unable to eat. How he’d wanted to give in to her! She hadn’t known, or hadn’t cared, what peril she was in.

The stripe of blood she’d drawn from his throat in her fury cut a dark path through the gold and he stared at it in the mirrors that surrounded him. He’d created this ornate room, the gold he wore, for the people’s pleasure. He fattened their calves and increased the yield of their grain so they could ply him with this bribery. He wouldn’t eat. He would not please anyone this feast day. But he must, and so he circled the room.

For the first time in his reign, he considered flight: to leave the temple where he’d spent his interminable adult life, to leave Rhyman and responsibility. He could find Ahr and spirit her away; he—his plans deflated as he realized how little he knew of the world. How did one find a citizen in Rhyman? How did such people live? He could conjure goods for survival, but he couldn’t conjure sense, nor Ahr.

Ra sat defeated before the banquet table, ill at the sight of so much food. He didn’t want to be this foolish idol, made indolent on the gluttony of his subjects. He slammed his fists into the piles of food. So they wanted him to gorge himself? Then he would gorge himself. He was good for nothing else.

Ra began to devour the feast with an ugly fury, climbing the overladen table like a hunter cornering its prey. He consumed the flesh meant to replenish some cattleman’s herd, the wine offered that a vintner’s fruit might be more abundant, the breads and cakes provided by the harvesters of wheat, the creams and cheeses from the dairies—all of their blood-soaked bribery. He was sickened on it all, but he wouldn’t allow himself to vomit. He continued to punish himself with the food until he was dizzy and racked with pain.

Ra stumbled from the table and surveyed the wreckage of his plundering. Over the carnage of devoured food, he saw his reflection echoed to infinity in the gilded mirrors surrounding him. He pursued it, pressing against the glass and breathing hotly over his own hot breath fogging back at him. He was a repulsive, golden, bloated monster; a grotesque, painted puppet who couldn’t speak his own mind for obligation to his flatterers. He made ghoulish faces at himself, taunting the devil in the mirror with his face still pressed to the other’s. Had he no obligation to himself? No obligation to Ahr? He pressed his tongue against the tongue and licked over the glass, following the lewd companion that wouldn’t leave him.

Then, with a sudden burst of fury, he slapped his hands against the monster’s hands with a force that shattered the mirror beneath his palms. He ground his palms in the glass and watched the blood ooze through the glittering shards and golden grease. He opened his mouth and shouted at his now-cracked ogre, and the shout became a wild scream that tore through the room and shattered his image in mirror after mirror in a deadly spray of hurtling glass about him, but not touching the one that leered at him.

“Destroy!” he shrieked at himself, but the glass before him remained cracked only by the damage he’d done with his hands. He couldn’t destroy that over which he had no power.

Ra dropped to his knees among the glitter of a thousand needles of glass. The monster in the mirror had begun to drip red, clownish tears from its wavering face. Ahr had only asked one thing of him, the acknowledgment of his child, and he was impotent, after all, to give it to her.

He was neglecting his sacred duty with this indulgent self-pity. He must listen to the wisdom of the Meeric Ages in his head. He must answer a petition. He stared at the golden Meer who had the power to create, but not the power to rule himself. He would answer a petition. He would give the petitioner what she asked for. He lifted his eyes to the eyes of the Meer. “The child is mine,” he said. His words could not be taken back.

Ra touched his fingertips to the dark head of the baby, careful not wake her. As once he’d touched her mother’s fingers to assure him of her reality, he now took the same assurance from this touch. RaNa was real, and she’d come to him in his sepulchral temple. The templars had looked the other way at his indiscretion.

He couldn’t think of Ahr and how she must have mourned at her privation. He would be true now to his station, committing no more offenses of indecency. Though it was as well Ahr didn’t pursue RaNa to the temple, for at the sight of her he would have fallen at her feet and succumbed once more to his interdicted desire.

Ra watched his daughter in this clandestine fashion as she grew from infant to child. Her natural questing and exuberance was curbed and coached from her through the tutelage of her servants and the templars. She learned that she mustn’t conjure toys and comforts at her fancy. RaNa was tamed, and filled with the knowledge and custom of the Meer, and learned to adopt the deportment that was expected of her.

By the age of seven, she was considered old enough to rule Rhyman at her father’s side. The templars were beside themselves with pride at having not only one Meer in Rhyman, but two. They would be prosperous beyond any province in the Delta, where elsewhere the Meer were waning.

RaNa’s teachers and caretakers were no longer needed; only her handmaiden would remain in attendance on her at the temple. Ra found himself alone with his daughter for the first time in the child’s life. RaNa was polite, and revered him as the Great Meer to whom she was secondary, but didn’t seek his attention as a father. It wasn’t within the vast realm of knowledge with which she’d been instilled.

Ra recalled little of his own parents. In the days when he’d been conceived, Meer of neighboring provinces came together for brief unions to produce a child, and the child was raised in the temple of its mother to rule by her side. His mother was a vague, grand image of strength and splendor. He couldn’t remember her having spoken to him. Ra resolved that this would no longer be the case for his child.

On an early spring morning, he found RaNa meditating by a pool of water. Her small body was a still, marble replica of a child. Ra sat down beside her, and she looked up at him slowly as though she’d been sleeping. She was to bow in his presence, despite her Meerity, but they were both already seated on the ground. RaNa leaned her head and chest over her lap in an attempt at obeisance, but Ra lifted her chin and looked at her. She stared back with mild curiosity. He didn’t know what to say to her, didn’t know what fathers said to daughters. Her eyes were dark, intent eyes—a color between blue and black, indigo ink.

“Do you like the temple?” he blurted.

RaNa was startled at the sound of his voice, her face a canvas reflecting the image of a thousand delicate birds flying up at the sound of footfall. “Like?”

“Are you happy here?” Ra amended.

RaNa’s face worked, trying to puzzle out what was expected of her. “I am honored to serve Rhyman.”

Ra stared into the midnight eyes. She had of her mother the only thing he truly knew of her face. He rose abruptly and left her there, unable to contain the depth of feeling that had come over him.

On another day, he sent for her, and RaNa came obediently, approaching him in his austere room of throne and altar. She bowed graciously with one hand behind her back and feet crossed, the small toes adorned with jewels. Ra observed the care with which she’d been dressed, in garments as fine and opulent as his own. Her miniature robe was vermillion and gold, the gold a sheen of intricate threads embroidered on the dark fabric. Her garment crossed in front and buttoned down the side, ending in a straight line above the glinting feet. Her dark head, with a braid of hair the color of his own stretching down her back, was still lowered, waiting for what her elder wished of her.

“None of that between us,” he said, and RaNa looked up at him. She’d been trained in the ways of the Deltan Meer, and variance wasn’t among her instructions. “Custom is for the benefit of your subjects,” said Ra. “One as old as I has no use for custom.”

“How old are you?” she asked, and then bit her lip since she hadn’t been asked to speak.

Ra laughed and stepped down from the chair, once again flouting custom. He held out his hand to her. “Come walk with me,” he offered, and she took his hand uncertainly. He was awed by the touch of the small hand in his as they passed under the arch of the great courtyard. In all his years, he couldn’t recall having walked hand in hand with anyone.

“How old do you think I am?” he asked as they stepped out into the orange light of early evening. Trees swayed along the banks of the river on which the temple stood.

RaNa looked up at him. “I don’t know.”

“I’ll tell you a secret.” Ra kept his face solemn, and RaNa fixed her earnest attention on him, impressed. “I don’t know either.” He smiled, and RaNa wrinkled her brow, unsure how to respond to him. “The Meer have greater power over our elements. And greater responsibility. Time is inconsequential and often melds together for us, indistinct. Your time as a child is but an instant of the life that lies ahead of you. Don’t rush toward that empty stretch of time, Na.”

They’d come to the steps that led down to the river, and Ra nodded to the sentinels who stood beside them. The servants fell into place behind the Meer and followed as Ra and RaNa descended. The perfume of early summer was on the water, blossoms rotting on its banks. Ra let go of his daughter’s hand and tested a foot in the water. RaNa stood back, wondering what he meant to do. Her hands flew to her face, astonished, when Ra dove into the river. He came up laughing. He’d struck the water awkwardly, as it was his first time at such a thing, stinging his chest and plunging himself downward with a mouth full of water. He shook his long hair, and water sprayed onto the assembly at the river’s edge.

“Come, Na,” he called to her.

RaNa stared at him as if he were mad. She looked down at her velvet dress and then back at the guards, passive on either side.

“Come.” Ra laughed. “It’s not so bad!” He splashed her playfully as he moved farther from the bank.

RaNa stood a moment longer, face twisting with conflict, and then took a deep breath, stepping down from the marble into the river with a solemn expression. She drew in a sharp breath as the water swirled about her legs. It rose to meet her gingered steps, and RaNa stumbled, accustomed to the soft and steady ground of the temple. Submerged to her shoulders, her small body faltered in the current. Panic transformed her features as the water tugged at her, and RaNa shrieked and flung her arms out, wide and erratic, flailing in the river’s flow.

In an instant, Ra waded to her and caught her up. The water was only waist high for him here and he held her above it. To his surprise, she threw her arms around his neck, wrapping her wet limbs about him and holding on so tightly he nearly stumbled.

“It’s all right, child,” he assured her. “I won’t let go of you. You are safe with me.” He was mortified that his attempt to draw a smile from his daughter had instead terrified her. He waded out of the water and tried to put her down on the steps, but RaNa clung to him, a shivering spider. He waved the bewildered sentinels before them and carried her back up to the temple.

All attempts to coax her from him so that she could be taken out of her wet things were futile, and at last Ra dismissed the servants and sat down with RaNa still wrapped about his neck before the rumbling fire they’d laid for her in the great hall. Ra knelt on the stone floor beside the adamantine pit with his burden. As the first logs began to pop and settle in on one another with the comfortable sound of sifting ash, he realized RaNa had fallen asleep. Ra marveled at her impulsive trust in him; she was a child after all.

When RaNa woke in the morning, still curled in Ra’s lap, she sat up and observed her father. He couldn’t fathom what she contemplated behind the piercing indigo.

Her handmaid came for her, and RaNa rose and went to her chambers wordlessly. Ra, stiff and scored with the stones’ markings on his legs, rose also and returned to his Meeric duty.

Weeks passed without encounter. There were meditations, conjurings and rituals to attend to. Returning from their annual boon to the commonfolk, Ra attempted once more to engage RaNa in some kind of communion. The stifling ride through Rhyman in his private litter had brought back on a wave of sense-memory the ride with Ahr. He had wept, staining the bowls of rose and violet water with spirals of red. RaNa was his only link to her, the one indelible proof that he’d penetrated the human wall of separateness and been, once, within Ahr. RaNa was his solace.

He sent for his daughter when she returned to the temple after him, and subject to him, she obeyed. Standing before him, she appeared as formal and impassive as ever, but she remembered not to bow before him.

“Hail, Na,” he greeted her, and RaNa’s mouth gave away the girl within the idol, parting in surprise at his address of her as equal, rather than subordinate. “What do you think of the People’s Procession?”

She paused a moment to think, as though it hadn’t occurred to her to do so before. “It serves the good of Rhyman.”

“And what of your good?”

RaNa’s puzzlement was plain at this question. Her brow knitted with concentration, her face intent with thought as she sought an answer.

Once again, Ra laughed and came down from his dais, putting his hand on her head. “Nana,” he chided. “It shouldn’t be such work to think of your own good.”

“Why do you call me that? Na, and Nana?”

“It is more your name than mine is.” RaNa meant simply Ra’s Daughter. “Only Na rightfully belongs to you.” RaNa absorbed this information. “You are Nana,” Ra added. “My little daughter.”

A small crease formed at the edges of the midnight eyes and the corners of her mouth curved hesitantly. At last, he’d found something that pleased her.

With the gentle curling of a growing vine, RaNa transformed before Ra knew it from the petite replica of a Meer into a willowy young Meeress in her own right. She was devoted to her father, who seemed to her always mysterious, consumed at times by some great despondency that only the sight of her seemed to cure—and sometimes seemed to cause. They were each other’s company, in a fortress that kept them from the world.

Her father’s pride, she rode among their subjects in an open litter on the annual processions. The templars had planted this idea, believing it would sway a discontented people toward the fealty of tradition, entranced by the vision of the New Meer; a new breed might restore their faith. It soon became apparent this wasn’t the case. The Meer continued to bring them prosperity, but little of it seemed to reach the common subjects, and the people of Rhyman and the Delta began to shift with unrest.

Ra couldn’t understand it. The discontent trickled to him in distorted bits, stories of greedy rioters who begrudged the Meer their offerings and were put down in their rebellion by the faithful templars. His prelate advised him that a feast day benison was needed. Give the people something extraordinary—let MeerRaNa give her first gift to her subjects.

RaNa’s attendants prepared her for this generous presentation. She’d sat with Ra before in receiving petitioners, but this was a special performance. Vast things were asked of the Meer on these occasions, requests that would exhaust their strength to conjure.

It was one thing to say “pearls”, and draw their essence out of the matter of thought and into the hands of the fortunate subject; or to answer some question that preyed upon an old man’s mind about his fate, to reach into the chaos of life’s threads and pluck one out to tell the elder he would die peacefully in his sleep. It was another thing entirely to set in motion something that must spiral out into the world and continue on its own over time: the fertility of crops from seed not yet formed; the promise of fame or wealth or love, requiring that fate be subtly shifted in the petitioner’s favor to the tangling of an endless skein of threads; the spark of life in a fallow womb that an ended line continue.

RaNa was solemn in her responsibility. She would do her best.

Ra emerged from his bath to the ceremonial chamber and RaNa watched as he was transformed into the gilded idol. The warm oil was poured over her head, and RaNa stood still while it trickled over her face and past her eyes. Topaz and gold beads were woven into the dark sheen, and it was braided in a thick rope that hung down her back. Her attendants stroked the sacramental paint over her body, rubbing it in to ensure that none of her skin was missed. She submitted to this covering of her body, sparkling gold smoothed over the tender beginnings of her breasts, insinuated into the intimate folds of her regenerative power. She was ready. Meer and Meeress descended to hold court.

The crowd was discontent. Ra was shocked by the sound of derision murmuring through the body of the mob. “A painted harlot,” someone whispered. “They’re incestuous,” said another. “All that bounty wasted on an obscene girl, while mine has no bread.” This wasn’t the rhythmic chant of petition. Some of them didn’t speak these thoughts aloud, but they came to the pair of Meer just the same. They’d tuned in to them, ready to receive.

RaNa didn’t falter; it wasn’t for her to pass judgment on these affronts. She was the vessel of their want and must empty herself of simple feeling. She heard the petitions of those who came to her, and endured the emboldened denigration of the growing unrest in the crowd.

Ra ached as he sat watching. Something had gone wrong, and his people hadn’t embraced his child. The air was pungent with foreboding. He tried to understand the chaotic whisperings in the pool of foreknowledge, but it was unintelligible. It was as if there were a madness on the people, and he could no longer read them. He fought his fury that this rabble dared to insult his daughter. For the first time in his reign, he felt the temptation to use conjuring for harm. Ancient Meer had been a different breed, dark and vengeful, and he felt their blood burning in him. Only RaNa’s serene presence stayed him. She was magnificent despite their ungraciousness.

In the banquet hall, its mirrors long since restored from the fateful vandalism before her coming, RaNa joined him. Her doll face was stained with two red stripes that cut ominous fissures through the gold. Ra’s heart lunged. He held out his hands to her, and RaNa came to him.

“They despise me,” she said. “What have I done?”

He drew her into the comforting circle of his arms. “You have done nothing wrong, Nana. There is some madness in Rhyman.”

She tensed against him. “Someone said—” She paused. “Someone said I was the daughter of a whore.” She looked up at him from the moist depths of night, her eyes dark moons ringed in red portent. “Who was my mother?”

Ra extricated himself, held mercilessly by those eyes, fathoms deep. She’d never asked him, but he’d seen this coming in her ascent toward womanhood. He’d caught her watching herself in mirrors, stretching her fingers out to touch and letting them hover in the space before the glass, the way the secret hovered between them. Only out of respect for him had she contained her questions.

“Your mother,” said Ra, staring past her into the distant fabric of time, unaware for a moment that he’d stopped speaking. RaNa waited. He exhaled. “Was not Meer.” Ra resumed his silence then, as though that had answered it, but she was no longer a child, and such passionless facts no longer satisfied her. She wanted to know. He sighed deeply. “She was blameless, pure. The shame was mine.” RaNa’s dark orbs blinked at him, unyielding. He didn’t know how to go on.

“Did you hurt my mother?” She spoke in a voice so quiet he wouldn’t have heard it if the silence in the room hadn’t been so complete. The sounds of night, of the river, and of the indefinable hum of the earth itself were absent.

Ra felt a palpable wound in his chest. “No. No, Nana,” he said earnestly. It was unbearable that she’d harbored this fear that she might have been born of violence. “She came to me willingly.” He drew himself up from the unconscious sag of his shoulders. “But I was Meer. I knew the law. It was unforgivable.”

RaNa smudged the dark tears from her cheek, looking up at him for an eternal moment. “You loved her. It was a crime of passion.” His daughter was too astute.

“Yes.”

RaNa sat in the chair that waited at the table’s foot. Graceful and reverent, his goddess of absolution, she took a pale grapefruit from the table and began to peel it, dusting the air with the mist of its skin. The ritual feast had begun. Ra sat also, at the head, and they ate in silence, devouring the bribery of the soth of Rhyman.

When they finished, they descended to the stone circle where contemplation was to begin, threading their way through the scattered rows of sacred candles. Side by side, they sat in the center of this population of wax and flame, legs folded triangles before them in meditative pose. The incense left by their attendants consumed the air, and the flickering confabulation of the waxen mob, a murmur of hisses and whispers, impregnated their minds and began to speak of Rhyman’s needs, lusts and desires. The unruly light transformed them into two tawny statues made of undulating shadow and scintillation.

“How did my mother die?” RaNa spoke abruptly from the threshold of her trance.

Ra’s head was heavy and the present was insubstantial and vague. He was descending into the void of his darker mind. “Ahr?” he murmured. “She lives.”

“Ahr,” she repeated.

As Ra slipped deep into the flow of seeing, focused on the needs of the people of Rhyman, he felt RaNa pause, stepping mentally from the river of their shared knowledge and letting it wash past her. She was devoted to her Meeric obligations; held them sacred and inviolate. It was unthinkable that she would refuse her duty. But instead of her consciousness in the flow, he heard her speak.

“I want to see Ahr.”

Ra woke to the sound of screaming. He was in his bed, as he always found himself after ceremony, and groggy with the night’s exertion. He tried to leap up at the terrible sound but stumbled on the floor. His limbs were of no use yet, and he was blind. His body’s custom was to regenerate after such a trance with a deep sleep. He usually slept for twenty-four hours or more.

RaNa. RaNa was screaming. Ra grabbed hold of the bedpost and threw himself away from it toward the wall, staggering in this way along the corridors of the temple to the sound of his daughter. Voices, like the insistent entreaties to which he’d succumbed in the night rose in the courtyard, dissonance and din. Where was Merit? Where were the sentinels? RaNa!

Ra staggered from the temple, his sight returning to him in a riot of undulating dizziness and color. RaNa was perched before him at the edge of the courtyard steps, wheeling in terror from the temple arch, propelled by a rabble of strangers. He heard one thought: mother, and then astonished silence as the steps rushed at RaNa with a violent force and a flare of white exploded in her head. He heard it echoed in his own, like the sound of a thousand clay pots breaking.

And then on the steps—on the steps—

Enough! No further. No further. Nana! Nana! It was enough the first time; death had been the only mercy in that moment; death had been the only comfort; death had been Ra’s lover—please, the blow, quickly—let him die—let me die—take this unbearable thing away; let it end; please; have mercy. Erase; eradicate; forget; oh god, oh god, forget!

Ra convulsed on the floor of her rented room, the body desperate to dislodge the soul. She arched back against the seizure and the vision, the thing she’d fled even sweet death to escape. A sound issued from her mouth that was neither a scream, nor a wail, nor human words, but the sound of her lungs contracting, rejecting air and expelling it violently into the world as a dreadful stridor, as though breathing itself were poison.

She lay still. Traitors, her lungs accepted the return of her enemy, and the vapors of life rushed in, filling her chest so that it rose and fell with a pain like fire. The descending sun crept in along the wooden planks and pointed at her with a narrow, triangular finger. Sweat glistened in her hair—a starburst of wild snakes around her head—like the sacred oil of a god’s anointing, and soaked her white sleeping-gown of cotton so that her naked form was outlined.

She’d repaired the damaged slate of memory. She had restored it. Ra lived.

The Meerchild rocked forward, drawing as quickly as it could. The goddess emerged beneath its blackened fingers, supine on the floor of a wooden room. She was here, so close the child could smell her. She was in Soth In’La. The Meerchild hadn’t known the name of In’La until the visions whispered it. She is here, they told the child. She has come to Soth In’La. She lives.

The child drew the folds of the white gown clinging to her sleeping limbs, the black snaking lines of her hair against the wood, the beads of sweat upon her brow. It drew the window high above her and the winter light upon the floor. It drew the city of In’La and its odd contraptions, its wharf and its piers. It drew the temple in which it had unknowingly spent its entire life.

When it finished, the Meerchild studied the drawings with more care than the Master had ever perused them, memorizing every line. And then it carefully obliterated them with solid fields of black, tore them into tiny pieces, and tucked them beneath its pallet.