Imajica

  “Yes.”

  “And the Autarch didn’t know it?”

  “That’s right. She hid Herself there to escape Hapexamendios when He passed through the Imajica. Jokalaylau went into the snow and was lost there. Tishalullé—”

  “—in the Cradle of Chzercemit,” Jude said.

  “Yes indeed,” said Lotti, plainly impressed.

  “And Uma Umagammagi hid Herself in solid rock,” Paramarola went on, telling the tale as though to a child, “thinking He’d pass over the place not seeing Her. But He chose the Pivot as the center of the Imajica and laid His power upon it, sealing Her in.”

  This was surely the ultimate irony, Jude thought. The architect of Yzordderrex had built his fortress, indeed his entire empire, around an imprisoned Goddess. Nor was the parallel with Celestine lost on her. It seemed Roxborough had been unwittingly working in a grim tradition when he’d sealed Celestine up beneath his house.

  “Where are the Goddesses now?” Jude asked Lotti.

  “On the island. We’ll all be allowed into their presence in time, and we’ll be blessed by them. But it’ll take days.”

  “I don’t have days,” Jude said. “How do I get to the island?”

  “You’ll be called when your time comes.”

  “That has to be now,” Jude said, “or it’ll be never.” She looked left and right along the passageway. “Thank you for the education,” she said. “Maybe I’ll see you again.”

  Choosing right over left she made to leave, but Lotti took hold of her sleeve.

  “You don’t understand, Judith,” she said. “The Goddesses have come to make us safe. Nothing can harm us here. Not even the Unbeheld.”

  “I hope that’s true,” Jude said. “To the bottom of my heart, I hope that’s true. But I have to warn them, in case it isn’t.”

  “Then we’d better come with you,” Lotti said. “You’ll never find your way otherwise.”

  “Wait,” Paramarola said. “Should we be doing this? She may be dangerous.”

  “Aren’t we all?” Lotti replied. “That’s why they locked us away in the first place, remember?”

  II

  If the atmosphere of the streets outside the palace had suggested some post-apocalyptic carnival—the waters dancing, the children laughing, the air pavonine—then that sense was a hundred times stronger in the passageways around the rim of the flood-scoured basin. There were children here too, their laughter more musical than ever. None was over five or so, but there were both boys and girls in the throng. They turned the corridors into playgrounds, their din echoing off walls that had not heard such joy since they’d been raised. There was also water, of course. Every inch of ground was blessed by a puddle, a rivulet, or a stream, every arch had a liquid curtain cascading from its keystone, every chamber was refreshed by burbling springs and roof-grazing fountains. And in every tinkling trickle there was the same sentience that Jude had felt in the tide that had brought her up here: water as life, filled to the last drop with the purpose of the Goddesses. Overhead, the comet was at its height and sent its straight white beams through any chink it could find, turning the humblest puddle into an oracular pool and plaiting its light into the gush of every spout.

  The women in these glittering corridors came in all shapes and sizes. Many, Lotti explained, were like themselves, former prisoners of the Bastion or its dreaded Annex; others had simply found their way up the hill following their instincts and the streams, leaving their husbands, dead or alive, below.

  “Are there no men here at all?”

  “Only the little ones,” said Lotti.

  “They’re all little ones,” Paramarola observed.

  “There was a captain at the Annex who was a brute,” Lotti said, “and when the waters came he must have been emptying his bladder, because his body floated by our cell with his trousers unbuttoned.”

  “And you know, he was still holding on to his manhood,” Paramarola said. “He had the choice between that and swimming—”

  “—and instead of letting go, he drowned,” Lotti said.

  This entertained Paramarola no end, and she laughed so hard the baby’s mouth was dislodged from her teat. Milk spurted in the child’s face, which brought a further round of merriment. Jude didn’t ask how Paramarola came to be so nourishing when she was neither the mother of the child nor, presumably, pregnant. It was just one of the many enigmas this journey showed her: like the pool that clung to one of the walls, filled to brimming with luminous fish; or the waters that imitated fire, from which some of the women had made crowns; or the immensely long eel she saw carried past, its gaping head on a child’s shoulder, its body looped between half a dozen women, back and forth across their shoulders ten times or more. If she’d requested an explanation for any one of these sights she’d have been obliged to inquire about them all, and they’d never have got more than a few yards down the corridor.

  The journey brought them, at last, to a place where the waters had carved out a shallow pool at the edge of the main basin, served by several rivulets that climbed through rubble to fill it to brimming, its overflow running into the basin itself. In it and around it were perhaps thirty women and children, some playing, some talking, but most, their clothes shed, waiting silently in the pool, gazing out across the turbulent waters of the basin to Uma Umagammagi’s island. Even as Jude and her guides approached the place, a wave broke against the lip of the pool and two women, standing there hand in hand, went with it as it withdrew and were carried away towards the island. There was an eroticism about the scene which in other circumstances Jude would certainly have denied she felt. But here, such priggishness seemed redundant, even ludicrous. She allowed her imagination to wonder what it would be like to sink into the midst of this nakedness, where the only scrap of masculinity was between the legs of a suckling infant; to brush breast to breast, and let her fingers be kissed and her neck be caressed, and kiss and caress in her turn.

  “The water in the basin’s very deep,” Lotti said at her side. “It goes all the way down into the mountain.”

  What had happened to the dead, Jude wondered, whose company Dowd had found so educative? Had the waters sluiced them away, along with the invocations and entreaties that had dropped into that same darkness from beneath the Pivot Tower? Or had they been dissolved into a single soup, the sex of dead men forgiven, the pain of dead women healed, and—all mingled with the prayers—become part of this indefatigable flood? She hoped so. If the powers here were to have authority against the Unbeheld, they would have to reclaim every forsaken strength they could. The walls between Kesparates had already been dragged down, and the plashing streams were making a continuum of city and palace. But the past had to be reclaimed as well, and whatever miracles it had boasted—surely there’d been some, even here—preserved. This was more than an abstract desire on Jude’s part. She was, after all, one of those miracles, made in the image of the woman who’d ruled here with as much ferocity as her husband.

  “Is this the only way of getting to the island?” she asked Lotti.

  “There aren’t ferries, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I’d better start swimming, then,” Jude said.

  Her clothes were an encumbrance, but she wasn’t yet so easy with herself that she could strip off on the rocks and go into the waters naked, so with a brief thanks to Lotti and Paramarola she started to climb down the tumble of blocks that surrounded the pool.

  “I hope you’re wrong, Judith,” Lotti called after her.

  “So do I,” Jude replied. “Believe me, so do I.”

  Both this exchange and her ungainly descent drew the puzzled gaze of several of the bathers, but none made any objection to her appearing in their midst. The closer she got to the waters of the basin, the more anxious she became about the crossing, however. It was several years since she’d swum any distance, and she doubted she’d have the strength to resist the currents and eddies if they chose to keep her from her destination. But they woul
dn’t drown her, surely. They’d borne her all the way up here, after all, sweeping her through the palace unharmed. The only difference between this journey and that (though it was a profound one, to be sure) was the depth of the water.

  Another wave was approaching the lip of the pool, and there was a woman and child floating forward to take it. Before they could do so, she took a running jump off the boulder she was perched on, clearing the heads of the bathers below by a hair’s breadth and plunging into the tide. It wasn’t so much a dive as a plummet, and it took her deep. She flailed wildly to right herself, opening her eyes but unable to decide which way was up. The waters knew. They lifted her out of their depths like a cork and threw her up into the spume. She was already twenty yards or more from the rocks and being carried away at speed. She had time to glimpse Lotti searching for her in the surf, then the eddies turned her around, and around again, until she no longer knew the direction in which the pool lay. Instead, she fixed her eyes on the island and began to swim as best she could towards it. The waters seemed content to supplement her efforts with energies of their own, though they were describing a spiral around the island, and as they carried her closer to its shore they also swept her in a counterclockwise motion around it.

  The comet’s light fell on the waves all around her, and its glitter kept the depths from sight, which she was glad of. Buoyed up though she was, she didn’t want to be reminded of the pit beneath her. She put all her will into the business of swimming, not even allowing herself to enjoy the roiling of the waters against her body. Such luxury, like the questions she’d wanted to ask as she’d walked with Lotti and Paramarola, was for another day.

  The shore was within fifty yards of her now, but her strokes became increasingly irrelevant the closer to the island she came. As the spiral tightened, the tide became more authoritative, and she finally gave up any attempt at self-propulsion and surrendered herself utterly to the hold of the waters. They carried her around the island twice before she felt her feet scraping the steeply inclined rocks beneath the surge, presenting her with a fine, if giddying, view of Uma Umagammagi’s temple. Not surprisingly, the waters had been more inspired here than in any other spot she’d seen. They’d worked at the blocks of which the tower was built, monumental though they were, eroding the mortar between them, then eating at them top and bottom, replacing their severity with a mathematics of undulation. Slabs of stone the height of the masons who’d first carved them were no longer locked together but balanced like acrobats, one corner laid against another, while radiant water ran through the cavities and carried on its work of turning the once-impregnable tower into a wedded column of water, stone, and light. The eroded motes had run off in the rivulets and been deposited on the shore as a fine, soft sand, in which Jude lay when she emerged from the basin, given a giggling welcome by a quartet of children playing nearby.

  She allowed herself only a minute to catch her breath; then she got to her feet and started up the beach towards the temple. Its doorway was as elaborately eroded as the blocks, a veil of bright water concealing the interior from those waiting nearby. There were perhaps a dozen women at the threshold. One, a girl barely past pubescence, was walking on her hands; somebody else seemed to be singing, but the music was so close to the sound of running water that Jude couldn’t decide whether a voice was flowing or some stream was aspiring to melody. As at the pool, nobody objected to her sudden appearance, nor remarked on the fact that she was weighed down by waterlogged clothes while they were in various states of undress. A benign languor was on them all, and had it not been for Jude’s willpower she might have let it claim her, too. She didn’t hesitate, however, but stepped through the water door without so much as a murmur to those waiting at the threshold.

  Inside, there was no solid sight to greet her. Instead, the air was filled with forms of light, folding and unfolding as though invisible hands were performing a lucid origami. They weren’t working towards petty resemblance, but transforming their radiant stuff over and over, each new shape on its way to becoming another before it was fixed. She looked down at her arms. They were still visible, but not as flesh and blood. They’d learned the trick of the light already and were blossoming into a multiplicity of forms in order to join the play. She reached out to touch one of her fellow visitors with her burgeoning fingers and, brushing her, caught a glimpse of the woman from whom this origami had emerged. She appeared the way a body might if a damp sheet billowed against it, momentarily clinging to the shape of her hip, her cheek, her breast, then billowing again and snatching the glimpse away. But there’d been a smile there, she was certain of that.

  Reassured that she was neither alone nor unwelcome here, she began to advance into the temple. The promise of eroticism she’d first felt as she gazed into the pool was now realized. She felt the forms of her own body spreading like milk dropped into the fluid air and grazing the bodies of those she was passing between. Musings, most no more than half formed, mingled with the sensation. Perhaps she would dissolve here and flow out through the walls to join the waters around the islands; or perhaps she was already in that sea, and the flesh and blood she thought she’d owned was just a figment of those waters, conjured to comfort the lonely land. Or perhaps . . . or perhaps . . . or perhaps. These speculations were not divorced from the brushing of form against form but were part of the pleasure, her nerves bearing these fruits, which in turn made her more tender to the touches of her companions.

  They were falling away as she advanced, she realized. Her progress was taking her up into the heights of the temple. If there had been solid ground beneath her feet, she’d lost all sense of it as she crossed the threshold and rose without effort, her stuff possessed of the same law-defying genius as had been the waters below. There was another motion ahead and above her, more sinuous than the forms she’d met at the door, and she rose towards it as if summoned, praying that when the moment came she’d have the words and lips to shape the thoughts in her head. The motion was getting clearer and if she’d had any doubt below as to whether these sights were imagined or seen, she now had such dichotomies swept away.

  She was both seeing with her imagination and imagining she saw the glyph that hung in the air in front of her: a Möbius strip of light-haunted water, a steady rhythm passing through its seamless loop and throwing off waves of brilliant color, which shed bright rains around her. Here was the raiser of springs; here was the summoner of rivers; here was the sublime presence whose strength had brought the palace to rubble and made a home for oceans and children where there’d only been terror before. Here was Uma Umagammagi.

  Though she studied the Goddess’s glyph, Jude could see no hint of anything that breathed, sweated, or corrupted in it. But there was such an emanation of tenderness from the form that, faceless as the Goddess was, it seemed to Jude she could feel Her smile, Her kiss, Her loving gaze. And love it was. Though this power knew her not at all, Jude felt embraced and comforted as only love could embrace and comfort. There’d never been a time in her life, until now, when some part of her had not been afraid. It was the condition of being alive that even bliss was attended by the imminence of its decease. But here such terrors seemed absurd. This face loved her unconditionally and would do so forever.

  “Sweet Judith,” she heard the Goddess say, the voice so charged, so resonant, that these few syllables were an aria. “Sweet Judith, what’s so urgent that you risk your life to come here?”

  As Uma Umagammagi spoke, Jude saw her own face appearing in the ripples, brightening, then teased out into a thread of light that was run into the Goddess’s glyph. She’s reading me, Jude thought. She’s trying to understand why I’m here, and when She does She’ll take the responsibility away. I’ll be able to stay in this glorious place with Her, always.

  “So,” said the Goddess after a time. “This is a grim business. It falls to you to choose between stopping this Reconciliation or letting it go on and risking some harm from Hapexamendios.”

  “Yes,
” Jude replied, grateful that she’d been relieved of the need to explain herself. “I don’t know what the Unbeheld is planning. Maybe nothing . . .”

  “. . . and maybe the end of the Imajica.”

  “Could He do that?”

  “Very possibly,” said Uma Umagammagi. “He’s done harm to Our temples and Our sisters many, many times, both in His own person and through His agents. He’s a soul in error, and lethal.”

  “But would He destroy a whole Dominion?”

  “I can no more predict Him than you can,” Umagammagi said. “But I’ll mourn if the chance to complete the circle is missed.”

  “The circle?” said Jude. “What circle?”

  “The circle of the Imajica,” the Goddess replied. “Please understand, sister, the Dominions were never meant to be divided this way. That was the work of the first human spirits, when they came into their terrestrial life. Nor was there any harm in it, at the beginning. It was their way of learning to live in a condition that intimidated them. When they looked up, they saw stars. When they looked down, they saw Earth. They couldn’t make their mark on what was above, but what was below could be divided and owned and fought over. From that division, all others sprang. They lost themselves to territories and nations, all shaped by the other sex, of course; all named by them. They even buried themselves in the Earth to have it more utterly, preferring worms to the company of light. They were blinded to the Imajica, and the circle was broken, and Hapexamendios, who was made by the will of these men, grew strong enough to forsake His makers and so passed from the Fifth Dominion into the First—”

  “—murdering Goddesses as He went.”

  “He did harm, yes, but He could have done greater harm still if He’d known the shape of the Imajica. He could have discovered what mystery it circled and gone there instead.”

  “What mystery’s that?”

  “You’re going back into a dangerous place, sweet Judith, and the less you know the safer you’ll be. When the time comes, we will unravel these mysteries together, as sisters. Until then take comfort that the error of the Son is also the error of the Father, and in time all errors must undo themselves and pass away.”