I’ll tell you a story, then. This is a story I tell myself from time to time. A tiny city was overrun by soldiers who took its little god and a very young local man to look after it. The two of them were locked away together. The man was sad because he’d seen the soldiers kill his family with swords and now he was without them. The god was sad for godly reasons. Because he’d let his people down and now their crops would rot, and because he knew how they’d come for him and look at him when they got him back and no one had ever asked him to god them.
The man cried and he was angry with the god. “My baby’s dead,” the man said. “My wife is dead. What good are you? Set me free. You’re the only god of my city so you’re the god of everything. Harvests and war and childbirth and everything. And death. I’m too afraid,” the man shouted. There were knives in the armory but he wouldn’t pick them up. “So you do it for me. Don’t I worship you? Do it.”
The god felt the man’s worship, and, farther away, the worship of his other people as they approached with ransom. It gave him no strength, it made him tired.
The man and the god watched from the top window of the tower. “They’re coming,” the man said, “and you’ll have to start doing your job again.”
The man looked into the god’s silver eyes. The god looked into the man’s gray. The man jerked like a toy, grabbed his chest, gasped and wheezed and fell down.
The priests and the soldiers of the victorious city came up the stairs, escorting the defeated holy men and women. They heard a great crash and a scream. They rushed into the top room.
Strewn across the floor were the remains of the captive god. The man had smashed it against the walls. It was all in pieces. Its wood was in splinters. Its metal was twisted. Its gems—and there were never many—were scattered and broken. There in the middle of the rubbish stood the young prisoner. He was slapping the sides of his own body and his head, screaming and staring with wide eyes at his own hands.
The high priest assured his defeated enemies that this hadn’t been his orders, that it was an insane action by this slave. Who was, he reminded them, one of their own countrymen. Nonetheless, the deicide brought a bit of shame to the priest. It had occurred under his city’s authority. Of course their city had to stay under his city’s control, but they could keep their ransom. And the slave, he told them, would be executed.
But when they’d gone, he looked thoughtfully at the young man, who was still gripping his own flesh as if it bewildered him.
“I’m going to have you whipped,” he said. “But what happened? You hate gods now? All of them? Or just your own? For failing you?
“If you ever do anything like that again without instruction,” he said, “I’ll have you killed. But I need a slave who has a bit of scorn for gods. A bit of spite. Just enough not to be cowed by them.”
He had the young man whipped, and then he had him bandaged, and then he told him what his duties would be. And the new slave said to him, “Not spite. Pity.”
Don’t be afraid. Were you sleeping? I’m going to take my hand off your mouth now.
Can you see the moon?
Oh thank you. You’re kind. You are a kind god. Let me kiss your cold face.
Tonight I could hear the soldiers downstairs like snorting calves. I heard them eating and laughing, shuffling in their blankets, and I started to hear them more and more clearly. I heard, I heard the secrets that floors and walls tell in their creaks. When I got up I don’t remember, or how, perhaps I flew as if my feet had little wings, or as if my head was a cloud. But I was by the window and that moon talked back to me in its light.
There are things about the ways bodies see. There are things to be said for how flesh eyes see night and fail to see it. But to look through shadows to where the mountains are like the teeth of fishes again! Everything’s silver like the metal that was upstairs on the floor a long time ago.
The soldiers are moving early. Visitors are coming with tribute for you.
Don’t be sad, god. What you’ve done—it’s such a thing.
Follow my finger towards, yes, there, not a bat but a moth, and its heart rises in its little moth chest because it’s in love. Geese will wake and cry in the day soon, and the lava in the ground will answer them.
I’ll put my arms around you. These are old man’s arms but let me carry you my friend, let’s rise, like when you fly. Yes you’re heavy even though you’re not so very gold but I don’t care how heavy you are. I’m not as heavy as I was once, either, or as strong, but I’ll carry you.
Look. In the mountains are rock machines and rock ships with eyes, and we can see the edges in the seamless stone that separate those things from the rock that holds up the trees.
Your worshippers are coming. I know. Come up with me to the top room.
They’re coming to buy your freedom, you small heavy god. Your city’ll be a colony and your worshippers’ll take you back.
Come in. That’s only wood on the floor. All the scraps of silver they took away, years ago, to make more of their own gods in the city. That wood I leave there for nostalgia. To push it into my fingers.
You never heard my name and I never heard yours. It doesn’t matter at all. Listen to what that angry cloud is telling you, the mutter of all the animals on the crest of the hill.
I can’t remember: did a young man destroy his miserable god, or did a god free its worshipper and take his blood and his bones?
Well.
Let me put you here to talk to the sun, which is coming soon, to talk to it with your motionless golden mouth and the scatter of its heat on you. Let me put you down—these arms are shaking!—not in the alcove by the junk of an older god’s body, but right here, out on the ledge as far as I can, so the wind worships you. That worship doesn’t hurt? No. That you can bear a minute.
They’ll call me mad again. Here come your worshipping people, and that’s another thing: don’t worry, you’re ready, and no one will do anything for you or to you, you do it all, you’re a god, you move in your ways. I’ll put you one tiny bit closer to the air so the birds are ready for you.
And don’t think me rude as I leave a little grease kiss on the back of your head and turn my back. This is your communion. I’m going to jump and dance—these old legs! The floor’s vibrating, more and more now as here come the soldiers and your worshippers. Don’t be sad, you needn’t see: you are facing the other way.
My dance makes the tower shake. You quiver on your threshold.
They call out to you! How sad they are to see you move!
And you aren’t sad any more. Thank you, you kind god.
So. Feathers like mountains, or knives, unfolded gold? Rush.
SÄCKEN
Joanna took Mel to Dresden, to the Frauenkirche. They timed their visit to coincide with a monthly English evensong. “Firebombs not enough?” Mel whispered. “Now we inflict Anglicanism on them?” Her giggles attracted attention.
“Jesus,” Joanna muttered, shaking her head but laughing too. “Shut up.”
They left the city and drove on busy roads for more than an hour through diminishing satellite towns. Then through smaller towns still and a rolling damp landscape. The clouds came low. Joanna and Mel played their mountain playlist, though these were hills not mountains.
“Into the woods,” said Joanna, and made witch fingers.
Past Tharandt and through pretty forests, south at Freiburg. The country was thick with trees. Small rivers veered in the undergrowth. Joanna and Mel passed barns from which languid animals watched them.
In a market town Mel tried out German words as she bought bread, cheese, meat, and wine. She didn’t entertain or win over the shopkeeper. Outside she watched a cat trot the length of an alley wall-top. A middle-aged woman in a saggy dress nodded to the tall young Englishwoman.
“Spying on locals?” Joanna said.
“Just greeting the polite Fraulein.”
“Frau, I feel certain,” said Joanna.
They ascended. “I
s that the lake?” Joanna said. To the right the trees climbed and grew more densely. To the left as the slope fell away they petered out, and through them Joanna and Mel kept glimpsing water. They cheered.
At a junction, Joanna paused the car and tied up her hair, tilted her head back and forth, looking at the road alternately through and over her glasses. “What?” she said, because Mel was smiling at her.
“There’s a little village down there, I think,” Joanna said. “Look out for a green gate. That’s our marker.”
“That can’t go wrong,” Mel said. “A gate in the middle of the country. We’ll be fine.” But Joanna showed her her phone with the picture she’d been sent and there was in fact no mistaking the entrance. They saw it from some way off, slanting across a muddy turnoff.
“You’re up,” Joanna said. “Good luck in those shoes.”
Mel put up her middle finger at Joanna. She got out and crossed the mud and grass with long strides, without incident, to open and close the gate. She returned to the car and patted her imaginary do. “Impressed,” said Joanna, and they drove down the rocking slant of gravel through trees, past what might once have been a neat garden and was now boiling with greenery and low bushes, left wild while the house it surrounded was spruced. Beyond the bramble and the house was the lake.
There it was, imperfectly reflecting the trees and sky and the few other houses at its edge. The shore curved out of sight to the east. Mel and Joanna looked across the lake at moored boats, at paths and clearings in the trees where people could come to the water.
The house was modern and whitewashed. It looked to Mel like a film set. “Did we not do good?” she said. Joanna struggled with the groceries and the unfamiliar keys and gently kicked open the door to enter. Mel stood on the path, staring. “Did we not?”
“Who’s ‘we’?” Joanna said. “One of us as I recall did the online hunting. While the other put in some really invaluable complaining time.” She put food on the table.
“You did good,” Mel said. “Can we explore?”
The furnishings made them joke about IKEA. They were both surprised by the roughness of the grounds. “It’s not like it was cheap,” said Mel. She was paying a token amount. “They could’ve tidied it up.”
“Honestly, you don’t know you’re alive,” said Joanna. She was also disappointed. “Kids these days. I like it like this.”
They pushed through the undergrowth like children finding secret paths. At the end of a jetty a small boat swayed in the lake. Joanna consulted her information sheet. “That’s ours.”
“Come on,” Mel said. She lowered herself in. She struggled with the oars.
“You look like Alice,” Joanna said.
“When does Alice go rowing?”
“She goes with a sheep. She catches a crab.”
Joanna let herself be talked in. Ostentatiously cack-handed, laughing at their own incompetence, taking turns with the oars, she and Mel wobbled away from the mooring, watched by birds.
They hauled and pulled and mocked themselves. They slowed. They kissed at last, many meters from land. If they were watched from any houses they would only be specks. The air was cooling. After a few minutes they turned their boat and, yanking and moaning, headed back in.
Later, when they were inside, as the evening came, lights appeared in the windows of the houses over the water. “Look,” said Joanna.
The first few hours after breakfast, Joanna worked on her essays. That had always been the plan. She piled up the books and printouts she had brought, theses on Dresden’s golden age, centuries of diplomacy, law, and culture. The books were thick with place-markers.
“Which are you doing first?” said Mel. “Don’t do the one on King What’s-his-face, that other one sounds more fun. His mistress, who used to be a slave or something?”
“Maria Aurora’s the sugar lump,” said Joanna. “Augustus is the castor oil that gets me funding. Speaking of, I have to do that conference proposal too.”
On the second day, Mel pretended her boredom was playfulness. Pushing open the door to the study with her head, she crept in on all fours. “Hush, ignore me,” she muttered, “I’m only a quiet cat.” Joanna gave one short laugh.
Mel coiled in the armchair but Joanna did not acknowledge her again and after a while Mel left. When Joanna came down to make coffee she found Mel on the sofa. She had plugged her console into the television and was playing a video game with the sound off.
Joanna had to look away. What incredible petulance, she thought. To do that here, amid all these trees, in the light from this water. She felt the years between her and Mel. She felt like an older sister. But upstairs again, she sat back in her chair and glanced at the lake and there to her great pleasure and surprise she saw Mel, in the boat, gamely and inelegantly rowing.
Mel splashed and pulled the oars and fastened them up in their housings. She sat back in the boat in her London clothes. She picked up a book and began to read. Joanna put her fingertips on the glass. Mel was not looking in her direction. It was too far to see if Mel was smiling too.
When Mel returned Joanna came down but Mel raised an elegant eyebrow and pointed upstairs. “Back to work, you,” she said. She took a kitchen chair into the garden and read there for a while then dropped her book for ants and woodlice to walk over. She watched the moon while it was still just day, until Joanna called her in for food.
After supper she headed back out.
“You’ll be eaten alive,” said Joanna.
“I’ve got bug stuff,” said Mel.
Joanna was checking emails at the kitchen table. Mel looked back from outside and the doorway was a glowing crack.
Grass pulled at her. She walked toward the dark chop of the lake. Mel found her book and picked it up and brushed it clean. The wind came up. Mel let the water wet the toes of her trainers. These were the ones she did not mind getting ruined.
The shore was littered with dead, bleached plant matter. In England, she thought, the little waves would be throwing up crisp packets and plastic. Mostly the stones were the wrong shape to skim but she found a disc-ish one and sent it skipping five times across the water. She felt again among the weeds.
“Can you close the door?” Joanna called across the dark garden. “Midges.”
In the water at the shore Mel saw what looked like a perfect stone, but when she picked it up it was too light to be stone at all. She looked at it in the light from her phone.
It was black wood, slick with algae, the size and shape of a medal. On one face were eroded ridges. She stared and felt them under her thumb. They weren’t random. They were outlines, a tiny figure, five stick limbs.
Mel stood quickly and swayed, dizzy. She shook her head at a sudden smell, and then the wind came in and brought a much worse gust. “Jesus Christ,” she said. Cold air buffeted the garden and her hair.
She threw the wood as hard as she could into the undergrowth.
“What?” Joanna said when Mel came in. She got up from her typing, putting her glasses up in her pinned-back hair. “What is it?”
“Off, off,” Mel said, shrugging Joanna’s hands from her and striding to the sink to wash. “Something stinks.”
When Joanna had suggested Mel join her on this trip, Mel had immediately walked away from her temp work at a solicitor’s office. Joanna was delighted by Mel’s insouciance: this was the second job she had quit since graduating less than a year before.
Joanna had rented the house for nearly two months. Mel would be there for half that time.
While Joanna worked, Mel rowed out most mornings, with a big travel mug of coffee wedged between the knees of her least expensive jeans. The drink cooled quickly. She didn’t mind it cold.
The lake was green and silty. Mel reached into it. Her skin disappeared. Even in the sunlight the dark water amputated her hand only a few centimeters down. She clenched unseen fingers, made a fist, saw nothing but eddies.
A man and woman stood on a jetty on the far bank. M
el waved to them and the woman waved back. They watched her drift. She reclined and read. She always took two books into the boat with her: one nonfiction, for the postgraduate work she still told Jo she was contemplating; one fiction. That morning, like all mornings, she read the novel. She enjoyed how her wet hand buckled every page it touched.
A cockerel crowed. Mel started.
She lost her grip on the cup in the row lock where she’d rested it. It dropped into the water. “Oh fuck,” she said and sat up, reaching for it quickly but it was going down in bubbles and was almost instantly out of sight, leaving a coil of coffee.
The crowing came again. It sounded close. Mel made the boat rock in the middle of all the water, looking about. The only birds were far overhead, and silent.
“Met some of our neighbors,” Mel said. “Did you clock the other boats out here? We’re so the poor relations.” She served Joanna a ladleful of stew.
“Bloody hell,” said Joanna. “This is amazing.”
“I dropped my cup in the lake.”
“Oh, you’re kidding. That was a rare mid-period Starbucks Dynasty, wasn’t it?”
“There’s some chippy little cockerel around here,” Mel said.
“Das ist der countryside. Are you surprised?”
“I don’t know from cocks,” Mel said.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Joanna said, “she’ll be here all week.”
After supper Mel heard the crowing again. She and Joanna were standing in the bedroom with the lights off, looking across the water and at the clouds. “Hear that?” Mel said. “That bird’s nuts, it’s the middle of the night.”
“I didn’t hear.”
“There,” said Mel. “There it is again.” But Joanna was walking away. She pulled back the covers and lay down and waited.
Mel did not sleep but listened to the noises of the house. She listened to Joanna’s breathing, its slow and lovely rhythms.
Before dawn, Mel rose and tiptoed downstairs. She smoked with the door to the garden open, exhaling into the tangle. She hugged herself though it was not as cold as she had expected. She wore only slippers and her outdoor coat over a long T-shirt. When she finished her cigarette she hesitated, then walked quickly through the vegetation. The wind made bushes bow.