Echoes of the Goddess. Darrell Schweitzer. Читать онлайн. Hotlib. HOTLIB.NET

Darrell Schweitzer

Echoes of the Goddess

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BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY DARRELL SCHWEITZER

Conan’s World and Robert E. Howard

Deadly Things: A Collection of Mysterious Tales

Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder from the End of Time

Exploring Fantasy Worlds

The Fantastic Horizon: Essays and Reviews

Ghosts of Past and Future: Selected Poetry

The Robert E. Howard Reader

Speaking of Horror II

Speaking of the Fantastic III: Interviews with Science Fiction Writers

Published by Wildside Press LLC

www.wildsidebooks.com

DEDICATION

To Steve Behrends, whose enthusiasm, support, and nagging contributed substantially to bringing about this book’s existence.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PROLOGUE

The Goddess is dead. The Earth is very old. The fabric of time itself has worn thin. Who knows what might be glimpsed through it?

—Opharastes, After Revelation

At long last, she died. The Goddess of Earth, the Mother of Centuries, the dual mistress of dreams and nightmares, of the burning light and the impenetrable shadow, died.

It was revealed. The prophets knew, but did not proclaim it. There was nothing left to prophesy, save that in some remote, unimaginable future, the godhead would be reborn yet again in a form too strange to be described, like a storm once more gathering strength out of dissipated winds.

But for now, in the interregnum, would be an age of random portents and incoherent miracles.

The priests knew, but kept silent. They heard the divine voice fading away like an echo in a vast cavern.

About this time a certain soldier was mustered out of the army in Ai Hanlo, the capital of the Holy Empire. Wasting his money in taverns, drunk, exhausted from one last debauch, feeling desperation in his soul, he wandered across the plains, into the hills, without seeming direction or purpose, without any goal except to seek rest, to find peace. In his nightmares, all those he had slain in battle pursued him, screaming, their red wounds gaping. He cried out in fear and awoke in darkness, amid the spray of winter rain, but even while he was awake, the dead men proclaimed the news to him, saying, “Our deaths are as nothing. Behold. Look up.”

And he looked up. The clouds parted, and he saw the Goddess falling across the sky, her hair trailing like a comet. To such an unworthy man as he, this vision came, while around him the ghosts of his enemies dissolved like soft clay in the rain.

The soldier abandoned his name, or perhaps forgot it, and lived namelessly until he felt himself worthy, and then assumed another name, Telechronos. Because he happened to dwell in the land of Hesh, he was called the Heshite, though even he no longer knew his exact origin. It was given to him to explain to mankind how, in the fullness of time, even the Goddess must perish, how the fragments of her divinity are scattered across the world like drifting ashes, some of them taking the forms we call the Bright Powers and the Dark, miraculous and dreadful yet not alive, like shadows that can speak.

He explained, too, why young men dream dreams and old men see visions, but the dreams and visions are without any intelligence or meaning, directionless, even if they are still holy.

For in the time of the death of the Goddess the worlds roll aimlessly in the dark spaces, without any hand to guide them. The Powers roam the earth and sky, working merely arbitrary wonders, leaving men to make what sense of them they may.

Let the many voices of these times speak.

Let the stories be written.

In the time of the death of the Goddess—

THE STONES WOULD WEEP

In the time of the death of the Goddess, there lived a boy named Ai Harad, who wanted to be a singer. He was the son of Thain, who had been a soldier, was himself the son of Scidhain, also a soldier, who had served in the Golden Legion of Ambrotae IV, the Guardian of the Bones of the Goddess. When the Goddess was yet living, the Harads had tilled the soil since time’s beginning.

But change was in the air. All things were in upheaval in the time of the death of the Goddess. Signs and wonders multiplied. It was whispered that soon men would be free from caste, no longer subservient to lords, that the world would be remade. Therefore Ain Harad aspired to be a singer.

Now when Thain saw his son grow to be slight and slender and not very tall, he knew that the boy would never bear arms. Therefore he put him to work in a field, minding a herd of goats. The days were long and lonely in that field. The goats only acknowledged Ain’s presence when he poked them with a stick, or stood up and shouted. Although beasts were said to have obtained the ability to speak in the aftermath of the Goddess’s passing, they never revealed the secret to him. He and they regarded one another with close-mouthed contempt and not a little boredom.

To fill the hours, Ain would play upon a kind of lyre, which he had made out of a shell and some string, and sing songs of his own devising. This was his true calling, as anyone who had ever heard him could attest, save for the goats, who offered no opinion. When he sang, he forgot all that was around him, and seemed in a different world. It was as if some fleeting, beautiful spirit possessed him. Perhaps one did. Those were unsettled times.

It was said that when he fell into his trance and played, even the stones would weep at the sound. It was said that the trees bowed down and the streams stopped following, pausing to listen. Many things were said in those days.

And it was also said, or at least observed, that when Ain was enraptured in his music and paid no attention to anything else, the goats would wander off in search of tastier pastures.

One evening in his fifteenth year, he came to himself again after playing, and there was not an animal in sight. He rose, put the lyre into the goatskin bag he wore over his

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