stood my ground.
“Father, where is Mother?”
“As I said…gone to the gods.”
“Will she be coming back?” I asked, hopeless as I did.
Father did not answer. He stood there for a moment, staring into space, as if he’d forgotten I was even there. Then he said suddenly, “What did you see, Sekenre?”
I told him.
He was silent again.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It didn’t mean anything. Did I do something wrong?”
For once he spoke to me tenderly, as he had in the old days when I was very small.
“No, faithful child, you did nothing wrong. Remember that the vision of your life goes on as long as your life does; and, like your life, it is a mystery, a maze, with many turnings, many things suddenly revealed, many things forever hidden. The longer you live, the more you will understand what you have seen this night. Each new piece of the vast puzzle changes the meaning of all that has gone before as you draw nearer and nearer the truth…but you never reach your destination, not entirely.”
The cold and the damp had given me a fever. I lay ill for a week, often delirious, sometimes dreaming that the masked figure in the vision stood at my bedside, barefoot on the surface of the black water while dead reeds rattled all around. Sometimes, as the sun rose, he took off his mask and a heron screamed at me, leaping into the air on thunderous wings. Sometimes it was my father beneath the mask. He came to me each dawn, put his hand on my forehead, recited words I couldn’t make out, and bade me drink a sweet-tasting syrup.
After the fever had gone, I saw him very little. He retreated to his workroom, noisily barring the door. Hamakina and I were left to care for ourselves. Sometimes it was hard just finding food. We tried to assemble the leftover pieces of Mother’s hevats but seldom got much for the results.
Meanwhile, lightning and thunder issued from the workroom. The whole house shook. Sometimes there were incredibly foul odors, and my sister and I would spend our nights outdoors, on rooftops among the beggars of the city, despite all the dangers. And once, as I crouched by the workroom door, terrified and holding back tears, Father spoke and I heard him answered by many voices, all of them faint and far away. One sounded like Mother. All were afraid, pleading, babbling, screaming.
At times I wondered where Mother had gone, and tried to comfort Hamakina.
But in my worst fears, I knew perfectly well what had happened to her. I could not tell Hamakina that.
There was no one I could turn to, for now Father was the most feared of all the city’s black sorcerers, and even the priests dared not anger him. Demons of the air and of the river regularly convened at our house. I heard them scratching, their wings and tails dragging, while my sister and I huddled in our room, or kept to the rooftops.
In the streets, people turned away when they saw us, made signs and spat.
Then one day Father came to me, moving slowly and painfully, as if he were very old. He sat me down at the kitchen table and stared into my eyes for a long time. I was afraid to turn from his gaze. He had been weeping.
“Sekenre,” he said, very gently, “do you love your father still?”
I could not answer.
“You must understand that I love you very much,” he said, “and I always will, no matter what happens. I want you to be happy. I want you to do well in your life. Marry a fine girl. I don’t want you to become what I have become. Be a friend to everybody. Have no enemies. Hate no one.”
“But…how?”
He took me by the hand, firmly. “Come. Now.”
I was terribly afraid, but I went.
There was near panic as he came into the city, yanking me along, walking in his strange way with his whole back writhing and rippling beneath his sorcerer’s robe like a serpent trying to stagger on heavy legs.
People shouted and ran as we passed. Women snatched up their children. A pair of priests crossed their staves to make a sign against us. But Father ignored them all.
We came to a street of fine houses. Astonished faces stared down at us from high windows. Then Father led me to the end of an alley, down a tunnel, and into a yard behind one of the mansions. He knocked at a door. An old man appeared, by his garb a scholar. He gasped and made a sign to ward off evil.
Father pushed me inside.
“Teach my son what you know,” he said to the old man. “I will pay well.”
That was how I became an apprentice to Velachronos the historian, scribe, and poet. I knew letters already, but he taught me to make fine ones full of swirls and beautiful colors. Then he taught me something of the history of our city, and of the river and the gods. I sat with him for long hours, helping to transcribe ancient books.
Clearly Father wanted me to become learned, so that I would dwell in honor among the people of the city, and know at least modest comfort, as Velachronos did. The old man remarked on this once, “You seldom see a rich scholar or a starving one.”
But my sister was ignored completely. Once, when I came home after lessons and found Father outside of his workroom, I said, “What about Hamakina?”
He shrugged. “Take her along. It hardly matters.”
So Velachronos had two apprentices. I think he accepted us out of fear at first. I tried to convince him we were not monsters. Gradually he acquiesced. Father paid him double. I labored over the books. Hamakina, too, learned to paint beautiful letters, and Velachronos taught her something of music, so she could sing the ancient ballads of the city. Her voice was very beautiful.
He was kind to us. I remember the time with him fondly. He was like a grandfather or a generous uncle. He took us to the children’s festival that spring, and rose from his seat to applaud when Hamakina won the prize in the contest of the masks and the sparrow-headed image of the god Haedos-Kemad leaned forward and showered her with candy.
I felt too old for that sort of thing, yet Father had never taken me to the priests to declare me a man. It is a simple rite unless parents want to make it elaborate. There is only a small fee. I had already had my vision from the gods. Yet Father did not take me and I remained a child, either because I was somehow unworthy, or he merely forgot.
Meanwhile his sorceries grew more extreme. At night the sky flickered from horizon to horizon, and sometimes he came out onto the wharf in front of our house to speak with the thunder. It answered back, calling out his name, and, on occasion, my name.
The stenches from the workroom worsened, and there were more voices, more terrifying visitors in the night. But, too, Father would sometimes stagger about the house, pulling at his beard, flailing his arms like a madman, like someone possessed by a frenzied spirit, and he would seize me and shake me so hard it hurt and plead with me, “Do you love me, son? Do you still love your father?”
I could never answer him. It drove me to tears many times. I locked myself in my room and he would stand outside the door, sobbing, whispering, “Do you love me? Do you?”
Then came an evening when I sat studying in my room—Hamakina was off somewhere—and a huge barbarian adventurer climbed in through the window, followed by a little rat-faced man from the City of the Delta.
The barbarian snatched the book from my hands and threw it into the river. He took me by the wrist and jerked. My forearm snapped. I let out a little yelp of pain and the rat-faced man held a long, thin knife like an enormous pin to my face, pressing gently on one cheek, then the other, just below my eyes.
He whispered, flashing filthy teeth. His breath stank.
“Where’s yer famous wizard da’ who’s got all the treasure? Tell us, brat, or I’ll make a blind girl out of ye and tie yer guts fer braids—”
The