“It is done with great care and love,” Balthazar explained gently, “and the solemnity of the ritual is touching—for them, to kill the father is to release the son from the shadow of that great man, and to place your death in the hands of a beloved son is the most noble way to perish. We do not judge. We never judge. Nevertheless, you are equipped with neither male aspect nor a father, and so could not enter the Tower. And since it is rather clear to us that you are female, the Tower of Hermaphrodites is also barred to you—the secret must be kept from all, and we are already aware of your sex.”
“You are left with the Tower of Sun-and-Moon,” Bartholomew went on, “who have their eyes turned ever upwards, charting the courses of the heavens, and ever earthwards, watching for glimpses of dustbound Stars. They collect ways of worshipping—some say the Stars were chewed out of a black horse, some out of a woman whose skin was the sky, some say they were awled in the belt of heaven, or worried out of the keel of an infinite ship by celestial mice. The Tower has all their gospels catalogued. But the Stars are not gods, they say; they are just lost children, as we all are. They are the most ancient order among us, and also the poorest, for the educated and wealthy have palates refined towards more complex and colorful faiths.
“The Nightingale Tower, too, would take you: Their method of worship lies in music, and the filling of the heavens with their songs, for they serve the sibling-Stars Chandra and Anshu, who made the first music of the world between them with their illuminate voices. There are also Towers of the Living and the Dead. With the Living you would be bonded to a creature: a falcon, or a wildcat, or a serpent, even a little green mantis—for they believe that divinity resides in even the smallest of beasts, and that they are the voices of heaven. Your union with the creature would be absolute; you would hunt and live and die as one being.
“In the Tower of the Dead, you would study the bodies of all those who die in the City—blood-magic and lymph-magic and the arcana of rigor mortis. They believe that this life is only an initiation, that death is the beginning of enlightenment. The corpse is the vessel of knowledge; the soul goes on to other spheres, leaving the body saturated with the secrets of this world. They worship the Manikarnika, who are long dead, their bodies long lost, and raise altars to their ghosts.”
“But which one is right? The real gods? The truth?” I asked.
Balthazar smiled gently, as if speaking to a very slow child. “That is not for us to judge. Each of us believes what seems true enough to him, and allows others the same luxury. Who can know what happened in the dim dawn of the world? We can barely decide what to have for breakfast without a theological debate—the Nurian law is polite disagreement. We do our best with how the world appears to our own eyes.”
Bags snorted and scratched behind his furry ear. “I think you’re forgetting one, brother.”
“Oh, yes,” said Bartholomew, dismissively, “the Tower of St. Sigrid, which, while we certainly do not judge, is hardly a religion at all. They follow in all things the example of the philosopher-mariner, Saint Sigrid of the Boiling Sea, who was neither a Star nor any other sort of god, and whose feats change each time you ask a Sigrid about their Lady. She was a great navigator, they say. She was a sea-goddess in the lands of old. She was a humble oarswoman. She had three breasts and grew a beard. Who can tell? They are secretive, and they ply the river’s current on ships of cypress-wood and tell no one of their rites.”
“And there is our own Tower,” said Bags fondly, “the Chrysanthemum. And of us you know already—The Book of the Bough and The Book of Carrion, the sanctity of plants, of all growing things, which give us of their own lives so that we may live.” He tousled my hair as if I were a child. “Of course, all the Towers are specialized and rarefied faiths—some have to do with the countryside faith of the Stars, some do not. Religion is a starchy dish, and we spice it more exotically here.”
I breathed deeply, intoxicated by the variety of Towers and people—my village had contained no more than a few hundred souls, and only one Temple, little more than a cave of ice in the mountainside. But I did not have any particular predilection for birds or cats, beyond the eating of them; I could neither sing nor play any instrument at all. In the end, I decided that I had spent half my life already in the worship of the sky—I had given enough to them, more than enough. And, much as it shamed me to think it, I did not wish to bow down to flowers and never again eat venison rich with spices. I saw no sin in it; it was not in my nature. And this left but one Tower.
“I will not say I have decided—I know so little! But take me to the Tower of St. Sigrid…”
In the Garden
THE GIRL’S EYES SEEMED TO REFLECT THE MOONLIGHT, SILVER TRACKS appearing in the solid black of her skin. Her voice had suddenly ceased, cutting off her tale like a fisherman tying off his line. She looked into the distance at the waving plum trees, their leaves glinting dark and light as the wind shuffled them lazily. The pond rippled silkily beside them, lapping against the cattails and arching roots of bowing willows. The boy shifted, feeling that he was hardly noticed anymore, that the girl was telling her tale to the night itself, and did not even see him sitting before her. Would she now brave his tower window to sit beside him? He feared to leave her, that he might never find her again in the vast Garden, with its labyrinth of hibiscus and jasmine, its flocks of tame birds, their tails glittering like a treasure house, its tall cypresses pointing upwards like hands of pilgrims.
His breath was as short as it ever was when her voice slid into him. Despite his confusion, the city of Al-a-Nur had laid itself out somewhere in h
is belly, spreading its Towers through his little body, and he had fallen into the trance that the girl could induce in him so easily, roaming those profoundly blue streets and smoke-filled alleys in his own dreaming gait, nibbling a sugared apple bought from a yellow-robed monk, and yearning to vanish into a Tower of his own.
Suddenly the girl focused her attention on him, and his heart leapt like a frog after the moon at its sound.
“I am sorry… sorry that I left you for so long. I didn’t mean for you to be hurt by it.” She hid her face in the shadows, and the boy trembled a little, but did not let it show.
The girl smiled, tentative as a hare in a field, and began again.
SNOW’S FINGERS WERE WET AND THICK; SHE COULD hardly feel the coarse net ropes between them. She turned her head away from Sigrid, shamed. She felt suddenly as if she were a ghost in her own life—this woman had been young and alone like her, and had found her way to a city of gods and wolf-headed friends, whereas Snow had found nothing at all but a cold waterfront and a teasing nickname spoken so often she had forgotten what her real name might ever have been. All she had done was slowly turn the color of this freezing, heartless town, and the color of the sea that battered it with salt. She wondered if she had any blood left in her, or if her body had just filled up with water and cold.
“I wish,” she whispered, “that I were as brave and bright as you, that I could go to such a place, and meet such folk, and know about such things.”
Sigrid frowned, her curly hair flattened against her broad forehead by the damp, like a monk’s tonsure. “That’s funny, you know. I spent most of my time in Al-a-Nur wishing I were as brave and bright as Saint Sigrid. We all have someone we think shines so much more than we do that we are not even a moon to their sun, but a dead little rock floating in space next to their gold and their blaze.”
Snow breathed on her fingers. Their tips did not warm, even the littlest bit. She looked up sidelong at Sigrid, whose cheeks were whipped to scarlet in the wind.
“I certainly thought everything in the world outshone me then, and Bags the brightest of all, until I met the next brightest of all, and the next…”
BAGS AGREED TO TAKE ME TO THE TOWER OF S
His rust-colored fur caught the late afternoon sun and turned it into a sweet, merry fire. The darkness of the Black Papess seemed to have slid from him like old clothes once he had crossed the threshold into Al-a-Nur, and his wolfish face wore a wide smile; he seemed to be breathing in the city as we walked.
“It’s all right that you’re not coming with us, you know. You might be… uncomfortable. Most of the Chrysanthemums are like me—if not Cynocephaloi, other half-breeds of various kinds. The Sigrids are lovely, despite what Bartholomew says. We don’t strictly have a deity like most of the Towers. We don’t really pay much attention to Stars, either way. The divine is present in the earth, in all growing things, all life and all death, and the Bough guides us through life, Carrion through death. That’s enough for me. Bartholomew looks down on some because they don’t have any sort of worship at all, like the Patricides, or because they idolize a person who couldn’t possibly be better than any other person—but I never met a Sigrid who wouldn’t steer her boat to your aid if you called her, and that’s the truth.” He giggled behind his brown, splay-fingered hand.
“Of course, they’re terrible at Lo Shen. They can’t help it—they lead with their Triremes every time.” Suddenly he stopped, and a shadow passed over his face like a cormorant’s wing. “I wonder if we’ll be allowed to enter our Tower again. I don’t think there is divinity to be found in the death we gave.” He snapped back to me as quickly as he had gone into himself. “Ah, here we are.”
The Tower of St. Sigrid was a mammoth spire made entirely of broken ships. Prows jutted out at all angles, long keels and tall masts wrapped the walls, rigging and sails like vines and veils hanging haphazard from every window. At the entrance stood a gargantuan ship’s wheel, warped and splintered with age, casting its long shadow towards the bolted door. The sentry was a muscular woman whose head had been roughly shaved. Her wide, flat teeth shone brightly. At the sight of her, Bags’s eyes lit like lamps on a midwinter night. She greeted my canine friend with an enormous embrace that would have cracked the bones of a musk ox.
“Bags, old mate! You whelp! You never come to see me anymore! Afraid I’ll take your God down a peg or two?”
“Not as long as you keep throwing your ’Remes around like they’re ten for a penny!” He clapped her prodigious back and rubbed her bald head happily. “I’ve got a recruit for you, Sigrid—we picked her up on the lichen flats up north. She’s a dear, eager little thing, but she hasn’t quite made up her mind as to a Tower yet. Likes her morning bacon a bit too much to come in with us.” He winked at me and I blushed deeply, ashamed at his guess.