What the Right Hand Carries

What the Right Hand Carries 54 MINUTE READ

God does not apologize, least of all to His angels.

You do not apologize to your hand when you injure it. You do not apologize to your eye when the light strikes it too hard. Him apologizing to me was as pointless as the pained noises I learned to make from Jeannie when I hit my shin on a table. The hurt is inconsequential. Offense can only be given to things separate from you.

God apologized.

“We’re not even made with as much consideration as a hand,” Gabriel said that night we met again after a thousand years apart. “You cage yourself for no reason. Isn’t that infuriating? Isn’t that alive?”

I am not supposed to be alive. Living things are distinct things. Separate things. Not angels. And what is there to apologize for?

…

Ginika had never learned to write. She had no shame over it. Her purpose was not to impart information, it was to watch, then wield the flame. Speaking was only useful when it moved humans out of her way and enemies into it.

Assistant Librarian Carnation Hucks at the Dryades Colored Branch of the New Orleans Public Library seemed to think she was ashamed, though. At least given how often she assured Ginika such shame was natural, but nothing she needed to hold on to, during their hour-long appointment.

“We have some amazing writers,” Carnation said as she brought Ginika, along with pencils and paper, to settle in the reading room. “Our collection has volumes to borrow from W. E. B. Du Bois, Fauset, Hughes, even a fifth edition of Poems on Various Subjects by Phyllis Wheatley—she published before America was even founded! Once you can read, so much will be—”

“I can read,” Ginika corrected her. “I cannot write. I would like to know how.”

Carnation blinked at her owlishly, eyes enlarged by her Coke-bottom glasses. “You… You never even tried to copy the letter shapes?” At Ginika’s stony silence she backpedaled. “It’s just that the two tend to go hand-in-hand…”

“It was not my work to do,” Ginika said.

Carnation’s expression moved sympathetic again. Ginika weighed the librarian’s misplaced desire to be of help against her own selfish pursuit. Was it selfish? Asking internally yielded nothing more concrete than the feeling of vague dread that carried her to the library in the first place. She asked externally.

“Is it selfish? To… inscribe what I know to be true, before it is lost? If it may be lost?”

“No, honey,” Carnation said, leaning forward to grasp Ginika’s hands. “No, no, there… There’s no telling how much we’ve lost because so many couldn’t put a pen to the page. We have stories of hurts, things that had to be known to make a change, but so few joys, or even easy days…”

Ginika’s teeth ached with the need to clarify, to be plain in her purpose so there was no room for interpretation or misunderstanding. But Carnation wasn’t looking at her. She was looking at a young black woman in a cheap dress who didn’t know how to write. If Ginika truly focused, she knew in a way beyond knowing Carnation was looking at her mother. That she saw her in every young black woman who grimaced over not understanding a word or misspelling it.

“I can make the shapes,” Ginika offers, because it isn’t untrue. “I do not know how I should… arrange them? How I should order Mem… my memories. How to make the letters curl together.”

Carnation grinned and pushed her glasses back up the broad bridge of her nose. “So… grammar, styles of memoir, and penmanship?”

“Is it too much?” Ginika asked.

“Not at all,” Carnation promised. She hopped up from her seat. “As a matter of fact—let me just grab one more thing, alright? And you…” She snatched a pencil and a scrap of paper and jotted down three names: Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. “…you run back to the shelves and hunt these folks up, please!”

They reconvened a few minutes later, Ginika with a pile of books and Carnation with a parcel wrapped in brown paper. They exchanged their burdens.

“I picked it up on a whim this morning,” Carnation explained as Ginika stared quizzically at the wrapped item. “Like I don’t have a dozen. Comes of working with words, you know? It’s the go-to gift. But, maybe… it’s a sillier thought, but maybe I got it for you, huh?”

Ginika unfolded the paper to reveal a red, leather-bound book with the words DAILY REMINDER embossed on the cover. Ginika stared at them until she realized Carnation was fidgeting.

“You do not know what you’ve done for me,” Ginika said.

“I might,” Carnation said. “Let’s take a look at the books you brought over, now, and get started.”

In the beginning I was the wrong shape.

Physical shapes were difficult for Him. He knew an extension of Himself would need a shape to visit the world He had found, but beyond that His understanding was vague. He looked down as much as He was able. Then, working slowly, He took His Memory and made it into many shapes. He knew I would need to be many things to serve.

Plasma. Cosmic wind. The wings of birds, glimpsed far below. Eyes to perceive— many, to aid the perceiving. Rings like those of the planet you call Jupiter. He thought it would help me seem to belong. Last, a voice. A shade of His way of communicating which could be perceived by the auditory organs of the creatures below, so I could speak questions to them and He could listen to their answers.

In this way, I was Recalled here.

I first descended to a group of travelling dancers following the Tigris. They were very hungry as dancing was not yet much of a trade. Yet they danced even as they walked. They rang hand cymbals and flew colored scarves. Laughter and music reached me even before the details of their faces.

Those who did not die from brain aneurysm when I first spoke perished seven days later from the radiation poisoning.

This is the first thing I remember.

I returned to Him to be reforged. What little I had seen helped greatly. He was excited with the project. Moods are rare for Him. It suffused everything in Him. I was once more in Him. I must have been excited.

It makes me angry when Gabriel is right. I was not excited.

…

II.

Carnation sucked her teeth as she looked over the first page.

“This, ah…” Her eyes flicked back up the words as if hunting for something constructive to say. “You… You’re very good at making each letter look like its fellows! Your printing is so neat, maybe—” She laughed a little. “—maybe too neat? But it’s a fantastic start. You’re a natural, Miss Ezemonye. As for your story, here, I…”

“Does it make sense?” Ginika asked. At the slight panic on Carnation’s face, she cracked a smile and clarified, “Not the contents, but the sentences. The way I describe the events. They are clear?”

“You don’t much care for commas, do you?” Carnation asked. She seemed grateful for the out. “Or long sentences in general. Adjectives, descriptions… I only mention because your writing is very clear, but better description can help it fuller a better picture of what you lived in a reader’s mind. You can note down little things you remember smelling, colors you saw, how things you touched felt, and so on.”

“I should better describe the deaths of the dancers,” Ginika concluded.

“Ah, that depends,” Carnation said. “I know of it, we have general papers on the topic, but not the specifics— can radiation really kill a person? How?”

“I will not describe the deaths of the dancers,” Ginika decided.

“Sure, that’s fine,” Carnation replied, “and in terms of good examples of description, interesting diction we can look back at Harriet Jacobs. She was edited, of course—” The librarian opened to an early page in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. “—but Jacobs got so much attention at least partly because she wrote with the sort of straight-forwardness you have, but knew when to drop in something beautiful, even in all the ugliness of her life.

“‘Notwithstanding my grandmother’s long and faithful service to her owners, not one of her children escaped the auction block,’” she read aloud to Ginika, trailing her finger across the lines. “‘These God-breathing machines are no more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton they plant, or the horses they tend.’”

Ginika’s face grew stony as Carnation read. “What is beautiful about that?”

“That phrase,” the librarian insisted. “It’s stuck in my head since I first read Incidents. ‘These God-breathing machines.’ It’s an oxymoron, see—pointing out that God made all of us, is in all of us, but to her white owners all Harriet’s family were just tools. It’s an affecting turn of phrase.”

“You believe that,” Ginika asked, “that y— we are of God, contain God?”

Carnation’s expression skewed both sad and contemplative as she studied Ginika. Ginika couldn’t tell how she’d taken the question, either on its face or how she felt about Ginika asking it. Finally, she said, “I think so, yes.”

“Why?”

“People can be so good and so desperately bad,” the librarian said. “Like God, we have both the flood and the rainbow in us. Animals don’t have those extremes, I don’t feel, or at least not the intent. That’s… divine.” She flushed a little, cheeks darkening. “At least, I think so. Also, that’s what the Bible says, ah, more or less.”

“That you are made in His image,” Ginika recalled.

“All of us,” Carnation agreed, smiling.

I was better shaped in Akkad, although I could not yet walk among the people without incident. The bends of my joints belched fire and my eyes had no white. When humans looked on me they screamed and ran. This reminded me of the dancers. It was hard to walk, even with Him willing me, when I remembered them.

For this reason, I went to Kish at night. Roads were yet new but very convenient. It was good to travel on mostly flat ground. I had knees, but the foot and ankle are complex. He and I were contemplating the function of toes when a woman-shaped thing stopped me outside Kish.

She was not human, I knew, but she was not like Him. She radiated power I could trace to the ground, the gates of the city, not to the void above where He swam. She stood in the middle of the road: bloodied to the waist, hair bound up with bronze ornaments, hands low at her sides. Full breasts hung under layered necklaces of beads and precious gems. Each deep brown nipple was pierced with a heavy gold ring. Her right hand held a bare sword. Her left, an axe.

She said I would go no further.

Her nakedness was of great help to us. The lines of her ankles, elbows, and wrists shifted as she adjusted her stance, revealing some of their mysteries. I wondered what she was if not human. He wondered how she had made her shape so accurately. It was not a conversation when we thought together. It all happened at once, some thoughts were just clearer, louder, usually His— though all were stored in Memory. But as I was externally silent the woman-thing in the road grew uneasy. She demanded I tell her what demon I was.

I was not a demon, so I only stared. He adjusted my joints with a burble of wet clay, hiding away more of my fire. The woman-thing looked ill and yelled again. She demanded my name and gave hers: Nanaya, goddess of love and war. She raised her sword and told me I would die by her blade if I did not speak.

Much progress had been made on my shape. I had seen many things, but not enough yet to satisfy Him. I could not die.

He pressed a super-heated exhalation from within me that made something like a mouth as it escaped. I said that I was Nanaya. They were my first survivable words and they upset her more. I know now a name is precious. Most have only one. In the case of gods, names give them meaning, as well as power. In my repetition she heard a threat.

She stuck the hook of her axe under my chin and told me I was not Nanaya. I was mud and flames and wrongness. In saying this she recovered from some of her upset and smirked. She told me I made a poor demon. I was essentially just a pot, and an ugly pot at that.

So she was Nanaya. I indicated I understood. With more talking I had more language to shape my thoughts. I repeated: she was Nanaya. I was a flame vessel.

It was the closest phrase I could find, though it was not accurate. She mistook me to mean a kiln. As the moon rose higher Nanaya began to find our disjointed talk funny. She drove her sword into the road and rested her axe across her shoulders to better gesture. She smiled and mocked me. She asked me if I knew what I was. I asked if she knew what I was.

A very pointless conversation. But Nanaya laughed from her bloodied belly, brown skin gleaming under the moon like her ornaments.

The Akkadian word for kiln was kūru, and this is what she settled on calling me. With that decided her critique moved to who or what she thought had made me. I was very badly made in her mind. I had neither hair nor genitals, and Nanaya insisted I would need both to challenge her. She ran fingers over my blank face that tried to pinch it into features. Whatever a goddess was could not do His work, however, so nothing changed. But she had noticed Him taking the shape of her hands to improve me and had her own ideas. She suggested I join her in visiting a statuary display. That she would like to see me take from them.

It is important for context to know most of those had hair and genitals she approved of.

My purpose was to observe. Her presence and interest were providence—no. Provided. Nanaya led me, Kūru, by the hand into Kish. As we went I leaned down to collect her sword from the road. I offered it to her. She told me her hands were full with mine and her axe, and I should hold onto it.

I think at that time she pitied me. I looked very pitiful compared to her. I never acted accordingly, however, and this impressed her. More and more as I changed and became like the thing she was: some kind of god. Some kind of human-shaped flame vessel, at least. She came to say my name softly, Kūru. Then coyly with her confused peers in the Akkadian pantheon— mannu Kūru? Then, as the years passed and her joke was corrupted, with affection, like the actual name of someone beloved. Makru.

By the end my vessel was without flaw. I had a name. I had seen many wonders of Akkad and Sumer and the other squabbling city-states of what is now called the Fertile Crescent. He was fascinated. We should have been equally fascinated, but I had been given two gifts which fascinated me more: Nanaya’s sword, the leaf-bladed bronze weapon I still carry, and Nanaya’s love, as much as the woman-goddess-thing she was could love the flame-vessel-thing I was.

He consumed this with all other information I gathered—examined, conceptualized, stored, and moved past.

Nanaya’s hands were always cool. She told me it was because I burned to touch. I tried to burn less. She touched more. And I knew, because I knew the limits of the human-eyes her goddess-eyes were shaped after, that when she looked at me she could not see Him.

…

III.

Carnation thought Ginika was insane. This suited Ginika well enough because it changed nothing about how she taught. It also meant she was less likely to pick details out of Ginika’s memories to verify against her books. Not that there was much to verify with. Writing in a way that survived all the time between Ginika’s first life in Akkad and her latest in New Orleans was something few managed.

“Never thought I’d be hunting for woodcuts of cuneiform on my day off, but your story got me wanting to look at them again,” Carnation said as Ginika waged a battle of wills with a fountain pen. The librarian pored over pages of uneven bricks, marked with the sharp lines, indents, and angles of the ancient script. “When I first saw these all I could think was, damn! What a pain in the ass library they would make up. And it’s bad enough when somebody drops my bound books! Clay like this? All that knowledge would just shatter.”

“They were not baked, then,” Ginika pointed out. “So they would just deform. Get dirt and hairs on the edges. But it seems many which eventually baked did shatter.”

Carnation’s wistful look turned sad. In that expression Ginika saw both Richard, reading past the point of exhaustion in the Library, and Cyrus, fervently explaining how the Library would be both penance and his long life’s work. Ginika didn’t like to see Carnation look that way, so she pressed too hard on the body of the pen and splattered herself with ink. The woman choked on a laugh and slapped a hand over her mouth to cover her grin.

“Oh, jeez, let me get you a rag. What did that poor pen ever do to you, Ginika? Huh? There, towel yourself off. Lord, where were we?” Carnation glanced at the now-ruined loose paper in front of Ginika and had to stifle a fresh gale of laughter. “Right. Cursive. Well… We could keep going with a pencil, but we can also probably take a break on that. There was something I wanted to talk to you about after reading your last entry anyway.”

“The visceral?” Ginika prompted. Carnation winced.

“No, I, uh, think you’ve got just about the long and short of that, and if I never have to think about nipple piercing again, it’ll be too soon.” Over Ginika’s snort she continued, “We haven’t really talked that much about punctuation, I realized! I mean, you know the basics: where to put your periods, commas, and apostrophes. Though you don’t seem to like commas or contractions much. But you just described what everyone said. You didn’t write dialogue!”

“I did write of dialogue,” Ginika said. “There was conversation between us. We both spoke.”

Carnations cleared away the stained paper and stacked some fresh sheets on the table. Taking up a pencil, she wrote in large print:

“I AM HAPPY,” HE SAID.

“These,” she explained, tapping the end of the pencil on each character as she explained it, “are quotation marks. They show someone is talking. You put what was said between them and you try to write it like they said it, word-for-word. You put a comma at the end in place of a period, then attribute it either by name or pronoun. You can also use question marks or exclamation points to help get the tone across.”

Ginika stared down at the simple quotation. She traced the punctuation with a fingernail. “So, these indicate precise words. Not just the meaning of what was said.”

“Yep. Some writers just do what you did, just say what somebody said in general terms. But if you can remember the exact words someone used, why not get it down just so?” Carnation paused. “I guess in memoir, though, it’s harder. Memory gets unreliable. And quoting someone if you’re not sure you’re right on the money can be risky business.”

“Yes. Some of my memories have been lost, or…” Ginika hesitated. “…absorbed. In a way forgotten, in everything else learned. But some words have stayed with me.”

Carnation tapped the paper with her pencil and smiled. “There you go, then. In the next installment of your, uh, story, get some of those down! You’ll see things really start to come up off the page.”

“Or, if I lose more,” Ginika said, “there will be a record.”

“Yeah.” Carnation got that sad look on her face again. “Or that.”

The months after I became Makru were dogged by war. Nanaya kept busy. I observed. The humans who beheld me on the battlefield called me god of judgment and of funeral pyres. I could not travel far without being in the proximity of a pyre at that time, so this made sense. The other domain confused me. Eventually, I discovered that humans who feel they have done wrong find judgment in being perceived at all afterwards, even idly.

There is much to feel you have done wrong with a sword in hand.

It was strange to be labelled a god. He and I had surmised gods were beings of power humans made for themselves: virtues, fears, and dreams given human-like faces or figures, given magic through devotion. I was not this. But even in a perfected vessel, I was closer to their inhuman idols than their reality.

Nanaya swung her blades alongside the unstoppable armies of Akkad and their bloody champion. At night, when the wounded limped back from the front lines to die slower deaths, she rutted like an animal in our temple, full of the blood and suffering and life of her followers. Full of their desperate wish to survive, to triumph.

Her passion had killed previous husbands. I only cracked, myriad fine lines webbing across my bronze skin. Nanaya lapped at the spilled light even when it burned her tongue. By the morning I was always whole again. Prepared for another day spent watching over clashes at the dawn of human civilization. There was much to glean from the conflicts, but eventually the humans stumbled into a peace.

I awoke on the first morning of it to the ringing of ceremonial bells. Rhythmic footfalls marked the progress of the high priestess and retinue up the temple steps. I rose to behold it, and found the goddess whose temple I shared clothed and waiting in the antechamber. Her axe hung on a wall as if decoration; there were other, different weapons laid out for use. At her feet drowsed a lion. That was new. It looked over when I entered, but the goddess did not.

“Nanaya?” I called out. “What news does the morning bring?”

“Victory,” the goddess answered. Her voice was strange to my ears. “Empire.”

The procession of the high priestess came in sight of the open doorway. She sat on a palanquin and cradled a suit of armor between her thighs, as if a lover. Its breast bore an eight-pointed star and its underpinnings were patterned with rosettes.

I stepped forward to regard the procession, then looked back to take in Nanaya’s reaction to it. I had never known her to wear more than jewelry to the battlefield. But the face I found was not Nanaya’s, not wholly. Her nose was there, but the lips, the eyes, and the shape of her chin were all changed.

“Goddess Inana!” the priestess cried, head bowed so as not to lay eyes on her directly. “Sargon the Great offers his conquest to you: all of his empire, from Hatti in the north to Magan in the south, from Elam in the east to Alashiya in the west, which has seen Sumer conquered and many peoples made into one. He sees your temple filled with gold and silver, abundant grain, youth to serve you, and offers the finest work of his armorers to clothe you in the battles to come.”

The goddess who was not Nanaya laughed just as Nanaya used to. The lion yawned, flashing its fangs, and the priestess nearly dropped her ornate offering.

“Leave it here,” Inana instructed as she turned and moved deeper into her palace. “My consort will see to its preparation.”

I was left to receive the armor, portions of the gold and silver, a bushel of grain, and the fervent prayers of the high priestess. I erected a stand for the armor and inspected it. The craftsmanship was indeed fine. But still it sat ill with me. I sought out my wife in our bedchamber.

“How have you come to the name ‘Inana’?” I asked. “That belongs to another goddess.”

“Which other?” said Inana. “I am the only one. Although in the days to come you may also hear ‘Ishtar’ on the lips of my believers.”

My confusion grew. “That… is also another goddess.”

“Is it?” Inana-Ishtar asked, looking over a robed shoulder at me. “Is that your belief?”

“I am not a consort,” I said, taking another tack. “I am your husband.”

“Inana does not wed,” Inana-Ishtar countered. Then she laughed the familiar laugh again. “Well, she may wed, but she will never be faithful. This is understood. So, now, would that make you… Dumuzid, the shepherd?”

“I am not a shepherd, either,” I said. As the words left my lips, someone new stirred in our bed.

“Then either leave or so change the myth. It is not me who you must convince,” Inana-Ishtar replied, waving in dismissal towards the city beyond the temple. “It is them.”

I found a choice before me. The decision I made came from above and within at once, although the reasons were very different. The dissonance fascinated Him and left me unsettled. I stripped as Inana-Ishtar went to dress in her new armor, leaving behind the ill-fitting mantle of Akkadian demi-godhood. I left before the conjured Dumuzid rose to wash the feet of the new empire’s goddess.

…

IV.

“Is this seat taken? Wait, who am I kidding, nobody else is coming to a library on a Friday night at the end of the world.”

Gabriel dropped into the seat across from Ginika looking too pleased with himself for having found her. Ginika barely spared him a glance before returning to the careful loops of her penmanship. Carnation, seated to the side, looked between them with clear confusion. Gabriel wore a fur coat against the evening chill but no shirt. He smiled in lipstick a shade of coral too orange for his complexion. He propped his elbows on the reading room table and gave the librarian a finger wave.

“I’m the brother,” Gabriel explained. “Has she mentioned me?”

“Um.” Carnation fumbled. “Yes?”

“How can you be so rude and keep falling in with good people?” Gabriel asked Ginika. “Did you hear her just lie to make you seem nice?” As Carnation continued looking confused, Gabriel gestured between himself, apparently Hispanic, and black Ginika. “Orphanage pals. Her house burned down in the middle of the night, but she was sleep-walking, so she just woke up in the yard thinking it wasn’t the right time of year for a campfire, and wham! Orphan. Me? I got sold to the circus, but I ran away because the work was too hard. The only thing for me to do was pretend my parents were dead instead of in Iowa. But same thing, right?”

He laughed in a way that invited Carnation to laugh with him. She obliged him with a reluctant chuckle before Ginika cut in.

“None of that is true,” she said. “He is my brother. Our family is just strange. I am sorry he has disturbed us.”

“Oh,” Carnation said, looking sheepish for having played along. “No, it’s fine. Did he, um—” She decided to address Gabriel. “Were you interested in writing lessons? Your sister has really been coming along.”

“In her writing lessons?” Gabriel repeated. He dropped his chin into his hands and grinned across the table at the top of Ginika’s head where it bent over her work. “Wow, times do change. But no thanks, ma’am. Being illiterate is more than a failing with me—it’s a hobby.”

“He reads and writes perfectly in multiple languages,” Ginika cut in again, deadpan. “But I did not want to learn from him.”

“No idea why not,” Gabriel mused. “We’re imminently compatible. Perfectly complimentary. Two peas in a divine little pod, some would say. Simpático, even.”

Carnation laughed again in earnest. Both archangels looked at her in surprise.

“Don’t mind me, just figuring some stuff out,” she said. “Who’s older? I think it must be Ginny. She’s very diligent. Then you would have no choice but to go a little wild. Which only makes her more rigid, you know.”

Ginika started to say something but Gabriel cut in before her mouth was really open.

“She’s not rigid,” Gabriel insisted. “Just the other day she gave me a piggyback ride for at least six city blocks before throwing me into traffic.”

“I hope you write about Gabriel,” Carnation said, ignoring him to encourage Ginika. “I bet your childhood was fun. Even if you decide to make it about, I don’t know, the pharaohs?”

“Funny you should say that,” Gabriel said.

I met Gabriel in Dep.

The meeting was chance and unsettling. I was observing the life in a riverside market of the Nile: the arranging of and haggling for wares, the variety of them, the many people who shopped. One moment I was alone among them. The next, I looked over to find a woman speaking to three entranced men and recognized her.

Our eyes met over the crowd. It felt as if I had accidentally caught sight of myself in a mirror I did not know was present. She grinned and cut across the busy street to take me by the arm and haul me over.

“Hello! Come in! I wondered if I would see you!” she said. She waved at the humans as if to shoo them off her doorstep. Heavy kohl adorned her eyes and gold wrist cuffs cast in the shape of snakes clanked musically against other bracelets as she tugged me.

“Honored one, what you were saying about the movement of the stars…” one of the humans ventured to interrupt, looking vaguely ill. “What could drive flames to circle in such a way? How close are they?”

I looked at her sharply as she continued shooing them.

“I am not the high oracle of Wadjet, merely a devotee,” she deflected, smiling all the wider as she moved to shut the door. “I have but a little knowledge. Perhaps tonight the goddess will reveal to you greater understanding! You should come tell me if so. Be well!”

“You are no devotee of any goddess,” I said as the closed door shut out the confused humans, the noise of the street, and the warmth of the sun. “Who are you?”

“You mean you do not know?” she teased.

I took her round face between my hands and shook her. “Who are you?”

“I am called Nebetta for now,” she said, sliding from my grasp, “and perhaps I am not a devotee of a goddess in the way you have been, brother, but it is a useful thing to be oracle-adjacent given what I am to do. What are you called now? Anything?”

I put aside the question for the urgency of my own. “What are you to do? Why do you speak to humans of things they cannot understand?”

“You demand much for someone who hasn’t even sat down to a meal with me yet,” Nebetta chided. She bustled about the inside of the small wooden house, gathering earthenware mugs of beer and a bowl of sweet-smelling dates. “It is a long way from Ugarit. Sit, sit!”

“We have no need for food,” I pointed out, but sat anyway, if only so she would stop gesturing for me to do so. “Why pantomime?”

“We have no need for sexual acts either, but you have engaged in those. Why do anything?” Nebetta retorted. “So many questions! You made a decent eye and ear. Here is a question to your question: do you have a navel? You, who were not born, but made?” She reached for my robe but I swatted her hand away. “I will take that as a yes! Belonging among them is the reason, and we can taste and smell as they can, so, why not? Have the beer. It is foul!”

I did not have the beer. “You speak too much.”

Nebetta rolled her eyes. She dropped down across from me at the room’s low table and popped a date in her mouth. “He is done with your part. Well, not done forever, and your part is going to change, but He has enough to be going on. Nearly two thousand years of looking and listening. He wishes to speak to them, so I have many words.”

“Speak to them of the stars? When they die in droves from bad water, still?” I crossed my arms. “I do not think this wise.”

“That is so interesting!” Nebetta said. She drank deeply from her cup of beer and made a disgusted face. “You have this opinion despite not being a you.”

I opened my mouth but found no words.

“You forget, brother,” she said, “because you have walked among them so long, been named and perceived, charged with actions and beliefs. You are not a you. I am not a me. I am here, therefore He thinks it is wise, and I will speak. Eat the dates. They are not foul.”

She was correct, then. She was Him, as I was, yet I felt hollow and strange. Above, He also felt those things, and was fascinated by them. The fascination came back as a shiver in Nebetta, who could not suppress another knowing smile.

“How many of us are there?” I asked. “The walking Memory given shape and purpose?”

“Oh, just two,” she said. “We’re complicated to make. I wouldn’t even exist if you didn’t stay away in temples with their gods, or sit at the edges of parties just staring at them without dancing—whatever it is you’ve been doing. But it is fun to exist! It suits me.”

For the most part I do not feel pain as humans do. Still, I remember I began to feel a headache building behind my outer eyes. I rubbed at the bridge of my nose in the way I had seen humans do to ward them off.

“I have seen the power of their belief,” I said. “I have seen it make creatures of much greater power than any one of them, then change them completely. As you say, it has… skewed my own perception. What do you think will happen if you give them knowledge beyond what they have context for? What chaos might we cause?”

“He doesn’t know, obviously,” Nebetta said. “That’s why I’m doing it!”

The nose-rubbing was not helping. “Do you have bedding, here? I will rest my vessel and then be gone. There is no point in two of His agents being so near to each other.”

Nebetta got up and pulled aside a curtain in the back of her small house to reveal a sloppily-constructed bed of straw and linen. She paused, then mused, “You know of sexual acts… Say, would us lying together be incest, if humans perceive us as siblings, or masturbation, since we are in truth just appendages of Him?”

“I am not answering that,” I snapped, “and if you try to get into this bed while I am still here, you will not get to have fun existing any longer.”

“Fine! I will put the idea to a human tomorrow and see what they make of it.” Nebetta laughed as she wandered back towards the door to go out among them again. “If nothing else, a very strange myth may come of it.”

I lay down and closed my eyes. I tried not to think of how seeding myths in humanity made me uneasy. It did not make Him uneasy and I would not be staying. Eventually the thing that was my body became dormant. In the darkness of not-perceiving for a time, I thought I heard Nanaya laughing. Or perhaps it was the creature like me who was called Nebetta.

Our relationship might have recovered from this meeting if she had not left a lamp burning in her hurry to go play again. I decided afterwards her slamming the door had knocked it off balance. After some hours it caught the rushes on the floor. Fires were often calamitous at that time in Egyptian settlements.

In this stupid way, I died for the first time.

…

“You still blame me, huh?”

Ginika looked up from the last sentence of her entry to find Gabriel draped across the pew to read over her shoulder. She flicked her pen at him, dotting his face with ink, but he only mopped it off with her dress sleeve.

The rest of those assembled in St. Benedict’s had coffee and talked quietly amongst themselves now. The congregation was still modest, mostly grizzled men fresh from a week of sixteen-hour days on the docks and grateful for the physical and spiritual respite of Father Thomas’s Sunday mass. Ginika’s attendance began as reluctant meetings with Gabriel to be updated on ‘our little following’ after Father Thomas gave them aid. He illuminated the growth of modern Christianity using the bibles and his own long memory. He had only died twice, to her knowledge, and been Recalled quickly each time. At the last mass before the battle for Atlantis, she used the time of ritual and reflection to write.

“No, I do not blame you,” she said. Gabriel let out a short, bitter laugh.

“Right,” he said. “That’s why you had to mention the oil lamp, huh? I apologized for that in Israel. Twice!”

“My decisions do not revolve around you,” Ginika pointed out. When he started to open his mouth again, she silenced him by snapping the journal shut. “I do not blame anyone. More than most in existence, we understand the universe is chaotic.”

Gabriel boosted himself over the pew to slide down beside her. He was dressed ‘unnoticeable,’ as he called it, in a shabby brown suit with only a misprinted silk tie for a splash of color. It was his concession to the humble church’s conservatism. Slinging his arms over the back of the pew, he studied her sidelong before asking, “Then why are you so damn angry?”

“I appear angry to you?” Ginika asked.

“As long as I’ve known you,” Gabriel said, “which means, basically, since I was Remembered here and every time we met after. It just radiates off you. I assumed it was Him, for whatever reason, he just gave that to you to carry around. Something to do with the flame? But after a while I started to think…”

“No,” Ginika agreed. “It is mine.”

They sat in silence for a while. Ginika studied the cross at the front of the room, the weeping man nailed to it in miserable detail. He did not much resemble the young man she met for a time in Hebron. Gabriel bounced his leg but clearly worked to maintain his silence. Ginika felt an unexpected wave of fondness wash over her.

“You were right,” she conceded. “If I was ever just a limb, I was changed near the beginning. I… do not know what that makes me now.”

Gabriel didn’t grin or gloat, as she’d expected. He just leaned forward, studying her face, hands hanging loose between his knees.

“I remember that feeling. It took a long time, you know, because I was having fun for the most part. Don’t know if that says more about me, you, or Him.” He scratches at the stubble on his jaw. “You weren’t here for the Crusades. I got about halfway through it, wondered what the point of it all was, wondered how I could wonder that if He knew the point and I was Him. It was like I just… stepped off a ledge.” He turned his face to look at her. “What happened to you?”

“I haven’t had the time to decide,” Ginika said.

“It wasn’t the dancers?” Gabriel asked. Ginika gave him a sharp look. He threw up his hands. “Don’t blame me for being curious! You haven’t had your eye on your book all the time.”

The anger was right there, as ready to her hand as Nanaya’s blade. It was justifiable—the violation of privacy, the probing of a painful memory. But now that he had described the length of its existence, its terrible and abiding duration, she recoiled from it. She wasn’t angry at Gabriel.

“No,” she said with certainty. “But that is my first memory. I do not know where else the root could lie.”

His expression turned despicably pitying. “You really don’t?”

I was Recalled outside Onueke almost five hundred years after I died in the fire at Dep.

From the moment I opened my eyes again I knew there was a new reason for my existence. My idle times of observation were done. I had an Adversary. A beast of great power stalked the low hills outside the market town and abducted droves of traders. I would lay it low. I would protect the balance between man and other, here.

I walked out of the scrublands and into the settlement unclad. My vessel then was not unlike my current one: apparently female, dark of skin, hair, and eye, but shorter, broader. In time I was provided cloth wrap, beads to hang about my wide hips, and when I walked back out and in the direction of my Adversary my sword awaited me, laid out on a flat rock. I hummed with power like a plucked oud string. Authority and certainty incarnate.

It was not until I grasped Nanaya’s blade again that I felt my own horror.

I returned to Onueke and found shelter for the night in a shrine to Ekwensu. I made myself fit into a corner protected from the elements and clutched my knees.

Five hundred years gone. Every human I had ever known, gone. Many of their gods, gone. Cities, nations, and empires—all gone. I was thousands of miles from the place I died and the cultures I had seen take shape over millennia. I had been Provided only with what I would need for this hunt: knowledge of the people, the way their gods dealt with them, the trouble that plagued them which I was Recalled to handle. I had not been provided with a name.

“Woman, where are your people?” a man called to me. He appeared in the doorway holding a straw broom like a spear and frowned on seeing at my actual weapon. “The house of the trickster is not a sanctuary for the lost.”

“It has a roof, yes?” I asked. I did not have it in me to make my tone kind. It made him laugh.

“It does have that,” he conceded. He crouched to be on my level and examined my face. Half of his, I could then see, was powdered with chalk. “You are not osu. Unhappy bride? Are you going to make an offer so I will plead for Ekwensu to turn your suitor into a goat? The cost will depend on how many wives he already has.”

Despite the lingering sickness in me from my shock, I scoffed at him. “None of this. I am simply cold.”

“The temple of Ekwensu has a roof but no fire,” he pointed out. “Come, lost woman. Food is cooking over mine.”

So it was. As it turned out the man was a dibia, a priest and intermediary for the gods, called Ikem. He had two wives of his own who were constructing a hearty stew in his warm house. They did not seem bothered by my appearance. I came to understand that being married to a man who served a trickster god meant they were surprised by little at this point in their lives. The younger was Adamma, who bid me sit and found me a blanket. The elder was Mmerisinachi, who told Ikem if he was going to bring home guests he should bring home more yams as well. The argument seemed old and well-worn. As I sat and warmed myself, young children appeared with plates and bowls and curious looks.

How strange it was. With clear purpose burning in my mind’s eye, I felt lost. Taking supper with half a dozen total strangers anchored me.

“You carry a blade but no provisions for the road,” Ikem pointed out later, after the meal was finished, the children slept, and Mmeri and Adamma had gone to lie with each other. “You are no bride or supplicant. Why have you come here?”

He had put me to work grinding spices for tomorrow’s breakfast, as I looked strong. His suspicion was confirmed when he peered into the large wooden pestle clamped between my thighs and inspected the paste. I continued working it under his direction as I spoke. “I have been sent to slay the beast in the far hills. It will be quick work. I… do not need a name.”

“If it is to be quick work, why are you here now?” he asked as he chopped fresh-picked utazi. Before I could answer, he added, “Better—if it is to be quick work, why do you have no name to be called by when it is done and you come to live among those you save?”

I stopped grinding. My hands had begun to heat. I focused to push back the flame before I ignited the cookware. When I looked up Ikem watched me with eyes gone milky white.

No, it was not Ikem who studied me.

“Ah, Anyanwu,” Ekwensu the Trickster said in Ikem’s voice, “or some strange dibia of his. Sun-filled and flame-hot. Why did you not seek out his temple over mine?”

“I seek nothing but the beast,” I replied. “I have no other answers for you. Either of you.”

Filmy eyes lingered on me. In a tone of growing unease, the god peering from Ikem said, “No, you are not Anyanwu either. Nor anything of Chukwu. What are you? Are even the alusi to pray for foreign blades when foreign gods come to steal our people?”

“What does that mean?” I demanded. But Ikem’s eyes returned to black-brown and he only shrugged.

“Ekwensu is never clear. But it is interesting he called you Anyanwu. Are you not…?” He trailed off. I do not know what he saw in my face then, but he stopped questioning me. He reached out with a cool hand and cupped the side of my face. The other set down his knife and gently prized my grip from the pestle. Blackened marks showed where each of my fingers had been. “Never mind this. You need rest.”

“I have not done anything tiring,” I protested.

“Maybe not today,” he said, “but you are tired.”

Tears came. They steamed as they fell but Ikem wiped them for me without flinching.

I bedded Ikem then. Because he was kind, but also, perhaps, because I did not want him to continue speaking softly, asking gently, and for words to fall out of me I could not take back. I forced them from my head and burned as I always do.

“I do not know what god speaks to you, not-Anyanwu, but they are crueler even than mine,” he said, after. “We need your help. That is true. But I think you also need ours.” He smiled, creasing what remained of his ceremonial chalk. “Sleep now. When you wake, you can hunt. Relieve yourself of that purpose. Then either I or Ekwensu should have some idea of your fate here. And then you can have some of this breakfast we prepared. Let it be so.”

It was so. I only rose to bathe and dress when I felt Ekwensu’s return. Studying me in the dark, trying to see how I fit in the web of human and divine interaction he knew.

At dawn I faced the beast of the hills and understood the trickster’s words. Terrified and confused humans were kept alive in the beast’s lair. He needed their perception of him more than he needed their flesh, blood, or trade goods. I recognized him. Or He recognized him, and deigned me worthy of just a little more knowledge of my task.

“Cernunnos,” I addressed him. “How have you come here from across the seas?”

Thousands of miles displaced from his believers, the horned god of the Celts had grown wretched. Emaciated, filthy, wounded, more mortal-seeming than even the mortals he had captured. I do not know if he understood me. I had only Igbo language and when he spoke it was not in that tongue.

“Mura ghlac an dia-itheadair mi,” Cernunnos rasped, rounding on me and lowering his head to gore, “cha mhò a ghlacas tu!”

Nanaya’s blade struck true as I ducked and lunged, my fire roared through it, and the lost god was ash. Quick work. I freed the confused captives who babbled to me about demands they pray, hunt animals that did not roam here, and paint themselves with foreign symbols.

Those that saw my flame thanked me as Anyanwu. I felt ill.

Ikem waited on the outskirts of Onueke near the flat rock where I had found my sword. He held a spear and faced away from me, surveying the market town.

“Were you going to help me?” I asked.

I was relieved to see him even though I did not know what the future held, or by what name he should greet me. Then he turned. There were dark tracks on the chalked side of his face and wetness on his bare cheek. I did not see his eyes were pale until the spear slid between my bare breasts.

Ekwensu had decided what my fate here was.

My new-made vessel cracked with ease. If I were cruel, I might take comfort in knowing the subsequent explosion destroyed my killer too. I am many things, including a killer myself, but I believe at least I am not cruel. And it was not Ekwensu who died.

…

VI.

“I figured it out,” Carnation said as they ate lunch under the spreading branches of a crepe myrtle. “It’s an allegory.”

“Hmm?” Ginika hummed. She sliced figs with precise little knife movements and piled the halves between them. Carnation took a bite of a finger sandwich Jeannie had packed for what she called Ginika’s ‘school day,’ then flapped a hand to indicate she would explain as soon as she swallowed.

“Sorry. Your story, I mean. It’s an allegory.”

“Which is?” Ginika prompted. “Words continue to be made up every day. I do not know them all.”

Carnation finished her sandwich and tapped her lips as she chewed. “Mm. Allegories are stories that talk about real-world issues in new context. They’re usually stories about fantastic places and people that didn’t really exist, but represent big ideas the author wants to get across. Some people argue most of the Bible is one. Probably there wasn’t ever a real Job; it’s just a story meant to tell people that even if your whole world falls apart, if you keep believing in God, someday things will get better for you.”

“So, they are lies,” Ginika concluded. Carnation scoffed.

“Only if you call every piece of literature in the world ‘lies,’ too,” she chided. “You’re over-simplifying. It’s a technique. Sometimes if you try to tell someone the way your life is, they stop listening. They don’t want somebody off the street unload their troubles on them. But if you make up an interesting character who has the same troubles, maybe they listen, Hell, maybe they even do something about it.”

“So, it is an empathy trick,” Ginika concluded again. Carnation sighed.

“You’re pathological.” She unwrapped another tiny sandwich. “Sure, Ginny, it’s an ‘empathy trick.’ If we lived in a better world, maybe we wouldn’t need them. If we were all better people, maybe. But it’s a good technique. And thinking about it makes me wonder what your real troubles are.”

“You think the people I describe are false?” Ginika asked.

“No,” Carnation insisted. “They’re not necessarily… historical, but they’re real to you. They represent something.” She made a production out of deciding where to take her first bite of the new sandwich. “I… think if I can puzzle out what that is, I’ll know who you are, Ginika Ezemonye.”

Ginika bit into a fig half. “Perhaps.”

He was more circumspect in Recalling me the next time He had use for me. I was a he, then, and had a name: Mikael. Only a century gone since my day as Anyanwu. I once again had an Adversary to hunt, but I also had clothing befitting the culture and time, coin, and an immediate place to take shelter and speak to humans.

I was Recalled in a wheat field. Its owner was not pleased.

“Who are you?” a large, bearded man with floured hands demanded. “Does the men’s council now send wandering tramps to burn my crop?”

I looked around. Many stalks of wheat surrounding me still smoldered, including those under my feet. I stamped to smother embers. “No. I am called Mikael. I am…”

I tried to say, ‘I am here to slay an Adversary.’ I could not make myself produce the words. Less time had elapsed than outside Onueke but I was again frozen by horror. Once more I was whole, and thus able to understand the death of Ikem, and presumably many others near the site of my destruction in Igboland. Their deaths a hundred years ago. Their deaths by my fire.

I bent at the waist and retched. All that came out was wet ash. Because my existence sometimes feels like a laughable cycle I cannot break, the large man did not seize the chance to remove me from his property, or slay me for the harm to his field. He moved beside me and rubbed my back.

“Mikael, arrived in flame,” he said. “Either I am insane, or God has put you in the wrong spot. The temple is far up the road in the other direction. I am no rabbi.”

Rabbi. The knowledge I was provided on being Recalled illuminated the word. A priest. In some ways like a dibia. Like a devotee of Wadjet. Like a nude woman on a palanquin, ascending a ziggurat. My head spun. I retched again, producing a small gout of flame.

“Would water help, or would it just steam my crop?” the large man asked. His tone was weary.

“Water might help,” I said, though I did not know for sure. Miserably, I added, “I am sorry about your field. I can help to replant it.”

He grunted a negative. “The time for sowing is past. But you can knead.”

The large man’s name was Alter, a solitary baker of the relatively new Jewish faith I understood without having to be told was Gabriel’s work. He kept a modest home, fields, and mill outside a settlement too small for a name in the Levant. I did not question his solitude for a long time. I was preoccupied with my own thoughts.

The desire to slay my Adversary inherent in my Recollection plagued me. I found myself angry, not at this distant foe, but for reasons I could not think, let alone speak. The anger led to avoidance. I did not leave Alter’s home for over a month, even as I suffered visions of death and destruction resting in his small hayloft. In the day I worked to drive them from my thoughts. There was plenty of work to be done, even setting aside the kneading.

“I prepare all of the dough two nights before the Sabbath,” he explained to me the first week. “Then I rise before dawn to shape or braid the loaves. I bake them, load the cart, take Abel from his mill yoke, and drive to Aliza’s. She pays me so long as the bread can be sold for Sabbath dinner before sundown. It is similar on holidays. Can you aid with this?”

“If you sell near sundown, you travel back after,” I noted. “You do not keep the Sabbath?”

Alter frowned and crossed his arms. “I am devout.”

“That is not what I asked.”

“God knows my heart,” he said, “and I travel quickly… and cook quickly. And clean sparingly.”

Alter kept Sabbath after I came. Reaping, milling, mixing, cooking, and cleaning I learned easily. He frowned to see me do it, asking often after my holy mission. But he left earlier in the day to make his weekly sales and was home to light his candles at sunset. Baking was the task that troubled me most. He knew in some innate way how to measure by sight, touch, and smell. While I stepped in to knead, I rarely finished loaves. I would wake the morning before Sabbath to his prayers as he did that. In the days leading up to Rosh Hashanah, however, neither of us slept much at all.

“כִּֽי־יוֹדֵ֣עַ יְ֖הֹוָה דֶּ֣רֶךְ צַדִּיקִ֑ים וְדֶ֖רֶךְ רְשָׁעִ֣ים תֹּאבֵֽד,” he murmured as he braided challah in the bluest hour of early morning. For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked shall perish. He yawned and waved me towards the oven. “Stoke the fire.”

I did so with my bare hands. From the beginning I hid nothing of my powers. At that point he was almost used to it, though sometimes still he blinked quickly or choked on a laugh. Disbelief. But he was devout, so it only extended as far as not believing I willingly kept company with him. No one else did. I clapped my hands to rid them of ash. Alter watched me.

I was aware he found me attractive. My vessel then had olive skin, short, curling hair, and strong limbs. I found him attractive in our contrasts—his height dwarfing mine, his conviction firm while I warred within myself, his unshakable gentleness at odds with the way I sometimes attacked mucking out Abel’s stall as if a foe. I was not sure why he did not act on his desire. He seemed a man of strange discipline to me when I lived mostly in my own conflicted thoughts. I learned not to prod him to explain himself for my satisfaction. I learned to wait, and then he would move.

So it was that morning. I think it may have been the coming new year. Or perhaps the peace of his life since my arrival. I did not know it then, but the sight of a stranger with him had paused a series of torments by the town’s young men. Regardless, Alter moved.

“Will you learn to braid?” he asked once my hands were clean again.

“Will you teach me?” I retorted. “I have memorized the verses you speak. I have been prepared.”

He set aside a finished loaf to be baked. “You do not need the verses. It is simple.”

I went to the work surface and floured my hands the way I had watched him do for months. He stood beside me to inspect my work.

“Start here,” he murmured, showing me how to part a ball of dough into three pieces. We rolled them together into long strips. He arranged them for me parallel to each other.

“If the verses are not necessary, why do you say them every time?” I asked as I drew the left piece over the middle, then the right, as his larger hands directed me. “I thought it was to keep rhythm.”

“It does give a rhythm, but that is not why,” he said.

We were quiet for a while. I could feel him considering something, and my eyes strayed from my work to his solemn face. He caught my wrist gently before I mislaid the middle piece over the right.

“I pray when I bake because I love God,” he said. “I have gratitude for my life and my work to offer Him. I pray when I bake because I cannot go to the temple to say this.”

He hadn’t dropped my wrist. I looked up into his eyes and asked, in earnest—he would tell me later it was the earnestness that convinced him, more than any Talmudic argument—I, the archangel, asked him, “Why not?”

He kissed me.

…

VII.

“…just a thought, not that I support privatization, mind you,” a familiar voice said from somewhere in the stacks. Ginika squared her shoulders. Cyrus rounded a corner with an older black man Ginika recognized as the head librarian, Carnation trailing behind.

“Mr. Dawnfordth, you know I’m happy to reject all of your generous offers in private,” the head librarian said, “but you must know you are not… the ideal presence for our patrons, especially at this hour.”

The white, rich, and not altogether healthy-looking vampire blinked. “…ah, yes, of course, I didn’t even stop to think—”

His guilty gaze swept the branch and landed on Ginika. He nodded to the staff even as his chagrin faded into nosiness.

“My apologies, Dr. Hunford, I’ll send you a formal offer you can look over later,” Cyrus said. “I must know what this is, and I’ll be right out of your bother.”

The head librarian seemed unfazed by his flightiness, but Carnation goggled as he made a beeline towards Ginika. Ginika offered a resigned expression in return as he slid into the chair across from her at the reading room table.

“So this is how you’ve been busying yourself outside of siege preparations,” he said excitedly. He held his hands in a mantis-like droop, poised as if he meant to prey on her unfinished work. “Is it autobiographical? About you?”

“I know what autobiographical means,” Ginika groused. It wasn’t a lie. Carnation had explained last week. “What does it matter to you?”

Cyrus ignored the question and frowned in thought, his ruby eyes distant.

“Is it difficult?” he asked. “To remember?”

“Is it for you?”

“No.” Cyrus wrung his hands, looking down. “Not anymore.”

“Because you remember more clearly, or because you accept what you have done?” Ginika asked.

Cyrus tapped his chin. “Both. The former more than the latter.”

Ginika said nothing. She closed her journal after noticing his eyes flick over the upside-down pages.

“For a while, though, when I had lost my memory,” Cyrus continued, “I believe that was the easiest life I had. Sure, I was a hated being even without my identity, but to have power without guilt was a privilege I did not appreciate. Luckily, my instinct was to do good. Still, I hated myself even then, being that I inherently needed to prey on others to do such good.” He made a limp gesture. “I have feeding down, now, to do minimal harm, but as a fledgling—or so I thought—it was, erm… old-fashioned, to spare you the details.”

“Is there a point to this confession?” Ginika asked.

“Of course!” Cyrus insisted. “I cannot balance out any of my wrongdoing, but neither can you. A certain amount of religious suffering was a product of your creation, the same as my victims were mine— for a short while.”

“You are a busybody,” Ginika said, “and we are not the same.”

“Now, now,” Cyrus said, “I am merely suggesting there is one thing true of both of us: that regardless of the harm we caused, the world is a net better place while we continue to exist within it.”

Alter, son of Efrayim, lived in limbo.

He loved and wanted other men, but the Torah forbade lying with them as women. Rabbinical court, however, would not exercise the death penalty prescribed to him unless very specific conditions were met: being caught in the act by two witnesses, being warned of his violation of scripture, and persisting despite this. So long as he was alone, his “defect” was not fatal.

In their mercy, his people made him perfectly alone.

Alter was grateful. He was grateful to be alive, and to have his small holding, and to make his bread. To be able to sell it for a pittance to a woman who did not spit on the ground when he arrived. To make enough to buy seed for another year. He was grateful for his stubborn mule, Abel, and the warmth of the sun, and the strength of his arms to keep his home in order without any aid. He cultivated a powerful and solitary gratitude that fueled him through all things.

All things but the arrival of an agent of God who did not agree with scripture.

Some weeks into our affair, I laughed in the dark of our shared bed. “My brother wonders what I find in this. Why I engage in it.”

“Why do you?” Alter asked, in a drowsy tone I knew meant he was sincere in asking but also on the edge of sleep. I thought about the question as he drifted. His arms tightened around me in a brief jolt. He was falling asleep. I had come to be fond of the way human minds trick them to negotiate with their bodies.

“It is how I learned to be held,” I said, finally, “and I find I like to be held.”

I thought him gone, but his slow, even breathing paused in response to my words. “You do not need to bed me to be held by me. You can just ask.”

I blinked into the dark. “Yes?”

“Of course,” he said with ferocity I did not understand for a moment. Then I huffed another laugh.

“I do also enjoy the other parts,” I assured him. He pressed his cold nose to the nape of my neck. Most nights now he did not even build a bed of coals for the room. I warmed him.

“Good.”

After that he did sleep, but not I. My contentment almost took me away to a place not quite the same, adjacent and restful, but the part of me that was formed eons ago to observe could not be quieted. I dissected his words. I speculated on their emotional weight. He worried for my comfort like one of his kind, though he knew I was anything but.

In the core of me I felt the constant pull to the west, towards my Adversary, towards my purpose as a tool to vanquish.

I channeled this conflict into chasing off those who heard the rabbi’s unspoken pronouncement to leave Alter be and still sought to punish him. Unoccupied young men broke his fences, stole chickens, defaced his home with urine or animal waste. They paused on my arrival. They attempted to resume with renewed hatred when they understood I would not be leaving. Unfortunately for them, I was newly made to hunt. I heard their step a mile from the homestead. I smelled them before that. By the time they arrived with cages for chickens or heavy sacks of manure, I stood in the field while Alter slept on. I did not do anything. I did not have to. I was not shy about standing with my blade naked and my eyes unblinking.

Alter found me there one morning, the vicious men only an hour gone. He carried hot tea to me and then wrapped me in his arms.

“You do not have to thank me for this,” I told him.

“That is not why I hold you,” he told me.

Inevitably, their timing improved. One night, while Alter diverted all my senses, they finally reached us. They had sense enough to block the exits before knocking Abel in the head with a mason’s hammer. The mule’s brief death cry only alerted us in time to hear the roof catch and notice the window covered.

“Oh,” Alter whispered as smoke crept into the bedroom. He did not seem to know what else to say. As I dressed at speed he stayed in bed.

“Up,” I said, tugging at his arm and slapping lightly at his face. “Up, moving now.”

“Why?” he asked.

He did not ask in hysteria or anger. I looked into his eyes. While I shrugged into my shirt, something had come over him. He asked in earnest, as I had all those weeks ago, when we braided challah. Earnest and with a long-battled despair, finally triumphant.

“Because I am not burning to death again!” I snapped. “And neither are you! If we move quickly, we may be able to douse—”

“They have decided to burn me,” he said. “They will not stop now that they have set the first torch. Even if we save it all, they will light more tomorrow. Or the day after.” He sat back against the pillow we shared. “It is done.”

I saw the house was a loss once I broke a wall and dragged Alter out of it with me. Everything smelled of burning flour. Abel’s stall was on the side we escaped by. Anything I might have said to bolster Alter died on my tongue as his eyes fell on the animal, sprawled in bloodied straw.

Our would-be executioners did not hoot or shout recriminations. They just circled, wary, armed with torches and slings. Not all were the young men I had memorized the faces of. The rabbi was not among them, but the chazzan was. All human. All human, just… hateful. Scared. Furious. I looked between them one by one. I held their eyes as I ignited my sword. Mouths fell open. I could all but hear the beginning of a word on their lips, shedim, demon.

I opened my vessel a fraction and let them peer at the truth.

Gabriel smirks whenever he finds a chance to show me angels painted prior to the early modern age. Wings. Eyes. Rings. Cosmic dark. Infinite flame. I can only think of trying to dress Alter in the least-bloodied clothing I found among the corpses I made that night.

…

IIX.

Ginika found the alligator provided to devour Jean-René Marceau after she passed judgment on him dead. It was sprawled on the small spit of dry land a ladder sprang from, up to the shack on stilts Jean-René called home after the destruction of Ruddock, Louisiana.

It had been decaying for a while. Nothing seemed to have made a meal of it after it came to rest there, though. Its bones and what remained of its flesh were undisturbed, ribs slowly opening as the elements rendered them separate components, rather than purposeful parts of a whole. The thinner hide of its belly was gone. Nestled inside were the broken and jumbled bones of Jean-René.

“I am sorry,” Ginika said to them. “It was not you who I found fault with.”

A rumble passed through the ground. Louisiana was not a place of earthquakes. The most likely cause was the lost kingdom, the strange machinery at work below. The right rear stilt of Jean-René’s shack snapped with a crack like a gunshot. The whole structure sagged backwards, as if recoiling. Everything seemed to pause as wood and gravity fought a brief battle.

Then Jean-René’s shack crumpled into the murky waters of the Manhac Swamp.

“I’m so sorry,” were the first words out of Raphael’s mouth.

The leper colony on Poveglia was a bright place. Dense plants covered the main structure’s edifice, but the empty frames of windows high above let in sunshine and fresh air. A warm spring tumbled over rocks as a small waterfall in the central chamber. Disfigured but happy people soaked their feet there or bathed in the waters. I loved it immediately. Or, I felt the love there— I felt it suffuse the tiled halls, and the linens hung to divide rooms. I did not understand how a place of sickness could have such radiance until I met my youngest brother.

Raphael was very young, but his face suggested a terrible life. He had the light brown skin and dark hair of many humans in the area, but bore massive scars across his cheeks, forehead, and chin. They looked long healed but rendered the features of his face into strange territories. One twisted his smile. A trailing end tugged at the bottom of his left eye. Yet he radiated a gentleness that made the horrific easier to accept.

(“He let me choose how I would look,” Raphael told me later. “I knew what I was for. For the suffering.”)

The gentleness was present when he came to see me separately from Alter, but not the smile. The ruin of his face was arranged in quiet sympathy.

“For what?” I croaked. I had not spoken much since I took us from the Levant, and I was hoarse.

“Leprosy is an infection, something I can heal, the same with syphilis, typhoid…” He wrung his hands. “I can stitch wounds and I can, given frequent quiet conversations, sooth some ailments of the mind. But…”

“Say it,” I commanded.

“He isn’t injured by something I can mend,” Raphael said. “He learned in no uncertain terms other humans will kill him for his difference. He has accepted it without an urge to fight. So… he is like this.”

I put a hand over my eyes. “Broken.”

“Yes,” he said.

I could not tell if Alter liked the sun and the sea on the island. His expression stayed blank, and his beard grew out, though I tried to keep it tidy. He did not express disgust for the lepers, which was good. As Raphael explained it, he could cure the disease and heal open wounds, but the disfigurement was permanent. Patients who tried to return were run off again for appearing ill. Thus, Poveglia was a village of hale outcasts: people who lived simply but would have welcomed good bread and asked few questions, especially not of any favored by us, their divine protectors. But nothing moved Alter. He took meals, slept, sat in the sun. Years slipped by, but nothing moved him. Not even me.

The night he died I took the lead anchor from a ship and threw myself into the sea.

I sank a long time before my vessel insisted on breath. When I took in saltwater I shattered, a sudden union of cold water and super-heated matter that boiled a league. I woke up the next morning on the beach. I had new clothes, new information, a subtly different skin tone. My Adversary remained the same. My mission, still waiting. My sword gleamed on a nearby piece of driftwood. Raphael sat in the sand next to me.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

“No,” I decided then. “The fault is mine. Humans… I have invested too much in humans. I have not listened to Him. And the Greek, the god-eater…”

“Causes much imbalance, much suffering,” Raphael agreed. He looked very young, knees tucked to his chest, drawing in the sand with a finger. “But if you wanted to stay here, I wouldn’t care.”

I felt his kind eyes on my back all the way as I walked to the boats again.

…

IX.

“There’s a story I could tell, here,” Carnation said. “I could say, ‘Once upon a time there was a curious father who had a daughter to see the world in a way he couldn’t. He raised her up strong, real strong, so once he’d seen enough, she could do hard things for him. But he found he’d made her real tough on the outside and left her insides soft, and the hard things hurt her. So, then he had a son and did things a little different. Made him hard on the inside and real soft on the outside. He could bounce around the world easy and never fret over it. But even still, eventually, the son was hurt. And so, then he had a second son, who he left totally soft and put close to the others, in the hope everything would wash out. But the damage was already done—even if not directly by his hand.’

“I could tell that story. Maybe the father was from the Caribbean, and when he got here he was all excited but had no idea what he was getting into. I could make it a tragedy about…” Carnation trailed off. “…make it a tragedy about culture shock and the American dream! But that’s damn hard when you’re standing in my back alley killing a demon with a flaming sword, Ginika.”

“I am sorry,” Ginika said as she pulled the sword free. “If it helps, this is not a demon. It is a shadow bartered to a fae king for a song.”

“For cheap, you mean?”

Ginika shook her head. “No, for an actual song. But the king did not keep it, and shadows without objects to anchor them are… dangerous.”

“This is why you wanted me to visit kin in Mississippi,” Carnation surmised. “This, and the end of the world Gabriel mentioned.”

“Yes,” Ginika said, somewhat awkardly.

“So, God is real but the Devil isn’t,” Carnation said. “Heaven and Hell are both theoretical, but pagan magic isn’t, and neither is human channeling of the divine—though God didn’t make us. You’re an angel. Your brother’s an angel. But you don’t play harps. I… feel insane.”

Ginika wiped inky residue off her sword with a handful of loose newspaper. She watched how Carnation studied it. Took note of the cuneiform made stark in the bronze by black blood as she sheathed it. She stepped forward and took note of how Carnation stepped back.

“That is reasonable,” Ginika murmured. She wasn’t Gabriel, Raphael, Deckard. Her voice held no innate soothing power. She just kept it low. “Carnation— Librarian Hucks. Please look at me.”

“Assistant,” Carnation choked out, “it’s, uh, I’m an assistant librarian, there’s— the pay scheme is—” She made herself take a deep breath and met Ginika’s eyes. “Okay. Okay, I’m looking.”

Ginika held her now-empty hands palm up. “I mean you no harm. No harm will befall you while I am here. Do you understand that?”

“Yes,” Carnation said.

“Your belief is not false,” Ginika continued. Her dark eyes were soft, though her expression was neutral. “Your understanding of the world, your faith, God, angels, history, none of it must change. None of it has been changed. Do you understand that?”

“I’m not a child, I can hear what you’re saying!” Carnation snapped, though she shook slightly. “How can it not, though, Ginny— Michael? Mikael? Should I call you that?”

Ginika shook her head. Her hair was pulled back in an archaic-looking chignon, but a lock of tightly curled hair had come loose in her battle.

“I am Ginika Ezemonye now,” she said, “and my existence as such has not collapsed the church you attend. Whatever role we had in inspiring it, the faiths of Abraham are not beholden to us. You have done me a great kindness. I… selfishly, I wished for there to be a record separate from Him of my experiences. I have that now. You may forget me. Nothing will change.”

“If the world doesn’t end,” Carnation pointed out. Ginika grimaced.

“Yes,” she amended. “Nothing will change if the world does not end.”

Carnation slowly raised her hands to lay her palms against Ginika’s. “Why did God make you a black woman?”

“There are places in New Orleans only a black woman can go,” Ginika said. “Experiences only they can have. People only they can connect to.”

“Do you like it?” Carnation asked.

Ginika looked at her for a long moment. The softness in her eyes turned glossy from withheld tears. “It has been the happiest time in my existence thus far.”

“So why are you talking like it’ll be over soon?”

Ginika’s palms fell away. They stood looking at each on opposite sides of the threshold until a car horn in the street made Carnation jump. Ginika absently pushed her stray hair back into place.

“If you are able, you should attempt to leave the city tonight,” she said.

“So if it all goes to shit, Dryades can— can flood, or burn, or turn to dust? No, no.” Carnation crossed her arms. “I’m gonna go pack a bag, and you’re gonna walk me over so I can keep an eye on things. Till all’s said and done.”

Ginika made an aggravated noise in her throat. “No.”

“Why are you talking like you’ll be gone soon?” Carnation repeated. “If I recall from the part in Nigeria, that’s something that tends to be explosive.”

“Because He apologized!” Ginika hissed. The moment the words left her lips she seemed to regret them, but she continued, “He knows I have been happy. I have hunted my Adversary, but I have also… I have also been among you again. Found joy here. But He sees it is inevitable I will fall and return to Him. This is the only reason I can think He would apologize.”

“It can’t just be because He did wrong?” Carnation asked, soft.

“Even if He did,” Ginika said, “apology would not fix it. The harm was done long ago—”

“At the very beginning,” Carnation said, “when you were on the way down. You knew right off you didn’t belong, that y’all were gonna change things, and you’ve only gotten more upset as you’ve come to love us more, I figure.”

Ginika stood frozen. Carnation pulled her bath robe a little tighter around her and stepped out in the alley. It was her turn for the sympathetic expression.

“It’s done,” she said. “You’re here. And apparently you’re a big enough deal for God to apologize to, so I think whether you live or die is in your hands, same as it’s in mine.” She snorted. “And apparently you’re not gonna leave big holes in any stained-glass windows either way. So how about you make like us people you’re such a fan of, and do your damndest to survive?”

“Human survival instinct would probably advocate against fighting in an apocalyptic battle with my most powerful Adversary yet,” Ginika pointed out.

Carnation took her hand. “No, that’d be cowardice. Survival would advocate you win. Now come in and wait while I get my bag.”

I am leaving space here. When the battle is done, I will describe what came to pass.

Ginika Ezemonye 19 July, 1920

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 3/10/2021 | REHOSTED 2/27/2024