The God Orkrem by Tanith Lee

Author:Tanith Lee [Lee, Tanith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

A last old woman met me on the track. And she was so old she had been wiped of anything, like as if she might have been a baby stretched like a string, and so peculiarly tall. Though her eyes were like dull yellow coins.

“None otherwhere to go, warrior,” said she, “but up in the sky.”

“Then that must be my road, granny,” I told her. “No use to warn you then,” she said. “For you were warned of lizards and lions and paid no heed.”

“Nor have I seen a single lizard since. Let alone any lion.”

She spat on the earth, but her spit was wholesome, and only like a drop of bright water. It was almost like a courtesy when she spat. A tenderness that had no kindness, and could be borne.

“There have been lizards aplenty,” she said. “They have run under your feet, and over your body as you lay sleeping.

And through your body they have run, as if through a long cave or a deserted house, and through your brain they have run and in and out your dreams, as if through a high room in a tower. And many their lions have followed you, smearing the waste of their kill in your footsteps, and breathing their hot stinking breath into your nose and mouth when you slumbered, and stood on you they have, heavy as millstones, and torn your skin with their claws.” She sighed, rustily.

“But you saw and heard and felt nothing of any of it. The heavens crashed on your head and you missed it. The sea came up the hill and drowned you and you never even felt its wet. Go on then. Go up the sky.”

“I shall, granny.”

“I am never your grandmother. I am only the very final thing of humankind you will see before you meet your god.”

Then she was gone, and so was I.

But I had learned not one thing from her, as nor had I from the other two.

No man can climb up the sky.

Yet I reached the topmost peak and stood on its flat table, staring upward.

All round, beneath, the lands fell away together, but they were like a gameboard, with their colors of plague and faithlessness and blood. The world no more real for me.

In the sky the higher clouds ascended like a stairway. I stretched up my arms, and for hours on end I bellowed, till my voice was gone. I called his name: Orkrem! Orkrem! And then I whispered his name: Orkrem.

Night bloomed its black poisonflower and the stabs of the stars pierced out.

Then a wind woke in the core of the sky.

It came forth on me like a giant bird, a dragon. Roaring, it clutched me, and whirled me off the peak.

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