What Will Be, Was

Ashset massaged a cramp out of his right hand.

He had been allowed to write to his friends and family in Ak-Toum, tell them he was safe and that he had taken a well-paying job in Ak-a-Kartam to build up savings ahead of his marriage. Then they had set him to practicing his penmanship, with both the traditional Jalabartan cuneiform and the newer Lugo calligraphy– new to him, at least, though purportedly it had been introduced near the beginning of the Eternal Emperor's reign, five centuries ago. Instead of stamped imprints, this writing style was done with a brush–not usable on wax or clay, but faster for writing on papyrus or vellum, once you got the technique down. Largely, the characters were the same, with the stamped wedges replaced with fading, tapered brushstrokes.

It was a different set of motions using muscles he had engaged very little before, so after writing the kr character in rows of eight, eight rows per page, across four pages front and back of scraped-thin vellum, there were tendons in Ashset's elbow, wrist, and palm near his thumb that felt ready to jump free from his skin. He rose from the cushion at his low writing desk to stretch his legs.

The Great Temple had a strange status quo regarding the nature of its gods. The priests all seemed to understand that Bulan, Giver of Humility and Khur, Giver of Charity had once been Lee Sangwoo, Penitent of Pride and Conor ó Niéll, Penitent of Greed. Like his friend Yuya, they had been born as humans into a world called Earth, but much more had happened to them since that first death that brought them to Nod, and they had, at some point since, become something vastly more than human. The priests accepted this, agreed that such origins didn't diminish their worthiness for worship, and even discussed the matter openly in front of the scribes and other temple staff, though they never broached the topic with them directly.

Never, that was, except to offer one admonition to any underling who seemed to be piecing together the truth, an admonition Ashset had been given immediately by the fourth-degree priest Zeffar. They said that this was a truth beyond the spiritual needs of the common rabble. Those possessed of the humble piety needed to work in the Great Temple would not be harmed by knowing. A priest who served the gods directly needed to know this, to best serve his god's needs. The rest, however…

Well, unsanctioned sorcerers represented a wicked enough presumption. Imagine if every court wizard, mad alchemist and dealer with demons were striving to replicate the process by which these men had become gods. Imagine if one such unworthy soul succeeded.

Ashset complied with the implicit taboo on repeating this information to those outside the Temple, for the time being, though he didn't quite feel fully persuaded by the argument for it.

Khur was the patron god of Jalabarta; it was understood that a particularly good harvest stemmed from an abundant outpouring of his blessings on the land, and a poor one from a withholding of these. The latter was not necessarily a sign Khur was angry with his people– it was understood there were powers above the gods, that even they were beholden to the will of Heaven. But if Khur– Conor– was human, in mind if not necessarily in power, could that mean the famine wracking the land might possibly be a matter of simple incompetence? Might he have poor control over the powers that had been imposed on him by some outside force, potentially– and Ashset was disgusted by his own inability to set aside this blasphemous thought– being a god they ought to reject and replace by the apotheosis of another, more worthy human?

Well, today was a Day of Benediction, so Ashset might have a chance to steady his wavering mind, in one direction or the other. They had celebrated these special holy days, one a season, back in Ak-Toum, but there they had petitioned an icon of Khur, a painted representation of the god, and it was well-understood that asking the god to grant you a personal miracle tended to get an answer more often when done in person.

From a balcony on the upper floor of the temple scriptorium, he watched a dense crowd pour into the courtyard as the gates were open. The sight of the common folk of this city– gaunt, hollow-eyed, some as skeletons with skin– twisted his heart, tore it between gladness and guilt at the privilege he had experienced first as an involuntary guest in the home of a wealthy priest, then as an employee with room and board inside the Great Temple. The privilege of experiencing a full belly at least once a day. Though the motion felt to him like an act of cowardice, he let his eyes lift from the crowd and fix on the far side of the courtyard, where sixteen first-degree priests were carrying a god's litter to a dais.

A litter of jade, Ashset noted, with curtains of porphyry. A hush fell over the crowd.

Ashset had seen Khur's litter, where it was stored in a reliquary near the temple proper. It was solid gold, curtained and upholstered in a burnt saffron-orange.

“Be attentive!” called a priest with a thick Lugo accent. “Jalabarta has the great fortune this Day of Benediction to receive its blessings from Bulan, Giver of Humility, Patron of Lugo, Vizier of the Gods, Greatest of All Things Under Heaven. A sign of favor from all the gods, and from the Eternal Emperor, may he reign forever. The god will call those selected forward!”

Other scribes were rising from their work now, crowding onto the balcony around Ashset. “Has this ever happened before?” one asked, “Another god performing the benedictions on Khur’s behalf?”

They all looked to the second-degree priest charged with overseeing the scriptorium, who shook his head. “Four thousand Days of Benediction have come and gone since the Giver of Charity took up residence in Ak-a-Kartam, and not once has any other, god or spirit or man, appeared before the masses in his stead. This visit from the first god of Lugo has been… a strange occasion.”

Blessedly, sound carried quite well from the dais where the litter had been set to this balcony, off to the god's right. The curtains remained closed as Bulan called out, but fluttered faintly in a breeze, teasing the crowd with flashes of his arms and legs that shined golden wherever the sunlight touched them.

“Let the man in the fourth row with the club foot be brought forward.”

Someone about Ashset's age, thin and disheveled, was helped through the crowd by a friend, limping on a deformed foot.

This was an immediate departure from the way Khur handed out blessings. Rarely did the miracles he performed alter deformities the recipient had been born with. Almost always, it was said, the first miracle on a Day of Benediction was to transmute a beggar's sackcloth into silk and his wooden alms cup into gold. The gifts that followed were almost all likewise material, turning gravel into money for the poor, worn leather sandals into living cows for the hungry, sticks into tools for laborers that never broke and swords for soldiers that never dulled.

Instead, Bulan called, “Gershan ba-Gerdan, be made perfect!” and the youth's foot twisted as on a hinge into a normal position, splaying out into a healthy shape. He tested his weight on it, then ran skipping and jumping back into the crowd, falling twice but looking no less elated for the scrapes that came of it.

An older scribe made a noise of interest, confirming to Ashset that eyewitness experience at the Temple matched up with the rumors and small handful of miracles from icons he had to judge precedent from. “In a famine like this,” the balding man said, “I would expect Khur to turn a great deal of sand to flour and stones to bread. How is Bulan going to handle it?”

Many people with the skeletal look becoming all too common in Ak-a-Kartam were called up before the dais, the sort who could desperately use a basket of miraculous bread. Instead, the god declared to each of them, “Be put above the disgrace of hunger!” Each immediately lifted his or herself to a straight posture and an energetic gait, walking away with the fluid motions of one well-nourished. Many loudly announced that they no longer felt hunger or fatigue from their condition. The painfully thin bodies and look of death in their faces, however, remained.

“Certainly not how Khur would have done it,” the older scribe said, “and I have to wonder if any blessings at all are flowing through the icons into the provinces. If this is a surprise to us in the Great Temple, the lesser houses of worship are surely still clueless to which god is giving out blessings today.”

For the better part of the morning, Bulan went on granting the unspoken petitions of the men and women who had packed into the temple courtyard. Most of these were answered much as the second; starvation was the problem of the day, and Bulan relieved a hundred people at least of the sensation of hunger.

The repetitive ritual halted for a moment, as the god hesitated. While none of the gods of the land were entirely omniscient, their connection to the places and peoples they patronized was such that divining the name of one such person, standing before them, came easily. It wasn't a stretch to imagine Bulan might be able to do this for all of Lugo's tributary peoples, as well as the Empire's citizens. Yet, as the curtains of his litter lifted in a sudden gust, he could be seen with a look of consternation on his shining face, as he nervously swirled a golden goblet full of some vivid red liquid. “Will… the one who has traveled farthest to seek my blessings… the Penitent… come forward.”

It was a long time before an emaciated figure managed to shamble its way through the crowd. Ashset strained to see if it was Yuya, and made out long, blonde hair over a death's-head face. The woman was the worst of any starving figure that had yet been called forward, soon falling forward on her hands and knees in a motion that seemed more for lack of strength to stand upright than out of reverential awe. Her clothes were ragged: a shirt with very short sleeves and a collar that seemed too small to pass her head through, and a long skirt held on by the same stretchy material Ashset could assume to answer the mystery of the shirt-collar. She was garbed much as Yuya had been, and seemed to have worn those same clothes for several weeks.

Bulan now held his curtain fully open. The crowd fell prostrate, as best they could, many laying across one another. The god ignored their obeisance, staring hard at the woman.

“Sarah? Sarah Young?”

“Please,” she rasped, only the particularly lucky acoustic accidents of this balcony's position in the courtyard carrying her weak voice to Ashset's ears, “send me home. This is a land of pain and hunger. I’d give anything… just to… taste… apple pie or… a good angus cut again…”

She fell on her face, limbs limp and jaw slack.

“The benedictions are ended!” the god thundered over the courtyard. “Temple physicians, bring this woman inside. The rest of you, begone!”

The ensuing chaos saw Ashset, responding to one barked order from a priest after another, end up somewhere in the inner rooms of the Temple, fetching food and water and medicine as Bulan and a handful of doctors huddled around the woman on a couch. There was far too much urgency in the scene to ponder the mere mortals trying to find a mundane cure while a god in the flesh put a hand silently on the head of their patient, but whenever Bulan's eyes came off this Sarah woman, he commanded any who tried to keep a respectful distance or stoop in reverence to proceed as though he were not there.

In the brief up-close glance he got of her face, Ashset noticed an Antediluvian character in dark red on her tongue, as it rested limply against her cheek.

Khur entered this scene from the innermost sanctum, and when sunlight from a window fell across him, Ashset noticed that his face shown in it far less radiantly than Bulan's. His eyes looked sunken and tired, as though… no, a god couldn't fall ill, could he?

“Is it really her?” the red-headed god asked his peer from the south.

“It was. She's back in the hands of… of the Lord of Death, now.” The priests of these two gods recoiled and made signs against evil at the mention of the savage Cainites’ dark patron.

“A Naomh Mhuire, a mháthair Dé… that means the next thing she experiences will be… was…”

“This is not something to discuss in front of the mortals. Leave us! All of you!”