GODSPELL I:
Womb of The World
O Remember Pen Argiil, you Men-of-Ket. In the days when Man’s misery rankled the nose of God, it pleased the Uhokerrable that Leb - slave-patriarch of that city - should be afflicted with most holy augurs. Thus was set into his flesh a score of sores to weep red-lozenge worship upon the docks, for the eve of Esh was upon Ket and their shackles already trembled. In the throes of fever, he paced the quay from sugar mill to the rocks at Bangur until his very footprints smoldered. Then terror fell upon him, and he bade his wives bind him beneath the river lest the passion of his skin set alight the birling bundles of sweet harvest and so forfeit the hides of his kin to the Master of Mills.
For thirty and one days he boiled the Niben, during which time all water-faring beasts of scale and claw burst in their skins and were heaped upon the riverbanks for such feasting as was never seen by the slaves of Mer, and so great a roil of smoke hung over the valley that all tribes of men cast off their agony and breathed in righteousness, for the tongue of Khetar was on their lips, giving praise to the One and his blessed seed, whose name was liberty.
On the thirty-second day, the waters ran dry and the plagued prophet rose from his bed of mud, grey and gummed with lotus cinder. Then boat-drudges carried him through the city gates and raised him high on a gutting-block, so all might gather round and marvel. On his palms were engraved all the profanities of Man; on his head, a crown of duckweed; and from his bowels spoke the voice of The One.
“Children of Ket, break your chains and be free. Forth from the city I call thee, for the Starry Legions come to cleanse its sin, and none who remain shall live.”
And so the Faithful of Ket did liberate the rafts and gondolas of their masters, and stealing to the river in the blackest night, they cast off their bonds and surrendered themselves to the Niben. But those among them who loved their chains remained to defend their masters with spades, and shears, and rice-kettle bludgeons, and their treachery inflamed the heart of God.
Among those left behind was Boma, Leb’s own son, called The Curious; for though he was counted among the faithful, still he was loathe to leave the land of his birth and so hid himself in the pen of a threshing fish, that none of his kin might find him.
Ere daybreak, the host of High Heaven fell upon Pen Argiil, and the Sacred Daughter went before them, kicking dust in the moons’ two eyes, and about her all her armsmen singing:
“El-Esh has come! She grinds her foes in the dirt; she shrouds their faces in the grave. Let the earth glut itself on the armies of Mer, and may the Kings of Mer be swallowed by the sky!”
A great slaughter began that stained the river with gore. From beneath the pen reeds, trembling Boma strained to catch glimpse of Paravant, stymied by his own cowardice til battle swallowed the harbour. Then he beheld her, Heaven’s Daughter stained in blood and bronze, battle-weary as she bent to cup refreshment from the fouled river. And he beheld, too, the Keptu knave, perfidious slave, who crept from shadow to crack her starry brow.
Seeing this, Boma cast himself before the attacker, for though his heart ached at the city’s annihilation, still yet more he could not bear to witness the destruction of one so holy. And anticipating his end, he cried aloud, for life was still dear to him.
So warned by his alarm, fury-fair Esh clasped arms with her assailant and took his blow across her own chest. Stricken of breath, she coughed to his face a haloed syllable – meager sound, but the ground split before it and scraqed a great watery wound; for Nirn’s flesh knifes open on the writ of the nib-end blade of Perrif’s tongue.
This was the end, for the waves wrapped Pen-Argiil and sank in her embrace and stones swept abaft the glutted rivers to the shutter and crack of timber. Her defenders were hurled from their high walls and nodded blind in the bottomless, eyes burst by the crushing sea. These waters washed grey with muddled mortar at the sun’s rising, born again as rubbled islands. This was the natal Rumare – crater scar of Ayleid purgation.
Thus by flood was Pen Argiil wiped clean: her bricks cracked, her great gates splintered, her filth washed into the deep. Master and slave shared the same frothing grave; even babes were swept from the paraqets for the sins of their elders, and Boma floated with them.
The tumult wrest his hand from the sure clasp of the High One and he was carried away in the dark. Untethered from earth and feathersome he struggled: all hollowed out, hollow in lung and strain-beat-choking an animal panic, insubstantial in the voluminous blue. In the tremulous web of water, blind and bung-eared, he was reversed and swallowed up again. And Boma for an instant knew his place in its great churning and despaired.
But the Paravant did not forget him.
By will of The One she roused the great cuttlefish from her threshing pen and sent her to save the son of Leb. She found him thrashing in the flotsam of the deep and swallowed him into her maternal vastness, so that of those who had remained in the city, only Boma called The Curious survived.
There he sunk in umbrate warm, skin-tickled by the world’s slow rhythm til his own heart eased to the time of its beat. Yet even safe he filled himself with bruises, for within him clamoured that same violence that scored Rumare into the earth and he could not close his eyes but be haunted by the red-lit flesh of his lids.
And the Spirit of Esh softened at his wretchedness, and she lifted his head and took his tears upon her own neck.
“O Child of the One, you are the meat and muscle of boundless apeiron and all the world is your home. How can you know grief? The sea’s tumult is but the rocking of your cradle, and I am your mother’s lullaby. Here in the world’s womb, you want for nothing.”
“Great Merciful,” he cried, “If any love you bear me then let me die, for I am the most wretched of mortals and drowned Pen Argiil is a torment I cannot bear. Grant me this little comfort: that my body might join that same soil my hands worked.
“Take me beneath her seabed grave, to her sloping walls and ruined tower. By the waters they were swallowed, and I was last to look upon them.
“I climbed those old fortifications as a boy. My fingers knew the map of every crack and foothold: scrabbling up to the summit and running at a careless height. My naked feet slapped along the south wall where the brick is always hot, and then looking out – how far I could look out – to the jewel valley rushing to and through me from every direction, green vertigo, converging under vast, apricot sky.
“I was frightened immensely – and glad
“For four walls, a gate, a hearthfire,
“A discrete square of earth that would never misplace me.
“An anchor in the riverbed.
“And we had nothing before you came, but we had this. It was theirs but it was ours. The Heart of the World, and it was ours.”
Then Esh spoke:
“Remember it, O Child of Ket, and it shall always be so. In you tones the echo of all that you have loved. Within you and without you, for you have never been that which you thought, and those high walls you treasured must fall that your known self may meet the Unknown. This is home, and you will meet it wherever you go.”
Then he raised his hand and found his fingers webbed and pale as moth wing, yet he knew no fear.
“Here is your chrysalis. If I take the Heart, then I give the Womb.”
So saying, she pressed her lips to his brow and opened his eyes, and at last he knew the molten heartline of The Infinite.
To the lull of Esh’s tongue, he flowered inwardly, dis-gested in a fetal nub. Yet more awake and more alive than before, for he peered from a thousand different eyes and felt a thousand foreign stab-pangs of joy and grief and tedium. All belonged to him. This was his flesh envelope, these his svcking limbs, this his chromatophoric shifting skin.
He swung down the river’s tail, his bursting heart swelling out his flesh coat until his rubbered flanks scraqed the scum-netted banks and bowled over balletic cranes, muddying their white faces. Mangroves tore at his diaphanous limbs, and he left them behind without regret. At last the riverbed rose to meet him in the shallows where it emptied into the bay. Lodged in its mouth – a purple clot – The Niben rose high and strained its banks. Then he shot free into the open lake, buoyed up on a floating tide of flattened otters.
From thence he was drawn by the current to the western shore, and beached in the thick mud there. And the One was with him, for it was here that the exodites of Ket had gone, and they suffered greatly. For departing with little provisions, they found the Promised Land cursed with salt and poor soil, and the waters still polluted by Merish devilry and the taste of blood.
Coming upon Boma’s vessel at morning ablution, they hitched a team of those elk which had not yet perished and drew it from the bay. Where it furrowed the earth, sweet water welled – the river men now call Larsii. The Men-of-Ket drank from it and their strength returned. Then they discussed amongst themselves how best to use this gift.
Some, thirst quenched, now attended their hunger and would consume it, for it looked like meat. Still others wished to cast it back, for it seemed a soft, limping, giblet that throbbed like a thing alive. But Leb felt the nearness of his only son and bade his boateers open it.
At the first rip of the knife, a cry went up, and Ket fell back, trembling to watch the shudder of the blubbery hull, heaving like one in the throes of labour.
The petals cracked and welled with wet, until the whole bud burst and life came screaming (alarming at first) as a scroggy and scrofulous flux which no mortal vision could resolve. And Leb’s son was in the chaos-song, though he was not: Leb’s son and All.
Man and Mud and Matrice entwined as they found their rhythm and took shape in fluorescent hymn, some finding affinity for certain others and twirling in pairs, or flinging forth drugged and frothy music all askew, which caught in lobes of hanging fruit and draqed the trees with chime. Up stirred a jungle steeped in hot pallet, attended by a gallery of living brushstrokes awhirr to paint joy-sloppy with ichor amnii of second birth and homeland – an anointing.
Leb lead his folk wade in rich-womb mud that budded memory where the righteous tread. Mothers cast their children into its wetness, from which they sprang up fully grown. Thoughtform grew like begotten seed, formulating in urbano God’s City: conceived by the immaculate. From bare-toe-prints in soft soil it rose, seeding infant temples, whalebone ward-walls, smoky fish markets, foam-flocced docks, and streets that felt familiar. Around the world’s womb it grew in lace-knot harmony, the holy poem home of remember-me-new.
O Remember Pen Argiil: flame licked, humble under-sky, pale brick and ghost-gleamed on the brink of night. What need have we for tower, sour eye-scraqe and agnatic line?
The womb is deep,
and Boma is its secret seat. [e]
Go As He and Speak With The Uhokerrable.
» Mon Jul 01, 2013 2:35 pm 
