Copyright © 2011 by Jonathan E. Feinstein
Dancing with the Sphinx? The phrase came to me while working on Teasing the Furies, especially after I had Lizzie the Sphinx learning to dance at the New Year’s Eve party. By the way, yes, I know the Sphinx from Greek mythology does have a proper name; Phix, although some scholars maintain that this is just a form of the word “sphinx.” Hwoever, I chose to go with the proper name school here, although you’ll see that she is only called Phix a few times and always by those who knew her in the past.
I think the Sphinx I an interesting character. In mythology and literature she is frequently depicted as a demon and a harbinger of bad luck or the monstrous issue of various chthonic figures of the earliest Greek myths. She was supposedly originally from Ethiopia but was transported by one god or another (it varies according to the writer) to Thebes where she posed her famous riddle to those who attempted to enter the city. The earliest versions of that story do not actually specify the riddle she asked, and some of the later stories had her asking multiple riddles.
More recent writers have treated her in a more kindly light, so I guess in some ways, at least, my imagining of her is quite modern in nature. Well, none of the deities in this series are quite what they were in the ancient world. It’s been a long time and I’ve allowed some of them to change with the times. People can change as they age, why not gods and goddesses?
So Lizzie started dancing and the title came to mind. I though the Sphinx deserved a story of her own and then decided she could use at least three stories. A Plethora of Deities has never been a normal series. It started out as a couple of books that had a common cast of characters even though they were not tightly connected. Then I wrote a pair of stories, The Seed, and The Tree, which were certainly related to each other and I used them to tie in the first two books as well. Then came the trio of stories, Tempting the Fates, Teasing the Furies, and Inspiring the Muses which I thought of as a series within the series and now we have another subseries. I plan three stories in the Dancing with the Sphinx series, Waltz, Tango and Foxtrot which will center around some of the characters introduced in this volume.
I hope you’ll enjoy the journey.
Jonathan Edward Feinstein
June 4, 2011
Westport, Massachusetts
Wade Vogel, pausing to catch his breath, looked down to see how far he had come. Not far enough. “I ought to be in better shape by now,” he grumbled to himself, but while he had been traveling along the Appalachian Trail for months, this was the first time he had tried to free climb up a sheer cliff. By rights he should have had protective gear on, but not being a regular climber, he did not know that. Like in so much in his life, Wade saw something he felt like doing and just went ahead and tried.
It was not all that much of a cliff and perhaps that had been part of his mistake. It was only about one hundred feet tall and not too far off the marked trail, but now that he was halfway up, he was not sure how he was going to get back down. The rock was weathered and loose in places and what had looked like good hand and footholds had come loose frequently as he ascended.
He looked down again and then upward and decided he was wrong. He was only one third of the way from the top. He took a deep breath and continued on. Why had he done this? Four months earlier, on another part of the Trail, he had seen a friend do something like this. She had made it seem easy.
Ellen had been another hardcore hiker trying to travel the entire length of the Appalachian Trail in a single season. She and Wade had traveled together for a few weeks. Where was she now? Probably back in Des Moines, Wade thought to himself. It was late in the season, the middle of October, and he had planned to have reached Mount Katahdin by now and he was still only in New Hampshire. Why was he taking yet another detour? Why climb this cliff?
Because it is there? He wondered wryly as he inched his way up the face. Another sturdy looking hand-hold came off in his hand and he let it drop. At least it wasn’t under his foot that time. He thought that maybe someone should have planted a sign at the base that would have said, “Only an idiot would climb here.” He laughed in spite of his predicament. That would not have stopped him.
Then, almost miraculously the going got easier. The rocks jutting out from the cliff face stopped popping out when he touched them and they seemed ideally situated for climbing. He made his way up more rapidly than he had so far and soon reached the top of the cliff, a wide ledge from which the mountain continued on toward the sky in a somewhat more leisurely fashion.
He flipped himself around and sat on the edge, looking outward. The view was worth the bother. It was late morning and the fog that had blanketed the valley was gone now and the mountains all around him were ablaze in their autumnal colors.
He was still trying to catch his breath when a woman’s voice purred, “Not bad, little man. I was not certain you would make it.”
“Huh?” Wade asked automatically, turning around to find himself face-to-face with a monster.
She had the lithe body of a lioness but with great, feathered wings on her back that she held close to her body as if they were a cape about her shoulders, and she had the face and chest of a woman. Her hair was black and wavy, although her leonine fur was tawny, and her eyes the blue of the sky. Wade thought it was a beautiful face, or would have been if not for the predatory smile that exposed hints of sharp teeth.
“I have a question for you,” she purred again, padding a few steps closer.
“Uh, four legs, two legs, three legs,” Wade blurted out hastily, wondering at the back of his mind where he had remembered that from. High school English class, maybe. “Man!”
“Ah, the classics!” the Sphinx whispered with a reminiscent smile, “but that is not my question.”
“What is then?” Wade asked.
“Tell me, little man, can you dance?”
“Call me Lizzie,” the Sphinx invited Wade sometime later. “All my friends do these days.”
“Why?” Wade asked.
“I honestly don’t know,” Lizzie laughed lightly. “The name was given to me by a demoness I know. I think she may have been as nervous meeting me that first time as you were. I do have a reputation, you know.”
“Aren’t you supposed to kill yourself when someone answers your riddles? Wade asked.
“Once,” Lizzie admitted. “I was young and rather high strung. Oh heck, I was what you might call a drama queen. I grew out of that.”
“But you died?” Wade pressed.
“Death is rarely permanent for a supernatural creature, Mister Vogel,” Lizzie replied.
“Wade,” he corrected her.
“Wade, then,” Lizzie nodded. “The history of the world is made up of cycles. Take your average human life. You are born to infancy – the four legs part of my famous riddle – you mature – two legs – you age – three legs, um, walking with a cane, of course – and eventually you die. Perhaps that riddle should have been four, two, three, none? And as you may recall the riddle was ‘I walk on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and three in the evening.’ The Day is another cycle. The year as well is a cycle as is the Lunar month. Civilizations go through cycles too.”
“The rise and fall of the Roman Empire,” Wade nodded.
“A good example,” Lizzie agreed, “although all civilizations do the same in time. And it is these longer cycles that are reflections of the great cycles.”
“The great cycles?” Wade prompted.
“The world is born, Wade,” Lizzie replied. “It grows and matures and then slowly begins to decline and eventually it is destroyed to be born again.”
“Over the course of billions of years maybe,” Wade replied.
“No,” Lizzie shook her head. “I suppose that is an even greater cycle, but the world is destroyed more frequently than that.”
“Do you mean like the Sufi belief that God is creating, destroying and recreating the universe continually in every instant?” Wade asked.
“What an interesting concept,” marveled Lizzie, “but no. Let’s see, the last time the world was destroyed it was in a great war between the forces of Order and Chaos. That was about twenty years ago.”
“Twenty years?” Wade asked. “I was fifteen. I think I would have remembered the world coming to an end.”
“Mortals almost never do,” Lizzie replied. “A few will, but their memories will seem like dreams or nightmares or else in some ages were ascribed to prophecy or other sorts of visions. You see, once the world is destroyed. It pauses for a bit and then comes back to life pretty much where it left off, although there are always a few differences. The last world was a magical one. Magic actually worked and it was every bit as much a science as chemistry is in this world.”
“Then why don’t I remember the magic?” Wade asked.
“That was that world, this is this one, it was recreated in retrospect so in a sense, that world not only no longer exists, it never did, except in the memories of supernatural beings like me.”
“So how is it that you’re alive?” Wade asked again. “I didn’t get that.”
“I had not yet finished explaining,” Lizzie replied. “Most supernatural beings come back to life at the start of each cycle, well assuming we died in the first place.”
“Most?” Wade asked. “Why only most come back.”
“Sometimes death is permanent even for us,” Lizzie explained. “Anyway, I killed myself and the next thing I knew some kid named Alexander was out conquering the world.”
“I think I’ve heard of him,” Wade remarked dryly.
“I would be surprised if you had not,” Lizzie replied in the same tone. “So what brings you to this mountain ledge?”
“My hands and feet mostly,” Wade commented. “I thought you were watching me.”
“I meant why are you here at all today?”
“Oh, yeah,” Wade shook his head as though to clear it. “Sorry. It seemed like we were verbally sparring and I just kept going.”
“We were sparring with words,” Lizzie smiled. “That is how people get to know each other sometimes. But go ahead.”
“Last spring I decided I wanted to walk the full length of the Appalachian Trail in a single season,” Wade replied.
“Why?”
“Why?” Wade echoed. “I just felt like it. I thought it would be interesting and fun.”
“Was it?” Lizzie inquired.
“Most of the time,” Wade replied instantly and then revised that. “Well, some of the time. It was long walks on hot days and sleeping in a tent on cold nights. The company was good most of the time. I started out last May at Springer Mountain in Georgia and started heading north.”
“It’s getting late in the season, isn’t it?” Lizzie observed. “I would have thought it made more sense to go southward for a longer hiking season.”
“There are those who do that,” Wade allowed. “I met some from time to time going the other way, but there were a fair number of us who started in Georgia. I haven’t seen any of them in a couple weeks or more though.
“A lot of hikers give up,” Wade went on. “You get to a point where you just want to stop sometimes, or you run out of money and have to go back to work, or you just run out of time. I may have run out of time. Really should have been done by now, but I quit the Trail in July when I was still in Virgina in Shenandoah National Park.”
“You ran out of money?” Lizzie asked.
“Money?” Wade laughed. “Not hardly! I made a bundle back in Ninety-nine before the Tech Market crash. Do you know about computers?”
“A little,” Lizzie allowed. “I have never used one, but most of my friends do.”
“Well, I got together with a few friends when I was in college and we started writing a computer game. It was pretty good and so very different from most of the ones on the market. It combined fast-paced action, problem solving and historical trivia. We formed a company as soon as we graduated and kept working on it. There were some pretty lean times and we did a lot of database work to make ends meet, but we had a few investors even though we never actually finished the game.”
“Why not?” Lizzie asked.
“It was early in 1999 that a large software company approached us and bought the key algorithms for the game from us,” Wade explained. “Even after paying off our investors and creditors we were set for life assuming we didn’t waste the money. So I’ve been careful about that, mostly I live off the interest and am careful about investments. That last was important. The company who bought us out went under along with several others later that same year. Fortunately, we got the rest of the money they owed us during the settlement. Well, not the rest of it, but enough and it showed me what not to do with the cash.
“Since then,” he went on, “I’ve been doing a bit of this and that. I don’t really like working and I have enough saved up that I don’t have to. So, I do whatever I like. I never found another business that interested me and I wasn’t really the brains of the financial end in any case and stuff like hiking is a lot easier than work.”
“So you’re just drifting along then,” Lizzie observed. “You call that a satisfying life?”
“Like I said,” Wade replied defensively. “I do whatever I want. What do you do?”
“I am a hunter,” Lizzie replied simply. “I hunt.”
“I thought you played riddle games.”
“I sometimes use riddles as a part of the hunt,” she told him. “Not as much these days. Believe me; anything can get boring after one or two thousand years. The hunt is a sport, you realize. It’s a game for me.”
“Didn’t you eat the people who couldn’t answer your riddle?” Wade asked.
“Never!” Lizzie told him and then changed that to, “Well, not very often. I don’t really like the taste of human. There are so many much more tastier creatures I prefer, so I do not eat people. Who else could I dance with?”
“Dance?” Wade repeated. “You asked if I could dance. Is that how you hunt now?”
“It is,” Lizzie agreed.
“How does that work?” Wade asked. “If your prey can do a passable mazurka, you let them live?”
“What’s a mazurka?” Lizzie asked. “At the moment my hunt is not for prey. I am looking for a partner.”
“What sort of partner?”
“I want to explore the possibilities of Dance,” Lizzie explained. “It is a relatively recent interest for me. Most dances I have studied require at least one partner.”
“So why are you looking for a partner out here in the mountains?” Wade asked.
“I can hardly walk through a city unmolested in my natural form, now can I?” Lizzie countered.
“Who would try to make trouble for the Sphinx?” Wade argued.
“There’s the police,” Lizzie answered, “or anyone with a gun for that matter. I can be killed by gunshot. That would be painful and inconvenient.”
“I imagine it would ruin your whole day,” Wade chuckled.
“I have never been shot by a gun,” Lizzie informed him. “It might kill me permanently and I would prefer not to take the chance.”
“And it’s safer out here in the woods?” Wade asked. “What about hunters?”
“This is parkland,” Lizzie pointed out. “There are no hunters here. This is much less risky. Truly. If you went back to town and said you saw me, who would believe you?”
“Good point,” Wade allowed. “And that’s why you are studying Dance instead of hunting?”
“All life is a hunt, Wade,” Lizzie replied. “I think dancing is a stylized form of the hunt.”
“Interesting concept,” Wade admitted, “ but I still do not understand why you’re bothering.”
“Partially because it interests me,” Lizzie replied, “and partially because I have friends now. I did not always have friends, but I do now and I think well of them. I want them to think well of me.”
Wade paused to drink that in. “Dance?” he asked again.
“Yes!” Lizzie replied emphatically. “Maybe you should meet my friends.”
“Um, okay,” Wade agreed. “Who are your friends? A cyclops and a siren?”
“What?” Lizzie laughed. “Oh, please! A cyclops would have eaten me for dinner… or breakfast; they’re not picky eaters. And the sirens are too self-absorbed to be friends with anyone outside their little sorority.”
“Then who?” Wade asked.
“You’ll see,” Lizzie promised. “Climb up on my back. We’ll fly.”
“I, uh, left most of my gear at the base of the cliff,” Wade pointed out.
Lizzie leaned over the edge. “So I see. No problem, we can pick it up before we move on.”
“Move on,” Wade repeated. “Where are we headed?”
“A lovely town on the Southcoast of Massachusetts,” Lizzie informed him. “It’s called Hattamessett.”
The sky turned red as they flew. Not the red of a sunset, but a bright, even cherry red from horizon to horizon, except for the yellow and green clouds. The sun was still high in the sky, but when Wade glanced at it, he could have sworn it had a face. He shook his head and looked again, it seemed like a normal sun again and the sky was fading to pink while the clouds were flashing. The sudden light startled him.”
“Careful with the hands there, Wade,” Lizzie admonished him.
He had his arms firmly gripped around Lizzie as she flew and realized in panic one of his hands must have wandered. “Sorry about that,” he gasped. “I suppose I should have bought you a drink first.”
“What?” Lizzie asked, sounding confused. Then she laughed, “No. I meant you were gripping so tightly I was having trouble breathing. It takes a lot of air, both under my wings and in my lungs to be able to fly. Cut off one or the other and our flight becomes all too ballistic. No trouble now though. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Wade responded automatically. “Are we there yet?”
“Very soon,” Lizzie promised. The sky turned blue again and the clouds became white. Below them there was still a lot of ground covered with bright blue foliage, but as they descended, the leaves returned to a more normal set of colors for mid-October although not as advanced as they had been in New Hampshire. And as Lizzie came in for a perfect landing they were suddenly on a wooden porch attached to a cottage in a quiet neighborhood. The porch was mostly surrounded by pivets, hiding them from the street. “We’re here,” she announced. “Wade, be a dear and climb down and ring the bell would you?”
He did and a moment later they heard the sound of approaching footsteps. The door opened to reveal a tall, dark-haired woman who seemed both young and middle aged at the same time. “Hi, Ash!” Lizzie greeted her.
“Lizzie!” Ash returned the greeting. “You could have just walked in, you know.”
“Had I been alone, I would have,” Lizzie replied. “This is Wade. I hope he is welcome here.”
“If he‘s with you, of course,” Ash replied automatically. “Come in, both of you. Tanise and I were just having tea out back.”
The cottage seemed like a normal suburban home until they reached the solarium in back beyond which was a host of impossibilities. The first thing to draw Wade’s attention as he stepped outside was an improbably tall maple tree that seemed to just keep going on up forever. The colors of its leaves were brighter than any maple’s he had ever seen and he could not stop staring at it.
“Isn’t he magnificent?” someone asked him. He blinked and turned to face the talker and found himself staring at a green-eyed young woman wearing a dress made out of colorful maple leaves. “Hi!” she told him brightly. “I’m Tanise, and that is my Tree,” she added proudly.
“Your tree?” Wade echoed uncertainly.
“Tanise is technically a dryad,” Lizzie informed him. “And that is a World Tree.”
“Like Yggdrassil?” Wade asked, remembering another trace of his early education.
“His parent,” Tanise nodded.
“I should explain,” Lizzie cut back in. “We are in a different universe here.”
“Given the way everything looked along the way, I’m not surprised,” Wade replied, “But I thought we were in Massachusetts.”
“We are,” Lizzie replied, “or rather the house is. The backyard is a whole other world. The Tree is the foundation of that world. That universe really. It’s a very long story and I’ll explain it later. But these are two of my friends. Asherah and Tanise. Where’s everyone else?” she asked Ash.
“Eddy’s up in Vermont, visiting Dee,” Ash replied. “She’s been so busy with the college she doesn’t always have time to come here, so he thought he may as well go there for a change. Maggie still works as an oceanographer, you know, and Amy is in her final year at Brown University.”
While Ash was answering, Wade managed to look around the backyard now that he had gotten over the sight of the tremendous Tree. They were standing on what looked like any other stone patio with teak coffee tables and Adirondack chairs, but any other stone patio would not have been situated between the typical Southcoast cottage and an A-frame building that was three times the size of the house and could have passed as scenery in any Viking movie.
“That’s Eddy’s mead hall,” Tanise informed Wade.
“It looks like it,” Wade nodded.
“Thor built it for him,” Tanise added.
“Um, okay,” Wade nodded.
“The Norse god of thunder,” Lizzie told him.
“Of course,” Wade continued nodding for just a moment. “What?”
“Wade, you’ve already accepted that I am the same Sphinx who met and was defeated by Oedipus,” Lizzie continued. “You understand that we’re in an entirely different universe here. Tanise is a dryad. Why does it bother you that Thor the Thunderer built a mead hall for a friend?”
“It sounds like something from a comic book,” Wade replied sheepishly, then he looked at Ash. “So you’re a goddess too?”
“Yes,” Asherah nodded, “I used to be the queen of the Canaanite and Israelite pantheons.”
“I thought the Israelites were monotheists,” Wade commented.
“No,” Ash shook her head. The Israelite religion eventually became the monotheism we now call Judaism, but originally their gods and goddesses were closely related to those of the Canaanites.”
“I see,” Wade shrugged, “and this mead hall belongs to Eddy? Who’s he really?”
“Eddy Salem,” Lizzie informed him, “is a retired ad executive from Boston. He is also the supreme deity of this universe.”
“He’s God?” Wade asked disbelievingly.
“Not the way you mean it,” Ash laughed. “This is not your world, remember?”
“Okay, I can accept that,” Wade decided. “I guess I was just thrown for a loss when you mentioned Thor’s name. I’ve heard of him. No offense, Ash, but I’ve never heard of you before.”
“That’s not surprising,” Ash allowed. “Most modern people haven’t. I’m just one of many gods and goddesses who were important once, but who are virtually unknown now.”
“I’m sure you’ve heard of some of my other friends,” Lizzie told him, “and we’ll meet them in time if you like. Ash, I would appreciate your opinion.” Ash nodded her acquiescence and Lizzie related the long conversation she had shared with Wade.
“I agree,” Ash replied at last. “Wade you’ve just been drifting. That’s can be very relaxing for a short vacation, but it’s a waste of life. You need to find something worthwhile to do.”
“Such as?” Wade asked.
“Ah,” Ash sighed. “Now that is the question. Why don’t you and Lizzie stay here for a while and maybe we can help you find out.”
“Would you like to see my world?” Tanise offered. “The dinosaurs are really cool.”
“Dinosaurs?” Wade echoed.
The flying carpet made Wade laugh out loud and until it lifted off the ground he was certain Tanise was having him on, but she was cute and personable and persuasive in her way so he played along. And then they were off.
The carpet was faster than he might have thought from a dozen movies that featured them and somehow Hollywood had completely failed to convey how windy the ride would be or how bumpy. Movies rarely remembered how thermals could affect a flight or just how rough a flight could be when flying through a large, puffy cumulous cloud in the middle of an afternoon. Even when some clouds were flat and calm, they were always wet and a flying carpet did not have an enclosed cabin.
Tanise was an experienced flyer and knew enough to avoid the clouds, but updrafts and downdrafts were invisible so the flight was not as smooth as Wade would have expected and he found himself gripping tightly to the edge of the carpet. “See down there, Wade?” Tanise asked, “There are a hunting pair of Tyrannosaurs.”
“Where?” Wade asked, looking down.
“There,” she pointed. “They’re a little hard to see, I know. They blend in with the foliage. Natural camouflage. They’re a light brown with a bit of green in their color, but they’re about to charge that herd of grazers up ahead.”
“I see them too, but they aren’t all that easy to make out,” Wade admitted. “How do you do it?”
“Experience at knowing what to look for, mostly,” Tanise replied.
“Oh yes, I see them now,” Wade commented. “Funny how something as big as they are can just disappear into the background. They aren’t even the exact same color as anything around them.”
“No, they are just close enough,” Tanise agreed, “there they go. Well, let’s move on. Carnosaurs don’t have pleasant eating habits.”
“Hard to believe you have dinosaurs here,” Wade admitted at last.
“This is a fairly young world, Wade,” Tanise told him. “It’s still developing and this is its Cretaceous Age.”
“I meant that if it’s an entirely new world, why are there dinos here at all?” Wade clarified. “Evolution is not an intelligent process. It goes anyway it pleases. I would have thought the chance of another world following Earth’s pattern would be almost impossible.”
“I think you got the right word there,” Tanise replied. “Pattern. My Tree is the offspring of the World Tree called Yggdrasil, so the universe he represents is going to be very similar to yours. There are other worlds, planets in this universe and they followed the evolutionary patterns their counterparts did in your universe too. They are very different from this.
“Dee thinks this world is so similar to Earth because Eddy is its supreme deity and, subconsciously at least, he has been directing the formation of this universe in the manner in which he is accustomed, But we expect that to change once sentient life develops here. People always seem to shape a world to their own desires.”
“You’re really something, you know that?” Wade chuckled.
“What do you mean?” Tanise asked, a hint of anger in her voice.
“Well, no offense intended,” Wade began, earning a glare from Tanise, “but dryads are reputed to be somewhat flighty and innocent. You, to the contrary, seem more serious and, well, worldly, I suppose.”
“I have more responsibilities than most dryads,” Tanise replied. “Most of my sisters need only care for a single tree, but my Tree is the universe. They never had to grow up in the same way I did. Also, very few dryads have had much of an education over the centuries, whereas I may be home-schooled, but I do have a very good education, or rather I’m still working on it.
“It is possible the fact I was born in the fall and not the spring may go a way toward explaining my differences,” Tanise went on. “I was born out of season for a dryad.”
“Why is that?” Wade asked.
“It was necessary for the Tree,” Tanise told him simply. She checked her watch and decided, “You must be getting hungry. We should be heading back now anyway.”
Wade admitted she was right, and was glad he did when it turned out they were still an hour away from Tanise’s home. “Did you have a nice tour?” Lizzie asked him as they landed.
“A good day for flying,” Wade admitted, “but we should have brought a snack.”
“Good,” Lizzie nodded. “I suppose we have time to eat before we leave.”
“We’re leaving already?” Wade asked.
“Yes,” Lizzie nodded. “While you were out, we got a call. It seems another friend could use our help.”
“I thought Tanise’s Tree was large,” Wade remarked, “but this…”
“Yggdrasil is much older,” Lizzie replied as they walked along a wide branch. The great ash tree’s leaves had turned yellow and were starting to fall gently to the ground, far below although it was already too dark here to see the ground. The Sun was near the horizon from where they were travelling in the tree and it was already night for the lower branches. Lizzie insisted they hurry along before they lost the light.
“This branch is almost like a road,” Wade marveled. “A great wooden, bark-covered road.”
“Some choose to see the Tree as a road,” Lizzie explained. “I suppose it is a passable metaphor and if heights bother you that would be more comfortable. But it is hard to fall off a branch by accident and I find the natural aspect of the tree more pleasant.”
“And the locals appreciate the lack of motor cars on our branches,” a high, squeaky voice added sarcastically.
“Hello, Ratatosk,” Lizzie greeted a large gray squirrel tiredly. Ratatosk was about the size of a German shepherd and had a voice that might have made him the fourth member of Alvin and the Chipmunks. Wade decided instantly Ratatosk was obviously the member who left before they made it big.
“Hiya, Sphinxie,” Rataosk shot back. “Who’s your boyfriend?”
“Wade Vogel,” Lizzie introduced. “Wade, this dinner in a fur coat is Ratatosk. It’s his job to make trouble around here.”
“I can believe it,” Wade commented. “Your smaller cousins were the bane of my peach trees when I was growing up. They didn’t seem to grasp the point of sharing,” he told the squirrel.
“Hey, peaches are good,” Ratatosk laughed.
“The peaches weren’t ripe yet,” Wade went on. “They stripped the trees completely before any of them ripened.”
“Green peaches have a special tang to them,” Ratatosk replied.
“They didn’t actually eat them,” Wade amplified. “They just took a small bite then tossed the rest away.”
“That’s the best way,” Ratatosk agreed.
“To do what?” Wade shot back. “Get on the endangered species list?”
“An unripe peach won’t kill you,” Ratatosk laughed.
“No, but a shotgun would,” Wade replied. “I’ve no love for your smaller relatives.”
Ratatosk reached out into the air and pulled back a large, but obviously green peach. “Hey, Wade!” he called tauntingly. When Wade turned to look at him, the squirrel took a small bite out of the peach , spit it out and then tossed the rest of it over his shoulder. “Refreshing!” the squirrel laughed.
“Got a shotgun?” Wade asked Lizzie.
“Ignore him,” Lizzie advised. “He’s just doing his job.”
Ratatosk suddenly jumped down from the branch he had been and took a place on the branch in front of Lizzie and Wade. “So, tall, winged and hairy,” he said to Lizzie. “We don’t see your kind around here much. Where you off too?”
Lizzie took a swat at the squirrel with her right paw, forcing him to scamper out of the way. “We’re off to the Springtime Seed Company,” she replied at last, “not that it is any business of yours.”
“Huh?” Ratatosk asked. “What’s up?”
“Ninti asked for my help,” Lizzie explained.
“She could have asked me,” Ratatosk commented.
“She said she needed a hunter,” Lizzie countered, “not a troublemaker.”
“I can be a hunter,” Ratatosk maintained.
“You eat fruit and seeds,” Lizzie pointed out. “It doesn’t take much talent to sneak up on a tree.”
“Hey!” Ratatosk complained. “That‘s not fair.”
“Is it supposed to be?” Lizzie countered, but she continued in a much gentler tone, “Look, Ratty, you have an important job to do, but I’m at leisure as they say. Which of us do you think is a better choice to hire as a hunter?”
“If you need a job done,” Ratatosk replied, “it’s best to give it to someone who is already busy.”
“Nonsense!” Lizzie scoffed. “You give it to the best one qualified.”
“Which more often than not, is the same one,” Ratatosk shot back.
“Evidently not this time,” Lizzie replied. “While we have you here, though, has there been any unusual activity around the Tree? Something that might be related to this job Ninti has for me?”
“Not that I’ve been aware of,” Ratatosk admitted after some thought. “Not everything that happens is unusual or wrong in the universal sense, you know. The World is in a quiet period for a change.”
“That would be a change,” Lizzie agreed. “Usually there is someone making trouble somewhere or other.”
“I didn’t say it was all sweetness and light,” Ratatosk pointed out, “merely that there does not seem to be any universal wrongnesses out there.” Just then a great gust of cold wind blew through the Tree and all around they could hear the branches creak. “Maybe I spoke too soon.”
“Or maybe winter is coming on,” Wade speculated. “The day here does seem to be ending sooner. Are we that much farther north or is it the longitude.”
“The day around Yggdrasil is unusual,” Lizzie explained. “We are above the Arctic Circle here and the day at this time of year is much shorter, but the time of day is subjective to the traveller. We left in late afternoon, so the light here is what it should be for our longitude at the Tree’s latitude. If we were in another part of the Tree it would probably be full night.”
“And in a month or so, it will be full dark no matter what time of day you came from,” Ratatosk added with unusual helpfulness. “Maybe you should have brought a flashlight?”
“No need,” Lizzie shook her head. “My night vision is excellent and we’ll be in South Carolina in a few minutes if we keep moving. Why don’t you think that was a natural wind?”
“Nothing is natural on the divine plain, toots,” Ratatosk replied. “By definition, anything that happens here is supernatural, but I know what you meant. In spite of what you might think of me, I am one of the Tree’s guardians and I have a special connection to Him, or Her or It… however you think of Him. That was no normal occurrence. Something is happening, but I don’t think it relates to what Ninti called you about.”
“How can you tell?” Wade asked.
“Just a hunch,” the squirrel replied, “but a hunch based on over a millennium of experience. Ninti is a level-headed girl.”
“Woman,” Lizzie corrected him firmly.
“Whatever,” Ratatosk shrugged. “She’s one of the few truly sensible gods or goddesses I’ve ever dealt with and She would not have panicked and called you or anyone else without good cause and without first using the resources available to Her. That would have taken time and if that’s the case I would have noticed something happening sooner if this related.”
“So what was that wind about?” Wade inquired.
“I’m not omniscient,” Ratatosk snapped, “but I am curious. I intend to find out. See you.” The squirrel jumped back up to the next branch and then to another and another until he was out of sight and beyond their hearing.
“So, a mystery,” Wade remarked.
“But not our mystery,” Lizzie told him. He turned to see she had transformed into a fully human-appearing woman. She wore a dress that was the same tawny color of her fur and her dark hair had become somewhat longer although it was now tied back into a ponytail. Her face, of course, remained the same.
“How did you do that?” Wade asked, “And why?”
“It’s a natural ability for most supernatural creatures to be able to adopt a human guise, although it does take some training,” Lizzie admitted. “I do not do this very often. I find my natural form more pleasant, but we may be seen where we are about to go. In fact, it is a busy business district, so I would say we are very likely to be seen. So while I do not favor this form normally, it is more appropriate than a winged lioness with a woman’s face and breasts. This way.” So saying, she took a step off the branch, now somewhat narrower than it had been earlier, and vanished. Wade hastily followed her.
A moment later they found themselves outside a two-story office building along a frontage road that paralleled a busy highway. The sun was higher in the sky once again and it looked like it was still at least an hour before sunset. Just after they arrived, the sun went behind a cloud and there was a rumble of thunder.
“How auspicious!” Lizzie murmured. All around them, people were climbing into their cars and starting to drive away. “End of the business day,” she noted.
“No one seems to have noticed we just appeared here,” Wade remarked.
“I’m not sure why,” Lizzie admitted. “It might be a special property of the Tree. The Tree is the World, you see, so while we were not actually here, we also were not exactly not here at the same time.”
“Like Schroedinger’s cat?” Wade asked, “both dead and alive or neither until someone actually observes it.” There was a flash of lightning.
“I don’t believe I’ve heard of that,” Lizzie admitted as thunder rolled across the sky again, “although that sounds more like the definition of proof to me than an actual state of being.”
“Perhaps it is,” Wade nodded. “It was supposed to be a thought-experiment to explain the nature of quantum mechanics.”
“Beyond my classical education, I fear,” Lizzie replied, “but I suppose that could be related. Of course, it might just be a natural enchantment of sorts or else most mortals just don’t see what they are not supposed to. We can ask Mother Nature sometime, if you like. She might know.”
“There really is a Mother Nature?” Wade asked as they carefully crossed the parking lot. The sky was getting darker and more and more of it was covered by thick clouds. “Everyone seems to be staring at us now, though.”
“Yes,” Lizzie answered his question first. “She’s Eddy’s girlfriend or wife. I’m not sure how they see their relationship and I’ve always been too polite to ask. And I suppose we must stand out a bit here. I’m wearing a long dress, a bit formal for the locale and you are still in a shirt and jeans and still have your pack.”
“I probably could have left it in Hattamessett,” Wade admitted.
“Possibly,” Lizzie agreed, “but we may need it. Just ignore the people.”
“I’m probably a bit dirty and travel worn,” Wade remarked. “I haven’t had a chance to shower in days.”
“You may refresh yourself here, I’m sure,” Lizzie told him as they stepped through a plate glass door marked “Springtime Seed Company.” It started raining just behind them. “Or just stand outside a few minutes,” she added, pausing to watch fat drops of rain bombard the pavement.
“No thanks,” Wade shook his head, following her in. “I prefer hot showers.”
A pleasant chime sounded as the door opened and then again as it shut and a moment later another woman stepped around a corner to greet them. She was not tall, and yet she seemed statuesque. Her face was round with a slightly larger than average nose that accented her beauty rather than marred it. Her straight dark brown hair was shoulder length and she was wearing a bright green blouse over jeans. Her only jewelry, however was a simple ceramic pendant which Wade thought might have had some writing pressed into the surface, but he could not get close enough politely to be able to read it.
“Lizzie?” the woman asked. “Is that really you? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in guise.”
“I don’t spend much time where mortals might see me, Ninti,” Lizzie replied. “Oh, this is Wade Vogel. I met him in New Hampshire and he still hasn’t answered my question.”
“What question?” both Ninti and Wade asked together.
“I asked if you could dance,” Lizzie reminded him.
“And you’ve managed to put off answering this long?” Ninti laughed. “Lizzie, obviously he can not only dance, but he has moves you never thought of.”
“I didn’t realize you were serious,” Wade explained.
“Wade, Lizzie is always serious,” Ninti warned him. “Even when she is joking.”
“Especially when I am joking,” Lizzie added. “But I am very serious about Dance.”
“Any new insights, Lizzie?” Ninti asked politely.
“Not really,” Lizzie replied. “I’m really just a beginning student. It’s hard to find a teacher who won’t mind having me as a student.”
“I’m sure you’re an excellent student,” Ninti assured her. “You put your whole heart into everything you do.”
“It is just part of being a predator, I think,” Lizzie shrugged off the compliment. “There’s no room in nature for an indifferent predator.”
“I don’t entirely agree,” Ninti shook her head. “I’ve seen hunters who just sat around while prey animals walked by unmolested. They were only interested when hungry. Once their bellies felt full, they were content to just sit and sun themselves.”
“Perhaps,” Lizzie allowed, “but a full belly never lasts long enough and any hunter who isn’t at least thinking about the next hunt is going to miss more than a few meals. And speaking of hunters, why do you need one?”
“Enki has gone missing,” Ninti explained.
“As I recall he often forgets to call in when an enthusiasm grips him,” Lizzie remarked.
“He does not forget to answer his phone, however,” Ninti countered.
“Cell phones don’t work in Heaven or Hell,” Lizzie pointed out, “or anywhere on the Divine Plain for that matter.”
“But he was supposed to be in Vermont last weekend and he still hasn’t arrived,” Ninti went on. “Sherburne College is one of his enthusiasms, as you call them. He wouldn’t have forgotten about it. Someone or something might have waylaid him along the way, however. Or maybe the Divine Plain is closed like it was briefly last year.”
“I doubt it,” Lizzie replied. “We went between the plains to get from New Hampshire to Hattamessett and then traveled via Yggdrasil to get here. Was he travelling through the Tree? We could ask the squirrel or some of the others if they saw him.”
“Not the Tree,” Ninti shook her head. “He took that little red sports car of his.”
“I didn’t know he had one,” Lizzie admitted.
“Having a mid-life crisis?” Wade chuckled.
“At the age of five or six thousand?” Ninti countered. “Then again, in some ways his entire existence has been a so-called mid-life crisis.”
“So where do we start?” Wade asked, surprising himself by instantly jumping into the situation. It meant he had accepted all the supernatural things and people around him. He had always thought of himself as level-headed, but for some reason, from the moment he met the Sphinx he had instantly suspended any disbelief, except for that brief time when they had paused in Hattamessett.
“We ate already at the start of the trail,” Lizzie remarked as another flash of lightning illuminate the room and was instantly followed by thunder. “Although I think we should wait until the storm passes.”
“It should only last an hour at the most,” Ninti shrugged. “Then we’ll get little rumblers for half the night. Typical weather around here. We have time for dinner before you set off.”
“You waited several days,” Lizzie pointed out, “and Wade will need some sleep soon. It may be best to wait until morning.”
“I can leave now,” Wade insisted.
“No,” Lizzie told him firmly. “You’re getting tired. I can see that even if you won’t admit it to yourself. Hunting on an empty stomach is something you cannot always avoid, but hunting while sleep-deprived rarely leads to a successful conclusion. Also I recall you wanted a hot shower and some clean clothing. Ninti, Wade has been hiking for months and his clothing is a bit worse for the wear.”
“I can pop out while you both rest and buy him a couple pairs of jeans,” Ninti promised, “And we always have the company shirts.” She indicated her own blouse on which the logo of Springtime Seed Company had been tastefully embroidered. “Enki really overbought on those. They were useful the first year, but… Well, you’re welcome to as many as you like.”
“So we know Enki was headed for Killington, Vermont,” Lizzie told Wade the next morning after breakfast. True to Ninti’s prediction, the rain had tapered off after an hour and by morning the sky was clear. They stepped out of the air-conditioned office to find the morning already hot and humid. “Let’s see if we can follow his trail.”
“Does a god leave a scent for you to follow?” Wade asked. He was wearing a new pair of jeans now and a freshly unwrapped light blue company shirt. Ninti had insisted he take several shirts in button-down and polo styles along with the spare set of jeans. On seeing the new clothing and comparing it to what he had in his pack, he instantly tossed out all the old things. Lizzie had been right; they were all too ratty to wear now even if he had not noticed it.
“Only if he hasn’t bathed lately,” Lizzie replied. “My sense of smell is not any more acute than yours.”
“Then how?” Wade asked.
“I hunt with my eyes, ears and most importantly with my mind,” Lizzie informed him. “There will be traces along the way. Our job is to find them.”
“Along the way to where?” Wade asked.
“We know he was headed to Killington,” Lizzie replied. “We’ll try to duplicate his route.”
“Oh wait!” Ninti called to them from the doorway. She held out a fancy-looking smartphone. “I think this might come in handy.”
“I have a cellphone,” Wade told her.
“Have trouble keeping it charged?” Ninti asked.
“On the trail? Sometimes,” Wade admitted, “although there’s usually somewhere I can plug in.”
“Ours don’t need charging,” Ninti explained, “and you’ll find several useful numbers preprogrammed in. Lizzie knows everyone on the list.”
“It still won’t work on the Divine Plain,” Lizzie pointed out.
“No, but you can always return to the mortal world to check in,” Ninti pressed the phone on her. “We’ve been thinking of upgrading to 4G for video calls, but Enki and Jael are still arguing over whose service is more reliable and has the best models. I’ll figure they’ll come to an agreement about the time 4G is considered to slow to bother with.”
“Thank you,” Lizzie accepted the phone and placed it in a bag she had slung over her shoulder. “Maybe I should have you hold it, Wade. I won’t have hands most of the time.”
“Your bag is as good a place for it as any,” Wade shrugged. “So how do we get to this Divine Plain?”
“That’s my job,” Lizzie told him. “Just walk with me and I’ll guide you. Ninti, thank you. We’ll let you know as soon as we learn anything.”
A few minutes later they were walking along what seemed to be a packed-dirt road. Lizzie had transformed back into her native Sphinx shape the moment she could. Wade had barely noticed the transition from the highway in South Carolina. It had changed so gradually he might have thought it had just been like this all along had he not known better. Doesn’t the Divine Plain have better roads than this?” he asked as they walked along.
“This isn’t really the Divine Plain,” Lizzie explained. “Actually this is not even a place. But if it were a place it would be between the two plains.”
“It looks like a place,” Wade remarked.
“This is the stuff that dreams are made on,” Lizzie quoted. “Everything you see is a figment of your imagination. Well, maybe not. I’m guiding you, so it’s my imagination that is controlling our progress. You could probably do it too, with training, but for now I would rather you did not try. We could lose the trail.”
“Okay,” Wade agreed. “That makes sense. So if this Enki chap is driving, why are we walking?”
“Speed has very little to do with progress on this particular path,” Lizzie told him. “We will get where we are going just as rapidly as we would if we were driving too.”
“Then why is Enki in a little red sports car?” Wade wondered.
“Well,” Lizzie chuckled. “I do have to admit the man has style.”
“And driving is easier than walking,” Wade added.
“Wade you’ve been hiking in the mountains for months,” Lizzie admonished him. “You are physically fit and have excellent stamina. You don’t need anything but your own two feet to get yourself anywhere.”
“Being willing to walk where I go,” Wade replied, “doesn’t preclude me from accepting ride every now and then.”
They continued to walk for the next few hours and as they did the world changed around them gradually. “We could be progressing much more rapidly,” Lizzie admitted when they stopped to rest and have a snack, “but Enki did not leave a very clear path, not that I expected him too. There was no reason he should have gone out of his way to do so.”
“I haven’t seen anything,” Wade admitted.
“There hasn’t been much to see,” Lizzie remarked, “and some of the time we may not have been on his direct path. The best hunters are able to understand how their prey thinks. They know how they will act and react and therefore can catch them. Ninti did well to ask me to look for Enki because in this place, or not-a-place as I explained, being able to think like the one you are following is of the utmost importance. I could wish I knew him better. If I did we might have found him already, but when I get it right, I get glimpses of his trail.”
“And if we lose the trail?” Wade asked.
“If we arrive in Killington without finding him,” Lizzie replied, “there will be others I can consult and then we will try backtracking to find him.”
An hour later they came across a fork in the road. “That’s very odd,” Lizzie noted. “I have never seen a split in the perceived path in this non-place before.”
“What does it mean?” Wade asked.
“I don’t really know,” she shook her head. “Have you been trying to make changes here?”
“You told me not to,” Wade reminded her.
“That wasn’t what I asked,” Lizzie snapped.
“No,” Wade replied at last. “I’ve been trying to leave my mind blank. If I did this it was subconsciously.”
“Hmm, I don’t think you did,” Lizzie decided after a few more minutes’ study of the situation. “This is something else. I just don’t know what.”
“Maybe both paths are right?” Wade suggested uncertainly.
“No, I don’t think so,” Lizzie denied. “More likely one is the path Enki took and the other is the one he should have taken.”
“Well, which path looks less traveled?” Wade asked.
“That one on the left,” Lizzie pointed.
“Then we should go that way?” Wade suggested uncertainly.
“Huh?” Lizzie sounded confused. “Why?”
“Isn’t it more poetically correct to travel the road not taken?” Wade pointed out.
“Not when hunting someone who went the other way,” Lizzie chuckled. “But I like the fact that you can think the way you do. It’s creative. That’s very good.”
“So you know he went to the right?” Wade asked.
“Probably not the way you mean that,” Lizzie replied. “This path, both of these paths, do not likely look the same way that Enki saw them. This is just how we perceive them at this time and we are merely following the path that is right for us.”
“So there really might be two correct paths,” Wade concluded.
“No,” Lizzie shook he head again and then reconsidered the answer. “Well, maybe there are, but Enki definitely turned right here.”
“How can you tell? Wade asked.
“There are tire prints that way,” Lizzie pointed them out, “and that is really odd. I would not have expected to actually see tracks like this. Not here.”
“Why not?” Wade asked yet again. He was starting to feel like he could have just recorded the words and played them back over and over again. It had been a long time since he had found himself in a situation in which he knew so little, and yet he was starting to enjoy that.
“We do not usually leave lasting impressions of that sort in this non-place,” she explained. “There really is no place to leave them, but Enki must have done so for a reason.”
“Such as?” Wade prompted.
“Let’s find him and ask,” Lizzie suggested.
The left-hand fork disappeared the moment they stepped on to the right and the continued on, but after a while Lizzie admitted she had lost the trail and they started walking back and forth in her attempt to find it again. Finally she found the tracks again and they continued on, but only for a few more minutes when they reached the end of Enki’s trail. “Well that’s it.” Lizzie decided. “This is where he crossed over.”
“Are you sure?” Wade asked, “and what do you mean by crossed over. He’s not dead, is he?”
“Dead?” Lizzie echoed. “I don’t know one way or the other yet. I just meant he left this between place. You can tell by the way the tire tracks suddenly end with a sharp vertical edge. As for where he might be, well it’s either the Divine Plain or the mortal world. We shall find out in a moment.”
Lizzie guided Wade and in an instant they found themselves on an idyllic hill covered with daffodils. Ahead of them was a trail of crushed flowers and soon after that was Enki’s red sportster. Wade climbed into the car and checked it out. “Well here’s his problem,” he laughed. “The car is out of gas. No wonder he left it behind. Do you think he might be out looking for a gallon or two?”
“Perhaps,” Lizzie shrugged. “It’s hard to tell though. I have often considered that Enki’s grasp of modern technology has more than a few holes in it. For all I know he may have kept that car running by divine force of will rather than filling the tank with high-test.”
“Is that possible?” Wade wondered.
“The whole point of being a god is the ability to produce miracles at will,” Lizzie pointed out. “Also, Enki is a good idea man, but he has a tendency to get others to make those ideas work.”
“Then if he wasn’t out of fuel,” Wade countered, “why did he abandon the car?”
“I don’t know yet,” Lizzie admitted, “but I’m sure Enki does and this time he really did leave footprints among the flowers for us to follow.”
As they followed the new trail, Wade asked. “Where are we, anyway?”
“Good question,” Lizzie commended him. “Hard to tell with so little to go on. It could be someone’s version of Heaven.”
“Or it could be Hell,” Wade countered, “depending on their allergies.”
“I doubt any one person has the strength of belief to have their personal afterlife represented on the Divine Plain in isolation from all others,” Lizzie argued. “That sort of thing takes the belief of many people. But this is definitely some religion’s Divine Plain. The air here is too sweet and pure for us to be in the mortal world. The temperature is too perfect too.”
“And it’s too idyllic if you ask me,” Wade put in. “All I see are rolling hills covered in flowers with a few copses of trees here and there. The place is too perfect to be believed.”
“Then it could be Heaven,” Lizzie told him.
“Too empty,” Wade decided. “I’m not sure just what I expect Heaven to be like, but I don’t expect it is unpopulated.”
“I am told that Heaven has whatever would make you happiest,” Lizzie replied, “but I think you are right. This is not any part of the Judeo-Christian version of the Divine Plain. It is something else.”
“Maybe it’s a new universe, like the one in Hattamesett,” Wade suggested.
“No, not the way we got here it isn’t,” Lizzie retorted. “That is truly a universe apart from our own. This is an aspect of our universe, some religion’s version of how this part of Creation should be. I think it might be an obscure religion, however. One that does not have a clearly defined Divine plain.”
They were still discussing that when they found Enki seated on the bank of a small river. “I was wondering who Ninti would send,” he told them after their greetings.
“You expected her to?” Wade asked.
“She’s my daughter,” Enki explained, “and we know each other very well by now. So when I got trapped here, I knew it would only be a matter of time before she sent for help. I can’t say I expected to see Lizzie, but she may be a better choice than any of the others.”
“Why?” Wade asked, then changed his mind. “Cancel that. How are you trapped here? And are we trapped too?”
“Look at my legs,” Enki instructed them. He was sitting on a large rock beside the stream, but his legs were in the water from their knees on down. No, on second look they saw Enki’s legs ended abruptly where they touched the water. “I’m attached to this river,” the god explained. “I have become a part of it and it is a part of me. It is only through sheer force of will that I have managed so far to avoid completely merging with it. I can stay like this for a while, but without help it will pull me in completely and change me.”
“That sounds bad,” Wade observed.
“It’s not good,” Enki agreed, “or at least I do not think it is. I like myself the way I am and would like to keep me that way.”
“But how do we get you out?” Wade asked. “Can we just pick you up and drag you out of this world?”
“You can try,” Enki shrugged. “I certainly cannot move away on my own.”
They tried to lift Enki out of the water, but he might have been frozen in ice, rather than a flowing stream, for all the progress they made. “I think we’re lucky you didn’t slip in altogether,” Wade decided. “What kind of a world is this?”
“A vague one. This place is a god-trap,” Enki pointed out. “It’s an only partially formed Divine Plain aspect. My suspicion is that it belongs to a religion that is little more than a cult and that either it does not have a well-developed theology, or else there aren’t enough believers for their gods to manifest yet. Probably the latter. The problem is that it tries to latch on to any compatible deity or supernatural creature who stumbles in.”
“Then why don’t I feel drawn in here?” Lizzie asked.
“There is probably no place for a sphinx in their beliefs,” Enki shrugged “or else your personality is unlike any supposed deity of the religion this place represents. The good news is you can get out and go for help.”
“Are you going to be all right if we leave?” Wade asked.
“Maybe you should stay with him,” Lizzie suggested.
“That’s a good idea,” Enki agreed. “Having someone to talk to helps me resist this world’s pull on me. Before you arrived I was slowing slipping deeper into this river, but since you got here I have not sunk so much as a fraction of an inch.”
“Won’t I get trapped here too?” Wade asked. “I don’t have the will power of a god, you know.”
“I think you’re safe,” Enki assured him. “The power of this place calls to divine power and then adapts it. As a mortal it is not interested in you or you probably would have already been changed by the place. In the ancient world I was the god of fresh water, among other things, so it is trying to turn me into a river spirit. Lizzie, uh, where did she go?”
“She left while you were explaining this place,” Wade explained. “So you were a water god?”
“In ancient Mesopotamia fresh water was very important,” Enki replied. “I invented irrigation in a land that is not easy to irrigate. Sure there were rivers, but the trick is getting the water into the fields when you want it.”
“And that land is a desert now,” Wade nodded.
“It was pretty much a desert then,” Enki replied, “but irrigation brought the land to life and allowed some of the world’s earliest cities to flourish.” He paused and looked around. “Dilmun was a god trap too in its way.”
“Where or what was Dilmun?” Wade asked.
“It was my pantheon’s version of Heaven and Olympus,” Enki replied. “The home of the gods and the original birthplace of Mankind.”
“Uh? How can that be?” Wade asked. “Humans evolved from the earlier hominids, in Africa mostly.”
“Yes,” Enki agreed. “You were also created as many times as there are different religious stories to explain it. In the mortal world you evolved, just as you say, from the apes to the hominids and then into true Humans. Absolutely true. But on the divine plain the truth is different and contradictory. So it is true that the gods of my pantheon created the world and everything in it, just as it is true that your God began by saying ‘Let there be light!’ And every other creation myth is true as well, on the Divine Plain, because while it only happened once in the mortal world, it happened many times here on this side of Creation.”
“Isn’t that a paradox?” Wade countered.
“Not on the Divine Plain,” Enki told him. “You mortals have had some horrendous wars over which religion is true and you’ve done some things I find absolutely terrifying all in the cause of whatever you claimed the one true religion was. Let me assure you they are all true even when their basic tenets are in conflict. On the Divine Plain what you call paradox is just the way things are. And while humans might fight over religion most of your gods do not.”
“No?” Wade asked. “I seem to recall a lot of side taking in Homer’s works”
“I never said we were impartial,” Enki laughed, “but you never would have found God and Allah going to war with each other during the Crusades. That would have destroyed the Universe permanently. Possibly it might have caused it never to have been created in the first place.”
“I thought God and Allah were just two names for the same deity,” Wade replied.
“Maybe,” Enki allowed. “It’s hard to tell with the Infinites.”
“Infinites?” Wade echoed.
“Most gods and goddesses are far from all-powerful,” Enki replied. “Actually we’re larger than life and most of us are very powerful, but our flaws are larger than life too and in many ways we’re just plain folks. Many cultures see their gods as the archetypical people. Our virtues were greater but so were our flaws. We are both wiser and more foolish than mortals. Some of us are no better than spoiled children. Heh! Some of us are spoiled children who also know the wisdom of the ages.
“But most of us are neither all-knowing, all-powerful or all that,” Enki continued. “And then there are the ones we call the Infinites. This includes Yahweh, the Christian God, Allah and a few others. Maybe they are all one and the same and maybe not. That’s something the rest of us don’t know for certain either.”
“Is there room in the Universe for more than one infinite and omnipresent God?” Wade asked.
“That’s a good question, Wade,” Enki acknowledged. “Sadly the answer is that I don’t really know and my guesses go both ways depending on my mood at the time. But the rest of us think of them as different deities since there are differences in their parts of the Divine Plain, but that could be the doing of their believers who sometimes think they are the only ones who can go to Heaven. It is possible that they are both plural and singular at the same time, of course.”
“Huh?” Wade reacted. “More Divine Plain nonsense?”
“Maybe,” Enki grinned. In that moment Wade looked closely in Enki’s blue eyes and studied his face. With that grin, Wade realized that Enki was one of those rare individuals who could find the humor in nearly every situation. “We gods are not all that immutable. We change with the beliefs of our worshippers. In Sumer, I was Enki. Later I was known to the people of Akkad as Ea. Ea was not exactly the same god as Enki, though, not to the people who believed in us. For one thing Ea had a son named Marduk, a great hero-god. As Enki, I had children, but Marduk was not one of them. I was an important and popular god to the Sumerians. I was still important to the Akkadians, but I was an elder god and Marduk was the new power to be reckoned with. Many of my earlier exploits were attributed to him and gradually Enki and Ea became different. I had a choice to make then.
“I could have become two different gods, Enki and Ea or I could have allowed the two to be one, becoming Ea while still remembering Enki,” Enki went on. “This sort of thing happens all the time. Well, all the time in the course of history. I wouldn’t want you thinking gods and goddesses change that way as easily as they might don a new robe, but we call these different related deities aspects of ourselves and if two aspects are close enough in nature we can merge with them. One of the most successful goddesses to that do was my grand-daughter, Inanna.
“Well, she was originally Enki’s grand-daughter,” he continued. “Our relationship changed over time.”
“Inanna?” Wade asked. “I don’t think I’ve heard of her.”
“Sure you have,” Enki laughed. “She is also Ishtar, Astarte, Tiamat, Aphrodite, Venus…”
“Oh! You’re right,” Wade agreed. “I have heard of her. Is she still around?”
“Oh yes,” Enki nodded. “She currently calls herself Ina Loveall and she teaches Comparative Religions at Sherburne College.”
“You’re making that up,” Wade accused.
“Not at all,” Enki denied.
“But isn’t Aphrodite a rather flighty goddess?” Wade asked.
“She was,” Enki allowed. “She was also Queen of Heaven in Sumer, and a similarly powerful goddess to the Canaanites and Phoenecians, but I told you a lot of us gods act like spoiled brats. When you are immortal you don’t have to grow up any faster than you want to and it did take a while for Inanna to become the mature and sober individual she is today, but I assure you that after five or six millennia even a god can grow up.”
“So, wait a moment,” Wade cut in. “You said you were Enki and then you were Ea?”
“And a host of other names before and after,” Enki agreed.
“So why do you call yourself Enki now?”
“Personal preference,” Enki replied. “Sometimes a god loses his worshippers. That is often the beginning of the end of a deity which is why we tend to merge with our latter day aspects when we can. But we do not die all at once and, in fact, if we want to live, we can keep going indefinitely, but without active worshippers… Well, sufficient active worshippers. I think there are a few prayers tossed my way from time to time, mostly by obscure cultists who took the odd class in archaeology. But anyway, without active worshippers we are free to be who we want.
“A fair number of the ancient Mesopotamian gods and goddesses either did not or could not merge with later aspects. Sometimes there is no one to merge with or else your aspect is so different that merger is not possible. You met Ninti, right? She has an aspect in your own modern religion.”
“She does?” Wade asked. “Who?”
“Eve,” Enki replied. “Wife of Adam and mother of Cain, Able, Seth and, by extension, all Mankind. But Eve is a mortal aspect and Ninti was unable to merge with her and possibly would not have even if she could. To merge with a mortal aspect is to become mortal, so Ninti, also known as ‘The Lady of the Rib,’ eventually became trapped with me and quite a few others in Dilmun when it got closed off. When a religion is completely forgotten and no longer practiced, that happens sometimes. The associated part of the Divine Plain becomes isolated and sort of turns back on itself so no one can get in or out.”
“Then how did you get out?” Wade asked.
“Archaeology, I think,” Enki grinned.
“Come again?”
“My entire pantheon was completely forgotten,” Enki explained. “Sumer, Akkad, Assyria, Neo Babylonia and a lot of other civilizations were either forgotten or only barely remembered in religious texts. No one knew much about the cultures or about their gods until archaeologists started excavating in what is now Iraq. Even so it took a long time to learn how to read the ancient languages, but eventually our stories came to light and scholars started seeing how many of our stories and the gods within them had striking parallels to the mythologies they did know. Gradually they became more well-known and that knowledge somehow weakened the barrier that kept us enclosed.”
“Could it be the belief of cultists who, learning about you, started to toss those prayers your way, as you put it?” Wade asked.
“That’s a strong possibility,” Enki allowed.
“Lucifer!” a woman swore from nearby. “What a horrible place!”
“It looks rather pleasant to me,” another woman, one with a slightly higher voice, remarked. Wade and Enki turned to see who had spoken and saw a blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman wearing a jeans and a workshirt, but as they watched she quickly transformed into a slightly shorter raven-haired beauty with violet eyes and two short horns sticking out of her temples. Lizzie stood beside them.
“That’s because it isn’t trying to transgender you,” the woman retorted apparently to her blonde self.
“Jael!” Enki called. “Rona, so nice to see you.”
“Lizzie says you got yourself hip-deep in it this time,” Jael remarked after a round of introductions.
“Only knee deep so far,” Wade cut in.
Jael studied him. “Lizzie, you found a funny one. Are you sure you’re going to be able to put up with that?”
“I do not mind humor, little demoness,” Lizzie replied seriously. “I put up with you too.”
“So you do,” Jael chuckled. Then suddenly she gasped and bent over in pain. Wade started to reach toward her in an attempt to help, but she waved him off and straightened back up a few seconds later. “Really nasty,” she commented.
“You said this world is trying to transgender you?” Wade asked. “Are you normally a man?”
“No!” Jael replied a little too forcefully. “Uh, sorry about that. This is really hard. I’m very much female, but I am also a demon.”
“A demoness, I would say,” Wade corrected her.
“Normally, I would too,” Jael agreed, “but I think this world belongs to some neo-pagan cult and not one of the more imaginative ones. It has latched on to my association with Hell and decided I’m a demon. A male demon. It may even be trying to make me the Devil himself. In any case, the associated religion or cult obviously sees such things in dichotomies such as Good versus Evil, Order versus Chaos and Light versus Darkness. It also probably equates Good with Light and Order and Evil with Chaos and Darkness. Well, another such dichotomy is Female versus Male. Now in some Oriental religions Male is equated with Light and Good, but in this case it is just the opposite. No doubt they see Female as the creative and nurturing force and Male as destructive.”
“So since you’re evil the world is trying to make you male?” Wade asked.
“Jael is not evil,” Enki told him.
“This world doesn’t see it that way,” Jael shook her head. It sees my connection to Hell and is trying to make me over into the way it thinks I should be. Lizzie, I can’t stay here. It’s taking everything I have just to stay me. We’re going to need someone else.”
“I’m sorry, Jael.” Lizzie apologized.
“No need,” Jael waved her off. “You warned me about what happened to Enki, I figured I could handle it if I saw it coming.”
“The draw on me seems to have been much more subtle,” Enki admitted. “I felt a calling as I was on my way to Killington so I stopped to investigate. I was here for a while before the world tried to transform me.”
“Maybe not,” Wade told him. “Seeing how quickly it latched on to Jael, it might only have been waiting until you could reach a place where it wanted you.”
“Good point,” Enki agreed.
“Well, I honestly don’t know how to get you out of there,” Jael told Enki, “And it is obvious this world wants me as much as it already has you. I think we need Dee.”
“Won’t she get trapped here too?” Wade asked, wondering who Dee was.
“I don’t think so,” Jael replied. “Dee is Mother Nature. Most of these neo-pagan cults already venerate Her in Her aspect as the Goddess. Dee’s earliest known aspect was that of the Mother Goddess of the Paleolithic period. Now this world might not see the connection. It only chose the most obvious and least compatible one for me, but even if Dee is not the Goddess of this world, her affinity might be sufficient and certainly she has a better chance to resolving this than I do. Ugh!” she doubled over again. Straightening up, she continued, “I’ll go find her.” She took a few steps and stopped. “Uh oh! I can’t get out.”
“Maybe I can carry you out,” Lizzie offered.
“It’s worth a shot,” Jael agreed. “I’ve never been a destructive sort and I’ve certainly never been a guy. I’d like to avoid both of those possibilities.”
“Maybe if I took over?” the blonde woman within Jael offered.
“No, Rona, that makes it worse,” Jael told her. “When you’re in charge I’m completely helpless to resist.”
“I don’t get it. Who is Rona?” Wade asked.
“My conscience,” Jael snapped. “The other side of me, if you would rather.”
“Jael is a very unusual demoness,” Enki explained. “She is possessed by a human soul.”
“It’s not so much possession,” Rona added without actually manifesting this time, “but I do hold the mortgage.”
“Rona!” Jael gasped. “Even that’s too much. Lizzie, get me out of here if you can, please.”
“Put your arm over my shoulder,” Lizzie advised. They tried walking a few steps but Lizzie vanished leaving Jael behind. The Sphinx immediately reappeared and they tried again several times. “This isn’t working,” Lizzie commented.
“Yeah, I noticed,” Jael replied.
“I’m feeling a bit of resistance though, if that’s the right word,” Lizzie continued, ignoring Jael’s sarcasm.”
“Trust me, Lizzie,” Jael assured her. I’m with you in spirit all the way.”
“But only partially with me in body,” Lizzie remarked. “It feels to me like I am carrying your arm only and it is your body that is trying to stay behind. Try climbing up on my back.” Jael did as instructed and Lizzie tried again. “Much more difficult,” Lizzie told her, “but I think I can do it if I really push, so to speak.” So saying, she started running and after a while stretched out her wings and took flight.
Around the Sphinx and demoness the air began to glow and shimmer. It was a deep red as first and then orange and finally bright golden yellow. “Getting hot in here,” Jael commented.
“You should be used to that,” Lizzie laughed.
“My offices in Hell were air conditioned,” Jael pointed out.
“Really?” Lizzie asked just as they suddenly broke out of the god-trap world and found themselves hurtling head-long through the branches of Yggdrasil.
“Yeah!” Jael screamed as Lizzie banked hard to avoid a branch. “I wish I were there right now!”
“It’s not our office anymore,” Rona pointed out with preternatural calmness within their shared head.
“So?” Jael shouted back and then realized Lizzie was back in control of her flight and was coming in for a landing.
“So what?” the Sphinx asked curiously. She touched down at a brisk run and started slowing down.
“Oh, never mind,” Jael told her. “I was just talking to myself. That was quite a ride.”
“Let’s do it again!” Rona told them both enthusiastically.
“Sure,” Jael agreed. “Next time you do it from the outside.”
“Have I ever told either of you you’re crazy?” Lizzie asked, sounding amused.
“My demoness,” Rona replied, manifesting fully, “I think I’ll keep her.”
“I don’t know if you two deserve each other,” Lizzie chuckled, “but you are a matched set.”
“But a matched set of what?” Jael shot back. They started walking toward the trunk. They were both experienced at traveling through the World Tree and the wild flight had left them unsure of where they were. They both knew without discussing it that the best way to get their bearings was to head toward the trunk.
“You make a good team,” Lizzie replied seriously. “Two people whose knowledge and abilities complement each other. That’s the best kind of team. I’ve always been a loner.”
“Is that why you’ve been dragging Wade around?” Jael asked.
“Most dances require a partner,” Lizzie pointed out, “and there is something about him.”
“Really? Tell me about it,” Jael requested.
“Oh, I can’t really put it into words,” Lizzie admitted.
“Really?” Jael asked interestedly. “Lizzie, words are one of your hunting tools. I’ve never known you at a loss for them. It must be love.”
“What?” Lizzie asked disbelievingly. “No, there’s no physical attraction between us. How could there be?”
“You have a human guise when you want one,” Jael pointed out.
“Actually I meant our age difference,” Lizzie replied.
“It didn’t stop me,” Jael pointed out. “Come to think about it, it didn’t stop Ninti, Dee or Ina either.”
“Well, that’s not what is happening here,” Lizzie told her with certainty. “Not at all. But there is some sort of intellectual connection. No, I’m wrong there, we have the potential for that. He’s quite unusual. You know how most mortals react when they meet me, especially when I surprise them. I half expected Wade to jump back off the cliff he had just climbed. I think most people would have. I was ready to catch him, but he didn’t panic. He just took a look at me and we started talking. Then I brought him to Hattamessett and he took all that in stride as well. Same for meeting Ninti and Enki. He asks a lot of questions, but he accepts the answers.”
“Maybe he hasn’t the wit to realize how unlikely it is for him to meet us all,” Jael suggested.
“No, he’s fairly bright. I can tell,” Lizzie told her. “But he’s been drifting through life too long. He made a bundle of money in a very short time and hasn’t had to work since, so instead he’s been doing things just to try to find something that really interests him. It’s made him a bit jaded, if you ask me, but I think we’re knocking that out of him in a hurry.”
“I’m sure he’s learning that our world bears very little resemblance to the one he knew,” Jael chuckled. “Hey, I think I know where we are,” she noticed as they came to a junction with another branch. “That branch is the way to Killington. See this mark in the bark?”
“You defaced the World Tree just to blaze a trail?” Lizzie asked.
“Of course not!” Jael denied. “It’s a natural scar or at least it was here before I noticed it. It’s just that I’ve been through here enough I got to know the landmarks, so to speak.”
“So we should go down that branch,” Lizzie concluded.
“No, Dee’s out of town for a few days,” Jael told her. “I think she might be in Hattamessett, so we keep going this way. Dee might not be our best choice, now that I come to think about it, though.”
“Why not?” Rona asked.
“I’ve been thinking about it since we started out,” Jael remarked, “and while I’ll stand by what I said about Dee’s qualifications going back to being the Mother Goddess of the Stone Age, I remember a conversation we had on the subject a while back. We only think that was Dee, but it wasn’t only her. The Mother Goddess was a rather nebulous figure from what we can tell and Dee is not the only goddess to have descended from Her although she is likely the most closely related to that prototypical goddess still extant. Ina is another direct descendant. Even as late as the Canaanites there was some confusion between her as Astarte and Dee as Asherah.”
“Wait a minute,” Lizzie cut in. “Dee and Ash are the same goddess?”
“Not quite,” Jael shook her head. “Hmm, this takes some explaining. I got it a spoonful at a time, but… Okay. The earliest historical aspect of the goddess currently calling herself Doctor Delores Meter, aka Mother Nature, was the Sumerian Ninhursag or Ninmah or… well the Sumerians invented writing so I guess they were fairly proud of their way with words. I think a lot of Dee’s and Enki’s names were meant more along the lines of epithets and titles. Anyway Dee was Ninhursag. She was also married to Enki early on, which sort of made sense since he is the god of inventors and she was the goddess of Nature and thereby invented most living things, although from the myths all the gods had a hand in that project.
“You know that gods and goddesses change over time as the beliefs of their worshippers developed and eventually, in Canaan, Dee was the Queen of Heaven, Asherah, the wife of King El. According to Canaanite mythology they were the old, possibly tired royal couple. Sleepy old gods who mostly sat on their thrones and smiled down benevolently on their creations. The young power couple, the ones who were really active in the heavens were Baal and his consort Astarte.”
“Whom we know as Inanna or just Ina,” Lizzie supplied, mostly to indicate she was keeping up.
“Right,” Jael agreed. “Baal eventually became associated with Lucifer and His other aspects although he is a separate god again these days… long story and not related to this. Anyway, Dee and Ash were still one in that period until the Israelites became a separate people. Now according to the Torah, the first leader of the Israelites was Abraham who came with his people from Mesopotamia and maybe that’s true. It happened millennia before I was born. Certainly it is true on the Divine Plain, at least, but the archaeological evidence is that the Israelites diverged from the Canaanites and brought their gods with them, but there were major differences between the two peoples.
“The Canaanites,” Jael went on, “were primarily city dwellers while the Israelites left the Canaanite cities to be semi-nomadic pastoralists.”
“You make it sound like the Israelites were a back-to-nature movement,” Lizzie remarked.
“That’s not entirely inaccurate,” Jael told her. “Their religion was fundamentalist in many ways. Baal and Astarte were much less important and for the early Israelites, El Almighty and Asherah were vibrant gods who actively ruled their domain. There were a variety of other household gods and goddess, but chief among them were El and Asherah.
“About this same time,” Jael went on, “Dee was also active in other Mediterranean pantheons. It was a time in which many of the gods had multiple active aspects. That happens from time to time, although many merge again later. So Dee was Demeter and Ceres and various other nature and harvest goddesses, while Ash was the Queen of the Israelite pantheon.
“So why didn’t Ash and Dee merge?” Lizzie wondered.
“Ash went into hiding,” Jael explained. “Not from Dee, of course. That would be like wanting to hide from yourself. As the Israelite religion developed, one of El’s names became the four letters some pronounce as Yahweh or Jehovah, and He, the king of all gods, was worshiped in his Temple in Jerusalem during the Monarchy period. For the most part only the priestly, well caste is not accurate, but it will do to describe the separation of the priests from the commoners, were allowed to worship in the Temple, although there were special holidays during which others might come to sacrifice and pray in the Temple grounds. Ash and the minor gods and goddesses was somewhat more accessible to the common people and were prayed to in the homes and in what were called the High Places. There are restrictions in the Hebrew Bible against worshiping in the High Places or under trees. That’s because Asherah and the other gods were worshipped there and by then the priests of the Temple were pushing for their God to be the one and only God of all. That was the birth of monotheism and also the beginnings of modern Judaism. So for some reason, and even Ash doesn’t know why or how, she ran for it and was hidden within Ina until a few years ago.
“Anyway, “Jael continued, “that tangent aside, Dee has active worshippers these days and entering that world could cause her to split and have two active aspects.”
“Is that bad?” Rona asked.
“Two divine aspects do not always get along,” Jael replied. “One of the reasons they diverge is that there is enough of a difference between them that they cannot remain a single entity. If that difference is great enough, they might even be mortal enemies. Dee could suddenly be at odds with herself and all the less capable of helping Enki. But going on about all this does give me an idea. How about Asherah?”
“Wouldn’t the same hold true for her? She is an aspect of Dee’s, after all” Lizzie asked.
“They’re both diverged too far from each other to merge at this point,” Jael replied, “and even if they were not, an aspect is a discrete entity until you merge with him or her. Ash is not being actively worshipped, not as she is right now. Oh, I suppose there’s someone here or there praying to her, but not enough to make much difference. She might be in danger of becoming part of the god trap – she certainly could be the Goddess for that world – but at least she won’t be at odds with herself.”
“Okay, you got me convinced,” the squeaky voice of Ratatosk commented from the next branch over. “Let’s go ask her. I’ve been looking for an excuse to visit my girlfriend anyway.”
“Ratty? What are you doing there?” Jael asked without thinking. Inside her own head she asked Rona, Did I really just hand him a straight line? Rona merely chuckled silently.
“Duh!” Ratatosk replied. “I live here, gorgeous. What’s your excuse?”
“Just passing through,” Jael muttered. “Hey, Ratty, anything you can tell us about the god trap world?”
“Which one?” Ratatosk asked. “I heard you talking, but your description was a bit vague. Correction, you didn’t really describe it at all.”
“Not a lot to it really,” Jael admitted. “Lizzie, you saw more of it than I did.”
The Sphinx described the world to Ratatosk, but when she was done he replied, “That’s still not much to go on. There must be dozens of those places around. Where is it on the tree?”
“From here I cannot really say,” Lizzie admitted. “We got here somewhat precipitously and I was more concerned with not hitting something harder than I am.”
“Yeah, I saw that too,” Ratatosk admitted. “But you know how to get back there?”
“From Hattamesett or Killington, yes,” Lizzie replied.
“Good enough,” Ratatosk told her. “Well if you’re going to Hattamessett, follow me. I know a short cut.”
“Have you been holding out on us?” Jael asked.
“Chica, it’s my job to know my way around the Tree,” Ratatosk replied. “Only the Infinites know every branch and leaf, but if there’s a non-Infinite who knows the Tree better than I do, I’d like to meet him.”
“Have it your way. Jael shrugged. “Good thing I borrowed one of Evie’s blouses with the slits in the back for her wings. A moment later, Jael’s full natural demonic appearance manifested. Her face was the same, but two large, black bat-like wings had sprouted from her back. There was also an uncomfortable look on her face. “Oh heck! I forgot I was wearing jeans. Dratted tail nearly ripped a hole in the seat of my pants. That would have been embarrassing.” She concentrated a moment and then relaxed. “There that’s better. I don’t really need the tail to fly, but I do use it for balance.”
“We only need to coast a bit to that branch,” Lizzie pointed out. So saying, she sprung into the air and landed lightly next to the squirrel. Jael did likewise and they were off.
“I’m willing to help,” Ash told them readily, “but Eddy and Tanise are out exploring. You just missed them, in fact. They’ll be out of contact for a week or so.”
“Don’t radios still work in this world?” Jael asked. “They did last year.”
“They’re planning to go beyond the range of any equipment we have,” Ash explained, “so they didn’t take one. I promised to hold down the fort. That’s a silly expression, isn’t it?”
“I’ve heard worse,” Jael shrugged, “but that’s not a problem. I’ll stay here until you get back. Isis can cover for my classes at the college and I certainly can’t go back to that world. Just being out of there makes me want to break out into a rousing chorus of I Enjoy Being a Girl.”
“Was it truly all that bad, dear?” Ash asked with concern.
“Ash, you have no idea,” Jael shivered a little. “I don’t know how much longer I could have resisted. It was closer than I want to think about, but I doubt you’ll have that problem.”
“Could have other ones, though,” Asherah admitted, “but I agree with your reasoning and we should try it anyway. Well, if you’re here, I don’t have to worry on that account. Lizzie are you ready to travel?”
“Of course,” the Sphinx replied. “We came in the back way, but I only know how to get where we’re going through the front.” She transformed once more into a human woman. “Let’s go.”
They had only been on the branch of Yggdrasil for a few minutes when Ratatosk came scampering up behind them. “Hey!” he called. “Wait up. You sure left in a hurry. Trying to leave me behind?”
“I wasn’t aware you were coming with us,” Lizzie remarked. “I thought you were visiting your girlfriend.”
“Well, I can’t very well let you two go in there without a guide,” Ratatosk told them. “That’s a very dangerous sort of place if you aren’t careful.”
“Ratty,” Ash laughed. “I didn’t know you cared.”
“Uh, well,” the squirrel hemmed and hawed. “Streya wouldn’t talk to me if I didn’t agree to help out.”
“Streya?” Lizzie asked.
“Short for Astreya,” Ash explained. “That’s the name the black squirrel of Tanise’s Tree chose for herself. Ever since the new World evolved enough for well-defined mammals to come along she’s been able to talk and lately she’s been chatting up a storm.” Ash laughed at that. “Ratatosk, I’m surprised you were able to get a word in.”
“Well, I can talk when I want to too, you know.”
“We’ve noticed,” Lizzie remarked.
“Astreya is generally more polite though,” Ash commented. “So she’s forcing you to do the right thing?”
“As she sees it,” Ratatosk grumbled. “So where’s this god trap of yours?”
“This way,” Lizzie replied unhelpfully.
When they finally entered the world where Enki and Wade were waiting, Asherah began to glow almost instantly. “Interesting special effects,” Ratatosk commented dryly. “Golden is definitely your color.”
“What’s happening?” Wade asked.
“She’s transcending,” Enki informed him. “Lizzie it might not have been such a good idea to bring Ash here.”
“No, Watergod,” the Goddess replied. “It was the right thing to do. You are released.”
“But You are trapped here,” Enki pointed out, lifting his wet legs out of the stream at last.”
“This is My place,” the Goddess replied. “Nor am I trapped here. There is work for Me to do, however.” The glow around her expanded and filled the world. “There, now My world is normalized. It will not trap any deities who wander in and new gods and spirits may develop in the normal manner.”
As She said that, the glow that filled the world and retracted until it was just a accenting aura around her. As their eyes cleared from the brilliant golden light, they noticed Asherah standing next to the Goddess.
“Why did you do that?” Wade asked her an hour later once they were all back in Hattamessett. “Separate from the Goddess, I mean.”
Ash shrugged. “Omniscience is boring,” she replied with a crooked smile. “That world needs its Goddess and I am happy to have provided an aspect to fill the role but it was not for me. So I left Her to manage Her own world. I think I might have gotten in her way in any case. There was a part of me that could never have been comfortable in that aspect. Diverging leaves the Goddess pristine and pure and without my doubting influence.”
“But you would have had a place to belong,” Jael commented.
“I already have a place where I belong,” Ash replied serenely.
Jael excused herself not too long after everyone had returned to Hattamessett. “Just as well you made short work of it, Ash,” she told the elder goddess. “I do have classes in the morning and Isis will be glad she doesn’t have to take them for me. Philosophy is not really her strong suit.”
Enki admitted to being exhausted from his ordeal. He promptly helped himself to one of the guest rooms and fell asleep. He was still sleeping four days later when Eddy and Tanise returned from their exploration. Lizzie and Wade stayed on partially to keep Ash company, but mostly because they were not sure of where they were going to go next.”
“It’s too late in the season to pick up where I left off on the trail,” Wade admitted the night Eddy returned. For some reason Wade found Eddy the least surprising person he had met since he first ran into Lizzie. Somehow it just seemed right to him that the supreme deity of a universe looked like everyone’s grandfather. And Eddy did not behave all-knowing, all-seeing or all-powerful. He was just a soft-spoken senior citizen whose inner self-certainty made him someone Wade wanted to respect.
“You’re both welcome to stay here as long as you like,” Eddy invited them. “Lizzie you’ve stayed here for months at a time and I know Tanise would love the extra company especially now that she’s starting to settle into her winter sleeping habits.”
“What do you mean?” Wade asked.
“You know she’s a dryad?” Eddy asked.
“A very special one, I understand,” Wade nodded.
“Very,” Eddy agreed. “Most dryads are awake all summer and then hibernate with their trees, but they can stay up in the winter if they really want to. It involves a few weeks of getting used to a new sleeping habit during which Tanise will drop off with very little notice and then be up at odd times, but after the adjustment period, she’ll be awake during the days with only a cat nap or two but sleep most of the nights.”
“Interesting,” Wade admitted. “Does she have trouble readjusting in the spring too?”
“Ha!” Eddy laughed. “Not at all. Just the opposite in fact. One day she just happens to notice she isn’t sleepy and then that’s it until autumn again.”
“Have to admit there I times I could have gone without sleep like that,” Wade chuckled.
“It has its pluses,” Eddy agreed. “That’s for sure.”
“We can stay for a while,” Lizzie agreed. “Probably through the holiday season at least if that’s okay with Wade.”
“I have another idea,” Enki told them as he entered the room.
“Have a nice rest?” Wade asked dryly.
“Passable,” Enki replied, matching his tone. “I’ve slept longer and deeper.”
“Much deeper and Eddy would have put me on shovel detail,” Wade pointed out.
“I might have at that,” Eddy laughed, “had Ash and Tanise not been keeping an eye on you. Tanise was worried beyond thought at first, but Ash insisted that sort of sleep was natural for a god when healing from exotic injuries. You’re feeling better then?”
“Much better,” Enki replied, “Thank you. Lizzie, Wade, I could use your help in an interesting project.”
“What did you have in mind, watergod?” Lizzie asked in a formal tone.
“I was on my way up to Killington to recruit Jael and Ina to help me on a new project I’m working on,” Enki told her, “but now I think you and Wade would do as well or better.”
“Don’t you ever look into your own matters?” Lizzie demanded.
“I was planning on going with you,” Enki replied defensively. “This is an idea I came up with last spring, but we were all still too busy with the end of the first school year and cleaning up the mess Apollo made to do anything about it this past summer, but I am hoping we can open next summer.”
“Open what, exactly?” Wade asked. He actually liked Enki on the personal level, but there was a certain clever trickiness about the god that threw up great red suspicion flags in Wade’s mind. Enki, he decided was a great guy to swap lies with over drinks, but it seemed obvious any time he came up with a “great idea” it would be wisest to check that idea for anything that could and would go wrong.
“A summer camp,” Enki replied, “for young gods and other supernatural creatures. The college has worked out so well for our teenagers, helping them integrate with mortals undetected and in a manner that inhibits the usual sort of snobbery and feelings of superiority, it seemed to me that we can start even earlier.”
“Sounds a bit mild for you,” Lizzie observed. “Besides, don’t you have a baseball season that time of year to keep you occupied?”
“Not every day,” Enki told her, “Since the first season we’ve only been holding games once or twice a week, and not every potential camp counselor is on a Celestial League team.”
“How many young gods and goddesses are there these days?” Wade asked. “I know human population is rising, but if the divine population is going up at the same rate, I’m surprised Yggdrasil’s limbs aren’t being weighed down by the weight of travelling gods.”
“Not just gods,” Enki shook his head. “We have giants, centaurs, satyrs, dragons and more at Sherburne College.”
“And they all had to learn how to maintain a human guise before classes began,” Lizzie pointed out. Would children be able to do so reliably? I doubt it.”
“Even in guise,” Wade added, “it seems to me these children would still be stronger and faster than their mortal counterparts. And being that young they would probably want to show off.”
“I was not planning to make this a camp of both mortals and immortals,” Enki explained. “As you say, it would be impractical, but it would be a good place to start training the campers in those skills they would need later. There were more than a few near misses at Sherburne and some of our best still accidentally gave themselves away in front of mortal friends. There was no harm done, fortunately. Those friends were true and could keep a secret, but it would have been better for that to have never happened.”
“But are there enough immortal children to make a whole camp?” Wade persisted. “How many such children are born every year.”
“Enough, I think,” Enki replied.
“And aren’t gods born fully mature and knowing?” Wade continued to ask.
“Some are,” Enki replied. “Many are. Not all, but it’s just another reason to keep the camp segregated from mortals. Also not all supernatural creatures are immortal, so yes there are new generations.”
“So what do you need from us?” Lizzie asked.
“I haven’t had a chance to find a place to hold the camp,” Enki replied. “I’d like you to help me evaluate a number of places.”
“Why not here in the new World,” Wade asked. “It’s wide open and there are no civilizations to destroy if the little godlings get out of hand.”
“I would rather not,” Eddy cut in. “Amy’s and Evie’s friends were mostly good kids when they were here last year and even this past summer, but there are always a few bad ones. Throw in the lack of maturity and…” he trailed off with a shrug.
“This world is still developing at an accelerated rate,” Enki commented. “Its balance is too delicate to mess with that way. The college students, for the most part, understood the rules of being here, I doubt the younger ones would behave as well.”
“As I recall,” Ash spoke up, “Some of our college students went out to hunt a dinosaur after being expressly told not to. I suspect the children would be worse.”
“My thinking exactly,” Eddy nodded.
“I agree,” Enki told them. “This is not the place I need. So, Lizzie, Wade, will you help me?”
Wade looked at Lizzie and she returned his gaze. “Think of all the young ones who never heard your riddles,” he suggested.
“I used to kill the ones who got them wrong,” Lizzie reminded him, “but as I said, this seems fairly mild and it might be nice to see parts of the world I have not yet been too. Enki, we’ll help.”
“Well, I must say this does look like everyone’s ideal setting for a summer camp,” Wade admitted as they stepped out into a world on the Divine Plain. They were in the middle of a natural clearing in a primeval pine forest. The scent of pine needles filled the air. “All that’s missing are the cabins and a lake to swim in.”
“There are no shortages of lakes here,” Enki told him. “The question is whether we would be allowed to erect cabins or even bring the children here.”
“So who do we see?” Wade asked. “Immigrations and Customs?”
“If the Native Americans had thought of that about the time of Jamestown and Plymouth Colonies,” Lizzie commented, “history might have been very different, indeed. Am I right in assuming this is one of those worlds?”
“Well spotted,” Enki commended her. “Yes, this is the world of the Choctaw mythos. Jael and some of the others stumbled into here to avoid a blizzard a couple of years ago. They made friends with one of the local characters and I was hoping to use him as a guide. Lizzie, you remember Bohpoli?”
“I do,” Lizzie agreed. “He was a bit immature and mischievous for my tastes; even more so than Ratatosk. He played his part well though. Are we here to meet him?”
“Hopefully,” Enki replied. “It’s not like I was able to arrange an appointment in advance.”
“The place seems quiet and fairly empty,” Wade opined.
“Not as empty as you think,” Lizzie warned him. “There are many creatures all around us. Most of them are prey.”
“No hunting here, please, Lizzie,” Enki requested. “Those prey animals are actually minor spirits and as divine as you are.”
“Divine?” Lizzie laughed, her laughter echoing softly off the trees. “I’m hardly divine. Supernatural maybe, but never divine.”
“Well, I suppose it’s a matter of whether you have worshippers or not,” Enki allowed, “but the eating of minor gods is not likely to make friends with the major ones of this place.”
“I have fed recently,” Lizzie assured him, “and can resist such temptations in any case.”
“Good,” Enki nodded. “Well, I guess we’d better start walking since we do not seem to have a reception committee.”
“Where?” Wade asked.
“Anywhere, I suppose,” Enki shrugged. “Until we find Bohpoli or someone else to talk to, we can have a good look around. That is why we’re here, after all.”
They walked out of the clearing and found a narrow winding path through the trees. They had not gone far when a rock hit a trunk just above Wade’s head with a resounding thwack. Turning around to see who had thrown it, Wade spotted a little man. He was only two feet tall, had long white hair and was dressed in skins and bark cloth. The little man laughed and then, still laughing ran off into the forest. “Little bugger!” Wade snarled and started chasing him.
“Wade, no!” Enki called him, but it was too late and Wade’s entire attention was on the little man he was chasing.
They ran for several minutes through the woods. The little man was able to duck nimbly under branches where Wade had to push them out of his way. More than once the little man reached up to grab a branch and flex it, causing it to go crashing back at Wade. The third time that happened, Wade tripped over the branch and fell head long into a swamp.
He stood up and found the water was only hip deep, but when he tried to wade back out, he discovered he was sinking slowly into the bottom. Meanwhile the little man sat on a nearby branch and continued to laugh at him. “Quicksand?” Wade shouted the question. “You think that’s funny?”
“Yes, yes!” the little man laughed even harder. “Good fun!”
“Oh yeah?” Wade growled. “We’ll see how much fun it is for you when I get out of here.” He reached an overhead branch and attempted to free his feet from the bottom, but the branch was dead and dry and broke off easily. The little man laughed again and Wade threw a piece of the branch at him. The branch hit the little man and knocked him off the branch and into the swampy water. “Not so funny now is it, short stuff?”
“Ha ha!” the man kept laughing, now at himself. “Good joke!”
Seeing the man could take as good as he got, Wade calmed down enough to consider his situation. He laid back into the water and attempted to float. Slowly he felt his feet and lower legs slipping free of the bottom’s embrace. He was almost out when Enki and Lizzie finally caught up to him.
“Wade,” Enki introduced, “this is Bohpoli, the Thrower, the Watcher, He Who Stays in the Woods.”
“I go into town sometimes,” Bohpoli remarked, swimming to the water’s edge and pulling himself out.
“Must cause quite a stir in the supermarket,” Wade remarked, finally getting out of the ooze at the bottom and swimming on his back to the shore. It only took two strokes and then Enki helped him out.
“I told you we were looking for Bohpoli,” Enki reminded Wade.
“Looks like he found us first,” Wade retorted.
“That did make it easier,” Enki agreed, “but he wasn’t actually throwing that rock at you.”
“I only hit what I aim at,” Bohpoli agreed. “It’s more fun to surprise than hit.”
“Whole sentences?” Wade asked. “What was with the ‘Hee hee, good fun,’ routine.”
“Sonny,” Bohpoli chuckled, “how about you try speaking coherent sentences while laughing yourself silly.”
“Good point,” Wade admitted. “I still don’t get the point of it though.”
“It’s just his way of saying, ‘Hello,’” Lizzie translated. Bohpoli nodded.
“If you say so,” Wade shrugged.
“Bohpoli,” Enki cut in. “I could use your help again.” He explained his idea for a summer camp and why this world seemed ideal to him.
“Ideal?” Bohpoli questioned the notion. “I couldn’t say. It would not be up to me in any case, but while there are rules of hospitality toward guests, I am not sure your campers would technically be seen as guests here. The White settlers and their religions did a number on our world, you know. Foreign gods coming to live here could be seen as an invasion.”
“They’re not going to live here permanently,” Enki argued.
“But they will not just be passing through,” Bohpoli pointed out. “This will be a matter for Hushtahli, the Great Good Spirit, to decide.”
“Hushtahli?” Wade echoed.
“Also known as Nanapesa, Ishtahullo-chita, Uba Pike and other names,” Bohpoli informed him. “He has even more names than I do, although I think that is proper.”
“So where can we meet with Hushtahli and how soon?” Enki asked.
“Hushtahli is everywhere,” Bohpoli replied.
“I was under the impression that He was in the habit of doing personal appearances whenever someone willed it,” Enki shot back.
“Are you seriously considering a spirit quest?” Bohpoli laughed. “It would have the virtue of being unique, but it’s not necessary. Hushtahli will talk to you if and when He feels you are ready.”
“Well, then,” Enki replied, “so long as He is not telling us to leave, how about you show us around the place?”
Bohpoli led them through the forest. To Wade it looked very much like any typical Southern pine forest filled with birds, insects, squirrels and other woodland creatures or it did until they happened on a murky pool in which there were several beings who stood in the water up to their hips. They were white and glowed, giving them the appearance of ghosts, although they seemed to be solid.
“Bohpoli,” one of the white beings called out, “who are these strangers? They do not belong here.”
“Visitors,” Bohpoli replied. “They mean no harm. These are the Okwa Naholo,” he told Enki, Lizzie and Wade. “The White People of the Water.”
“Take them away,” one of the Okwa Naholo told him. “Their presence is unwanted.”
“They wouldn’t be so unwanted if you thought you could catch one and make him one of your own,” Bohpoli shot back. “They do that,” he told the others, “when they can get away with it.”
“They are in pain,” Enki observed.
“They’re always a bit sour,” Bohpoli remarked.
“No,” Enki disagreed, “Their water is polluted. Is this an incursion from the mortal world?”
“Could be,” Bohpoli allowed. “What divine world is not influenced in some way by the mortals?”
“Let me see if I can help,” Enki offered. As he stepped to the water’s edge, the Okwa Naholo backed away, but he ignored them and cast a spell in the ancient manner. Enki had been, among other things, the god of water and of magic. Filtering out a few pollutants was child’s play to him. A few minutes later the pool was once more clear and deep blue. “There. Is that better?” he asked.
The Okwa Naholo nodded slightly, but they were obviously uncomfortable because of the strangers.
“That’s about as much thanks as you will get from them,” Bohpoli remarked. “Let’s move on. There’s more to see.”
“And we’re walking, and walking…” Wade whispered to Lizzie.
“What?” she whispered back.
“Oh nothing,” he shrugged. “This just reminded me of some guided museum tours I’ve been on.
Bohpoli spent the rest of the afternoon showing them around. An hour after their encounter with the Okwa Naholo, they met a strange being called Kashehotapalo. He had the body of a man, but his face appeared withered and shrunken. Instead of human legs and feet he had the leg and hooves of a deer. He ran incredibly quickly and they might have not noticed him at all had Bohpoli not spotted him and called out.
“Bohpoli,” Kashehotapalo greeted the little man as he came to a halt in front of them. “You have guests?”
Bohpoli introduced the others. Kashehotapalo scowled at Wade briefly, but was otherwise polite and formal. He did not stay with them very long and was soon running away from them. A moment later, however he came up behind Wade and shouted “Boo!” before running off again laughing wickedly.
“Don’t mind him,” Bohpoli advised. “He likes to frighten people and that was about as friendly as he gets.”
“Scaring a year’s life from me is friendly?” Wade asked, still feeling his heart pumping.
“Yeah, well,” Bohpoli shrugged, “For him that’s similar to the way I startled you with that rock.”
“You throw rocks, he frightens the wits out of people,” Wade observed.
“I throw sticks too,” Bohpoli replied, “and a mean party as well when I feel like it.”
“Yeah, you’re a real friendly bunch, here, aren’t you?” Wade commented.
“There are worse places,” Bohpoli shrugged.
“Wade,” Lizzie cut in, “you have to realize that most of the people who would have venerated the gods and spirits of this place have been converted to other religions, so for the most part the only worshipers they have are a few very old people who keep partially to the old ways and a few younger ones looking for spirituality through a small cult.”
“This world is nothing like the last cult world,” Wade observed.
“That was a new emergent world being formed by the beliefs of a new cult,” Lizzie explained. “This is an older world, very well defined, but some new cults have chosen to embrace the mythologies of older cultures. I understand the various Native American mythologies are particularly popular.”
“Yes,” Bohpoli agreed, “but they tend to take what they want and ignore the rest from a number of worlds. They mix us up, confuse our different aspects, and that confuses us a bit as well. My role, for example, was not just as a trickster type. I was also a teacher. I would steal away children with the talent and teach them what I know about herbs and medicines. Do I do that these days? No, of course not. If a young Choctaw boy or girl wants to be a doctor there are medical schools who can teach them more than I can. These newer spiritualists who seek us out have no need for that sort of service either. Oh they give me lip service. Honestly I don’t know where they learned some of what they believe about us.”
“The Internet,” Wade cut in.
“Excuse me?” Bohpoli asked.
“The Internet,” Wade repeated. “The greatest store of information in the history of Mankind. Unfortunately it is also the greatest store of misinformation we have ever known. If there are two sides to a story you can find another dozen on the millions of available wikis, blogs and websites. The most magnificent nonsense spews forth by the moment in one hundred and eighty-four character tweets all delivered as though it is the wisdom of the ages. And anyone who has a different notion of how something ought to be can and often will publish it as though it is documentable fact.
“Oh, there’s a lot of valuable data to be found, but it’s best if you know something about it before you go searching or you can’t tell the facts from the fakes,” Wade went on. “I imagine a lot of the confusion arises from there with differing and contradicting articles on you, your world and the religion it represents.”
“I think you’re right, Wade,” Enki agreed. “I love having all that information at my fingertips, but I can’t tell you how many times I relied on something I read only to find it was wildly inaccurate. But the effect is really not much different than how divine worlds generally evolve except that these days it seems to be happening faster, at least in the lesser-known parts of the Divine Plain.”
Bohpoli nodded his agreement and they moved on. Wade’s characterization of the day as a museum tour was borne out as Bohpoli pointed out to, in some cases introduced them to various local spirits. Finally as the sun set, he suggested, “If you are staying, it would be best if we went to my shelter. There’s a storm coming and we’ll all be more comfortable there.”
He led them back into the deepest part of the forest. “Hear that?” he asked them.
“Sounds like an owl,” Lizzie remarked.
“Yes,” Bohpoli nodded. “That is Ishkitini, the horned owl. He flies through the night hunting men and animals alike. If you hear his screech it means someone will die suddenly. Heart attack, maybe or murder.”
“How pleasant,” Enki remarked dryly.
“Owls are bad luck here,” Bohpoli replied. “Their screeches always mean someone is about to die. Always a tragedy, but different owls forebode different victims and means of death. The sound of ofunio means the death of a young child, the opa…”
“Where’s Wade?” Lizzie asked suddenly.
They looked around the darkening forest until Lizzie spotted an orange light bobbing around through the trees. They raced toward the light and found Wade following it around the edge of a small swamp. “Ah!” Bohpoli chuckled, “don’t look at the orange light if you can help it.”
“Why not?” Enki asked.
“It is the heart of a Hashok Okwa Hui’ga,” Bohpoli replied.
“A will-o’-the-wisp?” Lizzie guessed.
“Yes,” Bohpoli nodded, “like that. Just grab him, he should snap out of the trance in a minute or so.” They did so and started walking Wade away from the swampy area.
“Huh?” What happened?” Wade asked shortly.
“You caught sight of the heart of a Hashok Okwa Hui’ga,” Bohpoli told him. “They are invisible most of the time, but at night you can see their hearts. If you do not turn away immediately they will ensnare your mind and lead you around in circles until the next dawn.”
“Oh,” Wade replied. “I should have been more careful. Thank you.”
“You’re new here,” Bohpoli allowed. “I doubt you’ll make that mistake again.” There was a rumble of thunder. “We’d better hurry now. Follow me.”
Bohpoli turned out to live in a small cave, although he had it comfortably furnished and even had a fireplace near the back were there was a hole in the ceiling that acted as a natural chimney.”
“Nice place you have here,” Enki remarked.
“Where’d you get the couches?” Wade added.
“They were on sale at Ikea,” Bohpoli replied off-handedly. Wade’s mouth opened soundlessly and then closed slowly. After a minute he decided it did not matter if Bohpoli was pulling his leg or not.
Wade woke up just at dawn to the sound of a bird tapping on a nearby tree trunk. He got up and walked to the mouth of the cave where Bohpoli appeared to be studying something. As Wade drew closer he saw it was the same bird whose tapping had woken him.
“Biskinik,” Bohpoli told him.
“Good morning to you too,” Wade replied, taking his best guess as to the correct response.
“Huh?” Bohpoli asked. “I’m talking about the news bird over there.”
“Looks like a sapsucker to me,” Wade noted.
“Yes,” Bohpoli nodded. “He brings news.”
“So what is it?” Wade asked.
“I meant he comes ahead of news,” Bohpoli clarified. “When the biskinik arrives in the early morning, It means you will have news of something by noon. My guess is you’ll have your answer today. The way that one is excited I’d say in a few minutes. Let’s get everyone out here to greet Hushtahli.”
“I thought you said He was everywhere,” Wade commented.
“Yes, true,” Bohpoli answered, “But it is always polite to meet Him part way.”
Bohpoli’s prediction proved true minutes later as all four stood respectfully outside Bohpoli’s cave. Hushtahli did not fully manifest. Instead a piece of the sun broke off from above and settled just above and in front of them.
“Lord Enki,” a voice spoke from the small disk of light before them. It neither whispered nor boomed, but spoke in a normal conversational tone, “I have considered your request, but I do not believe it would be best for this world to allow you to build your summer camp among us.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way, Lord Hushtahli,” Enki responded politely.
“So am I,” Hushtahli admitted, “but you may bring your young spirits here for a brief stay if you wish. They will be welcome here so long as they do not stay more than one night.”
“Thank you,” Enki replied as the light faded out.
“Well, that’s not too bad,” Wade remarked. “Many summer camps have special overnight forays in which they leave their cabins and go somewhere else to sleep in tents and then go back again. This can be a field trip.”
“Not a bad idea,” Enki agreed. “Well, it’s time to check out the next possible site. Bohpoli, thank you for the hospitality.”
The little man nodded politely, “I felt I owed you for all the fun you let me have on your game show.”
Wade retrieved his pack and they started out. Once more a few steps brought them to the limbs of Yggdrasil. Since their last trip through the tree many of the leaves had fallen from the great ash. It was mid-autumn and this far north winter was coming on fast. The sun was low on the horizon but so far as Wade could tell it was high noon. It would be night again soon.
“We’ve a long way to go,” Enki remarked. “All the way to the other side of the tree. Rather than walking, I can speed this up a bit.”
“Oh it figures you lot would show up about now,” Ratatosk complained before Enki could do anything to increase their progress. The Squirrel jumped down to the branch they were on.
“Why?” Enki asked. “Is there a problem?”
“Of course there’s a problem,” Ratatosk told him scathingly. “There’s almost always a problem. The periods of relative peace and tranquility just stand as bookmarks between the normal activities of Creation.”
“All right,” Enki tried again. “Is there anything wrong that is truly unusual going on?”
“Would I be all in a bother if there wasn’t?” Ratatosk shot back.
“Possibly,” Enki shrugged. “You do get excitable at times, and for all I know this is part of your normal job to carry strife across the world.”
“Normal?” Ratatosk screamed at him in his squeaky voice. “If this were normal there would have to be a dozen of me. Strife and trouble are carrying each other right now and I could use a Carribean vacation for the next couple of centuries.”
“Oh yeah,” Wade chuckled. “That’s gonna happen. I hear all the Vikings retired to Dominica.”
“Funny,” Ratatosk replied sourly.
“What’s really happening?” Enki asked.
“That’s the problem,” Ratatosk admitted, “None of us know. There’s just some problem that is shaking the Tree, but no one can get a handle on it.”
“I know you well, Enki,” Lizzie put in. “You want to look into this.”
“Yes, I do,” Enki admitted.
“Where are you going to start?” Ratatosk asked. “Ask any of the other denizens of the Tree. Even the big birds can’t see where it is coming from.”
“Then we’ll continue on,” Enki decided, “but keep Ninti informed if you actually learn something. She can spread the word and I’ll check back here as often as I can.”
Once Ratatosk had run off, Enki enclosed the three of them in a large bubble and flew them through the branches of the Tree. When they got to the trunk they headed downward toward the base and then turned left at the last branch and headed out again. Even at the speeds Enki was zipping them around at it took nearly an hour to find the end of that long branch. Then there was a quick flash of light and they were floating over a cold, snow covered basin with only a trace of moonlight for illumination.
“Where are we?” Wade asked. “And you should have told me I’d need to dress for full winter.”
“This is the heart of Enderbyland in Antartica,” Enki told them as the bubble smashed into the snow and tunneled downward. “We actually have a way in directly from the Tree, but I guess I missed the turn off.”
“In where?” Wade asked, but suddenly they broke into a large hollow in the snow and Enki caused a light to shine, exposing a large stadium.
“Enderby Field,” Lizzie identified it. “Celestial League baseball teams play their championship games here. It’s going to be cold inside.”
“I asked to have the heat turned up before we left Hattamessett,” Enki informed her, “although it still might be a bit chilly. There should be some extra clothing for Wade to wear there. Uniforms mostly, but an extra layer should do the trick.”
Enki dropped his bubble just outside the locker room boors and they hurried inside. “Man! That’s cold,” Wade complained. “Makes it feel hot in here.”
“That won’t last,” Lizzie predicted. “I doubt it’s better than an early spring day.”
“Probably not,” Enki agreed, he rummaged through a locker and pulled out a deep blue uniform with gold trim. “This ought to fit over your other clothing,” he told Wade, tossing it across the room.
Wade looked at the shirt and read the name on the back, “Gilgamesh?”
“Yeah, he played third base for the Lamassu this past season,” Enki replied. “Too bad we lost by one run in the eleventh to the Olympus Cubs. That rankled Inanna especially.”
“Why?” Wade asked.
“She originally wanted to play for the Olympus team as Aphrodite, but they had decided there would be no women on the team,” Enki replied. “It was foolish of them, since that put both Ina and Dee on our team the first year and they’ve been with us ever since, but this year they managed to beat us. Can’t win them all I guess.”
“I suppose not,” Wade replied uncertainly.
“I’ll explain it to you later,” Lizzie promised. “For now, just keep in the mind the gods can be as foolish as or more so than mortals. Speaking of which, Enki, are you seriously considering this place as a summer camp?”
“Is there a problem?” Enki asked.
“When are you planning to hold this summer camp?” Wade asked.
“Next summer,” Enki replied.
“Next summer where?” Wade pressed. “In the Northern Hemisphere?”
“Well, of course,” Enki replied.
“When it’s the dead of winter down here?” Wade continued. “Do you really want your campers wandering around when the outside temperature is 100 degrees below zero on the average?”
“Um, Farenheit or Celsius?” Enki asked.
“Does it matter?” Wade countered.
“These campers can take it,” Enki assured him.
“Perhaps,” Lizzie broke in, “but will they enjoy it? Enki, you were the god of fresh water. Were you also the god of ice?”
“Well, no,” Enki admitted, “not really. Hmm, I see your point. This is another place they might visit, but it would not do to stay here, and the long-term use of the stadium lights would probably be detected by satellite cameras. Well, I did not really have a lot of hopes for this place anyway, but at least we would not have had to ask permission.”
“This is much warmer,” Wade admitted as they arrived at their next stop, “and a lot dryer. Where are we?” The air was arid and while there was vegetation in sight, the grass was all golden yellow and dead-looking and the few small shrubs and trees looked like they were hanging on by only a wish and a prayer and not a very sincere prayer at that.
“The divine aspect of the Kaliari Desert,” Enki replied. “This is where the gods and spirits of the San people live. Specifically, the !Kung, although I am told there is some mixing between the spirits of the !Kung and other San, which is to be expected.
“I’ve heard of the !Kung,” Wade commented. “We studied them in Anthropology 101. They call themselves ‘The Harmless People’ as opposed to those who are not San, but I got the impression from my teacher that most no longer live their traditional lifestyles.”
“Perhaps, although I understand there are still some isolated family groups who do. Perhaps one third of the total population,” Enki replied. “Actually, it was Isis who told me of those people, but this is not the Kalihari of the mortal world, but the idealized one of the Divine Plain. This is also the dry season. I understand it can get quite wet and verdant here during the rainy season, which does not last very long. After that most of the available water is locked up in the roots of the local plants and such.”
“The San have had to adapt to the desert since it was the only place the Bantu and Europeans would not chase them out of,” Wade pointed out.
“But they have been here over a thousand years and more,” Enki told him. “There have been whole civilizations that have come and gone in that time.”
“So you have a desert in mind for your summer camp,” Lizzie commented. “Who do you need to make a deal with here?”
“I was advised to seek out Gaoxa who lives in the Tsodilo Hills,” Enki replied. “I am hoping we may be able to make a deal here. Unlike the world of the Choctaw, this is still a fairly active part of the Divine Plain. Christian evangelists of various denominations have made inroads with the San, but so many of them are still nomadic and hard to locate. I’m told that only ten percent or so of the !Kung have converted to Christianity, at least if the population estimates are correct.”
“So those hills on the horizon are where we are going?” Wade asked. “Why didn’t we go there directly?”
“Isis warned me the Tsodilo Hills are especially sacred, even here on the Divine Plain,” Enki replied. “As visitors it is most polite for us to approach on foot and in plain sight. Just as the people of this land have been oppressed by outsiders, so have their gods. By approaching this way, we demonstrate our humility and respect for the gods of the Kalihari.” An hour later he added, “Although I suppose we might have arrived a little closer than we did. I could swear those hills aren’t any closer than they were when we started.”
“That’s your imagination,” Lizzie replied. “We’re just further away than you thought. We’ll be there in another hour.”
“They really look larger to you?” Enki asked.
“No,” Lizzie shook her head, “They look exactly the same size as when we started out, but we’re closer now so they take up more of the horizon.”
“Ha!” Enki laughed “Good joke.” Then he saw Lizzie was serious. “Do you really see it that way?”
“Knowing the real size of an object is supremely important to a predator,” Lizzie replied calmly. “The apparent size is just a means by which I can judge the absolute size. So I see those hills as closer but not larger.”
“Interesting perspective,” Enki admitted, “but you are sure we’re closer?”
“Of course we are,” Lizzie insisted.
“Looks closer to me too,” Wade admitted.
“If you say so,” Enki told them both. “I was serious when I said they had not seemed to gotten any closer. They still don’t seem so to me.”
“A selective glamour, perhaps,” Lizzie suggested.
“A what?” Wade asked.
“It’s old magic,” Enki explained. “Gods and wizards would cast spells…”
“Wizards?” Wade asked skeptically.
“There have been wizards,” Enki told him. “Some cycles have been more magical than others. This current one is astonishingly lacking in magic, but it is as far from the norm as the Middle Ages went the other way. History gets rewritten retrospectively as a new cycle begins, but there are always echoes of the previous cycle and most events tend to have been the same even if the causes sometimes differ.
“Anyway,” Enki continued, “a glamour is a spell that makes something appear other than it is. The most common use, of course, it to make something or someone appear more attractive, but the magic is the same if you do the reverse or something else altogether. With a selective glamour I could be made to think the hills are not getting any closer because their appearance remains the same, while to two of you see them as they are.”
“I don’t get it,” Wade admitted. “Why would you be the only one fooled?”
“It could be because I’m a god or at least supernatural,” Enki replied. “This is the divine aspect of the Kalihari remember. No one would expect mortals to be here and a spell of this sort can be all the more effective if aimed at supernatural creatures only.”
“What about Lizzie?” Wade asked. “She isn’t being fooled either.”
“As she said, a predator needs to be able to see the true size of something,” Enki replied. “There are those who are immune to such magic and she may well be one of them. I sometimes think I’m amazingly susceptible to them. If you read the stories about me you’ll see I’ve been fooled many times.”
“Why is this place so empty?” Wade asked.
“It isn’t,” Lizzie informed him. “There are spirit animals all around us, but they are small and avoiding the heat of the day. I am surprised we have not seen larger animal, like an antelope, a lion or an elephant, though.”
“This is a desert,” Enki reminded her. “In the heat of the day very little moves, I suspect. You know what they say about those who go out in the mid-day sun.”
“Only mad gods and Americans?” Wade asked.
“Something like that,” Enki sighed.
It took Enki another half an hour to admit that they really were approaching the hills and that there had been no sort of concealment charm or glamour that made them seem to stay away. Wade decided, “Enki, I think you’re spoiled.”
“Huh?” Enki responded. “What do you mean?”
“I think you’re so used to just doing things as soon as you think of them that having to do things the way a mortal might frustrates you. Normally you would have flown to those hills, or maybe you would have just materialized there. But here you have to walk for hours and you’re just not used to that.”
“Good observation,” Lizzie told him. “Enki, he’s right. You’re willing to work on a long term project, but you have this habit of picking others to do the boring parts for you.”
“Hmm,” Enki hummed thoughtfully. “You could be right. I certainly haven’t had to play by others’ rules much lately.”
Finally, they entered the hilly region. “Where to?” Wade asked. “That large hill over there?”
“I suppose that sounds sensible,” Enki agreed, but it was not necessary for them to walk any more.
“Welcome, my friends,” a soft voice greeted them from their left. They turned to see a short human-looking god with short curly hair and brown skin. He looked like one of the people from a popular series of movies Wade had seen involving the people of the Kalihari. He was not speaking English but a language that including many clicks and pops, but Wade found he could understand Him anyway. “Would you like to join me in my shelter?”
“We would be honored,” Enki responded.
He led them around one of the hills and into a natural rock shelter where it was shady and comfortable. There were primitive paintings on the walls of the shelter, figures of animals in red and white. The !Kung god caught Wade’s examination and informed him, “I painted those. It is partially a hobby, but there is also great magic in such symbolism or there was.”
“There isn’t any more?” Wade asked.
“My power is not as it once was,” the god admitted. “I am Gaoxa, of course, and My people still believe in Me, but My sacred home on Earth has been profaned. I am lessened.”
“Is there anything we can do to help?” Wade asked.
“No,” Gaoxa smiled. “This is something that happens to us all eventually, I think. I thank you for your concern. May I ask to what I owe the pleasure of your visit, my guests?”
Enki spent the next hour explaining their mission, while Goaxa served them food and water. At first Wade wondered about the simple faire. The food consisted of some smoked and dried meat and a bowl of something like porridge with grains and the water was just plain water, but he decided that here in the Kalihari this could be a feast. He could eat his fill if he were rude enough to do so and the cup he was given might well represent a man’s whole day’s worth of water. In this place it was a princely gift and as he thought back on Anthropology classes he might have been obliged to eat far worse.
“This is an interesting project you have,” Gaoxa admitted at last, “and I wish I could welcome you and your young gods, but the Kalihari is a land of limited resources. It is rich and giving to those who know how to use its gifts but my people are few they do not tax the region beyond what it can give. Similarly, this aspect of the Kalihari can only support so many deities. Bring too many in and I fear there would be damage to this fragile system.”
“Might they be brought to visit?” Wade asked, remembering the offer from Hushtahli. “Would it be all right if they were to stay only overnight so they could appreciate Your world for what it is?”
Gaoxa thought about it. “Yes,” He decided. “I would like that.”
“That was good thinking,” Enki commended Wade later as they moved on. “We might not have found a site for the camp, but we did find another good place for a field trip.”
“I noticed you didn’t take us back by way of Yggdrasil,” Wade observed. Enki had shifted them to the non-place between the plains and had once more encased them in a bubble so they could travel in relative comfort. Outside the landscape was changing at a rapid rate. The sky shifted color constantly as did the ground. There were mountains that melted away, then popped back up as rolling hills that shifted into a range of volcanoes and then everything flattened out again and was replaced by an ocean.
“I thought it might seem too cold and dark after the desert,” Enki replied, “and our next stop is equatorial so it should be relatively warm.”
“Where are we going?” Lizzie asked.
“South America,” Enki replied. “In fact we are there, down below us is Lake Titicaca, well, the divine Titicaca, of course. This area’s mortal aspect has too many tourists for our purposes.”
“So once again we need to make a deal with the local gods,” Lizzie concluded.
“There’s some confusion as to whom I should speak,” Enki admitted as then landed on the shore of the large lake. The Incan religion changed over time as did their chief deities, but I think that’s because the Incas called themselves the People of the Sun, we should consult with the Sun god, Inti.”
“We don’t fly to the Sun to talk to Him do we?” Wade asked.
“It might be safer to do that at night,” Enki grinned.
“Oh very funny, wise guy,” Wade told him sourly.
“On the Divine Plain that is actually possible, Wade,” Lizzie remarked. “Keep in mind that the rules are different here and are governed by the beliefs of the religion this world represents.”
“And did the Incas believe the sun went out, doused by the ocean each night?” Wade countered. “Seems to me they were a very sophisticated people and that sort of myth would have died out very early on.”
“The religious beliefs of a people do not always coincide with their mundane knowledge,” Enki pointed out, “but I was only joking and, I have done my homework on this world just as I did for Gaoxa’s world. I’m not sure who to go looking for, although I am sure Inti will know we are here to talk to him. We’re foreigners and will probably need an intermediary. At the least we shall need a guide.
“You will remember how every creature in the Choctaw world was a divine spirit of one sort or other?” Enki went on. “Well it’s even more so here. Absolutely everything is divine here; the flowers, the herbs, every blade of grass.”
“It’s sacrilegious to walk on the lawn?” Wade wondered out loud.
“Not at all,” another voice laughed. “But it is proper to venerate that lawn for what it does for you as you walk on it.” They turned to see a male figure, dressed in traditional Incan clothing. He was muscular and of medium height. He also bore scars on every part of his body that was exposed. “I am Thonapa,” he introduced himself.
“The Civilizer,” Lizzie identified him.
“I thought you didn’t know anything about this world,” Enki commented.
“Did I say that?” the Sphinx asked. “Water god, do not mistake silence for ignorance.”
“I know you too, Phix of Thebes,” Thonapa grinned. “Do you have a riddle for me?”
“No,” Lizzie shook her head, “only questions.”
“Phix?” Wade asked Lizzie.
“That’s my name,” Lizzie replied with a smile.
“Then why…?” Wade started to ask.
“It’s a very long story but Jael named me Lizzie,” Lizzie admitted. “I liked the name, so I kept it.”
Wade nodded before turning to Thonapa. “You brought civilization to the Incas?” He asked.
“In a sense,” Thonapa admitted. “You could say I preached it into them.”
“And collected a lot of scars doing it,” Lizzie observed.
“Sadly, they were a stubborn people,” Thonapa agreed. “I was beaten and arrested many times before I got my message through.”
“Cursing those who maltreated you pounded the message into the rest I imagine as well,” Lizzie told him.
“Some people will only listen to you if you are strong,” Thonapa shrugged. “Because I used words, some made the mistake of thinking I had no other tools.”
“What did you do to them?” Wade asked.
“It depended on how I was treated,” Thohnapa admitted. “I inundated Yamquisupa so that now there is only a lake to mark where it once was. Some I turned to stones, but these are the cautionary tales. Most did listen to my preaching and became the great civilization you know as the Incas. So you need a guide?”
“We would appreciate it,” Enki admitted and informed Thonapa about the summer camp project.
“This land could well support your camp,” Thonapa nodded, “if Inti is willing. No doubt you will hear from Him when He has decided. In the meantime, let us walk. On the sacred lawn, if you like,” he added with a grin.
With the appearance of Thonapa, other divine personages seemed to suddenly show up as well. “They were here all along,” Thonapa explained to Wade when he asked. “You were just unprepared to see them until now. Look to the south, you can see Pachamama.” They turned to see a dragon kneeling in a field watching others planting seeds and seedlings. “She is a fertility goddess who oversees the planting and harvesting. We should leave her alone to her work, though, for she also causes earthquakes when angered or even mildly annoyed.
“But she is not our only fertility goddess,” Thonapa continued. “To your left you can see Zaramama. She is a goddess associated with grain and has a special affinity with maize, especially the odd ears that grow in multiples.”
“And does she cause volcanic eruptions when ticked off?” Wade asked.
“No,” Thonapa smiled. “Not all our gods and goddesses have a temper. She is also associated with willows.”
They continued the tour throughout the morning and part of the afternoon as Thonapa pointed out the Qocamama, tending a garden of coca plants and from a distance they saw a group of deities Thonapa referred to as Huaris. “They are the aristocratic ancestors of one or more tribes,” Thonapa explained. “Like so many of us they take an interest in agriculture. In their case it is because the land once belonged to them and in a sense it still does.”
“We don’t see many of you, your pantheon, that is, on the rest of the Divine Plain,” Enki remarked. “Is there a reason for that?”
“I suppose there is always a reason,” Thonapa shrugged. “I guess it all comes down to the fact that this world is nearly closed. We are no longer worshipped in the manner we once were. Most of our people have embraced the religion of the Conquerers. The only reason, I think, we are not entirely isolated is that we live on, to an extent, in the superstitions of the natives who still live here in the mountains.
“There is still veneration for the rocks of the land and of the lakes, especially the great Titicaca,” Thonapa continued. “But no one seriously worships Inti, the god of the Sun.”
“Didn’t that involve human sacrifice?” Wade asked pointedly. Thonapa nodded. “In the modern world that’s generally frowned on.”
“I am sure he would accept sacrifices of flowers and token parts of the crops,” Thonapa replied. “Those were often sufficient in the old days.”
“And we must move with the times,” Enki put in.
“Agreed,” Thonapa nodded. “Anyway no one worships Inti these days or his Son, Pachacamac. Actually I have not seen Pachacamac in a long time, although Pachamama visits frequently. I should ask her.”
“I hope he has not passed,” Enki remarked. “We lost many of my pantheon when Dilmun was isolated. They just gave up hope.”
“My sympathies,” Thonapa replied sincerely. “Perhaps now is the time to consult with Inti.”
“I hope so,” Enki replied.
Thonapa looked upward and to the west where the sun was beginning to set. For a moment the light seemed to get just a bit brighter and then suddenly clouds climbed up from the horizon and covered the Sun completely. “I am sorry,” Thinapa told them, “but Inti does not consent.”
“So much for third time being the charm,” Wade commented.
“Well, thanks for the tour,” Enki told Thonapa. “You have a nice little world here, but I guess we ought to be moving on.”
“Wait,” Thonapa held them up. “I like the idea of this training camp for young deities and other supernaturals and I agree that maybe it is time some of us here go out and see what’s going on in the rest of Creation. If you will have me, I would be one of your camp’s, uh, teachers?”
“We call them counselors,” Wade informed him.
“As to give aid and counsel to the young,” Thonapa nodded. “Yes, very fitting. May I join you?”
“Welcome aboard,” Enki replied, smiling. The two gods grasped their hands to each other’s lower wrists. “I’ll let you know where and when. Hmm, if you haven’t been out in a couple centuries or more, I’ll either come for you myself or send someone to show you the way.”
“Thank you,” Thonapa replied.
“Anyone hungry?” Enki asked as they left the Incan Divine Plane.
“Ravenous,” Wade admitted. “And Lizzie hasn’t eaten since yesterday.”
“There are always lean times,” she replied with dignity.
“Well, no need to go hungry,” Enki replied with forced cheerfulness. “I know a superb cevicheria in Lima not too far from here, assuming you like fresh fish marinated in citrus.”
“Sounds good,” Lizzie opined. She shifted into her human guise.
“Actually, Lima is littered with good cevicherias,” Enki admitted. “I’ve been slowly trying to get to all the best. Well, we’re here,” He announced as they stepped out on to the sidewalk of a busy city street.
Almost immediately his cell phone began to ring. “I haven’t missed this thing at all,” he told Lizzie and Wade. “Hello?”
“Father Enki,” he heard Ninti’s scolding voice through the phone “Where have you been?”
“Here and there,” Enki replied.
“More there than here, I’ll wager,” Ninti told him. “I’ve been trying to contact you for days, I even put Ratatosk on the lookout for you.”
“Why?” Enki asked.
“Lord Shiva contacted me,” Ninti explained. “He is requesting your assistance in what he calls a most important matter.”
“Interesting way to put it,” Enki noted. “You don’t think it’s important?”
“I do not know whether it is important or not,” Ninti snapped at him. “I don’t know anything about it.”
“We were just about to eat,” Enki pointed out.
“You are always just about to eat,” Ninti laughed.
“This time the hungry ones are Lizzie and Wade,” Enki told her. “I really should feed them, Ah! I know. We can stop to eat on the way. That place we found in Australia last year. Ninti, dear could you make the arrangements?”
“Not exactly fast food,” Ninti pointed out.
“I owe them a good meal and if this is as dire as Shiva thinks it may be a while before we have the time to do more than grab a meal on the run,” Enki told her.
“Very well,” Ninti replied. “I’ll put it on the company account. How soon do you expect to be there?”
“Twenty minutes on the outside, if we hurry,” Enki replied.
“It’s breakfast time there,” Ninti warned him.
“Fine,” Enki replied. “Given Lizzie’s recent interests, I think this place is perfect.”
“Very well,” Ninti replied. “Get moving. Lord Shiva is awaiting you at Mount Kailash.”
“Let’s go, kids,” Enki told Wade and Lizzie.
“No seafood?” Lizzie asked.
“Oh they’ll have something,” Enki returned. They were already back between the plains and Enki formed a bubble around them. Togather they zoomed off in a blur of changes.
“I thought you said relative speed did not matter,” Wade commented to Lizzie.
“We are shifting through changes faster than I can do it,” Lizzie admitted, “but I do not think our actual velocity is all that fast.”
“I couldn’t say for certain,” Enki admitted distractedly. “It’s hard to judge speed without a frame of reference. If we were in my little sportster, I could check the speedometer. What did happen to my car anyway?”
“I’m afraid we left it in the god-trap world,” Wade answered.
“Oh,” Enki sighed. “That’s a pity. Well I suppose I could go back and get it.”
“Do you remember where it is?” Lizzie asked.
“Not really,” Enki admitted, “but I know you do. Oh wait. The car probably doesn’t exist anymore.”
“Huh?” Wade asked. “Why not?”
“When Asherah, or rather when the Goddess normalized that world,” Enki replied, “any foreign influences outside her immediate area would have been removed. Well, I had fun shopping for that car and I imagine I’ll have fun again. Maybe this time I’ll get a Ferrari.”
“If you had an SUV,” Wade pointed out, “We could be sitting.”
“Sit, if you’re tired,” Enki offered. “You won’t fall.”
“No thanks,” Wade replied. “It’s bad enough standing on a bubble that formed underneath me. At least I can try to ignore it if I keep standing.”
“Have it your way,” Enki told him.
They continued on and a few minutes later appeared to be coming in over the ocean. “Is that the Sydney Opera House?” Wade asked, looking down.
“Sort of,” Enki replied.
“I don’t remember hearing it had been painted the colors of the rainbow,” Wade replied.
“I did say ‘Sort of,’” Enki pointed out. “Actually that is a view of it here in between. I’m still playing with our personal reality and that landmark is a reference point. When it looks white we’ll be there, although by then there will be a building or two blocking our view. And prepare to join the breakfast crowd.”
A moment later they were standing on yet another sidewalk with people walking around them. “Does no one notice us just popping in out of nowhere?” Wade asked as they started walking again. It was a foggy morning, but the mist was more invigorating than annoying for the moment.
“Part of the trick,” Lizzie informed him, “is setting up your arrival correctly. If you do, then in the minds of the people you have already been there before your actual arrival. I’ll admit I’m not very good at that, but then I do not normally frequent human cities, so I have not had to practice it either.”
“Here we are, Lizzie,” Enki announced. “In your honor, the Sydney Dance Café.” They stepped into the busy restaurant and were promptly seated under the name of the “Waters, party of three.” “I’m not sure we needed reservations for breakfast,” he admitted, but since we’re in a hurry, this bypassed the line.”
“We didn’t make a lot of friends by cutting in,” Wade noticed.
“They could have reserved a table had they wanted to,” Enki replied. “I see they’ve remodeled a bit since my last visit. Rustic and pop-art seems to mix well and you have to admit we have a nice view of the harbor. Well, let’s see what’s on the breakfast menu.”
“The usual and a couple things I haven’t seen for breakfast before,” Wade admitted.
“I’ll have the salmon breakfast,” Lizzie decided. “You got me in the mood for seafood back in Lima.”
Enki ordered the Grilled mushrooms and Napolitano sauce, but Wade decided his stomach was not up to an adventure at the moment and went for a less exciting cinnamon waffles with maple syrup.
There was a bit of a wait for the food, but all three were in the mood to just sit and soak up the local scenery. Finally when they were done, Enki paid the bill with his corporate credit card and they were off again.
“Since when do gods carry credit cards?” Wade asked when they were back on their way. This time Enki chose to travel by way of Yggdrasil.
“It’s a convenience,” Enki shrugged. “Oh I might have conjured up money to pay the bill, but almost no one takes gold dust or nuggets these days and keeping track of local currency is a full time job. One little plastic card and I can buy almost anything anywhere.”
“Uh, you didn’t just create that card, did you?” Wade asked.
“Well it is my design,” Enki admitted, “but the card is legitimate. I founded the Springtime Seed Company some years ago when several of us decided we wanted to see what is now Tanise’s Tree grow to maturity. It was just a seed at the time. Springtime Seed was really just supposed to be a front through which we could deliver the seed to Eddy Salem, but I tend to want to do something correctly, so I went to the bother of actually incorporating and having a few catalogs printed up. Eddy was, and still is, an inveterate gardener and we had to entice him to buy seeds from us, so we arranged to have some very rare seeds available at bargain prices.
“I think it was Jael who convinced me that all modern companies had websites on the Internet,” Enki went on, “and we did not know much about Eddy at the time. Had I known he had never used a computer in his life, I would have squashed the idea, but the website brought in a few extraneous orders and we filled them too. And suddenly we had a customer base. Oh we could have just filled the orders and closed the company, but I found that it gave me a convenient front in the modern world and these days it’s best to have a paper trail when you are dealing with large sums of money.”
“There are always people willing to deal under the table,” Wade pointed out.
“True, but we don’t have to seek them out this way,” Enki replied, “and besides, making it all work is the most fun I’ve had in ages. You heard what I told Thonapa about Dilmun having been isolated. We were cut off from the rest of Creation for thousands of years. Since getting out, I’ve been doing my best to make up for lost time.”
“That you have,” Lizzie agreed. “I’m not sure which was nearly more disastrous for Creation, that game show or the college.”
“That wasn’t my fault,” Enki replied defensively. “How was I to know other gods would enter the Living Legend contest?”
“That was your project?” Wade asked.
“Did you like it?” Enki asked.
“I thought some of the contests were exciting to watch, but it all seemed too contrived,” Wade admitted.
“Of course it was contrived,” Enki laughed. “It was reality programming. And what happened at the college last year really wasn’t my fault. I can’t help that Apollo decided he was being snubbed. The fool could have just asked to be included you know. He certainly did not have to contrive to have Athena’s school set so close to mine and put us in contention with one another.”
“And yet, he did,” Lizzie remarked. “It seems to me that you keep overlooking one of the most basic properties of gods.”
“Which is?” Enki prompted her.
“That most of you are children who never really grew up,” Lizzie replied. “Well, I suppose most of you never really had to. Look at your own history. You were supposed to be a very wise god. You are supposed to have guided men for ages, and yet you were also a spoiled brat. You cheated on your wife, with at least one of your daughters, if I remember correctly, and when told to keep your hands out of your wife’s garden, you went on in and started eating the plants wholesale.”
“Uh, yeah, but that was very early on in our marriage,” Enki replied sheepishly.
“That’s a defense?” Lizzie asked incredulously.
“I’d like to think that after a few thousand years, I have, indeed managed to grow up,” Enki replied.
“And perhaps you have,” Lizzie admitted. “I never had that luxury. What I did in Thebes was a basic part of my nature as a predator, but it wasn’t done just to see what might happen. I was young too, but not immature. The riddle was a part of the hunt.”
“I always wondered about that,” Wade admitted. “The Oedipus myth paints you as a monster and evil and pretty much just assumes you were being monstrous.”
“Not at all,” Lizzie shook her head. “I am what happened when a predatory animal was combined with human intelligence. I felt the compulsion to hunt, but my brain prodded me to use intellect as a part of the hunt.”
“But why Thebes?” Wade asked.
“It’s where I was,” Lizzie remarked.
“It’s possible some meddling god or goddess compelled you to go there,” Enki remarked.
“That only goes to help prove my case about your lot,” Lizzie told him seriously.
“It does, but keep in mind that while gods are often slow to mature, we can mature in time. Look at Inanna these days,” Enki insisted.
“True enough,” Lizzie admitted. “She went from behaving like a flighty ditz to a mature and responsible individual. I wonder if that had something to do with her association with the new Tree.”
“Only in that Dee had a talk with her,” Enki replied, “but honestly, Ina was ready to put her childish self aside before that. We all get caught up in our reputations sometimes. It took a verbal slap in the face to wake Ina up, but it worked.”
“So where in India are we headed?” Wade asked as they continued through the World Tree.
“We’re not going to India,” Enki laughed.
“But isn’t Shiva an Indian god?” Wade asked.
“He is a Hindu deity,” Enki acknowledged, “and one of the most important of them. To tell the truth, that pantheon always confused me, even back in the ancient world. So many of the important gods have active aspects they can shift through at will whereas most of us use only one at a time and changing is something we do over time. For Lord Shiva his aspects change with locations and mood. In any case we are going to his home in Mount Kailash in Tibet.”
They arrived at the foot of Mount Kailash a few minutes later. The sky was slate gray and there was a chilly wind blowing in their faces. “If I have this right,” Enki told them, “We have arrived at the Hindu aspect of the mountain. Kailash is sacred to five religions, you see.”
“Five?” Wade asked.
“Hinduism,” Enki recited, “Buddhism, Jainism, Ayyavazhi and the Bön faith. In each religion it has different significance.”
“Looks like an interesting peak to climb,” Wade remarked.
“There are no recorded attempts to climb the one in the mortal world,” Enki told him. “It’s just too sacred to too many people. This is the Hindu aspect of the mountain and it is the home of Lord Shiva and He is said to reside at the very summit and sits in a state of perpetual meditation along with His wife, Parvati. But Shiva has many aspects and I doubt that is the one we are meeting here.”
“Why not?” Lizzie asked.
“Like I said,” Enki responded, “He resides there in perpetual meditation. That means He wouldn’t be waking up to talk to us, but we are supposed to meet Him here, so I imagine it will be another aspect we meet.”
“Then which one is He today?” Wade asked.
“All of them, I am sure,” Enki chuckled, “but I don’t know which we will meet. Probably a less contemplative one, although I assure you whichever of His aspects we talk to he will have all the advantages of the rest. He may be a deity of many active aspects, but He is only one deity. What one aspect thinks or knows the others will as well.”
They approached the base of the mountain and were met there by a woman who rode up to them on the back of a tiger. She had golden skin and long dark hair but she was wearing jeans and a modern-style, heavily embroidered silk blouse that had been custom tailored to fit all four of her arms. “I am Parvarti,” she announced. “Welcome, Lord Enki. Thank you for coming.” She looked politely inquiring toward Lizzie and Wade.
“My friends and companions,” Enki introduced them. “Lizzie, the Spinx of Thebes, and Wade Vogel.” Wade caught himself staring at the goddess.
“Is there a problem, Mister Vogel?” she asked.
“Oh, sorry,” Wade apologized. “You do not appear as you are commonly depicted.”
“No,” Parvati smiled. “We do not always appear as the artists have drawn or sculpted us in the past. But, my guests, it looks like it is about to snow. Let us go inside.”
“Inside?” Wade asked in spite of himself. “Is there a cave?”
“Not as such,” Parvati replied. She turned and rode her tiger directly into the side of the mountain.
“Well, let’s go,” Enki suggested and he too walked up to and through the rocky surface.
“I am not certain I can do that,” Lizzie admitted nervously. “It would feel like walking into a trap.”
“Claustrophobia?” Wade asked.
“Perhaps,” Lizzie admitted, “but we must go in.” She swallowed hard and took two steps forward and then stopped just shy of the cliff’s face. “I cannot. I’m sorry, Wade.”
“Do you trust me?” Wade asked gently.
“What?” she asked.
“Do you trust me?” he asked again. “If so, then close your eyes and let me guide you.” Lizzie closed her eyes and Wade draped his arm across her leonine shoulders. “Okay, let’s start walking,” she suggested.
Together they got closer to the stony wall, although Wade needed to coax Lizzie the last few steps one at a time and then finally they were past the side of the mountain and, seemingly in a warm sunny garden. “You can open your eyes now,” Wade told Lizzie. He looked around and saw Enki and Parvati watching the two of them.
“Wow!” the Spynx breathed, looking around. “This is amazing. Is this another aspect of the mountain?”
“Not as such, at least not in the religious context,” Parvati admitted. “This was set up so we could receive you here in a proper manner. I am sorry we caused you such discomfort, but we did not know you would be here, nor what weaknesses you might have.”
“Even I know that I cannot always trust my eyes, Holy Parvati,” Lizzie replied, bowing her head slightly.
Parvati gave her the same gesture and dismounted from her tiger. “Lord Nataraja is waiting.” She turned and started walking across the garden, although the tiger made a deep rumbling noise in its throat and wandered off.
The garden, they saw as they passed through it, had several areas within with padded benches for people to sit on, but they continued past them. The area seemed sunny, but when Wade looked upward, he could see no visible source of light. “Is this an illusion?” he wondered out loud.
“Yes, and no,” Parvati replied. “It is the nature of this place. Do not concern yourself with it.”
Beyond the garden was a large ornate building – a palace, Wade decided at first and then decided that while tall and imposing, it was not large enough for a palace, but it had ornately carved stone walls and one large, golden onion-shaped dome in the center. Wade paused to look at the carvings, but it was mostly writing in a language he did not know. He suspected it was Sanskrit.
As they entered the building, they discovered it was all one open room with a dais in the center. The only illumination was provided by an arch of flames over the dais. Inside that arch was a four-armed manifestation of Shiva, the Lord of the Dance known as Nataraja. Lying on the floor of the dais, under Nataraja’s feet was the dwarf-demon of ignorance, Apasmara. The demon was squirming under the Dancer’s feet, but He danced on. There was a cobra coiling and uncoiling around one of His arms and another snake moving around His waist, while the god’s long hair whipped around wildly in the dance,
However just as they entered, Lord Nataraja stumbled ever so slightly and Apasmara tried to escape. But the god recovered Himself and restarted the dance. It did not look precisely how it was traditionally depicted, but depictions, Wade reminded himself were static and stylized , each feature had special religious significance. This was a living dance of creation and destruction, he knew, and thus it was a fluid, ever-changing artform.
Just as He got back into the proper rhythm of the dance, Nataraja looked down and saw them. “Greetings, Lord Shiva,” Enki called out.
Shiva shrugged slightly and stepped down through the arch of flames to greet them. As he did he was transformed into a two-armed manifestation, whose hair was neatly coifed. He greeted each warmly in turn and directed them back into the garden where they sat on some of the benches. There were cool drinks and delicate halvahs and other honeyed pastries for them to eat there. As Shiva sat beside Parvati, they merged until one side was obviously the male Shiva and the other the female Parvati. “You saw Me stumble, did you?” Shiva’s voice asked after they were all comfortable. “That is why I have called for help.”
“I have learned,” Lizzie remarked, “that it is not the point of a dance to be perfect.”
“Ah,” Shiva responded warmly, “but it is of paramount necessity that both Tandava and Lasaya be perfect. It is my duty to dance the dance of Destruction and Creation. In fine, My dance is nothing short of the state of the Universe and it must be in balance.”
“Isn’t Your dance supposed to be constant?” Wade asked. “How could You stop it to talk to us?”
Shiva smiled at the question, “I have not stopped dancing, just as I am perpetually in meditation atop this mountain a part of me, the Natarajah, is always in the Tandava and Lasya, but I manifest in several forms, this being another of them. Also, the dance always continues in the heart.”
“Wade,” Enki cut in, “This is another example of how there is no paradox on the Divine Plain. Lord Shiva is not an Infinite, but like Mother Nature, He is very close. In fact, I would dare say that if such could be measured, He is closer to that state than Mother Nature.”
“Ha, Watergod!” Shiva laughed. “I appreciate the compliment, but I fear your grasp of mathematics falls shy of reality. While, I and some others may approach infinity we are all still finite and the difference between finiteness and infinity is still infinite. In a very real sense I am no closer to being an Infinite than You are.”
“I am far from even approaching Infinity,” Enki denied.
“Either one is Infinite or not,” Shiva argued. “It is an absolute state, much like being pregnant. To say a woman is ‘slightly pregnant’ is an interesting turn of phrase, but it is sheer nonsense nonetheless. The same is true of deities. We are either Infinites or we are not. Since we are not, then we are all equally distant from being an Infinite. Contending in that matter does not avail us anything.”
“Then you might as well say that Lizzie or even I am equally close to being an Infinite,” Wade pointed out.
“Yes, I might,” Shiva replied easily. “All might approach Infinity in their own way. Being mortal or immortal matters not so long as you can achieve enlightenment. But as pleasant as I find this debate, there are more important matter to discuss. The reason I stumble is that the Universe is out of balance. It is My job to maintain the balance, but the source of the imbalance is not from within My realm. I can continue to dance, but I need someone to find the source of the imbalance or eventually even I might stumble and the Universe will be destroyed utterly and forever.”
“I see,” Enki agreed. “If the source were from within Your realm it would be simple for You to rout out the cause and extinguish it.”
“Perhaps not simple,” Shiva grinned as he stood up and diverged from Parvati again. “We are both hero-gods and heroes do not often get quests that are easy, but it would be My responsibility alone. In this case I see that my part will be to keep the Universe from falling apart while you seek out the disruption.”
“Why Enki?” Wade asked. “No offense intended, but why would you choose a god whose own believers died out thousands of years ago?”
“For a number of reasons,” Shiva replied, leading them back toward the large onion-domed building. “First of all, I knew Enki in the ancient world, and a more creative and inventive god would be hard to find. More important is what Enki has managed to do in this more modern era. I was most impressed with the means He used to bring the new Tree to term. He has learned to use teamwork, something few of us understood in the old days. He knows how to build a team and has proven it repeatedly.”
“He certainly knows how to let the rest of us do the work,” Lizzie remarked.
“That is sometimes called ‘leadership,’” Shiva replied. He transformed back into Nataraja and stepped up onto the dais once more. “Perhaps you should study my dance before you leave. It might grant you some needed insight. My dance has two aspects; the gentle dance and the destructive. The purpose is to not only balance the Universe, but to release the souls of men from the traps of illusion. Now you need only be concerned with the gentle dance. Watch.”
Nataraja began to dance out slow, measured paces. It was, indeed, only half the dance they had observed on their first entrance into this place. Wade and Enki made mental notes, but it was Lizzie who reared on her hind legs and attempted to mimic some of the steps.
“I believe you will find this easier in human guise,” Nataraja told her. His face remained impassive while in the dance, but there seemed to be a smile of approval in his voice. Lizzie shifted form and tried again. “Not bad,” he told her and stepped back down again. “Here, let me show you one step at a time.”
They worked together for the next two hours and insisted Wade learn the steps as well. “There is a variant for two,” He told them, “or more.” Finally Nataraja decided they were ready. “Yes, Lizzie, you will know what to do.”
“Know what to do?” Lizzie asked.
“Yes,” Nataraja nodded, “and Wade here can follow your lead and support you.”
“And I?” Enki asked.
“We have already discussed your strengths,” Shiva pointed out, climbing back on to the dias again. “You are a team leader, but I can sense that Lizzie is the key element to this search. A search is just another form of hunt, and who better to hunt than a consummate predator?”
With that pronouncement Nataraja began to dance again in earnest.
“He gave us a clue there, I think,” Lizzie remarked as they walked back on a branch of Yggdrasil. It was cold in the Tree today and they had arrived just at dawn, but at this time of year that meant they only one two hours of light left. Wade was glad he had brought a warm coat and Lizzie transformed back into her natural form. Enki did not seem to feel the cold.“The imbalance is manifesting as a form of dance, right? Then we should seek out other gods of dance. Their attributes should enable us to find the imbalance.”
“I doubt that will be necessary,” Enki disagreed. “I have a place here on the Tree where we can spy out the imbalance fairly quickly and go directly to it.”
“You do?” Wade asked.
“Of course,” Enki nodded.
“Of course?” Wade echoed incredulously. “How does an ancient Mesopotamian god have any sort of place on the Norse aspect of the World Tree?”
“It goes back to the war that ended the last cycle,” Enki explained. “That was between the forces of Order and Chaos. I set up a number of scrying bowls at a key part of the Tree and we used the area as a sort of war room from which to coordinate the forces of Order. From there we can see most of the Universe.”
“Most?” Wade questioned him.
“Yes,” Enki replied, puzzled at where Wade was headed with the argument, “Why?”
“Most of an infinite Universe?” Wade pressed.
“Right.”
“Lord Shiva just had this discussion with us,” Wade pointed out. “The Universe is infinite, but what you can see is not, therefore there is still an infinite amount of places you cannot see from your war room. Right?”
“This is different,” Enki told him. “The places we cannot see from there are not within the known Divine Plain.”
“What if the imbalance comes from an unknown part of the Divine plain?” Wade countered.
“I seriously doubt that,” Enki told him confidently. “Besides it’s the best place to start and if it does not work we’ll try something else.”
Wade and Lizzie exchanged glances, but they both shrugged and followed the god of water. They arrived at the old war room an hour later. There were numerous large bumps in the bark of the Tree branch, but only one of them looked like it even approached being bowl shaped. “This is it?” Wade asked.
“Um, yeah,” Enki admitted. “I forgot about this. The tree keeps growing, of course and my bowls have been covered over and filled in with new growth.”
“What about this one?” Lizzie asked, indicating the one that still looked a little bowl-like.
“We rebuilt that one out not too long ago,” Enki informed them. “Actually Dee did it for me, but I know how it is done.” He concentrated and the was a creaked of bending wood as the bark smoothed out and the wood beneath it stretched up to form a better defined and deeper bowl.
Almost immediately they heard the sounds of two screeching birds and the hurried scampering a giant squirrel. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Ratatosk demanded, paused and then commented sourly, “You again?”
“Hi, Ratty,” Enki greeted him.
“Hi, Ratty?” Ratatosk echoed scornfully. “You stand here torturing the Tree and that’s all you have to say for yourself?”
“I wasn’t torturing the Tree,” Enki denied. “Dee has done the same thing several times.”
“Dee knows how to do it correctly,” Ratatosk argued as one of the deer who inhabited the tree showed up. Wade and Lizzie learned a little later its name was Dain. “She knows enough to ask the Tree to do it for her, rather than just shaping the tree as though whittling with a knife. You just caused Yggdrasil considerable pain and who knows how that will translate out in the mortal world?”
“Sorry,” Enki apologized.
“Don’t say ‘sorry’ to me,” Ratatosk told him. “Tell it to the Tree.”
Not too much earlier Wade would have thought that was just an expression, but now he understood the squirrel meant it literally. So did Enki. The water god closed his eyes for a few minutes and after a while there was a soft rustling through the leaves.
“You’re lucky he forgives easily,” Ratatosk told him sourly. “So what are you three up to now?” Enki proceeded to fill the bowl with water that he seemed to make appear from nowhere, but Wade thought he must he causing to condense from the ambient humidity. It was taking a while because the air was so dry. So it fell to Lizzie to explain to Ratatosk and Dain. “Oh this is so like you, Enki,” the squirrel crowed once he realized what Enki was trying to do. Like the water you command, you always try to use a directly downhill approach to almost any problem you encounter.”
“Not every solution is so easily gained or directly approached,” Dain added. “We, the guardians of Yggdrasil, have detected a wrongness in the World for weeks now, but we can see no enemies of the Tree from here.”
“Well, I need to see for myself,” Enki grumbled at them and continued to fill the bowl.
“We probably should have brought a thermos full of hot soup,” Wade commented. “It’s cold up here and I cannot think of a less appropriate place to build a fire.”
“Good thinking,” Ratatosk told him. “The world ends, some cycles at least, with the burning of Yggdrasil, and that’s a flame that can burn forever.”
“If it is only until the end of the cycle, it’s not forever then,” Wade pointed out.
“It is as far as the cycle is concerned,” Dain remarked. “The next cycle is different and while most of the history of the previous cycle is recreated in retrospect, it is still a different world.”
“Hmm, so if you had a small branch, a twig, from the Tree and lit it on fire it would never go out?” Wade asked.
“You’re not planning on experimenting with that, are you?” Ratatosk asked. “Fires that do not go out are the most dangerous kind and impossible to contain forever.”
“You’re right, Wade admitted. “I might be careful to keep it safe for all my life, but I would have no control over it after that.”
“And it could be stolen,” Dain added. “The thief might or might not know what he had. Either way could be a disaster.”
“Well, I was only thinking,” Wade admitted. “I certainly would not take a piece of the Tree with me unless the Tree himself offered it to me and even then, using it to make a fire… Well, I’d have to be really desperate, wouldn’t I?”
“Beyond desperate, actually,” Dain replied.
“I suppose so,” Wade agreed, “but in some cycles the wood of Yggdrasil did burn?”
“Sadly, yes,” Dain replied.
“And no one was able to put it out?” Wade asked.
“By the time it happened,” Dain replied, “no one who might have tried was left. The destruction of Yggdrasil is the destruction of the world. In the last cycle the forces of Order won. Had they lost Chaos would have destroyed the Tree.”
“Well, I finally got the bowl filled,” Enki announced. “We’d better start looking before it freezes over.”
“It wouldn’t work when frozen?” Ratatosk asked.
“It needs to be clear,” Enki replied.
“Ice can be perfectly clear,” Wade pointed out. “The trick is keeping it agitated while it is freezing. It prevents air bubbles from being trapped in the ice.”
“Where did you learn that?” Lizzie asked.
“I had a friend who made ice sculptures for extra cash while in college,” Wade replied. “He tried cutting costs by making his own ice in the Physics Building using liquid nitrogen. It didn’t work so well and by the time he worked it out we were ready to graduate. Enki, I don’t know how to use a scrying bowl. Just one of those things missing from my education.”
“Just what are they teaching you kids these days?” Enki grumbled. “You don’t need to. We only have one bowl and a limited amount of time in which to use it. I’ll make it work, the rest of you keep an eye on the bowl and see if you spot anything.”
“What are we looking for?” Wade asked.
“I don’t know,” Enki admitted. “Something out of the ordinary.”
“Uh, I’m standing on the branch of an impossibly large tree,” Wade pointed out, “I’ve been running around all Creation with the Sphinx and an ancient god of fresh water. Along the way I’ve spoken to various spirits and gods, not to mention a mouthy squirrel…”
“Always glad to be of service,” Ratatosk put in.
“So far, everything has been out of the ordinary for me,” Wade concluded.
“Just look at the pretty pictures,” Enki told him irritably. “Hopefully one of you will spot our imbalance when you see it.”
For the next two hours, Enki used the bowl to look into the mortal world as well as many regions of the Divine Plain, but none of them saw anything they could say was causing the problem. They finally quit when a skin of ice finished forming across the top of the water in the bowl.
“Now I think we should go looking for other gods of Dance,” Lizzie told Enki.
“I have one more thing to try,” Enki held her off. “We’ll go back to Hattamesset and look from the Tree there. We’ve been able to see things there that were hidden from here.”
“It won’t work,” Lizzie predicted.
“How did you get to be a successful predator with such a pessimistic attitude?” Enki asked.
“A predator must be a realist,” Lizzie maintained.
“Well, I think there is a real chance this will work,” Enki insisted.
“Have it your way,” Lizzie shrugged.
“I’m sorry, Enki,” Tanise told him two days later. “There is just nothing to be seen from here. To be honest, I never thought there would be, but I tried my best. You have to keep in mind this is a different universe. Except for only a few special cases I can only see things that would affect this universe in some way. Whatever is happening there, it has nothing to do with my world.”
“Mister Waters,” Eddy remarked, using the name Enki had first used when they met, “it seems to me that since this problem is manifesting as a disruption to the dance of Lord Shiva, maybe you ought to consult with other deities who are patrons of Dance.”
“I told you!” Lizzie crowed.
“And I think you were right Lizzie,” Eddy nodded. “Terpsichore was here last summer. Doesn’t she teach in your school, Waters?”
“She does,” Enki admitted. “She teaches Gym. Maybe that’s why I didn’t think of her. Oh very well, Lizzie have it your way, and while we’re up there I need to have a chat with Dee anyway.”
It was snowing in the branches of Yggdrasil and the going was hard, so Enki lead them back out of the Tree and they made their way Between the plains on foot. “I really need to replace that car,” Enki commented.
“It was a two-seater,” Wade pointed out. “We still couldn’t all have fit inside.”
“Well, maybe you’re right,” Enki sighed. “We could rent a car, I supposed. That’s what I usually do when I have to travel with others.”
“Why bother?” Lizzie asked. “This way we have one less thing to lose.”
“Not having to carry all my stuff on my back would be nice for a change,” Wade admitted. “I would have finished the trail long ago if we hadn’t met, but maybe you’re right. A car would have limited our means of travel.”
“How do you see that?” Enki asked.
“Even if you could drive on Yggdrasil, the guardians wouldn’t let you, I’m sure,” Wade replied. “They were fast to respond when you created that bowl. I imagine they would be even quicker on the scene if you were leaving skid marks. And that car would have only fit on the largest of branches anyway.”
“You’ve only seen the Tree in that one aspect,” Enki told him. “It does have others. Admittedly most of them are also trees with religious significance, but one of its aspects is as a highway.”
“Then why haven’t you used that highway?” Wade asked.
“The Tree is not perfect, nor does He live ideally,” Enki explained. “The deer, who symbolize the four great winds eat its buds, the dragon, Nithhogg gnaws on at least one of its roots and there are other pests that bother it as well. It constantly withstands damage from natural and less than natural causes. The other aspects are similar or else are unapproachable and the Highway? Well, let’s just say it needs a Department of Public Works in places. We can walk the length on foot, but some of the potholes more resemble tank traps. So, by car, the way is easier Between. Also, the Tree is picky about who may travel through His branches. I have always been allowed, but I’m not even from a closely-related mythos, so I try not to strain the courtesy.
“You’ve met Jael,” Enki remarked. “Didn’t occur to you how unusual it was that a demoness was allowed to travel via Yggdrasil or any of its aspects?”
“I assumed the Tree was neutral,” Wade replied, “I have not had a problem travelling that way, save that I could not get there myself.”
“You might,” Enki told him. “A few rare mortals have learned, but that is not my point here. Most of Jael’s kindred are prohibited from traversing the limbs of Yggdrasil, although the tree tolerates some individuals, often by criteria we do not understand, and not to all parts of the Tree. There was a brief moratorium on that at the end of the last cycle when Hell joined the forces of Order and were among the defenders of Creation.”
“What?” Wade asked. “Since when is Satan a defender of anything?”
“In spite of His falling-out with your God,” Enki explained, “Lucifer is as much a supporter of Order as the deity he rebelled against. If you ever visit Hell you will see one of the most efficient organizations in Creation. Also Lucifer, reputedly, would like to rule Creation. He cannot rule what does not exist. However, While He was an ally at that time and I continue to have no animosity against Him, I have no idea what His plans concerning that are. I know however that most demons are not tolerated on Yggdrasil most of the time, but Jael is more than tolerated. The Tree welcomes her and allows her absolutely everywhere, even at the very peak of the tree from which you can see all of Creation at once.
“Heh!” Enki laughed suddenly. “If you ever need to find Jael and she doesn’t seem to be anywhere else look for her at the very top. That’s where she goes when she’s troubled and needs to think things out. I’ve found her there a few times.”
“Jael did not impress me as the sort who would be troubled often,” Wade remarked.
“You do not know my friend as well as I,” Lizzie told him. “She is a contemplative sort and a caring creature. I think that may be partly Rona’s influence, although I knew her before she merged with Rona and even then she was unique among her kind. Jael is a demoness whose feelings and beliefs in what is right are frequently at odds with her heredity and upbringing. Of course she needs to clear her head from time to time.”
“We’re just about there,” Enki told them, “but, Lizzie, I don’t think you’ll need your guise. I plan to arrive directly at the athletic field.”
“I’ll change anyway,” Lizzie told him. “You do not know what class is there right now and the mortal students might be.”
The precaution proved unnecessary, however. Sherburne College was a school, Enki had taken over with a mind toward giving supernatural beings a modern education. He had filled gaps in the faculty with various deities and managed to round up several dozen “special” students of all sorts. However, the school had been there before he came along and most of the students were mortals. The supernaturals were encouraged to mix with their mortal counterparts and most did, but their gym classes were kept strictly segregated and when the supernaturals were on the field, it was shielded magically from mortal eyes so they could get their exercise in their natural forms, rather than the mortal guises most were compelled to use the rest of the time. They arrived during the sophomore year supernatural gym class.
“Lizzie!” a young woman with large bird-like wings called out from above. Wade and Lizzie both looked up to see a teenager flying toward them. Her wings were mostly light brown but shaded toward black at the tips and she had black hair. Her fingers ended in long, sharp nails that looked almost like claws and when she smiled she had fangs. She was wearing dark glasses, but when she landed in front of them, Wade could see a few streaks of what looked like blood on her cheeks.
“Hello, little flyer,” Lizzie greeted her.
“Miss Neth!” another woman’s voice rang out. “I expect another ten laps from you.”
“Oops!” the young fury laughed. “Sorry, coach! See you in a bit,” she told Lizzie and flew back up and over the track, nearly colliding with an angel. “Sorry, Astra!”
“Shall we dance again, Evie?” the angel asked and the two of them circled each other laterally a few times as they flew around the track. Both were laughing companionably.
“She flies well,” Lizzie commended.
“Yes, she does,” the coach agreed as she approached. She was of medium height with long dark hair that had been pulled back into a pony tail and kept down with a baseball cap. She was wearing a heavy winter coat over sweats that bore the Sherburne College emblem. “And I rarely have to chastise her at all, so I suppose this was a special occasion. Enki, what brings you here?”
“You do, Terpichore,” Enki replied and together all three explained why they were there.
“Well, yes, I am the Muse of Dance,” Terpsichore agreed at last, “but unlike Lord Shiva, my powers do not extend to universal balance. My patronage is more of the aesthetic sort.”
“Shiva’s case is unique, I agree,” Enki told her.
“He is as close to an Infinite as any of us are likely to get,” Terpishore replied, “perhaps even closer to that state than Doctor Meter is.”
“Shiva gave me a class in divine mathematics recently,” Enki chuckled. “According to his lecture, we’re all equally far from Infinity.”
“Only in the mathematical sense,” Terpsichore shrugged. “I wish I could help you, but…”
“Maybe you can,” Lizzie put in. “You are attuned to Dance, it is your specialty. Shiva taught me the merest facet of His dance and I could sense a wrongness. Not being an expert, the sensation was slight and unfocused and I honestly have no notion of how to handle it, but perhaps you could.”
“I have a free period coming up,” Terpsichore decided. “Give me half an hour, please.”
“We’ll wait in the stands,” Enki offered.
“You may, but it’s cold out here,” Terpsichore responded. “If we’re going to dance, I would prefer to get out of this heavy coat. We can use the gymnasium.”
After the class had been sent to the showers, Terpsichore met them in the gym. She tossed her parka and baseball cap into one of the corners. “All right,” she told Lizzie. “Show me how to dance.” It sounded like a challenge.
“Ha!” Lizzie laughed. “I would not presume to teach you how to dance any more than you might presume to teach me how to hunt.”
Terpsichore smiled tightly, allowing only one corner of her mouth to turn up. “Thank you,” she replied simply. “Perhaps I should have requested that you show me what you know of this specific dance.”
“Gladly,” Lizzie responded. She phased back into her human guise. “I can show you how a single dancer might move and Wade and I can demonstrate how more than one might go through the steps. To tell the truth, I only felt the wrongness when I was dancing with either him or Lord Shiva and it was more pronounced when I partnered with Lord Shiva.”
“That makes sense,” Terpsichore admitted, and watched carefully as Lizzie moved through the basic steps of that part of the Lasya or gentle dance that Shiva had taught her.
She and Wade were demonstrating the paired form of the dance when a voice from the gymnasium doorway sighed, “Wow!” They turned to see the angel, Astra, now without her wings and the young fury, also in human guise, along with another woman Wade did not recognize. “Can we learn that one too?” Astra asked.
“I am not certain it would be appropriate,” Terpsichore replied.
“Who better to dance the Dance of Creation than an angel,” Lizzie countered.
“But it is not the Dance of Creation in her version of Heaven,” Terpsichore maintained.
“Nor am I at all angelic,” Lizzie pointed out, “And yet Lord Shiva taught this to me.”
“I don’t think these young ladies will harm the dance,” Enki added. “You might dance Lasya, but none of you have the power to create the Universe, not even if you work together. That is an aspect of this dance I am certain that only Nataraja can invoke.”
“Don’t you three have classes next period?” Terpsichore asked. The three looked at each other and shook their heads. “Oh, very well. Let’s see what you can do.” She introduced all three students to the others although only Wade had not met Evrona, the fury and Nerys, who it turned out was actually a dragoness in guise. Then he and Lizzie helped them all through the basic steps.
At the end of the hour they were all doing passable renditions of that small part of the Lasya although Wade noted that each had their one distinctive style. It was as though they were all speaking the same language, but with different regional accents. He thought about that and decided it was probably natural that each person perform acts of creation in their own unique manner.
“I can detect this wrongness you mention,” Terpsichore told Lizzie, “but I do not know what to do with this knowledge. I can, however, continue to study it while you seek out others to help you. I have a commitment to remain here and teach, but I can join you later if you need me.”
“Tell Ninti anything you learn,” Enki instructed her. “She will know how to pass it on to me.”
“And if I learn anything that will help,” Lizzie promised, “I’ll get it back to you.”
Their next stop was across the campus at the Administration Building, but the Dean’s office was closed and locked. “Dee isn’t in at the moment,” Isis, the Egyptian goddess and assistant dean, told them. “She’s in Brazil on business.”
“What sort of business could the Dean of Sherburne College possibly have in Brazil?” Enki demanded.
“She is not there as the dean,” Isis replied with a slight smile. “Is there something I can help you with?”
“Another point of perspective is always welcome,” Enki decided and once more the related what they had learned.
“Hmm, I was goddess of magic among other things,” Isis considered.
“You still are,” Enki replied.
“Am I?” Isis countered. “Oh, I have all my attributes, but like so many of us I no longer have much in the way of worshipers. It’s a philosophical question, I suppose; is a god still a patron of something if he is no longer venerated as such?”
“You may as well ask if a tree falling in an empty forest makes a sound,” Wade pointed out.
“I have,” Isis admitted. “I decided there was no such thing as an empty forest. I know who you can consult, however. Try Ihy the sistrum player, son of Hathor and Horus. He was the god of music and dance in Egypt, although last I heard he was hanging out in Yorkshire.”
“England?” Wade asked.
“Is there another?” Isis countered. “He could be in any of the cities up there, but the last time I saw him he was in York.”
“What’s he doing in York?” Enki asked.
Walking around inside the cramped and twisty streets of the walled city, they eventually encountered Ihy in a somewhat more open area where he appeared to be making a living as a busker. He was playing a modern guitar instead of a sistrum and there were two young women who danced on either side of him with tambourines. Perhaps it was coincidental or not, but they were performing what Wade felt was a very unimaginative rendition of “Tambourine Man.”
Ihy looked young, appearing as though in his late teens or early twenties. He was dressed in jeans and a workshirt which seemed somewhat incongruous, but only because it was a cold day with a heavy mist in the air. The two women were dressed only slightly warmer, but they had winter jackets nearby on the ground. They did not have much of an audience that day. There were only a few passersby and most of them kept moving so as to reach the warmth of their destinations.
Rather than interrupt the concert such as it was, however, Enki flipped an old silver coin into Ihy’s guitar case, which inevitably caught the young-seeming god’s eye. “Hey there!” Ihy exclaimed, suddenly stopping the song. “I haven’t seen a tetradrachm in ages.” He looked up, recognized Enki and added, “Literally.”
It had been Lizzie’s idea to use that particular coin. It had been minted during the reign of Ptolomy I and bore the head of Alexander the Great on one side and a portrayal of Athena in armor with an eagle on the other. “Yeah,” she chuckled. “Thought you might recognize that one. As I recall, you used to perform a bit like this back in Alexandria.”
“Do I know you?” Ihy asked, looking at Lizzie closely.
“Four, two, three,” Lizzie suggested with a hint of the predator in her voice.
“Ah ha!” Ihy laughed. “You look a bit different with only two legs. And you?” he asked Wade.
“I’m just tagging along,” Wade admitted, but Lizzie introduced him formally and in such a way that Wade felt she was making him sound far too important.
“So,” Ihy asked at last, “what are all of you doing in York?”
“Looking for you,” Enki replied. “Why don’t I buy you a drink?”
“Why not?” Ihy shrugged, taking the money out, putting his guitar away and closing up the case. “Not counting that museum oddity you tossed in my box, I’ve made all of half a quid this afternoon.”
“A quid?” Enki asked.
“A pound,” Ihy translated the slang term. “Oh, never mind. I just meant it’s a rubbish day to be busking. Come on. I know a less public spot we can relax in.” He gave the money from the case to the two dancers, although Wade noticed he kept the ancient coin. Then Ihy slung the guitar case over his shoulder and led the others around the corner and another three blocks away. At the first turn the two dancers waved and went the other way.
“What about your dancers?” Enki asked.
“Yeah,” Iny nodded. “Nice girls. Smart too. I never have to tell them when I have private business.”
“So,” Enki asked. “They aren’t divine?”
“They’re positively heavenly,” Iny laughed “But they are mortal, if that’s what you meant.”
They finally reached a plain gray doorway beside a sign that merely displayed the pictures of two cobras raised and ready to strike. Ihy pushed the door open and walked in, but stopped to hold the door open for the others. “This way,” Ihy told them.
“You call this place less public?” Enki asked incredulously as he saw it was a crowded and noisy pub.
“Hey!” Ihy laughed. “Nobody here but us chickens.” He paused to wave at some of the others.
“What do you mean?” Enki asked.
“Everyone here is either supernatural or in on the secret,” Ihy explained as he found them a table. “Well, mostly.” He signaled toward the bar and the bartender nodded.
“Mostly?” Enki pressed. A barmaid sauntered over with several pint glasses filled with a golden foaming liquid.
“See those two over there?” Ihy pointed to a pair of men playing darts, while he took a first sip. “Centaurs. And the two cute chicks flirting with the bartender? River nymphs named Florence and Jeanne. The bloke at the bar is Govannon, the Celtic god of brewing.”
“And a heck of a lot more,” Enki noted, “but okay, and the others?”
“Well, the five sitting around the fire are from the Etruscan pantheon,” Ihy explained. “Nice guys, but they mostly keep to themselves, and those two in the booth across the way are Lugbara spirits who moved up here last summer.”
“What about the ones in that booth next to them?” Enki asked pointing at a crowded booth filled with young laughing men and women.
“Kids from the local college, I think,” Ihy replied.
“What are they all doing here?” Enki asked.
“They just sort of wandered in here one day,” Ihy shrugged. “I think they were looking for the sort of dive their teachers wouldn’t approve of and I guess we qualified. Besides, we have the best bitter and cider in town. Govannon makes it himself.” He drank again as though to emphasize the fact. Wade finally tasted his and decided it was pretty good.
“Not the kids,” Enki retorted.
“Oh, well everyone has to be somewhere, I guess,” Ihy commented. “I don’t know really. Just something about this place drew us here.”
“Something drew you here?” Enki echoed. “Do you think it might have been something of power that called you?”
“What?” Ihy laughed. “Nothing of the sort. It might just have been this pub. I think Govannon got here first and just sort of settled in two or three centuries ago. These days most of the locals think of it as the ‘old place’ if they even think of it at all. You’ve got to admit this pub is on the rustic side.”
“Rustic?” Wade laughed. “I’m surprised the health inspectors let it pass. Are those rushes on the floor?”
“I doubt there’s been an inspector in here ever,” Ihy replied, “and Gov likes it this way. The rushes are fresh.”
“Still somewhat out of date should anyone have a look,” Wade maintained.
“Why would they?” Ihy asked. “This place doesn’t exist officially. The only ones who can find it are supernaturals and the occasional mortal with a hint of the old power.”
“And none of them ever go into government work?” Wade pressed.
“I’m sure Gov has other defenses,” Ihy shrugged.
“So this place is a haven for supernaturals and I never even suspected,” Enki marveled.
“Thinking or opening a bar and grill now?” Lizzie asked him
“No,” Enki replied, “Although… no, too much on my plate already.”
“Going to do another show for the telly?” Ihy asked. “We all watched ‘Living Legend.’”
“You did?” Enki asked. “I suppose the gods on the Silver Team were favorties here.”
“I was rooting for the Red Team until they got eliminated,” Ihy admitted. “I didn’t know there was anything supernatural about the Silvers until Lugh came stumbling in here a month after the last show. He was still griping about losing in the finals, but to tell the truth most of us were more partial to Secmis, uh, Isis, that is. We would have called in our votes, but you were only taking them from North America.”
“I wasn’t aware the show was running anywhere else,” Enki admitted.
“It got picked up by Sky1,” Ihy told him, “but due to the time difference, the so-called live finale wasn’t shown here until the next evening. But I doubt you came in here for a review of the show.”
“No,” Lizzie shook her head. “We need gods of dance.”
“Have you talked to Terpsichore?” Ihy suggested. “The Muses are still venerated to an extent. The rest of us are pretty much has-beens.”
“You think Lord Shiva is a has-been?” Lizzie countered.
“No, of course not. Is He involved?” Ihy asked.
“He is,” Enki nodded. “He’s the reason we’re here.” Together they explained what they knew so far.
“Well that does sound dire,” Ihy admitted, “but what would I know about universal balance? Musical balance, yeah sure, and the balance you need to dance, of course, but…”
“They are related,” Lizzie insisted. “You have been a deity of music and dance, son of Hathor and Horus. How can you have failed to see the connection?”
“Hey, I’m young yet,” Ihy complained.
“You are thousands of years old,” Enki pointed out. “It is only your aspect as a child god that appears young. You seem to have aged a bit since the Middle Kingdom.”
“Much younger and I could have only gotten by as a street beggar,” Ihy pointed out.
“Then perhaps it is time to grow up,” Enki suggested.
“Terpsichore didn’t see the connection at first either,” Wade pointed out.
“The muses were always too caught up in their artistic or scientific specialties to see how they were really all parts of the same thing,” Lizzie shrugged.
“And how does a monster come to see dance as a part of the Universe?” Ihy challenged her.
“You watch your mouth!” Wade told the young god angrily.
“No, Wade,” Lizzie held up a hand to stop him. She smiled, displaying almost pointed teeth. “I am a monster. It is no insult, but thank you for your defense. It’s, uh, sweet of you. A monster is any creature who is neither fully natural nor divine. In my natural form I am a winged lion with the head and chest of a woman. I am a monster. Ihy, I am also a hunter, a predator by nature. Over the millennia I have had many pursuits. Sitting on a mountain, composing riddles could only satisfy my intellect for so long, so when not hunting prey, I hunt knowledge. Lately I have studied Dance. It is a most fascinating subject.”
“Of course,” Ihy agreed proudly as though she were complimenting him.
“Not ‘of course’,” she rounded on him. “It is not just you I am talking about. You are really only one patron deity of music and dance. There are many others.”
“I invented Dance,” Ihy maintained.
“In your part of the Universe you did,” Lizzie agreed, “but on the Divine Plain anything, even the world, can be created an infinite number of times. You know that as well as I do.”
“I also invented beer,” Ihy told her, looking at what was left of his pint of bitter. He signaled for more.
“So did I, youngster,” Eni shot back. “You’re just proving the case for us. Now tell us, do you truly not have a connection to the state of the Universe?”
“Uh,” Ihy seemed to shrink back into himself a little. The second round arrived and he drank so as to have to avoid answering.
“I can see, you’ve set yourself up well here in York,” Enki remarked. “The leader of your little pack, are you?”
“I am,” Ihy admitted, “of course.”
“Just another way to avoid growing up,” Enki noted. “Ha, you think you have matured, but you’ve only made it to your late teens. That’s the point most kids think they’ve really grown up, but most of us eventually realize that growing never really stops and we can look back and realize how little we knew back when we thought we knew it all. So here we all come and make you feel like a kid again and what’s worse you know inside that you feel like a kid because compared to us you are a kid. So tell me, kid, are you ready to grow up?”
“I don’t have to take this,” Ihy muttered.
“No, you don’t,” Enki agreed. “You can be a child and just tune all this out and let the grown-ups handle it.” Enki started to get out of his chair.
“Hey wait!” Ihy stopped him. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t try to help.”
“If you’re going to put yourself into it, you have to go all the way,” Enki told him, “and the one thing I don’t have time to deal with, kid, is your ego.”
“Look who’s talking!” Ihy crowed. “Face it, Watergod. If you’re looking for a flaw in the Dance of the Universe, you need the god of dance. You need me!”
“Good,” Lizzie nodded, slipping a wink toward Enki. “But can you feel the imbalance?”
“I can if you can,” Ihy shot back.
“Let’s find out,” Lizzie suggested. “I see there’s room for a dance floor. Let’s see your stuff.”
As they got up, Wade held Enki back and asked quietly, “Do gods always act like that?”
“We can be childish at times,” Enki shrugged easily.
“No,” Wade shook his head. “I mean do you always try to manipulate each other like that? I saw the way you were yanking on Ihy’s strings and he was trying the same sort of stunt on you. You were just better at it.”
“You caught that, did you?” Enki chuckled.
“Kind of hard to miss,” Wade told him.
“Hmm, yeah,” Enki admitted. “Very observant of you. The kid was right about at least one thing, though. We do need a god of dance in the party and I really did have to leave Terpsichore in Vermont. Oh, they’re coming back now. Why don’t you order another round, stout this time if you don’t mind, and something to eat? I think we’re going to be talking for a while. So, Lizzie?” he asked the Sphynx, “Did the kid pass the test.”
“I can feel the imbalance,” Ihy told him defiantly, then he calmed down and added. “I’m in.”
“It seems to me that the more gods of dance we have, the better we are going to do,” Ihy suggested later that night.
“I thought you said you were ‘The’ god of Dance,” Enki chuckled.
“I got carried away,” Ihy admitted sheepishly. “Of course there are others and we all have our specialties.”
“Did you have anyone in particular in mind?” Enki asked.
“I met another dancing god here a few years ago,” Ihy told them. “He was on vacation or so he said. Hah! Like a god needs a vacation.”
“A vacation is any decent break in the routine,” Enki commented. “Your whole life has been a vacation. No, don’t take offense. Think about it. You’re a god of entertainment when you get right down to it. Sure most of your music and dancing was of a religious nature, but…”
“No, you’re tight,” Ihy admitted. “I’m a kid and I like to play.”
“Some deities work more seriously,” Wade pointed out. “I imagine those who do have a daily grind, so to speak, would want to take a vacation every now and then. So where does he normally hang out.”
“Mexico,” Ihy replied.
“Not that awful hummingbird god of sun and war the Aztecs used to worship, I hope,” Wade shivered.
“Huitzilopochtli,” Enki supplied. “No. He hasn’t been very active this cycle. I’m not sure he’s even still around. He was killed during the war of Order and Chaos and should have come back in the new cycle, but he was killed so late in the last cycle he may not be back until next time or perhaps not at all. Or maybe he’s just laying low. The rules change with each new cycle and sometimes enemies become allies. Well in any case it wouldn’t be him, I’m sure.”
“Good,” Wade nodded. “That one demanded too much human sacrifice.”
“Blame that on the beliefs of the Aztecs themselves,” Enki told him. “They believed that the good gods would keep the bad ones away so long as the good ones were strong enough and they believed the good gods were kept strong by human sacrifice.”
“They did get a bit carried away with it though,” Lizzie opined. “So who is this Mexican god who dances?”
“Xochipilli,” Ihy replied.
“The Flower Prince?” Enki asked. “I thought he was a fertility god.”
“From the way he made it sound,” Ihy shrugged, “he was a kind of jack-of-all-trades. Mostly he was a god of the arts and beauty. Song and Dance was just part of it, but he and his wife were here and they showed me a few dances I had never seen before.”
“Any idea of where in Mexico he resides when he isn’t gadding about the world?” Enki asked. “Mexico is a big country.”
“Not really,” Ihy admitted. “I figured he lived in Mexico City.”
“He might,” Enki admitted, “but that’s a big city too. Let me make a call. Huh!” he grunted a moment later, looking at his cell phone. “I’m getting no bars in here.”
“Yeah,” Ihy nodded. “Gov doesn’t like them. He doesn’t mind having the telly over the bar, but he heard somewhere that cellphones cause cancer so he won’t let them work anywhere in here.”
“Gods don’t get cancer,” Enki told him, “and I haven’t heard a lot of proof of that among mortals, at least concerning modern cell phones.”
“Tell that to Govannon,” Ihy retorted. “I just know he blocks them somehow. Just step outside. That’s what the rest of us do when we want to make a call.”
Enki did and returned a few minutes later. “Well that was easier than I thought.”
“Was this Xochipilli listed in the local Yellow Pages?” Wade asked.
“Hardly,” Enki chuckled, “but it turned out Ninti has been keeping a database on gods in the modern world and where they live. She actually apologized for not knowing his phone number, but she did give me his address. Well, come on, folks. We’re off to San Christóbal de las Casas.”
“Where’s that?” Wade asked, getting to his feet.
“Mexico, like Ihy here said,” Enki replied, “although nowhere near Mexico City. It’s in the state of Chiapas, in fact. Southern Mexico.” One step outside the door and they were on a branch of Yggdrasil.
The cold wind was whistling through the branches and it appeared to be a moonless night. “Dark here,” Ihy noted, “and not quite a tropical paradise.”
“So next time bring a flashlight,” the squeaky voice of Ratatosk told him from out of the darkness.
“A what?” Ihy asked, “oh a torch. Good idea.”
“Hey, no flames on the Tree,” Ratatosk warned him.
“I said a torch, not a firebrand,” Ihy pointed out nastily. “A battery-powered torch.”
“That’s what we call a flashlight,” Wade pointed out. “You’ve been in Britain a long time haven’t you?”
“Who the hell are you anyway?” Ihy demanded of Ratatosk. Suddenly there was a small globe of light hovering over them and Ihy saw the squirrel looking down at him from the next branch up. “Oh, is that where we are? I’ve heard of you, but I usually travel Between. Why didn’t we, by the way?” he asked Enki.
“I didn’t feel like swimming,” Enki replied.
“You don’t have to swim, even if crossing an ocean,” Ihy argued.
Enki smirked and admitted, “This route is faster when you’re going several thousand miles.”
“Is it?” Ihy asked. “I’ll have to take your word for it.”
“Why?” Ratatosk asked. “Are you planning to sleepwalk your way to… where are you going anyway?”
“Mexico,” Wade answered.
“Count me in,” Ratatosk told them. “I was actually thinking a Irish Coffee would go down right about now, but margaritas on the beach will do in a pinch.”
“We’re not going for drinks, Ratty,” Enki told him.
“I’ll tag along anyway,” the squirrel told them.
They started walking, but Lizzie held the squirrel back and asked, “So do you actually have a reason for joining us or are you just trying to make trouble?”
“Aw, Lizzie,” Ratatosk retorted. “You know me.”
“I do know you, rodent,” Lizzie told him bluntly.
“Yeah, okay,” Ratatosk did a passable shrug, “you got me. The fact of the matter is at least one of the guardians is always watching those who travel through the Tree. The deer and the birds usually remain hidden or even if seen will not interfere until the visitor means trouble. Why else do you think I show up so frequently when you or the others are passing through?”
“You say the others generally stay away though?” Lizzie asked.
“I’m just the gregarious sort,” Ratatosk replied. “To tell the truth the deer and the birds mostly just tolerate me. They take their jobs so seriously they haven’t got a whole sense of humor between them. About the only one I can really call a friend rather than a colleague is the goat.”
“The goat?” Lizzie asked. “I’ve never seen a goat here.”
“His name is Heidrun,” Ratatosk commented. “Sometimes he’s up here among the branches, but most of the time he stands on the roof of Valahalla and just nibbles on the branches that he can reach from there. He’s not so much a guardian as an irritant, but he has his part to play. Well, unless your night vision is better than I think it is, we’d better hurry and catch up to the others.”
They walked a little faster and were soon close enough to hear Enki chatting with Ihy about the invention of beer. “We drank it through a long straw,” Enki told the younger god. “It was served in a large ceramic urn with holes in the lid, although it was also served in cups depending on where and when. It wasn’t cold like modern beers are, but then cold beer wasn’t really known until it started being brewed in colder climates, oh there you two are. I was starting to think we should have gone back to look for you.”
“No need,” Lizzie told him. “I just had a professional question for Ratatosk.”
“Really?” Enki asked. “Are you planning to move here?”
“It’s nice to keep my options open,” Lizzie evaded the question.
“Your choice,” Enki shrugged. “Ratty, we’re headed for San Cristóbal de las Casas. Would you happen to know a short cut?”
“Not really,” Ratatosk, “and we do have some rough weather coming in.”
“Are you suggesting we hunker down somewhere and wait out the storm?” Enki asked.
“That’s an option,” Ratatosk admitted, “Or you could try another aspect of the Tree. I was thinking Ashvatha, the Hindu aspect might be nicely warm.”
“I’m not acquainted with that one,” Enki admitted.
“Like this it’s a sacred World Tree,” Ratatosk, “although it’s a fig tree, rather than an ash. It will be in full leaf, of course and the climate is better. Also, like some of the Jewish Tree of Life aspects, it has its roots in Heaven and grows down toward the Earth.”
“So we’ll be upside down?” Wade asked.
“It feels the same,” Ratatosk replied. “Just don’t look up if heights bother you.”
“How well do you know that aspect?” Enki asked.
“Not all that well,” the squirrel admitted. “Hinduism has its own share of troublemakers and most of them are a lot worse than me, but I figure that if you’re on an errand for Lord Shiva, free passage through Ashvatha ought to be a given.”
“We’ll try it,” Enki decided. A moment later the branch beneath their feet had changed and it was no longer night although the sun had not yet risen. The bark was rougher than that of Yggdrasil and the branches were not as straight, nor did they spread outward as much.
“Yikes!” Wade exclaimed when he noticed the branch they were on was nearly vertical. He fell to the branch and gripped the bark as tightly as he could. A moment later he noticed he wasn’t falling off the branch and he relaxed his grip.
“Are you all right, Wade?” Lizzie asked solicitously.
“Evidently I’m fine,” he replied, getting back to his knees, “although the view makes me dizzy.”
“Don’t look then,” Ratatosk advised.
“How can I avoid that?” Wade demanded. “This branch is headed directly for the ground.”
“We’re heading in the wrong direction then and keep your eye on the branch, maybe?” Ratatosk told him with a note of uncertainty. “I don’t have a problem with it.”
“You’re a squirrel,” Wade pointed out. “And why aren’t we falling off the branch at this angle?”
“Because Ashvatha does not want us to,” Ratatosk shot back.
“Really?” Ihy asked.
“I don’t know,” Ratatosk admitted. “It just is. You’re a god, try explaining to me how miracles work. All I know is that the few times I’ve been in these branches, gravity held me against the branch.”
“No one else is having the trouble I am?” Wade asked.
“How can you be afraid of heights?” Lizzie asked. “You climb mountains and have flown on my back.”
“But in all that time down was always down,” Wade replied. “I can’t even call this sideways, it’s at an angle to everything.”
“Try closing your eyes,” Lizzie advised.
Wade did, and with his arm over Lizzie’s back for guidance tried a few steps, but then he stumbled over a crack in the bark. “I don’t think that’s going to work.”
“I have an idea,” Enki told them. Once again he formed a bubble around the party and lifted them all a few inches above the branch. “Where to, Ratty?”
“I only know my way around here in approximate terms,” Ratatosk admitted, “but now I think we can take a shortcut. Rather than following the branch to the trunk we can fly through the branches to the one we want.”
“And you know which branch we want that way?” Enki asked.
“Do you trust me?” Ratatosk countered.
“Just point the way,” Enki replied tiredly.
Wade kept his eyes closed as much as he could, but every so often Enki’s bubble had to swerve out of the way of an on-coming branch and he opened them involuntarily. Each time he did the view made him dizzy and he had to fight to keep his last meal where it belonged. Finally, Ratatosk told Enki, “Right there!” and they left the Sacred Fig Tree behind.
Wade opened his eyes to see something very large and silver flying just a few feet above their heads with a roar that shook him to his core. A moment later, his mind was able to translate that into reality, as they were all buffeted to the ground.
“Now where are we?” Enki asked, supernaturally calm.
“That was a jet!” Ihy screamed. “We’re in the middle of a bleeding runway.”
“And we’d better get back off of it before airport security arrives,” Wade pointed out, wondering in the back of his mind just how he was managing to remain calm. Was nearly being hit by a departing jet plane really less disturbing that what he had gone through on Ashvatha? Yes, he decided silently, at least we’re in the right part of Creation.
“Good point,” Lizzie agreed, “and there’s a good chance those sirens are for us.”
“Do not ask for whom the siren screams,” Ratatosk deliberately misquoted with a laugh. “You’re both right, though. We might have a bit of trouble explaining that we mean no harm and a giant squirrel might be chalked up to being a pet, though I doubt it…”
“You probably couldn’t keep your mouth shut long enough,” Wade told him, “and then they’d go looking for the zipper on your costume.”
“True,” Ratatosk agreed, “and the Sphynx would represent a riddle they wouldn’t give up on ever.”
“I do not like being on this side of the hunt in any case,” Lizzie pointed out.
“Who does?” Ratatosk bantered.
“Uh, mates?” Ihy cut in. “There are several cars and lorries headed this way, and I don’t think all those flashing red lights mean it’s a parade in our honor.”
“Quickly,” Enki told them. “Follow me in Between.” They took a step and the runway turned into a wide road. “Okay, I think we can relax a bit, but we still don’t know where we are, so it would be foolish to go very far this way.”
“Why?” Wade asked.
“Finding your way between the plains requires you to know precisely where you are and where you are going,” Enki explained. “Otherwise, you could well find yourself at the bottom of an ocean or inside a volcano when you come back out again. Fortunately I managed to get enough of a look around to get us to safety. Then we can figure out where we are.”
They walked for a few minutes while the scenery around them stayed the same except that the wide road quickly became a foot path. Finally Enki stopped and told Lizzie, “I think you’ll want to be in guise.”
“What about me?” Ratatosk asked.
“I’m still trying to decide whether I trust you,” Enki told him.
“I meant my appearance,” Ratatosk clarified.
“You can be my pet,” Ihy remarked. “Come ‘ere, Fluffy!”
“No… way,” Ratatosk told him in frosty measured tones.
“Can you act like a bratty kid?” Enki asked the squirrel, then corrected himself, “Of course, you can.” He waved his hand and Ratatosk was instantly transformed into a boy. Wade estimated his apparent age to be nine or ten.
“I don’t feel any different,” Ratatosk commented.
“It’s just an illusion,” Enki told him. “Try to keep your mouth shut anyway, but this way at least no one will go screaming to the National Enquirer that they saw a giant talking squirrel. Honestly, I wonder how those tabloids stay in business sometimes.”
“Lots of gullible people,” Ratatosk commented.
“And lot of bored ones standing in shopping lines,” Wade added. “They can print anything they like because no one really expects much from them.”
“Anything, you say?” Enki asked distractedly.
“It seems so to me,” Wade replied. I sure as heck don’t see a ton of footnotes or corroborating data in anything those rags print.”
“So you read them?” Enki pressed.
“Not often,” Wade admitted, “and only if there’s nothing else around to read. I don’t buy them, ever, but I know people who do. They enjoy laughing at the articles. Some of them are pretty outrageous. Why?”
“Oh, just thinking,” Enki replied.
“Don’t do that,” Lizzie told him firmly.
“But we could publish such a paper that was utterly true,” Enki replied with a grin, by-passing the banter for a change. “No mortal would ever believe it, but…”
“Bad idea,” Lizzie predicted, “And you’re still trying to set up a summer camp.”
“True,” Enki admitted, “true. Are we ready? Good, let’s rejoin reality.”
This time they found themselves on a broad strip of concrete that turned out to be the verge for an airport terminal. “Newark Liberty International Airport,” Wade read a sign out loud, “Terminal B. Ratty, I don’t think much of your navigation skills.”
“We’re on the right side of the ocean,” Ratatosk countered.
“And still three thousand miles from our destination,” Wade pointed out. “Not exactly a near miss.”
“I should have done this in York,” Enki told them. “I’m renting a car.”
“You were going to rent a car in Britain to drive to Mexico in?” Ihy laughed. “I’d loved to have heard the conversation with the desk clerk.”
“Well,” Enki replied, “from here it’s not so ridiculous.”
“Better make sure it seats six comfortably,” Wade advised him.
“There are only five of us,” Enki pointed out.
“But we hope to add Xochipilli to our company,” Wade reminded him.
“Maybe I need to charter a bus,” Enki mused.
“No need to go crazy,” Wade told him, “and we’d also need to have a bus driver. That takes a special license.”
“I wonder,” Enki thought again.
“You don’t have time to get your own license,” Lizzie told him.
“I wasn’t thinking of that,” Enki replied, sounding a little hurt. “I was wondering if there were any gods of transportation who maybe were working in the modern world as chauffeurs or bus drivers.”
“Garuda?” Ratatosk suggested.
“I doubt that,” Lizzie countered. “He’s a giant bird. How about Hermes?”
“No,” Enki shook his head. “Last I heard he was still running messages for Zeus when not playing outfield. No. It was a good idea, but I doubt any of us are driving a bus at the moment. Wait here, Wade and I will go inside and make the arrangements.”
It turned out that Terminal B had no rental agencies, but there was an “AirTrain” that ran every few minutes between the various buildings of the airport. There was a fee to board the train, but Enki was getting annoyed at all the “Little details,” and cast another spell that got everyone on board for free. It still took another two hours to get a van because they had arrived at a busy time and without reservations and then were planning to drive cross-country in it. Enki also grumbled at the cost when he found out how expensive it would be to have it for a month, but he used his credit card and they were finally on their way again.
“I wonder if they’ll notice how few miles you actually put on the van,” Ihy commented after a few minutes of the next leg of the trip.
“That’s why I told them I was going to drop it off in South Carolina,” Enki replied. “I still can’t believe how expensive this was.”
“Enki.” Lizzie told him. “After everything you’ve spent on that TV show and the college, I’m surprised a few thousand dollars bothers you.”
“Well, to tell the truth, I let Ninti handle most of the financial matters,” Enki confessed. “That does remind me. I should check in with her.” He pulled out his cell phone, looked at it, then put it back in his pocket. “I forgot. No reception off the mortal world. I’ll call her from Mexico. I also want to talk to Dee if she’s back from Brazil. We seem to keep missing each other lately.”
“Maybe she doesn’t want to get roped into yet another of your schemes,” Ratatosk suggested.
“You think she’s avoiding me?” Enki asked thoughtfully. “I doubt that! She’s never hesitated to tell me when she disagreed before. And she has completely refused to have anything to do with the camp. Too busy with the college, she says.”
“And if she keeps not being where you are, there’s no chance of you changing her mind,” Ratatosk countered.
“Have you ever tried changing Mother Nature’s mind about anything?” Enki asked him. “I have. I’ve tried to several times through the ages. I can count the number of times it worked on the fingers of one hand and each time I did, it ended badly. I don’t try to change Dee’s mind these days.”
“Ah hah!” Ratatosk laughed. “So you can learn from your mistakes!”
“Ratty,” Enki sighed. “You obviously haven’t read up on Mesopotamian mythology. Learning from my mistakes is practically the only way I have learned, at least if you go by the cuneiform texts. I’m considered a god of wisdom, but it’s all wisdom gained the hard way. Ah well. We have a van and we’re headed for Mexico now.”
“What could possibly go wrong?” Ratatosk laughed. Hearing that, everyone else groaned.
In spite of Ratatosk’s often ill-omened words, they arrived in San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico without further incident and using the GPS unit that came with the van, they soon arrived at the front door of Xochipilli’s home, just outside of the city.
“Nice little hacienda,” Ratatosk remarked. “I could stand to hang out in a shack like this.” The house was large and set back over one hundred feet from the road at the end of a long, winding driveway. It was covered with a golden yellow stucco but was ornamented with frills and designs in a myriad of colors along the roofline, windows and doorways.
“What I notice first is the big wrought-iron gate,” Wade commented, “and the tall stone wall that encircles the whole estate.”
“Big estate too,” Ihy whistled.
“Behind a locked gate,” Lizzie remarked.
“You don’t expect a lock to stop us do you?” Enki asked.
“The gate and its lock don’t bother me in the least,” Wade pointed out. “I’m more concerned that the god who lives inside is pretty much saying he wants to be left alone. I know you are all big and strong, but is picking a fight the best way to get this guy on our side.”
“We could try ringing the bell,” Ratatosk suggested. They all turned to look at him. “What?” he asked. “Just because I have a big mouth it doesn’t mean my head is full of feathers.”
“Do gods have doorbells?” Wade asked.
“Eddy does,” Lizzie pointed out.
It turned out that not only did Xochipilli have a bell, but an intercom that ran from the front gate to his house. “Hola?” a tenor voice asked through the tinny speaker in a pleasant, if possibly bemused tone.
“Hola,” Enki replied in perfect Spanish. Wade barely knew anything in the language beyond “Que pasa?” but he discovered he could understand every word and nuance of the conversation. “My name is Enki and with me are Ihy of Memphis, the Sphynx of Thebes and Mister Wade Vogel.”
“Ahem!” interrupted Ratatosk.
“Oh, yeah, and Ratatosk of Yggdrasil,” Enki concluded. “We’re looking for Xochipilli.”
“Far out!” the voice responded. “You found him, man. Come on in!”
The gate swung open silently and they got back into the car and drove on in. Parking by the front door, they got out and were met by a short, slightly flabby man with a pronounced nose. He was dressed in a tie-dyed t-shirt and jeans and wore wide bracelets on each wrist and several strings of beads around his neck. There was a beautiful woman on his arm whom he introduced, “My wife, Mayahuel.”
Mayahuel was wearing a long dress of very light cotton that was mostly purple but printed with daisies. She also kept her hair tied back in a long braid into which she had twisted flowers and also wore a beaded leather headband. “Peace,” she murmured to them, flashing a hand sign that looked to Wade like a “V” for victory. “Welcome to our home.” She gave each of them a flower and a kiss on the cheek.
“Yes,” Xochipilli agreed. “Do make yourselves welcome on the veranda.” He and Mayahuel led them through the house and out on to a wide terrace. They sat around a round wooden table with a wide colorfully striped umbrella that sprouted out of the center. There, in the shade of the umbrella. Mayahuel served them cups of a white, somewhat viscous liquid. The veranda was surrounded by a vast garden filled with every flower imaginable. The floral scent of the garden was both pronounced and ever changing, depending on how the light wind shifted.
Wade sipped at his cup and found the white liquid was alcoholic. “What is this?” he asked.
“It’s original name was iztac octli,” Mayahuel replied with a gentle smile. “It means ‘white wine,’ but since the Conquest it is more commonly called pulque. I make it from the sap of the maguey plant, agave.”
“Isn’t that was Tequila is made from?” Wade asked.
“Tequila, a form of mescal,” Mayahuel replied, “is made from the cooked heart of the blue agave. Pulque is the fermented sap of any of several sorts of agave.”
“I didn’t know that,” Wade admitted. “Thank you.”
“Peace,” Mayahuel responded.
“Groovy!” Xochipilli responded, “Maya makes the best pulque, of course.”
Wade nodded and, out of the corner of his eye, caught Ratatosk eating the flower Mayahuel had given him. “Ratty!” he hissed an admonitory whisper.
“It’s cool, man!” Xochipilli laughed.
“You have a lovely garden,” Lizzie told him. “I hope you will show it to us.”
“Of course, pretty lady,” Xochipilli replied. Wade glanced at Lizzie, expecting she was in human guise and was surprised to see she was in her natural form. “I would be delighted to.”
Wade had expected Enki to charge right in with the reason for their visit, and so was surprised when instead he allowed Xochipilli to show his garden off for the next three hours until the sun was low on the horizon and the Aztec god invited them all in for dinner.
“Yes, I realize this home is rather out of my traditional territory,” Xochipilli admitted after dinner, “but, really, what does that mean anymore? We found this place and made it our own.”
“We were looking at a nice place in Beverly Hills,” Mayahuel added, “but we decided Los Angeles was not right for us. Not that it has always been quiet here.”
“Truth,” Xochipilli agreed. “We had hoped Jovel, that’s what the locals call the city, would be a nice peaceful city, but the Zapatistas… Ah, but what they do in the city does not affect us.”
“We keep them out of our estate,” Mayahuel explained. “It is a minor enchantment.”
Finally Enki got down to business and tried to explain why they were there. “I don’t understand,” Xochipilli admitted when Enki and the others finally ran down. “Why do you feel the need for so many dancing gods, though?”
“Because the first symptom of the imbalance was one that affected Lord Shiva’s cosmic dance,” Enki replied.
“Huh?” Xochipilli asked.
“We are hoping that deities with an affinity for Dance will be more sensitive to the problem,” Lizzie explained.
“Oh,” Xochipilli nodded. “Far out!”
“And as you are also a god of nature,” Wade put in, “it seems to me you might be even closer to the problem than the others.”
“Wow!” Xochipilli breathed. Out of the corner of his eye, Wade saw Ihy whispering something to Ratatosk, then they both sniggered silently. It seemed to Wade that Xochipilli was not a stupid being, but he seemed perpetually distractable and if you came at him to too many different concepts at once, he tended to tune out. “That’s so cool! Yes, I’ll help. If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”
“Good,” Enki nodded, “but first I think we should make sure you can feel the imbalance. Lizzie, why don’t you demonstrate the dance for our host?”
“Let’s go out on your terrace,” Lizzie suggested. “We’ll have more room there. Ihy, I think I can use your help. Wade too.”
“I’ll be right with you,” Wade told her. “Enki and I will help with the dishes.”
“No need,” Mayhuel told him.
“I insist,” Wade told her. He started stacking plates and motioned to Enki to do likewise. Once they had them all in the kitchen, Mayahuel shooed them out, which gave Wade the chance to ask a question that had been on his mind for hours. “This Xocipilli?” he asked Enki softly. “Is he all there, do you think?”
“Along with being a god of the arts and nature,” Enki explained, “he is also the patron of various natural hallucinogens. His statues frequently depict him in a drug-induced trance.”
“And that’s why he sounds like an old hippy?” Wade asked.
“I imagine he found himself right at home with the whole Timothy Leary, ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out,’ sort of thing back around forty years ago or so,” Enki replied. “That may have been when he was looking for a place in Los Angeles. I wouldn’t know. I was isolated from the mortal world at the time so what little I know about it is second hand. Anyway, don’t let that bother you. I think he will make an ideal part of the team. His affinities are perfect. Now let’s go outside. You know Lizzie is waiting for us.”
“Wade, good!” Lizzie called when he and Enki arrived. She had slipped back into her human guise for the dance and she and Ihy were guiding Xochipilli through the multi-participant form of the dance.
“Yes,” Ihy agreed. “With three of us, we notice an imbalance of our own.”
“Sadly, yes,” Lizzie agreed. “While I embrace dancing, I do not have the strong association with it that Ihy and Xochipilli do. We’re hoping that if you dance with me we can overcome that.
“Yeah, that’s better,” Ihy remarked after Wade and Lizzie started dancing together, the pair of them taking the place of a single dancer. “Hey, ‘Pilli, can you feel it better now?”
“Right on, man!” Xochipilli replied enthusiastically. “It’s cosmic!”
“Well, duh!” Ratatosk commented dryly to Enki.
“But what do we do now?” Xochipilli asked. “I mean, how do we find the cause?”
“We seem to get better perspective as we move apart,” Ihy pointed out. “If we separate enough, we should be able to triangulate on the problem.”
“That could mean scattering across half the world,” Wade pointed out. “Even with cell phones that’s going to cut down communication efficiency.”
“Not if we use Yggdrasil,” Enki told them. “You can stay within shouting distance of each other and still be symbolically scattered for triangulation.”
“Yeah!” Ihy agreed enthusiastically. “That’s good sympathetic magic.”
“What?” Wade asked.
“You can do magic by performing an action in miniature that you want to happen on a larger scale,” Ihy explained. “That’s why so many so-called rain-dances involve the spilling of water at one point or another. The water represents the intended shower of rain you are hoping for.”
“That sort of makes sense if you believe in magic, I suppose,” Wade replied.
“Hello!” Ihy retorted. “You’re running around with gods here. How much more magical do you expect to get, mate?”
“Gods, yes,” Wade nodded, “but I note that even you guys are constrained by the laws of physics and nature.”
“Little dude’s got it right, man,” Xochipilli pointed out. Wade was about to ask what he meant by ‘Little dude,’ considering the Aztec god was a head shorter than Wade, but decided to hold his tongue. “We can’t transgress the natural rules, only use them to our advantage. We can speed up or slow down growth, cause new things to come into being, but we cannot create things that could not evolve on their own or invent things that could not otherwise exist. Using the World Tree is a good idea, though.”
“Ratty, when will it be morning there?” Enki asked the squirrel.
“You know that depends on where you are coming from,” Ratatosk pointed out. “From here though in about sixteen hours and then you’ll only have an hour of any light at all. It’s going to be mid-winter night in a couple of weeks, you know. The sun will only be over the horizon for a few minutes, although it’s already the land of the noonday moon.”
“Not this week, though,” Enki noted. “The moon’s fairly new and still too close to the sun to be seen most of the time Well, do me a favor and get Terpsichore from Vermont and then meet us in the Tree.”
“Where?” Ratatosk asked. “In case you’ve forgotten, it’s a big Tree.”
“Hmm, up near the top?” Enki suggested.
“It’s a great view of creation,” Ratatosk pointed out, “but you won’t achieve a lot of triangulation. Meet us at your war room. It’s not ideal, but then short of planting one dancer in each of the four quarters, it’s as good as you’ll be likely to do.”
“Wow!” Xochipilli commented. “It’s freaking cold here.”
“And you’re still dressed for the tropics,” Ratatosk told him. “You brought that woolen poncho. Were you planning to wear it or sell it to the natives?”
“Oh yeah,” Xochipilli nodded. “I forgot. Thanks, little dude. Peace.”
“How far apart should we get?” Terpsichore asked the others.
“While waiting, I got an idea,” Enki told them.
“Uh oh!” Ratatosk moaned. “Time to duck and cover!”
“Funny,” the water god told him flatly. “This location is on a particularly wide branch but there are others not too far away. Specifically, we have branches not too far above and below us. If one goes to the branch above and one below, the others can spread out on this one and we should get some fairly good triangulation.”
“We could do that almost anywhere in the Tree,” Ratatosk pointed out.
“Perhaps,” Enki replied, “but this place is unique because I can use the water in this bowl.”
“The ice, you mean?” Ratatosk asked impudently.
“I’ll melt it,” Enki told him tightly. “Okay? Anyway, I can use the bowl to visually tune in on what the rest of you are triangulating on.”
“Yeah,” Ratatosk nodded. “Too bad you can’t attach a GPS unit to it as well.”
Enki contrived to ignore that. “Ratty, it’s going to be your job to keep them all coordinated.”
“Show business at last!” Ratatosk commented with false glee. “Mother would be so proud!”
“What is with you today?” Enki demanded of him.
“He’s nervous,” Lizzie remarked.
“Nervous?” Enki asked. “You have the easiest job of us all.”
“I’m just contemplating all the things that might go wrong,” Ratatosk admitted.
“All the world loves an optimist,” Enki muttered. “So who’s going to take the upper branch?”
“I will,” Xochipilli volunteered. He began to stretch upward like a growing plant until his hands grasped the side of the branch above, then he shrank back to his normal size and pulled himself the rest of the way up. “Far out!” they here his say softly.
“Well, that’s one way to get high,” Ihy commented.
“Darn!” Ratatosk muttered. “You beat me to it.”
“Wade and I will take the lower branch,” Lizzie announced. “Climb on my back, Wade, and I’ll fly us down.”
That left Terpsichore and Ihy to move apart on the same branch. “Is this far enough apart?” Terpsichore wondered out loud. Lizzie and Wade heard her clearly from where they were..
“In real world terms,” Ratatosk replied, “you’re spread out over a thousand miles. That ought to do for anything on Earth. If the imbalance is somewhere else in the Universe, we’ll probably need a different set of dancers altogether.”
“I think we’re ready to start,” Ihy commented. “Ratty would you tap out a beat to get us started together.”
For a change the squirrel didn’t have a wise remark and instead started tapping a measured beat on the branch of the tree. The sound was soft, but it carried to all the dancers. It turned out he was only saving up his remarks as they had only been dancing a few second before he let out a wolf-whistle and told Terpisichore, “Yeah! Shake it, baby. Shake it!”
Lizzie immediately broke off from the dance and flew back up to that branch in her native form and trapping the squirrel under her front paws told him, “You’ve got too smart a mouth for such a tasty morsel.”
“Uh, right,” Ratatosk agreed instantly. “Shutting up now.”
“Don’t stop!” Ihy complained. “You and Wade were a key ingredient to the dance.”
“Sorry,” Lizzie called back and rejoined Wade directly. She changed back to her human guise and after only a brief hesitation they rejoined the dance.
At first very little happened for Wade. Unlike the others he had not felt the imbalance very strongly and in fact for all he could tell, it was just the dance making him a bit dizzy. However, he also had not danced the Lasya for more than a few minutes until now. As they continued, the dizzying sensation continued in Wade’s stomach until he thought the entire Tree was shaking beneath his feet.
“Something’s happening,” Lizzie commented and Wade suddenly realized the Tree really was vibrating. “Ratatosk! Are we doing this?”
“Yes and no,” the squirrel replied unhelpfully from above and then explained. “The Tree is not being harmed. I think He is trying to join you.”
As they danced the vibrations became more pronounced and disruptive to the dance, but slowly the two rhythms, that of the dance and that of the Tree, became synchronized and the entire area became suffused in a warm golden light. The wind hummed through the branches and the Tree began to sway back and forth
“The whole World,” Lizzie exulted, “Wade, the whole Universe is dancing with us!”
“I’m getting a fix on the disturbance,” they heard Enki say, but by now all the dancers were too deeply into what they were doing to pay much attention to him.
“I can feel Lord Shiva’s dance, Wade,” Lizzie told him. “Can you?”
Wade examined his sensations and thought that she might be right. “Yes,” he agreed at last. “I think He is guiding our steps.”
“Could be,” Lizzie agreed, “and there is more. I can feel the destructive Tandava going on as well. It is not a different dance, but truly one with the Lasya. Both fit together, two halves of a greater whole. Neither can destruction nor creation can exist for long without the other, but someone else is dancing and they are out of step. How can they be out of step? The steps are natural once you start.”
“Unless they are dancing out of step intentionally,” Wade pointed out. “Someone was causing Lord Shiva to stumble when we first saw Him, remember?”
“I do,” Lizzie agreed, “but while I can feel the disturbance, I still cannot feel where it is coming from.”
“Didn’t you hear Enki?” Ratatosk asked them from nearby. “He said he was getting a fix. You guys can stop now.”
“No,” Lizzie shook her head, “We cannot. Not yet. We must reach the correct point in which to stop or we will cause still more damage.”
“Have it your way,” Ratatosk told her. He scampered off to another branch.
They continued to dance. Time was meaningless and then they reached the end and it was right to stop. “That was a very long set,” Wade commented.
“But a good one,” Lizzie smiled. “Let’s rejoin the others.”
“Where?” Wade asked.
“Somewhere near the bottom of Kotzebue Sound,” Enki repeated.
“Sorry,” Wade shook that off, “I meant, ‘Where is Kotzebue Sound?’ Strangely enough my grade school geography class left that one out of the curriculum.”
“It’s about thirty some odd miles north of the Arctic Circle off the coast of Alaska,” Enki told him.
“North of the Arctic Circle,” Wade repeated. “So another place without much daylight.”
“At the bottom of the sound,” Enki retorted, “it’s not likely to be fully illuminated no matter what time of year it is. Anyway that appears to be the center of the disturbance.”
“At the bottom of the ocean?” Ratatosk asked nervously.
“Well, it’s not the middle of the ocean, just a wide passage near the Chukchi Sea,” Enki replied.
“I’ll give you good odds Wade’s teacher never mentioned that name either,” Ratatosk told him. “So, unless you have an aqualung in my size…”
“Oh, I forgot your water problem,” Enki replied.
“It’s not a water problem,” Ratatosk shot back. “I just have the same problem with depths that some folks have with heights.”
“Well, as it happens,” Enki told him, “I have another job for you. Go find Dee, wherever she might be and tell her what’s happening.”
“Any idea where that might be” Ratatosk asked. “Mother Nature does get around, you know.”
“I know,” Enki sighed. “I’ve been playing tag with her for months. Start in Hattamessett. She might not be there yet, but Eddy ought to know where she is. If she’s still in Vermont you can call her from there. Otherwise you have a bit of a search on your hands.”
“On my paws,” the squirrel corrected him. “It’s better than seeing how long I can hold my breath.”
“Are you really expecting us to hold our breaths at the bottom of the ocean?” Wade asked after Ratatosk had left.
“No,” Enki shook his head. “I have a way with water, you might say. You’ve already traveled in one of my bubbles. I can make individual ones for you as well. You’ll be able to breath quite comfortably and you won’t even get wet.”
“Then what’s Ratty’s problem?” Wade asked.
“He tends to forget and then he panics,” Enki replied. “I think it’s a form of, uh what’s that modern word for it… claustrophobia, or maybe it’s a fear of drowning. In any case he always has trouble when he comes to Dilmun because the entrance is underwater. Well, let’s get back to the van, we can at least travel to the Alaska in comfort.”
It was full dark north of the Arctic Circle when Enki came to a halt in the city of Kotzebue at the end of Baldwin Peninsula. They drove around the small city looking for a place to eat and eventually found the Empress Chinese Restaurant more or less next to the Bayside Inn. “We came a long way just to get Chinese food,” Ihy commented, “but I could kill for a curry about now.”
“I figured we can all use a quick bite before going to find out what is happening and Lizzie and Wade really do have to eat,” Enki pointed out.
Of them all, only Xochipilli really enjoyed the food. The others were too bound up thinking about what might be coming next to really notice. Eating was just something to do in the meantime. While sitting there they discussed strategies until Wade pointed out that since they did not have the slightest notion of who or what they were about to meet, any strategy they were likely to have was going to have to change on the fly.
“We know something is disrupting the balance of the world, right?” he argued.
“And we have to restore that balance,” Ihy nodded.
“Actually,” Lizzie corrected him, “All we have to do is find the cause and stop it. Lord Shiva will restore the balance. But I think the Lasya will be part of what we have to do. Otherwise why would He had wanted me to know the dance, or at least that small part of it I do know.”
“I doubt it’s going to be all dancing,” Enki told her.
“I’m not much of a fighter,” Terpsichore pointed out.
“You’re tougher than most people think,” Enki laughed. “And that dance is one heck of a weapon. Well, has everyone eaten? Good. I’ll pay the bill and we’ll be on our way.”
Back in the van, Enki drove a short way down Shore Avenue and then turned directly toward the water, but by then they were no longer in the Kotzebue of the mortal world. Once more they rode between the plains and while in Kotzebue the only illumination was provided by street lights, there was plenty of light Between. Wade asked about that.
“I have complete control of the conditions Between,” Enki explained, “so there is no need to not see where we are headed. It will be different on the Divine Plain when we get there, of course.”
“The Divine Plain?” Wade asked. “I thought we were headed to the bottom of the sea.”
“We are,” Ihy cut in. “It’s just that the disturbance is as much on the Divine Plain as it is in the mortal world.”
“Possibly more,” Terpichore added. “I had a look at the local newspaper, such as it was, and there had been a series of small earth tremors here lately, but that’s about it. From experience I would guess they are reflections of divine activity.”
“Reflections?” Wade asked.
“Almost everything of note that happens on the Divine Plain is reflected, in some way, in the mortal world,” Enki took up the explanation. “When gods contend with one another, there is tension, and sometimes warfare, on Earth as well. It goes the other way just as often, however. Gods do like to take sides and support their favorites.”
“We have tried to keep that to a minimum this cycle,”
Terpsichore commented, “but there have been some cycles in which the mortals
couldn’t spit without hitting a god or goddess.”
“Eew!” Lizzie wrinkled her nose at the expression. “Really, Terpsichore! I would have expected a more genteel expression from a Muse.”
“And I might have expected a coarser one from you, dear,” Terpsichore replied without heat, “but I fear I picked that one up from some of my students. A Muse can be inspired too, you know. Not all inspirations are good ones. Still, you must admit, regardless of how you phrase it, that pretty much sums up the Trojan War.”
“True enough,” Lizzie nodded. “The combined armies of Greece should have been able to storm the walls of Ilium in fairly short order or else starve out the city in a year at the outside.”
“And battering rams predated that war by thousands of years too,” Terpsichore noted.
“I’ve heard that some scholars think the so-called Trojan Horse actually was a battering ram,” Wade interjected.
“Could be,” Terpcishore nodded.
“You don’t know?” Wade asked incredulously.
“You could ask my sister, Klieo,” Terpsichore told him. “The problem is, history changes in the details from cycle to cycle. I was not actively interested in the Trojan War or any other wars, for that matter. My interests lie in the fields of music and dance primarily, although athletics also fall to me. That and keep in mind that my current aspect is late Medieval and Rennaisance in origin. My sisters and I were not so well-defined in the ancient world, but we did leave the fighting to the big boys and girls. Hera, Athena, Aphrodite, they started that whole mess with that beauty pageant of theirs. Choosing Paris as a judge wasn’t exactly their wisest move either. Have to admit, though, that Aphrodite turned out to be cleverer than I might have given her credit for at the time, not that she bothered worrying about the long term effects of her little bribery, but then the other two weren’t playing fair either. They never did. But I’m straying.
“The thing is, the Trojan War, as depicted in Homer’s Iliad,” Terpsichore continued, “never happened in this current cycle. This cycle is not quite twenty years old, and the past was created in retrospect, based on how it happened in earlier cycles but adapted for the conditions of this one. Well, this one is an amazingly mundane cycle in which technological cleverness has had to take the place of magic, so for all I know the real Trojan War in the past of this cycle was little more than a raid on a fishing village. But in the cycle during which that was a current event the world was very different. Homer’s poem and other works that have since been lost to the world give you a fairly good notion of what it was like back then. Lots of magic, lots of direct divine intervention. Sacrificial offerings and prophecies really meant something then too. Reading the auspices was more than just gutting a poor innocent sheep and checking the entrails even if that did mean lamb for dinner.
“So, in at least one cycle the Trojan War took place exactly as Homer described it,” Terpsichore went on. “I’m sure of that, but it happened in other ways in other cycles. Homer wasn’t the only one to write about that war and its aftermath. There was the Cypria, which may have been intended as a prequel by Homer, although there are others who are thought to have written it. There are only fragments of that known these days. Then there was a set of three works, Aethiopis, Little Iliad and Sack of Troy which told the story somewhat differently and were written by different authors. They seem to mostly happen after the action in the Iliad, but there are only fragments of them left too.
“Supposedly, the Muses went there to mourn Achilles,” Terpsichore told him, “but if I was among them, I don’t recall. It would have been an earlier aspect of mine and not one I have memories from.”
“Does that happen a lot?” Wade asked. “Losing memories from one aspect to the next?”
“Sometimes,” Enki told him, “if there’s enough of a difference between aspects. Usually we remember from one to the next as though such things happened to someone else, but if you go through many different aspects, like some have, earlier ones get lost completely.”
“None of that is to the point, though,” Terpsichore told them. “What we were discussing were reflections of the actions from one plain affecting the other. The Trojan War was just such an example. The gods battled on the Divine Plain and the mortals in their world, except that the gods frequently tried to manipulate how their own struggles progressed by meddling to those of the mortals.
“More recently,” Terpsichore concluded, “we have tried to stay out of most mortal lives, but we do still get into arguments and vie for each other’s worshippers and sometimes that shows up in the mortal world. So those earthquakes I mentioned are probably just that sort of reflection and if so, at least we’re in the right neighborhood.”
“Which is just about here,” Enki remarked as the external light of Between was extinguished so that the only illumination was from the van’s headlights. “Time to get out.”
“Underwater?” Wade asked, forgetting what Enki had told him about being able to breathe down there.
Enki did not have the time to answer, however. Just then a large rock staved in the windshield and the ocean came rushing in. Wade held his breath and when the others jumped out of the vehicle, he followed suit, not knowing what else to do.
“Breathe, mate,” Ihy advised him. “You’re turning blue and I don’t think that’s just the light from our headlights.” Another rock, seemingly from nowhere, crashed into the front of the van, and cut their available light in half.
“I wonder if the rental agency is going to believe what I tell them,” Enki remarked lightly.
“That depends on what you tell them, man,” Xochipilli shot back.
“I think they’ll tell you, you just bought a van,” Terpsichore remarked, “no matter what story you give. Did you at least take out insurance?” Another rock extinguished the other headlamp so now there was only a dim redness from the tail lights.
“We don’t need that van anyway,” Xochipilli remarked. He raised his hands and a moment later a light appeared in the water above them and illuminated the area better than the headlights ever had. “Far out, man!”
“I still don’t see who’s attacking us,” Ihy remarked.
“I don’t see what’s keeping my feet on the bottom of this bay or sound or whatever it is,” Wade added. “Shouldn’t we all be floating toward the surface?”
“Part of the enchantment,” Enki replied, keeping his eyes on the edge of the illuminated area. “You won’t have to worry about the bends either.”
“Hadn’t even thought about that,” Wade admitted.
This time they saw the rock coming, but Wade and Lizzie dodged it while Enki fired back what looked like a high-speed jet of water. “Pretty sure I missed,” Enki muttered.
“At least you can fight back,” Ihy commented.
“I can too, man!” Xochipilli told him. The area seemed devoid of vegetation, but Xohipilli somehow made the water swirl around them and turn faintly green, before he gestured as though pushing something very hard and there was a loud rushing sound all around them followed by a grunt and an angry howl.
Suddenly the water came rushing back at them and even though Enki’s magic made it seem like air, they were still caught up in a hurricane, fighting to stay on their feet. And while the water might have felt and been as breathable as air it was only as transparent as the water itself and at the moment there was a lot of silt that had been stirred up by the turbulence. There was something moving around in the muddy water, but Wade couldn’t get a clear view and it was too loud to shout to one of the others.
He did not need to. The others were catching glimpses of their own, but they too were having trouble. Xochipilli was stunned by the backlash when his spell was turned back on him and Enki was doing everything he could to keep his own spell from collapsing. Ihy and Terpsichore had been blown together and thrown to the sea floor while Lizzie had immediately gotten down into the classic sitting sphinx position. Wade caught sight of her and smiled in spite of himself.
There was another mighty gust and this time there was water in what felt like wind. Wade feared whatever was out there was eating its way through Enki’s magic, and the wind and water finally managed to knock him off his feet. He started rolling and was not able to stop. Enki’s magic was not infinite and he knew that any moment he would be pushed out the area of effect.
“Got you!” Lizzie shouted over the wind as she suddenly jumped on top of Wade pinning him in place.
“Thanks,” Wade gasped. He was going to say more but looking back toward the gods he saw the figure of their attacker was no longer circling them but floating in place. No, not floating; she was dancing.
She looked like a mermaid gone mad. Her long dark hair had not been combed in ages. It floated around her in tangled knots and her face was twisted into an expression of unreasoning anger. Wade thought she was shaking her fists at them, but when he got a better look he saw she had no fingers on her hands. She was dancing in the water in spite of Enki’s enchantment and, as she did, the ground beneath them trembled and they were buffeted by waves of wind and water.
“We have to dance!” Wade shouted over the roar.
Only Lizzie heard him, but she agreed, “Yes, she is dancing something like the Tandava, but it has no gentle side it is raw destruction. No wonder it is throwing the world out of balance. Let’s start dancing and hopefully the others will join us.”
Lizzie stood up and lifted Wade to his feet. This without a paused she started dancing he section of the Lasya with Wade as her partner. Lizzie regained her human guise after the first few steps and after another few Wade notice they were no longer affected by the raging sea all around them. They were in an imperturbable bubble of calmness.
Next Terpishore noticed what they were doing and she dragged Ihy up and they both started dancing. At first they too were a couple, and then they broke apart and Terpsichore danced her way over to Xochipilli. The Aztec god recovered his senses under the healing influence of the dance and soon he too was up and dancing with them.
They surrounded Enki, giving him respite in which to both maintain his spell and try to counter the ones coming from their attacker. The more they danced the gentle dance, the mermaid-like creature danced destruction at them. Then she swam away and the area became calm.
“Do we go after her?” Wade asked, still dancing.
“She hasn’t gone all that far away,” Terpsichore responded. “She is still doing her arrhythmic dance.”
“Arrhythmic?” Wade asked. “Is it really?”
“It is the dancing equivalent of dissonance,” the muse replied. “And it vibrates on a cosmic scale. We must continue our dance and, in fact, pick up the pace.”
“Faster?” Lizzie asked. “Are you sure?”
“She’s right,” Ihy agreed. “We must match the pace of the other dance and do so quickly. Something is building up out there.”
“She is dancing war at us,” Xochipilli added even as they all started dancing faster. “We must counter it with peace, man!”
The continued the gentle dance and as they did, Wade began to feel the disturbance headed their way. It was a distant rumble in the Earth at first but it grew and approached them from underneath. For a long several minutes the forces of destruction and creation met each other and held each other in check, but then a second wave of imbalance swept over them.
The dancers managed to keep their footing, but they could feel the water around them receding. The water was draining out of Kotzebue Sound and it was Enki who first realized what that meant. “Tsunami!” he shouted. “We need to counter it.”
“How?” Ihy asked.
“We need more distance between us,” Wade suggested. “Just like in the Tree. Enki, how wide a dance floor can you give us?”
“As far as you could read by the light Xochipilli created,” Enki replied.
“Do it!” Lizzie told him and while she and Wade continued to dance as partners, the others spread out.
“Here it comes!” Terpsichore announced almost as soon as they had reached their new limits.
Even though it felt like air, Wade could feel the approaching wave. There was nothing a mere mortal could do to stop such a wave, he knew, but he was dancing with gods. The water was rushing back into the sound and they were not actually stopping it, but they were regulating the rate, they were allowing the natural tide to control the movements of the sea and not the artificial tsunami.
Suddenly, from out of the wave, the mad mermaid attacked. She swam at Xochipilli fiercely, knocking him over and continued on toward Enki, but as she did, Ihy and Terpsichore tackled her and forced her to the sea bed and Enki placed a binding spell on her.
“Who the hell are you?” Ihy asked.
The question had been mostly to himself, but she screamed her answer defiantly, “I am Sedna!”
“Who?” Ihy asked with a shrug.
“I’ve heard of her,” Wade told him. “She’s very important in Inuit mythology and also to the other tribes of the Arctic area from here to Greenland.”
Sedna roared at them incoherently and Enki told them, “I can only hold her for so long unless you can calm her down. I think the Lasya might help.”
“If we can direct it that finely,” Lizzie agreed.
“Dance in a circle around her,” Terpsichore suggested. They danced more slowly this time and after a while the madness drained out of Sedna’s eyes and at last she calmed down enough to be rational.
“I am Sedna,” she repeated almost conversationally. “I am Goddess of the Sea and My children are the seals and whales.. By My will the hunters prosper or starve.”
“Never heard of you, love,” Ihy remarked.
She shot him an angry glance, but she held her temper. “I once lived on land with My tribe. They say I was beautiful and I think I was. So beautiful that all the hunters wanted Me for their wife. None of them were good enough for Me. None of them deserved Me, so to show My disdain I married a dog instead.”
“Dating outside your species, were you?” Wade remarked, earning a poke in the ribs from Lizzie. “Sorry,” he apologized. “Maybe I’ve spent too much time with Ratty.”
“It was an act of defiance,” Sedna explained angrily. “The dog was loyal and affectionate. He kept Me warm. The men only thought to increase their own status by marrying Me, but it enraged My father and he took Me out to sea and threw Me out of his boat to die. But I wouldn’t die. I swam back to the boat and tried to climb in, but he cut off My fingers and forced Me back into the sea where I could do nothing but watch him paddle away.
“Soon I sank to the bottom of the sea,” Sedna continued. “My fingers became the first seals, walrus and whales and My legs joined and became this tail and I came to rule the deep. When the people anger Me, I lock up the creatures they eat. When they please me I allow them to hunt. I can create storms and great waves. I am Sedna!”
As she concluded the madness returned and she shook off Enki’s binding spell. She pushed them all off here and floated above them. “How can she swim in the air like that?” Wade asked.
“Not affected by the spell is my guess,” Lizzie told him. “Wait!” she called to Sedna. “Why are you doing this?”
“The people are trying to destroy me and my creatures!” Sedna screamed. “They throw their refuse into My waters, making them foul and polluted. Their fires warm the sea, killing the creatures that live here. It is a desecration and I will not tolerate it! If they want destruction, I will give them destruction!”
Once again, Sedna began her dance with such sudden ferocity they dancers were again thrown to the sea floor. This time the silt and mud rose into the water and then fell back down on top of them, but Xochipilli pushed back the mud and started the gentle dance once more. He reached out his hand to Terpsichore and freed her as well. Then she helped Ihy back to his feet while Wade and Lizzie helped each other up.
Both dances, gentle and destructive were danced at a feverish pitch. Neither could overcome the other but both sides strove for dominance. “We’re going at this all wrong,” Lizzie suddenly realized. “Just as Nataraja’s dances are really two aspects of the same dance, Our dance and Sedna’s should be one as well.”
“Can we do that?” Wade asked. “I’m no expert, but part of the problem is that her dance is an imperfect Tandava, isn’t it? Wouldn’t our own dance have the same imperfections?”
“Nobody’s perfect,” Lizzie laughed. “We must counter her imperfections with balance. Follow my lead.”
They continued to dance, but now Lizzie began to improvise. Sometimes her changes threatened to collapse the defense of the others, but more frequently it bolstered it. Finally she found a pattern that felt right and she and Wade danced to each of the others in turn and showed them the variants.
As they embraced the changes, however, Sedna changed her dance as well. Soon the revised dance was no more effective than the original and they were all forced to improvise again. “Can we do this freestyle?” Wade wondered out loud.
“That would be dangerous,” Terpsichore warned him from a few yards away.
“But Sedna doesn’t have a pattern to her dance,” Wade pointed out.
“Of course she has a pattern,” Ihy argued, “or it would not be a dance. We just have not managed to figure out what it is.”
“So far we are matching move for move,” Xochipilli added. “She attacks and we defend.”
“Right!” Wade agreed. “We’re reacting to her, we need to make her react to us.”
“I doubt she’s being that rational,” Lizzie commented.
“Of course not,” Enki told them, “so if you can get ahead of her dance she won’t be able to counter you.”
“Lizzie,” Terpsichore told her. “You seem to have the best instinct for this.”
“It is a form of the hunt,” Lizzie replied, “or so it feels to me.”
“Then you lead the way, love,” Ihy told her.
The dance continued and Lizzie kept leading Wade into new and ever more complex innovations. “Are you sure of what you’re doing?” Wade asked.
“Not really,” Lizzie admitted. “This is a hunt, but I can neither make out the tracks nor the scent of my prey.”
“It’s a riddle,” Wade replied without thinking.
“What?” she asked.
“Oh, sorry,” Wade apologized. “I just meant that we need creative thinking here to figure it out. Four legs, two legs, three legs…”
“One tail,” Lizzie replied. “Yes. Our dance is more complex. We can do things she cannot duplicate. It’s worth a chance. Start again with the basic dance as we know it,” she called to the others.
The dance began again, but this time Lizzie performed variants that a tailed swimmer could not perform easily. On the ground, the dancers could shift and change directions quickly and easily. In the water, Sedna had to deal with drift, currents, and once in motion in one direction she needed to work much harder to change direction.
Slowly, Lizzie’s dance, supported by the dancing gods, began to predominate and Sedna found herself fighting back. Now that the gentle dance was dominant the destruction could not prevail and Sedna found herself being lulled to sleep by the gentle and irresistible dance that Lizzie led. “Come to me, my prey!” Lizzie murmured.
“No!” screamed Sedna, as though she had heard Lizzie. But Sedna did not only have the dance at her command. She broke off from her flawed rendition of the Tandava and began, once more, to circle the dancers and now she was singing. It was a forlorn and insistent chant and it cut through the water and air with equal keenness.
Almost immediately a pod of pilot whales answered her call and a large group of walruses followed soon after. Unlike Sedna, herself, they were not immune to Enki’s spell, but they could still attack. The pilot whales swam directly at Enki and the dancers with such speed, they passed through the area of air-like water and back out again, unless they chance to hit someone or something in the way. Xochipilli was knocked down twice and Ihy once, although Terpsichore managed to dance out of the way. Wade was nearly hit and only saved because Lizzie pulled him roughly to the side and knocked him to the ground again. “Stay down!” she told him urgently.
There was a crash and a concert of roars. The Walruses were attacking the van Enki had rented. “Hey!” Enki shouted, rushing to try to chase them off. Several of the large males turned and started toward him with their tusks. He backed up a few steps, but then the great beasts, slowed down and simply fell asleep.
Another mournful chant. The pilot whales stopped attacking and the sea started draining out of the sound once again. “This isn’t good,” Ihy muttered.
“Get back up and dance,” Enki told them.
Xochipilli started the dance this time and the others followed his lead, During a spin, Wade happened to catch a look at Enki’s face. The god of fresh water just seemed to be standing still, but from his expression he must have been in a terrifying struggle. Wade faltered at the sight, wanting to help his friend, but Lizzie insisted, “No. Keep dancing. Too many lives are on the line.”
“Is this happening in the real world too?” Wade asked.
Lizzie did not bother to correct his notion of reality and merely replied, “Yes!”
The Dancers danced while the water continued to drain out of the sound. Wade’s legs were throbbing beneath him and he wondered how the others could keep going. They’re gods, of course! he told himself, but he knew that while supernatural, Lizzie did not have limitless resources of stamina. Another look told him she was as tired as he was, but the Sphynx was determined to see this out. She was on the hunt and Sedna was her prey.
Suddenly, Wade found his head was above the surface of the water and the water continued to flow away as though they were in a great river rather than an arm of the sea. Xochipilli’s light went out, but it had been hours and the glow on the horizon signaled false dawn. Wade tried to remember how long the daylight would last or if the sun would actually get above the horizon. He didn’t think they were so far north of the Arctic Circle that there would be no sunrise at all, but he also did not expect it to last long.
Suddenly Enki grunted and slumped to the ground. Just as suddenly his enchantment was broken and the Dancers found themselves ankle deep in moving water. “Another tsunami,” Wade gasped.
“An improbably big one,” Lizzie agreed.
“I don’t think our dance is enough to stop it,” Terpsichore told them.
“You’ve done your share,” a woman’s voice told them gently. “Now it is My turn.” Wade turned to see a tall green-haired, green-eyed woman standing just behind him. She was dressed in a grey business suit but looked as though she should have been wearing long flowing white robes.
“Dee!” Lizzie greeted her. The Sphynx looked like she wanted to say more, but her legs gave out from underneath her and she collapsed to the wet sand. Wade caught her as she went down and helped soften the landing. “Thank you, Wade,” she whispered. “My body is not built for such a long chase. I’m a sprinter, not a long-distance runner.”
“Are you all right?” Wade asked, partially pinned underneath her.
“I will be,” Lizzie sighed and closed her eyes.
Wade looked around and saw Ihy, Terpsichore and Xochipilli were still dancing, but now the newcomer, Dee, had joined them. Wade tried to remember where he had heard the name and remembered that this was Mother Nature. I wonder why they call her “Dee?” a rogue part of his mind wondered. He managed to pull himself from under Lizzie’s sleeping body and went to check on Enki.
The ancient god was just opening his eyes and Wade helped him sit up. “Maybe I should have bought the insurance when I rented the van,” he chuckled.
“You’re recovering quickly,” Wade noted.
“Divine stamina,” Enki remarked. “How did we get to the beach?”
“This isn’t a beach,” Wade told him just as a thin arc of the sun crested the horizon and in the distance he saw a mountain of white-capped water. In the next minute it rushed toward them with alarming speed and then it slowed down until it was only a few hundred yards away from breaking over them and there it stopped, seemingly frozen, although it still looked to me mostly liquid.
Enki stood up and asked Mother Nature, “Can you release that slowly?”
“That’s the idea,” Dee replied, still dancing the Lasya feverishly. “Can you keep us breathing?”
“That’s the idea,” Enki chuckled back at her.
There was a groan and Wade turned back to Lizzie who was trying to sit up again. “The others are handling it,” he told her.
Lizzie looked up at the mountain of water and replied, “It’s not over yet. Sedna is still out there. She’s is still dancing destruction.”
“You don’t have the energy to rejoin the dance yet,” Wade warned her.
“How can you tell?” Lizzie asked archly, trying to stare Wade down.
“Because you’re not on your feet dancing already,” he shot back. “I seem to remember lionesses wait for their prey to come to them.”
“I am not entirely a lioness,” Lizzie replied. “I am more.”
“You are indeed,” Wade assured her. Lizzie smiled at him warmly and remained seated.
The water rose gently, but Enki had re-established his moratorium on wetness. They could move freely and breath even once they were fully submerged again. Soon it was dark beneath the waves again and one of the gods produced a light spell once again.
Wade was starting to think it was over, when Sedna appeared again. Screaming, she swam directly at Dee with a spear of ice somehow gripped between her fingerless hands. Dee, so engrossed with the gentle dance and her work on the Tsunami was just spinning toward Sedna as the icy weapon struck Dee, plunging in and sticking out her back.
Mother Nature fell to the sea bottom and the remaining dancers collapsed. Wade, now detached from the dance had not realized there was a connection between the dancers, but he did not have time to consider that as Lizzie suddenly sprang up from her crouch and knocked Sedna down, pinning her to the silt and mud with sharp leonine claws.
“I have a riddle for you,” Lizzie purred menacingly.
Sedna struggled beneath Lizzie’s weight, but the Sphynx held the sea goddess in her grasp. “What has four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and one leg at dusk?” Lizzie chuckled.
Sedna howled and out in the water something howled back to her. It sounded familiar to Wade, but he could not place it. He heard the howl again and he recognized what was coming. It was far louder than the recordings that had been briefly popular, filled with bubblings and clicking and slowly climbing screeches start started out in deep below the human auditory range and rose up hitting notes higher than any soprano could. It was whale-song, and it was coming from not one but many whales. Sedna was calling to her children, and her children were coming to her aid.
The ground shook and there was a deep, almost bell-like note, although far lower than any human-made bell had ever been built for. Wade fell down again and looked up to see dozens of whales outside Enki’s area of enchantment, they seemed unable to enter and instead were battering at an invisible wall. Each time one or more hit that wall, however everyone inside felt the crashing vibration.
The whales were battering the wall randomly at first but another howl by Sedna changed their behavior and soon they were attacking in unison. On the second such attack, Lizzie lost her grip on Sedna and the sea goddess once more rose up above them, howling and laughing as she prepared another attack.
“I don’t think so,” Dee told her and suddenly Sedna was entrapped in a block of ice. Wade turned to look at Mother Nature. Her business suit was torn where the icy spear had penetrated her, but Wade could see it had gone in through her left shoulder. There were traces of blood in the cloth, but her wounds were obviously healing rapidly. Ihy, Xochipilli and Terpsichore were sitting up now too.
Dee look toward the whales and whistled something at them. They immediately turned and swam away, although their song could be heard for a long time after, only gradually fading away. Then Dee turned her attention toward the frozen Sedna. “Such a pity,” Mother Nature commented. “I don’t blame you, really, but this was not the way.”
The ice around Sedna melted rapidly and the large mermaid-goddess slumped to the ground, unconscious. Dee put a hand on Sedna’s forehead and a golden glow spread out from the contact.
“Is it over?” Wade asked hesitantly?
“Is what over, Mister Vogel?” Dee asked him. Wade wondered how she knew his name, but remembered that Ratatosk must have filled her in. “Life is never over so long as you remain alive. Sedna was not entirely wrong here. Mankind has been poisoning the seas with chemical and heat pollution. Naturally she was upset, but she chose the wrong means of addressing the situation. She has always been a vengeful sort of goddess, however, and I think the harm to the ocean has harmed her mind as well
“She is not right, I fear,” Dee continued, “but she will be. I’ll stay with her for a while and help. Enki, could you let Isis know I’ll be back in Vermont after the holidays?”
“I’ll do that,” Enki nodded.
“We should go see if the dances of Nataraja are back in balance,” Lizzie commented.
“They are,” Dee assured him. “You did very well. Lizzie I am impressed.”
“I did not do it alone,” Lizzie replied. “We all worked together. We all had equal parts in the dance.”
“Yes, that too,” Dee remarked mysteriously. “Mister Vogel, take care of her. Lizzie is a very special friend of mine. Sedna is about to wake up now. I think it would be best if you are all gone when she does. Oh and, Enki, do take what’s left of that van away.”
“It’s somewhat beyond repair,” Enki remarked and repeated, “I really should have bought insurance.”
“Try asking Hephaestus,” Dee suggested. “I understand he has a garage somewhere in Oregon these days. Athena should know where. He might enjoy the challenge.”
They helped Enki get his van to the garage of Hephaestus through a combination of magic and muscle power. “What happened to this?” the mechanic demanded gruffly as he limped over toward the van, using a sledge hammer as a cane. “Looks like it was eaten by a herd of mad walruses.”
“It was eaten by a herd of mad walruses,” Enki admitted.
“Are you making fun of me?” Hephaestus asked suspiciously, looking straight into Enki eyes. “Huh! You’re serious? Did you drive it off the wharf somewhere too?”
“No, but it was parked at the bottom of Kotzebue Sound,” Enki admitted. That got a blank look. “In Alaska,” he amplified.
“Who are you?” the blacksmith of the gods demanded.
“Enki,” Enki replied, “or Ea if you prefer.”
“You pitch for the Lammasu, don’t you?” Hephaestus asked.
“Some days I play first base,” Enki admitted.
“Well, that explains a lot,” Hephaestus grumbled. “The moment one of our kind gets in trouble with a car, somehow they find me.”
“Demeter suggested you, but it was Athena who gave me your address,” Enki replied.
“Both of them, huh?” Hephaestus asked. “How’s my ex, by the way? I hear she’s been hanging out with you lately.”
“Who?” Enki asked.
“Aphrodite,” Hephaestus replied.
“She’s doing okay,” Enki replied. “She’s grown a lot since the cycle started.”
“About time,” Hephaestus commented. “Still, I bear her no ill will. Ours was a match made in Hades.”
“I thought you loved her,” Lizzie commented.
“Phix?” Hephaestus asked, noticing something other than Enki and the van for the first time. “I didn’t see you there. Given up eating people?”
“They tend to be tough and stringy,” Lizzie chuckled.
“Huh!” the blacksmith god grunted a laugh. He looked at the others, not finding another familiar face, he went on, “No, I wish Aphrodite well. We were both much happier once the cycle ended and we could go our own ways. So you had this crate parked at the bottom of a bay?”
“Pretty much, yes,” Enki admitted. “It’s a rental and I neglected to take the insurance.”
“Cash on completion,” Hephaestus sighed.
“Company credit card?” Enki asked.
“Visa?” Hephaestus asked. “Master Card?”
“Amex,” Enki replied. “Platinum.”
“Hoo, hoo!” Hephaestus laughed. “Aren’t we special? Well, yes, I take that too. How soon do you need this back?”
“As soon as possible,” Enki admitted.
“It’s going to be a challenge to have it finished by morning,” Hephaestus admitted.
“I’ll help you,” Enki offered.
“I charge double for that,” the lame god warned him.
“Enki,” Lizzie told him. “You can stay here if you like, but I think the rest of us will continue on. Dee asked us to meet her in Hattamesett.”
As Lizzie had told Wade early on in their acquaintance, relative speed had little to do with progress when moving between the plains. Lizzie was fairly well accomplished with such travel, but Terpsichore was even better and the terrain around them changed with every step so that a mere half an hour later they were three thousand miles from Hephaestus’ garage and standing on Eddy’s porch in Hattamesset.
Wade rang the doorbell and promptly heard two women’s voices inside say, “I’ll get it.” The two kept insisting it was their turn to answer the door until He found himself face-to-face with two women who seemed about the same age as Tanise. They didn’t recognize Wade, and only one of them looked vaguely familiar to him. Then the familiar-seeming one of them spotted the others behind Wade and instantly greeted, “Lizzie! Welcome back. Hi, Coach. Come on in and introduce your friends.”
“Amy, Evie,” they heard Tanise calling. “Who is it?”
A short time later after everyone had been introduced, they decided to congregate in the mead hall out back where Ash was already at work in the large kitchen. “We haven’t used the place since Thanksgiving,” Tanise explained to Wade, “and we have a big party next week on New Years Eve. You’ll stay for that, won’t you?”
“Lizzie and I were just starting to talk before Enki got himself lost,” Wade admitted, “so it may take a while to finish that first conversation.”
“Good!” the woman named Evrona nodded. She had long black hair and wore dark glasses that hid her eyes even inside. “Jael told me about the god-trap world, but I want to hear everything you’ve been up to.”
“I’d like to know what we’re going to be up to next,” Ihy commented. “We make a great team. It’d be a shame to break up now, don’t you think?”
“Before all this started,” Lizzie admitted, “Wade and I were discussing a more detailed study of Dance. I was thinking of opening a studio.”
“You were?” Terpsichore asked. “Until you got me involved I never knew you had any interest in the subject.”
“I came to it fairly recently,” Lizzie explained. “It was at one of Eddy’s New Year’s Eve parties. I suppose it might have just a passing thing, but I have always been an enthusiast about my interests, so I started looking a bit deeper.”
“I haven’t been doing much with my life lately,” Wade admitted, “and I have the money. Let’s open a school for Dance.”
“Far out,” Xochipilli whispered, “If you do open a school of dance, I wouldn’t mind teaching a class or two.”
“And I would hardly be true to myself if I did not as well,” Terpsichore added.
They all turned toward Ihy. “Hey! Count me in right now. Do you have accommodations yet?
“It would be lovely if you could open it in this area,” Tanise told them. “That way you could visit more often.”
“Hattamesset is a small town,” Lizzie considered. “I don’t know if we could scrape up enough students. If there is one thing I learned from Enki, it’s if you’re going to do something, try to get it right. If we open a school, it should at least support itself.”
“Wareham isn’t too far away,” Amy suggested. “That’s a larger town, and New Bedford is about the same distance in the other direction.”
“Boston would be better,” Terpsichore put in. “There are a lot more people. It would be easier to get enough students.”
“I’ve never been very comfortable in large cities,” Lizzie remarked, “But I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to look into all the possibilities.”
“We can start tomorrow,” Ihy told her enthusiastically.
“On Christmas Eve?” Amy asked. “It will be crazy out there. Wait a couple of days and we can use my car.” Then something occurred to her. “Wade, don’t you have a home, and a car?”
“Oh geeze!” Wade laughed. “I put my stuff in storage last spring, but my car is still waiting for me at the end of the trail in Maine.”
“We can pick it up in a few days,” Lizzie suggested. “And check out Boston on the way back. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Sounds like fun,” Wade agreed.
Polyphemus sat in the dark and felt the warm rays of the sun on his skin.
Time heals all wounds, they say, but some wounds are too deep to heal in a single lifetime. It had been like this for centuries. That man who called himself Nobody, Odysseus he admitted later, had come to the island of Polyphemus’ people, the Cyclopes. They had crept into his cave like thieves and then they had blinded him and laughed at him in his misery.
Polyphemus had prayed to his father, Poseidon, for revenge, and the scoundrel Odysseus had paid for his crimes, Polyphemus supposed, but ever since Polyphemus had been forced to go about his life unseeing.
He had always lived alone and there had never been many Cyclopes in any case, but ever since that day he had been cast out of the society of his people and force to make his own subsistence, alone and unloved.
He was a shepherd, of course. He had always kept sheep. He still kept sheep. It was work he could do even without the use of sight. He had learned a little magic over the centuries too. Magic that gave him a sense of where things were without having to see them. But while shepherding kept him busy and fed, it also afforded him long periods of time in which to think and brood over his fate.
Polyphemus slept a lot too. There was not much else to do. Few wolves dared to attack the flock of a Cyclops, after all. And in his sleep he dreamed. He dreamed of the days in which he could see. He dreamed of the sea nymph, Galatea, frequently. He had loved her, but she had loved another. In his jealousy, Polyphemus had killed the man, another shepherd and that had been the end of any chance he might have had with Galatea. But that was not the dream that haunted him the most.
In his dreams he saw Odysseus laughing at him, always laughing. This afternoon was no different. Polyphemus had fallen asleep in the hot sun and Odysseus had come to laugh. Then he had turned into the sun and continued laughing at him and burning as well. Hot. So hot!
Polyphemus opened his one eye to see the blinding light of the sun. See? Did he truly see or was this just another cruel dream. Polyphemus sat up and blinked. Slowly his vision cleared and he could see the land around him.
What a dump! he
thought. I deserve more. I deserve
better. Aloud, he proclaimed,
“I can see again! Nobody Odysseus, I am coming for you and all your people!”
- 30 -