but illusion, she decided, was better than nothing, and she took the rope from her spear and tied it around the shapely pillar. She tugged on the rope and, mighty warrior that she was, dislodged the stone. It tilted farther and farther until it wrenched loose. The rope pulled but she held it and, with the figure in tow behind her, steered a course for home. The wonder is that the weight of the stone didn’t pull her boat under, but by now you might have guessed that there was something unnatural in it all.
She tied up her boat at the base of her span, and then hauled in the stone figure. As it bobbed to the surface and rolled, Akonadi saw that the swirling waters around the island had endowed the figure with another prominent feature of her husband’s, and she was careful not to damage this as she dragged the stone up the many steps to her house. Neighbors saw her and clambered down the steps to help her with it. If they thought anything odd about the stone, they said nothing. They helped her carry it through her house and into her garden, where she stood it upright and let it dry in the sun. In the daylight in her garden, the stone looked less like Meersh, save for that smooth phallus that the water had shaped and polished, an object of ceaseless arousal. That was very like him.
That night, every time she walked past the garden, she found herself glancing at the stone figure. The twin moons cast their light so that once again the facets of it resembled her husband.
Finally, Akonadi’s longing broke free, flooding her thoughts, drowning her senses in need. She rushed to the stone, embraced it, kissed its cold hard lips, its face. She hiked up her skirt, wrapped her legs around it, and slowly, steadily, with immense pleasure, impaled herself upon its most prominent feature. She rode the stone figure for hours. Consciousness fell away and wonderful sensation consumed her. When at last she stepped into the dirt again, her legs would barely hold her up. It was as if her spirit had flown to some other place and returned. She stumbled off to bed, leaving the stone figure glistening in the moonlight. The essence of Akonadi was absorbed into it, permeated it, ran like divine blood through it.
Sated, Akonadi slept soundly. In the morning when she awoke, she was astonished to find that the gray stone figure lay beside her in her bed.
She sat up and scrabbled back the way a crab scurries across a beach. The stone rolled over. Its features were more distinct than before, the face real. A piece of the stone figure seemed to tear loose from the body. It stretched toward her—an arm. Fingers uncurled, invited her. Tentatively, she gave it her hand, and the stone man drew her to him, lifting her up on top of him. She impaled herself once more and began again the previous night’s lascivious ritual. How long it went on, Akonadi didn’t know or care. She succumbed to sensation, lost all thought, all awareness, and only later came to her senses lying beside the stone, now warmed like flesh by the sunlight, and she drifted away to sleep.
For weeks after that Akonadi and the stone man lived in bliss. Each day it seemed he was more alive. He attended to her every need, obeyed her every request, strong but always looking to her satisfaction. The only desire he did not satisfy was her eagerness for conversation. His mouth remained no more than an imperfection in the stone. He said nothing.
Some time later, word arrived from the neighboring span of Valdemir that a great convocation was going to take place to elect sun and moon gods. The span of Valdemir, then newly formed, did not have any, and in those early times Edgeworld was not so cleft from us as it is now—a span could elect its own gods.
The news meant little to Akonadi, but it traveled along the spiral and reached Meersh wherever he was, and he came running home, for the idea had come to him in a besotted epiphany that he might be able to have himself elected a god.
Entering the house at night, he discovered the great stone pillar lying in his place and feigned outrage. “I’m gone a few months and this is how you replace me?”
Akonadi answered, “Husband, you’ve been gone a year and