much larger? She kept silent. If Nocnal had to ask, then he didn’t understand.
Yet he continued asking her till finally she retreated inside where the walls were near, the territory small and safe. When her husband came in later and lay down beside her, she rolled over to clasp him and he held her tight. “I know,” he said.
“What?”
“Something is coming.”
The certainty in his words terrified her more than her own inexpressible unease. “What is? What’s coming? Tell me.”
“When it arrives, I’ll know it.” He couldn’t tell her more, and they lay like that, tightly bound in unshared fear, too conflicted even to remember shared desire.
Chilingana tried to forget what he’d told Lupeka. He continued fishing as he had always done, but with uneasy glances over his shoulder, down the length of the adjoining spans, across the ocean to where they vanished over the horizon.
One afternoon the face of Lord Akema was particularly fierce. Chilingana lay on the shadowed side of his house as people still do to escape the god’s fury, and he happened to glance up to find a stranger walking up the next span.
The fisherman who had created the world leapt to his feet. Other than his wife, this was the first person he had ever seen. Whatever he’d dreaded for so long, this had to be it.
The stranger was tall and gaunt. He wore robes that we would say belonged to a mystic. They were deep red and glittered with powerful designs woven with silver thread, thick as fishbones. The hood of his robe kept the stranger’s features in shadow. All Chilingana could determine was that this traveler was very dark indeed.
The stranger came to the place where the dreamed bridge ended and stepped across the gap onto the balcony encircling the stilt house. The stilts groaned beneath him as if he weighed as much as the world. He walked right up to Chilingana, who huddled shivering in the shadows. It took all the fisherman’s reserves not to cry out and flee inside. He stared into a face of sharp cheekbones and high polished brows, looked into bottomless eyes. “Who are you?” he asked.
The traveler replied, “I am Death.”
“What sort of name is that?”
Death laughed. “One new to you even though you’re the Dreamer. Your bridges have grown to encompass the world, reaching even as far as the land of the dead, which is a barren and uninhabited place I was happy to leave. Your creation invited me to walk the world, and I set out directly to find you.”
The fisherman raised his shoulders. “You aren’t making sense.”
“I think you’ll see that I am, once you’ve come inside me.” Death opened wide his robes, and Chilingana saw a place so cool and inviting that the harsh rays of Lord Akema couldn’t find him there. He must have fallen into those robes, for he had no memory of walking. Once he was inside the cool place his mind tumbled with memories. The robes that had been held open closed, and at the core of the darkness within them lay a red glow of life out of which came discordant noises he’d never known—crackling energies and devices that rang and then spoke, the barking of dogs, the canister rumble of machines as they rolled along an empty boulevard, the clicking of a metal thing that unfurled strips of paper covered in indecipherable symbols, and the voices of people—more people than he could hold in his mind—all speaking at once and shouting through objects in the sky that were nothing like Akema, lifeless creations, but spraying chatter out and down like rain in a million different tongues drowning him under their flow. He saw impossible blue-glass buildings across which clouds slid like oil, and lighted things that were not fish but traveled far beneath his perfect sea, and he knew that all of these things, however they were new to him, were also ancient, long gone, dredged up out of a collective silt of memory, from some other time and place before he and his wife had arrived. And he knew torment, for in all his new recollections, his birth was nowhere to be found.
He sank to the stones before the traveler. His head hung, too heavy for his neck to lift. Death spoke. “Now you know mortality. Now you’ll live and age and cling to what memories you have, because you will always be falling away from them.”
Then Death left the fisherman there and entered his house. Chilingana