A grape tastes like a grape? Of course not. Until you bite the grape, it has no taste. It might as well be a stone lifted from the cold current of some river in autumn: a smooth, chill orb, reticent, flavorless. You could hold it trapped between your palate and tongue forever, with only the faintest hint of juice at the tiny breach where it was plucked from the stem.
You are like that grape—plump with slick, rich sweetness, with wet purple life. The truth of life is the grape’s truth: only when jaws bite down, when the skin splits, when the sun-cold flesh explodes onto the tongue does it matter. Without the moment of its own destruction, the grape is just a smooth, colorful stone. Without the foreknowledge of the woman who holds it in her hand, her anticipation, before it even passes her lips, of the mangled skin and the sweet life draining over the tongue, the grape would hold no savor.
The Csestriim and the Nevariim were like this, if the chronicles are true—immortal, unbroken stones, incapable of joy, either the feeling or the bringing. Of course, my god was young when they walked the world, his strength more meager in the age when they were made, meager enough that for thousands of years and longer they escaped his touch. They might have continued forever that way—immortal save in those rare cases when the body was so broken by violence that my god could finally slide his fingers inside—but the Csestriim overreached. In their dust-dry desire to catalogue the world, to know it so they could bend it to their will, they pushed the Nevariim too far, and finally, the Nevariim pushed back.
They lost; the Csestriim wiped them from the world, but my god learned much in the conflict, and in the long millennia that followed, he grew stronger, strong enough that when we came—humans, women and men wandering the unforgiving earth—he could end us with a flick of his infinite fingers. He never learned the trick with the Csestriim, but it didn’t matter. We were there to help him, to pry open that immortal flesh with our bronze and let him in. The Csestriim were stones, but we shattered them, scrubbed them out as they had scrubbed out the Nevariim.
We are not stones. Our human skin is thin, the life inside us bright. And death? The god I serve? He is the jaw locked around us, the promise of a sweet purple destruction without which we would be no more than so much polished rock.
My brothers and sisters in the faith understand this better than most. We devote our lives to this truth. And so, within the walls of Rassambur there is no shortage of joy, of delight, of music, and yes, of love. I have watched old couples step hand in hand from the bloodred cliffs, linked even in the moment of their unmaking. I have seen wives pour the poisoned tea for their husbands, hold the clay cup to the feeble lips themselves, offer the final release when the pain of one disease or another grew too great. I have witnessed the glee on the faces of younger couples as they sneak away, even felt a hint of it myself, a little shiver of ecstatic bliss when my lips met other lips.
But not love.
Not that it bothered me. I was young, strong, alight with my own devotion and the fellowship of my sisters and brothers. Love was a pleasant afterthought, something I could experience later, more slowly, when I was finished being young.
Then came the Trial, and with the Trial, the song.
My god is a great lover of music. Not the still, finished forms of painting or sculpture, but music. Music is inextricable from its own unmaking. Each note is predicated on the death of those before. Try to hold them all, and you have madness, cacophony, noise. A song, like a life, is all in the letting go, in the knowing, the moment you begin, that it will end. And of all music’s variegated forms—fiddle and drum, harp and horn, plangent or joyous—Ananshael loves the human voice, the sound of the instrument giving song to the knowledge of its own impermanence.
It was no surprise that the test concluding all my training would begin with a song, but of all the melodies I’d heard at Rassambur, this one had been kept from me, as it was from all the acolytes, until just before the Trial. Listen, and you will understand the fierceness of my sudden need to love:
One who is right, and one who is wrong,
A singer snared in a web of song—
Deliver them, deliver them
Into his million-fingered hands.
Deliver to him a dealer of death,
Severed from life, shorn of breath.
Deliver a mother, ripe with new life.
Find the kindness in the sharpest knife.
Deliver to him a giver of names;
There are no words in his domain.
When these are safe inside his hands,
One more remains,
One more remains—
Give to the god the one who makes your mind
And body sing with love
Who will not come again.
I don’t know who composed the music, but it is perfect, polyphonic, one melody the naked blade, the other the warm skin in the moment before it parts. Ela and Kossal sang it for me—it fell to them as my Witnesses in the Hall of All Endings, a vault-roofed, windowless sandstone cube just a dozen paces across. Not so much a hall as a room, really. Twin candles lit the space, ivory pillars as thick as my thigh set into sconces in the wall. There were no altars. Their singing bodies were the altars, their music the offering, brimming in the lambent space until it seemed almost liquid, her voice throaty, rich; his spare and unadorned as old iron. I cried, listening to them, cried first for the sheer beauty of the thing, and then again, a moment after, when my mind moved from the music to the words, and I realized what it meant: I was going to fail. I had already failed, fallen short of my great exercise of devotion even before it truly began.
The song is a list, obviously, a list of those that each acolyte must give to the god before becoming a full priest of Ananshael. From the first offering to the last, the would-be priestess is allowed fourteen days. Fourteen days for seven offerings. Not such a daunting task—not for one raised and trained in Rassambur—but an impossible one for someone, like me, who had never been in love.
The words trembled in my mind even after the singing was over: Give to the god the one who makes your mind and body sing with love.
Ela saw my shock first, but she misunderstood it.
“I know,” she said, sliding a strong, gentle hand over my shoulders. Her fingers were warm in the cool night air. Even without the notes, her voice still sounded like song. “I know.”
Kossal had already turned to the candles. Those twin flames gave the room its only light, but he was halfway to snuffing them, reaching for the first wick with his calloused fingers, ready to pinch the flame.
“Give her a moment, you old goat,” Ela said.
The priest paused, turned. Despite his age, he didn’t stoop. He carried himself—that whole tall, sinewy frame—like a man forty years younger, though his face—olive beneath the graying stubble—looked like something carved, each line and wrinkle scored into the flesh. Candlelight glinted, needle-bright, in each eye.
“She can have all the moments she wants. In the dark.”