That made me very happy indeed. This was my chance to carefully sort through the matters of the Selistani embassy, the pardines and their desires, and Blackblood. Though at first I kept my thoughts to myself, their quiet murmurs and occasional mutual touch tempted me over and over to speak.
They fed me a musky tea that tasted of flowers. I liked it well enough, but would not seek out the blend again. A small bowl of lentils, cooked soft and spiced with a dash of pepper. Both sat well on my stomach. My hunger was eased.
Watching them move, I realized these two touched each other constantly. For reassurance, or as a method of communication. It was like seeing old lovers, or some of the senior Blade mothers, where the bodies were shared much as the thoughts of these twins surely were.
Finally I spoke above the roil of my own thinking, still considering my troubles. “You are very close.”
Osi-I believe-smiled. “We live by a strict code.”
Iso nodded. “If we touch or are touched by one not of our rite, we must be cleansed with ritual, prayer, and fasting.”
No wonder they’d moved so carefully through the crowded market. These two were not fighters, they were ascetics. As I’d seen when I first met them. “So if I were to brush my fingers across yours, this would be unlucky?”
“Unclean,” Osi replied. He held up his hands, as if to ward me off. “Not to say that we doubt your hygiene or your personal practices. Just that you have not followed the spiritual journey we share.”
I was not offended. Rather, I was fascinated. “So you touch one another, but no one else.”
“Exactly.” Iso, this time. I thought I could tell them apart now. He continued: “No matter if you are a beggar or a king. We would still pull a drowning child from the waves, but we would be forced to cleanse ourselves afterward.”
“Both of you?” This amazed me.
Osi ran a hand down Iso’s forearm, barely tracing the seam of his brother’s yellow sleeve. “For one of us to touch is for both of us to touch.”
One mind, one body. I could not truly imagine such closeness. Not even with my baby, who swam inside my womb even now. No lover had ever been so merged. We are born alone, we die alone, we live alone along the way. Had these two found a method to surpass that ultimate confinement of the human spirit to a single body?
I knew it was different for the pardines, and could say nothing of other races, or humans in other places. But these two… “I find your dedication admirable.”
Osi shrugged, the motion passing to Iso in perfect coordination. Iso answered, “It is who we are. We garner no praise and curry no favor, but only follow our rites.”
Iso added, “We must tell you a thing. In our practice, any touch is unclean, but a woman’s touch or breath is a poison to the spirit of a man.”
I laughed, though that rang false against my heart. “You had best avoid the Temple of the Silver Lily, then. My goddess’ halls are full of women.”
“You are the first woman we have taken a meal with in more years than we could easily number.” Osi’s tone was very serious.
Even knowing his words for flattery, he still soothed the hard edge they had just now raised in my mood. “Because I am Green?”
Iso smiled again. “Because the gods here are strange, and more disturbed than we have found before. You stand at the heart of the matter.”
Osi made with his right hand a small sign I did not know. “We have much to learn. Our temple visits are not simple offertory and prayer. You are the one who birthed a god, Endurance.”
His brother: “We have never before encountered a theogenetrix.”
I was tempted to say they had not encountered one now, but I didn’t suppose that to be entirely true, regardless of my misgivings. “You should have known Federo. He carried the god Choybalsan as a woman carries a child beneath her beating heart.” I looked at their serious faces, blinking owlishly at me in the shadows of the warehouse. “Would this have been easier for you if I had been a man who called Endurance into being?”
Osi’s honesty was disarming. “Yes. Much easier. But we are challenged in our work, just as anyone who pursues a quest must be.”
Iso: “So we shall lay aside some rituals, and make additional time for others.”
“No god will strike you down, I think.”
“We are not struck,” Osi said. Something in his tone plucked at my thoughts, but I could not place it, and so dropped the subject as I already seemed to be pushing beyond the edges of their comfort.
Afternoon passed in shafts of dusty light that walked slowly across the warehouse’s cavernous interior from narrow windows set high in the walls. First these battens gleamed, then those grates, and for a while a pile of brass binnacles flashed like gold. I spoke more to the brothers, and spent time in my own silences as they attended to their meditations. Though they were mendicant, and seemed to possess little, what they did own unpacked and opened and refined and subdivided into smaller and more manifold belongings. For example, a small satchel revealed a collection of tools. The handles of each opened to smaller tools and firestarters and tiny blades.
It was a very efficient sort of asceticism. I recognized some of their implements as having violent use. A corkscrew can open a wine bottle, but it can also stab an eye or breach a throat. Osi and Iso moved with the practiced ease of old professionals in any field. It was so simple for me to see the Blade mothers in these two men, for all their differences.
I wondered if I would ever be free of the shadows of my past. Was anyone in truth ever liberated from the bondage of memory? A question that dogs me still, all these years later.
But we did talk. Some of our discussion was of Copper Downs. I explained the Temple Quarter as best I could, and the clever architecture that made the Street of Horizons, a mere eleven blocks long, seem to be endless when looked at from either margin of the quarter. The gods, how they’d slept under the old Duke and been awoken at his mysterious death-omitting my central role in that event-and how they had since pushed for power. I’d been away in Kalimpura for much of that awakening, but my own encounters with Blackblood, the past attempt to assassinate Marya, and the very presence of Endurance alongside the traditional pantheon were taken together more than sufficient to upset the established order.
The brothers in turn talked about the doctrine of theogenic dispersion. This I knew of from my readings in the Factor’s house, how the titanics who were the greater gods at the beginning of the world had fallen away and sundered into their children and their children’s children, just as a shattered jar will birth generations of splinters on a tiled floor. Much along the lines of my own recent meditations.
“Just as Father Sunbones and Mother Mooneyes,” I said at one point, recalling a pair of theogenic tales that spoke of the birthing of Desire’s daughter-goddesses, but from a very different perspective.
“Yes,” Osi said. “We listen to the rituals, and we learn the tales told in each place we visit.”
Iso added, “By marking the differences in the traditions over time and distance, we can chart something of the spread of the story.”
“Likewise the gods themselves.” Osi, again. “Every city has a sailor’s god, and one who watches over farmers. We believe these to be aspects of the same facet lost in the Splintering of the Gods.”
“Your Endurance is an exception,” Iso told me. “We find that ilk of gods most interesting, for they can tell us what aspects of godhead arise independently, and what must descend from the earliest times.”
His brother spoke again. “Someday our devotional charts will give us a map of the theogenic dispersion. From that we can trace our way back to the site of Father Sunbones’ garden. Eventually we can learn of both the miracles and the errors which occurred there.”
“All thinking creatures were grown to flesh and ensouled in that garden,” I mused, remembering my own reading. “I assume it for a metaphor of the richness of the world.”