16. Crescendo
Crescendo
Essemteu is in our garden.
This was the danger of accepting his invitation, it rewarded his poor behavior. He thinks he can come and go as he pleases, that he is welcomed here.
I ball my fist. I don’t know much about violence, I’ve never needed it. I compel my human prey, they are no threat to me. I suppose I am stronger than them, but if it came down to a fight, I am woefully unprepared. I do not know how to strike, but his weaknesses are mine.
Perhaps I will start with words of anger? No, that is not like me. I may be older and made by an Elder, but I am a temple mouse here. Your shadow protects me from harm, but it makes me an extension of you. Normally I would not mind, but in this case I do.
I want him gone.
I shove open the gate to our courtyard and come up short—he is not alone. You sit next to him, speaking quickly. How did I miss the sound of your voice? Was my anger so great that I did not recognize you?
You glance at me, the words dying on your lips.
What were you speaking of? The secrets of the Elders? Please, do not say you’ve confided in him before me.
Rage turns my insides and I think once more of violence.
I smother it, because I will never win you if I defy you.
You do not invite me to the conversation. “Evening, Melinoe,” says Essemteu.
“Hello,” I greet in return. I pause just steps from you, waiting for my invitation to sit. It doesn’t come. You both stare at me, wordless.
I understand I am being dismissed.
He comes several more times, each while I am away hunting.
I hunt alone more often now, choosing to wander the vast streets of Alexandria for several hours before picking my prey.
Sometimes I follow the human I picked for several days before taking them.
Other times I grab bodies in the street and feast.
We still hunt together, though it is less often. I don’t know what you do when I’m gone. Sometimes I think to hang back, to follow you, to watch.
You would know, though. I do not feel your presence, I know it. You would know if I were near, watching.
Essemteu’s visits are inconsistent. Sometimes they are daily, then he will disappear for several weeks, seen only at the full moon meeting.
These meetings have become spectacles. Something changed the day you spoke of the First, something that deepened the divide between the factions.
Theon says the First is proof that we should not feast on humans. “We are not a mistake—we are what comes after,” he says. He thinks this is a profound thing to say, waiting for someone to write it down like his heroes he studies.
But they’ve adopted the five rules. Sometime in the last few months, the rules snuck their way into the group.
If they found my journal of scribbled notes of your history, they would dismiss me from the group.
Would they risk your ire? By now every word you say is sacred, fodder to either side for their surety of their righteousness.
“If it is as you say, then the humans are the mistake, and we are what comes after…to correct that mistake,” Zahra smirks. Theon frowns, puzzling over his own words.
“We are like the gods,” Ardashir says, his gaze turning to you. He is reverent where Theon is critical. I expect that any day now Ardashir will kneel at your feet just as I do and ask to worship you. I suspect his intentions are of a more carnal nature. It upsets me and amuses me in equal measure.
I cannot fault him for loving you as you deserve.
“We predate the gods,” you say. You have not given them an age, I suspect you never will.
Is it because you are not so old, or is it because your antiquity rivals our understanding of mankind?
Theon tries to trap you in a lie, stacking questions like tiles, waiting for them to fall.
He asks the same question two ways to weigh your answers.
“Which gods?” Theon asks. “There are an awful lot of them.”
Essemteu tsks. Even so many decades removed as a priest in the temple of Thoth, he regards them as holy. He once asked about my time in Delphi. Theon must have told him, I do not think I ever come up in your conversations with Essemteu.
“Do you still worship him?” he asked once.
“Who?”
“Apollo. The god of your temple?”
God? I do not recall a god, but a goddess.
I try to recall the face of the serene statue that looked down on me as I worked, but I no longer see it.
It warps from the feminine to the masculine.
That cannot be right. Has time stolen this memory from me as well?
Many centuries later I will find out he was right, that the temple in Delphi did not serve a goddess, but a god named Apollo.
Perhaps I saw the face of Athena and her temple at the base of the hill, just below the main temple?
Or perhaps I saw Eileithyia, who is said to have a small altar there?
When I recall that altar, all I think of is you making me on it, our blood covering its surface.
“I see,” he said, disappointed in my lack of piety. “What fragile thing drove your devotion?”
What should I have said? Ignorance, I think. Ignorance of you, of what was outside the walls of the compound. I knew only the temple and the gods and goddesses within.
“Poverty,” I said instead. He laughed, patting me on the shoulder as though I had told a great joke. Essemteu would never understand. He was a priest in his temple, the highest calling someone of his birth and station could hope to achieve. Even remade, he was afforded luxury most would kill for.
He’d never understand what it meant to be a temple mouse. He knew only what it was to stand on the altar and lead.
Essemteu is horrified by Theon’s sacrilege, both against you and his gods and goddesses. “The gods grow with us, Theon. They always are and always will be.”
“Is that true?” Theon asks, his sharp gaze on you. “Have the gods always existed, just changed as we do?”
“No,” Shimon interjects just as your mouth opens to answer. “My god is not yours, they have no commonality.” Shimon was always quick to point out his monotheism. To him, we were created by his god, because that is how things are.
“Fine, then who follows the oldest gods?” Theon asks.
“I don’t know,” you answer, but it is a lie. I follow the oldest god—you.
“Hmph,” Theon says.
“The world is much bigger than you can understand,” you say. Your stuttering truths are a thing of the past. Since the revelation of the First you’ve spoken more, commanded more of the group. Occasionally you lead discussion, just as you did the first night in the garden with Essemteu.
“There are maps,” Theon says.
“Incomplete,” you say with a wave of your hand.
“How would you know?”
“Guesses by humans,” you say dismissively. “Mountains where there are none, deserts where it was once fertile, water where it was once ice. Maps are a frozen moment in time. If I had come to Alexandria four hundred years ago, what would I have seen?”
“A large city in its infancy,” Essemteu marvels.
“And four hundred years before that?”
“Nothing,” Essemteu replies. He leans forward in an attempt to get closer to your words.
“A moment in time,” you repeat. “If I first came to Alexandria eight hundred years ago, I would call it a settlement. If I never returned, my map would mark it as small and insignificant.”
Dione hums her agreement as Theon glowers.
“Then we may never know the first god as we know the First of our kind,” Essemteu muses. “If we ask different humans, we get different answers about the origin of religion. Yet, when it comes to our beginnings, we have the source.”
You. He means you.
I should have seen what he was doing. I wonder sometimes if you knew and encouraged it. I didn’t need encouragement to fall into the shift of the guild. I hated those that hated you, and I tolerated those that loved you. At last others saw what I did: a goddess worth worshiping.
Then someone moved the benches.
It was still circular, but the bench we sat at was elevated. Several blocks rested beneath its legs, elevating it like a throne above the group.
“What is this?” Theon rages.
“Natural progression,” Essemteu says with a shrug. “It is time we accepted it.”
“Accepted what?” Theon asks.
“An Elder as our leader,” he says.
I stood by as the rift became a chasm.
Theon, who once asked me what it was like to be so close to a god, spits on the floor near your feet. “She is not a goddess! She is flesh! She bleeds and feeds just as we do!”
“Well, not as you do. She takes from humans, not beasts,” Zahra says.
“Lower the bench,” Bastianos says between clenched teeth.
“No,” Essemteu replies pleasantly.
“We agreed upon founding that there would be none above the other,” Bastianos says.
“And yet, you named me leader.”
“We have no leader. You were named as a representative to approach her. You were the one we cared the least if she killed,” Theon snarls at him before turning to you. “Mother of Silence, more like murderer of your own kind!”
“Theon…” begins Shimon.
“You defend her now? What happened to not celebrating death? She has killed countless of our kind. Do we dare elevate a traitor to her own kind? How long until she kills us for disagreeing with her?” Theon’s voice grows in pitch and fervor, his green eyes bulging out of his head.
I will kill him, I think. I consider asking you for the easiest way to do it, but I see your face. It is blank, your shield against their words. It is the face you wore when you nursed me back to health after my burns, the same face you had when I admitted I’d commissioned a box to leave you.
The urge to kill him crescendos.
The others are uneasy at his words. Perhaps they think you will do it. Ardashir shifts from one foot to the other, having scented the possibility of bloodshed.
“A vote, then,” Essemteu proposes.
“If it is not consensus you want but clarity, then I will speak to only those who wish to hear,” you say flatly.
Then you leave. I am not far behind.
Neither are Essemteu, Ardashir, Menodotus, Dione, and Zahra.