The Killing Moon (Dreamblood #1)(107)
“You grieve for him?” he asked.
For Ehiru. For Nijiri. For Gujaareh, which would never be the same. For herself. “Yes,” Sunandi replied.
He got to his feet and crossed the sands to stand before her. “Then share this,” he said, and cupped her cheek with his hand.
In that moment her body—her mind, her whole being—was suffused with a joy more powerful than anything words could capture. It warmed away the lingering scars of the Reaping and Lin’s death, filled her with hope almost too keen to bear, blazed like a thousand suns in the core of her soul. Tears were not enough; laughter was not enough. Both at once were useless but she wept and laughed anyhow, for it would be criminal to leave such absolute joy unacknowledged, unexpressed.
When she once again became aware of herself, she found that she had pressed her face against the boy’s chest, clinging to him because he too knew the bliss within her. That made them one. His arms around her shoulders felt like the most natural thing in the world.
“This is his peace,” Nijiri said into her ear. “Now you understand.”
She did. At last she understood so much.
He held her until the tremors stopped, stroking her hair and murmuring soothing nonsense words all the while. When she finally looked up, he stepped away, gracefully shunting aside the inevitable awkwardness that followed a moment of intimacy. When he offered his hand to her again it was as Nijiri, the rude fierce youth who had protected her in the desert, not Nijiri the Gatherer. The former was easier to deal with, so he had become that for her—even though the latter was his new reality.
She took his hand, and he helped her to her feet.
“Go to Yanya-iyan, Speaker,” he said. “Tell the fools Kisua has sent to rule us how to do things. Hananja abhors clumsy transitions. Gujaareh will not resist if you treat us with respect.”
She nodded, still too moved to speak. He led her out of the Garden then, and back to the hall where Hananja’s statue stood watch over Her people.
Looking up at Her, Sunandi said, “Thank you.”
“It’s a Gatherer’s duty to bring peace,” Nijiri replied. When she focused on him again, Rabbaneh had joined him, and after a moment a third man with Gatherer’s eyes stepped out of the shadows. Once upon a time she would have shuddered in their presence, but now she only smiled.
“Do your work well,” she told them. “Your people need you.”
Nijiri only nodded, though she saw warmth in his eyes. Then he turned to follow as the other two walked away. She watched them cross the Hall to the dais, where the Sharers immediately stopped their work and moved aside. Together the Gatherers knelt and bowed over their hands at Hananja’s feet; a moment later they rose and left the Hall. They would exit the Hetawa by the Gatherers’ Gate, she knew, and not return for many hours. They would leave corpses in their wake. But by their efforts, the soul of Gujaareh would once again find peace.
Nodding in satisfaction, Sunandi left the Hetawa and went forth to do her part.
Acknowledgments
My thanks here are mostly for resources rather than people, but only because the list of people to thank would be another book in itself.
The list of helpful resources would be, too, but I’ll single out a few for particular note. First is Mythology: An Illustrated Encyclopedia by Richard Cavendish, a coffee-table book that attempted the impossible—a survey of all the world’s myth systems. It had some notable problems of cultural bias and the usual problems of any broad survey, but it was helpful in one way: when I first read it, I began to see the common structure underlying most human cosmogonies. I used this common structure, as I did in the Inheritance Trilogy, to create the gods of Kisua and Gujaareh.
Also, On Dreams by Sigmund Freud, and The Red Book, by Carl Gustav Jung. The latter I was able to see “in person” at last thanks to a lovely exhibit at the Rubin Museum in New York. Early psychoanalysts got a lot of things wrong in their studies of human nature, but in their partly spiritual, partly intellectual quest to understand their fellow human beings, I got a sense of how a faith can be born. To some degree, Gujaareh’s founder Inunru—er, sans mass murder and megalomania—is inspired by them.
Also, the Brooklyn Museum’s Egyptian and Nubian collection. The British Museum’s collection is much bigger and more impressive, but I don’t live in London, and that museum was too crowded and anxiously guarded to allow the hours of close study I needed. No quick visit can give you a real sense of the day-to-day life of ancient city-dwellers: how they combed their hair, how they cleaned their teeth, how they traveled from home to work, how they gossiped about that guy down the street who looked at them crosswise and didja hear he worships that god? In Brooklyn nobody cares if you sit in one place and stare at something for hours, as long as you don’t then get up and shoot somebody.
Oh, and I’ll allow myself one bit of people-thanks: to my first writing group, the BRAWLers, who were the Boston Area Writers’ Group until we decided we needed better branding. You guys tore this book apart and put it back together better, and you loved it and cheered for it before anyone else. (No, Jennifer, they did not have sex.) Thank you.