Chapter 2: The God Who Speaks

The first light came back as a pale thread drawn along the sun's lower rim, and the crowd's single ragged moan broke into a thousand small sounds — weeping, prayer, the struck-dumb shock of people who had watched the sky die and could not yet believe it had agreed to be born again.

Jim held his arms open to it. That was the whole of the art he had left in the world: to look as though the light were returning to him, and by his asking, and not once to flinch. A man who flinches is a man who bet and lost. A man who stands utterly still while the dark lets go its grip, head back, hands spread as though catching the first returning ray like a child catching rain — he is read as the one who was never a victim of the dark but its landlord. Jim knew it was theater. He had taught theater for twenty years, mostly about people who had converted terror into authority by standing perfectly still at the exact moment their lives hung in it, and now he was the one standing, and the sweat was running cold down his spine and he forced himself not to name it fear, only the ordinary heat of a body that had been allowed to keep breathing.

Down in the great yard the people were not rising. They had been moving a moment ago — dancing, stomping, driving that wall of sound up against his platform to hurry the knife home — and now the whole plaza lay broken on its own knees, faces turned up at him through the syrup-thick light with an expression he had only ever seen in the oldest, most frightened drawings: worship and dread braided so tightly they could not tell themselves apart.

Jim almost smiled, and stopped it dead. It would have been an alien thing, the wrong signal at the wrong moment. Instead he let his arms fall slowly, and turned, and looked deliberately at the man still kneeling at the platform's edge. The shaman. The one in the falcon crown, whose knife lay a few paces away in the dirt where it had leapt from his hand.

"Stand," Jim said, low and flat, and the word carried because a crowd holding its breath is the quietest room in the world. "Pick up your knife. Sheathe it. And come here, and kneel again when I have told you a thing about the sky."

He did not know, yet, whether that would save his life or hang it. Probably both, the way a man crossing a flood uses the current to hold himself up. But it was the only move he had, and he made it.

The shaman rose on unsteady legs. He was younger up close than the mask of paint had promised — perhaps thirty, perhaps less — a man chosen young to carry a whole people's fear of the sun, and it showed in the seams around his mouth and in the way his hands shook as he retrieved the flint knife and fumbled it into the sheath at his hip. He walked to Jim, and he knelt, and he laid his painted forehead against the boards and offered nothing, waiting.

Jim let the silence sit past the point of comfort. He counted heartbeats and then doubled them. He wanted the entire yard leaning in until it could lean no further, and then he spoke, and he made every word round and slow so that it sounded, to ears that did not know his tongue, ponderous and weight-bearing and exactly as ancient as he needed it to be.

"You nearly cut a friend of the sun," Jim said. "The sky closed its eye in anger, and I called it back. Do you understand the thing you almost did?"

The shaman made a low sound in his throat that might have been assent and might have been terror.

"Do not do it again," Jim went on, "and the sun will keep its face open for your people. But you and I are going to speak plainly now, man to man, about what has changed in this valley since the dark." He watched the shaman's lowered face for the movement of a muscle. "Tell the people I am not a demon. Tell them the sky speaks through me, that I am to be fed and kept and asked, and that no hand is to lift a blade to me again. And you," he said, and here he sank his voice so that only the two of them could catch it, "you will watch me. You will study me. I know that you do not believe a word of this — that is your right, and your office." He waited, and let the shaman feel the risk of the honesty. "But you will not move against me while I watch you back, and in exchange I will tell you, man to man and truth for truth, whatever you ask that I can answer. We will neither lie to the people nor to each other. Have we a bargain?"

For a long moment the falcon crown did not move. Then, very slowly, the shaman raised his head, and Jim saw, at last, something real sitting behind all the ceremony — a sharp, careful, frightened intelligence, the look of a man who had been reading portents all his life and could recognize a very good bluff because he had pulled so many of his own. He understood, fully and instantly, what had just been offered him: life, and the chance to make an enemy into something half-tamed. His painted lips moved.

"Yes," he said. And then, because a god could not hear him speak the crude tongue of men without shattering the tale, he turned to the crowd and rose, and raised his arms, and let out a long, singing proclamation in his own language — of which Jim understood not a single word — and every voice in the yard answered, a pounding, pealing unison, and then they called down a thunderclap of syllables that ended by touching on the two words Jim had already learned to dread and cling to.

"Speaks-the-sun," the shaman said, turning and touching his chest, then pointing at Jim, and the crowd took the phrase and throttled it into a drumbeat: speaks-the-sun, speaks-the-sun, speaks-the-sun, until the plaza was a pulse made of the name they had just traded him for his life.

Jim let it ring. He had won something. He had also, he knew with the cold clarity that had carried him off the altar, walked into something. A god is fed. A god is housed. A god is feared and consulted and obeyed. And a god is never allowed to be wrong, is never allowed to grow tired or old or afraid, and every omen that fails from this day forward will be held against him like a debt with interest. The title was a cage that happened to have the shape of a crown. But a cage is still somewhere to stand, and not ten minutes ago he had been standing flat on a dying altar with a blade winking at his chest.

They led him down then, into the crowd, and the people opened before him as they would have opened before lightning, bowing, reaching, snatching their hands back before they touched him, and he walked that gauntlet of awe with his shoulders square and his eyes straight ahead and his heart a fist, until they brought him to the longhouse at the summit of the earthen height and gave it to him as his own.

He wanted to be alone. He had been alone, in the ways that mattered, for a long time; the whole architecture of a careful academic life is a contrivance for being alone inside company, and he was practised at it. But a god does not get solitude, and he had not been granted half a breath before the first of them came to the longhouse door and simply stood there, bent at the waist, looking at the floor, wanting only to be looked at in turn. He waved the man in. He let himself be touched — the fearful, reverent brush of a hand to his cuff, to the strange pale skin of his arm — and he made himself endure it, the way he had endured the ache in his wrists, because he had decided somewhere between the altar and the longhouse that fear was a coin you could spend once and not live on, and whatever these people needed from him he was going to make ordinary before they made it fatal.

The claims of godhood dulled their edges over the afternoon. They wanted him to look at them, to say their crude sentences back at them, to confirm that the sky had truly spoken and that he was the voice. He did it as well as a man who knew perhaps ten words could manage — with his hands, with his eyes, with the slow gravity of a man who has decided to be a weight in any room he is set down in. By dusk he had learned that a god in this valley is, above all things, a listener, and he found he could listen with a patience that surprised him, seated cross-legged at the longhouse mouth while the people filed up the slope and told the sun's voice their fears — their sick children, their too-small harvests, their night-terrors, the whole enormous unburdening of a town that had watched the sky die and been spared. He said almost nothing. He let each of them give him a name to carry, and asked a question back with his hands, and they left the higher for it, higher and lighter, and he let them believe it was the god doing the lifting when in fact it was only a man who had learned long ago how little anyone truly wants to hear in answer.

They fed him. They had been a breath away from killing him and they fed him everything they had, a great wooden platter of maize and venison and the dark sweet flesh of a river fish, and a clay bowl of water passed with both hands and downcast eyes as though the bowl itself were sacred. Jim ate slowly, forcing every swallow, though his stomach was a knot of cold lead, because a god who does not eat is a god who is dying, and he had exactly one weapon left and it was the shape of him in their eyes.

At the door of the longhouse, behind the wall of food and fire, the shaman lingered. He watched Jim eat. He watched Jim drink. And when he thought the god could not see him, the shaman's mouth moved — a low whisper, not a prayer, a man testing the shape of some private thought against the inside of his own teeth — and his eyes went hard and flat in the orange dark, the way they had been on the altar before the knife came down.

Jim saw it. He let no sign of it cross his face. He dipped the bowl again, and drank, and smiled at the boy who had brought the water, and the boy's whole face blazed with holy terror, and behind them both the shaman turned and was gone into the firelit yard to tell his people, in their own singing tongue, how lucky they all were to stand on the earth of a god.

Years of teaching had taught Jim this, and it was the only lecture he had ever given that was now feeding him: that a crowd will believe almost anything, if the man who tells it does not hesitate. He had not hesitated once. The sun had gone dark at his word and come back at his word, and the whole valley had seen it, and the name they had given him was doing the work his muscles could never have done.

But under the drum-fire of the name, in the last quiet echoing corner of his own mind, Jim kept a single cold fact stacked and braced like a timber against a flood: the shaman had not been afraid. Not of the death, not of the dark, not even of the returning light. At the bitter end, when the whole plaza was weeping at a dead sky, one pair of eyes on that platform had been watching him the way a man watches something he intends to understand in order to use it.

Speaks-the-sun. A fair trade for a life, for now.

But keep your arms open, Jim. Keep your hand on the light while you've got it. Because the day the sun does not answer for you is the day the name turns back into just a man, and that man is going to wish he had kept this supposed godhood in good repair.

He set the bowl down between his feet on the warm boards of the longhouse floor, and let the fire of strangers burn its way into him, and made himself memorize the ceiling smoke, the smell of the place, the shape of everything he would have to learn by morning. Because the name would not save him forever. The language of these people would. And he had, he realized with a jolt that went straight to his palms, not yet earned a single word.