Nomvula

39 - The Crown of Third Hill

Anathi breathed. Her walls were red clay, a dead thing pulled out of common earth. The wind buffeted them with the silent disgust of waves slapping against inelegant, formless cliffs. It was the clay of wild roots awaiting the scythe of the boar's tusk. It was the clay of stubborn gardens, of flattened elephant trails. Those walls had bones of stone and wooden beams. Stong, stubborn bones, but unremarkable. Forgettable. How long would she last in the presence of such great hills and mountains? There she was, the thatched crown of Third Hill, surrounded by dead homes in the valley, and homes that had never lived crowning the other Hills. No, not dead -- they had never lived. They were the fortunate ones.

The Queen had done well to make some of her walls glass. No finer substance knew the salt and foam of the sea, the warping embrace of fire, the freedom of steam, the life of fleshling lungs. In its first form, it was granules of sand to be trod on. But glass knew depth, life, death, and resurrection, and when it rose, it was perfect, so proud it would sooner shatter than be changed again under the touch of lesser hands. Her favourite walls were glass. The cool mists of the middle seasons would cling to those panes on the outside and form cold jewels to adorn her, and within, the glass would be warm with the breath of lovers tumbling in their chambers.

Her roofs were thatch, but the beams were spiced wood to ward away gnats. The Queen's mother hung onions under the mended patches where the thatch was fresh and sweet enough to attract the godlessness of worms. In the midseasons when the rains were plenty, the children lathered her roofs with oiled sap to keep her dry. The women swept away the dried mud of footprints in her hallways, the men hauled stones into the rained away gaps in her foundations. The Queen would roast fragrant beans in her ovens to calm them both.

But her ceilings.

The Queen's daughter played with dangerous magic with the walls in her chambers. She wove ancient godspeak into mountainstone, glass, citruswood, and iron -- and her's was the only ceiling the Queen had allowed to be made of stone. Her grasp of the tongue was basic and limited, despite her mind being above most of the flesh. With that godspeak, she could draw light and trap the scent of things. It was almost admirable. Not even she knew of the dark clay hidden beneath the plaster of the other ceilings. It was the clay the Diviner covered her skin with to keep the heat of her ancestors from burning her to madness. It was the clay manlings used to ward away snakes and cloak themselves in shadow. Red clay was dead. Glass was perfect but trapped by its pride in one form. The black clay of the Wayfarer's southernmost banks was putty thrown down by the careless hand of forgotten gods.

The Queen had traded most of her bridal gifts to the manlings of the southern mountains for enough to cover her ceilings, and...

Anathi pushed her focus to the ceiling of the hallway in the royal living quarters. The pressure of the air had shifted here, as if someone had released a stormcloud from a bottle. There, in the rooms of the Queen's daughter. No clay to hear through there. Fleshlings often talked of time, short time and long time, moments and hours. She knew only waiting and then receiving.  Anathi waited.

The Queen walked out of her daughter's chamber, leaning heavily on a walking stick. 

"Mumzo!"

Her son rushed to wrap an arm around her. Anathi looked to them, then to the open door the Queen had just come from. Whatever had happened in there, she felt her purpose near the surface, like a tree with its rotting trunk near breaking. The Queen was back in her body, once again reunited with the Sunspear she had abandoned in favour of her daughter's mind. The Queen's daughter was one of only three people Anathi knew who had the power to erect walls in their spirits, to split the cave of their being. In spirit, she was as Anathi was -- she would have the sentience of three rooms. The Queen's manse had twenty-eight, twenty-seven of which Anathi governed.

"...Dumani is a violent coward."

All of Anathi's attention converged around the Queen's words. Dumani. Dumani. Dumani. Chaos-bringer. His presence was a bruise in her manse and it spread daily. Where his name was spoken, the air grew bitter, conversations dimmed, the beer warmed and flattened. And there he was, in the ribs of her dungeon. The Queen and her son walked towards it, and the Sunspear lifted its head ever slightly, a hound sniffing danger in the wind.

Anathi pooled as much of her spirit as she could spare into the clay of the hallway's ceiling. The body of a girl formed, and she dropped down to the floor, and followed silently.