Traces of the God - 3
There are times when instinctive action outruns rational judgment. And the instinct that races ahead of reason is almost always the survival instinct.
So without turning it over in my head, I followed that instinct.
"I'm sorry."
I got the apology out before the woman with the laughter still bright in her eyes could finish speaking.
Right now, reading the situation came second to bowing. Hesitate and dither, and a badly tangled mess could evolve into something catastrophically tangled. I hadn't even managed introductions, but I didn't need to hear her name. When things had already reached this point, not knowing would have made me an idiot.
Of course, an apology of words alone carries no sincerity, so I slammed my forehead to the ground without delay. In the native style it was a full prostration of contrition; across the water they called it dogeza. You had to show at least this much sincerity if you wanted the real thing to show through.
"Aha! Refreshingly straightforward!"
With my head down I couldn't see her face, but the chuckling laugh told me she was reasonably satisfied. Whether that satisfaction came from the apology itself or from the spectacle of someone abruptly slamming their head into the dirt, I couldn't say.
"Still, lift your head. We finally managed to meet—we should at least look each other in the face while we talk."
"I'm sor—"
"Enough. Just lift it."
The words were close enough to a command that I raised my head at once. From her reactions so far, at least she didn't seem ready to scream You faithless bastard! and kill me on the spot. She was gracious enough to give me time to talk.
And the first thing I saw when I lifted my head was the woman just setting a leather waterskin to her lips.
Or… is it?
A fresh wave of unease rolled through me. The hearty way she tipped it back looked like she was drinking liquor, and the sight instantly summoned a certain historical drama I had watched before the possession. Had she told me to raise my head not so we could talk, but so she could cut my throat?
I was afraid. Afraid the liquor she held in her mouth was about to spray across my face. I didn't want to die, but I especially didn't want to die while being misted with booze.
"Khh! Want some?"
"No, I'm fine."
"Yeah? Well, I guess it might not suit southern mouths."
Whether she knew of my terror or not, she offered once, accepted the refusal without a second thought, and drained the skin dry. It had been a fairly large skin, and she emptied it in one go. The woman could drink.
At any rate, the woman who had flaunted her drinking from the first meeting looked at my rigidly frozen form and let out a short snort of laughter.
"I think you already know, but since it's our first meeting I'll introduce myself properly. I'm the one you people call Eternal Blue Sky. A sky god of sorts."
The fact I had guessed—and at the same time desperately hoped wasn't true—was confirmed, and I bit my lip without meaning to. After tussling with the fairies I had even tried a little reality-escape fantasy that maybe this was the god named Constantina. Of course it wasn't.
"It is an honor to meet a god."
"Honor, nothing. I'm a fallen divinity as it is."
The answer came mixed with laughter rather than thunder, yet it still made me want to die. I held a considerable share of the responsibility for that fall, after all.
I was going crazy. If she had just gotten angry it would have been the disaster I expected, and I could have accepted it with humility. This atmosphere was so far outside my predictions I had no idea how to react. Hell, I had never once imagined I would meet a god in the first place.
"Khheh. Feeling sorry, are you?"
When I failed to produce a suitable reply and only kept reading her face, Eternal Blue Sky laughed again.
"I appreciate the sentiment, but you've overestimated yourself a bit! From the moment settled peoples appeared, the decline of a nomad god was only a matter of time. The schedule just got moved up a little—it's not really your fault!"
So she told me to straighten my shoulders and started thumping my back with hearty force. She looked exactly like a boisterous mother comforting a dejected son.
Which only made me crazier. Why was she reacting like this?
Didn't she go berserk?
Bedler had clearly said the god was furious and involved with my scar. Murder of an apostle, desecration of temples, insult to a divine artifact—of course a god would be enraged. I had never once doubted that Eternal Blue Sky was in a state of wrath.
I had simply marveled, in several senses of the word, that I had managed a grand slam of blasphemy in a world where gods actually existed.
Was it a misunderstanding?
The thought even crossed my mind for a moment. Had Eternal Blue Sky actually felt nothing toward me at all?
Right. How could a human fathom a god's heart? The dense divine power in my scar might have been pure coincidence, or Kagan's independent malice. Appearing before me now might simply have been pity for a man thrashing around alone in prayer.
I should reflect. Not to understand Mother Sky's generous heart—
"Well, it did get pulled forward so flashily that I got pretty pissed myself."
Never mind.
I'm fucked.
When the party herself says "pissed," she means it. How sincere must it be for a god to use that kind of language?
"You killed the apostle I cherished, you shoved the divine artifact I carefully bestowed into some corner, and you even smashed my temples. I thought, what kind of bastard is this? Even during the religious wars, kids like you were rare."
"I'm sorry…"
The scolding that even in the days when religions truly tried to wipe each other out, no one had pulled stunts like mine. Suddenly I felt like a war criminal and couldn't lift my head.
"Forget it. Once you've handed out the punishment, that's the end of it. Honestly, a god who's taken a hit to their faith looks weak if they don't dish out any retribution, so there was some showmanship involved too…"
Eternal Blue Sky stopped there, pressed her lips together, then scratched her cheek as if embarrassed.
I felt uneasy. What on earth was she about to say that made her act like that?
"Curious why I'm inside your body?"
"Ah… yes."
I nodded on pure instinct. Of course I was curious.
Even the Saint called a Son of God, even the most devout priests, only received a god's power—they didn't share a body with one. If a god itself dwelled in a person, wouldn't that person basically be a god?
Yet I had nothing to do with faith, and "just to punish him" felt excessive. Attaching yourself to someone's body for punishment was some serious stalker-level obsession.
"I'm trapped."
"…What?"
"I said I'm trapped."
Eternal Blue Sky's gaze dipped slightly. I froze solid.
A hair-raising silence settled over us.
From the red-faced Eternal Blue Sky I finally heard the full story.
When Kagan had cut me open, every scrap of divine power dwelling in the artifact had transferred into my wound. Ordinary attacks only left residual traces, but the problem was that Kagan's strike had been a full-power final blow. So the divine power in the artifact had poured everything it had into killing me as well.
Of course the one who died was Kagan, and divine power that leaves its artifact is supposed to dissipate on its own—
"I fixed the divine power in place then. The apostle had already wounded you, so there was no need for further damage. Just making that wound last a long time felt like enough of a punishment."
Through a god's intervention, divine power that would have faded if left alone transformed into an immortal force. Since a god had personally laid hands on it, no mortal could scrub that power away, and because the divine power couldn't be removed, the wound never healed. That absurd situation had now dragged on for three years.
"I planned to reclaim it after about a year…"
Eternal Blue Sky's mouth closed again mid-explanation, but she soon continued.
"In the meantime, the place I could stay disappeared."
"What?"
Strange. She was clearly explaining, yet I couldn't understand. Did gods even have a concept of a place to stay? Weren't they more of a "in the heavens" sort of thing?
"Gods have houses?"
I couldn't wrap my head around it and asked back. Eternal Blue Sky let out a small sigh.
"We do. A place that holds divine power—that's both a temple and a god's house."
I couldn't manage any reaction to those words.
Because if temples were a god's house, then "I have nowhere left to stay" made perfect sense.
"But you smashed every last one of them, so the only place left with divine power is your body."
The faintly resentful look Eternal Blue Sky gave me almost dragged a hollow laugh out of me. While shattering the northern nomads' rallying points I had swept away Eternal Blue Sky's temples as well, and it seemed the northern nomads still hadn't managed to rebuild them.
As a result, nowhere in this world still held Eternal Blue Sky's divine power. Only I, who had taken the artifact's power into my body, remained both the bearer of her strength and the vessel that contained it.
What the hell.
What kind of bullshit situation was this? It was awkward for me and embarrassing for Eternal Blue Sky.
"So the reason you've stayed quiet until now and suddenly appeared—"
"If the fairies peel my power out of you right now, I die…"
At that desperate confession I shut my mouth again. Eternal Blue Sky had been living in hiding and only burst out now as the final thrashing of someone standing on the brink of life and death.
It was pitiful. A god's death might be different from a human's, but the fact that she recoiled from it meant it still wasn't a good thing.
I should have moderated myself.
Hearing the circumstances, I regretted it. Just one—if I had left even a single temple standing—Eternal Blue Sky would have had no reason to be trapped in my body, and the power in the wound would have been reclaimed after a year on its own.
Of course, from the perspective of someone tormented by the nomads, I could also call it self-defense.
"If only the war hadn't broken out, it wouldn't have come to this…"
"Didn't you give the order yourself? The apostle took the lead, so of course I assumed that."
"That was because he was so devout! I never issue war commands! My already sparse flock dying in battle would be a problem!"
"Doesn't winning increase the number of believers?"
"As if people forced to serve a god would actually believe!"
After hearing all that, it was hard to keep resenting the god. From her position she had simply taken splash damage from her followers' screw-ups.
Besides, the history of settled peoples thrashing nomads outnumbered the reverse, so if we were arguing self-defense we were actually the ones on shakier ground.
"Hey… so… I called you because there's something I really need to ask."
As if embarrassed by having vented her grievances, Eternal Blue Sky cleared her throat and carefully opened her mouth again.
But she seemed to have come to the wrong person for favors. Tanian the Saint might be one thing, but what could change by asking a swordsman for help with a divine problem?
"I'm not even a priest. Would I be of any use?"
"It's fine. Just pass along what I say to the fairies."
Fortunately, that much I could do.
I closed my eyes and opened them again to find not the pure-white space but the elder's house.
"Sky Auntie, you were here."
"It's real, it's real."
"Aura, heavy. Aura, can't take…"
From the fairies' conversation, it didn't even seem like time had passed while I was in that white space.
She had played the pitiful card about having no home because of me and being trapped, but a god was still a god. Casually transcending space-time.
"Kids."
Anyway, I was properly back, so time to handle the request. If I ignored it and the cornered Eternal Blue Sky decided we should die together and went on a rampage, only my body would suffer.
"Let's step outside for a bit."
"Outside? Outside?"
"Outside? Why?"
"Outside, nothing there. Elf Auntie, lives boring."
I saw the elder, suddenly sniped, flinch, but I soothed the fairies as best I could. This was a request, yet it was also a request that wouldn't hurt the fairies either.
"You might get to see your mom again."
The instant the words left my mouth I learned that even thumb-sized children become formidable when more than a dozen of them clump together.
"Outside! Outside!"
"Mom, mom, mom!"
"Really? Real mom? Not a lie? Not a lie?"
"Lies, bad! If lie, we cry!"
I did not want to learn that fact while being dragged along by my hair.
Kids, grabbing my clothes would have been plenty… dragging me by the hair is going a bit far…