How does one create a god? First, forget all the stories, myths, and songs about how the first gods were created. That method was one and done. Primordial Waters. The Formless Void. Those are non-renewable resources. Burned through extravagantly and with élan. But don’t despair. There are many ways to call the divine into existence. Some are brutal and quick, others subtle and slow. But like wings, fleshy fruit, and crabs, divinity is too useful to only arise once.
Start, in this case, with a community. They tend their farms on the banks of a river, with no memory of anywhere else, and no desire to ever leave. But this is not to be. Far to the south, an upstart group aspires to become a kingdom, their conquests rippling outward in a cascade of migration and displacement.
Picture many people packed tightly onto a bed. Every now and then someone moves, just a bit, and everyone else adjusts. Then one person, near the middle, starfishes out. Refuses to budge. The others must move away or be crushed. Some, inevitably, fall off the edge. This community scrambles up the headboard.
They move only a handful of days’ journey by foot, but a much smaller and more critical distance up. Up the side of the mountain that watched over their ancestors, the only place where there are not already people. It is colder there, the growing seasons shorter. The trees are different, the plants below unfamiliar.
The community brings their oats and barley, their pouches of vegetable seeds, their single plow and precious oxen. They cut down the unfamiliar trees to clear land for fields. They adjust their planting and harvesting times, learn to be clever with water. The crops make a brave go of it but the soil is thinner, deteriorates faster. The soil of their parents was lush and fecund, annually replenished by the river. It never asked anything of them, so when this soil does they do not know how to answer. Over a handful of generations the margin between how much food they harvest and how much they need to eat grows thinner, begins to tip the other way.
But that is not their most pressing problem. They should be so lucky as to die the slow death of starvation. The people who forced their grandparents’ grandparents from their homes are now eyeing land up the mountainside. They are more numerous and well-fed on good alluvial harvests. There is nowhere for our mountain folk to flee. The only future they see is slaughter.
So. Start with a community. Put their back to the mountaintop. Take away any hope they have for survival. Give them a ruthlessly pragmatic leader, and elders who know their way around a ritual. Together, in desperation, they weave something new.
Those of fighting age draw lots—one stick dipped in scarlet, ten in black, another two dozen unmarred. The recipient of the red stick—a woman of nineteen, unmarried, still in her parents’ house—becomes the warp, the foundation on which everything rests. The recipients of the black sticks give their lives to become the weft. A willing sacrifice, final and fatal. The most powerful magic there is. Then the edges are cut and hemmed with the desperate pleas of the community. Protect us. Save us from those who would destroy us. Help us survive.
What they create is a being that wears the body of a young woman but no longer is one. Inhumanly powerful, as long as they keep her in offerings and prayers. Who can be killed, with a lot of work, but otherwise won’t die.
Out of blood, fear, and hope, a new god.
Arda bares her teeth at a valley warrior, then slices him open from thigh to opposite shoulder. She has buried her sword in the next warrior before the first one hits the ground.
Arda hardly needs to be on the battlefield at all. Every arrow her people looses flies true. Every blade finds fragile flesh. She sees to it. None of her people get so much as a scratch. She sees to that as well. All the blood that her people needed to shed was given to her two nights ago. But still she carves her way through the enemy in a brutally efficient dance that the few survivors will recount. Stories will spread. These people have a god protecting them. A monstrous thing so drenched in blood that it is impossible to tell if it is a man or a woman. Nobody will have the nerve to attack them for a generation.
Arda is doing what she was created for and it is glorious.
When all the bodies have been taken away, Arda’s people hold a feast for their god, and for the eleven who sacrificed themselves to create her. Arda looks over her people, and the love and responsibility she feels for them burns so strong it would reduce her to ashes if she were mortal. Every part of her sings with it. I have saved them. I have protected them. I am theirs. They are mine.
Two days later, flush with gratitude and offerings, she is already growing restless. Arda the god was created for a singular purpose, now fulfilled. The enemy was defeated and her people have survived to farm another day. What is there left for her to do?
Some of the villagers have ideas. Where a scant few days ago they were desperately grasping at anything that might save them from extermination, now they grow ambitious.
“We should attack them while they are still licking their wounds,” Oeric says. “We can take back the land of our grandparents.”
“My purpose is to defend,” Arda calmly tells the gathered elders, “not to attack.”
“Sooner or later they will come back,” Oeric argues. “They won’t be able to help themselves. The best way to defend ourselves is to ensure they can’t attack us again.”
A couple of the other elders nod along. Arda leans forward. The words written into her seams felt unequivocal before. Now she understands that there are vast gulfs between them, waiting for interpretation. Her purpose need not be fulfilled. There can always be another enemy. Oeric’s words are like the key to a lock inside of her.
“No,” says Ceadda, the head of the council, he of the ruthless pragmatism. “We will not go down that path.”
There is more argument but Arda settles back. The lock inside herself remains in place. The words that created her were spoken in a chorus, but it was led by Ceadda. His interpretation wins, for now.
Ceadda finds her after.
“I think it would be best if you go away for a while,” he tells his god. “We are not under immediate threat here. You can travel. See the world outside the village.”
Arda the woman once shyly confessed to Ceadda a desire to do exactly that. Arda the god just blinks at him.
“My purpose is to protect my people,” she says. “I should stay here.”
Ceadda sighs. “Your presence here is dangerous. Right now the best way for you to protect us is to leave.”
Arda looks at him, bewildered and hurt. Ceadda raises a hand as if he wishes to touch her, to comfort her in some way. But a man does not comfort his god.
“Maybe,” he says instead, “you can learn something in your travels that can help protect us.”
It feels wrong to leave her people but Arda is unsure without a weapon in her hand. She defers to Ceadda. She says goodbye to everyone. Accepts another round of prayers and offerings and thanks. A man and a woman hold her tightly, never mind that she is a god. A young boy clings to the woman’s skirts. A week ago they prayed to a god they did not yet have that their daughter’s stick be anything but black. Now they have simply lost her in another way.
Arda lets them hold her but she feels no more for them than for any of her people whom she was created to protect. You have to cut a lot out of a person to make room for the divine.
The first town Arda enters is a shock. More people than Arda the woman met across her entire life can be found in the central square. She makes her way to an inn and lurks against the wall, listening at the edges of conversations. She learns that the conflict that consumed her village was neither spontaneous nor singular, but the result of war far to the south. The town is full of displaced people, bemoaning their fate. Arda listens, fascinated, to their hushed and horrified descriptions of a massive army and the twin gods that march at its head. One carries a giant sword, the other an enormous shield. These gods, Arda thinks approvingly, are fighting for their people. She is baffled all over again that she had to leave her own.
Arda learns that for every refugee complaining bitterly over ale or flashing unfamiliar coins at the marketplace, there are another half-dozen begging in the streets. She learns that it is possible for a person to starve while surrounded by bounty. She learns about trade routes, and year-round markets, and professional soldiers, and cows raised solely to be eaten, and dozens of foods that even her riverbank dwelling ancestors never tasted.
She learns little about gods. There is one in that first town, with a fountain in her honor in that crowded square. But the god herself is elusive. Disappointed, Arda moves on after a week. She visits temples in towns, lingers at roadside shrines. But those gods that can, avoid her, and those that can’t, refuse to speak with her. They see the blood that coats her, invisible to human eyes. They see a bow pulled taut, arrow notched, awaiting its next target. She would not be the first infant god to cut a bloody swathe through whatever land caught her attention. Like Ceadda, they decide that it is best if she is someone else’s problem.
But even without other gods’ help, Arda learns things about herself. She learns that no matter how far she roams she can tell which direction leads to her people, like a thread that starts in her village and ends tangled in her rib cage. She learns that being away from them is an ache, a hunger that burns and burns and is never satisfied. And yet she doesn’t starve. She learns that a sudden feeling of strength signals an offering left for her. The intrusion of a foreign, desperate thought is a prayer. She learns that she can send a bit of her own power back and that when she does the ache subsides, just for a bit. She learns that she doesn’t need to eat, doesn’t need to drink, doesn’t need to sleep, but she likes to anyway.
She learns that when bandits see a woman traveling alone on an empty road, their first thought isn’t that she is a god.
Three people follow Arda out of the latest town. They are armed and trail behind at a distance that just barely keeps her in sight. Arda, curious, lets them. The exhilaration of discovery she felt in that first town has been worn away by the relentless repetition that followed. Every town has refugees that beg in the streets and a god that won’t speak to her. She is desperate to experience something new.
When the trio disappear into the woods that line the road, Arda slows, pretends she doesn’t see. A few minutes later, a man and a woman step out onto the road in front of her. Another man, a boy really, stumbles out of the woods behind Arda, planting himself nervously at her back. The man in front of her gives the boy a sharp look before turning his attention to Arda.
“What do we have here?” he asks. “A little lost lamb?”
The woman next to him smirks. “It’s dangerous for little lambs to be out without their flocks.”
Arda doesn’t say anything, just cocks her head, waits to see what they will do. There are threatening gestures and more questions which they clearly don’t expect her to answer. It takes them forever to actually lay hands on her. When they do it is over very quickly. She has been unsure of everything else since she left her village but this is superbly straightforward. It has been a terribly long time since she has gotten to kill anyone.
After that, Arda roams the roads between villages. She learns that there are many who would prey on a person traveling alone. She begins to develop a reputation. Bandits think twice when they realize the traveler they are eyeing is a young blond woman. Women who must travel alone send a prayer to her, asking for protection. Arda doesn’t hear them. They are whispers in a language she doesn’t speak. But she might learn it, given enough time. There is more than one way to create a god.
Then, one day, things deviate from the script. It is early spring, the snow just starting to melt, and Arda is on a road halfway up a mountain. Not her people’s mountain, but the trees and budding flowers are familiar and it makes the ache in her chest a little easier to ignore, if not actually less. Two men step out of the tall trees that line the road. They smirk at Arda. Arda smirks back.
Before they can move towards her, a third man runs out into the road. He plants himself between Arda and the men, brandishing an axe.
“Get back!” he snarls. Arda’s would-be attackers look at each other, then back at Arda and her unexpected protector. They look less sure now that it is fair odds.
One of the men raises his hands in a placating gesture. “We were just chatting with the girl,” he says. Arda grins wolfishly at him and the men look at each other, unnerved.
“Leave. Now.” The man with the axe says, his back to Arda. The other men obey, melting back into the trees.
The man lets the axe drop to his side and turns to Arda. “You’re safe now,” he says, voice soft and reassuring.
The man tells Arda his name is Éamonn. He insists that she cannot continue on alone with the bandits still about. Arda is taken with the novelty of being rescued, however unnecessary it was, and accepts his offer of a place to stay the night. She follows him back to a snug and sturdy one-room house bordered by carefully-tended fields.
Éamonn is a perfect gentleman. He insists Arda take the bed while he sleeps on the floor. The next day he tells her she is welcome to stay as long as she likes. Arda surprises him when she accepts. She is charmed by this bashful generosity offered in ignorance of her divinity. But there is something else on the farm that interests her far more.
At the northernmost corner of Éamonn’s fields lives a god.
Here is how one creates a god of the cairn. Start with a field, recently denuded of trees by a fire, their charred flesh nourishing the soil.
Add a farmer. The farmer, over days and weeks, carefully removes the rocks from the field and piles them in one corner. It is a small, indistinct mound at first, but the farmer is taken with it and the effort it represents. He talks to the pile. He shares planting strategies, concerns about the weather, the most optimistic of harvest projections.
When his first harvest is bountiful, the farmer leaves a sheaf of wheat as an offering to the cairn. He adds more rocks to the cairn, some perfectly smooth, others rough and plow-scarred. He begins to take care with their placement, gives the cairn a more uniform shape. He continues to leave offerings. Then, because her father did, his daughter does as well. She is less of a talker but that doesn’t matter. Her son, when it is his turn, talks enough for both of them. And so on, down the familial line. A connection through the generations as slender yet sturdy as spider silk.
The god cannot pinpoint the moment of his creation. He only knows that he looks out across the fields one day and understands where and what he is, and that he has been there for some time.
He whispers advice—what to plant, when to harvest, when to leave a field fallow an extra season— that the farmers don’t hear as words but follow anyway. The god does what he can to make their harvests slightly more bountiful, their lives a little bit easier. He helps plants to send their roots just a little further, to stretch their leaves just a little faster towards the sun. When the wind blowing between his rocks says that rain is coming, he tells his farmer in turn.
He does this for a dozen generations of farmers. It is straightforward, honorable work for a god, unvaried year after year. Until one day his latest farmer brings home a new god.
The god of the cairn knows exactly what Arda is the moment her feet touch the soil of the farm. An absurdly young god, made the quick and gruesome way. Created for one bloody purpose and then cut loose. Trouble with a capital T. He refuses to speak to her.
He tries to warn Éamonn, but the man expects all guidance from his god to pertain to farming. He interprets the uneasy feeling in his gut as a warning of a final spring frost and delays the vegetable planting unnecessarily.
After a week the god of the cairn changes tack. He speaks to Arda for the first time.
“Why aren’t you with your people?” he asks. “Don’t they need you?”
Arda, delighted, replies. “They told me to go out and learn about the world.”
The god of the cairn recognizes creator’s remorse when he hears it. He feels sorry for her. Almost. “There are far more interesting places to learn about the world,” he tells her. “Other gods with whom you have much more in common.”
“Other gods won’t talk to me,” Arda says.
These other gods, the god of the cairn decides, have the right idea. When he was silent, Arda was intrigued. Now she is fascinated. She peppers him with questions. What is your name? How old are you? What is your purpose? How did they get you into the cairn?
“How did they get you into that body?” the god of the cairn retorts.
Arda tells him. He wishes she hadn’t.
Éamonn is a good man. Kind. Hardworking. Loyal. If he has a flaw it is that he possesses a stubborn pride. This comes out primarily in an insistence in always doing a job well, no matter the stakes. In making each field the same number of perfectly even furrows. In making furniture that is beautiful and keeping a house that is tidy, even if for many years no one saw it but him. He is the sort of man whom Arda the woman would have been pleased to marry.
He asks her after she has been with him a month. It is clear he thinks it a formality. They have been living as man and wife for nearly all that time. Arda shocks him when she says no.
The thread connecting Arda to her people is still there, vibrating with prayers and offerings, if less frequently than before. She doesn’t tell Éamonn this, says only that she will have to go back to her people some day.
“Then stay as long as you can,” he tells her. “My home is your home. For as long as you want it to be.”
Éamonn is sincere. He wants as much of his new love as she will give him. As they lie in bed at night, sweat cooling on their bodies, he asks Arda about her childhood, hungry for any detail she can give him. She tells him stories of Arda the girl. Truths that taste like lies. She remembers everything of that life but it is distant. Like stories told to her about someone else.
Arda doesn’t tell him about her true life, her life as a god, except in the broadest, most misleading strokes. She skips over the attack by the valley folk, elides the details of her travels until she could be any woman who left home for reasons she doesn’t wish to share. She lets Éamonn think the only bandits she has ever encountered are the ones he thinks he saved her from.
When it becomes clear that Arda is sticking around, the god of the cairn tells her that she might as well learn to be useful. Arda is already helping Éamonn with the spring plowing and planting. She is strong and never tires, although she pretends to when Éamonn does. Then, when she realizes that is still a blow to his pride, shortly before. They plant a crop Arda has never seen before on one third of the field. Beans, Éamonn calls them, smiling shyly as he hands her a dried brown pod. They can be eaten, he tells her, but more importantly they nourish the soil.
The god of the cairn teaches her the same lesson, in miniscule. He describes to her the little bulbs that form on the roots of the bean plants, giving back some of what the wheat takes away. Arda sits with him and stares at the soil until she goes cross-eyed. If she concentrates really, really hard, she can see those miraculous little nodules that he describes, their centers the dark ochre of incised flesh, diligently working away underground. But when she turns her focus to helping them grow, her concentration runs through her fingers like water.
“This is boring,” Arda says. “Are you sure you don’t have anything I can stab? That’s what I was made for.”
“You said you were made to protect and defend,” the god of the cairn says patiently. “Your people didn’t say anything about stabbing when you were created.”
“It was heavily implied.”
“Stabbing has its limits,” the god of the cairn tells her. “There is not always something to stab. And when there is, stabbing might make it worse. You might,” he continues, “consider diversifying. After all it’s better to grow multiple crops so that if one fails you don’t starve.”
Arda rolls her eyes. The god of the cairn’s metaphors are always about farming.
In the fall, Éamonn and Arda harvest the pods from the bean plants, then plow under their bodies. They clear the weeds from the fallow part of the fields and plant wheat. The god of the cairn shows Arda a fungus that is eating at the roots of the cabbage plants. With a few minutes’ effort and a ferocious look she burns it away, then returns triumphant to the god of the cairn. He begrudgingly admits that, in this aspect of farming, Arda’s natural abilities are better suited than his own. He then has to stop her from eagerly burning away every other fungus on the farm. Many of them, he explains, are beneficial to the plants. Arda sulks for the rest of the day.
But there are other dangers to the farm. Arda may not know a helpful fungus from a harmful one, but she is exquisitely attuned to any threat that carries a blade. She can sense each time bandits pass through the woods surrounding the farm. She informs Éamonn, lying that she glimpsed one through the trees. Éamonn assures her that he will protect her.
Arda is no more successful with the god of the cairn. He cannot sense anything outside the boundaries of the farm and is distressingly unconcerned about it.
“Not my purview,” he tells Arda.
“Do you want me to take care of them?” she asks. Her fingers twitch eagerly at the thought. She misses the fluidity she only feels while fighting. The graceful twist out of the way of an enemy’s reach, her own weapon burying itself in their body, like a dance the two of them had choreographed ahead of time.
“No, little murder god,” the god of the cairn replies. “I do not want you to kill random people in the woods.”
“They’re a threat,” Arda argues. “They could attack the farm.”
“They won’t,” the god of the cairn replies. “I’ve been on this farm for a dozen generations and it has never been attacked.”
Arda thinks this is astonishingly naive, particularly for a god who is always going on about how much older and wiser he is. But she complies. She has already had to leave one home because of fear of what she might do to a possible threat. She doesn’t want to leave here as well. She lies awake at night, tracking the bandits’ movements in the woods, and waits.
As the air turns cold, Éamonn tells Arda he wants to make her a chest. It will take twice as long as she has lived with him to make it. A year to dry the wood he will use before he even starts carving. What sounds at first like a plan is in fact a question. Will she still be there when he completes his gift? She can’t make that promise. Éamonn buries his disappointment under a smile and forges ahead.
Arda sits with the god of the cairn. Together they watch Éamonn approach the tall pine trees that line the hillside at the western edge of his fields. He walks around a tree, scrutinizing it for some criteria that Arda can’t fathom, then puts his palm to the trunk and closes his eyes.
“Not that one,” the god of the cairn says. Éamonn opens his eyes and repeats the process with another tree. If Arda lets her attention drift, she can almost hear the god of the cairn the way Éamonn does. Wind whistling through the gaps in the rocks, carrying the barest hint of meaning.
“What was wrong with that one?” Arda asks after the god of the cairn rejects a fifth tree.
“Hush,” he tells her. “It’ll confuse him if I’m talking to you right now.”
“Just tell me which one is the right one and I’ll tell Éamonn,” Arda says.
“Absolutely not,” the god of the cairn replies. “That might work this time, but what happens when you are no longer here and he’s forgotten how to listen to me?”
That shuts Arda up. The other god’s words anger her, even as they only echo her own repeated insistence that she will, inevitably, leave. Now, for the first time, she considers the possibility of staying.
The people that she loves so fiercely are getting by without her. Their offerings and prayers are fewer and farther between. What will happen when they give up on her entirely? Will she fade away to nothing? Or are there enough scraps of Arda the woman to sew back together into a whole person? She wonders if the fondness she feels for Éamonn could ever bloom into the sort of love Arda the woman was capable of. If she could then take that love and string it like a rope between two cliffs. Follow it, hand over hand, back to humanity.
“Yes, that one will do,” the god of the cairn tells Éamonn. He is resting his hand on a trunk identical to the dozen previously rejected.
Éamonn looks over at Arda and smiles at her. She smiles back. He goes to get his axe and Arda squints at the chosen tree. Then she squints harder and examines its roots. It is easier than it would have been a few months ago, but unenlightening.
“Why that one?” she asks. “What makes it so much better than the others?”
“Nothing,” the god of the cairn says. “The first one would have suited his needs just fine.”
Arda looks at the god of the cairn with confusion, then annoyance. “So why,” she asks, “did you just waste an hour directing him to that one?”
“It wasn’t a waste,” he says patiently. “It was a ritual.”
Arda settles back at these words. Rituals she understands. “So what does the ritual do to the tree?” she asks. “Does it make the wood sturdier? Easier to carve?”
The god of the cairn laughs at Arda, but not unkindly. “Not all rituals have to transform something,” he explains. “This ritual is for Éamonn. It reminds him that a tree should be cut down rarely and with careful consideration.”
“But there are plenty of trees,” Arda points out. “And more will grow.”
“Yes,” the god of the cairn says, “but everything needs to stay in balance. If Éamonn cut down a tree whenever he wanted, and then his child did the same, and his child’s child, eventually all the trees would be gone. What do you think happens then?”
“There won’t be any trees to burn for firewood or make into furniture?”
“Well, yes, I suppose,” the god of the cairn says. “But more importantly, there will be no roots to hold the soil of the hill in place. A good rain will send it all sliding down, burying the fields.”
Arda frowns, mulling this over. The god of the cairn reminds her of Ceadda, when he speaks like this.
Éamonn returns with the axe. He strikes the tree trunk with steady rhythmic thwacks.
“People,” the god of the cairn continues after a while, “are very bad at planning for a future they will not see. Why should they sacrifice their own comfort for strangers they will never meet? It is very hard for something that lives for only seventy years to plan for even another seventy years after their death. That’s why they need gods.”
Hard for a man of not-yet-thirty, and harder still for a god barely two years old. Particularly one created by a people whose only goal was to survive the week. Arda tries to get her mind around the concept, but it is like a tree trunk too wide for her arms to encircle, no matter what angle she tries.
Winter is early and hard. The god of the cairn’s warning saves the crops from the first freeze, but the plants they harvest are smaller, have had less time to grow. Thanks to his god, Éamonn has always been blessed with more than he can eat. Arda, impatient and unsuited to farming as she is, has still helped to pad the margins of the harvest. Even though it has been years since there was more than one mouth to feed through a winter, there is still, just barely, enough.
Éamonn spends a week hewing the trunk of the tree into a beam, the beam into carefully smoothed planks which he lays out in a shed behind the house to dry. He fills his days with various repairs around the farm. In the evenings he shows Arda the patterns he could make on the chest, sketching them out with charcoal on an old board as he shyly asks her opinion. Arda finds that this is one slow, drawn-out task she can find patience for. It is as if she and Éamonn are collaborating on an offering to herself.
It is not the life she was created for but maybe, Arda thinks, it could be enough. Maybe she could stay. Éamonn has asked her to marry him twice more since she first turned him down. Maybe the next time, Arda thinks, she will say yes.
But not all farms are so lucky as to have two gods watching over them. Many starve. Others, who only a season ago cursed those preying on them from the forest, now join their ranks. They are ashamed, but there are no other options. Desperations must.
When they attack, there are more of them than Arda ever sensed lurking in the trees, and they don’t hesitate. Arda is in the field, bundled up against a cold that she is sure hadn’t bit this hard the previous winter. The god of the cairn’s shouts trail her as she races around the house, roaring a battle cry.
There are seven of them in all, four men and three women. They are dressed in torn clothing, their bones standing out sharp through the holes in the fabric. They have been on starvation rations for weeks. Later, Arda will think about this. About the kind of desperation that drives a person to do such a thing. About who they might have hoped to bring food back to. About how not everyone can call on a god for help.
But now, as she tackles the first woman to the ground and wrestles her for the jagged knife she carries, she thinks only about how much harder this is. Harder than the first battle protecting her people. Harder even than the last time she fought bandits.
She finally wrenches the knife from the woman’s grasp and dispatches her with a clean slice through the throat. She whirls and stabs the same knife up and underneath the ribs of the man nearest. Then someone behind her swings a sword into her side and Arda bleeds for the first time in her brief divine life. The remaining five bandits encircle her, just out of reach of her knife. They dart forward singly and in pairs, forcing her to parry their blows. She realizes with horror that they might be capable of tiring her out.
Then the man who is lunging at her goes down, Éamonn’s axe in his back. Arda feels a fresh burst of energy. There is no magic to it, nothing divine. Just the strength that comes from knowing one isn’t alone in a fight. She lunges at the woman nearest, sinks the knife into her stomach. One of the men who has retreated out of reach throws a knife at Éamonn. Arda snatches it out of the air, then sends it singing back to bury itself in the man’s neck. She is once again weaponless, so she leaps, much farther than Arda the woman would have been able to, and snaps the neck of a bandit with her bare hands. The last one is already running. Arda hefts a stone and throws it. It hits the base of the bandit’s skull with a crack. He flies forward and sprawls onto the ground. Arda doesn’t need to check to know he is dead.
She turns. Éamonn is standing behind her. There is not a scratch on him and only the blood of that first bandit on his axe. Arda feels the same triumph as when all her people came back from battle unscathed. Except none of them looked at her with this much fear in their eyes. He stares at Arda, knuckles white where they grip the handle of the axe. Arda spreads her hands out slowly, like Éamonn is an animal she must not startle.
And yet even with his fear, Arda feels an exultant relief. If she is destined to lose her godhood then at least it will not be in a slow, secret fade. Éamonn has seen what she really is, even if he does not yet understand it. She will tell him everything and they will face whatever her future holds together.
After they have laid out the bodies in a neat row and washed the blood off themselves, Arda takes Éamonn’s hand in hers. She answers each of his questions truthfully, including the ones he doesn’t know to ask. Every answer he gets dampens his enthusiasm for the next. By the third question he has extracted his hand from hers, folding his arms across his chest.
“You were never in any danger at all when I found you,” he says eventually.
Arda shakes her head. She realizes, finally, that the emotion on Éamonn’s face is not fear, but embarrassment.
Arda has always considered how she and Éamonn met an amusing bit of chance and misunderstanding. But she understands now that for Éamonn it is the foundation of their relationship. He saved Arda’s life, and as a result she came to live with him. The shy romantic in him might have thought she would save him in a metaphorical sense, but never a literal one. His pride will not allow it.
That day and into the night, Arda buries the bodies. She doesn’t pretend to get tired, or to need to sleep or eat. In the morning she says goodbye to the god of the cairn.
“You had the right idea,” she tells him, “when you tried to warn Éamonn about me.”
“If I had succeeded he would be dead now,” the god of the cairn replies. “The farm would be lost and I would be gone soon as well. They didn’t seem like the type to leave offerings. I should have let you kill them when you first asked.”
“I don’t think those were the same ones,” Arda says. “Or at least that wasn’t all of them. It might not have made a difference.”
“Maybe those ones attacked a different farm and killed the people there,” the god of the cairn says, undeterred.
“Maybe,” Arda says. She thought a lot, as she dug graves in the hard winter ground, about how she could kill every person who looked like they might be a threat and it still wouldn’t be enough.
The god of the cairn directs her to a small flat stone halfway down on his eastern side.
“Take it,” the god of the cairn tells Arda. She looks at him in confusion.
“It’s a part of you,” Arda says. “Will it connect me to you when I’m far away?”
The god of the cairn laughs. The sound sings through the gaps in the rocks. “No more than your hair is a part of you after you cut it. Once you take it, it will just be a rock.”
Arda’s hand hovers over the stone, not quite touching it.
“Thank you,” the god of the cairn says, “for saving us.”
Arda understands then. The stone is an offering. She picks it up and it fits perfectly in her palm. It is warm from the sun. As she slips it into her pocket she feels something click open inside of her.
“I’ll come back to visit,” she says. “When you have a new farmer who doesn’t remember me.”
“I would like that very much,” the god of the cairn says.
Inside the house, Arda’s few possessions are already in a bundle. Éamonn stands in the corner, wary and still. It hurts Arda, seeing him like this. But it is like the wound on her side, already closing up. She was never meant to live like this, performing a parody of romantic love. That temptation had been an echo of Arda the woman, incompletely written over and showing faintly through like a palimpsest. But she is not Arda the woman and never will be. Arda the god has a people to protect.
“Thank you,” she says to Éamonn, “for letting me stay here.” She invests the words with all the gratitude she feels. Holds them out like an offering. Éamonn grimaces and looks away. Ah well.
Arda walks over to the wall, sticks her hand in a sack there and pulls out a handful of dried beans. “I’m taking these,” she tells him, and places them in the pocket with the stone.
Then she walks out the door and doesn’t look back.
Arda makes her way, unhurried, over mountains and through valleys, retracing the path she took a year before. She sits down at crowded tables in inns, strikes up lengthy conversations with farmers. She learns that people are drawn to talk to her without them quite understanding why. She speaks with people driven from a dozen different villages and towns, trying to map the terrain of the distant kingdom’s ambitions.
She talks to gods as well. Not all of them are willing. But many see that while she is still coated in blood, on top of that is a layer of dirt. Good, well-tended, healthy soil. Her last stop before returning home is the village that attacked her people. They don’t recognize her, and she seeks out a shrine, built since her people’s ancestors were driven out. She speaks for a long time with the god that dwells there.
She arrives back at her village almost three years to the day after she left. Winter was hard here as well. The sacrifices that created her have saved the village again by being eleven fewer mouths to feed. Everybody looks older. More haggard. Arda looks exactly the same.
Ceadda is dead, from nothing more remarkable than growing old. The woman who clung to Arda when she left is dead from fever, along with two others. Arda the god is not meant to mourn the deaths of individuals, but she regrets Ceadda’s absence. She values his foresight in a way that she had been unable to before.
Instead there is Oeric, chosen as the village’s new leader after Ceadda’s death. The hard winter and deteriorating harvests have caused village opinion to trend martial, even without their god to lead the charge. They are eyeing the fields down the mountain the way those people so recently eyed theirs.
Oeric brings her to a hasty gathering of the elders.
“Our god has returned,” he declares. “She has heard our wishes. She supports us in our hour of need.”
He goes on. His new role has turned him pompous and long-winded. Arda regrets Ceadda’s death all the more. She cuts Oeric off.
“We’re planting these in the fields,” Arda says. She pours out a sack full of dried beans, grasping the corner to stop the stone at the bottom from spilling out with them. The beans are more numerous and varied than the ones she took from Éamonn, the collected wisdom of all the farmers she has spoken with. “I also have some plans for improving irrigation,” she continues, “and we’re going to plant more trees along the edges of the field.”
Oeric looks at her like he has been handed a delectable looking fruit only to bite into it and find it unaccountably sour. The other elders exchange looks.
“I thought you came back to protect us,” Oeric says. “To defend us.”
“I have,” Arda says. “I’m defending you from hunger. From starvation. From having to move again because nothing will grow in the soil.”
Arda lets the elders debate. She notes who is inclined to defer to their god, who is the most intransigent in their opinions, who the others look to for guidance. This is not the last thing she will need to convince them of, or the hardest. When she sees that some of them are unswayed, she breaks in mildly. “And of course when our harvests grow and surpass those of the valley, and the people there inevitably covet everything we have and attack, I’ll defend you then. And who knows where that might lead.”
This mollifies the holdouts, Oeric included. Arda goes to reacquaint herself with her village and her people. On the southern edge of the village, at the corner of a field that Arda the woman grew up tending, she finds a shrine. It is a modest, rough-hewn thing, with a small altar for leaving offerings. On it is a wood carving of a deer, a feather from a blue jay, a trio of small hard apples. She touches the tip of her finger gently to the feather. It feels like something is dropped into a pool within herself. A slight disturbance, then ripples moving outwards. Arda takes out the stone and places it next to the feather.
Arda had not been lying to the elders. If the village is attacked again she will defend her people, and gladly. But Arda has learned many things in her travels. Things like treaties and trade agreements. Regional harvest festivals. Alliance against a common enemy.
She was created to protect her people and she is going to do so. Maybe protect a lot of others as well. And she’s going to do it in a dozen different ways. She’s diversifying. But for now, she goes to help with the spring planting.
| Rachel Meresman is a speculative fiction author living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her short fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Escape Pod, and Fusion Fragment. You can find her online at rachelmeresman.com. |  |