Deification—a dying emperor becoming a god
She remembers nothing. And then she feels the light. It is all around her, lifting her, raising her up. It is clarity. Her mind is in control of itself for the first time. She feels each cell of her body and knows the connections between them. There is no war between the will and the deed –to want is to do. She walks forward, out of the light into a place that is strange but that welcomes her. She remembers everything.
Everything. The sound of a pebble falling into a lake in another lifetime, when she was six; the first time she killed a fly; every kiss she gave or got; the taste of blood from when she smashed her head on a rock; names she’d successfully buried in the depths of her memory; her father’s smile; how many steps led up to the palace that was hers when she was alive; the soreness in her body after her first battle and her joy in that soreness, which meant she had survived; years and months and days and seconds; her death.
It had not been painful. It came after a long illness, and was like slipping into warm water. She was alive, and then she was not. And now she has reached this place of renewed life and vigor—this paradise, this home of the gods. This is what it is to be a god: absolute control of self, ceaseless remembrance, knowledge that cuts like a knife.
For everything the Senate had said was true: she had, through the love of her people, earned divinity.
Do ut Des—sacrificing to the gods so they will give you your desire
It is very strange to be the recipient of sacrifices. Stranger still to be privy to all the desires that go along with them. The other gods tell her that she cannot give as much as she wants to, as much as she is able to. Their reasons differ—because mortals must be left in doubt, says one. Because they cannot have all they desire. Because they must earn what they get.
–You have earned your place, says one god. It was not given to you. You earned everything you had. Would you have valued your empire if you had inherited it, or if a god had descended and bestowed it upon you?
She remembers her hands covered in blood. She remembers seeing the ocean for the first time, mounted on a tall horse, at the head of an army. She remembers going to her general’s—her friend’s—farm, to tell the general’s husband that she had fallen in service of the Empire. She remembers the man’s tears. She remembers the sweat running down her back as she hacked at a training dummy, seeking oblivion in exhaustion.
–Yes, she lies.
The god smiles. He is a god of something nebulous, like the force that impels the sun to rise in the morning, which is very different from being a god of the sun itself, or else the dew in the morning, or shadows. She has found it hard to tell the gods apart. She is the god of something now herself. It is not enough to be deified. You must specialize, even in the home of the gods. She is the god of the last hope. If it were in her to be a terrible god, she would be; as it is, she weeps nightly—for gods can weep, and have much to weep about.
She still wants to give. All that she can. And that is everything.
She feels the prayers hit her like arrows.
–Heal my son, who is ill.
–Help me walk again.
–Grant me safe passage over the sea.
–Bring my sister home safe.
–Heal me.
–Heal me.
–Heal me.
They give her all they can—a chicken that represents days of privation, or a perfect white bull. The best. That is her due. She feels their prayers, their need, nourish her even as they pierce her to the heart. And she heeds the other gods, and gives only rarely: to the father who holds his sick son; to the sister who prays for her sister’s return; to the mother who labors to feed her family.
In a tiny hut on the banks of the river, a girl lies dying. Her mother bathes her feverish forehead with clothes soaked in cool water, and on the proper days she makes sacrifices to the last empress, who has so lately become a god. She has nothing. And yet she gives so much, so that this daughter, this one of five, might live. The new god observes her, coming back to her again and again, watching her hope wane.
But she feels the gifts she gives diminish her. She knows that some of the other gods never give and understands them even as she disdains them. What good is eternal life, eternal strength, eternity, if she cannot use it to aid the people of the empire she had lived to serve?
Eximius—chosen for sacrifice because of its perfection
What is excellence? It is a thing to be strived for and not to be won. There is always more. There is no apex. She had learned that you must remain in constant motion, ever onward, ever upward. Each day must be better than the last. She doesn’t remember, even with the perfect memory of a god, when she had learned it. It is a thing she had taken in with the air she breathed. The impossibility of perfection could have weighed on her so much that she never moved. Instead, she took one look at impossibility and decided to conquer it. And so she did: with sword and with pen, in the courthouse and on the battlefield. She forced herself to be good. She saw the errors of her predecessors and understood them and condemned them.
She did not decide to be emperor until she knew she could be—knew that she would win the battles that mattered and that she would serve the Empire well. She served her time as a soldier and she excelled. She won promotions easily, through the simple expedient of being inescapably the best. She was not liked. That would come later. Each day was another chance to prove herself.
They would say, when it came time to argue for her deification, that an eagle swooped down and placed the laurel wreath upon her head. It is not true. She crowned herself, in an act of will, as she did everything else. She was the only possible candidate for the troops to choose—a woman of ice, it is true, but a woman whose iciness itself mended fences in legions, a woman who had no favorites and no lovers, a woman in whom righteousness burned, cold as ice.
Augury—the art of telling the future through the reading of signs
The future is always with her. She sees it before her, endless as the fruitless sea. It is hard to keep going when she knows there is no end. She had not known it, but she had been looking forward to the rest that was the underworld, after a life as grueling as that of a bull beneath the yoke.
There is no point to the pursuit of excellence when you have attained immortality. There will be no respite and no reward. She wanders through Paradise with no purpose.
She seeks out an emperor who had been deified three hundred years before to ask him what you do with the impossible gift that has been given to you.
–You survive, he says. You give what you can, and you stop your ears to the prayers you can’t bear to hear, and you keep going.
–But why? she asks. Why wake up, when I have no reason to be better each day? When I must watch my successors destroy what I have striven for?
–Would you have oblivion?
–Rather than uselessness? Perhaps.
She turns away. She needs something from existence that perfection cannot provide: a purpose. And more than a purpose, something to want. She lacks nothing, here in paradise, in this world where leaves turn colors with her thoughts, from green to gold and back to green, where she could make the rivers run backward and rain fall upward. It is worse than she could have ever imagined the fires of Hell to be.
Devotio—a general promising his life to the gods for victory
She wins the love of her troops by saving them—from the dishonor of defeat, from a traitor’s death. They love her because she does not love them. They love her because she is as quick to reward skill and virtue as she is to punish vice and carelessness. She is an empress they could follow—would follow, will follow—anywhere. It is their good fortune that they will follow her to victory.
Her army pauses only once, at the Great Sea. Born in the heart of the empire, deep in the forest, which is itself like a sea, she had never imagined that so much water could exist in all the gods’ world.
She stands astounded, controlling her horse with automatic movements. The sea crashes on the beach, and the fleet stands ready, waiting to be blessed by the priests, who wait on her command. She is struck dumb by the immensity of the sea. Her second-in-command comes up behind her to remind her that it is time to go, and she holds up her hand.
–Give me time, she says. I need more time. This is Eternity, and I want to see it.
And then she goes down to the beach and watches the priests paint the ships with blood. Their songs reach the heavens, a cacophony of instruments and singers; and the hoarse voice of the High Priest rises over it all.
Fanum—a shrine, a place sacred to a specific god
Divinity hits all of them hard. Most of the deified emperors take refuge in drink, the immortal drink that is more intoxicating than any wine. Or else in war. They fight each other forever, their blades clashing uselessly off each other, drawing ichor that stains the white sand purple. No one watches these battles. There is no interest to them: the combatants cannot die, cannot win, cannot lose.
She retreats to lonely corners where she can watch the world happen. It doesn’t help. Nothing helps. The world goes by and she cannot influence it. It is hard for her, who is accustomed to having her slightest whim obeyed, to watch and to clench her hands uselessly as the next emperor condemns her favorite for the crime of having loved her. Even when her heart is not engaged, she is angry: her successor, whom she had chosen, mismanages the finances; he destroys her legacy. It is barely a balm to her heart that they call her reign “the good old days of the last Empress.”
Whom do gods pray to? She doesn’t know whom the others choose; for herself, she chooses no one. She sees the daily miracles of sunrise and sunset, the growing of the grain and the fall of snow, and she is no closer to knowing what engenders them than she had been when she was mortal. Certainly it is not her fellow gods, who quarrel and battle and tear at each other.
She finds the quiet places of Paradise, the places where the paint does not renew itself, where there is a certain human shabbiness, and she makes them her shrines. She becomes a god of cracks and shadows. Mortals do not forget her. They remember her when they are lost and call out to her—a Queen of the forgotten, of the dying, of those in extremis. And she saves them, choosing at random. A sailor falling from the mast. A boy dying of cancer. A man encircled by wolves.
Dies imperii—the day an emperor takes up power
The city opens its gates to her, all seven of them at once.
The grinding of the gears can be heard from miles away. She enters not as an invader but as a savior. They bring her predecessor’s head on a platter. She does not look at it, but throws her mantle over it, giving the dead woman the honor and the dignity she does not deserve. It will all become part of her legend.
Numbly, on a horse that is still caked with the dust of the road, in a uniform that was last laundered three provinces away, she rides through the streets of the city that is now hers, lifting her hand at the right times, to loud cheers and great approbation. It is not real yet. It will be soon—when the glory fades, when it comes time to speak to the Senate and to take stock of the treasury.
But that time has not come yet. Now she makes herself into what they want her to be. They see the stained uniform and the woman sitting ramrod straight on the tired, dusty horse, and they see a soldier, a woman who has come to bring discipline to a city that desperately needs correction. That is what she is, what she must be, what she was born to be. The gods hold their hands over her.
After so many years of emperors who wasted the gifts they were given, here is an empress who will do what is necessary. She will be a stern mother to the empire. She will purge it of the lassitude that has plagued it.
Miraculum—a miracle accomplished through the power of a god
–It’s not worth saving her, the other god says. You will gain her another seventy years at the most. And who’s to say that she’ll thank you? Mortals are an ungrateful race.
The new god is silent, her mouth stubbornly set.
–I see, he says. You want to save her for yourself. To make yourself useful and virtuous. Well, do as you please. Fate does not concern itself with lives like hers.
–And shouldn’t it? she says, her fear and anger flowing into her speech. We are told that the gods hold the fates of the smallest of us in their hands—that nothing we suffer for them goes unremarked.
–We soothe children with comforting lies, he says mildly. Is it not the more comforting to know that your choices are your own?
She turns away from him. Down there in the mortal world, a girl is dying.
Down there in the mortal world, a thousand thousand girls are dying. She cannot help them all. But one girl, whose life she feels pulsing like a fish jerking at the end of a line, a girl whose mother asks her, the deified twenty-seventh empress, for her divine aid, a girl whose mother gave the cow that kept her family from poverty so that she might live—this girl she can help.
And so she does.
The epics told of gods visiting mortals in disguise, but that much was fiction. A barrier keeps their worlds apart. The new god sends a thought like a shaft of light to the bed where the feverish girl tosses and turns, coughing in her sleep. She is not healed immediately. But the coughs come less frequently, and she sleeps more easily.
The god sees the outline of her life, stretching out past the horizon, circling the earth thousands of times. She would do nothing of note, for good or for ill; she would love and marry and have children and leave behind a mill that ground good flour. A steady, comfortable life.
Paludata—in military dress, referring to the ritual state of an emperor or general
Her sword brought an empress to her knees. But the general is no longer needed—now is the time of the accountant. And so she puts the general aside, hanging her in the back of her closet along with her armor. No epics will be written about the battles she fights now, these late-night battles of stylus and wax. And yet she knows that more good will come of them than of those other battles.
Her stylus slashes downward, forming a “1”—somewhere in her vast empire, the columns of a temple rise. She crosses a “7”—a bridge spans an uncrossable river.
There are worse epithets for posterity to know you by than “The Bean-Counter,” she decides.
And so she burns her candles in the depths of the nights, and sleeps not enough, and argues her cases in the Senate. It does not occur to her to appropriate funds for her pleasure. After all, does a sword or a pen have pleasure? She is an instrument of the gods, who favor this empire, as they have for the past five hundred years.
She is a good accountant, as she was a good soldier, as she would have been a good farmer. That’s the thing about her story: it’s the traditional story of a rise and fall. But there is no fall, only a rise that keeps on rising and rising and rising.
Aeternitas—the endless expanse of time
After she heals the girl, her existence is much the same. The same monotony of perfect days. The same golden sun and gentle breeze. The same sickening feasts on food too perfect for mortals to taste. The same thwarted desires.
No wonder the ancient gods had grown cruel. What else was there to do with eternity but set mortal against mortal for entertainment’s sake?
And still she resists. She heals other mortals, here and there. She hears prayers. She watches the empire she had brought to a glorious zenith drop and decay and die.
With the empire, the gods’ usefulness to humanity dies. There are no more sacrifices, no more prayers, no more demands. She feels the waning of their power as a release like the release from guard duty when she was a mortal soldier. Her back relaxes. She allows herself to breathe.
At last there are no more prayers. The gods look up from their separate games, look at each other across reflecting pools that are no longer quite so brilliant, at faces that would no longer incinerate a mortal with their glory. They begin to forget.
But they are still immortal. The universe cannot recall its gifts. What does a god do, when their divinity is gone? She doesn’t know. She leaves what was paradise—its paint peeling, its wood splitting—behind her, humming a soldier’s tune. What does anyone do, when they’ve outlived their usefulness? She can’t say. It doesn’t matter. She has all of eternity to find out.
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A.J Hammer has a B.A. in Classics from Princeton University and has worked in the field of education policy. She used to be a short track speed skater, but now writes fantasy. Her work can be found in the Gothics and Archives editions of Lackington’s Magazine, Issue 5 of Anathema: Spec from the Margins, and the Scifi and Religion edition of Big Echo Magazine. She lives and gardens in Texas. |