"SO WHAT DID SHE LOOK LIKE, THIS GODDESS?" ALICE DEMANDED.
"Didn't get much of an eyeful," Edward said. "She was there and then she was gone. You've seen one goddess, you've seem them all."
The two of them were strolling through St. James's Park, Edward casually swinging her overnight bag. It was a beautiful autumn afternoon. They had lots of time, and a straight line from Lambeth to Paddington would take them through the fairest parts of London—over Westminster Bridge, past the Houses of Parliament, across St. James's Park, Green Park, and Hyde Park. Then they would be almost there.
It was wonderful to have Edward back, after three years of wondering and worrying and almost but not quite giving up hope. He was more than just a cousin. He was her foster brother, her only living relative. She had not yet plumbed all the changes in him—strength and firmness of purpose. The schoolboy honor would be more deliberate and perhaps more practical, but no less firm.
This should be a marvelous day, a day to savor and remember, yet she could not shake off a creepy sensation that she was being followed. She glanced behind her once in a while, although reason told her that any follower could hide amid the milling crowds.
Edward noticed, of course. "What's the matter? You're jumpy as a grasshopper."
"Guilty conscience. I ought to be at work."
"They'll hold the war for you. What sort of work do you do, anyway?"
"Can't talk about it. Official Secrets Act." If he were to guess that pianists made good typists and very few secretaries in London could type Kikuyu, he would not be far off.
Policemen bothered her. She kept thinking they were staring at her.
Half a dozen young men walked past talking loudly. Edward glanced back in surprise. "Americans?"
"Canadians, I expect. On leave."
He shook his head disbelievingly. "The whole world at war! It's mind-boggling."
"They all seem to come to London," she said. "I don't know how they stand it—a few days in civilization, knowing they have to go back to the trenches, to be scarred and tortured—or killed."
Edward said nothing.
"That wasn't exactly tactful of me, was it? Edward, are you sure your duty is here?"
He looked down at her quickly, then away. He pointed. "Never thought I'd see guns in London. Antiaircraft, I suppose?"
"Answer me!"
He frowned. "Of course my duty is here! You know! We weren't born in England, you and I, but this is our native land. Nextdoor isn't."
"But you know you can achieve something worthwhile there, in your storybook world, because of that prophecy! Here you may just become another number, one of millions."
"I will not be less than those millions!"
"But you could be one in millions."
He scowled. "Alice, can't you understand? You might have talked me out of it before, but now I've seen what it's like! Those men carried me for hours across that hell, and I saw. I had never imagined war could be so horrible. I had never imagined anything could be so horrible. But now I've seen it. Now I know. I have to go back there! I can't run away now."
That seemed a very stupid, masculine way to think. "We have to win the war," she said. "It's cost so much that we can't stop now. But I don't know that you belong in it." Or D'Arcy, either. "We aren't all called to serve in the same way. You don't pull carts with racehorses."
"You don't make pets of them, either."
They paced on. The park was surprisingly crowded. She took his hand, though she had promised herself she wouldn't. He squeezed her fingers without looking down at her.
"What amazes me," he said after a while, "is how you all seem to accept my story. I'd have expected you to have me locked up in Colney Hatch as a babbling loony."
"You carry conviction. You always did. Have you ever told a lie in your life?"
"Course I have! Don't be ridiculous! Everyone has."
"About anything important?"
He took some time to answer, staring woodenly at nothing. "Lying isn't important. Betraying friends, now . . . that's worse."
"I won't believe you ever have."
"Well, that's where you're wrong!" he snapped. "Twice! That damned prophecy keeps trying to make me a god . . . . And I keep thinking of Holy Roly . . . . Telling people what they must do—what's right and what's wrong!" He looked down, and she was astonished to see that his eyes were shiny with tears.
She reminded herself that something had changed him and to pry might be needless cruelty. This day was much too precious to spend quarreling. "Tell me what magic feels like?"
He smiled. "That's impossible! Like describing color to a blind man. When you have mana you know it, but I can't say how. It's a little like having a bag of money, so you can feel the weight of the coins. You're a great pianist—"
"I had some talent."
"How did you know your talent? Mana's like that. How does an athlete know his strength? It's a fizz in the head. It's an excitement. I thought I knew what it was like, but I didn't really. Not until that day in Olfaan's temple. Oh, I'd picked up scraps now and then, but nothing like that. Having a troop of warriors to lead had been giving me some, but we hadn't been on a node. Nodes make all the difference. That's why strangers find themselves nodes and become numens—gods, if you want to call them that. As soon as we marched in, my chaps realized that my drill had made them superior to all the other contingents. They were thinking, Good old D'ward! and I could feel that pride and admiration like a shot of hot brandy."
"You weren't frightened of the numen, Olfaan?"
He laughed. "I was a complete innocent! I still trusted Krobidirkin, you see. I thought he would have foreseen that ceremony and warned Olfaan I was coming and won her approval. Astina's lot were not part of the Chamber—so I thought, and in a very rough sense I was right about that. I was wrong about Krobidirkin. The Herder was just using me. There's the palace!"
"It's usually around here somewhere."
They stopped at the curb, looking across at Buckingham Palace, waiting for the policemen controlling the traffic.
"Ugly heap, isn't it?" Edward said. "You'd think that the King-Emperor of a quarter of the world would have a more impressive residence. Pity he isn't home, or we could drop in for tea." The royal standard was not flying.
"He's doing his bit. He does a lot for the troops."
"So he damned well should! They're certainly doing enough for him."
Alice glanced up, surprised. "What's wrong?"
"Oh . . . nothing."
"Come on! Out with it."
He shrugged, frowning. "I wish I understood how it works here. That was something we didn't talk about much in Olympus. A couple of thousand years ago, yes. Then it worked on Earth very much as it still does on Nextdoor. I think there really was a god at Delphi, then. When the Greeks went to consult the oracle, there was a numen present and the prophecies were genuine. Or some of them at least. When the Romans prayed in the Capitol to Jupiter Optimus Maximus, someone was listening. But things changed a few centuries back."
Alice had been wondering about that. "Nietzsche? 'God is dead'?"
"No. The gods are not dead. They're still here, or else there are new gods. People stopped taking them literally when the Enlightenment came, but they didn't die. They've taken some other form."
"You're not saying King George is a stranger?"
He laughed. "Hardly!" His mood darkened. "No. Creighton said the Blighters started this war, but there's no nominal god of death receiving the sacrifices. That doesn't mean the sacrifices aren't being made. Who is lapping up the mana?"
"Edward! Are you saying that all gods—all gods—throughout history . . . that all gods and all religions have been fakes, frauds?"
He hesitated. "No. No, I'm not saying that. You see, what the Service is trying to introduce in the Vales is a system of ethics that you would recognize. You would approve. I do. It has a lot of Christianity in it, and a lot of Buddhism . . . . The Golden Rule, mostly—the sort of thing that has cropped up in our world and in that world many times. It has to come from somewhere and—Come on!"
The policeman was waving. They crossed the road. She kept trying to release his hand, but he was holding her fingers tightly. Passersby shot them disapproving looks.
"It's incredible to be back here," he said. "To see all the old familiar sights again."
"And yet the differences? What do you notice?"
"Crowds. The whole population of the Vales would not fill London. People overdressed, because of the climate. Walking their dogs! How absurdly, typically English! Mothers pushing babies in prams. Tourists and late holidaymakers, soldiers on leave. Policemen. Do those barrage balloons really do any good?"
They talked of the war for a while. They crossed Piccadilly and entered Hyde Park. His sinister talk of sacrifice bothered her, though, and eventually she asked him how it worked.
He sighed. "Know that, and you would understand all mysteries! The essence of sacrifice is that you do something you don't want to do because you think it will please your god. If you're lucky, you get a pat on the head and feel good. If I hadn't known that before, then I'd have learned it that day in Nag. All those warriors from Sonalby sacrificed to me! They didn't mean to. They didn't even know they were doing it, but each of them had to perform a very unpleasant ritual with a blunt knife and a handful of salt. They thought they were doing it for their own manhood, their goddess, and poor old Golbfish, but I was their leader and their friend, and there I was, right on the node. I had charisma! So they did it for me, and pretty soon I was gibbering drunk with mana."
"That was what you used on Golbfish?"
"Not really. I didn't use anything on him except charisma, and I couldn't help that. Oh, I suppose I was being a little more than naïve. Right at the beginning, as soon as he went up to the altar, I knew he was a very worried man. Probably no one else knew. I had no idea what the matter was, but I felt sorry for him. When I finally got my chance to march up the steps, I tried to give him a bit of cheering up. I gave him one of those looks you do when you want to tell someone something without actually speaking, you know? He sort of grabbed at it, and I realized that he was in mortal terror."
"Then the goddess came?"
"At the end she did. If I was tipsy, she must have been completely bung-eyed by that time. She'd all those thousands of people singing hymns to her and then hundreds of men offering blood and pain, all right on her node—mana in torrents! I don't suppose she'd had a feast like that in a generation. And suddenly it was cut off. It was all coming to me, see? So she came to find out what was going on. I'm sure nobody else saw her. I caught a glimpse and thought, Whoops! and she saw me and I'm sure she guessed right away who I was. I was very bad news, because I might queer her with Zath or Karzon or with major intriguing in the Pentatheon. The lady did not want to be involved! So she scarpered."
"But what did she look like?"
"Nothing special, as I recall," he said vaguely. "Big woman. Hardly saw her. It was like two friends passing in a busy street. They tip their hats to each other and are gone. I was more worried about Golbfish."
"Why? Why did you decide to help him?"
Edward shrugged, almost shyly. "I didn't do anything, really. He needed a friend and my charisma made him trust me. He thought up his own way out. I was amused to discover I now had a prince under my command. I wasn't thinking too clearly, as I said. I felt invincible! Good day for sailing boats!"
Alice looked to where the children were playing by the Serpentine.
"Is that what you want to do? Stop and play with toy boats on a lake, just let the world go by? Two worlds?"
"I want to enlist."
"Edward, what exactly is prophesied about you in the other world? What does the Liberator actually do?"
He turned on her in sudden anger. "I told you: He kills Death. Not real death, just Zath, of course. And that's disaster! It leads to disaster! There's only one way it could be done, and that's for me to set myself up as a god and collect more mana than Zath—and he's been at it for a hundred years. I can't imagine what horrors I'd have to invent to squeeze worship on that scale out of the masses, and what happens after? What happens to me? What happens to them? All that just to kill one stranger, who'll probably be replaced by another in two shakes? Zath's the first one nasty enough to claim to be god of death, but it's such a great swindle he invented that he certainly won't be the last. The guv'nor saw all that, and when I finally got to read the bloody Filoby thing, I saw too, and I won't have anything to do with it! I came Home to enlist, but I also came Home to break the chain, and I'm never going back! Never! I won't! I mean it! That's final!" He spun on his heel and stalked away, walking faster than before.
She ran after him. "No, I don't see. Are you sure you can't kill Zath without using mana?"
"Absolutely certain."
"Then you could take the god of death office yourself, to make sure it isn't abused."
"Faugh! No. Don't worry about it. It won't happen. I'd rather stop a German bullet any day. What else do you want to know, apart from that?"
"What happened to Golbfish?"
Edward sighed. "Ah, that's quite a story. If it wasn't for Golbfish I wouldn't be here. First thing, of course, when we'd barely left the temple, was that a couple of heralds appeared, demanding that he return to the palace."
"And?"
Edward grinned, looking suddenly very juvenile. "I told them that Golbfish Warrior was now under my command and I refused to release him. I had a hundred spearsmen with me, so the argument was brief."
Alice glanced at her watch. They still had an hour before train time.
"Of course," he said, "I realized that I had blundered into a major political crisis. We'd hardly got back to camp before I was summoned to appear before Kammaeman Battlemaster, the Joalian general. I was told to bring my new recruit with me, but I didn't. I went alone and explained that the prince couldn't come—he was too busy digging latrine ditches. After that, they sort of lost interest in us."
"Never mind your confounded modesty! What did you really do?"
"Nothing much," Edward said blandly.