Dust of Dreams

perhaps, and then lost on the fly, striking a hard and unyielding surface—a flagstone, yes—one making up the winding path in the garden. Injured, blind in the blazing sunlight, it could only pray to whatever gods it wanted to exist. The blessing of water, a stream to swim back into the soft soil, a sudden handful of sweet earth descending upon it, or the hand of some merciful godling reaching down, the pluck of salvation.
    She had watched it struggle, she was certain she had. But she could not recall if she had done anything other than watch. Children understood at a very youngage that doing nothing was an expression of power. Doing nothing was a choice swollen with omnipotence. It was, in fact, godly.
    And this, she now realized, was the reason why the gods did nothing. Proof of their omniscience. After all, to act was to announce awful limitations, for it revealed that chance acted first, the accidents were just that—events beyond the will of the gods—and all they could do in answer was to attempt to remedy the consequences, to alter natural ends. To act, then, was an admission of fallibility.
    Such ideas were complicated, but they were clean, too. Sharp as the crystals jutting from the ground at her feet. They were decisive in catching the rays of the sun and cutting them into perfect slices, proving that rainbows were not bridges in the sky. And that no salvation was forthcoming. The Snake had become a worm, and the worm was writhing on the hot stone.
    Children withheld. Pretending to be gods. Fathers did the same, unblinking when the children begged for food, for water. They knew moments of nostalgia and so did nothing, and there was no food and no water and the sweet cool earth was a memory finely dusted with ash.
    Brayderal had said that morning that she had seen tall strangers standing beneath the rising sun, standing, she said, on the ribby snake’s tail. But to look in that direction was to go blind. People could either believe Brayderal or not believe her. Badalle chose not to believe her. None of the Quitters had chased after them, even the Fathers were long gone, as were the ribbers and all the eaters of dead and dying meat except for the Shards—who could fly in from leagues away. No, the ribby snake was alone on the Glass Desert, and the gods watched down and did nothing, to show just how powerful they really were.
    But she could answer with her own power. That was the delicious truth. She could see them writhing in the sky, shrivelling in the sun. And she chose not to pray to them. She chose to say nothing at all. When she had winged through the heavens, she had sailed close to those gods, fresh and free as a hatchling. She had seen the deep lines bracketing their worried eyes. She had seen the weathered tracks of their growing fear and dismay. But none of these sentiments was a gift to their worshippers. The faces and their expressions were the faces of the self-obsessed. Such knowledge was fire. Feathers ignited. She had spiralled in a half-wild descent, unravelling smoke in her wake. Flashes of pain, truths searing her flesh. She had plunged through clouds of Shards, deafened by the hissing roar of wings. She had seen the ribby snake stretched out across a glittering sea, had seen—with a shock—how short and thin it had grown.
    She thought again of the gods now high above her. Those faces were no different from her own face. The gods were as broken as she was broken, inside and out. Like her, they wandered a wasteland with nowhere to go.
    The Fathers drove us out. They were done with children.
Now she believed the fathers and mothers of the gods had driven them out as well, pushed them out into the empty sky. And all the while and far below the people crawled in their circles and from high up no one could make sense of the patterns. The gods that sought to make sense of them were driven mad.
    ‘Badalle.’
    She blinked in an effort to clear her eyes of the cloudy skins that floated in them, but they just swam back. Even the gods, she now knew, were half-blinded by the clouds. ‘Rutt.’
    His face was an old man’s face, cracked lines through caked dust. Held was wrapped tight within the mottled blanket. Rutt’s eyes, which had been dull for so long that Badalle thought they had always been so, were suddenly glistening. As if someone had licked them. ‘Many died today,’ she said. ‘We can eat.’
    ‘Badalle.’
    She blew at flies. ‘I have a poem.’
    But he shook his head.