The Crippled God

light a world of ignorance. How sweet must that have been.
    Gruntle snorted. Where was the mind that dreamed of unimagined possibilities – like hands groping in the dark? Groping – was that a flare of distant light? Was that a promise of something, something … wonderful? In the moment before the low growl – hackles snapping – and the sudden lunge. Better to die reaching for dreams than reaching for … for what? That tick under the armpit of the smelly creature huddled against you?
    I have heard that rock apes gather on the cliff edges to watch the sun set and rise. What are they thinking? What are they dreaming? Is that a moment of prayer? A time to give thanks for the glory of life?
    A prayer? Aye: ‘May all these two-legged hunters chew straight up their own arses. Give us spears of fire and lightning to turn this battle – just once, we beg you. Just once! ’
    He reached out a massive barbed paw and slapped at a small skull, watched it skid and then slowly spin in place. Got you, I see. Fangs went crunch, dreams went away. Done . With a low growl, he slipped past the heaps of bones until he found the place where the ancient cats had slept, bellies full, running through the wild grasses of their dream worlds – which were no different from this one. Imagine dreaming of a paradise no different from the one in which you happen to live. What moral might hide in that?
    All these worlds, all these fraught warrens, mocked him with their perfect banality. Patterns without revelation, repetitions without meaning. It was not enough to imagine worlds without humans or other sentient fools; the simple act of imagining placed his all-too-human sensibility upon the scene, his very own eyes to witness the idyllic perfection of his absolute absence. For all that, it was easy to harbour such contradictions – when I hold on to this humanity within me. When I refuse the sweet bliss of the tiger’s world .
    No wonder you forgot everything, Trake. No wonder you weren’t ready for godhood. In the jungles of ancient days, the tigers were gods. Until the new gods arrived. And they were far thirstier for blood than the tigers ever were, and now the jungle is silent .
    This night, he knew, here in this cave, he would dream of the hunt, the perfect stalking of the perfect prey, and dragging his victim up the trail and into this cave, away from the hyenas and jackals.
As dreams went, it wasn’t that bad. As dreams went.
Black fur, the taste of blood in my mouth …
     
    He had found him outside the walls of a dead city. Kneeling on a dusty road, collecting the shattered remnants of an old pot, but it was not just one pot that had broken apart, it was hundreds. A panicked flight, smoke and flames rising to blacken the limestone cliffs against which the city had cowered, the blurred passing of wretched faces, like broken husks and flotsam in a river. Things fell, things fell apart.
    He was trying to put the pieces back together, and as Mappo drew nearer he looked up, but only briefly, before returning to his task. ‘Good sir,’ he said, with one finger pushing shards back and forth, endlessly rearranging, seeking patterns, ‘Good sir, have you by chance some glue?’
    The rage was gone, and with it all memory. Icarium knelt with his back to a city he had destroyed.
    Sighing, Mappo set his heavy satchel down, and then crouched. ‘Too many broke here,’ he said, ‘for you to repair. It would take weeks, maybe even months.’
    ‘But I have time.’
    Mappo flinched, looked away – but not at the city, where capemoths crowded window sills in the slope-walled buildings leaning against the cliff walls, where the scorch marks streaked the stone like slashes into night. Not at the city, with its narrow streets filled with rubble and corpses, and the rhizan lizards swarming the cold, rotting flesh, and the bhok’arala clambering down to lick sticky stains for the salt and snatching up bundles of clothing with which to make nests. And not at the gate, the doors blasted apart, the heaps of dead soldiers swelling inside their armour as the day’s heat burgeoned.
    He stared instead southward, to the old caravan camps marked only by low stone foundations and pens for sheep and goats. Never again would the desert traders travel to this place; never again would merchants from distant cities come seeking the famous Redworm Silks of Shikimesh.
    ‘I thought, friend,’ Mappo said, and then he shook his head. ‘Only yesterday you