The Bracelets of the Gods
by A.D.R. Forte
The woman, Chiri, has never seen the bracelets of the gods even though she is from the city and a grown adult. For this reason, Nama pities the city woman in spite of all her fine clothes and the one bracelet Chiri does wear, which is quite heavy and gold and wrought in the shape of a serpent biting its own tail. Nama looks proudly at the row of many-colored, thin metal bangles adorning her own narrow arm and runs her fingers down their length, listening with pleasure to the click and clink they make.
“I can take you,” she says. “I’ll take you all the way up. For a fee, of course.” She likes to say that. For a fee. Like Mister Komal when Nama’s father asks him to haul a cow in his steam-truck to the market in the valley for butchering and sale, and he hems and haws and puffs his chest out to show how important he is for having the only vehicle in the village.
Chiri doesn’t argue. She only nods very seriously, looking Nama right in the eye, and says, “How much?”
She’s not like other people, especially city people, this one. She looked around the village real sharp when she arrived, but she didn’t sniff or wrinkle up her mouth the way the city folks normally do, and she wears a headwrap almost like a man’s, but made of some thick, satiny material in a color that makes Nama think of the sky over the mountain. When Nama addressed her as Miss, she sat down on the steps of the Chief’s house so she was practically eye to eye with Nama, and said, “Just Chiri will do. Can you take me up the mountain?”
Now they haggle over the price, and for this Nama respects her even more, although she’s pretty sure the woman is doing it out of kindness and can afford the fee three times over without blinking an eye. This seems proven by the fact they end right back up at the original ask, and Chiri gets to her feet right away, briskly brushing off her skirts.
“Are you sure we can go all the way to the summit?”
Nama nods with confidence.
“Nobody else in the village knows the way. But I’ve been all over the mountain since I was a small girl. My father doesn’t like it now. He says how will I ever get a husband if I am always off climbing rocks like a goat? But you know, I don’t even want a husband. I don’t want to have to push a baby out and be sick. I’d rather be like Tanty Rae.”
Tanty Rae is important too, much more so than even Mister Komal or the Chief. Everyone shuts up and listens when she speaks, and she goes pretty much wherever she wants, whenever she wants. Sometimes Nama thinks she must be a bit lonely though, up there in her house at the top of the road with no family, which is why Nama goes and sits on the steps with her to shell peas and listen to stories about the old days when the forest was thick and the village green and blue.
The stories remind her of the bay beyond the mountain. The one no one ever sees except for her. And now, maybe, this stranger from the city with her odd manners and her lovely clothes who seems to believe Nama that the bracelets of the gods are a place, not just a myth. Who seems so determined to make it up the mountain and see for herself these things out of story and legend.
The hot sun beats on their faces and hands, their vulnerable backs and heads shielded against its rays by scarf and dress and headwrap. Chiri does well enough as the road narrows and turns to red dirt and the canyon walls draw in, rising up on either side of them. And she doesn’t even falter as they start up the sheer face of the cliff wall, holding her own in leather sandals with gold-tipped straps. Nama has taken her own sandals off and slung them around her neck. It’s easier this way to find the crevices in the rock with her toes and get a good grip, but she doesn’t expect Chiri’s soft city feet can manage without protection so she says nothing, and up they go.
By the time they make it three-quarters of the way, sweat is running down the city woman’s elegant face, her amber skin sheened with a patina of red, and even Nama is ready to sit for a minute and sip water from the canteen at her waist. Chiri doesn’t complain, however.
Nama’s only ever brought three others this far. A pair of city men, dressed more soberly than Chiri, but similarly well-fed and well kept, and another man in battle-leathers with old, livid scars disfiguring his cheeks and a pair of crossed swords on his back. That last one didn’t speak much, and he climbed like a goat, like Nama herself. Though she kept her distance from that one, she afforded him a measure of grudging respect.
But the other two spent the entire time arguing in soft voices, questioning Nama’s credibility; the younger, thinner one urging them to go on and the elder one sniffing and complaining that it was all a waste of time and money, a scam, an error in the younger one’s research. Though what they could have been researching up here was beyond Nama.
Halfway up, the younger one brought out a series of odd contraptions and instruments, placed them on the ground, and muttered over them to no effect. The old one had laughed nastily, as if he’d anticipated the disappointed look on the young man’s face and relished it.
By the time they made it to this rest point, the city men were bedraggled, belligerent, and exhausted. They threatened to throw Nama off the cliff, and she threatened to leave them there for the crows to pick their bones. The third man had cracked his knuckles and she’d shut up. Finally after more whispers, they ordered her to guide them back down, and walked off without paying her at all.
Only the young man had hesitated a minute, glancing back up the face of the escarpment to the heights stark against the blue sky. Then the scarred man paused too. They’d shared a single glance, looked up the mountain again, and Nama had shivered a little at the expression on the scarred man’s face. But finally the young man walked off, tossing Nama a single brass coin. The scarred man followed, and that was the last she’d ever seen of them.
She tells this story to Chiri while they sip their water, and Chiri’s fine brows draw together as if she is listening very, very carefully to every bit of the story. At one point, she asks Nama to describe the men again, and Nama swears the woman is committing every word to memory, but after all is said and done, Chiri only smiles and tells her that it’s a pity they reneged on the contract in such dishonorable fashion.
“Shall we go on?” she says pleasantly, and Nama nods and scrambles to her feet. She doesn’t want Chiri to think she is lying and aims to cheat her out of the rest of the trip. She wants Chiri to get to the top, to see the blue bay with its white capped waves streaked with turquoise streams of algae. The green islands rising up into the clouds. And the great, verdant arches bridging earth and sky, capping each island like vertical crowns, stretching out into the distance as far as the eye can see. Bracelets on a giant arm made of land and water and firmament. The bracelets of the gods.
Nama wishes they could go faster, but this is the steepest part. To look down at the dizzying plunge is madness, so she keeps her eyes focused up, on the next outcropping for her hands, the next small ledge just big enough for a human foot. Up and up they go, another hour in the blazing sun, and then at last they reach a ledge, whether natural or carved by human hands there’s no telling. It’s just wide enough for two grown men to stand abreast, and though the wind shrieks and whips around the mountain, tearing at the stone with wild and deadly fingers, on the ledge it is calm. They can stand easily and catch their breath in the shelter of a small overhang of rock.
The ledge seems made for human comfort, defying the vagaries of nature, even though no horse or steam-powered vehicle can make its way up here. No machine can withstand the punishing winds, or man and beast the pitiless sun and paper-thin air. It is why the developers left the mountain alone when they came in search of trees and ore, sap for rubber, and the plumes of rare birds to adorn the heads of the wealthy. They kept to the slopes where the villages still cling, and to the once-lush fields of the valleys. It is inconceivable that anyone should have shaped and formed and chiseled this wedge of rock into a shelter, yet here they are.
“Not far,” Nama says. She points to the yawning entrance another thirty yards ahead. “This is the top.”
Above them is a pinnacle of stone, no more than five hundred feet perhaps. This is the crown of the mountain.
Chiri frowns, but only nods and gestures Nama ahead, and together they make their way to the blessed shade of the cavern in the rock. And now there is no question human hands have been at work.
The dome of the cavern is smooth and painted with frescoes in patterns of turquoise and pink and gold, stars and arabesques and geometric shapes. Nama points upward and Chiri’s gaze follows. Her frown clears, widening to surprise, and Nama nods with satisfaction.
“Come,” she says, leading the way further in, or trying to, but Chiri is still standing in the middle of the room, gazing at the ceiling.
“It’s this way,” Nama adds, impatient but still loath to be too forward. She realizes by now that Chiri’s deference is merely to humor her, and if she’s quite honest with herself, she’s more afraid of crossing this petite, dainty woman than she was of the scarred man with the swords, for reasons she cannot put into words. As long as Chiri wants to stand here gawking, that is what they will do.
Finally, the city woman stops muttering to herself and turning round and round, staring up all the while—so long that Nama’s neck hurts just thinking about it. Chiri gives her a big smile and waves her arms magnanimously.
“All right. Come on, come on. I know you are cross with me.”
Nama shakes her head vehemently to deny any such disrespect, but she starts forward again, glad to be on the move. They head into the shadows and the light dims, but Nama doesn’t stop to get a torch because somehow, through some trick of the architecture of the place, just enough light funnels from the mouth of the cave all the way into the recesses of the tunnel in which they now find themselves. It isn’t bright, but it’s enough to see by.
Chiri clears her throat.
“We’re heading down.”
Nama nods and then realizes Chiri probably cannot see her.
“Yes. We have to go down to get to the bay.”
“The bay?”
“You’ll see.”
The descent gets steeper. It twists and turns through the rock, leading ever down and still their path is dimly lit, as if by filtered daylight, though by now they are deep in the heart of the mountain. So deep they can hear the groan and sigh of the earth as the wind moves through the tunnel ahead of them. Leading the way.
The wind is stronger now, a little bit fresher with each step, and soon Nama fancies she can taste the tang of brine. Another few yards and the salt smell in her nostrils is no fancy anymore. The light grows brighter. They hear the crash of waves and the call of gulls, and at her side, Chiri gasps. They have reached the mouth of the cave.
Beneath their feet is sparse, wild grass sprinkled with white flowers, and a pair of grazing gazelle startle at their appearance, fleeing in the blink of an eye from the plateau where the humans stand to another grassy spot on the other side of a steep drop to the waves below. Chiri clicks her tongue in amazement—the only reason, Nama guesses, that her mouth is not hanging wide open, and Nama grins with satisfaction.
Chiri isn’t looking at the gazelle. Her gaze is on the enormous loops of thick vines and leaves and brambles woven together that rise from the slopes of every island, each one lined up behind the other in perfect symmetry regardless of shape and placement of the land below.
“You see?” Nama says, glowing with vindication, and her companion nods slowly. Wordlessly.
“We can get down to the beach over there,” Nama offers, pointing beyond the gazelle to where a tiny peninsula juts out from their side of the bay. “But there’s no boat to the islands themselves and it’s too rough to swim.”
Like she’s been asleep, Chiri shakes herself and takes a deep breath. She looks at Nama as if surprised to find her there and smiles broadly.
“Thank you,” is all she says, but there’s plenty else behind the words, and Nama glows again, with pride this time.
Chiri steps out onto the plateau, and the wind ruffles the edges of her fine dress, now streaked and stained from their journey, but Chiri doesn’t seem to care at all. She looks at the bracelets the way she did the ceiling in the cave, and hems and mumbles as she digs about her person. From somewhere beneath her scarf or in the folds of her dress, she pulls out a smallish metal object and places it on the ground. It looks like a long, very fancy, silver candlestick with an egg fixed to the top.
The young city man had one just like it. Nama remembers it because he fussed over that one the most out of his collection of paraphernalia. She wants to ask what it is, but Chiri is frowning again. Concentrating. So Nama swallows her curiosity and sits down cross-legged to watch.
Chiri is moving her hands in odd motions over the candlestick thing and saying words that sound like gibberish under her breath. The young man did the same sort of thing with his tools too. That’s what these things are: tools of some sort, but for what Nama can’t imagine. What are they trying to do? And what do the bracelets have to do with it all?
She sighs at the effort required to stifle her questions and fidgets because nothing has happened in a quarter of an hour of Chiri doing her fussing. Chiri herself seems perturbed by this fact and puts her hands on her hips, looking out at the bracelets with a puzzled expression.
Nama tilts her head back to feel the touch of the wind on her face. It’s playful today, pulling at her scarf and the ends of Chiri’s headwrap as if to encourage them to join it as it runs through the bracelets, making the very air sing and hum like a giant bumblebee. She likes to watch it race the gauntlet of the bracelets, though it takes the clouds being just right: white and wispy and not too thick, so she can see the path the wind takes when the clouds follow.
Chiri comes to sit beside her, still looking discomfited.
“I don’t understand. There’s so much power here. I can taste it, it’s so thick. But I can’t find it.”
She is talking more to herself out loud than to Nama, like her father and Tanty Rae do when they’re working. In those cases Nama only makes helpful grunts, knowing her input is neither needed nor useful, but she desperately wants to help Chiri. They’ve come so far, and for the first time, Nama has someone to share the bracelets with. Someone who understands.
Even though she can’t get her candlestick to work, Chiri understands these bracelets better than even Nama herself. Nama’s willing to bet she understands better than the young city man would have even if he had made it here, and she’s suddenly glad no one else has ever come. She’s glad she gets to share this with Chiri alone.
“The wind in the bracelets always helps me calm down,” she blurts before she can think better of it. “When I get mad, I come up here and listen to it hum and I always feel better.”
And the gods know she gets mad plenty often of late. The wind up here is often the only thing that can ease the hot, angry knot in her chest that makes her want to put her first through walls for no reason at all.
At first she thinks Chiri is offended, the way her father gets when she complains that her siblings are too loud and he is too irrational. But then Chiri lets out a loud whoop, grins, and grabs Nama by the shoulders.
“The wind! Oh I’m a fool. Thank you. Thank you, child,” she babbles, scrambling up.
She runs back over to the candlestick, kneels next to it and whispers something, lifting her arms up as if she would lift the whole bay along with them, islands and arches and all. The candlestick flashes once with silver light and then the egg at the top begins to glow blue. Slowly it changes from dull metal to faceted crystal, a sapphire oval sending out sparks of blue light.
It hums with the same timbre as the wind and the bracelets and the air around their heads seems to shimmer with faint iridescence. Now Nama knows what Chiri means. She can taste that shimmer: a tart resonance on her lips and tongue. Vibration and smell and flavor all wrapped together even though there’s nothing to taste or smell or touch.
This, this is magic.
Stunned, she looks at Chiri, who is contemplating the islands and the arches with an unfathomable expression as white, rainbow-shot light suffuses them. They pulse with the rhythm Nama can taste, that pulses in her own blood. The wind grows stronger, its song ever-louder. Nama feels herself pushed forward as it rushes over her, streaming out towards the bracelets, feeding the pearly radiance they emanate. Chiri’s headwrap looks in danger of blowing away entirely, but she pays no attention to it, all her focus on the bay. On the bracelets.
The candlestick is tottering in the breeze now, its blue light flashing every which way, and to be honest, it doesn’t look entirely safe. Nama can feel herself trembling, like she’s coming down with a fever. Only somehow worse. She tries to stay quiet, but it’s impossible to repress a small, panicked squeak, and at the sound Chiri looks around. She looks at Nama, looks at the candlestick, her curvy lips drawn into a thin, severe line; and waves a hand through the air, over candlestick and bay and everything else.
Immediately it all ceases. The light, the wind, the candlestick, the glowing.
Once more all is as before, peaceful, serene, and nonthreatening, and Nama pants, feeling her heart thud much too hard and too quickly in her chest, her palms and armpits soaked with cold, feverish sweat. She stares at Chiri, who is unmoving and grim.
“Are you all right?” she says in an oddly harsh, wooden tone.
Nama nods, and then shakes her head.
“What… happened?” she manages finally.
Chiri sighs, and more like herself now, puts a gentle hand on Nama’s arm and rubs it.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t expect…”
She doesn’t finish the sentence. Once again she gazes at the bay and when she turns back to Nama, her expression is hard again.
“That was power. Power such as I, and no one alive today, has ever seen.”
“The power of the gods.” Nama is breathless.
Chiri glances at the bay and nods as if not terribly impressed by this awesome fact.
“Gods or not, it is tremendous. It is as old as the world, and if not used the right way it could be very, very terrible. It could—” She bites off the words, and retreats behind that tight-lipped expression again as if thinking better of saying anything more to a gawping village girl.
Nama shuts her mouth and straightens her shoulders though she very much wants to cower down and put her scarf over her head. Her mind’s eye is filled with a vision of a world in flame. Streets and trees and houses, great cities and her own dear village all writhing and blackening in iridescent fire. She knows the rest of the sentence that Chiri will not say.
“Everything,” she whispers.
Chiri nods.
“Yes. Everything.”
The wind suddenly feels cold. There’s not much that she can say scares her. She doesn’t fear the silly things that bother others: spiders and snakes and being laughed at. Spiders and snakes are no joke, but they can be dealt with, and when the laughter cuts too deeply, she always has the bracelets to run to. Her father always called her his little fearless one, back in the days before they were always arguing about husbands and propriety.
But this… this is fear like she’s never known. Like a piece of lead in her soul. Everything. How can it take everything?
Chiri sits down heavily beside her, and puts an arm around her shoulders.
“I think I will leave you here,” she says.
“What?”
Chiri looks at her.
“I was going to offer to take you with me, to the city. When I left. But now I think… I understand that you must stay here, Nama.”
Her mind whirls, overwhelmed by too much at once. Go to the city with Chiri—to do what? But now she can’t anyway? Gods, it’s too much. She looks at her beloved bracelets, graceful and soothing as always, as if they don’t hide an unthinkable, deadly secret. Though it’s not their fault, any more than a knife’s when it’s used to wound instead of peel potatoes.
She breathes through her teeth and Chiri rubs her arm again.
“You’re the only one who knows the way. Who can make sure no one else finds it. I knew there was a reason.”
Nama nods. That makes sense. Perfect sense. That she can do.
“Yes.”
Chiri is frowning thoughtfully this time, less tension in her face as she works through some plan in her head. Nama holds her breath, feeling the slow, rhythmic beat of the other woman’s heart through their bodies side by side, and wonders at her calm. Slowly she tries to match her breathing to Chiri’s, willing her own nervy blood to steady its pace.
“Of course, this means you do not get to have a husband and children, but I think that suits you, yes?”
Nama nods emphatically and Chiri smiles approval.
“Don’t worry. You won’t be alone. I shall stop and have a word with Tanty Rae, and I will send someone to see to your education. Someone you’ll like, I promise. And as I can I will come myself to ch—”
“My education? But I go to school. I’m the top of my class. In fact, I even know more than half of those dunders in my brother’s class and they’re two years older.”
Chiri smiles.
“There is more you’ll need to know to be an effective guardian than arithmetic and vocabulary, my dear.”
“Guardian?” That’s important, no question. But where there should be swelling pride, there’s an odd, hollowish sort of sensation like she’s eaten too many sourfruit before rolling down a hill.
Chiri nods.
“You’ll make a fine one. You know how to use your head and how to keep your mouth shut.” She pauses, fingers tapping an erratic drumbeat on Nama’s arm. “In the meantime, if anyone should get too close. If those men come back. Or anyone at all. You come to the city right away, you hear?”
She turns, and grabs both Nama’s arms, pulling her about so they are face to face.
“You come to the city gates and you give them this.”
She puts something into Nama’s hand and folds her fingers over it. Curious, Nama opens her hand up right away to examine the small square of metal with a round knob on the top and an embossed circle on the bottom bearing an elegant design of symbols and sigils amongst which Nama can just make out a letter C.
“And,” continues Chiri, “you tell them that you are there at the command of Archmage Chirandra.”
Nama looks up and stares, not caring this time that her mouth has dropped open.
“Archmage?”
Chiri is giving her a twinkling smile. It’s just not possible. She’s far too young. And small. And pretty. And not terrifying at all. Who in a million years would have thought…
And Nama has dared to haggle with her! Not to mention mouthing off at least once.
Face burning, Nama hangs her head.
“Forgive me, exalted one,” she mutters. Archmage. Second only to the Empress in the land. With royal blood herself.
Chiri laughs and chucks her chin up.
“Nothing to be sorry for, child. Nothing at all.”
But the weight of all this is just starting to add up. There’s a world-ending secret in her mountain and now that it’s been proved her bracelets aren’t a childish fancy, they’ve turned out to be something awful instead. She’s going to get her heart’s wish, no husband and a life of secret importance, but now she’ll really, truly always be alone. Worse than Tanty Rae, because there’s no one she can talk to in the village. No one she can tell her story to.
She will bear this task alone, and while the Empress and the Archmage far away in the city may know her worth, in the village she’ll just be Nama the oddball, wandering the mountain paths all her life with no sensible purpose, living in her father’s house until Tanty Rae dies and maybe she can become the village wise woman. Maybe. If they don’t think she’s simply too much of a pariah to do the job.
She puts her face in her hands. Maybe a husband would be easier.
“Nama?”
She looks up. Chiri puts her hands on either side of Nama’s face.
“I know,” the Archmage says. “I know this is all too much. But I also know you can do this. You trust me, don’t you?”
She nods.
“Then if I believe in you, you must believe in you too. Right?”
That’s some twisted logic. City people logic. But Nama appreciates the effort. She takes a quavering breath and bobs her head up and down. Yes.
Chiri beams.
“All right. Come on now. Let’s get home before it gets too dark to go down.”
Nama casts a last look out over the bay, over her beloved bracelets just starting to cast shadows as the day begins to wane. She looks down at her arm and shakes the small, ordinary, metal bracelets on her arm to make them jingle. No matter the path, some parts are always treacherous, loose stone and dirt threatening a deadly fall. At least until you learn the way.
She looks back at Chiri and sighs.
“All right. I’ll take you back down,” she says, wearily. She understands now why grown folk always sound so tired. “No fee for the return trip,” she adds.
Chiri throws her head back and laughs.
_______________
A.D.R. Forte lives in Texas and loves Halloween, cats, and tea, not necessarily in that order. Her fantasy short fiction has been included in Penumbra magazine and the Spells & Swashbucklers anthology from Dragon Moon Press. Her erotic fantasy & sf collection, A Touch of Steel, is available from Circlet Press.
