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She snorted laughter. “That ought to be a short journey. I hear mother is nothing but a puddle of rot these days. But you can’t really be here to say good-bye to me—when have you given me the courtesy of a hello?”
Ama-Terasu is a difficult woman—it all comes of being born first. I cannot explain it, but I did want to speak to her, to touch her light, to feel once as though I had a sister, and that her nature did not stray so far from mine. The instinct of siblings is strange and frequently foolish, but it surged in me, and I wanted her to touch my hair, to call me her little brother, her lamb, her storm-child. I was willing to make the first overtures, of course, and I touched her neck lightly, with a warm palm
.
“I do not trust you,” she said, but her eyes slid to my hand. “And no one comes here without a demonstration of loyalty—this is the land of the sun, and I am the sun, and my light is law.”
“What do you suggest?”
She fingered the sword at my waist, a simple thing, dug from the barrels of the earth by Izanagi for his son. The moon has one like it, I am told. Taking this as invitation, I fingered her necklace, which hung in loops and whorls around her glowing neck, all red beads, carnelian and garnet and ruby. We stood thus for a long while, feeling the heft of each other’s belongings, before Ama-Terasu made her bargain—a bargain I should have suspected all along, for she is part of the rutting, multiplying earth, the fulminating green, the doubling and tripling blue. In those days all the world was hemorrhaging offspring. Why should she be different?
“Let us have a contest of childbearing,” she said coyly, her golden smile smirking, “and if you should bring forth sons, I will know your intentions are good. But if you should bring forth daughters, I will know you bear me ill—girls are such trouble, you know.”
“Oh, yes,” I chuckled, “I quite agree. The first troubles of all things troubling. Very well, if this is what you require of me, I will gladly give it.”
I moved my palm to her cheek, and tilted her heat-radiating face to mine for a kiss. Was this what I had come for? I could not for certain say no. Her breath smelt of deserts and sweet grasses. I confess it, yes, I confess that for the first time—though hardly first of all things that lusted—my body was moved by a thing which was not grief.
And at the moment that our lips touched, cloud to sun, she broke free of my arms and pulled my sword from its knotted sash. I watched in rain-soaked horror as the bright-belted bitch broke it over her knee in five places—the sound of the shatter was like birds’ wings snapping. Her grin was a cracked yellow gourd and her hands moved so fast, so fast, sweeps of light over the metal. Out of the five pieces she fashioned five strong boys, with limbs of quicksilver and eyes like hilts glinting. Their hair was iron; it hung in clanging choruses around their identical faces. Each was sullen as a sword, and each had my eyes, the line of my nose.
I pushed her back from my boys and snatched the red beads from her neck—a burst of scarlet gushed from her, blood-quick—a thousand stones popping from her throat like seeds from a bean pod. I sneered at her; she laughed at me—this is the way of siblings. From her broken necklace I took five beads and stretched them into five children, red of arm and calf—but no matter how I prodded the jewels, they would not make the angles of sons, only curves and breasts like apples, hair unfolding over their ruby skulls like silk. They looked up at me through five identical sets of long, rosy lashes, and snickered behind their hands, mocking and slattern-red as their dam.
“Daughters!” Ama-Terasu crowed, rooster-preening. “I knew you came to harm—you would never come for any other purpose, crow-brother.” How she loves to be right!
“Daughters, yes,” I said slowly, playing at the craft of an ingenuous smile, “but daughters from your necklace. From my sword, from my body, you see five stalwart boys. They are my issue, these blushing five are yours.”
She seemed to waver, unsure of my explanation, but the alchemy between siblings bubbled already away within her as in me, and I could see that she too wanted a brother, that she never saw the moon, and missed the communion of the waste-children, the children out of the Root-Country. She took me by the hand, up the last of the stair and into the corona of the sun.
Behind us walked five daughters and five sons, beautiful as gallows.
I want it understood that I did not intend, at first, to be anything but a sweet and loyal brother to Ama-Terasu. I helped her to comb the water of her paddies for rice; we laughed together when the storm-clouds around my head flashed blue and gold when splashed by the Speckled River-Trout of Heaven. Our ten children followed behind us through the high plains, and we thought them very fine; we broke the Piebald Colt of Heaven into his saddle, and held hands for the first time with real affection while feeding our dun-colored foal apples and sugar.
She blushed in the morning fog as he nuzzled her palm. I stroked her burning hair.
She poured in the evenings a tea all of light, and kept her blazing orange sleeves carefully out of the steam. I roasted octopus for her when she complained of fever. We were happy, brother and sister in one house.
I was bored beyond dreams of leisure.
She thought the rice harvest too meager, the colt not swift enough in its growth. She sniped at me, she taught her sons to reflect the crackling bolts of my storms with their mirror-limbs, taught her daughters to smile behind their hands when I had gone from them. She denied me her gleaming flesh and would not be moved even a step closer to me than she pleased, though we had all these ridiculous babes at our feet. I could not have drunk another cup of tea without gagging on it, and she retched at the thought of octopus.
She was not Mother. Mother would not try me the way she did, would not willfully thwart my devotion. Mother would not exhaust me to the point of the silly tricks I played, would not spend her nights laughing at me behind her hand, when my desire shivered and snapped between us like a lightning-struck tree.
In her hall of pearl and jasper, laid out in flecks from one side of heaven to the other, I pissed out her whistling tea, I squatted and shat out her awful, starchy rice—the pearl stank and the jasper steamed and I was well pleased. She pretended not to notice. She sent our boys to clean it, and the clang of their iron hands on the lacquer scraped my ears spotless.
I walked through the rice paddies we had planted together, hands in the mud, and hers so bright under the sludge that I thought the sludge was itself gold, and what rice would grow from such soil! With my belt of cirrus flashing black, I kicked through her retaining walls and jumped from terrace to terrace, splashing in the sudden water as paddy flooded into paddy, and the rice—not so different than any other farmer’s rice—spoiled in the blinding light of Takamagahara. At this she did cry out, and sent our boys to shore up the walls again, but their ore-padded knees rusted in the standing wreckage. Her face was wide and twisted, shining in terrace after ruined terrace. I laughed—the Rice of Heaven was not even good for wine.
But she did nothing to me, she knelt and poured the tea that evening as though nothing had happened, as though she had Mother’s patience, and I could not see her stomach flaring through her robes, and her hunger. Yellow-faced fool, she could not touch Mother’s patience with the longest of her beams.
Sometimes I feel as though there is something else living within me, a smoke-mouthed and sneer-eyed creature which is me-but-not-me, and I cannot speak to it, but it drives me, drives me after dragons and Mothers and causes me, in its salt-in-wound morbidity, to push further than even I would have if it did not sit like a crow on my spleen, cinching in my guts with its claws. And so I think it was this thing which saw the Piebald Colt of Heaven prancing it its bronze pen, which saw the colt and hopped, horribly, from one black foot to the other.
It must have been this thing in me which opened the pen and put out its hand for the colt to nose, which brought an apple and a lump of sugar and murmured to the beast as it chewed the sweet, wet meat. It could not have been I who stroked its blond mane, called him a good beast, and a kind beast, and put a nose to his. It, and not I, must have felt his hot breath on its cheeks and heard the soft snort as it cut into his flesh, peeling that gold pelt from the muscle, all in one apple-swift strip. I could not have watched the blood of the Piebald Colt of Heaven seep into the celestial plain, the creature I had raised with my sister, had called gentle, and lovely, and ours.
Perhaps it was this thing which had had statues made of it, which stomped snakes with clay soles.
It could not have been I who threw it into the chambers of Ama-Terasu, who laughed at the sodden slap of the carcass on her polished floor, at the high, flute-pale screams of our daughters as they leapt from their sewing, red hair f
lying, red eyes flashing.
It must have been the storm-seed inside me, for I could never do those things to such a woman as the sun became.
