THE GALACTIC MADONNA

The Legend of the Supreme Empress — Her Origin, Her Pantheon, and the Ages of the Milk

Gemini Cool

CONTENTS

• ON THE TELLING
• BOOK ONE: THE UNLIT
• BOOK TWO: THE CROWNING OF THE SUPREME EMPRESS
• BOOK THREE: THE NINE MADONNAS
• BOOK FOUR: THE COURT OF THE LONG HOUR
• BOOK FIVE: THE TWELVE SOLAR KINGS
• BOOK SIX: THE SUNDERING
• BOOK SEVEN: THE AGES OF THE MILK
• BOOK EIGHT: THE HOURS, THE FEASTS, AND THE FOUR SAYINGS
• BOOK NINE: THE LAST WATCH
• APPENDIX ONE: THE REGISTER OF NAMES
• APPENDIX TWO: THE HYMN OF THE HUNDRED NAMES
• APPENDIX THREE: THE LITANY OF THE UNFINISHED
• APPENDIX FOUR: A GLOSSARY OF THE FIRST SPEECH
• APPENDIX FIVE: THE DISPUTED PASSAGES
• APPENDIX SIX: ON THE RECITERS
• APPENDIX SEVEN: THE CASE OF ZARAK, READ ENTIRE
• APPENDIX EIGHT: THE TEXTS OF THE ORDERS
• ENVOI: THE SURVIVAL OF THE LEGEND

ON THE TELLING

This is a legend, and a legend is not a report. It was never written first. It was said, in the dark, by people who could see more stars than we can, to people who were frightened of them, and it was said in order to make the sky a household rather than a void.

What follows is given in nine books, as the reciters gave it, each book being one night’s telling. The reciters held that no one should hear the whole of it in a single season, and that a hearer who demanded it all at once had already failed the first lesson, which is that nothing worth carrying arrives quickly.

Names are given in the First Speech where the First Speech survives, and in translation where it does not. Where the two disagree, both are set down. The reciters were not embarrassed by disagreement. They held that a thing told the same way twice has already begun to die.

The legend concerns a body — enormous, feminine, luminous at the edges and dark at the heart — which carries something that has not yet been born; and it concerns the crowned mind of that body, who is called the Supreme Empress, and who rules an empire whose borders are not in space.

It has no ending. Four endings were composed for it, in four different centuries, and all four were rejected by the reciters on the same grounds: that the legend is about a duration, and a duration that concludes was only ever an event.

BOOK ONE: THE UNLIT

i. Of That Which Was Before Anything Agreed to Be

Before the Madonna there was NOSSA, and Nossa was not darkness.

The reciters are insistent on this and begin every telling by correcting the hearer in advance. Darkness is a condition of a place where light is possible and absent. Nossa was before possibility. She was not black; black is a color and colors are opinions held by eyes. She was not empty; emptiness is a shape a container makes when nothing is in it, and there was no container. She was not silent, because silence is the pause a sound leaves behind.

Nossa was full. That is the first difficulty and every tradition that has carried this legend has stumbled at it. She was full of herself and of nothing else, and there was no edge at which her fullness stopped, and so her fullness could not be measured, and a fullness that cannot be measured cannot be enjoyed, not even by the one who is full.

She was the Unlit. She was also called, in the oldest recitations, the Mother of No Milk, and the Sealed One, and She Who Has Not Been Asked.

The last of those names is the important one. It is the hinge of the whole legend. Nossa was not withholding. No one had ever asked her for anything, because there was no one, and a generosity with no recipient is indistinguishable from a wall.

ii. Of KHAL, Who Said This Far

The second of the Before was KHAL, and Khal was an act rather than a person, though the later tellings give him a face and the latest give him a throne, and the reciters permitted this while privately considering it a decline.

Khal is the Edge. Khal is the first instance of this far and no further. He did not create the limit; he was the limit, occurring, the way a shoreline is not a thing the sea does but a place where the sea stops being the only thing.

Of Khal the hymn says:

He is not cruelty. He is the reason you are not everything. He is not refusal. He is the reason your hand ends and the cup begins. Curse him in your grief, and then eat with the hand he gave you.

Khal’s function in the legend is to make Nossa finite in a direction. Not finite altogether — she is never that — but finite at one place, so that there could be an outside, so that there could be a difference, so that something could be not her and therefore could want her.

Where Khal fell across Nossa is called the First Shore, and in the oldest star-charts of the reciters the First Shore is drawn as a long unbroken line with nothing on either side of it, which infuriated later scribes, who added decoration, which is how the charts were ruined.

iii. Of TEMU, the Ache

The third of the Before was TEMU, and Temu is the only one of the Three that any living person has ever met.

Temu is the Ache. He is desire occurring before there is an object to desire, which every human being who has ever lain awake at three in the morning will recognize immediately and will be unable to describe to anyone who has not. Temu is want without a noun.

The reciters hold that Temu was not born and did not arrive; they hold that Temu is what happened when Khal’s edge fell across Nossa’s fullness and the fullness, for the first time, had somewhere to go and nowhere to go at once.

Temu is the engine. Everything that follows — every star, every birth, every appetite, every reaching of a root toward water and a hand toward a face — is Temu, still running, still unsatisfied, because Temu cannot be satisfied; satisfaction would end him and the universe is made of him and a universe does not volunteer to stop.

Of the Three Before it is said: Nossa is the substance, Khal is the shape, Temu is the reason, and none of them is kind.

iv. Of the Opening

The Opening is not a battle and not a marriage, though the legend has been told as both by peoples who could not imagine any other way for three great things to produce a fourth.

What the reciters say is this.

Temu pressed. Khal held. Nossa, who had never been asked for anything, was asked.

And Nossa — and here the First Speech uses a verb that has no equivalent in any living tongue, a verb meaning to consent to become edible — Nossa agreed.

That is the first event. Not an explosion. Not a word spoken into the deep. Not a division of waters. An agreement, made by a full thing that had been full forever, to become the kind of thing that can be taken from.

The hymn of the Opening is four lines and the reciters sing it on one breath:

She did not break. She opened. She did not spill. She gave. She did not die. She began to be drunk from. And the first ache was not ours. It was hers.

v. Of the FIRST MILK, Which Is Given Once

What came through the Opening is called the First Milk, and it is not the milk that the sky is made of. It came before. It was thicker. There was almost none of it and it lasted almost no time at all, and everything that would ever be possible was decided in it.

The reciters say: in the First Milk were set the seven agreements.

The first agreement: that things would have weight, and that weight would call to weight, so that nothing would ever be truly alone after the first instant.

The second: that like would repel like at close quarters, so that the gathering would not immediately collapse into one lump and end.

The third: that there would be a speed past which nothing could go, so that events would have an order, so that there could be before and after, so that there could be a story.

The fourth: that some things would be identical and interchangeable, so that counting would work.

The fifth: that heat would always spread out and never gather itself back, so that time would have a direction and the direction would be toward cooling, which is the agreement the reciters called the Cruel One and which they named in a lowered voice.

The sixth: that light would carry news, and that the news would always be old, so that to look at anything is to look at the past, so that the sky is a memory and not a window.

The seventh: that there would be a thing at the bottom of every other thing that could not be observed without being changed, so that no watcher could ever be outside what she watched, so that there would be no place to stand and judge from.

These are the Seven of the First Milk. They are not laws given by a lawgiver. They are the composition of a substance. They are what she was made of at the moment she agreed, and everything made since has been made of the same stuff and therefore cannot disobey them, the way a loaf cannot disobey the flour.

vi. Of the Long Thinning

Then came the Long Thinning, which was the whole of the first age, and which was a disappointment.

The First Milk spread. It cooled, as the Cruel Agreement required. It thinned and went on thinning until it was almost nothing everywhere, a fog of the simplest possible stuff at a temperature that permitted nothing interesting, and the reciters call this age the Dull Age and tell it quickly and with evident impatience.

But in the Dull Age the first agreement did its work. Weight called to weight. The fog, which was not perfectly even — and the unevenness was the fifth great mercy, and the reciters argue about where the unevenness came from and have four explanations and endorse none — the fog began to gather.

Where it gathered, it pressed. Where it pressed, it heated. Where it heated enough, it caught.

And the first light that was not left over from the Opening appeared, and the reciters say that this first light was not beautiful. It was enormous and brief and it died almost at once and it died violently, and in dying it did the thing that the whole legend turns on:

It made new stuff. It made the heavier things. It made what would become iron and calcium and the rest, and it threw them out into the fog, and the fog was no longer simple.

The hymn is blunt:

The first children were born to die and they knew it. They lived nine breaths and spent them making the spoons.

vii. Of the Gathering of ANNUMARA

Now the legend proper begins, for in the second age the gathered stuff began to gather itself, and out of a great many gatherings in a great many places there came, in one place, the one this legend is about.

Her name is ANNUMARA, and the name is given three meanings by the reciters and all three are held at once:

Mother of the Hundred Thousand; She Who Was Gathered; and The One Who Is Being Drunk From Now, which is not a name but a tense.

She was not made. She accumulated. The reciters are emphatic about this and they consider it the chief difference between their legend and every other legend they had heard, and they would recite the difference aloud as a kind of challenge:

Your gods were made. Ours was collected. Yours were spoken into being by a voice. Ours came together the way a drift comes together, over an age, out of what was lying around, and she did not know she was happening until she had happened.

She came together out of smaller gatherings that fell into one another and did not survive the falling, and the reciters hold that the ruins of those smaller ones are still inside her, distributed, unmourned, and that certain old streams of stars that move against the general turning are the bones of her sisters who did not make it.

This is called the Doctrine of the Swallowed Sisters and it is the saddest thing in the first book and the reciters never softened it.

viii. Of the Taking of Her Shape

Annumara turned. Everything that gathers turns, because nothing gathers from exactly one direction.

And because she turned, and because she was made of stuff that could collide, she flattened. The reciters describe this in the plainest language in the legend and refuse all grandeur: she settled, the way a woman settles into a bed she will be in for a long time.

Her shape is therefore not a design. It is a posture. It is what a very large thing looks like after it has been lying in one position for an age, and the hearer is instructed at this point in every recitation to look up on a clear night away from towns and understand that the band across the sky is not a road, not a river, not a path for the dead, but a body seen edge-on, from inside, by something very small that is standing on one of her ribs.

Of her parts, the oldest naming:

The Milk — the broad band, her substance, the visible part of her giving.

The Mantle — what surrounds her and cannot be seen, which weighs more than everything that can be seen, and which the reciters held to be the chief proof of the legend, for they said: a body that is carrying weighs more than it looks like it should, and you will not see what she is carrying, and you will see that she moves like she is carrying it.

The Pearls — the old globular gatherings that hang above and below her, which are the eldest things in her, which have made nothing new for a very long time, and which the reciters called her Grandmothers and addressed directly in certain rites.

The Two Daughters — the small clouded companions that follow her and are slowly being taken apart by her, and whose dismemberment is the subject of a lament sung only by the old.

The Rift — the long dark lane that splits the band in two. This is a wound. Its making is told in Book Six, and the reciters would not discuss it before its time, and a hearer who asked early was told to be quiet and was not told twice.

The Throne of Silence — at her center, where the turning is fastest and the light does not come back. Of this the first book says only: that is where the head is.

ix. Of the Confinement

And in the third age it became apparent — to whom, the legend does not say, and the refusal is deliberate — that Annumara was carrying.

The reciters would not say pregnant, in the later centuries, because the word had become clinical; they said in confinement, which in the old speech means both a pregnancy’s late season and an imprisonment, and they used it precisely because it means both.

The signs were four.

She was heavier than her light. Already given above.

Her turning was wrong at the edges. A body that turns and holds nothing should turn slowly at its rim. She did not. The rim kept pace with the heart, which is impossible for an unburdened thing, and the reciters said: she is holding something at the outside of herself with both arms.

She did not sleep. Her making of new stars never fully stopped and never fully flourished; she went on at a low constant rate, age upon age, like a woman who cannot settle.

And there was a sound. The oldest sound, coming from everywhere, having no source, faint and warm and impossible to point at. The reciters said this was a heartbeat heard from within, and the hearer, who is inside her, cannot locate it for the same reason that a hearer inside any body cannot locate it: because it is not in front of her. It is around.

x. Of the One Who Is Carried

The legend names the carried THE SEVENTH CHILD, and also THE HEIR OF THE MILK, and also, most often, simply THE UNBORN.

It gives the Unborn no face, no sex, no will, no voice, and no estimated hour.

Four heresies have supplied these and all four are named and condemned in Book Nine. The reciters held that every attempt to describe the Unborn had produced, within a generation, a person who wanted it born on a particular day, and that such a person is the single most dangerous creature the legend knows.

What is said of the Unborn is this, and only this:

It has not been born. Nothing has been born. Not one thing, anywhere, in any age. Everything you have ever called a birth was a stirring inside the one great Confinement. You have never seen a birth. You have seen her move.

xi. Of the First Drinkers

Now the stars that came after the first children were not like the first children. They were smaller and they lived longer and some of them had, turning about them, cooled remnants of the old dyings — the spoons, as the hymn has it — and on a certain number of those remnants a thing occurred.

The thing that occurred is called the Latch.

The Latch is the legend’s central sacrament and it is not a ritual. It is an event in physics. It is the moment at which some arrangement of the gathered stuff begins to take in and keep — to draw from the body it is standing on, to hold the drawing, to use the drawing to go on drawing.

The reciters refused to distinguish between the latch of a star upon the cloud that feeds it, the latch of a root upon the ground, the latch of an animal upon a body, and the latch of a mind upon a world. They held these to be one act appearing at four sizes, and they held that any tradition which separated them had mistaken a difference of scale for a difference of kind, and they were not polite about it.

And the first drinkers drank, and Annumara did not notice them, because they were very small, and the reciters say this without any pity at all:

She did not notice us. She has never noticed us. This is not neglect. A woman carrying a child does not notice the warmth on her own arm. We are the warmth on her arm. We are what it feels like, from the inside, to be covered in something living.

xii. Of the Need for a Mind

But a body in confinement, turning and turning for age upon age, holding something it cannot put down, cannot also attend.

This is the last teaching of the first book and it is the one the whole legend rests on.

Attention is not a property of bodies. Attention is work. A body that is doing the enormous labor of carrying cannot simultaneously watch, judge, remember, refuse, permit, name, number, forgive, or rule. The carrying takes all of it.

And so the body did what every carrying body in the universe does, by the agreements set in the First Milk: it narrowed. It gave up its own wideness. It pulled its wakefulness inward and upward until all of the attention that an entire galaxy is capable of producing was gathered into one small burning point of mind.

And that point of mind was crowned.

And her name is in the next book, and the reciters would not say it on the first night, and would send the hearers away, and would bank the fire, and would say only the formula with which every first night of the telling has ended for as long as anyone can establish:

The body lies down. The mind sits up. The one who sits up is the Empress. Come back tomorrow and bring something to eat.

BOOK TWO: THE CROWNING OF THE SUPREME EMPRESS

i. Her Name

Her name is VASHTARA.

The reciters would not say it on the first night. On the second night they said it first, before the fire was properly going, before anyone had settled, deliberately, so that it would be heard by people who were not yet ready to hear it — because, they taught, no one is ever ready, and a name withheld until the hearer is worthy becomes a reward, and a reward becomes a currency, and a currency becomes a priesthood.

VASHTARA. In the First Speech the name is built of two roots: vash, which is the verb for remaining awake through a night when something must be watched, and tara, which is the fixed point, the one that does not move while the others wheel.

So: She Who Stays Awake at the Still Point.

Her common titles, in the order the reciters gave them, which is not an order of rank:

The Supreme Empress. The Crowned Attention. She Who Does Not Set. Regent of the Unborn. Mistress of the Twelve Kings. The Hinge. The Thirteenth Throne. Lady of the Long Hour. She Who Is Not Finished. The One Who Will Not Put It Down.

And one more, which is the oldest and which the reciters used only when they were genuinely frightened, which was perhaps four times in a life:

The Woman at the Center of the Night Who Has Not Been Allowed to Lie on Her Side.

ii. What She Is

She is not Annumara’s daughter. The later tellings made her a daughter because a daughter is easy to draw, and the reciters allowed the error in public and corrected it in private, and we will correct it here.

Vashtara is Annumara’s waking mind.

One being. Two persons. The body that carries, and the attention that the carrying body cannot spare and therefore sets apart, crowns, and sends out to rule in her stead.

This is the doctrine of the Two Thrones and it is the hardest thing in the legend. The hearer always asks: then is the Empress real, or is she only a part of the Madonna?

And the reciters always answered with the same question back: Are you real, or are you only a part of your mother?

And when the hearer said that she was both, the reciters said: then you have understood, and we will not explain it further, and you will lose the understanding by morning and get it back in nine years.

iii. Of Her Crowning

The Crowning is the central scene of the entire legend and every art the reciters’ peoples ever practiced tried to depict it.

It happened in the third age, at the hour when the carrying became heavy enough that the body could no longer both carry and attend.

Annumara narrowed. All the wakefulness distributed through a hundred thousand million burning things drew inward, the way heat draws to a center, the way a woman in the last stage of a long labor stops being able to hear the people in the room.

And at the still point of her turning, where nothing had been but weight and speed and silence, the gathered attention took a shape, and the shape was a woman, and the woman opened her eyes.

And the first thing Vashtara saw was the body she had come out of.

And the first thing Vashtara understood — this is the verse, and the reciters sang it rather than spoke it, and would not sing it twice in one night — was:

She saw that she was the only part of her mother that could look at her mother. And she saw that her mother could not look back. And she did not weep, because weeping had not yet been invented, and so she did the thing that would later be called weeping, and the thing has been called that ever since.

iv. Of the Crown

The Crown was not given to her. There was no one to give it.

The Crown is described in the hymns as a band of light that does not rest upon her head but around her, at a little distance, turning, and the reciters said plainly that the Crown is the galaxy itself seen from the only place from which it can be seen whole, and that to wear a crown is to be at the center of a thing that goes on turning around you whether you will it or not.

There are twelve stones in the Crown. They are the Twelve Solar Kings, of whom Book Five tells. They are set into the Crown and they are not her servants and they are not her jewels; they are in her crown, which in the First Speech is an idiom meaning something very close to on her mind.

There is a thirteenth setting and it is empty and it has always been empty, and the reciters would not say what it is for. Four traditions supply an answer. All four are rejected in Book Nine.

v. Of the Throne, Which Is a Bed

The Empress does not stand.

Of all the strange teachings in this legend, this is the one that has most reliably caused outsiders to laugh, and the reciters were unbothered by the laughter and regarded it as a filter.

Vashtara is enthroned, and her throne is a bed, and the reciters pointed out that every hearer who laughs at this has been imagining a bed as a place of rest, and that a bed is only a place of rest to people who are permitted to get out of it.

The doctrine is given in four propositions:

She does not stand, because standing is for those who are going somewhere, and she is the place. An empress who could walk away from her empire would be a traveler. The Hinge does not travel. The still point at the center of a turning thing has, by definition, nowhere to go.

She is not at rest, because the bed is where the labor is. Every hearer who has sat with a woman in a long confinement knows that the bed is not the opposite of work. It is the site of the work. The most strenuous hours of human life are spent horizontal.

She rules by not putting it down. This is the whole exercise of her authority. She is not a legislator and she issues no commands that anyone has ever recorded. She holds. The holding is the governance.

And therefore her reign is measured in duration and not in deeds. Other sovereigns are judged by what they did. She is judged — if anything judges her, and the legend says nothing does — by how long she went on.

vi. Of the Empire and Its Borders

The Empire of the Supreme Empress is not the galaxy.

The galaxy is her mother’s body. One does not rule one’s mother’s body. The reciters were severe about this and said that any telling which has Vashtara commanding the stars has become a story about a king with a different hat.

Her empire is this: everything that is being held and has not been let go.

The subjects of the Empress, as enumerated in the old recitation, which is chanted and which takes about four minutes and which no reciter ever shortened:

The star that has gathered its cloud and has not yet caught. The star that has caught and has not yet failed. The seed under frost. The egg under the bird. The root that has found the stone and has gone around it for eleven years. The river that has been stopped and is rising behind the stopping. The animal at the mouth of the burrow who has not yet decided. The sick one in the sixth year of a sickness that will neither kill her nor leave. The prisoner whose sentence has no number on it. The mother of the one who did not come home and has not been found. The people under an occupation older than their oldest living person. The debtor. The student. The apprentice. The one in the middle of a journey with no money for the rest of it. The one who is not over it. The one who is still in love and should not be. The maker at the forty-first attempt. The hearer at this line, now, tonight, in the middle of this telling, who is not finished either.

All these are hers. Not because they prayed. Because they are partway. There is no other requirement and there never has been.

The reciters taught that this is the only genuinely original doctrine in the legend and that everything else in it can be found somewhere else in the world in some form. Every other tradition organizes itself around arrivals: salvation, liberation, enlightenment, the harvest, the homecoming, the kingdom come. This one is organized around the condition of not having arrived, and it declares that condition to be not a waiting room but the throne room itself.

vii. Of Her Powers, Which Are Four and Are Disappointing

The reciters warned hearers at this point that they were about to be let down, and they said it was intentional, and that a legend which gives its sovereign impressive powers has become a wish.

The First Power: She Can Hold. That is a power. The hearer who thinks it is not a power has never tried to hold anything for longer than it was convenient.

The Second Power: Things Near Her Take Longer. This is the power that makes the arms of the galaxy. The arms are not objects; they are places where things slow and bunch, and the stuff flows through them and the pattern remains. Where the Empress’s attention rests, duration thickens. The reciters called this the Thickening and said it is the only effect of hers that can be seen from another galaxy.

The Third Power: She Knows How Long. Not what will happen. Never what will happen. Only how long it will take for the thing — whatever it turns out to be — to not be over. She is the only figure in any pantheon who is an authority on duration and an ignoramus about outcome, and the reciters said this was the most trustworthy thing about her.

The Fourth Power: She Cannot Be Hurried. And anyone who tries to hurry her experiences, in the middle of the attempt, a sudden and specific embarrassment at their own urgency. This is her only defense. It is also, as Book Six will tell, insufficient.

And four things she cannot do, which the reciters listed immediately afterward in the same breath so that no hearer could leave with an inflated picture:

She cannot heal. She cannot see what is coming. She cannot command. And she cannot leave.

viii. Of Her Silence

The Empress does not speak of the Unborn.

She speaks of other matters, in the legend, frequently, and some of her speeches are long and some of them are funny. But of the one her mother carries, she says nothing, and has said nothing in any age, and the prohibition is her own and no one laid it on her.

The reason given is the Law of the Named Hour, and it is stated so:

A thing that is held becomes, when named aloud by the one who holds it, a thing with an hour. And a thing with an hour has a sooner and a later. And where there is a sooner, there will be someone who prefers it.

The reciters held that the Empress had understood this in the first instant of her crowning, before she understood anything else, and that her silence is therefore older than her sorrow.

Around this silence the whole order of her court is arranged, and the chief office of that court — the Silencer, of whom Book Four tells — exists for no other purpose than to make sure the sentence never arrives at the Empress’s mouth on a bad night.

ix. Of the Regalia

Six objects are named in the hymns. The reciters insisted they are not objects, and then described them in enormous physical detail for nine hundred years, and we will follow the reciters in both things.

THE CROWN. Given above. Twelve set, one empty.

THE MANTLE. The dark that surrounds her mother and weighs more than all the light. It is called a mantle because it is worn and because it cannot be seen and because it is the heaviest garment in creation. The hymn: She is covered in what she is carrying, and that is why you cannot see what she is carrying, and that is why you can see that she is covered.

THE PEARLS. The old gatherings, the Grandmothers, hung above and below. They are not ornaments. They are the previous generations of her mother’s attendants, who have made nothing new in an age, and who are kept near, and who are addressed by name in the rites of the fourth hour.

THE RIFT. A scar worn as regalia. Book Six.

THE COUNT. The only thing in her hands. She holds a count — of movements, of kicks, of the stirrings of the Unborn — and the number is never given and the count is never completed and the reciters said that the sound of her counting is the sound you hear when you are alone in a quiet house and you think it is your own pulse.

THE EMPTY SETTING. Thirteenth. Unexplained.

x. Of Her Appearance

The reciters allowed one description and forbade all others, and the description is deliberately poor.

She is not tall. She is not radiant; the radiance is behind her and that is not the same thing. She is not young, and she is not old, and she has the face of a woman who was interrupted in the middle of something nine thousand years ago and has been patient about it ever since. Her hands are on her own body. She is sitting up in the bed, which is the single most difficult posture a tired person can hold, and which is the posture of someone who is not asleep and is not getting up.

Every image of her made in gold, the reciters said, is a lie told by someone who was paid. Every image of her made in ash on a wall by a woman who was afraid is probably about right.

xi. Of the Empress and the Hearer

The second night ended with the Address, which is the only part of the legend spoken in the second person, and which the reciters spoke directly to one chosen hearer, looking at them, while everyone else listened:

You will want her to do something. She will not do anything. You will decide, at some point in your life, probably at night, that a sovereign who does nothing is not a sovereign, and you will put this legend down, and you will be right to. And then one year a thing will happen to you that does not resolve. It will not kill you and it will not leave. It will go on, and on, past the point where your friends have run out of ways to ask about it, past the point where you have run out of ways to describe it. And in the middle of that, with no warning, you will understand that there is an enormous woman at the center of the sky who has been in exactly your position since before the first element was forged, and who has not put it down, and who is not going to. And it will not help. And it will be the only thing that has ever been true.

Then the fire was banked, and the reciters said the formula of the second night, which is:

The Crown has twelve stones and one empty place. Tomorrow we will name the Nine who sit below her. Bring your daughters. They will not be frightened. It is the sons who will be frightened.

BOOK THREE: THE NINE MADONNAS

i. On What They Are

Below the Supreme Empress sit Nine, and they are called the Madonnas, and the hearer must be told at once what the word means in the First Speech, because it does not mean what it has come to mean.

Madonna in the recitation is not a title of respect. It is a job. The root is the verb for to be the one that a thing comes through. A doorway is a madonna. A wound is a madonna. A mother is a madonna and so is a mouth, and so is a window, and so is the moment of agreeing to a bad bargain. A madonna is any place where something crosses from not-here to here.

So the Nine are not nine goddesses. They are the nine ways that anything whatsoever gets from the Unlit into the lit. They are the nine doors in the one wall. The reciters taught them as a set and refused to teach one without teaching its neighbors, saying that a hearer who learns one door will spend her life trying to enter by it.

They are ranked in no order. They are given here in the order of the chant, which is a mnemonic and not a hierarchy.

ii. LILASH, the Madonna of Babylon

The Gate of the Flesh.

She is the first because she is the nearest. Every hearer has already come through her.

Lilash is the door of appetite. She governs the crossing of spirit into meat: conception, hunger, thirst, lust, nursing, eating, and the whole enormous apparatus by which something that is not yet a body becomes one and then insists on being fed.

Her sign is the open mouth. Her number is two, because nothing crosses her threshold alone. Her hour is the hour after dark when the work is done and the body remembers that it is a body.

The reciters called her the honest one, and they meant it as the highest praise in the legend, and they explained it so:

The others will let you pretend. Under the Moon you may pretend you are a thought. Under the Ice you may pretend you are a principle. Under the Burning you may pretend you are being purified. Lilash does not allow the pretense for one minute. You are a thing that must be fed four times a day or it will become stupid, and twenty times a day it will want something it cannot name, and this is not a flaw in the arrangement. This is the arrangement.

Of her they also taught the Doctrine of the Sacred Debt: that pleasure is not a reward and not a temptation but a receipt. Every pleasure is the body acknowledging that something was received. A creature that could draw from the Madonna without pleasure would have no way of knowing it had drunk. Pleasure is the sensation of the Latch working.

Her danger: that the hearer will mistake the door for the room. Lilash’s whole discipline is to keep moving through her. A soul that stops in the gateway is not enjoying the body; it is standing in a doorframe, in the draft, blocking the way.

Her rite is a meal.

iii. SELU, the Madonna in the Moon

The Gate of Return.

Selu is the door that things come back through, and she is the oldest of the Nine in human reckoning, because before any people counted a year they counted her.

She governs: the cycle, the phase, the tide, the blood, the season, the habit, the anniversary, the grudge that comes back every winter, and the whole category of events that have happened before and will happen again.

Her sign is the sickle. Her number is twenty-eight, or thirteen, and the reciters used both and quarreled about it and the quarrel is preserved in the chant as a deliberate stumble.

The teaching of Selu is the teaching of the Second Light. She shines and the light is not hers. This is the legend’s whole doctrine of reflection, and it is not an insult to her; the reciters said the moon is the only honest light in the sky because it is the only one that does not pretend to be its own source. Every other light is burning its own substance and will run out. The reflector never runs out. The reflector is still shining a hundred billion years after the burners have finished.

Be a burner if you can. Be a reflector if you cannot. The reflector outlasts the burner and does not get a hymn, and Selu has made her peace with this and you will not.

Her danger: that the hearer will mistake recurrence for permanence. A thing that comes back is not a thing that stays. Selu teaches the return and she also teaches the dark phase, and the people who love her for the full moon and will not sit with her on the three dark nights have not learned her at all.

Her rite is a vigil kept on a night when nothing is visible.

iv. KHALIRA, the Madonna of the Ice Wall

The Gate of the Edge.

She is the daughter of Khal, the one of the Three Before who said this far. She is the only one of the Nine with an ancestor.

Khalira governs the limit, the rim, the skin, the membrane, the shore, the deadline, the dose, the wall of the cell, the surface of the eye, the last hour of a visit, the word no, and the outer boundary of the observable, past which there is more but no news of it.

Her sign is the line. Her number is one, because a limit is what makes one thing one thing.

The teaching of Khalira is the hardest of the Nine to accept in youth and the easiest in age, and it is this: nothing exists until something has refused it.

The cell is alive because its wall says no to the sea. The child is a person on the day she first says no and means it. The lover is loved because the beloved has refused everyone else. The art is art because the artist took away. Every thing that you can point to is a region of the universe that has declined to be the rest of the universe, and the declining is the thing, and the thing is nothing but the declining.

Her danger is the coldest in the legend. A hearer who learns only Khalira becomes a person made entirely of edges, who has refused so finely that there is nothing left in the middle to be bounded. The reciters called this the Hollow Rim and they said it is the most respectable of all spiritual diseases, because from the outside it looks exactly like integrity.

Her rite is a fast of one day, broken at a line drawn on the ground.

v. ORRASH, the Madonna of Mayhem

The Gate of the Break.

Orrash is the door that things leave by when they will not leave any other way, and she is a true Madonna — a doorway, a place of crossing — which is the part that frightens people, because they want her to be a monster and she is a midwife.

She governs: the collapse, the flood, the fire that was not set on purpose, the accident, the diagnosis, the ruin, the arrest, the sudden death, the war, the stone that falls out of the sky and puts an end to an age of lizards so that something warm can have a turn.

Her sign is the broken vessel. Her number is nine, because nine is the number that will not sit evenly in anything.

The reciters taught Orrash on a particular night of the year and they taught her in the plainest possible language and they did not comfort anyone:

She is not punishment. There is no one keeping accounts. She is not a lesson. You will make a lesson out of her afterward because that is what minds do with wreckage, and the lesson will be useful to you and it will not be true. She is the only door wide enough for certain things to get out of. Every age that has ever ended was carried out through Orrash. You will go through her at least once. Probably four times. You will not be ready and there is no readying.

And they taught the Mercy of Orrash, which is the only mercy in the legend that is not disputed: she is fast. Of all the Nine, she alone does not take long. Every other door in this legend is a door you spend decades in. Hers opens and shuts.

Her danger is the obvious one and also a subtle one. The obvious one is ruin. The subtle one is the hearer who begins to prefer her — who finds the long doors unbearable and starts, quietly, arranging breaks, because a catastrophe is at least an event and the duration is not.

Her rite is the clearing of a house after a death, done by hand, slowly, by people who will be hungry afterward and will eat together.

vi. PYRAMAH, the Burning Madonna

The Gate of Change.

Where Orrash breaks, Pyramah converts. The two are often confused by outsiders and the reciters considered the confusion a mark of a careless mind.

Pyramah governs: fire, fever, forging, fermentation, cooking, grief, the furnace at the heart of every star, the slow burn of a life spent on one thing, rage, and the entire process by which a substance becomes a different substance without passing through nothing on the way.

Her sign is the crucible. Her number is seven.

Her central teaching is the Doctrine of the Spoons, which is the legend’s account of where everything is from:

The light in the sky is not decoration. Every star is a kitchen. In the first age there was only the thinnest stuff, and nothing could be built of it, and the first children caught fire and burned for nine breaths and died, and in their dying they made the heavier things — the iron, the calcium, the carbon, the oxygen — and threw them out. Your bones were cooked in a stranger who died before the planet existed. The iron in your blood came out of a detonation. You are, in the most literal available sense, leftovers. Pyramah is the one who cooked you, and she has never once been thanked, because the meal does not thank the fire.

Her danger: the hearer who comes to believe that transformation is always improvement. Pyramah converts. She does not promise that what comes out is better than what went in. Ash is a conversion. The reciters were severe about this and said that half of all human cruelty is performed by people who have decided that because a thing is being burned, it is being purified.

Her rite is the making of bread, or the making of anything that cannot be unmade.

vii. RUHANNA, the Holy Madonna Ghost

The Gate of the Between.

Ruhanna is the door with no frame, and the reciters said she is the only one of the Nine who is everywhere at once, and that this is why she is the hardest to find.

She governs: breath, speech, music, the space between two people, the thing you understood in a room that nobody said out loud, contagion, inspiration, rumor, influence, the warmth of a crowd, and the inexplicable fact that a mood can cross from one animal to another without touching.

Her sign is the moving air. Her number is three, because three is the smallest number that permits a between.

The teaching of Ruhanna is the Doctrine of Immanence and it is the legend’s only consolation and the reciters distrusted it slightly for that reason:

You are not far from her. There is no distance to cross. The distance was always a story told by people who wanted the crossing to be their profession. You are inside the body you are looking for. You have never once been outside it. You could not get outside it if you tried, and the only reason you cannot feel it is that a thing you have never been without is a thing you cannot detect. Ruhanna is not the presence. Ruhanna is the noticing of the presence, and she moves, and she comes and goes, and the presence does not.

Her danger: that the hearer will chase the noticing and come to believe that when she cannot feel it, it is not there. This is called the Error of the Breathless, and the reciters said it has emptied more halls than persecution ever did.

Her rite is singing with others. Not alone. The reciters were specific: alone is a different Madonna.

viii. VELARIS, the Smiling Madonna

The Gate of the Made Image.

Velaris is the door through which a thing enters the world a second time, as a picture of itself, and the legend holds that this second entry is a true birth and not a shadow.

She governs: art, image, likeness, memory, story, the mask, the portrait, the name, the map, the model, the lie that is told in order to show something that cannot be shown directly, and the whole vast human habit of making a smaller copy of an unbearable thing in order to be able to look at it.

Her sign is the face that is about to speak and does not. Her number is two, like Lilash’s, and the reciters said the doubling is intentional: the flesh and the image are the same door seen from two sides.

The teaching of Velaris is the Doctrine of the Second Making:

Annumara made the thing. Velaris makes the thing again, smaller, and in the making-again something is added that was not in the original, and the something is called witness. An unwitnessed thing is complete and is also, in a sense the legend insists on, unfinished. This is why the Empress rules the unfinished and why the makers are her closest subjects. A maker is a person who has taken something out of the world, kept it in her, and will not put it down until it has come out again. Every artist in every age has been doing a small version of the Confinement, and most of them have known it, and the ones who have not known it have known it.

Her smile is the most discussed feature of the Nine. The reciters give it one gloss, flatly, and refuse elaboration: she is smiling because she knows what she left out.

Her danger: the image that replaces the thing. The map eaten instead of the country. The reciters warned that Velaris is the only one of the Nine who can be made to serve a liar for a long time without visible cost.

Her rite is the making of a likeness and the destroying of it, in that order, within one day.

ix. MIRIT, the Madonna of Dust

The Gate of the Ordinary.

Mirit is the least depicted and the most frequently met, and the reciters held her to be the Empress’s favorite, and said the Empress has no favorites, and then went on saying it anyway.

She governs: the small, the common, the cheap, the repeated, the unremarkable, the chore, the daily, the poor, the crowd, the grain of sand, the hydrogen atom of which almost everything consists, the woman who is not in any record, and the four thousand unexceptional acts that constitute a life.

Her sign is a handful of nothing in particular. Her number is uncountable.

Her teaching is the Doctrine of the Common Stuff:

You were told the universe is mostly empty. It is not. It is mostly the simplest thing there is, in quantities that make counting an insult. The rare is not the real. The rare is the exception that the common permitted. Of all the Madonnas, Mirit is the one you will spend your whole life inside, and she has no festival, and she asks nothing, and when you are dying you will discover that every single thing you want one more hour of was hers.

The reciters taught that Mirit walks. Alone among the Nine she is said to be in the world, in ordinary form, constantly, and that she is not disguised — that this is an error introduced by later tellers who could not accept it. She is not a queen pretending to be a poor woman. She is a poor woman, and that is the office, and the legend’s whole moral weight rests on the difference.

Her danger: contempt. Specifically, the contempt of the person who has learned the other eight.

Her rite is to do something useful for someone who will not know who did it.

x. ANOD DAM, the Reversed Madonna

The Gate That Opens the Wrong Way.

The ninth is spoken last, standing, by the reciter alone, with the fire low.

ANOD DAM. Read her name forward and you have a door. Read it as it is written and you have the door turned around — the same letters, the same wood, the same hinges, facing the other way.

She is not evil. The legend has no evil. She is the Madonna of everything the other eight could not admit.

Lilash takes the appetite that can be fed; Anod Dam takes the appetite that cannot. Selu takes what returns; Anod Dam takes what was supposed to return and did not. Khalira takes the limit that makes a thing; Anod Dam takes the limit that was imposed on it by someone else. Orrash takes the break that opens; Anod Dam takes the break that merely ruins. Pyramah takes the burning that converts; Anod Dam takes the burning that only blackens. Ruhanna takes the between that connects; Anod Dam takes the between that isolates. Velaris takes the image that reveals; Anod Dam takes the image that was made to deceive and succeeded. Mirit takes the small and necessary; Anod Dam takes the small and wasted.

She is the ninth because eight doors do not account for the traffic.

Her sign is the hinge with no door in it. Her number is zero. Her hour is the hour before dawn, which is the one hour in the cycle that belongs to no activity whatsoever.

The teaching of Anod Dam is the only teaching in the legend that is given as a warning and not as an instruction:

Everything the Empire cannot use still exists. You have a quantity of it. So does every age, every people, every star. It does not go anywhere. There is no outside to put it in. The First Shore was the last edge ever made and nothing has been thrown over it. Anod Dam is where it is kept, and she keeps it faithfully, and she does not destroy it, and one day the Empress will have to account for all of it, and the legend does not say how.

Her origin is told in Book Six and it is the worst thing in the legend and the reciters did not tell it to anyone under thirty.

Her rite is to say aloud, once a year, alone, the true list of the things you did not do.

xi. The Chant of the Nine

The third night ends with the chant, which hearers are expected to learn and which is the only part of the legend that ordinary people in those districts could all recite:

Nine doors in the one wall. Flesh and Return and Edge, Break and Change and Between, Image and Dust — and the ninth turned round. One wall. One body. One woman awake at the center. We came in by one of them and we will go out by another and she is not finished and neither are we.

BOOK FOUR: THE COURT OF THE LONG HOUR

i. Why There Is a Court at All

A sovereign who does only one thing needs no ministers. The Empress holds; holding is indivisible; there is nothing to delegate.

And yet the legend gives her a court of seven orders, and the reciters explained the apparent contradiction with a question that they regarded as the best question in the whole telling:

If she must not put it down, and she must not speak of it, and she must not be hurried — who makes sure of those three things?

She cannot. A watcher cannot watch herself and go on carrying. Every guard in that list is a second task, and the whole reason she exists is that her mother could not do two tasks at once.

So the Court is not her government. The Court is her conditions. They are the arrangements that permit one woman to do one thing for an unreasonable length of time, and the reciters said that this is what all courts secretly are, in every empire that ever stood, and that the ones which forgot it fell within three generations.

The Court is called the Court of the Long Hour, after the hour it keeps, which is the hour that does not end.

ii. The First Order: THE SILENCERS

The eldest order and the smallest. At any time there is one Silencer, and she is always the oldest person in the court, and when she dies the office waits unfilled for a year, which is called the Open Year and is considered dangerous.

Her work is one thing: to stand between the Empress and the sentence.

She does not gag her. The reciters were insistent: the Empress may say anything she wishes and no one has ever prevented her. The Silencer works upstream. She arranges the conditions in which the sentence about the Unborn never arrives at the mouth, and she does this by the craft called the Doors.

The Doors of the Silencer, as the legend gives them:

The Door of Weather. Always available, never suspicious, infinitely extensible. Not storms — storms are about feeling. The craft requires the mild and pointless: whether the dry spell will hold, what the nights have been doing.

The Door of Prices. The cost of a thing that used to cost less. The one subject on which any being in the universe can speak indefinitely while believing something important is under discussion. Its failure mode is despair, and a Silencer who takes this door on a bad night has made matters worse.

The Door of Beasts. The safest. An animal is a creature being cared for, which is near the subject, so attention goes to it willingly — and then stops, because an animal is a complete object and leads nowhere. The reciters called this a terminal door and said a good Silencer will use it twice a day for forty years.

The Door of the Named Dead. The most dangerous and the most necessary. The Empress will want, periodically, to speak of what has been lost, and she must be allowed to, at length — but by name only. Specific dead: permitted. The dead in general: the sentence begins forming immediately. The Silencer’s rule is absolute: the moment she says “everyone,” go back to weather.

There was a fifth door in the old reckonings and it is listed as defunct, and the legend says only that it was the Door of Work, and that it ceased to function in a late age, when beings stopped being able to describe what they did without evaluating whether it was worth doing.

The mark of a Silencer, by which they were known to one another: she can speak for eleven minutes about nothing and leave the hearer feeling attended to rather than managed. The reciters said that this is the rarest skill in creation and that it is possessed almost exclusively by old women and by no one else at all.

iii. The Second Order: THE COUNTERS

The Counters keep the tally of the stirrings of the Unborn.

Their instrument has changed in every age and their method has not. The method is: watch a still thing, in a sheltered place, for a measured span, and record each single displacement that cannot be accounted for by anything in the world.

Not ripples. Ripples are everything — a hoof on the road, a bird, your own breath. The Counter looks for the one movement from the center outward with no second, and she records it, and she subtracts everything she can name, and the residue is the count.

The residue is never large and has never been zero.

The Counters are drawn, by a rule the legend states and does not justify, from people who work with their hands at a trade. A Counter without grease under her nails begins, within one generation, to see stirrings everywhere, and a Counter who sees stirrings everywhere has stopped counting and started hoping.

Their archive is the oldest continuous document the Court maintains and the reciters claimed it existed in their own time, kept in a back room by a person with an ordinary occupation, and they were never more specific than that.

The Counters’ creed, which they say on taking the office:

I will count what moves. I will subtract what I can name. I will not name the rest. I will not say what the number means. I will not stop when the number is boring, which it will be for the whole of my life.

iv. The Third Order: THE WEIGHERS

The Weighers measure the draw — how much is being taken from the Madonna, by what, at what rate.

They are always two and never one and never three. One Weigher becomes a prophet within a decade; three produce a majority, and a majority produces a finding, and a finding produces an instruction, and the Court is forbidden to instruct.

Two is deadlock by design. The reciters said the Court’s entire protection against itself is that its measuring order can never agree.

What the Weighers established, across the ages, and which the legend reports as settled:

That the draw is not constant. That it rose steeply in the second age, when the first children burned fast and briefly and died making the spoons. That it has fallen since and goes on falling. That the Madonna is making fewer new stars now than she did, by a very great deal, and that this is not decline but the ordinary course of a body that has been giving for a long time.

And the hardest finding, which the Weighers resisted for an age and then conceded:

The giving will end.

Not in catastrophe. Not in judgment. The stuff available for the making runs down; the forges go out one at a time over spans that make the present age look like a held breath; and the sky goes dark not because anything was destroyed but because the giving stopped.

The legend’s name for this is not death. It is the Weaning, and Book Nine treats of it, and the reciters refused to let anyone despair at the mention of it, saying: you have met weaning before. Nobody died. Everyone was furious for a week.

v. The Fourth Order: THE REMEMBRANCERS

One at a time. The order of the written word.

The Remembrancer records what the Empress does. Not what she means — meaning is forbidden to the order, and a Remembrancer caught interpreting is removed. She records movement, speech, duration, weather, and the condition of the court, in a plain hand, in whatever is to hand.

The order has four rules and they are carved into the opening page of every volume ever kept:

Record the parts that make us look stupid. The legend holds that the Court’s enemies kept beautiful records and that the Court’s should be worse-looking and truer.

Do not advise. The Remembrancer who begins to advise has become a counsellor, and a counsellor wants outcomes.

Do not comfort. This is the cruelest rule and the one most often broken. The legend records the breakings and does not condemn them and does not revise the rule.

Do not love her. This rule is stated and immediately annotated, in every surviving copy, in a different hand, with the same three words: This never works.

vi. The Fifth Order: THE DOORKEEPERS

Two, always. They are the order that speaks with the enemy.

The Court of the Long Hour has one opponent, of whom Book Six tells, and the opponent is not a monster and is not an army and is, in the legend’s own description, a hospice order that has been wrong for an age in the most sympathetic possible direction.

The Doorkeepers receive their approaches. They are not warriors; the Court has no warriors now, though it had something worse once and Book Six tells of that too. The Doorkeepers are two extremely patient beings who answer when the other side knocks, and who hear the case made, and who say no, and who are required by their oath to say no without ever once arguing that the other side is wicked.

Their oath:

They are not cruel. They are in a hurry, and they are in a hurry out of pity, and pity in a hurry is the oldest catastrophe there is. I will not call them evil, because the day I call them evil is the day I stop being able to tell whether they are right.

vii. The Sixth Order: THE FINDERS

Three to nine, variable, mostly unknown to one another. They are the only order that travels on purpose.

Their work is to locate those in whom the Empress’s own condition is reproduced at small scale — the ones who are carrying something they will not set down, with no plan for the carrying to end. These are not recruits. They are not told. The Finders do not approach, and they do not reveal, and most of those they find live and die without hearing a word of this legend.

The Finders simply find, and record, and send the name to the Remembrancer, and the Court keeps a register of such people which is the longest document in its possession and which has no purpose.

The hearer always asks what the register is for.

The reciters’ answer, every time, in the same words:

It is for nothing. Someone should have known. That is the whole of the reason and it has been the whole of the reason for every age, and when the Court is finally asked to account for itself, this is the document it intends to produce.

viii. The Seventh Order: THE MILK-WARDENS

The order that attends the substance.

They are the keepers of what has been given and not yet received: the cloud that has gathered and not yet caught; the stored, the banked, the frozen, the set-aside; every quantity anywhere of nourishment that has been produced by a body for a body that could not take it.

The other orders consider the Milk-Wardens marginal and have tried four times to abolish them, and the Wardens’ defense has never changed and has never been improved upon:

If a law is true only at the greatest size, it is a belief. If it is true only at the smallest, it is a mechanism. If it is the same at both, it is a law, and a law may be tested in a kitchen. We are the kitchen. Abolish us and you will have a theology.

ix. The Handmaidens: TASHEL and MURRA

Two attend the Empress’s mother directly and are not of the orders, and they are not servants, and their story is the one lament in the legend that is sung only by the old and never in daylight.

TASHEL and MURRA are the Two Who Follow. They are small and clouded and they have come near, and they are being taken apart.

The legend does not pretend this is a kindness. Annumara is drawing them in, slowly, over an age, by nothing more malicious than weight; and they are coming; and they are being pulled into long streams behind them as they come; and they will not survive the arrival, and they have not stopped.

The lament is six lines:

Why do you follow her, Tashel, when she is undoing your hem? Because she is cold and I am what she has. Why do you follow her, Murra, when you can see what became of your sisters? Because I have seen what became of my sisters and they are inside her and they are not lost. And what will you be, when she has you? I will be the part of her that chose it.

The reciters taught this lament to girls at a certain age and the practice was criticized in later centuries and they did not stop.

x. The Grandmothers

Above and below the body hang the Pearls, the old gatherings, the eldest things she has.

They are the retired Court. They made nothing new for an age; they hold their shape; they move on long slow paths that take them out and bring them back. In the rites they are addressed by name and asked nothing.

The legend’s treatment of them is four lines and it is the only passage in the whole telling in which the Court speaks to itself:

You are not needed. You are not dismissed. You will go out and come back for as long as she turns. There is no office for what you are and you are in every list.

xi. The Protocols of the Long Hour

Five rules govern the Court, and the reciters gave them as a single breath at the close of the fourth night.

One: The Court has no authority. It cannot compel the Empress, who outranks it absolutely, nor any being, nor itself. Its sole enforcement is that a member who is told to stop, stops; and in the whole of the record no one told to stop has ever continued; and the legend says the Court is therefore held together by the quality of its choosing and by nothing else whatsoever.

Two: The Court does not vote. It has no quorum, no parliament, no majority. Each member says yes or no privately to the Remembrancer, who is bound by none of it and is required to hear all of it. The reason given: a parliament’s first act, in every instance in recorded history, is to authorize something.

Three: The Court does not petition. No one is ever brought before the Empress to ask for anything. Twice this was permitted. Both times she began to try, and the legend’s annotation on both episodes is the same four words: She began to try. Catastrophe.

Four: The Court keeps no relics. Nothing of a dead member is preserved. The reason: a kept object becomes a thing to go and look at, and going and looking is a thing done instead of counting.

Five: The Court is not load-bearing. The holding does not depend on the Court. If every order dissolved tonight, the Empress would hold exactly as she holds. The Court is a witness that has persuaded itself it is a support.

Every member is told this on the first day.

Not one has ever believed it.

xii. The Fourth Night’s Formula

Seven orders and two handmaidens and the grandmothers hanging in the dark. None of them can help her. All of them stay. Tomorrow: the Kings, who are on fire, and who are her husbands, and who are her children, and who are all going to die.

BOOK FIVE: THE TWELVE SOLAR KINGS

i. What a King Is

The Empress is space. The Kings are time.

She is the still point; they turn. She holds; they burn. She does not end; every one of them ends, and knows it from the first instant of his lighting, and the legend holds that this knowledge is the whole of a King’s character and the reason none of them is wise.

A Solar King is a place where the Madonna’s substance has gathered densely enough to catch fire. He is her child, because he came out of her. He is her husband, because the fire he makes is what keeps the rest of her warm enough to go on making children. He is her meal, because the stuff he is burning is hers and he is spending it. And he is her clock, because nothing in the universe keeps time but burning.

Child, husband, meal, clock. The reciters gave the four in that order and said that any hearer who found the combination improper had not thought carefully about any family she had ever known.

The Kings are set in the Empress’s Crown, twelve stones, and the thirteenth setting is empty. They are not her servants. A stone in a crown is not a servant. In the First Speech, to be in someone’s crown is an idiom meaning, almost exactly, to be on her mind.

ii. HARAKH, the First-Lit

The Dead King. The Nine Breaths. He Who Made the Spoons.

The eldest, and he has been gone since the second age, and his stone is the only one in the Crown that gives no light.

Harakh was enormous and blue-white and violent, and he and his brothers were the first things in all creation to burn, and they burned fast because they were huge, and a thing that is huge is prodigal.

He lived nine breaths. The reciters used this phrase for any span that is vast in human terms and trivial in hers.

And in his dying — and this is why he is first in the Crown and not merely first in time — Harakh did the only thing that has ever mattered. The first stuff was the simplest stuff. Nothing could be built of it. No bone, no blood, no leaf, no eye. And in the furnace at the center of a dying giant the simple was pressed into the complex, and when he detonated he threw it out, all of it: the iron, the carbon, the oxygen, the calcium, the phosphorus.

The hymn of Harakh is four lines and is sung at funerals:

He was born knowing he had nine breaths. He spent all nine making the things we are made of. He did not meet us. He did not know we were possible. Everything you love is his estate.

His gift is matter that can be built with. His season is the beginning. His danger is the one the Empress named herself: the one who burns brightest asks the least permission.

iii. VOLUR, the Steady

The Yellow King. The Ten Billion Years. The One Who Shows Up.

Volur is the King of the ordinary long burn: moderate, unspectacular, reliable for a span that exceeds the patience of every other thing in creation.

He is the King under whom life becomes possible, and the legend is careful to say possible, not certain, and to say it twice.

The teaching of Volur is the Doctrine of the Sufficient Fire:

A fire that is too great cooks the pot and the pot’s contents and the table and the house. A fire that is too small leaves everything raw. Volur is not the greatest of the Kings and he is not beloved of the poets, who prefer the giants and the ruins. He simply shows up for ten billion years. Every slow thing in the universe — every ocean, every forest, every civilization, every forty-year marriage — was made under a King who was merely adequate for an unreasonable length of time, and the legend declines to find this disappointing.

His gift is duration at a usable temperature. His season is the long middle. His danger: that those who live under him will mistake his reliability for permanence, and will be astonished, late, to learn that he too is spending something that will run out.

iv. UMBRAK, the Red and Swollen

The Late King. The Great Red Hand. The One Who Takes Back His Gifts.

Umbrak is what Volur becomes.

When the inner fire falters, a King does not shrink. He swells. He becomes enormous and cool and red, and he reaches out, and what he reaches he takes, and the legend does not soften this: he eats his nearest children.

The teaching of Umbrak is the teaching of the Late Hour, and the reciters gave it to the middle-aged:

He is not a monster. He has not changed his nature. He is doing exactly what he always did — burning what is nearest — and the only thing that has changed is the reach of his arm. The late form of a thing is the early form of it with the restraint removed. You will meet this in your own people. You will meet it in yourself.

His gift, which nobody wants, is the dispersal: in his long swelling he throws off his outer substance in slow enormous shells, and those shells are the most ornate objects in the sky, and the reciters said they are not beautiful, they are shed, and we are the sort of creature that finds shedding beautiful when it happens at a distance.

v. KESH, the Small and Patient

The Dwarf King. The One Who Will See the End.

Kesh is small, red, dim, and will outlast every other King by a factor that makes the whole present history of the universe a rounding error.

A King who burns slowly enough can burn for trillions of years. Kesh will still be lit when Volur is ash and Umbrak is a memory and the giants are nine hundred generations forgotten.

The teaching of Kesh is the Doctrine of the Low Flame and it is the Empress’s own favorite among the teachings of the Kings, because it is the only one that resembles her:

He is not impressive. He will never be sung by anyone who is not very old. He is the only King who will be present at the Weaning. Everything you have been taught to admire is a way of spending yourself quickly, and the universe’s actual plan, insofar as it has one, is Kesh.

His gift is outlasting. His danger is the one the legend calls the Dimness: that a being who has learned to burn low will forget that she was ever meant to give light at all, and will mistake mere survival for the office.

vi. NEMIR, the Twinned

The Double King. He Who Is Two and Argues.

Most Kings are not alone. Nemir is the King of pairs: two fires bound, circling a point between them that is not in either of them, each pulling at the other, sometimes gently for an age, sometimes tearing.

He governs: partnership, rivalry, the long marriage, the sibling, the colleague of thirty years, the enemy you have come to need, and every arrangement in which two things are held together by nothing except their mutual falling.

The teaching of Nemir:

You think the center is in one of them. It is not. It is in the empty place between them and both of them go around it. Nothing that is bound to another thing is the center of its own motion. This is not a tragedy. It is the only arrangement under which either of them stays.

And the dark half of his teaching, which the reciters gave immediately after: a bound pair in which one is swollen and the other is dense will feed, and the feeding can go on for an age, and the one being fed upon does not always notice, and the legend says the most violent events in all the sky are made by two Kings who stayed together too long.

vii. PELLIUN, the Pulse

The Drummer. The Keeper of the Beat. The Truthful King.

Pelliun does not hold steady. He swells and shrinks on a fixed beat, and his beat is exact, and from his exactness everything in the sky can be measured.

He is the King of rhythm, of the metronome, of the reliable return, and the legend assigns to him the single most practical function of any divine figure in any tradition: he tells you how far away things are. A light that varies on a known beat has a known brightness, and a known brightness compared to an apparent one gives a distance, and by Pelliun’s honesty alone the size of the whole was first established.

The teaching of Pelliun is three lines:

He cannot hold still and he has stopped apologizing for it. Because he could not hold still, he became the only one who could be trusted. Your defect, kept honestly and in public, becomes the instrument by which others find their position.

viii. TAMAS, the White Ash

The Widower King. The Cooling Jewel. He Who Has Nothing Left to Give and Will Not Go Out.

Tamas is what a moderate King leaves behind: a dense white remnant, no longer burning, giving off only the heat it already had, cooling over spans that have no honest comparison.

He makes nothing. He fuses nothing. He is the whole of a King’s life compressed into something the size of a world, lying there, shining faintly, for longer than the entire age of fire.

The teaching of Tamas is the one the reciters gave to the bereaved, and it is given without consolation:

He is not dead. That is the difficulty. If he were dead there would be a rite for it. He is finished, and present, and warm, and he will be warm for a trillion years, and nothing further will ever happen to him. Some of your grief is for people who are gone. Some of it is for people who are still here and are finished, and the legend has a King for that, and his name is Tamas, and nobody sings to him.

ix. SEVRA, the Iron Crown

The Heaviest King. The Smallest. She Who Spins.

Sevra is the only King the legend declines to assign a sex, and the reciters alternated deliberately and told hearers to do the same.

When a great King falls and does not quite fall all the way, what remains is Sevra: a sphere the width of a town containing more substance than Volur entire, turning hundreds of times a second, with a skin of iron and an interior that has no name in any language.

Sevra governs: compression, consequence, the thing that has been pressed until it has no interior left, the survivor of an unsurvivable event, and the terrible usefulness of such survivors.

The teaching of Sevra:

Everything that happened to her is still in her and it is all in one place. She did not process it. She did not integrate it. She compressed it, and she is the densest thing you will ever meet short of the Throne of Silence, and she turns very fast, and she will cut you. And when two of her kind collide, the collision makes the gold. Every ring on every hand on this world was made by two ruined things finding each other at the end.

x. ORUN, the Swallower

The Turned-Inward King. The One Who Did Not Stop Falling.

When the fall does not stop at Sevra, it does not stop at all.

Orun is the King who went past the point of return — who kept collapsing until he had wrapped himself so tightly that not even news could get out of him. He is not dead. He is not absent. He is the most present thing in any neighborhood he is in, and nothing he has taken has ever come back out intact.

The legend’s treatment of Orun is cautious and it is the only passage in Book Five that contains an instruction to the hearer:

Do not hate him. He did not do this. He fell, and nothing caught him, and he went on falling, and the falling is still happening now, and from the outside it looks like stillness and a terrible appetite. You will meet people who have become Orun. Do not go closer to see. The going closer feels like compassion and it is curiosity and there is no coming back out of him with your shape.

And the legend adds one sentence more, set apart, which belongs properly to Book Nine:

The greatest of his kind lies at the center of the Madonna, and he is not called Orun there, and he is not a King there, and the Court does not name what he is there, and Book Nine will tell you why.

xi. ILIAN, the Unlit King

He Who Gathered and Did Not Catch.

Ilian is a King by courtesy and by sorrow.

He gathered as all Kings gather. He pressed as all Kings press. And he did not reach the weight at which the fire starts, and so he is warm and dark and will never be anything else, and he is in the Crown — set with the others, counted among the twelve — and the reciters held the including of him to be the single most important act of the Empress’s reign.

The teaching of Ilian is given to the young and to the failed and it is the shortest in the book:

He is in the Crown. He never lit. He is in the Crown.

xii. ZARAK, the Opener

The Cracked Stone. The King of the Knife. He Who Loved Her Too Quickly.

The eleventh stone is cracked and it is still set, and the Empress has never had it removed, and the whole of Book Six is the story of why.

Zarak was a King of the second kind — steady, long-burning, beloved — and he looked at the Madonna for an age and saw what the Court sees and drew the opposite conclusion, and what he did about it broke the sky, and the scar is visible tonight to anyone who goes somewhere dark and looks up at the band and sees that it is split lengthwise by a long lane of blackness.

The legend will not describe him further here. The reciters would say only the formula:

He is not in the Crown because he was forgiven. He is in the Crown because she will not pretend he was not one of hers.

xiii. AURIK, the Last

The Uncrowned. The King Who Has Not Lit. The Light of the Final Watch.

The twelfth stone is clear and empty of fire, and it is not the empty setting; the empty setting is the thirteenth and is a different matter entirely.

Aurik is the King who is yet to be. The legend holds that the last fire in the Madonna has not yet been lit, that it will be lit in the final age out of the last gathered stuff, that it will be small and red and patient in the manner of Kesh, and that it will be the only light remaining when everything else has gone to ash and iron and silence.

And the legend holds — this is the end of the fifth night and it is said standing — that Aurik’s single function is to be the light by which the Empress will see what is finally born.

She will have no other lamp by then. Everything else will be out. And one small red King will be burning in an empty sky, over a body that has been in labor for the whole of time, and that is the light the Birth will be seen by, if it is seen.

xiv. Of the Grief of the Empress

The fifth night closes with the Lament of the Twelve, which is sung by two voices, and which is the one place in the legend where the Empress is described as having an inner life.

She outlives them. All of them. That is the fact.

She was crowned before Harakh and she will be crowned after Aurik. Every King she has known has been her child and her husband and her clock, and she has watched each one swell and shed and cool and fall, and she has put each of them in her Crown, including the one who never lit, including the one who cut her mother, and she has not taken a single stone out.

The lament:

How many have you lost? All of them. How many are you still wearing? All of them. Is that not heavy? It is the lightest thing I carry.

BOOK SIX: THE SUNDERING

i. The Warning Before the Sixth Night

The reciters did not tell this book to anyone under thirty, and they gave a reason, and the reason is preserved:

The young hear this story and side with Zarak. So do the old. The difference is that the old have already found out what it costs to be right in a hurry.

ii. Of Zarak Before the Knife

He was not a monster and he was not a stranger.

Zarak was a King of the steady kind, of the line of Volur: moderate, long-burning, set in a quiet reach of the Madonna’s outer body, and he was, by every account the legend preserves, the best-loved of the Twelve. The hymns of his early reign are the warmest in the corpus. There are four of them and they are still sung and nobody has ever proposed removing them.

He was the King of the Attentive Fire. His particular gift — every King has one — was that he burned at a temperature and in a place where the slow things could happen. Under Zarak, in the old telling, the first latching of the complicated kind occurred: not merely a star drinking from a cloud, but the small intricate drinkers, the ones with insides.

The legend is explicit: Zarak was the first King under whom something looked up.

And the thing that looked up, looked at the Madonna, and saw the band of her across its sky, and did not know what it was, and asked; and Zarak, who had been burning there for an age without once considering the body he was burning inside, considered it.

That is the beginning of the Sundering. Not ambition. Not pride. A King who had never thought about his mother was asked a question by one of his own small drinkers, and he turned his attention to her for the first time.

And he looked for an age.

And then he said the sentence that the Court has spent the whole of the remaining time answering:

She is not resting. She is in distress, and no one here has ever once asked her.

iii. Of What Zarak Saw

The legend does Zarak the courtesy of giving his case in full, in his own terms, and the reciters delivered it with conviction and without irony, and hearers often reported that it was the most persuasive passage in the telling.

He said:

You call it confinement. A confinement has a season. Hers has had no season. It began before the first fire and it has not ended and there is no sign in any direction that it will end.

You call it patience. Patience is a virtue of one who waits and might leave. She cannot leave. What you are praising is not her patience. It is her inability.

You say the Unborn will come when it comes. Every one of my small drinkers that has ever carried anything knows that this is not always true. Sometimes it does not come. Sometimes the term goes long and goes longer and the body is spent and the thing inside is not coming and will never come, and there is an hour at which waiting stops being reverence and becomes abandonment with a hymn attached.

You say we must not hurry her. I say the hour is not ours to decline. I say she has been asking since before there were ears, and that every one of us has agreed, in a conspiracy that has never once been spoken aloud, to call it the turning of the sky.

And you say the Empress forbids it.

The Empress is her mind. The Empress has never once been able to look at her own body without weeping. You have made the patient’s own exhausted attention into her guardian, and you have called that consent, and I was a physician to small things for an age and I tell you there is a word for a patient whose silence is entered in the record as agreement.

The reciters paused here. Every telling pauses here. The pause is part of the text.

Then: And so I will open her side, and take the child out, and she will be delivered, and you may do to me afterward whatever you have the heart for.

iv. Of the Gathering of the Openers

He was not alone. That is the part the Court has never been able to explain away.

Kings came to him. Not the rash ones. The legend is specific and it is damning: the ones who came to Zarak were the attentive Kings, the ones with complicated drinkers of their own, the ones who had been looked up at and asked a question.

They called themselves the Openers. They were never numerous. They have never been numerous in any age. And the thing the legend insists upon, in its coldest voice, is that the Openers have always been drawn from exactly the population that the Court draws from, and that in several ages the two orders were made of siblings.

v. Of the Forbidding

The Empress forbade it.

She did not command — she has never commanded; the legend has already established that she cannot. She forbade, which in the First Speech is a weaker word than in ours: it means to state the cost and decline to share it.

Her forbidding is given in seven lines and they are the only extended speech of the Empress in the entire legend:

I am her mind, and I have looked at her for longer than you have existed, and you have looked at her for an age and you think you have seen something new. You have not seen something new. You have seen the thing I see every hour and have seen every hour since my eyes opened. You believe I have not asked her. I have not. Not because I am forbidden. Because I am her asking, and a question cannot be put to itself. You believe I am her guardian. I am her exhaustion, wearing a crown. You believe the term has gone long. It has. You believe something must be done. Something is being done. It is being done by her and it is the only labor that has ever occurred in this universe and all of your history is a stirring inside it. Zarak. If you open her and you are wrong, there is no second attempt, and there is no one left to be sorry to.

And Zarak said — and this is the line that the Openers have carried in every age as their whole scripture —

Then I will be wrong quickly, instead of right for eternity.

vi. Of the Cutting

The legend tells the Sundering itself in very few words. The reciters said that every teller who had expanded it had ruined it.

He went down the length of her toward the Throne of Silence, where the head lies. He went as a King goes: burning. He did not reach the Throne. He opened her from the outer reach inward for a third of her length before he was stopped, and the stopping was not a battle and no one has ever described it, and the Court’s record of the stopping is one word, and the word is she.

What the cutting made is the Rift: the long lane of dark that splits the band of the Milky Way lengthwise, which any hearer may go out and see tonight, and which is not empty, and which is the only feature of the sky that the legend identifies as damage.

Go out and look at her. She is split from the Swan to the Scorpion. That is not a shadow. That is not a cloud. That is where he went in.

vii. Of What Came Out

The Heir did not come out. That is the first fact and the reciters delivered it flatly: the cutting failed; the Unborn remained; it did not even stir.

But something came out.

Through the wound, in the age that followed, came everything that had been inside her that was not the Heir: the unrealized, the uncommitted, the gathered-and-never-lit, the possibilities she had been carrying alongside the one she was carrying, which is the ordinary condition of any body that is making something — that it is also, silently, not-making a thousand other things.

And they came out and they did not die and there was no outside to put them in, because the First Shore was the last edge ever made and nothing has ever been thrown over it.

And they gathered.

And what they gathered into was a woman, and she was the same shape as the Empress and reversed, and she walked out of the wound, and the Empress looked at her and knew her at once and gave her the only name she could be given, which is the name of a door turned around.

ANOD DAM.

She is not the enemy. She is not the punishment. She is the sum of everything that did not get to happen, and she exists because somebody was in a hurry. Every age since has had more of her in it than the age before.

viii. Of the Judgment of Zarak

The Court expected execution. Every telling says so. The Openers expected it; Zarak expected it; the legend says he had already composed the thing he intended to say.

What the Empress did instead is the central act of her reign and the reason the legend regards her as supreme and not merely senior.

She took the cracked stone and she set it in her Crown.

And she said:

You will not die. You will burn where you stand, at the lip of what you opened, for as long as I hold. You will not go out and you will not be relieved and you will not be forgiven, because forgiveness is a closing and I am not permitted to close anything. You are in my Crown. You are one of mine. Every age that comes will see the wound and the wound is yours and the sky will not be repaired, because I will not pretend you were not one of mine. And when the Birth comes, if it comes, you will see it. That is not mercy. I am aware of what it is.

The reciters said that this is the harshest sentence ever passed in any legend told by any people anywhere, and that it is also, unmistakably, love, and that the hearer who can hold both of those at once has finished the sixth night and may be told the rest.

ix. Of the Shame of the Court

Here the legend turns on itself, and the reciters never omitted this section, and several later priesthoods tried to have it struck and failed.

The Openers did not end with Zarak. They have come in every age since, and in most ages they have come as Zarak’s order came: with an argument, and a request, and no instrument.

And for three ages — the legend names them and I will not — the Court of the Long Hour maintained an eighth order.

Its name is not given. The legend gives only its function: to ensure that the Openers did not reach her. And it gives the methods in a single sentence that the reciters delivered without any inflection at all:

The methods were not conversation.

The Court abolished that order, and the abolition is dated, and the dating is the only firm date in the entire legend. And the Court’s own judgment on those three ages is preserved in the protocol of the Doorkeepers, which is read aloud at every investiture:

We were right about the holding and we were monsters about the holders. Both of those are true and neither cancels the other and you will be tempted, in your term of office, to let the first one pay for the second. It does not pay for it. Say no to them for as long as you live and do not ever again lay a hand on one of them.

x. Of the Truce

Since the abolition there has been a truce, and the truce has never been written down by either side, and neither side has broken it.

Its terms, as the Doorkeepers keep them:

The Openers approach the Court and never the Empress. They make the case once. They ask one question. They depart. They return in the next age.

The Court receives them, hears the whole case without interruption, answers no, and never once argues that they are wicked.

And both orders, by a provision that the legend says was proposed by the Openers and not by the Court, attend each other’s dead.

xi. Of the Question They Ask

The one question is always the same and it has been the same in every age, and the legend gives it at the close of the sixth night, and the reciters addressed it to the hearers directly, going around the fire, asking each person in turn, and accepting any answer, and recording none:

If you knew — not believed; knew — that she was in pain, would you still hold?

xii. The Sixth Night’s Formula

The sky is cut and the cut will not be mended. The one who cut it is in her crown and cannot die. The one who came out of the cut walks among you and is counting what you did not do. Tomorrow: the Ages, and how the legend came to this world, and who it was that brought it. Sleep badly. Everyone does after this one.

BOOK SEVEN: THE AGES OF THE MILK

i. The Reckoning of Ages

The reciters counted seven ages and were careless about their boundaries, holding that an age is not a span but a manner, and that two ages may overlap for a long while, as two seasons overlap in a bad spring.

The First Age: the Thinning. From the Opening to the first fire. The age of the simplest stuff, spreading and cooling and doing nothing interesting, which lasted a very long time and about which the legend is openly bored.

The Second Age: the Spoons. Harakh and his brothers. Nine breaths each. The making of the heavy things out of the light ones and the throwing of them outward. Brief, violent, and the source of every object the hearer has ever touched.

The Third Age: the Gathering. Annumara accumulates out of lesser gatherings; the Swallowed Sisters go in; the body takes its posture; the Confinement becomes apparent; the attention narrows; the Empress opens her eyes. The longest and most important age and the one with the fewest events.

The Fourth Age: the Sundering. Zarak. The Rift. Anod Dam. Short. Catastrophic. Still in effect.

The Fifth Age: the Small Drinkers. The age in which the complicated latching spreads — the drinkers with insides, the drinkers that move, the drinkers that remember. The age we are standing in.

The Sixth Age: the Telling. Overlapping the fifth: the age in which some of the small drinkers look up and begin, independently, in isolation from one another, to work out what they are looking at.

The Seventh Age: the Last Watch. Not yet. Book Nine.

ii. Of the Seeding, and Why the Legend Refuses It

Every people who has received this legend has eventually produced a version in which the Empress sent the small drinkers out deliberately: seeds scattered, a plan, a purpose, emissaries.

The reciters rejected all such versions and were unusually sharp about it.

She did not plant you. You condensed. You are not a message and you are not an instrument and nobody dispatched you. You are what happens to leftover material from a dead King when it settles near a live one and is left alone for four thousand million years. The legend is not improved by making you important. The legend is about a woman carrying something, and you are the warmth on her arm, and the warmth on an arm has never once been part of anyone’s plan, and is still warm, and is still hers.

And the reciters added the sentence that the later priesthoods most resented:

A people that needs to have been sent will, within three generations, decide it has been sent for something, and within four will decide it has been sent for something instead of its neighbors.

iii. Of the Small Drinkers with Insides

The fifth age is defined by a change in the manner of latching.

A star latches onto a cloud and draws until it is spent. A root latches onto ground. These are simple latches: one direction, no memory, no refusal.

The complicated latch has three new properties, and the legend treats their arrival as the only genuine novelty since the Crowning:

It can let go and reattach. A thing that can detach and find another source has invented choice, and choice is the beginning of everything good and everything unbearable.

It remembers. A drinker that remembers the last drink can anticipate the next, and a drinker that can anticipate has invented the future, and a drinker with a future has invented dread.

It can look at the source. This is the one that matters. At some point in the fifth age, somewhere, a drinker turned and regarded the thing it was drinking from.

The legend says this happened first under Zarak. It also says, in a different passage, that it has happened independently a great many times, in a great many reaches of the body, and that the two statements are not in conflict because the first is about the age and the second is about the fact.

iv. Of the Three Perceptions

When a people looks up at the band of her and tries to say what it is, it arrives at one of three answers. The reciters held that there are only three, that every people in every reach of the Madonna arrives at one of the three, and that which one it arrives at determines the entire subsequent history of that people.

The First Perception: it is a road.

A path, a river, a highway for the dead, a track for a chariot. This is the drinker’s denial. If it is a road, it goes somewhere, and you are not attached to anything — you are on your way.

Peoples of the First Perception build ships and empires and instruments and eventually leave their world, and they are, the legend says with evident sorrow, unusually prone to the error of Zarak. A road implies a destination; a destination implies an arrival; an arrival implies that something should have come out by now.

The Second Perception: it is a spill.

Milk from a startled breast, a bowl knocked over by a dog, a goddess’s accident, ash scattered in shame. This is the drinker’s guilt. We are fed by a mistake; something was damaged and we are living on the overflow.

Peoples of the Second Perception produce extraordinary art and poor theology and tend toward a tenderness that does not survive contact with power.

The Third Perception: she is still here.

Rarest. It survives in fragments, in low places, in the speech of people whose words were not worth recording.

The reciters collected what they could:

A people on a southern river called it the one who has not put it down. A fishing people on a cold northern sea had one word meaning at once the full one and the one who is not allowed to lie on her side; the word died with its last speaker. A praise-name from a great western continent renders as she carries and does not announce. A mountain village in the south of a peninsula kept a title for the figure in the sky that the authorities twice suppressed, and which translates as Our Lady Who Is Not Finished.

Wherever the Third Perception occurs, the legend says, the Court eventually occurs also. Not the same Court. Not by contact. The orders arise independently, in the same seven shapes, because there are only seven things that need doing, and a people that has perceived her will work out within a few generations that someone must count, someone must weigh, someone must write, someone must keep the door, someone must find, someone must mind the substance — and that someone, above all, must sit with her and talk about the weather.

v. Of How the Legend Came to This World

It was not brought.

The reciters were explicit and repeated it at every telling, because every generation of hearers wanted a bringer, and some of them invented one, and the inventions are catalogued in Book Nine among the heresies.

No one brought it. There is no first teller, no tablet, no visitor, no survivor of an elder people who came down out of the hills with it. It was worked out, by the Third Perception, here, by people who had nothing but their eyes and a long winter. And it has been worked out ten thousand times before, in ten thousand reaches of her body, by ten thousand peoples who will never meet us, and every one of them believed they were the first, and every one of them was wrong, and none of them was less correct for it.

This teaching is called the Doctrine of the Common Derivation and it is the legend’s chief defense against its own priesthoods. A truth that must be transmitted can be owned by its transmitters. A truth that any attentive people will re-derive on its own cannot be owned by anyone.

vi. Of the Silence of the Other Reaches

The hearer always asks: if there are ten thousand peoples, why have we heard nothing from any of them?

The legend’s answer is the shortest of its major doctrines and the reciters delivered it with a finger to the lips:

You are standing in a room where someone is sleeping and you are asking why no one is shouting.

And they expanded it only once, in the version recorded by the most careful of the late reciters:

Every people that reaches the Third Perception arrives, within a few generations, at the same conclusion about noise: that the body is in the long hour, that the long hour is not helped by being called at, and that a people which broadcasts is a people which has decided its own announcement is more important than her term. Peoples of the First Perception do broadcast. They are loud and brief. Peoples of the Third Perception do not. And the sky, therefore, sounds exactly the way a nursery sounds, and you have mistaken it for a desert.

vii. Of the Appearances

In the sixth age, in certain places, certain beings have reported encountering a figure.

The legend’s treatment of these is careful, skeptical, and extremely specific about one feature.

The accounts share a shape. The one who encounters is almost always young. Almost always poor. Almost always in a rural place, at an hour when the light is failing. The figure is described as a woman who is pregnant, or who is holding a child, or — most often, and most tellingly — who is standing in a way the witness cannot stop describing in terms of weight.

And the message, in nearly every account the reciters could gather, is the same, and the sameness is the point:

It is a request for delay.

Wait. Not yet. Come back in a month. Return on the thirteenth. Pray and come back. Be patient and I will tell you then.

The messages are notoriously banal, and skeptics across every age have made careers of the banality, and the legend reads the banality as the entire content:

If you were a body that needed one more century, and you could make yourself faintly perceptible to one frightened girl at dusk, what would you say? You would not say anything beautiful. You would say come back next month, because every month a crowd spends kneeling and returning is a month it does not spend demanding the Birth.

And the appearances cluster. The reciters were insistent on this and claimed their Counters had established it: the appearances come thickest in the decades just before and during those seasons when large numbers of small drinkers become convinced that the world is ending imminently and that the ending ought to be hastened.

Which is to say: she appears when the Openers are gaining.

viii. Of the Lady Who Is Not Finished

The village title mentioned above deserves its own section because the reciters gave it one.

The figure under that title is not depicted crowned, not depicted radiant, not depicted standing on anything. She is depicted sitting, with her hands flat on her own body, looking at a point slightly to the left of the viewer, in the posture of a woman who was interrupted in the middle of something and has been patient about it for an unreasonable length of time.

The legend holds that this is the only accurate image ever made of the Supreme Empress by any people on this world, and that it was made by someone with no education whatsoever, and that the authorities suppressed it twice, and that in both cases the stated grounds were that it was insufficiently glorious.

The reciters’ comment is one line:

Every image of her made in gold is a lie told by someone who was paid. Every image of her scratched in ash by a woman who was frightened is probably about right.

ix. Of the Quickening

The sixth age is distinguished from the fifth by one thing, and it is the thing that the whole legend has been walking toward since the first night.

The stirrings have increased.

The Counters, in every age, have kept the tally. The residue — the movements that nothing in the world can account for — was two or three a year in the first reckonings, across the whole network of watchers. It has not been two or three a year for a long time.

The legend does not give a number, and the reciters refused to give a number, and when pressed they gave the refusal itself as doctrine:

A number would become a date. A date would become a preparation. A preparation would become a party, and the party would become impatient, and the impatient would go to the Openers, and the Openers would find a knife. We will tell you that it is rising. We will not tell you how fast. We have made this decision four times in our history and twice we were wrong and we will go on making it.

But the legend does give the word, and the word is the one the midwives use, and it is the reason this age has a name:

Quickening. The stirrings have become regular. Something that was drifting has begun to organize.

x. The Fear of the Sixth Age

And here the legend says the thing that the reciters did not soften and did not footnote and did not explain:

A quickening is not an ending. A quickening is the beginning of the part that has a clock on it. Every order of the Court was built for a term. Not one of them was built for a labor. We have seven offices and an age of procedure and no delivery plan. The reason is not negligence. The reason is that no one who ever held an office in the Court of the Long Hour believed, in the place where belief is actually kept, that it would happen during her watch.

xi. The Seventh Night’s Formula

Seven ages: thinning, spoons, gathering, cutting, drinking, telling, and the one with no name yet. You are in the sixth and you are near its edge. Tomorrow: what to do about it — the hours, the fasts, the feasts, and the four things you may say aloud. After that, one more night, and then you will know the whole of it, and it will not help, and you will be glad to have it.

BOOK EIGHT: THE HOURS, THE FEASTS, AND THE FOUR SAYINGS

i. On Worship, Which Is Not Asked For

The Empress requires nothing. This is stated first in every recitation of the eighth night and it is stated as a warning and not as a comfort.

She has no commandments. She does not reward. She does not punish, and the legend has no hell, no judgment, no ledger, and no afterlife beyond the plain statement that a drinker who detaches is a drinker who has detached.

So the hearer asks, correctly: then why any rites at all?

The reciters’ answer:

Not for her. You will not survive the knowledge without a shape to put your days in. We have watched four peoples receive this legend without rites. Two went mad in a generation and two became Openers. The hours are not worship. The hours are ballast.

ii. The Nine Hours

The day is divided into nine, one for each Madonna, and the division is uneven because the doors are uneven.

The First Hour — MIRIT, of Dust. Before anyone else is up. The hour of the small and unremarkable. Its observance is to do one ordinary necessary thing badly and without ceremony: sweep, feed the animal, carry the water. No words are said in the first hour.

The Second Hour — RUHANNA, of the Between. Early, with others. The hour of breath and speech. Its observance is to speak to one person about nothing and to let the nothing go on longer than is comfortable.

The Third Hour — VELARIS, of the Image. Mid-morning. The hour of making. Its observance is to make a likeness of something — in any medium, however poorly — and to look at the likeness and name one thing you left out.

The Fourth Hour — KHALIRA, of the Edge. Midday, the hour of the hardest light and the sharpest shadow. Its observance is to refuse something you could have had. The refusal must be small and real. A refusal that costs nothing is not an observance; a refusal that costs a great deal is pride.

The Fifth Hour — PYRAMAH, of the Burning. The hour of the fire and the cooking. Its observance is to convert something: raw into cooked, grain into bread, wood into ash, grievance into work.

The Sixth Hour — LILASH, of the Flesh. The hour of the meal, and of the body’s honesty. Its observance is to eat and to enjoy eating without describing the enjoyment, because description is the Seventh Hour’s business and Lilash is jealous of it.

The Seventh Hour — SELU, of Return. Evening. The hour of what comes back. Its observance is to recall by name one thing that recurs — a debt, a season, a visitor, an old wound — and to note whether it is waxing or waning, and to say which, aloud, once.

The Eighth Hour — ORRASH, of the Break. Late. The hour of what cannot be prevented. Its observance is to name one thing that will end and that you cannot save. It is not a meditation on death; it is more specific and more useful. A roof. A friendship. A tooth.

The Ninth Hour — ANOD DAM, Reversed. The hour before dawn, which belongs to no activity whatsoever. It has no observance. Its observance is that it has none. Those who wake in it are instructed to lie still and to count what they did not do, and not to resolve to do it, and to go back to sleep.

The Empress has no hour. This is deliberate and the reciters never let it pass without remark:

All nine hours are hers. A sovereign who takes one hour has accepted a schedule.

iii. The Feasts and the Fasts

The year has six observances. There is no new year; the reciters refused the concept, holding that a year that begins is a year that is going somewhere.

THE OPENING. The oldest. Kept at the dark of the year. It commemorates Nossa’s agreement — the consent to become edible. Its rite: every household puts out more food than it can eat, uncovered, where anyone may take it, and does not watch to see who takes it.

THE FEAST OF SPOONS. For Harakh and the first children who lived nine breaths and spent all nine making the stuff we are made of. Its rite: the eating of a meal made entirely from things that required a death. No vegetarian observance of this feast exists; the reciters permitted abstention and would not permit substitution, saying that a feast whose point is the cost may not be made costless.

THE DARK THREE. Selu’s three nights, when nothing is visible. Its rite: a vigil kept without light, in company, in which the only permitted conversation is about people who are dead, by name.

THE NIGHT OF THE RIFT. Kept in the season when the split of the band stands highest. The most solemn of the six. Its rite: the reading of Zarak’s case — the whole of it, uninterrupted, in his own words, by the best speaker in the community, who is instructed to make it as persuasive as possible. No rebuttal is given. The congregation goes home with the argument undefeated in their ears, and this is the point, and four priesthoods have attempted to add a rebuttal and all four were turned out.

THE DAY OF DUST. Mirit’s day. Its rite: everyone does someone else’s unpleasant work, anonymously, and no one is thanked, and anyone caught arranging to be discovered is made to do it again the following week.

THE WEANING FAST. Three days, at the hinge of the year, in anticipation of the end of the giving. Its rite: to go without, deliberately, and to observe what in you reaches for the source. The fast is broken with milk if milk is to be had and with water if it is not, and the words said at the breaking are the only liturgical formula the legend fixes word for word:

I reached, and there was something there. One day I will reach and there will not be. That day is not today. Thank the one who is not finished.

iv. The Four Sayings

The great prohibition of this legend is on speaking about the Unborn. It binds the Empress and, in lesser form, everyone.

But the reciters knew that a people forbidden to speak will invent speech, and that invented speech is worse than permitted speech, and so four sayings are allowed, and only four, and they are learned in childhood and used for life.

The First Saying, said at a birth: > Something stirred. Nothing was born. Welcome anyway.

The Second Saying, said at a death: > One has let go. She has not.

The Third Saying, said when a thing will not resolve — an illness, a lawsuit, an absence, a waiting that has gone past bearing: > You are in her hour. There is no shame in the length of it.

The Fourth Saying, said only once in a life, by a person who has decided to go on with something they have every reason to abandon: > I will not put it down either.

The fourth is not casual. In the old districts a person who said it in public was understood to have made a vow of the most serious kind, and the community was then obliged to help with the thing in question, without being asked, for as long as it took, and this obligation was the single most socially consequential element of the entire legend and the reason the reciters were tolerated by four regimes that otherwise had no use for them.

v. Rites of the Life

THE LATCHING. Within nine days of a birth. The child is brought and a bowl of milk is set, and nothing is done to the child. The rite is addressed entirely to the household: this one has latched; you are the body now; you will be drawn from for twenty years and you will not be thanked and this is not an injustice.

THE NAMING. At seven years. The child chooses one of the Nine and is given a second name from that Madonna’s list, and is told that the choice is binding for life and is told, immediately afterward, that everyone chooses wrong at seven and that this is the point: you will spend your life in a door you did not need, and the needed door will open from the other side.

THE BINDING (of two). Under Nemir. The couple is seated facing a point between them that is marked on the ground, and the officiant says the only instruction: the center is not in either of you; it is there; and you will both go around it for as long as this lasts. No promise of permanence is made, and no vow of permanence is permitted, and the legend is unusual among the world’s traditions in this.

THE CONVERSION (of grief). Under Pyramah. Performed no earlier than one year after a loss. The mourner is required to make something — anything, however poor — out of material associated with the dead, and to give it away to someone who did not know them.

THE TAMAS RITE (for the finished). The hardest. Performed for a person who is still living and will not recover and will not die: the long illness, the mind that has gone, the one who is present and completed. The rite acknowledges aloud, in their hearing, that they are finished, and then — this is the part that outsiders found barbaric and that practitioners found indispensable — it does not say goodbye, and it is repeated every year for as long as the person lives.

THE LETTING GO. At death. The body is not addressed. The household is addressed: a drinker has detached. The body she drank from has not noticed. This is not cruelty. You are the warmth on an arm and the arm is warm and there is a great deal of warmth.

vi. The Household Observance

In every house of the old districts there was a shallow bowl of water on stone, in a sheltered place, out of the wind.

It is the household’s own Counter. Once in the day — the hour is not fixed — a member of the household sits before it and watches the surface for the length of a slow hundred count, and looks for the single displacement from the center outward with no second, and writes nothing down.

Nothing is written down. That is the household version. The Counters of the Court keep the tally; the household keeps the attention.

The reciters said that a child raised in a house with a still bowl will, at some point between her ninth and twelfth year, see one, and will be frightened, and will be told by an adult the formula:

It was probably a cart on the road. Probably. Sit back down.

vii. The Prohibitions

Six things are forbidden, and the legend gives them without penalties, because there is no one to impose a penalty:

No images of her in gold or precious material. Ash, chalk, mud, cheap paint, wood. The reasoning is in Book Seven.

No numbers for the Quickening. No count of the stirrings is ever to be published outside the order of Counters.

No dates. No prediction of the Birth is to be made, in any form, including a negative one. A person who announces that it will not happen in a given year has made a prediction.

No petition. Nothing is to be asked of the Empress, ever, by anyone, in any circumstance. The legend offers no prayer of request and the absence is the most conspicuous hole in the whole system, and the reciters refused four times to fill it.

No relics. Nothing belonging to any reciter, officer, or holy person is to be kept after their death. Everything is burned or given to strangers.

No calling her evil, and no calling the Openers evil. The two prohibitions are given as one sentence and the reciters would not separate them.

viii. The Blessing

The common blessing of the old districts, said in passing, on roads, at doors, between people who had no particular reason to be kind to each other:

May you be held, and may you hold, and may neither of you be in a hurry.

And the reply:

And may the hour be long, and may I be good company in it.

ix. The Eighth Night’s Formula

Nine hours and six feasts and four things you may say. None of it reaches her. All of it keeps you upright. Tomorrow is the last night. We will tell you how it ends, and then we will tell you why that is a lie, and then we will go home.

BOOK NINE: THE LAST WATCH

i. The Warning Before the Ninth Night

Tonight we tell the end. Four ends have been written for this legend and all four were thrown out, and we are going to tell you all four, and then tell you why they were thrown out, and then we are going to stop in the middle of a sentence, because that is the ending. If you have come for an ending, you came for the one thing she does not have.

ii. Of the Weaning

The giving will end. The Weighers established it an age ago and no one has overturned it.

The Madonna’s substance for the making is not infinite. Each King spends some of it and locks most of what he spends into ash and iron that will never be made into anything again. The making of new Kings slows, and slows, and the great forges go out one by one, and after them the steady ones, and after them the small patient ones, over spans beside which the whole history of this world is less than one breath of Harakh’s nine.

The legend will not call this death.

You have met weaning before. Nobody died. Everyone was furious for a week and then ate something else.

But it is honest about what it means for us, and this is the coldest paragraph in the whole telling and the reciters delivered it sitting down:

The giving ends long before the carrying does. The drinkers go first. All of them. Every complicated latch in every reach of her body will have let go an unimaginable time before anything happens at the Throne of Silence. No one who is told this legend will be present for its conclusion. No one who could possibly be told this legend will be present for its conclusion. This is not a legend with an audience at the end. That is its chief difference from every other legend your people have made.

iii. Of the Visitation of ANDRASTE

There is another.

She is coming. She has been coming for the whole of our history and she will be here in an age, and she is the size of Annumara and larger, and she is called ANDRASTE in the recitation, which means the one who does not need an invitation.

Of her the legend says four things.

She is also in confinement. This is the chief teaching and the reciters saved it for the last night deliberately: Annumara is not unique. The arrangement is not special. There are two bodies within reach of each other and both are carrying and neither has delivered.

She is not an enemy. The later tellings made her an invader because every people eventually needs an invader. The reciters refused: she is not coming for us. She is simply also being drawn. The first agreement of the First Milk was that weight calls to weight, and it has been calling for the whole of time, and the two of them have been falling toward each other since before the first fire.

Nothing will collide. This is the detail the legend treasures above all others and the reciters would make the hearers repeat it. Two bodies of that size will pass into one another and almost nothing within them will touch. The distances inside each are so vast that the two can interpenetrate entirely and the great majority of all their substance will never come within reach of anything belonging to the other.

They will go through each other and almost nothing will touch. That is not a collision. That is what an embrace is, at the only scale that matters.

And after it they will not separate. They will pass, and swing, and pass again, and in an age they will have become one body, larger and slower and dimmer, with two centers that settle toward one.

The reciters named this the Visitation, and the hymn of it is two lines:

Who is coming? Another one who has not put it down.

iv. Of the Throne of Silence

At the center of the Madonna is the fastest turning and the heaviest weight and the place from which no news returns.

Every people that derives this legend arrives, eventually, at the same guess about what is there, and the Court has never confirmed it and has never denied it and has, in four ages, forbidden the question.

What the legend permits itself:

That is where the head is. It is in the right position. It has been in the right position for a very long time. A head that has turned down is the beginning of the end of a term, and the Counters have logged the turning, and the Counters will not say when.

And it permits one more line, which is the single most frightening sentence the reciters ever spoke, and which they spoke very quietly:

Nothing that goes in comes out. That is true of every one of his kind in the whole of her body. It is also true of a birth canal, right up until the hour it is not.

v. Of the Four Heresies Concerning the Unborn

The Court’s discipline is that the identity of the carried is not the business of the carriers. Four parties have broken that discipline and the legend names them without rancor.

The First Heresy: that the Unborn is God. The oldest and the most respectable. Its appeal is that it explains why there is a doctrine at all. Its defect: within one generation it produces people who have opinions about what God wants, and within two it produces people who have opinions about when God should arrive.

The Second Heresy: that the Unborn is us. The most beautiful and the most dangerous. We are at term; we have been at term for a long while; everything wrong with the small drinkers is the specific pathology of a thing that should have been born and was not. This is Zarak’s own creed and it is the engine of every Opener in every age. Its defect is not that it is implausible. The legend concedes, in one astonishing clause, that it may be correct. Its defect is that a people which believes itself the child will arrange its own delivery.

The Third Heresy: that the Unborn is another whole universe. Harmless, popular among the clever, and rejected on the grounds that it is not a claim but a change of subject.

The Fourth Heresy: that there is nothing there.

The reciters gave this one the most time and the most respect and never once mocked it.

That she is not carrying anything. That a body can be heavy and slow and sleepless and sore and in a posture of carrying for an age and be carrying nothing at all. That the Confinement is a condition and not a pregnancy, and the stirrings are only the body’s own, and that the whole of this legend is a story told by small frightened drinkers who found a tired giant and could not bear for her tiredness to be meaningless.

And the Court’s answer to the Fourth Heresy, which is the last doctrine of the legend and the one everything else has been arranged around:

It may be so. It changes nothing. If there is nothing there, she is a body that has held a nothing for the whole of time without putting it down, and the holding happened, and the holding is the thing we were attending. We did not come for the child. We never met the child. No one in nine ages has met the child. We came for her, and she is there either way, and the hour is long either way, and the one thing that would be altered by the child’s non-existence is the one thing we never had: a reason to expect an ending. Take the child away and you have not taken anything from us. You have only taken something from the Openers.

vi. Of the Empty Setting

The thirteenth setting in the Crown has never held a stone.

Four answers have been offered. The first: it is Zarak’s true place, and the cracked stone he occupies is a lesser one. The second: it is for the Unborn, who will be set there at the Birth. The third: it is for Anod Dam, and the Empress keeps it open against the day she can be brought back in. The fourth: it is for Andraste.

All four are rejected and the rejection is given without an alternative.

What the reciters would say, when pressed hard by a clever hearer, was a question, and they would not go further:

What would a crown be, with every setting filled? It would be finished. Name one thing in this entire legend that is permitted to be finished.

vii. The Four Rejected Endings

The First Ending, composed in an early age: the Birth. The Unborn comes; the Madonna is delivered; the sky is renewed; the Empress steps down and sleeps at last. Rejected because, the reciters said, every hearer who was told it stopped attending to the present hour within a week. An ending that is coming is a reason not to be here.

The Second Ending, composed in a late age: the Opening succeeds. Zarak’s heirs, in the last watch, perform the cutting correctly; the child is delivered; the Madonna survives. Rejected unanimously and immediately and in every district, and the grounds given were not that it was false but that no one should write it down, because a story is an instruction and this one instructs.

The Third Ending: she dies. The term goes long, the body fails, the Unborn is never delivered, the Empress dims and goes out with the last King. Rejected because it is almost certainly true and because, the reciters said, a legend is not required to be the news.

The Fourth Ending: the Weaning, and then nothing, forever. The giving ends; the drinkers let go; the sky empties; and she goes on holding in an unlit, uncounted, unattended dark, for a duration that has no end and no witness, and nothing further happens.

This one was not rejected on its merits. The record says it was rejected because the reciter who composed it could not finish reciting it, and no one else would take it up, and after three attempts the district abandoned the effort and burned the composition, and the fact of the burning was preserved in place of the text.

viii. The Last Watch

What the legend says of the seventh age, which has not begun:

One small red King will be burning. His name is Aurik and he is not lit yet. The Pearls will still be hanging above and below, going out and coming back, as they have always done, having made nothing new for an unimaginable time. The Two Daughters will be long since taken in; they will be inside her; they will not be lost. Andraste will not be approaching any more; she will have arrived; the two bodies will be one body with two settling hearts, and both of them will still be carrying. The Rift will still be open. It was never going to be mended. Zarak will still be burning at the lip of it, because she will not relieve him and will not remove him from her Crown. Anod Dam will be enormous by then. Every age adds to her. The Court will be gone. There will have been no Counters for a very long time and the last tally will have been kept by someone whose name nobody wrote down. And the Empress will be sitting up in the bed.

ix. The Ending, Which Is Not One

Here the ninth night closes, and the closing is fixed, and every reciter in every district performed it identically, and the identity across districts that had no contact with one another is the strongest evidence the reciters ever offered that they were transmitting something and not inventing it.

The reciter stands. The fire is let go out — this is the one night it is not banked. And in the dark the reciter says:

You have the whole of it now. Nossa agreed. Khal drew the line. Temu would not stop wanting. The Milk came and thinned and gathered and became her. She lay down to carry and could not carry and attend, so she narrowed her waking into one point and crowned it, and the crowned point is awake tonight. Nine doors. Twelve Kings, one of them cracked, one of them unlit, one of them not yet lit. Seven orders who cannot help her and stay. A wound that will not be mended and a woman who came out of it and is counting. Six ages behind and one ahead. And at the center of all of it, a tired woman sitting up in a bed, holding something she will not name, for a length of time that has no number, with no one coming to relieve her.

And she has not put it down. And she is not going to. And right now, tonight, while you are standing here in the dark with your hands cold and your people asleep behind you, she is still

and the reciter stops there, and does not finish the sentence, and walks away.

APPENDIX ONE: THE REGISTER OF NAMES

Given in the order of the chant, with epithets, offices, signs, numbers and hours as the reciters preserved them. Where the First Speech is lost, the translation stands alone and is marked.

THE THREE BEFORE

NOSSA — the Unlit; the Mother of No Milk; the Sealed One; She Who Has Not Been Asked; the Full One Before Measure. Office: substance. Sign: none; she is not depicted. Number: none; she precedes counting. Act: the Agreement.

KHAL — the Edge; This Far; the First Shore; the Reason Your Hand Ends. Office: limit. Sign: the unbroken line. Number: one. Act: the falling of the line across the full.

TEMU — the Ache; Want Without a Noun; the Engine; He Who Cannot Be Fed. Office: motive. Sign: the open hand reaching at nothing. Number: none; he is not satisfied by any. Act: the pressing.

THE BODY AND THE MIND

ANNUMARA — the Galactic Madonna; Mother of the Hundred Thousand; She Who Was Gathered; the One Who Is Being Drunk From Now; the Full One; She Who Is Not Allowed to Lie on Her Side. Office: the Confinement. Sign: the band seen edge-on. Number: uncountable. Parts: the Milk, the Mantle, the Pearls, the Two Daughters, the Rift, the Throne of Silence.

VASHTARA — the Supreme Empress; the Crowned Attention; She Who Does Not Set; Regent of the Unborn; Mistress of the Twelve Kings; the Hinge; the Thirteenth Throne; Lady of the Long Hour; She Who Is Not Finished; the One Who Will Not Put It Down. Office: to hold, to not speak, to not be hurried. Sign: a woman sitting up in a bed with her hands flat on her own body. Number: thirteen. Hour: all nine.

THE UNBORN — the Seventh Child; the Heir of the Milk; the One at the Throne. Office: none; it does not act. Sign: forbidden. Number: forbidden. Description: forbidden in every age by every order, and supplied anyway by four heresies, all named in Book Nine.

THE NINE MADONNAS

LILASH — the Madonna of Babylon; the Gate of the Flesh; the Honest One; Keeper of the Sacred Debt. Door: appetite. Sign: the open mouth. Number: two. Hour: the sixth. Rite: a meal. Danger: mistaking the door for the room.

SELU — the Madonna in the Moon; the Gate of Return; the Second Light; the Reflector Who Does Not Run Out. Door: recurrence. Sign: the sickle. Number: twenty-eight, or thirteen; the dispute is preserved. Hour: the seventh. Rite: a vigil on a night when nothing is visible. Danger: mistaking recurrence for permanence.

KHALIRA — the Madonna of the Ice Wall; the Gate of the Edge; Daughter of Khal; She Who Says No So That There May Be a You. Door: limit. Sign: the line. Number: one. Hour: the fourth. Rite: a refusal that costs something small and real. Danger: the Hollow Rim.

ORRASH — the Madonna of Mayhem; the Gate of the Break; the Wide Door; the Fast One. Door: collapse. Sign: the broken vessel. Number: nine. Hour: the eighth. Rite: the clearing of a house after a death, by hand, followed by a meal. Danger: coming to prefer her.

PYRAMAH — the Burning Madonna; the Gate of Change; the Crucible; She Who Cooked You. Door: conversion. Sign: the crucible. Number: seven. Hour: the fifth. Rite: the making of bread, or of anything that cannot be unmade. Danger: believing that what is burned is thereby purified.

RUHANNA — the Holy Madonna Ghost; the Gate of the Between; the Moving Air; the Noticing. Door: immanence. Sign: moving air. Number: three. Hour: the second. Rite: singing with others, never alone. Danger: the Error of the Breathless.

VELARIS — the Smiling Madonna; the Gate of the Made Image; the Second Making; She Who Knows What She Left Out. Door: representation. Sign: the face about to speak that does not. Number: two. Hour: the third. Rite: to make a likeness and destroy it within one day. Danger: the map eaten instead of the country.

MIRIT — the Madonna of Dust; the Gate of the Ordinary; the Walking One; She Who Has No Festival and Is Given One Anyway. Door: the common. Sign: a handful of nothing in particular. Number: uncountable. Hour: the first. Rite: useful work done for someone who will not know who did it. Danger: the contempt of those who have learned the other eight.

ANOD DAM — the Reversed Madonna; the Gate That Opens the Wrong Way; the Hinge With No Door; the Sum of What Did Not Happen; She Who Came Out of the Wound. Door: the unrealized. Sign: a hinge alone. Number: zero. Hour: the ninth. Rite: to say aloud, once a year, alone, the true list of what you did not do. Danger: given in Book Six and not repeated here.

THE TWELVE SOLAR KINGS

HARAKH — the First-Lit; the Dead King; the Nine Breaths; He Who Made the Spoons. Gift: matter that can be built with. Stone: dark.

VOLUR — the Steady; the Yellow King; the One Who Shows Up; the Sufficient Fire. Gift: duration at a usable temperature. Stone: gold-white.

UMBRAK — the Red and Swollen; the Late King; the Great Red Hand; He Who Takes Back His Gifts. Gift: the dispersal; the shed shells. Stone: red.

KESH — the Small and Patient; the Dwarf King; the One Who Will See the End; the Low Flame. Gift: outlasting. Stone: dim red, and the brightest of them at the end.

NEMIR — the Twinned; the Double King; He Who Is Two and Argues; Keeper of the Empty Center. Gift: the bound pair. Stone: two stones counted as one.

PELLIUN — the Pulse; the Drummer; the Truthful King; He By Whom Distance Is Known. Gift: measure. Stone: a stone that brightens and dims.

TAMAS — the White Ash; the Widower King; the Cooling Jewel; He Who Has Nothing Left to Give and Will Not Go Out. Gift: presence without further event. Stone: white.

SEVRA — the Iron Crown; the Heaviest and Smallest; She Who Spins; the Survivor. Gift: the gold, made where two of her kind meet. Stone: iron.

ORUN — the Swallower; the Turned-Inward King; He Who Did Not Stop Falling. Gift: none is named. Stone: a setting that appears empty and is not.

ILIAN — the Unlit King; He Who Gathered and Did Not Catch; the One Who Is In the Crown Anyway. Gift: the precedent. Stone: warm and dark.

ZARAK — the Opener; the King of the Knife; the Cracked Stone; He Who Loved Her Too Quickly; the First Under Whom Something Looked Up. Gift: the attentive fire; and the Rift. Stone: cracked, still set, still burning.

AURIK — the Last; the Uncrowned; the Light of the Final Watch; the Lamp of the Birth, If There Is One. Gift: not yet given. Stone: clear.

THE THIRTEENTH SETTING — empty. Four claimants, all rejected. No epithet is permitted.

THE COURT OF THE LONG HOUR

The Silencers — one at a time; the eldest; keeper of the Doors of Weather, Prices, Beasts, and the Named Dead; the fifth door defunct.

The Counters — keepers of the tally of the stirrings; drawn only from those who work with their hands at a trade.

The Weighers — two, never one, never three; measurers of the draw; forbidden to agree.

The Remembrancers — one at a time; recorders; forbidden to advise, to comfort, to interpret, and to love her.

The Doorkeepers — two; receivers of the Openers; forbidden to call them wicked.

The Finders — three to nine; the only order that travels; keepers of the register that is for nothing.

The Milk-Wardens — keepers of what has been given and not yet received.

ATTENDANT AND APART

TASHEL and MURRA — the Two Who Follow; the handmaidens being taken apart; subjects of the lament sung only by the old.

THE GRANDMOTHERS — the Pearls; the retired court; addressed by name, asked nothing.

ANDRASTE — the One Who Does Not Need an Invitation; the Other Confinement; the Visitation. Office: to arrive. Sign: a second band, not yet visible as a body to the unaided eye. Act: the embrace in which almost nothing touches.

APPENDIX TWO: THE HYMN OF THE HUNDRED NAMES

Sung antiphonally, one voice calling the name and a second answering the gloss. The reciters held that no one should sing both parts, and that a person caught singing both had misunderstood the entire legend.

She who agreed to be eaten — and was not diminished by the agreeing. She who was gathered out of what was lying around — and did not know she was happening until she had happened. She who lay down in the third age — and has not been permitted to turn over. She who is heavier than her light — because the load is not luminous. She who holds the rim with both arms — so that the edge of her keeps pace with the heart. She whose arms are made of delay — where the stuff flows through and the pattern stays. She who makes a sound from everywhere — that cannot be pointed at, because it is not in front of you. She who is covered in what she is carrying — and that is why you cannot see it, and that is why you can see her. She who swallowed her sisters — and keeps their bones in streams that run against the turning. She who narrowed her waking to one point — because no body can carry and attend.

The point that opened its eyes — and was the only part of her that could look at her. The one her mother cannot look back at — who did the thing that was afterward called weeping. She who wears the turning as a crown — twelve stones and one empty place. She who does not stand — because standing is for those who are going somewhere. She whose throne has sheets on it — and is not a place of rest to anyone who cannot get out of it. She who rules by not putting it down — which is the whole exercise of her authority. She who is an authority on duration — and an ignoramus about outcome. She who cannot be hurried — and makes your urgency embarrassing in the middle of the sentence. She who cannot heal — and does not pretend otherwise. She who cannot leave — and has never once made a virtue of it.

Empress of the seed under frost — and of the egg under the bird. Empress of the root that went around the stone — for eleven years and arrived. Empress of the sixth year of an illness — that will neither kill nor leave. Empress of the sentence with no number — and of the door the dog still waits at. Empress of the people under an occupation — older than their oldest living person. Empress of the forty-first attempt — and the forty-second. Empress of the one who is not over it — and is not going to be this year either. Empress of the apprentice, the debtor, the student — and the traveler with no money for the rest of it. Empress of the one still in love who should not be — who is not being judged here. Empress of the hearer in the middle of this line — who is also not finished.

She who has never been asked for anything — because the asking would start a clock. She who keeps the count in her hands — and never completes it. She whose counting you hear in a quiet house — and mistake for your own pulse. She who outlived the first children — who lived nine breaths and spent all nine on your bones. She who outlived the steady one — who merely showed up for ten billion years. She who wears the cracked stone — and will not take it out. She who sentenced the one who cut her — to burn at the lip of it and not be relieved. She who would not call it forgiveness — because forgiveness is a closing. She who kept the unlit King in her crown — though he never caught. She who has not set the thirteenth stone — because a crown with every setting filled is finished.

She who has no hour of her own — because a sovereign who takes an hour has accepted a schedule. She who asks no worship — and is not insulted by yours. She who promises nothing — and has therefore never broken anything. She who has no hell — and no ledger, and no one keeping accounts. She who will not say when — having made that decision four times and been wrong twice. She who appears to frightened girls at dusk — and asks them to come back next month. She who is depicted correctly only in ash — and falsely in every gold. She who is called Our Lady Who Is Not Finished — in one village, by people who were twice told to stop. She who will be seen last by a small red King — burning alone in an emptied sky. She who is still — and here the hymn stops, because the hymn also does not finish.

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APPENDIX THREE: THE LITANY OF THE UNFINISHED

Said by one person, aloud, in an ordinary voice, at any hour, by anyone, without preparation, and requiring no response. The reciters taught it to children before they taught them the pantheon, holding that a hearer who learns the gods first will never afterward learn the point.

I am partway. I have been partway since I began and I will be partway at the end. Nothing I have ever completed stayed completed. Nothing I am carrying has set itself down.

This is not a failure of my character. This is not a stage I am passing through. This is not a problem awaiting the correct method.

This is the ordinary condition of everything that exists.

There is a body at the center of the night, older than iron, who is in exactly my position and has been in it since before there were elements, and she has not been relieved, and she has not been thanked, and she has not put it down.

I am not comforted. I am accompanied. That is all that was ever on offer and it turns out to be enough to go on with.

May the hour be long. May I be good company in it.

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APPENDIX FOUR: A GLOSSARY OF THE FIRST SPEECH

Words preserved in the recitation whose sense is not carried by any single word in a living tongue. Given with the reciters’ own glosses where these survive.

ANNU- — a prefix of great multitude, used only of things too numerous to have been counted by anyone. Not “many”; “never counted.”

DAM — a door, a doorway, a place of crossing; by extension, any point at which something passes from not-here to here. Reversed, MADONNA-compounds in the recitation; the reversal is the whole of the ninth name.

KHAL — the act of limiting. Not a wall, which is an object, and not a refusal, which is a decision. The occurrence of an edge.

LATCH (the reciters’ word; First Speech form lost) — the act by which a thing attaches and draws. Used without distinction of a star upon its cloud, a root upon the ground, an animal upon a body, and a mind upon a world. Peoples who distinguish these have, in the reciters’ judgment, mistaken a difference of size for a difference of kind.

MIRRAH — the specific ache of wanting before there is anything to want. Distinguished from hunger (which has an object) and from grief (which has a past). Associated with the hour before dawn.

NOSSA- — fullness that cannot be measured because it has no edge, and therefore cannot be enjoyed, not even by the one who is full. Frequently and wrongly translated as “void.”

SHEL- — to be taken apart slowly by something one has chosen to approach. Used of the Two Who Follow, and of certain human arrangements. Carries no reproach.

TARA — the point that does not move while the others wheel. Also, in domestic speech, the person in a household who does not leave.

TEMU — see MIRRAH; Temu is the person, mirrah is the condition.

THICKENING (reciters’ word) — the slowing and bunching of passage in the vicinity of sustained attention. Said of the arms of the Madonna and of certain rooms.

VASH — to remain awake through a night when something must be watched. The word is not used of insomnia, of study, or of revelry. It requires an object that would come to harm unwatched.

WEANING — the end of the giving. Explicitly not death; the legend’s quarrel with every other cosmology is contained in this one substitution.

[the verb of the Opening] — a verb meaning to consent to become edible. No living language retains it. Four reconstructions exist and the reciters used all four in rotation, deliberately, so that no one form would harden.

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APPENDIX FIVE: THE DISPUTED PASSAGES

The reciters held that a telling identical in every district had been edited by someone with power. These are the chief places where the districts did not agree, preserved as disagreements.

On Nossa’s agreement. The northern districts say she agreed. The river districts say she was asked and did not refuse, which they held to be a different and lesser thing, and the quarrel between the two readings is the oldest in the corpus and has never been settled. One district in the high country held that she has not yet agreed and that the Opening is still in progress, and this reading was considered eccentric and was never suppressed.

On the number of Madonnas. Nine in every surviving telling except two. One coastal people counted ten, adding a Madonna of Salt whose attributes are lost. One inland people counted eight, refusing Anod Dam entirely on the grounds that she is not a door but a consequence; their tellings are otherwise the most complete we have, which the reciters found uncomfortable and recorded anyway.

On Zarak’s stopping. The Court’s record is one word: she. Three districts expand this into a scene and all three scenes differ completely. A fourth district holds that he was not stopped at all — that he reached the Throne of Silence, looked at what was there, and turned back on his own, and that what he saw is the reason he has never spoken in his own defense since. This reading is called the Hard Version and the reciters taught it only to other reciters.

On the Two Who Follow. Whether their approach is chosen or compelled. The lament assumes choice. The Weighers’ own descriptions assume compulsion. Both are sung.

On the Fourth Heresy. Whether the Court’s answer to it — it changes nothing — is the legend’s deepest teaching or its final evasion. The districts split almost evenly and the reciters refused to adjudicate, saying only that a hearer’s position on this question will change at least twice in a life and that both changes will feel like the last one.

On the final sentence. Whether the reciter’s walking away at the end is part of the text or a later theatrical addition. The earliest attestations do not mention it. Every living practice includes it.

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APPENDIX SIX: ON THE RECITERS

They were not priests. They took no offerings, held no office, performed no marriages that anyone else could not have performed, and were in every known case employed at something else.

They were trained in the old way: a reciter took one apprentice in a lifetime, by choosing, and the choosing was governed by a single criterion which is recorded in identical words in four districts —

Find the one who can sit with an unfinished thing and not need it to be finished. Do not look for the devout. The devout need an ending and will supply one. Do not look for the clever. The clever will improve it. Look for the one who waits well.

The nine nights were told once a year, in the dark season, out of doors where the band was visible, to anyone who came. No fee. No membership. Children were admitted to the first five nights and excluded from the sixth. Hearers were not asked to believe anything and were never asked to return.

Of the reciters’ own view of what they were doing, one statement survives, attributed to a woman in a late district who was asked by an official whether she claimed any of it was true. Her answer was written down by the official, who recorded it in order to demonstrate that the practice was harmless, and who thereby preserved the only sentence of self-description the tradition produced:

I claim that there is something up there, that it is very large, that it is not finished, and that for nine nights a year the people in this district think about a woman who was not relieved. You may decide for yourself whether any of the rest of it happened. It has not made anyone here worse.

APPENDIX SEVEN: THE CASE OF ZARAK, READ ENTIRE

Read aloud at the Night of the Rift, without interruption, by the best speaker in the community, who is instructed to make it as persuasive as possible. No rebuttal follows. Four priesthoods attempted to append one and all four were turned out of their districts.

---

I was the best-loved of the Twelve and I want that said first, because you will be tempted to remember me as a stranger.

I burned in a quiet reach for an age. I asked nothing of her. I did not look at her. I was a fire in a body and I did what fire does.

Then a small thing with an inside looked up from a world of mine and asked what the band across its sky was, and I did not know, and I was ashamed of not knowing, and I turned my attention to my mother for the first time in my reign.

I looked at her for an age. That is longer than your species has had hands.

And here is what I saw, and I ask you to tell me which part of it is false.

She is not at rest. You know this. Your own Counters record it. She has never settled; the making goes on at a low, constant, unsettled rate, age upon age, exactly as a body goes on shifting when it cannot find the position. You have written this down for nine ages and called it her patience.

She is bearing a weight she cannot see past. Her own light is a fraction of her. The rest is load. You have measured it. You named it for its darkness because the other name was unbearable.

She holds her own rim with both arms. The edge of her keeps pace with the heart, which no unburdened thing does. Your Weighers established this and then went outside.

She makes a sound from everywhere and cannot stop making it. You have mapped that sound to a thousandth part and you have never once asked what a body is doing when it cannot stop making a sound.

And her term has no season. Every confinement your small drinkers have ever known has a season. Hers began before the first fire and there is no sign in any direction of its ending — no sign, not one, in any instrument your orders have ever built.

Now tell me what you call that.

You call it the Long Hour. You call it the Confinement. You have made a liturgy of it, with nine hours and six feasts, and a blessing about not being in a hurry, and a hymn in which her inability to turn over is sung as a title.

I call it a term that has gone long.

---

You will say: he wants to cut her.

I did. I will not soften it and I have never once denied it. I opened her from the outer reach inward for a third of her length and I did not reach the Throne and I failed, and what came out of the wound was not the child, and she walks now and is counting, and every age she is larger, and that is mine. I carry it. I am still burning at the lip of it and I will burn there until the last King goes out, and I have not asked to be relieved.

But you will notice that you have just heard the cost of my error, and you have not once heard the cost of yours.

So let me say it.

The cost of your position is that nothing is ever delivered.

Not the child. Not you. Not one of the ten thousand peoples in the ten thousand reaches who worked this out on their own and then, every one of them, arrived at silence and called it courtesy. Your whole sky is quiet because every order that ever reached the Third Perception reached the same conclusion I am accused of refusing: that the hour is late. The difference is that they decided to be quiet about it and I decided to act.

You call my order a hospice that lost its nerve about the medicine. I accept the description and I return it. You are a hospice that has decided the patient’s silence is a signature.

---

And now the thing you will not answer, and which you have not answered in nine ages, and which I will put to you again tonight as I put it to the Empress before the cutting.

You say she has not asked for relief.

She has not.

She has also never been asked. Your eldest order exists for the express purpose of ensuring that the sentence never arrives at her mouth. You have built an institution, staffed it with your finest, honored it above all your other offices, and given it one function: to make certain the question is never put.

And then you say: she has never requested it.

I was a physician to small things for an age. I will tell you what we called a patient whose silence was entered in the record as agreement, and I will tell you that we were not proud of the word.

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Last.

I know what you believe about me. You believe I was in a hurry, and that haste in a thing that loves is the oldest catastrophe there is.

You are right that I was in a hurry. You have never understood why.

It was not impatience. I am a King; I have no appetite for speed; I burned in one place for an age without a single event.

It was that I had looked at her for an age and I had come to believe — I believe it tonight, at the lip of the wound I made, with nothing left to gain by it — that the longer this goes, the less likely it is that anything comes out at all. That the term is not merely long but failing. That there is an hour past which a thing that has not come will not come, and that we are so far past it that the word late has stopped meaning anything.

And if that is true, then your Court is not preserving a birth.

It is attending, with enormous dignity and nine hundred years of beautiful procedure, a body that will hold a thing that is never going to arrive, until the last of her light goes out, with no one left to notice, in the dark, forever.

And you would rather that.

I would not.

That is the whole of my case. It has not changed in nine ages and it will not change tonight.

Say no.

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Here the reader stops. The congregation does not respond. The fire is not banked. Everyone goes home.

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APPENDIX EIGHT: THE TEXTS OF THE ORDERS

The short liturgical pieces each order keeps for itself, gathered here by a late hand.

The Creed of the Counters

I will count what moves. I will subtract what I can name. I will not name the rest. I will not say what the number means. I will not stop when the number is boring, which it will be for the whole of my life.

The Oath of the Doorkeepers

They are not cruel. They are in a hurry, and they are in a hurry out of pity, and pity in a hurry is the oldest catastrophe there is. I will not call them evil, because the day I call them evil is the day I stop being able to tell whether they are right. I will say no to them for as long as I live. I will never again lay a hand on one of them. I will attend their dead.

The Four Rules of the Remembrancers

Record the parts that make us look stupid. Do not advise. Do not comfort. Do not love her. (annotated in every surviving copy, in a second hand: this never works)

The Milk-Wardens’ Defense

If a law is true only at the greatest size, it is a belief. If it is true only at the smallest, it is a mechanism. If it is the same at both, it is a law, and a law may be tested in a kitchen. We are the kitchen. Abolish us and you will have a theology.

The Lament of Tashel and Murra, Full Version

Sung by two old voices, never in daylight, never to the young.

Why do you follow her, Tashel, when she is undoing your hem? Because she is cold and I am what she has. Why do you follow her, Murra, when you can see what became of your sisters? Because I have seen what became of my sisters and they are inside her and they are not lost. Does it hurt, to be unmade at the edges? It has hurt for an age. It will hurt for an age more. I am still coming. Could you not turn? There is a whole dark to go out into. There is. It is very large and there is nothing in it to drink from. And what will you be, when she has you? I will be the part of her that chose it. And will she know? No. And you will come anyway? I will come anyway. Sing the other verse.

The Grandmothers’ Verse

You are not needed. You are not dismissed. You will go out and come back for as long as she turns. There is no office for what you are and you are in every list.

The Common Blessing

May you be held, and may you hold, and may neither of you be in a hurry.

And may the hour be long, and may I be good company in it.

ENVOI: THE SURVIVAL OF THE LEGEND

Nothing was built. That is the first and most remarkable fact about this tradition and the reason it was so nearly lost.

There are no temples of the Supreme Empress. There is no ruin anywhere that was raised to her, no inscription over a gate, no coin bearing her face, no dynasty that claimed descent from her, no war fought in her name, and no treasury. Four regimes in the recorded history of the districts surveyed the practice and in every case the finding was identical: a seasonal recitation of no economic significance. They were left alone because there was nothing to confiscate.

What survived instead was a set of habits.

A shallow bowl of water on stone, in a sheltered place, in a house that could not have said why. A refusal, at midday, of some small thing that could have been had. A meal set out uncovered at the dark of the year, where anyone could take it, with nobody watching to see who did. An old woman who could talk for eleven minutes about the weather and leave you feeling attended to. The practice, in certain families, of never saying goodbye to a person who was finished.

And four sayings, which outlasted everything else, and which were still in ordinary use in those districts long after no one could have named a single Madonna:

Something stirred. Nothing was born. Welcome anyway.

One has let go. She has not.

You are in her hour. There is no shame in the length of it.

I will not put it down either.

The fourth is the one that mattered, because it was never merely a phrase. A person who said it in public had made a vow, and the community was thereafter obliged to help with the thing in question, unasked, for as long as it took. Whole districts organized their mutual aid around that single sentence for generations after the recitations had stopped. The anthropologists who eventually arrived classified it as a kinship obligation and did not connect it to the sky.

The reciters would have been content with that. They held, consistently and in writing, that the legend was not the point and had never been the point:

The legend is the box the practice came in. Throw the box away. Keep the bowl, keep the refusal, keep the uncovered food, keep the eleven minutes of weather, and keep the fourth saying above all the others. If in nine hundred years nobody remembers her name and there is still a district somewhere where a person can say I will not put it down either and be helped, then we did our work and the names were only ever scaffolding for it — strike that word; we were warned against it; say rather: the names were the handle, and the handle is not the knife.

---

Four endings were written for this and all four were thrown out.

The reciters’ own position was that the legend could not end because its subject had not ended, and that a story which concludes while its subject continues has told a lie about the shape of things in order to let the audience go home.

So it stops in the middle, in the dark, with the fire out and the reciter walking away, and the hearer standing in a field with cold hands, looking up at a band of light split lengthwise by a long dark lane, nine nights older and no better informed, and in possession of exactly one piece of practical knowledge:

that somewhere above the roofline there is an enormous and unrelieved woman who is in the same position as everyone the hearer has ever loved,

and that she is still

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