Stone / Heart / Flesh / Wound by P. H. Low
1900 words, ~9 minutes reading time
Issue 5 (Summer 2024)
You cannot love.
The oracle of your local temple tells you this as you kneel on her dais, your knees aching on cold flagstone because your parents refused the wine-colored cushions that would have made you more comfortable. Your family has come for your blessing, from the Lady carved in moon-white alabaster: a rite of passage, for a child to have their nature told to them at the cusp of their understanding.
But as the Lady turns toward you, her face the high angled starkness of a cliff in winter, your three-year-old brother Marek bawls from the back of the room, sensing he is not the center of attention, and—though you will barely admit it to yourself—you wonder what would happen if you dragged him into the fountain by the door, held him against the bottom until he stopped.
And the Oracle stretches out her pale cold hand, with its immaculately carved fingers, and proclaims in a voice like thunder, this one was born wrong. And you know—even outside any belief that the priests carved her according to the High Gods’ sacred will—that she only tells the truth.
You are five years old, and already a worse sinner than half the people in your temple will ever be.
In the years that follow, you try to prove her incorrect: if only to yourself, since your parents speak of the Oracle’s verdict to no one (though they watch you with a particular sharpness, voices razor-edged when you fail to help Marek with his sums or play his stupid games); if only so the guilt crushing your own chest loosens for a few breaths at a time and you almost convince yourself that upon your death, you will not be hurled into the deepest sulfur-burning underworlds. When you kick Marek in the face for breaking your favorite stylus, you volunteer to muck out the family stables for a month after, though you’re not, and can never be, truly sorry. When you are a little older, you secretly resent the schoolmates you spend time with for their slow-witted talk, their clumsiness at handball—the way their wrongness draws forth your own in the presence of the faster, cleverer children who won’t even look you in the face. But you leave extra bread at the Oracle’s altar every week, your stomach twisting in shame: If you are truly born wrong, at least you will have the self-awareness to compensate.
As you grow into your tenth year, then your fourteenth, you come to love poetry; develop great skill with the lute, and your own voice. But is it not selfish, to attend to craft without the accompanying generosity of soul? What beauty can there be in an exquisitely chosen word, a ballad that drives your own tutors to tears, when the person from which it comes is irreparably corrupted?
Eventually, you leave the temple.
You leave town altogether, in fact—journey across dusty roads to a land of soft green hills; take a lute-playing gig at a tavern where only half the patrons speak your language. But when you aren’t performing—or tutoring, or looking for other jobs—you stumble, for the first time in your life, into having friends: poets and artists and thinkers, hanging around the cafés and public squares. People whose minds you could probe forever, in conversations that leap from philosophy to new-discovered stars; who come to care for you, and you for them, and with whom your old resentments do not flare.
Other oracles have been carved, in this land, of granite and gneiss and shining red porphyry: messengers of the same High Gods who nonetheless tell you different things about who you can love, and what life is for, and what it means for you to be good. You kneel before each in your best robes, and listen with the thirst of one stranded in the desert; discuss with your companions, afterward, which you come closest to believing.
But the Lady of White Alabaster haunts the corners of your mind—the hard divots of her palms, her eyelids’ cold crease. And you suspect, with your little experiments in faith, that you are only committing blasphemy. You are picking and choosing, you hear in her waterfall voice, doctrines that will only make you feel good; that will require the least action, the least sacrifice, the least pain.
Proof, again, that you were born wrong—you cannot love the High Gods, who have gifted you the entire cosmos, with even a sliver of the passion they deserve.
You cannot love, so you give up trying.
When Euan’s roof breaks after a rainstorm, you arrive with several carts of thatch and mud brick and like that they thank you; take pride in the way they look you in the eye. When Nessa asks you for flour, you brave the market already knowing she will leave a basket of soft cakes at your door the next morning. When Andreas discovers his partner has cheated on him, you spend the night walking together among the hills, raging and screaming at cold constellations, and it is a balm for your loneliness, in those dark quiet hours after the tavern closes. Love exchanged for love means nothing, you know—true virtue is spilling the cup of yourself for those who cannot fill you in turn. But your friends draw close to you, and each other, like the reeds of a basket pulled taut. And sometimes, as your fingers pluck the strings of your lute, the world goes bright as if you have just woken, and you think: You have never felt so right in all your life.
You return to your hometown for Marek’s wedding.
Your relationship with your brother has been admittedly cool, even after you outgrew the small hurts of youth. His bright gregariousness won him the clever childhood friends you longed for, and an easy indulgence from your parents; his talent for handball brought him wealth and honor and a fair-haired lover with a chirping laugh. Marek grew up knowing how to love and be loved—grew up without the Lady’s stares boring into him through the temple walls, or the whispers in his own mind of wrong, wrong, wrong. So you’ve had little to say to him, over the years. Even less, now.
You tell yourself you are not jealous.
The way back, as you ride a speckled horse Euan has lent you for the week, is at once different than you remember and familiar as a dream. A couple new villages have sprung up along the high road, farmers hawking fluffy sheep and bright bolts of fabric. Children look up as you pass—taking in the basket of Nessa’s sweetbreads you have brought for the wedding, and the cloak Andreas wove for you, patterned with rivers and leaping deer—and hide in their parents’ skirts as if you are a full-grown adult and not just a few years their elder.
A temple turns its face to you as you approach the outskirts of your town. It is smaller and shabbier than the one you grew up kneeling in—plain columns instead of flower-carved, dirt floor covered by a sun-faded rug. Squatting on a narrow, dusty street to which your parents never found reason to bring you. But an oracle of butter-gold sandstone sits cross-legged on the dais, one finger crooked as if beckoning—and soft clusters of cushions are gathered at her feet.
Something surges in your chest for which you have no name, and you climb down from your horse and kneel.
Only quiet, at first: the blurred echo of supplicants’ voices against the recessed ceiling, the rush of feet and horse-trot in the sunlit world beyond. As if time has eddied around this small stone capsule, left you behind.
Breath expands your lungs. Your knees, which have begun to creak on winter mornings, sink into forgiving cotton.
A cool solid pressure, on the crown of your head.
My gentle boy.
Your face heats. Gentle is not a word you would use to describe yourself—weak, sometimes, when you are so lonely you cannot bring yourself to rise from bed; oversensitive, when your friends vanish around a curve in the road and your eyes prick with unshed heat. Gentleness is a hand cupped to a jaw, a head resting in the crook of a shoulder, an arm wrapped around a stranger as they sob into your chest. It is not—precisely—you.
Your songs are fierce, this new Oracle concedes, brown thumb resting light but firm in the center of your forehead. You have forged your soul into a shield, to protect yourself from those who would hurt you. But the way you love—a flash of faces behind your eyelids, and you see Andreas again on that high hill, your voices rising into that dark vault of stars; feel the sun heat your back as you hand Euan another brick. You taste the dew-cooled figs you picked with Nessa one early summer morning, and the mulled wine you sipped on long evenings in the square, and the night air as the four of you lingered outside the tavern, debating the latest poets and plays. And you wonder: Have you become someone who can love, in the years since you left this place? Here, on the far side of your surrender?
You listen, the Oracle says. You accept them as they are. They know that, and they love you, too.
You breathe. Breathe again. The words settle against your quick-beating heart, autumn leaves drifting to dead forest floor.
But am I not wrong? you ask. The word a thorn in your throat, embedded deep from decades of faith. Am I not—incapable?
The Oracle’s mouth does not curl upward, but you swear she is smiling.
Gentle boy, she says again, and your chest tightens at the appellation. Would you agree that the High Gods are beyond our comprehension?
You nod, your hair rumpling a little beneath her unmoved palm. Yes.
Would you agree that anyone might receive evidence of Their will, through prayer and scripture reading and meditation?
It is one of the core tenets of your religion, though the oracles and priests are meant to guide you. Yes.
And you are aware that the priests have carved us—of finest stone, but still with human hands?
You swallow, your throat dry. I am.
Then you are only as wrong as we are. The Oracle’s stone touch is suddenly light on your elbows, helping you to your feet. As wrong as our acolytes, sweeping the temple floor.
We are not gods, after all. We only pick up their fragments and call them mirrors.
You leave in a daze. Outside, the road is still bright with afternoon, a racket of voices and carriage clatter, and when you’ve climbed back onto your saddle, you find yourself sitting straighter; as you nudge the horse forward, cloak soft around your shoulders, a warmth like sunlight spreads through your bones.
Euan’s horse. Andreas’ weaving. Nessa’s patisserie, smelling even now of almonds and yeast.
A priest stands before a mosaic on the side wall, polishing its facets with a rag. They nod as you pass, as if you could be any believer wandered in off the street to pray.
No more or less wrong than you are, you think, inclining your head toward them. Then, bolstered by echoes of the hands of those you love, you make your way back toward a place that is not quite home.