Page 85 of The Merciless Ones
An indolo, we murmur, the thought appealing more and more to us. Perhaps that is what we will become.
I gasp awake.
When my eyes blink open, the temple is empty. Quiet, except for the flames popping and sparking in the braziers. It’s as if I’m alone in the world. But I know I’m not. My companions are somewhere outside the door. If I strain, I can hear their muffled movements, each one distinct and unnaturally slow. The air feels nearly like it did back in the Warthu Bera’s caverns, when I was moving so fast, everything else seemed to crawl at a snail’s pace. But I know that’s not what’s happening now. I’m not moving fast – or at all, for that matter. The Idugu are distorting time. Or, rather, this entire chamber is the distortion. It’s just like the Chamber of the Goddesses, except instead of the river of stars, there’s an entire temple hidden inside this room. Once upon a time, I would have called this chamber a miracle, but now I know it for what it is: a fickle whim of fickle gods.
I walk closer to the statues, noticing how lifelike they’ve become. Heat rises from them, almost as if they are breathing. Even more telling, my palm is so completely smeared with gold, I have to wipe it off using the undergarments lining my armour. So I was right: these are the sleeping forms of the Idugu. But they aren’t rising like the mothers did when I touched my blood to the gold imprisoning them. They’re just frozen there, unmoving. I frown. Could it be that they’re somehow still imprisoned like the mothers were?
No, that can’t be possible. They’ve been communicating with me all this while.
I look up at them. “Why did you show me that memory?” I ask. “To prove you are the brothers to the Gilded Ones?”
“Brothers?” The disdainful reply rolls under my skin, a thousand voices in one. I look up to find the Idugu’s mouths moving, visible ripples underneath the gold veiling them. “After everything that you’ve seen, do you really think that is what we are?”
“Then what am I supposed to think?” I ask. “That you’re some kind of counterpart to the mothers? That you were once one with them, like indolos?”
“Then, now, always. The exact same being.”
“Then why this?” I gesture around the temple. “The separate temples, the alaki sacrifices – the blood, the fighting? Why not just rejoin with your counterparts if that is what they are?”
“Because they were the ones who chose to sever our bond!” The floor buckles under the force of the Idugu’s ire. “You saw the memories! They were the ones who imprisoned us here – hid us from the world! They were the ones who decided to steal all our children for themselves. The alaki, the jatu – they took them all. Constrained them to fit their idea of the world.”
Images flash through my mind: White Hands emerging from a pool of gold in all their glory, a being of all genders, of endless possibilities. A being as divine as the essence they were created from. But the mothers are horrified at their appearance, so they reject all the other facets of them, whittling away until only the feminine ones remain. All the while, the Idugu watch from behind the veil, helpless. They watch as the mothers then create new children, elevating the females and ignoring the males and the yandau as they cavort with humans and build the empire that will one day be known as Otera. All the while, the Idugu watch, trapped in their prison, that in-between world, the celestial realm turning RedOrangeRED in their ANGER FURY blackgrey bleakness HUNGER—
I wrench myself away from the memories, unable to take them any more. They’re so powerful, so overwhelming. And they’re only half the story – the Idugu’s half. Before, I would have taken them as the whole truth, but I’m no longer as naive as I once was. Nowhere do I see the reason the mothers imprisoned the Idugu in the first place, or how the Idugu managed to keep their rising power hidden from them and from the alaki for so long. These memories, they’re a manipulation, and not even a decent one, as compared to White Hands’s dealings.
Anger blazes over me. “Lies!” I roar. “All lies! You expect me to believe that male gods who put men above all others valued a being like White Hands? Wept at her fate? These are all convenient mistruths to make me hate the mothers, to make me doubt their every action.” And I need no help doing what I’ve already started on my own.
This answer, of course, displeases the Idugu. “You speak of lies, Deka?” comes the sneering reply. “You travelled here searching for the angoro, did you not? Did your mothers tell you what it was? Did they say it was a golden throne, one that grants power?”
“And what if they did?” I scoff. “Are you offering to hand it to me?”
The Idugu continue as if I haven’t even spoken. “The Gilded Ones never informed you of our existence, never told you there were other gods. All they told you was that they were the only ones, the only creators of the alaki and jatu. Tell us, why do you think that is? Why did they take all the worship, all the glory, for themselves? Why did they hide us, starve us?”
The word rumbles through the chamber, sending an image flashing through my mind – the Idugu watching the Gilded Ones from behind the veil, those red-oranges of anger, rage, simmering inside them. But another colour slithers under their emotions, one I saw so briefly, it was gone before I could understand it. Black, thin and bleak – helplessness. Hunger…
And finally, White Hands’s words just a few mornings ago make sense: Names are what give things power. Even gods.
Realization shatters through me: the mothers stripped the Idugu of their names and identities, and in doing so, denied them the chance to be worshipped. And gods need worship to survive. The subservience and belief of humans are what sustain them. But the Gilded Ones starved the Idugu of worship, then banished them behind the veil to die what should have been a very slow and painful death.
Yet they’re still here.
How can they still be here? My rational mind surfaces again, picking holes in the Idugu’s claims. By all rights, their consciousness should have long faded away. They should be barely more than energy, floating in the universe. How can they still exist, talk to me in this temple of Oyomo, if—
Wait.
This temple of Oyomo.
Oyomo…
The air is sucked out of my lungs. “You’re the ones who created Oyomo!” I exclaim. “You created a new identity to help you feed!”
It makes so much sense. No wonder the jatu were able to take the Gilded Ones by surprise and imprison them – they had the Idugu leading them and the mothers didn’t know. They thought the Idugu were securely imprisoned behind the veil – slowly starving out of existence. But unbeknownst to them, their counterparts had created a new identity called Oyomo and used it to manipulate the jatu into following a new path, called the Infinite Wisdoms. And if the memory I saw in Melanis’s mind was true – that jatu gazing up in despair at the mothers – the jatu were already well inclined to follow. I’ve seen the way the Firstborn treat men, the way they look down on them as lesser. Of course, the jatu would fall under the sway of Oyomo, the god who promised them a world completely ruled by men. A world where women would be forced into subservience and alaki would be steadily decimated until a special ritual was required to find and execute the last few who remained.
When the mothers ruled the world, they created a hierarchy based on gender, so the Idugu, when they had their chance, did the same. But the difference is, they were even more vindictive than their counterparts, massacring the children the Gilded Ones had raised and using those sacrifices to feed themselves, to gorge on the power that had been denied to them for so long.
Fury sweeps through my body, so powerful now, I can barely speak. “The Infinite Wisdoms, the temples – you created all of it so you could be worshipped!” I rage. “So you could feed and use the power you gained to seek revenge on the mothers and their children!”
It’s all so sinister, all so twisted, I can barely comprehend it. Everything I suffered – the horrors of that cellar, the burdens of life as a woman in Irfut – it was all because of the Idugu. Because they needed to be fed. Yes, the Gilded Ones imprisoned them, but they were the ones who took things to the extreme. They were the ones who transformed Otera into this perverse and sinister place. Suddenly now, I remember the words Elder Durkas said to us countless times back in Irfut: Worship is not just the prayers that we recite; it is the acts of obedience that we perform. And the Idugu used the Infinite Wisdoms to demand almost complete obedience from women. So every time I walked more slowly because the Infinite Wisdoms told me to, every time I bowed my head, held my tongue, made myself small – every time I did any of those things, it was worship for the Idugu. My subservience – my pain – was feeding them.