Kalimpura by Jay Lake EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available For Free Download
- Author: Jay Lake
- Language: English
- Genre: Action & Adventure Fantasy
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Copper Downs, Postpartum
I HAVE RARELY recalled my dreams, not in those years of which I now tell,
nor since. I do not know why this should be. Life has perhaps always been
so vivid, so overwhelming, that the far countries of sleep pale by
comparison. How can a dream offer more than the simple richness of a mug
of kava whipped with cream, cinnamon, and red pepper? How can the
illusions of the sleeping mind overwhelm the feel of the wind on one’s face
as dawn paints the eastern sky in the colors of flame and life, while the first
birds of morning leap to the air in their chattering hordes?
Yet during that last month or so of my pregnancy, I had been dreaming as
never before. Even now I recall my extraordinarily vivid awareness of life
beyond the gates of horn at that time. I awakened time and again in the tent
that my old friend and Selistani countryman, the pirate-turned-priest
Chowdry, had made my own out of his concern for me. Swollen and
awkward from the babies in my belly, I was barely able to waddle in order
to break my fast amid the overgrown children who labored to build this new
temple to this new god Endurance whom I helped create. Those last weeks
of my pregnancy were certainly the dullest of my then-sixteen years of life.
Perhaps it was thus that the dreams came to prominence.
Not for me visions of the face of my long-lost father, ancient wisdoms
dripping from his lips, as I have heard others tell. Nor the refighting of old
battles. Little enough, judging from the books I’ve read that speak of such
signs to be found in the night mind. Instead, my dreams had been of
heaving oceans and sheets of flame leaping to the sky. Ships and burning
palaces and always I ran, looking for those whom I have lost. Always I
begged and swore and promised I would never again do wrong if only I
could set right what had been overturned in my careless haste.
Dreaming, in other words, of what was real. A girl and a young woman
lost as hostages borne across the Storm Sea. The girl is Corinthia Anastasia,
child of Ilona whom I loved though she did not love me the same in return,
stolen away by my enemies as a hostage to my future good behavior.
Likewise the Lily Blade Samma, my first paramour from my days in the
Temple of the Silver Lily. Those two, each dear to me in different ways,
were being held to bind me to the will of Surali, a woman high in the
councils of the Bittern Court back in Kalimpura.
In short, I awakened not from prophecy, but from memory.
And now my belly hung empty. Two tiny mouths gnawed at my breasts,
which I swore belonged to some stranger. I was never pendulous, nor did
my nipples weep before childbearing. There was little about pregnancy
consistent with dignity. Motherhood had not begun much better.
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