Clocks, Resurrection, Kings, Gender

the ancient alliance between the Bells and the Sandtimers manifested itself in a festival jointly sponsored by the orders.

Clockholiday entailed gifts of clocks, been individual members of the rich and by princely sponsors to cities. there was a momento Mori aspect to it, and the sand-dialers dressed up in bleached bones and dark cloaks and went about with their hourglasses as the Timekeeper angels, just as they did with the order of the sickles on their feast for the dead.

on both feasts they wore masks like birds and men and beats and women, and the people tossed holy sand at their hourglasses, open to the air, in hopes that the sand might prolong lives.

free cities held contests to aquire designs built by master clock-architechts, who were as a rule and rutine imprisoned inside the clock upon completion, so that they might be kept to keep the device oiled and running, and to train apprentices to do the same, and to prevent them from constructing even more elaborate clocks for other towns (insect dreams).

on the feast of the dead the sickles and the sanddialists and the quills read off the names of the dead from that year, then from years past, then from the future years (all those known to be living now) and then possible future years for those not born and named yet.

to hear your own name in the procession is alternatively good, bad, auspicious, suspicious, perspicuous, or ominous.

the dead are made to walk and talk, fed their favorite food, reminisce with the living, and those for whom the knack is especially strong will resurect their own dead, husbands their husbands and wives, wives their wives and husbands, children their parents and parents their grandparents and grandchildren, apprentices their masters, masters their long lost prodiges known at the very end or very beginning of their own careers, lost in foreign lands or common colds or cryptic madnesses or naked tragedies.

prophets are resurrected and made to prophessi, kings and judges are consulted, learned experts are polled, and most especially the demonized are resurrected and indicted, inquisited, tried and condemned and henceforth made to bear what thoughtful men called torture and angry men called justice, or bear what their death loaned forms could sustain and simulate suffering to.

rarely a soul is exiled from the graveyards and made no entry into the periodic reliving with those still on their first lives. it happens, to politicians and statesmen especially, for whom even all the shadow of power is enough to retake office and wage a few brief weeks of war by the dead, which is known to be the most abjured of wars. it happens, to reincarnationists who would bring back the abjured dead, to prophets whose time in their gods' halls, remembered or imagined, was too toxic and proscpicious a manufacturer of cults. it happens to saints, whose bodies stay under the penumbra only of death, seeming to be almost sleeping, uncorruptible. some say the last sacrifice of a saint is that they will abjure both afterlife and resurrection and instead repeat certain scenes, of their own lives or other saints, or of demigods, scenes of hellish torture or heavenly rebellion or infinite patience, vowing like bodhisattvas that they shall not enter into narvanna until they have shepherded ever devotes from across all of the infinite worlds into Nirvana first. saints do undergo resurrection, especially great saints for whom a single knucklebone or knapsack or donkey's hoof or the smallest meanest splinter of the true cross is enough to summon up their ghosts, made to reenact to the audience's satisfaction the histories which the priests or the other holy dead had to recount to them in muttered lines from piecemeal scripts.

when the saints remains are numerous--so numerous as to be self contested, as in the v case of Saint John the Poisoner, whose 45 thumb bones each bear the black acid mark like a the lipstick postscript of a kiss-- they may be obliged to manifest across many cities at once. for those saints not given to bilocationality in their own lifetimes, this can be extremely distressing, and schizosancticacity has led some saints to denounce and defend contradictory heredoxies in the same breath, for each city tends to demand endorsement or at least sympathy from their saints for the heretics which make their towns famous, which they may ideally broadcast across all manifestations of that saint they can reach.

heretics are often subjected to fire, drowning, or rapid decomposition to prevent their allies from resurrecting them at the first chance they get. yet when the need is strong enough the right resurrectionist can and will call for the blacklisted dead from the fire, from the sea, from the carrion birds of the sky funerals and the hot glass gardens where man become mulch. these partial and transfigured haints posses a special grace, not least inflected with bizarre and dislocated suffering, which adds to their heresies the romance of affliction which continues even in the afterlife.

are the dead really there? they do not seem to be merley the puppets of the conductor and the crowd. there are many things which the dead cannot of will not do, and these change often enough from one year or century to the next to make study ambiguous. there are things they do not remember which we are quite confident they did, and the dreams of soil and tombstone play strange tricks on their minds, but that is only to underline how much they have wills and agendas of their own. there is a king who, despite being raised by 11 different resurrectionists with all sorts of checks and restrictions, almost always ends up escaping, persuading someone to raise his ministers, sons, grandfathers, and even his enimies and thereby polarize the entire community around a familiar grudge. they tried not raising him but his gravitational pull from the afterlife drew resurrectionists from the most unlikely lines--such as his enimies, who knew his resurrection would mean there's as well. his opinion as a strategist was almost always regarded as indispensable even for the most routine of matters because there was always someone for whom things weren't going in a fruitful way happy to exploit the ruptures sure to come.

the king had a grandson, or possibly a great grandson, or a favorite nun, a princess or God daughter whose parents were not of useful marrying stock but who could always be given to a monastery or covenant.

her body was of unknown provenance. no relics purporting to her origen had been recovered recently and all the old ones showed no sign of responding when her name was invoked with incense and oranges and marigolds and chocolate, the standard offering for a youth or small child of anonymous tastes, nor had more speculative gestures won her presence either.

the king was desperate to see her, to speak with her. he was not certain she had perished as a child but to him it seemed most likely, and there were no credibly sourced indications of her after she'd become an adult. a crisis had chanced on her while she was being relocated, with her parents and much of their clan, to a defensible position near a very important nunnery, where oracles had long been trained and women could walk through fire and converse with snakes. they were said to turn men into snake, or to take snakes as lovers, or that they had been born, some of them, the originals, as snakes, and these other snakes were their younger brothers, who had never shed their snake form to walk among the humans, much the pitty, or much the blessing, neither side could quite remember how the score stood.

was she taken to be trained as an Oracle? yes, that was what he remembered, and it had the ring of truth, right down to the details that didn't quite fit. for example, oracles were only recruited from among orphans, as the temptation to look into the future to see when ones parents will die is very strong. if the parents of a particularly promising initiate were still alive, the sisterhood was not above using assassination.

if a child of a marriage important to an entity the sisterhood wished to count as an ally, as a favor to the sisterhood or to the ally, were delivered to the sisters for training, her parents would be seperated from her at a very early age, as early as possible, before her first tooth should knick their breast or their finger and taste the salt of their blood.

yet his god-daughter had her milk teeth, he recalled watching from a balcony as the clans moved out, lamps swinging from ox carts and goat shrines rattling and full of the household and clan gods in the reliquirium, and the personal gods of certain leaders, and certain heirs, the medicine woman and the shaman who road facing backwards on one of the 8 legged, 8 horned, 8 eyed, 2 headed oxen, blindfolded and trailing a long stick on the ground, a boy perhaps 4 or perhaps 6, the clan's sponsored monk who was everyone's son and everyone's brother and everyone's father and everyone's reincarnation, for he was learning that special meditation which allowed one to talk to ghosts, not immanently but distantly, as if over a radio, and he could speak over the radio with his brain, and call back the shaman when somnambulance carried him far from camp, and could sleep a medicine sleep and help the "2nd mother" and "3rd grandmother", the honorific of a midwife or mishusband, could see which way the baby needed to move, where the fever was burning too hot and where the frost was not yet too cold. this boy his granddaughter or was it his grandfather was trotting along near the monk, skipping and waving, as they set out at sunset, for they had just been told they would be persona non gratis at dawn.

go east, be told them, go to the sisters of the the pale mountain, they will let you have hospice for as long as you need.

"they do not welcome men who are not among them by clanblood, and we have no members to count among our ranks, for though many men have joined their secular service, we have no women in their membership."

they will take you, because you bring them my grandfather, or my god-daughter, or was it my son's bastard girlchild, tenth child of my child but not an honest born heir among them.

they will take you, because they will take any guest who brings them an Oracle, and she will not be refused Oracli Candidatis

may it be so, but her parents live. let her become a high priestess, or a bishopess, or a princess of the archway, or a daughter of the snakes, and we will be their kin, but for her to be an Oracle makes us only strangers among strangers until she comes of age and chooses a temple, our one joining marriage her mother and father dead to enable her selection and training.

but for her to join as a neophyte I needed to give my consent, and I would not have her

she was a prodige, like my grandfather Nikoli, whose son was King but who was himself only a cadet Prince, and who was spared the crown and a long life by the brilliance of his self consuming flame. he had never had the opportunity to receive training as an oracle, though three monasteries and disastrous stint in the army has tried other ministrations. at the very end of his life Xechari'is grandfather was told a visit to the hot springs on the slopes to the West of the primary summit would do him good and that they were finally open to pilgrims. she opined to his parents, the archduchess and the future Crown Prince, as younger brother to the future monk-king, that the Cadet Prince, who would posthumously be recognized as a kingly line, might have once been treatable through the technique or seven of certain schools of thought among the Oracle trainers, had he only been smuggled there as a boy of the veil. this almost third gender was of great utility (and often for outsiders anxiety). usually a boy with promising Oracle or priestly talents would be swapped for a sister in a purely or mostly pro forma way, and sent to study the ways of Oracle or priest. they remain veiled as a courtesy to a hypothetical but problematic betrothal which might be pressed at some point, necisitating her anonymity in public society, which is what a cross into the cloistered life was most often ruled to be.

veiled boys were usually housed in separate rooms of adjoining lodging, though if there were only 1 or 2 such segregations were often dispensed with. the possibility of a prince and a priestess being discovered was of less notoriety than a powerful clan having sworn Candidatis betrothal for a boy, due to homophobia or jealousy it varied by the decade, partly depending on whether one of the emperors were himself gay, since winning a betrothal promise from an emperor or someone associated with his party, a common enough decoy promise that it could spread little currency, made families who's put the work into raising eligible boys suddenly have double the usual bargaining chips.

empresses rarely ignited the same furry, besides, they often married boys from outside the enclave and girls from within, vice versa for the male emperors. there were three emperors at a time except for between vacancies and inaugurations, and each tended to have a party, aesthetic, cohort, League, officers, musicians, politicians, actors, philosophers, civil servants, academics, priests and prophets and, if he can get his hands on one, an Oracle.

could a boy be trained as an Oracle? never! could a veiled boy? it had been known to happen, and was sometimes routine, though only, the observation went, routine in retrospect.

was this why they hadn't offered a space as a veiled boy to the grandfather?

partly. veiled Oracles had probably been considered likely routine a few decades ago. a few young veiled Oracles were currently embarking on their careers, just as when the grandfather was born. but so far as it was ever acknowledged, these were especially tolerant times, and those were especially segregationist. candidacy would have been much harder, much riskier, a much less forthcoming possibility.

more precarious.

perhaps, she said, but all these positions are precarious. Oracles are perhaps the most expensive members of the Precarit.

so would the kill the goddaughter's parents, as they surely would not have killed the grandfather's mother, sister of the king and two queens in quick succession, her husband? no husband, but the pirate princess of a merchant Republic, according to what they said in the papers, who came bearing for wedding gifts Letters of Marc and maps to burried treasure.

the life of the sister to three sovereigns--Lady Zepherithite, King Regilops, and Queen Saxhsa--aunt to two more, King Fillmontis and the extraordinarily long lived Czar Quazzium, and namesake to xir great grandson Cosimo, Cosimatashzia rose to the rank of First Sealady of the Sovereign's oceans, spent time as a professor, treasure Hunter (they couldn't let her wife's dowry go to waste after all), zen poetry mønk'n, and senior stateswoman, taking on the roles of Secretary of State and later chair of the ambassadors Congress Midway through her niece's career and at the very end of hers, at the bitter end of her divorce from the pirate queen Tribune of the anarchistic monastic run merchant republics, monks being for the most part the only ones who could calculate the stock market and it's stratagems, they had taken large parts of the market hostage and used it to broker strange, at times explosive, at times quietly and ruthless predatory, but most disturbing of all for long periods, sometimes dozens of years, utterly inactive.

the tribune of the market hostages claimed that the markets had taken them hostage, not the other way around. many of the monks were legally the property of corporations, individuals having long abandoned personal slavery as too risky and hard to insure against the risk of abolitionist funded servile murder, but easier to manage if divided up in ownership and financed through the monastic equivalence of student loans.

is it plausible that the monks are only opperating off the orders of their corporate owners and in rare cases individual masters? hard to say. many of those masters no longer exist, their assets having sold for public auction or prior to their dissolution in private. or perhaps the nonks had killed their masters, exercising that ancient right of every regicide slave that they be freed and exiled, and they did indeed live in exile, had begun raising novices in exile to learn the calculative trance the nuncs used in what some whispered to be experimental and forbidden hive mind technology, of what some whispered was the original cause of the hostages being taken hostage by the market, unless it was the market that was held hostage and the hostages its hostiles.

your grandfather was probably too old by the time his condition was recognized for our techniques to have made him an Oracle, veiled or not. but we learned long ago that not all to study how to be oracles need to become oracles to be useful. many linger past the upper age limit for ascension as teachers aids, translators used for immersive fodder, absorbing languages. others, more successful outside of the temple, an honored brother of ambiguous connection, an ambassador of adviser. much as your grandfather has attempted to be, she explained to me, when I asked her further questions in an anonymous cafe where I had her meet me.

he would have been able to remember, perhaps, for more than 60 days at a time, and I winced, recalling that even after short holidays apart my grandfather could not recognize not only me but our whole shared world--my parents his children, the servants, the family dog, the family home, names and places and dates and events having always to be spoon-fed to him if he had at any point for longer than a month or so failed to study his worn flash cards, which he troubled over most nights with anguish and grief and dread, or left forgotten at the back of a drawer, blissfully forgotten in tear stained ignorance, until the next fateful parting inspired a rush to reinforce details and he came across such cards in his study, sometimes having produced the same card nearly exactly 6 or 7 or a dozen times.

his relationship with time is, shall we say, melodramatic? the joke was lost on me, if it even was a joke.

he doesn't have the kind of voluntary access to the future as an Oracle standing at the eye of the storm. he isn't teathered or strung along by something as solid as a particular current in the wind, like a prophet or medium. and though there are techniques to orientate oneself absent these, he never learned from his peers or elders, or students for that matter, because the family has kept him so isolated.

.

can you teach him now?

we can begin with breathing exercises, mind clearing, things he already does but isn't necessarily conscious of or used to talking about. it's impossible to say if they will be impactful in a way you can recognize. but they will be good for him for the afternoon he does them. negative reactions are rare and, when they happen,are usually a canary in the coal mind

I thought about his pun.

will you offer these services to him. I have and I will continue to do so, when he consents to see me. he is very useful, your grandfather, and much in demand, and the family rents him where they think there is profit and nowhere else. if I can attach myself to the court of such a project I might submit a request for an hour of the old man's time, and he is in the habit, sometimes, of taking such requests, at random, or

whimsy, or as a favor, or out of boredom when he cannot sleep, and you may be summoned.