Old Pantheon Revisited

I think this is better, although not necessarily the final version. I'm still thinking about the animism aspect. Note that LJ doesn't allow me to italicize. Note also that this scene is preceded and followed by action sequences.

Faint music sounded from the back of the cavern and the crowd stilled. It drew nearer, echoing – pipes, flutes, drums, something eldritch that might have been the wind whistling between the worlds. Figures advanced carrying torches. Their shadows preceded them, casting fantastic shapes on the cavern’s fissured walls. The crowd drew back as the procession entered the body of the cave.
Jame was reminded of Mother Vedia’s approach on her feast day. There, in fact, she was, again seated like a living statue on an upraised litter, again surrounded by her dancing, snake-wreathed attendants, but this time without bats or followers.
Before her went a gross figure looking like a younger version of the Earth Wife but also hugely pregnant, attended by a host of waddling women in a similar state.
After them, unaccompanied, came a skinny crone carrying a box. While people cheered the other two, they turned away from this last figure, shielding their children’s eyes.
“The Great Mother in her aspects of life-bearer, healer, and hungry tomb,” said Kroaky, raising his voice over the renewed clamor of the crowd as the next god emerged from the shadows.
“What’s in the box?”
“Death, of course.”
Jame regarded the diverse figures and remembered her conversation with Gran Cyd, queen of the Merikit. Showing her a fertility figure and an imu, both representing the Earth Wife, she had said, “These images were ancient long before Mother Ragga was even born.”
Jame had wondered at the time if the Earth Wife and the other three of Rathillien’s elemental Four, while each a distinct individual, wore different, older aspects in different cultures and were subject to older stories. Here, perhaps, was the answer.
It raised a further question, however: how had the deification of the Four effected the Old Pantheon, which preceded them?
There was the Earth Wife, in three of her native aspects.
Next came a cauldron seething with river fish. Fingerling trout crept over the edge of the pot and pulled up a figure glittering with scales. Cold round eyes regarded the crowd through a net of green hair and pouting lips parted over needle teeth in a smile meant to entice.
The Eaten One, thought Jame, or some variation of her, probably linked to the Amar. Did she also take a human lover? Where was Drie now, still blissfully in his beloved’s arms or deep within her digestive tract?
The goddess of love and lost causes walked behind her, backward, gazing into a mirror whose surface rippled like water. Around her feet, threatening to trip her, swarmed a host of green and yellow frogs.
“Geep!” they chorused. “Geep, geep, GEEP!”
Rain pattered in their wake.
Gorgo, thought Jame, happy to see an almost familiar face, or faces. She wondered how he and his priest Loogan were doing in Tai-tastigon. Sooner or later, she would have to find out.
More followed. Those clearly aligned with the Four seemed to fare the best. Others passed as phantoms of their former selves, and received little recognition from the crowd. Who now worshipped that dog-faced being or that drifting tatter of silk, that musky orange glow or that thing of clattering bones?
A dazzling light entered the cavern.
“Ooh!” breathed the crowd, and covered their eyes.
Jame peered through her fingers at the Sun in all his glory. She could almost make out a figure at the heart of the blaze, a man stumbling forward supporting a giant, swollen phallus with both hands.
The moon circled him, her face alternately that of the maiden, the matron, and the hag, just like the pommel of the Ivory Knife. She looked up with shifting features and saluted Jame.
“Sister, join us!”
Was this also a mortal who had undergone at least a temporary apotheosis – Like the Guild Lords above? Like Dalis-sar in Tai-tastigon? Like she herself, eventually, if she became That-Which-Destroys?
Heat washed through the cavern, worse than when the sun had come among them but without his dazzling light. An old woman carrying a heath-side firepot, a martial figure clanking in the red hot armor of war, and then a stillness. Heat gave way to a sudden, mortal chill. Jame felt the sweat on her brow turn cold.
“I won’t look,” said Fang, and hide her face against Kroaky’s shoulder.
A cloaked and hooded figure had entered the cavern. He made his way forward slowly, feeling ahead of him with an iron-shod staff. Why should he cause such dread? Perhaps it was the smoke seeping from within his garments. Perhaps it was the stench of burned flesh. Perhaps it was because he came alone, without attendants, and all turned their backs on him.
“Nemesis,” said Kroaky, glaring down defiantly although his voice shook. “I had nothing to do with the old man’s death. Ask Tori. He was there.”
“Wha …” Jame started to ask him, but memory caught her by the throat.
My father, nailed to the keep door with three arrows through his chest, cursing my brother and me as he died ….
“It wasn’t our fault,” she said out-loud. “D’you hear me, Burnt Man? Neither one of us was there!”
Wind frisked into the cavern. It swirled around the dark figure, teasing apart his robe, releasing streamers of smoke until with a flick it twitched away the garment altogether. For a moment, a black form stood there, exposed. His charred skin was laced with glowing cracks; his eyes and gaping mouth were pits into nothing. Then the wind blew again, harder, and he crumbled from the head down into a shower of cinders. The crowd cheered.
“They think he’s gone,” said Kroaky in an oddly husky voice, “but he always comes back. Like guilt. Like sorrow.”
The wind remained, now tumbling about the onlookers, snatching off this man’s hat, flinging up that woman’s skirt. Laughter followed its antics, all the louder with relief. A figure appeared whirling like a dervish in a storm of black feathers.
“Who …?” asked Jame.
“The Old Man,” said Kroaky, almost reverently, holding down his ginger hair with both hands. “The Tishooo. The East Wind.”
“In the Riverland, we call him the south wind.”
“Well, he would come at you from that direction. In fact, he moves about pretty much as he pleases, the tricky old devil. Some say that he governs the flow of time itself in the Wastes, don’t ask me how. Here we most often get him direct from Nekrien. He keeps away the Shuu and the Ahack from the south and west, from the Barrier across the Wastes and from Urakarn. We don’t honor those here.”
“What about the north wind?”
“The Anooo? That blows us the Kencyr Host and occasional weirding. Blessing or curse? You tell me. Without the east wind and the mountains, though, Kothifir, Gemma, and the other rim cities would be buried in sand like the other ancient ruins of the Wastes.”
The procession wound around the cavern until it reached its center. Here torches were set in holes drilled in the limestone floor and the avatars of the Four joined hands within the circle. They began to rotate slowly sun-wise. Their worshippers formed a withershin ring around them, then another going the opposite way, and so on and on, alternating, to the edges of the cave. Jame grew dizzy watching their gyrations. Everyone was chanting, but not the same thing:
“There was an old woman …”
“There was an old man …”
“There was a maid …”
“There was a young man ….”
The circle next to the gods slowed, swayed, and reversed itself. One by one, the rest corrected themselves until all were revolving the same way, those innermost going slowly, those outermost running, panting, to keep up. The world seemed to shift on its axis. Torches flared blue, casting shadows across an open space grown impossibly wide, split by fiery sigils.
They had opened Sacred Space.