The Raven Tower

by Ann Leckie

Stories can be risky for someone like me. What I say must be true, or it will be made true, and if it cannot be made true—if I don’t have the power, or if what I have said is an impossibility—then I will pay the price.

I think it likely that I existed a long while before these earliest memories. But I cannot say for certain.

I had not wanted to be buried in ice, and so I had not been. Thinking back, I had not wanted to be buried in the seafloor, covered over with layer after layer of drifting sediment, and so I had not been. I had willed, and I had acted, so very subtly that I myself had not realized I was doing it.

You may find the idea of a god without language impossible or ridiculous. After all, if there is anything people know about gods, it’s that they exercise their power through speech.

But with sufficient power, with carefully chosen words, a god can do anything it is possible to do. How can a god be a god with no language?

And if language is a thing humans had to teach to gods—my experience suggests this was the case—how did those other gods I saw so long ago do anything?

gods are, as a rule, more easily able to help those who have already made their own efforts.

“Yes, ma’am,” you replied, with the air of someone who had met her sort before and knew better than to argue or contradict her.

In addition to teaching me their language, once the priest decided she had my attention, and that I more or less understood her, the people began to make regular offerings to me—

Yes, they trained me as though I were a dog, with attention and treats and constant praise. But I trained them as well. They quickly learned that, while I would take blood or milk or even water, what I preferred was fish from the nearby river, or shells from the now-distant sea.

The Myriad was surprised at my surprise. It hadn’t occurred to her that when she reported on the far-flung peoples she visited and mentioned words she’d learned, I would take those words only in the context of the language we were speaking to each other, and not intuit the existence of the languages from which those words had come.

What is it that makes gods gods? What am I? I beg your forgiveness—I have long been in the habit of musing to myself in the chilly silence of my northern hillside. It is still easy for me to be distracted by such thoughts. I will resume explaining my history.

Still, it was that agreement over driftwood, and that coalition, that drew me into Ard Vusktia’s war against the Raven of Iraden.

So simple, for a god! Speak what one wishes to be true and your power will make it so!

I had finally found another being in some way like myself and was no longer so alone? Or was it perhaps that their speaking to me—taking so much time to teach me to understand and speak in my own turn—made them so unusual in my experience?

“It would be far more convenient for the rest of us—not to mention for the people building your transport and digging you out of the ground—if you took my advice.” “No doubt,” I agreed, and did not argue further. But neither did I change my plans. The Myriad was a good friend, and a wise one. But I can be very stubborn.

“I’ve been thinking,” I said to Oissen, when he returned the next afternoon. “Yes, the Myriad had warned me you might do that.”

Even with the payments of the Leases, even with my unwilling assistance, still year by year he was forced to call on me more and more. And all that time, I watched, and waited, and thought.

The ancient gods are, I have been told, difficult to kill.