Sweet Romance17 min read
I Looked for Him Ten Years — Then Met the Highest God Who Wore His Face
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I have been looking for my ordinary husband for ten years, and then I found the Highest God, and he looked like the man I loved.
"He cannot see the hurts you've gathered," a child of the mountain hissed as she pulled my arm so hard it cut. "Who let you into the High Court?"
"I came for an answer," I said. "I came to ask where Desmond is."
The god stood like a peak of white jade, sunlight tangled in the clouds behind him. He had the same face Desmond had — the same mouth shaped to smile soft and private, the same nose that bent just a bit when he read too long, but the god's features were sharpened, untouched by the small kindnesses life gives a man. He looked down at me the way a king might look at moss on a stone.
He reached down and brushed the little phoenix perched on his shoulder. The bird blinked, proud and fierce despite being so small. When the god spoke, his voice was old and unconcerned.
"I have just woken from a long sleep," he said. "If you mean the mortal by that name — of course I remember."
"Do you?" I heard my voice, small. "Do you really?"
He touched the phoenix's feather and smiled in a way that did not reach his eyes. "Of course. We had a life in the West, a vow under pear blossoms. I remember everything."
The mountain girls behind me whispered like dry leaves. One of them laughed. "You really think you fooled any of us?"
"She resembles me," said a woman stepping from a pool, cool and pale as a moonflower. She wore blue and carried a folded lotus in the crook of her elbow. When she looked at me I felt the warmth leak out of my skin. "I am Alejandra. I knew of this likeness from the Mirror of Returns. He lost his memory when he came back. He took the face he remembered and mistook it for the man he loved."
"He called himself Canaan," the god said. He looked at me. He looked entirely like Desmond until he didn't — when he moved he was Canaan, freshly raised from an old throne.
The mountain maidens snickered. "Ten years: he went to sleep, and you have been digging graves in his name," one said.
I tasted bitterness, then a little laugh without joy. "All ten years? He is dead then? Tell me. Tell me he is truly dead."
"He's not down here," Alejandra said, laconic. "He is elsewhere. You came to beg luck in the House of Highest Light. You should go back to dust and not bother the gods."
They pushed me. My foot slid. My hands were all sores and scabs from climbing across a world that had no kindness for a stubborn girl who could not let go. I pressed my palms to my mouth. "Desmond," I whispered.
Canaan's face did not move. "My name is Canaan," he said.
I thought, for the fraction of a breath, that he was Desmond pretending to be a god. I thought he was the other. I thought that everywhere the world can hurt someone a hundred small ways, he had found his refuge in forgetting.
Alejandra bent and let water drip from the lotus she held. One drop landed on my foot; the rotten flesh knotted and pulled back like a bloom. A coolness spread through my feet, and the pain I had carried for ten years — all the frost of the Green River, all the nights of sleeping in ditches — the pain loosened like a knot.
"Your ten years are finished," Alejandra said. "The Highest Court owes you nothing more. Leave."
I shouldn't have laughed, but I did, hollow and tight. "So that's what it was. I chased a dream."
"Your house fell to thunder," the earth god joked from nowhere. A rough voice. "Your field is green."
"He's dead," I told the god. I said it because I had to have the name fall out of me and be done with it. "He died under the old pear tree in the west fields. He didn't become a triumphant immortal. He died and lay there like a man who had worked until he had nothing left."
Canaan watched me. Something in his eyes — a shadow, not pity — looked at me wrong.
"I am Canaan," he repeated, almost bored.
I turned away and walked down from the cloud palaces like someone sliding back into their old skin. The valley below had turned my house into new earth; they said heaven's lightning had razed the roof. The field where we promised to watch seventy winters was a green stretch of shoots now. I crouched on the furrow and cried the way someone cries when they have given everything to a memory and learned it was not enough.
Frederick — the rustic guardian of a patch of field who could gossip as loudly as any city boy — peered at me with his wide, earthy eyes.
"Isn't that Ivory?" he asked, surprised. "You found him, then?"
"I did," I answered, voice broken. "He is gone. I couldn't bring him back."
"Then come home," Frederick said. "The earth's soft and will take a head full of sorrow like it nursed it in. Come rest."
I touched the green shoots and let my tears fall. It was the first time in a long time the world felt like it might keep something for me.
*
Back on the mountain, life is a long set of small duties and small jokes. I had been raised there; I had left to follow a pale-faced young scholar who had once smiled at me and said, "I am Desmond." He had been my anchor. I had made him a place in the world with a carved rabbit and an indifferent old house. I had given him a funeral shrine and set my life to one finish line: find whichever life-spring had his name again.
They dressed me, after a fashion, in the old silk and pinned me up the way the matchmaker insisted. Beverly Bullock, the old matchmaker who had braided every girl in the valley at some point, fussed and said, "You passed your hundredth mourning day. You should think of a new life."
"The mountain chose for me a tea stall by the path," Corinna Goto said, squeezing my hand. "Sell some cool tea and greet travelers. Don't be foolish with grief."
"That old house of yours ought to be flowered," Garrison Barrett said from where he lounged by a tree. He was handsome in a way that smelled of peaches and too much confidence. He grinned. "You could marry an adventurer. I'm only teasing, Ivory. I know who has your heart."
"Don't pretend you know anything," I said.
Garrison shrugged like he had seen everything and wanted it anyway. "I'm not the only one who hears gossip. I hear the Highest God has been visiting the West Slope."
"He is staying at your little place a while," Corinna said.
"He's killing monsters," Garrison said, eyes bright. "He's famous for it. They say his sword is the first among fourteen shores."
"I came back to my old life," I said. "I don't want fame."
A creature rose from the sea like frozen stormwater given a spine. A long neck uncoiled; an ugly maw threatened the gulls. I watched as Canaan — white as a willow blossom and terrible as a blade — stepped to the cliff, drew down a sword out of wind and light, and with a single bright movement severed the monster. The sea replied and the wind quieted. The gods around us murmured low as waves.
Then Canaan's gaze flicked to me. He took a step in my direction. Corinna laughed with other girls into her fan. Garrison made an exaggerated groan.
"I have heard many silly women's tales," Canaan said, and the air around him did not thaw. "Why do you tie yourself to pain?"
"What does it matter to you?" I said.
He reached, not to me but toward the little cloth knot pinned to my hair. For a breath he looked as if he did not know why my fingers were so callused, why my hands were so clever. He actually asked, "Why do you keep it?"
"Because he carved the rabbit," I said. "Because he said he'd always find me."
Canaan's brow tugged. "Mortal vows are frail. They fray with time."
I threw sand at him in a childish fit. "Leave me alone."
He was patient, even when I grabbed his collar out of anger. The wind took us both; it pressed us to the cliff and we fell. The void laughed. I landed against him, and his chest was warm where my cheek hit. For one blinding second the world narrowed to the smell of him — sweat and cedar — and I thought I had found everything again.
We did not fall. We clung to the lip and the world spun around us. I tasted salt wind and something like terror but hidden under it was the feeling that membranes had been pricked between two lives.
"Are you mad?" he asked when we scrambled to stand.
"Perhaps," I answered. "But it's my madness."
He watched me a long time. "You have scars," he said softly. "They are not all from the road."
They were from the years I had followed a name. They were from a love that had taught me stubbornness like a second skin.
*
I found him again in a small house that had been rebuilt. The sea-scarred courtyard had a pear tree budding. The sickly scholar was white and thin and small like a book's corner, and when he opened the window the night smelled of pears.
"I am Desmond," he said.
The world tilted. I slid over the sill and wrapped myself around him like a bird who had found a hollow. He laughed softly and kissed the top of my head.
"I thought you were a trick," he said.
"Tricks are sometimes true," I told him. "You are absolutely, solidly real."
He did not flinch at my calling him by that name. He did not ask for proofs. He asked simply, "Do you want tea?"
I thought: here are his hands, quiet and clever; here is the breath that had once warmed my collar on a cold morning. Here was the place where I had left my heart.
We settled into a small life that felt like patchwork and gentle work. I kept his books in order and hid little sweets by the porch. I replaced lazy servants with those who would not speak ill of him. When some of them did slander him, saying he had the bad luck of an ill star, I was a fierce thing.
"You lie," I told a woman who whispered he was a killer. "You did not know him."
"They accuse me," Desmond said, finger to book. He looked resigned. "They are frightened of story. Let them."
"Let them?" I was angry with a courage that surprised me. "No."
"Who will cook then?" he asked quietly.
"Me," I said. "I'll do everything."
We had nights of small wonders. He touched a page and read, not for his studies but for pleasure; he would half-close his eyes and say, "Ivory" as if the name tasted like honey. Once, in the damp light after rain, I invited the fireflies to dance by cupping my hand and blowing, and the yard filled with soft gold.
"Do you see?" I asked, breathless.
"I see you," he said, and put his hand to the back of my head as if to keep a dream from washing away.
When he kissed me that night, it was like the river had paused to let a true thing pass. He was gentle and a little awkward, as if he was practicing how to love someone fully without instruction. His lips were warm and trusting and I felt the long years of thirst ease.
"Are you happy?" he asked later, holding both my hands in the lamplight.
"Yes," I said. "I thought I had nothing but a vow in a wash of memory. But I have you again."
"Then stay," he said.
So I did. For a while the world left us alone. We read, we mended the garden, and sometimes I would sit and count the small miracles of living under the pear tree.
Then Canaan returned.
He came like a gale, like a man walking through what he had shed. He was weaker now; his wounds had been tall and the light in his step dimmed. People said he had damaged himself in a dream to release something monstrous. He seemed smaller than before, as if the bright thread around the Highest Court had been frayed.
He claimed a small key from his palm and walked up the path to where I was standing. He caught my hand before I could cross the threshold.
"This is his key," Canaan said. He looked at me with a tiredness that startled me. "I kept it."
My fingers trembled. The key matched the rabbit carvings Desmond had made for me. I had thought it lost for good and felt my throat tighten.
"Thank you," I said.
He coughed. He looked as if something inside him had been rent, like a seam torn. Then he said, "You lived in his small house."
"Yes."
"Desmond kept things ordinary," Canaan said. "Why am I strange to you?"
"You are not the same reason," I said, quietly. "You are not his patient hands. You do not read by the same light."
He smiled and it looked like a man who had been trying to understand a locket for years. "I was born long before this world. I forgot what it was to carry time like you do."
I said nothing.
Alejandra found us there. She did not come haughtily this time. She had watched the way the Highest One looked at me and she had seen one small tear fall over a memory. She said, "I watched him cry after you."
"Did you?" I asked.
"He learned sorrow late," she said. "Sorrow is a language he had to translate."
"You mocked me," I said. "You said I stole something."
Alejandra's face softened. "I thought the world was orderly. I have seen many things. I was wrong. He is not a lesson. He is himself."
Her voice had no triumph now. It had the weight of confession.
Canaan sat and watched Desmond from the shade of the pear tree. He was still a god with thunder in his hands, but now he kept to the shadow and touched nothing. For a while he said nothing at all.
"I cut myself to let the dream go," Canaan told me one night. "It hurt more than you can know. I thought I would lose the part that made me kind. I tried to give up everything I knew to free it."
"Why?" I asked.
He looked at Desmond, who was asleep with a book sliding from his hand. "Because the dream had Desmond's face, and I wanted to know if I could love the part that wore it without stealing his life."
I put my hand on my husband's shoulder. He stirred and opened one eye, then smiled at me in a way that made the world breathe out.
"I am Canaan," the god said softly, "and I have learned something in a way gods are not meant to. I have learned how small and sharp human promises can be."
*
Up above, word ran like flame. The attendants who had laughed at me, the goddess who had coldly explained my grief as some vanity — they had a day of reckoning.
It did not happen quietly.
They called a court in the central hall of the Highest Place, under a sky that always held one sun more than the world below. All the courts had gathered. A ring of gods like white pillars surrounded a dais, and on that dais stood Alejandra, crisp in her blue, cheeks flushed with a color that was no longer simply pride.
"They mocked a mortal for a vow," one of the lesser ministers said, voice like thin wind through reeds. "They said she took what was not hers, called kindness theft."
A great murmur ran across the crowd; even peacocks tucked their tails in at the shame of it.
"There was cruelty in their jest," Canaan said, and he came forward with a slow step. When he spoke, his voice was both the cliff and a small child who had been struck. "They minimized a life to a story to make themselves comfortable."
Alejandra's mouth opened. "We were keeping the order—"
"Order," Canaan snapped, and for the first time his anger was thunder. The phoenix Lennon fluttered up and let out a single, clean cry. "Order does not forgive cruelty."
Then he did something the hall would never forget.
He touched the embroidered hem of Alejandra's robe. Alejandra's robe had been threaded with gold and air — it let one float above a canyon and not feel the pull. Canaan's fingers put no mark on it, and yet the robe dulled as if someone had drawn a gray wash across a painting. The crowd gasped: color left Alejandra's sleeves; the silk took on the hue of plain plaster.
"Why?" Alejandra asked, half-indignant, half-panicked.
"I will not have praise for pain," Canaan said. "You are to see what your words did."
The attendants who had mocked me — three of them — felt their voices fell under a hush like a lid. They tried to step back. One reached for the hem of her gown, already trembling.
"You will stand in the market at the foot of the mountain," Canaan said. "You will speak the truth you said as if it were a joke. You will name these things you thought were game." He glanced at them and the gods around him caught the look; it held a quiet hunger for account.
The first attendant opened her mouth, and the mountains itself seemed to hold its breath. "I only..." she began. Then Canaan touched the pendant at her throat. The pendant that had been carved to make jokes sharper and laughter quicker. It turned cold in her skin. The laughter fell away in her throat; shame rose like a tide.
The crowd moved with the perversity of a wave. Some gods—older, who had seen millennia ripple like small storms—smiled in a way that had the relief of a tide changing course. Younger ones looked with wide eyes as if watching something that could not be undone.
"They will be required to undo harm," Canaan said. "They will go to the fields where a name was mourned and plant blossoms for every year of shade they helped cast. Their voices shall be used to tell the truth, and they shall open the doors they closed with words."
"That is hardly a punishment," Alejandra said, maddened by the loss of her gilding. "You cannot order souls to plant things."
"Actually, I can," Canaan replied. He reached then for something more cutting. With his palm he scooped a little wind and set it in motion. The sky over the market clouded and the first attendant's hair slipped from its braid and went white at the roots. When she touched it she could feel the warmth of every small woman she had once mocked — every face she had smirked at now held in her memory like a small stone. The weight of them was heavy in her hands. She began crying, openly and exactly.
The crowd's reaction changed shape. The laughter that had been hucksters' coins turned to hand-to-hand comfort. They did not clap, but their eyes rippled with a new seriousness. Garrison Barrett, who had once teased at the edge of the crowd, looked ashamed enough that he turned his head.
They did not take her far. They kept her where the mountain air could touch her, in the square where the peasants and the godlings bought bread. The gods' decrees were not pleasant; the parable was public not because it glorified pain but to turn the sting outward then mend it. The attendants had to say aloud, in a voice the whole place could hear, the names they had used to belittle me. "She is stubborn," one said; "she is foolish," said another. They said it and the wind turned the words into the shape of the people they had shamed. For an hour every had to walk through an image of the life of each person they had mocked.
The crowd changed. Where a god had been cold and isolated a moment before, now hands pressed for a story. Eyes, once bored, brightened with the need to know what had been hidden. Some cried. Some left their jewels on the altar as if to say, "I was wrong."
Alejandra was made to sit upon a bench in the sun where mortals mingle. Her lotus was gone; her audience was the peasant who had once been the butt of her jokes and now had the right to speak. He told his story in a voice like the land; he told of loss and a daughter's uneaten pear and nights of hunger. Alejandra had to listen as if the world was a book she had never read. For three days she could not rise without remembering. The court sent her back to the place where a name had been lamented: where Ivory had been tracked by rumor and cruelty. She had to kneel and plant with her own hands, and each seed she placed in the ground was a truth she had refused to see.
People watched. Theophants carried their tablets and the younger gods whispered among themselves. Some clapped, some took notes, some took no pleasure in the spectacle but learned something that felt like a brittle and useful truth.
The three attendants who had laughed were brought to the house with the pear tree and were made to work the fields for a whole season. They sowed the seeds of herbs and small bright flowers. Each evening they had to stand by the door and read aloud the vows of those they had laughed at. Sometimes the village children came and mocked them; more times they came and brought a sweatbread and asked a simple question. The attendants answered. They became part of the daily life they had once thought beneath them. The process changed them not by shame alone but by the slow honesty of labor.
When the season ended the people in the valley reported a change. The women who once sneered now bowed to those they had scorned. Alejandra came back lighter in the face, her robe no longer finished with perfect gold but with careful stitching and new humility. She came to me and said, "I was blind, and now I am not wholly. Forgive me."
I looked at her. "I remember the way your eyes were," I said. "It was not kindness."
"I know," she said. "I will not pretend otherwise. This is the beginning."
The public did not take pleasure in one person's fall. They wanted something they could keep: accountability. Canaan's punishment was not spectacle for the sport of gods; it changed the balance of the valley. People came and pressed their little hands into the soil where the attendants had knelt and took seeds. They kept a ritual on that day and they told the story of a stubborn woman who followed a man and of a god who learned to give way.
They learned that small cruelties accumulate like blackwater, and a true discharge requires effort.
For days after, townsfolk murmured about the spectacle. Some said the punishment was too gentle; others said it was perfect. The attendants' faces carried a nuance of newly thought softness. Alejandra's voice in the market was not sharp anymore but a little wry, and whenever she saw me she bowed in a way that was both apology and acknowledgment.
"I will watch you," she said quietly one afternoon. "Not to own you, but to learn."
"Then watch kindly," I said.
She laughed softly. "Yes."
*
That public reckoning sealed things in a way the heavens had not expected. It did not undo the long years I had carried; it did not bring everyone to understand me overnight. It meant at least that the highest of the high — the one who had scoffed at the ache — now had to see that ache named openly. It mattered.
Canaan did not return to the cloud bastions for a long while after. He lingered in our courtyard like a shadow of itself, between Desmond and me, learning to be less than a god for a time. He had cut himself in a dream to destroy a nightmare that was wearing human faces; the wound had not healed cleanly. He coughed sometimes and a line of blood would mark his lip. He would smile and say little things that sounded like an old man trying to learn the taste of fruit.
One night I stood between him and Desmond and I looked at both of the faces that had once been only one in my mind. "Who are you?" I asked Canaan, softly.
He looked at me. His eyes were as fathomless as storms. "I am Canaan," he said. "I was called that before your world existed. Yet —"
He stopped. The courtyard was a hush of pears and crickets. He smiled oddly. "When I reached to save what was mine, I found Desmond. I found the way he sighed at small things and the way he held a book like a promise. For a heartbeat I believed I could be him, and in that believing I learned something true."
"You told me you remembered," I said. "You told me you remembered our vows."
"I remember sometimes like one remembers a line of a poem," Canaan said. "It is possible for me to say both names."
I leaned my forehead against the doorjamb and felt the grain like a warm word. The house smelled like wood and a small thing called living. Desmond reached for my hand. He was simple in his steadiness. Canaan reached too but did not press where Desmond's hand held mine.
"I cannot be put back on a shelf that was not my shape," Canaan said. "I can learn to stand beside you."
Desmond looked from me to Canaan and then smiled with that quiet sweetness that makes things right in small ways. "Then stand," he said. "But stand without stealing."
Canaan lowered his head and placed his palm lightly on his chest as if to steady the roaring of his own self. "I will," he said.
We learned to let three names occupy the same small sky. The priestess Beverly was in the courtyard and she said, "Life likes complicated things. People who are kind to each other are complicated too."
"Who is punished when the heart is a tangle?" Corinna asked, tossing a handful of seeds.
"Perhaps we all are," Garrison muttered, but he smiled like someone who had been chastened.
The pear tree grew and the rabbit carved on the porch became a small thing to touch when nights were difficult. The phoenix Lennon would sometimes settle on the eave and preen in the sun; it had been given a new leather wrap, and it sang small clear calls as if approving. Frederick came with pies and small jokes that did the work of repair.
I planted a new garden. I planted not just flowers but a small set of seeds for reconciliation. When the first tender green popped through the soil I whispered, "For every year I was mocked, let there be a bloom."
We changed slowly. When Alejandra bowed to me in the market it was not theatrical; it was a person who had learned the cost of an unkind word.
"I will tell truths," she said. "I promise only that I will try."
I did not put away my mourning completely. It would have been foolish. But the heavy weight that had stuck to my ribs for a decade loosened into a steadyness like a hearthfire rather than a cliff.
The day Canaan left the courtyard it rained a soft warm rain. Desmond went to the gate with me, and the two men bowed together like two trees leaning in the same wind.
"Live," Canaan said to Desmond. "Live your small life well."
Desmond squeezed my hand and laughed. "I will. I like small things anyway."
Canaan turned to me then and said, softly, "Ivory, when I stood in the Hall and said I remembered, it was true. I remembered the shape of a life, and I wanted to try on its kindness. I could not keep what was not mine."
I touched his hand. It was cool and steady. "Then be what you can be," I said. "Be. Be something kind."
He bowed to both of us. "I am Canaan," he said again, then he added, "and sometimes I was Desmond in the way I wanted to be a man who loved easily."
The pear tree shook a single blossom down onto my shoulder like a small bell.
"Come home," I said, to my husband, my man who had been my anchor all along.
He laughed. "Come," he said.
We stepped into the house. I put the key into the lock, turned it, and the door opened with a sound like an old story settling back on a shelf.
When the door closed I pressed my back to the wood and thought of everything I'd done to find him. Ten years of searching, ten years of rafts and false faces and strange beauties. Ten years of scars.
I said to the house, to the pear tree, to everything, "Desmond, you are real."
And in the quiet, a voice that had been both thunder and patient tide said, "I'm glad you found him."
It was not a promise about forever. It was only the small bright fact that two people were where they wanted to be on the same night, and that was enough to mend a lot.
The End
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