The God of the Hive by Laurie R. King Read Free Book Online Page A

today’s eclipse of the sun—he would absorb the loosed psychic energies of his victims. However, he appeared to have kept this aspect of his teaching to himself: I had seen no evidence that he used any of his Inner Circle in his quest to become a god; only Gunderson.
    With Brothers in my thoughts and the Hebrew on my lips, my mindturned to the nature of gods. The Hebrew Bible does not say that the gods do not exist, merely that we are not to worship them. For a Christian, doubt is a shameful secret, a failure of faith, but the rabbis have long embraced doubt as an opportunity for vigorous argument. For the rabbis, the existence of God is no more of a question than the existence of air: Doubt is how we converse with Him.
    Small-g gods might be considered a sort of concentrated essence: Loki the impulsive, Shiva the destroyer, Wayland the craftsman. The local gods were why Brothers had come to Britain, a country littered with Norse and Roman deities. The Holmes brothers were a bit god-like: generous and well meaning towards lesser mankind, but capricious and sometimes frightening in their omniscience. What, I wondered sleepily, would Brothers have embodied, had he succeeded in becoming a god? For that matter, what god would carry the attributes of flying machines? Which deity would be represented by the rifle?
    As I sat in the deafening, cramped and frigid compartment, behind a dying pilot, holding a child for whom I could do nothing, incredibly, imperceptibly, I drifted into sleep.
    The grey scraps of cloud outside, tossed like leaves in a fitful breeze, shifted, becoming wind-tossed foliage. I was sitting not in a fragile device of metal and wood, but on a hillside, warm and secure in an ancient land. The foliage remained, a hedgerow bordering a field of summer wheat. The grain rippled with the breeze, the green wall danced, until in the midst of the leaves—or the scraps of cloud—I became aware of a Presence among the moving scraps of green or grey: a pair of eyes that were there and then gone, that met mine and were hidden again. Green, grey; there, gone; comfort, threat.
    I must have made a noise, because the child in my arms stirred, pushing away the heavy coat to rub her eyes and look around her.
    “What did you say?” she asked me.
    “I didn’t say anything, honey.”
    “Yes, you did,” she insisted.
    “I fell asleep, and was dreaming. It must have been something about that.”
    “I’m cold,” she complained.
    “It won’t be much longer,” I said. She gave me a look that declared her lack of reassurance at the statement. “Here, snuggle back under the coat,” I suggested.
    This must be what it felt like to be an Elizabethan noblewoman before a roaring fire, I thought: toasty warm in front, frigid in back.
    “What was your dream about?” Estelle asked.
    “Only a silly dream. A face peeping out from leaves.”
    “My Papa made a painting like that.”
    “Did he? Oh yes, I remember.” I’d seen it in a London gallery—heavens, only two weeks before? The Green Man , Damian had called it, a Surrealist rendering of the ancient pagan spirit of the British Isles, the surge of life in this green land. The figure was carved into church ceilings and pews, painted on the signs of public houses, leading processions. He was often shown as a face with branches bursting from his mouth and nostrils and twining about his head in the exuberance of life: a divine creature, speaking in leaves.
    Jack-in-the-Green, Will of the Wisp, Wild Woodsman: The figure represents not just life, but the cycle of birth and death and birth anew. His authority and mystery stand behind such diverse characters as Robin Hood and Puck. Damian’s painting began as a study in green, a canvas entirely covered with leaves so precise, they might have been the colour photograph of a hedge. Only after examining the wall of greenery for some time, searching for meaning in the shades and shadows, did the viewer become aware that two