PodCastle 887: “The Cuckoo of Vrežna Mountain
* Author : Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko * Narrator : Yaroslav Barsukov * Host : Kaitlyn Zivanovich * Audio Producer : Eric Valdes * Discuss on Forums Previously published by Beneath Ceaseless Skies Rated PG-13 The Cuckoo of Vrežna Mountain by Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko I realised I was in love with Ivor the day he went up the mountain to speak with the goddess. We were at that age when the affectionate ease of childhood tips over into something different, when every touch could be the casual brush of friendship or something more and I would never know in advance which was which. There were many times, in those days, when Ivor would take my hands in his, larger and warmer and smooth with the orange-blossom oil he rubbed into them; and I would jerk away with some hasty apology and adjust my trousers while he was not looking. To this day, I find the smell of oranges arousing at the most inopportune times, of which, in a town known for its citrus trees, there are uncomfortably many. Which is to say that it was not entirely unexpected, this matter of my being in love with him, except insofar as I had never considered the option until it was upon me; and if we had been boys further up the coast, away from the Oracle and her mountain, perhaps this would have been a cause for celebration: the sort of slow exploration of love and youth that ends, mutually, in a friendship deeper than it was before. But Ivor was a scion of the city Vrežna, and his mother Silva was a devout woman. Her ways were the old ways, and that was why I awoke early one morning to climb a mountain with Ivor and wait out the dew, wait out the dawn, wait out the moment he emerged from the goddess’s temple a betrothed man. The temple stood facing the sea, the bulk of the mountain shielding it from the town below. It was a simple structure, columned and open to the elements with a tall pointed roof. Inside, the floor was given over to a shallow pool of water that was a hand deep at most. There was no altar. The Oracle did not accept gifts. Ivor splashed through the water like a man born to the task. Silva and I remained outside, but the demarcation was immaterial. The Oracle’s temple was curiously small. It was easy to see everything that went on inside. Vrežna’s people claim that only those born within sight of her mountain could see the Oracle’s physical form. I do not know if this is true. I do know that until that day, until I looked at the thing slumped at Ivor’s feet, I had never seen anything in the temple. It was a woman, slumped against the shallow steps rimming the pool. Her skin was the same light brown as Ivor’s but mottled with pale splotches, like someone had spilled ink that sapped colour rather than granted it. Her open eyes were an even grey. She looked as though dead, I thought, until her lips opened around an indrawn breath. “How strange,” Silva said to me, and it took me a moment to realise that she was not looking inside the temple, not speaking of the woman lying there, “to stand with one of the Godless on the Oracle’s mountain. Or perhaps three dead gods is not enough for you? Would you strike down our Vrežna, given the chance?” She said it as if she had not herself stamped the permission form that allowed a non-Vrežni access to the mountain. “Two dead gods,” I murmured. “The third survives.”’ “Even worse! Yours are not the only people to suffer the death o...