She looked at him with an abstracted expression. “Whose turn is it to fix the door?… Oh, never mind, I’ll do it. I don’t have to be there for a bit.”
“Sorry,” Mriga said. “When she’s angry, I get angry, too…. I have trouble, still, figuring out where she leaves off and I begin. She’s out there wanting to throw thunderbolts at things.”
“This is unusual?” Harran said, picking up a much-worn shirt and shaking it hard. Rock dust snapped out of the folds.
“It should be,” Mriga said rather sadly. She sat down on one of their pieces of furniture, a large bed with multiple sword hacks in it. “I remember the way things were for her when she was a goddess for real. A thought was all it took to make the best things to wear, anything she wanted to eat, a god’s house to live in. She didn’t have to be angry then. But now…” She looked rather wistfully to one side, where a huge old mural clung faded and mouldering to the wall. It was a scene of Us and Shipri creating the first harvest from nothing.
Everywhere there was a wealth of grain and flowers and fruit, and dancing nymphs and gauzy drapery and ewers of outpoured wine. The wood on which the mural was painted was warped, and Shipri had wormholes in her, in embarrassing places.
Harran sat down beside her for a moment. “Do you regret it?”
Mriga looked at him out of big hazel eyes. “Me myself? Or she and I?”
“Both.”
Mriga put out a hand to touch Harran’s cheek. “You? Never. I would become a goddess a hundred times over and give it up every time, to be where I am now.