Allister Nelson

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The God of Honey Echo


Mine the ore like you are shucking butter corn, sweet and gently, my precious Honey Echo Akwaemezi, father had said to my young star-carved form once, when our skin was midnight like the dim sky of our space colony, lit only by a green sickle moon that housed the company boss base.

Abba had shown me the nickel clusters when I was four, great globules of silvery mineral, in the asteroid miner’s belt we called home. His body was already bent then from work, as if always crunched in prayer.

When the nickel hit the palm of my psy-skin, in the back of my head like a pomegranate from the Southern Clusters, my blood god Oractel sang to me for the first time, unfurling liquor of light, like the cognac I had stolen at the company boss’ second wedding to his much younger, half-royal wife.

Oractel blazed, electrifying my tender, small body:


Silver of nickel? No, no gods-Daughter of mine
holds silver.

Gold. Amber. Grain. Honey.
You are Queen.
Burn, Honey Echo.
Burn for your sweet God,
Oractel.


Father had wept as Oractel rode me, slipping into my prepubescent skull like a coin. Oractel lifted a callused palm of mine, shot plasma, and melted the nickel ore we had mined into useless powder.

Mine is a vengeful god, and I covered my locs from that day on, so that no spirit – god or not – could horse me as chwal.

Still, I learned that day: I, Honey Echo

must please

my god.

When my first moon’s blood came, they put me to work in the mines. Every silver piece I touched through my psy-skin was tinted gold. Oractel was hungry, so hungry in that dim nickel colony – starved of my mercurial god’s sunlight, far from the planet of Amber.

I would steal ration sugar from the company boss’s daughter, the girlchild my sometimes- friend, sometimes-tyrant, to feed Oractel and the spirits. The mining overseers worshipped geometry, no living life to their cult, just physics, dark matter, and space lice. I thought my frenemy’s religion stupid, but the galaxy was diverse in belief, non-belief, and divine interplay, so I kept my singular City of Amber faith to myself, and worshipped Euclid and black holes as well, a dvoeverie of space.

When I was nine, I set up a secret altar under my sunbed for Oractel. The shining glow of the solar ether of my covers and mattress warmed my tiny god: glowing ember god Oractel. I prayed to him in my small ways, you know.

Each night, Abba spoke of lineage and ghosts:

“Your mama had the same demon. We tried the mechanic cleric. It seems Oractel sticks to blood. I am sorry, my Honey Echo. Do what we can.”

Abba used silver sprays to coat my nickel down to the atom, hide it from the boss.

Oractel always made my palms hurt, when Abba did that

and I, Honey Echo

bled gold from my womb those days.


The days piled atop each other; the visions grew worse.

To the present. I boarded a ship to the Planet of Amber, where Mama had been born and cherished as Chosen. But I only knew the fables of the rot and vice of that city, and the company boss’s gossip: women ruled there, he warned his wife – supposedly a terrible thing.“Pissant matriarchy, that Amber: a city of hungry gods and even hungrier harpies.”

The company boss said it would eat me alive, and his daughter, who now tortured me for my poverty (I a steadfast toy and plaything for those who did not mine. They employed at poverty rations and tenement squalor) told me to eat asteroid dirt.

Abba found my under-the-mattress altar of Oractel one day. It had taken over my whole sunbed interior, and when I told Abba I must go home, Oractel’s Call being too much, Abba wept.

“Why do the gods always take and take, but not give?”

Abba gave me a weeping smile, then spent half his retirement savings on a one-way ticket to Amber, and I never
saw him again.


A question, my god Oractel, from your dear Honey Echo. Can you carry me and the blood of my ancestors – the Akwaemezis – safely home?

I am in the cargo bay, with tins of meat and cheese. My whole skin, gold and black, mottled like the old storybooks I had of the Ancient Greek gods – Melinoe, light and darkness.

Oractel’s halo curls around me as I wait out these passage days, and He holds me in his arms when no one is watching, my god. A hole light in the bottom of my berth cupboard – more tomb – shows sailing stars below.

He is warm. We kiss. Mostly, talk.

I am nearing

home.


Sun-bright spendings drip like spice in the mines of holy ichor. In the Mines of Amber, sloe-eyed priestesses of Melia tend to the Bear Mother with songs of mead and gifts of brassy grain. The citizens brew barley and hops to make beer as bold as fresh nettle stings for temple visitors, singing praise of the Bear Mother. Those of us in the fields and caves mine honeystone for rituals crude and bright.

I had come to the Mines of Amber for promises of fortune. Mining in a half-bit psy-skin was all I knew. An asteroid miner’s daughter, I was called by strange visions of the God who attended dearly departed mama’s Bear Mother Melia:

Oractel’s tawny form burned as a brazier in my nights in the honeystone mining town, bed companion, molding the wet, green clay of my mind into psalms and echoes. When he slipped inside my sex with his golden sugarcane fingers, Oractel sang:


Honey Echo! Draw Me as a veil over your precious jewels of eyes.
Thus speaks your God, Oractel! The God of Honey Echo.


I wanted to be free of the ghosts of my mother’s spiritual lineage. They had come calling in the asteroid mining belt of the planet Pasiphae nonetheless. Now, Oractel was not satiated, taking me as lover like one of his godsdamned Consorts! I had left all I knew to please him, and still, a wanting god. No matter the ore I burned red-gold, no matter my prayers at his altar.

He was, hot and wanting, there.

Everywhere.

In diners, the moonbelts, and night visual cafes.

Gone, Abba, to an exetor mining belt, to rot as I had lived. Half-dead. Now, I thrummed with life. His life. He gave me teas and pysclium powder to whet the godseed. I was not ready for that yet.

“Damn it,” I said the next morning. “Time to get rid of an Amber God. Surely, Oractel is pleased I am in Amber, mining honeystone and tending bees. He will leave.”

I repented in the Temple of Lady Ironslice. I bathed in the gaseous waters of Nitrogen Father.

Still, Oractel called – I could not free my mind, body, or tender loving heart of the sweet, mercurial Trickster God of my dearly departed mama.

My whole body turned gold, over time. His fingerpirnts you know. There was little unamber left. A curse or a blessing? Who knew. The psy-skin covered all, and I only showed my flesh of honey to my deprogrammed mirror, I and Oractel’s secret.

Well, that and my bath.

And my god.


Oractel met me when the triple moons of Pasiphae were high, and I had toiled in the honeystone mines, incognito so I need not face Mama’s forbidden, burning legacy.

Oractel formed a solar flare in the Temple, expanding and contracting. He had tricked the minds of the Melia Priestesses to clear it of all but us. Somehow, His energy field smirked, lashing me inwards on tendrils of fire. My poor soul could not resist the call of my Ancestors, and my sweet amber god.

Oractel, the damned, beautiful Gold, immolated me, purring like a space engine:


Honey Echo, I call you! Your home is far from harbors of nickel and ore. The City of Amber – the
People of your Mother Wasp – will welcome you into the perfumed temples and sacred dances of
my mistress Melia’s verdant lineage as Honey Queen.

It has fallen to rot, this golden pearl of mine.
The City of Amber calls!


“But why, sweet God of my lineage, do you have need of a poor miner’s daughter? I have come from far, content to labor for you with the divine honeystone. Do not make me face the ghosts of my mother, I beg of you, my sweet Oractel! Haven’t I given enough?”


I need a true believer for poor Me, Oractel. Do not forget: your mother was the last Honey
Queen. She promised her first-born to me, to escape. Gods always come calling, my dove.


“Ora! She rejected all of that when she eloped with a space trader. Then, her heart broken, she was saved by my father. I thought the Gods were done with the Akwaemezis.”


I am the God of Yours, my darling Honey Echo.
You must be crowned.


And like that, Oractel’s atoms split, and I saw Him as a Bearman: midnight skin, dusted with buttery metal flakes, slanted brown eyes a shade lighter than my own, dark locs to his waist, bare but for his yellow skirt, with platinum torcs on his arms.

I had never seen Him unbound by mortal form. It was beautiful, but I did not tell him. Instead, I spat at his feet, cursed, gathered my towel around me, dressed, and left.

And so here I was, on the quest of some accursed God who would not let me go.

I must go to Amber’s capital.

Damned man.



When I arrived, Oractel told the Honey Queen Jocasta that Niobe Akwaemezi’s lost daughter had returned to claim her birthright. Old wily Jocasta welcomed me with a gold-tooth smile and eyes like green grass.

I trusted no one but had nothing to lose. I let my gold skin shine, my psy-skin discarded as I walked naked but for a bronze brassiere and silvery-powder harem pants, barefoot and defiant, in the streets.

“I am Queen, City of Amber, your Queen Honey Echo!” I called. “Take my flesh for the hives, my will for the mines, and my magick for the grain. I will run from Mama’s birthright no longer!”

All over the city, my face. News reels, intergalactic TV. Oractel had trained me since birth in dreams, but I felt empty, wondering after Abba.



I was ushered in as Combflake Daughter of Jocasta Nezeka. To me went the harsh trainings of Melia – purifying my body with sweet oil and honey, tireless penances and fasting, ecstatic visions from the incenses of saffron and dragon’s blood of the Bear Mother and Her Cubs.

“It has been three years since I gained a daughter of my own, sweet Honey Echo,” Jocasta smiled, old in her age and hearty, as jolly as an old mine-yard dog.

Jocasta was of good humor and felt like the grandmother I never had. She was the only one I trusted here, an amber pit of beauties and vipers.

“I love you as my own granddaughter – I adopted your mother, you know. She ran away with that space trader, who broke her heart, then found her way into your father’s arms. I never could figure how she shook that old Oractel. Your father is a good man, Ironslice stock, but I fear he did not prepare you for the ways of Bear Mother Melia and the spiritual lineage you hail from…”

“Or how to properly deal with the Trickster God of our Pantheon,” I said, handing Jocasta a fresh date. “Oh, the harvest went so well, grandmama. But the consorts of Oractel were bitches as usual. They want Him all to themselves.”

Jocasta chewed it with her golden teeth. “Yes, sweet and figgy. More fig than date. I’ll have to program the crossbreeding of the date saplings’ genetic codes with some more lime variants. And men are greedy, even gods, but women always wonder.”

I smiled, placing a black curl back from my head. I kept my hair short and tightly coiled now, growing like beautiful ebon dandelions to the nape of my neck. No use covering it when I was chosen of the gods, here in the City of Amber, and he spent every night by my side, after carousing with drunks and his damned consorts, raining blessings on the poor and cursing the rich each day.

“Oractel would like that – tricking a lime into the shape of a date,” I mused.

“Yes, well, Oractel can fuck Himself. He tricks us all, dear Honey Echo, and disrupts the pristine balance of Melia and Amber with his Tricks.” Jocasta laughed. “Stick up the ass, expecting you to be crowned in His lineage. What a dangerous notion, crowning the next Honey Queen in a God’s image, not the Bear Mother’s!”

I clinked my jasmine teacup down, unsettled. “True, Oractel is a bastard. He comes to me in visions when I sleep in his arm as the great Gold, grandmama Jocasta, begging me leave Him offerings. Says He is starving, though He is well-fed, surely, by the Bear Mother and his Consorts! Each morning, here in our Hall, he makes me a feast, but does not Eat.”

Jocasta scoffed. “The City of Amber leaves offerings for no men, Gods or not. Lovers are all they get. We are a matriarchy. Perhaps Oractel should go bother one of my many husbands instead of plaguing the next Honey Queen.”

But that year, we prophesied that Bear Mother Melia grew weak without balance. Why? Why, oh why, was she dying?

The crops all perished, avalanches killed at the mines, our tech malfunctioned and there were uprisings across the System, placing delays on the supply chains.

And sweet, sweet Jocasta went with the fallen yellow roses, leaving the City of Amber queenless.

So I went to my God, my hot-blooded Oractel, and I left him an offering of honey-wine mead at his feet, proud and defiant, demanding of my God:

“Oractel, what must I do?”

He drank it down greedily, manifesting from the silver winds, as I sunk deep into trance, and Oractel carried my undulating body into His Court. An amber Hive of the Golden.


Be crowned in My Lineage, sweet Honey Echo.
I must guide you now.


And so, I did what no Honey Queen had done before: I built a temple to a God – Oractel – and crowned myself in His jewels. Only before had we ever given him consorts to abate. Now, at the City of Amber center, a Temple of Oractel, only a headspan shorter than Melia’s.



The harvest returned, the replacement parts arrived, we found new veins of ore, and our
city flourished.

All because the God of Honey Echo called her home to the City of Amber.

And the Bear Mother got married, that year. She settled into my flesh, a permanent possession, but my Will was strong. We fought for control of my mind for five moon turns, but I supplanted Her, in the end.

And now, my spit is honey, my sweat are amber drops, my fur gold, and Oractel and I are joined in a symphony of honey and amber, three bear god cubs

Between us.



We were threshing grain for the annual offerings, dying them in honey and gold, then years later. It was a happy life.

His muscles were thick, beautiful. I admired his locs and smile.

“They say you were the first Trickster ever, Oractel. Long ago on Terra. I read it in Jocasta’s diary.”

Oractel smiled, then kissed me, his honeybee wings curled around my fur.


“Once, my Honey Echo, I came to a girl lost in the savannah, starving. I was a small bee, mated and left to die after I spent my seed on my queen. That girl, Aka, poured all her belief into me, the child so strong in her faith, and I was born – an Oractel for my Aka, now my Honey Echo. Savior, imaginary friend, or God of your blood, I am only your Golden Oractel, my Melia- anointed Queen. Bride of my Flame, Honey Echo.”

We went to the top of the Temple, threshed the grain from the chaff, and rained it in molten gold fire down upon the Offering brazier.

Once, Honey Echo had a god

Once, Honey Echo fell

in love.

And it was strange, and true, and her God

was Good.

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Cover image by Alexander Grey, Unsplash, 2020