The Story So Far


The world is Paffir Eket.
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CHAPTER 13


"Huey."

Paula looked at Fuego, she looked at Clark, she looked past the open tent flaps where droplets were gleaming on the tips of uko leaves. Summer, she thought. When you look at a tree and the leaves don't surprise you, it's summer. In fall, when the leaves go, the trees are strange again until winter; then comes spring and the stranger, newer leaves. It was summer here, though the Lir still ran high and cold with floodwater from the north.

"Huey." They were straining, although it could do no good. Either he was there or he wasn't. Fuego clutched his probe and frowned. Relax, Paula thought. It's neurocode. Code is wonderful. You touched the probe, the sender entered and there came a message only you could discern from static; you and no one else, because this message knew you. Like angels, it spoke only to the worthy, and when it spoke it came clear beyond language, beyond senses, direct to the brain.

"Huey." Her calm was false. They had tried every day for weeks to raise Huey.

"Not in. Stand by." That was their daily answer. They looked at the ground. Clark tossed his probe aside. Paula gave hers a little yank and watched it float into place on the set. Fuego released his very slowly, sighed and went out into the rain to look for Akiva.

She raised the supply cart's burlap covering and put the communication equipment back in its corner beside the headset she had taken from Tiyar, when he decided to learn low Paffir and took drugs that repressed the language centers in his brain to force him to learn as a child would. The drugs also kept him from sleeping and made him irritable.

"I'll give back the headset when you learn to ask for it," she had told him, which was a little spiteful, since he couldn't understand her and when he learned to ask in low Paffir she wouldn't be able to understand him. He'd thrown mud at her and she felt a mild shock on contact as it soaked through her tunic. The clothes they wore now, taken from the dead Outlanders, were neither waterproof nor insulated.

She looked into the temperature-controlled drawer where Clark was forcing some potato plants. They were warm by night and cool in daytime, a happy little world like the botanic garden on Reshebora.

"Hey, Clark, how do you remat a Resheborian?"

"For two casheeks, we'll forget he's waiting. You told me that one this afternoon."

"Yesterday afternoon." It was true, both that she had run out of rematerializing-transport jokes, and they had been up all night. Just to hold one's own took so long here. By the time water was drawn and things cooked, washed or tended, this person spoken to about selling salt and a deal made with that one to trade wrought silver, the two or three daily squabbles broken up, and then every few days the slog, as Clark and Paula called it--the maddeningly slow trek of a hundred-odd lost and landless toward the capital-- by the time all this was done the summer day had passed into night almost without sunset, so clear was the Paffir air. Then, beneath shining moons in a sky brim-full of dim, distant stars, they studied together and did their special work, fussing with the potatoes, scanning new arrivals for disease, hearing life stories, asking questions, repairing defenses, checking equipment and trying to raise Hugh.

"I'll make up breakfast and strike the tent if you'll feed Tiyar," Clark offered. He pulled the compressed cereal from a drawer in the cart and began to rummage for a measuring spoon.

"Bringing his food isn't that big a job," Paula said. She was collapsing the sleeping sacs they hadn't used. "Unless he suddenly decides you're against him on the Local Question."

"The Local Question, is it? You know, Akiva might as well call Tiyar a local as the other way around. No, I don't care if he's hostile, but I don't like to see him when he's taking language drugs. It makes me sick." He turned from the cart, still squatting, to explain. "Drugs are the nearest thing we've got to divine intervention. Also pure hell." He turned back. "You know, when I took educational pharmacology, I couldn't look at a single one of the visuals. I skipped all the case studies and still I had nightmares about it." He found the measuring spoons, and beside them a little specimen vial. "What's this?"

"But you used ed drugs in school, didn't you?"

"No."

"How did you remember--?"

"I trained my memory. You don't need drugs if you know how."

Paula rolled the sac into a corner. What to tell him? You are an infinitesmal probability, a hundred-heads coin toss? "But you used Reshecomp's neuro system, just like everybody else. That's like a drug. It reads things into your memory centers."

Clark shrugged. "What's in this vial?"

"I found that. In the--during the bombing. There was a vault, underground. When the fires broke out, some people fell into it, when the earth shifted. There must have been something flammable in the vault. Probably brush had fallen in. The people were--they burned to ashes. Except the bones. And I saw that thing. I jarred one of the skulls and it fell out." She was looking at her feet. Boots had yellowed the skin.

"This was inside? It was inside the skull?" he asked.

"There was a...a little bit of tissue. Clinging to it." Paula feared that she might be sick or cry, and that Clark might try to comfort her, but he only asked in a calm voice, "Did you save the tissue?"

"Here. I dried it." She had to jiggle the drawer to get it open. There was nothing inside but the vial of black dust. "I should have told you about this before. I collected it for Luz, and then...then I forgot."

Clark bioscanned the dust. "You're right. It's brain tissue. The device is an energy reflector. Usually radio, I think. It's implanted in the brain to treat things like...well, mood problems, say. If you have a--it's a very gross thing, it's not fine-tuned. But suppose you have a condition where you're constantly anxious, and for some reason drugs and training won't work. You get one of these things put in so you can stimulate the--the--call them the calming centers. To control the mood."

"They can't have that kind of medicine here," Paula said. "I don't understand what you're talking about."

"No, no, wait." His voice was squeaking again. "That's clinical use. Now, maybe this one you found had been implanted clinically. In someone from off-planet. A spy or a fugitive. A Var. Or maybe these things are in common use here."

"But they can't be--oh." Where the hell is Fuego, she thought suddenly. But she could hear the Verloringers in the distance, singing their morning prayer, and knew he was with them. Did he sing or only listen? "Sure. It could be used as a weapon."

"I heard that on the Hostile Planets they used to implant them in prisoners because it's cheaper than jailing them. If the prisoner did something they didn't like, they just turned it on."

"What happened?"

"That depends on where in the brain they implanted the thing. In certain places, at certain frequencies, it can paralyze or kill. That was back when people practiced involuntary medication, in the old days. Sevit talked about that once or twice. Twice? No, it was once--the founders of Pravelany were the results of genetic experiments. That's why they were so tall, and they decided to settle on a low-gravity planet." He was talking to himself now and reconstituting cereal with the cart's expander. Paula went to the tent door to hear the Verloringers sing.

"Once. He talked about it once. The other time it was Akiva." When all sorrow was ended, they mourned ten thousand years for the sufferings of the past, he had said. Clark couldn't remember the rest of the story.

"This was my favorite time of day with Sevit. We used to get up early and spend an hour over breakfast, talking. Just talking about all the things--" Paula's voice trailed off and she returned to where Clark sat. "Can you find out whether anybody else has these implants? Scan people's heads?

"I guess so."

"OK. Do that. Just check, you know, when you're looking over the new recruits, but let's not tell Fuego and Tiyar until we're sure. It could have been just some random fugitive, and those two get upset about everything."

Clark smiled. "They are crazy, we are sane." How long had it been since he smiled last?

"Have you found out anything about the Ecclesiam mystery?"

Tiyar entered the tent, stooping. "Good morning, my friends and comrades. How are you? I do not see Fuego. Is this breakfast? Excellent. I am ravenous. We must set out soon; today we are coming to a provincial capital and we must expect a vigorous reception, and although we need not anticipate violence beyond reasonable caution, we are never sure--Rumors travel the city, that we come to destroy their temple, that we eat stones as if they were bread, that we will protect them from the Itscriyite refugees."

"Here," Paula said, handing him a dish of porridge. The language-suppressing drugs worn off, Tiyar would have the talkies until the stimulants failed, too. His eyes were glittering. He had to pause between sentences to wipe spittle from his lips.

"In a few days, we will cross the Red River into the Middle Plains. Akiva and his followers may wish to remain there. We must not." He paused, waiting for someone to ask why.

"Are you ready to go?" Clark asked.

"Because Pahid is coming and we cannot hope to defeat him. Pahid is the high priest of the Lir Temple, the Viyato's toady. The size of his army I do not know. Again we find rumor! His force seems to include a corps of women who fight under the influence of certain drugs--" He looked so eagerly at Clark, with eyes wide and palms toward him, that both listeners burst out laughing.

They sobered quickly. Paula guessed that Clark was remembering the party at Eyimalia House long ago, when it had been she and Sevit laughing, and Clark had met Efirr Nije. She said, "Every army has a killer corps of just women. It's a special effect, like having a knife tattoo on your arm that looks like it's stuck through a flap of skin."

Clark struck the tent and it vanished like a puff of smoke into a bag in his hand. The rain had stopped. Clouds broke for the change from chilly morning to full sweltering day. Tiyar went on, "The difference between high and low Paffir is this. High Paffir is spoken in religious ceremony by priests, and that is the language the Viyato and Ketry speak among themselves. I suspect they learned it here. It is the common speech of the upper class. It is very close to low Paffir, but pronounced at the front of the mouth. In low Paffir, by contrast, the sound has been guttaralized. 'Th' becomes 'gh' and 'k' becomes 'g.' That is the crucial difference. There are others. Low Paffir has many verb forms not found in high, and high Paffir has words and moods not found in low. This reflects the Viyato influence on the priestly class. But the two are degenerate tongues--oh, alas." He sat down on a fallen tree, closed his eyes and mouth and fell asleep.

The singing had ended. People were coming back from the Lir to gather their mats, blankets and tools. A ring of his disciples followed Akiva at a polite distance. Two or three were wet to the knees, the ones he had invited into the water. Akiva himself liked to sing his prayers to the morning immersed, so his clothing was soaked. At first, in the early spring when ice still floated in the river, Paula had thought this a strange ascetic practice, but she watched him go in and saw that he loved it. To him, the Lir was pure physical happiness.

Akiva pointed to Tiyar. "What is wrong?" he asked in high Paffir.

"Rest," Paula said.

Fuego came from a group of men and women. The hem of his tunic was wet. He had hung back. "We will carry him," he said.

They rigged up a stretcher and started out with Paula and Clark at Tiyar's head, Fuego at the feet. A little after midday, he opened his eyes to say, "The corn tassels are bright flames."

"We knew Ayekar in the generations of light," quoted Fuego, who could also see over the cornfields.

Tiyar sat up. "You shut your mouth, old skinbag! Those women are reactionary."

Fuego said, "I'm carrying you, Tiyar."

They glared at one another. Tiyar fell back. "They are with Pahid. He has recognized them. They march with his army."

"What women?" Clark called back.

"Those herbal-healer types," Paula said. "Their motto is we only..."

She looked over her shoulder toward Fuego's head where it rose between Tiyar's feet as though it had just been born from him. Some baby, she thought. Fuego's hair was matted, his eyes red and his smooth cheeks sagging because he had lost so much weight. In the hot sun he looked as though he had wilted.

"We knew Ayekar in the...the generations of light. Only we remember. False priests will never free the gods; it must be we only," Fuego quoted. "Or--yes. That's right. We only."

"False priests?" Clark put in. "What's wrong with that?"

"I tell you, Pahid has them! False priests--such terms are casheeks. Anyone may use them. Do you think he means himself, idiot?"

"You're going to get down and walk in a minute," Paula said without anger.

Tiyar shut his eyes; the rest bowed their heads. The thick dust provided no shade. We're going toward Pahid, aren't we, she thought. Clark grunted. Perhaps she had spoken aloud. But behind us come Itscriyites. There would be a crowd at the city. What could Tiyar say to move them? He knew only Greyesar's version of what Sevit taught, and the Outland, and Merced.

Merced was no training, an unhappy cavern teeming with sorrow and dread. There was no noble death there, seldom even any struggle, just the steady violence of unquestioned exploitation and despair. The Outland was a woman dazed by aphrodesiacs making love to the hiss of a titanium welder. The Outland was a miner so hypnotized by overwork that even in bed he lay exploring the ceiling with an imaginary probe, one shoulder ever higher than the other. It was winter and night without silence or rest.

Tiyar was talking to himself. "I see black spots in the sky," he said.

"Don't look at the sun," she mumbled. I don't even know where I am, she complained inwardly. If there were mining involved he could speak.

Tiyar murmured, half conscious, "Peasants. They are weeding among the vegetables. They dig deeper and deeper to find the root of the plants that rob them, but the roots are fast in bedrock. They chisel. They mine the rock, down and down, they seek the paymaster, but he--oh, he sits at an empty till."

Akiva, breathing the harsh musk of the sun-baked earth, would have lain down alone in the fields to embrace the old goddess. Earth remains, he thought. However troubled, so ever beautiful. She is her temple, brightest and darkest, most evil and good, house of the truest prayer. But this strong goddess is troubled, and with her all the others, even Hath.

A woman who met the Itscriyites had come to him the night before and begged him to hurry with his followers to the Middle Plains, where Pahid's Defenders would protect them. "The Itscriyites remember you. Father Akiva, the rainbringer, the godling of death," she said.

She was thin, with yellow eyes and tiny new breasts but a face already wrinkled. When she opened her mouth, there was only darkness there. A band of girls had come to her home in the middle of the night and set it and the fields on fire. The light drew others. The village was razed. "They killed my father and my mother. Men lay like animals on my sisters--not only strangers but our neighbors as well," she said, twisting her shirt in her fingers and casting glances along the ground as though she thought it needed to be swept.

"And you?"

"I joined the girls. We ran together until we came to the Lir."

"And then?"

"They drowned. They wanted to see who could stay under water the longest. Each one took stones in her pockets when the others weren't looking."

Akiva had once had a vision of the weeping moon at the Lir's source shedding drops of fire onto the burning earth. The woman's story, with the stubborn girls walking among the ghosts on the riverbottom, moved him deeply. He had her tell it all after he sent away everyone but Neshar, on whom she kept her gaze while she spoke.

"Our bodies were covered with marks. At night, we set fire to trees and bushes to light our way, and fought and ran till we fell. We set fire and watched the beasts and people flee, and we ran down the hillsides in bright moonlight. Sometimes we took off our clothes and compared our wounds and if one girl had too few the others beat her, and if a girl loved another she gave her marks because they were signs of strength and they made us beautiful in one another's eyes, and one girl became supremely beautiful and died--I, too, thought she was beautiful because her courage was so great and because she was dying, although I know, Father Akiva, that it is a sin to glorify these wounds."

She paused, so he said quietly, "It is virtuous to love the sick and dying."

The woman blushed and smiled and told him how they talked about Father Akiva, the rainbringer and agent of death, and jeered at their parents who fell on their knees in the dust when the rain began in Itscriye two years ago, after the drought.

"They love death; they are monsters. They spawn new monsters, as I became when they burned my village. They killed my mother and my father--" And she told the story again.

Akiva stopped, signing the others to walk on. They were fewer than a hundred, but their feet seemed innumerable and the cloud of dust they raised, glinting where it caught the sun, immense. Surely they saw it in the town, surely they heard the tramping feet in the Middle Plains, surely all these heads bent and hands swinging made some impression in the capital.

Nobody bothered to look up any more. Passing from the front of the line, he entered anonymity. At the front they followed him, but already as the first few passed Akiva became an obstacle, a lump in the dust. Now and then somone turned around, then backed away with a nod and a surprised smile. The stretcher went past. He walked beside Fuego, telling the woman's story.

Rarely did Feugo understand all that was said to him. He thought a moment and asked somewhat timidly, "Who brings rain?"

"Hath sends rain."

"But Hath is good."

"You mean, why are there floods? You've forgotten, Fuego. They offended the temple."

"I forgot. But suppose--" Fuego smiled, that was an expression he had picked up from Neshar. "Suppose bad gods also brought rain. Suppose they brought rain at a time when you needed it. Would you--?"

"Owe them reverence? No."

"All right." Fuego nodded cheerfully. He was easy to talk to, even in front of Tiyar. There was never any need to guess what he was thinking, nor was he continually falling on his knees whenever Akiva told him something new. And yet he believed. When Akiva spoke of gods, he showed neither false reverence nor embarassment, but understanding.

Fuego bowed his head again. Drops of sweat pattered on Tiyar's feet. "Gods do not die."

"No."

"Can they eat?"

"You mean the tax," Akiva said. "I don't know what use they have for gifts, since they are perfect. Giving ennobles, and that may be all they value. But though free of starvation, they can eat. We are human. For us, a pleasure comes with pain. For them, it is pure. For us, eat and starve. For them, eat. That is godhood."

"A tax is not given. It is taken."

"This should be given."

"Only when there is enough?"

Akiva shuddered very slightly. "Yes, freely given."

"You believe!" Fuego laughed. He pulled at Tiyar's feet and the two exchanged words in their sibillant language, hissing and frowning like puzzled babies. I have been tested, Akiva thought, as Fatayad tests earth each winter. In spring people brought the first shoots to his altar, saying, "Love has taken root."

Fuego had asked him these questions for Tiyar's benefit. The answers could not have been in doubt. Only a low priest, much abused and seeking comfort in legal certainties, would insist on collecting taxes from a needy peasant. And yet nearly all of them behaved so. "Freely given," he repeated. A dust dervish threw the glittering cloud high and let it fall.

Hours before they reached the city they could see it from the top of a ridge, a lump of red clay partly obscured by ragged windbreaks. Part of the wall had evidently slid over winters and summers into a broad pond between the city and temple. In another generation, that would fall in also. Move the building? Dredge the pond? The Council must debate it hotly at each meeting, but neither would be done and when the building was submersed they would build another. Two or three probably lay at the bottom.

When they were almost there, Akiva left the road to climb a hill. He saw new foundations laid just behind the old temple, with cornerposts dug deep, below the waterline, and the mud dragged off over a greyish path to the water. So religion was at work and when the temple succumbed a new one would be ready, each building a stone or splinter better than the last, like the world and her people. Yes, the woman had advised him correctly. He would go and cast himself at the feet of the Lir Temple priest and ask protection. Pahid is the flower of history, and if his mercy is not yet perfect, Akiva thought, I will make it stronger.

The sun was setting, but the day still hot when they arrived, the cloud of dust still following. It was pleasant to bathe in the blue-green pond fringed at one side with cat-tails and white waterblooms slowly closing. Other people were arriving, too, by the dozens, from beyond the city and from the north and south, some on the road by which the Verloringers had come. City people were climbing their walls to see. Bright yellow points danced among the gold and red of the little waves and the steel-grey troughs between them, as they had every cloudless evening for endless ages and would, perhaps, forever. Unchanging, you are changing ever, Akiva prayed.

Children were playing games behind him. Stones clicked together and fell in the grass. "Babyface, babyface, make us cry. Your papa set you free and your mama let you die," one sang, and others taunted, "Crybaby!" Cookfires were struck up all round the pond. The declining sun drew the yellow points in the pond into a shining band across the water.

"The world is your favorite goddess, isn't she?" Fuego asked.

"Is she yours?"

"She is dead..."

Akiva turned to look at Fuego, who was staring at the scintillating water. Fuego said, "We come from a place that was destroyed and broken apart a thousand years ago, into a new world, a harsh one. Our religion is magic. We worship power--not strength; we are not cruel. Even babies and wasters have power. But to us, love is mourning for the place we destroyed. People call it Dead Mama."

"For you, love is sorrow..." Akiva was remembering the conversation between Fuego and the wandering priests Tiyar had killed. Fuego had told him of asking, where do you come from, and the woman's reply, Dead Mama, just like you.

"Not any more," Fuego answered. "Akiva, these people say you are Verloring, but I know you are not a god."

Tiyar approached. He and Fuego hissed at one another in their language. Akiva could see that Tiyar had told Fuego to ask what he, Akiva, would say that night, and Fuego had not done it. He would have had no answer, anyhow.

The torch they carried into the temple choked in the heavy air and gave so little light that the Eyimalians would have fallen over the altarstones had not Akiva stopped them. Fuego, standing at Tiyar's elbow, lit a second torch. Akiva saw him recoil. Black water ran between the floorstones. The place had a moldy smell shot through with incense and blood from the altars, decaying garbage, and urine from the doorway.

Tiyar bumped into a pillar. "That is Verloring," Akiva said. "His friend is Ather, who betrays him. Behind you, he dreads the battle to come."

"Why?"

"He knows he will be taken prisoner and held until he is freed by the infant Fey."

"How is the infant to free him?" Tiyar asked. He was thinking of his leader, Sevit.

"Easy," Fuego said. "Like Neshar."

"Yes, easy, old man, as it was for Luz. Except that your demons and captors were only your own stupidity," Tiyar said blandly in high Paffir. He wandered to the next pillar.

Weak torchlight drifted around the temple, past Fea, past Hath, past the daughters of Winter hiding the infant Spring. The light revealed Hath with his net, knife and fire. This Hath looked like a fisherman stepping over fetid waves, eyes black as a fish's.

"I was priest in a temple," Akiva remarked.

Tiyar stopped. "When?"

"I was raised to it. By a folkpriest."

"And what happened?"

Tiyar scrutinized him so closely that Akiva skipped over the easier story of Berthe--how it happened he was no longer a priest--and told about Shurat. "It was as though a fish jumped out of the water and was caught in the air. The other fish see only the air's surface, and never know where he went," he concluded.

"Do you mean he vanished?" Tiyar demanded.

"He went out of his mind all at once, while preaching."

Tiyar said nothing.

"He dithered, in front of all the people. And later he died."

Akiva moved out of Fuego's torchlight.

"He might have lived, though, had you acted differently?" Tiyar suggested quietly.

"Yes." The cloud of light approached him; he moved away, accidentally touching Hath. Black ooze seeped through his tunic.

Fuego saw blood on a stone. "Akiva, let's go. This isn't a good place," he said.

"I had hoped to pray here, but there are no gods here," Akiva said. He picked up Hath's prayer bell, sharply, so the clapper struck, but before it could ring he muffled it with his hand. Even the desire has left me, he thought. He dropped the bell onto the stone.

Fuego took his arm. "Come outside. Outside you will feel--This is a bad place."

The other giant was studying the pillar that showed Rani forcing Shis, hand of fate, to speak. Tiyar mirrored the god's expression, fascinated and afraid, seeing the future of mankind in Rani's eyes.

"What do they see?" Fuego asked him.

Shis sees horror, Rani despair, Akiva thought.

"You sleep but you will waken," Tiyar quoted. He followed them out. "There is Fea. Strength and fertility, old man. I feel that these people remember their history." He held out his hands and the torch to take in the whole building. "I feel it. This place is ready for what must happen. Let us go and speak."

Outside, a crowd was drinking, talking and eating around an enormous bonfire. More were waiting in the moonlight along the pond's edge, and others watched from the top of the city wall where they could see well but would not hear. Akiva was going to use the peasant dialect anyhow, which city people generally couldn't understand. Whatever he decided to say. He watched the people, women plumped down in the grass to pass jugs around, youngsters wolfing hot barley and roughhousing, all sorts gaping at Tiyar. A woman sat on a stone, with a baby at her left breast nursing by moonlight and a child on her right knee ruddy from the fire. He would speak to her. Two moons and five hundred willing hearts must find voice. There Clark stood, a comfortable distance from the fire, with Neshar. Why do we need fire, Akiva thought. Some day sun will warm us and earth will give food we can eat without fire. It was the vision of Earth burning and the memory of Shurat that made him afraid of fire--but if that were so, he would fear water. He did. Even on those mornings when he shivered with happiness, a part of his exaltation was fear. Standing in the light of two moons and realizing he feared water, Akiva saw two girls throw big jars of oil on the fire. The flames shot higher than the city.

People chanted, clapping time. Drums beat. He heard southern piping. They raised their arms, clapping overhead, and swayed from side to side with the weight of their hands like stalks of grass.

Akiva listened to the roar and the echoes, facing them, his back to the fire, until the chant faded to whispers. They can't see me, he thought.

"Hath beckons!" he shouted. The shout echoed.

They sat frozen.

"Who will go?"

Five hundred voices kept silent. This always frightened him, the massive silence sustained by collective will. He had to control that silence and make it serve his voice.

"Hath, our giving father, calls. Hath the father mourns and grieves. Fea weeps; her raining tears wear down the mountains to bare stone. Verloring is gone, gone--in the height of summer, hope is gone. The harvest yet in leaf is pledged to an empty temple, the child is in the bearing who will die of want this winter. Behold the perfection that is." He jerked his head toward the temple, and heard the people in front explain his motion to the ones behind, a quick rush of whispers that spread out in a ring beyond hearing.

"Who will go? Not one? Yes, they are far away, the gods. As far as son from father, as far as sister from sister, as far as between two lovers in darkness, as far from us as the length of a prayer, as far as we will not look, in their far heaven, their loneliness. They call us as silently as we refuse to hear, we the best and basest of their creatures. We only can love them with hearts that have voice, we only can wound our mother goddess with hands."

He walked almost into the front row to look at them. Eyes lowered. People looked at their hands, people studied the backs of those before them.

"Why do we do this? Why in the world beloved of the sun and washed by the shining Lir from the tears of the third moon, in this place where every hair of every feather on each tiny bird is perfect, why among these fields, the sun-glittering soft-shadowed clothing of our goddess, do we live in hells of vengence and despair? Why, beneath this sky and before those mountains, does the temple rot and stink of blood?"

They liked that. Some were cheering, some laughing, some throwing stones at the building. "We are children of earth, and earth, whatever they may say, is pure! Only look," he went on. Sweat dripped from his fingers. Pahid would have him carded--it was a primary tenet that earth had been sullied in the battle for Ayekar and the gods could not touch her except through the farmers. Yet not one peasant stood up to defend his importance.

The time for shouting passed. People sat down to listen and drink again. Akiva raised his hands. "Here is your priest, come to tell you about gods. What need I tell you? For those who see it, there is news of them everywhere. Summer warmth tells us their kindness, cold winter their sorrow. There are floods and droughts, storm and plagues and the priests and taxes. What do these things mean?" He paused, but kept his hands up.

"These are the voices that speak to those who do not fill their heads with senseless chanting. These are the scrolls that every man and woman can read, whereon is written the truth. Priests and scholars tell us nothing with their mouths. But only watch them. Watch when they come in the fall on their wagons, and let each one ask, what do they say with their hands. Only watch and listen. It is from the mouths of want-mad children you will hear the truth. We are betrayed!"

He stopped, and the slow, laboring silence covered them. Many leanded forward. They wanted to understand and were ready to believe. He smiled encouragingly.

"So you ask, how is this? How am I betrayed? Does earth not feed us? Do the priests who collect the tax not bless me in return? Make the sun shine and the rain fall?" He paused to look them over, turning his body from far right to far left, before he asked slowly, "Do they not feed the gods?"

Now it was too late. If he never spoke another intelligible word, the damage was done. He led them through confessions of every sin he could think of, from envy to murder, and a prayer for Verloring, and then he walked over to where Tiyar sat. Standing in front of him, Akiva yelled, "Now listen to a man who has spoken face to face with gods! Listen closely. Your children's children will ask you of this night." The Eyimalian rose up behind him like a shadow.

Tiyar raised his arms, palms inward, and let them drop. He might tell them anything he liked, but he could not tell them about the empty temple, because he had not felt it. Akiva saw him take a deep breath.

"The Lost God is among us. The lost one is male; the lost one is female. The lost one is new born; the lost one is older than the temple. Verloring may be found in any province, in any village, in any heart that longs for justice. We bring him an army that will rid the world of evil." He sat down.

That was all. The crowd shouted, chanted, rushed forward to embrace and kneel to them, becoming confused, stepping on one another's feet. Akiva performed about twenty naming ceremonies. Drums sounded again, with keening pipes, flutes and solemn dulcimers until all but the drunkest were dancing.

One moon illuminated the little stream that fed the pond. Akiva walked beside its gulch toward the moon and listened to the water. White ripples showed where the brook dropped over stones, splashed into pools between them or sprayed in white beads to another black pool below. This is her altar and bell, he thought.

Clark brought him Neshar. He tied the sling around Akiva's waist and shoulders while he talked. "The priests do give the taxes away, and they do get good weather in return. Not from gods, but--"

"What are you going to do tomorrow?"

"Show people how to grow potatoes."

"Nor do you deserve our prayers in return."

"No."

"So you understand. A god is not just a powerful being. A god is an embodiment of that which creates," Akiva said. Behind Clark, Fuego was beaming. Akiva's students repeated the conversation among themselves. When he had passed three or four comfortable hollows and they had all dropped away to bed down, he unslung Neshar and set him in the tall grass.

Fuego sat down beside him and started to braid the living grass by moonlight. "You said something that makes you an enemy of the temple," he remarked.

"Perhaps."

"Not just the taxes. I mean what you said now, what you have been saying since I met you. That reverence is for the good that godhood is, not for good weather and good luck. That idea will destroy the temples for you, in time."

"Before tonight, I thought I should go and ask Pahid to accept me," Akiva said, watching Fuego from the corner of his eye. A thin curtain of his own hair trembled between them.

Fuego shook his head. "You have more power than he does."

"No. I know who has power here. For myself, he could kill us all, and he would do so on your account."

Fuego's breath made the curtain flutter. "We know. But I swear that we--or I, at least--will protect you. And--and you know why."

He did. Fuego was in love with him. How unlike his people Fuego was, having such a simple heart. Akiva took Fuego's hand. Neither spoke. They continued to sit by the water until the moon dropped low and Fuego was snoring. Then Akiva got up, taking Neshar, and walked quickly to the road and away.

No one came after him; none of the people still carousing by the pond looked up as he went by. He was invisible, a pair of feet under a black dress, as he had been years past when he chased Shurat over the fields, outside another city, running from torches that bobbed and flared like madmen's heads set afire. Thus it was to be a ghost, leaving the firesides of the hereafter to return again and again to the place of death. No one hears me or sees me, he thought. He had opened his mouth and said nothing and they heard themselves. Fuego sees the hand of his own desire, he thought. He must expunge the lie and drop the veil of night between them, must show his self at its defining moment, like the pictures in temple that defined the gods. This is my hand, he thought, my hand pulling the man's head from the water where I drowned him who, in the heart beyond lies, was my father, and the bright light dripping from him is the true light, the light that shines between the worlds.

The dirt was rippled as water from the many feet that had passed there, and a fine layer of dust, like fog in the moonlight, still floated above it. All those feet, those people, their five hundred visions of him each uniquely false. He turned off the road.

Enemy of the temple. He had felt nothing at Hath's altar, but now, on climbing a dirt trail up a hillside, he saw Hath a stone in the weeds, soft and solid, faintly glimmering on the side toward the big moon. Here was Fea, a fat uko nut that dropped from the tree and cracked open on the stone for a mouse to find, and there was Fey in the summer scent of the wind, and all around him earth. There were spirits even in the human voices that called to one another in the hilltop village and smiling domestic goddesses at the kitchen fires, though in the city and temple there were nothing at all.

Half a dozen houses surrounded a muddy well-yard. Young pigs ambled at liberty.

A woman screamed. Doors opened, and women hurried through the mud to the birth house. A young girl came out, calling, "She isn't having it yet."

_______________________________

SKIP THE CHILDBIRTH
_______________________________

Akiva and Neshar kept still. The women retired, stretching. The girl stayed leaning in the doorway, twisting the ends of her thin hair, and sang just audibly, "Come for me, at eventide. I'll follow you everway."

"Fea watch you," Akiva said, in the church language.

She paled.

"I'm alone," he said in the peasant language. He came closer so she could see him in the light from the doorway.

"Well, if there's just you--and a little boy." She closed the door behind her. "What's your name, little boy?"

"Neshar."

She looked up doubtfully. "Doesn't that mean ghost? After his mother? Is she dead? Was she very beautiful? Was it sad?"

"It was a long time ago."

"Very long?"

"I was a little older than you," Akiva said, stretching the truth. This girl was about fourteen, he had been eighteen.

"How terrible," she breathed, sliding one arm around him to press herself against his side.

Neshar took a step away.

"The same thing is happening to my sister. Everybody says she will die." She laced her fingers behind his neck. "Then I will marry her husband." Her warm breath made his hair stand on end. "Please help me," she whispered.

"If--if--" Akiva stuttered. His arm wrapped tight around her hips.

"I don't want to be longing for her to die," the girl whispered, pushing him into the shadow of the house. She loosed one arm to face forward and led him part-way down the hillside. Neshar stayed behind.

There was no dissembling. The girl dropped down and out of her frock, pulling Akiva after her. Two bony knees poked up above the flowering heads that surrounded the dark hollow where she lay. Her own musks rose with the scents of crushed grass and turned soil along the insides of his arms and billowed across his chest as he plunged into that warm cave and tried to bury himself between her breasts. She sighed like a fed child. Too young, he told himself. In a panic of restraint and desire, he rubbed his belly against her lanky thighs. She made tiny eager shrieks of like small birds, arched her back, shuddered, bit his neck and shoulders with powerful kisses. Now Akiva was seized by sensations of violent delight and turned his body first one way and then another as his muscles jerked taut and loosened in a delerium of feeling. She clambered around him like a squirrel in a treetop, her small tongue at his center making hands and feet thrash among the grass, until he sat bolt upright, choking back a cry, and the fluid went harmlessly to earth. Pulling her close, he bedewed her face with kisses. The girl's bright giggles poured over him, like cooling wind, a relief and thankfulness he lifted as prayers of gratitude to Hath because he knew, hearing how she laughed, that she was most likely a virgin.

"Now I can wait a long time," she said, pulling on her dress.

Akiva laughed.

"Her baby is possessed by demons," the girl told him, a little reproachfully.

"Maybe I can cure her. I--know prayers."

"You can help my sister?"

"Maybe. It depends on the demon."

"Oh, come and cure her!" the girl cried. "I will go home. You come knock in half an hour, with your little boy ghost." She ran away to her house.

A heavy man answered Akiva's knock. Dweller and caller squinted at one another, he hindered by darkness and Akiva by the smoke and sudden blast of heat from inside. Though it was a warm night, they had evidently stoked the household fire until it roared, and used new straw to do it. The man started to shut the door.

Akiva stopped it with his knee. He quoted Fatayad among the people: "Listen. I bring you help."

"Who are you?" the man asked.

"Priest," Akiva told him.

The man opened his mouth, but he said nothing. This was the husband. His eyes were red and sunken. He glanced past Akiva to make sure there were no more priests. Inside the house, a woman groaned. Hearing her, the man bowed his head. "Go next door, wanderer," he said quietly. "We have sick people here."

"I can help them, especially if the trouble is demons."

The man scrutinized him. "Priest." The door swung open, releasing another blast of heat and smoke. "Come in," he said.

Stepping past the husband, Akiva saw the parents sitting on stones by the fire. Green twigs and straw were scattered around them. Every few minutes, though it gave no signs of abating, one of them would toss a handful of fuel on the fire and the other would jump and feed it also.

The husband sat down with the parents. Beyond them, the girl was making cord. With the house so hot and dry, she had to keep it mostly under water and the going was slow.

Neshar clung to Akiva's wrist with both hands. Akiva freed himself and said, "Go sit down."

"What did you let him in for?" the father demanded suddenly.

The husband shrugged. "Priest."

Now the father studied Akiva. His eyes, too, were bright from sleeplessness and his thin cheeks sagged. His mouth hung open.

"Can't hurt," the husband offered.

"Let him do what he wants," the old mother put in. Like her husband, she was skinny and wild-looking. She flung a handful of twigs into the fire. The other two followed suit.

The sick woman groaned again. She lay on her back on the other side of the fire. They had put bales of straw next to her so the heat was trapped in her bed of oxhides spread on more straw. A spark in the roof would set this house roaring, Akiva thought. The woman was so bloated that he doubted she could stand, but now as he watched she threw off the hide and scampered

around the straw. She pressed her back against the cooler surface of the outside wall and sobbed.

"It has claws!" she wailed. "It's tearing me with its horns." The mother ran to her and she sank in the old woman's arms, groaning, "It has claws."

"Can you help her?" the father demanded.

"He can," the mother said. She led her daughter back to the oxhides and came around the fire to take Akiva's hand. "Do whatever you must," she pleaded.

When Akiva did not reply, the father said, "Then you will." He set a log across the doorway with such force that the whole house shuddered. "Don't fail," he said.

"We will do whatever you ask," the mother promised.

The husband cast more fuel on the fire. The parents hurried to assist him.

"Quit stoking it," the girl said. "She's sweating a river."

The three looked at the fire as though they hadn't noticed it before, and for a moment they agreed it was too high. Akiva guessed they would forget their resolution, but the girl's sudden sensible remark cheered him. If I succeed, they will become like her again, he thought. He felt the kinship with them that he had felt with his audience earlier.

The mother came forward again. "Go on," she urged. "We won't stop you."

I may die in an hour, Akiva thought, but until then I may do as I please in this house. He wished Tiyar were with him.

The daughter lay quiet. "Take away that straw. I need room," Akiva said, more to give the family something to do than to make the woman comfortable. The mother hastened to obey. The father joined her.

Akiva knelt and put his hands on the woman's abdomen. "Demon, be warned. I will rid this house of evil," he recited, realizing at the same time that he paraphrased Tiyar. He tried to think of the battle for Ayekar and how good prevailed, but found himself doubting. Was it not far more likely that Ayekar had fallen altogether, and the ones who took the heavenly city were not good? Indeed, the ones who took taxes and brought weather seemed seldom good and not mortal; they might be devils. And the defeated gods, where were they? Here, captive. It was an awful explanation, sensible and blasphemous and not unlikely.

A violent kick made the woman scream. "You see, the demon is writhing in fear," he told her. Over his shoulder, he said, "Call the midwife."

"The midwife has gone to Pahid," the mother said.

"No, no!" the daughter shouted. "Never! It must not come. Stop it." She sat partly upright. "Don't let it come."

She understands what we say, Akiva noticed pointlessly. "Why not?" he asked.

"It has claws! It's killing me!" she moaned.

"She knows," the husband said. He nodded at Akiva, to say he expected the woman to die and bore the priest no ill will. Like the mother, he would object to nothing. "Water broke at sunset. She's been like this ever since."

Akiva groped in his mind for the little he knew about childbirth. Once the water came, the baby must follow, however much later. He had heard women say, "It's broken water already," to mean something was imminent. That would be his warning.

He described a mandala of the sun over the woman's body, with her head, hands and feet as its projections and her navel at the center. Then he signed another on her abdomen, making all nine points. Again she screamed, "He gouges me!" her face so wrinkled and furrowed that she looked like a mother of ten.

"Listen," Akiva told her. He prayed slowly in the church language, making the words as impressive as he could. "Fea, mother of life and sun of mothers, you bring only truth in this hour." He repeated the prayer in dialect. "Now, you must say that over and over while I fight the demon. So long as you say that, he will not dare resist. Do you understand?" Could that be true? He had heard Shurat say it. But if Fea were captive, she would be powerless to help.

The woman disrupted his musing with another scream. "He is killing me! He will drag me to hell!" She rose up and pointed into the fire. The husband threw a big handful of straw on it, and her parents did the same.

"No, he won't," Akiva consoled her. The flames jumped. "Fea looks kindly on childbirth, and takes mothers into her own hand." But if her hands were not strong enough to wrest a mother from hell, and since in any case there were demons in both places...or was the evil in Ayekar and then hell must be heaven because the evil one sent his enemies there...Akiva was talking as he wondered. "I will now drive out the demon and you will bear your own innocent baby. Say the prayer."

While she repeated the words, Akiva took a handful of ash from the fire and drew a full mandala on the baking stone, with Hath's name at the center and each of the nine points labeled. The points made triangles, one for Fea, Earth and Raina the first woman, one for Fatayad, Fey and Rani the first man, and the last triangle for the sun, Zatoye, and a nameless god. He labeled the ninth point Verloring, then drew each god's sign below the name. Then he told the mother to draw it on her daughter's body.

"You do it," she said. Bringing her head close to Akiva's, she murmured, "Press hard. Our goddess will save who she saves and the others will take who they can." Before Akiva could answer, she pulled off the daughter's dress so he had to turn away. The father watched Akiva. The husband covered his face with his hands.

Someone knocked at the door.

"Not yet," the girl called.

"Fea, mother of life," the sick woman moaned.

"Pangs again," the mother said. Standing, she put one hand on Akiva's shoulder and pointed to her daughter. He had to go. He wrote with his right hand, resting the left under her navel. Another pain contorted the woman's body.

"Will it be soon?" he asked. Was he pressing too hard with his left hand?

The mother did not answer.

Akiva was about to take his left hand away, but he realized suddenly that a red mark where he was leaning would betray him. He finished the nine projections and began to write the first name. Already the pattern was dissolving in sweat.

The girl sat by her sister's head and mopped her face. "Lie quiet," she said. "You don't push till the pains are closer together." The woman shrieked. She clutched her belly, erasing the design. Akiva began again.

A neighbor came and someone let her in. When she saw the markings on the daughter she went away, saying it was not time. The father barred the doorway after her, pulling the heavy mats tightly together.

Akiva sat hunched between the girl on his right hand and the mother on his left, who was trying to bend the woman's knees as though birth was imminent. Had she given her daughter some herb to bring it on? He tried to work faster. The lines went awry.

"Pray!" he bellowed at the writhing woman. "Do as I told you!" Now when he moved his left hand away, he saw that he had made a mark, but he did not try to conceal it. The daughter suffered another pang, and screamed so loud and suddenly that the sister jumped, almost knocking Akiva into the fire. "Be careful!" he shouted.

The fire had not been fed since the mother stopped tending it. Akiva tossed in a handful of twigs for light to work by. He peered at the lines he had drawn, trying to remember where he had left off.

"It's coming. Raise her up," the mother said.

The girl lifted her sister's shoulders and braced them with her own. "I'll hold so you can push. Breathe deep. Fea, mother of life," she prompted.

At times the sick woman almost listened to her sister, but when the pains came back she always forgot. Noticing Akiva, she pushed his hands away.

"I can tie her wrists together," the mother offered.

"No! Calm her."

"I can't," the mother snapped.

The house grew darker and the lines of sweat-diluted ash harder to find against the woman's skin. Suddenly, after what seemed hours of whimpering punctuated by ever more frequent moans, the woman began to push. She kept silent now, eyes shut, fists clenched with effort. Akiva raced to finish the mandala, terrified lest the baby be born with horns and claws still on it.

The mother pushed on her daughter also, straining awkwardly. Akiva finished. A half-second later the old woman sprang away, saying, "That's the head." Soon she drew out a small grey, bloody mass trailing its cord. The baby's pate and fingers were smooth. It seemed dead at first, but then gave a squeaky cry.

Someone opened a window. Daylight softened the shadows. Akiva collapsed in the straw and the family let him rest. They seemed more human now, tired and anxious instead of desperate. He would stay here. No one had recognized him, no one would bother him much with questions if he simply put up a hut near the town and worked quietly, helping in the fields and fishing, teaching Neshar and his newborn friend. Questioned about the past, he might tell them he was a young widower. The girl would soon marry him, they dance at his wedding and he speak the ritual himself at the true altar of life. He would grow old here in peace and quiet, loved by these men and women, with grandchildren trailing his steps as he had tagged after Shurat, die quiet in mind and in sight of Ayekar.

It was evening. Neighbors who hadn't expected the child to live had managed to scare up some presents and begun arriving at the hut, when they heard the sound of a horse on the roadway. Children ran to investigate, were called back and sent home while grownups hurried to places where they could watch from the forest. The birthing gifts, mostly honeyed fruit and some meat and beer, vanished. "Maybe we should stash all the food, just to be on the safe side," a woman suggested. "Did you hear what they did up mountains? Just this spring. Went back and collected again. Taxes."

"In springtime!" someone affirmed.

Another committee set out for the road and came back shouting excitedly, "Look out! Look out! They're coming this way!"

"They? How many are there?" Everyone ran to the windows.

A single horse scrambled up the path to the village, circled grandly and stopped in front of the door where the new grandmother stood. "I'll be plowed and planted," Akiva heard her say. "I'll be harrowed and sowed."

He went to the window. Everyone in the village was clustered as close together as they could stand around a shiny brown gelding that dripped sweat, rubbing it down with their sleeves, stroking its head and neck, untangling the hairs of its tail one at a time. Every snort and stamp brought murmurs of appreciation from the crowd. They also fingered the saddle, bridle and stirrups, thick leather jointed with bolts of steel.

On top of the horse sat a little weather-beaten woman, wrinkled and dark from years of exposure, but wearing a fine woven coat of heavy wool with a broad marroon stripe at the waist and a bright scarlet cord on her arm. When she jumped down, he saw that her leather boots reached to the knee. "It's a good horse, isn't it?" she asked the crowd. "My captain lent it to me. It needs water."

A dozen people volunteered. Others ran to find it some oats. Now they began to look at the rider. They fingered the hem of her coat and hitched it up to look at her boots. "Have you seen Pahid?" someone asked. So this was the midwife.

"Sure. I'm a regular soldier. Watch." She drew a thin polished knife and tossed it casually at a peg a few paces away. It hit the peg's center, quivered and stuck. "Just takes practice." She waited for the excitement to die down and someone to fetch her knife before she turned to the new grandmother. "I'm on a mission from him now, as a matter of fact, but I heard your girl was at her time so I thought I'd stop in."

"Too late."

"Too late?" It was the disappointment of someone who had expected a birthing fee. "It can't be too late. What do you mean? Is it dead?" She entered the house. "There you are--oh. Born so tiny. You forced it."

The mother was sound asleep, the baby nursing. When the midwife sat down she opened her eyes for a moment to say, "Ma Syrie. You came."

"Of course I came." She looked around. Akiva signed Neshar to bring her a dish of sweet fruit, and she bolted the food. The second daughter handed her some porridge. She made herself eat that more slowly. "They outfit us grand, but Pahid's tight as a noose with money, and my captain never crosses him."

"What's it like there?"

"Stay home. You wouldn't like it. We sleep afield half the time and the food as I say's irregular. Spend nights riding horseback hither and yon, and have to march in the morning. It's hard work. He's tougher than gristle. Gave me a day's ration and said, Go find the Akivites. And I went, too. We're all like that. Whatever he tells you, do. If he told me to lie naked in the snow and feel warm, then I'd do it. And the captain. Berthe. She's a giant woman, bigger than most of the men are, with long red hair, a real beauty, and nobody's fool. It takes wits to stay living, that close to Pahid." She noticed Akiva. "What are you looking at?"

He had moved to the front of the crowd and was now glaring at her in apparent fury. "Where is she?" he asked.

"With Pahid, on the way to the Middle Plains."

He picked up Neshar and went out. A few steps took him beyond the village. Both moons were bright in opposite parts of the sky. He threw shadows in two directions, northeast and southeast. A few days' walk northwest would bring him to the Middle Plains, to fighting against earth on the side of the dark temples and blood-stained altarstones. He knelt and prayed to Hath.

"He has won her truly." Ma Syrie stood behind him. "I know."

"We're on the priests' side now. The Lir Temple is fighting with us to save our goddess. Look what happened in Itscriye. They'll do the same everywhere we don't appease them."

"Who?"

"They speak to him, face to face."

Akiva studied her. Double moonlight vieled the woman in fine shadows. Light gathered in the centers of her deep-set eyes shone there when she looked up, then went out. All reflected. He knew she cherished Pahid's strength and the illusion of power it gave her. This woman would follow the evil one himself for the promise to rule his darkest nether chamber, or even for nothing, for the horror such a gift would attach to her name. "Why are you so worried about opinion, when you know your own self to be boundless?" he asked.

She shrugged.

They stood watching the wind eddies in the grass below. Ma Syrie bowed her head. "It's been so long," she muttered.

"But at last it is now!" he whispered in reply. Each turned slightly away from the other. There was a longer silence.

"How many are you?" she asked at last. He said nothing. "Will you really destroy the temple?"

"The buildings in the cities will all be destroyed in time, but the temple is here."

"Shall I tell him that?"

"Tell her."

Ma Syrie walked back to the hut where the whole village was gathered, singing and talking around a bright fire. Silence fell at her entry.

It was just sunrise when he came to the city pond. Ducks made black wakes as they streaked off the silver water. Tiyar waited for him on the opposite shore. He looked as though he, too, had been awake all night. "I'm glad to see you," he said. "I was afraid you would not come back."

* * *

Low from a dry summer and muddy, the Red River flowed slow between two rocky shores as though unwilling to meet the Lir. It was too wide to raft easily and, since the tax road ran along and not across it, there was no bridge.

A human corpse, long dead, floated slowly past them as they stood on the eastern bank, then another and a third, then no more. In the morining Akiva walked out on a row of stones to bathe in the water, but as soon as he stepped on to the riverbottom he sank in to the hips and had to be dragged out with poles. River parasites raised blisters all over his body.

Paula came to the lean-to where he sat contemplating the sound of the grasshoppers and of the children who chased and caught them in grass-lined nets. She stood outside facing in the direction he faced. After a moment's anxious silence, she said, "I'm sorry, Akiva. No bathing in this river. The water is bad here, the women say. No one fishes from it or goes near it."

"I know," he said, showing her the blisters on his hand.

She looked at it, looked away and extended her own hand to show him a small shiny container that looked like a cocoon, with a grey worm inside. She sat down beside him. "I need to tell you something. This--the thing inside--is just a piece of metal. But it had been put inside someone's head. Someone living. I found it in that first city, in the fire. When the head was--was broken." She could not bring herself to tell the story of the implants except in these short, childish sentences but when she was done she was sure he understood.

"They put these in living people," she concluded. "They can open the head and close it again--"

He shrugged. "I believe you."

"Oh. Good." She smiled unexpectedly, then went on, "We don't know whether this has been done to many people, or for how long. People would suddenly go out of their minds for no reason. People would suddenly die."

"At their whim. Is that what you are saying?"

"Yes." She looked intently at him, not quite in his eyes but about his chin.

"So we are that helpless. We wonder how mercy came even to be," Akiva said. She nodded. "We are small. All we can hope is obscurity. But we are small and many. Who is there who would not answer if called upon? In each generation there are many who are never called, but also many who are called for the first time, and fewer are lost. Isn't this true everywhere?"

"I suppose." She sat with her chin perched on her knee, then got up. She took a little jar from the bag she wore at her waist like a virgin's girdle. People said it looked odd at her age, but the herbalist old maids she admired all wore them, so she did, too. She handed him the jar, saying, "A woman gave me this for your blisters."

He opened it. "My hands are sore, but the others can make boats to cross the river."

Paula grinned. "Boats nothing. We're going to make a bridge."

For three sunny days Paula built her bridge. First she climbed up a dirt trail to a thicket and felled trees, some with a single blow, using entropist techniques. The Verloringers marveled, but she said, "Any idiot can hit a tree. The trick is knowing where to hit it," and that became a camp joke so that for a few days no one could break a stick or lift a bucket without declaring, "Any idiot can hit a tree."

Next she bade everyone who wanted to help her strip the trunks and carry them to a place where the rock jutted out on both sides. They erected a scaffold and carved the ends of uko trunks to a point so they could be driven into the river bottom and a small bridge built sideways between them. From this, they drove more pylons and built another arch two-thirds of the way across. Since they left the branches on the outsides of the pylons and the bottom sides of the crosspieces, leaves rained steadily into the river while they laid the roadway, made a second pair of arches atop the first, and hung supporting ropes of grass, then of sticks and finally of green branches as thick as Paula's wrist.

Paula stood up on the scaffold and yelled directions or ran at the head of the crews whistling and gesticulating and, at night, waving a signal torch. In the daytime Tiyar followed her to translate; while he slept she fended for herself. "This is her heyday," Clark told Akiva, using a Resheborian word that ever afterward meant smiling industry and bright sunlight in a woman's hair to him. She liked to quote an expression she had picked up somewhere, "Heart to Fea, soul to earth." Akiva didn't know the original meaning, but with her it meant everything falling in place, all energy flowing toward its goal.

Each morning those four sat down together to call to their friend Huey, and once Neshar sat with them, but each time they heard nothing. Then Paula would leap up and drag Tiyar off to work while Clark tried to interest Fuego in their food. They ate a black powder that took on colors and textures when cooked, but still suggested to Akiva and everyone else seomething no one could eat.

Scores of people came to watch the construction, and everyone wanted to help. Old men and women and children hardly able to walk gathered grass and twigs for the rope, teenagers so skinny they seemed about to snap helped drag the great trees into place, well-dressed brewmasters donated refreshment and fiddlers sang and played to cheer the workers. On the opposite bank, a smaller crowd yelled and whistled at each new mark of progress.

On the second morning, a beggar named Krup came to Akiva and whispered that he was leader of a gang of escaped road-builders. Their village had undergone a Division when the tenth generation came, and those heading north to new land were impressed into service by priests, he said. They were made to work on a road somewhere many weeks' march off their route. Despite the hardships of the march and the work, from which several died, they remained in the road gang for fear their families would be killed if they ran away. Early in the spring, a mob of Itscriyites had swooped down on their camp and killed nearly everyone. Fleeing, the survivors had become lost in the strange land, so they gave up hope of ever finding their original village and decided to go to the Middle Plains. Then, Krup said, they had heard Akiva and decided to follow at a distance, until they were sure he would keep their secret, since they were road slaves still and might be re-impressed. "So the long and the short is this," he said finally, to Akiva's amusement. "We want to help."

Akiva was surprised. The man had reminded him of Paula, less because of an interest in building than because, like her, he seemed incapable of conversion. She simply believed that Akiva could teach her nothing, and she usually looked at him with the same perfunctory respect that this man did now.

Krup was middle-aged, short, with a sharp little nose and no beard. His dull eyes and unwrinkled face suggested a man usually expressionless because he was rarely interested. Asked, "Who would not answer if called upon?" Akiva would have looked at him and said, this one. Earth, how I fail to see you, he thought, and he accepted the offer of help. Krup, with four neighbors, set to work on the instant, clambering up on the arches and down near the water to string guy-lines, fasten supports and lay planking for the walkway.

* * *

It was Paula who first saw the bodies floating downstream. Her throat constricted and though she yelled, "Akiva!" as loud as she could, the sound felt small.

He ran to her. Clark ran, too, and after him, at a distance, came Krup. The four of them watched from the bridge. There might have been twenty bodies floating single file, bumping away from rocks and turning slowly in the eddies as they came to the now-finished bridge, where the branches in the water stopped them.

Everyone began to cross. The people going to the east bank met the people going west without any greeting or shoving, almost indeed without touching, so intent were they all on getting to the opposite side as quickly as possible.

The bodies in the river had been mutilated. Two wore bracelets that would surely not remain had they been killed by robbers. One woman had a red cord around her arm.

"That's Earth red," Paula explained. "Pahid gives those cords to herbalists."

Akiva laid his hands on the railing. "Ma Syrie."

The face turned upward. Paula laid a hand on his arm. "I hadn't known you knew her. She gave me the balm for your sores."

"A messenger," he said.

"Who killed them?" Krup asked Paula, rather casually. Clark edged away from him.

Paula glanced down at her signal detector and the other machinery on her person, still concealed. "How should I know? The best are taken and the worst are taken," she said. "All right, let's make sure everybody's on the side they want to be on before we knock the bridge down."

"Destroy it?" Clark asked.

"Certainly. The complete bridge-building experience. Destroy it. Right, Krup?"

Clark was shocked to hear her address the man so. The mere sight of Krup usually made him want to hide himself.

"Otherwise, the Itscriyites will cross into the Middle Plains," Krup answered.

Down at the foundations, Krup's neighbors were cutting away the branches that caught the bodies. People who had crossed before crossed back again. Paula and Clark went to strike camp. She jerked her head in Krup's direction. "He's from off-planet. He has a communications rig."

"He does? Akiva thought he was strange--he doesn't have any parasites. That's rare...and no bad teeth, but that's not conclusive. I didn't notice any modern equipment among his things."

"Well, it's there. I wouldn't call it modern, but it's decent. He could call to the moons."

"Has he?"

"Not yet. If he does, he'll set off my alarm."

"I can take it away from him," Clark offered. For that matter, he thought, I could do him in.

"No. As long as he doesn't know we know, let's just watch him. Damn, for all we know, he's on our side." They laughed.

Tiyar and Fuego, sitting with their backs to one another, both raised their eyebrows at this gaiety. They had been keeping out of sight more and more, and it made them irritable. "Destroy the brigde?" Tiyar asked suddenly. "Was that you, shouting that you will destroy the bridge? By no means. This is an opportunity to send the Itscriyites down Pahid's throat."

He proved intransigent. When they crossed the bridge for the last time, he brought up the rear. Halfway across, he stopped and refused to go on until Paula went ahead.

"Do you really think I'd hesitate for one minute to destroy this bridge just because you were on it?" she whispered harshly.

"Yes."

He was right, and she had gone half an hour's walk into the foothills of the ridge around the Middle Plains before he descended to the western shore.

Standing on a platform of planks across a village well, Paula accepted the thanks of a fat brewmaster and the blessing of a thin mendicant preist. She drew a diagram of the bridge, showing how to destroy it, should need arise, by removing a certain pin from the underside. The brewmaster thanked her and carried the paper to his attic, where important relics had been kept since time out of mind. A woman who had sat near the platform during the ceremonies took her pipe from her mouth to say, "Set them on their heads and those dopes would piss upways."

Paula looked down at her. The speaker was a herbalist with a leather bag at her waist and Pahid's Earth-red cord on her arm. Her shiny dark skin was lined with dust. She pursed her lips and arched her eyebrows in anticipation of a reply.

Paula asked what she meant.

"They'll never remember what you told them about the pins, and the picture you made won't help them. Those are city ways, pictures like that."

"You've been to the city, I guess."

Her eyebrows rose higher. "Sure. Haven't been in Ebur all my life. Been there? Rania's guts, I lived there..."

"Ebur? This place is Ebur? That means crossing. Why is this town called Crossing?" Paula said, not loud enough for the woman to hear. She knew the answer. It was Crossing because there had been a bridge there before, in the old days before the Eyimalian Conquest of Paffir Eket. That wasn't surprising, because it was the natural place for a bridge, which meant the place where people, namely the Itscriyites, were most likely to come to the river. She had run headlong into a trap.

"That's where I learned about writing," the woman continued. "I can't do it myself, but the city priests can, and there's a woman named Ma Zauber--healing woman--who knows how it's done. I can't do it. Tried, but I couldn't, myself. Priests can do it."

A trap, Paula thought. We've been in a trap since--since who knows when. "I'll tell you what. I'll make a model of the bridge. A little one. Then you can look at the model. It's easier," she said.

When that was settled, she asked about Pahid.

"Saw him once. Bald. There's a woman with him, a herbalist, too. She and her women are strong. Defenders of Faith. I'm too old, myself, to join--you go and stand in one place all day from sunrise to sunset. Just stand. Keeled over in four hours flat, by the temple clock." She put her pipe back in her mouth.

Clark and Tiyar came toward her from opposite sides. Tiyar thrust a lump of clear plastic under her nose and asked, "What is this?"

She hated to say she didn't know. "It looks like one of those things you put in the kitchen to kill roaches. A Toximatrix."

Tiyar smiled. "Just a few moments ago, the mendicant priests dropped this item into the village well behind you." He dropped it into Clark's open hands.

"Do you have the hormone sensor?" Clark asked.

Tiyar always had the hormone sensor. He walked with it in his tunic and slept with it under his head so nothing could take him unawares.

"I thought they gave our man Krup a funny look," Paula said while Clark fiddled with the controls. "They knew who he was. He ignored them and they tried to ignore him but they sort of nodded to him. They backed out of his way."

"Who?" Clark asked absently.

"The traveling priests."

"Data!"

"What?"

"Data! This is progress. So pure! I sweated ice and never came close to this. So pure and so plentiful."

"What are you talking about?"

"This pellet. It's Ecclesiam purpuream. You see? They're putting it in the water."

The herbalist nodded sagely and blew a smoke ring. They had slipped into the Intersystems Language. Paula showed her the pellet, asking, "Why do they put these things in the water?"

She shrugged. "Supposed to keep it clean."

Tiyar ignored her. "Why do they do this?" he demanded of Clark, still speaking IL.

"I don't know. It's useless as a medicine after...after the diseases are accustomed to it. A few of the disease-bearing organisms survive, and they multiply. Then it's useless."

"But it would have been effective at first."

"Sure."

"Then it may simply be habitual. It appears to be an old practice."

The herbalist wandered away. Paula started after her, then returned.

"It is an old practice," Clark said. "The Eyimalian government was paying me to study...what happens in cases like this. Long-term treatment."

"And what happens?"

"I never found much effect in simple animals."

"But human beings?"

"Didn't have any to practice on," Clark said. Still touchy about the thesis. "Anyway, we've got the Ketries now. They'll have to do what we want, to keep this quiet. Involuntary medication is--it's not done any more. For a whole planet--it's unheard of."

"Unheard of means only kept secret," Tiyar replied. "We do not have them. They have reason to kill us."


Chapter 14


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