CHAPTER 9

Two moons shone. Trees at the water's edge cast a net of twin shadows as dense as by daylight and many times more subtle. Where they drifted under the net their reflective landing suits broke its pattern, but it closed over the water again, at first distorted by their wake, when they passed. Am I falling asleep, she wondered.

Looking up, she saw a shooting star. So must they have looked as the fires of entry died down around the transparent landing capsule and the sky above became purple, then blue. A line of steam formed in the blistered air behind them. The sudden sunlight after the halflit ship and the darkness of vacuum made everything seem bright and important. They dropped into the planet's shadow.

Too little data, she had thought. Standing in the descent capsule, she had tried to guide them in a slow fall while Fuego and Clark scanned for a large group of roughly human chemistry. They found one near the river and she aimed for it as best she could, but gusts blew them off course until they were too low to find the target again. She landed them well upriver, in the direction Huey said the mystic was traveling, so they could wait and meet him, but Tiyar misjudged his readings on the surface plot and set them down on a little cliff that broke off under the impact. The capsule slid down the riverbank, split open and scattered them into the water.

"Dad!" Luz yelled, entangled somehow. Her head was pulled under and bobbed up. "Dad! Dad!" The water rose and fell. Her hands flailed under the surface.

Fuego swam toward her, striking the water at a shallow angle to send clear sheets curling shoreward. His progress was slow. Mother, he thought, couldn't your man have been smaller? Bright drops of flying water confused him briefly. He heard Luz's voice to the right, then to the left. He stopped and saw Paula glide ahead of him. Luz was being pulled to shore. Paula reached her, grabbed her ankles and was pulled along. Fuego struggled toward them.

People were running along the riverbank. Treading water, he roared at them, "Let go!"

Tiyar was at his side. "Please be calm. You will frighten them."

Fuego made his legs relax, but he had to keep his arms tense to stay up. Luz's head was above water again. She and Paula were drawing fishooks from her clothing, both still being pulled to shore where a group of men and women seemed to be arguing. Paula swam away from Luz and approached them. After a moment, the parabolic swell of water around Luz widened and smoothed away as she stopped moving.

When all five of them assembled on the bank, Paula thought surely the fishers would run away, but even the Eyimalians, nearly twice their height, seemed not to frighten these people, nor did they insist on repeating their questions when she failed to understand. They accepted the fact that the strangers did not speak their language, and made them welcome, with signs and gestures, in a tent of woven mats that looked flimsy even compared to the mud houses of the peasants. A shared meal of porridge and camp rations told the fishers their visitors were not beggars and the Daybreakers that their hosts were merchants who did not eat fish but sold it. Two young men sat themselves beside Fuego to watch, giggling whenever he looked at one of them.

"Fuego, why do they fish at night?" Tiyar asked.

Fuego made a few hopelessly unintelligible gestures and shrugged.

"I'll ask," Paula said. She did this proficiently with the gestures for day and night her mother had used to express those ideas when she was called upon to make smalltalk with people who did not speak the Intersystems Language. The sign for fishing eluded her, but she improvised, pointing to a hookline near the door.

The two young men jumped up and embraced one another. Then they bagan a half-dance, half-pantomime, continually interrupting themselves to pull in their imaginary catch. One pretended to dangle a hook before Fuego, and he delighted the pair by snapping at it, but Tiyar signed to Luz to intervene, so she gave his elbow a tap, saying, "Look out Dad. They're probably married." Fuego waved his hand impatiently, but he kept his distance for the three days they spent there.

Tiyar learned that the men's embrace signified an eclipse of the two moons and somehow this meant an unusual demand for fish. Paula spent much of the night trying to forecast the expected Viyato attack. "Everything's dead quiet," she told Clark. "For this kind of operation there ought to be a homing signal going out from the target, but it's so quiet I can pick up communications from the Ketrys' landing field over the mountains. Nothing is making any noise."

The next afternoon, the fishers bundled up their wares and houses to go and attend the celebration of the touching moons by a famous traveling priest. The Daybreak contingent invited themselves along, Luz and Paula walking--or strolling and half-running, respectively--together, Tiyar dashing back and forth to try to question anyone who answered, though his grasp of the language turned out to be so poor that most of his talk came down to sentences even Clark understood: "What is this? What is that? Name this, name this, please?"

The land was quiet, the insects still awaiting spring in their eggs and the overcast sky so dark that Luz and Paula began to stumble over loose bits of rubble before they realized they had come into the ruins of a city. Now and then as they progressed, a distant flicker of torchlight brought into view the vine-covered edge of an old wall or a rock-strewn crater that ages ago was a city square. Soon they heard distant voices murmur, then shouts, singing and talk.

Luz shivered. "They sound like the ghosts that stand on street-corners waiting for little kids to come out to grab them and steal their bodies."

Paula laughed. "I didn't know they believed that stuff in the Outland."

"The Pravelany believe it. My mom told me about it. They're people who died in unholy places so they can't get reborn. They lure innocent girls into reciting the Mandala backwards, and when the last syllable comes out, the ghost comes into the girl's head and stays there forever."

Paula said, "I bet this was one of the cities the Eyimalians destroyed when they took over. Nine hundred years--look, the soil here is still sandy. The Ketries were in charge of planning the conquest. They used the cheapest wufers on the market, the kind of things the transport companies use to vape asteroids in the vac."

Luz continued to talk about the dead. "If you die in a good place, with good signs and your family around, you're reborn as one of your relatives. If you don't, you aren't and you have to fend for yourself. It keeps people at home. It keeps things in the family, too. Don't you think it's irrational--people can't always pick the place they're going to die in. We used to argue with the Pravelany Mission School students about it. Suppose you're killed trying to rescue somebody in the desert--suppose you die before you can scratch a good sign in the sand."

Forms were moving in the shadows around them. Paula stopped, and noticed that her hands were shaking. She controlled them. A dozen or so people came forward, all talking fast, asking questions of Tiyar.

They entered a large open space decorated by a broken wall, now covered with people sitting on and leaning against it, and what might have been a fallen pilllar. About a hundred people milled about, drank and danced and made noise with some sort of rattles. Children ran back and forth with vine garlands and torches that occasionally set the flowers alight and caused a little flurry of shouting and stomping out embers. Sometimes the low-lying rainclouds parted to reveal the thin upper layer through which they could see a few stars. Then the crowd would hush and hands fly up, fingers pointing. The moons were so close together now that they made only one bright gleam on the undersurface.

Tiyar translated people's questions and his answers as rapidly as he could. "How tall are you? I reply: You see me. Where do you come from? I reply: Merced. Are you gods? No. Giants? You see me. What is your name? You are dressed like a god. No, these are--Are you...? I don't understand...Are you with Father? I ask who is that...I don't understand...someone will tell him--" He indicated a slight weathered-looking woman with a baby on one arm, a bowlegged boy at her side and a smaller one holding her leg. "This lady is Klyne, a follower of the same priest who is to perform tonight's ceremony. She offers to convey our greetings to him."

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jump to: AKIVA
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Klyne departed and returned with a fourth child, a sturdy boy about three years old with red hair that left a streak of mud on her face when he pressed his head to her shoulder.

"This is the priest's son," Tiyar said.

The little boy looked at them with a shrewd child's expression, almost pokerface exept that his eyes darted from one person to another and his delicate brows drew somewhat closer together when he looked at Paula. Clark liked him. The boy permitted himself to smile when he perceived it.

Klyne spoke, and Tiyar translated automatically, "She directs him to say something nice."

The boy uttered one word in a firm high voice. Tiyar's hands, which he had held clasped before him, fluttered to his sides and began tapping against his legs. He spoke rapidly to the child, but got no answer. One hand flew back to grasp Fuego's arm. "Help me out, old man. I think this boy speaks the family tongue common to the Viyato and Ketry clans."

"What did he say?"

"Hello."

"How can you tell what he speaks from one word?" Luz asked.

Fuego signalled her by a touch to be quiet. "Ask him his name."

Tiyar spoke.

"Neshar," the boy replied.

"Well?" Fuego demanded.

Tiyar shook his head in surprise. "He says: Ghost."

Fuego laughed. Paula activated her receiver. Clark looked over her shoulder while she scanned again for signal activity. Both started when a series of numbers and a rough location diagram appeared on the tiny screen. "It's a little outside the crowd, over there," Paula said.

Too frightened to speak, Clark nodded. He grabbed Luz's elbow and pointed to the screen.

"--they came here to see strange things, and we're strange, all right. We fit everyone's expectations," Fuego was saying. He looked down at Paula, then at the screen. "Oh. What should we do?"

Paula was fishing in her pockets. "I'm going to find the transmitter and rig a propellant to it...how far are we from the ocean? Maybe I can make it land in the water...use the bio."

"I've already calculated the distance--" Clark began, holding out the hormone-sensing scanner. Paula nodded and took it from him. "What about the people here? Are they in danger?"

Fuego said, "Ti, let's talk to the priest. He can have the party someplace else, if there's time."

Everyone looked at the bright spot in the clouds.

"I believe there is something called the moontouch portent..." Tiyar mused.

"No, don't ask him to move the party," Paula directed. "The sig is just for rough location, probably for homing from one of the moons. When they get close, the jecs will switch to bioscan. They'll zero in on any concentration of people. You have to get them to disperse."

"OK, let's split up--" Luz began.

"Do you know what hormone the missiles will be scanning for?" Clark asked. "We might be able to synthesize something--make a decoy."

"Don't know. There are dozens of different kinds. Good idea but it's an old trick."

They separated, the Eyimalians going to look for someone in authority while Paula and Clark went to find the transmitter.

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FOLLOW THE EYIMALIANS

jump to: AKIVA HEARS OF THE STRANGERS
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After the torchlight, the night was very dark. Clark and Paula soon wandered into a newly-plowed field. Cheering in the ruin told them the moons had met.

Paula cursed. "Have you got a light?"

"But people will see it."

"I know. They'll think we're wizards and blame the attack on us. Listen, my father says rules are for people who don't have judgment. With these suits on we don't exactly blend in, anyhow."

"You keep quoting your father," Clark muttered, giving her his palmlight.

"Learn from the enemy. Marlow Maxwell, personal communication," Paula snapped. She shone the light around them. Beyond the field, trees flashed out and sank back when the ray passed. "Too far to walk around it," she observed.

"How much time do you think we have?" Clark asked as they struggled on, covering themselves with mud in their haste.

"I don't know. Generally, you don't want to be sending for too long ahead of time because people like us might detect it. One trick is to put a lot of them around and just leave them, for decades if necessary, and then activate them at the last minute. They're trying to keep out of sight here, though, so they're probably using the really cheap kind that only last a few weeks. We used to use them in demolab, on field trips. They're hand-activated and they transmit for about a day before the signal starts drifting."

Clark understood by this monologue that Paula did not want to argue. He said, "Isn't it dangerous to have a bunch of students using those things?"

"No, they were rigged up with lights and beepers so you could find them right away."

When at last they had traced the signal to its source, they found tethered in a thicket at the field's edge a small beast of burden. The animal looked so doleful that he almost fancied it knew.

"There it is. They must have fed it to him," Paula said.

"I guess so. Kill him?" Clark rested his hand between its ears. Paula nodded.

Clark had a Puro and a light knife. Since the Puro would leave a shell in the victim, while the light knife made a cut indistinguishable from a blade's, he decided to use the knife. Both weapons were in his hands when he was startled to hear voices behind them. The voices fell silent, and as Clark turned toward them, two women emerged from the darkness.

"Hey! What are you--whoa. Easy now," the older one said in the Intersystems Language, seeing the Puro. She was heavyset and rather tough-looking, with unevenly cut hair and a deep scar on her neck.

The younger one either did not notice the Puro or ignored it. She ran to the animal, flung herself upon it and spoke in the Outlander dialect. When Paula tried to draw her away, the woman turned and punched her square in the mouth.

"Clara!" the older called sharply just as Clark was about to shoot. The younger came meekly to her side.

"Watch them," Paula mumbled.

Clark held the Puro as confidently as he could, wondering what he would do if they tried to stop Paula. Shoot them, he assured himself, because their action endangered many lives, including his own. Suppose instead they ran away. Could he bring himself to shoot them then, even knowing they were murderers? He was uncertain. Surely if they got away they would strike again. Yet they might be unaware of what they were doing. After all, they had activated the transmitter but not yet fled.

It was true they did not seem at all murderous. The younger was sobbing about the little carrier beast, and the older one, embarassed but not wholly unmoved, whispered consolations.

She must be saying, hush, he's not going to hurt us. Because, he realized, the younger one was not crying about the animal. She was simply terrified, and suspected that after the beast was dead the next one killed would be she. A rough life had taught her the laws of violence, he concluded as surely as though he knew her. That was indeed one of the laws, that the Puro brought a sudden intimacy to their relations. Under its influence he felt kindly toward them both.

"Where should I cut?" Paula asked, taking the knife from his hand. She read the inscription: "To Clarkwell with love. Work for Harmony."

"Between the vertebra in the neck. Push its head down," he replied. He glanced at her. The two captives started forward, but he recovered and they shrank back so quickly that he thought he must have imagined it.

"Hold still, damn it," Paula was muttering. The younger woman turned her head away.

The beast of burden was never harmed. In thinking about it later, Clark found this the hardest to comprehend, that so many people died so horribly and this animal was spared.

The first explosion came not behind them, where the crowd was celebrating, but somewhere on the other side of the thicket. Either through some mechanical defect, or because the trees screened it from the more densely-packed crowd, a stray firebomb landed in a village. It demolished two homes and vaporized, leaving no trace in the ashes.

Clark nearly fainted in terror, but when he opened his eyes, his prisoners had not moved. The three stared at one another. If he tied them up, they might be caught in the fire and burned alive. If he let them go, they would tell the Ketries, or whoever had sent them, where to find the Armies of Daybreak on Paffir Eket. Killing them in cold blood was out of the question. Staying to watch them was unfeasible. Even as he weighed the alternatives, Clark was running. He forced himself to stop long enough to toss his weapon to Paula, though later he remembered that she had several, and then he fled away from the sound of the blast, toward the crowd.

Fires and explosions surrounded him when he came near the ruin. Despite the rainy weather, the underlayer of the vines and moss that covered the walls began to char. People ran in all directions. At times they fell into the smouldering vegetation and then their clothes burst into flame. One bomb landed so near Clark that his fire-resistant suit turned brown on that side and beneath it the hair on his leg was singed.

Klyne ran toward him, carrying a child in each arm. Two more ran after her. When the bomb exploded near him, she fell with no hands free and took the impact full face. Clark raised her up by the shoulders. He took the bigger of the children she carried, whom he recognized as the priest's son. They ran, the bowlegged boy leading.

A man shrieked, his clothing in flames. Clark flung himself down and smothered them, but when he got up he saw that the man was dead. The boy on Clark's back, who had been wailing, fell silent, clinging for life. A fireball landed nearby. As people burned, their smoke attracted more of the missiles and they became the centers of hideous florets, with those who had tried to help in flames all round them.

The earth roared as the blanket of vegetation ignited. Clark felt a blast of wind. Cool air rushed in from all sides to collide in the center and raise a tower of flame that shed sparks as far away as the river. He turned into the wind and ran with the others.

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jump to:AKIVA
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* * *

When the first fireballs began to come down among the assembly, Luz Ariela ran from one victim to the next, giving painkillers to those who might still be able to flee. There was not enough poison in her supply sac for even a part of the remainder, and she soon forgot them anyhow. The process became mechanical, a quick guess at the extent of the damage, a spray of anesthetic or a jolt with her nerve-blocking euphrequency generator set at its broadest range and an urgent push toward the river. She allowed herself to avoid looking in their eyes and the work became a familiar nightmare of tedious problems, screams and stinks. Burning flesh drew fire, she saw, but the seconds between were all she required to treat and drag the patient clear.

She felt invulnerable, aloof and alone. It was the best reaction; empathy would surely lead to madness. Madness-- a hand was clutching at her sleeve; she pulled free-- an outdated concept, except in law. Here, after all, triumphed madness in its most dangerous form. Best not to dwell on that. The hand grasped again. She pushed it away. Indiscriminate thinking had never gained her much. The patient was dead. She moved on.

Burns, fractures; what fragile systems we are, she thought. Beuatiful if you like, with an intricacy only half guessed at, but so easily destroyed. Life was ill-designed. Still, if you knew how, it could be patched and mended-- but really, what was the use? Firebombs were dropping thick as snow. Yet each case was a problem, view it that way, each case a problem and it would not do to leave too many unsolved. See them as problems; what could happen to her?

"It hurts!" a patient shrieked in Outlander. For an instant she thought it was her father-- she had barely glanced at the whole form-- but it was not. It was a short man in a skin coat.

"What are you doing here?" she asked.

"I've sinned!" he howled. "Fiya, shining mother-goddess, holy..."

Luz heard no more, but she looked up for the first time and saw all about her people in awful death agonies, and she knew that it was for no reason. They were suffering, these problems of hers, the lives she had thought so flimsy as hardly to be there. Suddenly with the sound of a tramendous gasp the walls and very ground burst into flame, and she saw the empty darkness coming toward her.

"Must I be alone?" she cried. No one could bear it. Then it seemed she saw the multitudes of the dead. One hand brought the poison to her mouth, the other gave the same boon to the stranger beside her. The sudden tower of flame parted the clouds. Hot gusts drew her up into the vaccuum. She ran to join the others.

* * *

Akiva sat on a crumbled wall and watched the people gather. The last conjunction of the moons had brought him Berthe. His followers were convinced that this one was fraught with meaning to them, even to Akiva alone, and it was difficult to conceal how desperately he hoped so. Beside him, an old man called Manitey passed the time by complaining. "It's the shinbones...I don't mind the joints, they've always been bad, but the bones ache now...if I could eat I wouldn't mind..."

"What is this place?" Akiva asked him.

"Can't say...it was a city. Everything was made of stone. Houses, churches, streets, all stone. Belltowers. Ironworks and weavers and carpenters--like wizards. They worked magic on things. They made the metal and the cloth and the wood obey them. In those days a carpenter could build a house that floated right on the water, and a weaver could make clothes that worked like a human being even when there was nobody inside. Made nets that caught fish with their hands--"

"Ayekar."

"What?"

"I didn't say anything," Akiva replied quickly.

"Yes, you did. Don't get rattled now, you said Ayekar. You did. I heard it," Manitey insisted.

"Yes, I did." These unlooked-for comments that he could never remember making frightened him. Such a one had set him on the road to the capital with a stone in his pack and a wound on his thigh.

At that time, his followers had revelled in the notion of calling down fire from heaven. They had grown so arrogant that instead of begging at villages along the way, they exacted tribute. They thought him a magician and those near him invulnerable. One day he had asked them to pass before him in groups of five so he might bless them, and they had gone in order of strength, with the young men and women first and the elders and children in the rear. He made each one of them kiss the feet of everyone behind, though it took all of a rainy afternoon in a desolate stretch between villages. Manitey had been the last in line. He accepted the adulation Akiva forced on him so gracefully that kissing his feet seemed rather to enoble the others than to debase them. But even the old man's admirers called Akiva the priest of fire, the hand of Shis or fate, and they gloated over the destruction he would bring. They said he would burn the world clean, and though he knew it was bravado he feared the path his Verloringers might take if he brought them to the capital in a mood of vengance. He must find some way to retract his threats against the parish of Itscriye.

"Ayekar," Manitey was saying. "Fatayad touched--he tapped the ground and the crop sprang up! Leaves that touched the sun. Streets draped with cloths and banners. The homes the gods live in are warm and beautiful as the cliffs of the Middle Range in summer. When they come to Hath's banquet, each one of them has fifty children trail behind with presents. Jewelry as bright as drops of water, bowls of food as deep as the children are tall, rugs and blankets as soft as...as--"

"Soft as the earth in the evergreen forests and warm as old straw," Akiva finished for him. He sat up. The trembling in his legs ceased. The moons were closing rapidly. "We have all that, food plentiful as air, gems of earth and gems of sky-- we are mantled in glory even as Fea, because we were born to earth-- do you hear? We are in the city of Ayekar now, but our minds are too distracted to perceive it."

"This?" People were looking around at the ruins. They had mistaken his meaning, and thought this city was literally Ayekar. Akiva decided to let them wonder so that, when they eventually understood, the idea would be clearer than his stumbling oratory could make it.

Manitey began to plait Akiva's hair. There were no bells and few flowers, but the children had made strings of rattling seedpods to drape along his arms and villagers brought herbal wreaths that rustled at his waist. The old man knotted a dried ugewa flower at the end of each braid. There were brittle ugewa blooms everywhere. Celebrants brought him handfuls of them, and he had entrusted Neshar with a sack to keep them, but each time the boy opened it to put more in, others blew out and were snatched up by older children.

"Akiva, look!" Neshar called.

Akiva looked where the boy was looking. A strange new party was studying the celebrants.

Their size alone would have marked them as foreign, and their clothes were white and fine as hoarfroast, white and fine as the storied raiment of the Golden People. Some of them were twice as big as any peasant. A few of ordinary height were among them, but these looked even stranger in the same radiant garb.

"What do you think?" Manitey asked.

Akiva shook his head. He looked around, trying to decide who might go and greet them.

Klyne stood at his elbow, holding her baby in one arm and middle son in the other. The eldest sat behind her, chafing his swollen knees. He was so bowlegged that at times she carried him and let the toddler hold the infant. Klyne dropped her gaze when Akiva looked at her.

"Will you ask the giants where they come from?" Akiva asked.

She did not respond except to look up at him for an instant. Her wild glances, sunken cheeks and protruding upper teeth always made him think of a trapped animal. So far as he knew, she had no other name than Klyne, meaning little one, which her brother had called her when he gave her to Akiva. Her two sisters had bowed their heads and let her be taken without farewell.

"Do you see them? Go and speak to them," Akiva said.

She went, the boy limping after her. In a few minutes she returned. Avoiding Akiva, she picked up Neshar and carried the boy off toward the strangers, entrusting her own sons to their brother. Akiva watched her brush a clump of mud from his child's face and laugh in a voiceless grunt at something he said. Her two older boys, watching her, grinned. They doted on Neshar although their mother favored him above her sons. Artless and natural though it seemed, their fawning saddened Akiva. It was a reproach that she responded to kindness from him like a stone to warm weather, and yet basked so gratefully in the least smile from Neshar.

Manitey was talking about the battle for Ayekar. "Trees burned. Fields burned. Clothes on the people's bodies and hair on the children's heads burned. Rani--Rani took Fatayad's staff that he used to touch thr ground so the plants would spring out--"

"Why'd he take it?" a boy asked.

"Why?" Manitey shrugged.

"He took it for us, his children," Akiva interjected. "Rani is our human father, don';t you know that?"

The boy rattled off the answer like a preacher. "Fatayad and earth got Rani, Rani was the first of men."

"Human fathers forget the divine laws for their children's sake." Akiva shut his eyes. Rani was also he who gripped the wrists of Shis, the hands of fate, demanding prophecy, and Shis, seeing the human future in Rani's eyes, could not look away. "Man, you sleep, but you will waken!" So it would be.

"It was a sign," Manitey went on more quietly. "When Rani used the staff it sprouted fire, and the dragon beasts came out of hell. They took away Verloring who dwells in the heart. The leaves and the standing trees and the roots in the ground all burned. They say the Lir ran red. All around was burning fire!" He jumped at the boy, who laughed. "That's what happens when you steal," he concluded.

Akiva glanced at him with one eye. Was that all the moral he drew from Verloring's loss and the exile of humanity from Ayekar?

Klyne returned. She set Neshar on the ground and nudged him a little away from her so that she stood alone, but she continued to look at him.

"Who are they?" Akiva asked.

"Priests."

"Where do they come from?"

"Fishermen pulled them from the Lir."

Everyone within earshot stiffened. Ghosts lived at the bottom of the Lir.

"Did they tell you they came from the Lir, or Lir Temple?" Akiva persisted.

"I asked them..." She turned her face away and plucked at the ends of her sleeves as though she might creep inside her shirt like a turtle.

"They answered?"

"Mur--mur'a--mura set."

The people around her were laughing, glad something relieved the tension.

"Quiet!" Akiva commanded. "What are you all afraid of? I have told you again and again, our lives are full of portent. Theological things happen everywhere. Why should we quail at ghosts, even from the days of Ayekar?"

The mention of Ayekar, usually comforting, now terrified them. Parents gathered children close. Everyone moved away from the walls as though the vines might reach out and snatch them.

Still working on Akiva's hair, Manitey said, "It's because you said this was Ayekar." He turned to Klyne. "Were they angry?"

She shook her head.

"Have they come to celebrate the moontouch?" Akiva asked.

She glanced at him almost coolly. "They come to hear you."

Akiva dropped down to the wall and signed them to leave him. The drumming had begun. There was no time to go to the river, so he went out from the city into a field that was not yet plowed and sat down. He imagined the Lir as it must be now, the water's surface calm, the rounded tops of the shallow waves gleaming in what moonlight reached them through the clouds. Ghosts might be rising from it even now. The ghosts--even he thought of them thus. Could that be the moontouch portant? He looked back at the city he had inadvertently made them believe was Ayekar, and wondered if it might be true. The real truths did not come written in the sky with lightning or from the mouths of seven-footed cats in winged chariots, but during those moments of unseeking contemplation he considered the highest form of prayer.

The strangers were probably not ghosts. Peasants, and many priests, thought people sank in water so anyone found in the Lir must be dead, but he, who had done it, knew the human body would float if not weighted down. People believed otherwise because the body was so often weighted down-- in any case, he was leery of signs and omens. In some provinces all the women tried to conceive on the moontouch night because those children would be stronger and wiser but in others they slept on the floor because children conceived then would go mad. Who could say what the moontouch signified?

Then there was Neshar. The sign showed black as devilspawn's whenever they came out of the mountains and stayed in a town, but he knew the boy had no more evil in him than any other three-year-old-- surely no more in the towns than in the mountains. It was rather the corruption of the towns that burned him, and so Akiva had decided the so-called devilspawn were really more pure. Yet everywhere people reviled them.

The world had fallen into a state that left the true and false interpretations of signs in confusion. Better to ignore them and wait for those unguarded moments when the gods spoke through his mouth.

It would be vanity to think the gods had drawn ghosts out of the Lir for him, making them rise up from their sleep on the bottom, their bodies distorted as the waves twisted light, their eyes glassy. They would look like corpses drifting to the surface. Coughing water and blood as though drowned, like the old priest Shurat, they would stumble up the riverbank to seek him --he raised his hands to his face. There was blood on his palms. Dark rings encircled the fingrnails and flashed in the distant torchlight when he turned his hands. The image of floating bodies in the Lir would not leave his mind.

He studied the ruins. Why had he called this place Ayekar? He began to circle around them. Ayekar was not a place. Shurat had said it. That is our exile, he thought. To remain in paradise, unable to see it. Shurat had told him that, had been telling it at the temple on the last day he spoke. There must have been demons there. The old man had looked into some pair of eyes, seen hell and lost his mind. Some hand had pulled him down-- he had said Ayekar was no city. It was the world

Heavy underclouds parted before the moons. In the sudden light Akiva saw bats circling over a plowed field. Voices cheered behind him. He stripped off his costume and flung himself into the mud, thrilled at its icy touch. The earth embraced him roughly, and the stones left bruises, but his body warmed the mud until it yeilded to him and instead of robbing his strength redoubled it.

He saw torches coming from the city. Torches-- they sought him. So it had been with Shurat. This time he would not flee. This time there would be no panicked chase, no hiding under water. Yet he was running toward the Lir and the mud flew in droplets from his naked body.

They pursued him. A man held out his robe. He could neither stop nor speak to them. In the orange firelight they looked as soft as chicks. He slowed his pace so they could follow. In the ruins, the peasants were dancing to the moons themselves, forgetting him.

They were halfway to the Lir when the music and shouting ceased. Claps of thunder sounded, loud as Hath's footsteps. Flame started up over the walls, and in a few minutes the walls were glowing beneath the new vines as though the stones had been heated red. Some people had the presence of mind to flee, others remained where they were. Manitey ran straight to the river, and many followed him. Mothers dragged children by their wrists or left them. Neshar was nowhere to be seen.

Akiva ran back toward the ruins. The ground burned his feet. Already people were running out of the flame-pit that had been the festival ground, their hair and clothes on fire. Someone shouted his name and Verloringers, naked as he, clustered around him. He pointed toward the Lir. They took to their heels. A bolt of flame knocked him down as he tried to run in the mud and rubble, and he fell into a mat of vines. The dead ones underneath were smoldering. He shuddered and rolled off them.

As he got to his feet he saw Neshar floating above the smoke on what at first looked like a cloud. The boy's face was expressionless, his little stock of emotions overwhelmed. He began to float away. Rising, Akiva saw that the boy sat not on a cloud but on the shoulders of a white-garbed ghost.

"Neshar!" Akiva called. The dusty air lashed his burns as he ran.

Neshar shrieked, "Akiva!"

The ruin exploded, flinging stones as far as the Lir, and every individual wisp of flame poured its strength into the fiery column that rose from the center of the festival ground as the dead generations of vines and twigs and their shroud of dust ignited. The ghost ran.

Akiva ran also. When he stumbled, Neshar screamed, "Akiva!" The one who carried him paused. In the brilliant light Akiva saw the white-clad figure's face and read there such grief that he knew everyone had been mistaken. This is neither a ghost nor a demigod, he thought. It is a living man.

Both staggered, and had they not clasped hands both would have fallen. They stared at one another. Thus did Rani meet Zatoye and learn what we are, Akiva thought.

They guided one another through the unplowed field by the garish light of the fires, running with hands sometimes joined and sometimes free. When they came to the riverbank, Akiva tripped and fell headlong into the water. He saw the boy float away a little distance, then drift safely to earth as he was put down. Hands grasped Akiva and dragged him from the Lir.

Chapter 10

Go forward to: THE PRISONERS

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