CHAPTER 10

~*~ They covered themselves with mud to guard against burns and the flies already gathering, and began to dig. Akiva worked beside the giant strangers. When he found the tall woman's body, he touched one of them on the shoulder. In this way he chanced to see what those who did not know him were to call the only tear Tiyar Kituman ever shed.

Inside one of the underground chambers, a grey-eyed boy kicked Akiva's hand so hard it turned crimson, but he felt nothing. "Don't be afraid," he said, moving back toward the earthen wall.

"We're dead," the boy told him.

"No. You are alive."

"How do you know?"

Akiva leaned back. The earth was hot. "There is no death but to forget Ayekar," he breathed. Aloud, he said, "I know because no one feels pain after death. Now come out."

The boy sat down and pulled his legs up to his chest. His eyes narrowed. "Leave me alone. Everybody's dead."

Akiva left him there.

He carried the wounded children to the unplowed field where a woman ghost had everyone set them in rows. She washed them and covered the dead while a peasant witch and the blond-haired one crept slowly along the rows, treating the uncovered ones with alien medicines. Those dead too big to carry were the charge of his own followers, who dragged them down to the Lir, while those alive were brought to the medicine ground by the biggest of the ghosts and some local men with stretchers.

Those who seemed about to die were left to Akiva. Most lay below ground in the caverns discovered by the blaze. Strips of red cloth tied to rocks and vines marked their presence for him. He picked his way from one to the next, preparing arguments in his mind to encourage them.

Few rebuked fate or the gods, though. It might have been that they did not recognize him. They said their wounds hurt, told him secrets and charged him with messages to friends and family, so many that he had already begun to forget them when he climbed out of one hole to look for the next.

Many spoke of love. One, whose eyes were sealed shut, recalled, "She was forty years old when I met her. She was taking her daughters to be married. She smiled at me--the smile of Fea Listening. I never knew her name."

Another said, "With Father Akiva you find kindness, wisdom and religion. Outside is superstition, ignorance and cruelty. He came to the village with the little boy on his shoulders. I told my grown son, here is the lost Verloring with little Fey. He is truly homeless...he dwells in the heart."

Some still believed they were in the holy city. A youngster whose leg had been torn off sighed, "I knew he would lead us to Ayekar, but not like this."

An old woman burned deeply on one side shrieked at the blond-haired stranger, "It's a lie!"

The herbalist knelt beside her, whispering, "Yes, it was a lie."

The old woman rolled her eyes and went on talking in a hollow voice, now high and now deep as though a variety of spirits were calling from inside her. "It's a lie. There were no sparrows. It was our triumph. A woman god bore Fey with the help of women. It was our mothers birthed the laughing god. Sparrows! They lie."

The herbalist cradled the woman's shoulders. Akiva thought she was finished and stretched out his hand to bless her despite her minor heresies, but the old one started up and gave him a fierce look. "Hell-gods rule creation!" she gasped. "We--only we--we only--" She fainted.

The herbalist murmured, "We knew Ayekar in the generations of light. Only we remember. False priests will never free the gods, it must be we only."

Akiva walked away. She must know what she said when she denied the sparrows. They were divine grace, the emissaries of Hath to Fea's childbed. To hear the old woman, feeling the touch of hell on her own body, attest that its gods ruled creation, made him sick.

It was evening. Akiva shuddered as a cool breeze ruffled his tunic. He went to the campfire to put fresh salve over the burns on his chest. Everyone there was silent. Some wept. Neshar came to lie in Akiva's lap. He was covered with grass, dirt and blood.

"Am I bad?" he asked.

Akiva held him close, despite the burns, and kissed him. "No."

"Everybody is hurting," Neshar whispered.

"Yes."

"Are you hurting, Akiva?"

"Yes." He caressed the boy's hair, crumbling the dirt out of the strands. Orange, he thought. Yellow and orange, not only in the firelight, but also by day. Tears spattered Neshar's cheeks.

Manitey sat down beside them, groaning. "Do you know what's happened?" he asked.

"Hell-gods--" Akiva shut his mouth. The flames leapt. A mass of insects seemed to be creeping over his body, but when he looked down, there were none. He jumped to his feet, too quickly, and fell in a rush of sparks.

He heard a rustling noise. A black cloud was floating toward him. It was a crowd of bats flying up from the caverns. They came and came, blackening the night, more than he had thought existed. The rush of their wings made a wind that carried the smell of burnt flesh and ashes with them. Then he saw in his vision what had driven them out. Water rose around his ankles to his knees and hips.

The woman herbalist's face appeared between the bats' wings and disappeared as the water closed over his head. The stars wavered and ran together. The bats dived like fish. They surrounded him.

A pair of hands emerged from among the winged fish. It was Shis, the hand of fate. Akiva grasped them and they jerked back, but he had caught the wrists and he held fast.

"Tell me!" he insisted. He pulled the hands close, seeking the god's head. Eyes came near. Looking into them, he saw fire. "Tell me!" he shouted. "And--tell me why." He wanted to look at the god's face, but the eyes held his gaze.

The winged fish gripped him and raised him out of the water, above the forest. He looked down on treetops now dancing and now still, leaves black or moonlit where they turned their undersides. The Lir ran smoothly to the ocean from its origin beneath the Weeping Moon. As Akiva watched, the teardrops turned to fire and the Lir began to burn.

Earth shuddered. Fire overran the mountains. He covered his ears, but shrill screams assailed him. His teeth rang with them. Suddenly the fish dropped him.

His body whistled through the air. The impact of landing seemed to break his spine. The stone he had brought from Itscriye landed an arm's length from himself. It had been eaten away by worms.

Tiyar sat at his head, Manitey at his feet. Someone had taken Neshar to bed.

"The Itscriye stone," he whispered.

"Father Akiva--" Tiyar began.

"He says we ought to get away," Manitey put in.

"There will be more fire," Tiyar went on.

"Winged demons," Akiva said.

"--their power is so great that they have made themselves invisible--"

"Rest now," said Manitey. "Tomorrow...will you make us spirit dolls?"

"We must raise all the people of the world against them," Tiyar declared.

"He says there'll be more fire."

Akiva shook his head. "I know. I know all that. The demons and the terrors--the wings and claws of darkness...where is the stone?"

Someone brought it. The stone was warm and damp like a clump of silage. They had left it near the fire and had to douse it when it was called for. Tiyar hefted it. "What is this?" he asked.

"Vengance." Akiva sat up. Manitey helped him stand. "The grub of evil."

"Not to avenge the past but to--" Tiyar began.

Akiva staggered. Manitey clasped his arm, the woman herbalist caught the other. Still with us, he thought. Maybe the witch would follow him. He had no precedent for forbidding her.

"You said, regain Ayekar," Manitey whispered.

"Ayekar." He sagged between them. "Let me go." He held up the stone. "This thing is too heavy for me to carry to Ayekar," he told the crowd.

Their confused whispers and mutterings reached him like a groan. "It weighs us down," he said.

By the time he had talked them to their feet, it was midnight. They all went down to the Lir and threw in tokens of old hatreds discarded and offenses forgiven. Pebbles dappled the water. Rivals embraced. Akiva saw the strangers watching, and wondered whether they longed to jump in and return home. He hurled the Itscriye stone into the dark. It struck a rock on the riverbank and broke apart to reveal a nest of crystals that glittered in the moonlight like stars.

They all fell silent. "A Feaswomb," someone whispered.

Akiva forced a wan smile. The stone would not leave them. Finally he said, "Take it back to the fire and break it into shards so every one of us may keep one in sign of our birth." Instead, they demolished it with their hands, there on the riverbank, and passed the fragments round. He watched them for a while, thinking about the omen. The possibilities depressed him. He and Neshar wandered away downstream.

Tiyar came after him to show him a piece of metal that Akiva thought at first was some kind of jewelry.

"This is a fire-caller. We found it near the city."

Akiva looked at the giant's face, but discovered no hint of what he might be thinking. Throughout their time together, Akiva never learned to relax his mind in Tiyar's presence. Instead of fear and pity or admiration, the giant inspired only dislike.

"Is it calling fire now?" he asked.

"Yes, but...they have already answered it, so no one is listening. Still, it can lead us to them, to the enemies who put it among us--"

Akiva pointed to the river. "Throw it in. There are always enemies."

Tiyar smiled, revealing the edges of his teeth. It would be a charming smile, had Akiva liked him. He must think I'm afraid, Akiva thought.

"No, we must find them," Tiyar cajoled.

Akiva looked past him. Another of the strangers, an enormous man, gazed sadly back. "It calls them?"

"Yes. They will come here, to prevent anyone else from finding this thing, and to be sure you are dead."

"Then..." Akiva turned again toward the river. Near as they were now to the sea, he felt close to the weeping moon. Clustered flowers dropped from the da'sheth trees down to the water, black against the moonlight, to make little rings on landing. So had the uko done in springtime beside his house, long ago.

Tiyar said, "We can use this to direct them and trap them safely. Wouldn't you like to ask them why they sent the fire?"

"They don't know."

The sad one interrupted in another language, and it happened while they were talking. A group of shadows dissociated themselves from the night behind them and a voice commanded, "Halt."

"Who are you?" Akiva sked.

"Quiet. I can kill you from here."

A tuft of grass right at Akiva's feet burst into flame to prove those words. Neshar gripped Akiva's leg tight but made no sound. By the fire's light Akiva saw a tall man, balding, with a sharp nose and chin each tipped by a drop of sweat despite the chill river breeze. The man looked at the horizon as he spoke. "Listen to me. I warn you. Those two giants are evil. They brought the fire." The flame went out.

"You are lying. You need never lie. The gods know everything," Akiva said.

"All right, I brought the fire," the man said. He lunged suddenly to grab Neshar's ankle and pluck him away.

Akiva's throat went dry. He had erred, either because he was distracted by Tiyar or because of his own foolishness. And what was his prejudice against Tiyar but presumption? "Hath," he gasped.

"I'm going to drop him down the bank. Think he'll die? I can kill one at a time. Not everyone can do that. It's easy to kill a hundred people--right, Kituman?"

Akiva dropped to his knees.

"Down," Neshar said.

The stranger went on talking in a different language. Tiyar whispered, "He says: If you kill one at a time you're a nuisance and they get rid of you. If you kill by the dozens they call you a maniac, they laugh. If you kill by the hundreds of thousands they make you a king, by the millions, a god. You're going to do it the hard way now, Kituman. One. You're making me talk and my hand will get tired--'"

A woman's voice interrupted.

"She says she is hungry. He bids her be silent."

"Hath, god of fathers--" Akiva began.

"Shut up," the sweating man said. Others spoke.

"They argue. He abuses them. They would kiss the ass of a cockroach rather than step on it. Do they not remember the ones who laughed as they crawled in the mud...pelted them with rotten fruit from their storerooms...did they not say they would avenge...do they think that even taking Tiyar Kituman and Fuego Ariela will redeem them in the sight of their keepers...there can be no going back...she asks whether he can smell the cookfire. He bids her shut up. She says...fish soup and flatbread."

Someone attacked. The man who held Neshar leapt in the air, back arched, and fell. Akiva drew his knife, but before he could select an opponent Tiyar had knocked down all the rest. His friends were binding the fallen ones' wrists. Ignoring the dead man, they trooped off with the captives almost before Akiva could see in the shadows who the rescuers were. The blond-haired one remained behind. "My name is Clark," he said.

Neshar lay curled up near the dead man.

"You're safe now," Akiva told him.

The boy kept still. "Are they coming?"

"Who?"

"People."

"No."

"I hear them coming. There's a--a nation. They're coming to get him."

"Maybe that's the dead, coming to get their own."

"Akiva! Maybe they'll take us away too."

"Why? We're not dead."

"But they'll think we are!" the boy wailed. His teeth gleamed in the moonlight. Calm yourself, Akiva thought, and Neshar did calm himself, as though for the moment they were thinking together. Neshar pointed to the corpse. "Is that him?"

Him? It was him, the reasonless other of childhood. Akiva said, "What do you mean?" although he knew.

"Was he holding me?"

Akiva squatted by the head. He pricked the skin with his knife.

Clark said, "At home, they take the...unwanted dead for study. And if anyone fears the dead, he writes his name. As you are. To hide the fear."

Akiva sheathed his knife. He remembered Shurat lying on a riverbank and the frightened looks of his pursuers.

"Akiva, when he was holding me like this--" Neshar raised one foot in the air and leaned sideways. "How did I get there?"

"He took you from me."

Neshar turned away. "Did he want a boy?"

"No, I didn't give you to him. He took you by force."

Neshar began shivering.

"Are you cold?"

"Nn-n-n"

Akiva knelt. He put his hands on Neshar's face. The eyes did not blink. "Are you cold? Look at me. You weren't afraid then. Don't be afraid now. Look, he's dead. He's dead! Look at me!" His hands were shaking. Neshar's teeth rattled in his grip. He began again, whispering, "I dwell ever in the heart of earth--remember? There is no beauty so perfect nor love so constant as my soul's immortal mother--your mother is here and I am here, so no one is going to hurt you."

Neshar stared ahead.

Akiva heard a noise from the dead man. He whirled around. Clark slit the body's gown, cut a piece from the skirt and draped it over the boy's shoulders. An ordinary tear slid along Neshar's eyelashes to his cheek. Akiva kissed the tear. In a few minutes the boy was asleep, still weeping.

When they passed the ruins, where carrion birds still circled in the early light and a foul mist was beginning to rise out of the cellars, Akiva left Neshar at the margin. He walked along a heap of rubble to the center until he could barely see the two standing figures through the fog.

"Come out!" he called.

The grey-eyed boy who had kicked him earlier came out and followed them back to the camp without speaking. Once there, he let no one but Akiva come near him until the end of his life, a few weeks later.

Go to: NEXT BATTLE

Go to: THE PRISONERS

Go to: NESHAR'S MOTHER

Chapter 11

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