CHAPTER 12

His back to her, Pahid unfurled a scroll. Was that blood on his fingernails? She would swoon. She would fall at his feet and he, only mildly annoyed, would kill her at once. She would gut herself now with those fire tongs in the corner and die on the instant, before him, luckier than Hex. She would vomit. He would whirl, enraged, and she would rise to kill him, but he was too strong; she would shrivel in his gaze. Hex, carded and burned, had gone taut as a wet rope, soft eyes all mad. She fought against sobbing.

"Don't be afraid," Pahid said in the church language, still with his back to her. She nodded anyway, in case he might somehow know and it please him. Muscles jerked tight in front and back, all down the spine and sternum to her waist.

The scroll snapped shut. She jumped, and landed sharply on the stones. One jabbed her kneecap. "What is your name," Pahid said tonelessly.

"Berthe."

"And your goddess."

"Earth."

He turned around. His stare was sharp as though he took aim, right now, at her heart. "So you do speak the temple language. Where were you born?"

"Nichayu."

His face was sharp, too, his nose like a beak, eyes small and bright like the eyes of a bird of prey. A few white hairs still clung to the sides of his head, but its bare top shone in the torchlight like an oiled blade.

"Who taught you?!" he roared, advancing.

She jumped to her feet. Cast your darkness on me, Hath, she prayed. His gaze rends the night.

"Who? Tell me who taught you!" The roar echoed a dozen times, echoed a hundred times until every stone was shouting at her, but he drove the echoes back with a flicker of a look, and she heard among them that he was really speaking quietly.

"Shurat. People's priest --Nichayu," she stammered.

He continued to stare, but his tone became introspective. "Nichayu. That's one of the new ones--north fringe, eh? Shurat, the heretic. How did he teach you?"

"He told us stories. He...preached." Was it day or night? She longed to glance out the window.

Suddenly he pulled up her gown to her knees, then dropped it. She almost screamed. He pushed back her sleeve and pulled her wrist toward him.

"Your knees are cleaner than your elbows," he said. He knew her for a witch, that easily. It was a luxury of insight; he could as easily have found out the black urine itself.

Berthe staggered backward, unable to see or hear. Surely now her body would be cast into the deepest pit and her soul to the realms of torment. How she would have loved, now, only to spin, only to haul, only to plow to mortal exhaustion, to stand in merely frozen mud of a spring field, to suffer only cold and hunger, to fear only illness and tempest and drought.

Light returned. She heard a laugh. It was him. He laughed, his eyes tiny and gay, the lines under them curved into smiles. She might have danced like a leaf in the wind.

"All right. I don't care." He turned his back again to look out the window. It was day. "Berthe, have people told you I speak with gods?"

"Yes."

He spoke slowly. "Do you know what they have threatened to do to this province? First, gales and floods will lead their way. Spring hail will strip the stalks. The rain will wash down trees from the mountains and drown the people in mud. Hills will crumble into valleys. The earth will split open and people will be hurled into the crevices and swallowed. Beneath the soil lies a cauldron, Berthe, and those who have followed your example will be hurled into it."

Berthe covered her face. She imagined Meta's daughter, outstretched hands above the mud, drowning. "But why-- will they do these things?"

"Once I asked them why. A horde of orange ants came crawling over my skin to eat my vitals. I no longer ask why."

Berthe looked down involuntarily, but nothing moved toward her.

"These trees, these fields, these people; all destroyed," he went on, his voice soft. "Berthe, have you heard of Itscriye Province?"

"The revolt."

"There was no rain in Itscriye for a year. We chanted day and night. The skulls of four hundred rebels were carried from Itscrid Genshiye to the capital and laid at Hath's altar. Fea appeared to me and she said, bring wheat. I said, there is no wheat in Itscriye. She said, go to the temple of Miyosar Vena, which is to the south of Itscriye, and bring from that province a double tax in ugewa and wheat and corn and wrought metal, things like that. We laid the province of Miyosardia bare to redeem its neighbor. Then the goddess appeared to me and said, in six weeks it will rain in Itscriye. Six weeks. We sent messengers with the news, and the people killed them and took the blood from their bodies and poured it on the fields. It did rain. It rained day and night until the hills and the houses were under water. Even that was not the worst. Diseases came. I stood for days in the headwaters of the Lir, neither eating nor drinking, to receive a vision of Fatayad the sower. I begged him to tell me how we might appease his anger. He said, do not presume to say we are angry. Were it not for our constant intercession, all the world would be always like Itscriye and there would be no soil."

"Earth is my goddess," Berthe said, more from habit than daring.

Still looking out the window, he replied, "You cannot have only one goddess, Berthe. You upset the justice of Ayekar. You earth-women bring calamity on the very land you hold sacred. Do you understand?"

"Calamity?" He was using familiar words, but she could barely grasp their meaning.

"Yes. They said, we will wreak such havoc in the mountain province that the people will flee from there to Itscriye. They are beside themselves with anger, Berthe. This province has so grossly insulted them--there are bastard shrines here. I would have blessed them all and made them holy, but when my priests went out into the country to collect the images and bring them to the temple to receive the sacred cord, women took those images and hid them. Why did you do that? Other towns, having given up the images, would not pay the tax to recover them, but abandoned them and made new ones. Do you see what has happened? Rebellion. You have rebelled. When my priests came to the shrine at your village, you yourself drove them away with a club as heavy as a man."

He was going to kill her. Was it true that he could command the dead, that, like the spring that calls Seed, he would make her rise from underground to follow him? Hex had said Pahid wandered the chambers of the world below, calling ghosts to march.

"I am the gods' last clemency to a place that merits destruction, Berthe. They would have leveled the mountains. I have burnt a few villages. They commanded me: go, and choke the rebellion in blood. I said, let me take one earth's-woman only, and I will quench the rebellion with fear. That woman died for you. Her suffering has won us time to save ourselves, and we will do it, though at a terrible price." He glanced over his shoulder at her. "After all, we can expect no more. In this province, sick people no longer come to priests but seek out women who give them roots containing the blood of demons slain in the battle for Ayekar. Forty generations of farmers have labored to purify the earth of that blood, and still they feed it to the sick." He rested his head in his hands, leaning slightly out the window.

He went on, "They are bad women. But I think some can be led to the good. I have come to lead them. If I fail--" He sighed, a long sigh like winter wind; Berthe felt a tear escape her. "Berthe, will you help me save these mountains and this people?"

"Oh, yes!"

"When I tell you the price, you may falter."

"No."

He turned to her. He was smiling. The sun shone upon him. Loose fibers in his woolen gown caught the light and held it about his shoulders. "Good. And, do not be afraid. The gods are with us."

He kept her at the city, in a windowless room whose door was barred each night, and he taught her to read. Days were spent studying in the archive and learning to use a spear from horseback in the fields outside the city wall. Pahid's two sons learned with her, they galloping wild through cropland in pursuit of cattle, farmers or Pahid's own footmen while Berthe kept to the woods where her sturdy mare, who usually pulled wagons, meandered grazing as Berthe recited the lessons she had learned that morning.

Pahid reminded her daily of her vow, but he would not yet tell her the price. She had no illusions that it was anything but her death, and to prepare for that she wrote out alphabets on scrolls of bark, with little drawings to remember the sounds by, so others could learn after her. In her musty corner of the archive, surrounded by yellow wads of tax accounts, she sat crosslegged in warm straw and thought of death and drew butterflies and flowers. If she lived until spring she would make an alphabet with flower petals. She selected from the bag in which she collected them twenty seeds whose names began with sounds like the twenty letters and pressed them into clay to make a bracelet that was also a teaching device, with the seeds outside and the letters next to the skin. When Pahid saw it, he looked at her strangely and threw it on the floor, but only shrugged to see it roll instead of breaking.

The history of the world was recorded on four long scrolls that were kept in the archive and recopied every other generation. In addition, there were tax records for centuries, telling how much each family had paid and who had gone away in a Division. The very first Division was recorded there, on a scroll that contained the words of the call given by Hath at the Lir Temple to the head priest five lifetimes before Pahid.

The history of the world was exceedingly difficult. Berthe began at the beginning and read for days, struggling over each strange new word, about the establishment of cities and "trade routes" in places she had never heard of. She learned each city and memorized each route, tracing them on her hands and giving the names of the landmarks and confluences to fingertips, joints and scars. Then, on the ninth day, all was destroyed by the sentence, "But these things vanished long before the coming of mankind." She nearly wept with frustration.

Winter closed them in and freed her. When the snow was deep so she could not run away, and she had read half of one scroll, almost to the birth of Rani and the beginning of mankind, Pahid ordered the bar removed from her door. Berthe left a twig from a medicinal plant in a certain cranny of the city temple, and the next day a thin woman passing in the street showed her a leaf of the antidote and whispered, "Tonight."

Berthe went that night to a tree near the city where Hex had used to meet other women to talk and trade herbs and artifacts. The thin woman leaned there. Berthe came and sat down on a stump that had a jagged part, where the tree had started to fall, and a flat part where someone had cut it. Since the bark was stripped for fuel some winters ago, the yellow wood showed in the moonlight.

"This is your first night away from him. Does he know?" the woman asked.

"I think he does," Berthe said.

"Are you going to betray us?" Her expressionless face and small pointed chin reminded Berthe of a doll.

"No." A cloud dimmed the moon and passed by. "He is teaching me to read."

"Read! That's good. But be careful. He lies."

"No, he doesn't. Gods appear to him. He says they are angry. They may level the mountains unless we pacify them."

"Our earth? Angry?"

"You cannot have only one goddess. I have been reading...there are different medicines. So are there different gods. One plant will not cure all sickness. He may be wrong in other things, but I believe him in this."

A wolf howled.

"It will snow tomorrow," the woman said.

"Yes. I will come if I can. I know it's a long wait when the nights are cold."

"With three it's not so bad."

Berthe glanced past her. The two others were still hidden.

"Ask him what he would have us do," the woman said. She walked away. Her cloak, trailing on one side, made a wavering mark in the snow.

In the morning Berthe went to Pahid's study, a screened-off corner of the archive farthest from the fire and nearest the window, where he sat barefoot and still on a stone bench, making himself as cold as possible while he studied papers spread on a low table before him. He seemed less to sacrifice physical comfort than to detest it.

"What do you want?" he asked without looking up.

She knelt. "Last night I went to visit some women--some witches--" She was shivering. "Herbalists."

The sound of cloth moving over paper tempted her to look at him. His fingertips rested on a scroll. "Be very careful, Berthe. You must tell me everything."

Be careful. It is impossible to tell everything, Berthe thought. One of the Tales of Ayekar began: "Who can describe even the most fleeting impression? Every instant encompasses forever." She answered, "I will." Be careful. "I told them the gods were angry with us. They said, ask him what he would have us do."

His hands rose slightly and stayed in the air. "First, they must bring gifts to Hath. Then--will they do all that I ask? They must show publicly that they are won over. Make a cord, and dye it--red, for Hath's fire--make a dye that is not easily duplicated."

"I can make one that is never the same from batch to batch. It comes from heartroot," Berthe told him. The dye was called Earth Red, but she did not say so. The priest who first brought ugewa to the Lir Temple, and convinced the gods to accept it in place of grain, had not mentioned that it grew wild.

Of course, everyone knew then that ugewa grew wild, and they soon learned that a weed seems immortal only until it becomes a crop. Now fields had to be seeded with it just as with corn or rye, and weeded lest grass and briars choke it, and it died in flood or drought like everything else. So with me, she thought. Pahid must know what this dye is and that my women will accept the cord in earth's name, not his, and we may learn that a sign changes its meaning as quickly as the news passes from one to the next.

She ground armfuls of root to make the dye, and for a week she was red from her fingertips almost to the waist. After that, one of Pahid's skinny auburn-haired sons carried a bag into the temple and dropped it at her feet, saying importantly, "This is from south of the river."

Berthe opened the sack. Inside was a cloud. She put in her hand. It felt soft, like grass. Her hand remained dry. She pulled out a tuft and tossed it, but it did not rise. "What is it?" she asked.

The son was polishing Fea's prayer bell on his sleeve. He held it close to his face and squinted at it, clicking his tongue. "Cotton. It's a flower."

Seeds fell out of the flower when she spun it. She set up a borrowed wheel midway between the pillars of Hath and Fea, so she faced one showing how Fea gave up her child by the sun, Zatoye, into the care of earth. That seemed incorrect. The women must be reconciled to Fea, not celebrate earth's one triumph over her.

She would face Seed Hears Spring, and because that meant she turned toward Fea, she moved the wheel a little closer to Hath. She began to twist a leader cord. Why was Seed Hears Spring carved in this temple? Shurat had never liked that one. He said it was a childish fancy, not doctrine. Yet here it was, in a second temple. We err and are recalled everywhere, she thought. But awakening was the theme of a doctrinal scene also, of Rani Forces Shis, the hand of fate. Were there to be two awakenings? And now, looking at Rani, she saw that facing Seed meant she was closest to The Daughters of Autumn Hide the Infant Spring. That was bad; it hinted at deceit. She sought Pahid.

Pleased by her concern, he came to the temple, saying, as they left the city gates, "We must always use careful diplomacy when the gods are set against one another."

Earth and sky answered one another's white with white. Mountains lightly veiled in brown floated apart from either. Pahid explained, "The great peace that the temples superintend has been kept, since Hath slew the dragons of the evil ones to win back Ayekar, by diplomacy. The gods shield us from evil and the Lir Temple shields us from the gods. So--what is that?" He pointed a blue finger at her spinning wheel.

"Spinning wheel." Then it was tryly new, unknown in the Lir Temple. A proud impulse made her say, "I invented it."

He picked it up. "So they told me. Berthe, this device offends. Already the gods receive more cloth than they need and too little grain, but with this--do you know how much grain and ugewa was withheld here, and substituted by cloth? One third less came to the capital. They will starve if this continues." He threw the wheel out the east window. "Spun wool is not like ugewa. It is not always welcome. You should have sent this thing to the temple when you made it. Households that eat too well now will go hungry when the tax is recollected in spring."

"Spring?"

"You promised not to falter."

"In spring?"

"They demand their rightful tribute, Berthe. My brothers of the Lir, in their wisdom and terror, would have collected again this winter. Only the risk of losing all our wagons in a mountain storm dissuaded them. When the spring floods are done, we will take what was not paid in fall."

That was the price. She looked at the blue-white feet sticking out from under his robe. His chin was so cold that icicles glinted like snow in the stubble of his beard. He looked like old Winter, before whose picture he now stood. "The people will refuse," she quavered.

He did not look at her. Eyes fixed on nothing, he appreared to have turned to stone. Finally he said, "Get a distaff and spindle. Pace around the temple while you spin."

The thin woman met her in the woods by a shielded copse. Berthe could see a fire nearby and the others smoking pipes around it. Her messenger held out a basket, saying, "Look what they've sent already for the temple," but Berthe put the gifts aside.

"He's angry about the spinning wheels," she began at once. "There was too much cloth in the taxes. They're going to collect again in spring."

The messenger's eyes and mouth opened wide, like the fear-face on a spirit doll. She looked just like the figurine Akiva had kept above his bed to ward off nightmares. "Wait," she said.

Berthe sat down on a fallen trunk. Sparks flew up from the fire beyond and lost themselves in the treetops as the women kicked the embers and argued about what to do. It had been days since Berthe warmed her hands at a fire, and comradship belonged altogether to her life before Pahid, but she stayed where she was until the doll-woman came back to her.

"Reason with him, Berthe."

There was no answering that.

"Or else kill him."

Berthe jumped up. "Never say such a terrible thing to me! There must be no treachery in my mind when I face him. And have you already forgotten what I told you? If not for him, the mountains would be thrown down on top of us. His measures are harsh, but he fights for our earth and her people."

New shadows came between the trees. They were listening.

"He commands things like that--storms, floods, earthquakes?" It sounded like Ma Zauber, the most powerful doctor in the rich Middle Plains province. Her mothers had been herbalists for generations.

"Of course not. Hath commands those things. But he speaks with the gods, face to face, as easily as I speak with him."

"Then speak with him!"

"I will," Berthe assured her. "He threatens to do an awful thing, awful not only for the hunger that will follow, but for the defiance he will arouse. It is very hard on us, that having only just won our loyalty by explaining new things to us, he tries our friendship this way, yet he has no choice. Like a woman who starts a fever after labor, he asks more of us when most would ask less, but we must not falter."

"Fields will be naked as a new baby." Maybe it wasn't Ma Zauber. Berthe had met her just once. "Father Pahid has come to cleanse and purify, all right."

Berthe stood. The greater moon was rising over the mountains to the east and she knew she must return to the city soon. Long ago, when she had lain in a hut near a city wall, the moon's setting in the west behind these same mountains had been her sign to leave. How bright, and how soft, it shone on him when he left the mountain shrine with the baby. "The gods and the temple are far better to us than we know," she said. "In the days of the fight for Ayekar, many people betrayed them, so many that Hath was afraid the gods would starve because we would not feed them and earth was polluted by the evil ones' blood so they themselves could not touch her. He would have purified her with fire, killing us all, and peopled her with a new race that would venerate the gods."

No one said anything. A puff of wind brought smoke. Berthe went on, "Fea, the mother of Rani, pleaded for us to no avail. At last little Fey wept, his only tear, and so Hath permitted us to purify the earth with the slow fire of living things. But when Fatayad came to show us how to do this, again people would not listen. The few who believed took a harvest, but the rest tried to steal it from them. What little they saved, the believers carried north and south, east and west, loking for Ayekar, because the way had been lost."

"Nobody believes us, either. Tell them to lie down and they sit up, tell them to sit up and they lie down."

Berthe ignored this. "North and south, east and west. No one can find Ayekar. The believers would have hidden, in the Middle Plains, but Fatayad commanded them to teach the others. And he told them to build temples and tax roads and he made wells to fresh water for every city and town where even one believed, and so they won us, very slowly because we were so stubborn. That is why the priests still rule us, because without them we would fall into disbelief and Hath would abandon us to begin again with a new world."

The shadows were still. "Well, maybe we brought the priesthood on ourselves, but we don't have to keep it there forever." That was Ma Zauber's voice, deep and rough as Berthe remembered it. "I heard about what you said, that we can't have just one goddess any more than we can use just one medicine. I heard you can read. They said you had a piece of bark with sound marks on it. Yes? But I tell you, this priest you're all so afraid of is nothing compared to what is coming here from Itscriye."

The woman turned her face to the moonlight. It was she. "He led the Itscriyites through Miyosardia and they stripped it bare. Then he left them. They had to go back to Itscriye. Now they are running by the dozens, north and south, east and west, as you put it. They come to a house and kill everyone they find there. Sometimes they spare the children, just throw them out to wander. When everything's eaten, they move on. I have seen them. The more they eat, the hungrier they get. They plant stones in the field. Eat them like bread."

Berthe said, "It's time for me to go."

"Come back tomorrow with his answer. I'll tell you about the days before Ayekar," Ma Zauber told her.

Outside the thicket, the wind pierced the wood with ease. Branches creaked. The darkness increased. Soon it would be dawn. Now each day is a beginning for me, she thought. Free of old errors, I can learn the truth. Yet the mass of rumor and prejudice knit together by fear is all I have to keep from forgetting the little we have learned and drifting away, alone. Each day untwisted from the fabric of the past yields one hour's certain future. She shivered. The wind came from the north over the snowy forest, recoiled from heaven and harrowed the warm rotting soil with claws sharpened in the icy sea at the top of the world.

At dawn she brought the basket of gifts to the archive, where Pahid sat on his cold bench. She knelt beside him, saying, "If you collect in spring, the people will starve."

"Is that what your women said?"

"Yes."

"They are wrong. The grain is there, Berthe." He leaned forward a little. "Consider the women who spin. Have they worked any less afield? Of course not. They only spun faster. Perhaps they did spin longer, because of the novelty of this thing. They may have slept a little less, tended their husbands and children a little less, or spent less time gossipping with their neighbors, but it is a very rare peasant who scants the fields for a new invention. Now, if we do not collect, then we may see women begin abandoning their work to make useless cloth and then, when the Lir Temple is packed from floor to ridgepole with this ill-wound stuff the gods neither use nor enjoy, then, when it is refused too late, we will see starvation. The auspicious moment is now, while the grain is there, and since the cloth is useless, we will soon find that women have abandoned this complex device and gone back to the old sturdy distaff and spindle." He stood up. Sunlight made the top of his head bright and cast his shadow on the stones before him.

They have only spun faster, she repeated to herself. With what joy they had paid that fall, though, piling the wagons with the best and softest gowns and blankets and green ugewa baled with corded summer flowers. They had taken more than was required and brought it dancing down the petal-strewn path to the road where the tax lackeys waited. They had given more than they were asked to give, and still more would be taken. "We thought this winter there would be enough at last," she said.

He was looking out the window. "Fea, the sun and cloud of Ayekar, had three children. Two were the sons of gods--the child Fey by Hath and our father, Rani, by Fatayad. A third was Zatoye, not of a god but of a celestial being, the sun. Even she could be wrong, you see, but recognizing her error she gave over the child to Earth. Isn't that a charming story? Don't cling to your mistake, Berthe. Give it over, as Fea did."

He waited. Finally Berthe said, "Yes, the grain is there, in the rafters and the barn lofts. By it the winter-weaned children, who would have died, will live. Now you will take it and the child who might have lived will die again."

"When we look around us, though, we see no golden descendents of Zatoye. You see, the tale is not literally true. The golden people are what we might have been, had we kept the innocence in which Hath made us. Now we are mired so deep in the unholy blood, in the cares of farming, that we can become golden only through long effort and sacrifice. Not all will live who might have; this is our reparation. I can give no other answer, Berthe."

She looked up. Sunlight fell between them; dancing motes obscured his form. "We paid so gladly--" she began.

"So gladly that the neighboring town, which had paid in grain, came to trade with you--"

"Trade--!" she put in hotly.

"And when you refused, they burned the village. You were building new hovels beside smoking pits when I came there. You see what trouble this device has caused already."

She bowed her head. Part of her village was burnt, in truth, but theirs had been razed to the ground.

It snowed all day while Berthe paced in the temple, combing and spinning the southern flowers into brittle yarn. At first the flakes were small and few. They twinkled in the morning light before the sun went behind thick clouds. Later they grew and settled on the frozen ground. They made each blade of grass and stump of corn-stubble distinct by separating it from all others, then buried each completely. Snow turned the black trees white as the sky. Birds could not fly against it. Even human voices went only a little way, faded and fell. Light remained trapped in the clouds long after sunset. Berthe found her way easily to a cave where she knew the women would be. Its black walls were dappled white and drifts filled its mouth, but beyond them a sunny fire glowed.

She called, "I'm here," and waited nervously. By day, she had seen the snow so white and the stone so black that the walls were like a winter sky full of black stars. Firelight turned the white to yellow, but it deepened the black. Thus do we feed light to darkness, she thought. We take what we have worked so hard to purify, and use it to part ourselves ever more from Ayekar, and we cannot stop it.

A voice asked, "Have you seen him?"

"He is adamant."

Ma Zauber came out from behind the drifts. "There was a spring collection in the Middle Plains about eight score years ago. Earthquake. They couldn't take the fall collection by the main road south, so some of it went east and they never did find that part. They came around again in spring. Said they hadn't gotten their third. They got it. Killed a lot of people." She fumbled in a bag at her waist. "Are you sure he's going to do it?"

"Yes."

Ma Zauber looked up. Her face, though wrinkled, looked youthful because it was scrubbed so clean. Lightly oiled hair gleamed all around it, silver hair very like a crown. "They'll give him a rough time," she said, smiling.

"No! Listen, all of you. Gods will bring devastation. The people will flee from here and go to Itscriye to hide. Hath will visit floods and pests and the mountains will collapse into the valleys. Earth will engulf us. We will choke in mud. This tax is our last hope of appeasing them. They are offended by the fall tribute. What do you expect? Even gods can't eat cloth."

Someone handed out a burning stick. Ma Zauber lit her pipe.

"Whether we like it or not, the tax is just," Berthe went on. "Or have we grown so aloof that we will not deign even to feed the gods who warm our earth with the sun and clothe her with life and bring us sleep and make the plants and mosses grow that cure all sickness? Shall we break our ties with them? Shall we go into the forests and live as beasts, fearing the approach of our kind and freezing in every breeze that blows, dreaming only of food and warmth, raped in fall so we may pup in summer and drive away our young as soon as they can walk, naked, grunting instead of speaking, unable to think? Then we may keep all we can find or gather. But if we want our fine temples, our houses and families, speech and medicine and kindness and all that distinguishes us from sheep and wolves, we must hold to our religion."

The doll-faced messenger came out. Both women studied her. Berthe turned away, still talking. "Do you understand that? Can you repeat it? Here." She took out the alphabet she had brought for Ma Zauber, one she had made in the autumn. Unrolled, it smelled of late apples. The memory of summer calmed her.

"Each mark is a sound," Berthe explained. She recited the sounds. When she came to "s," more of them emerged to look. There were two old sisters who lived near the city and a fussy widow from the village next to Berthe's own, who had called her a mindless whore when the two towns clashed. She still glared, but she was here. "How goes it?" Berthe whispered.

The widow shrugged.

"We don't make that noise," one of the sisters objected, pointing to s. Then she hurried back to the fire and the rest did the same.

Berthe shivered. Now if Pahid asked who she had met, she must answer. But how good to see their faces. "You might as well stay," she said, laughing, but they didn't. "Don't worry about that hissing noise. The priests use it. We can forget that one." She read the rest of the sounds.

"So, what does all this mean?" the doll-face asked.

"There is a mark for each sound. If we learn the marks, we can read and write."

"That?" It was the fussy widow. "All the sounds of speech are there? Do you mean those are all the sounds I will make in my whole life?"

"Well, how many do you want? There are only seven spices for all foods, and there are only...four colors in the autumn forest, but the variety of their mixtures is as great as earth."

"No. There are ten thousand colors."

Berthe was annoyed. "Yellow. Brown. Red. Green," she counted, ticking them off on her fingers. "That comes to four, not ten thousand."

"And...vermillion. And white. And black. And--"

"All right. And black and white. But any baby can tell you vermillion is only a mixture--"

"And blue." She heard giggles.

"All right! Blue! That makes seven!"

"You have learned a great deal, Berthe. Already the thousand beauties of autumn--"

"I thought you said ten thousand," Berthe put in. Ma Zauber held up a warning finger.

"--are reduced to seven plain dyes for your famous yarn. What will be left of spring when you're done with it? These marks--my speech and my mother's and a child's sigh and a young man's song are all the same now. This is learning." A red angry face poked round the snowbank.

"Go ahead, spit on this gift because you're too lazy to learn how to use it," Berthe snapped. "We won't get another chance like this in a thousand years. Sour old fool."

"Think you're the best thing we've seen since the temple started."

There were more giggles. Ma Zauber yawned. Berthe wanted to hit them both. First the wheel and now this alphabet. Nobody wanted to change for fear of losing the nothingness they had.

Ma Zauber held out a sprig of bitter Aghata. "Can you say this in marks?"

She had chosen Aghata because the priests could not say the 'gh' sound but shortened it to 'j' like babies. Berthe had already thought of that, however, and she substituted the 's,' saying, "We will give this extra mark a new use." In her enthusiasm, she wrote out the names of a few dozen herbs, until the silver-haired witch made her stop.

"What was the time before Ayekar?" Berthe asked her.

Ma Zauber was putting the sprig in her bag. "Can't make it grow in the Plains," she remarked. She handed her pipe to the doll-woman, who passed it back to the fire. It returned again, full. "A human being is very small," she remarked. "So small that pride and shame are the same thing, just a little ripple in water." She smoked up a fragrant cloud. "We think our gods are ancient, but they are no older than this puff of smoke. It can hardly remember going up to the roof, only stories about the days of the pipe. And before that, backwards, nothing. The time of the leaf growing is as far from that puff of smoke as the days before Ayekar from us. We are like the puff of smoke that barely knows the pipe it was blown from, let alone the tree where its leaf grew."

Time before gods. Nothing. "That's all you know?" Berthe asked.

"That's all."

"Are you sure there was a time before?"

"I told you what my grandmother told me."

Berthe stretched, her back crackling loudly because of the night air. "If there was a time before the gods, then the world truly floats in nothingness," she said.

Ma Zauber shrugged. "It might have been good. Maybe better; maybe Ayekar reminds them of it."

It was near dawn when Berthe came out of the cave. Ground and sky would mirror one another all day, first one and then the other brighter. Earth's was a richer, bluer gray as yet. The clouds paled as the sun rose and then began to shimmer, and the snow shone back. The glossy near-ice of the little stream that flowed near the city's wall was translucent silver between banks of jet-black mud. The stones at its bottom, magnified by the water, looked each distinct and full of feeling as a farmer's words. They reminded her of the stream by which she and Meta had often sat. Meta would have another child soon. Who would help her? Her mother- and father-in-law were dead, her husband probably not well yet since the time some men from the other town had caught and beaten him for burning their houses. They had broken one of his legs and left him to crawl home, but luckily Hex had found him. After a scandal, his brother had married Schwalbe the beauty, and lived in his own house now.

A breeze carried the sharp scent of Aghata from the brambles where a dip in the streambed made a clear pool. She decided to gather some for Ma Zauber. This patch was large and easily reached. No one would care if she rooted up a few plants and tried to sprout them; the two sisters seldom came here because men bathed in the pool in summer.

Delving gingerly in the frozen ground, Berthe thought about the time she had found Meta in the mountain shrine by following her song. She listened now, but there was no sound except the scrape of her blade in the dirt and the watter lapping ice-encrusted stones. Could one follow the water's song? She prized up a clump of plants and stood, but a noise halted her.

A priest was singing. She squatted down again--it was never good to meet them while at this work. Too late, she recognized Pahid's head shining over the clump of bramble that separated her from the bathing pool.

So he did bathe daily, winter and summer, in flowing water. And how calmly he came to these ordeals, singing Hath's morning song that praised the resurrection of the world. Standing with his back to her, he quickly doffed his woolen gown. He passed a stream of black urine into the mud. Then he walked in up to his waist, crouched until only his head remained above water, and recited the salutations to each of the nine major gods. Berthe watched, so awed that she could not move and her feet grew numb with cold. Pahid emerged--she shut her eyes--and was gone.

She mulled over the scene as she walked back to the city. First, Father Pahid was a devilspawn. Despite his holiness, despite his learning and his power, the sign was black as the blood of the dragons that took Verloring, as black as hers and her given-over baby's. There was no other explanation, and really no more to be said about it. The flaw was just another of his attributes. So deeply immersed in the supernatural that he seemed to remain human only by an effort of will, a being of sheer power, he might be the high priest of evil as well as the strongest god-conjurer at the Lir Temple.

Second, he endured suffering for its own sake. Years of it had not lightened the sign or brought him any gain. It was a gift to the gods, a gift of pure feeling. She, like others, had often given presents and had tried not to complain of the hardship required to spare them, but she had never thought the hardship was part of what she gave. Now that polite denial of what her offerings cost her seemed cold. She had treated her goddess like a child incapable of understanding. He, with his positive joy in useless pain, gratified the gods' understanding.

Truly, she had treated her husband better than she had earth. And if he, never a great thinker, could so love her after three years' incohabitation as to defy Pahid for her sake, then surely the gods, if she let them see her, would love and reward her and her people.

What brought Gelukish to mind? She seldom thought of her husband, and did not miss him now, not as she had her mother in the first alien nights of her marriage. Still, she resolved to visit him again. Fondness counted no more in her decision than in the stream's to run downhill or the leaf's to return to soil, dust and air. She simply remembered that no one in that life had heard she was still living and determined to ask Pahid leave to go and tell them, before the road turned muddy.

"You are no longer married, Berthe," he replied when she went to the Archive to ask. "I thought you had left the world of soil and physical things."

"I want to see...he thinks I am suffering." She looked up. Those sharp eyes killed falsehood. "I want to warn him about the spring, and tell him what I have learned."

"What will you tell him? You have learned Hath's law, the law of justice. Laws of the just gods. He lives by the earth laws, by Fatayad, the gods of decorum, not justice. It is a great chasm, difficult to bridge."

"I want to go."

"Yes, I know that. You will return here in a few weeks--I need not send anyone with you. You will return because you know about the fire and flood that will result if we fail. Be grateful that it is the gods of justice who threaten us, because they act from anger and can be appeased. Retribution and reward. Justice. The earth gods, the weavers of this natural fabric, act from their sense of beauty. Beauty, appreciation and disinterest. if they find us unlovely, they cannot be appeased."

Throughout this speech he had looked at her, but abstractly. Now his attention returned to what he saw, and this slight change of object spoke as loud as though he had suddenly turned to face her. She started back. He said, "You have been awake all night."

"Yes..." Justice, beauty? She must say something to show she understood. "The gods of justice are different from the gods of feeling?"

"That's right. There are the human gods: the household spirit, Hath and Shis and Verloring. The others are not the same: earth and sun and Fatayad and Fey. These do not reward or punish or truly care about us."

"Earth gives--" Berthe responded.

"No, she exists. To be revered."

"And Fea?" Had he mentioned Fea? No, he hadn't. "The saying goes, Heart to Fea, soul to earth."

"Does it? The heart--between soul, which is earth's, and mind, which is Hath's. That is Fea, between soul and mind. And that is where you are, Berthe."

He was telling her one of his secrets. Berthe drew her folded hands into the warm cleft between the bottom of her breasts and the top of her stomach. She wondered whether Pahid had seen her at the pool when he came to bathe. Of course he had no reason to fear, knowing her own secret, but hadn't he been ashamed? No. He was never ashamed of anything a human being might see, because the eye of heaven was on him always. Perhaps he was not trading secrets at all, but merely assumed these differences among the gods must become apparent to her as she read, listened to him and visited her women.

He kept looking right at her. "You are not still afraid of me, are you? We are allies--" He paused and ran a hand over the top of his head, evidently wondering whether she understood that word. "Allies, we work together as blade, cord and fire work in felling trees. All right. Then get up."

Berthe rose.

"I am telling you this because you are about to return to the world of earth and you must remember that that goddess, wise and intricate past all comprehension, would grant us nothing were it not for the mercy of Hath that sent us the temple. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

He pointed to a trunk in the corner. "Open that."

Berthe went to it. From the box's dark wood a mandala had been gouged out on top and a lighter wood fit into the pattern. Pahis's name and the name of the Lir Temple Archive were marked on the side by the same method. Smooth leather straps fastened by shining wilver buckles held it shut. Though she had seen buckles before, Berthe had never used one, and it took her a minute to realize the metal tongue must be withdrawn from the leather, and to figure out how to do this. Done, she glanced at Pahid with a little smile of staisfaction. He watched so fixedly that she almost saw the gleam of the buckle reflected in his eyes. She raised the lid.

Inside were a number of spirit dolls, a cord with more than twenty silver bells, a woolen robe of deep violet with blue and scarlet designs embroidered on it, three full sacks, several barbed spearheads, and five scrolls. Four were bound together by a silk ribbon.

"Bring me the fifth scroll," Pahid said.

It was a drawing entitled, Jurisdiction of Regional Temples. Berthe had no idea what jurisdiction was, but she saw that one irregular shape was labeled Nichayu.

"This is a picture of the world," Pahid explained.

She found the way her parents had brought her to be married, through mountains. And the Lir Temple, west of the mountains as her village was, while all the old cities were in the east. The first priests must have fled west when the unbelievers pursued them.

"Here is the way you will go," Pahid said. It was simply a matter of following a certain road over a long distance. She knew that, but kept quiet. "These are the towns through which you will pass. Win them."

She saw Itscriye, by the coast. It was even farther away than beyond the Middle Plains.

"You will encounter disbelief. You yourself will doubt. Worst, people will lie and pretend to believe you. Simply repeat what I have said. Again and again, forever." He rolled up the drawing and thrust it at her. "Here. Put it back."

She did and turned from the mandala to look at him, his face now warm against the grey sky. Had he, too, defied heaven in defending her? "You know I might not come back," she said.

"You will, because the greatest holiness you have seen is here. Away from it, you will be horribly lonely."

That made her sorry for him. He must long for Lir Temple. On her way out, she remembered Ma Zauber and asked, "Father Pahid, was there a time before Ayekar?"

He braced his hands on the windowsill behind him and leaned back, his breast forward in a vulnerable attitude. "I don't know," he said. "There may have been a time in mankind's infancy before the gods asked our help. I am very glad that I am living now."

She smiled. "So am I."

Pahid's two sons wanted to go with her, to protect her from bandits. All these soldier-priests were terrified of bandits and they beheaded one or two each week in the city as retribution for the robberies they suffered whenever they went to the villages to order clothes and drink, to have their saddles repaired and blades sharpened or to find new prostitutes. They said the woods were full of desperate murderers liable to sweep down on travelers or lonely mountain villages, to kill and rape and plunder, cooking and eating the animals, and to burn the towns when they were through. Berthe laughed. Bandits were the same people as the ones who lived in the mountain hamlets. Winter boredom might drive them to war on one another, usually with just fists and between drinking matches. News of rich Lir priests nearby might rouse them to attack in groups of twenty or so, but the idea of a whole village rising up to come and rob one Berthe as she passed was silly. She went alone and Pahid assigned the boys to dye the mountain of cord she had spun by that time according to directions she left them. They saw her off with hurt looks and many warnings.

She was welcome in every village. Children came yelling to meet her and the brewmasters' doors opened wide. When she had eaten, the whole town came to look their fill at someone new. In the morning they gathered to watch her go. All of them wanted to hear about Pahid, and they were willing to hear good as well as bad. The terror with which the news of his coming inspired them a year ago made his actual violence seem restrained by comparison and now, after a quiet winter, they were eager to believe the best.

First she scared them again by telling of his murders. She spoke of Hex, over and over again, reliving even when she did not mean to the horror of the moment when she approached her teacher and saw that she had gone out of her mind. Speak to her, Pahid said. Berthe knelt by Hex with a poison she had hidden in her hair and whispered, "I have brought it," but Hex only giggled. Each time she retold it, Berthe felt the inexhaustable tears again and had to stop until someone took her hand.

Stories Pahid himself had told came tumbling out. The fear she had tamed with months of practice suddenly leapt up so strong that stolid fathers wept at the thought of what he had done to the hapless villages in his way to the provincial capital. Then, when she had him settled in the city for winter, she told about her own capture by one of the gangs that went from town to town looking for herbal doctors, speakers of church language, rich peasants, prostitutes, Itscriye-born wives, and troublemakers of any kind.

She told about her first meeting with Pahid and described him with heartstopping accuracy, from his knifetip eyes to his blue frozen toes. Then she told about the threatened disasters, how the mountain would fall into the village or the village be thrown into the valley. In her imagination every new town she entered became an erupting chaos, and when she paused on the road to admire a view or mountain scene, she found herself wondering how it would look when it was sucked under a wave of mud or threw up a spout of molten stone.

When she spoke of the disasters, listeners would chime in with suggestions--which streams would dry up first, what fields would go under, whose houses would be crushed. Arguments broke out. She squelched the predictions by saying, "Hayseeds, the whole town will be so demolished, even the worms won't be able to find you." When they were all finally cringing, she would pat one of the children on the head and say, "Don't worry. Father Pahid will save us."

At first she had feared to lose them at this point, and prepared many arguments to prove that the disasters could truly happen, that they could be prevented by speaking to the gods, and that Pahid would do so. She quickly learned that there was no need for proof. The idea of setting one danger against another delighted them. They gaped as admiringly at her as if she personally had invented it.

This simpleminded faith made her work easier, but Berthe would have been happy to meet resistance if only one had thought of asking why the same person who promised disaster was offering to deliver them from it, for a price. No one objected, until she came to the spring collection. Then their reaction was as sullen as it had been gleeful, and just as thoughtless.

At one town in a mountain pass, where all the houses were on stilts to keep out the melted snow that rushed down from the peaks in spring, they gathered in the rutted icebed of the road to see her go. Berthe told them as gently as she could. They listened so quietly that she found herself looking away from them, up at the morning sky. When she tried to look down the village, still dark in the mountain's shadow, looked black. She stared ahead at the shallow fields until finally, as she got to the crux of the matter, she could see around. "And he will come back, and take however much grain you did not pay."

"How's he going to do it?" one asked.

"The same way the other priests do," Berthe said.

There was a laugh. "Three men in a wagon? We'll just take their mules out of harness and put them in it. Then we'll let them pull their wagon around town a while--"

"He'll burn the town, root the fields and kill every man, woman and child," Berthe warned.

Someone nudged the man to shut up. "He won't come like the other priests. He's got an army," a woman said.

"How's he going to get an army to every single village in the province by spring?" the man demanded.

The woman slapped him.

"He'll get here," an old man predicted bitterly. "We're right on the roadway, waiting for him. He'll get here, all right."

She spoke of the divine hunger and called on them to feed their gods. They folded their arms over unfeeling hearts.

"Suppose we don't care," someone called.

"You can sit here and die if you want to be stubborn. But if you do as you must, as a human being, you will not only live, but will enter the city of Ayekar. Human beings cannot live free on the earth like beasts and flowers, because the gods have made us better than that, stronger and more beautiful. They burden us with love. They call us from our ignorance to make the world pure. They call wisdom to grow in us like shoots in the frozen mud."

There was silence, then a gurgling sound in the pool of night under one of the houses. Forwarned, Berthe ducked, but no one threw anything. They only stared. The strange noise grew louder. Faces contorted. People were laughing.

"It's true!" she insisted. "Whatever you paid a year ago will be demanded, less what you paid in grain this year. The cloth will be valued at nothing."

They slapped their thighs. They roared. "There's nothing here. We sold it for wool," a girl explained.

It had never occurred to Berthe that someone might do that. "What for?" she asked.

"We could weave it up over winter, and save some for next year."

"You won't believe this," her father gasped. "This year we had the best crop since I was six years old! So we sold it. What else? The shepherds talked us into it!" He flung up his hands and guffawed until he choked.

Someone thumped him on the back. He went on, more soberly, "We hear the temples aren't what they were--who knows. There's someone coming to tear them down, stone from stone."

"Pahid would have you carded to ribbons for saying that," Berthe warned. This increased their merriment.

"So what? He's not here," a woman answered. "There's a priest who's going to tear down the temples. Dare me to say it again? No, wait. Listen. He went into one--we heard this from shepherds--went into a temple someplace, and told them to knock it down and go out and worship in the field. When the priests tried to kill him, they couldn't lift up their hands. Another time--"

"Why?" Berthe asked.

"Why what?"

"Couldn't they raise their hands?"

The woman shrugged. "Magic, I guess. Another time, he met some tax collectors at a house and he--"

"He plants stones in the field and they turn into bread," a boy interjected.

"Shut up. I'm telling this. He met some tax collectors--"

"We'll plant stones, too! We've got plenty of those!" someone cried. Berthe gave up trying to reason with them.

Luckily, most villages had been more cautious and still had the grain on hand. A few in each settlement took her side. These were unmarried men, widows and families who had been too stubborn or too poor to buy wool, so they paid their tax in grain. All winter they had envied their well-fed neighbors and now when they understood that the new tax would be collected from each according to the amount of cloth paid, they pulled their ragged coats around them and solemnly praised Hath's justice.

Sometimes a few of these moralists walked a little way with her, or an herb woman came and they talked about medicine, but this time she was alone, puzzling over what she had seen. How would Pahid do it? For the first time she began to doubt him. Spring was short, the province big and he could not afford to divide his forces. How would he do it?

The answer came as she watched slow-falling snow join in a lattice over the surface of a mountain lake. The flakes would melt unless the water had been nearly frozen. Now as they touched the water, rays of ice struck out across it. So must the people be nearly subdued when the first demand reached them. She understood now why Pahid called her his ally. He will need an army, she thought, and it must be an army of us. That was the significance of the red cord; it would denote his minions.

When she understood tht, Berthe took even greater care to seek out those who took her side, and to win over the herbalists. She told them how much Pahid had taught her and related a little of the history of the world. She refrained from making any alphabets, though. They were too powerful, somehow, and like strong medicine sometimes worsened what they were meant to cure. Even her friends at the provincial city had given up studying to read. They forgot the letters as soon as they learned them. If they did succeed in keeping a few in mind, they still could not understand how some lines on bark could signify real objects. Ma Zauber had spent hours staring at a scroll, awaiting the promised moment when she would hear it speak. It remained silent, until finally she rolled up the bark and took it with her to the Middle Plains in case someone there might be able to use it.

The field where Berthe and Meta first met was blanketed by snow when she reached it. Stubble poked through in her footsteps. The new shrine, covered with leaves and rattles like the one that was burnt, rustled and pattered in the wind. Ice ringed little puddles of juice and water on the altarstone. A new Fey danced over the frozen gifts.

Berthe prayed there for a little while, shivering and trying to pretend her nervousness was cold, until the west turned yellow and the shadows on the snow were blue. A green tinge crept up from the horizon to meet a band of orange running behind a cluster of bright clouds. Sunlight glinted like fire in the ice-tipped trees and snow caught in the trunks held the glow of the fading afternoon, but lower down the bark faded into the ground cover, now turning from the very softest grey to black. She leaned against an uko at the wood's edge to look at the brilliant sky, the deepening ground and the trees that touched them both, and at her husband's house, a round lump at the edge of the empty corn field.

It was dark when she came to the door. One of the straw mats had been pulled into place to keep out the night air. She heard someone moving inside. Before she could push aside the mat and enter, a woman's arm thrust out. Berthe stepped away from the light. A bare foot showed behind the inner curtain.

He had remarried. Berthe leaned against the house, then she went around to look in the window, where they had always left a gap in the shutter to draw air for the fire. There were the fifteen black feathers he had used to ward her off, tied in a bundle on the shelf. Had he kept them in her memory, or forgotten them?

Gelukish, much the same, was eating supper, while she, pale, raven-haired and farther pregnant than even the hastiest remarriage could account for, nibbled from his bowl and called him a little duckling. He called her fat hen. She pulled his hair. He bit her shoulder. She turned her back, telling him to leave her alone. He pulled her into his arms, kissing her ears and squeezing her breasts while she undid his laces. Her giggles turned to sighs and his low endearments died away altogether long before the pair rolled out of the firelight.

Her knees gave way and Berthe staggered, leaning against the house with her cheek pressed to her fist while the blood surged tingling through the backs of her legs. The fire still burned, under the ice and despite the empty stretch of years alone. Under its layers of stone and dirt, under the skin that lied and called its senses dead, under the deep blanket of new language, new learning and new terrors, the fire was burning still. Ever again Shis calls us, she thought. Fate calls us to meet not the future but the past.

She stood looking at the cold stars among the branches of the windbreak. The trees had promised spring when, big and full, she watched them from the doorway of this house. Now, she was outside with them. Leafless branches creaked in the frozen wind, pointing to emptiness.

Meta's house had also been destroyed in the fighting between the villages and the brothers erected a big southern-type one with part of the rafters covered to make a second floor where, until they had more children, the couple stored vegetables, strings of dried fruit, baskets of grain, beer and cloth. Downstairs was not as it had been, and Berthe stumbled over something as she tried to come in quietly.

The three-year-old daughter called out, "Mama, here's Auntie!" and caught at what she thought was Schwalbe's hand. Seeing how big it was, she let go.

"Hush," Berthe said. "Don't you remember me?"

"You're dead. Go lie in the ground," the girl told her.

Berthe shook her head.

"Ma!" the girl called.

Meta came unwillingly, saying, "Now what? You're going to wake your father--" She saw and embraced her friend in silence. Her forehead rested on Berthe's shoulder. In a minute she began to snore.

Not sure what to do, Berthe sat rocking Meta like a baby. She was very light and no longer pregnant. "Was it stillborn?" she asked the daughter.

"Don't know. Mama was sick."

"When?"

"Don't know! Before." Then, in a more friendly tone, she asked, "Want fire?"

"Yes. Make a fire."

The child pattered to the door, dragged in an armful of sticks and threw them on the fire. Light flared. It revealed Meta's husband, who shrank back without waking. Meta heard the flames. "We thought you were dead," she murmured. Squinting, she felt Berthe's cheeks and chin with her hands. "Are you crying because you went to your house?"

"He thinks I died," Berthe sobbed. "Now I want to come back. I want to come back and I can't. I want it to be like before. Do you remember when we were pregnant?"

"We were hungry."

Berthe wiped her cheeks and moved closer to the fire. She began to shiver as though she had never felt cold before. She told about Pahid, his sons, her lessons, how she had learned to ride a horse, the history of the world and how Pahid forbade them to use the spinning wheel. Once during the night Meta pressed a bowl of mush into Berthe's lap. Later, she laid her head there.

Had she been sick? Her hair was much fuller than Berthe remembered and, she thought, a little darker. Her parted lips were dry. "Do you love him?" Meta asked.

Berthe was supporting Meta's head with one hand, sharp chin in her palm, her fingers bent under the jaw and the smooth cold curls--fuller, they must be--covering her wrist. "Love him. He knows how to move the hearts of gods. But I--he has spared my life a day at a time." She laughed. "The more he teaches me, the less I care about him. Do you know, every morning he goes down to the stream and stands in cold water up to his armpits? And he sings. I have seen him do it. He understands something about the gods and the world that we...We bribe the sprites and spirits, but he moves Fea's heart. To a human being, though, he looks like an ugly old man."

"Are you afraid?"

"Yes, but--no. What am I risking? My life is already like morning mist, isn't it? I was an empty woman. Now I have the history of the world. When I see people working and hear their voices, I see the whole humanity moving with them and hear the voices of the silent and the dead crying out. I am about to learn my name. As for dying, I would die anyway. He may yet kill me. He is not as cruel as we thought, though." And she told about the disasters they would avert and the spring collection.

Meta did not say anything to that, but she drew Berthe's hem out smooth and began creasing a handful of the cloth into tiny pleats.

"I'm sure he will do it," Berthe told her.

Meta pressed another crease.

"They'll come with this year's record and last year's. Whoever paid less will have to make up the difference. Everything is written down."

Another crease.

"You see, the gods are closer than we thought, and they were angry when we tried to cheat them. We must be much more honest. Pahid says it's better to collect now, before spring planting. Otherwise people will think they can pay in cloth, and plant less."

Meta sighed.

"Save grain, Meta. I warn you. He will demand every bit, even what the rats have eaten. They will take no less. Save it."

"We did," Meta said. "He thought something would happen."

"It seemed as though--who could have thought Lir priests would ever come to this town? When I came here, I thought I had gone so far from the world that even my ghost would be scattered in the wind instead of going to Ayekar with other people's. Instead, I have met more ghosts and people than I knew there were."

The long winter twilight had begun. Slowly Meta's face appeared, shining pale and grey beneath the skin. She smiled dreamily. "I want to sleep forever."

"Don't say that! You have no idea how close they are."

Meta laughed. Her husband, now visible on the pallet under the second storey, stirred, rolled over and went back to sleep. "For ever and ever. I want to go to the sleeping paradise, where no one works. Everyone just floats and dreams."

"You might dream you were working."

"Maybe...must we pay?"

"Yes. Every bit and right away."

"Will we get our cloth back?" Meta teased.

"Little miser, what would you do with it?" She pointed to a folded white rag stuck between the ash jar and the water jar. "You've got more than you can use already."

"That was for the baby." There were birthing mats, too, under the blanket in which the little girl lay propped on her elbows, gazing at her mother and the ghost. She looked well, even fat.

"Why doesn't she sleep with the two of you?" Berthe asked.

Meta jerked her head toward the husband. She sat up and signed her daughter to bring more wood.

Berthe watched the man. His broken leg had healed only a hair shorter than the other. It was Hex's best work ever. "What do you mean?"

Meta shrugged. "We sleep alone. Is it hard to read?" she asked suddenly.

"At first. Once you learn to hear the letters speak, it isn't hard, but you need a good teacher."

"Can you teach it?"

"No. I tried, but none of them learned."

Meta took a handful of sticks from her daughter and arranged them to burn slowly, nudging the icy wood into place rather than grasping it. She rubbed her fingers over the flames. "You taught us, remember? You taught us to spin. And I'm teaching this one. It's not so hard." She smoothed the girl's hair with both hands. "Look how dark she is. Just like her grandfather." She winked at Berthe.

"Are you a good learner, Telinge?" Berthe asked. The little girl ran to her. "She's so young that if you took her now and put her in a bird's nest she would grow feathers and learn to fly." She flapped the girl's arm like a wing.

"Can I? Can I learn to fly?" Telinge jumped up and down.

"Teach her," Meta said.

Her husband opened his eyes. "You women start talking before the sun's up and you don't shut your mouths till midnight," he said without looking at them.

Berthe went to the door. "I don't want Gelukish to know I came back," she whispered.

"Wait." Meta came and took her hands. She looked around. "Wait," she said again. The man groaned. They stepped out onto the bright snow.

"I have to go now," Berthe said.

"Teach her."

Berthe yanked the clay bracelet from her wrist. "Here, take it. You see the seeds; you know them. And here are the writing signs inside. The first sound in the seed's name is the same as the mark on the other side. See: aghata. The first sound is a. Then beril, and the mark is b. Do you understand?"

Meta shielded her eyes to look at it. "No. But I'll show her the seeds--"

"And the marks."

"Every day."

Telinge was straining over her mother's shoulder toward the bright ground. "Day!" she cried.

Inside, the husband finally woke and began shouting, "Meta! Meta! Come here!"

A voice in another house said, "Shut up, you brat!" So that child was still alive. Berthe had delivered him.

"I'm coming," Meta called.

Her husband shouted again, calling her a sow that had littered too often. He threatened to beat her.

"I'm getting wood!" she told him crossly.

"I'm going," Berthe said.

"Tell her the names. Just once." Meta put the child in Berthe's arms and embraced them both, then pulled back with a sweeping motion that brought the cold air in a rush up Berthe's chest, and grabbed up an armful of wood. She went into the dark hut.

The child clung to Berthe's shoulder. "Alep," Berthe said.

"Alep."

"That's right." They turned their backs on the house and faced the bright snow. Berthe carried the girl chanting back and forth until the sun rose high. Then she hurried into the forest and set off among whispering trees toward the city and temple.

Chapter 13

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