CHAPTER 14

The girl whose sister Akiva had helped in childbirth was there. She sat alone on a rock by a fire, sharpening the blade of a hoe.

"Hello, priest," she said when he came near.

The edge of her blade shone. Her white palms caught its light between them. As Akiva sat down before her, two sparrows alighted near the stone, one on either side.

"How have you--?" he began.

"I ran away. I'm going back, though, when I have one of their heads to bring. Unless they kill me."

He avoided her gaze. "You are--" What? The dreadful birth, the obedience he had commanded there, the girl talking blindly of murder, defied a name. "I had not expected to see you," he said.

"Why not? They might cut me up into pieces; I might cut them." Her smile vanished. "Oh, priest, the Defenders of Faith wouldn't have me." At this, the sparrows flew off.

She has spoken by inspiration, Akiva thought. "How did you get here?"

"I ran away. To the Middle Plains," she said.

One would have had to run every step of the way to have been in the Middle Plains with the Defenders and gotten back by now. "How did you cross the river?" he asked.

"Oh, I don't know," she answered impatiently. "I guess I sort of floated. I sat on some thatch."

It seemed impossible, yet she was here. She was no vision...she looked up and tested the blade's edge. He saw. "The best are taken and the worst are taken. You were spared to keep simple good in the world," he said.

She nodded.

"There is...no one with you?"

"Nope. Rat-eaters got them all." She smiled again. "I'll fight anyway. The Defenders are coming here and I'll fight the Itscriye devils with them. When Pahid comes, he'll see my back."

"Fight! Fight!" people were shouting. A little crowd rattled between the walls of two houses, knocking occasionally into the posts. Two big men circled one another, each beset by friends trying to hold him back, both ranting that they would brook no insult. When he turned again to the stone where the girl had been sitting, she was gone.

* * *

So many, Clark kept thinking. He scanned everyone who came near him, testing their sweat for a minor metabolite of Ecclesiam purpuream to see whether they had the drug in their systems. It was everywhere. Verloringers, villagers, Krup and the road slaves and the various wandering people who seemed to have been drawn to Ebur by the bridge, all of them fairly oozed the stuff. He tried subject after subject, dabbing so quickly at their arms with his microcollector that none of them even noticed his touch. Paula, Fuego, even his own sweat were contaminated. "There are a lot of worlds and a lot of people," he muttered to Fuego. "Room for a lot of--" He felt sick to his stomach and finished, "--of poisons," because he had lost his train of thought. He found Ecclesiam in a little stream running near the village and traces in the soil and even, very faintly, in the morning dew.

Remembering his experimental problems with the worms on Reshebora, he kept an eye out for people who didn't metabolize Ecclesiam normally. They would be the controls. He found exactly one such person: Neshar. The boy's sweat was pure, though his blood was full of Ecclesiam. Clark asked him for a urine sample, but Neshar seemed deeply offended by the request so Clark, supposing the boy was aware of his peculiarity and, like most boys, unhappy to be singled out, gave up.

While Clark fretted over Ecclesiam, Paula and Tiyar worried about Pahid. They scouted the foothills all the way to the Burning Mountains, old broken peaks that divided the eastern country from the Middle Plains. Mountaintops fallen ages ago into valleys or crumbled in century-long landslides made soft outcroppings above the slowly rising terrain or filled the gorges where rivulets fell now and then in echoing cascades, throwing rainbows on the rocks and flowers. Big-leaved nut trees and dark evergreens cleft the bedrock in chasms, from the bases of which slow streams carried the fertile water to marshes and pools below.

In ages past, boulders shaken loose by earthquakes had struck the granite foothills, shattered and sent off sparks that burned the mountain meadows, and in these ancient bruises grew marshes full of snails and butterflies and thick foliage in spongy soil. Now and then a wild creature started up from the brush, saw Paula and Tiyar, and ran away.

Pahid would be marching along the road with his footsoldiers, stopping often to wait for supply wagons and to terrorize the towns in his way. They might meet him wherever they liked. They chose the widest clearing they could find, a gap between two hills where the road ran through. From the summits they would be able to look down on what was happening below, assuming the Daybreak contingent could surround Pahid's forces. If they could lure him into the grassy bottom, they might catapult stones on their enemy from all sides; otherwise they must fight at close range in the woody hillsides where the horses could be panicked.

A stone ledge that stuck out from the hill near where the enemy would enter caused Paula some hesitation.

"Boobytrap it," Tiyar said.

"Too obvious." She was watching a fat bird run down the road in the plain, flapping its little wings noisily. It hopped into the air and flew out of sight.

"Use simple traps, of course. Poisons, and snares that are easily deployed and present no problems of technological immiscibility."

"No. I know better than to go around boobytrapping the countryside and so do you. We'll just have to beat them to the ledge, take it and hold it. Is that so difficult?"

For several fine, cool days, refugees kept coming and coming to Ebur. Their makeshift hovels in the flower-strewn grass around the village soon become a little city where, fanned by mountain breezes scented with pine, they suffered from wounds and infections and fevers and fought like dogs over anything a person could eat. Their numbers kept increasing, and so did the speed with which they came, until by the end of the fifth day people were coming in from all directions at a run, children and elders dragged along flying and bumping over the roads. Wide eyes and mouths drawn tight gave them the intent expressions of people looking for some sign of what to do, where to go, to whom to turn.

Information was at a premium. Whoever spoke with authority commanded an instant audience, and the wilder the lies the better. Pahid was an ogre weaned on human flesh; Itscriye had been submerged in the sea. Sprites tricked farmers into eating stones that turned them into trees. A man swore he had seen forests with human hands and faces, trees that shrieked with hunger and snatched birds from their branches to eat them alive.

Refugees from the Itscriyites ran generally west, while those fleeing the Defenders went eastward. Two such groups nearly collided a little way from the village, one shouting, "Rat-eaters!" and the other, "Pahid!"

Clark was going to an outlying part of the camp to examine a little boy who had heartworms when he saw the two mobs standing apart, screaming at the tops of their lungs that the Itscriyites would eat anyone in their path and Pahid would murder anyone found outdoors, such was the Lir Temple's mercy to the dispossessed. Tiyar and Paula ran out of the crowd, heading full tilt along the road to the Red River.

"The bridge! The bridge!" Paula yelled in Eyimalian.

Clark whirled about and began to run also, and behind him came the Verloringers. It was a long way. He cursed himself as he ran, breathing down to his toes and trying not to let his heart race. He should have known that in the end he would follow his common sense and decide to pull down the bridge, and he should have done so, instead of wasting hours in useless argument with Tiyar. This is the stream, the tide of lives that Sevit taught us cannot fail, Tiyar had told them, and instead of folding their arms and saying no, they had allowed themselves to be pulled into debate after debate about which side was manipulating history for temporary gain. Endless debate--Clark glanced up as he ran. Vermillion clouds gathered around an orange sun. A black V of low-flying birds glided through the zenith. He looked up again and again at the beautiful clouds, stumbled and fell. As he scrambled in the dust, feet overtook him and trampled him, running heedlessly over his back and legs and head. Others caught under his ankles or stubbed into his sides and people fell on him, rolling, yelling and cursing. He got up and ran on, struggling to the front of the crowd. At the brink of a steep hill he left them behind and hurtled into the river valley.

The shrubs around the bridge on the far side had been trampled flat, but the roadway on the Ebur side bore only a few dozen footprints. Planks had been torn from the floor of the bridge and blood stains on the holes showed that people had fallen through. Had they drowned? Clark later realized that he hadn't looked into the river, only at the bridge. Among the supporting tree limbs and ropes and vines were human bodies.

The herbalist of Ebur and three friends, all dead, lay draped over the trunks and vines where they had been climbing up to pull the vital pin.

Clark looked again at the opposite shore. Uprooted bushes and trees, parts of houses, mats and bones were strewn about. From the number of animals and birds around the mess, he supposed there were bodies, too. It was another bloody footstep in their passage. Violence gathered everywhere their motion ceased an instant, here perhaps just long enough to fight over who would be first across.

Tiyar ran onto the bridge to keep Paula from destroying it. Once there, he did nothing useful but angel-fought dreamily, his equipment set to its clumsiest position. Scared, Clark thought.

The herbalist had died somewhere along a severed tree that rose at a shallow angle from the water, and slid down the trunk until her arm caught on a limb. Muddy water licked the soles of her feet. Her face, rsting with one cheek on the bark, seemed to look across a little stretch of mossy rock at Paula.

Clark let himself down the bank and they clambered over the stones to gather up the body. "Heart to Fea, soul to earth," Paula whispered. She gave two sighs that sounded to him like death rattles, once when they picked her up and once when they slipped coming ashore and nearly dropped her.

"It doesn't look as though very many have come over yet," he offered.

"Not even memories," she said, apparently thinking aloud. "Smoke in darkness." She leaned back and cupped her hands to her mouth to yell, "Tiyar! Where did they go?"

Up on the bridge, Tiyar waved his hands at the trees on the riverbank. Suddenly, Clark remembered that the herbalist had a daughter, probably on her way here now. People were coming over the hill from the roadway. They moved slowly in the twilight, tense and ugly against the deep-hued sky and soft green of the forest. When they saw the bridge, they paused, and some dropped back while others pressed forward. As the people began to see the four bodies, the families of the dead were lightly turned aside.

Three fish jumped at once in the river. Paula started. Her features seemed to weaken, but she made no sound. "Be calm. Don't think about it," Clark told her.

"She was me," Paula said, but her mind was trained, like his, and she diverted her thoughts.

"--there is yet light," Tiyar was calling to the crowd on the ridge. He turned one palm to the opposite bank and pointed with the other hand at the woods behind his listeners. "There are many more who will soon cross. And Pahid cannot be evaded. Therefore, we must prepare ourselves before nightfall." People milled back and forth on the ridge, then regathered, facing west. Akiva was speaking to them. Tiyar shouted louder, but already the crowd had thinned as people went back to Ebur.

It was almost dark, the river still glimmering and the breeze from the east growing stronger. Clark stopped on his way up to the bridge to listen. This was Feyling's song, the gentle hum of a continent's trees all lightly rustling in the sunset wind that whispered over each hill and plain and valley. It did sing, almost. "You hear words in the air," he said to Paula.

"It sounds like: ay, ay, ay."

She climbed up the bank in time to hear Akiva say, "--and don't be afraid. These are important times. Remember, the moons will join tonight."

Tiyar lingered on the bridge when the crowd had gone home.

"You'd better get off of here," Clark told him.

"No. We must have a way of retreat."

Clark let himself over the side and down to the jointed pin.

"Don't touch it," Tiyar said.

Clark straightened the pin. Tiyar aimed a Puro at him.

"Cut that out," Clark said.

Tiyar fired. The projectile cut so close by Clark's head that he smelled burnt hair.

He had only to pull out the pin. Surely he could do it, even in the time he would take to die if Tiyar fired agian. Surely one life was little enough for the thousands who would be saved if the Itscriyites were prevented from crossing. And there was a chance Tiyar would not fire.

"Climb up," Tiyar said.

Clark could not bring himself to refuse. He looked past the underside of the bridge at the great broad-winged fisherbirds swooping in to their nests along the shore. Though he might never have come here and still been happy, and though he would soon leave and not miss it, he somehow could not part from that place yet. He waited while one after another of the birds vanished among the trees and the greater moon rose from the ridge on the western shore, and finally he climbed up over the rail. Tiyar handed him the Puro, muzzle toward himself, and for a moment Clark was tempted to shoot him, but he opened it instead. There was nothing inside.

"I embarrassed you," Tiyar said. "I am sorry. But if I fought with you, you might have fallen from the bridge and drowned."

___________________________________________

jump to: TIYAR REMEMBERS THIS MOMENT
___________________________________________

* * *

"What if a god said to you: I require you to do great evil in your lifetime and afterward be punished in recompense to your victims, and perhaps the god would compel you to kill your own children, or abandon them, or kill your father, perhaps--must you do this in obedience to divine command?" Tiyar asked.

Akiva started as though Tiyar were threatening him. The moons would soon touch again, and he was tying a bunch of rattles around his ankle while a girl fastened a rope of flowers around his waist. Covered wrist-deep with flowers and berries of every description, he sweated in the cold predawn breeze as though he wore armor, vines and red blossoms woven into his braided hair, hands and face still smeared with the mud in which the flower-bringers had found him. Muddy sweat pooled under his eyes. "Divine command to do evil? You believe in evil that brings about good. Good is also needed to bring about good."

"But the evil is required of you. The god commands: kill your father."

"Abandon your children. Kill your father. Not long ago, I helped birth a child who was possessed in the mother's womb. The birth was so hard that the mother's mother told me to press down on the woman and crush the child."

"Did you do it?"

Clark, eavesdropping, thought the question surprised Akiva.

"No, I didn't. The child was born alive. But the grandmother said: no one will stop you."

"Yes."

Akiva crouched back a little so the flowers screened his face. Two moons illuminated them and the dozens of people running back and forth with flowers, cords and interlaced branches. "If you spoke now, Tiyar, your voice would travel through the whole world with nothing to stop it."

"This is no answer! What if you must do evil?"

"We propitiate the gods to make sure that will not happen." Akiva stood up, creating a little blizzard of flowers. "Besides, it is far rarer that we are commanded to do evil than that we cannot bring ourselves to do good, isn't it?" He shrugged, making another flurry of petals, and went to position himself for his dance. "Abandon children, kill father," Clark heard him mutter.

We cannot bring ourselves to do good, Clark thought. Well, suicide is extreme. Maybe I'll get another chance tomorrow. The odd sigh in the wind came to him again, the same noise he had heard on the bridge. "Paula, doesn't the wind sound strange to you?" he asked.

She looked up from her hands, and he realized she had been contemplating them all evening. "No. Yes, it does. It sounds sad. Maybe it has to do with the two..." She raised her hands toward the moons as though she'd forgotton what to call them. "Coming together. These things are rare events. Once in about ten years, usually." She translated this for the herbalist's daughter, who sat beside her.

"It is a long, long time between them, isn't it, most times?" the daughter agreed in a low voice roughened by crying. "Why do they come so often these days? Only last year there was one, and my mother said..."

Very distant drumming, almost like heartbeats, now reached them. Of course they were dancing in many places tonight.

Klyne sat down a little behind Clark and leaned forward. "My sons say Father Pahid was dancing near here. Would you like to see him?"

"The boys?" Clark jumped up. "Where? How could you let them go there?"

"Please relax," Tiyar commanded impatiently. "Strangers are welcome at the ceremony. What concerns me, however, is that they have selected our chosen battle-ground for the celebration."

"Have you been there with the kids?" Clark asked.

"No. Paula and I deposited watching eyes there yesterday." He handed Clark the receiver.

Instead of flowers and seed pods, Pahid wore ribbons and embroidered cloths and long cords of silver bells that gleamed like water. He danced slowly, stamping to make the bells ring and striking a drum he carried, and now and then he leapt straight up as high as his waist. When he looked at the triple ring of children who sat watching, they shuddered.

Of his own people, half were paying attention while the others wandered around the woods, drank and held horse races in the roadway. There were about thirty horses and perhaps three hundred adults, evenly divided between men and women, as far as Clark could see. But maybe the distribution of women favored Pahid, while more of the men were off drinking in the halflight, or again some of the women might have stayed back at the camp--he shook his head to clear it. "What do we do?" he asked.

"Wait," Tiyar said.

Klyne had already set off. Clark followed with some other parents, an oddly merry little contingent, all of them singing so as to attract no notice at the celebration. They arrived in time to see Pahid end his dance with a leap, heavy clothing and all, over someone's head. His followers cheered.

Next came a long sermon damning the ungrateful who failed to appreciate the temple, extolling the few and good who upheld it, promising to deliver the upright householders. So he would murder the homeless. He warned against strange magic seeds that sprang up quickly and yielded a fat harvest but nourished neither human beings nor gods. "When the stranger comes with the wonderful promises, the easy crops with no work, easy faith with no sins and no sacrifices, shut him out. Keep the bad seed out of the good old dirt. You've got to turn blind and deaf to it," he told them. The children had almost gone to sleep when he got to the horrors of divine retribution

"There'll be no help, there'll be no hope, there'll be no rescue. You'll feel the worm in your bones, you'll see him eat your eyes..." It was awful. It reminded Clark of Tiyar's stories about the Pravelany Temple in Merced.

The children had begun sobbing with guilt and terror long before Pahid got to the part about how a bad child could lead mother and father to damnation. Soon they were completely beside themselves, some rolling in the dirt while others lay on their sides with their knees drawn up and hands pressed to their ears. He switched tactics and started talking about Fea and how the priests knew special ways to draw her favor and protect children from angry gods. The children were more or less soothed when he finished, but as soon as he dismissed them they raced to their parents and urged them away. Pahid mounted his horse. He rode out with half a dozen others the same way they had come in.

Clark could follow and shoot Pahid, or for that matter the group of them, with his Puro. He was tempted, longer and more strongly than he ever dared admit, but the whole province would surely be devastated worse than Itscriye for his crime and the Armies of Daybreak gain little or nothing.

As he reflected, he was following. They were poor horses, easy to keep up with, but he was following in the woods in near darkness while they had the road in the grey before dawn, and by the time he convinced himself to put away his Puro, they were out of sight. The dust of the empty road, reflecting a twilit sky, looked so bright and smooth that he decided to chance walking back that way. Turning east, Clark began thinking about the boy with worms in his heart. He ran through everything he knew about parasites, their structures and systems, the human heart and all the drugs he could think of that might affect them, but came up with nothing they had on hand that would drive out the worms and not harm the weakened patient. If the boy could have gone to Reshebora--but the world was poor.

A horn sounded ahead of him. Someone had given the alarm. Clark began to run.

Horses galloped toward him from behind. Clark ran faster and for a long time he led them. At last he saw a culvert and leapt into it. The horses clopped by, keeping near the ground as though afraid they would fall. Low-gravity gait, he thought. At home, people who kept horses laughed at the Eyimalian breeds, but here they were, equus Eyimalia, probably raised by the Viyatos in the Outland.

Now that the sun was up, he could see the riders' faces. First to pass was one of the biggest women he had seen on Paffir Eket. She stopped not far beyond him and turned back, allowing two skinny men to pass.

Like the rest, she wore a leather cap, padded with straw, that provided a nest for mites and dripped tanning fluid when wet but could not have protected her from even the worst-aimed blow. Her leather tunic looked a little more useful; it could prevent abrasions if she fell. Though not a uniform that could make a brave warrior of a coward, it seemed forbidding on her because she looked so tough. Her hands and feet were bare, but so hard that she might as well have been gloved and booted. The size of her knife and spear attested to her strength. She pulled off her cap, letting down a blanket of red hair that sparkled like new mail, and looked around. The tranquility of her expression chilled him. It was the gaze of an intelligent fanatic. Pahid, who came up beside her, looked hard and bleak, a man who would be no more miserable in hell than in heaven.

Shoot them? He knew he couldn't. Yet he should prevent them from reaching the battleground. He could shoot their horses. Tiyar had been telling him for weeks that they had better not use modern weapons, becuase the Viyato were watching Pahid. Cursing silently, he took out his slingshot. So far he had practiced only on rodents and his record with them was terrible. A stick lay in the culvert. He drew it closer.

The woman's horse stood so near him that she heard the sling's whistle and turned her head as the beast collapsed. She dismounted hastily, dropping her spear in the process. Pahid's horse fell on the old man's leg and wrenched his knee. Clark reached out of the culvert and grabbed the woman's spear, but before he could pull, she hit him in the neck with her fist. He dropped down just in time to avoid her knife. She took a few blind stabs at the shrubbery, but he kept the stick between himself and her and managed to crawl away with only a few cuts on his arm. The two of them ran down the road toward the battle, Pahid barely limping though his knee was already swollen. Clark bound up his arms in Expandages he carried with him. The cannister had been leaking sticky threads of white bandage for days. When he finished, it was nearly empty. Had he been on his toes, he might have figured out some way to trip the horses with it and so avoided getting cut.

From the top of the ridge around the hollow he commanded a fair view of the battle in the grass. A small part of Pahid's force had allowed itself to be drawn out there, but that did little good since the catapults had not been set up in the hilltops before the alarm was sounded. A team of men who were supposed to be engaging horses in the wood had instead gone down to the fields, where five of them baited riders to charge while the other two held a pike on which to gore the horses. A line of shield-bearing Verloringers swept through the woods, followed by men and women wielding slingshots. Pahid's red-haired lieutenant, riding again, led a corps of twenty women divided in two groups, who approached the shields from either side, slinging stones and feigning charges, holding them stationary as though to exhaust their ammunition. Clark was sure she must be backing them into a trap. From where would someone have a clear line of fire at them? He remembered the rock outcropping Paula had worried about. It must be near.

Stones whirled past Akiva. One struck him in the chest and knocked him flat. Others were falling also. There was a pause while the horsewomen reloaded their slings.

"Stagger your fire, don't forget!" someone yelled.

Now a volley of stones flew toward the horses.

"Advance!" Tiyar commanded.

The first man to respond was carrying a field harrow shaped like a giant claw. He almost flew forward, hurled by the weight of his weapon. Tiyar followed. The horsewomen moved back. Spear-wielders emerged from behind the horses. Verloringers with pitchforks ran down from the west under cover of flying stones. The first return vollley stopped half Pahid's spears and left people and several horses writhing or dead.

A boulder flew out of the hills at them. The horses screamed and bolted. The Verloringers fled. Soon, that side of the hollow was empty. The Verloringers massed on the opposite side, the north, surrounded by slings and spears that hemmed them in without inviting combat. For the Defenders, this was no longer a battle but an exercise, and to be hurt in such minor action would make a soldier ridiculous. Pahid's mounted force waited on the plain for an order to charge.

Clark had followed the boulder's trajectory to its origin. Here must be the catapult. A stone grazed his stomach. He dropped down flat. Someone ran past, trampling on his hand. He grabbed an ankle. It was a boy, about fourteen years old, with a slingshot. He tied the boy's wrists with the shotstrings and lifted him to his feet. "Now, I want you to go back where you're coming from," he told him.

The boy led him a short way and stopped. "Over there," he said.

A granite outcropping shone pearl-grey in a thick stand of pines. Clark squinted to watch a shadow appear and disappear at the top of it. The smell of granite dust mingled with fresh-cut pine. The machinery creaked. A rock flew past and landed far off with a boom like thunder. Still holding the boy, Clark circled behind the rock under cover of the thicket. He counted five warriors casually reloading the catapult. He pointed to one at random and said, "Call him."

The boy did nothing.

"Call him," Clark repeated. The boy rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. Clark knew the horses might charge at any moment. He landed a vicious kick in the boy's knee.

"Don't!" the kid sobbed.

One of the figures on the rock turned around. When she came near, Clark jabbed full force in her solar plexus with his stick and took her knife away. Kill her? He gave her a push downhill, thought better of it, pulled her back and struck her on the head with his stick. The boy knelt beside her.

"Ingrid!" a man called from the rock.

Clark's stone hit the man and he fell into the undergrowth. Groaning, he rose to his knees. Clark scuttled as close as he dared. Two younger women came to help the man. Clark guessed them to be sisters, and wondered if these five might be a family. He leapt out of the brush, knocking down the man as he did so, and held the knife above the man's head. The daughters shrieked.

"Quiet!" Clark hissed, but it was too late. He heard footsteps. He ducked into the underbrush. Someone followed him. He turned suddenly to stab the pursuer. It was Fuego.

They returned to the catapult. The father was about to cut the restraining rope and fire, while the two daughters braced themselves to steady the base so it would not turn when the mechanical arm swung. Fuego whispered, "I'll get the man. You tie up the big sister in the cord. Then we turn the base and cut the rope."

Clark handed him his light knife. "To Clarkwell with love. Work for Harmony," Fuego read. He wrapped his fingers around the crescent, turned it on, and dropped it with a gasp.

"No, that's the end the beams come out of. Hold this end. Move this button to move the point where they converge. That's what cuts. Your hand all right?"

"I think I can make a fist. Let's go."

Down on the field, Paula was telling everyone, "When they come, just stand your ground. Then drop back, behind the horse-pikes, running backward. Show your fronts; otherwise they'll slow down. Keep them coming." She moved among the troops, showing an authority she did not feel, slapping people on the back, correcting a grip here and moving someone to a better position there, while behind her Tiyar did the same among those who manned the pikes. A line of women held shields turned to the north, uphill, where Pahid's footsoldiers lounged, jeered and occasionally shot stones. No one bothered to shoot back. The east side was clear, except for splintered trees and half a dozen new boulders that described the limit of the catapult's range. Retreat in any direction would be bloody.

For a moment there was quiet. All the birds and animals had fled. Even the worms had gone deeper, it seemed. Paula saw an ant crawl over a woman's foot and felt a rush of gratitude for the little emissary. But it could not be there on purpose, she thought, and her welcome turned to pity.

A great stone rent the air. This time Paula could see the volley would not fall short of them. She would die here. To die is inevitable, she reasoned. We are only another means of settling the universal dust. How lucky to die in a cause, in rescue, to be spared the ridiculous years of nostalgia for these few moments of real life. She charged Pahid's line.

"It's the witch!" a man screamed. They made way, then closed around her as she fell.

A stone landed, square in Pahid's cavalry. The horses panicked, scattered and finally, the riders barely clinging to their necks, fled galloping out between the two hills to the west. The two groups on foot, Defenders and Verloringers, stood looking at one another. Neither side wore leather or any uniform but muddy cotton overshirts, Pahid's soldiers' greyish and those of the Verloringers tending to black. Most of the Defenders of Faith looked about sixteen to twenty years old, while the Verloringers ranged from twelve to past sixty. A few on each side were pregnant. The Verloringers crouched and called out threats in deep voices. The Defenders stood erect and jeered. Stones flew back and forth but seldom hit.

The Verloringers advanced. The grinning enemy dropped back. They could hear one or two horses neighing in the hilltops while the two groups slowly traversed the hollow, keeping clear of the plain though the catapult seemed asleep. When they were backed almost to the woods, the Defenders turned and circled back toward the other side.

It was past noon when the great stones began to fly again, not toward either side but onto the roadway and up in the hilltops. Both sides stopped moving. They heard the horses coming back, racing up the western pass behind the Verloringers.

"Attack!" yelled Tiyar, lunging forward. His weapon was an axe.

The harrow claw lodged in a spearwoman's side. She screamed. Her companions ran toward her. Others ran at her killer. He dislodged his weapon and raised it. They fell back. He swung it round at shoulder height, spraying them all with blood. Every Defender slingshot was aimed at him. A deluge of stones rang on the iron fingers.

The rest of the Verloringers seized the chance to come close. They tumbled forward, laughing with relief at the end of the long weeks of marching, days of waiting and the morning's slow fearful dance around the hollow, to begin the fight at last.

Tiyar shouted, "You stand at the brink of hell!" a battle cry he had picked up from Pravelany toughs at home.

"You are in hell!" a man replied.

Tiyar hesitated at this explanation. The side of his face, his arm, and the blade of the axe gleamed bright in the sun. Then he struck with such fury that the blade split a man's skull and the long bone of his upper arm, meeting a stick raised to block it, gave way. He switched the axe to his other hand and leapt among the spearmen, dodging their thrusts and slashing their hands and faces. At this range, they often speared each other.

Pahid's cavalry could not have charged without killing as many of their own footsoldiers as Verloringers, even if they rode good horses. They came into the hollow at full speed, earth trembling, and made the treetops quiver. A few charged straight onto the stones catapulted there. Others were crushed by stones still falling. Most of the rest stampeded across the plain, the riders clinging on with arms around the horses' necks. Of those who were not thrown, about half managed to swing the horses' heads around and turn them off the road before they ran out of the hollow again.

Dismounted cavalry began to reinforce the Defenders in close combat. On both sides, people struck wild and slipped in the mire of blood, dust and sweat. Now and then eyes rolled skyward, imploring help. The sun retired behind blue-grey clouds and tinged them lavender. Stones continued to fall on the road. Horses ran down from the hilltops in a zig-zag path, running around obstacles rather than trying to jump them. Tiyar grasped a rider's elbow as she struck at him, pulled her down with the momentum of her swing, and dragged himself onto her horse. Clinging with his legs, he kept on but could not direct the frightened animal. It carried him to the trees on the southern side of the hollow, then suddenly knelt. He let himself fall just seconds before he was thrown.

Others followed Tiyar's example, and many succeeded in wounding or dismounting a rider. A few got themselves onto horses and scattered around the hollow. They sniped stones at the Defenders from behind bushes or up in trees. Others simply ran.

By nightfall, the horses were back in their riders' control. Clark and Fuego had remained at the catapult, surrounded by wooden shields and firing randomly into the brush to keep people away. The Defenders who erected the machine had left a supply of grease and straw, so they surrounded themselves with a flammable barrier.

Women rode between the falling boulders on the hillside and attacked, jumping off their horses when the beasts tripped or threw them, yelling shrilly and running heavy-footed as a herd of strange animals, their drugged, startled eyes and faces set grim for murder. Clark and Fuego shot stones as fast as they could and the thwack of the ones that missed and struck wood echoed between the rock and the hill like the sound of falling water, but they had to stop firing the catapult when they ran out of stones and then more women came, and men as well. Fuego touched Clark's light knife to the straw. At once a moat of flame protected them. They scrambled over the rocks, rolled down the other side and ran.

The distant sigh Clark had heard in the wind before was louder now. He could hear it even in the uko thicket where he and Fuego buried themselves in rustling leaves.

There were people in the trees around them struggling to stay awake, keep their balance on the branches and shoot stones at the enemy running and riding by. Occasionally someone fell, and then Clark and Fuego crawled over to see how badly the person was hurt and to do what they could with sticks and Expandages and painkillers. They worked through the thicket this way and came to the plain.

After a day's fighting, the field looked like an open sore. Bodies of human beings and horses lay under, on and among rocks of all sizes from which they were hard to distinguish in the darkness. Blood pools splashed up on the rocks left darker shadows than the moons could throw. The ground was runny with clotted mud. And there was motion in this festering place. Some of the bodies twitched or even crawled blindly toward the nearest shadow, leaving twisted trails of blood. Some fighters not wounded crept over the bodies to prey on them, some darted out at others on horseback, and about a score were still battling in wild exhaustion. Birds were screeching.

"We'll have to hide somewhere on this planet until Huey can get us out," Clark said. Fuego did not answer.

The sighing grew louder. People dropped down, playing dead, to listen.

"Babyface, babyface, make us cry. Your papa set you free and your mama let you die."

Clark had heard the words before. It was a children's song, fighting words if you were under ten, but these voices, coming closer and closer and finally surrounding the hollow, belonged to adults. Cries of "Fire! Fire! " could be heard.

Attracted by the flames around the catapult, they came first through the western pass. Groups of twelve or fifteen ran backward and forward, breaking apart and rejoining, clustered around torches that bobbed and fell as their carriers swung the fiery ends in circles around them until they were wrestled down and the torches, taken away from them, surfaced elsewhere like bubbles of flame. The crowd seemed to boil over the top of the pass and pour into the hollow still foaming.

The song faded when the Itscriyites came close enough to see the battle. They began to laugh and howl and yell.

"Look, look, look, a claw! He'll shred you with the claw!"

The Verloringer with the field-harrow stood still. Everyone was running away from him.

"A claw! A claw!" There were scores of them, yelling, most of them less than fifteen years old. They know how they sound, Clark thought. The bridge had slowed them, brought them together and intoxicated them with their numbers.

"But it won't do you any good," one taunted. "You're already dead!"

"No good!" the chorus wailed.

"Let's burn things! Give me a torch! Burn! Burn!" They set fire to the grass and trees around them. "I want to break things!" someone shouted, and another called, "I want to kill!"

Red-corded Defenders came running out of the fire around the catapult, whooping and shouting, "Die! Die!"

"Fight! Fight!" The Itscriyites were jumping up and down. At the first attack, they made way and let the women rush through. Now they were uphill. Each grabbed a flaming stick and they leapt on the Defenders, clubbing, stabbing and painting long firey stripes on their opponents. Wounded, they giggled and kept fighting until they dropped.

When three Defenders of Faith lay dead, the Itscriyites began to retreat, not together but one at a time as they came to the forest's burning margin. They darted through the flames and ran away, laughing, tripping, tumbling and setting fire to trees. Others, attracted by the noise and flame, were still arriving in groups.

Suddenly, at a shouted order, the Defender women turned and fled. The Verloringers ran to the thicket where Clark and Fuego were hiding.

"Let's stone them," Manitey suggested.

"Not yet," Tiyar answered. He was sitting on a downed branch, rubbing a bitter oil on his arms and chest. "These vapors smell bad, but they burn very cooly," he explained to Akiva, who was leaning against a tree while Clark salved his injuries. "I will seem to burn."

"Paula--where--?" Clark tried to ask, tried to restrain himself from asking, and dropped the Expandages.

"Taken."

Clark turned toward the battlefield. He turned back. "Hold still," he said to Akiva.

On the plain, the fires in the trampled grass had gone out quickly. Itscriyites were running over grey stones and black puddles full of blood. Tiyar climbed onto a boulder in the road. He burst into flames.

The Itscriyites, now numbering over two hundred, fell back as silent and still as stones. Tall and thin, clothed in fire, Tiyar looked the embodiment of famine and war.

Someone said, "It's death."

The whisper carried to all of them. "Death! Death!" they called softly. People flocked to the burning man. Some kissed his feet and some climbed up to embrace him, but he pushed away anyone who came too close. The pushed-away slid down in the mud that coated the boulder, down to the ground.

Fuego climbed up. They argued, Fuego bringing his mouth as close to the flaming head as he could. Unable to see, Tiyar groped for him and pushed. Fuego slid down. Tiyar descended slowly.

"Where are my dead ones?" he asked. "Are you dead? Lie down. Lie down and be dead." He urged people down with his hands. Men and women threw their arms around him, but he put off their embraces more gently than Akiva had thought he could do, saying, "Lie down, lie down, my dead."

The people did as he asked them, slowly, without looking at one another. They lay on their backs with their wrists crossed, in the posture of burial. Tiyar chanted the Pravelany funeral song. Then he addressed them in an unshouting voice that yet filled the hollow.

"Now you are dead and everything in life is finished for you. The dead do not forget the past, but weep. They weep for it because it is so far away. The past is gone. It can not reach them and now they weep for it. Weep now, yes, for all you bore in life without weeping."

The greater moon emerged from behind clouds. Nearly all the people lay with their eyes closed. Tears ran down the sides of many faces. A few tentative sighs escaped them.

"Weep freely. Why do you not weep freely?" Tiyar asked. "It is the duty of the dead to mourn themselves. The one now gone who was yourself is worthy of mourning."

Clark groaned. Fuego spoke with him.

Tiyar went on, "You are dead, you are dead. Weep freely, you are dead. Here are your brother and sister dead, we who want nothing, who are always kind. We no longer want or need or fear. You are not alone, however deeply you believed it, you who believed it more deeply than you know. You believed you were alone. As the castout wolf crossing those white crags believes he is the only thing that lives and sings to himself in the dead moon, you sang to yourselves in fire and murder and thought you were alone." He was pointing to the mountains. His fire had dwindled to a glow. "There are others. This you must believe, you must feel. Other people, other families, other villages, provinces and lands. Other temples, other worlds."

Clark was lying face down in the leaves.

"There are others. What divides you from them? Ignorance and weakness of faith, because only faith will remind you that others are as real as you. Only faith convinces you, when you are in a strange land, that you still move among human beings. Now that you are dead and free from the circumstances that robbed you of your humanity, you know this."

Tiyar began to walk along the crowd's edge. Standing alone between the battlefield and the empty predawn sky, he looked very small. "That is the most important thing I have come to tell you. The other truth I know is one of which you have probably had some suspicion, that the temple is no temple, its gods are no gods and its priests are only thieves. Does this surprise you? No, it does not. But we value this truth, because it lends direction. How can we forfend another famine like the last? The first truth impels us to do this. The second truth tells us how. We must destroy the temple of the Lir."

He finished his circuit around the group. "Now I have told you what I know. Know these things, and the world is changed completely. Do you have the courage to join me in this world?"

They seemed to Akiva to sigh all at once, each quietly but together audible. The sound rose from so near the ground that he thought it might have been Earth herself, whispering, "Must I?"

The sky was now light. A flock of small birds flew high above them.

"Sparrows!" Akiva shouted. "They come to your birth. Tell me your new names and I will deliver each one of you, children of Fea beloved to Ayekar." By day he had given names to two hundred.

Chapter 15

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