CHAPTER 15

Blows fell. People shouted and ran. Someone took her medicine bag. She was carried a short way on a horse, then pushed off. Someone covered her head and dragged her. Now it was dark, whether the same night or the next one she could not calculate. Feet shuffled around her. She tried to listen to the birds, but heard none. This was a town. She felt thirsty. Perhaps a long time had passed since her capture; her internal clock, once so accurate, had stopped.

They uncovered her head. A balding wiry preist squatted beside her. His gaze felt like a blast of hot wind.

"Now," he said in high Paffir. He was balancing himself with a knife, point in earth. "Now," he repeated.

Paula stared at the black sky, but the man's life-killing gaze made itself felt. Relaxing the muscles at the back of her neck, she tried to look calm. The priest gripped her jaw and yanked her face toward him. She relaxed her stomach. Now she wanted to live.

The priest smiled. "I think you know a good deal. I am a man of learning, too. We can bring one another light." He held up her medicine bag. "I have seen fluids and devices like these, in dreams." He touched his whiskers. "Say your name."

Paula chose, at random, a name she had heard often. "Berthe."

"I would be more surprised to learn that you are another Berthe than that you dare to lie. But I know nothing. Perhaps you want me to believe your forces are the mirror of mine, of the Temple's. That I won't. Let it stand, though." He grinned. "Of course, I could torture it out of some women, but you are reserved for more important work."

"You're right," Paula said. "You know nothing." She saw no harm in making him think her unafraid. He wants me to respect him, she thought. He wants to scare me into some gentlemen's agreement where I do what he wants. What did he mean about a mirror, mirror of the Temple's forces? Maybe he thinks we're demons.

Two skinny priests raised her to her feet, and one retied the rope around her ankles to leave slack enough for little steps. She had to mince along behind the bald one. Paula nearly faltered when she saw they were heading for the back door of a temple, but she resolved that so long as anyone could see her there would be no show of fear. She slowed her pace and, taking a deep breath, began to shout a revolutionary song Tiyar had translated into Paffir.

The crowd stopped milling. Everyone listened. The assistant priests gaped, shut their mouths and glared. The older one was smarter; he pretended not to notice. She had time to finish at a fine solemn tempo, "With one voice we cry no more," and walk through the door singing. The assistants hustled her down a flight of stairs.

They brought her to what looked like an unused cheeseroom illuminated by a torch set in an iron ring in the wall. Near the cieling, a thin window overlooked the gutter outside. The floor was covered with straw.

"We need a woman to search her," one of the younger men said in high Paffir. Their accent was almost like Tiyar's. The real thing, she thought, Lir Temple. This is how their gods, the Viyato, speak. Few religious tongues anywhere came so near.

"She's not going to poison herself tonight," the older one sneered. "And what's all the new straw for? Well, leave it here. Her bed is more comfortable than any of ours, but so be it."

Quit complaining, Paula thought. You don't have to show me how disorganized you are. But the hint about suicide bothered her, and she had to stare at the torch to keep from looking at the old man.

He was watching her. "What is your name!" he shouted suddenly.

"Berthe."

A kick in the knee toppled her.

"Your goddess?" the priest asked quietly.

"What?"

"Who is your goddess?"

"I don't have any."

He thrust the torch near her chin to study her. She felt like a child caught and dragged to the mirror to confront her liar's face. He turned around abruptly and went out, followed by his assistants, leaving Paula in darkness with her wrists still bound.

She examined the cell. Its floor was square, earthen, five paces on a side. Two clay walls opposed two stone ones she supposed were outer foundations. Three times she nearly tripped in holes at the corners, and each time she heard rats. They might be useful, she told herself firmly.

After a few minutes' effort, Paula was able to climb up three of the iron rings set in the wall. She guessed that with her hands free she could swing from the highest to kick someone coming in the door, or leap from the ring to the window. There was no hope of escaping that way, however, since the window was too small to squeeze her head through, even if she lost so much weight that her body would pass. She found two more rings near the floor. Might as well sleep, she thought. Huey had said a prisoner's best weapon was calm.

"You are very strong, almost free from the degeneration normally associated with heresy," the priest told her in the morning after a giantess, whose name really was Berthe, inspected Paula and retied her wrists. "Your strength is bad, for two reasons. First, I am going to please the gods by making you their supplicant. That won't be easy. Second, we need a nature in which the effects of godlessness are obvious."

The intent of this speech was to reduce her to gibbering terror. "You're a tough kid," Paula's father had told her once. She thought of him now and shrugged. The two assistant priests were building a small fire in the middle of the cell, their faces so alike in concentration that she wondered whether they were brothers. Fire. Would they--? But the mirror, the mirror. As she tried to think, the priest's comment about the mirror kept returning. Was it because of the woman whose name really was Berthe?

"My sons are going to drag you into the presence of the gods, and you will arrive in pliant spirit," the priest went on.

Paula rushed one of the sons, intending to break his nose with her head, but the other tripped her and threw her off balance, so that when the first one kicked her she fell. They tied her, wrist and ankle, to the wall, while the father blew on the flames.

Tiyar had told her a way of shutting her brain's channels to pain. She tried to do it, but at the first touch of the heat she screamed. Faces appeared at the window, some laughing, some wincing for her, all reddened because people had to stoop over to see.

"Don't be so childish," the priest said. He took a red ember in his own hand and clenched his fist. His expression did not change. He opened his hand. Skin and ember were black. He motioned to his sons to continue.

At first Paula thought of nothing. Later she tried to stop her screaming in order to hold something in reserve. Her body tensed so long that when they stopped and let her fall on the bed of straw her muscles were as sore as though she had been made to carry heavy weights for hours. She slept and woke in daytime. Berthe came to see her wounds.

"Is it morning or evening?" Paula asked.

Berthe shook her head. "Above all else, I must not tell you the time. We have stopped the temple bells for you."

"He's trying to drive me out of my mind." Paula held the other woman's sleeve and looked at her eyes. Confront, she told herself. Confront and confront and confront. "Are you going to help destroy me?"

"No. He said you are one for whom it is morning, but you believe it is night. We must tear you free from wrong thinking." Berthe rolled up Paula's sleeves to reveal burns from wrist to elbow.

Why did I have them covered, Paula thought. Already hiding wounds. "Is this for my own good, too?" she demanded.

"Where time is short, the remedy must be harsh. Have patience," the giantess pleaded. "Other souls than your own depend on this."

"What?"

"Little children are being reared so far from our gentle goddesses. We must reach them." She took up Paula's hands. "Only priests have skin as smooth as this. Everyone in the south will follow when they see these hands at prayer."

"Who says I'm going south? Who says I'm going to pray?"

"Father Pahid does."

A deep, lifeless chanting labored toward them in the hallway and then filled the room. Berthe withdrew. The priests came in. After some incomprehensible questions, they flailed at her with cords, chanting above her cries, trying to make her join voice with their inhuman song.

It was dark. The priests might have been there half an hour or all day; the time and the marks on her body ran together so she lost count of the things they had done. Soon her memory would confuse day and night until she knew only isolated moments of pain and peace. The word "torture" never entered her mind during her imprisonment.

Once, when a cold rain muddied the floor of her cell, she climbed on the rings to stay dry and saw Pahid standing some distance away in the vacant street, his arms raised as Akiva's had been by night in the forest long ago. He was still there when she fell asleep and tumbled down. The next time he visited her, his hands, usually blue, were purple.

At times her own strength exhilarated her. "You will fail!" she ranted at Pahid as his sons made up the fire. "Your boys will get tired of burning me, or I will die yelling the truth in your ears! When the downtrodden of this world throw off the weight of your temple, my words will triumph."

"Yes. We give you innocence, purity, suffering," Pahid answered grimly.

Occasionally she tried to make use of opportunities to question him. Once when he asked where she came from, she said, "From where giants live." It was dangerous. He didn't hit her, though. His curiosity was roused. He must know about Sevit. Had this face looked upon Sevit's? She could have loved him wholeheartedly.

"Where is that place?"

"South."

"What kind of giants?"

"They have yellow hair."

"Yellow? Not red, like his?" He pointed to one of his sons.

"No."

Pahid went on to other subjects. He could not have seen Sevit, whose hair was black as vac. But he had heard something. She was coming near. Suddenly she wondered if she were not loosing her mind after all, if he might not have told her where Sevit was, and she forgotten. No. She was coming near.

At other times she felt too miserable to think even about dying. Then she would sit or lie where they tossed her and nothing could make her weep.

"Woman, don't you see how many people are working to save you?" Father Pahid demanded when she was in a dejected mood. His face was pale and dry, though the room was hot and his sons perspiring. "No, you insist on pretending you suffer alone. But we will keep on. You will be dragged sulking and cursing all the long way to redemption, and only there, at the gates of Ayekar, will you see who are your true and loving friends."

Suddenly, Paula switched into anger. "You are tiny! You are nothing! Your religion is a joke!" She panted, then went on, merely shouting, "Use your common sense! What gods would be pleased with what you have done to me?" She glanced out the window to see whether the spectators were impressed, but it was night and they had gone home.

Pahid's sons were shocked, but he said only, "Untie her. The rest will wait until tomorrow. Today we will talk." He always referred to each visit as a day, even when he came at night. Paula suspected that he sometimes left and returned again or twice between sunrise and sunrise, but she could hardly tell the difference between an hour and a day any more. Time had gone out of control.

The sons went away. Paula sat on the heap of straw. Pahid stood.

"Your masters," Paula said. She wanted not to rest, but was too tired to frame a proper question.

"The fathers of the temple," Pahid said.

"This temple?"

"This building? No, of the whole. Do you think a local priest would dare tamper with magic as I have with you?"

"Where are they?" she persisted.

"The fathers? In a place. They come to me at the Lir Temple."

"Where the taxes go," Paula said. Her eyes closed of their own accord.

"Yes, that too. All communication between human beings and gods is through my masters."

"Gods? Thieves," Paula said. She opened her eyes. "The masters."

"Why are you preoccupied with theft? If we give them what they ask, the gods send favorable weather, health and such things. When we fail them, there is famine, disease and madness. If it is the food we give them that troubles you, be assured no human being could eat what my masters take away."

"Black dust?"

The priest waved his hand. "Yes, and you will say they have some use for it or that by some magic they restore it to edible form. What they do with it is of no interest. We give them all they ask. In return they protect us. They give us laws and the temple, without which you know full well we would subsist like beasts. There would be no rules to govern our dealings with one another and no one to stop us from doing wrong. What would that be but damnation?"

"Damnation," Paula exhoed stupidly. She wanted to make him see how inutterably tiny he was, by telling him how many worlds existed. How long did I sleep when he said it was night, she wondered.

"Damnation. Beyond the help of divinity. We would behave like beasts were we left to ourselves. You must have seen that."

Paula thought at once of Tiyar, but she objected, "People make laws to govern themselves."

The priest shook his head. "Not without help."

It seemed there was no arguing with that. She could say they did, he would say they didn't, until one of them died from old age. There must be some evidence. She was half-dreaming by now, and had to rally herself to answer, "But there are hundreds of different kinds of law. You can't say they all derive from the same gods."

The priest looked down at his hands. For some reason they were red today. "Hundreds of kinds of laws. Well...people who have lost sight of the gods sometimes try to make laws in imitation of what they remember. We saw that in Itscriye. Something like it existed among the herbalists, too. They had laws of their own. But the first law, the good law, comes from Ayekar."

Paula's eyes narrowed. She hated this man, his logic, the absurd temptation of his faith, the temptation to believe her suffering was more than chance. If I believe in his gods I will know I've lost my mind, she thought. "How do you know gods exist?" she asked.

He laughed. "How fearful she is! Thieves and tyrants under an empty heaven are all she believes. Of course I know there are gods, the same way anyone knows anything. I have seen them and spoken with them. Besides, there is hunger and so food exists. There is thirst, hence water. Weariness, hence sleep. And there is reverence, so there must be gods. From whom could we learn the idea of holiness, which everyone understands though few have ever seen it, if not from the gods?"

"That's what you say," Paula answered slowly, trying to keep her point clearly in mind. "You don't believe it. Because you don't believe it, you left an open window up there instead of putting me in a windowless room." She paused.

He waited.

"You wanted people to look in and judge you because you were afraid of what might happen if they didn't. You were afraid to rely on gods."

Pahid smiled. His head looked like a stone cleaving to present two sharp edges. "It helps to have a temporal reminder."

"You're just too honest for fire to scorch, aren't you?" Paula snapped. She jumped up, intending to seize the torch and kill him with it, but the blood rushed down from her head and she fainted.

"You were saved," Berthe told her when she came to. The big woman carried out the wet straw under the window and brought in some wooden bowls, stopping now and then to speak. "Does your head hurt? You must eat. Before you fasted. That was because you were subduing a wicked body. But the gods love you now and so you must preserve yourself."

"I hate him," Paula groaned.

"No, no. He is the father of your soul now," Berthe said. She crumbled some herbs into a bowl of porridge.

"Father of my soul," Paula spat back. She flung the porridge at the wall. "I hate him! I have every reason to hate him!"

"No, he is your holy father," Berthe said patiently.

"I hate my father."

"Why? He acts only from love for you."

"He raped me," Paula said bitterly. She lay back in the straw.

"Pahid?"

"My father."

Berthe looked down. She thrust her medicine-stained hands into the straw to hide them. "Oh. That was bad, I think. He should not have done it, even though he is your father and can do as he likes. The gods do not allow it."

"There are no gods!" Paula shouted.

"Of course there are. Otherwise it would not be wrong to do as your father did."

"You're mad! You're out of your--driving me out of my mind! All of you," she panted, suddenly fatigued. "All of you are making me lose my mind. Stop. Please, use your common sense."

"It is of no use in the contemplation of Ayekar. Faith alone can guide us," Berthe said.

Paula closed her eyes. She imagined herself walking in the hot sun beside a quarry. Far away at the bottom of the pit she saw Clark chained to a stone, trying to call her.

"Don't be sad. You should be happy now because your soul is free," Berthe said.

Who is this, Paula thought. She asked the first personal question that came to mind. "Where were you born?"

"I was born in Nichayu."

"Are you married?"

"Yes."

"Does he treat you well?"

Berthe smiled involuntarily and blushed. "I am bigger than he is."

"Nichayu," Paula mused. Berthe wriggled uncomfortably, but she was not deterred. "I know that name."

"Have you been there? Is the crop good?"

"No, I haven't. Akiva didn't want to go there."

"Oh," Berthe said faintly.

"How did you get to be a Defender of Faith?"

"I was the biggest and most religious woman in my village. I was the only one who understood the church language," Berthe said. "When Father Pahid came to my village, he chose me."

"How did you know the temple language?"

"From going there. Some learn, others do not."

Paula closed her eyes. "It's bright in here."

"Fever. We will let you sleep."

"This is madness," Paula whispered.

"Sleep and get well. They need you in the south."

"My eyes...are you the same Berthe that Akiva remembers?"

"Yes."

* * *

The mountains south of the Middle Plains rose from a wide marsh that absorbed its brooks and streams and rivers and transformed them into a superabundance of cat-tails and mosquitoes. As elsewhere on Paffir Eket, the tax road through the Middle Plains followed the rivers, into the marsh and through it to the Lir. In spring the rain-loosened topsoil clouded the water and in fall the best of the harvest came away on wagons, so a common expression for crushed hopes was, "gone the way of the good dirt."

Here, near the roadway, the Daybreakers camped. By night Tiyar trained them, by day they gathered fish and edible grass. Akiva taught his students to build boats and lectured the Itscriyites on the realms of air and water, comparing the two to conscious thought and meditations of the soul. During his year as a wanderer he had lived once with a fisherman on the eastern coast, kneeling for hours in the prow of a canoe while he stared through the water's surface to the depths, spear ready, and thought of the fisherpeople's gods. The sound of water lapping the boat returned him now to the peace of those days, so tranquil that he feared to confess to anyone how much he loved them. Dreams ripened the very air of this voluptuous marshland, the life-oozing delta of the Middle Plains where earth and the outcasts of humankind would beget their paradise.

Within a week, though, the edible grasses thinned. Harmony between the Itscriyites and the Verloringers likewise withered. Some Verloringers went north to beg in the wealthy Plains, and Itscriyites followed them to steal. Tiyar and Akiva campaigned against banditry. Fuego searched his archives for recipies to cook insects. Clark planted special varieties of potato on the rocky hillsides.

One afternoon, Clark and Fuego sat tying nets while Akiva's students discoursed about theft. They pursued ownership through some tricky parables: a farmer grew a crop from stolen seed; a farmer planted his own on another family's land; a farmer reared a pig on stolen fodder; a farmer nourished himself with stolen food. There was no particular decision on any case. Akiva broke in to talk about seeds once, and matched wits occasionally with the disputants. On the question of the pig, he asked how many children each farmer had.

"None. That is, neither of them is real," the student answered.

"You see? We make law. Gods make worlds. That's why they laugh at law."

Fuego leaned forward. "Gods laugh at law?"

"Every human being is a separate, sacred law. Isn't that so? These laws of ours are like dolls."

"And we--" Fuego began, still leaning forward, earnest and hopeful. The question of how they would eat was now to be decided. "And we--"

But at that moment, the boy with worms in his heart made his way into the tent and laid his head in Akiva's lap. His thin hands, uable to support their own weight, made faint prayer gestures. A worm crawled down the inside of his leg. "Fea, my darling, I'm ready," he murmured.

Akiva turned to Clark. His hair brushed audibly across his shoulder and fell, black and straight, his black eyes bright with life looking out over a small face the color of a dead moon. Clark remembered the look of calm inquiry as a bitter reproach.

"He's dying. He has worms all through his body, and I don't know how to kill them without his dying, too," Clark said.

"I will sing them out," Akiva said. "Lie down, boy. Don't be afraid. Think of your goddess, think of your soul's mother."

All night he sat at the boy's head and sang a chant that consisted of the word, "Go." While Clark waited to see whether anything would happen, he drifted between waking and sleeping, contemplating the command Go. All of us go without wondering that we go, he thought. How strange. We might as well do nothing and die right away as do something and die later, but all things that live heed the command. Go, catch light and make food from it, bloom and seed and thrive. Go, divide and hatch and be born, swim and crawl and walk and fly. Go and eat and live, gather and hunt and nest and spawn. The leaf, feeling nothing, moves into the light. The blind cell, understanding nothing, surrounds its prey. The new bird pecks at the wall of the universe until it shatters. From this feeding and multiplying spring up purposes as distantly removed as research into the working of an antibiotic or travel to Paffir Eket for the sake of friendship and love.

He heard the students fall asleep one by one and curl up in their places, come to, rise and go away to their sleeping huts in the trees. Only he and Fuego remained. Nothing happened for hours, while Akiva chanted in a low even voice, lulling the boy's heart to near death in the most gentle and drastic of treatments.

Clark dozed for a moment and dreamed that he saw Paula, far away, looking at him with an expression of pity because his arms and legs were chained. When he woke, the morning light was almost strong enough to show color.

Worms began to leave the boy's body through various ways, bringing with them so much blood that the child, now naked, was soon covered in it. Clark thought he saw worms emerge through the skin. He had seen parasites exit the dying before, but the sight still horrified him every time, and this exodus was worse than most. Fuego had also seen it before, and had helped Luz collect the worms and destroy them, but he looked sick now, too.

Clark decided to help cool the patient by bathing him with water, so he went out to fill a jar at one of the streams that ran everywhere in the camp. He saw Tiyar practicing marksmanship on the other side. Insects, butterflies and birds died in the air all around him. Branches snapped, scattering green leaves over the dead creatures. Clark heard Tiyar step across the water and approach, but he filled his jar quickly, sinking it with a plash in the icy current, and went back to the tent.

Fuego sat in the entry, still trembling. "They stopped," he said.

"Is the boy alive?"

"His heart's beating. Sorry to be so squeamish."

Akiva came out behind Fuego, patted his shoulder in answer and extended his hand, saying, "Come sit by the fire until the sweat dries. The cure comes close to death, doesn't it, Clarek? I told you, gods laugh at our law."

"Close to death," Clark agreed, looking around at the stream and thinking of rivers and roads and the command, Go. The boy's life perched itself in the tiny space between the illusion of death and death as did theirs between starvation and Pahid and, for that matter, all life between beginning and end, pressed each to the surface of its island in night. Vac-tremors again. He sneezed.

Both he and Fuego sat absorbed in thinking about the cure and kept silent when Tiyar came to demand a solution to the food question, as though their failure to provide one showed that he had been right all along. Both looked at Akiva. The answer came again and seemed obvious now, while they were thinking of life sustained in the gap between simulation and actuality, and of a cure that might prove fatal. So it would be if they robbed the tax wagons, sustaining the Temple's destroyers with its tithes at risk of becoming bandits themselves.

They agreed. The Itscriyites would have done it in any case, with bloodshed, and pillaged the Middle Plains as well. Better to rob the enemy than prey on their friends. Besides, the single road led south from the Plains through the marsh. It would be simple.

* * *

Twenty-five wagons came in single file, surrounded by stave-carrying priests who coughed and spat and tripped over stones in the mist. According to the lookouts there were about half a dozen people with each wagon and an escort of sixty priests sent by Pahid.

Up on the wagontops, drivers looked through clouds of rising dew and insects at pallid emptiness. Down in the mud, Clark fought an impulse to cry. A marsh bird yelled. The flock took off in a thunderous rush of clapping wings, roiling the grass and mud and water. Human beings emerged from the swamp. Their water-wrinkled bodies dripped black muck that released bubbles of marsh gas where it fell.

Clark climbed onto the road in front of the wagons. The first one stopped. There were cries of annoyance, then the second stopped. More cries, then the third and on.

"Get down!" Clark shouted in high Paffir. No one moved.

Stones rushed out of the fog and struck wheels and axles. The drivers jumped down, their boots clacking on the roadway. They crouched and stared.

A huge crowd surrounded them. The population of a city had risen from the mud. They were two crowds, stretching back from the point of contact into the mist.

"Go back the way you came. Run, otherwise you'll be killed," Clark warned them, speaking clearly.

"Hey, you're not letting them go, are you?" one of the Itscriyites called.

"Come on!" yelled another. About fifty people clambered up onto the roadway.

"Stop," Tiyar shouted from his hiding place. "Remember our plan."

"I almost froze off my balls, waiting in the mud," someone complained.

The priests were staring at the robbers, trying to follow the low Paffir conversation. One of them seemed to groan, or it might be the wind in the pass.

"Remember the weapon of discipline. You are not ruffians now. You are an army," Tiyar said.

Suddenly one of the priests jumped off the road into the swamp. A dozen Itscriyites chased and caught him and dragged him back. He stood in front of the wagons, blotting his tears with his sleeve. "I am killed by children," he said.

One of them kicked him. Seeing that no one else was running away, the man shouted, "Run for your lives! What are you waiting for? These are the rat-eaters, the dead from Itscriye!"

There was a quick exchange of whispers that sounded like the first fall of rain, then all of them, men and women, dove off the roadway. Horses ran headlong in different directions, fell and overturned the wagons. Priests thrashed like wounded birds in the grass, screaming at the tops of their voices.

Itscriyites ran after them with sticks and knives. They struck at random. Blades slashed the grasses, sometimes completing a swing and sometimes stopped. Blood spouted over the cattails. The Itscriyites killed everyone they could find.

It was over quickly, and silence fell with the suddenness of thunder after lightening, stilling them in the postures they had assumed at the decisive moment, Clark half-foundered in the swamp with his hands upraised looking at Fuego, who had crouched over someone to protect him. Tiyar had remained in his hiding place. He waited for the Itscriyites to come back, and then waited for them to sit down passively in a circle around him. Finally he said, "Soldiers do not kill merely to relieve childish anxieties."

They looked up at him, then down. Some tried to kiss his hands, but he recoiled. When they were all staring into the distance with bleak expressions, he commanded, "Bring every one of the dead to me." They rushed to obey him, pushing and quarreling to hide their remorse.

Fuego walked around the bodies, cursing in Eyimalian. "These people are out of their minds," he told Clark.

"I don't know," Clark said. He tried not to look at the bodies, all beyond his help in any case, but to concentrate on great disasters, destruction of planets and the loss of whole peoples, to keep these murders in perspective. Those gloomy thoughts only depressed him further. "Before, I didn't like the idea of killing those six Outlanders but maybe I was wrong. A small group may be killed, but a bigger group may be saved." He was talking too fast. "Nothing will happen without bloodshed. Maybe we need them."

"Not like this." He looked around at the people now dragging their burdens up to the road. "We must have known better."

One man lying with his throat cut, arms peacefully folded, attracted Clark's attention by the insignia on his cassock. "This is the one who warned them. Lir Temple priest." A satchel hung inside the dress. Clark undid the leather thong and scooped out a handful of medicine capsules. "Fuego! Fuego, look at this!" Beneath the capsules lay Holy Huey's map of Paffir Eket. "Fuego!"

"I see it. Is there anything else in there?"

Clark dug in the bag. There was a Resheborian undershirt and a folded paper densely covered in script. "It must be Paffir. It's a message from--it's Paffir." He started to call Tiyar to translate, then thought better of it and went to Akiva. Listening, Tiyar drifted near.

"Beloved children," Akiva read. "You are in danger. I have taken an Akivite witch. These are her effects. She is educated, but ignorant of religion, not fluent in any language. She speaks high and low tongues, but haltingly. Otherworldly origins must be conjectured. The prisoner represents something powerful, new and treacherous. We dare not ignore the possibility that the Akivites may have conjured souls from some time before the Temple, nor that this woman is one. I hold her as best They allow me. My beloved, you may guess your peril. Pray unceasingly. Sing, for your lives and the lives to come. Once more I crave your attention to the beleagured parishes of Itscriye and Miyosardia. Give them your prayers for fair weather. The few who remain there are in a piteous condition, even in view of the underreverence for which their lot is meted. I rejoice at the prospect of embracing you again. Pahid."

Akiva returned the letter. "My children afraid, my brother--my brother so nearly right and so afraid. I will go."

Clark folded the parchment and put it in his belt. "We can get to the city in a few days, walking, and spring her. Ten people could do it, with our equipment." After saying this, he glanced at the dead. He would have gone much farther on much less evidence at that moment.

"Ten could do it, perhaps, but four hundred may expect to meet resistance," Tiyar objected. "Since her captor evidently plans to bring Paula to the Lir Temple, they must come through this pass and we can easily intercept them then." He leaned against a wagon, resting his chin on one arm.

Clark said, "I'm going. Does anyone else want to come?"

"No, you must not divide the group."

"Why not? You'll still be here when we get back."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because none of the new people are trained," Clark told him impatiently. "You've got to make sure this doesn't--" He looked around. Birds were settling already. "It's safe for you to stay here. Even if people came after the robbers, you'd be bound to outnumber them by ten to one. Stay here and train."

Tiyar smiled.

"What are you talking about?" Fuego broke in, speaking Eyimalian. "Everyone who disobeyed orders this morning must be sent away, now."

"To where?" Tiyar asked. In low Paffir, meaning everyone around to hear, he said, "We need them."

Fuego took a deep breath. His face turned red. "All they can do is make you into a Ketry, a Viyato, or a Var. Take your choice. Don't forget it. If you use them to grab power, you isolate yourself from history. You'll all go down as a fluke of circumstance, a footnote."

"Don't be so nervous, old man. With these zealous friends and the others who will follow them, we can break the grip of the Ketries and the Vars and the Viyatos and release this planet from Eyimalian domination," Tiyar urged.

"What then? Nobody here can read except the priests. No one knows the planet's terrain except the Vars' Outlanders. Pahid's own letter tells you the Viyatos control the weather. Paffir Eket has no cash crop but Love's Arrow. The planet has no law, just a religion adapted from Pravelany." Fuego sat down on the ground.

"You may go if you like," Tiyar told him.

He was speaking to Fuego, but Clark said, "All right," took the hormone detector from Tiyar and walked off down the line of wagons, away from the fishy scent of blood. The mist had lifted and the day would be clear. Clark breathed the tangy air with more pleasure than he had taken in anything for weeks. He remembered the story Akiva had told him of the delivery from a bewitched mother, the woman insisting that her child, teeth and claws already grown, would attack the family. That's us, he thought. We're so sure we can raise hell on this planet, when all we can really do is get ourselves killed.

Many still lived, though. Only thirty adults from their side had been killed in the long fight in the hollow, and the children remained safely hidden throughout. He calculated the percentage, eager to think of anything, concentrate on anything anywhere. Theirs was an enviable survival rate, better than most deep-space construction crews. "I wonder whether my family thinks I'm alive," he said in high Paffir.

Akiva came up beside him, holding Neshar to his chest. The boy's eyes were closed. "Where do you come from?" he asked.

Clark named his home planet.

"Is that near Eyimalia?"

"No. It's closer to Reshebora."

"What are these places? I thought they were islands, but Fuego looks at the sky..."

"You can't see Eyimalia from here," Clark said.

"Is it up...?" Akiva pointed.

Clark was tired of making a secret of his origins, evading questions and saying mysteriously, "It's a place," or, "Far away." Akiva had obviously caught on. "It's a world," he said. "Worlds float in the sky, like islands. Even Paffir Eket is an island in the sky."

Now Klyne was behind them, carrying her baby on her left arm along with a blanket because her right, wounded in battle, remained weak. The two older boys trotted behind her. After them came Akiva's ten students and some women who had been friendly with Paula.

"Go back, everyone," Akiva told them. "Teach the new ones."

The students turned around and walked back. Some of the women went with them, others stayed. "We will go with you," Klyne said.

"The children are safer here."

"Not with the new ones," she answered. Clark felt himself flinch.

"There's more to eat here."

"I have food with me." She touched Akiva's elbow, face turned away as though finding something in darkness. "I will go with this one."

By twilight the group of three women, eight children, Clark and Akiva had come to the Middle Plains. The wheat there was cut, the exposed fields mantled with dust that shone faintly pink in the evening sun as though the fields had taken not only the peasants' lives but their blood as well. Shortly before dark, they left the main road to follow a dirt path to a village. The tax collectors had been there recently and worn a fresh rut with their haul.

"Too late, priest," an old man jeered.

"We're just travelling," Clark answered.

"You're off the road. Go back the way you came."

Klyne sat down. The other women followed suit. The children wandered off to gather sticks. When they started reappearing with armfuls of kindling wood, the man came out of his house to say reluctantly, "I can give you a light."

People watched from every house while they made oatmeal for supper. Akiva began singing a prayer. The old man came out again to say, "Keep quiet."

Later, after they had put up mats and laid the children to sleep under them, it began to drizzle. The mothers covered the blankets with grass. Again the old man emerged, still reluctant. "Kids can come inside," he growled. "And the women. Not you," he said to Akiva. "Priest."

"You just gave a third of your crop to the temple for nothing. It won't make you any braver to harry poor wanderers," Akiva said.

"I've sent more tax collectors scrambling over those hills than you've seen in your life, smart mouth."

"You have? What happened this year?"

The man sighed. "Pahid. The bullies from Lir Temple. They don't follow tradition. They want everything they can get." He started to go, then looked back. "We did send tax priests running once."

Akiva got up. "We, too, have set them running. You live alone as Fatayad since she died, don't you?"

He nodded. "Must be...don't know, ten years maybe. Gone fast."

"Yes. You get up in the morning and race to the field to weed and it seems it's just midday when the sky goes black. You mend and cook and spin a little and suddenly the day is back. Midsummer, replanting time and the nights should be short but they eat up the days and more. You lie on your mat and pray for daylight and everywhere a chink lets in the wind the drafts take voices, hers and her children's. And others? Yes, others. Fall comes, you've barely slept, then winter and you're alone with them. You wait for spring, but you know some day you must die and then they will have you."

"That's how it is," the man said.

"But if you were to enter the city of Ayekar this moment, would things be better?"

"Nope." The man looked at the ground, eyebrows up in surprise at his answer, then added, "I'd probably have to pay more taxes there, wouldn't I?"

"You see, you must build Ayekar here." Akiva tapped the man's chest. "People build temples and expect to find gods in them. But this earth is the temple of Ayekar and those who work its soil are her priests."

Suddenly the man knelt and kissed Akiva's foot. Big tears, bigger than raindrops, swelled on his lashes and fell. Akiva trembled slightly as the man holding his ankles shuddered. So that was how a heart melted. Clark took Akiva's hands, cold with sweat and shaking, and warmed them between his own. Then he led the two men into the house.

* * *

The city of the Middle Plains stretched from the low summit of Church Rise to its marshy bottom along the river. The lower section was a slum of decreped shacks on muddy streets so narrow that sunlight filled them for only half an hour a day. About three thousand last sons, widows, paralytics and illegitimate children of the poor lived here, unable by rank to become artisans and without land to farm. Many lived by charity, prostitution and crime.

Pahid's army brought a windfall to the bog neighborhood, its men and women strewing money through brothels, magic houses and taverns, its officers buying arms and conscripts to tend the horses. The city fathers sold barrelsful of bad wine from the municipal cellars to Defenders of Faith used to drinking something near vinegar. Occupation meant a heyday for thieves, whores and liars.

Nevertheless, the prevailing mood was anticlerical. The dregs of Paffir society did not love its religion, and the idea of rebellion amused them. When they saw Paula dragged singing to Pahid's dungeon, they liked her. The contents of the letter from Pahid to his superiors were common knowledge among these illiterate people, and confirmed their opinion of her power.

Paula's rescuers intrigued them as well. They surrounded the priest and the women and the sunburnt wizard who dispensed strong medicine and ranted like a madman about the importance of feeding children, listening respectfully.

Clark healed sores, relieved toothaches and cured catarachts. He applied Luz's topical salves to ulcerated feet and the lame rose up and walked. Their excitement made him giddy. He danced a little way with them, thinking of the healers back home who were often somewhat crazy.

Late in the afternoon, when the sky was darkening and the mosquitos gathered so thick that the children didn't brush them off but stood still and shivered, a woman took Klyne's hand. She was small, with yellow skin, teeth blackened from smoking, grey hair swept up in an exotic crest, her shapeless black clothes impressively clean. "You can't stay out here," she informed them. "Might wake up dead, or in Pahid's stable. Come on to my house."

They all followed her to a big hut divided into rooms by hanging screens. Clark could see no furniture in any of the little rooms they passed while the hostess led them to a cubicle where she left them standing, the women staring at the ground. He realized that the place was a brothel.

"Don't worry," he whispered. "That woman is probably as afraid of Pahid as we are, and she probably hates him just as much as we do. She has no reason to take sides."

Klyne motioned him to be quiet.

The woman returned with a smoky lamp she put on the floor, grunting as she bent over. "Now we can talk. Let me see. I'm Ma Zauber. Was born here. I've been to the Lir Temple, been everywhere. Studied the healing arts in the capital. My family goes back eight generations of healers. I know more about it than any other woman in the Plains. It's the truth. So if you're a teacher as well as a healer, you might as well start with me."

Clark nodded.

"Good! You're not shy." She beamed at the nervous women. "I can help you get her back."

"How do you know--?" Clark asked.

"If you were keeping that a secret, it's out. Everybody knows you're after the witch. The rest is just the details to Pahid, isn't it? We know you're with her because you're a ghost yourself. Mosquitos don't land on you."

Clark laughed. He had forgotten that his insect repellant was still active. "How can you help us?" he asked.

Akiva moved into the circle of lamplight.

The woman smiled, showing a gap between her front teeth, and pressed her little hands together. Clark had not noticed how small they were. No farmer, Ma Zauber, maybe not even fat but pregnant, though she seemed too old. "I know a woman who sees your friend every day. She's an herbalist also, but she's really an ignorant girl who believes everything the priests tell her. Defender of Faith. Hah. She'll be carded and burned some day, not that I'll be laughing then. It happened to her own teacher. That's the temple for you. Anyhow, they have her taking care of the witch. Good, then. Let's hear what you can teach."

All night Clark wrung at his knowledge of drugs, using the detector to identify the active ingredients in the medicines the herbalist showed him and trying to guess their properties. His mind lay silent while his memory toiled and leapt from thread to thread at terrible heights. Sometimes, while tracking a fragment of a lecture or a quick flash of an illustration seen long ago, he burrowed so far back in his memory that he forgot what was happening and thought he was still on the project he had been working on at the time. He heard voices, and in the morning he began to hallucinate rows of listeners behind Ma Zauber.

Her knowledge, all based on generations of trial and error, was formidable, but wieghed down by mistakes and conflicting observations. Good herbs were thrown aside because poisons had once contaminated a mixture. Some things only masked the symptoms, others aggravated them. Each discrepancy between her knowledge and his meant an argument. They lost their tempers quickly, and he called the woman a superstitious windbag more than once although he knew he was in the presence of a scholar.

When Clark invited Ma Zauber to write down what he told her, she answered, "I can't." Neither she nor any of the women of the house could write. They took turns listening attentively.

At sunrise, the woman said, "That's enough for one night. Now I'll pay you." She went out. Clark fell asleep.

The women of the house went to gather samples. A boy brought a pail of water and the Verloringer women went to wash. Their children followed, giggling uneasily at their mothers' nervous jokes. "They are talking about the farming days," Akiva remarked. "They're all afraid. This is an evil place." Clark, sleeping, did not answer. Out in the empty corridor, the women's laughter sounded faint.

Far down the hallway made of hanging mats, someone moved and swayed them. Akiva stepped back. A shape approached in the half-darkness, stopping to look in each room. Akiva went to the outside wall and looked through a chink at the street. There was no sign of danger. He extinguished the lamp, then returned to the corridor. The figure had drawn close.

"Who are you looking for?" he asked.

In the next room, the laughing stopped.

"Akiva," the figure sighed. He was pulled into an embrace that began when he was eighteen years old and now made the intervening years vanish.

A long time passed in perfect silence. He knew what she had become, that she was the captain of whom Ma Syrie had spoken. He had even caught a glimpse of her during the battle. In their old life they had been interdicted lovers, and the new one made them enemies, but now, in this quiet breath between two lives, they felt no passion or sorrow but only peace. Akiva remembered someone teasing Clark about his terror of the night between worlds, and smiled at the memory. I will never fear the emptiness between worlds, between lives, between one heart and another, he thought. That emptiness is love.

At last Berthe sighed again, a little last shadow from that night between lives, fleeting as dew and beautiful because it must perish. She quoted a hymn to the Lost God, "He is come back like the sun at morning."

"Berthe, we are enemies," Akiva sobbed.

She held his head to her breast. "Is it true, then? The annihilation of the Temple? If it is anything less, Pahid will forgive you."

He could say nothing.

"Will you destroy the only good?"

"Oh, Berthe, it's all gone wrong. It is not good. It has fallen--how can I explain their wickedness? It has fallen, the temple, the priests, the world and her people. To demons who feed on dreams. All the willing hearts that serve are serving evil."

Berthe smiled. "There can be no betrayal of faith. No one serves evil by being good, or good by being evil."

A light behind Akiva made him turn around. Neshar entered the hallway, carrying a little torch.

"Is this he? Is this Neshar?" She ran and knelt in front of him.

The sight of this enormous woman hurtling toward him would have frightened any child less used to adoration, but Neshar only looked up at Akiva and set his burning stick aside in case she should throw her arms around him. Berthe took his hand in hers and, after gazing at him a while, kissed his forehead. "Do they still call you Neshar? Yes? And you are nearly six years old. Have you been a good boy?"

"Most of the time," he answered.

"Are you afraid of water?"

"No."

"Good. I was afraid, that you might be. We had to put you underground, in a riverbank, when you were a tiny baby, to hide you until your father could come and take you away. We gave you to him at a country shrine by Feyling's altar." Her head dropped to his chest. Neshar's arms encircled it like a crown. He patted her hair.

"Berthe--" Akiva stepped haltingly toward them. He brushed against one of the hanging mats and it crashed down, filling the hallway with light. Klyne appeared, knife in hand, at the same time that Clark stepped into the hall with his Puro. They looked at one another and at Akiva and Berthe on their knees, and withdrew.

"Berthe, those tears were yours. I saw them falling past the window in the moonlight, but I didn't recognize them. Forgive me."

"I was afraid to come in. I had a husband--he said I was a devilspawn. I hoped...I hoped. And he is. He is alive. You have cared for him, as--"

"My own son. I, whose children are scattered everywhere, am given..."

Clark was at the door when they came into the room. "Have you seen her?" he demanded.

"Yes."

"Where is she?"

"In the temple. Where would she be? She is...alive. Pahid is working her soul's cure."

"How?" Clark shouted.

"With--fire."

Clark sat down. He turned his face to the wall.

* * *

Paula lay thinking about straw. It seemed to be plentiful on every planet, except perhaps Reshebora. Even there, one saw it in the gutters.

She had not gotten up or eaten since the last time Pahid came to her. He had made a cut in her leg then, and it was almost closed now. When she saw daylight on the ceiling, she closed her eyes. There was no daylight now, so her eyes were open.

I should do my exercises, she thought. She began one that could be done lying down, then forgot. The door opened. She shut her eyes.

Berthe closed the door and put a torch in the ring. Paula hid her face from the flame's glare. Berthe sat down by her shoulder.

"Pa'ula, I have something for you," she whispered.

So I told my name, Paula thought. She took the crescent from Berthe's hand. "It's a light knife." She chortled. "Look, it cuts." She slashed at the straw.

"Cut a hole in that wall and go through it. Then you will seal it with clay I will bring you. Can you do it in one night?"

"Sure." Paula turned off the knife and pointed it at Berthe. "Whatever you want. What do you want?" Leaning closer, she almost said, "Do you want to go to heaven?"

Berthe pointed to the wall. "Cut." She went out.

Paula sat looking at nothing. Do it? she thought. The choice was fun. Not doing it seemed attractive. Prisoners have no choice. No, that isn't true. A prisoner can obey or defy. A prisoner can choose suicide, sometimes. Suicide? She felt the knife in the darkness. Embossed. Her fingers read to her: Work for Harmony. She laughed.

She knew this knife. It was Clark's. I'm being rescued, she thought. Why didn't she tell me that. I should have guessed when she called me Paula; I'd never have told them my name.

Was Sevit's imprisonment like this? She began to cry, thinking of him. I'm tired of the dark in here, she thought. With the torch gone, the point where the light beams met seemed dazzling. She was through the wall long before Berthe returned.

Preparing a wine barrel was much harder. Berthe insisted that it have water inside, to muffle any sound that Paula made and to keep her from knocking against the wood. Paula was lighter than water and the weight had to be right, so they put stones in the bottom. If she were to be submerged in the sour bath, they must poke reeds between the staves so Paula could breathe.

"Couldn't you do any of this before?" she asked.

Berthe, wiping the wine-sodden barrelstaves with a handful of leaves, replied, "It would have been dangerous."

"What are all these barrels doing here?"

"When city people's wine goes sour, they give it to the temple. The temple gives it to the poor, or sells it."

Everywhere Paula's skin was broken, the evil-smelling water stung. "There's no getting used to things, is there?" she remarked. Climbing in, she thought that if she remained there for more than a few minutes she must surely be pickled alive. Keeping awake, at least, would be no problem.

"All right?" Berthe asked.

"Have you seen Akiva?" she countered, just so she wouldn't cry.

"Yes."

Paula maneuvered the stones onto her lap so they would knock against nothing hard. She squatted on the bottom, trying to keep her head above water. Berthe put a reed in her mouth and she sank down.

She found one of the breathing straws, blew through it and began to fight to keep her wits in the chilling blackness. Waves of compression pummeled her sides as Berthe pounded in the lid. When that stopped, her own heartbeat seemed dangerously loud. Faster, she told herself. Don't let it slow down or there's nothing to keep you from drowning. She sucked at the reed, thinking, what a wonderful thing air is. This is a lucky planet.

The barrel was abruptly tipped and the rocks fell into her stomach. Dust clotted the reed. She searched for another reed with her right hand and pushed back the stones with her left. There were five breathing straws in the barrel. After an awful time, she found one, but by then she was being thrown through the air and landing upside down. The barrel was suddenly righted.

The stones clunked against her thighs as the barrel began to move. After several minutes of jolting progress, the air from the reed was suddenly warmer and the dust tasted dry. I'm outside, but I don't feel any freer, she thought. The bouncing and rattling came faster. Then there were many long halts when she took the knife from her belt and waited to kill whoever discovered her.

Finally she was rolled a short distance, set upright and left. She put her ear to the staves but heard nothing. Looking through the reeds proved impossible. If she cut the hoops that held it together, she could easily burst the barrel and free herself, but she had no idea where she was. If something had gone wrong, it might be best to stay hidden.

She heard knocking. Someone was hammering the bung out of the bung-hole. Bubbles rose through the water. Something slammed hard on the top. They had discovered that their wine was watered. Now she had to get out. If the customers complained, the barrel would go right back to the temple. Here, at least, she might have the advantage of surprise.

Paula found the bunghole and pushed out the cork with her fingers. While the fluid drained, she made a slit between two staves with the light knife. She cut the hoops, punched out the top and stood with her arm upraised, half blinded by daylight and faint from sitting so long. Now the air made her skin burn.

She was in a small room with walls of thatch. Two boys stared at her. A woman with a broken nose rehealed crooked came in behind them, also staring.

"She is--" one boy stammered. The woman struck him without bothering to aim.

Low Paffir. Paula climbed out of the barrel, saying, "Don't be afraid. You are a lucky woman. You live at the time when the priests will be overthrown. Your grandchildren will remember you as a hero because you kept quiet." Keep talking, she told herself. What would Tiyar have said? "Some people have to fight. Some have to suffer imprisonment, like me." She bared her arms. Scars from the old burns and blisters from the new rose stark against the paler flesh and now the water-soaked skin pulled away in especially ghastly puckers. "This will not happen to you. All you need to do is keep quiet so Pahid doesn't notice you, and your grandchildren will chorus your praise."

The woman snorted. "Grandchildren in this place?"

This meant she was convinced. Paula said impatiently, "Well, are you going to die for the priests who made you live here? No. Now help me. Just tell me which way to go and I'll leave."

"Your friends are at Ma Zauber's," the woman said. She pointed. "That way. Two houses down. Here, cover your head or a soldier might recognize you."

Common knowledge, Paula thought. Of course it would be, in the poor quarter where Pahid's army came for whatever Paffir Eket called pleasure. Paula took the rag offered to conceal her dripping hair.

"Tell her to send me my wine," the woman called after her.

Paula stumbled in the direction indicated. Though it was late afternoon and the street deeply shadowed, what light remained assaulted her vision so she could barely see.

People thronged the street, shouting to one another, throwing things, leading and dragging animals. Or had she grown used to her quiet cell? There seemed to be children everywhere. Someone stepped on her foot. Someone elbowed her. Paula leaned against a wall. Someone nudged her from behind and she wheeled, ready to strike.

It was Klyne. She nodded toward a hut, turned and walked away.

Paula ran inside, then stopped, leaning on the doorpost, and listened to the erratic murmur of talking somewhere beyond the screens that hung all round. The evening breeze chilled her sopping clothes. She sat down in a dark corner to hide and warm herself, not minding the strong odor in the room. Then she sat up. The smell was real wine, gone sour. They had opened a barrel of it, thinking she was inside.

The screens hanging from the roof did not reach the ground. Sitting, she could look under them into a narrow hallway at the end of which a light gleamed faintly. She rose and staggered toward it.

A small boy dashed past her from behind. He ran into the lighted room. The voices rose. Someone came out, went back and came out again with a lamp. It was Clark. They touched palms, and he caught her when she staggered again.

"We'd better go. They'll be looking for you," he said.

"Where's Berthe?"

"She'll come later."

People gathered about her. Klyne wrapped her in a blanket. Two women draped her arms across their shoulders and half-carried her out to the street. More people awaited her there. Paula straightened up.

"Is that the ghost?" a voice asked.

"Yes, it's me," she said. "When Pahid comes looking for me, tell him I changed into a bird and flew away."

Some of them laughed. "But what is the truth?" the voice insisted.

"The truth? The truth is what he's most afraid of, that I'm a human being and so is he, no more, no less." Not clear. Try again. "The truth is that we are not afraid." Her rescuers hurried her away.

They trekked by moonlight across mown fields. When Paula grew too tired to stumble along, Akiva carried her, and when he tired Clark relieved him. The mothers carried children. It was slow going. After a few hours they came to a little stream shielded by willowy thesha trees and set up camp.

Paula had an idea that if she slept she would find her escape a dream. She sat in the door of the tent, watching the moons and trying to keep awake. They were far apart, one shining on the mountains and the other rising from the plain.

"You've got to sleep," Clark argued. "If you harm yourself for fear of Pahid, you might as well still be his prisoner."

"I'm so glad to be here," she answered weakly, but she lay down and he sat talking to her about Tiyar and the Itscriyites, Klyne and Berthe and Akiva until she was sleeping soundly.

Sunlight filled the tent when she awakened. Outside, cool air danced among the yellow leaves and the sharp fall odors of decay took off the reek of sour wine. She went down to the stream where Clark and Neshar were fishing, neither very succesful. The women walked slowly along the bank, looking for reptiles and berries. She stood a long time deciding which way to go and finally returned to the tent.

"How do you feel?" Clark asked when he came in at evening.

Maybe her trip outside was a dream. "Euphoric," she answered, watching the shadows lof the leaves on the roof, her feet in a shaft of red sunlight that came in the door.

"Good. Have you eaten?"

"Yes. I went down to the river, too, I think."

"I saw you. Now, let me look at your burns." He had rolled up his sleeves while fishing and now, without realizing it, he turned his own healthy inner arms toward her.

Paula did the same. "It was like being a kid again. Helpless. Waiting for somebody to make up his mind to hit me again. And this." She nodded at the burns. "He kept talking about innocence and purity and the gift of suffering. As though I were making him do this to me. How long was I there?"

Clark looked up. "Twenty-three days. I thought you were the human clock."

"I lost track. How did you find me?"

"Ma Zauber found us." Clark applied a salve to her arm that dissolved the scabs and blisters. His face was rigid, but his body relaxed with the professional control Tiyar had taught him. The scabs shrank and vanished into healthy, slightly rosy skin. Wizardry, marvellous wizardry.

"Most of the time I was alone, I guess," Paula said. "I thought about you." She leaned forward, hands in her lap, earnestly smiling. "Really, Clark, I love you."

"I was going to tell you the same thing."

It was easy. They drew one another close to exchange kisses, neither one nervous as they had both expected to be, both of them profoundly happy. Simplicity itself, Clark thought. His arms seemed to acquire new grace by tightening around Paula, and the chuckle at the back of his throat came not from him but a part of humanity that recognized and greeted them both. Hearing it, Paula laughed as well. They kissed for a long time and then, removing each other's rough clothing, made love in the Resheborian talking-style, speaking all thoughts, slow and decorous, with overwhelming passion. They compared one another's touch to moon-silvered dawn, to rain on parched earth, one another's gaze to rivers in starlight, hands to flowers, hair to grass and skin to summer breeze, and as they whispered they saw and felt themselves become these things. Pine scents caressed the taste of wild fruits embracing clouds at sunset kissing the tiny fish in shallow streams. Joined in imagination, mind and body, they dreamed as one.

Late in the night, Paula fell asleep. Clark lay holding her, both naked on the floor of the tent, bathed to the shoulders in moonlight. Outside, he heard a woman say, "...behold..."

Chapter 16

Skip to Chapter: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21