CHAPTER 16

Paula's hand turned. The palm began to knead his skin. So it had been with her, the explanations falling away one by one. Her hand moved along his chest and her face came into veiw at his shoulder. Sliding her fingers in among the roots of his hair, she pressed upon his lips a drowsy kiss. Then she pulled back. "Horses!"

They snatched their tunics and ran out, shouting, "Get up! Let's go! Pahid!" Hoofbeats echoed in the thesha trees. Klyne destroyed the fire with a kick.

The camp was on a rise between a mown field and a stream, both dangerous crossing on foot if they were persued by horses. Rather than be run down from behind, the women would fight. They sent the children to hide along the streambed and gathered under the trees, their faces pale, holding knives. Dew shimmered along the blades and fell in droplets from the quivering points.

There was no time to organize. Paula tied a small knife to her thigh in case she were taken again. She was looking around for a bigger one to use now, when Akiva handed her his own.

"What will you fight with?" she asked.

"There is no one to fight," he replied. He took a glowing stick from the fire's embers and swung it around his head until it flared. The sun was rising as he walked down to the field. Mist caught the light to form a golden wall that hid everything beyond. Akiva sunk into the mist. They heard the horses rush toward him.

"Decoy!" Clark said. The others began to throw burning sticks in all directions, though they knew it was too late.

The sun rose higher. The haze above the dew-silvered field now divided into curls and columns, thinned and turned white. Akiva was on the shining grass, leading a train of five horses toward them. Beside him walked Berthe.

They all shared the horses, riding and walking, showered with every breeze by red and yellow leaves that left the trees more and more bare to the open sky. The world seemed new. Clark walked with his head tipped up, enjoying the sunlight, the smell of the horses, the color of the leaves against the blue, organizing in his mind all that Ma Zauber and Berthe had told him about medicine on Paffir Eket. He would write them a textbook, like the Books of Healing at home, not Reshecomp beads that required a decoder but simply a collection of notes that anyone could read. Later, when beads and machines to read them became available--but he could barely speak Low Paffir and that, of course, must be the language of the book.

"Can you write, Berthe?" he asked, without stopping to recall the unanimous negative he had gotten at Ma Zauber's.

"Yes," she replied. As simple as that.

"I think we should write down what you know about medicine."

"Why? Other women know about it. Besides, none of them can read except me."

"We'll teach them."

"They never learn." And she told him about the herbal alphabet and the scrolls and the women sitting around them with fists clenched, waiting for the voice inside to speak.

"I can read," Neshar interrupted. "Clarek showed us all how. And he told us how straws work."

Clark had taught them the high Paffir alphabet at the rate of one letter a day on the road from the Wolf River to Ebur, and now the children liked to follow him around asking questions as he worked. They egged him into making speeches. Trees, bird flight, fire, grass and the chemical properties of water became his subjects. Lectures grew, burned and flowed all around him. Neshar's favorite had been delivered when some boys and girls happened to find Clark drinking through a straw. "A straw looks empty," Neshar recited, "But it is full of air."

Berthe traced the spiral of Neshar's hair with her finger, laying the snaky curls flat around the center. She tapped the flat spot, then kissed it. "So it is. Pahid would say, what then?" She looked at the red cord around her arm.

"Why?" Clark asked.

"Because knowledge is useless. Learning for its own sake is like eating when you aren't hungry. Knowledge comes second to understanding. 'Neshar!' he would say. 'What are you doing?'"

"Sitting on a horse."

"No, he would have you think of the big thing you are doing. Not what you are doing right now. He would have you say, I am helping to bring the world to Ayekar."

"The two are the same," Akiva interjected. He was walking on the other side of Berthe's horse.

"At least, one is part of the other."

Akiva stopped the horse by taking hold of its mane. "The two are the same," he repeated. He let go and the horse moved forward again.

"In any case, my women can't read. I tried to teach a few letters at a time--we couldn't meet often enough for one letter a day--and each time I gave them a few more of the leaves and berries that stood for letters and they took them back to other women. Nowadays you may see women in villages as far off as the coast with sprigs and seeds worked into their red cords in sign that they have been taught this and that much of the alphabet, and not one of them can read. We can only learn as children."

That's not true, Clark insisted inwardly, but he remembered trying to teach some of the men and women, and how quickly their interest had died. "But you were grown up when you learned," he said.

She turned her head sharply to look at him. Now he felt weighed down by complications, dangers and difficulties. Everything took so long here, everything followed a meandering course. The sun had grown hot. Acrid dust from trodden leaves adhered to his sweat.

"Yes, I was," she said grimly.

"What does that mean?" Clark demanded. Was she from off-planet? A Resheborian? Outlander? Some kind of a spy, like Krup? But Akiva had known the priest who helped to deliver Berthe.

Suddenly Neshar began to cry. "Poor Neshar," Akiva said, lifting him from his mother's lap. "My own child, and hardly mine at all," he said to Clark.

"Don't give me away!" Neshar sobbed.

Clark gave up. She was a peasant; clever peasants had no place in this world. Being able to read was an embarrassment.

[~*~]

He dropped back to Paula's side and they walked most of the day in comfortable silence, looking at things together and hearing sounds. If something called for comment, a touch often served. Clark could feel everything. Seeing a drop of water slide down a leaf to fall on the ground, he felt the cool trail across the leaf's back, the the quick descent and the yielding change from earth to mud. A bird tugged at a worm; he felt the hunger, the pain and the vital combat. His empathy outstripped reason. When light clouds softened the sunlight, he felt himself tinge the world with the colors of joy.

The women came up behind them to tell Paula what they had heard in Ma Zauber's house. Everyone there revered Berthe, including Ma Zauber herself who was the formost witch in the Middle Plains and eighth in an unbroken line. "But there's a Zauber in every generation," observed one, a flighty young woman with the peculiar name of Augenblau who had run away from her husband and wanted to be a witch. "Berthe is rare. Paula, do you see the red string on her arm? All the herbalists have them. Will we get them, too?"

"Do you know what that cord means? Pahid. It's his mark. They pay him for those. They're Lir Temple Red."

The woman answered gently, "No, they aren't. It's called Earth Red. It's a sign that all the other women know you."

"She made the cords in Pahid's temple! She spun them from cotton grown by Lir priests," Paula insisted.

Augenblau started a little, then smiled. "No, no, no. Some of it was made according to him, on a spindle. But the good ones were spun on a wheel."

"On a wheel? What difference--?" She sounded almost like Tiyar.

"Pahid burned the wheel, but some of the cord survived. That's the good cord. You can tell by the thickness of it, how even it is. You know they re-collected the tax in her province because of the wheel. The Lir Temple refused wheel-spun cloth, and they came back in spring. In the middle of spring, when people are hungry, they took everything in their path. Many people died. The good cord has their curse."

"Who's they?"

"They? Er--Pahid."

"Is he the they that collected the taxes in spring, or the they that made the curse? Never mind. You gang will believe anything. You're falling right into their trap. Do you know what Pahid most wanted from me? He wanted me to stop thinking." Paula began to recount what had happened to her. Clark listened with his head bowed to the glaring sun. When they passed a ditch, the reflection from the puddles struck him full force. "Pahid tried to drive me out of my mind," she concluded. "It's as simple as that."

"And did he--was he succeeding?"

She hesitated before answering, "No."

The wagons had been taken off the road by the time they reached the marshes, and rain had washed away the blood. A few dozen bales of ugewa still lay more or less neatly stacked, their bottoms rotting. Berthe stopped to look, arms folded, at their long shadows on the road. "Will you permit us to send these to our temple?" she asked.

Akiva said, "Yes."

She nudged her horse onward. After a moment she added, "You tried to bring back some of the grain to the villages, and the farmers refused it."

"For fear of Pahid, in gratitude to us, or for lack of understanding," Akiva replied. She was drawing him into argument, but he felt he could let no comment pass. By now they were almost in darkness and could see nothing but one another.

She said, "Fear of Pahid and lack of understanding? That describes you, not us. I know Pahid is nothing, and without the daily intercession of Hath he would vanish. And that without the daily intercession of the Temple our beautiful goddess-world would turn desert and kill us."

That was the Itscriyites' song, he thought. Babyface, babyface, make us cry. Your papa set you free and your mama let you die. Pahid's strength is rooted in the hidden abcesses where his warriors remain children. Since Berthe remained silent, Akiva said, "Gods, not priests, send weather."

"Gods caused the drought at Itscriye, but Pahid himself brought them rain. Or do you think you brought it?"

"No." He looked up at her and she down at him, their faces hard and pale. "I met the Lir Temple priests on the road through Itscriye. They named the day when it would begin to rain."

"They piled skulls around Fea's altar."

The two of them continued to look at one another. There was nothing else for either of them to look at. Neshar hid his face, the others of the group were off in the mist and darkness, and the moons had not yet risen.

"That is not Fea," Akiva said. "Berthe, isn't it better to defy the Temple, and damn ourselves if need be, than to serve such horrible gods?"

Lights bobbed up from the marsh. They were torches. Akiva muttered, "It was like this when the old man died. Do you remember Shurat, the folkpriest before me in Nichayu?"

"He was greater than Pahid. Pahid needs armies and horses to win people," Berthe said. "Shurat needed nothing at all. They said you killed Shurat, but I forgave you. Did you kill him?"

Akiva shook his head. He began to stroke the horse's neck, smoothing its mane and brushing bits of grass out of the hair. "It was a night like this. They came with torches. He ran toward the lights--he liked fire ever after he went out of his mind. I couldn't have it in the house because he tried to play with it. He ran toward the lights. Every morning they came throwing stones. They took everything he had touched and they burned it. I thought they were coming to burn him. He ran toward the lights, I caught him and picked him up and carried him to the water to hide. I was under him, and I lived, but he didn't understand. He breathed water. I know it isn't true, but I thought if I kept him there long enough the water would soak him and he wouldn't burn. I knelt in the stream with him on my back and prayed Hath to save us with his net and knife. They say they were only coming to look for him because they thought he was lost."

"Because when they found you, he was already dead. But they had torches, and if not for you, they would have burned him alive."

He took her hand, looking up at the pale face turned down to him. "Do you think so, Berthe?"

"Yes."

"But they might have relented. When the fire came up and they heard him crying, they might have relented."

"Do you think so? Is this Father Akiva who sees as Verloring, the one who dwells in the heart? No. I have seen it. Pahid--sometimes a group of soldiers drags someone into the square and the fire is built and their eyes turn blank. Only Pahid shows pity, only he can stand to believe the burning thing is a human being."

"What do the others do?"

"They watch, but their eyes are blank, and no one ever relents."

Akiva walked toward the bobbing lights. They seemed low to the ground, well below the roadway. At times they shone through the heavy brush as though they were at the surface of the water. They were in boats, Fuego and Tiyar at the head in a canoe poled by Krup. Lamps set in the gunwhale threw their shadows upward so their hair seemed to stretch out to the stars. Behind Akiva, Clark used his light knife as a beacon. Seeing it, Tiyar and Fuego began to paddle.

Paula ran down to the water. Fuego hugged her and they yelled each other's names. "Still living!" Fuego said in Eyimalian, and she answered, "Still living."

Tiyar waited until they were through before he stepped out of the boat and embraced Paula, saying. "People told me you sang my song as they dragged you away."

"You lent me strength," she said. They pressed close together. It was like a farewell. Tiyar's gaze fell on Clark. His grip tightened and then he let her go.

Eventually everyone bundled into the boats. They rowed through the marsh, torchlight real and reflected glaring in pitch blackness, the two sometimes meeting with a hiss amid stumbling and laughter. Paula could scarcely keep herself awake. When they came to the little cove where three huts stood over the water, she had to be wakened to stagger indoors and fall asleep on a soft mound in one corner.

It was straw, and the smell made her dream of Pahid. He spoke in an ominous gurgle. All she could make out was, "Sevit." At that, she woke. Unable to get back to sleep, she sat in the doorway.

Akiva stood shoulder-deep in the water, arms raised, with big Middle Plains fireflies in the palms of both hands. All looked peaceful. His cupped hands did not stir when the fireflies stopped shining and flew away. One of the students had told her, "The secret of standing with him is not to wait." No one stood with him tonight, waiting or unwaiting. She watched for a long time, then went back in.

Hammering and splitting and things splashing into the water woke her the next morning. People shouted, "Let 'er rip!" and "Make way!" Carts went creaking by, were called back, loaded and unloaded and sometimes bumped into each other. It was like the disaster sites she had visited with her father when the rebuilding got into full swing and people who had done next to nothing all their lives suddenly found themselves treasured as survivors.

The Itscriyites were making a city. Tiyar had told them to form groups of about nine, and now the committees were building their houses, some in the marsh and some on the hillsides. There was an infirmary, where some teenagers who had hurt themselves in the construction glumly weaved mats under the supervision of an aged Verloringer. There was a schoolhouse down in the swamp, built on a raft and moored to some trees. Each team of nine was to have a reader, a weaver, a carpenter, and a healer, all able to fight, but so far weavers and fighters abounded, and only children could read. An herbalist found among the Verloringers and a few Itscriyites who used to be handy with wood composed the school's faculty. Berthe had presented Clark with an alphabet scroll, which now hung at the front of the room like a flag.

Up in the hills, Paula and Berthe walked along rows being cleared for interplanting vegetables, potatoes and, to their surprise, flax. The Itscriyites had gotten wind of the new way to spin.

The plan was for people to travel by boat as far as the rivers would take them, selling linen and tools, and somehow or other they would settle in villages everywhere to teach and heal and weave and build as they had learned, and to undermine the Temple. Villages would not revolt but secede. This meant they would stay out of the temples, to which most people didn't go anyway, and they would stop paying taxes. It would become unnecessary to devote fields to ugewa, the flower crop the Lir Temple demanded but that had no use except to make Love's Arrow and Ecclesiam purpuream. Those lands would immediately become common, and village councils would decide how to use them. Instead of tribute grain, they would grow potatoes and flax or cotton or graze animals, so when the tax collectors came there would be noghing to collect. The cities would of course remain as centers of learning and trade, for the villages would soon begin to specialize in whatever grew there best, and artisans must naturally arise--

"But how long will they remember this nice plan when they're dispersed among hostile people like so many puffs of smoke?" Paula interrupted. Berthe looked at her in surprise; she must have used another picked-up expression. "Don't say too much," Paula added, in Eyimalian.

Tiyar did not answer her warning, but he turned off the path that would have led them to the granaries and they went instead to a clearing by the water where boats were being constructed.

No one on Paffir Eket used boats except fishermen, the people who somehow ended up without any land to farm. People ate fish only when there was nothing else, and blamed it, in various regions, for causing impotence and excessive sex drive. Rivers were the realm of ghosts. Nobody could swim. Berthe looked around the little boatyard with acute interest and asked many questions, but she did not believe for a minute that these people were making boats. When she wrote to Pahid, she said nothing of the plan.

Fuego showed them the wreck that had begun as the Verloringers' dwelling. Though many Verloringers came from Itscriye and even knew some of the refugees, they kept separate. They had left off calling the Itscriyites "rat-eaters," but substituted "loonies." When members of the two groups met, they stared into one another's eyes, afraid to look away. Each day the Verloringers became more religious and more afraid. They had decided to build themselves a big hall for sleeping and prayer so they could stay together, but when its roof collapsed Fuego persuaded them to settle for a cluster of huts.

The Verloringers' main job was to take care of the food. Itscriyites couldn't be trusted with it. They took huge servings, gorged to nausea, refused to share, stole food and hid it in the marsh where it rotted. Tiyar and Fuego had moved to stores to semi-secret locations and established what they called a dining committee to prepare and serve meals in the floating schoolhouse. Their cooking was poor, but the allocation of food was perfect. Everyone got exactly the same sized piece of bread, dollop of wheat or corn, mug of broth and handful of greens, all carefully weighed by officious youngsters from both camps. Tiyar made a speech at each meal, while Fuego quietly and persistently kept the peace. His main problem was that the water jars had to be shared among groups of ten. Red-faced Itscriyites tried to gulp it all down, while excited men and women hissed abuse, elbowed them and threw pebbles. Fuego was ever on his feet, stopping punches, catching missiles, shushing indignation, saying over and over again, "It's only water." Scarcely had Tiyar finished lecturing about harmony and discipline when a black-eyed Itscriyite named Pimel, or primrose, cried "Seconds!" and all the Itscriyites ran to be served. Again each got a measured dollop, and there was more quarreling, bartering and cramming of food into pockets and bags. Fuego sat down beside Berthe. After they had exchanged compliments to the tasteless mash, he said, "Thank you for returning Paula to us."

Everyone trusted Berthe. Paula had at first noticed this with surprise and alarm, but now she felt quite definitely annoyed. Reaching past Fuego to grab the jar, she said in Eyimalian, "Watch out."

"She walked here by herself," Berthe said.

Paula interjected, still in Eyimalian, "Listen, I think Sevit's in the capital." She had been saying that all day without being able to rouse any enthusiasm, but at least it might get Fuego off the subject. None of her friends seemed able to get it through their heads that Berthe loved Pahid, that she was his special find and best student, that he had tested her severely and murdered her dear friend and still she followed him. It was for her sake that many herbalists, who loathed Pahid, wore the red cord.

It was for their sake, Berthe claimed, that she opposed rebellion. She had complained before of how, accustomed to fear and jealousy and threats from everyone around them, they refused to see their danger. Despite their educated airs, the group had no real wealth. At tax time they ran to the forests to hide, and called anyone who did otherwise an idiot, but most of these sturdy independents lived on gifts from their patients, and in spring when the peasants were hungry they, too, had to stay the pangs with mad-dog weed.

And for all the denouncing, priests tolerated herbal medicine except for the very occasional purge. The women lived by the Temple's sufferance on the peripheries of faith. "If he sends priests into the villages with amulets and spirit dolls and commands the people to forsake my women, no red cords will save us. The people will hunt us like deer, like winter wolves," Berthe had once remarked. She must also keep in mind a second following. Eighty-seven female zealots known as Defenders of Faith called Berthe their captain and mother.

"Yes, you think Sevit is in the capital," Tiyar answered in Eyimalian. "But what do you know? Only that you think Pahid once heard of someone like him. He accepted your description of Sevit as blond. Therefore he has not seen him. We deduce--"

"Remember the six Outlanders," Clark said, also in Eyimalian. Everyone looked at him. Paula bowed her head. She must not fail to win Berthe, or she would some day kill her. Clark went on, "They said someone they knew had seen him once, at the Ketry landing field. That's near the capital."

"Had seen him once!" Tiyar repeated. "We do not know where he is. If we tip our hand, the three families will crush us, whereas if we continue as we are doing, we will break their grip on Paffir Eket forever. Only wait until the rivers are full in spring. When this swampland floods, our people will be ready to scatter as from a bursting pod--"

"Let's send scouts to the capital. Trading parties. Herbalists. Paula and I can go. No one would notice us," Clark said.

Jars were being collected. Verloringer children swept the floor. More dough was kneaded to make the biscuits they would eat after they had practiced fighting by moonlight. Akiva came in and someone offered him a plate of food but he refused it.

"Hypocrite, you seek danger to salve your aristocratic conscience," Tiyar accused Clark. Fuego laid a hand on his arm, but he brushed it away. "For you to make your purpose known in the capital would be fatal not only to you but to our city here. We cannot use the same technique to free Sevit that you did to free Paula, because he is kept by people who know his value." Akiva sat down with them. Fuego translated for him, though Tiyar shook his head in protest.

"We did not free Pa'ula," Akiva said. His hair and tunic were drenched, his eyes glazed. He looked like a river god, or a ghost.

"Who freed her?" Fuego asked softly.

"Pahid."

Berthe sat with her hands in her lap, her head down so her hair obscured her face. Orange strands covered her big fists like a blanket. As she gazed at those fists they shifted slightly and nestled into her stomach. "It was with his consent," she said.

Vanity, pride, Clark thought. So much for being heroes. Raising his eyes, he met Krup's. The road slave, the convert, the spy, whatever he was, he winked.

Krup took to following Berthe and Paula around the camp. Though he was supposed to be busy making footbridges, the two women saw him idling everywhere. When Paula built a spinning wheel according to Berthe's directions, he watched her bind sticks together, and when she took it it the drafty hut they called the cloth room to show the weavers, he was sitting among them. Though he seldom spoke to her, he stared so avidly at Paula that the Plains woman to whom he had been something more than a steady customer took offense and deserted the city. Once Paula asked how the bridges were doing. He interlaced his fingers and leered, "Just fine."

She put up with him because the project of the moment was brotherhood. Fuego and Tiyar had allowed the Verloringers and Itscriyites to work and live separately, but she integrated them. She found out the ringleaders of the various subgroups and cliques, and put them to work together. The scouting party they finally sent to the capital was made up of an Itscriyite and two of Akiva's students. The most popular Itscriyite woodworker found herself building rafts with a Verloringer patriarch. Itscriyites and Verloringers worked cheek by jowl at the looms and actually passed the shuttle without dropping it often, sometimes in a steady rythm and even to song. Youngsters from both sides pounded bark to split out the tough fibers for winter matting and overcoats, and though the first few "accidents" resulted in fights at the stream where Augenblau and an Itscriyite girl soaked the bark, Paula made them stay together until suspicion gave way for lack of evidence.

It seemed that she alone grasped the secret: most of the Verloringers came from Itscriye and most of the Itscriyites privately loved Akiva. When opponents played implacable, she would ask, "What's the matter, are you two from the same town?" and they backed off, because likely as not they were. She explained the secret to Fuego and Tiyar, but they kept on trying to reason through arguments, and getting caught in tangles of who did what first to whom. What little time she had slept before was now given over to love, but instead of tiring she seemed to have found strength at an infinitely renewable source, and the peace that suffused her seemed to dazzle and halt the most bitter antagonists.

"The world has two moons," she was always telling them.

Berthe laughed when she heard that, and told her the full expression was, "The world has two moons, but only one sun," meaning between doing what you should and what you must, the most important thing was to know what you could.

"You have two moons in your heaven," Paula said, thinking of Akiva and Pahid. "What's your sun?"

"Moons and sun and earth are all gods and goddesses. It remains to blend with their divinity," Berthe replied, and she slapped her horse to a gallop so Paula could not follow. She had been thinking of earth and Fea.

Berthe spent most of her time on horseback, riding up and down the big road to the Middle Plains as fast as the low-striding beast could carry her, with Neshar in her lap shrieking for glee, a spear in her hand and slingshot in her belt. She could cast while cantering bareback. Now and then she brought them a marsh bird or rabbit for supper.

"Why did they give Pahid sterile horses?" Clark asked her one evening.

"Before he set out from the Lir Temple, he fasted in the mountains for fifteen days and was granted a vision of Hath. Hath gave him armor and weapons and a hundred battle-trained horses," she began.

"What did Hath look like?"

"He shone."

"Everything shines when you're fasting," Clark objected. "Was he big? How did Pahid know who it was?"

"It told him."

There was no answer to that. Berthe said nothing either, and they ate in silence. At length, Clark said, "He must be the most powerful man in the world now."

"Until the horses die."

And they had brought the horses from off-planet because no one here could be trusted to train them and sterilize them, keeping not a single stallion in reserve to breed for a secret army. That explained the whole question of what the Eyimalian horses were doing on Paffir Eket, and so simply that Clark and Paula burst into happy smiles. Everything was resolving itself. Surely Berthe would make her decision soon, and then--. It was hard to think of that moment, both because of what depended upon it and because of what lay beyond.

Days passed, and Berthe did not decide. She rode the horses daily until they had a week of rain and everyone crowded into the various huts to make clothing or pottery or mats or tools. In the furtherence of some scheme or other, Paula climbed up on the roof of the collapsed Verloringer dormitory to inspect it and was nearly struck by lightning in a squall. Clark saw her standing on the ridgepole, tunic fluttering in the rain-laden wind, uko branches slapping her as the trees swayed low, and then she disappeared over the side just as a bright finger touched on the roof with a horrendous crash and set some of the thatch on fire. A moment later she came around from the other side of the building, embarrassed but unharmed.

Clark spent the gloomy days writing his herbal and bright ones collecting samples. Berthe continued to help him. She taught him her leaf-and-seed alphabet, and unwittingly solved the Ecclesiam mystery.

"Pa'ula used to call out your name in her sleep," she said one morning.

"Did she." Clark, sitting beside her, started to turn away, but then he turned back and demanded, "What were you doing there, when she was sleeping?"

"Pahid told me to chant the ninety-seven goddesses over her--I don't know all ninety-seven names, but I pretended."

"Why did he--?

"When he asked her who her goddess was, she said she didn't have any. He thought one of them might enter while she was sleeping if I chanted them. Instead, she called out your name."

Clark brought his face close to her. "When did this happen?" It was strange; for the most part he liked Berthe, but when she reminded him of what she had done to Paula there was always a painful chill inside. He wanted to make her vanish. This was what it meant to feel one's gorge rise. Calming himself, he told her about his dream on the night of the worms.

"It was about the same time. But then, you thought of her often. I thought about Akiva every day when...when I was pregnant. Neshar. When I see him I think he is the blessing rain, the light that brings opposites into harmony, the third and best way. I wanted to find that way between Pahid's gods and my women's, between justice and beauty, but it will not be found in this generation, I think."

"We have both of them here."

"No, you have justice. Beauty and justice are like sun and rain. You have rain. Akiva has sun. Who has both?"

"Both reason and feeling?"

"I know you feel. But you feel love. Love is a word. Akiva does not feel words. He has no emotions; he does not feel these things. He is these things, himself." She looked down. "I go to him every night and we sit and look at one another. Sometimes he holds my hands to console me for what I have lost in him."

Clark studied the grainy surface of a page. "I can tell you he is always moved when somebody loves him," he said.

Berthe was sitting with her legs curled up. She laid her head on one knee. "He is ascetic, like Pahid. They celebrate all that they can feel by suffering. But Pahid's suffering is for the gods of justice. He gives them gifts of feeling."

"Whereas Akiva?"

"His gods are not just."

Now they were talking like friends. "He told us the taxes shouldn't be taken by force," Clark reasoned.

Berthe twisted a lock of hair. "That may be, but his gods are not always so kind. And they are not just."

"You said the other day that Pahid burned one of your old friends. What kind of justice is that?"

Berthe hissed involuntarily, but she said, "Rain hurts you sometimes."

Clark almost said, "So does being poked in the eye, but that doesn't make it good." He restrained himself, though, thinking, the first time I met her, I had shot her horse and she was trying to kill me with a spear. We can't expect to agree on everything.

She got up and went to read the alphabet banner at the front of the room. Clark watched. She leaned against the wall, looking at him.

"Both Pahid and I are devilspawns," she said, wondering as she spoke at this effect of love, that she who was so used to craft and suspicion should suddenly feel so lonely that she confided the lethal secret to someone she barely knew. She was certain that he, a fellow lover, would not betray her.

In fact, he didn't even understand her. She had to explain in embarrassingly clear language about the black urine and what it meant, how her husband had disowned her when he saw it in Neshar, and how her mother concealed it when she, Berthe, was small.

[~*-]

Clark could scarcely believe what she told him. To emerge so calm and so honest--and she must be both, to live here among enemies, her life at stake if they decided not to trust her, and speak as plain as she had just done to him--from a life of such concealment was an astounding triumph. The slightest suspicion would have meant exposure for her, and her red hair would have signalled it like a flag. No one, once suspecting, would have said anything but, "Of course." Only her manner, her honest and relentless calm prevented it. Yet she had never become cynical, solitary, or even especially discreet. "Light from darkness," he quoted after he had thought for a while. "Fruited stone."

Then he was professional, and became excited. He got a urine sample from Berthe and she got him one from Neshar while he collected controls from Paula and Fuego and some Verloringers who were used to his odd requests. Their samples all contained metabolites of Ecclesiam; Berthe's and Neshar's did not. Berthe's and Neshar's contained whole Ecclesiam, un-metabolized. It wasn't really black, only darker than usual, but Berthe told him that in town it turned the color of night.

"Well water burns us," she explained. "But I think in some way we are like children, and that must be why I learned the church language, and learned to read when the age for learning was past. Some women have children when the time is past. I think what happens in their wombs happens to us also. Devilspawns are famous for being clever."

That was why Neshar had cried and shouted, "Don't give me away!" when Berthe said she could read. Clark stood at the window, watching the rain puddle on earth that could no longer receive it.

He began telling everyone to drink stream water instead of well water, and found an enthusiastic audience in the herbalists who had been wandering into the camp by twos and threes since Berthe's arrival. Women who knew nothing about it seized upon stream water as an answer to everything from earthquake to menstrual cramps. They went around warning each other that there was more to these false blessings than met the eye and other evil practices were soon to be uncovered.

The camp's location was entirely public now, and people came from as far away as the Plains city to see the looms and the big spinning wheels the carpenters had made after Paula's model, to sit by Akiva and hear Tiyar preach about liberty and the growth of a people, and to eat the same food that many of them had refused to accept from the rafting parties that brought the tax offerings unexpectedly back to their villages. Ma Zauber herself showed up and stayed for two days.

Paula knew it was liable to happen. She tried to prepare for it, but she could not overcome the nausea that attacked her when she came into the dining hall on a certain evening and saw Pahid.

He was dressed in a peasant's tunic, the nails of his fingers and toes black from whatever new self-abuse he had devised to gratify his passion. Because of her weakness, Paula had to make two entrances, and each time his gaze met her straight on, though she stood and he sat, and he seemed to fill the whole room. Her Puro appeared in her hand. She put it away.

"Either keep your distance or step close," Tiyar was always saying. She moved in close, and sat down beside Pahid. She could feel the chill of his wet clothing, she was so close.

"They say travelers entering the Middle Plains in spring think they have died in the mounatins and come to Ayekar," he said.

That was his greeting. She tried not to hear it, but her heart was beating fast. Someone nearby used a knife to cut bread. She could have reached out and touched it.

Fuego settled an argument and took a seat beside her. "What's the matter?" he asked in Eyimalian.

Pahid said quietly, "Whether or not I come alone, it can do you no good to name me."

That's obvious, she thought. She had to look at him, however sharply her insides protested, and take a bite of food after answering Fuego, "Nothing." It felt like sand.

"They say it will be ruined now," Pahid went on.

Paula did not try to speak. Clark arrived. Akiva arrived. They sat opposite her. Pahid repeated his last comment. She had to say something.

"What will be ruined?"

Pahid had been looking at Fuego. Now Tiyar joined them, and Pahid studied him. Recognition? Had he seen someone like that? "Some say it will come by drought, others by flood. The divine tribute has been stolen. Some say Pahid will collect again. Hunger must follow. People will starve because of those who are now eating."

Fuego said, "Don't worry about that. Pahid won't collect. He may try, but he can't do it."

Pahid looked him over again, and for the first time put something in his mouth. He swallowed with obvious difficulty, then said, "Perhaps he won't. I hear he says the Plains will be destroyed not by him, but by the Temple's enemies. They will work the retribution for their own crimes, he says."

"What does he mean?" Paula asked.

"He means they have learned to plunder."

Clark and Tiyar looked up from their food. In this camp, plunder was a fighting word, seldom used.

Fuego snorted. "He's pretty good at that himself," he said. Paula could have applauded.

Pahid ignored him. "They say he expects to win their souls. They may be ghosts, may have lived before the days of the Temple, and thier bodies may be magic as people say. But the heart needs no resurrection. When they have become agents of retribution, they will be tortured by pity."~*~

Paula stared at Clark. He was pressing back the cuticles of one hand with the fingers of the other, probably wondering how this unpleasant old man had come to sit with them. She imagined that he looked angry, but then she herself was so irritated that when she noticed Krup in the doorway, watching her as always with such smug enjoyment, she wanted to throw something at him. She actually reached for the water jar. He went out. Berthe came in, passing him, and sat down quietly on the other side of Pahid.

Akiva said, "Pahid lacks understanding. He hardens his body to endure the rigors of paradise."

"And you?" Pahid retorted instantly. "For what do you suffer?"

Akiva smiled. "I want to join earth, which no one can bear doing."

Some of them ate during the little silence that followed. Paula remembered that Clark and Tiyar had once gone to watch Pahid dance at a conjunction of the moons, and she wondered if Clark did not begin to remember this man. But that had been long ago, and he was in costume then.

Pahid was first to speak again. "What is the significance of the red cord?" he asked Berthe.

"It is a sign of our allegiance to one another as healers."

"And the Temple?"

"If the Temple works with us, yes. If not, then not."

This was the decision. They all stared at her.

"And gifts to Ayekar?" Pahid asked.

"If they are freely given."

"And--and Pahid?"

She shook her head. "If with us, yes. If not, then not."

He rested his forearms on the table, looking at his clenched fists. "They say he freed Pa'ula. They wonder why. Maybe he knew she was the seed, that she would do as he wished her to do wherever she went. Even now, your people tell me she is a conciliator and leads them away from strength toward peace. That, in the end, will make them spare the servants of the Temple, and so it will not die. Maybe he thought, the seed planted, she would return as to her soul's father. They say Pahid won her--"

"They say Pahid is a devilspawn!" Clark interjected. In the silence that followed, he considered how little a politician he was, that he was really only a friend of Sevit, only the guy Efirr happened to confess to, only a sympathetic lover.

Pahid turned to Berthe. "That which I forgave in you, you betrayed in me," he said in a voice almost tender. Berthe recoiled, truly frightened.

He had turned his back on Paula. The thin tunic clung tight to his body so she could see his ribs, the bumps of the spine and the narrow hips. She turned in her seat, planting herself firmly to deliver the blow. Her arms came in tight to her sides, fists clenched, one to the left and one to the right.

Reaching across the table, Akiva laid his hand over her fist. She was stopped.

As she looked at him, she remembered the story of the man Akiva held under water to hide him and the stories about ghosts from the bottom of the Lir. She imagined the Lir's water flowing, draining some lakes, filling others, and her hatred dissipated. Akiva's hand on hers allowed her to relax her body. He did not take it away.

Pahid saw this and turned to Akiva. "Are you he?"

"The Lost God resides in every willing heart," Akiva replied.

"You're Akiva. You've saved my life, so I'll warn you to get back from us. You're human, I guess, not like them. Get over there." He pointed a little distance away and Akiva moved, still keeping his gaze on Paula.

She almost rose, but didn't. Now a delightful tinkling sounded inside Pahid's tunic. He pulled out a string of silver bells on a purple cord.

"Waken, waken. These bells sing to the soul's condition, ghosts," he said. He repeated it, chanting, then took a lump of chalk from a pocket and drew a mandala on the table while they watched. Tiyar's hand went to his Puro, as did Fuego's and Clark's, but the danger only added to the magic tension. "Listen, listen, listen," he chanted. "The rippling water, the shining Lir, they are calling." Done the mandala, he raised one hand, palm out, and pointed at Tiyar.

Tiyar flinched.

"That you and your companions and all not born of women of Paffir Eket return to the worlds of your birth to never trespass this world again, I, Pahid, by my hope of Ayekar, command in the name of Marlow Maxwell."

Tiyar and Fuego went white. Seeing this, many Verloringers and Itscriyites lost their nerve. People ran from the building and left the camp without stopping. Others were too afraid to move.

Paula stood up. "Tell Marlow Maxwell I will not obey."

Pahid started back. The two stood looking at one another for a long time.

An alarm went off.

"That's Krup!" Fuego said.

Paula put her hands to her head. "I won't go back! Some go, some are dragged, some believe until the last instant that they're running in the opposite direction, but not me! I don't go. Dig your heels in, stop up your ears. It's the only way they can't use you."

She lowered her hands and made fists. Pahid did not attempt to defend himself, but spread his arms and said, "I wait."

Paula felt something she could not interpret, a rush of sensation and many emotions at once. Hatred left her before she struck. She knew something was wrong and then knew, without anger, that she was dying. Her body worked, her limbs moving vigorously, perhaps in fits. Something bright appeared. It looked like a radiant island. She felt that she was swimming toward a place of tranquility. She was flying as to a planet, crossing not the void that separates heavenly bodies but a space that was full. It was full of light and human voices resounding, a space that does not separate but joins, and the brightness enveloped her, had always enveloped her. She joined it and was no more.

Clark had seen this. He had to think, then to release himself into his memory and look around as he had been taught, before he recognized those seizures, the asymmetric flailing of limbs, and what he recalled was a nightmare that billowed up empty but was rooted in fact, in something he had seen. It was a conversation in Merced with Teresa da Flora about something that had happened in a Resheborian lab, to a rat with a transmitter in its brain.

That time he had been frightened and had pitied. This time he must act. He grabbed the scanner from Tiyar, heard an alarm ring somewhere, and shouted something about Krup. That must be what the road slave's equipment was for.

Paula could not be saved; she was dead already. Torches were lit, smoke darkened their light, people shouted and wailed. The smoke thickened. Whole buildings were burning. The dining hall, built on a watertight floor, slipped free and drifted, burning bright on the bright-reflecting black swamp. The smoke grew sweet and thicker; granaries were burning; grew acrid, some were put out. Krup's minions, caught, spilled blood and then stopped. The Itscriyites contained their killing, and that was a wonder, but they performed it unawares. There was too much to do. Paula was dead in her triumph, by an unknown hand, but there was no time for grief or awe.

Chapter 17

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