CHAPTER 1

The full moons touched. Akiva leapt. Fourteen bells jangled on his sleeves, twelve more clattered beneath the ropes of flowers across his chest. He ran toward the sun, leapt again and ran back toward the two moons. Through the straight runs, the turns, and the leaping, he sang at the top of his voice. He clapped his hands, guided by the rhythm of his footfalls, leaving his mind empty, letting his memory flow over.

Blue flower petals and leaves of green and gold cascaded down his arms and shoulders, down his chest and to the ground. The bells flashed in the sunlight. Akiva kicked and dropped, his legs extended, balanced on his hands. Looking up, he met Berthe's eyes. She stood close, half-clean and sweating, smiling down. Droplets glittered in her orange hair. He shivered, jumped and was off again.

When he was done, the flower petals lay strewn among the rounded stones of the temple yard and barefoot children stood in the drifts and squeezed them between their toes. The moons had gone off on their separate courses. He looked again at Berthe while the old men undid the long plaits of his hair. She sat in a patch of light by one of the stones that ringed the temple, a brother at her feet, looking inside where the city people danced for the lunar conjunction, or she was looking at Fea, the mother goddess, by the window.

Fea, halted at a doorway by a suffering woman's cry, her woolen mantle pulled back by a strong right arm, turned from the direction of her motion to look with serene attention at the supplicant. Berthe looked at the sky, then looked at Akiva and saw without surprise or modesty or pride that he watched her. He walked back to his hut, low grasses parting and rejoining in his wake.

Sunlight poured through chinks and windows into the little house. The bed, the desk, the worn place in the floor where Akiva had used to sleep when he was an apprentice, and the highbacked chair all rested under an even layer of dust. Dead leaves and evergreen needles whispered together under the bedstead and below the window. Each time the wind blew, a few more entered. Akiva lived outside the city walls, so close to the mountains between Nichayu province and the west that in winter the wolves howled outside. During the winter he had barred the door and carried a gong in the mornings to wake and set them on their way. That was when his predecessor, Shurat, the people's priest and Akiva's teacher, had been alive. ~*~

Akiva stood looking out the window. Some momentus thing would happen.

He was pleased with himself. Traveling priests had brought word from the astronomers in the capital that the moons would conjunct and he, Akiva, had confirmed it by tracing the celestial paths on old maps from the archive. He also learned that this decade would bring four conjunctions, two of them in a single year. Those would come at sunset, leaving a double moon in the night sky. Would the lesser moon be able to separate itself each time? The heavens might change forever in five years. Or they might go on as before. He turned his back to the window and was suddenly inspired to dust the chair with his sleeve. He frowned at the ceiling. New thatch would have to be put on the roof before winter, and a fresh coat of clay applied to the north side of the house.

When Shurat was alive, there had been no cessation from working, eating, copying the crumbled scrolls in the archive and studying the Tales of Ayekar. Now Shurat was dead, the days of his most ravenous appetite were gone, the archives closed to him by nervous hight priests after the disgrace surrounding the old man's death. It seemed he had nothing to do but brood over his full-grown body and remember old tales, and yet the house they had kept so ordered in their hurry was now, in his idleness, all disarray. He ate by taking handfuls of bread and cheese and drank from a jar dipped straight in the well. When he could not bother to go to the city to draw water, he went to the stream or merely lay in the brush outside his hut and drank the abundant summer dew.

He dusted his little table and the spirit doll above the bed. Warmth and damp had curled its fingers and toes. Its black corn-kernel eyes no longer bulged and the lock of Akiva's hair did not shoot up in ritual terror but hung down to its waist, heavy with the nightmares it had absorbed since he nailed the doll up after Shurat died. The brittle grass pricked Akiva's finger.

More dolls lay beside the door, bald unconsecrated heads leaning together. He took his ceremonial bag from under the bed and tossed a doll inside. There was a sick eldest child nearby whose family had decided to sell what could be sold and send for the priest, so Akiva had a rare professional call to make. The priest is always the last, he thought as he set out on the broad dirt path that led away from the city. Last, after the neighbors, after the charlatans, after the witches and grannies with their damning herbal cures.

Someone came out of the underbrush ahead of him, carrying a pronged wooden lever for prying up stones. The dappling sunlight that filtered between the leaves made the form's motion seem swift. Who carried that heavy load so easily? Akiva hastened to see, although he already knew.

Hearing him, Berthe slackened her pace. Had she timed her coming here to meet him? Well, he would speak to her. He was people's priest, it was his duty. None of the peasants were fluent in the temple language anyhow, though Shurat had tried now and then to teach them. They thought it was a kind of magic. In time of sickness he would find women at Fea's altar whispering "Child, child" in priest-talk to guard their babies.

"Where are you going?" he asked. His stomach churned, the sacred tongue shuddering inside him at this use. Her look charged the air with light. Where am I going? it echoed. Where do you lead me?

"One of my cousins is clearing a new field."

"How did you learn to speak--?"

Berthe shrugged. "It came--I don't know. My mother says I was an evil priest in yesterlife."

Evil priest. Akiva imagined his parish all following him like ducklings out of the cycle of rebirth, not to eternal rest but to the destruction of the soul. He walked faster.

"Tell me something," she said. "The very blessed escape rebirth. The ones who drown in evil are destroyed. Is that right? The world will be depeopled, won't it?"

Akiva glanced at her and their eyes met. "Yes, it will," he said.

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jump to: CONSUMMATION
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"Bad ones are not reborn..." Both were walking very quickly now.

"Destroyed," Akiva said.

"So the world becomes better and better." She smiled a little.

"The best are taken and the worst are taken."

"But our souls grow older and they learn," she said timidly. "From being here so many times, trapped in bodies. Alone."

Akiva turned his face away. She put her hand on his arm and his body seemed to vanish, leaving nothing but the place she touched. They stopped walking and stared earnestly at one another, until Berthe let her hand fall and they both went on as quickly as before.

At length she said dreamily, "I was looking at the picture in the temple where the Daughters of Autumn hide the infant Spring.

Do you think...If the daughters had obeyed their father, wintertime would never end. Goddesses know when to disobey. Is that right?"

Akiva said nothing. She said, "But then there is the betrayal of the Lost God, Verloring.

His friends disobeyed; they betrayed him to the evil one. And they lost him. And they were gods, too."

They stopped. "They knew," Akiva said. "They were divine and omnis--they could foresee the loss of Verloring from Ayekar." He paused. His jaw trembled. "They were not like human beings, who would have believed until the instant of his capture that they were Verloring's true friends."

"Until the instant," Berthe repeated. They looked at one another, pleading for restraint. She said, "But gods foresee everything, don't they? They see the time when the world will be good, and see the little godling lead him back to Ayekar."

Akiva walked on. She continued beside him, light and shadow racing over them as they walked faster and faster, each trying to breathe normally, both almost running. At last, tired by the heavy plank across her shoulder, Berthe turned off the road, panting, "I go through the fields from here. Good morning, Father Akiva."

"Good bye," Akiva said. He broke into a run. He could not stop running. He ran faster, his back and neck held stiff by her gaze. When he rounded a curve and was out of her sight, he sat on a rock and sobbed in exhaustion.

The boy was dying. Akiva saw from the moment he entered the hut that his efforts would be vain.

The child was so worn that the grandmother who sat mopping his brow with a wet cheesebag looked in the darkness like his daughter. He stared at the fire, moving occasionally in the tiny gestures Akiva knew were the soul preparing to flee the body. Something hampered it. They must have given him herbal medicines. It is we who sleep and he who wakens, Akiva thought. When the first man Rani grasped the hands of Fate and demanded prophecy, the reply was torn forth, "Man, you sleep, but you will waken." Torn forth in agony. The prophecy bespoke knowledge even Fate himself could barely stand.

The mother came in from her work while Akiva began the farewell chant. He thought of questioning her about the herbal witchcraft, but he knew she would tell him nothing so he continued to sing.

Afterward, the mothers fell to weeping. Akiva started homeward through the ill-kept field. As he walked away the man of the house went in and the lamentation increased.

It was late afternoon when Akiva returned to his hut. Low-lying rainclouds, tinged deep with blue and purple, gathered at the eastern horizon. The sky faded behind them from pink to grey. Wind among the grasses promised rain and new growth. The roof's shadow pointed up the broad trunk of the uko that shaded the house at midday, the shadows of its near leaves cast upon the ones behind to leave the edges shining. The leaves are transformed, Akiva thought. Possessed. The soul embraces them although they are nothing.

Possession. That could be it. A god was persecuting him. He could think of no reason why he should be chosen, since all human beings fell short. It was true that he had hated his mother and father for dying and leaving him alone, that he had been ungrateful to the women who cared for him, that he disdained the city people because they scorned the peasants' priest, and the peasants bored him. He had feared, almost hated Shurat's wife until she died, and as for Shurat himself -- Shurat was dead.

Some god, seeing his pride and disdain, had trapped him with it. A woman was sent to him from people worse than animals, herself animal when whe was among them, but when she came to him they invested her with the grace of Fea.

He had heard somewhere that she did not want to marry away from her parents. She would be near him until she died. What a trap they had set him, a goddess he could never cease to love. He would have no peace.

He could not have loved a goddess. The gods in Ayekar were his persecuters. Berthe could be no goddess. She was human or illusion. He had touched her, smelled her, seen her as a child. As a child...if she were illusion, all must have been foreordained at her birth, though he had not sinned yet. And what if she were a human being?

The light had faded. Akiva went inside and lit a taper to study. He was a priest, he would cure them both. His legs trembled while he removed his sandals at the door.

On the desk lay two small cup-shaped ugewa flowers, blue as -- he thought it before he could stop himself -- blue as her eyes, and bound together by an orange hair, thick and radiant, that must be hers. He stared, unable to close his mouth or cry out. He looked into the taper's flame and remembered a dream.

Some nights ago Akiva had dreamed that he was talking with Berthe in the temple, safe and calm, he seated behind the ceremonial screen and she before it as was proper, but suddenly the screen became invisible. She talked on and he watched as her words trailed to the floor in flowering vines that swayed with her movements. Her face shone in the light of a torch behind him. Leaves drifting in through the window blew past. He heard the sound of rushing water and the leaves turned to fish. The flowering vines floated toward him, then wrapped tight around Akiva's legs and surged upward, seeking his throat. He groaned aloud and dropped the taper.

"Berthe!" he whispered. He was certain. She could be no peasant; she was an incarnation of earth, outside the law. He could do only as she commanded. At the same time he knew she was a peasant and felt the pull of his soul's yearning downward.

He turned to the door, though where he would have run he did not know. Something moved in the half-light. It was she. She stood in his doorway, her wide hands quiet at her sides, and he could not look away. He raised his arms as at the beginning of the wedding dance, then stopped and let them fall. He said the greeting spoken by the groom to the bride, "I hail the prevision of Ayekar."

"Through you I grow worthy," she answered, extending her right hand. He took it and kissed the palm, then, pushing back her sleeve, kissed her wrist and the inside of her elbow. He had not smiled because he did not want to deceive her about the seriousness of what they did, but now he thought he should reassure her. Was she frightened? Her heart beat fast; he could feel it against his lips. He decided to smile but could not do it.

She wore a kerchief tied under her chin. He undid it. Red-gold hair fell over his face in a quiet rush. Her skin was so smooth to the touch that he thought it must be a dream. With her hair around them he could no longer see her, but he kept his mouth close by her ear and murmured the names of flowers and goddesses as they came to mind.

CONTINUE in Chapter 1

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