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CHAPTER 2

Berthe lay listening to the rustle of uko leaves that fell past Akiva's house. Both moons were out tonight, the smaller veiled in clouds, the larger free. Moonlight passing between the uko's seminaked branches entered the house at a shallow angle, crossed the room and fell upon Akiva, illuminating the nearer side of his face. With the eye closed it looked like stone.

To see a face as beautiful as yours in this world is stranger than finding a marble city in the wilderness, she thought. The risk is nothing. The risk is my life, and that has been in danger since its beginning.

Caution ruled Berthe. She knew it so well that she had won a full summer's love by secrecy that, in retrospect, astonished her. She had learned to steal in and out of her house silently as a dream, to hear a footstep twenty paces behind and elude the suspicious brother or send him on false leads that kept him busy till he was tired of following her, to feign sleep after coming at a dead run all the way from the city, and to bring herself alert when she was ready to collapse from exhaustion. Berthe had always needed to be careful because she was a witch. People would know that from seeing her urine, always black as midnight, and they they would have killed her, so she concealed it, but those deceptions were nothing as to this.

More than a dozen visits, each the object of a careful plot, forged a hidden chain of happy memory. She and Akiva had even found leisure for a lovers' quarrel. She had run angrily homeward in the twilight. He had followed until she stepped off the road, then jumped on her. They wrestled, she using a fraction of her strength, then they argued in whispers, and then they forgot. There could be no lasting alienation between them. Both knew they must remain together because they could love one another and that capacity was so rare.

A leaf drifted in through the window and slid rasping along the floor. The summer of my life is ending, Berthe thought. As the uko must finally stand exposed to winter, so she must eventually be discovered in one secret or the other. One person knew both secrets already.

She had learned that on Tribute Day, when the people came to the temple with ceremonial bundles of dried ugewa blooms for boiling down to dye. Flower-giving was the celebration of plenty after the harvest. No one minded giving up the pretty blossoms. The leaves, with the corn and barley, would go later on big tax wagons to the capital. Then even the most pious had no occasion to rejoice, but Tribute Day was all fun and dancing.

All day, beginning at sunrise, families came. Men and women hauled big sacks, children tossed their smaller bags at one another, hurled them up into the eaves of the temple, stole them back and forth and amassed little hoards of the sticky, crinkly cushions. In the afternoon, wagons arrived from the outlying villages. Hopeful brides and bridegrooms, out-country mothers who wanted their children named in temple, sick people who had lost faith in herbal cures and old ones who wanted to die holy poured out and went searching for the peasants' priest to hear their supplications. Too ignorant to know what a priest looked like, many gave their bribes to local codgers. Some wandered into the city and were chased out with dogs.

This year the confusion was worse because the bumpkins, unaware of Shurat's death, were looking for an old priest. One grandfather took a dozen fees and was looking forward to a year's idleness by the time a group of his victims caught him, beat him and recovered their gifts.

Berthe sat with her family on the ground near the temple where bales and bags and heaps of purple flowers, sometimes filled in with straw, spilled out of the building, down the granite steps, across the apron of hardpacked earth around it, and stopped with a few small packages leaning against the polished stones of the outer ring. Someone gave a hidden signal. The gongs and cymbals rang and tinkled and clashed. Babies howled, children yelled and danced, men and women cheered. The country folk pressed close to the outer stones.

Akiva came out on the temple steps, wearing his bells and the purple gown, his hair oiled and plaited, solemn eyes dutiful and loving. He raised his hands. They all fell silent. He spoke in the church language and Berthe translated to her family, trying to express not only the meaning of his words but also the sound and rhythm and the feeling that underlay his speech.

The sermon was a difficult one, not really suited to Tribute Day. Rather than praising the offerings, Akiva seemed to ask something of them that could not be so easily measured. Most people didn't understand the god-pleasing language, though, so they didn't care what he said. Sermons conferred blessing and that was enough.

He took as his subject the greeting spoken by Fatayad, god of agriculture, to the first farmers. Fatayad said, "I am with you."

"The father of your wisdom did not say, I am with you now; I am here today. Fatayad said, I am with you. There is a message for us in those words. It is an assurance, and it is a warning. The gods are with us. Let us rejoice, let us lift up our faces and be glad, they care for us. Let us lift up our husbands and wives and our children. Let us raise up our crops for them and in so doing purify the earth. Let us show generosity and kindness in our spiritual wealth, for the gods are with us."

Berthe repeated after him in a whisper. Her younger brother listened closely, frowning.

"We often think the gods are far away, that they are absorbed in their lofty concerns and they do not think of us. In truth, it is we who separate ourselves from them, we who care only about our small worries, about the next rain or the snowfall, we who care only about taxes and the next harvest, we who wonder, in our greatest feats of vision, about how our sons and daughters will fare when they are grown."

People were crowding around Berthe. She spoke aloud.

"We are interested in only one generation, when all the generations of eternity are our proper concern. We are interested only in feeding ourselves when the nurturance of that in us which needs no food is our most urgent business. It is our task, it is our most pressing duty, to remove ourselves from day-to-day affairs, and bring ourselves that much closer to Ayekar." He paused. The name of Ayekar echoed back from the trees, then silence. Make them hear, Berthe cheered him silently. But few understood more than an occasional word.

His voice was quiet now. "We must feed the gods, becuase this is the strongest proof of our love. But we must not become so enmeshed in the work of feeding them that we forget the gods themselves. We must remember always that they are with us. Let us never, never think we are alone."

"What?" someone whispered.

"Alone!" someone answered. Akiva glanced at them and away.

"When disease weakens us, let us have courage. When death strikes, let us not grieve," he continued. "They are still with us. When the rain does not fall, when the fields are parched or the fields are awash, let us have no fear. When we are weary and long for rest, let us remain steadfast, for the gods are with us. When our friends fail, let us not despair, for the gods are with us. But my people, when we allow lust and rebellion to enter our hearts, let us fear and fear greatly, for the gods are with us!"

She was speaking loudly. Akiva looked at her. He shuddered visibly. Berthe saw her mother's gaze move from the preacher to her daughter. She guessed. The blood welled up under Berthe's skin, that was too pale to conceal it. Her mother looked at the ground. She knew. The secret was safe with her, but one had guessed and soon others would guess also.

The summer of my life, Berthe thought again. She was not afraid. Who would outlive such a victory, and who could fight thus for more than one summer? She moved slightly in the bed and Akiva woke.

"Why are you crying?" he asked.

"You, who will be as Verloring..." Berthe murmured. "I am not crying. I was thinking...thinking how long this summer has been."

"It started before I knew you," Akiva replied with a smile. "A thousand years ago." He added seriously, "Berthe, I was a priest then."

"This wound will make your soul stronger." She wiped his cheek with the palm of her hand. They lay quiet.

"There is no Verloring," Akiva said. "Shurat--"

"There is. Everybody knows Verloring leads good children to paradise."

"It's a story. Shurat said that the Archives--"

"Verloring is our friend. He is the world's lost friend. Don't cry. We will find him."

"Do you believe it?" he asked.

She laughed. "Not that he leads good children to Ayekar."

He said nothing.

"Did Shurat tell you about Verloring?" she asked. Akiva nodded. "Did you believe him?"

Akiva opened his mouth and closed it. He swallowed. Finally he said, "People called me the Lost Boy."

"Because you talked about the Lost God?"

He did not answer.

"Do they call you the Lost Man now?"

"No. They've forgotten." He sighed. "Berthe, I was a priest."

There was no answer to this, so she said lightly,"You are still a priest. Priests are supposed to love their people as well as the gods."

"The people are stupid, narrow, dirty sheep. The gods--I read the books in the Archive. They waste themselves. They could be gods, but they are like people. They are like me."

She rocked him back and forth until he fell asleep. He is as tired as I, she thought. To decieve my family is nothing--he must evade the sight of heaven. Sometimes when she prattled about the gods he became annoyed and she thought of Fea giving up her child Zatoye to the sun. The goddess held out her misbegotten to its father with gestures of hope, and tears. As it grieved Fea to know her golden child would be raised by earth instead of her, so it must grieve this priest to know he would never meet his people in Ayekar.

To deceive my family is nothing, she thought. Her next-younger brother was the most difficult one. A romantic, he lay awake nights or went out to walk in the moonlight. Often as not when she said she was going to sleep in the hayloft he came with her, and then she must stay there because he might wake at any hour with some question like, "Berthe, why do they keep rain in the sky when it's only needed on the ground?"

The elder brothers were always suspicious, but too lazy to follow her unless their father insisted, and he was simple. When she said she would sleep in the barn, he forbade it or else he hesitated and then nodded, or else he agreed. If he agreed at once he would send someone later to make sure she was there. If he hesitated, then he had satisfied himself she was innocent, and she might leave at once. Tonight he had hesitated a long time, partly because she had not asked him while he was sober.

He drinks too much, she thought. All the good brandy and whiskey they had put down for her wedding was gone, and most of her sister's, too. The grain he kept aside to ferment took as much land and trouble as the ugewa. After a summer's day afield he came in too weary to sleep, and then he must drink himself into a stupor to be ready for the next day.

Sometimes Berthe looked out through the doorway at evening when the smoke of hearth fires rose from the distant houses and thought of the suffering that each wisp signified, the overworked fathers and worn-out mothers, the children beaten and allowed to starve. Something must come of this, she thought.

Something. There would be a baby soon at home. Her mother's labors were usually easy. She is old, though, Berthe thought, too old for children, almost, too old to work in the fields. Almost.

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CONTINUE.....................

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