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Akiva sat on a crumbled wall and watched the people gather. The last conjunction of the moons had brought him Berthe. His followers were convinced that this one was fraught with meaning to them, even to Akiva alone, and it was difficult to conceal how desperately he hoped so. Beside him, an old man called Manitey passed the time by complaining. "It's the shinbones...I don't mind the joints, they've always been bad, but the bones ache now...if I could eat I wouldn't mind..."

"What is this place?" Akiva asked him.

"Can't say...it was a city. Everything was made of stone. Houses, churches, streets, all stone. Belltowers. Ironworks and weavers and carpenters--like wizards. They worked magic on things. They made the metal and the cloth and the wood obey them. In those days a carpenter could build a house that floated right on the water, and a weaver could make clothes that worked like a human being even when there was nobody inside. Made nets that caught fish with their hands--"

"Ayekar."

"What?"

"I didn't say anything," Akiva replied quickly.

"Yes, you did. Don't get rattled now, you said Ayekar. You did. I heard it," Manitey insisted.

"Yes, I did." These unlooked-for comments that he could never remember making frightened him. Such a one had set him on the road to the capital with a stone in his pack and a wound on his thigh.

His followers had revelled in the notion of calling down fire from heaven. They had grown so arrogant that instead of begging at villages along the way, they exacted tribute. They thought him a magician and those near him invulnerable. One day he had asked them to pass before him in groups of five so he might bless them, and they had gone in order of strength, with the young men and women first and the elders and children in the rear. He made each one of them kiss the feet of everyone behind, though it took all of a rainy afternoon in a desolate stretch between villages. Manitey had been the last in line. He accepted the adulation Akiva forced on him so gracefully that kissing his feet seemed rather to enoble the others than to debase them. But even the old man's admirers called Akiva the priest of fire, the hand of Shis or fate, and they gloated over the destruction he would bring. They said he would burn the world clean, and though he knew it was bravado he feared the path his Verloringers might take if he brought them to the capital in a mood of vengance. He must find some way to retract his threats against the parish of Itscriye.

"Ayekar," Manitey was saying. "Fatayad touched--he tapped the ground and the crop sprang up! Leaves that touched the sun. Streets draped with cloths and banners. The homes the gods live in are warm and beautiful as the cliffs of the Middle Range in summer. When they come to Hath's banquet, each one of them has fifty children trail behind with presents. Jewelry as bright as drops of water, bowls of food as deep as the children are tall, rugs and blankets as soft as...as--"

"Soft as the earth in the evergreen forests and warm as old straw," Akiva finished for him. He sat up. The trembling in his legs ceased. The moons were closing rapidly. "We have all that, food plentiful as air, gems of earth and gems of sky-- we are mantled in glory even as Fea, because we were born to earth-- do you hear? We are in the city of Ayekar now, but our minds are too distracted to perceive it."

"This?" People were looking around at the ruins. They had mistaken his meaning, and thought this city was literally Ayekar. Akiva decided to let them wonder so that, when they eventually understood, the idea would be clearer than his stumbling oratory could make it.

Manitey began to plait Akiva's hair. There were no bells and few flowers, but the children had made strings of rattling seedpods to drape along his arms and villagers brought herbal wreaths that rustled at his waist. The old man knotted a dried ugewa flower at the end of each braid. There were brittle ugewa blooms everywhere. Celebrants brought him handfuls of them, and he had entrusted Neshar with a sack to keep them, but each time the boy opened it to put more in, others blew out and were snatched up by older children.

"Akiva, look!" Neshar called.

Akiva looked where the boy was looking. A strange new party was studying the celebrants.

Their size alone would have marked them as foreign, and their clothes were white and fine as hoarfroast, white and fine as the storied raiment of the Golden People. Some of them were twice as big as any peasant. A few of ordinary height were among them, but these looked even stranger in the same radiant garb.

"What do you think?" Manitey asked.

Akiva shook his head. He looked around, trying to decide who might go and greet them.

Klyne stood at his elbow, holding her baby in one arm and middle son in the other. The eldest sat behind her, chafing his swollen knees. He was so bowlegged that at times she carried him and let the toddler hold the infant. Klyne dropped her gaze when Akiva looked at her.

"Will you ask the giants where they come from?" Akiva asked.

She did not respond except to look up at him for an instant. Her wild glances, sunken cheeks and protruding upper teeth always made him think of a trapped animal. So far as he knew, she had no other name than Klyne, meaning little one, which her brother had called her when he gave her to Akiva. Her two sisters had bowed their heads and let her be taken without farewell.

"Do you see them? Go and speak to them," Akiva said.

She went, the boy limping after her. In a few minutes she returned. Avoiding Akiva, she picked up Neshar and carried the boy off toward the strangers, entrusting her own sons to their brother. Akiva watched her brush a clump of mud from his child's face and laugh in a voiceless grunt at something he said. Her two older boys, watching her, grinned. They doted on Neshar although their mother favored him above her sons. Artless and natural though it seemed, their fawning saddened Akiva. It was a reproach that she responded to kindness from him like a stone to warm weather, and yet basked so gratefully in the least smile from Neshar.

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CONTINUE..................... KLYNE REPORTS..................... FOLLOW KLYNE & NESHAR..................... CLARK & PAULA..................... |EYIMALIANS..................... A DEATH BY FIRE.....................

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INDEX