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Manitey was talking about the battle for Ayekar. "Trees burned. Fields burned. Clothes on the people's bodies and hair on the children's heads burned. Rani--Rani took Fatayad's staff that he used to touch thr ground so the plants would spring out--"

"Why'd he take it?" a boy asked.

"Why?" Manitey shrugged.

"He took it for us, his children," Akiva interjected. "Rani is our human father, don';t you know that?"

The boy rattled off the answer like a preacher. "Fatayad and earth got Rani, Rani was the first of men."

"Human fathers forget the divine laws for their children's sake." Akiva shut his eyes. Rani was also he who gripped the wrists of Shis, the hands of fate, demanding prophecy, and Shis, seeing the human future in Rani's eyes, could not look away. "Man, you sleep, but you will waken!" So it would be.

"It was a sign," Manitey went on more quietly. "When Rani used the staff it sprouted fire, and the dragon beasts came out of hell. They took away Verloring who dwells in the heart. The leaves and the standing trees and the roots in the ground all burned. They say the Lir ran red. All around was burning fire!" He jumped at the boy, who laughed. "That's what happens when you steal," he concluded.

Akiva glanced at him with one eye. Was that all the moral he drew from Verloring's loss and the exile of humanity from Ayekar?

Klyne returned. She set Neshar on the ground and nudged him a little away from her so that she stood alone, but she continued to look at him.

"Who are they?" Akiva asked.

"Priests."

"Where do they come from?"

"Fishermen pulled them from the Lir."

Everyone within earshot stiffened. Ghosts lived at the bottom of the Lir.

"Did they tell you they came from the Lir, or Lir Temple?" Akiva persisted.

"I asked them..." She turned her face away and plucked at the ends of her sleeves as though she might creep inside her shirt like a turtle.

"They answered?"

"Mur--mur'a--mura set."

The people around her were laughing, glad something relieved the tension.

"Quiet!" Akiva commanded. "What are you all afraid of? I have told you again and again, our lives are full of portent. Theological things happen everywhere. Why should we quail at ghosts, even from the days of Ayekar?"

The mention of Ayekar, usually comforting, now terrified them. Parents gathered children close. Everyone moved away from the walls as though the vines might reach out and snatch them.

Still working on Akiva's hair, Manitey said, "It's because you said this was Ayekar." He turned to Klyne. "Were they angry?"

She shook her head.

"Have they come to celebrate the moontouch?" Akiva asked.

She glanced at him almost coolly. "They come to hear you."

Akiva dropped down to the wall and signed them to leave him. The drumming had begun. There was no time to go to the river, so he went out from the city into a field that was not yet plowed and sat down. He imagined the Lir as it must be now, the water's surface calm, the rounded tops of the shallow waves gleaming in what moonlight reached them through the clouds. Ghosts might be rising from it even now. The ghosts--even he thought of them thus. Could that be the moontouch portant? He looked back at the city he had inadvertently made them believe was Ayekar, and wondered if it might be true. The real truths did not come written in the sky with lightning or from the mouths of seven-footed cats in winged chariots, but during those moments of unseeking contemplation he considered the highest form of prayer.

The strangers were probably not ghosts. Peasants, and many priests, thought people sank in water so anyone found in the Lir must be dead, but he, who had done it, knew the human body would float if not weighted down. People believed otherwise because the body was so often weighted down-- in any case, he was leery of signs and omens. In some provinces all the women tried to conceive on the moontouch night because those children would be stronger and wiser but in others they slept on the floor because children conceived then would go mad. Who could say what the moontouch signified?

Then there was Neshar. The sign showed black as devilspawn's whenever they came out of the mountains and stayed in a town, but he knew the boy had no more evil in him than any other three-year-old-- surely no more in the towns than in the mountains. It was rather the corruption of the towns that burned him, and so Akiva had decided the so-called devilspawn were really more pure. Yet everywhere people reviled them.

The world had fallen into a state that left the true and false interpretations of signs in confusion. Better to ignore them and wait for those unguarded moments when the gods spoke through his mouth.

It would be vanity to think the gods had drawn ghosts out of the Lir for him, making them rise up from their sleep on the bottom, their bodies distorted as the waves twisted light, their eyes glassy. They would look like corpses drifting to the surface. Coughing water and blood as though drowned, like the old priest Shurat, they would stumble up the riverbank to seek him --he raised his hands to his face. There was blood on his palms. Dark rings encircled the fingrnails and flashed in the distant torchlight when he turned his hands. The image of floating bodies in the Lir would not leave his mind.

He studied the ruins. Why had he called this place Ayekar? He began to circle around them. Ayekar was not a place. Shurat had said it. That is our exile, he thought. To remain in paradise, unable to see it. Shurat had told him that, had been telling it at the temple on the last day he spoke. There must have been demons there. The old man had looked into some pair of eyes, seen hell and lost his mind. Some hand had pulled him down-- he had said Ayekar was no city. It was the world

Heavy underclouds parted before the moons. In the sudden light Akiva saw bats circling over a plowed field. Voices cheered behind him. He stripped off his costume and flung himself into the mud, thrilled at its icy touch. The earth embraced him roughly, and the stones left bruises, but his body warmed the mud until it yeilded to him and instead of robbing his strength redoubled it.

He saw torches coming from the city. Torches-- they sought him. So it had been with Shurat. This time he would not flee. This time there would be no panicked chase, no hiding under water. Yet he was running toward the Lir and the mud flew in droplets from his naked body.

They pursued him. A man held out his robe. He could neither stop nor speak to them. In the orange firelight they looked as soft as chicks. He slowed his pace so they could follow. In the ruins, the peasants were dancing to the moons themselves, forgetting him.

They were halfway to the Lir when the music and shouting ceased. Claps of thunder sounded, loud as Hath's footsteps. Flame started up over the walls, and in a few minutes the walls were glowing beneath the new vines as though the stones had been heated red. Some people had the presence of mind to flee, others remained where they were. Manitey ran straight to the river, and many followed him. Mothers dragged children by their wrists or left them. Neshar was nowhere to be seen.

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CONTINUE..................... CLARK & PAULA..................... FOLLOW AKIVA RUNNING.....................

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