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CHAPTER 12

His back to her, Pahid unfurled a scroll. Was that blood on his fingernails? She would swoon. She would fall at his feet and he, only mildly annoyed, would kill her at once. She would gut herself now with those fire tongs in the corner and die on the instant, before him, luckier than Hex. She would vomit. He would whirl, enraged, and she would rise to kill him, but he was too strong; she would shrivel in his gaze. Hex, carded and burned, had gone taut as a wet rope, soft eyes all mad. She fought against sobbing.

"Don't be afraid," Pahid said in the church language, still with his back to her. She nodded anyway, in case he might somehow know and it please him. Muscles jerked tight in front and back, all down the spine and sternum to her waist.

The scroll snapped shut. She jumped, and landed sharply on the stones. One jabbed her kneecap. "What is your name," Pahid said tonelessly.

"Berthe."

"And your goddess."

"Earth."

He turned around. His stare was sharp as though he took aim, right now, at her heart. "So you do speak the temple language. Where were you born?"

"Nichayu."

His face was sharp, too, his nose like a beak, eyes small and bright like the eyes of a bird of prey. A few white hairs still clung to the sides of his head, but its bare top shone in the torchlight like an oiled blade.

"Who taught you?!" he roared, advancing.

She jumped to her feet. Cast your darkness on me, Hath, she prayed. His gaze rends the night.

"Who? Tell me who taught you!" The roar echoed a dozen times, echoed a hundred times until every stone was shouting at her, but he drove the echoes back with a flicker of a look, and she heard among them that he was really speaking quietly.

"Shurat. People's priest --Nichayu," she stammered.

He continued to stare, but his tone became introspective. "Nichayu. That's one of the new ones--north fringe, eh? Shurat, the heretic. How did he teach you?"

"He told us storieS. He...preached." Was it day or night? She longed to glance out the window.

Suddenly he pulled up her gown to her knees, then dropped it. She almost screamed. He pushed back her sleeve and pulled her wrist toward him.

"Your knees are cleaner than your elbows," he said. He knew her for a witch, that easily. It was a luxury of insight; he could as easily have found out the black urine itself.

Berthe staggered backward, unable to see or hear. Surely now her body would be cast into the deepest pit and her soul to the realms of torment. How she would have loved, now, only to spin, only to haul, only to plow to mortal exhaustion, to stand in merely frozen mud of a spring field, to suffer only cold and hunger, to fear only illness and tempest and drought.

Light returned. She heard a laugh. It was him. He laughed, his eyes tiny and gay, the lines under them curved into smiles. She might have danced like a leaf in the wind.

"All right. I don't care." He turned his back again to look out the window. It was day. "Berthe, have people told you I speak with gods?"

"Yes."

He spoke slowly. "Do you know what they have threatened to do to this province? First, gales and floods will lead their way. Spring hail will strip the stalks. The rain will wash down trees from the mountains and drown the people in mud. Hills will crumble into valleys. The earth will split open and people will be hurled into the crevices and swallowed. Beneath the soil lies a cauldron, Berthe, and those who have followed your example will be hurled into it."

Berthe covered her face. She imagined Meta's daughter, outstretched hands above the mud, drowning. "But why-- will they do these things?"

"Once I asked them why. A horde of orange ants came crawling over my skin to eat my vitals. I no longer ask why."

Berthe looked down involuntarily, but nothing moved toward her.

"These trees, these fields, these people; all destroyed," he went on, his voice soft. "Berthe, have you heard of Itscriye Province?"

"The revolt."

"There was no rain in Itscriye for a year. We chanted day and night. The skulls of four hundred rebels were carried from Itscrid Genshiye to the capital and laid at Hath's altar. Fea appeared to me and she said, bring wheat. I said, there is no wheat in Itscriye. She said, go to the temple of Miyosar Vena, which is to the south of Itscriye, and bring from that province a double tax in ugewa and wheat and corn and wrought metal, things like that. We laid the province of Miyosardia bare to redeem its neighbor. Then the goddess appeared to me and said, in six weeks it will rain in Itscriye. Six weeks. We sent messengers with the news, and the people killed them and took the blood from their bodies and poured it on the fields. It did rain. It rained day and night until the hills and the houses were under water. Even that was not the worst. Diseases came. I stood for days in the headwaters of the Lir, neither eating nor drinking, to receive a vision of Fatayad the sower. I begged him to tell me how we might appease his anger. He said, do not presume to say we are angry. Were it not for our constant intercession, all the world would be always like Itscriye and there would be no soil."

"Earth is my goddess," Berthe said, more from habit than daring.

Still looking out the window, he replied, "You cannot have only one goddess, Berthe. You upset the justice of Ayekar. You earth-women bring calamity on the very land you hold sacred. Do you understand?"

"Calamity?" He was using familiar words, but she could barely grasp their meaning.

"Yes. They said, we will wreak such havoc in the mountain province that the people will flee from there to Itscriye. They are beside themselves with anger, Berthe. This province has so grossly insulted them--there are bastard shrines here. I would have blessed them all and made them holy, but when my priests went out into the country to collect the images and bring them to the temple to receive the sacred cord, women took those images and hid them. Why did you do that? Other towns, having given up the images, would not pay the tax to recover them, but abandoned them and made new ones. Do you see what has happened? Rebellion. You have rebelled. When my priests came to the shrine at your village, you yourself drove them away with a club as heavy as a man."

He was going to kill her. Was it true that he could command the dead, that, like the spring that calls Seed, he would make her rise from underground to follow him? Hex had said Pahid wandered the chambers of the world below, calling ghosts to march.

"I am the gods' last clemency to a place that merits destruction, Berthe. They would have leveled the mountains. I have burnt a few villages. They commanded me: go, and choke the rebellion in blood. I said, let me take one earth's-woman only, and I will quench the rebellion with fear. That woman died for you. Her suffering has won us time to save ourselves, and we will do it, though at a terrible price." He glanced over his shoulder at her. "After all, we can expect no more. In this province, sick people no longer come to priests but seek out women who give them roots containing the blood of demons slain in the battle for Ayekar. Forty generations of farmers have labored to purify the earth of that blood, and still they feed it to the sick." He rested his head in his hands, leaning slightly out the window.

He went on, "They are bad women. But I think some can be led to the good. I have come to lead them. If I fail--" He sighed, a long sigh like winter wind; Berthe felt a tear escape her. "Berthe, will you help me save these mountains and this people?"

"Oh, yes!"

"When I tell you the price, you may falter."

"No."

He turned to her. He was smiling. The sun shone upon him. Loose fibers in his woolen gown caught the light and held it about his shoulders. "Good. And, do not be afraid. The gods are with us."

He kept her at the city, in a windowless room whose door was barred each night, and he taught her to read. Days were spent studying in the archive and learning to use a spear from horseback in the fields outside the city wall. Pahid's two sons learned with her, they galloping wild through cropland in pursuit of cattle, farmers or Pahid's own footmen while Berthe kept to the woods where her sturdy mare, who usually pulled wagons, meandered grazing as Berthe recited the lessons she had learned that morning.

Pahid reminded her daily of her vow, but he would not yet tell her the price. She had no illusions that it was anything but her death, and to prepare for that she wrote out alphabets on scrolls of bark, with little drawings to remember the sounds by, so others could learn after her. In her musty corner of the archive, surrounded by yellow wads of tax accounts, she sat crosslegged in warm straw and thought of death and drew butterflies and flowers. If she lived until spring she would make an alphabet with flower petals. She selected from the bag in which she collected them twenty seeds whose names began with sounds like the twenty letters and pressed them into clay to make a bracelet that was also a teaching device, with the seeds outside and the letters next to the skin. When Pahid saw it, he looked at her strangely and threw it on the floor, but only shrugged to see it roll instead of breaking.

The history of the world was recorded on four long scrolls that were kept in the archive and recopied every other generation. In addition, there were tax records for centuries, telling how much each family had paid and who had gone away in a Division. The very first Division was recorded there, on a scroll that contained the words of the call given by Hath at the Lir Temple to the head priest five lifetimes before Pahid.

The history of the world was exceedingly difficult. Berthe began at the beginning and read for days, struggling over each strange new word, about the establishment of cities and "trade routes" in places she had never heard of. She learned each city and memorized each route, tracing them on her hands and giving the names of the landmarks and confluences to fingertips, joints and scars. Then, on the ninth day, all was destroyed by the sentence, "But these things vanished long before the coming of mankind." She nearly wept with frustration.

Winter closed them in and freed her. When the snow was deep so she could not run away, and she had read half of one scroll, almost to the birth of Rani and the beginning of mankind, Pahid ordered the bar removed from her door. Berthe left a twig from a medicinal plant in a certain cranny of the city temple, and the next day a thin woman passing in the street showed her a leaf of the antidote and whispered, "Tonight."

Berthe went that night to a tree near the city where Hex had used to meet other women to talk and trade herbs and artifacts. The thin woman leaned there. Berthe came and sat down on a stump that had a jagged part, where the tree had started to fall, and a flat part where someone had cut it. Since the bark was stripped for fuel some winters ago, the yellow wood showed in the moonlight.

"This is your first night away from him. Does he know?" the woman asked.

"I think he does," Berthe said.

"Are you going to betray us?" Her expressionless face and small pointed chin reminded Berthe of a doll.

"No." A cloud dimmed the moon and passed by. "He is teaching me to read."

"Read! That's good. But be careful. He lies."

"No, he doesn't. Gods appear to him. He says they are angry. They may level the mountains unless we pacify them."

"Our earth? Angry?"

"You cannot have only one goddess. I have been reading...there are different medicines. So are there different gods. One plant will not cure all sickness. He may be wrong in other things, but I believe him in this."

A wolf howled.

"It will snow tomorrow," the woman said.

"Yes. I will come if I can. I know it's a long wait when the nights are cold."

"With three it's not so bad."

Berthe glanced past her. The two others were still hidden.

"Ask him what he would have us do," the woman said. She walked away. Her cloak, trailing on one side, made a wavering mark in the snow.

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

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