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In the morning Berthe went to Pahid's study, a screened-off corner of the archive farthest from the fire and nearest the window, where he sat barefoot and still on a stone bench, making himself as cold as possible while he studied papers spread on a low table before him. He seemed less to sacrifice physical comfort than to detest it.

"What do you want?" he asked without looking up.

She knelt. "Last night I went to visit some women--some witches--" She was shivering. "Herbalists."

The sound of cloth moving over paper tempted her to look at him. His fingertips rested on a scroll. "Be very careful, Berthe. You must tell me everything."

Be careful. It is impossible to tell everything, Berthe thought. One of the Tales of Ayekar began: "Who can describe even the most fleeting impression? Every instant encompasses forever." She answered, "I will." Be careful. "I told them the gods were angry with us. They said, ask him what he would have us do."

His hands rose slightly and stayed in the air. "First, they must bring gifts to Hath. Then--will they do all that I ask? They must show publicly that they are won over. Make a cord, and dye it--red, for Hath's fire--make a dye that is not easily duplicated."

"I can make one that is never the same from batch to batch. It comes from heartroot," Berthe told him. The dye was called Earth Red, but she did not say so. The priest who first brought ugewa to the Lir Temple, and convinced the gods to accept it in place of grain, had not mentioned that it grew wild.

Of course, everyone knew then that ugewa grew wild, and they soon learned that a weed seems immortal only until it becomes a crop. Now fields had to be seeded with it just as with corn or rye, and weeded lest grass and briars choke it, and it died in flood or drought like everything else. So with me, she thought. Pahid must know what this dye is and that my women will accept the cord in earth's name, not his, and we may learn that a sign changes its meaning as quickly as the news passes from one to the next.

She ground armfuls of root to make the dye, and for a week she was red from her fingertips almost to the waist. After that, one of Pahid's skinny auburn-haired sons carried a bag into the temple and dropped it at her feet, saying importantly, "This is from south of the river."

Berthe opened the sack. Inside was a cloud. She put in her hand. It felt soft, like grass. Her hand remained dry. She pulled out a tuft and tossed it, but it did not rise. "What is it?" she asked.

The son was polishing Fea's prayer bell on his sleeve. He held it close to his face and squinted at it, clicking his tongue. "Cotton. It's a flower."

Seeds fell out of the flower when she spun it. She set up a borrowed wheel midway between the pillars of Hath and Fea, so she faced one showing how Fea gave up her child by the sun, Zatoye, into the care of earth. That seemed incorrect. The women must be reconciled to Fea, not celebrate earth's one triumph over her.

She would face Seed Hears Spring, and because that meant she turned toward Fea, she moved the wheel a little closer to Hath. She began to twist a leader cord. Why was Seed Hears Spring carved in this temple? Shurat had never liked that one. He said it was a childish fancy, not doctrine. Yet here it was, in a second temple. We err and are recalled everywhere, she thought. But awakening was the theme of a doctrinal scene also, of Rani Forces Shis, the hand of fate. Were there to be two awakenings? And now, looking at Rani, she saw that facing Seed meant she was closest to The Daughters of Autumn Hide the Infant Spring. That was bad; it hinted at deceit. She sought Pahid.

Pleased by her concern, he came to the temple, saying, as they left the city gates, "We must always use careful diplomacy when the gods are set against one another."

Earth and sky answered one another's white with white. Mountains lightly veiled in brown floated apart from either. Pahid explained, "The great peace that the temples superintend has been kept, since Hath slew the dragons of the evil ones to win back Ayekar, by diplomacy. The gods shield us from evil and the Lir Temple shields us from the gods. So--what is that?" He pointed a blue finger at her spinning wheel.

"Spinning wheel." Then it was tryly new, unknown in the Lir Temple. A proud impulse made her say, "I invented it."

He picked it up. "So they told me. Berthe, this device offends. Already the gods receive more cloth than they need and too little grain, but with this--do you know how much grain and ugewa was withheld here, and substituted by cloth? One third less came to the capital. They will starve if this continues." He threw the wheel out the east window. "Spun wool is not like ugewa. It is not always welcome. You should have sent this thing to the temple when you made it. Households that eat too well now will go hungry when the tax is recollected in spring."

"Spring?"

"You promised not to falter."

"In spring?"

"They demand their rightful tribute, Berthe. My brothers of the Lir, in their wisdom and terror, would have collected again this winter. Only the risk of losing all our wagons in a mountain storm dissuaded them. When the spring floods are done, we will take what was not paid in fall."

That was the price. She looked at the blue-white feet sticking out from under his robe. His chin was so cold that icicles glinted like snow in the stubble of his beard. He looked like old Winter, before whose picture he now stood. "The people will refuse," she quavered.

He did not look at her. Eyes fixed on nothing, he appreared to have turned to stone. Finally he said, "Get a distaff and spindle. Pace around the temple while you spin."

The thin woman met her in the woods by a shielded copse. Berthe could see a fire nearby and the others smoking pipes around it. Her messenger held out a basket, saying, "Look what they've sent already for the temple," but Berthe put the gifts aside.

"He's angry about the spinning wheels," she began at once. "There was too much cloth in the taxes. They're going to collect again in spring."

The messenger's eyes and mouth opened wide, like the fear-face on a spirit doll. She looked just like the figurine Akiva had kept above his bed to ward off nightmares. "Wait," she said.

Berthe sat down on a fallen trunk. Sparks flew up from the fire beyond and lost themselves in the treetops as the women kicked the embers and argued about what to do. It had been days since Berthe warmed her hands at a fire, and comradship belonged altogether to her life before Pahid, but she stayed where she was until the doll-woman came back to her.

"Reason with him, Berthe."

There was no answering that.

"Or else kill him."

Berthe jumped up. "Never say such a terrible thing to me! There must be no treachery in my mind when I face him. And have you already forgotten what I told you? If not for him, the mountains would be thrown down on top of us. His measures are harsh, but he fights for our earth and her people."

New shadows came between the trees. They were listening.

"He commands things like that--storms, floods, earthquakes?" It sounded like Ma Zauber, the most powerful doctor in the rich Middle Plains province. Her mothers had been herbalists for generations.

"Of course not. Hath commands those things. But he speaks with the gods, face to face, as easily as I speak with him."

"Then speak with him!"

"I will," Berthe assured her. "He threatens to do an awful thing, awful not only for the hunger that will follow, but for the defiance he will arouse. It is very hard on us, that having only just won our loyalty by explaining new things to us, he tries our friendship this way, yet he has no choice. Like a woman who starts a fever after labor, he asks more of us when most would ask less, but we must not falter."

"Fields will be naked as a new baby." Maybe it wasn't Ma Zauber. Berthe had met her just once. "Father Pahid has come to cleanse and purify, all right."

Berthe stood. The greater moon was rising over the mountains to the east and she knew she must return to the city soon. Long ago, when she had lain in a hut near a city wall, the moon's setting in the west behind these same mountains had been her sign to leave. How bright, and how soft, it shone on him when he left the mountain shrine with the baby. "The gods and the temple are far better to us than we know," she said. "In the days of the fight for Ayekar, many people betrayed them, so many that Hath was afraid the gods would starve because we would not feed them and earth was polluted by the evil ones' blood so they themselves could not touch her. He would have purified her with fire, killing us all, and peopled her with a new race that would venerate the gods."

No one said anything. A puff of wind brought smoke. Berthe went on, "Fea, the mother of Rani, pleaded for us to no avail. At last little Fey wept, his only tear, and so Hath permitted us to purify the earth with the slow fire of living things. But when Fatayad came to show us how to do this, again people would not listen. The few who believed took a harvest, but the rest tried to steal it from them. What little they saved, the believers carried north and south, east and west, loking for Ayekar, because the way had been lost."

"Nobody believes us, either. Tell them to lie down and they sit up, tell them to sit up and they lie down."

Berthe ignored this. "North and south, east and west. No one can find Ayekar. The believers would have hidden, in the Middle Plains, but Fatayad commanded them to teach the others. And he told them to build temples and tax roads and he made wells to fresh water for every city and town where even one believed, and so they won us, very slowly because we were so stubborn. That is why the priests still rule us, because without them we would fall into disbelief and Hath would abandon us to begin again with a new world."

The shadows were still. "Well, maybe we brought the priesthood on ourselves, but we don't have to keep it there forever." That was Ma Zauber's voice, deep and rough as Berthe remembered it. "I heard about what you said, that we can't have just one goddess any more than we can use just one medicine. I heard you can read. They said you had a piece of bark with sound marks on it. Yes? But I tell you, this priest you're all so afraid of is nothing compared to what is coming here from Itscriye."

The woman turned her face to the moonlight. It was she. "He led the Itscriyites through Miyosardia and they stripped it bare. Then he left them. They had to go back to Itscriye. Now they are running by the dozens, north and south, east and west, as you put it. They come to a house and kill everyone they find there. Sometimes they spare the children, just throw them out to wander. When everything's eaten, they move on. I have seen them. The more they eat, the hungrier they get. They plant stones in the field. Eat them like bread."

Berthe said, "It's time for me to go."

"Come back tomorrow with his answer. I'll tell you about the days before Ayekar," Ma Zauber told her.

Outside the thicket, the wind pierced the wood with ease. Branches creaked. The darkness increased. Soon it would be dawn. Now each day is a beginning for me, she thought. Free of old errors, I can learn the truth. Yet the mass of rumor and prejudice knit together by fear is all I have to keep from forgetting the little we have learned and drifting away, alone. Each day untwisted from the fabric of the past yields one hour's certain future. She shivered. The wind came from the north over the snowy forest, recoiled from heaven and harrowed the warm rotting soil with claws sharpened in the icy sea at the top of the world.

At dawn she brought the basket of gifts to the archive, where Pahid sat on his cold bench. She knelt beside him, saying, "If you collect in spring, the people will starve."

"Is that what your women said?"

"Yes."

"They are wrong. The grain is there, Berthe." He leaned forward a little. "Consider the women who spin. Have they worked any less afield? Of course not. They only spun faster. Perhaps they did spin longer, because of the novelty of this thing. They may have slept a little less, tended their husbands and children a little less, or spent less time gossipping with their neighbors, but it is a very rare peasant who scants the fields for a new invention. Now, if we do not collect, then we may see women begin abandoning their work to make useless cloth and then, when the Lir Temple is packed from floor to ridgepole with this ill-wound stuff the gods neither use nor enjoy, then, when it is refused too late, we will see starvation. The auspicious moment is now, while the grain is there, and since the cloth is useless, we will soon find that women have abandoned this complex device and gone back to the old sturdy distaff and spindle." He stood up. Sunlight made the top of his head bright and cast his shadow on the stones before him.

They have only spun faster, she repeated to herself. With what joy they had paid that fall, though, piling the wagons with the best and softest gowns and blankets and green ugewa baled with corded summer flowers. They had taken more than was required and brought it dancing down the petal-strewn path to the road where the tax lackeys waited. They had given more than they were asked to give, and still more would be taken. "We thought this winter there would be enough at last," she said.

He was looking out the window. "Fea, the sun and cloud of Ayekar, had three children. Two were the sons of gods--the child Fey by Hath and our father, Rani, by Fatayad. A third was Zatoye, not of a god but of a celestial being, the sun. Even she could be wrong, you see, but recognizing her error she gave over the child to Earth. Isn't that a charming story? Don't cling to your mistake, Berthe. Give it over, as Fea did."

He waited. Finally Berthe said, "Yes, the grain is there, in the rafters and the barn lofts. By it the winter-weaned children, who would have died, will live. Now you will take it and the child who might have lived will die again."

"When we look around us, though, we see no golden descendents of Zatoye. You see, the tale is not literally true. The golden people are what we might have been, had we kept the innocence in which Hath made us. Now we are mired so deep in the unholy blood, in the cares of farming, that we can become golden only through long effort and sacrifice. Not all will live who might have; this is our reparation. I can give no other answer, Berthe."

She looked up. Sunlight fell between them; dancing motes obscured his form. "We paid so gladly--" she began.

"So gladly that the neighboring town, which had paid in grain, came to trade with you--"

"Trade--!" she put in hotly.

"And when you refused, they burned the village. You were building new hovels beside smoking pits when I came there. You see what trouble this device has caused already."

She bowed her head. Part of her village was burnt, in truth, but theirs had been razed to the ground.

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

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