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It snowed all day while Berthe paced in the temple, combing and spinning the southern flowers into brittle yarn. At first the flakes were small and few. They twinkled in the morning light before the sun went behind thick clouds. Later they grew and settled on the frozen ground. They made each blade of grass and stump of corn-stubble distinct by separating it from all others, then buried each completely. Snow turned the black trees white as the sky. Birds could not fly against it. Even human voices went only a little way, faded and fell. Light remained trapped in the clouds long after sunset. Berthe found her way easily to a cave where she knew the women would be. Its black walls were dappled white and drifts filled its mouth, but beyond them a sunny fire glowed.

She called, "I'm here," and waited nervously. By day, she had seen the snow so white and the stone so black that the walls were like a winter sky full of black stars. Firelight turned the white to yellow, but it deepened the black. Thus do we feed light to darkness, she thought. We take what we have worked so hard to purify, and use it to part ourselves ever more from Ayekar, and we cannot stop it.

A voice asked, "Have you seen him?"

"He is adamant."

Ma Zauber came out from behind the drifts. "There was a spring collection in the Middle Plains about eight score years ago. Earthquake. They couldn't take the fall collection by the main road south, so some of it went east and they never did find that part. They came around again in spring. Said they hadn't gotten their third. They got it. Killed a lot of people." She fumbled in a bag at her waist. "Are you sure he's going to do it?"

"Yes."

Ma Zauber looked up. Her face, though wrinkled, looked youthful because it was scrubbed so clean. Lightly oiled hair gleamed all around it, silver hair very like a crown. "They'll give him a rough time," she said, smiling.

"No! Listen, all of you. Gods will bring devastation. The people will flee from here and go to Itscriye to hide. Hath will visit floods and pests and the mountains will collapse into the valleys. Earth will engulf us. We will choke in mud. This tax is our last hope of appeasing them. They are offended by the fall tribute. What do you expect? Even gods can't eat cloth."

Someone handed out a burning stick. Ma Zauber lit her pipe.

"Whether we like it or not, the tax is just," Berthe went on. "Or have we grown so aloof that we will not deign even to feed the gods who warm our earth with the sun and clothe her with life and bring us sleep and make the plants and mosses grow that cure all sickness? Shall we break our ties with them? Shall we go into the forests and live as beasts, fearing the approach of our kind and freezing in every breeze that blows, dreaming only of food and warmth, raped in fall so we may pup in summer and drive away our young as soon as they can walk, naked, grunting instead of speaking, unable to think? Then we may keep all we can find or gather. But if we want our fine temples, our houses and families, speech and medicine and kindness and all that distinguishes us from sheep and wolves, we must hold to our religion."

The doll-faced messenger came out. Both women studied her. Berthe turned away, still talking. "Do you understand that? Can you repeat it? Here." She took out the alphabet she had brought for Ma Zauber, one she had made in the autumn. Unrolled, it smelled of late apples. The memory of summer calmed her.

"Each mark is a sound," Berthe explained. She recited the sounds. When she came to "s," more of them emerged to look. There were two old sisters who lived near the city and a fussy widow from the village next to Berthe's own, who had called her a mindless whore when the two towns clashed. She still glared, but she was here. "How goes it?" Berthe whispered.

The widow shrugged.

"We don't make that noise," one of the sisters objected, pointing to s. Then she hurried back to the fire and the rest did the same.

Berthe shivered. Now if Pahid asked who she had met, she must answer. But how good to see their faces. "You might as well stay," she said, laughing, but they didn't. "Don't worry about that hissing noise. The priests use it. We can forget that one." She read the rest of the sounds.

"So, what does all this mean?" the doll-face asked.

"There is a mark for each sound. If we learn the marks, we can read and write."

"That?" It was the fussy widow. "All the sounds of speech are there? Do you mean those are all the sounds I will make in my whole life?"

"Well, how many do you want? There are only seven spices for all foods, and there are only...four colors in the autumn forest, but the variety of their mixtures is as great as earth."

"No. There are ten thousand colors."

Berthe was annoyed. "Yellow. Brown. Red. Green," she counted, ticking them off on her fingers. "That comes to four, not ten thousand."

"And...vermillion. And white. And black. And--"

"All right. And black and white. But any baby can tell you vermillion is only a mixture--"

"And blue." She heard giggles.

"All right! Blue! That makes seven!"

"You have learned a great deal, Berthe. Already the thousand beauties of autumn--"

"I thought you said ten thousand," Berthe put in. Ma Zauber held up a warning finger.

"--are reduced to seven plain dyes for your famous yarn. What will be left of spring when you're done with it? These marks--my speech and my mother's and a child's sigh and a young man's song are all the same now. This is learning." A red angry face poked round the snowbank.

"Go ahead, spit on this gift because you're too lazy to learn how to use it," Berthe snapped. "We won't get another chance like this in a thousand years. Sour old fool."

"Think you're the best thing we've seen since the temple started."

There were more giggles. Ma Zauber yawned. Berthe wanted to hit them both. First the wheel and now this alphabet. Nobody wanted to change for fear of losing the nothingness they had.

Ma Zauber held out a sprig of bitter Aghata. "Can you say this in marks?"

She had chosen Aghata because the priests could not say the 'gh' sound but shortened it to 'j' like babies. Berthe had already thought of that, however, and she substituted the 's,' saying, "We will give this extra mark a new use." In her enthusiasm, she wrote out the names of a few dozen herbs, until the silver-haired witch made her stop.

"What was the time before Ayekar?" Berthe asked her.

Ma Zauber was putting the sprig in her bag. "Can't make it grow in the Plains," she remarked. She handed her pipe to the doll-woman, who passed it back to the fire. It returned again, full. "A human being is very small," she remarked. "So small that pride and shame are the same thing, just a little ripple in water." She smoked up a fragrant cloud. "We think our gods are ancient, but they are no older than this puff of smoke. It can hardly remember going up to the roof, only stories about the days of the pipe. And before that, backwards, nothing. The time of the leaf growing is as far from that puff of smoke as the days before Ayekar from us. We are like the puff of smoke that barely knows the pipe it was blown from, let alone the tree where its leaf grew."

Time before gods. Nothing. "That's all you know?" Berthe asked.

"That's all."

"Are you sure there was a time before?"

"I told you what my grandmother told me."

Berthe stretched, her back crackling loudly because of the night air. "If there was a time before the gods, then the world truly floats in nothingness," she said.

Ma Zauber shrugged. "It might have been good. Maybe better; maybe Ayekar reminds them of it."

It was near dawn when Berthe came out of the cave. Ground and sky would mirror one another all day, first one and then the other brighter. Earth's was a richer, bluer gray as yet. The clouds paled as the sun rose and then began to shimmer, and the snow shone back. The glossy near-ice of the little stream that flowed near the city's wall was translucent silver between banks of jet-black mud. The stones at its bottom, magnified by the water, looked each distinct and full of feeling as a farmer's words. They reminded her of the stream by which she and Meta had often sat. Meta would have another child soon. Who would help her? Her mother- and father-in-law were dead, her husband probably not well yet since the time some men from the other town had caught and beaten him for burning their houses. They had broken one of his legs and left him to crawl home, but luckily Hex had found him. After a scandal, his brother had married Schwalbe the beauty, and lived in his own house now.

A breeze carried the sharp scent of Aghata from the brambles where a dip in the streambed made a clear pool. She decided to gather some for Ma Zauber. This patch was large and easily reached. No one would care if she rooted up a few plants and tried to sprout them; the two sisters seldom came here because men bathed in the pool in summer.

Delving gingerly in the frozen ground, Berthe thought about the time she had found Meta in the mountain shrine by following her song. She listened now, but there was no sound except the scrape of her blade in the dirt and the watter lapping ice-encrusted stones. Could one follow the water's song? She prized up a clump of plants and stood, but a noise halted her.

A priest was singing. She squatted down again--it was never good to meet them while at this work. Too late, she recognized Pahid's head shining over the clump of bramble that separated her from the bathing pool.

So he did bathe daily, winter and summer, in flowing water. And how calmly he came to these ordeals, singing Hath's morning song that praised the resurrection of the world. Standing with his back to her, he quickly doffed his woolen gown. He passed a stream of black urine into the mud. Then he walked in up to his waist, crouched until only his head remained above water, and recited the salutations to each of the nine major gods. Berthe watched, so awed that she could not move and her feet grew numb with cold. Pahid emerged--she shut her eyes--and was gone.

She mulled over the scene as she walked back to the city. First, Father Pahid was a devilspawn. Despite his holiness, despite his learning and his power, the sign was black as the blood of the dragons that took Verloring, as black as hers and her given-over baby's. There was no other explanation, and really no more to be said about it. The flaw was just another of his attributes. So deeply immersed in the supernatural that he seemed to remain human only by an effort of will, a being of sheer power, he might be the high priest of evil as well as the strongest god-conjurer at the Lir Temple.

Second, he endured suffering for its own sake. Years of it had not lightened the sign or brought him any gain. It was a gift to the gods, a gift of pure feeling. She, like others, had often given presents and had tried not to complain of the hardship required to spare them, but she had never thought the hardship was part of what she gave. Now that polite denial of what her offerings cost her seemed cold. She had treated her goddess like a child incapable of understanding. He, with his positive joy in useless pain, gratified the gods' understanding.

Truly, she had treated her husband better than she had earth. And if he, never a great thinker, could so love her after three years' incohabitation as to defy Pahid for her sake, then surely the gods, if she let them see her, would love and reward her and her people.

What brought Gelukish to mind? She seldom thought of her husband, and did not miss him now, not as she had her mother in the first alien nights of her marriage. Still, she resolved to visit him again. Fondness counted no more in her decision than in the stream's to run downhill or the leaf's to return to soil, dust and air. She simply remembered that no one in that life had heard she was still living and determined to ask Pahid leave to go and tell them, before the road turned muddy.

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

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