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"You are no longer married, Berthe," he replied when she went to the Archive to ask. "I thought you had left the world of soil and physical things."

"I want to see...he thinks I am suffering." She looked up. Those sharp eyes killed falsehood. "I want to warn him about the spring, and tell him what I have learned."

"What will you tell him? You have learned Hath's law, the law of justice. Laws of the just gods. He lives by the earth laws, by Fatayad, the gods of decorum, not justice. It is a great chasm, difficult to bridge."

"I want to go."

"Yes, I know that. You will return here in a few weeks--I need not send anyone with you. You will return because you know about the fire and flood that will result if we fail. Be grateful that it is the gods of justice who threaten us, because they act from anger and can be appeased. Retribution and reward. Justice. The earth gods, the weavers of this natural fabric, act from their sense of beauty. Beauty, appreciation and disinterest. if they find us unlovely, they cannot be appeased."

Throughout this speech he had looked at her, but abstractly. Now his attention returned to what he saw, and this slight change of object spoke as loud as though he had suddenly turned to face her. She started back. He said, "You have been awake all night."

"Yes..." Justice, beauty? She must say something to show she understood. "The gods of justice are different from the gods of feeling?"

"That's right. There are the human gods: the household spirit, Hath and Shis and Verloring. The others are not the same: earth and sun and Fatayad and Fey. These do not reward or punish or truly care about us."

"Earth gives--" Berthe responded.

"No, she exists. To be revered."

"And Fea?" Had he mentioned Fea? No, he hadn't. "The saying goes, Heart to Fea, soul to earth."

"Does it? The heart--between soul, which is earth's, and mind, which is Hath's. That is Fea, between soul and mind. And that is where you are, Berthe."

He was telling her one of his secrets. Berthe drew her folded hands into the warm cleft between the bottom of her breasts and the top of her stomach. She wondered whether Pahid had seen her at the pool when he came to bathe. Of course he had no reason to fear, knowing her own secret, but hadn't he been ashamed? No. He was never ashamed of anything a human being might see, because the eye of heaven was on him always. Perhaps he was not trading secrets at all, but merely assumed these differences among the gods must become apparent to her as she read, listened to him and visited her women.

He kept looking right at her. "You are not still afraid of me, are you? We are allies--" He paused and ran a hand over the top of his head, evidently wondering whether she understood that word. "Allies, we work together as blade, cord and fire work in felling trees. All right. Then get up."

Berthe rose.

"I am telling you this because you are about to return to the world of earth and you must remember that that goddess, wise and intricate past all comprehension, would grant us nothing were it not for the mercy of Hath that sent us the temple. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

He pointed to a trunk in the corner. "Open that."

Berthe went to it. From the box's dark wood a mandala had been gouged out on top and a lighter wood fit into the pattern. Pahis's name and the name of the Lir Temple Archive were marked on the side by the same method. Smooth leather straps fastened by shining wilver buckles held it shut. Though she had seen buckles before, Berthe had never used one, and it took her a minute to realize the metal tongue must be withdrawn from the leather, and to figure out how to do this. Done, she glanced at Pahid with a little smile of staisfaction. He watched so fixedly that she almost saw the gleam of the buckle reflected in his eyes. She raised the lid.

Inside were a number of spirit dolls, a cord with more than twenty silver bells, a woolen robe of deep violet with blue and scarlet designs embroidered on it, three full sacks, several barbed spearheads, and five scrolls. Four were bound together by a silk ribbon.

"Bring me the fifth scroll," Pahid said.

It was a drawing entitled, Jurisdiction of Regional Temples. Berthe had no idea what jurisdiction was, but she saw that one irregular shape was labeled Nichayu.

"This is a picture of the world," Pahid explained.

She found the way her parents had brought her to be married, through mountains. And the Lir Temple, west of the mountains as her village was, while all the old cities were in the east. The first priests must have fled west when the unbelievers pursued them.

"Here is the way you will go," Pahid said. It was simply a matter of following a certain road over a long distance. She knew that, but kept quiet. "These are the towns through which you will pass. Win them."

She saw Itscriye, by the coast. It was even farther away than beyond the Middle Plains.

"You will encounter disbelief. You yourself will doubt. Worst, people will lie and pretend to believe you. Simply repeat what I have said. Again and again, forever." He rolled up the drawing and thrust it at her. "Here. Put it back."

She did and turned from the mandala to look at him, his face now warm against the grey sky. Had he, too, defied heaven in defending her? "You know I might not come back," she said.

"You will, because the greatest holiness you have seen is here. Away from it, you will be horribly lonely."

That made her sorry for him. He must long for Lir Temple. On her way out, she remembered Ma Zauber and asked, "Father Pahid, was there a time before Ayekar?"

He braced his hands on the windowsill behind him and leaned back, his breast forward in a vulnerable attitude. "I don't know," he said. "There may have been a time in mankind's infancy before the gods asked our help. I am very glad that I am living now."

She smiled. "So am I."

Pahid's two sons wanted to go with her, to protect her from bandits. All these soldier-priests were terrified of bandits and they beheaded one or two each week in the city as retribution for the robberies they suffered whenever they went to the villages to order clothes and drink, to have their saddles repaired and blades sharpened or to find new prostitutes. They said the woods were full of desperate murderers liable to sweep down on travelers or lonely mountain villages, to kill and rape and plunder, cooking and eating the animals, and to burn the towns when they were through. Berthe laughed. Bandits were the same people as the ones who lived in the mountain hamlets. Winter boredom might drive them to war on one another, usually with just fists and between drinking matches. News of rich Lir priests nearby might rouse them to attack in groups of twenty or so, but the idea of a whole village rising up to come and rob one Berthe as she passed was silly. She went alone and Pahid assigned the boys to dye the mountain of cord she had spun by that time according to directions she left them. They saw her off with hurt looks and many warnings.

She was welcome in every village. Children came yelling to meet her and the brewmasters' doors opened wide. When she had eaten, the whole town came to look their fill at someone new. In the morning they gathered to watch her go. All of them wanted to hear about Pahid, and they were willing to hear good as well as bad. The terror with which the news of his coming inspired them a year ago made his actual violence seem restrained by comparison and now, after a quiet winter, they were eager to believe the best.

First she scared them again by telling of his murders. She spoke of Hex, over and over again, reliving even when she did not mean to the horror of the moment when she approached her teacher and saw that she had gone out of her mind. Speak to her, Pahid said. Berthe knelt by Hex with a poison she had hidden in her hair and whispered, "I have brought it," but Hex only giggled. Each time she retold it, Berthe felt the inexhaustable tears again and had to stop until someone took her hand.

Stories Pahid himself had told came tumbling out. The fear she had tamed with months of practice suddenly leapt up so strong that stolid fathers wept at the thought of what he had done to the hapless villages in his way to the provincial capital. Then, when she had him settled in the city for winter, she told about her own capture by one of the gangs that went from town to town looking for herbal doctors, speakers of church language, rich peasants, prostitutes, Itscriye-born wives, and troublemakers of any kind.

She told about her first meeting with Pahid and described him with heartstopping accuracy, from his knifetip eyes to his blue frozen toes. Then she told about the threatened disasters, how the mountain would fall into the village or the village be thrown into the valley. In her imagination every new town she entered became an erupting chaos, and when she paused on the road to admire a view or mountain scene, she found herself wondering how it would look when it was sucked under a wave of mud or threw up a spout of molten stone.

When she spoke of the disasters, listeners would chime in with suggestions--which streams would dry up first, what fields would go under, whose houses would be crushed. Arguments broke out. She squelched the predictions by saying, "Hayseeds, the whole town will be so demolished, even the worms won't be able to find you." When they were all finally cringing, she would pat one of the children on the head and say, "Don't worry. Father Pahid will save us."

At first she had feared to lose them at this point, and prepared many arguments to prove that the disasters could truly happen, that they could be prevented by speaking to the gods, and that Pahid would do so. She quickly learned that there was no need for proof. The idea of setting one danger against another delighted them. They gaped as admiringly at her as if she personally had invented it.

This simpleminded faith made her work easier, but Berthe would have been happy to meet resistance if only one had thought of asking why the same person who promised disaster was offering to deliver them from it, for a price. No one objected, until she came to the spring collection. Then their reaction was as sullen as it had been gleeful, and just as thoughtless.

At one town in a mountain pass, where all the houses were on stilts to keep out the melted snow that rushed down from the peaks in spring, they gathered in the rutted icebed of the road to see her go. Berthe told them as gently as she could. They listened so quietly that she found herself looking away from them, up at the morning sky. When she tried to look down the village, still dark in the mountain's shadow, looked black. She stared ahead at the shallow fields until finally, as she got to the crux of the matter, she could see around. "And he will come back, and take however much grain you did not pay."

"How's he going to do it?" one asked.

"The same way the other priests do," Berthe said.

There was a laugh. "Three men in a wagon? We'll just take their mules out of harness and put them in it. Then we'll let them pull their wagon around town a while--"

"He'll burn the town, root the fields and kill every man, woman and child," Berthe warned.

Someone nudged the man to shut up. "He won't come like the other priests. He's got an army," a woman said.

"How's he going to get an army to every single village in the province by spring?" the man demanded.

The woman slapped him.

"He'll get here," an old man predicted bitterly. "We're right on the roadway, waiting for him. He'll get here, all right."

She spoke of the divine hunger and called on them to feed their gods. They folded their arms over unfeeling hearts.

"Suppose we don't care," someone called.

"You can sit here and die if you want to be stubborn. But if you do as you must, as a human being, you will not only live, but will enter the city of Ayekar. Human beings cannot live free on the earth like beasts and flowers, because the gods have made us better than that, stronger and more beautiful. They burden us with love. They call us from our ignorance to make the world pure. They call wisdom to grow in us like shoots in the frozen mud."

There was silence, then a gurgling sound in the pool of night under one of the houses. Forwarned, Berthe ducked, but no one threw anything. They only stared. The strange noise grew louder. Faces contorted. People were laughing.

"It's true!" she insisted. "Whatever you paid a year ago will be demanded, less what you paid in grain this year. The cloth will be valued at nothing."

They slapped their thighs. They roared. "There's nothing here. We sold it for wool," a girl explained.

It had never occurred to Berthe that someone might do that. "What for?" she asked.

"We could weave it up over winter, and save some for next year."

"You won't believe this," her father gasped. "This year we had the best crop since I was six years old! So we sold it. What else? The shepherds talked us into it!" He flung up his hands and guffawed until he choked.

Someone thumped him on the back. He went on, more soberly, "We hear the temples aren't what they were--who knows. There's someone coming to tear them down, stone from stone."

"Pahid would have you carded to ribbons for saying that," Berthe warned. This increased their merriment.

"So what? He's not here," a woman answered. "There's a priest who's going to tear down the temples. Dare me to say it again? No, wait. Listen. He went into one--we heard this from shepherds--went into a temple someplace, and told them to knock it down and go out and worship in the field. When the priests tried to kill him, they couldn't lift up their hands. Another time--"

"Why?" Berthe asked.

"Why what?"

"Couldn't they raise their hands?"

The woman shrugged. "Magic, I guess. Another time, he met some tax collectors at a house and he--"

"He plants stones in the field and they turn into bread," a boy interjected.

"Shut up. I'm telling this. He met some tax collectors--"

"We'll plant stones, too! We've got plenty of those!" someone cried. Berthe gave up trying to reason with them.

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

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